Found in Translation

Tokyo

2005-02-01T09:13:00.000-08:00

Midnight on Thursday night at Akabane Station on the Utsunomiya Line. After a night’s hard drinking with workmates, the salarymen tumble out of the sardine-packed carriages. They are at various stages of inebriation. Some rush to the Gentlemens’. Some don’t make it. Some lucky ones are held up by their workmates. Some sink into in a stupor of fresh vomit. One starts running wildly around the station platform, dancing up and down the stairs, The same situation can be found at many stations,

Yamanote line:
Songs, jokes, laughter, reeling drunks.
Tomorrow’s far off.

For alcohol is the glue that binds together Japanese society, the loosener of formality, the path to intimacy and friendship, the force behind major decisions, the balm after a day’s drudgery, the thread that knits long-lasting relationships, the escape from home and family.

Just a few office ladies amidst the drinkers. We are still in a land where there is a vast difference between the lives of men and women. “It’s a woman’s job”, says one of my Department’s secretaries about the part-time job she has. Women earn much less than men for the same work, and are generally content to do so. They are rarely promoted. Few women occupy important academic positions. And hardly any do so in the business world. Many give up work after marriage. It may not “look good” for the wife to work.

Despite the fact that some 40% of 30 to 40 year-olds in Tokyo prefer to remain single, there are still social pressures to get married. Matchmakers, nakodo, are still very active, and arranged marriages, omiai, are quite frequent; my 28-year-old friends tell me their mothers have encouraged them to get in touch with a nakodo. And the world of Junchiro Tanizaka’s The MaKioka Sisters, a biting satirical novel, by a bitter Jane Austen, which satirizes the snobbery of a decadent upper-class family in the 1930s, who desperately try to find a suitable husband for Yukiko, threatened with being left on the shelf, has not yet completely disappeared. The MaKioka family name must not be sullied, and detective agencies are put on the trail of all future candidates. Such detective agencies still exist.

But life is not so bad for women. Men still hand over all their pay packet to the lady of the house and in return get a little pocket money. The clientele in Los Toros Spanish restaurant in Ginza on a Saturday lunchtime is 90% female. Groups of friends, old school pals reminisce away Saturday afternoon while the husbands are putting in an extra day at the office.

I watch again Lost in Translation. I recognize the Hyatt in Shinjuku and the view over Yoyogi Park and Meiji-Jinja Shrine and the huge video screens in Shibuya. Harris and Charlotte are lost in Tokyo. They are puzzled by the Martian-like behaviour of this pygmy race. Japan and Japanese are strange and weird. Communication is minimal. Harris is surprised by an unexpected pseudo-S&M visitor sent to his hotel room: “Lip my skirt!”, and we are back in the corny jokes on the mispronunciation of r and l: “Loger Moore”, “The Lat Pack”, “Brack Tie”, “Frank Sinatola”.

The food is impossible: “What kind of restaurant is it that makes you cook the food at the table?” Contemporary Tokyo is no more than kitsch: Japanese men are called Charlie Brown and Hans; it is the traditional Japanese Suntory whisky actor Harris is earning a fortune to promote. I remember an audition in Sao Paulo when I unsuccessfully tried to make a similar fortune. Only the actress Evelyn Waugh seems to be content in Tokyo.

A chauvinistic film which looks down at Johnny Foreigner and shows only Americans can have any deeper feelings. Or a satire on American narrow-mindedness? Or two people lost in a crazy big city?

Near Ueno Station I see three junior sumo rikishi wrestlers out shopping. They are easily recognizable not just because of their bulk but also because of their hairstyles. They look cold in kimono and slippery sandals, but their clothese are regulated by their “do”, the prescribed form of life of a sumo wrestler, the do, which regulates all aspects of the rikishi’s life.

Clip-clop of sandals,
Bulk, kimono, oiled hair:
Rikishi pass by.

The cold air over the Sea of Japan picks up moisture and deposits a metre of snow on the North coast of Japan. But Tokyo, on the southern coast, is dry and cold. A thousand miles to the south-west, the cherry-blossom buds will soon be visible. But I shall not be there to see them.

Okinawa

2005-01-26T08:05:00.000-08:00

General Douglas McCarthy, Supreme Commander of the American forces controlling Japan after the Second World War, took up residence in one of the first tall buildings to be completed in Tokyo after the war. It gave him an excellent view of the Royal Palace and grounds, and even to the naked eye he could see all the comings and goings. The Americans had kept Emperor Hirohito on, though forcing him to renounce his divinity, as a way of coercing the Japanese people, who still greatly admired him.

McCarthy’s worries were unfounded, however. After the surrender public opinion abruptly turned against the General Tojo and the military, under whose power the Hirohito was seen to have been. Soldiers who had been revered were now reviled. Young men grew their long so as not to appear soldiers. And just a few days after the surrender newspaper leaders looked forward to a new peace-loving and prosperous Japan that would forget its bellicose past, when up to 60% of its GNP was spent on defence.

Losing the War had great advantages. Big Brother would look after us. True, he had certain demands. Japan must be firmly anti-communist. In the small port of Nago, two thirds of the way up the island of Okinawa, I saw a plaque to Kyuichi Tokacho, the most prominent citizen to have been born in this small port of Nago, an opponent of the military pre-war Japanese government, but who, as Secretary General of the Japanese Communist Party, was forced to leave Japan for China in 1950.

So Japan became an exemplary pupil of the USA. The huge oligopolies such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi were partially dismantled in order to open up competition; Japan was initially given aid, then procurement contracts in the Korean War, and was now unhampered by military spending, maintaining only a small self-defence force. Japanese industriousness did the rest. Many commentators say the Samurai warrior-like instinct was now turned to business. First steel and chemicals, then toys and radios and household electrical goods; after cars and electronics; now high-tech goods: Sony, Sanyo, Toyota, Nissan, Honda.

The US still defends Japan, or rather, uses Japan as a strategic base for South East Asia and the Pacific. Mostly on Okinawa, some 300 km south west of the main islands, where some 30,000 troops are stationed, and 20% of the island is, to all intensive purposes, part of the US. And, despite rumblings from the Pentagon that it should pay its way and provide a NATO force, such a proposal has limited support and would be electoral dynamite. Deep scars are still there.

Sporadically there is anti-American protest in Okinawa, which was under US jurisdiction till 1972. On Sunday some forty young men gathered in a central square in Naha, the capital of Okinawa to protest against continued American involvement in Iraq. But nothing like the enormous anti-American protests when an Okinawan 12-year-old was raped by American soldiers in 1995.

But they seem to have died down. The pro-Tokyo and therefore pro-American governor, Keiichi Inamine, is now in his second term of office. The bases bring in a lot of money. An Okinawa is one of the poorest parts of Japan.

11 a.m.on a Monday morning in Okinawa City, next to the huge Kadena air base, which the Americans first took in 1945. I seem to be in the seedy district of some small town in the Midwest. Manila Bay, Amazonesu and Moonlight are sweeping up the weekend’s stale beer, cigarettes butts and maybe a used condom or two. A trolley woman asks me for money. Rap, house and hip-hop blare from the cheap clothes shops and army surplus stores. I eat at the Filipino café with the GIs. I pass China Pete’s, surely the toughest of saloons, but no, Pete sells delicate up-market china pottery.

Living in Tokyo, I never sensed that Japan was in many ways just another American state. I experienced little of the American Way of Life. The scale of most things was so small and un-American. I travelled by car once in three months. Everybody came by train to Tokyo University. Many students were completing their PhDs without ever considering how to learn how to drive.

But Okinawa City, like nearly all the island, and much of Japan, is truly American. The drab downtown caters for the old and infirm. The pavements, or rather, sidewalks, are empty but for me, the elderly, and an occasional school student. Economic life is on the strips and in the malls and the fast-food joints, bowling alleys and theme parks. There are no trains, and everyone goes just about everywhere by car.

The local lads go around in rappers’ uniforms. And the tourist shops in Naha, the capital of Okinawa, sell Hawaiian-looking shirts. Maybe Okinawa is another Hawaii or Honolulu? But is has never really been Japanese. The ancient kingdom of the Ryukus was an independent kingdom with allegiance to China until it was conquered in 1609 by the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. But it was left to itself and only in 1879 was it formally made a Japanese prefecture and pressurized to become more Japanese, to use standard Japanese dialect and to pay allegiance to Emperor Meiji. And in the hard times of the 1920s and 1930s many Okinawans emigrated to the Japanese controlled Melanesian islands and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

From my hotel room in Naha, the capital of Okinawa, I look down on what I think are ex-army bunkers. But I am wrong: they are the large Okinawan burial vaults. But I am also right. In the Battle of Okinawa, which raged for some 90 days from 23 March 1945, when Japanese solders were ordered to fight a war of attrition in order to weaken the American forces before their assault on the Japanese mainland, the people of Okinawa were caught in the crossfire. Many took refuge in the ancestral tombs.

The Okinawa Prefectural Peace Park shows revulsion at the behaviour of the Japanese soldiers, who often considered Okinawans to be second-class Japanese citizens. Okinawan people were tricked into the war by “Emperor-oriented militaristic beliefs”. Soldiers threw civilians out of their shelters and stole their food when they should have been protecting them, coerced them into killing each other, and shot those who spoke in the forbidden Okinawan dialect as traitors. 120,000 civilians, a third of the total population, died in crossfire, forced suicide in the name of the Emperor, shelling, malnutrition and disease.

Conscripted schoolgirls worked as nurses, fetching and carrying, looking after the wounded, holding limbs being amputated, burying and burning corpses in the caves that were used as hospitals. At then end of May 1945 the Japanese defence collapsed. Dispensable, the girls were ordered out of the caves but forbidden to surrender. Commanding Officer General Ushijima committed suicide but did not negotiate the surrender of civilians. Japan would fight on to the last man, woman, and child for the eternal cause of the Emperor: Goyoksai – to die gracefully for honour and a noble cause. Many were killed as the US forces mopped up. Some of those schoolgirls that survived, now old ladies, of course, take visitors around the Himeyuri Museum, dedicated to these schoolgirls.

But after all, nowadays Okinawa is not such a bad place to live. The island tourist brochure proudly announces that it has a greater proportion of 100-year-old people than anywhere else in the world!

Nagasaki

2005-01-18T06:36:00.000-08:00

One of the things I shall miss most about Japan is the muzak. When the university canteen closes down at three o’clock we hear For Auld Lang Syne. The Shakespeare Park in Marayama closes with the Beatles’ Yesterday. This evening I passed Ueno Zoo at twenty to five and heard Brahms’ Lullaby. Shopping streets normally play quiet jazz or pop classics to get you in the right mood to do a bit of spending. And of course at Xmas time we heard all the old favourites. Spanish restaurants are supplied with flamenco soundtracks; French restaurants play Edith Piaf non-stop; and my hotel in Kyoto had a permanent background of traditional Japanese music, and I had to listen to the same tape for six days non-stop.

On buses and trains the microphone is an essential part of the driver’s equipment. We are informed by the shrill taped female voice in Japanese about the next stop and warned to take care, then a rather deeper female voice will give the English version. Just for good measure the driver will also tell us about the next stop and also warn us about the hazards of stepping off the train or bus and tell us to “Mind the Gap”. This will all be preceded by the suitable jingles. And just as I was writing this on the bullet train the tinkling ice cream trolley passed.

In Shibuya and other station hubs we are bombarded by video screens and pop music, high-pitched screams advertising this and that, megaphones at every second shop, and the tinny electronic effects coming from the pachinko gambling parlours. Over Christmas and the New Year the right-wing party loyal wishing to restore greater powers to the Emperor kept up a monotonous commentary of “Banzai Heka Tenno”, “Long live the Emperor!’.

In the Nagasaki A-Bomb Museum there was a suitably sober background music, and the in Glover Garden, a park in the area which was the centre of European residence after Japanese ports were opened up in 1859, church music provided a suitably Christian flavour. For Nagasaki, the westernmost port of Japan, was a thriving centre of Christianity after the Jesuits, including St. Francis Xavier, went there in the middle of the 16th century, and though Christianity was officially banned from 1614 for some 250 years by the Shogunate, it survived underground and is still very active, and indeed is one of the ways in which Nagasaki is selling itself as a tourist centre.

I visit the cathedral in Urakami, to the north of Nagasaki, very near the epicentre of the A-bomb blast, which killed 75,000, and which of course completely destroyed the cathedral. I see Japanese nuns in the street. I visit the museum of Dr Nagai Takashi, who treated A-Bomb victims and studied the effects of the A-Bomb while he himself was dying of leukaemia, caused by excessive doses of radiation while screening for tuberculosis as insufficient X-ray film was available due to the war. In the five years before his death, while bedridden, he wrote a number of bestsellers, for example, Leaving These Children Behind and The Bells of Nagasaki. Like many of Nagasaki’s most prominent citizens, Nagai was also a Catholic.

When the bomb fell on 9 August 1945 he was injured but still continued working in his hospital. Three days later he returned to his destroyed home to find his wife and describes the moment in The Rosary Chain: “It was an expanse of ashes but I found her immediately. A black lump lay on the spot where the kitchen had been, the charred remains of a pelvis and spine left by the all consuming fire. A rosary with a cross was lying nearby. I scooped my wife into a scorched bucket. Her remains were still warm”.

A number of schools in Urakami were also near the epicentre. The Yamazoto Primary School is now a spruce new building with a number of memorials, including an air raid shelter, which a few of the 300 survivors out of a total of 1,500 children and staff, managed to reach.

The monument to the twenty-six Christian martyrs, crucified in 1597 by Shogun Totoyomi Hideyoshi is next to a church with two Gaudiesque towers. Nearby one can see the Fukusai-ji Temple, where the huge goddess of mercy, Kannon, is riding a giant turtle, whose belly is a temple, while children look up at her admiringly. Inside the temple I examine the offerings: the Hiroshima and Nagasaki symbol of peace, a chain of origami paper cranes; some cakes; a small bottle of sake; and some children’s toys.

But I’m told that Buddhism and its offshoot. Shinto, have no tradition of Christian charity. In Ueno Park, a kind of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, the home to Tokyo’s most important museums, many of the homeless camp in their blue canvas tents. Their number seems to be increasing. There are jobs available, but who wants to employ a middle-aged no-hoper who may have a drink problem. But today is a pleasant sunny day: clothes can be washed and dried. And there is a free lunch. A soup kitchen. And a pleasant upbeat female vocalist. And I see a large red cross.

Huis ten Bosch

2005-01-18T06:33:00.001-08:00

Never having been to Utrecht, I welcomed the chance to climb the Dom Toren, the cathedral tower, the highest in Holland. From the top on a dull January day I saw the narrow Dutch houses with their pointed roofs grouped around a number of town squares, separated by canals, the harbour, marina and luxury housing project; the posh 200 dollar a night hotels; the two recreated galleons, De Liefde, which capsized in the Far East in 1600, and Kanko Maru; and the fjord-like estuary and the hills beyond. I descended and in the adjacent Utrecht Plaza theatre caught the end of a performance of a Chinese acrobatic group.

It was chill Dutch weather on the canals. Despite the lack of wind, the windmills kept up their regular rotation. Mauritsplein was quiet today. Most people there were tourists, the majority Oriental. They hunted the souvenir shops for clogs, cheese, sponge cakes, drank beer at the Brauerei and sent tulip-shaped postcards home. Little traffic, apart from bicycles, buses and smoothly-running vintage cars.

At Langedijk Auction Rooms in Spakenburg Harbour there was a flower shortage, and in the traditional Dutch flower auction system of going down from the highest price, with the first bidder getting the goods, flowers had been replaced by chocolates, cakes and biscuits.

Many things had changed since my previous visit to Holland, less than two years ago. The marijuana selling coffee houses were no longer there. Neither were the whores exhibiting their goods in the shop windows of the red-light districts. In fact, a complete clean-up operation seemed to have been carried out. No punks, no drug addicts, no graffiti. I saw none of the recent racial tension in Holland we are now reading about. The cultural ebullience was also missing. Yes, there was a small Von Siebold Museum, and a 3-D show of Escher’s puzzles, but not a sign of the Flemish masters, or even the more popular van Gogh. And I was often confused when I entered a number of so-called “museums” only to find them to be up-market shops.

Yes, there is Teddy Bear World, and I learnt that teddy bears originated with a hunting expedition of American President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, who refused to shoot a small bear cub. News of the incident spread, and the teddy bear became his symbol. Of course, the Roosevelt family had Dutch origins.

I was surprised to see that the Stadhuis, Trouw Zaal, was now longer functioning as an administrative centre and had been turned into a museum for luxury glassware. And you even rent the upper floor for a wedding ceremony.

And piped music everywhere, but who knows any Dutch music? So we hear Strauss waltzes and even Irish republican protest songs on the ever-present speakers. There is even a lovely Parisian carousel for the kids on Nassauplein. And Dutch food is none too famous, so lots of Italian, French, Chinese and even a few Japanese restaurants and karaoke bars.

Queen Beatrix’s Palace, Huis ten Bosch itself, is impressive from the outside, and lit up every night, but surprisingly eclectic inside. The central hall is completely covered by a recent lurid pop-art style mural protesting against the ravages of nuclear war. Other rooms are in period style, others modern, but Queen Beatrix, apparently going through hard times, has rented large spaces to stores selling trinkets and porcelain and chocolate, and one wing of the palace can even be hired for weddings. Such are the bicycle monarchies!

Dejima

2005-01-18T06:12:00.000-08:00

You are a scholar or an intellectual, or at least want to be. Your country has closed all its borders. There is no Internet, television, radio, newspapers or even post. All government information is censored. Books from abroad are almost impossible to come by. You know that your country is a long way behind other countries in scientific discoveries, and you are desperate to find out about these developments. Your government permits a tiny trading post at the extreme western tip of your island country, where one foreign power is allowed to set up a depot, and this is the only contact possible with anything or anyone foreign. You manage to find a primer and learn the rudiments of the language of the country which runs this trading post. Desperate for knowledge about the latest scientific discoveries, you make your way to this port. You meet other young men there who are equally desperate to acquire knowledge. You meet one of the official interpreters, who has opened up his house and set up a study group to discuss and spread the scientific ideas which he has learnt from the doctor in the settlement. Your knowledge of the foreign language enables you to get a job as an apprentice interpreter.

Such was the position of Japan and Japanese intellectuals from 1641 right to 1859, when the Dutch enjoyed exclusive trading rights with Japan, and Japan’s mirror on the world was Dejima, a fan-shaped man-made island, some 70 by 200 metres, in Nagasaki harbour.

The Dutch had replaced the Portuguese as the favoured trading nation. For seven years from 1580 the Portuguese Society of Jesus controlled the area around Nagasaki, and the town became very Christian, with some 760,000 Christians in the west of Japan. Worried about the spread of Christianity, in 1587 Shogun Totoyomi Hideyoshi, who in effect controlled all of Japan, banned all missionaries and placed Nagasaki under his direct control. However, trade with Portugal was continued. In 1597 26 Christians, including a number of priests, were crucified at Nishizaka Hill in Nagazaki. They were later sanctified. In 1612 Christianity was officially banned, and all churches in Nagazaki razed. In 1622, the next Shogun, Tokugawa Hidetada, executed a further 55 missionaries. In 1635 the Shogunate banned Japanese citizens from travelling abroad, and after the 1637 Christian rebellion against the Shogunate, the Portuguese were confined to Dejima, only to be expelled after growing antagonism in 1639.

They were replaced by the Dutch East India Company, already powerful in the Far East, on certain conditions, including their promise to provide information about Catholic priests hiding in the area. 700 Dutch ships were to come to Dejima in the next 218 years, bringing luxury products such as silk, textiles, dyes, skins, medicines and glassware to Japan, which in turn exported silver and copper and ceramics.

There were severe conditions imposed on visits from Japanese to Dejima. Only authorized officials, traders, porters, interpreters and courtesans were allowed on the island. In 1720 there was a slight relaxation: foreign books could be brought into Japan, and the doctors were allowed to take Japanese students. In fact, the key people in terms of cultural contact were the Dutch doctors, who, like the Japanese interpreters they met, were fascinated by what they had heard about the other culture.

Not all the doctors were Dutch but as they had blue eyes and big noses could pass as Dutch. Engelbert Kaempfer, a German, arrived on Dejima, in 1690. He gave medical lectures to two of the Dejima interpreters, Narabayashi Chinzan and Motoki Ryoi. Narabayashi later compiled information from the European texts he acquired from Kaempfer to complete the book, Koi Geka Soden, (The Origins of European Surgery), which became known all over Japan, and launched the Narabayashi school of surgery. Motoki wrote a pictorial encyclopaedia of anatomy, also based on these European sources. He also introduced Japanese people to the idea that the ideas of Copernicus, that the earth was moving through space, translating a number of works on astronomy and geography. Newton’s theories of physics and astronomy were introduced by Shiduki Tadao in Rekischo Shinsho (New Impressions of History). Shiduki also wrote a comprehensive study of Dutch grammar. Motoki’s son, Motoki Shoei, carried on in his father’s footsteps and was part of an English language research project ordered by the Shogunate that resulted in the completion of the first English – Japanese dictionary in 1814. Kaempfer, in turn, published his Japan Diary, an account of his travels to the Edo court.

Born in Sweden, botanist Carl Peter Thunberg studied botany and medicine under Carl von Linne, the father of taxonomy. During his one year stay he collected some 800 plants to take to Europe and taught a number of influential pupils. Yoshio Kogyu introduced European surgical techniques into Japan, and developed a following across Japan. His house in Nagasaki was a stopping point for all those who came to Nagasaki in pursuit of knowledge. And Hakagawa Junnan and Katsuragawa Hosho, authors of The New Book of Anatomy, were instructed by Thunberg when he visited Edo.

Philip Franz von Siebold, also German, arrived in Japan in 1823, devoted much time to studying Japanese history, geography, customs and culture, wrote three books on Japanese flora and fauna, treated Japanese patients and lectured on botany and science. He received permission to purchase a house on the outskirts of Nagasaki, which was used by his students as a private academy, something of a Dutch medical school. Its students became doctors to the Shogunate and clan leaders and also translated Dutch academic books on a number of subjects. In autumn 1828 a typhoon struck Nagasaki Harbour and damaged the Dutch ship Cornelius Houtman. Amongst the cargo maps of Japan elite crests only to be worn by elite families were discovered. Despite having applied for Japanese citizenship to show his loyalty to the Shogunate, Siebold was banned from returning to Japan and forced to leave his wife, Taki, and daughter, Ine. Another version of Madame Butterfly. The Shogunate cartographer, Kegeyasu Takahashi, died in prison.

Every year a 90-day to Edo, the capital, now Tokyo, was made, to pay respects to the Shogun, and the visitors also met with scholars and physicians. They were not always accompanied by the doctors. Pity the poor merchants and traders who tried their best to reply to questions on astronomy and anatomy. Sake was then served to deflect questions.

With the signing of Japanese trade treaties in 1854 and 1855, and the opening up of Japanese ports to foreign trade, Dejima lost its reason for existence, and was closed down for good in 1859, becoming part of the growing settlement area for European residents in 1866. The surrounding land was all filled in, so Dejima no longer looks like an island. It is now being restored rebuilt as a museum.

Hiroshima

2005-01-10T05:22:00.000-08:00

Approach Hiroshima with care and reverence, I thought, as I had done Salem, Massachusetts, only to find witches decorating every second house. But that was a relatively small scale incident nearly four hundred years ago. When I went to Auschwitz I found the locals taking their dogs for walks around the camp, and the Arbeit Macht Frei gate was a favourite stopping-place for to dogs to take sniff and a piss. Life must be lived, and we cannot disconnect a whole city from the daily affairs of human life.

And so it is with Hiroshima, which reminded me a little of Coventry, the city in the UK which proportionately suffered the most bomb damage in World War II. Hiroshima, like all cities in Japan, is rich and vibrant: Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Armani, a large pink-light entertainment district, smartly dressed people exuding prosperity.

As in all of Japan on this public holiday, Coming of Age Day, all who reach the age of 20, must register at the Town Hall. It is custom for girls to do so in kimono, and for many this is the first time they will ever have worn one. Unaccustomed to making short and dainty steps, they stumble, trip and fall. Many just call a taxi.

The Hiroshima Swimming Club is holding a dip in the chilly waters of the Motoyasugawa River, just next to Peace Park. They enter the icy water silently, do not complain about the cold, then a quick 50 metre dash. Some synchronized swimming, then two swimmers open out parasols and fans. We are told the next swimmer will draw the kanji for peace while in the water to provide a nice shot for the press with Genbaku Dome, the building that survived more or less intact and which has become a symbol of Hiroshima, in the background. But no, the kanji he draws demand that the city council provide his baseball club with a ground. Life in Hiroshima is certainly normal!

Hiroshima is at the forefront of Japan’s official pacifist policy. The Mayor, of whatever political affiliation, will write a protest letter to any country that carries out a nuclear test.

And this is the theme that runs through the Peace Memorial Museum, which meticulously describes the history of pre-war Japan, the build-up of the military barracks in the city, from where forces were despatched to Korea and China, the blast itself, the immediate tragedy, the reconstruction, and the consequent illnesses such as microcephaly, cancer and leukaemia, which many later suffered from, and the problems which many of these hibakusha still have to cope with. Blasted household items and burnt clothes are exhibited; I remember a toddler’s tricycle, a tin helmet, and various handkerchiefs. We see photos of the charred victims and the desolation of the city. Particularly poignant was a shadow etched on some stone steps where the victim took the force of the blast and prevented the step from darkening.

At the exit we see drawings by the survivors: a man taking his very last swig of water; blackened corpses; bloated corpses in a backwater; a son with his sister on his back looking for his father amidst more corpses in a river.

Of particular interest are the letter Albert Einstein sent to President Roosevelt early in the war outlining the advantages of the bomb and excerpts from the diaries of the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. Japan’s growing militarization is not spared, but neither is the American desire to prevent the Russians from getting a foothold in Japan, and Truman’s need to prove that the US$2 billion invested in research for the A-bomb was worthwhile.

In the adjacent Peace Memorial Hall we are surrounded by a 360 degree photo of the charred and desolate city and can look up records and pictures of those who were killed and enter a huge computerized file of personal memoirs of the survivors.

My hotel overlooks the Yanagi-bashi Bridge over the Kyobashi River, some two kilometres from the epicentre of the blast. Now it is flanked by offices, flats and tree-lined walkways. But I imagine that on the 6 August 1945 some of the 150,000 victims of the A-bomb were desperately seeking water and some relief in this now tranquil river.

Kyoto

2005-01-10T02:37:00.000-08:00

New Year in Japan. One visits the local Shinto shrine to ward away the evil spirits and make a wish for the next year. At Meiji-Jingi Shrine in Tokyo I join three million others to throw my coin in the box, clap my hands to call the gods, ring the bell just in case they haven’t heard, make a quick wish and prayer, tie my wish written on a piece of paper or a wooden votive tablet to a tree. Then go and buy amulets, souvenirs, food and drink at the nearby stalls. Some of the shrines even provide buckets of sake, the holy Japanese drink. Many girls put on their kimono, and some of their partners even wear Samurai dress. The shrines are decked out in lanterns and flags. Each shrine will be dedicated to its own particular deity. At many of the Shinto shrines one sees the effigies of the chubby badger god, Takuni, and the fox god of money and business, Kitsune, whose shrines are popular in the New Year as many companies bring their staff to pray for a prosperous year.

Shinto has grown out of an awe for natural manifestations, each of which has their god, and many shrines have been erected in places where these manifestations took place, often on mountains and hillsides. These myths have been given a peculiarly Japanese character. No religious texts exist, and one cannot convert to Shinto. When Izanagi-no-Mikito and Izanami-no-Mikito stood on the Floating Bridge of Heaven, they dipped the Heavenly Jewelled Spear into the ocean. Brine dipped from the spear and created the island of Onogoro-jima, where the two were married. Izanami gave birth to the islands of Japan and its deities. When Izanagi died he purified himself into a stream and created the deity of Amaterasu, the sun goddess, from who the Imperial family was supposed to descend.

The vagueness and flexibility of Shinto was used to create the myth of the racial superiority of the Japanese amidst the growing industrialization and militarization of Japan from the late 19th century to the Second World War, and the deification of the Emperor added on to Shinto and used to produce obedient and patriotic subjects. Only in this period did Buddhism, which has peacefully co-existed in Japan since early times, suffer a certain repression. Since Shinto was disestablished after the war it has taken a back seat. Many Japanese pay no more than lip service to Shinto and do no more than attend important festivals. At a local shrine in Tokyo Kussun called the friendly priest, the owner of the shrine, to have his photo taken with me. When the priest dies, his son will inherit the shrine.

Butt I must leave Tokyo, and I catch the Shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto. No big deal here in Japan. Buy your 100 dollar ticket at the machine as if it were a one dollar metro ticket, and stand up in the unreserved class if there’s no room. On board the smell of rice and soy sauce as families picnic on their return from Tokyo or visit relations in Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka and Hiroshima. Families in Japan are small, 1.29 children per couple, and New Year is one of the few visiting times.

We eat posh boxed lunches, like the rest of the carriage. Mt Fuji, now topped with snow, is on my left, a girl in kimono, maybe an apprentice geisha returning to Gion, opposite. But no, she gets off at Nagoya.

In Kyoto we climb up the Path of Enlightenment at the Choinin Shrine. The sky clouds over. A muggy January day suddenly chills. We enter a cemetery, tombs, slim wooden memorial tablets. The city is below us.

Crows hover above,
Bamboo sways in the graveyard,
Winter snow returns.

The first snowflake falls,
Crows circle, the sky darkens,
Forty-nine winters.

We descend into the city to see how Kyoto trades on Japaneseness. It was the home to the Japanese Imperial family from 794 to 1868, though, from 1600 to 1867, power was exercised by the shoguns in Tokyo. A city which exudes and trades on refinement. Shop windows are streamlined and delicate, with one lone item, a small dish, or a sweet. A closed door with paper shojo windows tells us those goods are not for all. But this sense of tradition accommodates the modern, as Japan always does: the girls in kimono are dependent on their mobile phones; the waiter wearing traditional serving dress in the restaurant communicates to the kitchen by cordless headset radio; and the insurance office clerk sitting on his heels is working at the latest Sony Vaio.

The gold-covered Kinkuji Temple glistens in the weak morning sun; it was burnt down in 1950 by a trainee Buddhist monk, and like so many “ancient” buildings in Japan, what we have is a reconstruction. Yukio Mishima used the incident for his famous novel, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Its Cinderella sister, two-tier wooden Ginkuji Silver Pavilion (but there is no silver) looks over a famous Zen garden. A five-foot cone of sand with the point sliced off, a garden of raked sand, surrounded by the larger garden of trees, stones, moss and water. Sit in the tea pavilion and contemplate the shapes into which the sand is raked, the dark wooden two-tier pavilion, the miniature pine trees and the bare cherry blossom trees, listen to the water running, see the garden blends into Mount Daimonjiyama beyond.

I leave the Ginkiji and pass through the tacky tourist shops, turn into the Philosophers’ path, following a stream which brings fresh water from the hills. I stop for coffee and cake, admire the bare cherry trees and think of spring and the blossom. I watch the locals walking their collies and Japanese akitas and listen to the songs of Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet, for even in the most Japanese city of all the foreign is easily accommodated.

Edo

2005-01-04T18:51:00.001-08:00

The first time I came to Tokyo I expected London or Paris and found a city straight out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a city of train lines, neon, department stores, flyovers. An ugly and impersonal city of shapeless office blocks, prefabricated houses and jerry-built apartments, made even uglier by the unburied electricity cables. No thought of visual harmony; no attempt to find a distinctive modern Japanese style. Or even recreate the castellated and turreted Meiji early 20th century style. Or do as Warsaw and Frankfurt did and recreate the old town as they had been before the War.

But buildings in Japan are not built to last. A house in Tokyo will stand for an average of 25 years. The ravage of earthquakes and fires of course, but also extremely high inheritance taxes, which put off families investing in a solid building meant to last for generations, and the traditional use of wood, which must be renewed from time to time.

In short, only a very few houses from Edo, old Tokyo, have survived earthquakes, fires and bombings. Tokyo is city with apparently no past. But it is not in the aesthetics of architecture that we must look to discover old Japan but rather in the conservation of arts such as shodo, calligraphy, pottery, kabuki theatre, and sports such as kendo, kyodo, archery, and sumo.

I arrive at the Hakkuka stable at 8 a.m., and a bleary-eyed rikishi, a sumo wrestler, resplendent in a flowery yukata gown, opens the door and guides me into the training area. I sit on the raised platform. The training session of the juniors is in full swing. They have completed their apprentice course at the sumo association in the basic moves and rules of sumo, its history and Shinto rituals, and associated arts such as calligraphy, where they have to master the special thick script in which the Banzuke, the sumo rankings, is published. They are fighting practice bouts. The winner stays in the ring to fight the next. A stocky and powerful 20 year-old, a rugby prop forward, is defeating all-comers. His shoulders are bruised. His top-knot is undone. He pushes weaker opponents out of the five metre diameter ring, neatly slips out of the way when larger wrestlers charge at him so their momentum will carry them out, and lifts those smaller than he out of the ring by their belts.

The seniors appear to carry out their exercises. They crouch and lift each leg 135 degrees outwards, for strong and supple thighs and thigh and groin muscles are the secret to sumo success. They walk in a frog and crab-like dance. They push each other out of the ring. They practice falls. They come in all shapes and sizes. One is short and flabby, sagging breasts, belly overhanging genitals, drooping inner thighs. Another is square like a brick. Another has narrow shoulders, an enormous paunch and elephant legs. Others have gorilla-like arms. Some are even quite lithe and have relatively flat bellies. And I wonder about one junior, thin and bony, 60 kilos at the most. Of course he is always carried out of the ring, for there is no weight division in sumo. Sometimes the nippier smaller guys defeat the heavies, and the crowd roars.

Everything is carried out in silence. The trainers hardly say a word. When they do, the rikishi just nod, say "Hai, Hai", or the more formal "Oos". Like all other traditional Japanese sports, repetition of the basic forms will lead to mastery and a state of perfection, where a state of calm and enlightenment can be achieved.

I smell food from the kitchen. The juniors are making the chanco nabe, the hot-pot, for lunch. Fish, chicken, vegetables, and plenty of rice.

The life of the sumo wrestler is heavily regimented and follows many of the Samurai norms from the early 19th century and before. Apprentices live in the stables with fixed duties and early curfews, for they must get lots of sleep. There are strict codes of dress, and outside the ring the wrestler will wear traditional kimono, and use the old Samurai hairstyle, with more elaborate top-knots for the higher-ranking wrestlers, which will be fashioned by one of the official Sumo Association barbers. Salaries for the different grades are fixed. And as in other sports, the Dan system of official promotion to a higher level after winning a tournament or a specific number of bouts, operates.

But there is a subtle mingling of the modern and the traditional. The wrestlers’ tournament kimono carry the names of the official sponsors, in traditional sumo calligraphy, of course. Official eyeing-up and glaring time has been gradually cut due to television requirements. Sumo wrestlers don’t seem to get involved in night-club brawls, but in the corner of the gym I see several bags of golf clubs. In Japan there are few who have they time or money to play golf on a Tuesday afternoon. Except successful sumo wrestlers.

Yoyogi, Harajuku

2004-12-26T20:25:00.000-08:00

Musak, instant snow,
Buy cakes, gifts, spend and spend.
Tokyo Christmas.

It’s snowing up in the Yebisu Center. At 5 p.m. and 6p.m. every evening the snow machines blow flocks over the gasping crowd, who capture this magical moment on their digital cameras.

After the snowstorm they crowd around the gigantic Baccarat chandelier, on show from Paris, with the Rodin and Bourdelle statues in the background, and the 1996-vintage Hotel de Ville. And just over the road is the Tsutaya Culture Convenience Club.

In Yebisu it is Heartfelt Christmas. At the nearby Atre store it is Precious Christmas and Queen Christmas as the queues mount up to buy yuletide Christmas cakes, decorated with reindeer and Santa Claus.

And Santa Claus outfits are popular with sales girls, students at end of year parties, many of them in drag, sporting a red Santa Claus outfit over black tights, and little sausage dogs, who scamper around in their red coats and hats.

The public is allowed into the Imperial Palace grounds on 23 December, to wish Emperor Akihito a happy birthday. He laments the natural disasters from behind a glass partition, flanked by his sons, but Crown Princess Masako is still recovering from depression. A few middle-aged guys shout “Banzai, banzai, long live the Emperor. Tourists wave their free Japanese flags. Young Japanese are notable by their absence.

Boxing Day lunch is at Eminence, the surprisingly filling restaurant of a local hotel cum banqueting center, specializing in weddings. We find the Christian chapel, though I doubt whether it is consecrated. And a gringo friend may be invited to “officiate”. Wedding companies offer a menu of Shinto, Buddhist or Christian. For a special price you can combine more than one.

I gaze at the beautiful pike in the aquarium. But wait a moment! A minute ago they were carp!. And didn’t I see goldfish when I came in? I’ve been looking at a fish tank with a video of fish!

A pity, because over the road there is a shop selling tiny colourful tropical fish. The gardens in the tanks are tended beautifully, and each has a particular theme: one is rocky and bare, Zen-like; another is lush and deep green; a third is full of hidden nooks and crannies.

As we leave Eminence, the delegates arrive for the Tokyo Society for the Preservation and Improvement of Schoolgirls’ Uniforms. All are male, most around twenty, some with a grunge look. They are frisked as they go in, unusual in Tokyo, where security is lax. Discussions will take place, position papers will be given, designs will be compared. Then a cutey schoolgirl band will entertain delegates. I enquire about membership.

Chicken and yaksoba were also plentiful at the Postgraduate Student Party of the Dept. of Comparative Literature and Culture at the University of Tokyo. Mixing and mingling is a little restrained. Boys stay in their bands, and girls in their broods. The German Professor tells me: “At my class party yesterday it was the same. I asked about it and one girl told me she would love to talk to the boys but was worried about what the others would think…” The girls leave, and the boys go upstairs to finish off the half-empty bottles of scotch.

Yoyogi Park on Boxing Day is a buzz of activity. Doggies sport their Christmas attire; there are games of frisbee rugby; musicians play Irish folk music with bongo drums; a gringo DJ plays trance music; Elvis rockabillies dance and preen; boys and girls juggle a small rag ball with their feet. This is the successor of kemari, a game played by young Japanese nobles right from the 12th century, in which teams of eight in full kimono would have to keep a leather ball in the air as long as possible. Kemari was played amidst four trees, always a pine, a willow, a maple, and a cherry. Geisha looked on. Last year David Beckham was the idol of all Japan. Surely Beckham in full samurai costume, with a top-knot, would be the ideal way to both revive kemari and his own flagging career.

Harajuku is a fancy-dress party. On the bridge all shades of Gothic. From Byronic black through blood-spattered doctors just out of theatre to demonic angels. The Little Bo-Peep and Little Miss Muffet curds and whey look with bonnets and balloon skirts has now been in for a couple of months, and the latest is the Edwardian chambermaid, a long prim black dress, starched white lacy pinafore, and a prim and proper brushed-back look.

Ebisu

2004-12-21T20:34:00.000-08:00

Professor Kurosawa and I lunch at Lever son Verre, the French restaurant on campus, 1,000 yen, US$10, for the setto menu. A salad, or rather a piece of lettuce, two inches by one, and the main course arrives: a square inch of cod on a bed of vegetables, or rather a slice of aubergine and a slice of carrot. Of course, beautifully laid out, as befits a Japanese French restaurant. I ask for more bread. Two thin slices come. Lever son Verre is packed. It has been on TV. Ladies come from all over Tokyo. Pleasant surroundings. Visit the campus.

Meanwhile, in the soba, don and ramen bars all over Tokyo, their husbands, anxious to get back to the office, are slurping their bowls of noodle in three minutes flat. Making noise when downing food is good form, at least in noodle bars.

We leave Lever son Dejeuner with our bellies rumbling. Is there a sadder experience in life?

I decide to follow fifteen-year-old schoolboys to the cheap cafes where they eat, for surely they have an insatiable hunger, and land in an okonomiyaki canteen, where a heavy floury pancake omlette is made on a grid in front of you.

The stodge fills me up for the next two hours, but I am hungry again. Biscuits and chocolate at one of the ubiquitous convenience stores must be the solution. I am pleased to see my favourite McVities Chocolate Digestives. But there are no jumbo-sized packs in Japan. A small elegant box, in which I find four small packs of cellophane each containing four downsized Chocolate Digestives. Then I buy a pack of Mini Milk Chocolate Biscuits to keep me going till later.

In a moderately priced restaurant in Shimokitazawa the sashimi and sushi is beautifully laid out on a bed of finely cut vegetables, placed on a flat rectangular dish with slightly curling corners, emblazoned with kanji. We admire the design, ask after the porcelain, discuss the layout, and might even pick at a couple of slices. But the waitress is actually surprised when I ask for a big bowl of rice to accompany the sushi and sashimi.

Restaurant going in Japan is primarily an aesthetic experience in which one pays 50, 60 dollars or more for a private show of ephemeral art to be discussed over wine or sake. Any idea of actually filling up your stomach is secondary. Better to have something at home before going out.

The art of designing confectionery, Wagashi, is, like Origami and Kingyo, the breeding of beautiful goldfish, one of those peculiarly Japanese arts. At the Atre Food Hall in upmarket Ebisu I buy a box of six bean-paste sweets. The grey-blue frosty wrapping paper is in itself too beautiful even to open. Then I find a polystyrene bamboo-like box containing the six sweets.

Number one is a ball of strips of the green of summer on one side and the brown of the soil on the other. Summer becomes autumn, and the brown is sprinkled with the winter snow. Number two is a snow like sphere, an igloo in winter, but with a gap at the top, a volcano, for Nature can never be completely dominated. Number three is a pink spring flower whose petals are about open while the yellow pistil at the centre welcomes pollinating bees.

We are in full summer in number four as the yellow chrysanthemum is beginning to bloom. But nature must be worked and produce, and number five is square of fertile black soil, with strips of green, fertility, harmony, late summer once again.But winter is again not far behind. Number six is pear-like, but with indented sides. It is a lush autumn brown, but covered with the hoary frost of winter.

Inside this small box
The four seasons of the year.
How can I eat them?

Rice and rice wine, sake, have semi-religious qualities in Japan. They are considered symbols of the Japanese nation and are eaten and drunk as part of formal ceremonies, during which the Emperor and dignitaries will formaly drink cups of sake and eat bowls of rice. At a shrine one early morning I saw a priest passing the cups of sake round to executives whose company was being blessed.

Of course wine at mass represents the blood of Christ, but such ceremonies would be more akin to Queen Elizabeth having the obligation of downing a pint of bitter and a bowl of boiled potatoes or Lula a goblet of cachaca on formal state occasions!

Tucked away in the corner of the Komaba campus is the tea house. I spy students going through the excruciating torture of sitting on their heels for hours on end and smell the matcha tea, the foul-tasting purgative green brew. And of course tea drinking is not just drinking tea but Zen: cultivating an inner field of consciousness and calm by sitting in a simple thatched hut with a beautiful view, listening to the iron kettle boil while the wind rustles through the dead leaves. A gentle incense should burn, and the cups are handmade and simple. A soft gentle light comes in through the shoji paper windows. Decoration is minimal: a calligraphy scroll in the alcove and a single spray of flowers.

Says Lotung, a Chinese poet: “The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third searches by barren entrail but to find there some 500 volumes of ideographs. The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration – all the wrong of life passes away through my pores. At the fifth cup I am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals. The seventh cup – oh, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves. Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.”

The top teamasters are highly-paid celebrities in Japan. Access to the elite circles of connoisseurs is difficult and costly. The greatest of them all was Sen-no-Rikyu(1521-1591), employed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), who unified Japan. Hideyoshi suspected Rikyu of intrigue and ordered him to die by his own hand, an honour for a samurai. Rikyu invited his friends to his last tea ceremony. After sipping their tea, the chief guest praised the beauty of the equipment. Rikyu presented the cups to those present. Except his own: “Never again shall this cup, polluted by misfortune, be used by me”, and he smashed the vessel.

The guests except one painfully take their leave. Rikyu takes off his tea gown and carefully folds it up, disclosing his white death robe. Tenderly he gazes on the shining dagger:

Welcome to thee,
O sword of eternity!
Through Buddha
And through Dharma alike

Thou hast cloven thy way.

Ginza

2004-12-13T21:07:00.000-08:00

We lunch at a noodle bar. The salarymen slurp their noodles in six minutes flat and return to their drudgery. I am an interpreter of things Japanese as I teach Professor Nirval, from India, how to use chopsticks.

We return to the Kabukiza theatre for the 2.22 performance of Umegoyomi. Monday matine, surely the house will be half-empty? We queue on the stairs and are told standing room only. We go up into the gods and manage to squeeze into seats.

The audience is voluble and chatty, tucking in to their bentos, their boxed lunches, for most of them have been here since 11 a.m. and have already seen two plays. The second session, with three different plays, will begin at 4.30 p.m., and many will stay for them. The audience is 95% female, retired, middle-aged. No teens. We are in a women’s world, for in Japan social worlds are very divided, and attending the kabuki, even at weekends, as very much a female activity.

Of course, all the roles are played by men. My taped commentary says, rather disparingly, that no women could ever manage to wear the 20 kilo wigs that the male actors playing geishas are required to wear. The pink, green and chocolate curtain open to reveal a 50 metre wide stage. An elaborate set. A riverside Japanese tea house. Geishas talking about the handsome Tanjiro, who arrives by boat. Stylized acting. Tiny steps and elaborate hand movements. Much use of the flounces in the trailing geisha kimonos. No sense of transvestism. No camping it up. Voices are not too high and breasts are flat.

Adakichi, played by the renowned Tamasaburo, an onnagata, an actor specialized in female roles, has stolen the handsome but feckless Tanjiro from the other top geisha in Edo, old Tokyo, Yonehachi, with whom he was almost setting up house. Despite his pusillanimity and inability to face up to problems, or maybe even because of these qualities, Tanjiro is the darling of the house, and his style is rough and samurai-like. When he enters, at at specific moments in the text, my neighbour, apparently a salaryman, shouts out his name, or another, his house name. People cheer. My neighbour is an omuko-san, a knowledgeable aficionado, “great distant people”, as they call out from the furthest seats from the stage.

A tea caddy, a family heirloom, has been stolen. Hanjiro, Tanjiro’s friend, has been responsible for it and must commit suicide if it is not found. Adakichi gives Tanjiro a beautiful haori. Yonehachi rips and muddies it. The geisha fight in a slow stylized way, hardly touching.

A corrupt samurai, Samonta, has stolen the caddy. Adakichi discovers and will seduce the samurai to get it. Her friend Masaji tells Yonehachi that Adakichi and Tanjiro are dining. Yonehachi throws her clog into the dining room, a terrible insult, but she has been tricked as it is not Tanjiro but the samurai who is with Adakichi. Samonta draws his sword. The geisha code forbids Yonehachi to apologise. And as a samurai can never return his sword to its sheath without cutting off at least one head, blood will run. But Kobe, the go-between, the head mafioso in the tea-room quarter, intervenes, Samonta is discovered as the thief, the geisha make it up, and Kobe decides that the handsome Tanjiro should now marry his fiancee, Ucho. And at the end the jilted geisha say together: “Puts you off, doesn’t it?”

The audience, many in kimono, leave, throw their plastic trays in the bins and parade and shop in the brightly-lit dusk streets of Ginza, traditionally the poshest part of Tokyo. At the fin de siecle it was the centre of fashion and culture, newspaper offices, western trends and theatres and well-known for its brick buildings, which all perished in the 1923 earthquake. Brick was seldom used again in Tokyo.

At the Mitsukoshi Department Store coffee is ten dollars a cup, so we switch to the Brazilian-owned Doutor Coffee. Coffee shops are almost exclusively places for ladies to chat and students to works on their laptops. Husbands are still at work, for they may begin late, and hours are long. And after work, even on a Monday night, they drink in a tiny bar run by a consoling Mama-san.

If theatre going fails to follow the Western fashion of a night out for a couple, touching and kissing also have their own codes in the East. Few courting couples hold hands, and many fewer kiss in public. Japanese even uses the English terms, boyfrendo and gurufrendo.Yet there is no moral or religious taboo on sex, quite different to that of the Fathers of Christianity in the West, and love hotels abound in Tokyo.

Last Saturday night we ate in the Campus French restaurant. At the next table a family group, including a young mother and her nine-month-old baby, He is lively and in a good mood. She whispers in his ear, plays with him but gave him not a single kiss, in all of two hours.

But there are a few young couples up Tokyo Tower, Tokyo’s quarter-size Eiffel Tower lookalike. It is a clear windy night, perfect for the view North, to the towers of Shinjuku, East to the dark and mysterious Imperial Palace and the lights of Ginza, South over Rainbow Bridge to Odaiba and the harbour, and West to Yokohama, Mount Fuji-san and the mountains beyond.

Nikko, Komaba

2004-12-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

Small is better. Pocket gardens, bonsais. Tachibana takes me to a cheap restaurant where we eat takoyaki, octopus balls, sorry, omelette-like balls with bits of octopus inside. Popular with schoolkids. Four tables sitting two apiece and six seats at the counter. A large establishment by Tokyo standards, where many bars run by a mama-san are much smaller.

But Tokyo is not Japan. And up in the hills outside Tokyo the concept of space is altogether different. At first sight, Nikko, a tourist town up in the hills with famous shrines and hot springs spa hotels, could be... England. Walking up the deserted main street at 6.30 on a dull Saturday evening reminds me of many a country town in middle England. Cars pass, but no pedestrians, I am homesick for the wall-to-wall restaurants, the thundering neon, the pink light zones, and I realize that Japan, outside the big cities, is a very car-dominated society.

I was looking for winter, and I found it in Nikko. In the hills trees bare, brittle branches ready to fall and disintegrate, and dying bamboo shoots. During the night a storm wiped the few remaining maple leaves into the gutter, but next day was summer again, temperatures up to 25C, while heavy snow fell in Hokkaido in the North.

Up above Nikko,
Bare bracken, dry and crumbling.
The leaves have fallen.

And where are all the trendy mini-skirted kawai, cute, girls? The Daily Yomuri warns me: “Japan heading for extinction” due to the low birth rate, while in Tokyo I have been surrounded by a never-never land of schools, universities and young people.

Teenage girls and boys
In Shibuya, Komaba.
Ah! So few of them!

In Komaba I try to buy stamps at the stationer’s. Friday’s lady is not there, and an old couple are in charge: her parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents. A bent old lady, as so many are, from long hours in the paddies, and her husband. 50, 60, 70, 80 years together, for people live till a mighty old age in Japan. She has difficulty in giving change, usually to her advantage. She can’t find the list of charges for Xmas cards to Iran. Husband insults. She retorts.

Couple in the shop,
Together for eighty years,
Insults day and night.

There are few incidents for the flaneur in Japan. Fights, robberies, shows of emotion in public are all too rare. Even the Friday night drunks behave with composure. But last Wednesday after Komabatodaimae Station the crowds gathered round as the station guards retrieved the schoolbag thrown onto the line by a chubby 13-year-old. He was told off in front of a growing crowd and seemed to be breaking down. He had lost his “face”; he was looking a fool in front of others. Ruth Benedict, in her classic study on Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, believes that looking bad in front of others is the worst thing that can happen to anyone in Japan, and contrasts this with Western feelings of guilt.

In traditional Samurai culture this loss of face would often result in suicide. It still often does when business or political frauds are uncovered. And parents have committed suicide through the shame of their child committing a serious crime.

And this can make teaching difficult. Opinions are not ventured; guesses are not hazarded, shots are not taken. The Rabbinical tradition of battering out ideas, interpretations, exegesis, Protestant arguing points of the Bible, Platonic dialogue, parliamentary debate, soapboxes, Hyde Park Corner, la clarte francaise are not part of the Japanese tradition. One must always be sensitive to the feelings of others, always avoiding possibilities of offence or embarrassment. Read between the lines; read the way I say things, not what I say. Watch my intonation, slight body movements, don’t read my words.

After work drinking sessions, almost the norm in many companies, are where bonding takes place and important decisions are taken. At the University of Tokyo clubs, outings, drinking sessions at the Students’ festival have a similar function, bringing together many of those who will play a central role in deciding the future of Japan.

Kamakura, Yasukuni-Jinja

2004-12-01T01:43:00.000-08:00

Like Roland Barthes, when I first looked towards the Imperial plaza, the invisible palace and the woods beyond, seeing no more than an embankment, I felt that the centre of Tokyo was empty. And like the many visitors skirting the outer grounds, which are open to the public, I too looked for something like the White House, Buckingham Palace, even the Taj Majal, guardsmen, a show of pomp, a waving hand, a sign of Emperor Akihito, Crown Prince Naruhito, a Rolls-Royce whisking Crown Princess Masako, an ex-diplomat, now a depressed caged bird, off to her shrink.

On this perfect day of late autumn I circle the Imperial Palace once again and turn into a side road separated from what I think is the palace by a moat. I hear a lone trumpet. Chet Baker. Could this even be a member of the imperial family practicing? But no. The sounds were coming from the Kitanomaru Gardens.

It is 15 August 1945. Emperor Hirohito speaks on the radio for the first time ever. Still a living God, blessed by the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami, for he will only renounce his divine status on 1 January 1946, announces the surrender of Japan. In his Hiroshima Diary, Dr Michiniko Hachiya, who is treating bomb victims, cannot believe what he has heard. Surely he was going to command us to fight the English and American monsters to the last man, woman or child, even with bamboo staves.

Historian Daitochi Irokawa believes he acted weakly with the military generals and should have seized the initiative to surrender much earlier.

"Was the emperor actually so afraid of a group of army officers? Did he not consider relying on the support of the many in the armed forces and the vast number in the public who were willing to die for him? If he really opposed the war, why didn’t he try to prevent it, even if it meant risking his life, in order to save more lives?

Whatever may happen to me
I put a stop to the war
Thinking only of the people who were dying.

Those who died in the war would surely regret the emperor did not write this poem before, rather than after, the war." (In Search of Modern Japan, p.90)

And the Americans allowed the now mortal Hirohito to stay on. He would be a bulwark against communism. The people would still obey him. Not a shot was fired when the Americans entered Japan after the surrender. In February he was sent on to the streets to behave more like a British monarch to tour and revive the spirits of the impoverished people.

I visit the Jimmu temple, where Hirohito collected botanical specimens while he was still a relatively free Crown Prince, and then descend into Kamakura, some 50km from Tokyo, capital of Japan from 1192 to 1333. I buy some mushrooms and dried sweet potatoes and enter the Meigetsu-in Temple, the Bright Moon Hermitage, founded in 1160, and to where Tojo Tokiyori, ruler of Japan, retired in 1256 at the age of 30. Up the stepping stones, how many centuries old are they? Past the hydrangeas, sadly not in bloom in autumn, to the temple. The left hand room has a gold-inlaid altar; the right-hand room is an eight-mat room which is empty but for a plate containing a single persimmon, for the humble caqui is the national fruit of Japan, sagging and swaying from the single tree of many a tiny backyard even at the end of November. And at the back of the room a large circular opening looks out on to the yellows and golds and reds and browns of the garden beyond. I turn and see a dry garden. Grey sand raked in swirls broken by rocks, small at the front and larger at the back as they blend in with the autumnal maple leaves.

Caqui on a plate.
Eight mat room of emptiness.
Autumn leaves outside.

The Meigetsu-in is one of the most famous Zen temples in Japan. Throw a small coin into the box, make a ten-second prayer to Kannu Bodhisattra, the deity of compassion, make a wish, then go back to admiring the autumn leaves.

At the Bright Moon Shrine
Leaves red, yellow, gold and brown.
Let’s take a picture.

For modern-day Japan keeps religion at an arm’s length. Shinto was the ideological basis of the Emperor-worshipping military machine, which saw the Japanese as a unique and divine race. Disestablished by the American occupation forces, it no longer plays a central role in the life of most Japanese. Shrines are visited, photographed, ceremonies are held there, but devotees are dwindling.

But this is a generalization. Many of those who lost their lives for Japan, including Class A war criminals, are enshrined at the Yasukuni-Jinja shrine in Tokyo, the “Repose of the Country”. The shrine and the adjacent museum have been covered in controversy, and today’s Daily Yomuri reports than Japanese PM Junchiro Koizumi has been criticized by China for having made frequent visits. “The US had no interest in bringing the war to an early end”, I read in the exhibition of war material. “Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged the war”, and the “colonizers”, who were “defeated by Japan early in World War II” “could not supress the ideals Japan had advanced after World War I of racial equality and self-determination” as many Asian and African countries achieved independence after World War II.

I pass through the Hall of Memory, see tanks and cannons and fighter planes which have been dedicated to the Shrine and look at pictures of the Jinai, the Divine Thunderbolt Kamikaze Unit, who vowed “to meet again in the next life under the second cherry tree near the entrance gate of Yusukuni Jinja”.

The Visitors’Book makes fascinating reading. For Azumi S. “ it was terrible day for me because I had to come here. I hate this place. I saw many foreigners come here and I beg them not to believe this exhibit as it is. Most of Japanese don’t take the war like that way, and schools tell us a normal history like you had. But unfortunately most of officials support this shrine and I beg you not to take Japan like this shrine shows”.

And Ali: “Why did you join the Nazi side? Why did you do so many war crimes? Why don’t you acknowledge what you did? I feel even Germans acknowledge and regret their past more honourably than you”.

But RJ, a retired US major writes: “As a war veteran I understand the meaning of sacrifice. Japanese warriors should be proud of their warriors as we are”.

Not too many visitors at the museum. The uncontroversial Showa Museum up the road, picturing exhibits of daily life in the war years, draws in the bus loads of the elderly, many of whom lived through the war.

Odaiba

2004-11-24T01:24:00.000-08:00

The Happy Few lucky enough to be getting a Xmas present from me this year will be receiving an Aibo, a robot dog from Sony. He doesn’t do much, just picks up a ball and a bone with a byte, but he responds to affection. Stroke him, and his tail wags; pet his snout and a series of green, red and blue lights on his face sparkle, he stretches his front paws out in pleasure and looks up at you. Of course he behaves well, a bit too well in my opinion: he doesn’t bark, chase cats, piss, fart or shit, eats little electricity, and finds his way back to his battery when he, or you, get tired. He looks more than a little like Snoopy. Was it mere coincidence that I saw a Snoopy products outlet just as I was leaving the Sony area?

Aibo is a snippet at US$1,700, available in black or white. But maybe next year’s puppies will be cheaper.

Aibo’s tail wags.
The children break out in smiles.
Sony’s tills ring out loud.

And if you are not too keen on animals, try a ball, apparently based on the same principle, called Q Healing Creature, because, according to Sony, it has “ feelings and instincts (...) which gives us a sense of what life is really like”. The ball will follow your hand, displaying its array of lights, showing pleasure that you are near, demonstrating that you have at least one pal and admirer. The Q Healing Creature is not yet on the market.

By contrast driving will be all hands-off. I “drove” a Toyota e-car, or rather it drove me, like a five-year-old on a fairground ride. We will be locked into a traffic conveyor belt on the motorways, with our steering and speed automatically controlled.

Sony and Toyota are two of the most successful zaibatsu, the enormous conglomerates which are so central and powerful in Japan, have large showrooms in two shopping centres in Odaiba, a district reclaimed from the sea in the port of Toky,o, and which is so typical of Japanese development projects. It had a shaky start, causing the downfall of mayor Shimachi Suzuki in 1995 though plans for a mega 1996 International Exhibition, but now, with Sony and other big companies there, it has taken off.

Toyota’s mall, Venus Fort, is Italianate, with Roman church facades, Venetian streets, classical fountains, a bright blue Mediterranean sky. What a pity the sky outside was so blue itself yesterday! Sony’s Aqua City is more American, with a quarter-size Statue of Liberty, and an array of mock 1950s shops, including The World of Coca Cola.

The crowds of shoppers on this public holiday, for the shops open every single day of the year, do not come down to the water. A pleasant spot, a park and few people. Over on the mainland contained ships are being loaded and unloaded. Behind the high buildings of the Shinagawa business district. A brightly lit pleasure ferry passes. I take a picture. To the right Rainbow Bridge, reminding me a little of the Golden Gate Bridge. I think of the Thames, the Seine and Hong Kong Island, but Tokyo seems to have turned its back on the sea and its rivers. No cafes, no restaurants, few bateaux mouches. It is because of the earthquakes, I’m told, for the areas near water are often the least safe, liable to instant flooding.

I return to Komaba, where the Students’ Festival is just ending. On Monday the rock groups were poor, the rap and break dancing much better, and the Barber Shop Quartet, or rather Quintet, La Voce, good. For four days students set up food and drink stalls, organized shows, and many camped out. The university provided the infrastructure, and the students did the rest. I went into the Planetarium, set up inside the badminton hall, where a Heath Robinson contraption, made out of coffee and beer cans and old lenses, shows us the night sky. Undergraduate courses are traditionally seen as an easy time between the years of struggle to get in and the long hours of a lifelong job in a big company, which was always a guarantee if you graduated from Tokyo University. Indeed, many of the students I see every day will be responsible for the next generations off Aibos and Q Healing Creatures.

Shinjuku

2004-11-17T23:17:00.000-08:00

I take the Inokashira Line from Komabatodaimae and change to the Keio Line at Medaimae, thence to Shinjuku on the semi-express. At Shinjuku I must get the Seibu Line but discover I have left my map at home. There seems to be no sign for the Seibu Line. Avoiding Restaurant City, I leave the Keio station through the Keio Department Store, for all the private lines have their big stores, their departos. I run the gauntlet through a column of food stalls and their beautiful packs of pickles, fruit, sour bean sweets, teas and chocolate and enter the JR foyer. Still no signs for the Seibu Line. Could it be a JR Line. No, the Yamanote Line I know, the Chuo-Sobo, Sobo, Seibo? The Shosen-Shinjuku, the Shinkansen, the Rinkai, the Saikyo? I caught this last one on Saturday, no way. No sign on the map. Has the Seibu merged? Changed its name? No longer exist? Have I confused it with the Odakyu? I go the the East Entrance – walk around the block and I’ll find it.

Now I’m at the West Exit. Where is the Seibu Department Store? But I seem to be getting farther away. An Australian woman asks me the way. I look at her map and see “Beware this area – hostess bars!”. I direct her to Takashimaya Times Square, but am lost myself. I pass the bus station and the Odakyu store but still no Seibu. The animal rights people are arriving. The second-hand manga comic sellers have set up their stalls. The Cockney kebab seller has opened up. I look down Shombun-Yokocho, Piss Alley, but nothing doing there. Could it be near Shinjuku Sanchome or Shinjuku Nishiguchi, or Minami, Kita, Higashi, East, South, North or West. I would have been better to go on the Yamonote to Ikebukuro, or is it Asakusa, and get the Tobu Line there. I finally lose my pride, descend into the Marounuchi Metro Line and ask for help. I’m shown a map of the Seibu-Shinjuku Line terminal hidden away and nestling close to the Kabukicho pink light district, and, after one or two more detours, am finally there.

Tokyo is a city of many centres, and Shinjuku is the Big Daddy of them all. The home to the largest suburban railway hub in the world, the Tokyo administration offices and many other corporations in the west side skyscrapers, and, on the east, kabuki theatres, Korea town and the largest pink light district in Tokyo. Neither Ridley Scott or Sofia Coppola felt quite at ease here, from what we can see in Blade Runner and Lost in Translation.

I return at greater leisure to Shinjuku Goen, the finest of Tokyo parks. Sit down at one of the viewing points or pavilions to jusst look at the Japanese garden; smell the rose garden laid out in the French style, even with a Helmut Schmidt rose; feel at home in the central English landscape garden, apparently laid out by Capability Brown, has a prospect of Tange Kenzo’s art deco NTT DoCoMo Tower. The wilderness area is neatly cared for. Get your ticket for the traditional tea house at the automatic ticket dispenser.

No geishas and their sponsors on an autumn leaf viewing outing but many collecting leaves for their ikebana or scrapbooks, and hundreds of elderly Japanese painting and taking pictures. What better to stave off senility than a telephoto lens, and if you get a bit shaky use the tripod.

Into Tange Kenzo’s Metropolitan Government Building, one of the few places in Tokyo where your bags are searched, remember the 1995 metro sarin poisonous gas attacks, and up the 48 storey towers, which, according to the Rough Guide are “ unmistakably Japanese”, as the “dome criss-cross pattern of its glass and granite façade is reminiscent of both traditional architecture and the circuitry of an enormous computer chip”. It is dusk, but a fine day, Mount Fuji-san is just visible beyond the smog, and all the cameras are out.

And then, just a stone’s throw away I find myself in Fudori Dori, a narrow suburban shopping street, with American 1950s songs quietly playing on the loudspeakers, where the bicycle mothers, and also bicycle executives and salarymen, stop on their way home. And so many small shops. One with a pair of elderly sisters selling just rice, another pickles, another beautifully packaged tea, another tofu. At one of the greengrocers I buy my rettuce and remons. The supermarket, Venga Venga, which provides bicycle parking, seems much fuller. Just how long will these small stops survive?. Areas outside the big cities seem very Americanized, with strip development everywhere, and an American dependence on the car. Here in Tokyo, with so little space, cars are often not practical, you have to carry your shopping home, and so still many such tiny shops, apparently remnants of a bygone age, survive, within the shadow of the Tange Kenzo’s stark futuristic towers.

Oizumi

2004-11-17T23:15:00.000-08:00

I tried, but failed, to find a similar wave of immigration, or reverse immigration, as it is being called. Many Argentines, of Spanish grandparents, or great-parents, are returning to Spain, but they speak Spanish, or at least Porteno. It is as if the Indian economy took a massive leap, the UK economy fell, the rupee became a hard currency and sterling weak, and 300,000 Britons of Indian origin returned to Bengal no longer speaking Bengali. Or let’s imagine a stagnant US economy, the dollar falling, and North Americans of Cuban origin, having lost their Spanish, taking up factory jobs in Havana in the post-Castro boom to save some strong pesos.

I get off the train at Nishikoizumi, 80km north of Tokyo, and enter Canta Galo, the secos e molhados general store of Sr Miyogi, three years in Japan, “Daijobi, tudo bem”, Brazilian rice and beans, tins of feijoada, Café Pele, even olive oil from Portugal imported from Brazil, and Inca Cola, the vomit green manna of the Andes, to quench the thirst of the Peruvian dekaseguis. Maybe even the most famous dekasegui of them all, Alberto Fujimori, or least his Yakuza minders, do their shopping here!

Into the Brazilian Plaza, Comida por Kilo, Pastel & Cia, Rio Fashion, Garoto for men’s wear, Elba Ramalho on the video. A despachante for Japanese driving licence and documents, and a Varig agent of course. The occasional Japanese is wearing a suit. A bauru at the lanchonete, Acogue do Ceara is selling beef from Australia cut in the chunky Brazilian way. Brazilian beef has not yet managed to get its foot in the door.

On my way out I’m accosted by the local Peruvian evangelicals, “Come to our culto, our service, tomorrow and find God.” Competition is strong, particularly after the recent visit of Bishop Edir Macedo of the rival Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus.

We drive to the Brazilian inter-school volleyball and indoor football championships. Schools have come from the other main area of dekaseguis, in Aichi, near Nagoya, a long drive. We are surprised by the lack of parents. But today is a Saturday, a working day for most. Orders are coming in. Jobs are there for the taking at Sanyo and Fujitsu electronics, Subaru car plant and their sub-contractors. Overtime pays 50% more or double, and this is why we are in Japan, to make some money, buy a house in Brazil, set up a business, maybe a franchise. In the 3D work, dirty, dangerous and difficult, in the foundry or paint shop, we can make up to US$4,000 a month. Stay two or three years, and we could make 50, 60, 70 thousand dollars, and then go back.

And such is the thinking of many. There is no engagement with Japan, the language, ancestors, Shinto, Buddhism, food or crafts. Karaokes are popular, but with English of Brazilian music.

Teenagers leave school at sixteen and go into the factories. Why go to high school in Brazil or Japan when they can earn U$2,000 a month and buy a smart car? But there is a feeling of non-belonging, of being in-between cultures. And we see the familiar consequences of petty crime, drugs and wannabe gangs.

Many have similar features but few have the willowy Japanese figure. The meat diet of the South of Brazil has thickened them up. Many of the families here are mixed. Wives and husbands are often from non-Japanese families.

The first descendants arrived in the state of Sao Paulo some hundred years ago to work on the coffee plantations. Many moved to towns or set up their own market gardens. Integration came slowly but surely. Brazil was always a melting pot. In the 1930s, to avoid the possibility of German bunkers, dictator Getulio Vargas banned schools teaching in foreign languages, and anyway, immigrant children had to learn Portuguese to get on. World War II was the watershed. After the war Japan was the shame of the world, burnt-out and poverty-stricken, better to forget, and Brazil the country of the future. More emigrants left.

But the Brazilian miracle of the sixties and seventies turned sour with the stagflation of the eighties and early nineties. Unemployment also appeared. And the yen was soaring and Japan booming, resulting in a shortage of labour. All those with one Japanese grandparent could obtain visas to work in Japan, and 300,000 came from Brazil.

Lunch at Mini Shop, where Marcelo is doing well. Where are hashi, the chopsticks? I settle for a steak, rice and beans as there is no feijoada, but Ana Maria Braga is on Globo more than makes up for my disappointment.

Some do go back to Brazil for good. Students spend a year or two here to pay for their studies. Many go back and stay in Brazil a year or two. Their business fails. Brazil seems messy and insecure. They have longed for Brazil, now they long for Japan. They are drawn by the Land of the Rising Yen, and return, and finally stay.

And eventually, in thirty, forty, fifty, years, there will be a permanent colony of second, third, generation dekaseguis. Speaking Portuguese almost certainly, Maybe a Portuguese with a difference. Business and newspapers and schools are already flourishing. Doctors and dentists too. There will be Brazilian-Japanese politicians seeking votes, films, radio and TV stations. A university, who knows?

We return to see the final of the girl under-16 indoor football. Viviane powers past Xuxa to score the winning goal for Hamamatsu. The reporters from Tudo Bem and International Press scribble in their notebooks. Edson Ruffino, ex-pro with Joinville EC, tells me about the lack of English schools in the area. Never mind Japanese, English is what we want, but not taught by a native Japanese speaker. And I think of the yen to be made...

My thanks to Hilda, Augusto and Marianne.

Ueno, Yokohama

2004-11-10T19:51:00.000-08:00

It is just before Christmas 2003, and I am strolling around the pink light district of Ueno, Tokyo and feel invisible. The whores fail to notice me. They have no interest in my being their john. My ego takes a blow, and my vanity is broken. On my third lap I get a single offer of a hand job, a massaji, five man, 50,000, yen, US$500. Slightly dear I think. Still, manual labour is expensive here. And white trash like me goes unnoticed when the salarymen are flinging their 10,000 yen notes to the wind. The company has done surprisingly well. And there is a Xmas bonus.

They do not see me,
Painted ladies of the night.
For he has few yen.

And such is life in Japan. Two coffees, tiny piece of apple pie, US$15. Anything that involves skilled labour will cost. An overhaul at the hairdressers sets you back US$200. But I swim in the subsidized local pool for US$3 and exercise on the sophisticated machines in the subsidized training room for US$2. At the university my health care is free.

And how the high yen attracts. Like bees round a honeypot. Casual labour will pay nearly US$10 an hour. Barmaids from North Carolina, kebab sellers from North London, club hostesses from Australia, systems analysts from India, dekaseguis from Lima and Sao Paulo, English teachers from all over. Many small importers. Export to Japan, so we can pay for their hi-tech exports. Jam, cheese, beer, mangoes, wine, rice, rice, rice. Save for a year, two. Invest, take it easy, chill out in India or Brazil.

Yesterday I was in Yokohama, where Japan first opened up. After 200 years of virtual seclusion, with only a limited amount of trading with the Dutch off Nagasaki, Captain Perry’s black ships from the US, black because of their smoke, forced the shogunate to open up, and in 1859 part of Yokohama became the Foreign Settlement, the only place in Japan where foreigners could trade. The Europeans, mainly Brits, lived up the hill, in Yamate, the Bluff, and the Chinese below. They had their own enclosed community with butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers, brewery, tailors, cricket and horse racing. I visit their graves in the foreigners’ cemetery: Hall, Anglin, Angus, Diack. Many Scots.

Perry’s black ships came.
Yamate became the Bluff.
And still is today.

Up on the Bluff little seems to have changed. Some of the old houses survive as teashops or museums. English, American, French housewives, an occasional househusband, fetch their children from the international schools. Two mothers from Bangalore discuss their problem in finding apartments. Down the hill on Motomachi, the smart shopping street, the French, Italian and British goods are still on sale, but these days imported, not produced locally. Up the road there is the American forces personnel compound, for the US still completely controls Japanese defence.

In the Cemetery there is of course the War Memorial. A Capt. Hawkins. Could he have been a relation of my grandfather? No memorial to the Second World War. All the foreigners had left by then. But this struck me as earlier in the day I had visited the Maritime Museum. Not a single mention of the Pacific War. It seemed the Yokohama shipyards had built just merchant vessels and luxury liners, and the years between 1941 and 1945 were a blank. And information inside the training vessel, the Nippon Maru, now in dry dock, delicately avoids the fact that it was used in the war.

And in Tokyo where are the war memorials? I first went there in 1996, just after visiting the concentration camps, cemeteries and memorials in Poland and was struck by their absence in Japan. It seemed a case of starting again, completely obliterating the past. Never again shall we devote all our energies to military expansion. The generals were totally discredited and still are. Japan is still, semi-officially, a pacifist country. Only a handful of nationalists would like Japan to reequip.

In Yokohama Bay,
Where are the ships of war?
A nation forgets.

Shimokitazawa

2004-11-03T19:52:00.000-08:00

They are even a pleasant sensation at first. A slight trembling, a slight swaying, a rocking, a lullaby. They wake me up in the middle of the night. I fall back asleep. They gently shake me out of my snores in the early morning. The Sunday morning after Nigata the after tremors shook the partition dividing my balcony from my neighbour’s. This was going to be it. But it wasn’t. And the Wednesday after the Computer Room began to shake. But the power didn’t even go off. And the nearby trains continued to ply their way...

At the time of the Nigata earthquake I was on a train. I thought the line was getting a bit rough, but it was the quake, 6.8 on the Richter Scale, the strongest since the 1995 Kobe disaster. The last earthquake in Tokyo was in 1923. Another is long overdue...

As the sun rises
The tremors awaken me.
Is this the big one?

And such is the danger of life in Tokyo. Urban violence hardly exists. The Yakuza keeps to its well-defined areas of prostitution and people smuggling. Many people carry wads of ten thousand yen (US$100) notes. Nobody uses credit cards or cheques. Handbags are left unzipped, doors unlocked. Small children ride the trains alone. The crowds pose no menace, no violence. And the white-gloved attendants so delicately shove you into the railway carriage. The drunken stumbling salarymen on Friday night are the most benign of drunks. Squads of workers clean up the dangerous slippery autumn leaves. Gangs of stray mongrels are not seen. All dogs must be licensed. In a month I have seen only one dog turd on the pavement. And that had disappeared the next morning!

I make my way to the nearby shopping area of Shimokitazawa. Narrow pedestrian streets, traditional Japanese lights, A group of retro 1960s and 70s shops. At Brand New Rocket angular stereo systems, red and blue plastic chairs, lean square Bauhaus sofas, formica tables, rectangular fireplace clocks made in China. Black and white televisions with tiny screens, what a relief are those fuzzy images from the flatiron hi-tech widescreens! Dinky, Corgi and Matchbox cars. I remember them well.

At Chicago the kids choose their weekend garb. Velvet or corduroy? Green, brown or crimson? Striped trousers? A top hat? Was that the purple velvet jacket I could never afford in 1973?

Record shops; vinyl is big here. Present shops, the Halloween decorations are replaced by Father Xmas. Naughty Pooch selling dog clothes. Western Suteki, waiters with their cowboy hats, next to Grand Cru and Rain Forest. Near the station chain drugstores, 100 yen shops and pachinko parlours. Under the railway arches a jazz band plays from Cabaret. Over the railway line the designer griffes, tea shops, tiny local restaurants seating five or six people behind their cloth curtains and paper windows.

A geisha passes.
Going to a rendezvous?
No, she works in a shop.

All is so tranquil,
Among the gorgeous shops,
And the cash tills flow.

Laughter from within,
Beyond the paper window.
Who’s drinking in there?

We eat at a sushi restaurant sitting on box stools outside. It is the end of October but 20 degrees. The small portions are presented on a variety of beautiful porcelain dishes and straw baskets, and we sip our sake from hooped cups.

Maruyama

2004-10-27T22:32:00.000-07:00

As I walked through the paddies near the township of Maruyama, some 80 km from Tokyo, the following lines from The Winter`s Tale were not on my lips, though, I was on my way to The Shakespeare Country Park, Maruyama:

Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice, -- what will this sister of mine do
with rice?

The paddies gave way to rosemary hedges, a mock Ancient Greece square, Rivers Plaza, with plaster friezes interpreting the constellations of the Milky Way, which were almost covered by the rosemary bushes. Ah, more Shakespearian than rice!

Doth not rosemary and Romeo both begin with a letter?

I first visited New Place, or rather, the replica of New Place, the property in Stratford Shakespeare bought when he was already an established dramatist. In the entrance models of an Elizabethan theatre and fair peopled with Japanese washi dolls. Then the gift shop, selling toy London buses and taxis, bardic tat, and local Shakespearian cheesecake. The back of New Place became the courtyard of an inn, of the type where many of Shakespeare`s plays were performed. On one side a Great Hall type theatre, showing a film demonstrating how the theatre was used.

In the room above the gift shop statues and models from some of the most famous scenes of Hamuret, The Tenpesuto and Richiarudo III, all neatly labeled and explained in Japanese. A wax Will composing at his desk. When questioned by a Marlovian figure on the adjacent TV screen, he opened his mouth, muttered a few wise words, moved his head from side to side and wrote a few more kanji.

Thence to the Italian Garden, the Knot Garden, the Physic Herb Garden and to neighbouring Henley Street, Will`s birthplace, recreated pretty exactly by craftsmen and designers from England. We see John Shakespeare at work making gloves, the bed William was conceived in, the bed he slept in as a boy, we see a pensive Will holding his firstborn, Susanna, pensatively scratching his chin. We see Shakespeare`s mother at work in a sparkling kitchen.

Then we visit Palmers’ Farm Tea Room at Anne Hathaway`s Cottage. Cheesecake again, the speciality of this Stratford-on-Avon. On a nice day we sit on the Village Green and feed the ducks and take pictures of the pillory. And wonder why… Why? Why this Stratford lookalike out on the Boso peninsula? Why not? Are not the Shakespearian properties in Stratford all renovations, rebuildings, sanitized refurbishments. Is not the Globe Theatre on the South Bank in London a little way from the original site?

And we must remember the Japanese fascination for Shakespeare. The RSC regularly tours Japan, and Japanese companies frequently adapt Shakespeare. And my favourite film adaptations of Shakespeare are those of Kurosawa.

Japan has also had a craze for recreating foreign resorts. Huis Ten Bosch, a Dutch village near Nagasaki, is the most famous, and there are Spanish, Russian, French, German villages. Some have a literary theme: Canadian World in Hokkaido highlights the Lucy Maud Montgomery classic, Anne of Green Gables, set on Prince Edward Island; and in Hakone, southwest of Tokyo, a French village is dedicated to Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince.

At the beginning of this piece I mentioned rice. Maruyama is outside the Tokyo commuter belt. There is no fast train. It is in an area which has suffered from rural depopulation and lack in investment in agriculture as economic policy has favoured industry and electronics. The paddies, now often worked part-time by elderly couples, who also have their pensions or other sources of income, are a central part of Japanese culture, but are uneconomic, and much Japanese rice is imported, especially from the US. So Shakespeare, the staple of a certain traditional English culture, has been brought in to support an area which depended on the staple of Japanese culture. Rosemary is now cultivated as a cash crop, and Will can bring in the tourists.

After our musings we step through the wicker gate into Rosemary Garden, and the words of the deranged Ophelia come to us:

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance.

But what we see is a little more sanitized: a New England style church (which of course is a gift shop already selling Father Xmas ware) surrounded by beds of flowers.
A quick stroll around the local Forest of Arden, the Forest of the Imagination, before I return to the New Place to buy some postcards. The shop assistant asks me for my answer sheet to the quiz. I haven’t filled it out! Reading Japanese is no easy feat. A six-year-old boy proudly presents his and collects his prize. And I bury my head in shame…

http://www.rosemary-hill.jp/scp/

The Bunkamura Gallery, Roppongi Hills

2004-10-21T20:47:00.000-07:00

To get into the “Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection” at the Bunkamura Gallery in Shibuya, you go through the Tokyu Department Store ground floor, and pass, on your left, the Cartier, Gucci, Salvatore Ferragamo franchises, and, on your right, the Bvulgari, and Chanel stands. You then enter the foyer, visit a commercial gallery selling watercolours of Mt Fuji, maybe pick up tickets for a show or Swan Lake at the adjacent theatre. Then have coffee and croissants at Les Deux Magots café and buy some Les Deux Magots souvenirs. If you`re lucky, you may see the Tokyo Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at their usual table. The Guggenheim exhibition is sponsored by Nissan. When you leave, you pick up brochures for the new Nissan Maeda.

At the Roppongi Hills Mori Arts Gallery the main exhibition is on the work of Dutch couturiers Viktor & Rolf. Descend from the exhibition on the 53rd floor, where the City View is also included in your admission ticket, to the atelier boulangerie, where the bakers are styling their cakes and bun and the craft jewelers are turning their rings.

Roppongi Hills is a fifty-three office block. The Bunkamura is part of an upmarket department store complex. The worlds of art, work and shopping are almost seamlessly merged. Though times are changing, rigid shopping hours in North America and many European countries have resulted in a division between “shopping” and other leisure activities. Here in Japan the shops are open till late at night everyday and all day Sundays, and shopping becomes part of a night out. Indeed, the term “Gallery” is often used for an upmarket jeweller`s or jewellry store. Le Corbusier`s modernist city would separate area for work, leisure and commerce. Brasilia was built to this pattern. Postmodern Tokyo mingles them all.

And it is in the shops that we get an idea of the immense wealth of modern Japan, despite the bursting of the economic bubble in the nineties and the recent sluggish economy. Consumer habits are in many ways different in Japan: cars are difficult to buy, not because of their price but because you must have a parking space to buy one. Few people own second homes: house prices are fantastically high, and few have sufficient leisure time – holidays are very short here – to be able to enjoy them.

As well as the international griffes, which all have several outlets in Tokyo, certain service areas seem to have taken off in Japan: aromatherapy; relax centers, which give you a ten-minute shoulder and back massage for $10; cyber cafes with private booths and comfy armchairs where teenagers have access to vast libraries of manga comics for $5 an hour. Money can make life that little bit more pleasant. The U. Goto florist`s in Roppongi has a pianist on a grand piano playing popular classics to make your purchasing all the more enjoyable.

Clothes shops for dogs are also popular. When the temperature falls a few degrees below 20C, parades of fashion conscious pooches take to the parks and walks. This year check kilts are in fashion for the ladies; and jump suits are a la mode for the gentlemen. And there are even shops for outfits for dog owners to wear, maybe to match that of your dog: “Sara Brandt – Casual Wear for People Who Love Dogs”.

Roppongi Hills. I looked for the hills and found none. We are in the world of Japish, the use of English by Japanese commercial establishments, which has its own peculiar usage. Standard English rules are broken. Terms take on meanings of their own. Nearby is another office and entertainments complex, Ark Hills. So “Hills”, maintaining a certain amount of its semantic meaning, defines a high place, but one that is man-made.

Japanese has no plural, so the English plural when we refer to a countable noun in general is ignored, and we find: “Gentleman”, “Lady”, “Condom”, “New Arrival”. “Casual Food” seems to be used in place of “Fast Food”. Particles may be ignored, so “make-up” becomes “make” in “Hair and Make”. Fashion and beauty services use English all the time: “Fairy Annex” is a local beauty parlour; “Feel Free – Hair Produce”, a hairdresser`s, which, like all the others advertises “Perm, Cut and Blow” No, I have yet to see “Blow Job”!

Some names make sense but surprise us: “Clean Living” is not a moralistic anti-pornography organization but a laundry franchise! Others fail to make any sense whatsoever: “Big Foot” is a store for pre-fabricated wooden houses; “Erotica” a shop selling eye glasses; could “Nude Trump – Used Clothes” be an ironic reference to Donald Trump, or a misspelling of “tramp”? My favourites are the gaudy neon signs advertising “Green Peas”, the name of a chain of halls for slot machine and “pachinko”, a mini-pinball gambling game.

Food and drinks use English. After sweating I drink “Pocari Sweat”, and in the morning I choose from the drinks dispenser between “Athens Morning”, “Morning Black” and “Morning au Lait”. Last December in Nara I ate a “Morning Dog”, a hot dog served before noon!
A local dog-training enclosure, about the size of a tennis court, lays on the hype: “Rainbow Fields. Companion Dog Trainer. Happy Campus Life”. Well, it is near the University of Tokyo!

At times there seems to be a hint of self-mockery. Was not the sign I saw in Meguro, “Fablic Cleaning of All Materials” intentional? And surely the notice in my residence: “Encycropedias not to be taken out of the robby” ironizes the Japanese difficulty to distinguish between “r” and “l”?

But is English not somewhat depasse? Isn`t it a little more chic to buy designer furniture from “La Citta del Per Favore”? Maybe even mix English and French, as we find in Junior City, the pre-teen mall in Shibuya, where one finds “Poesie Elf” and “Comme Ca Boys”; in the Roppongi Hills clothing stores, “Design Works: Deux Cotes”, Trois Rounds; and at the gentleman`s tailor`s, which advertises “Old England-Paris, in the 2004 collection automne – hiver”.
Travelling from Kyoto to Tokyo on the shinkansen, the bullet train, last December, I passed bright neon signs standing erect on the top of a number of buildings, “Hard Off”. But, unfortunately, I have yet to discover what kind of business or venture they referred to. It may have been a remedy for Priapism which turned out to be a flop.

Komaba, Shibuya

2004-10-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

Found in Translation

1. Komaba, Shibuya

I’m here at Tokyo University as Visiting Professor till the end of the year. My seminar will only begin at the end of the month, so I find myself with a certain amount of time to put down some thoughts in this blog. In the first few days, suffering from jet lag, I arrived at the Department office at 8 a.m. Nobody around. The Department secretaries trundle in at 10 a.m., and leave at 17.30. The Department office is the tea room, the gossip room and the lunch room. The two secretaries are squeezed into a corner. And I wonder about this high tech, workaholic Japan. Will so many of the students I see strolling from lecture to lecture with their designer punk coiffures, or on the tennis courts or the lacrosse field, tomorrow be the besuited “salarymen” I see on the train? Or is Japan changing? Is a new generation going to take it easy and rest on its laurels?

I live in a quiet residential district. House prices are high, extortionate. Streets are narrow, there are few cars, and those that one does see are usually SUVs, BMWs or Jaguars. Stray leaves are rapidly cleared up. In case of major earthquakes we are instructed to assemble at the local junior school. The other side of the railway line is not quite so smart and has the feeling of a neighbourhood where everyone knows everyone else. Schools abound. The Tokyo International School, Komaba Technical School, Tokyo Metropolitan High School among them. All schools have uniforms. The boys wear navy blue blazers similar to mine at King Edwards School in Birmingham. The girls wear miniscule skirts, blouses, cravats, socks, but no high heels or stockings. Primary schoolchildren wear dapper sailor suits or gymslips with 1920 style hats. Everyone travels the train, even the 6 and 7 year-old girls, alone, on their way home, or to cramming or piano classes. Nobody raises an eyebrow.

From Komaba one heads two stops to the terminal station of Shibuya. Shibuya, Shibuya, the junction of five railway lines and two metro lines, bus station, overhead flyovers, the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world, where more than half a million souls cross the road everyday to the backdrop of acres of neon, huge five storey high video screens, and the accompanying commentaries in high pitched childlike girlish whines. By comparison Picadilly Circus seems like a village green. After the 1923 earthquake the big stores, Tokyu and Seibu, developed the area, and this explains why you exit the station right through the department stores, the “departos”, and Shibuya thrived. Stores, shops, boutiques, all open till late, bars with names like Insomnia Bar, Black Flys and Joystick, slot machine parlours, fast food joints and restaurants from every corner of the world, love hotels, gentlemen’s clubs, a world of leisure and pleasure, especially for the young, that is, average age something between 15 and 17, who come here to show off their outfits, their hairdos and just hang around, this is Shibuya. But go down the alley to the public garden by the Yamamote train line and you will see the tents of the homeless. All men, fifty or more, drunks, dropouts, Skid Row, broken marriages, couldn’t cope. They eke out a living collecting cans, doing odd jobs, maybe getting state handouts. Their tents of plastic canvas are immaculately tidy. They are a steep above the men who sleep under the bridge. Each has a kind of cot, a 2 metre by one plastic wall surrounding his space. Cecilia Lorschiavo of the Universidade de Sao Paulo has written on the aesthetics of the homeless, including the homeless in Tokyo.

Everyone in Shibuya meets near the statue of Hachiko, the dog. After his master’s death in 1925, he continued coming down to the station every evening to meet him till his own death some nine years later, and was commemorated by a statue. But quieter times, and he didn`t have to find his master among the five million commuters who daily pass through Shibuya station nowadays.