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Guilty Pleasures: Tokyo Vice
Published in Japan Forward 1/2/2023
After watching Tokyo Vice, I had a great idea for a TV series. I’m calling it “New York Vice.” It’s about a rookie Japanese reporter who gets hired by a major US newspaper. Unlike his bumbling American colleagues who are content to regurgitate press releases, he is as brave as a lion and has a strong sense of right and wrong.
Naturally, our hero is irresistible to American women, to the extent that the mistress of the head of the Gambino crime family has got the hots for him.
Late one night my Japanese journalist is alone in the office when he hears from police radio that gang warfare is breaking out in Little Italy. Instantly, our hero bursts into action, grabbing his trusty bicycle and pedaling frantically to the crime scene.
Fortunately, there is nobody outside the building mentioned in the alert. That allows him to sneak inside, hide behind a sofa and take photos of the gangsters and cops negotiating some kind of deal. How’s that for a scoop!
What are the chances of my idea being turned into a big budget series to be seen all over the world? Zero. Everybody knows that the premise is nonsensical. But take the same scenario and set it in Japan with an American protagonist and it all seems perfectly natural.
If Tom Cruise can give Emperor Meiji advice on how to govern Japan in The Last Samurai, why can’t an American cub reporter become a dedicated yakuza-hunter, as happens in the actual Tokyo Vice?
Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed the series, despite plot absurdities and dangling threads that are typical of today’s multi-episode streaming marathons. The best feature is the dazzling cinematography. Rarely has Tokyo looked so cool and leading edge. In fact, Tokyo is the real star of the show.
Tokyo the star
The next best feature is the acting. With one important exception, the performances are pitch perfect. Japanese actors slip into yakuza roles with the same effortless ease as British actors morph into aristocrats for Downton Abbey-style period pieces. In particular, the two rival yakuza bosses are frighteningly intense.
The foreign nightclub hostesses are highly credible too. Having the most formidable of the ladies be an ex-Mormon missionary is perfect. She has simply put her skills of persuasion to a different use.
Meanwhile, the great Ken Watanabe does a solid job as the honest, pragmatic cop, though he and his wife look rather too aged to have cute little children. Perhaps the second season will reveal a twist – in fact, the kids are Ken’s grandchildren.
Ken Watanabe is the good cop
White Boy to the Rescue
Unfortunately, the one actor who seems miscast plays the main character. Baby-faced and gangly, Ansel Elgort seemed a strange choice for the male lead in Steven Spielberg’s recent remake of West Side Story, especially for those who remember the smoldering good looks of ‘Tony’ in the 1961 movie.
The same goes for his portrayal of the heroic journalist in Tokyo Vice. He is too wet behind the ears, too smiley and, in the Japanese context, much too tall. The idea that the lover of a top yakuza would risk serious bodily harm to get intimate with this nerdy beanpole strains all credulity.
As a journalist he comes off as more Tintin than Woodward and Bernstein, and the subplot about his Mom and Pop wanting him to come home to Nowheresville USA makes him seem even more adolescent.
To be frank, the drama would be grittier and more believable if that character did not exist. In his place, a tough Japanese reporter with a black belt in kyokushin full contact karate would fit the bill nicely.
But that would never work in commercial terms. Even in these woke times, you need a white protagonist to bring in the mass audience.
Consider the fate of Giri / Haji, a BBC-Netflix co-production which ran in 2019-20. A much more adventurous and sophisticated take on the Japan-themed thriller, it depicted a Japanese detective trying to find his yakuza brother in the neon-soaked backstreets of London. Rather than “orientalize” Japan, the production team emphasized the parallels between the two countries.
Cancelled after one season
On his research trip to Tokyo, scriptwriter Joe Barton noted that “the suburbs don’t feel all that different to other cities. It could be Madrid in some places, London in some places… the thing about Japanese culture was how many similarities there were {with Britain}, ideas about behaviour, how people see you, politeness, the front we put on.”
Despite a 100% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 88% from viewers, the series was cancelled in 2020. There were simply not enough couch potatoes who prefer commonalities to otherness.
I read Jake Adelstein’s book “Tokyo Vice” shortly after it was published in 2009. It was an entertaining read, particularly the first sections that recounted the humdrum reality of being a reporter, what actually goes on in the closed world of a Japanese press club and so on. It is fair to say that the TV series is far removed from author’s original story in terms of plot, characters and ambience.
Several Japan-savvy names are listed in the credits, as well as Jake himself. As a result, there are few of the false notes that are all too prevalent in Hollywood renditions of Japan. Think Black Rain, in which the yakuza hold their meetings in a hot rolled steel mill and Andy Garcia schools Ken Takakura in the art of karaoke. Think Sean Connery playing a Japanologist in Rising Sun and delivering the lines “I am very, very OKOTTA”, helpfully translated by another character as “pissed off.”
Nonetheless, Tokyo Vice has a few “hmm” moments. Would a third generation Korean resident of Japan even be able to converse in Korean with her brother? Would Japanese firefighters hang back and watch a man set himself on fire? Is it really so easy to defraud large Japanese insurance companies? All seem unlikely, though not impossible.
What about the unflattering picture of Japanese journalism? In the world of Tokyo Vice, on one side there is our hero’s employer, a gigantic Japanese media corporation that is spoon-fed information by the powers-that-be. On the other side is a scuzzy meth addict who writes articles glorifying the vicious gangsters that supply his drugs. There is nothing, it seems, in between.
In reality, Japan has a vibrant culture of weekly and monthly magazines which have a long history of busting political and corporate scandals, to the extent of unseating prime ministers and crashing the share prices of blue chip companies. They don’t need twenty four year old Americans to show them how to do it. They really don’t.
Needless to say, all the villainous characters are Japanese and the foreigners are all presented sympathetically. Some things never change in the American entertainment industry.
Nonetheless, I will be watching the second season of Tokyo Vice, promised for later this year. The series is the very definition of a guilty pleasure. I also hope that BBC-Netflix get their act together and resuscitate Giri/Haji which was truly innovative in its vision of Japan. And if any producer out there is interested in a story in which a rookie Japanese journalist takes down the New York mafia, please give me a call.
Tokyo Vice is currently streaming on BBC iPlayer.
Five + 1 Surprising Scenarios for the Year of the Rabbit
Published in Japan Forward 1/1/2023
2022 was a year when jarring shocks started to seem normal. It began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which marked the first outright land war in Europe since 1945. In the middle of the year the world was shocked by assassination of Shinzo Abe, the most consequential Japanese political leader for half a century.
Remembering Shinzo Abe
Meanwhile, Covid-19 refused to disappear, though most governments seem to have abandoned the previous draconian social mobility restrictions as being more damaging than the disease itself.
The quadrennial Football World Cup usually makes for a bright interlude in the succession of crises and disasters that make up the daily news. This year’s World Cup was less pleasurable than it should have been, despite the high standard of football on display.
For a start, it took place in November / December instead of the standard July / August, when the baking heat of Qatar would have endangered the health of players and spectators. So why stage the tournament in such an inappropriate place? And what is to become of that huge stadium that so many imported workers died hurrying to build?
Stadium in the desert
FIFA, the governing body of international football, is a paradigm of the dysfunctional, secretive but always richly financed organisation that exists beyond the reach of democratic accountability.
Other examples are the International Olympic Committee – the Japanese police are still investigating corruption related to the Tokyo Olympics – and the United Nations, which once again proved its structural uselessness in its response to the Ukraine War.
Nonetheless, there was one unexpected side-effect of the Qatar World Cup that could prove extremely important in geopolitical terms. The Chinese public watching the football saw with their own eyes that spectators at the stadium were not wearing masks to protect against Covid.
In other words, the pandemic was no longer considered a serious threat in most of the world, and their government’s claim that its “Zero Covid” policy was the best course of action was no longer credible.
The result was a short, sharp burst of social unrest that, insofar as we can tell, was dealt with in an unusually lenient manner. For the first time, Xi Jinping appears to have backed down.
Scorecard for Last Year
Last year, our predictions were for a treble digit oil price, double digit inflation, a Taiwan emergency, takeovers of large Japanese companies by American money and a “return to reality” from the virtual “working from home” lifestyle that took off during the pandemic. The outcome was three wins and two losses, which we consider a narrow victory.
Inflation did reach double digits in 2022, and the price of a barrel of Brent crude was higher than $100 for most of the year. Oil is likely to remain at elevated levels into the medium term as supply has been limited by a decade of underinvestment, and renewables are still a minor part of the energy mix in many countries.
On the other hand, demand is visibly weakening as the central banks led by the U.S. Federal Reserve have overtightened and brought about a global recession.
Investment curtailed
Likewise, consumer price inflation topped 10% in many European countries including Germany, Sweden, Belgium and the UK amongst others. Financial markets are expecting inflation to decline rapidly from next year, and that is quite likely given the sharp decline in liquidity in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But we now live in a world where inflation is always a real threat, as opposed to the complacent pre-Covid era when many intelligent people convinced themselves that inflation could never happen. No doubt, there will be other waves to come when governments shift their priorities and start to worry about weak growth.
Meanwhile, non-virtual life seems to be back in fashion, judging from the surge in tourism and collapse in the stock prices of “stay at home” companies like Meta (Facebook), Zoom and Netflix.
The other two predictions, the Taiwan emergency and the boom in acquisitions, turned out to be wide of the mark. The Ukraine war has served as a wake-up call for many countries, not least Japan, but also, in a different sense, China. Precisely because the world is now sensitized to the cataclysmic risks of a Chinese move on Taiwan, it is significantly less likely to happen.
The Ukraine war has acted as showcase for the new generation of American weaponry, but more importantly it has demonstrated the damage that a comprehensive sanctions regime can do.
In his best seller Chip War, Chris Miller notes that China’s semiconductor imports are larger than Saudi Arabia’s oil exports. America’s destruction of Huawei as a global player is a tiny taste of what to expect in the case of an assault on Taiwan. Everyone would be hurt badly, but China would be hurt most.
The potential for large-scale acquisitions of Japanese companies by American capital still stands, despite the collapse in the stock prices of Tesla, Meta and others. Thanks to the strength of the dollar, the relative scale of Japanese and American stock market capitalization is hardly changed since this time last year.
Over the last ten years, U.S. market cap has risen from 48% to 63% of the global total, against a share of global GDP of just 25%. At some point, this imbalance has to be rectified. Perhaps the Year of the Rabbit will be the turning point, with a reversal in the dollar-yen rate being a key driver.
THE 2023 SCENARIOS
The Super-strong Yen
This time two years ago the yen-dollar touched 102. In the September of 2022 it briefly topped 150. Such a rapid slump is usually the result of an economic crisis, but there was no economic crisis in Japan. Rather, it was the unprecedentedly sharp rise in US interest rates that touched off a financial market riot.
Normally, you would expect the currency of the country with the lowest inflation to be strongest and the one with the highest inflation to be the weakest. That is not what happened this time. The result: a yen that was much too cheap on fundamentals, meaning purchasing power.
In 2023, the US Federal Reserve will be confronted with a much weaker economy and will be forced to abandon its tight monetary policy. Meanwhile, the new Governor of the Bank of Japan will gradually allow interest rates to rise towards the natural level, which is north of 1%. The combination of these two factors will drive the yen much higher.
Complaints by CEOs and media people about the currency’s effect on inflation will be replaced by complaints about the strong yen’s effect on the profits of exporters and fears of a return to deflation.
Change at the Top in Japan
Over the last 40 years there have been 21 Japanese prime ministers, which means that the average term in office has been just under two years. However, during that time there have been three prime ministers – Yasuhiro Nakasone, Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe – who had quite lengthy stints in office. Not coincidentally, all three devised their own policy agendas and made significant impacts internationally. If we exclude these exceptional leaders, the average term in office for “ordinary” prime ministers has been one year and nine months.
In other words, statistically speaking, it is more than likely there will be a change of prime minister in 2023. It would make things more interesting if the next Japanese leader were a determined and outspoken woman.
China Pivots to Pragmatism
Over the last few years, the Chinese government has taken down tech tycoons who it felt were getting too powerful, directed bellicose rhetoric and deeds towards other countries, and imposed draconian social control in the name of “Zero Covid”. The change in that last policy has been startling – not a gradual easing, but a sudden full-scale reversal.
The authorities are keen to stress that the new approach had been long planned and was not a response to social unrest, but it seems that officials charged with implementing Covid policy had no idea what was coming. The protests, starting with the mass walkouts at Foxconn’s enormous factories and ending with the “white paper” street demos, were crucial factors.
Here are some comments from Wang Zhi’an, formerly of state broadcaster China Central Television, now an independent journalist reporting from Japan.
The outrage and anger of ordinary people, mobilised during all these protests, show that the extent of grievances is unparalleled. In the end, the Party conceded. This is quite rare. In the ruling history of the Communist Party, there are extremely few occasions where they finally made concessions in the face of mass protest… the Covid measures in the past were indeed unpopular, and even many people within the government did not agree. In fact, some within the system were likely privately supportive of these young people taking to the streets to protest, leading to a change in policy.
Could this mark the start of a tilt from social control to growth? It would make sense since economic stagnation and loss of entrepreneurial dynamism is in the interests of nobody, including the leadership. The proof will be in the performance of the Chinese stock market which has been an awful performer for several years now.
ESG Backlash
The growth of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) funds has been one of the most striking phenomena in the financial world over the last decade. Assets under management of ESG funds have risen from $15 trillion in 2014 to $38 trillion today, and Bloomberg Intelligence expects further growth to $53 trillion by 2025, which would put them at one third of the entire funds total. The idea is “do well by doing good”, as Benjamin Franklin advised. What’s not to like?
Three problems have cropped up. The first is that ESG funds did well during the bull market of 2015 to 2021 which was led by giant tech stocks. These companies produce negligible emissions directly but their stocks underperformed when commodities and old economy stocks started to boom. How much profit are investors willing to sacrifice for virtue? Only now is the question coming up.
The second issue is the difficulty in ranking stocks for ESG, with specialist rating companies coming up with drastically different scores for the same stocks. In 2022, several European funds were found to have been guilty of “greenwashing” by the financial regulator, and in one case German police mounted a raid on the asset manager arm of a flagship bank. Campbell’s Law: any metric used for decision-making will be gamed.
The third problem is potentially the most serious. Although ESG is presented as a neutral technocratic procedure, it is highly political – essentially a way of engineering significant social and economic change without the inconvenience of going through the legislature. As such, it is certain to meet political opposition. This is already happening in the United States, where officials from nineteen states have criticized what is being called “woke investing”, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has pulled several billions out of ESG funds.
2022 was the first year ever in which ESG funds suffered net outflows. It won’t be the last.
Roubini Disappointed
Nourel Roubini, Professor Emeritus at New York University, has published a book called “Mega Threats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future”. Adam Tooze, who teaches history at Columbia University, is equally pessimistic, declaring that we are in the midst of a “polycrisis”, meaning a number of disparate crises that interact and create one gigantic mess.
It’s enough to make your flesh creep, but there is another set of possibilities – that a kind of feedback loop operates and acknowledgement of the risks leads to steps being taken to avoid them. So China prioritizes its economic problems. Concern about a wider war leads to a ceasefire in Ukraine. Worried about a deepening global recession, central banks “pivot” to growth, taking stock prices higher.
A more optimistic thinker, Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, notes that the news is nearly always bad news. We pay close attention to natural disasters and horrible crimes and ignore slow, steady improvements in well-being and pleasant weather. It seems to be human nature to focus on the downside.
2022 was definitely a “Roubini year”, but 2023 could well be a “Pinker year”, which means one in which there is plenty to worry about and no doubt several new scares, but in the end nothing unusually terrible happens.
Japan the Giant-killer
Finally, an extra prediction in the field of sport. Samurai Blue, the Japanese football team, excelled themselves in the Qatar World Cup, emerging from the group stage with victories against two European giants, Germany and Spain, and narrowly losing on penalties to Croatia, who ended up as the third placed team in the tournament.
In 2023, it is the turn of the Brave Blossoms, Japan’s rugby team. They are in a tough group, containing England, Argentina and Samoa, as well as the lower ranked Chile. If they play to their full potential, they can rival the giant-killing exploits of the Japanese footballers.
Rockin’ in Rhythm: Japan’s Battling Big Bands
Published in Nikkei Asia 28/12 /2022
“When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air; you can never recapture it again”.
So said ground-breading jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy at the end of his final album “Last Date”, recorded in 1964. Many decades later and half a world away, his comment can be found inscribed on the coasters used at Tokyo jazz club B-Flat.
Of course music can be recorded, streamed from a phone etc. but that is not the same as attending a live performance, particularly in the case of improvised music like jazz, which has been dubbed ‘the sound of surprise’.
The experience is not purely auditory. Also important are the expressions on the faces of the musicians, the response of the audience, the smell of curry or pizza, the clink of glasses, the hum of traffic, the sense of being part of a temporary community made up of music lovers, staff – often music lovers too – and band members.
Such moments are unique and transient, as are the musicians themselves, as are all of us. Akira Suzuki, the owner-manager of B-Flat, probably had that in mind when he had the coasters designed.
B Flat in Akasaka, Tokyo
Suzuki-san was born in Hokkaido. When in high school, he and his girlfriend attended a concert by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. It was a transformative event, preparing him and Chie, who he later married, for a lifelong fascination with the music. Much later, his best friend from school quit a job in the financial industry to start a jazz club. When the friend passed away in 2004, Suzuki-san took over. Times were often hard, but somehow he kept the music flowing and spirits high all through the Covid era.
Now Suzuki-san has gone too, knocked over by a taxi near the club on a rainy night. On a late November afternoon, friends, family and musicians gathered at B-Flat to bid him farewell. Reminisces were exchanged, some slides were shown and then there was an hour of live music featuring some of Japan’s best players.
What happens to the club remains uncertain, and that is a serious matter for many musicians and fans. For B-Flat is one of the few jazz spots in Tokyo spacious enough to accommodate a full Big Band. Indeed, several Big Bands consider it their home territory and play there on a regular basis. And Big Bands occupy a special place in Japan’s musical culture.
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Pianist Junko Moriya knows all about Japanese Big Bands. A major figure in the world of Japanese jazz, she has been leading the Junko Moriya Orchestra, for over twenty years and has released six Big Band albums. In 2005 she became the first Asian and the first woman to win an award at the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute competition (now the Herbie Hancock Institute), taking the prize for jazz composition.
Moriya is also an educator, teaching jazz in two universities and, on one occasion, taking a middle school Big Band to play at the Monterey Jazz Festival. The economics of professional musicians grow ever more challenging, yet in her view college and amateur Big Bands are thriving as never before. Opportunities to play in public have increased as municipalities arrange various commerce-boosting street events. “Even in regions with populations of just 30,000 or 40,000 there are big bands playing to a good standard,” she says.
Is there something in Japanese culture that explains the appeal of Big Bands? Junko Moriya believes so. It is a group activity of the kind that many Japanese relish, with sixteen or more members functioning as a single unit with a single purpose. Social bonds are strengthened by lengthy practice sessions. In contrast, a quartet puts much more onus on the individual.
Her opinion is echoed by Shigenobu Mori, who runs the Someday jazz club. There he has hosted an annual festival featuring the cream of Japan’s Big Bands for forty years. The amateur big band phenomenon “reflects a desire for cooperation and comradeship,” he believes. It can take on the character of a lifetime hobby, with members who started playing in school or college continuing into their 70s and 80s.
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Japan’s fascination with jazz in almost as old as jazz itself. In his book “Blue Nippon”, Professor E. Taylor Atkins of Northern Illinois University notes that the first mention of the word “jazz” in a Japanese text came in 1920 “in a sheet music periodical featuring a photo of four men posing with drums, guitar, violin and banjo, with the caption ‘Tokyo Jazz Band’”.
By the middle of the decade, the Dotonbori area of Osaka was renowned for its dancehalls featuring bands such as Ichiro Ida’s Cherryland Dance Orchestra. By the end of the decade, jazz kissa (“jazz coffee houses” where records are played) were springing up and Japanese record companies were putting together studio orchestras like the Nippon Columbia Jazz Band.
In Atkins’ words, during the interwar period “jazz was not merely a music to be accepted or reviled, but rather a metaphor for Japan’s participation in global cultural trends.” That helps to explain the explosive popularity of jazz in the post-war period. The rejection of “global cultural trends” in favour of nativism had taken Japan to the brink of national destruction. In the post-war period, listening to jazz was not just an enjoyable experience. It put you back on the right side of history.
When artists such as Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers started to tour Japan in the 1960s, they received much greater acclaim than they were used to back home in the United States. Even after the rise of rock and pop music had squeezed the jazz economy, Japan’s jazz generation remained true to its heroes. Figures like John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis were selling out Japanese concert halls at a time when such a celebrated musician as McCoy Tyner, Coltrane’s erstwhile pianist, was contemplating taxi-driving to make ends meet.
American Big Bands, with their challenging logistics and high costs, were particularly vulnerable to the colder economic climate of the 1970s, and the musicians and their audiences were ageing too. In Japan, though, there was a flowering of creativity amongst the larger formations. Particularly noteworthy are the two collaborations between contemporary music composer Shuko Mizuno and Toshiyuki Miyama’s New Herd – Jazz Orchestra ’73 and Jazz Orchestra ’75 – both discs being released on the legendary Three Blind Mice label.
Miyama began his career aboard the warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, playing martial music in the brass bands. His band’s artistic highlight was the challenging material provided by Mizuno and subsequent collaborations with adventurous young jazzers like pianist Masahiko Sato and drummer Masahiko Togashi.
They, together with New Herd guitarist and composer Kosaburo Yamaki, were leading lights in the “Wa jazz” movement which sought to bring pre-modern Japanese music, sounds and ideas into the mix. Traditional Japanese music of all kinds could sound “avant garde” in Western terms, as Sato showed with a spectacular live concert featuring a jazz group and one thousand chanting Buddhist monks.
Another famed Big Band brought Japanese instruments and musical themes into its repertoire. Toshiko Akiyoshi was Japan’s best known jazz musician of the post-war era, having been discovered by Oscar Peterson performing in a Ginza coffee house. She became the first Japanese to study at the Berklee School of Music and a regular on the New York jazz scene, playing with greats such as Charles Mingus.
With her husband Lew Tabackin, she launched a Big Band which was to top the poll of the prestigious Downbeat magazine many times and garner a string of Grammy nominations. Japanese themes were there from the start, in 1974. Their first album, Kogun (“One Man Army”), referred to Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who continued to patrol a remote island in the Philippines thirty years after the end of the war.
Though based in Los Angeles, the band was a frequent visitor to Japan and continued to weave Japanese motifs into the music, with Tabackin mimicking shakuhachi (traditional bamboo flute) cadences with his flute.
“At first I was worried that Japanese audiences would be critical,” he recalls, “but they liked it.” They still do. On a recent visit to Tokyo, he played an extended ‘shakuhachi’ improvisation, as well as his fun tribute to the jazz club that hosted him – “B-Flat, Where It’s At”.
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It was in the early 1970s that a vital support for Japan’s Big Band culture came into being. Yamano Gakki (Yamano Music) is Japan’s most prestigious music-related business. Founded in 1892 with the idea that “music is a universal language that connects people”, in its stores it sells all kinds of musical instruments, sheet music and recorded music, as well as offering classes.
For the past fifty years, Yamano has held a Big Band contest for students. It is to jazz what the “Koshien” high school tournament is to baseball, which is to say that the practice sessions are long and arduous, the competition is fierce and many dream of becoming stars.
Some have succeeded. Over the years, more than 70,000 musicians have taken part in the Yamano competition and over a hundred have become professionals. Others join one of the amateur Big Bands that proliferate all over Japan. A few take jobs at Yamano itself. Several of the company’s senior executives are ex-contestants and continue to play frequently.
Some of the student Big Bands have an even longer history. Waseda University’s famed High Society Orchestra started off in 1955 and has many distinguished alumni, including Junko Moriya. Today, the repertoire consists of classics by Duke Ellington and Count Basie and also compositions by contemporary artists like bassist Christian McBride and Israeli saxophonist Eli Degibri.
In former times, the ethos was hierarchical and tough, with younger members being at the beck and call of the seniors. Today, with a society-wide awareness of “power harassment” (bullying), the mood is more relaxed. Even so, the musicians rehearse for three hours three days a week, and in advance of the Yamano contest they seclude themselves in a countryside training camp where they do nothing but practice morning to night for five days.
Japan’s jazz ecosystem contains a great variety of Big Bands. There are bands that reverently reproduce the music of Buddy Rich or, going further back, Harry James. There are Latin Jazz Big Bands, funk Big Bands and uncategorisable Big Bands like Makoto Ozone’s No Name Horses and Jonathan Katz’s Tokyo Big Band, which includes several expat musicians as well as top level Japanese players.
Special mention should be made of three avant garde Big Bands. They will not be everybody’s cup of green tea, but they are certainly adventurous and original.
The oldest is Shibusa Shirazu, which means “never be cool”. Taking inspiration from Japan’s underground theater of the 1970s, the band cooks up a stew of free jazz, rock, Latin and street music that went down well when they played the UK’s Glastonbury Festival in 2016. Unusually for a Big Band, the solos are often quite lengthy – sufficiently so that in a recent performance at the Pit Inn jazz club, leader Daisuke Fuwa had ample time to use the restroom.
“Even though musicians play the same notes, each sound has a totally different colour,” he declares. “And it creates music that is utterly unique and will never be played again.”
Yoshihide Otomo’s Special Big Band (the very first image above) comes roaring at you with instrumentation that includes accordion, marimba, ‘sine waves’ and Otomo’s wild guitar, as well as the usual Big Band sections. Starting his career as assistant to free jazz pioneer Masayuki Takayanagi, Otomo has a melodic side to him too and scored an unlikely hit with the theme for a TV drama series.
Satoko Fujii has run several Big Bands in Japan and overseas, with the Satoko Fujii Orchestra Tokyo being her main project currently. Imagine a soundtrack to the rough antics of the gods back in the dawn of time and you have some idea of what to expect.
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Back in B-Flat, there is good news for musicians and fans. It seems that Yamano Gakki is going to take the club over in order to support Japan’s Big Bands. As Eric Dolphy said, you can’t recapture the music that has gone, but the air should soon be full of new sounds.
Journey to Disaster: Toshiro Mifune in “Band of Assassins”
Published in the Mekong Review December 2022
Noted Japanologist and translator Ivan Morris believed that an admiration for doomed heroes ran deep in Japanese culture. In his book The Nobility of Failure, he wrote about ten tragically unsuccessful figures, ranging from a teenage prince falsely accused of treason and strangled by his cousin to Morris’s friend, Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual suicide in spectacular fashion in 1970.
An eleventh example could have been Isami Kondo, the leader of the Shinsengumi (Newly Selected Corps), the paramilitary force charged with cleaning up the mean streets of Kyoto in the 1860s. Certainly, he matches Morris’s description of “those eager, outrageous, uncalculating men whose purity of purpose doomed them to a hard journey leading ultimately to disaster.”
Indeed, so devoted was Kondo and his number two, Toshizo Hijikata, to the cause of the Shogun that they carried on fighting against impossible odds after the Shogun himself had surrendered and given up his office.
Hijikata (centre, in grey) and Kondo (in white)
Many Japanese films have told the story of the Shinsengumi. One of the best is Band of Assassins, originally released in 1969 and now available with English subtitles from samurai movie specialists on the internet. The Japanese title is the more neutral Shinsengumi, though there is no getting away from the fact that spying, torturing and killing was their stock in trade.
Mifune gives a bravura performance as Kondo, the farmer-turned-master-swordsman who became the leader of the Shinsengumi. His ruthless but loyal right-hand man, Hijikata, is played by Keiju Kobayashi. Rentaro Mikuni is scarily realistic as the out-of-control Kamo Serizawa, the original leader of the group.
Produced by Mifune’s troubled production company and directed by the little-known Tadashi Sawashima, the film is notable for its historical accuracy. The moving depiction of Kondo’s final moments before his execution conform with the recollections of those who were there. He asked to be shaved because he knew exactly what was going to happen to his head.
In his magisterial double biography of Mifune and Akira Kurosawa, The Emperor and the Wolf, Stuart Galbraith is rather critical of the film. To be sure, some acquaintance with the background would definitely enhance the viewing experience. The twists and turns of the story may be confusing at times, but that is understandable. It was a period of great confusion. Neither the man destined to be the last Shogun nor the youngster destined to become the European-style monarch known as Emperor Meiji had a clue what lay a few brief years ahead.
When the Shinsengumi was formed in 1863, Kyoto was a hotbed of revolutionary activity. Radical intellectuals and swordsmen – often the same thing in the era – thronged the ancient capital spreading the ideology of ‘Sonno Joi’, meaning ‘respect the Emperor and expel the barbarians’, and cutting down anyone who opposed them.
The barbarians in question were the Westerners who had forced the Shogunate to open up treaty ports, such as Yokohama, where they could reside and conduct trade. The radicals, known as shishi (men of high purpose) were appalled by the Shogunate’s weak-kneed approach and dreamed of toppling the current 250-year-old political structure and slaughtering enough foreigners to make them go away for good. They were to succeed in the first project but not in the second.
The Shinsengumi was set up as a semi-official police force that would answer violence with even greater violence, rather as Wyatt Earp did in Dodge City. Under Kondo’s famous ‘Sincerity’ banner, they would eliminate the shishi, restore peace to Kyoto and respect for the Shogun.
Kondo as played by Mifune is a charismatic figure, a brilliant swordsman and born leader who knows no fear. We first see him at home, a doting father dangling a baby daughter on his knee. He decides to enlist in the Shinsengumi out of gratitude for the favours that his forefathers received from the Shogunate. Arriving in Kyoto, he saves some townspeople from the wanton destructiveness of the Shinsengumi’s then-leader, Serizawa.
We want to like Kondo and do — but that doesn’t mean he’s a nice guy. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, he quickly becomes inured to the killing. As one of his oldest comrades tells him after attempting to leave the group — an offence punishable by death — he has become a puppet devoid of feelings.
Getting rid of the booze-crazed Serizawa was necessary, but the means chosen are sneaky. Having made sure that Serizawa was too drunk to stand up, Kondo and three other comrades steal into his sleeping quarters where he is lying in a courtesan’s arms and slash them both to death.
Serizawa glares at Kondo at a geisha party
Kondo himself starts to spend more time in the Shimabara pleasure quarters. Presumably that does not violate the Shinsengumi code, created by Kondo himself, which demands the highest moral standards.
Worse is to come. A substantial sum of money goes missing from the group’s safe and the naïve young man who takes care of the group’s accounts is accused of embezzlement. In an agonizing scene, he is forced to commit ritual suicide while the others watch. We learn later that the money was taken by Kondo’s pal Hijikata and used to buy out Kondo’s favourite courtesan from her geisha-house contract.
A serious ideological split opens up in the Shinsengumi and is resolved in the only way Kondo knows — by maximum violence. What never changes are his devotion to the Shogun, his courage and his fearsome skill with a sword.
The men of the Shinsengumi, like their enemy the shishi, were mostly ronin (masterless samurai), but there were also skilled fighters from non-samurai backgrounds, like Kondo and Hijikata.
The class difference is crucial. Several of Kondo’s friends sign up because they see the opportunity of rising up in the world. Nobody dares restrain Serizawa’s drunken rampages because he is a bona fide samurai, entitled to kill lesser mortals on whim. But when he taunts Kondo and Hijikata for their peasant origins at a banquet, he seals his own fate.
Kondo did rise in the world. His political opinions were sought by high-ranking officials. In the last days of the Shogunate, he was even made a member of the Shogun’s junior council, placing him among the feudal lords. Yet Japanese feudalism had one last trick to play on him.
When he was captured by Imperial loyalist troops, many of whose shishi comrades had died at the hands of the Shinsengumi, he was denied the right to commit ritual suicide because he was not a samurai by birth. Instead, he was beheaded by an executioner like a common criminal.
Ironically, it was only after the revolutionaries that Kondo fought against had triumphed that such hereditary castes were abolished. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 put an end to the Shogunate, but the winners no longer held to the creed of expelling the foreigners. Instead, the former radical patriots had pivoted to a full-scale embrace of Westernisation, symbolised by railways, steak dinners and modern weaponry.
Kondo’s death poem read as follows –
Submitting to the will of another
I have nothing to say on this day
I value honour over life
Ah, the long flashing sword
To which I readily surrender
And repay my lord’s kindness with my life
Kondo’s family had to pay a bribe to have his decapitated body disinterred and reburied with the honour appropriate to a hometown hero. As he would have expected, his head was sent to Kyoto, set on a spike and exposed to public derision on Sanjo Bridge.
According to Ivan Morris, noble failure is found in a man “whose career usually belongs to a period of unrest and warfare and represents the very antithesis of an ethos of accomplishment. He is the man whose single-minded sincerity will not allow him to make the manoeuvres and compromises that are so often needed for mundane success.
During the early years, courage and verve may propel him rapidly upward, but he is wedded to the losing side and will be ineluctably cast down. Flinging himself after his painful destiny, he defies the dictates of convention and common sense, until he is eventually worsted by his enemy, the successful survivor.”
There could be no better description of Isami Kondo as portrayed by Toshiro Mifune in Band of Assassins.
A Kurosawa Christmas: When the Turkey is Really Chicken
Christmas Day is not even a public holiday in Japan, and less than one percent of the population are Christians. Nonetheless, Akira Kurosawa seems to have had a special feeling for Christmas. He was in the habit of sending home-made Christmas cards to friends and associates, rather than the New Year’s cards that are almost universally exchanged by Japanese households and businesses.
Signed A.K.
There is no evidence that the great director was ever attracted to Christianity, but in his autobiography he described himself as “a man of the Taisho era”, meaning his formative years were spent in the reign of Emperor Taisho (1912-25).
That was a period of intellectual and artistic ferment in which many prominent cultural figures dabbled with Christianity, which was seen as an exotic import at the time, much as Buddhism would be in the West.
One such dabbler was the great writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who wrote the two short stories that became Rashomon (1950), the film that propelled Kurosawa to world-wide fame. Akutagawa’s eldest son became a successful actor who appeared in Wild Man Matsu (1958: Hiroshi Inagaki) alongside Toshiro Mifune. His third son was a composer with dozens of film soundtracks to his name.
It would come as no surprise if the young Kurosawa had been familiar with the debates about Christianity, as he was with Marxism, even briefly joining an underground Marxist group, though never going as far as to actually read any of Marx’s writings.
Indeed, Kurosawa could not have avoided thinking about Christianity, given his obsession with Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky’s novels are saturated with his Russian Orthodox Christian beliefs, and none more so than The Idiot with its Christ-like central character, Prince Myshkin. Kurosawa adapted the novel for the screen in 1951, but his version was not a success and is only available today in a drastically cut form.
The one Kurosawa film in which Christmas plays an important part is the flawed but fascinating Scandal, made one year before The Idiot. In terms of narrative, Kurosawa had no particular need to include a fifteen minute Christmas sequence, but he obviously felt that it bolstered the themes of the film, which are corruption and the necessity of moral choice.
The first indication that the Christmas is upon us comes when the film’s villain, the scumbag editor of a gossip magazine, bumps into a big, tough-looking guy in a Santa Claus costume on the street. Tough Santa is holding a signboard offering a special deal on turkey.
The editor is surprisingly well dressed
Turkeys are not native to Japan, and it is not easy to get hold of one for Christmas even today. In December 1949, the only channel for accessing the rare meat would be through the black market, having been pilfered from the refrigerators of the American Occupation forces by crooked insiders.
Kurosawa makes no reference to the American Occupation – to do so would have been a breach of the censorship code – but they are an invisible presence throughout the film. This yuletide season, with its tacky decorations and shouts of “Merry Christmas” in the occupiers’ language, is, for better or for worse, an Americanized celebration.
Even the black market Santa growls “Merry Christmas” in bad English as he hands over a leaflet. The scandal-mongering editor tosses it to the ground. The confrontation is over in seconds, but it foreshadows what is to come later.
The next section starts on a jollier note as Toshiro Mifune’s character, a promising artist caught up in a bogus scandal, rides his motorbike through the streets with a fully decorated Christmas tree strapped to the pillion. He is delivering it to the impoverished family of his lawyer.
The jaunty strains of Jingle Bells shift to the more spiritual Silent Night as the scene changes to the interior of the home, where the lawyer’s wife and terminally ill daughter are celebrating Christmas. Mifune hardly knows them, but has decided to brighten up their difficult lives.
Now the music becomes diegetic, with Mifune playing a harmonium and his lady friend singing the carol. Significantly, the words of the carol are sung in Japanese.
Here, Kurosawa seems to be saying, is the authentic spirit of Christmas. Then in walks the aged lawyer with a heap of trashy Xmas presents he has got by trading away his integrity. There’s no escape from cunning and deceit, not even at Christmas.
The final Christmas section takes place in a bar called “Red Cat” which is draped in Christmas decorations. The clientele is composed of drunks, ladies of easy virtue and and hopeless fantasists. Mifune decides to order some turkey. His lawyer tells him to forget it. “You’re young, aren’t you! In this place the only difference between turkey and chicken is the price.”
So Christmas is just another opportunity for a scam. Is the post-war regime ushered in by the Americans also going to be a case of chicken disguised as turkey?
An aged drunk stands up and swears that next year he will be a reformed man. He will build a house and take care of his long-suffering wife. He implores everyone in the bar to stand up and sing along with him, which they do – blowsy good-time girls, teary drunkards, and Mifune and his guilt-wracked lawyer.
At Red Cat
This time we hear not a Christmas song or a carol but the melody of Auld Lang Syne. The lyrics, written in 1881, are totally different from the the tribute to friendship composed by Robbie Burns. Instead, the Japanese language version – which is known to every Japanese as the signal of the end of the school day – is a song of farewell that also celebrates solidarity and determination in the face of adversity.
Light of fireflies, snow on the window
Days and months spent studying
The years flash by, we open the door
And make our parting this morning
While they are singing, they mean every word. It is another moment of authenticity, albeit one that is pathetic and fleeting.
Blind drunk, Mifune – wearing a paper hat – and his lawyer stagger out into the night. In a pastiche of the Christmas story, Mifune claims to have witnessed a miracle, seeing clusters of stars reflected in a pond of dirty water. He blows a party whistle. The lawyer yells out “Merry Christmas, everybody” in English, then falls flat on his face in the mud. Cut to the New Year.
An inglorious end to Christmas then, or so it seems. But in the concluding section of the film, a miracle does take place, a tiny miracle of the human heart. To adapt the words of Mifune’s character, a glittering star appears amongst the reeking slime.
Kurosawa’s Christmas is like much else in Kurosawa-land – corrupt and tawdry and sad, but also offering the promise of personal redemption. These themes were to be worked out with greater depth and sophistication two years later in the masterpiece, Ikiru.
Salute to Toshiro Mifune: Japan’s Greatest Movie Star
Published in Japan Forward 28/11/2022
Toshiro Mifune passed away twenty five years ago this December. He was the first non-white superstar of global cinema, the first actor to play a yakuza (in the 1948 Kurosawa movie Drunken Angel) and the inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name” and every other cool existential loner via his role in Yojimbo (1961; Akira Kurosawa).
Within Japan he remains a huge star. When Kinema Junpo, Japan’s oldest and most prestigious film magazine, polled movie critics and insiders in 2014, they chose Mifune as their all-time favourite Japanese actor.
His name is sometimes written not in kanji Chinese characters, but in the katakana syllabary, usually used for names of foreign people and things. The other person whose name is sometimes written in that way is Kurosawa himself. It is an acknowledgement that both men have transcended Japanese-ness and become global figures.
In his definitive double biography of both men, Stuart Galbraith describes the great actor as “a chameleon thespian more akin to de Niro, Jack Nicholson or Marcello Mastroianni… few actors (when given good direction) had the range of Toshiro Mifune.”
Mifune playing a small part in the ensemble comedy ‘Salaryman Chushingura’
After Mifune’s death, which came a year before his own, Kurosawa wrote that his films would have been impossible without Mifune. Most fans and critics would agree that the sixteen films they made together in that extraordinary run from 1948 to 1965 represented the summit of both men’s achievement.
When Japan House in London launched a commemorative season of Mifune films this year, it was inevitable that those chosen would all be directed by Kurosawa.
Yet while the films that Kurosawa made without Mifune are well-known and, for the most part, highly rated today, the films that Mifune made without Kurosawa have been little seen overseas and have had limited availability within Japan.
Fortunately, that is changing. Thanks to streaming sites and specialist purveyors of samurai movie DVDs, more and more of Mifune’s non-Kurosawa output is becoming available with English subtitles. Within Japan too, previously obscure works, such as The Sands of Kurobe (1968; Kei Kumai), are now streamable on Amazon.jp.
Mifune made a lot of films – 125 altogether, and that’s not counting several TV series, such as Shogun. After starting his own production company in 1962 he was under financial pressure for most of the rest of his life. His solution was to accept as much work as an actor as he could, which meant not being too picky about the quality if the remuneration was attractive.
Cigarette break when making ‘Red Sun’
Hence the numerous cameo appearances as well as participations in glossy international films that partnered him with heavyweights like Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson and David Niven, but were generally disappointing.
Nonetheless, there is much to savour in Mifune’s post-Kurosawa films, if you know where to look. He fits perfectly into an episode of the heart-warming Tora-san comedy series, Tora-san Goes North (1984; Yoji Yamada). Mifune plays a misanthropic animal doctor in the wilds of Hokkaido who has a beautiful daughter and a love interest he is too insensitive to notice. In other words, typical Tora-san fare.
Tora-san cheers up grumpy Mifune with fart jokes
Sword of Doom (1965; Kihachi Okamoto) and Band of Assassins (1970; Tadashi Sawashima) are thrilling slice-‘em-up samurai epics.
Picture Bride (1994: Kayo Hatta) is an interesting indie film that tells the story of the 20,000 Japanese women sent to Hawaii and elsewhere in the early years of the twentieth century to marry men they had never met. The charisma of the ailing Mifune is still intact in this, his penultimate film.
Appropriately he makes a brief appearance in the role of a benshi, a voice actor who would accompany silent films with spoken dialogue and sound effects. In a nice touch, he calls to two young boys who are play-fighting with sticks. Their names are Akira and Toshiro.
It’s hard to choose amongst all his projects, but here are seven particularly powerful films that Mifune made with other directors.
Death of a Tea Master (1989; Kei Kumai)
Kumai’s film, based on a novel by Yasushi Inoue, may have raised eyebrows by featuring Mifune as the celebrated tea master and advocate of wabi-sabi – the aesthetic values of simplicity and roughness that have subsequently become part of the Japanese identity. But in the context of the film there is no conflict.
This is not tea ceremony for prim young ladies. It is the era of warriors, and men in armour take the spiritual nourishment of the tea ceremony before riding off to battle. Rikyu’s pupils are tough, bold men willing to die at any moment. One of them, a large bearded fellow, insults the notoriously hot-tempered warlord Hideyoshi to his face. When Hideyoshi orders his soldiers to cut off the man’s nose and ears, he fights back, grabs a sword and commits seppuku, all the while roaring with laughter.
Mifune was in very poor health at the time, but you would never guess. He makes an unusual but memorable Sen no Rikyu.
The Life of a Horse Trader (1951; Keigo Kimura)
You are a hard-drinking illiterate brawler who scrabbles a living in the newly settled plains of Hokkaido. Money runs through your fingers, partly because of your vices, partly because, unlike the other horse-dealers, you don’t rip off the farmers. Luckily, you have an angelic wife who keeps the household together. Until she suddenly dies, as often happened in such places in those times.
You have a young son, and you are determined that he should succeed you and become the best horse-trader around. When he comes home crying after an encounter with some bullies, you call him a coward and send him back with a big stick to clobber them with. Then you learn that he is top of his class and the local moneylender is willing to finance his further studies in the faraway city. What now?
Mifune inhabits the role of the obtuse, infuriating, yet big-hearted horse-trader, as Takashi Shimura does the role of moneylender and aspiring politician. The combination of the two great actors, who became close friends, lit up many Kurosawa films and even more non-Kurosawa films.
Samurai Rebellion (1967; Masaaki Kobayashi)
Here Mifune plays a modest family man with two grown-up sons and a shrewish wife who doesn’t respect him. He is a master swordsman, but with the land at peace under the hierarchical rule of the Shogunate, he works as an instructor. He is finally pushed over the edge by the wilful behaviour of his feudal lord, who ruins his elder son’s happy marriage for political reasons. Mifune tries to be reasonable and argue his case, but the reality is that the feudal lord has absolute power over his vassal.
Despite the title, the film is mostly a psychological study until the final explosive act. In this account of an individual trying to preserve his integrity in a system designed to crush it, director Kobayashi seems to be channelling his wartime experiences, as he did with his masterpiece The Human Condition (1959-61).
The Important Man, also known as Animas Trujano (1962; Ismail Rodriguez)
Mifune’s first overseas film project was his most artistically successful by some distance. The story has the simplicity of a parable. In a brutally poor hill-top region of Mexico lives a peasant called Animas Trujano who dreams of becoming the wealthiest man in the area. According to the local custom, every year the man so designated is honoured by the community and in return throws a massively expensive party. The only problem is that Animas is a bone idle drunk who is obsessed with the local prostitute, much to the displeasure of his long-suffering wife.
Mifune was always convincing as a drunken roustabout, perhaps because that was part of his personality. Several associates noted that he became a different person when well lubricated with his favourite whiskey and sake, picking fights with yakuza and driving his British sports cars at high speed. In this film, he is extraordinary, becoming Animas in every gesture and facial expression. You even sympathize with the foolish peasant who ignores the age-old warning “be careful what you wish for.”
Samurai Assassin (1965; Kihachi Okamoto)
Like Samurai Rebellion, the film has a screenplay by Shinobu Hashimoto who collaborated with Kurosawa on several masterpieces. The story revolves around a real historical event – the plot to assassinate Naosuke Ii, the most important political figure in the land in 1860, when the film is set. The events portrayed are quite different from the historical record, but that is because the history is wrong, as Hashimoto’s script cleverly explains.
Mifune is on awesome form as an angry, emotionally crippled swordsman whose one chance of happiness was denied him by the vagaries of status. The long and bloody climax is superbly done, as snow swirls around the fully blooming cherry blossoms – one of the few details that happens to be factually accurate.
Snow Trail (1946; Senkichi Taniguchi)
Mifune’s screen debut is a tense thriller about bank robbers on the run in the Japan Alps in the depth of winter. Scripted by Kurosawa, it has comedy, shocks and a humanistic philosophy that seeks to distinguish between men who are redeemable and those that are not. With a well-oiled forelock hanging over his face, Mifune gives his character a dangerous vitality that comes from suppressed rage. He sneers, he spits on the floor, he never stops moving. You wouldn’t want to cross this man, in the high mountains or anywhere else.
The Rickshaw Man (1958; Hiroshi Inagaki)
People were rougher and tougher back in the day, at least they were in the Kyushu port town of Kokura, home to a rickshaw man known as Wild Man Matsu. On being denied his customary free place at the theatre, he storms in later with a large cookpot and boils up a tasty treat, featuring plenty of garlic, right in the middle of the expensive boxes. Fights break out, with Matsu and his pal giving everyone else a hammering.
Mifune is Matsu. He actually played the taiko drum himself in the festival scene, and he handles his character’s transition from virile young buck to confused and hurt older man with delicacy. The music and visuals pile on the pathos at the end, but the courage and honesty of Mifune’s Matsu shines through.
In the words of actor Yoshio Tsuchiya, who appeared with him in many films, “there was nobody else like Mifune and there never will be again”. His best work outside the Kurosawa canon deserves much greater appreciation.
Rock Gods in Japan: Who’s Appropriating Who?
Published in Japan Forward 10/11/2022
On their first tour of Japan in 1971, hard rock maestros Led Zeppelin came up with a generous gesture. In addition to their scheduled concerts in Tokyo and Osaka, they decided to add a benefit performance in Hiroshima.
The event was a success, with vocalist Robert Plant giving a moving speech about the healing power of music and seven million yen (about $150,000 in today’s money) being raised for the victims of the atom bomb.
Later in Osaka, drummer John Bonham, a heavy drinker with a violent streak, ran wild with a samurai sword he had bought, slashing everything in his suite to ribbons including pillars and decorative scrolls. The damage: seven million yen.
Led Zeppelin with the Mayor of Hiroshima
This anecdote encapsulates the contradictions and absurdities that surround the encounter between Western rockers and modern Japan, as described by author Chrisopher Keaveney in his book Western Rock Artists, Madame Butterfly and the Allure of Japan.
The intellectual key he uses is “orientalism”, cultural critic Edward Said’s term for the depiction of eastern cultures as exotic, alien and inferior. The template is Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, which tells the tale of a relationship between Lieutenant Pinkerton of the U.S. Navy and a young geisha in Nagasaki.
Keaveney is an Assistant Professor at Rikkyo University, but also an ardent fan of “the golden era of album rock” who played in several cover bands himself. A barometer of his musical taste is that he describes Cheap Trick Live at the Budokan as a “legendary” album and reveals that his first live rock show was Queen in New York in 1977.
It is fair to say that there is a tension between his obvious love of this brash, unruly music and the contemporary academic’s sensitivities to gender, race and power relations.
Cheap Trick in action
Does Deep Purple’s Woman from Tokyo really “draw liberally from conventional orientalist expectations of the geisha figure”? This is Deep Purple we are talking about here! Their best-known song is about a Swiss chateau burning to the ground. Another famous number of theirs compares a girlfriend’s physical attributes to those of a high-performance sports car.
In comparison, Woman from Tokyo – recorded before the band had ever visited Japan – is rather sweet.
Rising from the neon gloom
Shining like a crazy moon
Yeah, she turns me on like a fire
I get high
My woman from Toh-kee-O
She makes me see
My woman from Toh-kee-O
She’s so good to me
So influential was the song that most foreign bands have followed the three syllable pronunciation of Tokyo, as did J-pop megastar Kenji Sawada in his 1980 hit song Tokio.
Probably the first meeting of modern rock and modern Japan occurred in 1965 when a young Japanese music journalist called Rumiko Hoshika showed up at the Abbey Road studios in London where the Beatles were recording the Rubber Soul LP.
She won the band’s full attention because she was wearing a brightly coloured kimono. She had the full attention of Brian Epstein, their gay manager, because she had brought him a samurai sword and he was a major fan of the films of Akira Kurosawa.
Rumiko Hoshika with the Beatles
In the world of cultural studies, this is known as “self-orientalism” and is considered rather disgraceful. Keaveney goes as far as to say that Japanese people themselves are “complicit in the construction of Orientalism” if they offer a western visitor an unusual regional cuisine or a traditional souvenir like an uchiwa fan.
Back in the real world, Hoshika’s gambit worked wonders. Her meeting with the Fab Four went on for three hours and she was to interview them every year until the band broke up. She is still going strong today, hosting all kinds of Beatles events.
Keaveney does dig up some unpleasant and borderline racist material from a Swiss heavy metal band, as well as cliché-ridden stuff from 10cc and some forgettable British “new wave” bands of the 1980s. More valuable is his commentary on Styx’s song Mr. Roboto, with its Japanese language opening and super-catchy refrain of “domo arigato, Mr. Roboto”.
“For a Western audience,” Keaveney notes, “Mr. Roboto, a song about the cold efficiency of robots in a dystopian future and the association between this future and Japan, had a particular resonance. It is hard now to imagine the sense of anxiety, approaching, panic produced by Japan and felt in the West as Japan’s economic might steadily grew in the 1980s.”
Indeed. A year after the song was released in 1981, a Chinese-American man was beaten to death in Detroit by two auto workers who mistook him for a Japanese. This kind of paranoid Japan-bashing rock seems a good deal more objectionable than Deep Purple’s “Fly into the rising sun / Faces smiling everyone.”
It is a pity that the author did not spend more time on David Bowie, a long-time Japanophile with a particular interest in Yukio Mishima. During his stint in Berlin, Bowie painted a portrait of Mishima and in the 1990s acquired Sir Eduard Palozzi’s bronze bust of the Japanese novelist at Sotheby’s. In his 2013 album The Next Day, Bowie referenced an episode from Mishima’s novel, Spring Snow.
Then we saw Mishima’s dog
Trapped between the rocks
Blocking the waterfall
David Bowie’s Japan was very different to Deep Purple’s, let alone Styx’s.
Paolozzi’s Mishima
Likewise, rather than dwelling on obscure or boring artists, Keaveney could have analysed Japan-related songs by more interesting songwriters such as Nick Lowe’s Gaijin Man or Elvis Costello’s Tokyo Storm Warning. Then there are these curious lines in Bob Dylan’s Tight Connection to My Heart –
Madame Butterfly, she lulled me to sleep
In a town without pity where the waters run deep
She said be easy, baby
There ain’t nothin’ worth stealin’ round here
The rest of the song has nothing to do with Japan, but the associated music video plays amusingly with Orientalist fantasies. Shot in pre-bubble Tokyo, the story, insofar as there is one, has Dylan being busted for drug possession by singing policemen (perhaps a nod to Paul McCartney’s arrest at Narita Airport a few years before), then wandering around the Roppongi entertainment district.
There, the future Nobel laureate finds himself torn between a jealous America girlfriend and a mysterious Japanese beauty, played by Mitsuko Baisho. Unwilling to take sides, he seems to end up with both. Why didn’t Lieutenant Pinkerton think of that?
The book’s final chapters take us into the twenty first century, where rock has been dethroned by other musical genres like rap and pop and the market for CDs has collapsed. The two phenomena are linked since rock, with its thunder and theatrics, is ill-suited to streaming, which is for people to listen to while doing something else.
Japan’s image has changed too. Instead of Kurosawa movies and Zen temples, it’s all about anime, monster movies and cosplay. Contemporary rock band The Flaming Lips captured the zeitgeist brilliantly with their album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and elaborate live stage show.
Needless to say, there is no more running naked through hotel lobbies or wielding of samurai swords. The new breed of artist has to be super-sensitive to the ethical dimension of everything said and done or face the wrath of the social media police.
Keaveney’s hero is Rivers Cuomo, frontman of the band Weezer. In the 1996 album Pinkerton he gives a guilt-ridden account of dysfunctional relationships, struggles with identity and loneliness and likens himself to the “asshole America sailor” of Puccini’s opera.
On the other hand, Keaveney takes pop stars Gwen Stefani and Avril Lavigne to task for “cultural appropriation” in their Japan-themed music videos, echoing the condemnation of Asian-American activists at the time. Yet there was never any criticism of Harajuku Girls and Hello Kitty in Japan itself. Indeed, the songs were well received by the Japanese public, a fact that Keaveney finds perplexing and disappointing.
“One of the abiding ironies of criticisms in the West of the Orientalist representations of Japan by Western artists is how rarely Japanese traditionally have taken offense,” he comments. “What are seen as acts of inappropriate racial appropriation and stereotyping in the West often have been regarded by the Japanese as flattering.”
When Keaveney mentions the West, he really means the United States and the sliver of its population that obsesses about such issues. As for so-called “cultural appropriation”, that has been Japanese national strategy for the last 170 years.
Japan has also appropriated Led Zeppelin. Drummer John Bonham, who died of alcohol poisoning in 1980, was nobody’s idea of a role model, but the band is much loved in Japan, despite his appalling behaviour. Numerous tribute bands keep Zeppelin’s legacy alive, with the oldest, Cinnamon, now in its fiftieth year.
There is even a piano trio made up of top-notch Japanese jazz musicians which plays the music of Led Zeppelin and nothing else.
It’s unlikely that Weezer, or Gwen Stefani or Avril Lavigne or any other contemporary artist, will be attracting a similar following fifty years on.
Blowback: Sunak, Kishida & the Supercompetitive Yen
Published in Japan Forward 27th October 2022
Once upon a time Japan stood out for its rapid turnover of prime ministers, whereas British politics was generally stable, with leaders Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair holding office for eleven and ten years respectively.
No longer. Rishi Sunak has just become the UK’s fifth prime minister in six years, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt is the fourth person to hold the position this year. As was usually the case in Japan, all this turbulence at the top happened not because of a change of government, but while the same party was in power.
Meanwhile, the Japanese yen has fallen sharply on the foreign exchange market against the rampant US dollar, from 115 at the start of the year to 150 in late October.
At first sight, these two phenomena seem to be entirely unrelated, but political and financial instability often go together. It was during Japan’s “lost decades” of deflation and banking crises that prime ministers came and went so quickly that it was hard to keep track.
On the other hand, good financial conditions often coexist with political stability. Over the past forty years, there have been twenty one Japanese prime ministers, but only three served lengthy terms in office – Yasuhiro Nakasone (1982-87), Junichiro Koizumi (2001-6) and Shinzo Abe (2012-20). It is no coincidence that powerful bull markets took place during their stints in power.
The Japanification of British politics is happening because political leaders are as helpless in the face of the challenges they face as Japanese politicians were in the 1990s. The choices are between bad and very bad.
But Britain is hardly alone in its predicament. More or less the entire Western world adopted the super low or negative interest rate regime that came into favour after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Likewise, most of the world has experienced a sharp rise in inflation caused by the “free money” that central banks handed out to cushion the effects of Covid restrictions. Now we have the blowback.
The shift from near-zero interest rates to 4.5%, in the case of a two year U.S. bond, has been stunningly fast by the standards of monetary policy. The result has been an extraordinary surge in the value of the dollar. In terms of the real effective exchange rate – which takes inflation into account and measures against the currency of all trading partners – the dollar has only been stronger than it is now 3% of the time since the dawn of floating currencies in 1971.
It takes a year or more for monetary policy to have its full effect on an economy. The inflation gripping the world today is the result of actions that the world’s central bankers took in 2020 and 2021. Despite all their experience and the intellectual resources at their disposal, they didn’t see it coming. Are they now making the reverse mistake – tightening too fast and driving the world economy into a nasty recession? It’s quite possible.
After the Global Financial Crisis, the world was pulled out of slump by double digit growth in the Chinese economy and explosive mass demand for mobile devices. We may not be so lucky the next time around. Indeed, there are three new problems that will complicate the already tortuous task of crushing inflation without crushing growth.
The first is the hardening confrontation between China and the United States and its allies. Recent events such as America’s adoption of much tougher restrictions on tech exports and the removal of moderates and pragmatists from the upper reaches of the Chinese Communist Party would seem to put the two countries on a collision course.
Secondly, the Ukraine war is evolving into a proxy war between Russia and the United States in which neither side can afford to back down, with obvious implications for energy costs.
Thirdly, Japan and several other countries are going to find it immensely difficult to meet the “net zero carbon footprint” commitments that their governments have made.
In this treacherous economic landscape, nobody looks good but Japan’s weak yen is a tiny problem, if indeed it is a problem at all. Yes, Japan’s consumer price index is currently rising at 3.0%, but that massively overstates the outlook. Market expectations – as measured by the difference in yield between regular government bonds and those that are protected from inflation – are for annual inflation of a mere 0.9% over the next ten years. In other words, the consensus of investors, as revealed by their actions, is that the Bank of Japan is nowhere near hitting its target of 2% inflation on a sustainable basis.
So what should Japan do about the yen? The answer is nothing. In fact, it should stop intervening in the currency markets, which rarely has any lasting effect and, by reducing the available supply of yen, constitutes a tightening of monetary policy.
Significant currency movements always create winners and losers. Inevitably, the losers complain loudly while the winners count their profits and keep quiet.
In the case of the weak yen, the winners are exporters and global companies – in other words, Japan’s blue chip champions. Yet, such is the competitive edge that the severely undervalued yen creates that smaller companies may find it worth their while to venture into overseas markets too. In what is likely to be a tough and volatile economic environment, the weak yen could turn out to be a blessing.
There is always a possibility that the central banks successfully soft-land the global economy and political stability is restored, but it seems unlikely. As to which prime minister lasts the longer, Fumio Kishida or Rishi Sunak, I would put my money on the former.
Currency Crunch: The Yen is massively mispriced
Published in Nikkei Asia 22/9/2022
It’s not just Tom Cruise reprising the title role in Top Gun: Maverick. There is a distinctly 1980s vibe to the currency markets these days. “King Dollar” is blasting through the skies, leaving every other currency gazing in awe at its contrails.
Worst affected so far is the yen, which has fallen from 115 to the dollar at the start of the year to 144 recently. But remember what happened all those years ago. The Plaza Accord of 1985 triggered a dizzying plunge in the dollar that took the currency down 50% against the yen and the West German Deutsche Mark.
With economic conditions still difficult after Plaza, the dollar stayed flat on its back for nearly ten years. Even a Top Gun needs a long period of convalescence after a crash landing.
Treasury Secretary James Baker announces the Plaza Accord in September 1985
Foreign exchange markets move around much more than they should. The economic fundamentals of countries, especially large mature countries, change only slowly but the markets are in a constant state of flux, often driven by speculation about government policy, interest rate moves and other transient factors. Trend-following and massive overshoots are the rule, not the exception.
What should be the most important fundamental factor is the purchasing power of a currency over time. In other words, what you can buy for your money. All other things being equal, the currency of a country with high inflation should decline relative to the currency of a country with low inflation, thus preserving the balance in purchasing power. If that doesn’t happen, the high inflation country will lose competitiveness as prices rise.
To put it another way, the external value of a currency should mirror its internal value.
That is the theory. Market reality is very different. The yen has been weak this year, not just against dollar, but even against the struggling British pound and euro, even though all three Western economies are suffering from near double digit inflation. At 3.0%, Japanese inflation is extremely placid in today’s world, even more so than famously disciplined Switzerland (3.5%) and Singapore (7%).
The result can only be a large competitiveness gain for Japan. If sustained over time, this would result in higher profit margins or larger market shares for exporters, re-onshoring of production by Japanese companies, a greater likelihood of foreign companies choosing Tokyo as a regional hub and the mother of all tourist booms – assuming that all Covid restrictions are scrapped.
Historically, a super-strong dollar has been destructive, particularly to emerging economies, because it swells the value of dollar-denominated debt issued by foreign corporates and governments when translated into local currency terms. Sometimes this leads to a death spiral as the higher debt causes the currency to slump further, which raises the debt burden even more in local currency terms.
For Japan, exactly the opposite applies. It is the world’s largest creditor nation, and a declining yen causes the value of its treasure trove of dollar-denominated assets to soar.
Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has so far been able to weather speculative attacks on the yen and the Japanese bond market because, in stark contrast to George Soros’ coup against the unsustainably overvalued British pound in 1992, the BoJ’s current policy settings are doing no obvious damage. In market speak, the weak yen is not a “pain trade”.
The Bank of Japan
Of course, if Japanese inflation were to take off in a meaningful way, that would be a different story. At the moment, though, inflationary pressures in Japan are largely imported and there is little sign of an escalation in wages and salaries, as seen in the U.S. and elsewhere. More than likely, 2023 will see a significant drop-off in CPI inflation as the year-on-year comparisons flatten out.
Indeed, Japan’s GDP deflator – a gauge which measures all prices in the economy, not just those paid by consumers – has been in negative territory for six quarters in a row.
Kuroda’s term as BoJ Governor will end in the spring and his successor may well tweak policy settings, but a full-scale reversal is unlikely. In 2013, the BoJ undertook to achieve a 2% inflation target “sustainably”. It has yet to succeed. Even if the target is halved, which is one possible face-saving measure, some stimulative policies will likely continue.
Even so, there may be turbulent times ahead in the currency markets. The Japanese monetary authorities may find themselves with a familiar problem on their hands – how to cope with an excessively strong yen. They may even find themselves battling deflation again, bizarre as that may seem in today’s world.
There are two reasons why this could happen. The first is fundamental value. The Japanese yen has spent most of the last 40 years being grossly overvalued. Now it is grossly undervalued, to the tune of 43%, according to the OECD’s estimate of purchasing power parity versus the dollar. In other words, the yen is as almost as undervalued now as it was overvalued at the maximum in 1995.
What that means in practical terms is illustrated by the huge gap in wages that has opened up when viewed in common currency terms. For the first decade of this century, average wages in Japan and the United States were roughly the same. Today the average wage in the U.S. is $74,100. At current exchange rates, the average Japanese wage has fallen to $29,900.
Have U.S. workers suddenly become twice as productive as Japanese workers? Absolutely not.
Fundamental value is a notional anchor, but currencies can diverge from fair value for years, decades even, which was the case for the yen from 1987 to 2013. More important is the political backdrop, which is to say the interests of the United States, the prime mover of the yen dollar relationship and other sensitive exchange rates.
How overvalued is the dollar? And how undervalued is the yen? The answer to both questions is the same: very. The dollar / yen exchange rate was 140 in 1990, as it is now, but a 2022 dollar is nothing like a 1990 dollar. US consumer prices have trebled in the intervening period. Meanwhile Japanese consumer prices have risen just 10% in total. A 100 yen in 2022 is not much different from a 100 yen in 1990 in terms of what it buys.
The best way of capturing the relative purchasing power of currencies is through the “real effective exchange rate” which takes into account the effect of inflation and measures a currency not against just one other currency, such as the U.S. dollar, but against a basket of currencies that reflects their importance in trade.
On this measure, the decline in the yen started in 1995. The depreciation since that peak already amounts to 60%, taking the Japanese currency back to where it was in 1971. Where we are now looks a lot more like the end of a weak yen cycle than the beginning.
As for the ascent of the dollar, it is already long in the tooth in real effective terms, having kicked off in 2014. Moreover, over the entire 51-year era of floating currencies, it has only been higher than it is now 3.6% of the time: between April 1984 and February 1986. That, of course, was just before the orchestrated collapse of the dollar.
Fed Chairman Paul Volcker crushed inflation in the US
Back then too, the Federal Reserve was combatting structurally high inflation, yet America’s loss of competitiveness, worsened by the rampant dollar, could not be endured for long. It was the “free market” administration of Ronald Reagan that initiated the currency stitch-up at the Plaza Hotel, as well as a raft of protectionist export quotas and “voluntary” restraints aimed mainly at Japan.
The world has changed greatly since then, but the political calculus has not. It is just a question of time before economic weakness takes over from inflation as the number one problem in the eyes of the American public and politicians. When that happens, keeping the dollar high in the sky will require a feat out of another Tom Cruise movie – Mission Impossible.
Reflections on a Funeral
Published in Japan Forward 1/10/2022
It was one of those sticky late September days that seem to hark back to the summer, rather than anticipating the crispness of a Tokyo autumn.
I emerged from the Kudanshita metro station and joined the slow-moving crowd edging up the hill towards Yasukuni Shrine. The other side of the road, where the Budokan Hall stands, was blocked off to pedestrians.
Many moons ago, I worked in an office near here. Indeed, my colleagues and I would sometimes take our bento lunch boxes to the usually deserted shrine.
I also have memories of various events at the Budokan. Concerts by Eric Clapton, The Who, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. A karate tournament presided over by the awesome figure of Masatatsu Oyama, the originator of Kyokushinkai full contact karate.
Today, though, I was participating in a much more sombre affair, the state funeral of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. Together with 26,000 others, I was here to present a bouquet of flowers.
I did not know exactly what to expect, but neither did anybody else. Japan’s last state funeral, for Shigeru Yoshida, took place in 1967. There must be very few people who participated in both events.
I wore a dark shirt and trousers and a black mask, though it turned out that white masks were advised. I did better with my ample bouquet, having decided on white lilies, which symbolize purity. Well over half of the public lining up to present their flowers had made the same choice.
The area for handing in flowers was right next to the Budokan, but the organisers had sensibly decided not to have huge crowds standing around for hours.
Instead, we were sent on a scenic detour that took us past the British Embassy, where there were still floral tributes to the late Queen Elizabeth on display. Then on past the National Theatre and the Supreme Court before doubling back along the Imperial moat to Chidorigafuchi, one of Tokyo’s prime cherry blossom spots in the spring.
Some people were smart and had equipped themselves with parasols, hats and bottled water. I practiced my gaman (“endurance”) and sweated in the midday heat.
Finally, I arrived at the destination. There were several tables on which to place the bouquets, behind them large photos of a relaxed-looking Shinzo Abe. As you would expect, security was tight, but also polite and helpful. Signs everywhere said “no photos”. They were widely ignored, as people clicked away on their smart phones and officials pretended not to notice.
The whole experience took about three hours. The only protest I saw was when a group of elderly ladies appeared at a junction and attempted to hand out fliers denouncing Abe’s 悪政 (“evil politics”).
Nearly all my fellow walkers – mostly middle-aged or younger – blanked them out as if they did not exist. Only the man directly in front of me reacted by taking a flier, giving it a cursory glance, then scrunching it up and hurling it to the ground.
I’m glad the protesters were there and glad they got some feedback.
Several of my left-wing friends were opposed to the state funeral taking place at all, citing the fact that opinion polls showed that a majority of the public did not approve of it.
Opinion polls contain much important information – especially, when the same question is asked over time – but they have limitations. In particular, the phone polls taken by Japanese newspapers cannot measure the intensity of opinions.
A good proxy for intensity is how many people are willing to take time off work, in some cases travelling from distant locations, and trudge around central Tokyo on a hot and humid day. On that basis, the pro-funeral group outmatched the anti-funeral group by about 90% to 10%.
Strangely, there was grumbling about the cost, which was born by the public purse. The estimated sum of $12 million is trivial, equivalent to ten cents per Japanese citizen, and was spent mainly on security and accommodation for the foreign guests. Compare that with the last G7 meeting in Canada, which cost 750 million Canadian dollars
Why was it appropriate to hold such an elaborate state funeral for Shinzo Abe but not for other eminent leaders, such as Yasuhiro Nakasone? In retrospect, perhaps there should have been a similar event for Nakasone, who did great things for Japan in his time. But to be frank, there are no other fitting candidates amongst Japan’s myriad ex-prime ministers.
Shinzo Abe stands out for his length of tenure and the breadth of the changes that he initiated, but there is more to it than that. There is the manner of his death to consider too. The state funeral, with the participation of the public in offering flowers and signing condolences, sent another message – that Japanese society will not accept political assassination.
Finally, there is the geopolitical context of this particular moment in history. Shigeru Yoshida, the only other politician to be granted a state funeral, was a key figure in the development of post-war Japan. But he was not a global figure because Japan itself had little global impact then, not even being a member of the OECD when he was politically active.
Today Japan has become a crucial player in the politics of Asia, the fastest growing and potentially wealthiest area in the world. The expansionism of China and the naked aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia have set off a reaction in Western and Asian countries that is bringing them closer together. Expectations for Japan’s role are high. That is why four Australian ex-prime ministers attended the funeral as well as so many dignitaries from other regions.
Japan is global. The funeral was a global event with a global message. Those who criticise it on grounds of expense, constitutional niceties or distaste for Abe’s policies are thinking very small. The man himself rarely did that.