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Shirakawa: The Last Shogun of Hard Money
Published in Nikkei Asia 11/10/2021
“What will unfold might be inflation, a financial bubble and subsequent financial crisis, social discontent due to widening inequalities in wealth, a continuous decline in the growth rate or some combination of these factors… There is pressing need for change. I believe everything starts with recognizing clearly where we are and where we are destined to go unless we change course.”
This is the doom-laden prophecy with which former Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa ends his newly published 530-page memoir Tumultuous Times, Central Banking in an Era of Crisis.
Although his criticisms of the super-low interest rate and quantitative easing policies deployed by central banks are diplomatically expressed and never personal, it is clear that he thinks we are all going to hell in a handbasket.
Not only is unconventional monetary policy failing to cure the developed world’s ills, in his view it is actively making them worse. Using the concept of hysteresis (persistence of a state), he suggests that unnaturally low interest rates prolong themselves as demand is sucked from the future and companies and projects proliferate that would be unviable at higher rates.
To understand where Shirakawa is coming from, it is necessary to understand Japan’s recent economic history. Just as American policymakers today are mindful of the lessons of the Great Depression and their German peers are guided by folk memories of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, so Japanese financial officials are forever scarred by the experience of the disastrous bubble economy of the late 1980s.
The lesson learnt: You don’t need hyperinflation or mass unemployment to destroy a nation’s economic well-being. A large enough bubble will do the job just as effectively. And the Japanese bubble was one for the ages, comprehending real estate of all kinds, stocks, artworks, golf-club memberships, ornamental carp, anything that could be traded.
When it burst, the price of commercial real estate in Osaka, Japan’s second city, fell by 90%. The Nikkei Stock Average embarked on a 20-year bear market and has yet to recover its highs. Compared to this, other modern bubbles were as the popping of children’s balloons to the crash of the Hindenburg airship.
Shirakawa joined the BoJ in 1973 after studying economics at the University of Tokyo. The bank sent him to the University of Chicago, where he was taught by Nobel Prize-winner Robert Lucas and audited lectures by another Nobelist, Milton Friedman. Much later, Friedman was to criticize the Bank of Japan’s passivity in the face of deflation.
When the bubble madness was at its height, Shirakawa was a diligent, promising staffer in his late 30s. In his memoir, he attempts to deflect the blame from the institution where he spent most of his career. Indeed, as he points out, everyone bought in to the bubble logic — politicians, businessmen, intellectuals, the media, even foreign scholars and journalists who wrote best-selling books about how Japan was destined to unseat the U.S. as the world’s premier power.
Yet none of the above were charged with supervising Japan’s money supply and credit growth. That was the role of the BoJ, and it comprehensively failed in its mission.
The ensuing loss of faith in the authorities, including politicians and elite Ministry of Finance bureaucrats, was a bitter pill to swallow. The determination not to make the same mistake again became ingrained.
When official land prices finally bottomed out in 2006, the Bank of Japan stopped its quantitative easing program and raised interest rates, while the Financial Services Agency demanded more stringent lending standards. The “mini-bubble” that they were determined to stamp out consisted of a rise of 8% for residential plots in Tokyo, but of just 0.1% for the country as a whole. In many regions prices were still falling. The financial bureaucrats were jumping at shadows.
Shirakawa took over as BoJ Governor in early 2008 and experienced the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 and Japan’s triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in 2011. Whenever anything bad happened, whether overseas or domestically, the yen would strengthen, moving from 103 to the dollar to 76 in the course of his term.
A strong currency is appropriate if economic conditions are buoyant, but after the earthquake the Japanese economy was on its knees. Unsurprisingly, monetary policy became highly politicized, with businessmen, politicians and private sector economists increasingly vocal in their demands for a more reflationary policy.
Shirakawa held firm, maintaining that there was nothing he could do — the excessively strong yen was caused by overseas factors. He was and remains a strong advocate of fiscal tightening via tax hikes. Nowhere in his memoir does he address the point that Japan’s government debt is merely the other side of the balance sheet to the Mount Fuji of savings built up by Japanese companies and households.
Finally, the inevitable happened. Both public and politicians tired of hair shirt economics. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reappeared on the scene with a reflationary program that was to become known as Abenomics and give him a second, record-breaking stint in power.
The bad old days before Abe: the yen too high, the Nikkei Index too low
Almost from the moment that Abe won the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party, the yen fell sharply on the foreign exchange markets, as investors began to factor in a major change in policy settings. Shirakawa argues, very unconvincingly, that the rapid retreat of the yen to more than 100 to the dollar was caused by developments in the Eurozone crisis, not the imminent end of his own hardline policies.
Never say never, but so far the yen has not returned to anywhere near those nosebleed levels of the Shirakawa years.
Something similar happened in the stock market. In September 2012, just before Abe’s comeback, the Nikkei average was languishing at 8,870, the same level as in 1983. In a matter of weeks, it had embarked on a bull market that is still extant today, even after a trebling in price. Importantly, the rise has not been caused by bubble-type speculative excess, but by “fundamentals” — a remarkable improvement in Japanese corporate profits.
A man of principle, Shirakawa took the unusual step of resigning a few months before the end of his term, recognizing that he was not the right person to implement Abenomics after Abe’s landslide general election victory gave him a popular mandate.
Shirakawa published the Japanese version of his book in 2018, but has revised it and added new sections for the English version, which has comments on the COVID-19 era. He writes modestly and perceptively about the limited nature of our economic and other knowledge and makes some strong points.
Crucially, “unconventional monetary policy” has not succeeded — in Japan or anywhere else — in achieving its primary goal, which is to raise the rate of inflation. Is that because it has not been combined with expansionary fiscal policy, or is the structural force of shrinking demographics the key factor in staunching inflationary pressures, as Shirakawa believes? We will find out over next few years.
According to Shirakawa, the success or failure of monetary policy can only be judged in the long-term, by which he means in decades. On that basis, it is still too early to judge his record, but the same should go for his successor, Haruhiko Kuroda.
Shirakawa makes his point
Japan appears to be in a much better place now than it was in the pre-Abe years, but Shirakawa’s views and analysis are of great interest, nonetheless. In fact, they probably have more applicability in the U.S. and the U.K. — where asset bubbles, inequality and inflation are clearly visible and could well have dire economic and social consequences.
If they do, Shirakawa will have been at least partially vindicated.
“Monkey Man”: Book Review
Published in Japan Forward 16/9/2021
“I was born in a place absurdly deep in the countryside. It was a tiny settlement inside a mountain.”
“In a mountain?”
“Yeah. For generations my family line were its guardians. It was said the gods lived there because it was a sacred mountain. There was an uncut primeval forest of virgin beech trees that had been growing there continuously for eternity.”
The first speaker above is Monkey Man, one of a group of misfit schoolkids with secret superpowers. Like Spiderman or Batman, he hides his face when righting the world’s wrongs. The mask he uses is the likeness of Son Goku, the Monkey King from the sixteenth century Chinese novel, Journey to the West.
Older readers may remember the Japanese TV series featuring “the magic monkey” which became a cult programme overseas in the 1980s. Younger readers are more likely to know Son Goku from the “Dragon Ball” manga-anime-videogame franchise.
The Monkey (red tunic) with the Pig and the Water Buffalo, protecting the priest on the westward journey
Red Circle, the innovative British publisher, has come up with a second original novelette from best-selling writer Takuji Ichikawa. Appearing two years after The Refugee’s Daughter, Monkey Man is a “Young Adult”-type fantasy tale, but one clearly grounded in contemporary concerns about environmental degradation, excessive corporate power and alienated youth.
Monkey Man and his pals are “awakened”, meaning that they have a different ethical sense to ordinary people, who suffer from “the misery virus”. The rough kids at school mock and beat them, but they never resist. Instead, they have developed a videogame which rewards altruistic behaviour – you win by giving away points to other players. According to one girl, traditional shoot-‘em-up videogames are for “old blokes who live in the world of stone age CPUs. Our generation is cooler and smarter than that.”
Ranged against the awakened youngsters is “The Complex” of mega-corporations, the military and politicians. Its roots “spread out like a sticky, slimy, fungus-like mould and it uses manipulative language to sell completely unnecessary products to consumers that were actually nothing more than poison for the mind.”
Even worse, having engineered an enormous wealth gap, high-ranking members of The Complex are now trying to increase inequality in lifespan. They kidnap one of the Monkey Man’s friends and attempt to use her superpowers to rejuvenate a geriatric CEO of an enormous industrial group.
Ichikawa is a great admirer of teenage activists Greta Thurnberg and Malala Yousafzai, and Extinction Rebellion is explicitly mentioned in Monkey Man as a model to follow. The sometimes naive political message will not suit everyone, but it does reflect some of the unease that many, not just idealistic youngsters, feel about the way the world is going today. An apt symbol of our era was the richest man on earth, tech oligarch Jeff Bezos, taking a space journey for sightseeing purposes, while multitudes of ordinary workers were stuck in cramped accommodation suffering the stress of Covid lockdowns.
Bezos space oddity
In a recent interview, Ichikawa said “I like stories that undo all boundaries. Dream and reality. Past and present. Me and you. And me and the world. As well as life and death.”
That phantasmagorical quality is present in the strange, magical world of Monkey Man. The references to Son Goku and the Japanese animist tradition connect the story to age-old folk tales. It’s an absorbing read in its own right, with some of the charm of a Hayao Miyazaki anime film, and it also provides an intriguing picture of an ethical outlook that, judging by the author’s commercial success, commands widespread interest.
The crisp translation is by husband-and-wife team, Daniel Lilley and Lisa Lilley.
A compulsive writer who claims to have thousands of unpublished manuscripts in store, Ichikawa sold a million copies of his mega-hit “Be With You”, which went on to become a TV series and then a successful film that was remade for the South Korean and Chinese markets. The book has been translated into several languages, including English. Its success in East Asia may owe something to the themes of karma and rebirth which are also found in Monkey Man.
From the Korean movie version of “Be With You”
Clearly a writer who understands the zeitgeist, he himself was a misfit at school and was much later diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. In his writing, his sympathy for the marginalized and “different” is obvious. Interestingly, he claims to have never indulged in that standard solidifier of group dynamics, karaoke singing. His favourite authors include Kurt Vonnegut, fabulist and poet Kenji Miyazawa and outsider artist Henry Darger who lived and died in total obscurity, leaving behind 20,000 pages of extraordinary fantastical writing.
Takuji Ichikawa
Red Circle’s mission is to publish original contemporary Japanese literature in English. Like all their previous books, Monkey Man has not previously appeared in any language, Japanese included. Other Red Circle publications include works by well-known writers such as mystery doyen Soji Shimada, Naoki Prize winner Kazufumi Shiraishi and the late Kanji Hanawa, a scholar of French literature and prolific short story writer. All are well worth exploring. “Monkey Man” is a welcome addition to the Red Circle roster.
Dancing Cats and White Saviours: Johnny Depp in “Minamata”
Published in Nikkei Asia 10/09/2021
Hollywood has a Japan problem. Even when a film is nominally “about” Japan, such as The Last Samurai (2003), the drama is in the character development of the main — inevitably Western — protagonist. Thanks to his Japan experiences, the drunken American mercenary, played by Tom Cruise, recovers his self-respect – and gives Emperor Meiji some sound advice on how he should rule the country.
Minamata which was commercially released in August, is a much better and more serious film, and Johnny Depp is a far superior actor to Tom Cruise. Furthermore, W. Eugene Smith, the character that Depp plays with such remarkable skill, was a real person.
He lived in the pollution-stricken town of Minamata for three years, got badly beaten by company toughs and produced one of the most famous images in the history of photojournalism, capturing a severely disabled victim of mercury poisoning being lovingly bathed by her mother in the family home.
The real Eugene Smith
The cinematography is excellent, as is the supporting cast. Minami, who plays Smith’s assistant and later wife, gives the relationship an asexual aspect that is unusual and touching. Yet precisely because the film claims to be “based on real events,”, it also needs to be judged with a critical eye.
There are two flaws that serve to flatten and simplify the story. The first is the unnecessary exaggeration of Smith’s role. He is portrayed as a “white saviour” who wins the battle for the community, while the role of local Japanese activists is downplayed.
Environmental activism has a long tradition in Japan, stretching back to protests over the country’s first major pollution disaster at the Ashio copper mine in the late 19th century.
The second is the facile parallel with other corporate disasters, listed at the film’s close. These include the appalling thalidomide scandal of the early 1960s and India’s Bhopal gas leak of 1984 in which many thousands died. Conflated with these horrors are the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater oil spills which devastated coastlines but caused no deaths amongst the affected communities.
More controversial is the mention of “Fukushima.” On that terrible day in March 2011, an earthquake and resulting tsunami killed some 20,000 people along Japan’s north-eastern coast, mainly by drowning. The related meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power station caused by the tsunami led to one death and 16 injuries.
For anti-nuclear activists to make that the main event is to disrespect the memory of the victims of Japan’s worst natural disaster in living memory.
From Fish to Cats to People
Minamata disease is the best known of the four major illnesses caused by industrial pollution during Japan’s turbo-charged recovery from the smoking ruins of World War 2II. It is named after the small town on the west coast of Kyushu where the outbreak took place.
Chisso, a chemical company which was Minamata’s major employer, had been discharging methylmercury into the sea since the 1930s.The first sign of the poison seeping through the food chain was the behaviour of cats, which suddenly began “dancing” spasmodically and then died. Humans suffered neurological damage and many died horrible deaths too. Women who remained healthy bore babies with severe birth defects. Unusually, the placenta did not protect the unborn child from toxins, but absorbed the mercury.
From Sean Michael Wilson’s excellent Minamata manga
Shamefully, Chisso stalled for many years and refused to accept liability. Matters were complicated by different factions amongst the townspeople, some of whom were dependent on the company for their livelihoods. There were also unfounded concerns that the disease could be contagious, which led to the social ostracization of sufferers.
The company stopped dumping the methylmercury several years before Smith arrived in Japan in 1971. By then, the struggle was about the level of compensation and who was qualified to receive it, with the company attempting to reduce its liability to the bare minimum.
In the film, Smith decides to take on the Minamata project after a young Japanese activist called Aileen shows up at his Manhattan apartment and hands over a wodge of documents about the disaster. At first he is reluctant to visit Japan — flashbacks reveal his traumatic experiences as a war photographer in the Pacific — but he finally agrees.
In reality, Smith had already spent a year in Japan in 1961-62, working on Colossus of the Orient, a photo essay about Hitachi Corporation, and living in Roppongi with a young American assistant-cum- girlfriend. When he returned nine years later, it was not to lead a crusade, as the film suggests, but to oversee an exhibition of his work.
Aileen, who he brought along with him, was a half-Japanese student at Stanford who was thirty years his junior. It was a Japanese photographer who brought the Minamata story to his attention. The subject had attracted massive media interest domestically, with some photographers staying in the area for years. Smith followed in their trail.
The film has a fictional scene, in which the boss of Chisso is shown gazing at Smith’s just-published Minamata photo essay in Life Magazine. “We have to pay”, he mutters with tears in his eyes. The implication is that Smith’s work was the decisive factor in obtaining justice for the sufferers, not the long and ultimately successful legal battle waged by the activist groups.
Hiroyuki Sanada plays a firebrand activist
In another scene Smith and Aileen bluff their way into the Chisso Hospital and find secret files revealing that the company had known about the link between the cat deaths and human Minamata disease for years. That revelation did indeed deliver a crushing blow to Chisso’s credibility, but it had nothing to do with Smith. Rather, the director of the Chisso Hospital, long retired and wracked with cancer, made the sensational admission on his deathbed.
Dying of ‘everything’
The film ends with a neatly packaged resolution, when in fact the reality was as messy as Smith’s famously chaotic living conditions. The fact that he and Aileen married is mentioned, but not that they divorced a few years afterwards. Smith’s death in 1978, it is claimed, was caused indirectly by the injuries that he suffered from the beatings by company goons.
That is not what his biographer thinks. According to Sam Stephenson, he was suffering “from diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, severe hypertension with an enlarged heart”, having been an alcoholic and “amphetamine addict for most of his adult life… As was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of ‘everything’.”
Smith made his name as a combat photographer at Saipan and Iwo Jima and elsewhere. A bullet wound in his mouth troubled him for the rest of his life. From there he went on to become America’s premier photo-essayist, travelling the world to capture images of Albert Schweitzer in Africa, Welsh coal miners, Spanish peasants and a black midwife in Mississippi.
His work was socially conscious and eye-opening at a time when the photographic image, published in large format magazines, was almighty and photographers were stars in their own right.
Television put an end to that era, and Smith saw it coming. As biographer Stephenson notes, he had always been concerned about the tension between photojournalism and art, and greatly admired musicians and writers. In 1957, he left his wife and four children and moved to a loft in Manhattan which became an open house for New York bohemian society.
Jazz greats such as Thelonious Monk and Chick Corea passed through, as did Salvador Dali and Norman Mailer. Another visitor was Toshiko Akiyoshi, one of Japan’s most celebrated jazz artists. In 1976, she recorded a jazz suite called Minamata and won the album of the year award from America’s prestigious Downbeat jazz magazine.
Smith spent most of the 1960s working on projects that never happened. Wired on amphetamines, he stayed in his dark room for days on end without sleep. He also electronically miked the entire building and recorded everything that went on, from jazz jams to intimate conversations to TV shows. Altogether, there are 4,500 hours of tapes in the archive at the University of Arizona, including several of random street noise recorded in Roppongi in 1962.
Smith appears to have spent long years searching for some sort of artistic breakthrough. He achieved it at Minamata. In particular, his masterpiece, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath, transcends the circumstances of the pollution controversy protest to create an image for the ages, one that recalls the greatest works of religious iconography.
Smith was a much stranger and more complex character than the Hemingway-esque boozer of the film, but he was no saviour. He transformed his Minamata experience into superlative art, and surely that is more than enough.
Despite such reservations, it would be a great shame if the film were to be “buried” because of Johnny Depp’s current legal troubles, as the director Andrew Levitas fears. It deserves to be seen widely, as a warning of what can happen when technological advance is not properly monitored.
The Baron Smiles: The Olympics Win Again
Published in Japan Forward 8/8/2021
The 32nd Summer Olympics will be remembered for the steely-eyed resolve and ingenuity that Japan displayed in successfully staging the Games under the shadow of Covid-19, which has made such a mess of our economies and societies.
In such circumstances, the ability of great sporting events to lift our spirits is particularly precious. Replacing the virus as the top news item, if only briefly, is a gold medal achievement in itself.
Some critics, including athletes, have complained that it doesn’t feel like a “real Olympics” because of the lack of audience and the constraints on social mixing, which were indeed unfortunate and unprecedented. At least the quiet in the stadium was a lot more dignified than the fake crowd roar injected into spectator-less Premier League football (soccer) games in Britain.
Drone display illuminates the Tokyo night
Indeed, the empty Olympic stadium and the stunning drone display of the earth in orbit neatly summed up our world today, with its ever more sophisticated technology and weakening social bonds, both tendencies being accelerated by the pandemic.
In reflecting the era in which it took place, Tokyo 2021 was as “real” as any other Games. The truth is that the modern Olympic Games has never been a purely sporting event. Right from the beginning, it has always held up a mirror to the political and social reality of its era.
The founder, Baron Coubertin, conscious of France’s loss of status in nineteenth century Europe, copied the sporting ethic of British private schools, which he saw as key to the British Empire. By banning professionalism, he excluded working class athletes who had competed for prize money.
Statue of Baron Coubertin in Tokyo
Berlin 1936 signalled Nazi triumphalism and the clash of ideologies. Tokyo 1964 heralded the rise of Japan as an economic superpower. The shocking atrocities that occurred at Munich in 1972 ushered in an era of terrorism which has never ended. At the height of the Cold War, the US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games; the Eastern bloc returned the compliment in 1984 at Los Angeles.
As for our era, it is a strange one, marked by Covid and the extraordinary response of governments everywhere. In the background is a backlash against the excesses of globalization and the rise of an assertive China determined to challenge the geopolitical status quo. Meanwhile, fear, anger and distrust are instantly magnified by social media.
War with no bullets
Several of the episodes from the Tokyo Games seemed particularly redolent of the shifting values of today’s world. The transgender female weightlifter who was male until the age of 35; two high-jumpers preferring to share the gold medal rather than face off in a decider.
Then there was the American gymnastic superstar who dramatically quit mid-contest on grounds of mental health; the Japanese actor whose role in the opening ceremony was cancelled at the last minute because of an inappropriate skit broadcast 35 years ago.
Meanwhile, a gold-winning badminton player was blasted on Chinese social media for dedicating his victory to “my country, Taiwan”. Jessica Springsteen, daughter of Bruce, the denim-clad bard of the oppressed working man, became an Olympic equestrian.
Jessica Springsteen competing in Tokyo
There were also plenty of the marvellous athletic feats that the Olympics were designed to celebrate. Who could forget the Italian winner of the 100 metres sprint, who took up the event just two years ago; the Japanese brother and sister both winning gold medals in judo; the Norwegian 400 metre hurdler whose record-busting time bettered the British record for the equivalent flat race;
Other great stories were the 13 year old Japanese girl who struck gold in skateboarding, and the Philippine weight-lifter, apparently a trenchant critic of President Duterte, who won her country’s first ever gold medal.
13 year old gold medallist Momiji Nishiya
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.” That was the opinion of English author George Orwell, writing in December 1945 after an ill-tempered tour of Britain by the Moscow Dynamo football team.
What Orwell left out was that “war minus the shooting” is greatly preferable to “war including the shooting.” Recent Olympics have had their fair share of problems – financial corruption, doping, etc. – but as sporting jamborees go, the Games are fairly benign.
Good will is helped by the large variety of sporting contests on display, which mean different things to different countries. For Japan, judo is the crucial sport. For East African countries, distance running is all important. Over the years, Britain has harvested medals from sports that you can do sitting down – cycling, horse riding, rowing and kayaking.
By boosting the number of events, the International Olympic Committee has cleverly ensured that many countries will go home happy, with “a record haul” of medals.
“Imagine no Olympics”: a bleak prospect
As the drones rotated in the Tokyo night sky during the opening ceremony, a disparate group of remote singers broke into John Lennon’s “Imagine”.
At first sight, it seemed a strange choice. After all, if there were “no countries”, as the lyrics posit, there would be no Olympic Games, at least not in their modern form which is built on sporting nationalism. “No possessions” hardly fits the bill either, with some of the more photogenic star athletes on multimillion dollar sponsorship contracts.
In retrospect, though, John Lennon’s fifty year old song – jointly credited to Yoko Ono as of 2017 – suited the occasion. It is now a secular hymn, not a radical political programme. And as is the case with most hymns, people listen with respect or boredom then carry on regardless with their flawed human ways.
Yoko with Paul McCartney
That applied to the mercurial Lennon too. In an interview just before his death, he explained his idea of socialism. “I think people should get their false teeth and their health looked after, all the rest of it. But apart from that, I worked for money and I wanted to be rich.”
That is a proposition that would probably command a lot of support in the Olympic movement and indeed in most of the member countries.
Critics of the IOC and the Games make some good points, as do critics of the United Nations, which has many obvious flaws with little prospect of being fixed any time soon. Yet to delegitimize the U.N. or withdraw from it would be a terrible mistake, as the fate of its predecessor, the League of Nations, suggests. The same could be said for the Olympics. Despite its many shortcomings, it helps to hold us together.
Since Baron Coubertin launched the first modern Summer Games in 1896, there have only been two outright cancellations, in 1940 and 1944. In other words, “no Olympics” has historically signalled apocalyptical destruction and the reconfiguration of global power by violence.
Jesse Owens receives one of his gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
So far, the confirmed death toll from Covid-19 is 0.002% of the fatalities from WW2 relative to population, and our countries and institutions are still intact, more or less. Yet staging such an enormous global spectacle with so much medical, logistical and financial complexity presented a Herculean task.
Japan pulled it off. By maintaining the continuity of the Olympics cycle, and thereby reassuring us that one of the most familiar markers of the modern era is still intact, it performed a useful service for us all.
Yes, these Olympics were different from all others. That is because the world is different, and we are different too. The winners are all the athletes who took part and all the people who watched and enjoyed their performances.
Now the baton passes to Paris. Let’s hope the 33nd Summer Games takes place in healthier circumstances
Curried Narratives: An Indian Revolutionary’s View of Japan
Published in Japan Forward 26/7/2021
Even during Tokyo’s Covid-induced state of emergency, there was a queue outside Nair’s Indian restaurant in East Ginza. Fortunately, the turnaround at midday is impressively rapid, and I didn’t have to wait long before a table became available.
I ordered the “teiban” (signature dish) known as Murugi Lunch. Excellent value at Yen 1500, it consists of a leg of chicken that has been softened by several hours of simmering, together with turmeric rice, cabbage and mashed potato.
As I spooned up the multi-spiced and highly nutritious concoction, I reflected on how historical narratives differ according to who is doing the narrating. When it comes to the story of modern Japan, the signature dish was prepared by the western countries that were on the winning side of the Second World War. Let’s call it the Progressive Club Sandwich.
The Indian take is very different and likely to become more significant as India’s geopolitical footprint grows in line with its economy – which is on track to become the world’s third largest in 2030, according to Japan’s Center for Economic and Business Research. There could be no better symbol of an Indian alternative history of modern Japan than the founder of the restaurant in which I am sitting.
A. M. Nair, who died in 1990, opened his restaurant in the early years of the post-war American occupation. It would be interesting to know what he thought about the G.I.s then strolling around Ginza with their Japanese “pan-pan” good-time girls. It would be equally interesting to know what the American officers and bureaucrats who patronized his restaurant would have thought of their host, had they been fully informed of his personal history.
“Founded in 1949”
In his memoir, “An Indian Freedom Fighter in Japan”, Nair declares that “my close friends used to whisper, after the war, that for fighting against Britain and encouraging my Japanese friends to do likewise, I should have been booked as War Criminal Number One, and that MacArthur missed out on me.”
Nair does not mention the identity of the friends who made this dark joke, but one of his closest military contacts, War Minister General Itagaki, received the death sentence at the Tokyo Trials, while another, General Umezu, died in prison. Nair remained an Indian citizen all his life, but because of the espionage and undercover work he carried out, he was treated by Japan’s top military figures as equivalent to a major-general in rank.
Nair-san, as he was to be familiarly known, was a native of Kerala on the southwest tip of India. He arrived in Japan in 1928 at the age of 23 to study engineering at Kyoto University. Back home, he had already made a nuisance of himself, organizing India’s first school strike and agitating against caste restrictions and the British colonial authorities. Once settled in Japan, he was bowled over by what he saw.
“Here was a country which, in a matter of about a mere half-century, had progressed from a basically feudal set-up to the status of a great economic power… If Japan could do what she did, why should India at least not be able to break free from its colonial shackles?”
It is a testimony to the seriousness of Japan’s Pan-Asian ambitions that Nair, while still a hard-up student with less than perfect Japanese, was taken up by senior military men. General Yamamoto, commander of a division stationed near Kyoto, treated him “practically like a brother” and introduced him to other members of the elite.
On display in the restaurant
Soon he was lecturing far and wide and finding that his anti-British, pro-independence message was greeted with enthusiasm. As the clash of empires heated up, Nair was invited to Manchukuo (now Manchuria), the puppet state that the Japanese army had set up in 1932.
In the following years, Nair led a kind of Lawrence of Arabia existence, travelling through remote areas of Manchukuo, China and Mongolia, doing his best to damage British interests and promote Japanese influence. He disguised himself as a camel dealer, Moslem mullah and Tibetan “living Buddha.” Amongst other adventures, he foiled a British intelligence agent’s plan to map out a route to India across the Himalayas by setting ablaze the entire fuel supply for his vehicles.
When war broke out in the Pacific, Nair became the liaison officer of his mentor and fellow Japan-resident Rash Behari Bose, who led two important Japan-backed organizations, the Indian Independence League and the Indian National Army. In his memoir, Nair makes it clear that he considers that the work of R.B. Bose has been unfairly minimized and the contributions of the more famous Subhas Chandra Bose, who took over leadership of the I.L.I. and I.N.A.in 1943, has been greatly inflated.
In contemporary India, Subhas’s stature appears to have increased, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrating the 125th anniversary of his birth with a visit to his hometown earlier this year. There was even a series on Amazon Prime, The Forgotten Army, giving a glossy, heavily fictionalized account of the I.N.A.’s disastrous attempt to invade British India from Burma.
Nair is much less impressed. While esteeming Subhas’s charisma and patriotism, he slams his lack of realism and dictatorial tendencies.
Yet, as Nair notes, the I.N.A. indirectly helped to usher in independence. When the British Indian authorities attempted to try former members of the rebel army for treason, a storm of protest broke out nationwide and the Indian component of the Navy mutinied in Bombay. For British India, the writing was on the wall.
Nair chose to stay in Japan after the war, acting on several occasions as interpreter for Dr. R.B. Pal, the only judge at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials to find all “A-Class” (political) defendants innocent. Nair quotes Pal’s stinging counter to allegations of Japanese conspiracy to wage war: “Many powerful nations are living this sort of life, and if these acts are criminal, then the entire international community is living a criminal life.”
India was not one of the 49 nations that signed the US-Japan Peace Treaty in 1951. Nair had secured the unpublished text of the simultaneously effected US Japan Security Pact and brought it to the attention of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minster. In the Indian view, making the Peace Treaty conditional on the Security Pact violated Japanese sovereignty. Instead, Nehru concluded a separate Bilateral Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Amity with Japan in 1952.
Nair was not an uncritical admirer of Japan. He deplored brutal behaviour in China, the degradation of Korean and Japanese women in the red light districts of Manchukuo and the inability to learn from mistakes. But he saw Japan’s “Asia for the Asians” drive as the key to Indian independence – and in that he was right.
Over time, Nair’s anti-British animus appears to have abated. In 1974, he and his Japanese wife attended a reception for Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh in Shinjuku Gardens. In his later years, he visited India regularly and seemed disappointed by the limited improvement in people’s lives. One wonders what he would have made of the much more dynamic India of today – and of modern Britain with four politicians of Indian subcontinental descent in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet and one of Pakistani.
The Progressive Club Sandwich, with its assumption of Western moral superiority and Japanese backwardness, is still a popular comfort food. It has a long history, beginning with the “opening” of Japan by Commodore Perry’s gunboats in the 1850s and its influence can be found today in innumerable op-eds, books and academic papers.
Kerala cuisine is richly varied, reflecting the influences of vegetarian Hindus, first century Christians, Moslems, and the Portuguese traders who brought chili peppers from the new world.
Nair’s restaurant alerts us to a very different suite of flavours – and a very different narrative.
“Runner”: Why We Need the Olympics More Than Ever
Published in Japan Forward 7/7/2021
The Tokyo Olympics have been getting a bad press recently, but a new film reminds us just how important this quadrennial sporting jamboree can be.
The Olympics, it is often asserted, is all about the money. To a greater or lesser extent, that is true of all professional sports, but the Summer Olympics and the Football (Soccer) World Cup are in a class of their own, regularly attracting several billions of viewers. Hence the vast income generated by the organizing bodies.
In other words, these events are enormously popular. Jaded Western elites may turn up their noses, but the global multitude laps it up.
Why should that be? Some answers are provided by the indie documentary “Runner” (2019, directed by Bill Gallagher). In Japan it is known as “Senka No Runner”, or ”Runner Through the Flames of War”, which seems a better title. The film traces the extraordinary life-story of Guor Maker, a long-distance runner who participated in the London Olympics of 2012 and the Rio de Janeiro Olympics of 2016.
In London, he wore the colours of the Olympic movement itself, having refused to run for the country of his birth, Sudan. In Rio, he ran for the world’s youngest country, South Sudan, which had recently won independence.
Guor was born in a warzone. The Sudanese civil war, between the Arab north and the black Christian south, went on for decades, claiming some two million lives and driving many more from their homes. Twenty eight of Guor’s relatives were killed. With his father unable to support him, he found himself alone and scrabbling to survive at the age of nine.
He was kidnapped by armed marauders, then enslaved by a powerful military officer. At some point, his front teeth were knocked out by the butt of a rifle. “I would rather die running than stay here,” he decided and made a risky escape.
Guor kidnapped: animated sequence
One of the fortunate few, Guor made it to a refugee camp in Egypt, where he acquired official refugee status. From there – in an almost surreal transition – he moved to leafy New Hampshire in the United States. Sent to high school, he was amazed to discover that running was a sport, not a means of survival. A coach spotted his potential, and on his first ever marathon he qualified for the London Olympics.
“Runner”, a crowd-funded project, is far from being a perfect film, but somehow its low-budget, hand-stitched nature suits the material. The simple animated sequence of Guor’s childhood traumas works particularly well. Guor himself is not some Usain Bolt-type athletic superstar. At one point, he had to support himself by becoming an Uber driver.
He placed 47th in the marathon at the London Olympics and 88th at Rio. In the case of the 2016 Games, he actually failed to qualify, having taken the wrong route at the Toronto marathon and then collapsing from exhaustion at the Gold Coast marathon in Australia. The International Olympic Committee, which appears in an unusually good light here, offered him a special invitation to Rio.
Just as there was no Hollywood ending for Guor’s running career, nor did independence end the suffering of the people of South Sudan. A bloody civil war broke out between leaders of the Dinka and Nuer tribes, with “human rights abuses off the Richter scale”, according to one aid agency. Guor found himself in conflict with a well-heeled political figure in the new government who demanded he hand over the scholarship money provided to him by the I.O.C. Some things never change.
What sticks in the mind from the film is the passion of the South Sudanese fans urging him on at the London Olympics. As one puts it, “we told everybody in no uncertain terms that South Sudan was part of the Olympics and that he was our runner.” You would need a heart of stone not to be moved by the clip of the South Sudanese team, Guor included, dancing into Rio’s Olympic stadium in 2016, while young South Sudanese refugees in Kenya gaze delightedly at a TV screen.
Guor’s supporters at the London Olympics
A voluble minority of Japanese citizens and foreign pundits have been calling for the Tokyo Games to be cancelled on health grounds. That is despite Japan’s stellar record in controlling Covid infections and fatalities. Nobody can guarantee a 100% safe outcome, but professional sports events have been taking place around the world for many months.
The economic cost of cancellation could have been easily born by an economy as sizeable as Japan’s, but the reputational cost would have been significant, especially if China went on to mount a successful Winter Olympics six months later. The implication would be clear. Japan, and by extension the democratic world, is nowhere near learning to live with Covid and will be crippled by extreme risk aversion for years to come.
It is undeniable that the Olympic Games have become increasingly bloated. There is surely no need to include sports with their own high-profile tournaments, such as tennis, golf, baseball and sevens rugby. Marginal activities like surfing, climbing, skateboarding, BMX cycling and many others could be scrapped with few viewers caring. There also seem to be far too many swimming events and therefore medals.
Yet, the core sports, especially athletics, have an attraction that has lasted millennia. They are also – like football, that other enormous global spectacle – the nearest thing to a meritocracy that we have in today’s world. It doesn’t matter where Usain Bolt went to school or who Allyson Felix’s’ father was. Their accomplishments speak for themselves.
Cathy Freeman lights the flame at the Sydney Olympics
They can also speak for others, including those with no voice of their own. Boisterous Australian sports fans were reduced to tears when Cathy Freeman, an athlete of indigenous Australian descent, won the 400 metres at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Guor won no medals, but fulfilled a similar function for his homeland, as had always been his ambition. “It’s not just me crossing the finishing line,” he says in the film. “It is the people of South Sudan too.” Both Freeman and Guor were following in the footsteps of Jesse Owens, the grandson of a slave whose four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics were a crushing rebuttal of Nazi ideology.
Ultimately, it is that hunger for recognition and respect that fuels the popularity of the Olympic Games, the Football World Cup and similar international sporting fiestas. Despite their obvious flaws, in this troubled era of political and economic polarisation, de-globalization and ham-fisted social control, we need such events more than ever.
Sport may be the only thing left that joins us together. That’s worth considering as the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics approaches.
“Lady Joker”: What Goes Around Comes Around
Published in Nikkei Asia 10/6/2021
One of the most mysterious incidents in the annals of sensational unsolved crimes that dot Japan’s post-war history concerns the confectionary company, Ezaki Glico.
In March 1984, company president Katsuhisa Ezaki was abducted from his home and an enormous ransom was demanded. He made his escape some days later.
The criminal gang – which dubbed itself “the Monster with 21 Faces”, after a villain in a series of early 20th century mystery novels – then threatened to poison the company’s products. Shortly afterwards, a “fox-eyed” (ie. narrow-eyed) man in a baseball cap was caught on a security camera tampering with confectionaries on shop shelves.
Over the next 18 months, the Monster widened its focus to include chocolate maker Morinaga and several other food companies, while mocking the police in a series of letters to the media. Thanks to timely warnings, nobody was injured but the companies suffered severe losses as they were forced to make repeated product recalls.
On Valentine’s Day, some cyanide-laced chocolates were found bearing the label “poison inside,” while some unlaced chocolates exhibited the hardly reassuring label “no poison inside.” The fox-eyed man was sighted on numerous occasions, but always managed to slip away.
After one mid-ranking police officer committed suicide by setting himself ablaze at his place of work, the Monster called an end to its activities. Rumours swirled, but no hard information emerged about the criminals’ identity or motivation, and it is not known to what extent the companies met the extortionists’ demands.
Such is the background to Kaoru Takamura’s best-selling mystery novel “Lady Joker,” which has just appeared in English. The translators who undertook this gargantuan project are Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida.
Given the story’s length and complexity – over thirty main characters are listed in the dramatis personae – it was inevitable that the book should be published in two volumes. By delaying the second volume until 2022, Penguin Random House will be keeping English-language readers on tenterhooks for many months to come.
It is well worth the wait for anyone interested in a panoramic portrait of modern Japanese society, including its dark corners, as well as fans of intelligent mysteries.
Takamura’s novel began as a serial in a weekly magazine, running from 1995 to 1997. At the time, most of her readers would have had clear memories of the Glico-Morinaga affair. They might also have been aware that the statute of limitations had passed in 1994 without a single arrest being made.
The author substituted a beer company for the food companies in the actual case, shifted the action from the Kansai region of west Japan to Tokyo, and moved the setting to the mid-1990s, with the criminal gang calling itself “Lady Joker.”
Tainted beer
At the time, there was speculation that members of Japan’s burakumin minority group, the target of discrimination for centuries, were involved, and that people with political connections had advance knowledge of the sabotage and profited from swings in the share prices of the companies.
Takamura fleshes out these rumours, giving the Lady Joker crew not only credible motivation, but also something close to justification. She also incorporates some of the Monster’s clever moves. Notably, a young man enjoying an intimate interlude with a girlfriend in a parked car suddenly finds himself dragooned into collecting the ransom – and is duly grabbed by the waiting police.
“Lady Joker” features few action scenes and no bloodbaths or car chases. Conventional story elements, such as the planning of the crime, are skipped over. Instead, Takamura makes brilliant use of changes in viewpoint to explore the inner turmoil of her large cast of characters.
She takes us into the mind of a chief executive who is making a huge bet on a new product; a disaffected cop who hates his arrogant superiors; a child growing up in an impoverished burakumin community in pre-war northern Japan; and an ambitious young reporter aiming for the scoop of a lifetime.
An appropriate graveside offering: Hinode Beer
In the end, nearly all of them – criminals, cops, journalists and high-flying businessmen – appear to have “drawn the joker” in life. They struggle vainly with their organizations, their own mistakes, and social injustices. Redemption is fleeting, if it comes at all.
Takamura studied French literature before joining a foreign trading house in the mid-1970s. Her writing is highly realistic, giving convincing depictions of horse-racing fans, blast furnace technology and stock market scams, as well as the organizational dynamics of the police, press and major companies.
Like America novelist Tom Wolfe, she believes in experiencing what she writes about. In her preparations, she gambled at the race track herself and was on the spot at the press club attached to the Tokyo police when a gruesome triple murder occurred. A native of the Kansai region, she probably knows more about the Glico-Morinaga affair than has been publicly revealed.
In recent years Takamura has abandoned the mystery genre in favour of literary fiction – which is perhaps unsurprising, given her preference for psychological and political exploration rather than tension-building and twists. The point of Lady Joker is not “whodunnit,” but “why?.”
An excellent TV version of Lady Joker, comprising seven one-hour episodes, appeared in 2012. Although some details, such as the prevalence of employment discrimination and the influence of “sokaiya” corporate extortionists, appear a bit dated, the story holds up well for the 21st century.
The “sokaiya” extortionist having the last laugh
As for the real-life mystery, there must be several people alive today who know exactly what happened but continue to hold their peace. In his autobiography “Toppamono” (Bulldozer), tough guy Manabu Miyazaki, described the many factors that led the police to consider him the prime suspect.
Son of a yakuza and former member of a violent underground arm of the Japanese Communist Party, he indeed bore a striking resemblance to the fox-eyed man who police considered the ringleader. Yet Miyazaki was able to provide a satisfactory alibi and is now a well-known literary figure himself. The Monster’s sleep is untroubled.
Miyazaki in the mid 80s (l), police identikit of the “fox-eyed man” (r)
In her novel, Takamura muses about a coming era where companies will be expected to follow socially responsible principles, not just the pursuit of profits. This is already happening in the shape of the ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) investor agenda which is increasingly influential in many countries, Japan included.
Yet human nature does not change so easily. Economists John List and Fatemeh Momeni of the University of Chicago have found that employees of socially responsible companies are more likely to lie and cheat than others. Likewise, tech companies that publicly supported Black Lives Matter had 20% fewer black employees than average.
Corporate and other institutional scandals are not going to disappear in Japan or any other place. Behind the façade of planet-saving virtue, the age-old temptations of greed, lust for power and desire to hide unpleasant realities are as common as ever. That is great news for the writers and readers of intelligent mysteries, if no one else.
“LADY JOKER, Volume I,” by Kaoru Takamura, Penguin Random House.
Decolonizing the Curry-culum: Japan’s Indian Connection Part 2
Published in Japan Forward 7/6/2021
The wedding between Bose and Toshiko took place in secret at Toyama’s residence, with witnesses including Foreign Minister Shinpei Goto and future Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, both enthusiastic pan-Asianists.
In order to allay suspicion, Toshiko and her parents breached custom by travelling to the ceremony by streetcar and in ordinary clothes. Toshiko’s wedding kimono had been sent directly to Toyama’s house by the Takashimaya department store.
In the crude ideological categories of today’s world, Mitsuru Toyama carries the label of “right-wing nationalist.” He was a major figure in two semi-clandestine organizations, the Black Dragon Society and the Dark Ocean Society, and through mysterious means rose from poverty to riches while remaining a private citizen all his life.
Yet he was on good terms with the bohemian Nakamuraya crowd, to the extent that examples of his calligraphy remain in the Nakamuraya art collection to this day.
Toyama with the Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (see below)
Historian Ian Rapley of Cardiff University says this about the Nakamuraya circle. “There were undoubtedly strong socialist and in particular anarchist connections but, whilst we might characterize them broadly as ‘progressive’ or some similarly loose term, it is important to recognize that many associations crossed what seem, to contemporary eyes, to be intellectual boundaries.”
What gave the Taisho era its freewheeling dynamism – so different to what came before and after – was this willingness to cross boundaries and the intellectual ferment that was thereby generated.
With the end of the First World War, the British pretext for arresting Bose, that he was a German agent, lost validity. Bose came out of hiding and took his place in the Nakamuraya family. An accomplished linguist who had quickly mastered written Japanese, he set himself up as writer and activist for Indian independence.
In 1923 Bose took Japanese citizenship. His sponsors debated whether he should be added to his wife’s family register (a crucial aspect of Japanese identity) or start his own, as might be more fitting for a male. In the end, he started his own register, using Chinese characters for his surname: 防須 .
Toshiko died at the young age of 26 after bearing two children. By then, Bose was a shareholder and director of Nakamuraya and had built a house for himself in Harajuku.
Shinjuku was changing from a sleepy semi-agricultural suburb to a major hub. When the Mitsukoshi Department Store opened a branch there, Nakamuraya’s revenues plunged 15%. That was the context in which Bose created his “authentic Indian curry.”
Biographer Nakajima believes that Bose had an anti-colonialist agenda too: he couldn’t bear the thought of Japanese people assuming that the basic fare served up on the colonizers’ warships was a true representative of India’s national dish.
Nakamuraya’s 60 staff celebrate the opening of the curry restaurant in 1927
In reality, Bose’s curry had to be modified for Japanese tastes. The spices had to be milder, the meat off the bone and indica rice swapped for something softer and stickier.
Here the Somas came up with a masterstroke by reviving shiromemai, a rare rice variety favoured by the Shogun and the Imperial family in ages past. The product was a hit. Nakamuraya was able to charge eight times the price of British navy-style “kare raisu” as wealthy sophisticates flocked to the restaurant.
Yet the British had the last laugh. In Japan, “kare raisu” remains the overwhelmingly dominant format, to the extent that Ichibanya, a stock market-listed “kare raisu” purveyor, has opened restaurants in India itself, as well as several other Asian countries. Indeed, if you want to know what the food was like on board a British warship in the mid-nineteenth century, the best place to look today would be in a low budget eatery in Japan.
Bose and the Somas were great admirers of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet and thinker, and welcomed him several times during his five trips to Japan. Tagore had become increasingly critical of Japan’s copying of Western modernization, particularly its imperialist designs on the east Asian continent.
Other erstwhile Indian admirers of Japan, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, later to become India’s first prime minister, felt the same way. In the 1920s, Bose did too and published articles that deplored Japanese policy towards China.
According to the memoirs of A. M. Nair, another Indian resident of Japan, in 1934 Bose even sent a telegram to Minister of War General Araki, protesting the ill-treatment of the Chinese in Manchuria.
From bottom left – Aizo Soma (Bose’s father-in-law), R. Tagore, Bose’s son Masahide, Kokko Soma. Top – Bose, his daughter Tetsuko and wife Toshiko.
Later, however, Bose’s attitude changed to whole-hearted endorsement of Japanese expansionism. As he said himself, he was prepared “to shake hands even with Satan himself to drive out the British from India.” This damaged his reputation in the post-war period, and biographer Nakajima is highly critical of Bose’s support for Imperial Japan’s conquest of China.
Yet Bose was not an ideologue, but a single-minded Indian nationalist – and Japan never showed any interest in extending its empire into the subcontinent. A similar Machiavellian calculation caused the allies to shake hands with the communist Satan, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and trade away eastern Europe as part of the deal.
The clash of empires was indeed destined to end colonial rule in Asia, but not in the way that Bose had anticipated. He became an increasingly influential figure in Japan and an increasingly marginal figure in his homeland.
Although never a military man, in 1943 Bose was given the task of organizing and leading the Indian National Army, a pro-Japan force recruited from Indian prisoners-of-war captured by the Japanese in Hong Kong and Singapore. Eventually, command was transferred to his more famous fellow-Bengali, Subas Chandra Bose, also by no means a military man. The INA’s attempt to invade India from Burma ended in a disastrous defeat.
Neither Bose lived to see the end of war, let alone Indian independence, which followed two years later. Chandra Bose went down in a plane crash. Rash Bose died of illness in January 1945 while the bombs fell around him. At his funeral, condolences were read by General Tojo.
Bose’s son Masahide – “straight and excellent”, a name chosen by Toyama – died in the Battle of Okinawa. His daughter Tetsuko – “child of wisdom”- passed away in 2016 at the age of 93. She lived most of her life in the RB Building in Harajuku, named after her father and constructed on the site he acquired in the mid-1920s.
Golden years: Kokko (l) & Toshiko (r) wearing saris c. 1922
History is never kind to the losers, and Bose and his pan-Asian backers are often dismissed as apologists for Japanese Imperialism, which is certainly part of the story, but by no means the whole. A more nuanced verdict comes from Professor Cemil Aydin of North Carolina University.
“Despite its internal paradoxes and its tensions with the logic of Japanese imperialism, pan-Asianism nevertheless allowed Japan to conduct a relatively successful propaganda campaign against Western imperialism in Southeast Asia while motivating numerous idealist Japanese activists and their collaborators. Pan-Asianist propaganda, accompanied by Japan’s own imperial expansion during WWII, did contribute to the end of Western empire…”
The pan-Asianists may have been right about the western colonizers, but they were woefully naïve in assuming that the natural state of Asia was one of peace and harmony between different peoples. There was nothing in pre-colonial history to support such a belief, nor does contemporary reality correspond with it.
Which takes us back to the Quad – and specifically the paucity of human interchange between Japan and India. Imagine a future Japan containing tens of thousands of Rash Boses and hundreds of institutions like Nakamuraya. Imagine a twenty first century version of the Taisho era, overflowing with not just home-grown and Western trends but, to quote historian Ian Rapley on the Nakamuraya circle, “a complex and unpredictable mix of influences from across the globe.”
It would be a lot of fun – and Japan would be all the stronger and safer for it.
Toyama’s calligraphy, from a poem by Kaishu Katsu – “the sun and moon shine on all things with perfect equality”
Love, Curry and the Quad: Japan’s Indian Connection Part 1
Published in Japan Forward 5/6/2021
I’m sitting in the Nakamuraya restaurant in Shinjuku wolfing down a substantial portion of chicken curry. In the alcove behind me hangs the painting of a young girl staring out at the world with a seriousness beyond her years. The menu bears an unusual slogan – “the taste of love and revolution.”
The backstory is that the young lady was the eldest daughter of the couple who owned and ran Nakamuraya in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1923, she married the man who invented the curry I’m eating. He was an Indian revolutionary called Rash Behari Bose.
Bose and the two children he had with Toshiko Soma
A few hours earlier, I had been listening to an interesting online discussion about relations between Japan and India featuring Jagannath Panda of the Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and Satoru Nagao, non-resident fellow of the Hudson Institute.
Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” brainchild is fast becoming an important geopolitical reality. India, traditionally suspicious of the United States, is now part of the Quad, a China-containment configuration that also includes Japan, the US and Australia. But, as the two speakers pointed out, the developing relationship between Japan and India is driven almost entirely by security issues.
Human interchange, as measured by the number of Indians living in Japan and the number of Japanese living in India, is underdeveloped. Likewise, economic ties. Despite the impressive performance of car-maker Suzuki, which has half the Indian market thanks to its venture with local company Maruti, Japan ranks as number fifteen amongst India’s trading partners. For both countries, China is the number one counterparty.
For the Quad to grow into a NATO-like fixture, as will likely be required, the relationship between Japan and India will have to broaden from the current single-minded emphasis on security. As it happens, there is no better symbol of Japan-India human interchange than the Nakamuraya restaurant itself.
Nakamuraya started serving curry in 1927, just one year after Veeraswamy, the oldest Indian restaurant in London, opened its doors. Curry had been served in Japan well before then, but it was in the form of a thick stew originally copied from Indian cooks aboard British naval vessels. Nakamuraya calls its more authentic product “karii” as opposed to “kare raisu”, which is the standard term for Japanese-style curry to this day.
Bose is well-known in Japan for having invented the Nakamuraya curry, but he is a much more significant figure than that. A member of the Indian revolutionary underground, he fled to Japan in 1915 after staging a bomb attack on Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy of India. The Viceroy survived his wounds, though his servant was not so lucky.
Contemporary depiction of the attempted assassination
From then on, Bose (not to be confused with the more famous nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose) was a marked man. The Anglo-Japanese alliance required the Japanese government to hand him over to the British authorities, which would probably have led to the death sentence which had been the fate of his co-conspirator.
Fortunately for his sake, Bose had developed connections with important figures in Japan’s pan-Asian movement, and a sympathetic journalist from the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun covered his plight. Amongst the many newspaper readers who had been moved and angered by the article were Aizo and Kokko Soma, the couple who owned and ran Nakamuraya.
The nearest equivalent to Nakamuraya in today’s world would be a vegan patisserie with gallery and live music space attached. In the words of Richard Nathan, writer and publisher of the Red Circle imprint, the Somas were “a dynamic and radical couple… Their circle included activists, poets and university professors as well as artists – locals, returnees and non-Japanese alike.”
They actively supported artists that they respected, by offering studio space and lodgings in an annex behind the bakery. It was there that famed painter Tsune Nakamura created the portrait of their fifteen year old daughter Toshiko which hangs in the alcove of the curry restaurant. The infatuated Tsune also completed several more portraits of the girl, including a nude study which was highly esteemed by critics, but not by her Christian schoolteachers.
Toshiko at 15
Another member of their salon was the sculptor Rokuzan who had studied under Rodin in Paris thanks to financial support from the Somas. Like many artists of the era, he died young. His last work was an erotically charged female figure which bore an uncanny resemblance to the woman he was reputedly in love with, Kokko Soma herself.
“Woman”, bronze by Rokusan Ogiwara
It was the Somas who provided a safe house for Bose when he was days away from being forcibly expelled from Japan. The plan was hatched by Mitsuru Toyama, a powerful political fixer who was a committed pan-Asianist and head of the Black Dragon society, so named after the Chinese word for the Amur River. Toyama and his friends had already supported several political exiles in Japan, including “Father of the Chinese Nation” Sun Yat-sen and anti-colonial activists from the Philippines and Vietnam.
The scheme to whisk Bose away from under the noses of the authorities was beautifully simple. The Japanese police took Bose and his compatriot Gupta to a farewell dinner at Toyama’s house, located in what is now the grounds of American embassy. As is the Japanese custom when entering a residence, the two Indians left their shoes in the lobby, where they were in plain view of the waiting Japanese police.
What the cops did not know was that, after a few rounds of saké, Bose and his friend had donned alternative footwear and slipped into the grounds of the next-door house, owned by one of Toyama’s friends. Another friend was the proud possessor of one of the few high-speed cars in Japan at the time. Before the cops knew what was up, the two Indian nationalists had arrived at Nakamuraya in Shinjuku, where they were bundled into the annex.
As far as the authorities were concerned, the fugitives had disappeared into thin air. In due course Gupta, who was not facing serious charges, gave himself up and left for the United States, but Bose spent three years moving from safe house to safe house. It should have easy to trace an Indian in Taisho Era (1913-1925) Japan, but the formidable Toyama, who had himself been jailed as a young man for anti-government violence, knew how to keep the secret intact.
Toyama with Chiang Kai-shek in 1929
The Somas’ young daughter, Toshiko, was enlisted as an inconspicuous bearer of messages to and from Bose. That gave Toyama an idea. What if Bose were to marry Toshiko?
Kokko had refused to accept the penniless and consumptive painter, Tsune Nakamura, as a suitable match for her daughter. On the face of it, an Indian revolutionary on the run from the police was an even worse bet.
According to Takeshi Nakajima, Bose’s Japanese biographer, Kokko left the decision to her daughter, explaining that it would be no ordinary marriage and might end in disgrace or death.
Toshiko’s answer: “I know that. You and father are worried, but please let me go ahead.”
To be continued.
“AGANAI – Me and the Cult Leader”
Published in Japan Forward 12/4/2021
At the time, it seemed more like the plot of a bad James Bond movie than everyday reality. Imagine an obese, bearded guru with fifty wives who claims he can float in mid-air. Add a heavily guarded headquarters near Mount Fuji where scientists work tirelessly to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Throw in a giant microwave oven to get rid of the corpses of the guru’s enemies.
Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld would have felt right at home.
Yet the human damage was all too real. On March 20th 1995, Aum Shinrikyo attacked Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki subway station with sarin, a deadly nerve gas. Thirteen unsuspecting commuters were to die agonizing deaths and over 6,000 would be injured, some suffering lasting brain damage. Thirteen cultists, including guru Shoko Asahara, were eventually executed in 2018 for their part in this act of indiscriminate terrorism.
The director of the documentary film AGANAI, Atsushi Sakahara, was in Kasumigaseki station on that fateful day in 1995. He inhaled the toxic fumes and has been living with the physical and mental consequences ever since. In a strange twist, he went on to marry a woman who he subsequently discovered to have been a fringe member of Aum. It comes as no surprise that the marriage did not last.
AGANAI has been well received in various overseas film festivals. Perhaps because it was partly financed by a Hong Kong production company, it comes with English language subtitles even in Japan. That is good – the film deserves wider exposure. Although it tackles one of the most notorious events in recent Japanese history, it has a disturbing message about human nature that has universal significance.
There are two kinds of documentary film. The traditional type assumes an uninvolved, “objective” approach to its material. Then there is the interventionist type, exemplified by the work of Michael Moore, in which the filmmaker enters the world of the film as protagonist and provocateur. AGANAI is very much of that latter type. It consists of a series of conversations between Sakahara and Hiroshi Araki, the head of public relations at Aleph, as the Aum cult now calls itself.
If that sounds boring, it is anything but. The air crackles with tension as the two men engage in mind-games and soul-searching and delve deep into their own pasts. They have some things in common. Natives of the Kansai region, they both studied at Kyoto University in the late 1980s. Both were there when the red-robed Asahara arrived at the campus in a chauffeur-driven limo, hoping to attract highly educated recruits. The future film director yelled out “Go ahead and levitate.” Araki attended the guru’s lecture and was duly hooked. As the ancient Greeks insisted, character is fate.
Kasumigaseki Station 20/3/1995
In his programme notes, Kasahara describes the film as a “road movie.” Like all the best examples of the genre, it features a journey that is metaphorical as well as physical. Together the duo revisit Kyoto University and familiar countryside. Araki proves unusually adept at skipping pebbles in a lake near his grandmother’s house, but breaks down when recalling an illness of his younger brother that was potentially life-threatening but turned out to be trivial. Confronting the reality of life and death in this world was unbearable to him.
Unlike Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin in Midnight Run (1988), which is Kasahara’s favourite road movie, the two men can never be true buddies. AGANAI’s opening sequence – news footage of the mass murder at Kasumigaseki – ensures that.
“Aganai” is the Japanese word for atonement. Kasahara explains that by making the film he is atoning for his failed marriage and the suicide of a close friend that he was unable to prevent. In the course of the film, he forcibly confronts Araki with the need to atone for the crimes of Aum – in which the senior cultist has been passively complicit after the fact. We see posters of Asahara on the walls of the Aum / Aleph headquarters a decade after his guilt was established in court.
Posters of Asahara on the wall
Araki joined Aum in 1992, several years after Asahara returned from a trip to Tibet determined to implement his interpretation of Vajrayana, an esoteric form of Buddhism. The guru chose to take literally texts that are usually considered symbolic, such as this from the Hevajra tantra – “you should kill living beings, speak lying words, take what is not given, consort with the women of others.”
In 1990, an Aum hit-squad broke into the house of a lawyer acting for the relatives of cultists and, on Asahara’s specific instructions, murdered him, his wife and young son. The bodies were buried in remote areas, with faces and teeth smashed to prevent identification. Other killings followed, supposedly required by Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and creation repurposed by Asahara to suit his apocalyptic agenda.
Araki would not have known about that, but the paranoia and psychosis must have been noticeable to anyone willing to notice it. Film director Kasahara extracts one startling admission from Araki: the current head of public relations would not have joined the cult after the sarin attack. But as for leaving now, it seems unlikely. Aum / Aleph is his whole world. It has made him what he is. As Kasahara’s probing makes clear, Araki was a weak and frightened soul from an early age, which made him a natural recruit for Aum.
Araki (in blue) with Director Kasahara
To the western eye, it seems strange that a religious cult could attract masters students at prestigious universities and doctors and scientists. There were also sympathizers in the police, even in a TV network, where supporters managed to insert subliminal images of Asahara into a children’s cartoon.
Does that mean that highly educated Japanese are more gullible than highly educated Westerners? Not necessarily. Western elites tend to be less religious than the general population of their countries, but their record of falling for simple totalizing belief systems is appalling. If we broaden the concept of religion to include political dreamlands, the differences disappear.
It wasn’t truck-drivers and miners who idolized the psychopathic Mao Zedong, but Nobel Prize-winner Jean-Paul Sartre and distinguished American academics, some of whom defend Mao and his cultural revolution to this day. The limits of such delusions were exemplified by the radical British academic Malcolm Caldwell, a staunch supporter of Pol Pot who defended the Cambodian dictator from accusations of mass murder. Invited to Cambodia, he was shot to death by Pol Pot’s men a few hours after interviewing the creator of the “killing fields.”
Simon Leys, the Belgian-Australian sinologist, saw through Mao from on an early stage. This is his view of the dictator’s admirers, at home and abroad –
“What people believe is essentially what they wish to believe. They cultivate illusions out of idealism—and also out of cynicism… They believe because they are stupid, and also because they are clever. Simply, they believe in order to survive. And because they need to survive, sometimes they could gladly kill whoever has the insensitivity, cruelty, and inhumanity to deny them their life-supporting lies.’“ Simon Leys: the New York Review of Books, July 20 1989.
Not a comforting view of human nature, but one that matches the historical record in relation to Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Shoko Asahara and many others.
Director Kasahara chose to write “aganai” in capitalized Roman letters. In the programme notes, he comes up with some wordplay. “Ai ga nai” means “there is no love.” Replace the first word with the English “I”, and you get “there is no me.” One near-anagram that immediately strikes the eye is “again.”
Could an Aum-like phenomenon appear again? If Simon Leys is right, the answer is yes. The human capacity for self-delusion is endless. But where and in what form is anyone’s guess.