culture
Think Again, Al Jolson: Japan’s Silent Movie Culture Is Still Going Strong
Published in Nikkei Asia August 26th
This year marks both the 60th anniversary of the death of the great Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu and the 120th anniversary of his birth. I was lucky enough to attend one of several celebratory events — a showing of two short silent films that he made in the late 1920s.
Ozu is best known outside Japan for his emotionally complex post-World War II family dramas, such as “Tokyo Story” (1953), often considered one of the greatest films ever made. The two shorts, “A Straightforward Boy” and “Fighting Friends,” were very different: slapstick comedies influenced by Laurel and Hardy.
Both films were entertaining, but the experience was immeasurably enhanced by the presence of a benshi (talker), a live performer who provides a running commentary on what is happening on the screen, giving suitable voices to the silent actors and actresses, vocalizing sound effects and sometimes interspersing ad-lib remarks about contemporary events.
I had assumed that the profession of benshi was long defunct, killed off by Al Jolson’s famous line in “The Jazz Singer,” the world’s first real talking movie: “Wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet.” Those words were uttered on-screen in 1927, but nearly a century later the benshi culture is still alive and well in Japan — much smaller than in its heyday, but kept going by dedicated and highly skilled practitioners with the support of many hard core fans.
Akiko Sasaki performs to a full house; photo courtesy of Akiko Sasaki
I have subsequently watched several silent movies with benshi accompaniment. They range from Serge Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (1925) to Harold Lloyd comedies, from “slice ‘em up” samurai epics to Georges Méliès’ bizarre “Trip to the Moon” which was made in 1902.
What is clear is that as far as Japan was concerned, Jolson was wrong. The cinematic experience had been packed with voices and sounds from the earliest years of the 20th century. Indeed, watching a silent movie without a benshi comes to feel boring, like watching a football match on TV with no commentary, no crowd noise and no referee’s whistle.
The surprising thing is not that in the silent era Japanese audiences opted to watch films with live human mediation. What is strange is that no other countries — apart from Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, all then under Japanese influence — adopted such an excellent and fun idea.
In the peak year of 1930, there were 8,000 benshi active in Japan. The most famous lived like rock stars, acquiring loyal followings, wearing fashionable clothes, stepping out with movie starlets and earning vast sums. In Tokyo, many cinemas were destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, but within a few years there were more than ever. It seemed that in the aftermath of the disaster people craved cinematic entertainment, particularly comedies such as those of Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Ozu. And crucial to the success of any cinema was the quality of the benshis on its books.
There was even a cultural divide in benshi preferences, rather like the difference in taste between those who enjoy the latest Tom Cruise movie and those who favor “Drive My Car” (2021) or “Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).” Ordinary people, especially in the countryside, liked their benshis to be voluble and obvious. Intellectuals, like the great novelist and movie enthusiast Junichiro Tanizaki, prized restraint and ma, the Japanese sense of space.
The benshi with the most ma went by the name of Musei Tokugawa — musei means “silent” and Tokugawa is the name of the dynasty that ruled Japan as shoguns from 1603 to 1868. Tokugawa was a heavy drinker and once showed up for work too inebriated to utter a word. Even so, his sophisticated fans praised the subtly of his performance.
Inevitably, the coming of the talkies had a powerful effect on Japan’s cinema culture, dealing a shattering blow to the benshis. Many quit and reinvented themselves as writers, comic story tellers or voice actors. Others simply faded away. One of the saddest stories concerned a successful benshi known as Teimei Suda, who had a senior position in a committee set up to resist the firing of the many unneeded benshis. Failing in the impossible task of reversing history, he fell into a depression and in 1933 took his own life in a double suicide pact with a girlfriend.
Heigo at 9 (l), Akira at 5 (r)
That young man, dead at the age of 27, is better known as Heigo Kurosawa, elder brother of the great director Akira Kurosawa. Heigo had been a brilliant student at school and the family expected much of him. It was only after his death that his less promising younger brother was forced to find a regular job to support the family finances. Fortunately for all of us, he chose a chemical company that had recently diversified into filmmaking.
In Japan, silent films did not disappear overnight. For technical and financial reasons, the studios continued to make them until 1938. After the devastation of the war, some benshis traveled the countryside providing badly needed entertainment at a time when conventional films were in short supply. One was Shunsui Matsuda, son of a well-known benshi, who had got his own start as a child performer in the golden age.
Back then, nearly all benshis were male. In today’s world, the gender split is more equal. The most experienced contemporary practitioner working is Midori Sawato, a female benshi who has been in the business for over 50 years and studied under Matsuda, who died in 1987. So, as with many Japanese arts, there is an unbroken line of succession from the early years of film to today.
The recipient of several awards, Sawato breathed life into the two Ozu shorts I saw earlier in the year. She has performed overseas, and also advised on the period comedy-drama “Talking the Pictures” (2019), directed by Masayuki Suo, which tells the tale of a rascally fake benshi.
A scene from “Talking the Pictures”
A new generation has since taken up the challenge. Akiko Sasaki is a leading light of today’s benshi scene, and also has an impressive depth of historical knowledge about the subject. Much of the information in this article comes from her.
What caused her to become a benshi? Her first career was as a TV anchor and roving reporter. By chance, a friend took her to see a performance by Sawato and she was immediately enthralled. “I knew it was my destiny,” she says. What hooked her in particular was “the sense of oneness” between the film, the benshi, the musical accompanist and the audience.
Sasaki ascribes the longevity of the benshi culture to its similarity to traditional Japanese “talking arts” such as rakugo comic story-telling and, in particular, bunraku puppet theatre. Like the stars of the silent movies, the dumb wooden puppets need outside agency to give them speech.
To accentuate that sense of lineage, Sasaki uses five and seven syllable lines, the foundational rhythm of haiku and 0ther traditional poetic forms, when performing with Japanese silent movies. Given that benshis are expected to synchronize their words when close-ups of mouthed speech appear on the screen, that makes for an extremely complex task.
Working in the dark; photo courtesy of Akiko Sasaki
Each benshi writes his or her own script. According to Sasaki, a script should not simply explain the action and provide some dialogue but “open up the story” in the manner of a skilled playwright. She tells me that she has written some 220 scripts and gives 80 to 100 performances a year in music venues, libraries, schools and art-house cinemas such as Bacchus in the Koenji area of Tokyo. She also conducts classes for aspiring benshis of all ages, from school children to retirees.
Interestingly, Sasaki’s favorite silent film is Ozu’s “I Was Born But…”, a 1932 comedy with a dark message about class and human nature. Ozu made the very similar film, “Ohayo” in 1959 with the benefit of colour as well as actor’s voices. Despite that, the film is nothing like as good as the original, with its emotional cruelty and shocking physical struggle between the father and his adolescent son. Without a doubt, the best solution would be to watch the 1932 version with benshi accompaniment.
How would you set about becoming a benshi today? A good start would be to attend the performances of professionals like Sasaki. If you have the requisite verbal fluency, script-writing skill and sheer dedication, you might have a chance to try your luck. Ultimately, though, as with stand-up comedians, you either have the talent or you don’t. The customer is king.
In order to enjoy a modern-day benshi performance, it helps to have some Japanese language capability, but even without it the experience is worthwhile. Perhaps one day, some talented bilingual person will perform as a benshi in English. Or perhaps an AI benshi will get there first.
Whatever happens, Japan’s unique silent film culture has already lasted four times as long as silent movies did in the rest of the world and is likely to continue for a long time to come.
“Allez, Les Brave Blossoms”: Japan’s Special Sporting Footprint
Published in Japan Forward 14/09/2023
The midday sun was hammering down when we joined the 30,000-strong crowd in Toulouse, France’s capital city of rugby.
Japan’s team, nicknamed “the Brave Blossoms”, were starting their 2023 World Cup campaign with a match against Chile, newcomers to the event.
Japan itself hosted the last World Cup, in 2019. In the tournament before that, the Blossoms scored a sensational last minute victory over the fearsome South African Springboks. Japan’s involvement in the sport dates back much further than that – since two Cambridge graduates, Ginnosuke Tanaka and Edward Clarke of the Yokohama foreign community, introduced the game to Keio University in 1899.
Even given that history, though, the level of support from travelling fans, many of them female, was astonishing. Red and white rugby shirts, rising sun banners and “certain victory” headbands were everywhere.
The author with Japanese fans: photo by NW
It’s a long way from Tokyo to Southwest France but plenty of Japanese rugby-lovers deemed it a trip well worth taking. There was a much smaller, but enthusiastic Chilean contingent too, noticeable from their chants of “Ole, ole, ole.” Naturally, French fans were in the majority, including some wearing yukata and kimono and shouting “Allez Japon” (“Go, Japan”).
Rugby is a minor sport in terms of the number of people who play it, and the rules are complex to the extent that even seasoned observers can be baffled by the rationale for a decision by the referee. In contrast to football (“soccer” to some), the rules are always changing and what was considered fine play twenty years ago could now earn you a “red card” and an appearance before a disciplinary panel. Despite these drawbacks, rugby has retained a certain aura that distinguishes it from other sports and attracts unusual characters.
In his history of rugby, “A Game for Hooligans”, Huw Richards notes that the most famous Argentine rugby player is not the sublime fly-half Hugo Porta, but one Ernesto “Che” Guevara, whose earliest published writing was on rugby, not revolution. His biographer claims that Che learnt his guerilla tactics from his experience as a scrum half.
The players take the pitch in sweltering heat: photo by NW
Richards also quotes this interesting comment from former French international centre and coach Daniel Herrero – “The southwest [of France] in its historic rebellion against the abusive power of the north seized upon the game of rugby football as its main means of expression and space of joy.”
In contrast, Japanese rugby, like English rugby, began as an establishment pastime, nurtured in elite universities such as Keio, Doshisha and Waseda. Prince Chichibu, younger brother of Emperor Showa, had attended matches during his stint at Oxford University and in 1926, he became patron of the newly formed Japan Rugby Union.
The sport’s links with the Imperial Institution continue in the twenty first century. The same goes for the British Royal Family, with King Charles said to have had his nose broken in a schoolboy match.
Japanese rugby has developed a wider presence in the national culture too. Indeed, the word “rugby” has become a legitimate season word – one of which is required in all conventional haiku – signifying the winter months. Seishi Yamaguchi, a well-known haiku master, produced dozens of rugby haiku.
There is even one by Shuji Terayama, the pied piper of Japan’s 1960s and 70s counterculture –
cheek burning from
a rugby injury
I gaze at the sea
The world of rugby is refreshingly different from the world of geopolitics. In it, the United States is not a superpower but a minnow that failed to qualify for the World Cup this time, having been dumped out by Chile. Germany, which has Europe’s largest economy, was good enough to beat the French in the 1930s, but no longer features in any competitions.
New Zealand, with its population of five million, is the feared and envied hegemon that, until very recently, was an unstoppable force. China and India don’t exist. Russia has been banned from this World Cup, but stood no chance of qualifying anyway – though neighbouring Georgia is there, having beaten Wales in an away match last year. Meanwhile, the talented Fijians are starting to fulfil their undoubted potential.
Huw Richards maintains that rugby played an important part in the collapse of the South African apartheid regime. In his telling, the boycotts of sports such as football, tennis and cricket meant little to the hard-line Afrikaners who dominated the government in the 1980s. Only one sport counted – rugby, and particularly the long rivalry with the New Zealand All Blacks. Sacrificing that regular test of manhood really hurt.
Cosplay goes global: photo by NW
Today, rugby is a multicultural game in which – thanks to the sport’s lax qualification rules – national teams can field players that do not have citizenship. That can have the unhappy effect of stripping economically weaker countries, such as some of the Pacific Island nations, of their best players. In Japan’s case, the current team may offer a glimpse of a more multi-cultural future for the society as a whole, with trailblazing captain and Japanese citizen Michael Leitch showing what is possible on and off the field.
Japan’s squad includes a South Korea-born prop, a half-Zimbabwean half-Japanese full back, several foreign-born players who arrived in Japan at the age of fourteen or fifteen and a Tonga-born prop who incorporated his wife’s name – “Ai” meaning love – into his own when taking Japanese citizenship.
Japan has also made great strides as a sporting nation. In the recent Football World Cup in Qatar, it defeated Germany and Spain, two titans of the game. Earlier this year, Japan beat the U.S.A. in the World Baseball Classic, and in the figure of Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels it has a player with the potential to become one of the greats of the game.
What other country has the ability to compete at the highest level in such a disparate variety of popular sports? On that basis, Japan’s sporting footprint is unrivalled. Call it “soft power” if you like, but the on-the-field achievements of Japanese teams and the presence of their fun-loving but always impeccably tidy fans create a huge amount of good will.
Guess who he’s supporting: photo by NW
Back to rugby, described by Huw Richards as “that exasperating compound of beauty and violence, elegance and complexity, gentlemanliness and hooliganism.” The Brave Blossoms were too good for the Chileans, but they will need to raise their game if they are to get out of their exceptionally tough group, which includes a backs-against-the-wall England, a much improved Argentina and hard-charging Samoa, all of them placing higher than Japan in the current world rankings.
Nonetheless, I would not be surprised if they took one or two scalps from more fancied teams. The Japanese are at their most dangerous when nobody gives them a chance and they throw caution to the winds. Just ask the Springbok team of 2015.
As for the long term, the Japanese have always been highly skilled rugby players. Now they are getting physically bigger. The challenge will be to convince the next Shohei Ohtani – who stands 1.93 metres tall and weighs 95 kilos – to become a dynamic wing-forward or centre rather than a baseball player.
The Intelligent Ambiguity of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”
Published in Japan Forward 14th August 2023
An atom bomb has just been dropped on the city of Hiroshima. In a lecture room in Los Alamos, home of the Manhattan Project which created this new weapon, there is wild excitement. Project Director J. Robert Oppenheimer stands before the crowd and pronounces it a great day for America.
Flags are waved. One woman looks almost maddened with triumph. Then the scene changes to black and white, signalling Oppenheimer’s subjective experience. The room starts to shake and there are ominous flashes and rumbles. He realises that the world has changed forever, that from now on unimaginable carnage will always be a button push away.
The movie “Oppenheimer”, which tells the story of the so-called “father of the atom bomb”, has become a huge worldwide hit. It has already earned box office receipts of over $550 million since its first screening in July, a few days before the 78th anniversary of the Trinity test that ushered in the era of nuclear weapons.
That date made it impossible for the film to open in Japan at the same time as the rest of the world, given the sombre annual commemorations of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that take place in early August, followed by the anniversary of the end of the war and the “O-Bon” festival of the dead. Yet there is nothing disrespectful of Japanese sensitivities in “Oppenheimer”.
Wisely, Nolan does not attempt to capture the devastation caused by the atom bombing through special effects or newsreel, which could indeed have appeared exploitative. Instead, he has a character recount the terrible damage done to the bodies of children and young women, leaving the audience to use its imagination.
Why has the film been so successful? One reason is that it is an outstanding example of contemporary cinematic art, superbly constructed and acted. The three hour running time zips by without longueurs. Another reason, surely, is that the issue of weapons of mass destruction, which had seemed less relevant after the end of the Cold War, is very much with us today. We are living in Oppenheimer’s world.
Oppenheimer with Einstein
The decision to drop the bomb has generated a great deal of controversy over the years. It was originally New Left academics like Gar Alperovitz who cast doubt on the justification for using nuclear weapons. Interestingly, in recent years some voices from the opposite side of the political spectrum have come to agree.
In 2020, John Denson of the libertarian Mises Institute wrote “Japanese leaders, both military and civilian, including the emperor, were willing to surrender in May of 1945 if the emperor could remain in place and not be subjected to a war crimes trial… After the bombs were dropped on August 6 and 9 of 1945, and their surrender soon thereafter, the Japanese were allowed to keep their emperor on the throne.”
Likewise, Peter Van Buren, writing last year in the conservative Spectator magazine, states that the “Hiroshima myth”- that the bomb was the only alternative to a land invasion that would have cost millions of lives – was manufactured in the late 1940s as an antidote to John Hershey’s reportage of the bomb’s human consequences.
Nolan’s film handles the issue with a great deal of nuance. On one hand, President Harry Truman declares that his advisors are certain that the Japanese will never surrender. Yet well before the bomb is dropped, one of the Los Alamos scientists comments that Japan has already lost, as if it is an obvious fact.
Oppenheimer himself is given a prescient line of dialogue in which he posits that the carnage will be so terrible that such a weapon would never be used again. M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) certainly worked during the era of superpower confrontation, but will it be as effective when weapons of mass destruction are in the hands of theocratic states, non-state actors and dictators with nothing to lose?
Oppenheimer is the figure that all the action revolves around, yet he remains hard to sympathize with or understand. Born into great wealth and privilege – he was given a 28 foot yacht for his sixteenth birthday – he had a brilliant mind. As the film shows, he was capable of reading Sanskrit and teaching himself enough Dutch in a matter of weeks to deliver a physics lecture. Well-versed in the arts and literature, he named the Trinity test in tribute to a favourite poem by John Donne.
He was also dangerously impulsive. One of the first scenes in the film has him attempting to murder his tutor at Cambridge University by means of an apple spiked with cyanide, apparently a real event. He was already severely depressed and undergoing Jungian psychoanalysis at the time. Later, we see him and his wife transferring their baby to a friend because its crying had got on their delicate nerves.
The film depicts Oppenheimer as sympathetic to communism, but a patriot at heart. When a friend at a Christmas party mentions an underground route for getting atomic secrets to Moscow, he responds “that would be treason”. Yet, it is no surprise that his security pass was withdrawn once the Cold War started. Many of his associates were card-carrying members of the American Communist Party, including his lover, his brother and his sister-in-law. Oppenheimer’s own wife was a former member.
No doubt, several would have been attracted by the emphasis on antiracism and workers’ rights, but the party was no Eurocommunist-type middle-of-the-road outfit. It danced to Stalin’s tune. When the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed in 1939, there was no more talk about fighting fascism. “Peace” was the slogan, though members were required to support the unprovoked Soviet invasion of Poland, part of the secret deal between Stalin and Hitler. Some were also involved in underground activities, as delineated in the film’s Christmas party scene.
The process by which Oppenheimer is stripped of his security clearance in 1954 – thereby ending his career as a top government advisor – is manifestly unfair, but the script gives the bullying adversary lawyer some pointed criticism of his inconsistencies. Why, the lawyer thunders, does Oppenheimer still justify the mass killing of Japanese civilians while advocating disarmament with the Soviet Union? What does he really believe in? Oppenheimer’s response is silence.
Ambivalent testimony is given by General Leslie Groves, the man who picked Oppenheimer to head the Manhattan Project. When asked if he would approve Oppenheimer’s security clearance now, he answers in the negative – then adds, as an aside, that he would not give clearance to any of the other nuclear scientists on the project either.
We know now that the Manhattan Project was compromised by several Soviet-sympathizing scientists. The most notorious and the only one featured in the film is Klaus Fuchs who spent nine years in jail in Britain for espionage, then moved to East Germany where he enjoyed a long and illustrious career. Some say that included instructing Mao Zedong’s China in nuclear weapons development. History never ends.
The source book for Nolan’s film is “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Prometheus is the god who stole fire from the other gods and gave it to humans. As punishment, he was chained to a rock where an eagle gnawed his liver for all eternity. Oppenheimer had it easier, spending time sailing around the Caribbean and eventually receiving an award from President Johnson.
Genius, victim, hero, fool, egotist, communist, patriot, confused soul, or all of the above – Nolan’s film leaves it up to you to make up your mind. Hopefully, Japanese audiences will have the same opportunity before too long.
Ian Buruma’s “Collaborators”
Published in Nikkei Asia July 6th 2023
Ian Buruma has the rare skill of bringing together seemingly disparate characters and events in a way that sheds startling new light on well-worn themes.
Of his many works, my personal favorites include “A Tokyo Romance,” a memoir of his six-year sojourn in 1970s Japan, his excellent novel “The China Lover,” and “Year Zero: A History of 1945,” which describes the bloodshed and chaos that continued in corners of Europe and Asia long after the official end to World War II. Buruma has also published many other books that are well worth seeking out.
His latest is “Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II.” The title is provocative. When artists and musicians collaborate today, the term has a positive connotation. But in the context of World War II in Europe, it has a totally different resonance, summoning up images of young French women being brutalized by kangaroo courts for having sexual relations with German troops.
The word signifies disgrace and always describes those who consorted with the enemy, which is to say our enemy. Perhaps the Viet Cong had a similar word to describe the Vietnamese women who had sex with American soldiers in the Vietnam War, but we do not hear about them.
Much of this relates to the special status of World War II in our consciousness which, unlike all previous European wars, was not about national interests but the survival of Western civilization in its contemporary form. In today’s world of ever more fiercely disputed narratives, one of the few propositions that commands universal assent is that the Nazis were evil and it was a good thing that Germany lost the war. That is why the subject generates so many films, books and memorial events compared to more recent conflicts in the Korean peninsula, Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and the Persian Gulf. It helps us feel good about ourselves.
The 1941-1945 war in the Pacific carries nothing like the same moral heft, being more like a traditional clash of interests. The Western colonial powers had dismantled China in the 19th century and Japan’s national strategy was to make sure it did not undergo the same humiliation. Its early steps to create an imperial space in its immediate environs — defeating China and Russia in battle and annexing Taiwan and Korea — were warmly applauded by the Western powers.
As art critic Tenjin Okakura wrote shortly after the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, the West regarded Japan “as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace but calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields.” Only when Japanese ambitions began to threaten the interests of the dominant powers in East Asia, all of whom were white, did the mood change.
Buruma starts his narrative in the early years of the 20th century, recounting the life stories of three individuals, all of whom were displaced from their countries of origin by the revolutions and regime collapses of the era. Thus, their allegiances were tangled from the start.
Frederyck Weinreb, the darkest figure, was a Hassidic Jewish immigrant to The Netherlands who scammed other Jews by pretending to save them from the death camps, for a fee, while betraying some of them to the German occupiers. Found to have been responsible for 70 deaths, he lived on until 1988.
Felix Kerstner, who died in 1960, is the most representative. A citizen of Finland, which had declared itself neutral, he had been the personal masseur of Heinrich Himmler, a leading Nazi. In the post-war world, that was not a good look so he engaged in some drastic CV padding. Thanks to his persuasion, he claimed, Himmler had scrapped a plan to move the entire population of The Netherlands to Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe. Kersten was decorated by the Dutch Royal family, but in fact, no such plan existed. He had made the whole thing up.
Kersten’s feat of self-exonerating mythmaking was simply a bolder and more imaginative version of many such evasions and cover-ups. Indeed, as Buruma notes, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the wartime Free French forces and a post-war president of France, created a national myth in which most French people were in the resistance and were instrumental in freeing themselves from Nazi oppression. When film director Louis Malle made “Lacombe, Lucien”, a 1974 film that portrayed French complicity in the Holocaust, there was a furore and he ended up leaving the country.
The odd one out of the trio is Yoshiko Kawashima, also known as Dongzhen (Eastern Jewel), her Manchurian nickname. She is the only female, the only Asian and the only one not to survive her wartime experiences. The term “collaborator” seems a stretch too, since she was brought up in a Japanese household from the age of six and, as the child of a Chinese Qing dynasty aristocrat, felt no bond to the Han Chinese government that had toppled the Manchurian Qings. Her story is by far the strangest, the most colorful and the most poignant.
Manga version of the Yoshiko Kawashima story
At the time, Japan was a role model for many Asian intellectuals and activists, who were dazzled by the country’s leap from feudalism to modernity in a half-century. So it is no surprise that Yoshiko’s father sent her to a Japanese school in Manchuria, where he was living. It was slightly more surprising that he would pass her on to a Japanese friend as a kind of present.
Only slightly, because the nuclear family was far from established in either country. Wealthy people had a lot of children. The entrepreneur Eiichi Shibusawa, who is about to grace Japan’s new 10,000-yen banknote, had 38, including a few from his wives. Offloading your children to distant relatives or acquaintances and never seeing them again was by no means rare. It happened to the poet Mitsuru Kaneko and the novelist Yasushi Inoue. No doubt, uncountable numbers of children of distressed farmers would have experienced similar or harsher fates.
In Buruma’s telling, Yoshiko reveled in the image she created, yet the reality was extraordinary enough. The Japanized ex-princess became a gender-fluid cross-dresser who referred to herself as “boku,” a word that Japanese males use to mean “me.” Nonetheless, she had a large number of liaisons with important political and military men, which earned her the sobriquet “the Mata Hari of East Asia.”
After a brief marriage to a Mongolian aristocrat — unconsummated, according to Buruma — she moved to Shanghai, where she seduced the son of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Chinese republic, and obtained important secrets from him. Back in Manchuria, now a de facto Japanese colony, she gave rein to her Joan of Arc complex, leading a group of reformed bandits into battle.
She also became the equivalent of an idol singer, releasing a series of hit songs recorded in Manchuria’s state-of-the-art studios. As time went by, she became more unpredictable and more critical of Japanese activities on the mainland. She also developed a liking for what would now be called “hard drugs,” though there was no such concept in those days.
The fact that she was executed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Chinese nationalist forces n is an indirect tribute to her stature. The two European collaborators were basically myth merchants. All they did was lie, though Weinreb’s lies had fatal consequences for others. Yoshiko was an active participant in world-shaking events — as a spy, possible agent provocateur and symbol. She faced the firing squad in 1948, at the age of 40.
Buruma percipiently relates the 1920s and 1930s to our own time, citing a general cultural entropy in which chancers and conspiracy theories thrive. He is right. Conspiracy theories take hold and chancers get their chance when nobody knows what to believe. And sometimes, there really are conspiracies — or at least crucial decisions taken far from the public eye. To put it another way, the larger cause of the rot is a general collapse in confidence in elites.
That was very much the case for Japan 100 years ago as governments and business leaders deliberately deflated the economy through the 1920s, culminating in the disastrous decision to rejoin the Gold Standard in 1930. The upshot was the Showa Depression which led to the immiseration of farmers in northeast Japan, daughters being sold into prostitution, domestic terrorism, a bloody putsch that paved the way to military government and the full-scale invasion of China.
Through this entire period, Japanese financial policy was closely supervised by the Morgan Bank and Thomas Lamont and Company. Mark Metzler, professor of history at Washington University, had this to say about Lamont: “Were a populist conspiracy theorist of the time to have wholly invented a personification of the international money cartel that pulled the strings of the governments of the world, he could hardly have done better than the actual Mr. Lamont.”
If Japanese officials had listened instead to the British economist J. M. Keynes, whose ideas about the use of demand management to stabilize economies were already known to progressive thinkers such as the journalist and politician Tanzan Ishibashi, there might never have been a Showa Depression, with all its disastrous consequences. In which case, world history would have been very different and today Yoshiko would be known only as an LGBT pioneer who lived to a ripe old age.
Would she have wanted that? Probably not.
An Excremental Film Review
Published in Japan Forward on May 3rd 2023
Piss and shit rarely feature much in historical dramas, but in the recently released “Okiku and the World” they are crucial to the story.
The two male protagonists are entrepreneurs in the human excrement trade. We see them stirring the stuff, pouring it into barrels, even rubbing it in the face and clothes of an arrogant samurai. The film-makers take care to make it look highly realistic.
Director Junji Sakamoto was inspired to make the film after a discussion with a historian about the complex “circular bio-economy” that Japan developed in the Edo Era (1600-1868). In the giant city of Edo (now Tokyo), “night-soil” was gathered from collection points and taken by barge to farming districts to the west and north where it was exchanged for crops or money.
Delivering the goods
The trade was lucrative, to the extent that there were periodic protests about price gouging and market-cornering by middlemen. In the film, we see one of our two heroes watering down the product, which was another common ruse.
Farmers couldn’t do without the fertilizer, and Edo’s one million citizens couldn’t do without the fruit and vegetables it helped to grow. According to Director Sakamoto, the system has lessons for our current world of heightened eco-consciousness and “SDGs” (Sustainable Development Goals).
There seems little doubt that pre-modern Edo was a cleaner and healthier place than the teeming cities of the west at the time, partly due to the night-soil trade. Professor David Howell of Harvard University goes as far as to suggest that “a cultural memory of shit’s utility” lies behind Japanese people’s “refusal to treat excrement as an object of special anxiety.”
And indeed night-soil continued to be used as a fertilizer into the 1950s, much to the shock of expat housewives finding traces on produce at the local market.
Large parts of urban Japan were not connected to the sewer system until the 1980s and relied on vacuum trucks to suck the ordure out of septic tanks a couple of times a week. Your own personal dung did not disappear in a flash, as if by magic. It was still there, as the lingering odour proved.
Contemporary Japan’s relaxed attitude to its faeces is best captured by the Unko Museums (“Turd Museums”) located in Tokyo and other major cities. Here turds are amalgamated into Japan’s “kawaii” (“cuteness”) culture, and visitors can play “unko” games, take selfies of themselves sitting on fake plastic toilets with friends and family and buy “unko” mugs and snacks in the souvenir shop.
We are a long way from the anality taboo that that underpins much Freudian psychoanalysis.
Fun at the Tokyo Turd Museum
Who is out of step here, Japan or the West? Professor Robert Muchembled of Paris 13 University has written extensively about the history of smells. He notes that disgust at smells is fundamental to humans but is not biologically programmed. “It takes four or five years at least for European children to construct disgust at their own excrement. Few people nowadays are willing to acknowledge this, preferring to believe that such disgust is natural… in fact it is the result of several centuries of cultural pressure.”
Muchembled harks back to the French people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to make his case. “Having no choice but to see and smell what Rabelais called ‘joyful matter’ on a daily basis, they showed little disgust at faeces and urine, whether human and animal; indeed, both were widely used in medicine and beauty treatments.”
Two phenomena changed the cultural consciousness. First, the miasma theory of disease – debunked only in the late nineteenth century – held that malodorous air from rotting organic matter was the source of infections. Secondly, the Counter Reformation ushered in a hard-line religious morality in which bad smells were associated with Satan, ever ready with his temptations, and publishing dirty jokes could get you exiled or killed.
On this reading, it is the countries of the west that have been behaving bizarrely, not Japan, which had no Reformation or Counter Reformation and never subscribed to the miasma theory. Instead, the relaxed acceptance of bodily functions that characterized the earlier Europe of Rabelais and Erasmus carried on uninterrupted in Edo Era Japan.
The two entrepreneurs in action
If Professor Muchembled is to be believed, we have little need to feel sorry for the two piss-and-shit dealers in the movie. “Things do not smell good or bad in and of themselves: our brains categorize them and then record the memory,” he states. And “humans adapt perfectly to strong smells. After about fifteen minutes, we stop smelling even the worst stench or most delightful fragrance.”
The action in “Okiku and the World” takes place in the 1850s and 1860s, on the eve of the Meiji Restoration when the old order was visibly crumbling and a new world was waiting to be born. But you don’t have to be interested in history or ecology to enjoy the film, which subtly and poignantly recounts the trials and tribulations of the two men and Okiku, the school-teacher daughter of a down-at-heel samurai.
Despite – or, perhaps, because of – the unusual subject matter, the film-makers had no problem in assembling a star-studded cast, including the luminous Haru Kuroki as Okiku and handsome boy Kanichiro as the junior partner in the excrement business.
Okiku with one of the entrepreneurs
The acting is uniformly strong and the cinematography stays in the mind’s eye. Sakamoto uses an uncommon aspect ratio, and most of the film is in monochrome, with colour seeping in at the beginning and end of some scenes. That semi-retro look is, it seems, a tribute to “Humanity and Paper Balloons” (directed by Sadao Yamanaka; 1937), a pre-war classic which clearly influenced him.
The film works on all levels – as a human drama, as a portrait of a society on the cusp of wrenching change, as an illustration of a “circular bio-economy” in action. Given the unique background, it should intrigue foreign audiences too.
Flowing into the Future: Tokyo by Water
Published in Nikkei Asia 26/4/2023
“There is nothing–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,” said our captain, echoing the famous words of the water-rat in Kenneth Graham’s children’s story The Wind in the Willows.
Who would argue with that on a fine afternoon with the late cherries in bloom and our Jolly Roger pennant flapping proudly in the breeze? It certainly beat sitting in an office and gazing at a screen, even for a hopeless landlubber like me.
Our plan was to experience Tokyo from a different vantage point, travelling through its rivers, canals and bay. In doing so, we were taking the advice of Professor Hidenobu Jinnai of Hosei University.
In his book Tokyo A Spatial Anthropology, he wrote. “When viewed from the water, the whole city appears strikingly new. In order to read back through the accumulated layers of history… a water route proves far more effective and engrossing than travel by land.”
Tokyo in 1898: “shinsen Tokyo meisho zue”
The vehicle that we hired was a nifty 23 foot Yamaha motor boat capable of getting fourteen knots out of its outboard engine. All five of my companions were experienced sailors, though our fearless captain was the only one with a Japanese boat licence. The job of the rest of us was to give him advice, which he invariably ignored, and hand him his wine when he needed it.
The vibe was more Top Gun than Wind in the Willows as we surged down the Sumida River, burning off slower moving craft and leaving a V-shaped wake. Our captain, who I shall call ‘Maverick’ after the character in the 1986 movie, then veered to the right and announced we were heading for Nihonbashi, the most famous bridge in Japan, first built in the early seventeenth century.
We passed a few yakatabune leisure barges – mobile venues for revelry with geisha in bygone times, now used mainly for the tourist trade and corporate junkets. There were also quite a few classy leisure craft moored at a purpose-made jetty, but not as many as you might expect in a city as large and rich as Tokyo. Perhaps, the boat boom is yet to come.
Entrepreneur Eichi Shibusawa’s mansion in the Kabutocho stock market district of Tokyo – Meiji Era
As we progressed into the heart of the financial district, the waterways grew narrower and the bridges significantly lower.
“Looks like the tide’s rising”, Maverick drawled as we approached a semi-circular stone bridge. “Reckon we can get through?”
“Unlikely,” replied one of our number who I will call ‘Iceman’. “We’d better turn back.” That made sense. Getting stuck under the bridge and having to call for help would not be a good look – and would likely cost money.
Maverick nodded thoughtfully and carried on regardless, aiming for the centre of the bridge. His judgement was perfect. We came out the other side with at least two inches of clearance. Our Jolly Roger pennant stood straight and tall.
Soon we were gliding past the Tokyo Stock Exchange and looking up at the stone gryphons of Nihonbashi itself. This is Japan’s point zero, the spot from which all distances to Tokyo are measured.
I worked in a nearby office for several years and never gave a second thought to what lay under the bridge. In fact, I barely took notice of the bridge itself which was a sorry sight with an ugly expressway crammed on top of it, part of the construction boom preceding the 1964 Olympics.
The bridge in the Edo era – print by Hiroshige
Yet Tokyo’s waterways are living history. The city could not have become what it is today without them. At the start of the Edo period (1600-1868), so termed after the old name for Tokyo, it was a quiet fishing town with a coastline at Hibiya, now home to the Imperial Hotel. By the early eighteenth century it was a metropolis that supported a million people, making it the world’s largest city.
The logistics of bringing in food and other necessaries would have been formidable. In a world without trucks and trains, most of it was done by water. Rice and other agricultural products would be transported by river from agricultural communities to the north, lumber and other items by sea from more distant parts of Japan.
Barges had deliveries to make in the other direction too, gathering the “night soil” from every household and taking it to the farmers for use as fertilizer. This unique recycling system, based on financial incentives, kept the city hygienic in pre-modern times.
In 1877, R.W. Atkins of Tokyo University concluded that in the decade just after the Meiji Restoration Tokyo had a water supply purer than London’s.
Professor Jinnai mourned the loss of “the city of water” and its transformation in modern times into “a city of land.”
“It is all but forgotten today that Tokyo’s low city was once a city equal to Venice in its charms,” he wrote. “The beauty of the water’s edge was a favourite subject for woodblock print artists beginning with Hiroshige…The business of the low city grew along axes formed by the canals and rivers. The economic, social and cultural life of the city developed in close connection with the water… Most of the theatres of Edo and early Meiji Tokyo, for example, were located near water.”
Asakusa Park in the Meiji Era
Jinnai wrote those words in 1985 when the low city, meaning the eastern, working-class area, was at its most dilapidated. The waterfront itself was a mess of aged warehouses and industrial plants belonging to companies such as Tokyo Gas and engineer IHI. Since then, there have been big changes, starting in the 1990s.
As in London, the previously dowdy east of the city has been revived by an influx of hipsters and creative spirits and the whole waterfront has been turned into high end apartments, shopping meccas and places of entertainment – such as the theatre where Bob Dylan recently put on four concerts.
Maverick’s next move was to take us out to the bay, under the Rainbow Bridge and in the direction of Haneda Airport. The waves were choppy here, so canned chuhai cocktails were a better option than wine. It was also advisable to grasp something sturdy and metallic if you didn’t want a close encounter with the wet stuff.
Tokyo has long since lost its position as east Japan’s premier port to Yokohama, which was a mere village in the Edo era. Even so, there was plenty going on in the bay – huge container ships unloading, other ships being repaired, passenger ferries heading for Oshima and other outlying isles which are administratively part of Tokyo. The process of landfilling still goes on too, with large, barge-like craft dumping their loads in the designated spots.
It was the first Edo Shogun, Ieyasu Tokugawa, who imagined the giant city into being, pushing back the shoreline, creating a network of canals and diverting mighty rivers in order to turn uninhabitable flood plain into rich agricultural land. It has been spreading and shape-shifting ever since.
Hiroshige – view of the Sumida river from Nihonbashi
The waterfront that we observed as we made our return journey was totally different from what it looked like in 1985, which in turn would have been unrecognizable to someone in 1935. No doubt, the view will have morphed again significantly in another fifty years.
In his book, Professor Jinnai describes a trip he made around the waterways as “one of the best forms of amusement that Tokyo has to offer.”
Our pirate band would drink to that. In fact, that’s exactly what we did as Maverick locked the wheel into a slow circular motion a few hundred yards from the marina and we sipped the last of our wine and enjoyed our final moments on the city of water.
As Ratty said, there’s nothing quite like messing around in boats.
The Real Musical Magic of Ryuichi Sakamoto
Published in Nikkei Asia 08/04/2023
Ryuichi Sakamoto, who passed away last week, was the best known and most successful Japanese musician in the world. He won an Oscar for his soundtrack to Bernard Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” and several Golden Globes and Grammy awards and nominations for other films. In 1992, he scored the opening ceremony of the Barcelona Olympics, conducting the orchestra while a billion people watched.
His song “Behind the Mask” has been recorded by Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton. In Beijing, the foreign ministry spokesman said that China was “deeply saddened” by his death. In France, he was taken very seriously, being considered an heir to Eric Satie and Claude Debussy, in the words of the French newspaper Libération.
That’s not such stretch as it might seem at first sight. He studied both composers intensively at Tokyo University of the Arts. And just as Debussy was entranced by the gamelan music he heard at the World Expo of 1889, so Sakamoto was bowled over by a gamelan troupe who came to Japan in the 1970s. The influence is there in many of his compositions, most notably the most famous of all, the theme from the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”.
Despite his many accomplishments, Sakamoto seems to have remained a grounded human being, dropping into neighbourhood music bars from time to time and guesting on popular TV comedy shows. Like many Japanese artists, he had no objection to appearing in TV commercials and featured in dozens of ads for companies such as Nissan, Toyota and beer maker Sapporo.
Nonetheless, he never gave up the anti-capitalist political views that he acquired from the student movement of his youth. Indeed, one of his last actions was to send a letter to the mayor of Tokyo protesting the controversial plan to build a huge office and shopping mall complex in the leafy central district of Jingu.
I, probably like many others, formed my mental image of Sakamoto from his role in “Mr Lawrence”. The 1983 film is far from director Nagisa Oshima’s best work, but the powerful scenes depicting the fatal attraction between the commander of the prison of war camp, played by Sakamoto, and a British prisoner, played by David Bowie, stick in the mind.
As camp commander
Sakamoto was not comfortable acting and did little of it subsequently, but his charisma was palpable. Apparently, he modelled his part on another famous performer, novelist Yukio Mishima who had committed ritual suicide at a military base in 1970. Sakamoto’s father was a literary editor who had professional dealings with Mishima. Appropriately, Sakamoto titled the film’s unforgettable theme “Forbidden Colours” after the Mishima book of the same name.
At the time, Sakamoto was already famous as the keyboard player in YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra), a futuristic electropop trio that also featured bassist Haruomi Hosono, an equally bold explorer of offbeat musical pathways, and drummer and main vocalist Yukihiro Takahashi.
To an extent that no other Japanese band has managed before or since, YMO became an international phenomenon. “Solid State Survivor”, their second album, sold over two million copies. The standout track was their eerie synthesizer-driven take on The Beatles’ “Day Tripper” which they made sound like the lament of an android.
YMO were tapping into a cyber-punk vibe that took in the SF novels of William Gibson, the film “Blade Runner”, primitive video games and the musical experiments of synth pioneer Isao Tomita and American minimalist Terry Riley. In stark contrast to the dominant genres of rock and punk, the music was unemotional and precise. Foreshadowing the hyper-connected, A.I. controlled world we are entering forty years later, it was music for computer nerds at a time when nobody owned a computer.
Yet musically there was more than that to YMO. On their American tour, they appeared on the legendary black music TV show, Soul Train, playing their own version of “Tighten Up”, a funk classic by Archie Bell and the Drells. It is hard to envisage other electronic music pioneers such as the German band Kraftwerk getting the audience boogying on the dance floor, but Sakamoto had a populist edge to him, as well as a sense of humour. Listening to the jazz-funk of Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters band had revolutionized his thinking about music, alerting him to the importance of the groove.
YMO didn’t stay around for long, but they helped to pave the way for genres such as techno, hip hop and house music, with Sakamoto’s instrumental “Riot in Lagos” being particularly influential. The key to their sound was the battery of electronic equipment they used – samplers, sequencers, programmable drum machines, synthesizers, vocoders etc. The artificiality was the whole point.
Not all these gizmos were made in Japan, but very many did come off the production lines of Yamaha, Roland and Korg and were powered by semiconductors made by Toshiba and Hitachi. The 1980s were a time when the future really did look Japanese. Not for nothing was William Gibson’s breakthrough novel set in Chiba City and “Blade Runner” in a Japanized version of Los Angeles.
In retrospect, it is ironic that in his later years Sakamoto mourned the loss of sonic diversity in Tokyo as the buzz of cicadas and the chirping of frogs disappeared from the suburbs. The bleeps and blurps that have replaced them are not much different from the sounds emanating from YMO’s electronic instruments.
Sakamoto’s nickname was “Kyoju” (“Professor”), given to him by YMO drummer Takahashi because he was pursuing a higher degree when they first met. It stuck due to his somewhat academic looks and demeanour, but he was certainly impressively knowledgeable about many different kinds of music.
As an adolescent, his heroes were Stravinsky, Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt and The Beatles. At Tokyo University of the Arts, he studied under Toshiro Mayuzumi, one of Japan’s leading post-war composers, producing sonatas and chamber pieces in the style of Bartok and Webern as well as familiarizing himself with various ethnic musics such as Okinawan folk songs.
With such a background, it was inevitable that his own music would be highly eclectic, and so it proved. Sakamoto was such a prolific musician – and author, for that matter – that it is hard to sift through his oeuvre.
Personally, I prefer the spare, piano-based pieces of his later years to the electropop on which he made his name. A particular favourite is “Casa”, an album of songs by the great Bossa Nova composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, recorded in Jobim’s house and using his piano.
The performers are Sakamoto, Jacques Morelenbaum on cello and Paula Morelenbaum on vocals. Two similar albums followed, almost as good.
The avant garde side of Sakamoto came to the fore with “the tsunami piano”, an instrument that was waterlogged and badly bashed around when a terrifying tsunami hit the north east coast of Japan in March 2011. Sakamoto rescued it and patched it up. Playing it, he said, was like playing the corpse of a piano. But the irregular sounds it made were simply “nature’s tuning”, a concept that matched the abstract John Cage-like turn that his music was taking. Sounds from the tsunami piano featured on the track “Zure” from his 2017 album “async”, which is one of his most interesting and challenging recordings.
There won’t be any more like that. Sakamoto has gone and with him goes some rare creativity, but he leaves behind a plentiful legacy for his fans to explore.
Big Time Gambling Boss: Yukio Mishima’s Favourite Yakuza Movie
Published in Nikkei Asia 8/2/2023
Could videodiscs make a comeback one day, if only for a specialist audience? At first glance, it would seem an unlikely prospect. The streaming services offer you a huge variety of films to watch at low prices without the inconvenience of leaving your couch. Why bother to resuscitate a dying medium from the pre-internet era?
Yet, much the same could be said about vinyl records, which I collect myself, both second-hand copies of classic albums and the new releases that are becoming increasingly numerous. Why do I do it? Many vinyl fans would cite the sound quality, and indeed there is a night-and-day difference when compared with Spotify etc. But that is not all, or even the main reason for me.
More important is the connection with the physicality of the object – the artwork on the LP cover, the sleeve notes, the ritual placing of a shiny black disc on the turntable and watching it rotate. That’s all part of the experience. What’s more, the thing does not belong to some giant tech company that stores it in the form of bytes in a server farm in the middle of nowhere. It belongs to me, to lend to friends or do what I like with. It forms a tiny piece of my identity.
Such thoughts came to me after viewing “Big Time Gambling Boss” (1968; directed by Kosaku Yamashita), a yakuza movie recently released on Blu-Ray by UK company Radiance Films in a limited edition of 2,000 copies. Blu-Rays are similar to DVDs, but make use of superior technology. The retail price is not cheap at £16.99 ($22.99 from Amazon.com), but it’s worth every penny in my opinion.
Tsuruta on the left, out-of-control Tomisaburo Wakayama on the right
Much care has been taken with the presentation, a key drawing point for the intended audience. The cover is reversible and features the original and newly created artwork. A 24-page booklet includes an essay by Stuart Galbraith IV, author of a magisterial double biography of Akira Kurosawa and star actor Toshiro Mifune, and a rundown of the main actors by freelance film writer Haley Scanlon.
There are more extras on the disc itself. Mark Schilling, long-time film critic for the Japan Times and author of several books on Japanese cinema, gives a video talk on the yakuza film genre. Punk rocker and Japanese cult film expert Chris D. goes into detail about the 10-film series of which “Big Time Gambling Boss” was the seventh to appear. All these contributions add value and help to put the film into context. New subtitles have been added and the visuals are pleasingly clean, thanks to the high-definition digital transfer.
This hard work would be in vain if the film were just another example of the “ninkyo” (chivalry) yakuza genre, hundreds of which were churned out in the nineteen sixties. Happily, that is far from the case. It is arguably one of the best yakuza films ever made.
Most of the “ninkyo” films are corny and sentimental, featuring implausibly noble gangster heroes. Later, in the 1970s, yakuza movies became more violent and realistic, as exemplified by the “Battles Without Honour and Humanity” series, directed by Kinji Fukasaku.
That era is justly celebrated as the heyday of the yakuza genre, yet the films, though gripping and superbly written and acted, never get close to the greatness of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series. Modern-day yakuza movies are generally over-reliant on Tarantino-esque shock tactics and end up no more realistic than the formulaic 1960s product.
What is missing is inner conflict and character development. “Big Time Gambling Boss” delivers that in spades, largely thanks to director Yamashita, script writer Kazuo Kasahara and leading actor Koji Tsuruta. Right from the opening scene, we are plunged into a moral dilemma, as the gambling clan is asked to join a united patriotic front of yakuza groups (the story is set in pre-war Japan) tasked with peddling drugs on the Asian continent. That is just a prelude to the unavoidable human tragedy that slowly builds momentum through the film, engulfing the main characters in desolation and disaster.
Shoot-out
In his essay, Stuart Galbraith IV nails the source of the film’s power. “Yamashita confidently lets scenes play out in long static cuts, allowing his audience to focus their attentions on the unspoken thoughts of his characters.” This technique is common in the works of a master of subtilty like the great director Yasujiro Ozu. It is rare in yakuza movies.
Strangely, the film was not particularly successful on release. It was only when a rave review by novelist and right-wing provocateur Yukio Mishima appeared in a specialist film magazine that the cinema-going public sat up and took notice. More publicity was generated when Weekly Playboy (no connection with the U.S. magazine) published a dialogue between Tsuruta and Mishima in July 1969. Mishima was a long-standing fan of the handsome Tsuruta, who was just one month older than him, but, unlike the novelist, had served in the war.
A genuine tough guy, Tsuruta was famous for having stood up to real life yakuza on several occasions, displaying notable cool in the presence of Japan’s most fearsome gangster boss. Although he despised the war leaders and considered the kamikaze strategy a horrible idea, having himself “sent off” young pilots to their death from the airbase where he was stationed, he was almost as right-wing as Mishima in his own way.
Ad for Weekly Playboy featuring Mishima and Tsuruta (and Carmen Maki)
In the dialogue, he agrees with many of Mishima’s criticisms of contemporary Japan, even declaring that he would get his sword ready if radical political action was planned. Mishima ended the conversation with an admiring “you are exactly the man I hoped you would be.”
The friendship continued, with Mishima inviting Tsuruta and his wife to dine to dinner on several occasions. But Mishima did not involve Tsuruta when he sensationally committed ritual suicide in the headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces in November 1970, having failed to persuade soldiers to back a coup d’état. When Tsuruta heard what had happened, he unsheathed his ceremonial sword and wept.
Yukio Mishima is not the only famous admirer of “Big Time Gambling Boss”. It has earned high praise from Paul Schrader, who wrote the script for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and directed a fine film about Mishima, amongst other achievements. But who would have known anything about this neglected classic if Radiance had not released it? Certainly not me.
So is the videodisc on its last legs as a medium, or does it have a future as a niche product like the vinyl record? The latter, I hope. And if so, Japan may well play a crucial role. For Japanese consumers never gave up on vinyl, even through the long ascendancy of CDs, when retailers like Disk Union served as an invaluable source of product and information. Meanwhile, Tower Records still exists in Japan and does a thriving trade, more than twenty years after every other branch in the world disappeared from the map.
Tower Records today
Obsolescence is by no means inevitable, despite Big Tech’s ambition to own everything. There is always demand for a quality product, at least in Japan.
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.
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.