culture
“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.
The First Samurai: Remembering Toshiro Mifune
Published in Nikkei Asia 14/4/2021
Sixty years ago this month, one of my favourite films hit the cinema screens for the first time. Yojimbo, directed by Akira Kurosawa and starring the inimitable Toshiro Mifune, was an instant success in Japan and was to become highly influential worldwide.
The film gave birth to the “spaghetti western” genre. Indeed, Italian director Sergio Leone had to compensate Kurosawa for plagiarizing the story in A Fistful of Dollars, the film that established Clint Eastwood as a major star. Eastwood’s spaghetti western persona took so much from the Yojimbo character that you could say there would be no Clint without the dishevelled, toothpick-gnawing ronin (“masterless samurai”) that Mifune so memorably portrayed.
The “yojimbo” (meaning “bodyguard”) is an existential hero, cool and ironic, driven by chance and sheer whim rather than the knotty moral dilemmas of Kurosawa’s earlier films. Like Eastwood’s “Man with No Name”, his identity is uncertain. When asked to supply his name, the yojimbo simply improvises one, incorporating the name of whatever flower happens to be in view.
He has no back-story, no future plans. He just shows up, turns the world upside down and then disappears. In decades to come, innumerable wisecracking hitmen and mysterious outsiders were to follow in Mifune’s dusty footsteps.
Yojimbo, and the follow-up Sanjuro (1962) which features the same character, catapulted Mifune to international fame and made him the first Asian actor to become a global star, a decade ahead of Bruce Lee. Even now, in terms of the quality of his best performances and the films themselves, he remains in a class of his own. Not for nothing did both the readers and the writers of Kinema Junpo, Japan’s premier film magazine, vote Mifune the greatest Japanese film actor of the twentieth century in two separate polls.
So how and where should such a significant cinematic anniversary be celebrated? My choice of venue was the one remaining Mifune-themed restaurant in Tokyo, in a backstreet of the unfashionable Ningyo-cho district.
You won’t find many tourists here, even in more normal times. It’s an ordinary eatery, offering unpretentious fare to workers from nearby shops and offices. Unusually these days, it retains a smoking corner, which would surely have pleased the cigarette and pipe-puffing Mifune.
There is a Mifune space at the back with a wall display listing some of the roles that the great man played over the years, as well as the Mifune family crest and a four-character phrase dear to his heart – Yuu Mou Jou Jin, which means something like “ferocious courage and intensity”. Yet the décor is unobtrusive. If you have no idea who Mifune is, that’s fine too. You can concentrate on your set lunch of curried chicken cutlet, solid value at 850 yen with free refills of miso soup and extra rice.
The Mifune corner. Photo: N.W.
I couldn’t help contrasting this modest but enjoyable culinary experience with the chain of high-priced, high-concept Kurosawa restaurants, which are clearly aimed at tourists and businessmen with generous expense accounts. Somehow, the difference between the restaurants seems to symbolize the two men’s artistic reputations.
In a 2018 BBC poll of the best non-English language films, as picked by global film experts, two Kurosawa films placed in the top four. The one country where no experts picked a Kurosawa film in their personal top ten was his own country, Japan. Overseas, though, he goes from strength to strength. It was recently announced that a British version of the Kurosawa classic, Ikiru, is in production, with a script by Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Despite his enduring domestic popularity, Mifune’s legacy been less well tended, not least by himself. Suffering from financial troubles at the film production company he set up in the mid-sixties, he appeared in too many films, Japanese and foreign, that were unworthy of his talents.
Worse, he allowed himself to be typecast as a generic samurai and gruff military commander. In the more than 150 films he made, he played Admiral Togo, the man who sank the Russian fleet in 1905, twice. Likewise he had two shots at Admiral Yamamoto, commander of the attack on Pearl Harbour These were roles he could sleepwalk through.
Whereas Kurosawa ended his life garlanded with honours, having made an artistic and box-office comeback with his two historical epics, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985), Mifune’s career fizzled out in a series of underwhelming performances. Ill with Alzheimer’s and abandoned by his mistress, he cut a forlorn figure. The relationship with Kurosawa, in whose films he had produced his most sublime performances, had soured long before. Indeed, after filming Red Beard (1965), the director and the leading man never spoke again, though they both lived on into the late 1990s.
Critic Donald Richie blamed the estrangement squarely on Kurosawa, though Stuart Galbraith 1V, author of “The Emperor And The Wolf”, a double biography of the two men, suggests that their creative relationship had been exhausted.
What is certain is that no other actor could do what Mifune did in Red Beard – play a humane, progressive doctor who singlehandedly beats the living daylights out of a gang of thugs, all the while reproaching himself for unprofessional conduct. Somehow Mifune makes it look totally credible, to the extent that you wince on behalf of the bad guys.
Both men later acknowledged that their best work had been done together. After the rift, Mifune’s range narrowed and Kurosawa’s leading actors, although excellent, lacked the feral vitality that makes Mifune’s on-screen presence so compelling. In Yojimbo, the combination is at its peak, with the main character being a joint creation of actor and director. The dialogue is minimal. The nature of the man is expressed by the way he moves and eats and laughs.
Watch Mifune toss a stick in the air at the crossroads to determine which direction to take; cut down a pistol-packing psycho with a lightning-fast manoeuvre; gaze down from a bell-tower at the deadly factional battle he has engineered, like a film director pleased with his handiwork. Somehow, he seems to be made of some harder, denser substance than everyone else.
The film feels as fresh today as it did in 1961. As I finish off my meal in the restaurant that bears his name, I realise that Mifune, like all the true greats of cinema, is still with us now.
“Ferocious courage and intensity” Photo N.W.
Remembering 3.11: Faces and Voices of Resilience Part 2
Published in Japan Forward 4/3/2021
In June 2011, I went up to Tohoku to visit my friend K. who lives in the coastal town of Ofunato. I hired a car at the nearest bullet train station and set the satnav for Ofunato Station.
When I arrived after a two hour drive, I found that the station no longer existed and neither did the town centre. Instead, my gaze rested on acres of rubble, twisted metal, shattered plastic, wires, shelves, spoiled household goods, unclassifiable objects that once had a purpose.
A mile from the shoreline, a capsized fishing trawler nestled between broken buildings. A dead car sat in a river, water up to its windscreen. The air was acrid with dust.
There’s work to be done: credit, Shoko Hashimoto
K. greeted me, smiling and crying. On the phone she had told me “Women are strong.”
Her parents’ house had been close to the port. As soon as the tsunami alert sounded, she went to pick them up in her car and drove them to her place, further up the valley. Now all that remained of the parents’ house was a few bare concrete blocks. Their only surviving possessions were the clothes they were wearing at the time.
“Some people lost much more,” K. told me. “They kept their life savings in cash at home.
Ofunato had been lucky, she continued. It had suffered badly from the last serious tsunami, triggered by the Chilean earthquake of 1960. As a result, the townspeople were sensitized to the risk. Every year there were two or three alerts for a “large-scale tsunami”. Each time, K. would pick up her parents and drink tea with them at her place until the all-clear message appeared on her phone
In contrast, the neighbouring town got off lightly in 1962 and therefore was slow to react this time. Thirty percent of the people working in the local government office died.
“The first thing was the sound,” K. recollected. “A horrible crunching, roaring sound. I went out into the garden and saw the wave coming over the top of the pedestrian bridge. That’s when I knew we had to get out of here too. “
The water flooded into K.’s garden but stopped there. By that time, she and her parents had fled into the mountains. They spent days up there, living in an old people’s home with no electricity, no heating, no phone. After finding some gas canisters and a portable cooker, she defrosted some frozen food and cooked it up for the one hundred inmates.
K.’s father was head of the local post office for fifty years. Long after his retirement, his friends called him “Bureau Chief.” One of the proudest days of his life had been when the Emperor decorated him for his long service at a ceremony in Tokyo.
“We were lucky,” he said. “It would have been much worse if the tsunami had come at night.”
I heard this again and again. These people who had lost so much kept saying they were lucky. But perhaps luck comes to those who believe they are lucky. A few weeks after the disaster, K. was walking past one of the many piles of rubble that dotted the area when she saw something glinting amongst the lumps of concrete and broken furniture. It was her father’s medal, conferred by the Emperor, still intact. None of their other lost possessions reappeared.
Temporarily housed in a school: credit, Shoko Hashimoto
At dusk, she showed me the graveyard of cars, eight hundred of them, some just dented, others squashed like beer cans.
“If you come late at night you can hear voices,” she said. “People trapped inside the cars are calling out for help.” I checked to see if she was joking. She wasn’t.
I last saw K. in the summer of 2019. When the disaster happened, her husband and son were in Tokyo, working and studying respectively. Now they are all back together in the family home. She works part-time as a juku teacher and volunteers to help aged people, though Covid has disturbed the normal routine.
I stayed at the Ofunato Onsen Hotel, up on a bluff overlooking the bay. The seafood was delicious, the view spectacular. The town was entirely rebuilt, the station shiny new and equipped with all the latest tech.
The material devastation of 2011 had disappeared like a bad dream, but the human damage was irreparable. So many had died, so many lives had been blighted. K.’s father had passed away several years before, never fully recovering from the trauma.
Life is not easy here. It never has been and never will be. The courage is humbling. What is Covid-19 when you’ve been through 3.11?
The life-force runs strong: credit, Shoko Hashimoto
COUNT ME IN!
Shoji “Swifty” Sugawara reopened seven weeks after the disaster, half-expecting nobody to come. His top-notch audio equipment was in a sad state. Aftershocks would send the stylus skipping across the vinyl from time to time, but customers didn’t seem to mind. They drifted in straight away, wanting good strong coffee and whisky and, most of all, jazz of all kinds, at full throttle, now more than ever.
Swifty’s place was in Ichinoseki, a town of 110,000 in the south of Iwate Prefecture, a six hour drive from Tokyo. Well away from the coast, the town was protected from the deadly tsunami. Yet he knew people who had disappeared. Nearly everybody did.
Praying for the departed: credit, Shoko Hashimoto
The quake knocked down a retaining wall of the building, and the electricity was cut in this part of town. For a week he sat there in the dark, smoking and thinking. When power was restored, the sight that greeted his eyes stunned him. Tangled wires, broken glass, mess everywhere. The institution that he had spent four decades building had taken a hammer blow.
Yet he was determined to get the place up and running by April 26th. For that was the meijitsu (“date of death”) of the man who gave him his nickname and was the inspiration for his life’s work. The place that Swifty runs is named after him too: the legendary bandleader, Count Basie.
The “jazz kissa” (jazz coffee shop) is a peculiarly Japanese institution, born from the confluence of two booms in the early sixties. The first was the jazz boom set off by the visits to Japan of musicians of the calibre of Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. The other was the hi-fi boom, which increased the availability of audiophile-class equipment, such as Swifty’s beloved JBL (James Bullough Lansing) speaker system.
Back in the day, the typical jazz kissa would have a “no talking” rule and would serve only coffee, ensuring that there were no drunken interruptions to the flow of sounds. Today, Japan’s six hundred remaining jazz kissas are more broadminded. Some play music that isn’t jazz and offer a good menu. Some, horror of horrors, play CDs.
Basie is probably the most famous of them all. But it isn’t just a place to listen to life-affirming music in the middle of sparsely populated, somewhat left-behind Iwate Prefecture. It is also a node in an invisible network that has a nationwide, indeed a worldwide reach.
Well-known Japanese musicians who have been there, and in many cases performed, include piano pugilist Yosuke Yamashita, avant garde trailblazer Kaoru Abe and Sadao Watanabe, the only bebopper to be awarded the Order of the Rising Sun. Famous foreign visitors include Elvin Jones, Anita O’Day, Freddie Hubbard and sonic bomb-thrower Peter Brotzmann.
How did this come about? Swifty was born and brought up in Ichinoseki. In the late sixties, he spent several years in Tokyo. He attended Waseda University and joined its High Society Orchestra as a drummer, which led to a one month tour of the United States. Several of his pals went on to become highly influential in creative circles, such as veteran comedian Tamori. By chance, he met a well-known music and film critic who became his mentor.
Those few years were enough to provide him with a lifetime of connectivity. In 1970, he returned to his hometown and set up Basie. He has been running it for the last fifty years.
In 1983, Count Basie himself visited the jazz kissa named in his honour. He was using an electric wheelchair which required Swifty to install special “barrier free” ramps to negotiate the stairs. A year later, the great jazzman passed away at the age of 79.
Not many people get the chance to get on friendly terms with their musical heroes. When Swifty is asked what Count Basie was like in person, he answers as follows. “Listen to his music. He’s exactly like his music.”
In September 2011, exactly six months after the quake and tsunami hit, Swifty fixed up a charity concert for the Count Basie Orchestra, featuring several musicians who had played with Basie for decades. It took place at Motsuji Temple, a few miles from Ichinoseki.
Two thousand people attended in the cool of the autumn evening. Arrangements for the gig were helped by the fact that one of the temple’s monks was a jazz fan who frequently patronized the Basie jazz kissa.
***
I’ve gazed at many thousands of Shoko Hashimoto’s photos of the 3.11 disaster. They convey the scale and fury of the destruction, and also the power of the human response.
There are many images of people eating heartily and smiling unfakeable smiles, even while living in disused schools just weeks after the tsunami. Communal ceremonies, such as the New Year’s lion dance, have a deeper significance when dealing with adversity.
An unfakeable smile: credit, Shoko Hashimoto
The conclusion: my God, these people are tough. Perhaps all humanity is when survival is at stake. Most of us will never know because we will never have to face the same kind of test.
Let’s hope so anyway.
All photos are by Shoko Hashimoto. His photobooks are available at the Shashasha online bookshop.
The Sovereign Isle by Robert Tombs review – is this the best case for Brexit?
Now that it’s a reality, can an esteemed historian produce convincing arguments for the UK’s departure from the EU?
They may have triumphed in politics, but in academia, Brexiters are an embattled minority. Perhaps the most combative of their tribunes is the emeritus professor of history at Cambridge, Robert Tombs. Beyond the innate value of dissent, Tombs’s own position is also intrinsically interesting. As a brilliant historian of 19th-century France, he can hardly be written off as a Little Englander. As a French citizen by marriage, he presumably continues to enjoy the benefits of EU citizenship as well, so he has less skin in the game than most.
A short, punchy, eloquent statement from such a distinguished historian on the case for the kind of very hard Brexit that has now become a reality raises hopes for some genuine illumination. But The Sovereign Isle will, for varying reasons, disappoint both many of Tombs’s fellow Brexiters and anyone looking for a cogent statement of what this great disruption means for the economic and political future of the UK.
Can Joe Biden make America great again?
His skills as a fixer are finely honed – but they cannot restore a pre-Trump normality. As president, Biden’s private self, shadowed by loss, must come into its own
Every year after 1975, Joe Biden, his second wife Jill, his sons Beau and Hunter and their growing families, would gather for Thanksgiving on Nantucket island off Cape Cod. Part of the annual ritual was that the Bidens would take a photograph of themselves in front of a quaint old house in the traditional New England style that stood above the dunes on their favourite beach.
In November 2014, when Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president, he found, where the house should have been, an empty space marked out by yellow police tape. The building, he wrote in his memoir Promise Me, Dad had “finally run out of safe ground and run out of time; it had been swept out into the Atlantic”.
Peering into 2021: Tanjiro Kamado Battles Big Tech
Published in Japan Forward 2/1/2021
This time last year I wrote in Japan Forward about the concept of “Lenin weeks”.
I was referring to Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s dictum that “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
My thinking was that a random incident, such as a marine confrontation between China and the U.S. or Japan, could quickly escalate into a conflict that would change our world out of all recognition.
I had no idea that as I wrote a new coronavirus had manifested itself in the Chinese city of Wuhan and was already in the process of seeding a global pandemic that would cause the sharpest economic downturn of the modern era.
At the same time, the corona crisis has accelerated technological, social and political change in a way that Lenin would surely have appreciated.
Propaganda poster of Lenin
The digital economy has powered ahead, while businesses that depend on face-to-face transactions – whether selling pints of beer or automobiles – have suffered. In the wealthy countries, the middle classes with spacious homes and information-processing jobs that can be done remotely have felt no pain. Many low-paid workers have lost jobs that will never return.
In Japan, where such statistics are quickly available, suicides have started to rise after fifteen years of decline. The social malaise will be much deeper in Western countries that have suffered greater economic and human damage. Already, there have been reports of soaring depression, domestic violence and alcoholism.
Meanwhile central bank policies have made the asset rich even richer. Globally, there could hardly be a more favourable environment for populism and social unrest.
The stark contrast between the relatively mild crisis experienced by most East Asian countries and the economic and human carnage suffered by many Western countries raises another question.
Has the coronavirus speeded up the rise of East Asia and the relative decline of the West? Infections and fatalities in Japan have hit new highs at the turn of the year, yet the gap with other G7 countries continues to widen even further in Japan’s favour.
None of this looked likely on New Year’s Day 2020, though with the advantage of hindsight, it now seems obvious and logical. Likewise, what seems improbable now may look obvious and logical in twelve months’ time. Trying to forecast the future is always mug’s game, but the uncertainties are even greater than usual after the extraordinary events of the last twelve months.
One of the key questions is to what extent the changes that have taken place in this tumultuous period are permanent and irreversible. To put it another way, will people continue to cocoon at home, with the aid of Zoom, Amazon, Uber Eats etc., even after the corona crisis has faded? If so, the structure of our cities, social lives, education systems and much else is set to undergo an almighty “reset”.
Clearly, some of the most powerful entities in the world are solidly behind this agenda, including the so-called FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), various financial and entertainment behemoths and the World Economic Forum, famous for its annual confab at Davos. It is the WEF that pioneered the concept of the Great Reset, which it has been promoting for several years.
Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF
This is not a conspiracy, as some cranks believe. Rather, to quote an article in the UK’s Spectator magazine, Davos functions as “an ideological synchronization environment for individuals, corporations, and governments to keep on the same page.”
Intrinsic to the ideology is a kind of technological determinism that holds that innovations are always beneficial and must be embraced without question or concern about the downside risks.
Working with impressive speed, this July WEF kingpin Klaus Schwab published “Covid-19: The Great Reset,” written in collaboration with economist Thierry Malleret.
“The corona pandemic marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory,” the authors declare. “The world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more.”
Standing up against these powerful forces is a pure-hearted young man of amazing bravery who hails from a remote village in the Japan Alps. He is of course Tanjiro Kamado, the hero of Demon Slayer, the hit manga, anime TV series and movie.
It is the success of the movie version which is most impressive and most encouraging for what it portends.
To recap, Demon Slayer, which was released in mid-October 2020, has just broken Japan’s movie box office record, which was set in 2001 by another anime film, the Oscar-winning Spirited Away. Total takings to date are $316 million, the equivalent of 23 million admissions.
Think about that. In the year of the coronavirus, more than one sixth of the entire Japanese population went to the cinema to watch Demon Slayer, or Kimetsu No Yaiba, as it is known in Japanese.
They clearly did not get the “everything has changed” memo from Klaus Schwab.
The film is smashing records in Taiwan too, luring over one tenth of the population into cinemas. Despite the fact that it has yet to be released in China, the US or any other major overseas markets, it was the sixth most successful film worldwide in 2020.
Why did so many people choose to go to the cinema, rather than wait for the film to be made available on streaming sites, as will happen at some point? There are two obvious reasons. Firstly, watching the film is only half the fun. Discussing it with your friends, swapping gossip about the mysterious authoress, reading the reviews – this is all part of a communal experience that can only enjoyed when the film is hot.
Secondly, cinemas provide far better visual and auditory quality, which means a greater sense of immersion in the world of the film. Binge-watching on a TV screen at home or, worst of all, squinting at a smartphone screen, is the equivalent of gobbling a fast food takeout.
Likewise, there is no comparison between live music and a Spotify playlist, or a real conversation with work colleagues and a Zoom meeting.
The lesson of Demon Slayer is that most people are not willing to accept indefinite hikikomori (“social recluse”) lockdown lifestyles. They want to participate in what is happening in the society and culture around them. They want to travel, and will even try flights and cruises to nowhere, as happened in Singapore, just to have the feeling of being in motion.
Japan’s “Go To” subsidized domestic travel campaign was taken up fifty million people, which must be reckoned a tremendous success. It had to be suspended as infections rose late in the year. But did it cause the rise? Probably not. Neighbouring South Korea has experienced a very similar mini-surge, despite the absence of any travel promotion campaign. Seasonality is the most likely culprit. Hopefully, “Go To” will be restarted as soon as conditions allow. The demand is clearly there.
As mentioned above, 2020 saw the sharpest economic decline of the modern era. For some countries, such as the UK, it was the steepest in centuries. It was also the strangest, being caused not by problems intrinsic to the economy, but by governments preventing certain kinds of consumption for reasons of public health.
The result is that almost everywhere household savings ratios soared to record highs as people were unable to spend. They have subsequently fallen as restrictions eased, but the level of savings is still at historically elevated levels.
What comes next? Fear is a very powerful emotion. If it dominates public psychology, savings rates will stay high, the recovery will fizzle out and the FAANGs will become ever more dominant in our economic and social lives.
Muzan Kibutsuji, supreme commander of the demons
Yet fear tends to fade as people learn to adapt to whatever threat they face. If their innate sociability and lust for life comes to the fore, as I hope and expect, a splurge of spending, traveling and enjoying should lie ahead in 2021.
There are three core demon slayers; the brave, but brainless Inosuke, who charges around like a wild boar; the cry-baby Zenitsu who has childish tantrums; and the empathetic but super-tough Tanjiro.
What would happen to them if they were alive in 2020, rather than in the early years of the twentieth century, the story’s actual setting?
My guess is that Inosuke refused to wear a mask, took no notice of social distancing guidelines and ended up in hospital with a nasty dose of the coronavirus. Zenitsu spent the entire year cowering in his apartment and now has an eating disorder, depression and an addiction to social media.
As for Tanjiro, he went shopping for the old ladies in his neighbourhood, learnt how to play the shakuhachi and practiced his “water breathing” fight technique every day at dawn in the local shrine.
In 2021 he’s set to confront some gruesome demons, including those that belong to the highest rank of all, the FAANG brotherhood.
Good luck, Tanjiro!
Mishima in the Twenty First Century
Published in Nikkei Asia 23/11/2020
Can you imagine best-selling novelist Haruki Murakami leading a coup attempt against Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga? Or Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan taking a top general hostage in a British army base and inciting a rebellion against Boris Johnson’s government? Or any of the legions of writers and artists who regularly hammered President Donald Trump on social media choosing to die for their cause?
Probably not, but that would be the modern equivalent of what happened on Nov. 25, 1970, when the brilliant Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima and four accomplices invaded the office of the commander of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, called on his troops to topple the government of Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, and then committed seppuku, or ritual disembowelment (vulgarly known as hara-kiri).
Mishima had been nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was not just a writer. He was a major celebrity in Japan, the first to be described as a supasuta (superstar) by the media, and one of the best-known Japanese writers abroad. In the late 1960s the magazine Heibon Punch nominated him the “coolest male” in Japan in its “Mr. Dandy” awards, ahead of movie star Toshiro Mifune and baseball hero Shigeo Nagashima.
Since his shocking suicide, establishment Japan has preferred not to dwell on the “Mishima incident,” and only ultra-rightwing groups have seemed happy to mark the various anniversaries of his death. For the 50th anniversary, though, the vibe has been different. A few days ago, I managed to catch Mishima: The Last Debate, a documentary that uses recently discovered footage of a face-off between Mishima and hundreds of radical students during violent street protests in 1969.
The film was released in March, but was still screening in Tokyo’s central Shibuya district. I half-expected the audience to be dominated by elderly rightists in combat gear. I was wrong. There were women in their 20s and 30s wearing designer masks, some students, ordinary looking couples and solitary intellectual types. Although the film was advertised as a tense confrontation between violence-prone right and violence left-wing groups, the debate was mostly respectful on both sides, with Mishima’s wit drawing gales of laughter from the students and, indeed, the cinema audience.
Other films about Mishima have been made this century. The late Koji Wakamatsu, a radical left sympathizer once known as the “Kurosawa of pink [erotic] movies,” directed 11.25: The Day He Chose His Own Fate (2012). This biopic offers a straightforward factual account of Mishima’s last months. There is also a film version of Spring Snow, the first and best volume in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy.
His books are still popular too. Mishima wrote intense, heavyweight novels conveying his philosophical ideas, but also less serious fare as entertainments for the mass market. Interestingly it is the latter that have been doing particularly well these days. A light novel called Yukio Mishima’s Letter Writing Class has consistently ranked in Amazon Japan’s Top 10 for Japanese literature. Another entertainment called Life for Sale was the top seller of 2016 in the Japanese literature department of Kinokuniya, Japan’s largest bookshop, with total sales topping 250,000.
Mishima display at Maruzen bookshop (photo: Giles Murray)
At least 30 novels and essays have been translated into English, including Life for Sale. There are also two more biographies. Persona is a meticulously researched doorstopper by Naoki Inose, novelist and ex-governor of Tokyo, and Hiroaki Sato. Yukio Mishima is by British author Damian Flanagan.
Another British Mishima enthusiast was the rock star David Bowie, who appears to have planned his own death in 2016 with Mishima-like artistic precision. Bowie painted a portrait of Mishima, which he hung on the wall of his Berlin apartment in the late 1970s. In the 1990s, he bought a bronze bust of Mishima by British sculptor Sir Eduardo Paolozzi at Sotheby’s. More recently, he referred to the opening of Spring Snow in his 2013 album The Next Day: “Then we saw Mishima’s dog / Trapped between the rocks / Blocking the waterfall.”
The accent on the lighter, more humorous side of Mishima may have contributed to what seems to be a subconscious reassessment within Japan. There is also the fact that some of his political stances — on validating the constitutional status of the Self-Defense Forces, on protecting Japan’s traditional culture — no longer seem extreme.
Another impression came to me forcefully while watching the debate between Mishima and the radical students who were occupying the Tokyo University lecture hall. The cinema audience was agog at the huge moral issues that were being argued in a way that could never happen in today’s world.
Mishima engages with student Masahiko Akuta, now a respected theatrical impresario and actor
In his much-misunderstood book, The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama uses the ideas of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to speculate about what kind of landscape the post-historical “last men” will inhabit, once liberal democracy has triumphed everywhere. The answer is a world devoid of great art, struggle, risk, wisdom and self-knowledge. The last men, Fukuyama posits, “will be concerned above all for personal health and safety … content to sit at home congratulating themselves on their own broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism.”
Mishima’s dislike of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy came from Nietzsche. According to Flanagan, “Mishima’s bond with Nietzsche was described by Mishima’s father after his son’s death as of an intensity beyond imagination.”
Mishima committed seppuku just 25 years after the end of World War II, much too soon for him to escape being dismissed as an unbalanced reactionary throwback to the age of militarism. Fifty years on, the last man is here, placidly enjoying his lockdown thanks to Zoom, Netflix and Uber Eats, totally comfortable with the prospect of a future controlled by artificial intelligence and big data.
Perhaps we need a Mishima to shock us out of our complacency.
The Return of Yukio Mishima
Published in Japan Forward 22/ 11/2020
On November 25th 1970, novelist Yukio Mishima put the finishing touches to the last instalment of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Then, together with four members of his Tate no Kai (“Shield Society”) private army, he drove to the headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defence Forces and asked for an audience with the four star general in charge.
Once in the general’s office, Mishima produced a seventeenth century sword, gagged and bound the man and demanded that troops be gathered in the square below so that he could harangue them from the balcony.
When they answered his call for insurrection against Japan’s democratic government with heckling and jeers, Mishima went back inside and committed seppuku, an agonizing form of ritual suicide which involved disembowelling himself and being decapitated by one of his young comrades.
I’m old enough to have watched the BBC news report about the “Mishima incident”, and young enough not have had a clue what it meant. I seem to remember dark words about “rising Japanese militarism” and a general feeling that such an act was only to be expected from the Japanese.
Some years later, I came to work in Japan and found that both ideas were false. There was no trace of militarism in the air, and seppuku, vulgarly known as “hara-kiri”, had not been practiced since the end of the war. Mishima’s act was a deliberately anachronistic one-off that seemed to bewilder Japanese acquaintances as much as me.
When I asked a business colleague what he thought of it, he answered “crazy,” echoing the word used by Prime Minister Sato when he heard of Mishima’s suicide. It was a convenient way of dismissing the whole disturbing episode from the national consciousness, which as the eighties boom gathered momentum, seemed to be what people wanted.
By this time, I had enjoyed several of Mishima’s novels in translation and had also read biographies by Henry Scott-Stokes and John Nathan, both of whom had known him well. There was no doubt that Mishima was an extraordinarily talented writer who would have been worthy of the Nobel Prize that he was nominated for three times.
He was also extraordinarily active in a wide variety of fields, such as Noh theatre, kabuki, photography, body-building, boxing, karate, kendo, night-clubbing, acting in gangster and samurai films, appearing in a BBC documentary, breaking the sound barrier in a jet-fighter, as well as drilling his paramilitary outfit and planning his own death in minute detail.
All this while maintaining his prolific literary output, divided into serious novels of ideas and entertainments dashed off for the mass market.
Readers of Heibon Punch magazine, the Japanese equivalent of Playboy, crowned him the coolest man in Japan, ahead of actor Toshiro Mifune and baseball hero Shigeo Nagashima. The word the magazine used to describe him was the English “superstar.”
Many famous writers, Japanese and non-Japanese, have committed suicide. Many have strongly held political opinions. Generally, though, writers write and talk and, these days, publicize their opinions on social media. It is impossible to imagine Haruki Murakami or, for that matter, Jonathan Franzen or Margaret Atwood organizing a private army and inciting a coup d’état.
Mishima adhered to a Japanese version of Wang Yangming Confucianism, which holds that “knowing without acting is not knowing.” In other words, you have to walk the talk.
As the events of fifty years ago slip further into the past, they seem more astonishing not less; something that might happen in one of Mishima’s stranger stories, rather than in everyday life.
Indeed, violent death figured prominently in Mishima’s literary production, beginning with his startlingly frank autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask, written when he was 24 and replete with masochistic fantasies. In 1965, Mishima wrote, directed and starred in a film called Patriotism (Japanese title: Yukoku, meaning “Grieving for Your Country”), which depicts the act of seppuku in slow, lingering detail.
A scene from “Yukoku.” The calligraphy, “supreme sincerity”, is by Mishima himself.
If Mishima was acting out some dark private desires, he was also making a clear political statement by imploring the soldiers in his last speech to ”protect our emperor-centred Japanese tradition, our history, our culture” by rising up and forcing constitutional change. It is impossible to separate the personal from the political in Mishima’s ultimate piece of performance art.
That’s not to say that he didn’t see the absurd side of his project, which he hinted at in a published conversation with poet-playwright Shuji Terayama five months before his death. “It’s not an accident that Don Quixote encounters strange things,” he mused. “It’s caused by his personality… Don Quixote is a daydreamer. Things that a daydreamer encounters in this world are windmills and suchlike. So I’m a Don Quixote.”
Japan’s 1980s boom has slipped into the past too, and some of Mishima’s ideological positions – on constitutional approval of the Self-Defence Forces, on protecting cultural traditions – no longer seem so extreme. Perhaps it is for this reason that Mishima seems more popular than before.
At time of writing, Amazon Japan ranks one of Mishima’s light novels, Yukio Mishima’s Letter-Writing Class, as number two best-seller in the Japanese language literature section, placing far above works by Beat Takeshi and mystery queen Natsuo Kirino. Not bad for a writer who has been dead for half a century. Another entertaining work, Life for Sale, was turned into a six part Amazon Prime series for Japanese viewers in 2016.
Meanwhile, doing the round of Japanese cinemas is a fascinating documentary called Mishima: The Last Debate. Compiled from recently discovered footage, it shows Mishima’s face-off with 1,000 student radicals, who were occupying a Tokyo University lecture hall during the violent street protests of 1969.
The clash between extreme left and extreme right turns out be nothing of the sort as Mishima disarms the hotheads with his wit and charm. Such is the meeting of minds that he even attempts later to recruit one of the student leaders into his private army!
More of Mishima’s work is becoming available in English, including the aforementioned Life for Sale. There are also two more biographies. Persona is a meticulously researched doorstopper by Naoki Inose, novelist and ex-governor of Tokyo, and Hiroaki Sato. Yukio Mishima in the Critical Lives series is by Britain’s own Damian Flanagan.
Another British Mishima enthusiast was the late David Bowie, who appears to have planned his own death in 2016 with Mishima-like artistic precision. Bowie painted a portrait of Mishima, which he hung on the wall of his Berlin apartment in the late 1970s. In the 1990s, he bought a bronze bust of Mishima by British sculptor Sir Eduardo Paolozzi at Sotheby’s.
Paolozzi’s Mishima
More recently, Bowie found a place for Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea in his list of 100 favourite books, compiled in 2013. In the same year, he alluded to the opening of Mishima’s novel Spring Snow in his album The Next Day.
Then we saw Mishima’s dog
Trapped between the rocks
Blocking the waterfall
In continental Europe, Mishima never really went away. Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman to become a member of the Académie Francaise, published a highly sympathetic portrait in 1983, describing him as “a true representative of a Japan which was, like Mishima himself, violently Westernized, and yet remained distinguished by certain immutable characteristics.”
In the 1990s, Isabelle Huppert starred in a French adaptation of Mishima’s novel The School of Flesh, and the great Ingmar Bergman directed theatrical and TV versions of Mishima’s play, Madame de Sade.
All this would have been music to the ears of Mishima, who craved international recognition and revelled in his domestic stardom. On the day of his death, he left a note behind declaring “human life is limited, but I want to live forever.” Immortality is a tall order even for this brilliant and dangerous man, but he seems to be back in the public consciousness in a way that would surely have delighted him.