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.
Goodbye to the Future: The Last Days of the Nakagin Capsule Tower
Published in Japan Forward 7/5/2021
On the western fringe of Tokyo’s Ginza district, you can find a bizarre structure that looks like something from Logan’s Run or some other half-forgotten SF movie of bygone years.
It consists of an asymmetric pile of identical concrete boxes, each with a large circular window that stares out at the world like an impassive eye.
There are 145 of these boxes, which are living spaces designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa. In 1972, they were trucked one by one to the site from a factory in Shizuoka and bolted to the twin central towers. They have been hanging in the air there ever since.
This icon of Japan’s architectural avant garde is the Nakagin Capsule Tower. If you are interested in viewing it, you had better hurry. The word is that the new owner of the Nakagin company has secured enough votes from capsule owners to go ahead with a large-sale redevelopment scheme. If so, the entire building and its unremarkable neighbours are destined for demolition.
Such a fate would be sad, but inevitable and in some way instructive. The Nakagin symbolizes the boldness and imagination of the era that spawned it, but also the impracticality. There are lessons to be learnt from that too.
Kurokawa was a leading light of the “metabolist” movement which believed that buildings should be dynamic and adaptable like the city itself. Thus, he envisaged the individual capsules being replaced every twenty five years. Ironically, forty nine years after the Nakagin was completed, not a single capsule has been replaced, while the city around it has changed out of all recognition.
In 1972, you could gaze out of your round window – inspired, apparently, by traditional tea ceremony houses – and watch the sun setting over Mount Fuji. Today, far from being the highest building in the area, the Nakagin is overshadowed by the enormous, ultra-modern Shiodome complex. Back then, indeed until the mid-1980s, that area was home to a sprawling railway freight yard.
The inner window opens, but not the outer…. Photo N.W.
Why haven’t the capsules been replaced? Their only point of contact with the rest of the structure are the two high-tension retaining bolts. Yet the tiny space – about six inches – between the capsules suggests that removing just one would be an excruciatingly complicated business. Water-pipes running through each unit would add to the logistical nightmare.
The window shielded from prying eyes… Photo N.W.
Effectively, all the capsules would need to be replaced at once, but such a communal decision has proved impossible to achieve, given the varying opinions of all the owners and the different states of repair of their capsules. The total cost per unit of a full refurbishment is estimated at around ten million yen ($92,000), roughly the same as the current market value of a capsule.
Such human complexity was never part of the vision of the future favoured by avant garde thinkers of the sixties and seventies. They assumed that people would be as modular and uniform as the concrete capsules.
Kurokawa, who passed away in 2007, was an intellectual and something of a celebrity, particularly after his marriage to the luminous film star, Ayako Wakao, the Jeanne Moreau of Japan.
Kurokawa and his wife – campaigning for the Tokyo governorship
The concept behind Nakagin, as set out in his book Homo Movens (“Man in Motion”), was highly ambitious and, in the context of the Covid pandemic, quite prophetic.
“Until now,” Kurokawa wrote, “home life, work and leisure have been separated into different spaces and geographical zones. However, with our twenty four hour days, life is becoming more complex and multi-layered.”
The Nakagin was his response, an assembly of identical pod-like living structures that, depending on the interior furnishings, could serve as “mini-offices, ateliers, hotels, homes, meeting rooms or holiday cabins.”
Any meetings would have had to be sparsely attended. The capsules are tiny, with an area of just ten square metres. That is why the 2008 super-hero movie, The Wolverine, used the building’s memorable exterior to do service as a love hotel, but the interior scenes were shot elsewhere.
At six foot three (190 cm.), male lead Hugh Jackman could hardly fit into a Nakagin capsule, let alone perform a credible fight or love scene inside one.
Jackman and friend in search of a hotel
In the building’s glory days, a staff of “capsule ladies” was on hand to tend to provide secretarial and other services. There are no cooking facilities. The windows are permanently sealed, and the plastic bath-and-toilet unit is about the same size as an airplane loo. Today some of the capsules still retain the original fittings, including Sony reel-to-reel tape-recorders and dial phones.
Retro-tech: an original reel-to-reel tape deck. Photo N.W.
The original selling price was just five million yen, five times the average salary in 1972. Three quarters of the occupants were young “salaryman” businessmen, as Kurokawa had intended. As time went by and real estate prices rose, the Nakagin attracted wealthy CEOs and doctors keen to own a fashionable pied-à-terre so close to the Ginza nightlife. Kurokawa himself, and then his son, also an architect, owned a capsule for many years.
Today, twenty of the capsules are used as residences and some forty as offices. The rest are empty. An Airb&b letting became a victim of the pandemic.
The hard core of remaining occupants, including one foreigner, are in the creative industries. They have had no hot water since 2008, when a pipe broke, but there are health clubs reasonably close at hand that some residents use. Their devotion to the building is admirable, but they are fighting a losing battle against the overwhelming forces of time, economics and human nature.
Making notes on a foldable desk… Photo N.W.
In the words of French poet Paul Valéry, “the problem of our time is that the future is no longer what it used to be.” That is certainly the case with Nakagin, which looks more like a condemned building than a feasible living environment. The foyer is grubby. Tubes and wires protrude from empty capsules. Netting covers the entire exterior to protect pedestrians from falling debris. Capsule roofs and floors contain asbestos.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that metabolism failed because the buildings it produced weren’t metabolic enough to cope with the ever-changing needs of the city’s inhabitants. Surely, preservation of their work as some kind of cultural relic would be the last thing that the young radicals of the late sixties and early seventies would have wanted.
No matter what happens to the Nakagin Capsule Building, Kisho Kurokawa has made a lasting mark on Japan’s urban landscape. In 1979, he came up with a clever variation on his capsule concept by designing the world’s first capsule hotel. The Osaka Capsule Hotel still stands today, together with 300 other capsule hotels in Japan, making for a total of 34,000 capsule “rooms” available on commercial terms.
Kisho Kurokawa in his prime
Clean, convenient and cheap, capsule hotels are a great solution for non-claustrophobes who suddenly need a place to stay in the big city. Once the preserve of salarymen who had missed the last train back to the distant suburbs, they have become increasingly popular with single women and foreign visitors. Some offer sauna and massage, as well as more spacious, two-level capsules.
The idea has taken off in other Asian countries, such as Indonesia and Vietnam, and also some European countries. From the owners’ point of view, they are easy to build and easy to scrap or turn into something else – which makes them truly “metabolic” in both physical and economic terms.
Capsule hotel in Fukuoka
According to Jane Jacobs, the great thinker on urban planning issues, “there is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”
With the capsule hotel, Kurokawa put those words into practice.
“AGANAI – Me and the Cult Leader”
Published in Japan Forward 12/4/2021
At the time, it seemed more like the plot of a bad James Bond movie than everyday reality. Imagine an obese, bearded guru with fifty wives who claims he can float in mid-air. Add a heavily guarded headquarters near Mount Fuji where scientists work tirelessly to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Throw in a giant microwave oven to get rid of the corpses of the guru’s enemies.
Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld would have felt right at home.
Yet the human damage was all too real. On March 20th 1995, Aum Shinrikyo attacked Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki subway station with sarin, a deadly nerve gas. Thirteen unsuspecting commuters were to die agonizing deaths and over 6,000 would be injured, some suffering lasting brain damage. Thirteen cultists, including guru Shoko Asahara, were eventually executed in 2018 for their part in this act of indiscriminate terrorism.
The director of the documentary film AGANAI, Atsushi Sakahara, was in Kasumigaseki station on that fateful day in 1995. He inhaled the toxic fumes and has been living with the physical and mental consequences ever since. In a strange twist, he went on to marry a woman who he subsequently discovered to have been a fringe member of Aum. It comes as no surprise that the marriage did not last.
AGANAI has been well received in various overseas film festivals. Perhaps because it was partly financed by a Hong Kong production company, it comes with English language subtitles even in Japan. That is good – the film deserves wider exposure. Although it tackles one of the most notorious events in recent Japanese history, it has a disturbing message about human nature that has universal significance.
There are two kinds of documentary film. The traditional type assumes an uninvolved, “objective” approach to its material. Then there is the interventionist type, exemplified by the work of Michael Moore, in which the filmmaker enters the world of the film as protagonist and provocateur. AGANAI is very much of that latter type. It consists of a series of conversations between Sakahara and Hiroshi Araki, the head of public relations at Aleph, as the Aum cult now calls itself.
If that sounds boring, it is anything but. The air crackles with tension as the two men engage in mind-games and soul-searching and delve deep into their own pasts. They have some things in common. Natives of the Kansai region, they both studied at Kyoto University in the late 1980s. Both were there when the red-robed Asahara arrived at the campus in a chauffeur-driven limo, hoping to attract highly educated recruits. The future film director yelled out “Go ahead and levitate.” Araki attended the guru’s lecture and was duly hooked. As the ancient Greeks insisted, character is fate.
Kasumigaseki Station 20/3/1995
In his programme notes, Kasahara describes the film as a “road movie.” Like all the best examples of the genre, it features a journey that is metaphorical as well as physical. Together the duo revisit Kyoto University and familiar countryside. Araki proves unusually adept at skipping pebbles in a lake near his grandmother’s house, but breaks down when recalling an illness of his younger brother that was potentially life-threatening but turned out to be trivial. Confronting the reality of life and death in this world was unbearable to him.
Unlike Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin in Midnight Run (1988), which is Kasahara’s favourite road movie, the two men can never be true buddies. AGANAI’s opening sequence – news footage of the mass murder at Kasumigaseki – ensures that.
“Aganai” is the Japanese word for atonement. Kasahara explains that by making the film he is atoning for his failed marriage and the suicide of a close friend that he was unable to prevent. In the course of the film, he forcibly confronts Araki with the need to atone for the crimes of Aum – in which the senior cultist has been passively complicit after the fact. We see posters of Asahara on the walls of the Aum / Aleph headquarters a decade after his guilt was established in court.
Posters of Asahara on the wall
Araki joined Aum in 1992, several years after Asahara returned from a trip to Tibet determined to implement his interpretation of Vajrayana, an esoteric form of Buddhism. The guru chose to take literally texts that are usually considered symbolic, such as this from the Hevajra tantra – “you should kill living beings, speak lying words, take what is not given, consort with the women of others.”
In 1990, an Aum hit-squad broke into the house of a lawyer acting for the relatives of cultists and, on Asahara’s specific instructions, murdered him, his wife and young son. The bodies were buried in remote areas, with faces and teeth smashed to prevent identification. Other killings followed, supposedly required by Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and creation repurposed by Asahara to suit his apocalyptic agenda.
Araki would not have known about that, but the paranoia and psychosis must have been noticeable to anyone willing to notice it. Film director Kasahara extracts one startling admission from Araki: the current head of public relations would not have joined the cult after the sarin attack. But as for leaving now, it seems unlikely. Aum / Aleph is his whole world. It has made him what he is. As Kasahara’s probing makes clear, Araki was a weak and frightened soul from an early age, which made him a natural recruit for Aum.
Araki (in blue) with Director Kasahara
To the western eye, it seems strange that a religious cult could attract masters students at prestigious universities and doctors and scientists. There were also sympathizers in the police, even in a TV network, where supporters managed to insert subliminal images of Asahara into a children’s cartoon.
Does that mean that highly educated Japanese are more gullible than highly educated Westerners? Not necessarily. Western elites tend to be less religious than the general population of their countries, but their record of falling for simple totalizing belief systems is appalling. If we broaden the concept of religion to include political dreamlands, the differences disappear.
It wasn’t truck-drivers and miners who idolized the psychopathic Mao Zedong, but Nobel Prize-winner Jean-Paul Sartre and distinguished American academics, some of whom defend Mao and his cultural revolution to this day. The limits of such delusions were exemplified by the radical British academic Malcolm Caldwell, a staunch supporter of Pol Pot who defended the Cambodian dictator from accusations of mass murder. Invited to Cambodia, he was shot to death by Pol Pot’s men a few hours after interviewing the creator of the “killing fields.”
Simon Leys, the Belgian-Australian sinologist, saw through Mao from on an early stage. This is his view of the dictator’s admirers, at home and abroad –
“What people believe is essentially what they wish to believe. They cultivate illusions out of idealism—and also out of cynicism… They believe because they are stupid, and also because they are clever. Simply, they believe in order to survive. And because they need to survive, sometimes they could gladly kill whoever has the insensitivity, cruelty, and inhumanity to deny them their life-supporting lies.’“ Simon Leys: the New York Review of Books, July 20 1989.
Not a comforting view of human nature, but one that matches the historical record in relation to Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Shoko Asahara and many others.
Director Kasahara chose to write “aganai” in capitalized Roman letters. In the programme notes, he comes up with some wordplay. “Ai ga nai” means “there is no love.” Replace the first word with the English “I”, and you get “there is no me.” One near-anagram that immediately strikes the eye is “again.”
Could an Aum-like phenomenon appear again? If Simon Leys is right, the answer is yes. The human capacity for self-delusion is endless. But where and in what form is anyone’s guess.
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.
Tokyo Junkie: Robert Whiting’s Japan
Published in Nikkei Asia 17/3/2021
”Officials from the police agencies came in and sat alongside yakuza bosses who sat next to CIA agents. At times, one might see Catholic priests and missionaries of other faiths sitting next to exotic dancers and hostesses from neighbouring clubs…”
That was the scene in 1962 at a watering hole in the Roppongi entertainment district called Club 88. It was set up by two former Occupation-era intelligence agents who had gone on to work for a Tokyo-based American black ops group, the Canon Agency, fighting North Korean agents smuggling heroin and crystal meth into Japan.
At Club 88, you might see Shirley MacLaine on a trip to visit her Tokyo-based husband, a businessman named Steve Parker. Or Nat King Cole, dropping in to play a few tunes after a gig.
You might also notice a wiry young American in a cheap, three-piece navy-blue suit sitting in a corner soaking up the vibes. That would be the author of this book, who is probably the only person on the planet capable of telling us what it was like to be there at that particular moment in time.
The legendary Mugen discotheque opened in 1968
“Tokyo Junkie” is a double biography. It describes six decades in the life of Tokyo, and six decades in the life of Robert Whiting. Both would undergo dramatic changes over the years.
The character arc of Tokyo is clear. From a cacophonous, smog-choked sprawl with a limited sewage system to a clean, well-functioning, increasingly vertical city. From “endemic drug use” and rampant burglary to social cohesion and low crime rates. From the ruins of defeat to a city largely at peace with itself.
Bringing the funk in the early 70s
Whiting’s personal journey is more complex and perfectly summed up by his chapter headings – The Soldier, The Student, The Degenerate, The Penitent, The Professional and so on. He presents his young self as a naïve, small-town guy who happened to get a job as a U.S. military data analyst in Japan.
None of his colleagues had any interest in the country to which they had been posted and barely stepped off the base. Whiting was different. As with many long-term residents of Japan, a switch suddenly flicked in his mind and, to continue the metaphor of the book’s title, before he knew it he was hooked on the place.
Several senior figures, including the priest who taught him Japanese, advised young Robert not to waste his time hanging around in a backwater like Japan when there were so many opportunities in “the real world,” whatever that might be. Whiting had the confidence and foresight to ignore them.
Instead, he committed one of the worst offences among Western expats. He “went native,” living in ramshackle apartments, taking his meals in cheap eateries, being moved to tears by an anime series he regularly watched in a neighborhood bar. As time went by, he started to sound Japanese and think Japanese too.
Whiting’s range of acquaintance was exceptionally diverse, taking in hard-charging corporate samurai, gangsters, a plastic surgeon related to the Imperial family, and the future head of the Yomiuri media group, Tsuneo Watanabe. Not many people can say they were kept awake by the sound of pro-wrestling icon Giant Baba practicing falls in the apartment above.
Giant Baba in action
Particularly memorable is a fire-breathing radical girlfriend who suddenly moves back to her hometown and transmutes into a demure housewife. Whiting does not question her choice. On the contrary, in an endearing flash of self-knowledge, he admits “I didn’t know it at the time, but the same thing would be happening to me.”
Within a few years, Whiting did indeed clean up his act, calling time on the temptations of the Tokyo nightlife which have derailed many a promising career. He found a good woman and the career for which his talents had destined him – as a writer.
One of the highlights of the book is Whiting’s account of the 1964 Olympics, which should be read before viewing Kon Ichikawa’s artistically bold film of the event, Tokyo Olympiad. To clean up the country’s image, the government requested gang bosses to dispatch the most “unpleasant-looking” yakuza to the countryside for “spiritual training,” while street-walkers and vagrants magically disappeared from the city too.
Abebe Bikila winning the marathon in 1964
The whole nation was agog with excitement, as the Olympics was widely viewed as the symbol of Japan’s re-entry into the cohort of respectable nations. There were shocks and disappointments – in one case, ultimately leading to the tragic suicide of an athlete – but the overall result was a tremendous success for Japan in terms of medals and, far more importantly, in what we now call soft power.
Given that history, it comes as no surprise that the Japanese government is doing everything in its power to stage another Olympics in 2021. The geopolitical map now is very different from what it was in the early phase of the Cold War and Japan is a very different country. Nonetheless, pulling off a successful Games in the era of Covid-19 would be a similarly impressive feat.
The fact that Japan had negative excess mortality in 2020 – meaning fewer deaths than in a usual year – shows that it is highly qualified for the task.
Robert Whiting is the author of several acclaimed books about Japanese baseball and the best-selling Tokyo Underworld, which recounts the secret history of Japan’s post-war era via the biography of pizza entrepreneur and all-round rascal, Nick Zappetti. These are the nominal subjects of the books, but the underlying theme is culture, its importance, and the trouble it causes when you get it wrong.
In a sense, Whiting is a kind of Lafcadio Hearn for our times. Unlike the pioneering Japanologist, he does not do temples and shrines or wabi sabi aesthetics. He prefers stories about mobsters to ones about goblins, and it is hard to imagine him wandering the streets in a kimono, as Hearn did. Yet the two writers have in common a sense of wonder and empathy toward their chosen subject and adopted home.
Not many foreign writers would have the magnanimity to say what Whiting does about the “salaryman” ethos: “I came to admire them for their dedication to their firms — and to their country. To many Japanese, that gritty all-consuming struggle out of the dust and the ashes was a kind of life fulfilment. There was a certain beauty in it.”
The words of a true Tokyo Junkie. Whiting’s memoir is packed with insights and extremely funny in places. Historians of the post-war period will learn much about the nexus of politics, money, media and organized crime that helped fuel Japan’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes of defeat. It is also a narrative of change and growth – the turbulent maturation of a single individual and of a megalopolis inhabited by some thirty million souls.
And if you simply feel like time-travelling back to Club 88 and chatting to the hoodlums, spies and good-time girls that frequented it, while Nat King Cole tinkles the ivories and Shirley MacLaine flirts with the best-looking missionary, this book is the only way of getting there.
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.
Remembering 3.11: Faces and Voices of Resilience Part 1
Published in Japan Forward 3/3/2021
In the event of an earthquake, you’re supposed to shelter under a table. That’s the official advice, anyway. In the early afternoon of March 11th 2011, when the walls of my dwelling started groaning and shuddering like a creature in pain, primitive instinct took over. Before I knew it, I was outside on the street.
Others were there too, mostly complete strangers. Social distancing comes naturally in Tokyo, but suddenly we were hugging each other for comfort. Waves of energy surged underfoot, causing us to stagger like drunkards. An instant premonition told me that somewhere on this land mass many lives would be lost this day.
In a matter of hours, the giant city had ground to a complete halt. It was unnerving – but as became clear as the days passed, it was nothing compared to the devastation wreaked in the north east region of Japan’s main island. The people of Tohoku, as it is called, had suffered one of the most terrible natural disasters to afflict a developed country in the modern era
The earthquake and tsunami caused 15,899 deaths, nearly all from drowning, with 2,633 missing. The waves of the tsunami are believed to have reached a height of 133 feet and moved at 430 miles per hour, giving people just ten minutes of warning as the wall of water raced to the coast from the epicentre offshore.
The quake itself shoved Honshu, Japan’s largest island, eight feet to the east, and shifted the earth on its axis by some 4-10 inches.
It looked like a warzone: credit, Shoko Hashimoto
As if to prove the saying that bad news comes in threes, at the end of the week nuclear meltdowns occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. In all, over half a million people would have to be relocated.
Such statistics are easily digested. They have a numbing, almost comforting effect, allowing us to think we understand experiences that are unfathomable and unimaginable. How did the people of Tohoku cope with the reality?
***
Shoko Hashimoto’s face is a map of his life. It radiates intensity, strength, humour, boundless curiosity and a wisdom that comes from deeply lived experience. Though he has been based in Tokyo for decades, he seems to come from a different, earthier world – and indeed he does.
He is a native of Ishinomaki, a north eastern port town of some 150,000 souls which was hit hard on March 11th 2011, suffering some 4,000 casualties. He is part of Ishinomaki, and Ishinomaki is part of him.
For many years, Hashimoto held a regular photography workshop for elementary school kids in his hometown. Several of his pupils drowned in the tsunami, which took a terrible toll of schools near the port. Ten years on, he still has some of the photos they took.
A Nichiren priest prays for the dead children: credit, Shoko Hashimoto
He recalls the shock of that dreadful day. “Something awful has happened in my hometown. I don’t know whether my relatives are safe. Kawaguchi Citizens’ Hospital is under water. People are saying that the east side of Kawaguchi Town, the Kadonowaki area, the fish market and the port area have been totally destroyed. One of the men glimpsed on TV in an evacuation shelter was almost certainly my brother.”
It took over a week to confirm that his family members were indeed safe. On March 27th, sixteen days after the quake, he travelled up to Ishinomaki. He was shocked by what he saw. Some parts of the town looked like a war zone.
People rooted through the ruins of their houses, hoping to find something useable, and lined up for emergency rice rations. The smell of putrid fish was everywhere: the tsunami had wrecked trucks packed with seafood produce intended for the major urban centres.
Hashimoto decided immediately to make a photographic record of his hometown’s struggle to return to normality. “What has the disaster taken from people?” he asked himself. “What effect will it have on their daily lives, their values and inner selves?”
In an attempt to answer those questions, over the next three years he made thirty six trips to Ishinomaki, spending the equivalent of twelve months there taking many thousands of photographs.
The empty schoolroom: credit, Shoko Hashimoto
Hashimoto tells me that his childhood ambition was to become a diplomat, as English was his best subject at school. However, he soon came to realize that his heavy Tohoku accent, known as “zuzu-ben” because of the buzz-like intonation, might not go down well in top diplomatic circles. His next ambition was to be a painter, but his elder brother, who went on to become a fine arts teacher in Ishinomaki, got there before him.
In the end, Hashimoto opted for photography, which he studied at Nihon University’s College of Art. After a brief period as an in-house photographer for a monthly magazine – snapping celebrities was “boring”, he says – he took the plunge and became an independent art photographer.
This was at a time when photography was booming and practitioners like Daido Moriyama had the cachet of rock stars. In the 1970s, the photo magazine Asahi Graph, which backed several of Hashimoto’s projects, was able to sell 100,000 copies a week.
Hashimoto’s approach to his work has always been uncompromising and emotionally committed. One of his first projects after turning professional was to document daily life in Sanya, a rough-and-tumble area of east Tokyo where day labourers scuffle for jobs.
In order to understand their world, Hashimoto became a day labourer himself, unloading ship’s cargoes and cleaning up at construction sites. He even spent three days in the “monkey cage” (police holding cell), after photographing, and participating in, an invasion of Tokyo’s City Hall.
Some of his most interesting work has centred on Japan’s remote regions. Nishiyama Onsen: Empire of Nakedness explores the custom of communal mixed bathing in a medicinal spa high in the Yamanashi mountains. It was quite literally an immersive experience for Hashimoto, as he joined the naked throng singing and laughing in the crowded bath.
His Goze project involved roaming the countryside, mostly by foot in harsh conditions, with a small group of sightless female singers and musicians, the last remnants of an age-old tradition. Gaining the acceptance of the all-female band was no easy matter, but Hashimoto’s engaging, open-hearted personality invites trust.
Altogether, he was with them for three years, and the work he produced won him the prestigious Newcomers’ Award from the Japan Photographic Society. His images of 3.11 and its aftermath are just as visceral and haunting.
Trying to make sense of disaster: credit, Shoko Hashimoto
Hashimoto has an obsessive eye for detail. In conversation, he became quite animated on the subject of a classic photo by Bill Brandt. Well-known as the cover image for George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, it portrays a tramp hunting for food in the trash bin of a fancy restaurant while a man in a bowtie and tuxedo looks on.
An academic book had described the bin as being made of plastic. Hashimoto, convinced it was metal, researched the market for bins in 1930s France to prove his point and wrote to the book’s publisher asking for a correction.
The same visual acuity is present in the haiku that he writes. According to the late Tota Kaneko, one of the masters of modern haiku and a stern critic, Hashimoto’s haiku come from the same creative source as his photos and have “a special visual impact”. Here are two examples.
One cold morning
Two people using sign language
Come passing through
Fledgling swallows
Having eaten from mother
Snap their beaks shut
Back in Ishinomaki, Hashimoto lost himself in photography. “It was if I was in a boxing match with the actuality before my eyes,” he recollects. “Day after day, the camera captured piles of rubble, flattened fishing villages, the expressions on people’s faces.”
Sometimes he felt that he was talking to the tsunami itself, which had brought this once-in-a-thousand-years catastrophe. “Why did you do it?” he asked. “What was the real reason?”
The reply was always the same. “It was you.”
What does that mean? Hashimoto talks of an atonement that human beings must experience if they are to be protected from extinction on this earth, of the need to recognize the underlying principles of nature and the gods.
His heart told him to keep on pressing the shutter button.
All the photos in this two part series were taken by Shoko Hashimoto. His photobooks can be purchased online at the Shashasha bookshop.
To be continued…
Burn On, Joe! A 1960s Manga Icon Lifts Spirits Today
Published in Nikkei Asia 17/2/2021
The fate of the 2021 Olympics Games in Tokyo may still be hanging in the balance, but one indirectly related event is already in progress. That is the Tomorrow’s Joe exhibition which I recently viewed at the Bungakukan (“Hall of Literature”) in the city’s Setagaya Ward.
Tomorrow’s Joe is probably Japan’s most famous sports manga. Serialized in the Weekly Shonen Magazine from 1968 to 1973, it has sold over 20 million copies in book form and spawned two hit TV anime series and three films. More than that, it summed up a whole era and way of thinking that still resounds in today’s Japan. Joe Yabuki, the young boxer who is hero of the story, remains a symbol of living with maximum intensity, no matter how daunting the odds.
He is known for his famous words when, toward the end of his last fight, his faithful corner man is about to throw in the towel. “Old man, I’m begging you… let me carry on… until there’s nothing left of me but white ashes,” says Joe.
Joe’s trainer: Danpei Tange
On the day I visited, the diverse range of attendees included young women, families and numerous manga geeks as well as some chaps old enough to have read the first instalment when it was hot off the press. Of the two joint creators, story-writer Ikki Kajiwara passed away over 30 years ago, but artist Tetsuya Chiba is still active, a living legend on the manga scene.
In a recent publication, he describes the background to the creation of Joe. “Back then, the economy was developing rapidly, but at the same time there was a negative side to it. We’d lost our Japanese soul and sense of self-respect, also many people were suffering from pollution, and the beauty of the natural environment was being destroyed. Anyway, however you look at it, we wanted to recover from that terrible lost war and charge forward with reckless abandon.”
Young Joe’s story is a dark one. He arrives out of nowhere, with no friends or relatives, and demonstrates his street-fighting prowess on the mean streets of the Sanya flop-house district of Tokyo. Mythic heroes, from King Arthur to Luke Skywalker, always need a wise mentor to guide them. Joe’s Merlin is a facially scarred, one-eyed ex-boxer who sells his blood for booze money.
Joe is on the cute side of handsome, but the fights are gory and death lurks nearby. In one particularly disturbing scene, we see one of Joe’s opponents as a young boy bashing out the brains of his own father. Chiba based that gruesome incident on his own childhood memories of fleeing Manchuria among scenes of chaos and violence at the end of World War II.
Working class hero Joe
The manga was a tremendous success with students, including radical extremists. The leader of the nine-man armed group which hijacked a Japan Airlines plane and flew to North Korea in 1970 declared in their statement of responsibility: “Make no mistake – we are Tomorrow’s Joe.”
Most of the members of the Japanese Communist League Red Army Faction involved in that incident are dead now, but four remain in North Korea, including the former bass player of Les Rallizes Dénudés, a famed proto-punk band.
There were fans on the other side of the political spectrum too. One summer night in 1969, an editor working late at the offices of publisher Kodansha was amazed to find himself confronted by an impatient Yukio Mishima.
“I can’t wait until tomorrow for Tomorrow’s Joe,” quipped the great novelist and militant nationalist and demanded an advance copy of the magazine, so worried was he that his busy schedule would prevent him from procuring one. The editor quickly obliged.
Tomorrow’s Joe reached its apogee of fame in 1970 when poet and countercultural icon Shuji Terayama arranged a funeral to mark the death in the ring of Joe Yabuki’s great rival, Toru Rikiishi. The exhibit in Setagaya features a mock-up of a boxing ring and contemporary photos of this bizarre ceremony.
The funeral of Rikiishi
Around 800 mourners, ranging from junior high school kids to office workers, attended that event. Also present was Masahiko “Fighting” Harada, a Terayama pal and a former bantamweight and flyweight world champion, as well as the manga’s two creators.
A senior priest from the Soto Zen sect chanted sutras while musty incense wafted over a black-bordered portrait of the “deceased” manga character. In Japanese Buddhist style, he was given an elaborate “new name” to prevent him being called back to this world.
Terayama claimed that the square-jawed Rikiishi, who was dating the daughter of a super-wealthy zaibatsu family, represented the pro-U.S.moneyed elite. Joe, on the other hand, starts off as a petty criminal who dreams of using his ill-gotten gains to build playgrounds and clinics in the slums. In Terayama’s eyes, he stood for revolution, and his defeat by Rikiishi (who died after winning the bout against Joe) symbolized the establishment’s knockout victory over the radical left.
Rikiishi death match
Terayama’s interpretation was creative, but if Tomorrow’s Joe were merely a political fable, it would be forgotten today. The reality is that Joe and Rikiishi had a lot in common. They first meet at a juvenile prison where Rikiishi has been sent for beating up a spectator who insulted him. Joe is in awe of Rikiishi’s prowess and there is a mutual attraction based on their opposing personalities.
In order to make their final match-up possible, Rikiishi reduces his weight by a fifth and drops from welterweight to bantamweight so that he can fight the lighter Joe. This extraordinary feat almost guarantees that Rikiishi will lose.
Haunted by his responsibility for his rival’s death, Joe falls into a deep personal and professional slump, until he learns to take Rikiishi’s courage as his inspiration. His future victories are dedicated to the man he loved, hated and killed.
This is a Japanese story, so there is no Hollywood ending. Joe reaches the top rank of boxers but, unlike Fighting Harada, never becomes world champion. The other guy, reigning champion Jose Mendoza, is just too good.
What actually happens at the end of Joe’s final bout is still a matter of debate amongst fans. One thing is for sure – Mendoza is marked forever by his fifteen round encounter with Joe Yabuki.
Ultimately, Tomorrow’s Joe is a classic because it tells a compelling story of personal growth. Joe is a lazy, thieving street-kid who becomes a man under the influence of mentors, friends and, above all, the sport. Yet it is his inner wildness that makes him such an awesome fighter.
He gives everything he has and more because that is the only way he knows to live.
Joe and me
Not many of us can battle on relentlessly like Joe Yabuki, but now more than ever we need his example.
The exhibition at Setagaya Bungakukan continues until March 31st.