Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  Fashion in Osaka is not like fashion elsewhere. Tokyo is the home of trends: all the businessmen wear the same blue suit, housewives wear the same Armani, artists wear the same pastel shirts with high collars, and the young people hanging out at Yoyogi wear whatever the latest craze happens to be. Kyoto people are afraid to do anything that might make them stand out, so they dress rather drably – like Tokyo on a bad day. But Osaka is a riot of ill-matched color, tasteless footwear and startling hairdos. Satoshi puts it this way: ‘In Tokyo, people want to wear what everyone else is wearing. In Osaka, people want to shock.’

  Japan’s national problem is homogeneity. The school system teaches everybody to say and think the same thing, and the bureaucracies restrict the development of new media, such as cable TV, the information superhighway and even movie theaters. As a result, no matter where you go, from Hokkaido to Kyushu, all the houses look the same, the clothes look the same, and people’s lives center around the same humdrum activities. With everyone so well behaved and satisfied with their mediocre lives, Japan specializes in low-level pleasures. Pachinko is the perfect example. Why has pachinko swept Japan? It can hardly be the excitement of gambling, since the risks and rewards are so small. During the hours spent in front of a pachinko machine, there is an almost total lack of stimulation other than the occasional rush of ball bearings. There is no thought, no movement; you have no control over the flow of balls, apart from holding a little lever which shoots them up to the top of the machine; you sit there enveloped in a cloud of heavy cigarette smoke, semi-dazed by the racket of millions of ball bearings falling through machines around you. Pachinko verges on sensory deprivation. It is the ultimate mental numbing, the final victory of the education system.

  In a department store in Tokyo recently, I saw a girl at the Shiseido cosmetics counter who summed this up. She was seated demurely at the counter, while the attendant did something with her make-up kit. The girl’s head was tipped forward, and her long black hair hung around her on all sides, completely obscuring her from view. Her hands were folded with eternal patience in her lap; her down-turned head faced the table. The passivity, the way in which her hair shut out the outside world – it was a distinctive posture which I have seen in Japan so many times. Sensory deprivation? Passive silence? Fear of the world? I wish I could find the right words for it, but Japan is becoming a nation of people like this.

  Donald Richie, dean of the Japanologists in Tokyo, once made this observation to me: ‘The people of Iya were not the only ones who escaped regimentation during the military period. There was one other group: people living in the downtowns of big cities like Edo and Osaka. The merchants in these cities were a different breed from the farmers, with their need to cooperate in rice growing, and the samurai, with their code of loyalty and propriety. The samurai despised the merchants as belonging at the bottom of the social totem pole, but at the same time, the merchants had the freedom to enjoy themselves. The brilliant realm of the “floating world” – Kabuki, the pleasure quarters, colorful kimono, woodblock prints, novels, dance – belonged to the old downtowns. Even today, people from these neighborhoods are different from ordinary Japanese.’

  This is especially true of Osaka. The downtown neighborhoods of Tokyo, while they still exist, have largely lost their identity, but Osaka maintains a spirit of fierce independence which goes back a long way. Originally, Osaka was a fishing village on the Inland Sea called Naniwa. The writer Ryotaro Shiba maintains that the colorful language and brutal honesty of Osaka people can be traced to Naniwa’s seaport past.

  Osaka dialect is certainly colorful. Standard Japanese, to the sorrow of Edan and Trevor, has an almost complete lack of dirty words. The very meanest thing you can shout at somebody is kisama, which means literally, ‘honorable you’. But Osaka people say such vividly imaginative things that you want to sit back and take notes. Most are unprintable, but here is one classic Osaka epithet: ‘I’m going to slash your skull in half, stir up your brains and drink them with a straw!’ The fishwife invective and the desire to shock produced the playful language that is the hallmark of Osaka dialect. When Satoshi describes a visit to the bank, it’s funnier than the routines of most professional comics. It begins with the bank, and ends with the dice tattooed on his aunt’s left shoulder. Free association of the sort he employs is called manzai, and it is Japan’s most popular form of humor. Osaka people have manzai in the blood. That’s why comedians have to come here to study.

  During the early Nara period, Naniwa was Japan’s window to the world, serving as the main port of call for embassies from China and Korea. Osaka was so important as the seat of diplomacy that the capital was based there several times in the seventh century before finally being moved to Nara. In the process, numerous families from China and Korea emigrated to the Naniwa region, and Heian-period censuses show that its population was heavily of continental origin. In the late sixteenth century, Osaka’s harbor shifted from Naniwa to Sakai, a few kilometers south. As Chinese silk and Southeast Asian ceramics flooded into Japan, the Osaka merchants grew rich; among them was Sen no Rikyu, founder of tea ceremony. For several decades Osaka was again Japan’s window to the world, and outshone Kyoto as the source of new cultural developments. During the Edo period, the Shogunate closed the ports and three hundred years of isolation set in. But Osaka continued to thrive, its merchants establishing themselves as wholesale rice brokers and moneylenders. Certain unique occupations grew up, such as ‘runners’, who still exist even today; their job is to visit one wholesaling street and jot down prices, then dash over to the next street to report them to competitors – and then do the same thing in reverse.

  The mercantile ethos in Osaka resulted in many of Japan’s largest businesses being based there, such as Sumitomo and the trading house Itochu, which did more volume of business in 1995 than any other company in the world. Osaka’s good fortune lay in the fact that the government left the city almost totally free of control. In Tokyo there was the Shogun; in Kyoto there was the Emperor; but in Osaka there was nobody on top, except a skeleton staff of the Shogun’s officials holed up in Osaka Castle, pitifully unprepared to join in a battle of wits with wily Osaka merchants. The ratio of samurai to population was so low that people could go their whole lives without meeting one. In Edo, the Shogunate built bridges; in Osaka, private businessmen built them. In other words, in Osaka, the people ran their own lives.

  In recent years, the fact that certain areas like Shinsekai have became slums has acted as a protection, scaring away the developers and investors who raised land prices and transformed the face of Tokyo. Osaka preserved its identity, which goes right back to the old seaport of Naniwa. So when friends ask me to show them the ‘true Japan of ancient tradition’, I don’t take them to Kyoto: I take them to Osaka.

  However, Osaka today stands at a critical juncture. It has preserved its local dialect more successfully than any other city in Japan, and much of the brash insouciance of its people has survived; but TV and modern education are beginning to succeed where a thousand years of samurai government failed. Osaka people are becoming well behaved, and with their newfound good manners, they are becoming just like everybody else. In a classic case of misguided urban redevelopment, the city, ashamed of Shinsekai’s reputation as a slum, is planning to tear down Janjan Yokocho and replace it with the sort of colorless arcade seen everywhere.

  A different option for the revitalization of Shinsekai is illustrated by Amerika-mura (‘America Town’). This is a district of several blocks of import shops and novelty stores which was developed in the 1980s. No civic administrator decided to establish Amerika-mura; it’s not even known when the district acquired its name, now commonly shortened to Ame-mura. It just grew up, as young entrepreneurs started selling American jeans and boots on the streets behind the Nikko Hotel. Around the time of the Osaka Expo, a woman named Higiri Mariko opened a café-bar called Loop in the neighborhood. Loop caught on, and in 1976 Hijiri expanded her operations into Palms Di
sco, to which Osaka’s young people flocked. More cafés, discos and shops opened, and today Amerika-mura boasts hundreds of stores and is always crowded with young people day and night. Leaving it up to the people themselves is the traditional Osaka way, but it is the one option least likely to occur in modern Japan.

  As it turned out, Taro Okamoto’s ‘Tower of the Sun’ was just as ill-fated as the ‘Tower Reaching to Heaven’. Until Expo 70, Osaka’s last shining moment, the four big cities of Kansai held their own in the contest of power with Tokyo. However, one of the core developments during Japan’s period of rapid economic expansion was massive involvement by government agencies in trade and technology. As all these agencies are located in Tokyo, it became essential to be based there; as a result, Tokyo’s dominance is near total, and Kansai is slowly falling off the map. There could be no better indication of this than the incredibly slow response of the central government to the 1995 earthquake in Kobe. As people in Osaka and Kobe remarked at the time, ‘Would the prime minister have waited half a day to send in help if a disaster had occurred in Tokyo? No, the mismanagement on the part of the government was because the earthquake was in Kansai.’

  In the 1990s, developments in the art world bypass Kyoto and Nara; trade and business ignore Osaka and Kobe. Even giants like Sumitomo and Itochu, which are officially registered in Osaka, are managed out of their headquarters in Tokyo. Osaka has been relegated to the position of Branch Office of Japan Inc. The only hope for the city’s regeneration is to make it once more an international port, and there is much talk of turning Osaka into the ‘gateway to Asia’. Unfortunately, the chances of this happening are slim, as bureaucracies such as the Transport Ministry maintain their stranglehold on harbors and airports; for instance, the recently completed Kansai International Airport is so expensive and over-regulated that most international airlines shun it. For a moment there was a golden opportunity for Kansai to establish itself as the airline hub of East Asia, but the initiative has been lost to South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore.

  The future of Osaka as an interesting place is in doubt. It is the last bastion against the sea of ordinariness sweeping over Japan, and when it goes there will be many who miss it. In the words of Tamasaburo, ‘The decline of Kyoto I can live with. But please, please, Osaka never change!’

  CHAPTER 13

  The Literati

  Doing Nothing

  As the Chinese monk Lin-chi, founder of Rinzai Zen, lay dying, his disciples tried to reassure him by saying, ‘We will pass your wisdom on to future generations.’ ‘Then all is lost,’ cried Lin-chi. ‘My teachings will die with you, a pack of blind mules!’

  At the temple of Manpuku-ji, south of Kyoto, there is a large plaque over the Founder’s Hall, and on it is written, ‘The eyes of a blind mule’. The plaque is in the hand of Ingen, a Rinzai monk who fled from China to Japan after the fall of the Ming dynasty. At that time, Zen in Japan was in a state of decadence: teaching at the head temples of Daitoku-ji and Myoshin-ji in Kyoto had lost all rigor, and Zen was becoming a mere formula. When Ingen arrived in Nagasaki in 1654, he created a sensation. Tall, white-haired and austere, Ingen stood for no nonsense. ‘With a wild blow from my stick, I show who will live and who will die’, reads one of a pair of plaques by him at Manpuku-ji; on the other side, it says, ‘With a fierce Katsu! I shout who is dragon and who is snake’.

  Soon, several senior Myoshin-ji monks converted to Ingen’s Zen, and one of them invited Ingen to Kyoto, aiming to have him installed as abbot of Myoshin-ji. This sparked an anti-Ingen demonstration within Myoshin-ji by monks who disliked the idea of their institution being taken over by a foreigner. Just at that juncture, the young Shogun Ietsuna heard of Ingen and invited him up to Edo. The eighteen-year-old Shogun was completely taken by Ingen, and offered him something even better than Myoshin-ji: hundreds of acres of land south of Kyoto, where he could build a Chinese Zen temple, and establish his own sect, known as Obaku. With the full resources of the Shogunate behind him, Ingen imported shiploads of teak logs from Thailand and Burma and marble column bases carved in Beijing, and he built his Manpuku-ji Temple completely in the Chinese style. The Shogun and his warlords went on to support the building of hundreds of Obaku temples throughout the land.

  Ingen brought with him not only Zen, but Ming-style calligraphy and sencha (Chinese tea ceremony). Meanwhile, back at Myoshin-ji, the ‘Ingen shock’ lasted for decades. The monks revived the zendo (meditation hall), copying the one built by Ingen at Manpuku-ji. The anti-Ingen faction leaders shouted ‘Katsu!’ even louder and struck even more fiercely with their sticks; the disciples of the anti-Ingen group included such great masters as Hakuin and Takuan, and Myoshin-ji Zen came alive again. In this way, both by action and reaction, one Chinese monk succeeded in revolutionizing Japanese Rinzai Zen.

  Manpuku-ji still stands largely unchanged from Ingen’s day. The entrance is a three-tiered gate, designed after the pai-lou decorative gates of China. Inside, corridors of teak columns and swastika-patterned balustrades surround a courtyard planted with pine trees. On every gate and over every building is posted calligraphy by Ingen and his disciples. Manpuku-ji is pure Ming China.

  Japan is like an oyster. An oyster dislikes foreign objects: when even the smallest grain of sand or broken shell finds its way inside the oyster’s shell, the oyster finds the invasion intolerable, so it secretes layer after layer of nacre upon the surface of the offending particle, eventually creating a beautiful pearl. However, while pearls may vary slightly in size or luster, they all look very much alike. In the process of coating, not a trace remains of the shape or color of the grain of sand inside. In like manner, Japan coats all culture from abroad, transforming it into a Japanese-style pearl. The finished pearl is a thing of great beauty – often, as in the case of tea ceremony, more refined than the original – but the essential nature of the original is lost. This is why Japan, which has hundreds of thousands of Italian and Chinese restaurants, has almost no genuine Italian or Chinese food. Ingredients are altered and watered down, and there is even a brand of olive oil that bears the label ‘Specially Reconstituted for Japanese Taste’.

  While foreign influence is welcomed, the cardinal rule is never to delegate responsibility to foreigners themselves. This was one of the principal points of friction between the Trammell Crow Company and Sumitomo Trust. Sumitomo Trust avidly sought Trammell Crow’s know-how, but strongly resisted allowing the manager from Dallas to run the office in Japan. This, more than any other factor, led to Trammell Crow’s decision to sell out to Sumitomo Trust and withdraw from the Kobe Fashion Mart project before its completion.

  In my business days, I often met foreign staff who had been brought in to help out at the head offices of Japanese banks or insurance companies. Sometimes we would go out for a drink after work, and I would invariably be treated to a tale of woe. Elite stockbrokers from New York or London saw wealthy Japan at that time as the ultimate career opportunity. They arrived expecting to carve a niche in the booming Tokyo business world, only to find that their companies never gave them any authority or listened to their advice; the longer they stayed, the greater their unhappiness. Meanwhile, Japanese executives would confide, ‘You can’t rely on foreigners. We bring them into the office, show them everything, and then they leave us for another company.’ The reason, of course, is that in most cases a position given to a foreigner in a Japanese company is a career dead end. This is now a very real problem in Southeast Asia, where the Japanese have invested massively and have a great need for well-educated local staff. However, these are the very people who object to being kept in low-level positions, and they soon leave.

  For most of its recorded history, Japan has succeeded in keeping foreigners out. The biggest exception was in the decades before World War II, when thousands of Overseas Chinese moved to Yokohama and Kobe, and hundreds of thousands of Koreans were forcibly brought over to Japan as laborers. The descendants of these settlers form large and vocal communities today. Most
of the other well-known cases of foreign presence in Japan, especially those involving Westerners, disguise failures rather than successes. For instance, during the Edo period, the Dutch were allowed to trade from the island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbor. Heavily guarded, the island was connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway, which was closed after hours; traders could only venture onto the mainland with special passes for a limited length of time. The noteworthy thing about Dejima was that it was not a device to let the Dutch in – it was a way of keeping them out.

  Kobe’s ijinkan (‘alien residences’), a group of grand houses inhabited by foreign traders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are a popular tourist destination. Guidebooks describe them as an example of Kobe’s internationalism, but the houses actually represent a failed community. The families who once lived there have disappeared, and the number of foreign residents in Kobe is shrinking year by year; in the 1980s the American Consulate moved to Osaka, and in the 1990s Kobe’s international schools are struggling to survive.

  The history of keeping foreigners out is inextricably bound up with Japan’s smoothly functioning social systems – which is why Japan has not allowed in large numbers of foreign workers or students, even though its industry needs the cheap labor, and Japan’s future partly depends on its success in training a corps of foreign engineers and business people educated here. Allowing people of many races, creeds and philosophies to move too freely in Japanese society is viewed by conservative government officials as destabilizing. For the time being, therefore, the doors stay open only a crack.