A Japanese Mirror

by Ian Buruma

  The camera cuts to the fat man again, smoking his cigar and talking to another fat man in a foreign suit, also puffing a cigar: the bad gang boss and a corrupt politician. They are discussing the construction of a big office block. Money passes hands. The office block is to be built on the site of the street market upon which the good tradesmen depend for their living. ‘Leave it to me,’ growls the bad boss, with a hideous leer, ‘I’ll take care of them.’

  What we are witnessing is clear: they are the archetypal Japanese villains since the Monobes fought the Sogas: the scheming entrepreneur and the conniving politician, both influenced by wicked foreign ways, both, in a way, ‘progressives’. One hardly needs to point out that they are also caricatures of the architects of the modern Japanese Economic Miracle. To push the point about the old combination of foreignness and evil home even further, they are not just cigar-smoking fat men, they are very often Chinese or Korean cigar-smoking fat men. (In films set in the immediate post-war period, Japanese-Americans, rich and arrogant, are popular villains too.)

  Then we are taken back to the virtuous, loyal and pure Japanese men in their happi-coats. They are listening to their benevolent boss, the oyabun, literally ‘father-figure’, a sickly old man, shaking and trembling from some crippling disease, and always dressed in the simplest of kimonos. The contrast with the bad oyabun could not be greater. The ideal Japanese leader, let us remember, is more like a symbol than a strong boss; he is the banner, or, as one unusually perceptive yakuza said, ‘the portable shrine on the shoulders of the kobun (child-figures)’.5 His function is like God: he is always on our side. For this reason he must remain vague, passive and preferably old and weak – an idol to protect rather than a Führer. In short, he is like a typical Japanese emperor.

  At the same time he has to display an almost maternal indulgence to keep his ‘children’ happy. His will is never clear-cut but always open to many interpretations. If the young officers in the 1936 uprising had been told that the emperor disapproved of their actions (which he apparently did), they would merely have answered that he was being prevented from seeing the true Way by evil advisers, and their emotional demonstrations would have become more violent still. This indulgence demanded of Japanese leaders in return for loyalty from the children perhaps also helps to explain the frequent lack of control of Japanese Generals over their officers during the Second World War.

  The bad oyabun is just the opposite: he is strong, vigorous and healthy, a real leader ruling with an iron fist. He is actually much closer to the romantic bootlegging heroes of American gangster films in the Bogart and Cagney era, who were exaggerated versions of capitalist go-getters.

  The good oyabun, then, admonishes his children to be patient, not to rock the boat, to hold their feelings in check. They may be gangsters, but they are noble gangsters who do not start gang wars at the slightest provocation of mere thugs. This is hard to swallow for the younger yakuza who at this point go through their eye-popping, mouth-twitching, nostril-flaring routine, like bulls impatient to enter the arena. But gaman (forbearance), for the time being, wins the day.

  The provocation becomes worse, however: more stalls are kicked over, some are even burnt down. In a sub-plot somebody’s girlfriend, often a golden-hearted prostitute connected to the good gang, is killed. One of the good yakuza brothers is beaten up. It is only with the greatest difficulty that the dignified old oyabun can restrain his children now.

  Then something happens to push them over the brink, that brings them to the end of their gaman. Just as he is enjoying a quiet stroll in the evening with his little grandson, the good oyabun himself is shot in the back. This is typical, for villains carry guns, something strictly for cowards and foreigners. True Japanese heroes fight with their swords.

  Now we go to the deathbed scene. The old oyabun, tucked into his blankets, whispers his last words, usually a last appeal for restraint, to the sobbing children surrounding his bed. This is the moment late-night aficionados of the genre have been waiting for. A fan shouts ‘Cry, damn it!’ at the screen, and, sure enough, the sobbing of the loyal gangsters becomes louder and louder until they sound like professional wailers at a primitive wake.

  Hysteria finally takes over: the kobun prepare to attack the enemy in one mad rush. But then the real hero of the story steps in: ‘How can you behave like this in front of our oyabun?’ he says. ‘You stay, I’m going alone.’ ‘No, no, let us come with you!’ plead the kobun, eyes bulging. ‘Don’t you understand!’ cries the hero. And being Japanese gangsters, they rather reluctantly do understand. Order must prevail and this means that honour can only be saved by one scapegoat.

  The hero removes his happi-coat with the gang insignia, symbolically breaking with the group. He becomes an individual acting alone. He is helped into his best kimono by his wife who, understandably, finds it rather hard to bear. But she too understands why her husband has to die. Kimochi ga tsujita, the feeling is understood.

  He sets off to meet the enemy. His last journey, though often solitary, is much like the michiyuki, the lovers’ suicide trip on the Kabuki stage: it is accompanied by the melancholy title-song on the soundtrack:

  When you decide to do it, you must carry it out to the end

  If we discard our sense of giri

  Life is just a dark pit

  Do not hesitate or stop

  Rain falls softly in the night.6

  This may not seem like a very belligerent or even macho song. But then it is not meant to be. Neither were the songs by kamikaze pilots before they set off on their last sortie. The point of the scapegoat warrior is not that he kills others, but that he faces certain death himself. It is the sad poignancy of this moment that moves the audience. Late-night fans might shout ‘Yare!’, ‘Go to it!’, but this is like Spanish encouragement to the bull, backing up the sacrificial victim, before he purifies us with his death.

  Purification through death is a universal phenomenon: Christianity is based on it. But the Shinto cult, upon which Japanese purification ceremonies are based, has strong taboos about death and also about any form of bleeding. Both are forms of pollution. The Edo-period scholar Hirata Atsutane wrote in The Jewelled Sword (Tamadasuki) that even in the case of ‘nose bleeds, one should purify oneself by performing ablutions and make a pilgrimage to a shrine’.

  Yamamoto Jocho, author of the Hagakure, and an ex-priest obsessed with death, was aware of the contradiction. How can one be purified by something as polluted as death? He resolved the conflict in a very Japanese way – by simply ignoring it.

  ‘I believe in the effectiveness of praying to the gods for military success … If the gods are the sort to ignore my prayers simply because I have been defiled by blood, I am convinced there is nothing I can do about it, so I go ahead with my worship regardless of pollution.’7

  Mishima suggested that ‘samurai could not always be faithful to such ancient Shinto precepts. It is rather a convincing argument that they replaced with death the water that purifies all these defilements.’8 In other words, death, if chosen with pure, motives, purifies itself.

  I am not convinced of this. Rather it seems a case of aesthetics acting as a purifier. Death in the Hagakure, and indeed in Mishima’s own life and works, is a work of art, an artificial act, albeit with rather extreme consequences. In this way the ritual robs the taboo of its danger. Mishima once wrote that ‘men must be the colour of cherry blossoms, even in death. Before committing ritual suicide, it was customary to apply rouge to the cheeks in order not to lose life colour after death.’9 This seems to me an apt summing up of that odd mixture of effeminate dandyism and macho posturing that is such an important feature of death in the samurai cult, the Kabuki theatre and yakuza films.

  The final climactic battle of the lonely hero against an army of bad men is the spectacular and bloody catharsis to complete the ritual. We see the hero, sometimes with a friend, reveal his tattoo before slashing his way through the ranks of villains who desperately pump more and more b
ullets into his naked torso. But the spirit, in the best Japanese tradition, is stronger than the flesh, and the hero keeps going oblivious to the shots fired at point blank range. He keeps on slashing until he finally cuts down the bad oyabun, hitherto hidden behind a protective wall of kobun. Blood squirts, streams and splashes all over the screen in true Grand Guignol manner.

  Finally, mission accomplished, the hero staggers to his inevitable demise, his tattoo covered in blood. The dying man who has been the silent type all through the film usually deems this the appropriate moment for a long speech about his deepest feelings. At this supreme emotional climax he is usually held in the tender arms of his best friend, it being, as we have noted before, very much a man’s world.

  Emotional statements are an important part of dying in Japanese drama, Kabuki or yakuza. As usual this tradition arrived at its present form during the Edo period when it was rather dangerous for a person to speak his or her mind openly. It was – and still is – also considered a trifle vulgar. Feelings are to be felt, not talked about; opinions may be held, but not voiced. Strong opinions can upset social harmony and thus, one is told, silent communication of feelings is an outstanding feature of Japanese social intercourse.

  Earnest Japanese anxious to explain their culture to the ignorant foreigner still like to harp on this. It is as if every Japanese is equipped with a non-verbal emotional transmitter which functions only with other Japanese.

  Only imminent death seems to release previously unsuspected wells of loquaciousness. The common explanation is that certain death frees one at last to say what one really thinks or feels. Thus famous last words are always last speeches in Japanese drama, for the great soliloquies are always left to the very end.

  Various types of yakuza heroes represent different qualities the Japanese particularly admire. Because most yakuza films are the product of the same company (Toei) these stereotypes are often played by the same actors. The young Turk, pure, stoical and itching for a fight is acted by Takakura Ken. The good oyabun is usually played by such rickety matinée idols of yesteryear as Arashi Kanjuro. The violent type, whose purity and honesty always lead him into trouble is played by Wakayama Tomisaburo. But one actor in particular seems to combine all the elements that make a perfect yakuza hero; he is the most archetypal, most traditional, most essentially Japanese of them all: Tsuruta Koji. He is to the Japanese what ‘Duke’ Wayne was to Americans, even though the two men could not be more different.

  The one thing they have in common is that both men are like angels of a lost paradise, making a brave last stand for values that can only exist in a mythical past. Tsuruta Koji has the melancholy, haunted look of a man who has seen it all but still, somehow, manages to keep going, like an ageing courtesan or a seasoned gambler who sticks to the old rules in a bad new world where everyone plays dirty. He is the essence of what the Japanese call iki – the raffish elegance of hard-won experience.

  His heyday as a yakuza star is now over, but he still appears on television as a singer of noble gangster songs or sentimental wartime ballads, sometimes dressed in full naval uniform. Fan magazines and record-jacket notes never cease to inform us that Tsuruta was on the list to be a kamikaze pilot. But this chance of glory was cruelly cut short by Japan’s final defeat and like the rest of his countrymen Tsuruta Koji was forced to suffer the insufferable.

  Suffering is very much part of his image. Mishima wrote about him that ‘he makes the beauty of gaman shine brightly’.10 Indeed, Tsuruta is all gaman. The main thing he suffers from is being an anachronism. A typical beginning of a Tsuruta film shows him coming out of jail after several years, dressed in a kimono. He finds the world a changed place: his old friends wear suits now and work for construction companies taking kick-backs and bribing politicians. He is of course appalled and appeals to his friends’ sense of yakuza honour and humanity. ‘Ah, you’re talking about giri and ninjo now, are you,’ they sneer, ‘well, those days are over. Besides they were just tricks to make us go to war.’ ‘Whatever they are,’ answers Tsuruta, ‘they suit me. Without giri there’s nothing left.’

  Tricks to make us go to war. By having the villain equate splendid old-fashioned values with militarism the makers of the film drop a subtle hint that the wartime Japanese were somehow more noble than we are today. Ah ha, one thinks, right-wing propaganda. Certainly nobody could accuse producers of yakuza films of being leftists, but in fact, Right and Left are virtually meaningless in Japan as far as these matters are concerned. The yearning for the pure and noble past is not a sign of renascent fascism or ‘feudalism’ so much as a popular reaction to the cultural confusion of modern times. Yakuza heroes, especially during the turbulent 1960s, were as popular with radical students as with nostalgic old soldiers of the Empire. Images of Takakura Ken were brandished by students behind the barricades of Tokyo University in 1969. There is a connection between this kind of radical romanticism and nationalism, to which I shall return.

  Tsuruta almost always dies at the end of his films. Usually he is shot in the back by cowards in suits, sometimes symbolically set against a background of brand-new oil refineries or smoke-belching factories with blood-red skies like images out of some modernistic Hell. His death is as inevitable as the suicide of the forty-seven ronin. There is no place for the reactionary hero in the modern world, whether he is Yorozu in the sixth century or Tsuruta in 1967. He is like a spirit of the past conjured up like those living ghosts in No plays. His function – this is certainly true of spirits in No – is to remind us of the fleeting sadness of the world of man and once the ceremony is over he has to disappear.

  Tsuruta also suffers because his adherence to the code of honour often conflicts with his private feelings: the age-old battle between giri and ninjo, in other words, but with a slight twist. The yakuza code of honour, expressed in such terms as jingi (righteousness) or ninkyo (nobility), is not the same as justice in the West. Unlike Gary Cooper or John Wayne, or Mr Smith going to Washington, Tsuruta never thinks of anything as abstract as justice. Justice, in London or Hollywood, is a universal concept. It is symbolized by a blindfolded goddess weighing the scales, almost ruthless in her fairness. To the Japanese way of thinking this seems too cold, almost too impartial, because it fails to take the many, often irrational complexities of human relations into account. Justice for its own sake is meaningless to the Japanese hero. His code of honour exists only in the context of his own personal relationships, usually, in the case of yakuza, confined to the gang. Nobility in Japanese heroes is highly parochial.

  There is a stock scene to be seen in countless Japanese gangster films: a yakuza, escaping from the law perhaps, or the vengeance of a rival gang, seeks temporary refuge with another gang. He becomes a kyakubun, a ‘guest member’. But before he is accepted he has to go through an elaborate introduction ceremony executed in an awkward crouching position, bending the front knee and stretching the right hand, palm up, towards the other person. This ritual whereby the guest intones his name and personal history in stilted traditional language, as if reciting a liturgy, can take minutes of screen time. This is typical of the ceremonial atmosphere of the mythical yakuza world.

  In return for his shelter, the guest is obliged by giri to his hosts to do whatever they ask him. He can be ordered, for instance, to murder a rival oyabun, who may be a perfectly honourable and innocent man. Justice would of course forbid him to undertake such a mission, but jingi does not. He must do it. If the guest is an honourable man, he will say to his adversary: ‘I have nothing against you personally, sir. You seem to be a man of honour, but alas giri to my hosts obliges me to take your life.’ ‘I thank you for your polite words,’ replies the victim, ‘let us proceed.’ They draw their swords and the murder is duly executed.

  As the story goes on, however, the bad ‘host’ gang’s behaviour gets worse and worse, until the gaman of the guest member reaches its limits and his feelings of decency (ninjo) get the better of him. But simply to go over to a rival gang would break
all yakuza rules. He probably would not even be accepted. This means that he must turn on his hosts, but always at the cost of his own life. By cutting himself loose he acts as an individual and, as we have seen before, the price for that is death. This is why the friend who joins the hero on his last death march is very often just such a former guest member of a bad gang. Nevertheless, even this last dramatic deed is not prompted by justice so much as by his personal feelings.

  Tsuruta Koji is faced with a similar kind of predicament in one of the best films he ever acted in, entitled ‘Presidential Gambling’. This time the bad gang is his own. Though the next in line to be boss is Tsuruta himself, the post is taken over by an evil man who acts as the regent for a young and ineffectual oyabun. Tsuruta’s best friend, played by the specialist in hot-headed heroes, Wakayama Tomisaburo, popularly known as Wakatomi, rebels against this unfair state of affairs. Tsuruta, of course, simply shows his usual gaman. The code must be preserved until the very end, even though he himself may be the victim.

  Eventually Wakatomi’s violent rebelliousness becomes such a threat to the group order, that Tsuruta is forced to break the saké cup that sealed their original brotherhood. With the heavy symbolism typical of the genre, this scene is shot in a cemetery, dark and wet in the pouring rain. Finally, out of giri to the young oyabun, who is attacked by the impetuous Wakatomi, he is compelled to do the unthinkable: kill his own best friend, whose rebellion was started for Tsuruta’s own sake in the first place.