by Ian Buruma
There were dissidents, even in those days. Many of them were Communists, who spent the war in jail. And some writers with well-established reputations could afford to retreat into “inner emigration.” But on the whole, writers, journalists, academics, and artists conformed. This was sometimes enforced, not least by the sinister “Thought Police” who were always ready to pounce on domestic critics. But oppression in wartime Japan was not as heavy-handed and violent as it was in Germany. It didn’t have to be. Exile, unlike in Germany, was not really an option for most Japanese; few had either the contacts or the language ability. The thought of being excluded, or driven to the margins of society, was threatening enough for most people to rally around the national cause. The intricate social web of press clubs, advisory committees, state-sponsored arts and academic institutions, and mutually helpful bureaucrats, soldiers, businessmen, and politicians was flexible and inviting enough to co-opt even many of those who were privately skeptical about the Japanese war.
A typical case was that of Mori Shogo, a respected member of the editorial board at the Mainichi newspaper during the war. The Mainichi is still one of the three major news organizations. (The others are the liberal-leaning Asahi and the more conservative Yomiuri.) Mori was not a dissident but a patriot who was devastated by the Japanese wartime defeat. During the war, he conformed to the official truth: Japan was liberating Asia, military defeats were really victories, and so on. What is fascinating about the diary he kept in the immediate aftermath of the war is the sudden spark of independent thinking.6
Mori complains about the hypocrisy of American press censorship during the occupation: “We newspaper men had a difficult time during the war, when we were fettered by the militarists and the bureaucrats. Now, under the occupation of the US Army, we can expect another period of hardship.” But the problems were not just those imposed by General MacArthur’s “Department of Civil Information” (a misnomer, if there ever was one). Mori describes a meeting, in the fall of 1945, of senior Mainichi editors to discuss the “press club system.” Should this comfortable cartel of the major media, mutually agreeing on what news to report, be continued, or should the papers begin to compete in a free market of news and ideas? Mori favored the latter option. But he was in a minority. The old system continued.
And so it was that in the spring of 2011, after the worst natural calamity to hit Japan since the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, or, to go along with Oe, the worst man-made disaster since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese mainstream press decided to stick together and pass on the official truth, given out by government officials and TEPCO executives, that there was no danger of a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Not only that, but reporters from the major newspapers and broadcasters retreated together, like a disciplined army, from the worst-stricken areas after the first hydrogen explosion in Fukushima Daiichi on March 12. The official reason was that their companies would not allow them to take risks. McNeill, who was there, mentions Japanese who had other explanations.
An emeritus professor from Kobe College, Uchida Tatsuru, gave the Asahi newspaper his take on the journalistic retreat. There had been no attempt to investigate the disaster zone because the main papers were afraid to compete, to do anything different from the others. He claimed that this reminded some readers of the war, when the media consistently published complete fabrications about Japan’s disastrous military operations.
One of the heroes in the Fukushima story is Sakurai Katsunobu, the mayor of Minamisoma, a town fifteen miles from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. He complained to Japanese journalists that “the foreign media and freelancers came in droves to report what happened. What about you?” Cut off from information and essential food and medical supplies, he felt that his town was being abandoned. Out of desperation he turned to something that would not have been possible in previous crises. On March 24, Mayor Sakurai put a camcorded message on YouTube, with English subtitles, begging for help: “We’re not getting enough information from the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co.” He asked journalists and helpers to come to his town, where people were faced with starvation.
The video “went viral.” Sakurai became an international celebrity. Aid poured in from all over the world. And foreign as well as freelance Japanese reporters did come.
Birmingham and McNeill mention one Japanese freelancer, named Teddy Jimbo, the founder of an Internet broadcaster called Video News Network. His television images from the earthquake zone were seen by almost a million people on YouTube. Meanwhile, NHK was still sending out reassuring messages on national TV, backed by a nuclear expert from Tokyo University named Sekimura Naoto, who told viewers that a major radioactive disaster was “unlikely” just before an explosion at one of the reactors caused a serious nuclear spill.
Sekimura is also an energy consultant to the Japanese government. Later, much too late, NHK and other broadcasters finally bought some of Jimbo’s footage. In his words, quoted by Birmingham and McNeill:
For freelance journalists, it’s not hard to beat the big companies because you quickly learn where their line is.… As a journalist I needed to go in and find out what was happening. Any real journalist would want to do that.
No less than in China or Iran, the Internet has proved to be a vital forum for dissident voices in Japan. Another, older source of critical views is the varied world of the weekly magazines, some serious and some sensational entertainment. The weeklies came into their own after World War II as an alternative to the major media, even though some of them are actually published by the big newspapers. And they do not mince their words. One journal, Shukan Shincho, called the TEPCO executives “war criminals.”7 But even the magazines can quickly run into the limits of what is permissible. AERA, a weekly magazine published by Asahi, had a masked nuclear worker on the cover of its issue dated March 19, 2011, with the headline “Radiation Is Coming to Tokyo.” Even though, as Birmingham and McNeill point out, this was not untrue, the magazine was deemed to have gone too far. An apology was published and one of the columnists fired.
So there are gaps in the official truth of Japan. One of the unintended consequences of the 3/11 catastrophe has been the widening of these gaps. Fewer people believe what they are told. Cynicism toward officially sponsored experts has grown. Some see this as a problem. In March, Bungei Shunju, a prominent political journal, published an anniversary issue of the earthquake. One hundred well-known writers were asked to comment on 3/11. One of them, the novelist Murakami Ryu, lamented the lack of trust that resulted from the disaster, trust in government and the energy industry. It would take years, he said, to regain the trust of the Japanese people. Murakami is sixty and enjoys a reputation for being cool, even a bit of a bad boy.
Nosaka Akiyuki, one of the best postwar Japanese novelists, born in 1930, is a survivor of the bombing raids in World War II.8 He had a rather different view of the question of trust. Reflecting on the official penchant for hortatory slogans (“Japan, do your best!” “United we stand!”), he advised the younger generation to think for itself: “Don’t get carried away by fine words. Be skeptical about everything, and then carry on.”9
And yes, I did see the islands of Matsushima the second time around. The skies were clear. I listened to the guide explaining the splendid sights. The tourists around me didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what she said. Well, well, I thought, Japan has changed. Then I realized they were all Chinese.
1 Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World (New Press, 2012).
2 When the conservative Liberal Democratic Party came back to power in 2012, the government became more supportive of nuclear energy once again.
3 “History Repeats,” The New Yorker, March 28, 2011.
4 Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japan’s Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
5 “Japan Gov’t Media Colluded on Nuclear: Nobel Winner,” AFP, July 12, 2012.
6 Mori Shogo, Aru Jan
aristo no Haisen Nikki (The Postwar Diary of a Journalist) (Tokyo: Yumani Shobo, 1965).
7 Quoted by McNeill in “Them Versus Us: Japanese and International Reporting of the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis,” in Japan Copes with Calamity: Ethnographies of the Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disasters of March 2011, edited by Tom Gill, Brigette Steger, and David H. Slater (Peter Lang, 2013).
8 His masterpiece, The Pornographers, translated by Michael Gallagher (Knopf, 1968), deserves another attempt at English translation.
9 Bungei Shunju, March 2012.
27
VIRTUAL VIOLENCE
ASAKUSA, IN 1929, had seen better days. Asakusa usually has. That is the elegiac charm of this district in the east of Tokyo, flanking the Sumida River, the scene of The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa by Kawabata Yasunari, written in the late 1920s. Since the late seventeenth century, a warren of streets just north of Asakusa, named Yoshiwara, had been a licensed brothel area, whose denizens, ranging from famous courtesans to cheap prostitutes, catered to townsmen, but also to samurai, who sometimes found it necessary to disguise their identities by wearing elaborate hats.1 Asakusa itself really came into its own as a hub of pleasure in the 1840s. By the late nineteenth century the grounds of Asakusa Park, with its lovely ponds and miniature gardens, and its Senso temple dedicated to Kannon, the goddess of mercy, were given over to all manner of entertainments: a Kabuki theater, jugglers, geisha houses, circus acts, photography booths, dancers, comic storytellers, performing monkeys, bars, restaurants, and archery stalls where young women were reputed to have offered a variety of services.
Asakusa’s wildest days are said to have been in the 1910s, after the Russo-Japanese War, when Russian girls, performing Gypsy numbers in dance revues, known as “operas,” added an exotic tang to the Sixth District, where most of the theaters were. The main attraction was to show off women’s legs. Reviews featuring young women performing sword fights were designed for this purpose also. Some of the opera houses actually provided the real thing. An Italian named G.V. Rossi was brought over from London to stage operas at the grandly named Imperial Theater, only to find a scarcity of singers. In his production of The Magic Flute, the same singer had to play both Pamina and the Queen of the Night, with a stand-in on hand when the two had to appear in the same scene.2
The first movie houses in Japan were in Asakusa, as was Tokyo’s first “skyscraper,” the Twelve-Story Tower, or Ryounkaku. Soon the silent movies, accompanied by splendid storytellers known as benshi, became more popular than music halls or theater, and Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Clara Bow became the stars of Asakusa. As is usually true of entertainment districts, even the best of them, Asakusa was marked by an ephemeral quality, by a sense of the fleetingness of all pleasure, which was perhaps part of its allure. But Asakusa, in the twentieth century, really did live on the edge; the entire quarter was almost totally destroyed twice: first in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which hit just as people were cooking their lunches and incinerated the mostly wooden houses in a horrific firestorm; and again in the spring of 1945, when American B-29 bombers demolished much of the city and all of Asakusa, causing the deaths of between 60,000 and 70,000 people in a couple of nights.
After the 1923 earthquake, the famous park was a charred wasteland, the Twelve-Story Tower no more than a ruined stump, and the opera palaces were rubble. Only the Kannon temple survived. It was thought by some that the statue of a famous Kabuki actor striking a heroic pose had held off the approaching flames. (The temple did not survive the American bombs, however, and had to be reconstructed.) And yet, fleeting as its pleasures may have been, Asakusa could not stay down for long. The movie houses and opera halls were rebuilt, and the park, with its pickpockets, prostitutes, Kannon worshipers, dandies, and juvenile delinquents, sprang back to life. In 1929, the Casino Folies was opened, located on the second floor of an aquarium, next to an entomological museum, or Bug House, which had somehow survived the devastation of 1923.
The Casino Folies, named after the Folies Bergère in Paris, was not especially wild, although it was rumored—apparently without any basis in truth—that the dancing girls, sometimes in blond wigs, dropped their drawers on Friday evenings. But it spawned not only talented entertainers, some of whom later became movie stars, but great comedians too. The most famous was Enoken, who stars in Kurosawa’s 1945 film The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail. Everything that was raffish and fresh about Asakusa between the wars was exemplified by the Casino Folies, a symbol of the Japanese jazz age of “modern boys” (mobos) and modern girls (mogas). The cultural slogan of the time was ero, guro, nansensu, “erotic, grotesque, nonsense.” Kawabata was one of the writers whose early work was infused by this spirit, and it was his book that made the Folies famous. He hung around Asakusa for three years, wandering the streets, talking to dancers and young gangsters, but mostly just walking and looking, and reported on what he saw in his extraordinary modernist novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, first published in 1930.3
The novel is not so much about developing characters as about expressing a new sensibility, a new way of seeing and describing atmosphere: quick, fragmented cutting from one scene to another, like editing a film or assembling a collage, with a mixture of reportage, advertising slogans, lyrics from popular songs, fantasies, and historical anecdotes and legends. There is much ero, guro, nansensu there, related in the chatty tone of a congenial flaneur, telling stories about this place or that, and who did what where, while trolling the streets for new sensations. This fragmentary way of storytelling owes a great deal to European expressionism, or “Caligarism,” after the German movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. However, as Edward Seidensticker, quoted in Donald Richie’s excellent foreword, points out, it also owes much to Edo period stories.
Kawabata himself professed to hate his early experiment in modernist fiction and quickly went on to develop a very different, more classical style, but he still made an important contribution to the Japanese Roaring Twenties. Besides the novel, he also wrote the film script for Kinugasa Teinosuke’s expressionist masterpiece, A Page of Madness (1926). One of the most remarkable things about The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is that it was serialized in a mainstream newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, which is, as Richie says, as though Ulysses had been picked up by the London Times. This testifies to the high-mindedness of the Japanese press—almost unimaginable today—but also to the willingness of the Japanese public to accept avant-garde literature in a popular newspaper; it probably helped that the avant-garde expressionism was mixed with accounts of Asakusa’s low life.
Mixing high and low is of course part of modernism. Like many artists in the 1920s, Kawabata was interested in detective fiction and Caligarism is often marked by a fascination with violent crime. The use of slang and the references to popular culture of the time must have made The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa extremely difficult to translate, and Alisa Freedman has done a superb job, even though the full flavor of the original can never be fully reproduced.
The narrator/flaneur introduces the reader to various characters, low-life types like Umekichi, who skins stray cats to sell their pelts; and his girlfriend Yumiko, who poisons an older lover on a riverboat by kissing him with arsenic; and Haruko, dressed in gold crepe; and Tangerine Oshin, “the heroine of every bad girl worth the name,” who had “done” 150 men by the time she was sixteen. These are the people who drift into the Scarlet Gang. But there are others, more of the guro than the ero variety: the man in the Asakusa fairground with a mouth in his belly, smoking through his stomach; or the female tramps who dress like men; or the children who clean public toilets because they love modern concrete. The narrator is only interested, he writes, in “lowly women.” The lowest kind of prostitutes are the teenagers, known as gokaiya, who sleep with ragpickers and bums. Tangerine Oshin was one of them.
In true modernist fashion, it is never clear to what extent these people are meant to be real, or pure figments of the narrator’s imagination. In fact, the narrat
or is the first to point out the fictional quality of his story. Artifice is the point. Yumiko, after disappearing from the story for a long stretch, returns near the end of the novel as a hair-oil seller. Selling oil, in Japanese, means fibbing, making up a story. Yumiko and the narrator discuss how the story should go on. The writer compares his story to a boat, like the boat on which Yumiko entertained her lover before murdering him, meandering, without a plotted course. This is where traditional Japanese storytelling meets modernism. Both share this quality.
None of the characters in Kawabata’s novel has the depth of such modernist antiheroes as Franz Biberkopf in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz or Joyce’s Bloom. Compared to them Yumiko and the others are as flimsy as rice paper. It is in conveying atmosphere that Kawabata, like so many Japanese literary flaneurs, excels. Here is the first sentence of chapter four:
While she did her Spanish number (and I did not make this up—this is a true story), I clearly saw that the dancer on stage carried on her biceps needle marks from a recent injection, though a small piece of adhesive tape had been stuck on top. In the grounds of the Sensō Temple at around two in the morning, sixteen or seventeen wild dogs let out a terrific howl as they all rush after a single cat. That’s what Asakusa is all about. You come to sniff out the scent of a crime.
