Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  A young railway switchman by the name of Nakaoka Kon’ichi became so perplexed and outraged by what he saw as the cynical and highly partisan world of national politics that one autumn evening in November 1921 he approached Prime Minister Hara outside Tokyo Station and stabbed him to death. It seemed like a shocking relapse into the pre-civilized state from which the Meiji leaders had sought to lift Japan. In fact, it was a sign of things to come.

  Was the answer to these constitutional and political crises more democracy – or less? For those who took the former view, the lifting of the ban on women’s participation in politics in 1922 and then the granting of universal male suffrage in 1925 – quadrupling the electorate at a stroke – counted as major successes. For those inclined towards the latter view, the terrible prospect loomed of parties shaped by the masses enjoying Cabinet-level power. The chances of the country taking a radical, unwelcome direction were heightened further by a rocky economy in the 1920s: a stock market crash at the beginning of the decade, followed by a series of smaller shocks and the bankruptcy of businesses and banks saddled with impossible debt. A draconian Peace Preservation Law was passed the same year as the universal male suffrage bill, in an effort to ensure that this latest dubious democratic experiment enjoyed the safety net of enhanced police power.

  Amongst those floating moderate alternatives to Western-style democracy was the Christian political scientist Yoshino Sakuzō, who worked at Tokyo Imperial University and worshipped just around the corner at Ebina Danjō’s church. What Japan needed, he thought, was not government by the people but rather government for the people. Socialist prescriptions for Japan were wrong, because their assumptions were wrong: human beings are not merely the products of social environments. Instead, they possess a spiritual capacity – a blend of the moral and the rational – that transcends their environment, orients them towards the good, and should not be denied or downplayed. What they need is to be led by the right people: men of character (jinkakusha), who will respect and nurture these essential qualities, curb the power of the military and the state bureaucracy, and protect essential constitutional freedoms like free speech and the right to petition government.

  Yoshino called this system minponshugi: people as the basis of, or focus for, governance. But though Yoshino’s writings were widely read, alternative visions like his for Japanese politics failed to gain much traction across these crucial years. For some, they smacked too much of elitism and paternalism. For others, their idealism was at odds with the pragmatic materialism bequeathed by Japan’s Meiji-era leaders: a natural-scientific view of the world, harnessed to the exercise of power by a small group of capable people in a narrowly defined national interest.

  Two of the natural languages of subversive opposition to that Meiji settlement, religion and Marxism, had by the 1920s been successfully cast as marginal pursuits: the former at turns old-fashioned and potentially treasonous, the latter quite plainly beyond the pale given what Marxism means for monarchs. Throughout the 1920s, and especially once the new Peace Preservation Law was in force, left-wing activists found themselves periodically rounded up, beaten and imprisoned – some were murdered.

  And yet these were not the only ways in which people of this period registered their views about Japan’s present and its likely future, whether that was whole-hearted optimism, distress, dissent, suspicion of one another, or even a feeling that the country as a whole was heading for the rocks.

  *

  A man stands outside his pharmacy, boasting to his neighbours of how he couldn’t bear to be parted from his unfaithful wife – so he chopped her into five pieces and, using a ‘secret technique’ involving a chilled wooden barrel, cleaned, treated and reassembled the parts as a waxwork dummy in his window. This is it! he tells them, pointing through the window pane. Didn’t you realize? Didn’t you hear the water running at night?

  A student uses the ventilation shafts running through one of the new, anonymous apartment blocks being thrown up around the city to reach the room of an acquaintance of his. Silently, he makes a small hole in the ceiling, so that he can pour poison down a piece of string into the man’s mouth while he sleeps. Didn’t you realize? Didn’t you know who your neighbours were …?

  A young writer, Yoshiko, is making her way through her post when she comes across a letter from a man – ‘ugly beyond words … my lifestyle unsanitary’ – who is intent upon confessing a crime. A chair-maker, he once made a large armchair so fine that rather than part with it he concealed himself inside before it was taken to its final destination: the lobby of a luxury hotel in Yokohama.

  His plan was to crawl out of his tiny hideaway at night, and rob the hotel guests. But he soon discovered a quite unexpected pleasure:

  A girl in the hotel … sat on me. She was my first, and she kindled in my heart the most passionate love. I think she was European … she sang with such a sweet voice as she sat, for thirty minutes, moving her body and feet in tempo with the tune.

  I could hardly believe it. Me, who had always avoided the opposite sex on account of my horrifying face. And now my skin was almost touching hers through a thin layer of leather … oh, love in a chair!

  But, sadly, one day the hotel auctioned my chair off, and it ended up in the home of a high-ranking government official in Tokyo. Only, the chair turned out not to be for him: it was for the use of his young wife, in her room.

  Soon, I was with her almost constantly, joined with her as one. When she wasn’t eating or sleeping, her soft body was always seated on my knees …

  Yoshiko’s brow begins to furrow as the description of this home unfolds. It is her home. And the room is her room …

  Tokyo in the 1920s was a city where strange crimes of this sort happened all the time. But mostly in people’s heads. Though Inoue Enryō, a generation before, had hoped to banish the fantastical from modern Japanese life, it turned out that the city fired people’s imaginations as never before.

  Feeding off – and further fuelling – these fears and fantasies was Edogawa Ranpo, a writer of mystery and detective stories, who took his inspiration and pen-name from Edgar Allan Poe and created the murky worlds of the mannequin wife, the apartment killing and the ‘human chair’.

  Edogawa drew his cast of characters from the rotten heart of modern Tokyo – and of modernity itself. Conspicuous amongst them were wealthy women, corrupted by or punished for their new-found independence: adulterous, sometimes murderous wives; an elderly moneylender killed for the cash she is seen stashing in a plant pot. Most of the men are weak, ugly, hapless or bored, falling into crime rather than exhibiting any great passion or talent for it.

  Even Edogawa’s wise and perceptive detective hero, Akechi Kogorō, succeeds not because he enjoys life in modern Japan but because he understands what makes its people tick. Their hopelessness and grasping is all too common, and all too easy to read. Life itself has become commodified, to the point where a man kills and dismembers his wife in order to truly ‘own’ her.

  Writers like Edogawa enjoyed enormous success. Foreign detective fiction, with its feats of logical deduction, was considered a thoroughly wholesome grounding in rational thought for the nation’s youth, so the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin were welcomed with open arms. But with domestic writers like Edogawa, this central feature of the genre was subverted. Plot twists were thrown in that made a sudden mockery of what had come before – ‘The Human Chair’ ends with the letter-writer announcing in a second missive that the first was just an idea for a story, about which he is seeking Yoshiko’s opinion.

  Then again, why strive for narrative coherence in conjuring a city where so many people were living unfamiliar and unpredictable lives? The weird, the disturbing and the fantastical were far better suited to subject matter of this sort – as was a long-standing tradition of ghost stories, developed across centuries in a country where deceased relatives or friends at best watched over you, but at worst sought to do you harm. Ghoulish classics were reinvented
for audiences not yet convinced that modern technology was entirely benign. Ghostly voices had, in the past, whispered on desolate winds. Now they could be heard emanating from dimly lit telephone booths.

  People flocked to the cinema to see one of the six or so kaiki eiga – ‘strange’ or ‘mysterious’ films, often adapted from kabuki ghost stories – that were made every year, often released to coincide with Obon, Japan’s summer festivities to honour the ancestors. Newspaper editors with an eye to their circulation figures now and again splashed on ‘news’ stories about bakeneko – ‘monster cats’ or ‘changed cats’. At one point, a very useful rumour did the rounds that a collection of bakeneko had found their way into tenement housing in Tokyo and broken into a danse macabre.

  A bakeneko dance party (Utagawa Kuniyoshi, c.1841) For critics tempted to read a great deal into what a society does with its leisure time, all this was a clear sign that Japan was going backwards. Not long ago, the country’s driving slogan had been bunmei kaika: ‘civilization and enlightenment’. Now there was critical acclaim for a story about a man groping a woman through a chair.

  It was tempting, too, to regard an enormous earthquake that struck the Tokyo–Yokohama area in 1923 as a literal and figurative rupture with a more austere and purposeful past. Upwards of 100,000 people were killed, many of them dying in the fiercely destructive firestorms that swept through the city. In the building boom that followed, bars, tearooms and cafés proliferated. And where previously many such places had played host to intellectuals engaging in serious conversation – often with one or two policemen looking on from a corner – newer establishments seemed premised instead on fun, frivolity and on testing the limits of the freedom this city gave them.

  ‘Modern girls’, c.1928 Two of the great symbols of the post-earthquake age were the free-wheeling modan gāru and modan boi (‘modern girl’ and ‘modern boy’), and the café waitress. The former was an exaggerated take, by a scandal-hungry media, on young women and men who enjoyed dressing like Western stars of stage and screen and who seemed to their critics to live mainly for shopping and leisure. The café waitress ‘type’ covered a wide range of realities. Some simply served coffee. Others offered male patrons anything from a friendly smile through various grades of imaginatively thought-out erotic encounter – depending on the café, its owner and the girls themselves.

  *

  Sitting in one of Tokyo’s cafés was Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s ‘Mr A’, steadily nearing the end of his tether:

  Opposite me were a couple who appeared to be mother and son. Though younger than me, the son looked almost exactly like me. The two were chatting like lovers, their faces pressed close together. Watching them, I realized that the son, at least, was conscious how much erotic pleasure he was giving his mother. This was a classic case of a kind of attractive force that I knew well. It was a classic case too of a kind of will that turns this world of ours into a hell.

  These late encounters of Mr A’s came as part of a tumble he was taking through a hallucinatory landscape of house fires, hotel rooms, basement restaurants, trains and tracks. Inside one train carriage, a man jabbers on at him about seeing a ghost; and a schoolgirl with a nasal whine plies a passenger with leading questions about what a ‘love scene’ is.

  Mr A feels sick. His cultured, cluttered mind offers up Dante’s Inferno, over and over again. Religion too – the image of bearing a cross. Something he wrote a while back returns to him: ‘I have no conscience … all I have is nerves.’ Aphorisms suit his segmented reality, steeling him just a little until he can get back to his room and his dwindling supply of sedatives. ‘I don’t have the strength to keep writing this …’ he says at the end. ‘Won’t someone be kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?’

  Akutagawa had long had an interest in Christianity, visiting the Oura church in Nagasaki where Japan’s ‘hidden Christians’ had revealed themselves to Fr Petitjean. He brought a statue of Maria-Kannon back with him to Tokyo. His writings in the last hours of his life reflected on a religion so poetic and impossible that ‘not even Christ himself could have fully practised’ it. ‘Foxes have their holes, the birds of the sky their nests,’ he wrote, quoting from the Gospels, ‘but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ Here was a person who had managed to point people beyond the ‘mundane world’, thought Akutagawa, and yet at the same time towards the core of its suffering. Here was someone, all those years ago, who hadn’t needed the clatter and clang and shrieking intensity of an industrial city and a mass society to sense the homelessness that lay at the heart of the human condition.

  Akutagawa Ryūnosuke passed away in the summer of 1927 with a bible open at his bedside. He left behind great sadness and trepidation – but also questions. Had he found the transcendence that he claimed no one could live without, or had he given up on it? And what did he mean by this – a final fragment of writing, apparently mistaken in its language, perhaps distorted by tiredness or barbiturates; or perhaps a last testament of sorts:

  Christ’s life will always move us. It is a cruelly broken ladder for us to ascend to earth from heaven, left lying aslant in a relentless downpour from the grey sky.

  7

  Great Escapes

  Kosawa Heisaku regarded his psychoanalytic rival Ohtsuki Kenji, with whom he was forced grudgingly to share a city, as a bit of a charlatan. Despite possessing no formal training or qualifications, Ohtsuki had successfully set himself up as an evangelist for Freud around Tokyo and beyond. He penned provocatively Freudian commentaries for the newspapers, scanning the urban landscape for items of phallic significance – from neckties to baseball bats – while uncovering entertaining sexual subtexts in the work of major authors of the day. His psychoanalytic discussion group boasted the popular writer of detective stories, Edogawa Ranpo, as one of its members. And he was even called upon to advise the police and the courts on criminal psychology.

  Kosawa, on the other hand, had qualified first as a doctor and then as a psychiatrist at Tohoku Imperial University. But having torpedoed his university career by insulting his professor, Marui Kiyoyasu – from whom he learned about psychoanalysis only to announce that he was off to Europe to study it properly – he found himself, on his return to Japan in 1933, the unemployed father of a young and growing family. A little of Ohtsuki’s entrepreneurial spirit was in order.

  So up went a sign outside the Kosawa home, in Tokyo’s busy and fashionable Den-en-chōfu neighbourhood, increasingly in demand since the earthquake a few years before. Kosawa’s message was simple: ‘Nandemo sōdan’ – ‘Ask me anything’. Kosawa had posters put up at train stations, too, along with ads in the newspapers. Psychoanalysis was all but unknown amongst most Japanese, so talk of ‘libido’, or ‘the Id’, or sexual feelings towards one’s parents was unlikely to bring any but a few oddballs his way. Instead, to an urban society at turns thrilled and overwhelmed by rapid change, and increasingly at home with soliciting and receiving advice, ‘Ask me anything’ promised to make simple, intuitive sense.

  This was a city awash with potential clients. Across the late nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, more and more aspects of life had come to be assigned for a purpose: family relationships were semi-public, and self-consciously productive; education revolved around acquiring nation-strengthening skills and a communitarian ethic; and one’s profession was to be pursued for the sake of the nation – whether that be weaving cotton, wielding a rifle or pushing a pen for the state’s burgeoning bureaucracy.

  One could even be distressed for the sake of the nation. Writing about his recovery from neurasthenia in 1909, the journalist Ishikawa Hanzan had modestly traced his illness back to his membership of more than 100 governmental and social organizations, together with 1,000 public speeches delivered across Japan for the edification of the masses. Likewise, when Japanese authorities in Korea discovered rising rates there of mental illness, their response was, in a word, ‘Good’. One of their stated reasons for expanding their influence on the pe
ninsula was to lift it out of its Chinese-traditionalist quagmire, and to forge a modern nation in Japan’s own image. Psychological distress was a symptom of success.

  Japan’s most famous self-declared neurasthenic was the novelist Natsume Sōseki. While allowing that his condition was partly personal, a matter of excessive self-consciousness, he also blamed it on his country’s faulty process of ‘civilization’ in recent decades. The country’s ‘firebell’-like awakening to the modern Western world had yielded hurried, superficial and ‘extrinsic’ change, and the creation of a society in which anyone who tried to cultivate true civilization within themselves would naturally become ill in the process.

  A few miserable months spent in London between 1900 and 1902 helped Sōseki towards this conclusion. Hoping to deepen his understanding of English literature, Sōseki instead acquired a very different sort of education, courtesy of the almost daily humiliations that he suffered. He found himself on and mostly off two wheels around Lavender Hill and Clapham Common, as well-meaning friends tried to induct him into the latest craze: cycling. Policemen tutted, passers-by broke into ironic applause, and one man shouted ‘Chink’ when Sōseki nearly ran him over. Boarding-house landladies were by turn cold, sulky and overweening. He wrote of one:

  [She was] far beyond any femininity … All the human weaknesses – bitterness, envy, obstinacy, rigidity, doubt – must have taken a delight in playing with that face to give it that ill-favoured appearance … Turning her black eyes towards the narcissi withering in the glass vase, she [said] that England, a cold and cloudy country, was not a pleasant place to live. No doubt she intended to point out to me that in this country even the flowers failed to bloom.

  Meanwhile, London’s industrial fog conjured for Sōseki a vivid visual and emotional sense of what modernity had done to England, and was now set to do to Japan. Settling onto roadways and lawns, it created a landscape in which the colour, energy and rich detail of human life was smudged and suppressed. All he could see of a nearby garden was its hard ornaments: modernity’s pointless, lifeless artefacts freeze-framed in the damp gloom. Londoners seemed to be happiest when the curtain rose at the theatre, and they were transported, thanks to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, to a sunny ancient Adriatic: