But do ancestors and tengu really ‘exist’? Again: it doesn’t matter, Yanagita would respond. What a typically, tragically urban thing to ask. One should focus instead on the ‘liveliness and freshness’ of the people who feature in these stories, and on the dignity and honour they possess. In a round-table discussion with Akutagawa Ryūnosuke – who used kappa imagery in a satire on his society, written just a few months before he died – Yanagita repeated a speculation made by a teacher of his: one is less likely to do imprudent things if some ‘unseen entity’ might be lurking in the room, looking on and passing judgement.
Like Yanagita, the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, writing in the 1930s and 1940s, looked to rural life, human relationships and the distant past for purchase on Japan’s uncertain present. He claimed that Japan’s combination of a monsoon season with incoming Arctic air was crucial to understanding its people. These things had long made the country perfect for wet rice cultivation: a quintessentially cyclical and communitarian venture, tied to the tending of a particular patch of land. Watsuji was indebted to Heidegger, in his critique of modernity. But he thought that Western philosophy as a whole was wrong to insist on taking the individual and his or her experience of the world as its starting point. Watsuji pointed his readers instead to the Japanese characters for ningen, ‘human being’: Nin (人) is ‘person’; gen (間) is ‘space’ or ‘gap’. To be human, he concluded, is in fact to be, at one and the same time, an individual person and in relationship. Meanwhile, the thick internal walls of a Western home reveal the unfortunate meaning there of ‘family’: just a bunch of individuals in pragmatic cohabitation. Contrast that with the ideal Japanese home, where thinner, movable partitions of wood and paper suggest a ‘quiet but emotional and martial selflessness’, where the illusion of being a single, lone unit of being can never really take root.
A tengu (Ogata Gekkō) *
Great coffee, disappointing therapists. Such was Kosawa Heisaku’s verdict on Vienna and on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic circle, reported to his brother (and financial backer) in a letter home. Kosawa had gone to Europe in 1932 hoping to encounter, in Freud, some cross between a father and a saviour. He once wrote to Freud, in rather gushing literary German, of his ‘urge to experience my perfection through you’. But such dreams ended up dashed on the rocks of Freud’s own frailty by the time they met, not to mention Kosawa’s shaky command of the spoken language – to which Freud responded by suggesting that Kosawa find himself a German-speaking girlfriend, to help things along.
Unable to communicate well with Freud or afford his analytical fees, Kosawa instead received three short months of therapy with Richard Sterba, a disciple of Freud’s, yielding only rather generic Freudian fare: Kosawa was too close to his mother, hated his father and harboured an aggressive dislike of his university boss (who had effectively just fired him). Nor does Kosawa seem to have received the hoped-for feedback on his new thesis about religion, culture and liberation: an adaptation of Freud’s Oedipus Complex, which Kosawa called the ‘Ajase’ Complex, after a prince in Buddhist mythology.
The essence of Kosawa’s argument was that Freud had misunderstood religion, as the wrong sort of ‘escapism’. For Freud, religion had its roots in guilt and a fear of punishment. For Kosawa, a devout Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist, what he called a ‘religious state of mind’ was in fact the ultimate therapeutic liberation. Its achievement was (or ought to be) the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis. To illustrate his point, Kosawa offered a short parable:
The smash of a plate reverberates around a room, tiny fragments of ceramic skipping and tumbling across the kitchen floor. In the silence that follows a little boy – a good boy, already full of remorse – looks up to see his father’s fury building: Why did you do that to a precious plate? Why the hell can you not concentrate?
The boy apologizes, but the father’s stubborn incomprehension is overwhelming. He shrinks back – starting, early in life, to repay fatherly remoteness in kind: fine then, I don’t care anymore …
But the boy’s mother, too, is in the room: People are people, my love, and though what you did was wrong, never forget that I know you. And I know you can’t help it with things like this, no matter how hard you try.
You can see religion as Freud understands it, Kosawa suggested, right there in how the child reacts to the father. But look at what happens when the mother steps in: the boy feels totally understood, completely accepted, and so is able to abandon himself to a healthy, reparative guilt. Freudian ‘religion’ gives rise to neurosis; real religion dissolves it away.
Kosawa Heisaku having tea with his home-stay host in Vienna (early 1930s) Kosawa’s ideas owed much to a Shin Buddhist monk he had met while at boarding school, Chikazumi Jōkan. A sometime assistant to Inoue Enryō, Chikazumi’s was a more devotional, emotional form of faith than Inoue’s. Like Yanagita, he was convinced by the power of stories to move people and to get a point across in the most direct way possible. He often used in his preaching a version of an old Japanese folk tale.
A son carries his ailing mother into the mountains on his back, with the secret intention of abandoning her there. Unbeknownst to her son, the mother has been laying a trail of twigs as they go: she knows her son’s intentions. But the old woman harbours no hope of escape for herself. She wants to make sure her son finds his own way safely home.
The story of Obasuteyama – literally ‘the mountain where the old woman is to be thrown away’ – was, for Chikazumi, an allegory of the mercy of Amida Buddha. This was a mercy so complete that Shinran had founded the Shin sect, back in the thirteenth century, on the basis that a person needed only to recite a short prayer known as the ‘nembutsu’ – Namu-Amida-Butsu (‘Hail to Amida Buddha’) – in order to be saved. This wasn’t some magical incantation. It was a plea. It was an honest recognition of human weakness so profound that Shinran thought a person could not even recite the nembutsu without Amida’s help, working away at the deepest level of their identity. As Kai Wariko, a modern Shin poet, put it:
The voice with which I call Amida Buddha
Is the voice with which Amida Buddha calls to me.
The distinctly modern element in all this was that Chikazumi and Kosawa focused on family relationships – as a tremendous salvific opportunity. For Chikazumi and Kosawa, the restoration of a damaged or dysfunctional relationship, achieved through realizing and confessing one’s own deep vulnerability, was the very moment and the very means for Amida’s mercy to break into mundane linear time, and into mundane human lives.
In a move of which Freud would surely not have approved had he known about it, Kosawa claimed that the great pioneer of psychoanalysis and ferocious critic of religion was nothing less than a twentieth-century Shinran. Freud had brought the tools of modern science to a perennial human task, offering people precisely the sort of vision of their fundamental frailty that was essential to allowing Amida’s mercy to do its work.
What his clients therefore needed, Kosawa concluded when he returned to Tokyo to open his practice, was this: to experience a subtle blend of surprise and humiliation at the hands of someone whose love, compassion and insight were great enough to hold and guide them through the process. Kosawa would begin the work sitting behind his clients’ heads as they lay on his couch, narrating aloud the ideas and images that came into their heads. Do it as though you are a passenger on a train, Kosawa counselled, watching features of a landscape flash by: the sun hitting Mount Fuji, a farmer standing in a field, a schoolgirl on her way to school.
Clients had to agree in advance to hold nothing back. In Kosawa’s experience, people tended to filter what they told him, leaving out anything that seemed boring, irrelevant, embarrassing or liable to make the therapist angry. At some point, everyone started to resist the process. And yet here was the therapeutic gold. Just as Yanagita was sceptical of rojikku, so the way that clients wanted to present themselves to Kosawa was only of indirect interest to him. His role was to play, in turn, the provocateu
r and the open-armed mother.
Over time Kosawa evolved a particularly revealing means of accomplishing this with clients whom he treated via correspondence. He would ask them to send him, at regular intervals, two documents. The first was a covering letter, addressed to Kosawa. The second was a written record of a period of solo free association – all that had flashed through their heads when they obeyed Kosawa’s command and let their thoughts and feelings go where they would.
The first document told Kosawa about the client’s own self-understanding. The second was the really interesting one: it revealed something of what lurked in the client’s unconscious. As therapy went on, Kosawa would hope to see material move from this second document into the first: unconscious elements making their way into conscious awareness.
One client confided in Kosawa that he recalled being embarrassed, as a child, when his parents forced him to wear a girl’s rubber swimming cap at the seaside. Kosawa responded that he hadn’t been embarrassed at all: he had liked it. Covering up the ears symbolizes castration, which in turn suggests your desire to become a girl as a means of securing affection from your father. What’s more, your recollection and sharing of that memory now may well be a sign of homosexual feelings towards me …
Maybe the client would spill his morning tea as he read this response. Maybe he would peer nervously over the top of the letter at his father sitting across the table. Whatever happened, this was part analysis, part carefully calibrated attempt to nudge a client who was beginning to over-intellectualize the process of therapy into gentle humiliation and the new self-awareness that might come with it.
Resistance is fertile: this was the modern core of a therapeutic style that Kosawa once described to a client in quasi-Buddhist terms as Shinran no kokoro wo motte, seishin bunseki wo suru – ‘Doing psychoanalysis with the heart of Shinran’. If, as a client, you really don’t want to share something … then you probably should.
All of this lay in store for people answering Kosawa’s nandemo sōdan – ‘Ask me anything’ – adverts. And plenty did. Nearly 400 clients from all walks of life walked through Kosawa’s Den-en-chōfu doors during his first four years of private practice. A pharmaceutical salesman complained of domestic discord. The wife of a landowner had ended up lost in melancholy after the birth of a child. A company employee was driven to depression by overwork. A brothel owner and a confectioner were developing schizophrenia. A Buddhist monk, a fishmonger and a railway worker sought help with anxiety. Students struggled with erythrophobia (fear of blushing), which Kosawa suspected might be linked to masturbation. A paranoid bank worker came calling, as did a hysterical bonsai artist.
One day, a client reported to Kosawa a vivid experience of being momentarily outside of himself, or at least not quite ‘in’ himself in the usual way. Kosawa was overjoyed. ‘That,’ the client later recalled him as saying, ‘is the real aim of psychoanalysis. Without it, psychoanalysis as a technique will not survive.’
From his client notes, written in the standard medical mixture of Japanese and German, to the decor in his consulting room, Kosawa endeavoured to be scrupulously neutral and scientific in his work. And yet, for him, psychoanalysis was totally unlike any other form of medicine. It didn’t deal with just one part of a person, neatly separated out from everything else – like stitching a cut or setting a bone. In Kosawa’s line of work, any single symptom was a statement about the whole person, their past as well as their present, and about the wider world in which they lived. He didn’t introduce Buddhist language into the conversation because he didn’t need to: its core concerns were already at the heart of everything he was doing.
Here was a tremendously influential set of early twentieth-century ‘great escapes’ more or less in a nutshell. People had to be lifted out of relatively new and unhealthily solitary ways of being in the world and put (back) in proper touch with one another – and, in turn, with some greater power, principle or source of value in the world. In this way, body and soul might be healed. Time might start to mean something. And the modernity that Japan’s Meiji leaders had left as their legacy might be rolled back or redeemed.
Did that make people like Kosawa, Watsuji and Yanagita the past – or the future? In political terms, their ideas were deeply uncertain. They were potentially subversive, in that they refused to assume the rightness and inevitability of Japan’s present direction of travel. But though they threatened to take the sheen off one of Japan’s two great twentieth-century stories – that of Asia’s first successful modernizer – Yanagita and Watsuji especially provided plenty of ballast for the second: Japan as a special, superior place, since time immemorial. If and when the public and political tide turned against the first story, modernity’s foreign roots and damaging consequences becoming increasingly obvious, Yanagita’s and Watsuji’s ideas might become part of an attractive ideological alternative.
Depending on what you thought Japan needed in the 1920s and 1930s, people like Kosawa, Watsuji and Yanagita were radicals offering a path to freedom and flourishing, or they were reactionaries, seeking to put liberal democracy back in its box, returning it westward where it belonged. What they said about themselves here did not necessarily matter. More important were the future uses to which these and similarly subtle and complex schemes of thought might be put. A notable, worrying feature of these blueprints for a great escape – primordial authenticity, a timeless Volk, dynamic relationships that bind people together, encounters with Amida – was that in their romance they all reached out towards, almost seemed to crave, the same thing: power.
Part Three
* * *
LEADING ASIA / LEAVING ASIA
(1920S TO 1940S)
8
Self Power, Other Power, State Power
Eighteen-year-old Kikugawa Ayako stood patiently in line with the other young women. Each held a photo of a man in her hands – except for Ayako. After a while a group of men, all clutching portrait photos of their own, began to drift into the room, trying to match the images to faces in the line-up. Some checked the names etched into the women’s luggage, just to be sure.
One man stopped in front of Ayako’s willow-vine trunk. He looked up, smiling.
‘Are you Ayako?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, that’s good.’
Without another word, he picked up her bag and left the room.
Ayako followed him out of the Honolulu immigration station to a nearby hotel, where they ate dinner, mostly in silence. The next day, they journeyed north around the coast of Oahu island. Ayako was surprised when it started to rain – people back home had talked of a tropical wonderland.
‘So it rains in Hawaii …?’
‘Baka jya! [Ha! You fool!], of course it rains in Hawaii!’
Ayako would later remember the moment as their first real conversation.
The weather was really neither here nor there. Ayako had come to Hawaii simply to fetch this man, a distant relative by the name of Kikugawa Shitoku, home to his family in Kumamoto. Those other women, who like Ayako were just off the boat from Japan, were ‘picture brides’. Families back home had been introduced to one another, had swapped ‘exchange photographs’, and now these girls had come out to Hawaii to meet their men and settle down in one of the migrant labour communities here.
Sugar and pineapple plantations would, after all, not run themselves. And since Europeans arriving in Hawaii in the late 1700s had brought with them diseases that devastated the local population, labour for the generally Western-owned plantations had to be shipped in from elsewhere. Beginning in the 1850s, Chinese workers from Guangdong and Macao were brought to Hawaii, where they were quarantined, fumigated and set to work. Japanese joined them after the Meiji Restoration in 1868; a trickle at first, but numbers rose rapidly after Hawaii’s King Kalakaua visited his monarchical opposite number in Tokyo and struck a deal. By the turn of the twentieth century, nearly 100,000 Japanese labourers and their families had made the journey.
/> Young men who ventured to Hawaii alone, only to find themselves stranded there without the funds to return, called on their families to send them a wife – posting home a recent photograph to get the process going. Some sent photos of handsome strangers instead, the better to make a good match, meaning that a girl might set sail for romance in paradise, only to arrive tired and sea-sick into a rainy Honolulu, where a wrinkled old man was eagerly calling out her name. There was rarely a way back. The return fare would be prohibitive, and often the girls were already married to these men: the ritual exchange of nuptial sake cups had taken place back in Japan, in front of a photo of the beloved (or his better-looking stand-in, as the case might be).
Ayako made the most of the stunning coastline as they passed along it, the view occasionally jerking up and down amidst the jolting of her carriage. Her long journey from one volcanic archipelago to another was all for the sake of a very short stay. Or so she thought.
As soon as they arrived at Haleiwa, on Oahu’s northern shore, Ayako and Shitoku were offered food. Only it was no mere casual snack: long tables had been specially laid out on straw mats. Someone loaned Ayako a Western-style dress, shoes and hat – and was oddly insistent that she put them on right away. Festive food was brought out. This was a wedding reception. Ayako’s wedding reception.
It turned out that Ayako’s family back in Japan had secretly sent a photo of her to Shitoku, who had agreed to marry her. And there was another surprise to come: soon after the wedding reception finished, Ayako’s new husband revealed that he was deeply in debt. He had borrowed $400 to purchase a fishing boat, which promptly sank in bad weather. So instead of returning to Japan, later that summer in 1918, Ayako found herself being kitted out to work on a pineapple plantation, in order to help pay off Shitoku’s debts.
Japan Story Page 16
