Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  Akiyoshi had anxieties of her own about jazz: where it came from, to whom it really belonged, how – and to what extent – it could be passed on or picked up. Despite being technically brilliant, and knowing bad jazz when she heard over-confident GIs play it, she worried that there might be some deeper source of inspiration into which Japanese like herself would struggle to tap. She confided as much in Hawes, who advised her to eat ‘collard greens, black-eyed peas, and corn pone and clabber’. Akiyoshi didn’t realize he was joking. ‘Where can I buy that?’ she asked.

  It took Akiyoshi until 1974 – much of that time spent living in the United States – to produce a piece of music that she was happy to say brought jazz and ‘Japan’ together. She accomplished it not by ‘Japanizing’ jazz, but by personalizing it. She allowed the music she learned to pass from her eyes and ears to her hands via her heart rather than her brain, setting aside calculations about national origins and ownership, and instead allowing her own needs and desires to drive the process. Only in this way could an idea of foreign origin truly be domesticated.

  The breakthrough track begins with the steadily rising call of a Nō chant, and the clack of a tsuzumi (hand drum). Then the song’s signature flute line starts up: a quivering glissando intended to mimic the sound of the shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute. A close-harmony brass section takes up the melody from there, shifting the piece into a Western rhythm even while the Nō chant and drums carry through underneath. Akiyoshi called her creation ‘Kogun’ – ‘lonely warrior’ or ‘forlorn force’. It was inspired by a news story of the time. A soldier of the Imperial Japanese Army, Private Onoda Hirō, had surrendered in the Philippines after twenty-nine years of hiding out – or, as he saw it, holding out. His former commanding officer had had to fly to his island and formally order him to stand down. ‘Kogun’ was in part about Akiyoshi as well, and her experience of trying to make it as a lone Japanese woman on the US jazz scene.

  Akiyoshi Toshiko (1929–) (left) and Hampton Hawes (1928–77) (right) From hearing her first Teddy Wilson record back in Beppu, it had taken Akiyoshi nearly three decades of trial and error to get to this point. The rest of the Japanese population – democratic Constitution in hand and the first post-war elections now behind them – would enjoy no such luxury of time in experimenting with their American import. The end of the war had brought peace to much of the world, but it hadn’t brought stability. America’s leaders were setting new goals for themselves towards the end of the 1940s, and they had in mind a very specific role for their enemy turned ally.

  13

  Bright Life

  Japan’s new constitution was welcomed into the world on 3 May 1947, by a Japanese brass band playing ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’ outside the Imperial Palace. GHQ having thus dropped a strong hint about the document’s paternity, a thirty-page guide was produced, offering illustrated commentary designed to ensure that no one could miss the major points. The title of the booklet, of which 20 million copies were printed and distributed, was Atarashii Kempō, Akarui Seikatsu – ‘New Constitution, Bright Life’.

  The person destined one day to reveal to Japan and the world the true arrival of that life was at this point busy toddling around his house. Born near Hiroshima on the very day it was bombed, Sakai Yoshinori would one day be known around the globe as the ‘Atomic Boy’. His legs would bear him, clad in purest white, up a seemingly never-ending flight of stairs, halfway into the blue heavens. In his hand, a flaming torch. In the sky above, fighter planes trailing coloured smoke, their pattern gradually resolving into five interlocking rings. On that day, akarui seikatsu would be a mere slogan no more. But first the bright life had to be built – and bought. The price would be high.

  *

  Summer 1949 found Morita Akio and a group of friends standing around in a leaky shack, frying oxalic ferrite in a pan. Their initial idea had been to turn their physics and engineering know-how, until recently devoted to Japanese military projects, towards the making of small parts for the large electrical companies whose fortunes they expected would soon rebound. They planned to drive the parts around Tokyo in their old Datsun truck, full of American army petrol procured on the black market from enterprising GIs. Military police had taken to dyeing their fuel red and making random vehicle inspections, to try to catch the culprits. But someone had discovered a means of using charcoal to cancel out the dye – hardship inspiring entrepreneurship – so that democratizing US Army supplies remained a relatively safe ruse.

  Tokyo Tsūshin Kōgyō (‘Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company’: TTEC) was rather a grand name for a company whose headquarters was not yet waterproof. Nor was there any guarantee that their business model would work. Many of Japan’s electrical companies were part of large, family-controlled corporate networks that had evolved over decades. They were connected via stock ownership, interlocking directorships, exclusive and advantageous credit arrangements, and the buying and selling of one another’s goods and services at preferential rates. Known as zaibatsu, they were regarded by liberals at GHQ – and out in the country at large – as having been complicit in Japanese militarism, and so incompatible with new democratic ideals. TTEC might find some of their largest potential customers taken off the board.

  The challenge for those opposed to the zaibatsu lay in weeding out something so deeply rooted. These networks had expanded and diversified in tandem with modern Japan’s economy. The career of a man called Iwasaki Yatarō offered a case in point. Active in shipping before 1868, he had assisted the Meiji leaders in some of their early seaborne adventures: the ‘civilizing’ raid on Taiwan in 1874 and the transport to southern Japan of the men and arms required to crush the Satsuma rebellion. Over the years that followed, aided by an emerging state inclined to trust large companies and combines to wield scarce capital well, Iwasaki and his successors at Mitsubishi added to their core shipping concern one new line of business after another. They got into coal, copper and gold-mining; banking, insurance and postal transport; farming and beer-brewing (the well-known Kirin brand); paper and chemicals; oil, iron and steel production; water and electrics; engine-building; and finally aircraft. The revolutionary A6M Zero fighter, adapted for kamikaze missions in the last months of the Second World War, helped to bring them to the attention of American officers, one of whom posted a ditty to the bulletin board of his billet in Tokyo:

  There’s something rather fishy

  About the Mitsubishi

  And the rest of the zaibatsu

  Are also not so hot-su.

  It was a testament to the effectiveness of the red-carpet strategy pursued by the imperial house, conservative politicians and big business – starting compromise conversations before the Americans could get a word in – that the first US attempt at breaking up these zaibatsu was based on a policy actually put forward by one of the zaibatsu themselves: Yasuda, one of the ‘big four’ alongside Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo. Under the plan, zaibatsu holding companies were dissolved, with most of their top executives forced out of their jobs and forbidden from purchasing shares when they were sold off.

  The zaibatsu families could just about live with this – for now – while they set about gathering information on GHQ’s longer-term intentions. Representatives all but camped out at MacArthur’s Dai-Ichi building, while top American officials were wined and dined and their maids persuaded to spy on them. Eleanor Hadley, on whose zaibatsu research Occupation policy drew, was too junior to have a maid, and as a woman was thought unlikely to be susceptible to the charms of a geisha party. Instead, Sumitomo sent her roses.

  Patience and persuasion soon paid off. By the time GHQ managed, in December 1947, to get through the Diet a more general measure to tackle ‘excessive concentrations of economic power’, the mood music from the United States was changing. Business opinion had become ambivalent about MacArthur and his mission. The first two years of the Occupation had set the American taxpayer back around $600 million in personnel costs alone – and fo
r what? It was hard to imagine a country less favourable to future investment (or to achieving returns from existing ones): its economic recovery had stalled, while labour had been let off the leash and was causing no end of trouble. It was all deeply un-American. Putting those who had clearly colluded with militarism out of business was one thing. But GHQ seemed to want to go much further, punishing and purging the very people whose expertise was needed to get Japan’s economy going again. Their timing was terrible: communism was on the rise across Eastern Europe, there was no guarantee that Chiang Kai-shek would hold off Mao Zedong in China, and yet here was the United States fettering free commerce and all but preparing the ground for a Japanese revolution.

  Sympathy for this valuing of continuity was widespread amongst conservatives in Tokyo too: within GHQ, Japan’s political parties and in various government ministries. There had been calls after the war for an overhaul of the state bureaucracy. But American faith in expertise, combined with sheer pragmatism had helped to ensure that very little was done. A measure requiring all officials of a certain seniority to be re-examined, to check their fitness for office, yielded only the ‘Paradise Exam’: candidates were allowed tea, cigarettes and an unlimited amount of time to complete the paper. For the most part, the same old ‘shepherds of the people’ remained at their desks, with some even trusted to screen candidates for MacArthur’s purges – with the result that very few bureaucrats lost their jobs. Others pressed ahead with policy: the overwhelming majority of new bills introduced into the new Diet originated not with the political parties but with the ministries, in whose corridors every single Japanese prime minister right through to the mid-1970s began his career.

  The Occupation’s left-liberal idealists were beginning to feel that they had had their day. As the world’s post-war battle lines became clearer, Japan in American eyes went from being a social experiment to a key Pacific ally. A strong economy and a robustly pro-American politics were the priorities, so rights to unionize and to strike were duly tempered, while the planned assault on large companies was first cut back and then quietly dropped. Joseph M. Dodge, a Detroit banker who had previously advised American Occupation forces in Germany, was sent out to Japan in 1949 to get the country moving. His prescription became known as the ‘Dodge Line’. Inflation was to be tackled and the budget balanced, through taxes and public sector cuts. Extravagant government lending to business would be reined in, while subsidies and price controls were phased out. A workable fixed exchange rate would underpin foreign trade, control of which was now to be returned to private commercial hands (where previously it had been run through GHQ and the Japanese government). Last but not least, US aid to Japan would be scaled back.

  Whatever their long-term benefits, in the short term these measures nearly took the country under, with a recession that put half a million people out of work. Japan managed to stay just the right side of the Dodge Line largely thanks to another being crossed, in the summer of 1950. Amidst a barrage of artillery fire, Kim Il-sung’s Korean People’s Army surged down over the 38th parallel dividing North from South Korea. A freshly formed United Nations mandated that a force be put together for South Korea’s defence, and with the US contributing nearly 90 per cent of the troops, General MacArthur was selected as Commander-in-Chief.

  The war ended early and badly for him: he was relieved both of his Korean command and his position as SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), for trying – in more or less open defiance of his superiors’ wishes – to escalate the conflict into an attack on newly Communist China. But the conflict ended very well for Japan. Procurement orders from the US military for supplies and equipment repair brought between $600 and $800 million into Japan each year in the early 1950s. Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru described the war as a ‘gift from the gods’.

  This unexpected windfall, together with a growing availability of bank loans – thanks to a Japanese population determined to save its money as soon as it could afford to do so – made it possible for Japan’s wartime industries to refit for post-war production. Heavy and chemical industries were upgraded to supply the essential raw materials of economic recovery, especially coal and steel. Government tax incentives encouraged the importation of new technology to lower production costs, with the result that Japanese iron and steel production soon outstripped that of Germany, France and Britain. The years to come would see Japan reach one such milestone after another, helping to build a legend – at home and abroad – of a country floored by war, picking itself up again with incredible speed.

  *

  The talk around Morita Akio’s navy lunch table on 7 August 1945 had been of a ‘weapon that flashed and shone’, used at Hiroshima the day before. A physicist by training, Morita knew what it must be. He was shocked, not just by its use, but by its existence. He had marvelled, years before, at film footage of the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Complex in Michigan. Iron ore was shipped in, turned into steel, shaped into automobile parts and assembled into the final product – all in one place. But he had thought that even the Americans must still be twenty years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

  ‘New Constitution, Bright Life’: the front cover of a guide to the new Constitution (left). ‘No more war’ is helpfully illustrated (centre), as are the values intended for the new Japan: equality in marriage whatever the older generation think (below right), and freedom of religion (above right) Japan’s new Constitution meant that there would be no narrowing of that particular technology gap. But hidden away in their dripping shack, Morita and his friends were trying something else. Heated to just the right degree, the yellow powder in their pan turned brown: oxalic ferrite became ferric oxide. This was then mixed with a clear lacquer and applied, using fine, badger-hair brushes, to hemp-strengthened craft paper that had been painstakingly cut into strips with razor blades. The result: a crude form of magnetic tape, onto which voices could be recorded. The design was upgraded a year later when the team finally got hold of some plastic. Then, with great care, Morita was able to load up the company Datsun with TTEC’s pride and joy: a 35-kilogram tape recorder.

  Driving around Tokyo, looking for sales, Morita’s pitch was disarmingly simple. Who doesn’t like the sound of their own voice? Who doesn’t want to sing, and then play it back? But he went away disappointed for the most part. His company’s machine was expensive, it was enormous, and in a country still more focused on needs than wants, there was no pressing case for it. Even when TTEC whittled down the size of their device to that of a particularly bulky briefcase, the only buyers they could find were schools, currently being cajoled by GHQ into using more audio material in classes. To broaden the market any further, TTEC would have to cut down the size, power consumption and price of their product substantially. It would take a technological revolution.

  As luck would have it, just such a revolution had recently occurred at Bell Laboratories in the United States. The hero of the hour was no more than a few millimetres in diameter, and made from semiconductor materials. Its purpose was to amplify electronic signals – something that until now had only been possible with much larger and more energy-hungry vacuum tubes. An internal ballot at the lab to decide on a name for the new invention was won by the word ‘transistor’. And in 1952, while on a sales visit to New York, TTEC’s Ibuka Masaharu discovered that a manufacturing licence was now for sale. TTEC would buy it.

  Or, at least, they would have liked to. Between TTEC and what Morita was convinced would be a fortune loomed the powerful and disturbingly interventionist Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), to whom, in the wake of the Dodge Line, the Occupation authorities had steadily handed over control of Japan’s international trade, technology imports and currency exchange arrangements. In theory, MITI’s whole purpose in life was to fight the cause of Japanese industry, at home and abroad – employees liked to boast of their adherence to the old Tokugawa slogan of jōi: ‘Expel the barbarian!’ But in reality, civil servants tended to think that they
knew better than the business people with whom they dealt. They saw it as their duty to steer them away from decisions that would be bad for them, and bad for Japan. TTEC’s application cried out to be denied: a tiny, inexperienced company wanted to send $25,000 of precious foreign currency out of the country, in the vain hope of making serious use of a new and untried technology. Representatives of TTEC later recalled being ‘laughed out of the room’.

  Six crucial months passed – lost to potential competitors – before permission was finally extracted from MITI, at which point access to money became a problem. With the availability of finance not yet returning to pre-Dodge Line levels, companies were clustering around one of a small handful of banks, in the hope of getting at least some of the funds they needed. The banks, for their part, tended to regard big industrial customers and trading companies as their best bet for future prosperity. MITI encouraged the formation of these new combines (known as keiretsu), now with banks rather than family holding companies at their core and with shareholding and control more diffuse than before, for much the same reasons that its pre-war predecessors had championed the zaibatsu: to succeed in international trade and commerce, Japan needed to field powerful contenders. By the end of 1952, many of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu’s successor companies had been allowed to come back together. Mitsui’s followed a few years later.

  Fortunately for TTEC, they were able to hire as their chairman Mandai Junshiro: a former chairman of Mitsui Bank, who had initially been purged under the Occupation. The effect on TTEC’s bank managers was magical. Before, they had struggled to get a serious hearing. Now, they strolled into Mitsui with its legendary former boss at their side, talking about TTEC as ‘my company’. The taps were hurriedly turned on, and when Mandai mentioned in passing an upcoming share issue, employees at Mitsui took it as a personal command to invest.