Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  Here, as with the car industry, military expertise was put to profitable peace-time uses. Matsudaira Tadashi’s work on the Zero fighter persuaded him that Japan’s terrible safety record for train derailments was due not to faulty track, as people had thought, but to vibrations caused by the trains themselves as they passed across. His new design for the truck underneath the railway carriages eliminated the problem. Kawanabe Hajime brought with him to the ‘dream team’ his Navy signals knowledge, from which he developed a system for regulating the speed of trains using low-frequency sound called ATC (Automatic Train Control). It would be used for generations to come.

  From such technical feats, through futuristic contours and cockpits, to a space-age Centralized Traffic Control room, Japan’s newspapers could barely contain themselves at ‘the airplane that runs on rails’ and what it portended for Japan’s future. They would have relished, had they known, the reaction of a BBC commentator in 1964 as his train picked up speed after leaving Tokyo: ‘I felt a surge in my stomach … I was looking around for a seatbelt.’

  The importance of satellite broadcasting and the shinkansen went far beyond convenience or cheap nationalistic thrills. Before the war, ‘Made in Japan’ was so heavily associated with inferior products – paper umbrellas, pointless trinkets, toys that fell apart in children’s hands – that in the early post-war era Sony had taken to confessing their products’ country of origin on as small a label as they could get away with (on at least one occasion they were ordered by US Customs to make it larger). Now, Japanese electronics companies could boast about a hi-tech tradition in Japan, and expect to be believed.

  Amongst the many products that the Olympics helped these companies to sell at home, one in particular stood out. It was a truly game-changing piece of technology. But it didn’t come cheap. It needed grand, highly visual events to prove its worth and persuade people to part with significant quantities of their hard-earned money. Television had landed, and Japan was going to fall hard for it.

  Much of the heavy lifting in first switching the public on to the new medium had been done a few years before. Emperor Hirohito’s son, Crown Prince Akihito, caused a sensation in November 1958 when he became engaged to a commoner, Shōda Michiko. A ‘Michiko boom’ and spiralling public interest in the match, amidst hopes that the newly symbolic imperial institution might be about to take another step towards the people, gave an enormous boost to sales of television sets in the run-up to the wedding in April 1959. Nor did the nuptials disappoint. There was imperial mystique and splendour, with Michiko labouring under twelve layers of kimono – weighing nearly 15 kilograms in total, noted Britain’s Pathé News (‘Royal Romance Thrills Japs’ had been their headline the year before). There were close-ups of the happy couple’s faces at various points throughout the day. And there was a grand carriage ride through crowds in Tokyo, in the course of which a young man, incensed by the money being wasted on the wedding (when his fire-damaged school had yet to be reopened), threw a stone at the newly-weds and jumped up at their carriage, hoping to pull them out onto the road. He was quickly bundled away by police, later to be judged insane and locked up.

  Where the royal wedding had been a great television event – with no less than ten and a half hours of coverage that day – the Olympics promised a whole series of great events: nine every day for a whole fortnight. Companies like Sony rushed to market new sets and to ramp up production. And while television sets had until recently been horrendously expensive, prices were coming down in the run-up to the Olympics, just as people were starting to feel richer. In December 1960, Japan’s Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato announced a plan to take the nation’s income and double it within a decade, through renewed state management of the economy: from investment in priority industries to various forms of encouragement offered to private companies. The era of wartime and post-war sacrifice was officially over. People would continue to save their money, but at the same time they could now, in good conscience, also focus on achieving and enjoying prosperity. In the end, Japan’s leaders failed to fulfil this foolishly populist promise within ten years. They did it in seven.

  Advertisers did what they could to encourage and capitalize on this feeling of wealth and material comfort in the early 1960s, which had 90 per cent of Japanese defining themselves as ‘middle class’ by the middle of the decade. They worked hard via the print media to persuade people that they could afford a television, then increasingly adapted their expertise to fit the potential of the new medium. TV advertising faced a steep learning curve around the world during these early years. The British public had been incensed when they found out that American coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953 was interrupted by a tea advert featuring J. Fred Muggs the chimpanzee. Early Japanese stumbles included a live, close-up advert for whale meat in which a fly landed on the food, and audience outrage at the cramming of no fewer than three advertisements into the minute-long men’s 100-metre freestyle final at the 1958 Asian Games. But with the help of companies like the advertising giant Dentsū, Japanese businesses quickly became proficient in deploying a combination of direct advertising and programme sponsorship to boost their brands – the sponsorship, especially, intended to foster warm, long-term relationships with consumers.

  Shabondama horidē (Soap Bubble Holiday) was ideal for these purposes: a lavishly produced musical and comedy extravaganza, sponsored by Milky Soap. It was the brainchild of Watanabe Productions, or ‘Nabe Puro’, a talent agency that started out touring its artists around American military bases and later morphed into the media equivalent of Ford’s Rouge Complex. It acquired the raw material: song-writers, choreographers, costume consultants, music and television producers, and a regularly replenished store of telegenic and trainable young people. And then it beat, bolted and welded it all together into a wildly successful final product, which combined entertainment with strong publicity for a lengthy client roster of popular acts like The Peanuts, a duo of singing and dancing identical twins.

  To its defenders, mass entertainment television like Shabondama horidē, together with NHK’s New Year’s Eve song contest Kōhaku Utagassen (‘Red and White Song Battle’) and its annual Taiga Dorama – an epic historical drama split into weekly episodes across a calendar year – played a powerful role in bringing people closer: the post-war nation was knitting itself together as a fabric of families whose individual members gathered in the same room at the same time to enjoy a shared spectacle. Programmes made with a live audience enhanced the effect of bringing hearts around the country into sync, the cameras lingering almost didactically on laughter, tears or shock. The country’s numerous talent shows, meanwhile, were deeply democratic: ‘ordinary’ people were offered their shot at the big time. One of the first and greatest tarento – a term for mass-media celebrities, related to the English word ‘talent’ – was of course the commoner Crown Princess. Fans collected photos of the woman they preferred to call, simply, ‘Michiko-san’, and took coach tours around the town where she grew up.

  The final boon provided by the Olympics was the chance for tentative steps to be taken towards restoring a broader national pride in Japan. Nearly thirty years before, the organizers of Tokyo 1940 had fretted over how the Emperor could possibly open the Games given that ordinary people were forbidden from hearing his voice. This time, he would speak. The dilemma was how to position him when he did so, along with all the imagery that in years past had been used to illustrate the national story. So much of that imagery was now tainted around the world, from former prisoners of war who relived Japanese brutality nightly in their dreams to many millions of families around Asia for whom the loss of loved ones in the 1930s and ’40s was still similarly fresh.

  No one in Japan was entirely sure what to do. What did it mean to say that the Emperor was a ‘symbol of the state’? Was he head of state? The Constitution didn’t specify. Rather than raise this as a legal question, Japan’s conservatives pushed for him to be made sponsor of the Games, and
so give the appearance of a head of state by officiating at their opening. Similar finessing was applied to the old national flag and anthem, neither of which officially enjoyed ‘national’ status anymore. Here again, rather than raise difficult questions or reopen wounds, flag and anthem alike were inserted into the proceedings as Olympic rather than nationalist symbols. Japanese people were democratically surveyed, in the lead-up to the Games, on what they thought was the best shade of red for the disc at the centre of the flag. The winning hue was affixed to Sakai Yoshinori’s vest before he set off with the Olympic torch, and was used right across the Games. ‘Kimi ga yo’, the former national anthem, was played twice: timed first to coincide with the arrival of the Emperor, then later with the release of the doves of peace.

  The Self-Defence Forces provided 7,500 soldiers to help with security at the Games, along with Mitsubishi-built American F-86s to trace the Olympic rings. Here, too, great care was taken. The planes came from the SDF’s aerobatic display team, harmlessly branded ‘Blue Impulse’. And their appearance overhead was timed to coincide with the last of the doves, thereby enhancing a pacifistic image. Meanwhile, chrysanthemums festooned the stadium, and 28.8 kg of chrysanthemum perfume was pumped from dugouts as the ceremony unfolded.

  It was all a sign of things to come. Here was a country severely limited in the means by which it could develop and project its own national image. In place of an independent foreign policy, Japan would have to express itself abroad by means of industry, high technology and visual culture – all three of which would inevitably be parsed for their politics by friends and enemies alike. The potential benefits here, of a prosperous and peaceful ‘bright life’, were immense: a release from poverty at home; and a release from the past abroad. And yet, as a pitch-perfect ceremony opened the most expensive Games in history, some in Japan were already asking awkward questions. What was the long-term cost to Japanese people of living in the kind of society that could afford and was willing to meet this Olympic price tag? And would they one day tire of paying it?

  Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko, on their wedding day in April 1959 Sakai Yoshinori opens the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games in October 1964 The launch of the shinkansen in October 1964 The Peanuts

  Part Five

  * * *

  TWISTED VISIONS

  (1950S TO 1990S)

  14

  Exhibitionism

  Wasted forearms droop, bloodless and grey, from the sleeves of a dark kimono. Eyes bulge from a cold head, lolling forwards on the end of a snapped neck. A long, thin strand of mucus hanging from a nostril mirrors the long, taut rope on the end of which the elderly woman’s shrunken body dangles. The only remaining signs of life are creaturely and degraded: a yellow-ribboned dog feeds from the corpse’s nose; fish bob around a second dead body, which lies face down in a bloody pond.

  The macabre visual language in which Yamashita Kikuji couched his denunciations of 1950s Japan was learned amidst the atrocities he had witnessed – and participated in – across southern China and Taiwan during the war. He created this particular painting, The Tale of Akebono Village, after the Cultural Brigade of the Japanese Communist Party tasked him with reporting on a violent dispute between a landlord and local villagers. An activist had been killed, and a woman had killed herself after losing her life savings when a local bank owned by the landlord collapsed. Yamashita’s blend of socialist realism with a campaigning tinge of surrealism was typical of the ‘reportage’ painters of this era. He used it to bring out the scavenger-like existence to which the dead woman’s surviving granddaughter had been reduced: deprived of the savings intended for her (a white document under a black kettle is all that remains of the elderly woman’s bank account), she laps instead at the fluid streaming from her grandmother’s nose.

  Fewer than one fifth of Japanese surveyed in 1952 thought that the San Francisco Peace Treaty had brought them true independence. Signs of their country’s much-vaunted graduation from defeated enemy to respected and protected ally were hard to spot. Instead, there was evidence everywhere of continuing subordination to American power and interests. Richly symbolic incidents kept stacking up. In the spring of 1954, the crew of a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon 5, were irradiated in the fallout from an American thermonuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll in the mid-Pacific. Disfiguring injuries resulted, from hair loss through to skin disintegration. When one of the twenty-three fishermen died, a furious political row broke out about whether radiation or – as American officials were inclined to argue – improper medical care for an underlying condition was to blame. A ‘tuna panic’ over potentially contaminated catches ran alongside rumours of radioactive cherry blossoms. And as Geiger counters became a new and unwelcome staple of editorial cartoons, a reported 30 million people – more than half the adult population of Japan – put their names to petitions calling for the eradication of nuclear weapons.

  ‘Without military power,’ Japan’s Education Minister announced in a radio address back in September 1945, ‘we go forward with culture.’ His comment envisaged the country’s peaceful reinvention via education and the arts. The reality was that during the 1950s and 1960s culture became the principal means by which post-war battles over the nation’s identity, purpose and even ownership were fought. While the state, the Imperial Family, big business, advertisers and mainstream creative industries collaborated in the building of the ‘bright life’ story, the challenge for artists who opposed the bargain on which it appeared to be based – prosperity purchased at the cost of independence – was how to parlay an Akebono Village or a Lucky Dragon 5 into a popular movement capable of changing the country’s direction of travel. How to show people images of themselves and their society that they might not want to see. How to tell and garner attention for stories about Japan that were truer to its mixed reality than those one generally encountered while flicking through the television channels.

  The first, fundamental task was to find and occupy some public space, within or without the mass media, and make suitably arresting use of it. The Yomiuri newspaper’s annual ‘Nihon Indépendant Art Exhibition’, established in 1949, offered an important early opportunity. It represented a dramatic break from the past. Pre-war political leaders had dominated public space – literally and figuratively – via four national art institutions located in Tokyo’s Ueno Park: the Tokyo National Museum (1872) stored and displayed works of art; the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (1887) taught an approved selection of ‘traditional’ techniques; the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (1926) held exhibitions; and the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties (1930) carried out research. Government-sponsored art exhibitions were held annually from 1907 onwards, their influence magnified by extensive newspaper and magazine coverage.

  The Tale of Akebono Village (Yamashita Kikuji, 1953) The post-war artist and critic Okamoto Tarō charged the modernizing Meiji leaders who established much of this set-up with having been unable, or unwilling, to understand manners or morals or art except through Westerners’ eyes. Those leaders had taken Japan’s extraordinary cultural range, filtered out much that was primal and vital and self-aware, and sponsored instead an elite canon of fine art (put together with the help of scholars like Okakura Tenshin and the American Ernest Fenollosa) to be wielded for diplomatic ends abroad and conservative didactic ones at home.

  The constituent parts of this official artistic tradition were impressive enough, in their own right. They included Buddhist sculpture and painting, alongside ceramics, textiles and exquisitely crafted swords. There was Yamato-e painting dating back to the imperial court of the twelfth century, which balanced spare depictions of pale courtly countenances with a playful ‘blown-off roof’ perspective that allowed viewers to spy into an interior room. Nō theatre, bunraku (puppet theatre) and a reformed kabuki were all eventually included, alongside court music and dance. But Okamoto felt sure that much of this left ordinary people cold, or engaged only at a respectful distance. It s
imply wasn’t intimate or ‘disagreeable’ enough to fulfil the responsibility of art as he saw it: to supply a society with prophetic insight, and force it to pay attention; to continually register disbelief at the ingrained wrongs of the world; and to suggest, in the case of contemporary Japan, that material prosperity was a distraction from its demons (past and present) rather than an effective exorcism.

  The Yomiuri Indépendant, held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, upended this old model of elites carefully curating a national vision. In the spirit of early post-war democracy, the Indépendant opened its doors to all people and all styles. The youngest artist to be exhibited was a child of six. Paintings and mosaics by expensively trained professionals featured alongside a crayon drawing of a naked woman by a homeless man in Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighbourhood. And just as anyone could be an artist, so anyone could be a critic: visitors to the Indépendant were encouraged to vote for their favourite piece, and to contribute reviews for the national newspapers. Okamoto was amongst those who took things a stage further in the mid-1950s, organizing a ‘street debate’ in front of the museum at which artists and members of the public met and discussed what was going on inside. Those hoping to swing the Indépendant towards the traditional canon objected to abstract art, on the basis that the public wouldn’t understand it. The street debate was a chance to test that theory, and to ensure that such art – all art – engaged rather than alienated.

  Other artists roamed the country, joining forces with political protestors. In 1955, the reportage painter Nakamura Hiroshi visited the village of Sunagawa, to the west of Tokyo, where residents were trying to prevent their land being cleared to make way for the expansion of the nearby US Tachikawa Air Base – its runway was at present so short that planes running missions to the Korean peninsula and South East Asia were unable to take off fully loaded. Whenever government surveyors arrived to assess their land, villagers would burn straw, throw buckets of human faeces and spray poisonous insecticide to try to chase them away.