Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  Doctors and researchers cast around desperately for the cause. At first, they thought they might be dealing with some unknown infectious disease, because almost all the victims came from the same hamlets around the bay. But attention soon shifted to their diet of seafood, in which this area was famously rich: the boast was that if an unexpected visitor arrived, you could put the kettle on, go off to catch a fish or an octopus to feed them, and be back before the water boiled.

  Suspect seafood led investigators to the waters of the bay, and in turn to a large chemical plant nearby. Shin Nihon Chisso Hiryō (New Japan Nitrogenous Fertilizers) had been operating since the beginning of the twentieth century. It loomed large enough in the nation’s industrial and economic interests to warrant a pre-war visit from the Shōwa Emperor, thirteen Allied bombing raids and a privileged place in post-war economic planning. The city nearby was especially reliant on the plant. Minamata was known as Chisso’s ‘castle-town’: a reference, drawing on a bygone samurai age, to the company’s swaggering, feudal dominance in the area. Chisso employed more than half of the town’s working population and contributed the lion’s share of its taxes.

  One of Chisso’s most valued products was acetaldehyde. Widely used in industry, it was manufactured via a process whose waste products, dumped directly into Minamata Bay via a canal, were now thought likely to be the cause of people’s symptoms. Sediment near the canal mouth was found to contain a wide variety of chemicals, amongst them a concentration of mercury so high – around two kilograms per ton – that you could mine it for profit. Chisso later did so.

  But when researchers from Kumamoto University announced their conclusions about the links between people’s symptoms and the chemical plant, Chisso concealed its own, similar results, and resolved instead to fight. It issued pamphlets casting doubt on the science behind the university findings. And when sales of seafood from the bay ended up being banned as a precaution, it used mimaikin (sympathy money) to buy the silence of local fishermen. One condition of the money was that recipients waived their right to compensation, even if Chisso’s waste water was at some point found to be the cause of what was now being called ‘Minamata disease’. Central government likewise suppressed its own findings, and rewarded the efforts of the university researchers by cancelling their funding.

  *

  While waste water continued to gush into Minamata Bay, Japan’s leaders turned to more pressing concerns. The late 1940s and 1950s had seen the emergence of union activists, students and radical ideologues as the ‘usual suspects’ of street protest. The Anpo demonstrations of 1960 were different, and far more worrying for Japan’s leaders, because they brought them face to face with an unexpected and fearsome new foe: the general public. A tide of first-timers, swelling the ranks of protestors around the Diet building and across Tokyo, watched on television and talked about in the newspapers, presented an unprecedented threat to the government’s legitimacy and to its core claim: to be establishing the kind of ‘new Japan’ that the vast majority of people wanted.

  Kobayashi Tomi regarded herself as the sort of person who, when discontented by the world, would usually just ‘sit at home, becoming more and more annoyed’. But then she heard Prime Minister Kishi, in the course of berating the press for its one-sided and unrepresentative coverage of events in 1960, declare his intention to listen out for the ‘voices of the voiceless’. The implication seemed to be that anyone not actively and vocally contesting the status quo must be happy with it. This persuaded Kobayashi to help form a protest group for the protest-shy. They took Koe Naki Koe no Kai (Voices of the Voiceless) as their name, and created placards that included slogans like ‘Walk with us for fifty metres, or even ten!’ Their marching song said it all:

  Come on Citizens, let’s walk together …

  We know that you are busy at work every day

  And feel embarrassed to participate in demonstrations.

  But if we give up here and now, and fall silent

  Then Japan will never change for the better.

  Let’s act now so that one day, when our children ask,

  ‘What were you doing then?’

  We will not be ashamed …

  Come on Citizens, be brave!

  The all-important word here was ‘citizens’: shimin. Anpo showed that you didn’t have to build barricades, wield clubs or speak in mangled Marxist jargon in order to oppose injustice and help to achieve change. All you needed was a cause, knowledge of your constitutional rights, and a modicum of expertise in applying pressure in the right places. Nor did you have to agree that everyday life in Japan was now a web of odious, constraining economic and cultural attachments, from which only extreme vigilance, complete purification or violent self-marginalization would save you. Where radicals saw chains to be slipped, citizens spotted strings to be pulled. A rapidly expanding urban Japan offered no end of opportunity: it was densely populated, a hub for government and industry, and the scene of a rich – and therefore richly vulnerable – network of social and commercial transactions. It was here that battle would be joined.

  A pre-war housing crisis, wartime bombing and mass migration to the cities required the building of 11 million homes during Japan’s early economic boom years. Olympic visitors arriving in Tokyo encountered a landscape of concrete, cranes and half-structures – buildings in the process of either coming down or going up. By 1970, around 50 million people, or half the Japanese population, could be found living along the main section of the Tōkaidō corridor, running from Tokyo through Kawasaki, Yokohama, Nagoya and Kyoto to Osaka. People were soon talking about a ‘Tōkaidō Megalopolis’. Across ever greater proportions of this famous rail route, train travellers found themselves struggling to say where one urban conurbation finished and the next began.

  City-dwellers and their appetite for work and consumption were the life-blood of the new Japan. Couples dreamed of progressing from renting a home to living in a danchi, a government-built suburban apartment complex. These were soon joined by manshon – privately built city apartment blocks. The final step on the property ladder, if all went well, would be to stand one day, looking proudly on, as the constituent parts of a small prefabricated house were delivered to a newly purchased and freshly cleared plot of land.

  Problems of space and sound-proofing in some of these homes were countered by the joys, new to many, of indoor toilets. Communal tatami-mat spaces were increasingly exchanged for wooden and vinyl flooring, with living and dining–kitchen areas separated out from private bedrooms – in which adults and children now slept separately. Tables and chairs vied for precious floor space with a rapidly expanding array of labour-saving gadgets. There were culinary innovations too: Chinese fried dumplings called gyōza, brought back to Japan by soldiers returning from war; Western-style bread (toast for breakfast; sandwiches for a quick lunch); processed foods including the instant classic, ‘instant ramen’ (noodles).

  The year 1970 marked the country’s point of peak material fulfilment. As Morita Akio’s Sony became the first Japanese company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, many Japanese could look back on a decade of extraordinary growth that had allowed them to graduate from encountering luxurious homes and lifestyles on television to inhabiting and living them themselves. Where parents and grandparents had yearned for peace and stability, the present generation aspired to great careers and luxury clothes, fine dining and foreign holidays. Health insurance and other welfare measures launched in the early 1960s were helping people to enjoy all this for longer than ever before – Japan would soon boast the longest-lived men and women on earth.

  Yet few of Japan’s millions of new homes represented great victories for architecture. The emphasis had been on speed of construction, cost-effectiveness of materials and the use of all available urban space. And it showed. There was little in the way of coordinated planning: residents found that electricity and telephone cables suspended between poles and building façades ran mesh-like across their already l
imited window views. And even those without a particularly keen sense of smell found the provision of drainage and sewerage all too conspicuously lacking. The air in some parts of Tokyo was so thick with factory and car emissions that schoolchildren ended up being hospitalized.

  Two shocks in 1971 reminded people that even these rather mixed standards of living might not be sustainable. First, US President Nixon had announced – on live television, without forewarning the Japanese – his plan to visit the People’s Republic of China the following year. Then he had declared his intention for the United States to leave the gold standard. The first move threatened Japan’s long-term value to the US as an ally in East Asia, while obliging it to reverse its own longstanding post-war policy – originally forced on it by the US – of keeping its diplomatic distance from China’s communists. The second pushed the value of the yen sharply upwards, rendering Japanese exports suddenly more expensive (Nixon was not overly concerned about this: angry at the country’s leaders for their slowness in helping America with its trade imbalance, his economic policy was – in his words – to ‘stick it to the Japanese’). Two years later, along came a third shock. Oil prices briefly rocketed four-fold, caused by conflict in the Middle East and resulting in a ‘toilet paper panic’ as people scrambled to hoard essentials before prices went up or supplies ran out.

  In response to these setbacks, government planners prescribed more of the same, but with a few tweaks. Instability in the Middle East and the steady rise of competitor economies showed that Japan had to redouble its efforts at achieving a hi-tech economy, while becoming as self-sufficient in energy as possible. Investment was duly boosted in key areas from computers, bio-tech and robotics through to nuclear and hydroelectric energy. Electronics manufacturers worked to reduce the power consumption of their products.

  Two – perhaps more positive – epoch-changing moments arrived the next year in 1974. In May, the first 7-Eleven franchise in Japan opened its doors. The nation was launched on a love-affair with the local convenience store, or konbini. A little over forty years later, Japan was home to no less than 60,000 stores. The standard arrangement involved around 100 square metres of retail space, open twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week. There was hot and cold food and drink, cigarettes and toiletries, manga and magazines. People could access an ever-increasing roster of services besides: paying bills, withdrawing money, buying concert tickets, dropping off parcels or laundry, making photocopies, using a massage chair, and even checking their blood pressure.

  The second great consumer moment of that year was the national launch of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Kurisumasu ni wa Kentakkii (‘Kentucky for Christmas’) campaign. The manager of Japan’s first KFC, Okawara Takeshi, had overheard two foreigners in his shop talking about how much they were missing turkey, being so far from home at Christmas. That night, it came to him in a dream: what if KFC were to offer a special ‘party barrel’ for the festive season? Within a few short years children had come to regard Colonel Sanders and Santa as more or less the same person, special KFC Christmas dinners were having to be ordered weeks in advance, and Christmas and chicken had become inextricably linked in the minds of the Japanese population. Okawara’s dream eventually landed him his dream job: President and CEO of KFC Japan.

  Amidst all the opportunities, shocks and innovations of the 1960s and early 1970s, there were echoes, still, of an older domesticity. The latest vacuum cleaners contended with traditional tatami rooms. Sliding panels (fusama) and paper screens (shōji) remained an artful means of opening up or closing off space. And a sunken, plain-floored genkan (vestibule) was still used to mark and maintain a transition between the dirt and distractions of the outside world and the cleanliness and relative safety of the home.

  Housewives sitting at dining-room tables, drawing up lists of chores, no doubt detected rather more egregious continuities with the past. The Meiji Civil Code had been infamous amongst pre-war feminists for enshrining in law the ie: a ‘household’ whose headship, along with extensive rights over other members, passed exclusively from father to eldest son. That code very comfortably met GHQ’s generous definition of ‘feudal’, and parts of it were updated in 1947 to ensure equal individual rights and shared inheritance of family property.

  But here, as in many areas of life, Occupation reforms did not so much win thoroughgoing change as create the constitutional and institutional means by which people might one day win it for themselves. When it came to the family, women seeking a different deal had to contend with conservatives in government who were intent on ensuring a lengthy afterlife for the ie, both as a cultural ideal and an economic convenience. Government-backed, low-interest mortgages became conspicuous for their availability only to couples and families – not to individuals. Social security and taxation, too, were skewed towards establishing what LDP politicians referred to as a (‘traditionally Japanese’) ‘welfare society’ – contrasting it with the emergence of a ‘welfare state’ in parts of Western Europe. In Japan, government would offer a basic safety net, with adjunct roles played by employers and local communities. People would then look for care and social support primarily within the family – which more often than not meant mothers and grandmothers, aunts, sisters and daughters.

  Citizen movements across the late 1960s and early 1970s were built on the realization that all of this – growth, consumerism, government attempts to connect social with civil engineering – depended upon the daily cooperation of ordinary people. It might not be every feminist’s first choice, but even that list of chores in the housewife’s hand was a weapon of sorts. It was an inventory of companies and service-providers who relied upon households like hers to survive, and in turn to drive the economic growth without which Japan’s rulers lacked an impressive story to tell abroad or a mollifying one to offer an over-worked population at home. It was, in other words, as reliable a guide to Japan’s pressure points as you could ask for.

  In a battle for, and through, daily life, not every issue needed to be existential. Some of the most effective campaigns were fought on narrowly defined issues. Danchi complexes gave rise to citizens’ associations intent on tackling sewerage charges and the corruption of local officials – one even tried to have their local mayor recalled. Other organizations got involved in discussions of train fares, waste disposal and Japan’s shortage of high schools. Political study groups were set up, while veteran Anpo organizations like Voices of the Voiceless offered people advice on everything from campaigning tactics to dealing with the police (teaching them the legal difference between a threat and an actual arrest, along with a person’s right to silence and a lawyer).

  There was no shortage of participants. State enthusiasts for a post-war ie system soon discovered its downside: well-informed and influential women with time on their hands. They could present themselves, as inclination dictated or context demanded, either as wives and mothers or as women seeking to liberate themselves from roles assigned to them by men. The former offered political traction with conservative voters and politicians, and carried significant moral weight. The latter, increasingly common amongst a younger generation influenced by new waves of American and European feminism, encouraged citizens to look at the structural problems in Japan from which so many of their particular concerns stemmed.

  A danchi housing complex near Osaka (1967) A fresh culinary innovation: Morinaga’s potato mash The speakers and topics at an ‘Asian Women’s Conference Fighting Against Invasion = Discrimination’ in August 1970 demonstrated the broad and interconnected range of issues that women activists saw as having shared roots in discrimination, abuse of power and the failure of ordinary people – women and men alike – to wake up to their role in sustaining them. Alongside an opening statement later credited with kick-starting ūman ribu – ‘women’s liberation’ – in Japan, there were discussions of the Vietnam War and Japan’s relations with China, of the social problems that grew up around US and Japanese military bases and the food poisoning sca
ndals that seemed to have their roots in businesses’ lack of accountability.

  Discussion and activism amongst citizens, in which women played a central role, seemed to represent a rejection of the idea – in part a hangover from an earlier era – that governance was best left to specialists. There was also a growing realization that insisting on simple and uncrossable ideological battle-lines (politicians and bureaucrats versus the people, for example) was unrealistic in a complex society, and potentially counter-productive to a cause’s prospects. An LDP politician and his or her family were no less at risk from air pollution or tainted cooking oil than anyone else. So why not make allies there, rather than enemies?

  Citizens’ movements had constantly to contend, however, with a powerful post-war story, which most wanted to believe and for which evidence had been piling up during the course of the 1960s: Japan finally making an unbridled success of modernization, from astonishing economic and export growth to standards of living that left the early post-war years seeming like another world. And yet there was profound potential here for abruptly confronting people with vivid evidence of the chasm that in some places loomed between grand narratives and shabby realities. It was used to devastating effect in 1970. The great, upbeat motto of that year was the one associated with a futuristic international Expo in Osaka: ‘Progress and Harmony for Mankind’. To which a small group of citizens responded by dressing in the simple traditional garb of pilgrims (conical sedge hats and white robes, alms bags slung over shoulders), entering a shareholders’ meeting in that city, and unfurling a banner on which was written a single word, freighted with scarcely imaginable anger and pain. It read, simply: ‘Bitterness’.