Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

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  Beginning in the summer of 1969, people in Minamata had found their windows being smashed, their houses urinated on and human excrement thrown at them. Thugs turned up at their doors to threaten them. Flyers were distributed denouncing Minamata patients as fakes: alcoholics or eaters of rotten fish, who were grubbing for undeserved money and endangering the local economy with vexatious claims against its great benefactor, Chisso.

  Patients and their families had lived for the past decade with shopkeepers who handled their money using chopsticks and bowls, and with people who mocked their symptoms or held their noses as they passed by. But this was an escalation, and the reason was simple. The government had belatedly conceded, the year before, that Minamata disease was caused by effluent from Chisso’s factory. And now, citizens were taking their cause on the road, into the national media, and through the courts.

  Japan’s legal system was based on adaptations of French, German and – since 1945 – American law, applied via the Supreme Court at the top, running down through high courts (primarily hearing appeals), district courts, summary courts (for minor offences) and family courts. For those who were sceptical about the government’s interest in pursuing the progressive promise of 1945–6, the potential of the judiciary to rein in the legislature and executive was something to be explored and encouraged at every opportunity. Some of the richest sources of employment for the country’s small cadre of lawyers lay with labour unions and opposition political parties in search of results like the sensational Sunagawa decision of March 1959, which had declared US bases in Japan to be unconstitutional.

  Politicians and civil servants had good reason to worry about citizens resorting to the courts. Their power rested, far more so now than in the past, on tinkering, persuasion and public willingness to allow them a broad managerial remit. It was unwise to allow the legal boundaries of that remit to be tested too often or openly, or to permit too bright a light to be shone on the close working relationships between government and business – policy concessions and support abroad flowing one way, campaign funds and well-paid post-politics jobs the other. One of the many ways in which the wheels were greased in what green-eyed European and American observers took to calling ‘Japan Inc.’ was the phenomenon known as amakudari (‘descent from heaven’): civil servants retiring in their early fifties and offering their expertise instead to grateful corporate contacts.

  Contributing to government nervousness about the courts was the fact that Japan’s studiously vague codes and laws left much to play for. In the late 1960s, pollution campaigners had begun to try their luck. By the time the Minamata legal action began in 1969, three other pollution suits had already been brought: for mercury poisoning in Japan’s northern Niigata prefecture, resulting from a similar industrial process to that used by Chisso until recently; air pollution caused by a petrochemical complex near Yokkaichi City, in Mie prefecture (residents reported putting out their washing to dry, only to see it turn black almost immediately); and drinking water contaminated with cadmium in Tōyama prefecture.

  These three cases were all won, yielding not just compensation but legal judgments that were wide-ranging in their implications. Definitions were provided for negligence and causality in liability cases. The burden of proof was shifted, so that plaintiffs had only to establish likely cause on the basis of epidemiological data (as opposed to the more difficult process of gathering and examining clinical and pathological data), after which it would be up to the defendant to prove them wrong. And the defendant’s duty was established to use the best available technology in minimizing pollution – regardless of economic cost.

  Political leaders were forced to act, too. A ‘Pollution Diet’ of 1970 passed no fewer than fourteen specific environmental measures, designed to cope with public disquiet and to forestall future lawsuits. Almost overnight, the country acquired some of the toughest environmental regulations in the world. Regulatory powers were laid out for central and local government and companies were made responsible for cleaning up waste.

  The price of ensuring success for these measures would be constant pressure applied by the general public. Although the new measures looked impressive on paper, Japan’s bureaucrats had done what they often did, right across the twentieth century: they had set out to wrest back control of a situation by wooing and working with interest groups who were clearly on the up, giving them just enough and no more. Arrangements hailed by the LDP as efficient and rooted in conciliation rather than contest were, to their critics, vague and toothless. Civil servants at MITI and the Ministry of Construction accepted the pragmatic need to answer protestors’ concerns, but they could not tolerate having their or their business allies’ hands tied too tightly. So no specific standards or emissions limits were written into law: it would be for the ministries to decide such things. And no money was provided for enforcement. American-inspired arrangements to involve the public in scrutinizing proposed development work, via impact assessments and planning meetings, were similarly shorn of legal force. Instead, setsumeikai (‘explanatory meetings’) were offered: people were invited to hear a lecture on the rightness and necessity of whatever was in the pipeline.

  When the OECD rated Japan amongst the very best environmental performers in the world a few years later, it was a success for citizens’ commitment to a cause long after it appeared to have been won. The ongoing publicity that they managed to generate persuaded MITI to persuade, in turn, Japan’s businesses that pollution control was in their interests. Ministries advised on measures such as building taller smokestacks to avoid concentrating pollution in one area, and purchasing crude oil with lower sulphur content. In the same way, although Japan’s new Environment Agency had little funding and even less independent power, it was able to play on fears generated by legal cases and by the negative press surrounding them to win important victories on automobile emissions and a ‘polluter pays’ principle.

  Above all, no business wanted to become the next Chisso – vivid testament to what the Minamata protestors had achieved. Activists had worked to attract masu komi (mass media or ‘mass communications’) attention where they could, alongside producing their own mini komi (newsletters). Through the latter, support groups across Japan had been formed, one of which organized a well-publicized pilgrimage to the Chisso shareholders’ meeting in Osaka, in 1970. Having stopped along the way in Hiroshima to join their cause with victims of the atomic bomb, eighteen patients and thirty-five supporters – each of whom had bought a single company share in Chisso – entered the shareholders’ meeting.

  Desperate executives shut the meeting down as soon as they realized what was happening. But newspaper and television cameras captured the unfurling of the banner nonetheless, with its compelling one-word denunciation. They also filmed protestors confronting the company president with memorial tablets of deceased relatives. Hamamoto Fumiyo, who watched Minamata disease kill both of her parents and cripple her brother, took him by the lapels of his suit jacket: ‘You’re a parent too … do you really understand my feelings? How much do you think I suffered? You can’t buy lives with money!’ Chisso had hired the advertising giant Dentsū to help it with its PR. But with Minamata support groups creating plays and documentary films about the disease, while photographers put before the nation graphic, heart-rending proof of its effects, it became clear that Chisso had lost the publicity battle.

  They lost the legal argument three years later. The Minamata ruling in 1973 included a crucial observation: events outside the court had been influential in the progress of the case. Here was proof of the importance, for citizens’ movements, of fighting simultaneously on a diverse range of related fronts. Thinkers like Ui Jun, an engineer at Tokyo University who set up the Independent Lectures on Pollution in 1970, helped to furnish first-timers with ideas on how. Some of them learned to embarrass Japan’s leaders by publishing and disseminating internationally an English-language booklet called Polluted Japan, in 1972. Others took foreign j
ournalists on a bus tour of Japan’s most polluted sites. And in an industrial context where concealment was a common defence strategy, citizens uncovered and shared information. A housewife discovered a discoloured coin in a river, helping to identify hydrogen sulphide poisoning there. City residents mapped patterns of diseased pine trees, eventually locating a pollution source. Meanwhile, people were advised to look to their lifestyles as well. A campaigner against power-plant construction suggested a ‘philosophy of the dark’: one ‘power-off day’ per month would allow citizens to reflect on the costs of their culture of power consumption, while freeing them from the moronic television advertising that helped to sustain it.

  The citizen spirit trickled down into local government too. Tokyo governor Minobe Ryōkichi encouraged Tokyoites and bureaucrats to exchange notes on the challenges that each group faced in using and providing city services. Across his long tenure, from the late 1960s through to the end of the 1970s, the fruits of Minobe’s approach included free health insurance for elderly people on low incomes and the setting of ‘civil minimums’ – basic standards of life to which local government officials committed themselves.

  People’s energy for this kind of activity ebbed and flowed over the years that followed. In some cases, cooperation risked slipping into co-option – through the harnessing of citizens as a volunteer army by increasingly cash-strapped local authorities, as growth slowed during the 1970s. From assisting single mothers, the sick and the disabled to tidying up parks, a survey in 1976 revealed that 3.4 million people across the country were now working as volunteers. Was all this the beginnings of a distinctly, creatively ‘Japanese’ way of redeeming urban modernity, from which other countries might learn? Or had citizens’ movements and volunteers ended up homing in too closely and exclusively on single issues that could be realistically tackled? As Japanese wealth continued to wow the world into the 1980s, new, more expansive visions began to be offered: exploring the greater meaning of Japan’s – even humanity’s – present situation, and starting to imagine what form redemption might possibly take.

  Protestors, dressed in pilgrims’ robes and hats, confront the Chisso company president in 1970, some carrying memorial tablets for deceased relatives Uemura Tomoko, in the arms of her mother Ryoko, on the day (20 March 1973) that the Minamata litigants won their action against Chisso

  16

  Moving Mountains

  A girl in a gas mask picks her way through dense forest, seething with botanical corruption. Sticky, distorted sacs litter the hard ground, from which brittle, barren flower-stems emerge, bent and dented like the limbs of a giant crustacean. Furred tendrils tower and sway. Soft, feathery spheres hang down from the forest canopy on hairy cords, leaking spores into the gloom. Five minutes without a mask in here would kill you. So the girl keeps hers on as she walks; a weapon over her shoulder, a test tube in her hand.

  A siren tears the girl away from her work in the forest. Someone is under attack. She runs out, leaps onto her glider, and a modest ignition propels her skywards. Cruising along above dry, barren land, she finds an enormous beetle-like creature stampeding away from the forest. It is propelled along on a thicket of taloned legs, moving in a blur and churning up the dirt as it goes. The cascading layers of hard, protective shell that encase its body are studded with dome-like eyes, each glowing red with rage at a tiny human being desperately trying to outrun it on horseback.

  The girl swoops in, and uses a stun grenade to bring the creature to a halt amidst a cloud of dust. Then she does something unexpected. She apologizes, for having had to use violence. And she pleads gently for it to return to the forest. After a pause, it does so. Together with the man whose life she has just saved, the girl heads home: to a small rural farming community protected from the poisons of the forest by a fresh wind that blows in from the ocean, funnelled between tall, rocky valley walls. It is a thousand years since the great industrial civilizations of the world all but wiped one another out in a seven-day nuclear war. And this isolated band of innocents is hanging on as best they can …

  In this way, a young Marxist manga artist laid out the early frames of an epic adventure. His craft originated in China, as picture scrolls (emakimono in Japanese) up to fifteen metres in length, wrapped around a stick and tied with ribbon. The action on these scrolls took place from right to left, through a series of painted images sometimes accompanied by text. Themes ranged from cosmic cautions about the fiery tortures of hell to farting competitions amongst semi-naked, loose-fleshed men, and satire poking fun at Japan’s Buddhist clergy (sometimes authored by clerics themselves).

  Early scrolls were hand-painted, and too precious for most ordinary Japanese ever to lay eyes on. But a woodblock printing boom across the 1700s and 1800s made available combinations of images and words to almost anyone who wanted them. Edo bookshops and lending libraries boasted illustrated stories and series of scenic prints – Mount Fuji being a perennial favourite – alongside travel guides, encyclopaedias, books on fashion and medicine, adverts for local goods and services, portraits of kabuki stars, ghost stories, erotic shunga art and samurai adventures. A single print could be had for the price of a snack.

  The Tokugawa authorities kept a close eye on the world of publishing, and especially the forerunners of modern satirical manga, the much-loved kibyōshi. These were tall tales told in sharp prose, packed tightly around lavish illustrations and then enclosed between hard yellow or blue covers. The market was enormous – some editions sold up to 10,000 copies – so that when the Western political cartoon found its way to Japan in the late nineteenth century, writers and audiences were quick to adopt and adapt. Where their predecessors contended with kibyōshi, the Meiji-era censors leafed carefully through publications like Marumaru Chimbun and Tokyo Puck. The latter’s founder, Kitazawa Rakuten, created Japan’s first comic strip around the turn of the twentieth century: two country people explore Tokyo, musing on the confusing wonders of the modern world.

  Kitazawa became one of the earliest modern artists to use the word manga – ‘whimsical pictures’ – to describe what he was doing. It quickly became an industry, producing specialized comics for a youth audience: Shōnen Club (for boys) from 1914; Shōjo Club (for girls), from 1923; and Yōnen Club (for younger children), from 1926. All three were published by Kodansha, one of a small handful of publishers who managed to corner the manga market early on. After a grim interlude in which manga writers were compelled to follow their musician counterparts in producing narrowly patriotic and militaristic fare, the art form broadened and boomed once more in the 1950s, with stories of scientists, superheroes and ballerinas; futuristic fantasies; and a darker, realist genre called gekiga (‘dramatic pictures’).

  The ‘God of manga’ was the man who once sat in an Osaka cinema watching ‘Momotarō’s Divine Sea Warriors’ and vowing that he would one day do this sort of thing for a living. Tezuka Osamu created Tetsuwan Atomu (‘Mighty Atom’ – better known in English as Astro Boy) in the 1950s, alongside Ribon no Kishi (‘Princess Sapphire’). Influenced by performances of the all-female Takarazuka Revue troupe, to which Tezuka’s mother took him as a child, Princess Sapphire was one of the first characters to feature the large, sparkling eyes with which Japanese manga would later become synonymous around the world.

  This formative generation of manga artists shared with their colleagues across the arts a deep distrust of adult authority, born from memories of the war. Knowing the world to be complicated and capable of terrible violence, they did not seek to dumb down or sugar-coat these things in their work for young audiences.

  It was an approach that the Marxist manga artist took to heart as he set the scene for his heroine and her rural homeland. He didn’t yet know where this story would go, but Miyazaki Hayao had a clear theme, inspired by the Minamata tragedy: human beings’ ambiguous relationship with the natural world – at the same time abusing it and protecting it, in love with it and afraid of it, at one with it and estranged from it.

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nbsp; The heroine’s name was Nausicaä. She was a leader, fighter, scientist and psychic, driven by a deep sympathy for life in all its forms. But precisely what Nausicaä ought to be fighting for was difficult for Miyazaki to discern. While others in Japan experimented with a sense of ‘citizenship’ forged through pragmatic action in the service of individual causes, Miyazaki was amongst those struggling to sketch out a bigger picture: a highly philosophical, even spiritual critique of his country’s predicament – and that of contemporary humanity as a whole – along with a vision of what salvation might look like.

  He was doing so in the early 1980s, at the end of a distinctly mixed decade. Miyazaki had witnessed elite complacency, violent incidents and economic shocks, but he had also seen signs of citizens’ willingness to get involved in steering the ship.

  So was Japanese modernity beginning to mature? Or was recent progress no more than life-support for a system that didn’t deserve to survive? Miyazaki seemed to veer towards the latter, putting forward Nausicaä’s small rural community as an attractive alternative: an apparently pre-industrial idyll with manageable numbers (around 500 people), where agriculture was pursued with simple tools and an open and communitarian spirit. And yet hidden away in a hut was an old fighter plane. This was a radically post-industrial world, apparently concealing this relic of a hi-tech, destructive past in the hope that it would help that era to rest in peace. Here was history as something ultimately beyond the power of humans to shape. A force of nature, even a malevolent spirit.

  Nausicaä’s community discovers this soon enough, in a series of events seemingly inspired by episodes from the broad sweep of Japan’s modern experience. Nausicaä’s innocent, pre-Meiji community avoids predation at the hands of far-off, militarily advanced powers only because its people are of little interest. But blissful anonymity doesn’t last. Impossibly large aircraft appear overhead, hanging bulky and dark in the sky, cold bodies of riveted sheet metal dotted with the artificial yellow light of countless lonely windows. They tear up the pasture with heavy, bumpy landings. Then they disgorge imperial soldiers, anonymous in identical helmets, capes and satchels. Commanding these are a handful of leaders – callous and weak, intent on hiding behind a giant ‘divine soldier’ whom they are incubating as their ultimate weapon of war. An innocent Japan is being violated by its mid twentieth-century self, getting a taste of mainland Asia’s pain before an all-too familiar punishment is meted out. From the divine soldier’s mouth comes a furious torrent of nuclear fire.