Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  Miyazaki was forced to conclude his meditation on modern Japan prematurely when the offer came in to create an anime version of Nausicaä. Its final scene, in which Nausicaä sacrifices her own life to save her world, struck him in retrospect as looking too much like a ‘religious painting’. So while his new production company, Studio Ghibli, proceeded to turn out classics of sophisticated, child-friendly anime – Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986); My Neighbour Totoro (1988) – Miyazaki poured his darker, more pessimistic energies into giving his Nausicaä manga a proper resolution.

  Nausicaä had discovered early on that the poisonous forest – the ‘Sea of Decay’ – was in fact a living filtration system, gradually cleansing the world of the pollution to which the humans of the old hi-tech civilization had subjected it. Her job, in common with a number of Miyazaki’s heroines and heroes, was to work with nature and confront those who would harm it. But later in the manga, Nausicaä discovers that in fact the whole world – human beings included – is artificial. None of this is ‘nature’ anymore. The old civilization is waiting, stored as eggs in a crypt, to be reborn once the forest finishes its purifying work and the artificial humans of Nausicaä’s world – her amongst them – have all disappeared. The girl who started out as a messiah finishes as a killer: in order to save her own people, she has to destroy her ancestors in the crypt – even wielding the divine warrior as her personal weapon.

  Miyazaki’s final move in his Nausicaä manga was no mere twist in the story’s tail. It was a twist of the knife. In declaring even Nausicaä’s rural home to be the product of human fakery, he was calling into question one of modern Japan’s oldest and greatest consolations.

  The country’s famously mountainous topography presented challenges for urban planners. But it offered cherished respite for those dismayed by the stuffing of plains and basins with artificial undulations of shabby white-grey concrete and prefab – cubes and cuboids latticed and linked together with those endless trails of black wire. Thankfully there was, in theory at least, only so much scope for this kind of destruction: the point soon came when the economic cost of reclaiming liveable land from water or mountain rock meant that it was no longer worthwhile. Places of escape, even redemption, thereby survived.

  State-builders since the late nineteenth century had done much to encourage a view of rural Japan as pure and unspoiled. They set out to fabricate their new nation in urban factories, government offices, schools and universities, while relying on the countryside for sustenance: food, raw materials, a conservative corrective for foreign-inspired left-wingery, and finally a set of romantic symbols by means of which tired or culturally confused urbanites could gain access to a timeless ‘Japan’.

  Miyazaki’s casting of doubt on the naturalness of ‘nature’, as Nausicaä progressed, stemmed in part from unease about the political and commercial distortion to which rural Japan was regularly subjected. From the pre-war pastoralism of the folklorist Yanagita Kunio to record companies around the same time offering to transport urbanites through music to some lost furusato (home town), rural romance was always at risk of recruitment into nationalist strategies that conflated modernity’s flaws with unwelcome foreign influence – poisonous to the Japanese soul.

  Similar concerns surrounded so-called ‘spiritual intellectuals’ of the 1970s and 1980s. The popular philosopher and historian Umehara Takeshi found in the Jōmon-era Japanese a hunter-gatherer people whose awe of the forest, coursing with spiritual life, represented, he claimed, Japan’s primordial religion – and an antidote to contemporary society’s atrocious mistreatment of the natural world. The Jungian analyst Kawai Hayao became well known for his exploration of the Japanese psyche via comparative analyses of Japanese and Western folk tales. Both faced accusations that their work – and their consecutive tenures as Director General at Nichibunken, a research institute for Japanese culture set up in 1982 – was at risk of serving neo-nationalist purposes. Miyazaki was critical of Umehara in particular. He was attracted by the idea of a spirituality rooted in environmental ethics, and in a purity of person and place, but he worried about the ethnically exclusive element in this kind of thinking.

  Post-war commercial exploitation of a romanticized rural Japan was a decade old by the time Miyazaki created Nausicaä. Since 1970, large numbers of young urbanites had been heading off on train journeys around the country, hoping to discover some new dimension of themselves. The population had not, overnight, embraced philosophy or whimsy. These people were under direct instructions from the advertising agency Dentsū. Mō hitori no jibun wo mitsukeyō, ran their advertising slogan: ‘Let’s discover another self’. Colourful posters in trains and around stations featured young, urban Japanese women, depicted in modern Western clothing and various states of wonderment at scenes of old-time rustic beauty and tranquillity. ‘To go on a journey is to find a new home,’ gushed one of the posters.

  Frames from the first instalment of Miyazaki Hayao’s manga series Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982) This advertising campaign, ‘Discover Japan’, was created for the Japan National Railway (JNR), who were concerned about a likely fall-off in train travel once 1970’s Osaka Expo came to an end. Research and in-depth interviews revealed a vanguard of the discontented in the form of young, urban women. Old enough and wealthy enough to travel, they were not yet caught up in making lists of chores or chivvying children along with exam preparations. They were looking for recreation, remoteness and the ‘old Japan’. Famous places were beside the point: what mattered was the travel and the atmosphere.

  ‘Discover Japan’ borrowed heavily from ‘Discover America’ just a few years before, even down to the use of weathervane symbolism. But it took for one of its slogans a telling twist on a famous piece of recent Japanese prose. Accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, Kawabata Yasunari had entitled his speech ‘Utsukushii Nihon no watakushi’: ‘Beautiful Japan and Myself’. Dentsū’s slogan replaced the possessive ‘no’, which emphasized the sculpting of Kawabata’s self and soul by Japan, with a simple ‘to’ (‘and’). Utsukushii Nihon to watakushi promised a ‘Beautiful Japan’ that would serve as an inspiring, anonymous backdrop – or even an instrument – for self-discovery. Sun-dappled forest pathways, tranquil temples, moving mountains …

  For the choreographer Hijikata Tatsumi, ‘the Japanese in front of their televisions’ had portended a new ‘dark valley’. With ‘Discover Japan’, critics sensed its arrival. Not content with shaping a nigh-on inescapable urbanized ‘everydayness’, the mass communications industry had created a follow-on product to complement and extend the shelf-life of the first: a carefully curated rural liberation. And where that first product had been all about sight and sound – magazines and music, cinema and television – this new one played on a much-neglected third sense. To experience something in a truly authentic way, you had to go there, reach out and touch it.

  That the people who actually lived in rural Japan, always a majority up to and just after the war, occasionally felt somewhat used by urban fantasizing had become clear in periodic Meiji-era protests and then in the willingness of many to accept the military as their champion – against a distressingly resource-intensive urban decadence. Life for most rural Japanese improved rapidly after the war, thanks to land redistribution, politicians keen to shore up rural voting blocs with favours, and advances in agricultural materials and techniques. By the 1970s, relatively spacious rural homes accommodated much the same markers of middle-class existence as their more compact urban counterparts. Winter evenings could be whiled away in rooms lit by the same colour televisions and warmed with a combination of air-conditioning, kotatsu (a low table with a heater underneath and a blanket attached) and sake. At rest, somewhere in the dark outside, would be a piece of technology more revolutionary as a labour-saving device than any urban gadget: the power-tiller. Some 89,000 of these machines had been in use in 1955; by 1970, the figure was 3.5 million.

  And yet, but for the sound of the television
, many a country home in the 1970s would have been quieter than a generation before. During the 1950s and for much of the 1960s, Japan’s booming population had been sufficient to keep the countryside well stocked with workers, despite great waves of urban migration. But from the late 1960s, it was hard to see the trend as anything but an emptying out of the young from the countryside. Home to just a quarter of the population by 1975, rural Japan was becoming for many little more than a blur of paddy fields and dilapidated outhouses seen from the window of a bullet train. In summer slower trains might be taken, as people visited small-town relatives for the festival of Obon, honouring the spirits of the ancestors. But for most of the year, such places had to fend for themselves: reviving, even inventing new festivals and foods, to put themselves on the tourist map.

  Commenting on his ending for the manga version of Nausicaä, finally completed in 1994, Miyazaki expressed a deep pessimism about what happens when humans try to remake nature. He fantasized about the day when ‘developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer, wild grasses take over’, and Tokyo and Manhattan end up under water. For centuries in Japan, ‘nature’ had been intimately bound up with human desire and tinkering. Cherry trees were transplanted and cross-fertilized, to get the right blossoms flowering in the right places at the right times. Goldfish were bred for beauty rather than survival. Literature lauded highly stylized seasons and landscapes. Now, for the likes of Miyazaki, nature was imagined in a different way, offering a different sort of solace. ‘Nature’ was that which existed apart from all human meddling, truly flourishing only when left alone. This idea, and the shift from Nausicaä’s anime ending to its manga ending, seemed to reflect a trend in Japanese visions for the future – at least at the more expansive end of the story-telling spectrum. It was a movement from hope that the world could be redeemed, to a conviction that it must be destroyed; from seeking salvation to welcoming some form of apocalypse.

  *

  One of Nausicaä’s many fans was a young man in his late twenties by the name of Matsumoto Chizuo. The son of a tatami mat-maker, he was born blind in one eye and with severely reduced sight in the other. It was not uncommon for people in Japan with this sort of disability to work in healing professions, and this is what Matsumoto did, offering acupuncture, moxibustion and advice on herbal medicines. Later, he became interested in Japanese folk practices like divination, and in the array of spiritual ideas and practices available in Japan’s hundreds of ‘new’ and then ‘new new’ religions, which ran alongside a more individualistic ‘Spiritual World’ movement. Books and seminars linked to the New Age in the West covered everything from yoga, meditation and psychotherapy to alchemy, near-death experiences and reincarnation.

  The trend of the times, in the 1970s and 1980s, exchanged belief in grand metaphysical propositions for healing and purification (kokoro naoshi), as a means to both personal salvation and world renewal (yonaoshi). The creators of Dentsū’s ‘Discover Japan’ campaign had done their homework. They well understood the power of a concept like kokoro – the heart, or heart of things – in a complex world. Combine that with furusato (hometown), and you had a slogan with considerable punch. Tabi ni deru to, kokoro no furusato ga fuemasu: ‘Embark on a journey, and the hometowns in your heart will multiply.’

  A combination of all these desires – for home, for adventure, for meaning and for change – led Matsumoto initially to one of Japan’s new religions. Agonshū offered a revived Japanese Buddhist spirituality, rooted in contact with Tibetan Buddhism, the promise of psychic powers and the proper use of science and technology. The movement was opposed to the inhuman, destructive spirit of hyper-rationalism that science brought into the world when it confused methodology (which science was) with ideology (which it wasn’t). Instead, the achievements of science – from computers to television and video – should be put to use, it was argued, to somehow lift the world out of its present materialistic dead-end.

  In 1984, the year that Nausicaä hit Japanese cinemas, Matsumoto left Agonshū and started a yoga and meditation group for around fifteen people in the busy Shibuya neighbourhood of Tokyo. Two years later they set themselves up as the Mountain Hermits’ Society and began to acquire rural land – including a tract near the foot of Mount Fuji – on which they could build communes. Many of those who came to live there were students and young professionals. They were drawn by Matsumoto’s teachings and transformative personal charisma, just as they were repelled by the everyday world of rote, competition and corruption – despite having mostly, so far, succeeded in it. With his mission progressing, Matsumoto decided to change his name, along with that of his organization. He would be Asahara Shōkō. His group would one day be known around the world, as Aum Shinrikyō.

  The people who signed up to Aum from afar – 4,000 by the end of the 1980s – or who handed over their worldly possessions in exchange for a place by Asahara’s side in the commune, thought they had seen all they needed to of what Japan was becoming. Their fathers joined closely managed cohorts of salarymen trudging and slaving and pretending to enjoy their bosses’ company on compulsory evenings out. Mothers sought light relief from domestic boredom by suing companies over dangerously defective products, adulterated juices and over-priced fuel. Children were placed, at an early age, on a conveyor-belt education system where testing at ever younger ages had now reached the point of evaluating the parents.

  Meanwhile, the architects of all this seemed to be constantly, almost comedically, on the take. When Prime Minister Ikeda’s successor, Satō Eisaku, was brought down in the aftermath of the Nixon shocks, Tanaka Kakuei took his place. He was a master practitioner of kōenkai politics, a system whereby national politicians built around themselves support organizations made up of local political and business interests, and accepted financial and logistical contributions to their campaigns in return for channelling assistance and central government spending the other way – often in public works – once power was achieved. It wasn’t long before Tanaka, whose kōenkai boasted more than 100,000 members, found himself implicated in corrupt dealings both at home and abroad. He was forced to resign in 1974, after barely two years in the job.

  Still, Tanaka remained so influential that he became known as the ‘shadow shogun’, while the administration of Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro in the 1980s, which he sponsored, was dubbed the ‘Tanakasone Cabinet’. Tanaka managed all this despite being personally implicated when the vice-president of the US company Lockheed admitted in 1976 that during the ‘jumbo jet wars’ (which pitted his company against Boeing and McDonnell Douglas) millions of dollars had been paid in bribes to have All Nippon Airways and Japan’s defence agency purchase more than a billion dollars’ worth of aircraft.

  Helping behind the scenes to shift cardboard boxes stuffed with Lockheed cash had been one Kodama Yoshio. Alongside stand-out political fixers like Tanaka, Japan’s post-war yakuza were blossoming too. Gleaning sartorial inspiration from American gangster films, they became clearly identifiable in certain areas of the country’s cities by their dark suits and shirts and their white ties, set off with sunglasses, crew cuts and luxury American sedans. In the Osaka–Kobe area, the Yamaguchi-gumi had grown to 10,000 loyal members by the time of the 1964 Olympics. Tokyo had no single comparable organization. What it had instead, as an investigative series by the Mainichi newspaper made plain, was a nexus of power at whose heart was Kodama – helping to broker an association between the Yamaguchi-gumi and Yokohama’s Inagawa-kai, which created a combine so large that it left only four of Japan’s prefectures free of its influence. Interviewed by the Mainichi about these rumoured activities, Kodama replied that his only interest in life was fishing.

  The Lockheed scandal proved, in the end, to be Kodama’s downfall. His home was first raided by the police and then, in a style entirely befitting a larger-than-life career, was half destroyed when a porn actor and former admirer – decked out in a rising sun bandana and screaming ‘Long Live the Emperor!’ – flew an aeroplane int
o his porch. Kodama survived the attack, only to be harried by prosecutors and tax officials until he died in 1984 following a stroke.

  By this point the end was looming, too, for the LDP’s long dominance of Japanese politics. Voters recognized that, whatever its failings, the LDP had overseen three decades of economic growth in Japan and taken the country’s image around the world from one of poverty and hubris chastised to extraordinary affluence. But towards the end of the 1980s, an unpopular 3 per cent consumption tax was passed into law, intended to balance out falling income tax revenues as the population aged. Combined with a new scandal involving corporate payments to Diet members and bureaucrats, the measure dragged the LDP’s ratings down to a disastrous 27 per cent – just 1 per cent ahead of the Japan Socialist Party (JSP).

  A brief electoral comeback was undermined by an even bigger corruption scandal just a few years later, in 1992. A company called Sagawa Kyūbin was found to be linked to Inagawa-kai gangsters, and to have paid bribes worth billions of yen to around 200 politicians. A raid on a lavish Tokyo apartment belonging to one of the presumed beneficiaries, the LDP’s vice-president and Tanaka protégé Kanemaru Shin (nickname: ‘The Don’), yielded a made-for-television scene: a money mountain some $50 million high, in cash, bonds and even gold bars, hidden away in wardrobes and desk drawers. The public later heard of someone pushing a cart laden with $4 million in cash into Kanemaru’s office.