Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  When a court asked Kanemaru to part with only $1,600 as a fine for his wrongdoing, the country went into a paroxysm of protest at the state of its politics. Kanemaru did little to help, offering a single-sentence apology alongside some life advice regarding the importance of friends. ‘My political philosophy’, he declared, ‘is to have some appreciation for a person who saves a drowning child in a river, even if that person happens to belong to a crime syndicate.’

  More serious for Japan’s long-term prospects was the dangerous upward spiralling of stock and land prices during the late 1980s. One of the causes was the Plaza Accord of 1985, an agreement made at New York’s Plaza Hotel, in which the US, Japan, France, West Germany and the UK agreed to try to rebalance global trade by making currency markets interventions to devalue the dollar and help to boost exports to Japan. Japan also agreed to work to stimulate demand at home for foreign goods. Large-scale domestic spending by the Japanese government followed, contributing to serious asset inflation. Mortgage terms began to extend across three generations, and there were rumours in 1989 that Tokyo’s combined real estate was now worth more than that of the entire United States.

  Bureaucrats in the Ministry of Finance raised borrowing rates in late 1989, hoping gradually to deflate the bubble. Instead, it burst. The Nikkei stock exchange lost nearly half its value between late 1989 and the autumn of 1990, the world of real estate collapsed as loans went bad, and in 1992 Japan embarked on a period of recession that was soon dubbed its ‘lost decade’. No one, it seemed, was in a position to kick-start the economy. Interest rates were hurriedly lowered again, but most banks lacked money, trust in potential borrowers, or both. A tumble in the value of the dollar, beginning in 1992, left Japan’s famous export industry in crisis, as Japanese goods suddenly felt prohibitively expensive to American consumers.

  Corruption was dispiriting, but incompetence was intolerable. A vote of no confidence in the LDP Cabinet was passed in the summer of 1993. They were returned as the largest party in the election that followed, but lost their majority. A coalition of opposition parties formed a government instead. For the first time since its creation nearly forty years before, the LDP was out of power.

  Japan seemed to be on the cusp of dramatic change: from a country whose sense of economic purpose was so strong that it struck even the most ardent Western capitalists as vulgar or aggressive, to one that had lost its way. From a place defined by innovative technologies, business practices and labour–management relations, to one that commentators both inside and outside Japan increasingly sought to understand in terms of cultural and psychological quirks, most of them negative.

  Attempts to use deficit spending to drag the country out of the doldrums contributed to another new set of images abroad: Japan as a country that couldn’t make up its mind about nature – extolling, yet choking it, with chemicals and concrete. By 1993, more than 40 per cent of the entire national budget was being poured into construction, on which upwards of 6 million jobs came to depend. These were spread across more than half a million construction firms, most of them tiny sub-contractors. Japan was soon being talked about as doken kokka, a ‘construction state’: famous for ambitious projects that set out to tame its mountainous terrain, and for lucrative and widely publicized bid-rigging that meant each new road cost four times as much as the equivalent in Germany – or nine times the equivalent in the United States.

  Japan’s politicians were hardly the first in the world to practise pork barrel politics. And they had a hand in commissioning many necessary and impressive feats of civil engineering, including the world’s longest tunnel with an undersea section: the Seikan railway tunnel, completed in 1988, was nearly 54 kilometres long and ran for 23 kilometres beneath the Tsugaru Strait, connecting Honshū and Hokkaidō. But critics railed at what they saw as flawed logic, dishonest pretexts and breathtaking costs. Kanemaru Shin had supplied one of the most vivid examples in 1989. As Construction Minister, he helped to win a contract for his own home prefecture of Yamanashi to host a testing project for maglev trains, despite the fact that Yamanashi was so mountainous that 85 per cent of the test track would have to pass through tunnels.

  Many of the new projects across the 1990s were roads to nowhere, or bridges across to uninhabited islands. Natural rivers were straightened out, given concrete embankments, and sometimes dammed along their way to a coast whose length was strewn with concrete tetrapods in sterile, melancholy shades of beige and grey. And yet Japan faced no impending water or coastal erosion crisis that would justify such radical reworkings of its natural environment. Remote hillsides, far from populated areas where people might be at risk from landslides, were nevertheless dynamited or covered in concrete. Mountains were effectively moved from inner regions out to the sea, providing the raw material for filling bays and harbours, and creating artificial islands on which airports or offices or theme parks could be built.

  For twenty seconds on 17 January 1995, the earth appeared to rebel against all this. Tremors measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale struck not far from the city of Kobe, continuing until 400,000 buildings had been destroyed, numerous roads and bridges ripped up or overturned, utility supply pipes and lines cut and hundreds of fires started. Nearly 6,400 people died in what became known as the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake.

  As the nation looked on, the country’s civil servants appeared to bungle their response. Relief centres turned out not to have been planned for. Japanese and American troops were kept from helping, despite American offers. And yakuza soup kitchens were up and running before official emergency food supplies found their way in.

  A few weeks later, while the country was still reeling from the devastation and their leaders’ apparent lack of preparedness, five of Asahara Shōkō’s followers picked up umbrellas and bags of liquid wrapped in newspaper and left for the district of Kasumigaseki in Tokyo. Over the last few years, Aum Shinrikyō had grown in numbers and ambition. Asahara had morphed into a guru figure, advertising all sorts of special powers via the group’s own in-house manga artists – including an ability to foresee Armageddon. In some of his sermons, this was depicted as a nuclear apocalypse, not unlike the Nausicaä backstory. And the date kept getting brought closer, as the list of the group’s enemies got longer: the CIA, the Vatican, Japanese politicians and entertainers, even a member of the Japanese royal family. Trips to Russia helped the group to prepare, yielding many thousands of new converts along with weapons, machinery and even a military helicopter. There was a visit to Zaire, too, rumoured to have been an attempt to acquire the Ebola virus.

  The Kobe earthquake, when it came, was interpreted as the opening, at last, of the war that would bring Armageddon. Asahara claimed that the tremors had been caused by earthquake machines developed by the great enemy, the United States. Fortunately his alternative government, made up of Aum members, was already in place, ready to take over if and when Japan’s leaders succumbed.

  The five people who headed into Tokyo on Monday, 20 March, were tasked with striking at the heart of the Japanese government, before a series of expected police raids on Aum could take place (the group had come under increasing media scrutiny of late, over suspected violent activity – and had in fact committed a number of murders, in protection of its interests). Kasumigaseki had been home to major state institutions in Japan since the Meiji era, which now included a Diet building opened in the mid-1930s as well as the country’s central ministries and the National Police Agency headquarters. At approximately 8.30 a.m., in the middle of rush-hour, the five Aum members put their bags down on the floor of five different subway trains and punctured them with the sharpened metal tips of their umbrellas. Liquid sarin vaporized and began to fill the trains.

  Twelve people died and thousands more were injured in the attack. Casualties would have been far worse had the sarin been purified to a greater degree. But still, Japan had earned a dubious honour: it was the first time, anywhere in the world, that weapons of mass destruction had been deployed
by a private organization.

  Asahara was arrested in May 1995 and soon began what would prove to be a long wait on death row. Meanwhile, sensationalist media coverage helped to stir people’s anxieties, exaggerating the power and reach of a single ‘evil cult’ and covering in every last detail the hunt for the group’s remaining members. Many of those details, as they emerged, really were unnerving: advanced computing and chemical weapons technologies hidden away inside compounds; strange, alien lives being lived just yards from ordinary society; and, above all, the resonance with so many people of Aum’s core critique of Japan and the wider modern world – mired in materialism and stuck with soulless education and employment systems that left too many people bereft of higher purpose.

  As millions of television viewers in Japan watched and re-watched commuters struggling with the after-effects of being gassed on their way to work, the broader shock was just how rapidly and hopelessly a country could be brought low. They were witnessing the collapse of a widely lauded and apparently invulnerable economic and social model. Devastation of the sort that Japan, home to a tenth of the world’s earthquake activity, could never hope to secure itself against – but compounded by a vacuum of capable guidance at critical moments, as a large proportion of the nation’s leaders were revealed as greedy, incompetent or both. Now there had been a fanatical, murderous rejection, by some of the country’s brightest and best, of seemingly everything that Japan had once stood for.

  Asahara Shōkō in custody Where would the country go from here to find an account of itself capable of energizing a beleaguered citizenry? As the fifty-year anniversary arrived of the country’s wartime defeat and the end of its empire, it felt as though the answer was ‘back’ – back to a recent history insufficiently explored, and to regional relationships insufficiently restored.

  Part Six

  * * *

  RAISING SPIRITS

  (1990S TO 2010S)

  17

  Telling Tales

  4 September 1995. A car makes its way along a road, passing by sugar cane fields. In the back is a young girl. Her hands and feet are bound with duct tape. Her eyes and mouth have been taped shut …

  This is happening at the southern end of an archipelago that stretches for 1,500 miles, from frozen earth and crystalline outcrops in the far north down to subtropical rainforest a little further south of here. Thousands of islands, some of them trodden and known over tens of thousands of years. Tales have been told, memories piled up.

  A rippling rocky spine running down the largest of these islands kept the earliest settled communities mostly to its coasts – wearing bark and hemp and animal skins; living in thatched-pit homes dug into the ground and arranged in circles; hunting and fishing; cooking and storing acorns and nuts in some of the world’s first pottery.

  Forested land bridges to the nearby continent were soon submerged, but the neighbours continued to visit. Chinese records – dating from what Western calendars would one day mark as the early centuries AD – told of a ‘Wo’ or ‘stunted’ people living on these islands, grouped into around 100 small clan-kingdoms; of men tattooing themselves to ward off dangerous creatures when diving for seafood; of a female shaman ruling a people who baked animal bones then pondered their cracked remains for meanings and predictions, clapping to let the gods know where they were.

  These people recorded their own stories, across the centuries, in pottery and in figurines with full breasts and pregnant stomachs; later in weapons, tools and precious objects of iron and bronze and silk. As one clan-kingdom, Yamato, began to dominate its neighbours, so the story told by its most powerful family began to win out across a nascent nation: a tale of divinely descended imperial rulers, important enough that tons of earth were dug and piled up to create moated burial mounds on an epic scale. They were interred in stone chambers beneath, surrounded by the symbols of their story and power: mirrors, swords and bracelets. On top of the tomb were thousands of narrative clay figurines several feet high, arranged in a circle, marking the boundaries of the hallowed site – dogs and horses, shamans, maidens and armoured fighters. Two centuries later – the early 700s by Western calendars – these stories finally made it into writing, in the Kojiki (‘Records of Ancient Matters’) and the Nihon shoki (‘The Chronicles of Japan’).

  … The girl in the car had been walking home from a stationery shop, carrying a new notebook bought for school. A man approached her, asking for directions. Suddenly, a second man grabbed her by the neck from behind, while the first hit her in the face. The two of them bundled her into the back of the car, beat her up and, together with a third man, drove off with her …

  Those living in these far southern parts of the archipelago grew used, over time, to being bit-part players in other people’s dramas – a point on the compass for mightier neighbours. They inhabited China’s fabled eastern ‘Liu-ch’iu’ islands, or what Japan knew as its southern ‘Ryūkyūs’. Their kings paid tribute to both powers for a while, before finally entering into the providential story of a third nation: an expanding United States of America. The menacing midsummer beach pageant to which Commodore Matthew C. Perry treated the Japanese in 1853 – Marines in tight formation, guns and cannons, the strains of ‘Hail Columbia!’ – had its dress rehearsal down here a few weeks before, when Perry extracted the use of a Ryūkyū port as a coal depot and safe harbour for American vessels.

  The revolution in Japan whose fuse Perry helped to light soon spread south, in the form of a new state looking to mark out and secure its borders. The Ryūkyūs were annexed as ‘Okinawa prefecture’ in 1879, and an awesome logistical effort got under way aimed at making it, and its people, Japanese. Southwards across hundreds of miles of clear blue water went festivals, yen coins and criminal codes; post offices and portraits of the Emperor and Empress; merchants and industrialists; policemen and doctors; jūdō and kendō; Japanese surnames and styles of dress. Land, much of it previously communal, was privatized. Sugar cane fields were planted.

  The US had agreed to Tokyo’s annexation of these islands. But a few short decades later, American ships returned, hoping to make Okinawa a staging post for a final push north against their former friends. Soldiers from mainland Japan were sent south in response, not so much defending the islands’ people as defending the islands with the people: using them as human shields, taking their food, turning homes into billets and schools into barracks, raping some and shooting others as spies, and finally ordering them off cliffs in acts of mass suicide. A Peace Museum established near those cliffs later claimed that 100,000 civilians – up to a third of the island’s population – had died during the Battle of Okinawa (April–June 1945), killed by Americans or Japanese, starvation or disease.

  Roughly that same number of American service personnel remained on the islands after the US passed them back to Japan in 1972. Their bases occupied a full fifth of the main island, with much of what remained also not intended for the locals. Driving across that island, people passed by long stretches of barbed wire fence to the left and right, behind which American and Japanese flags flew from well-kept grassy banks and anonymous-looking military installations. There was vintage Americana: clapped-out bars and restaurants, forecourts full of rusting Fords and Chevys. And there were shiny new hotels and resorts, mostly built, staffed and patronized by mainland Japanese, rivalling the bases in the damage they did to the island’s air, water, sea-life, soil and coastlines.

  … The car stops on a quiet farm road. There is little to see through the windows beyond sugar cane and sky. The men, all three of them American military service personnel, climb into the back of the car, and take turns raping the Okinawan schoolgirl. When they’ve finished, they throw her out, half-conscious, onto the road and drive off. They dispose, in a nearby bin, of three sets of bloody underwear and one unused notebook.

  Okinawa erupted. Eighty-five thousand people poured onto the streets in furious protest – the largest gathering in the islands’ history – demanding an end to
the abuse of this place and its people. Women began to come forward to say that they, too, had been assaulted by American servicemen. They were encouraged to speak out by a group called Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence, jointly led by a local politician and an American missionary, whose delegation to an NGO Forum at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing had returned home to news of this latest attack.

  A clumsy American response spoke volumes about what the people of these islands meant to them. The commander of United States Pacific Command told a press conference that the three soldiers had been stupid – because for the price of the rented car they could have bought a prostitute. He was forced into early retirement. President Bill Clinton postponed a planned visit to Japan in order to avoid association with the incident, which came just days after First Lady Hillary Clinton had told the Beijing Conference that women’s rights were human rights, and that military rape was a war crime. US–Japanese plans were set in motion the next year to move Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to a less central location, where schoolteachers would no longer have to shout to be heard above aircraft noise, and artillery would not be fired across civilian roads.

  While life on Okinawa sometimes felt like being trapped in a Cold War museum, by the mid-1990s people further north in the archipelago were feeling afresh the weight of their mid-century wars. Ghosts long laid to rest – it was hoped – seemed to rise and rattle their chains. Others in Japan were more afraid of the future than the past. If China continued to grow, and the United States became less attached to its post-war Pacific ally, there was a danger that Japan’s fortunes might end up locked into reverse gear: becoming slowly less prosperous and less significant in strategic terms – perhaps eventually ending up once again an exotic, insular curiosity at the world’s ‘Far Eastern’ fringe.