Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  In China, above all, attitudes towards Japan were hardening in the mid-1990s. In retrospect, an historic visit to Japan in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping – the first ever by a Chinese leader, over more than twenty centuries of contact – looked like the high point for post-war Sino-Japanese relations. Deng had cooed at car plants, marvelled at industrial robotics and smiled for the cameras aboard the shinkansen. A peace and friendship treaty had been signed the same year, and the two countries had even begun sharing intelligence about Soviet missile deployments – post-war East Asia was home more to shared enmities than it was real friendships. Japanese loans and TV dramas – including a classic asadora (morning serial) called Oshin (1983–4) – were warmly welcomed into Chinese bank accounts and onto Chinese screens.

  Then controversies over textbook revisions and Japanese prime ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine had intervened – visits that were partly a matter of personal politics, but largely related to pressure from veterans’ groups to show some pride and respect. Popular protests across China in 1989, most famously at Tiananmen Square, brought brief respite from souring relations. Desperate for allies amidst worldwide opprobrium over the deadly violence with which the demonstrations were brought to an end, Chinese leaders reached out to Japan. In 1992, Emperor Akihito became the first Japanese emperor to visit China, taking the opportunity to express his own ‘deep sorrow’ at the ‘severe suffering’ inflicted on the Chinese people by Japan’s armed forces. But China’s leaders soon came to see that rapid economic change in their country, with all its unpredictable social consequences, required the ballast of a ‘patriotic education’. Jiang Zemin (1989–2002)resolved to supply it, and from the mid-1990s a new curriculum from kindergarten upwards emphasized modern China’s victimhood at the hands of Europeans and then Japanese. New dates were added to the national calendar, commemorating the Marco Polo Bridge incident, Nanjing and Japan’s surrender. Historical daytrips became popular, not least to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, which was built in 1985 and then enlarged considerably in 1995.

  Mao Zedong and Tanaka Kakuei meet, in September 1972 Neo-Gōmanism Manifesto Special: On War, featuring ‘colonial’ Allied flags trampled on by Japanese forces *

  Mixed feelings about Japan and its leaders abroad, across much of the 1990s and early 2000s, were mirrored by a worry at home that the country was losing its way. Nowhere was that clearer than in the self-interested and – to outsiders, at least – rather confusing party-political machinations that resulted in something of a revolving door at the top of national politics. Towards the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger passed around a piece of paper amongst themselves and some aides, inviting one another to name – in the correct order – all seven of the Japanese prime ministers with whom the Clinton administration (1993–2001) had dealt. None of them could do it.

  From 2006 until 2012, Japan would get through another six prime ministers, at the rate of roughly one per year. But during the period from 2001 through to 2006, a single prime minister managed to keep his job for five and a half years, eventually relinquishing the role in accordance with LDP party rules rather than in disgrace or through losing an election. Koizumi Junichirō – affectionately known as ‘Jun-chan’ – was exceptional in all sorts of ways besides his political longevity, refreshingly direct communication style and trademark long wavy hair.

  Abroad, East Asian relations were not helped by Koizumi’s annual visits to Yasukuni. But his friendship with George Bush, forged in the wake of 9/11 and sealed at Graceland five years later (as Japan’s most famous Elvis impersonator broke into ‘Love Me Tender’), went a long way to bringing US–Japan relations out of the deep-freeze. At home, Koizumi offered ‘pain’ in return for modest gain. He acted against the bad debts afflicting Japan’s banks in the wake of the economic downturn, and he cut government expenditure on public works – risking the wrath of the ‘road tribe’ of LDP members who owed their positions to construction contracts. He pushed through privatization of Japan’s postal savings and insurance systems (home to hundreds of trillions of yen that Koizumi regarded as being wastefully and often corruptly invested) and moved to loosen up the labour market.

  Greater flexibility for companies in employing workers on short-term contracts or hiring them via intermediaries was credited with enhancing competitiveness, but it was soon blamed for eroding old workplace guarantees over welfare and security of employment. When the global financial crisis of 2007–8 brought five years of respectable Japanese economic growth – around 2 per cent per year – to an end, companies responded by laying off temporary workers in large numbers.

  Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō – as Elvis The year 2009 began with stark televised images of tents, tarpaulin shelters and soup kitchens set up in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park – just across from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Drily named the ‘New Year’s Village for Contract Workers’ (toshi koshi haken mura), it was one element in a partially successful civil society and media campaign to embarrass Japan’s political and business community into a rethink. The eligibility requirements for unemployment benefit were softened, from one year of contributions down to six months – with those who remained ineligible offered welfare. Unused public housing was made temporarily available. And some Japanese firms reversed their lay-offs.

  Insecurity of employment remained a fact of life, however, one which analysts were soon linking to Japan’s accelerating demographic decline – on the basis that fewer people could now afford to start families. Some social critics pointed rather more speculatively to what they claimed was a broad malaise in the country, particularly amongst the young. People’s emotional lives, patterns of behaviour or experiences of psychological distress had long been analysed in Japan for signs of what modernity was doing to the country – beginning with shinkei suijaku (neurasthenia) in the 1870s, which doubled as an individual diagnosis and a sign of stressful, breakneck modernizing times. This intertwining of suffering with sociology gathered pace in the late 1990s and early 2000s, via a remarkable series of new categories and buzzwords.

  ‘Freeters’ were those engaged only in casual, part-time employment. ‘Parasite singles’ usually referred to young women who were accused of sponging off their parents while indulging a taste for high-end consumerism. Hikikomori shut themselves away in their rooms or homes for months, even years on end. Niito had origins in the British acronym NEET: people ‘not in education, employment or training’. Sōshokukei-danshi were ‘herbivorous men’, pushing hobbies or personal grooming to an advanced level of refinement, at the expense of relationships or work. Meanwhile, a general inwardness and lack of adventurism was detected in the youth of Japan, suggested by a sharp fall across the 2000s in the number of Japanese opting to study abroad.

  Here, as with the real state of the economy and Japanese people’s feelings about their past, perception – domestic and global – seemed to be at least as important as evidence. Quite different stories were told about these buzzword trends, all of which were real but most of which were amplified and distorted considerably by a sensationalist and sometimes catastrophizing media both at home and abroad. Some commentators were inclined to blame many of the trends on selfishness, weakness of will or a baffling reluctance to participate properly in a society which, for all its troubles, was still fundamentally kind, thoughtful, hospitable and secure. There were echoes here of the journalist Tokutomi Sohō, many decades before, regretting the late Meiji youth’s apparent loss of faith in the nation-building project.

  More sympathetic commentators blamed deteriorating living conditions, asking what it was about early twenty-first century Japan that compelled so many young people in particular to reject it in favour of a bedroom, a hobby, a handbag, perpetual single status, or some subcultural niche to be shared with a handful of the like-minded. Herbivorous refinement, or a temporary withdrawal from the world, could be read as a legitimate expression of dissen
t or even disgust – hikikomori might be staying at home because they knew there was nothing waiting for them outside.

  Foreign visitors struggled to share the more pessimistic predictions about Japan’s future. They encountered thriving and virtually crime-free urban public spaces, full of well-dressed and lavishly accessorized people eating in a fabulous array of restaurants, driving new cars, living the world’s longest lives (life expectancy rose from around fifty-two in 1947 to over eighty in 2005) in a society with markedly less inequality than the US or UK, and enjoying along the way a wealth of high-tech gadgetry and high-quality entertainment, from Nō to detective novels to nightclubs. ‘If this is a recession,’ declared one British MP on a visit to Tokyo, ‘then I want one.’

  Gaijin (‘foreigners’) who stayed longer in Japan generally had a more mixed experience. They contributed to Japan’s list of ambiguous modern maladies an affliction known as ‘gaijin-itis’: a cycle of culture shock, adaptation and fresh culture shock, spiced with insufficiently acknowledged homesickness and a perpetual sense of being unfairly kept at arm’s length by the locals, even actively discriminated against. No one could agree on how far the causes resided in the minds of each sufferer, and how far they were to be found out there in Japan – in some perpetually unfathomable blend of hospitality and xenophobia, and in a failing social and bureaucratic machinery.

  But although long-term foreign residents tended to have a reputation amongst Japanese for complaining, and for comparing Japan to the countries of their birth (at least implicitly, and often to Japan’s detriment), they were not the only ones worrying about their (adoptive) homeland’s direction of travel. Many Japanese too were anxious about apparent stagnation and the ceding of the political and economic initiative in East Asia to their near neighbour. Away from the headlines and the history wars, China’s growing economy had played an important role in Japan’s partial recovery from its lost decade, with China overtaking the US as Japan’s biggest trading partner in 2004. But in 2010, China became the world’s second largest economy, bumping Japan down to number three. It was a widely expected change of places, but nevertheless one that almost seemed timed to complete the gloomy picture that critics were painting.

  An important aspect of this gloom was that despite significant damage in recent years to the post-war story of a close coalition of politicians, bureaucrats and business people successfully co-stewarding Japan’s fortunes, these general arrangements remained in place. Some of that damage had been sustained back in 1985, when Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashed in the mountains of Gunma prefecture, killing 520 people – the largest ever loss of life in an accident involving a single aircraft. Alongside loss of trust in a flagship Japanese company, the authorities were accused of a catastrophically slow response: four lives were saved, but people wondered whether it might have been more had Japanese rescuers not taken nearly fifteen hours to arrive at an admittedly remote and relatively inaccessible site – having turned down American offers of help shortly after the crash occurred. Ten years later, the Kobe response and the Aum attack compounded a sense of a state unable to keep its citizens secure.

  Subtle shifts had occurred since in the country’s balance of power, from a resurgence of interest in volunteering (given a degree of structure through a new Non-Profit Organization law in 1998) to efforts at increasing government transparency. The ‘New Year’s Village for Contract Workers’ was just the latest proof of what intelligent activism could achieve. But it had so far proved impossible to dislodge what some called the ‘iron triangle’ of elected (especially LDP) officials, unelected civil servants and big business.

  An example of its operations, not widely reported at the time, came on 7 March 2011. On that day, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) released to Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), the results of research conducted three years before into safety at one of its coastal nuclear plants. The report concluded that existing sea walls were inadequate to prevent damage to the plant in the event of a large tsunami, but that the building of a higher sea wall would be too expensive when weighed against the imminent likelihood of what was regarded as a once-in-a-thousand-years event.

  The promise of atomic energy had been familiar in Japan since the Meiji era, when the physicist Nagaoka Hantarō wrote a piece in the Yomiuri newspaper explaining the incredible efficiency of one day moving a steamship ‘by destroying atoms, which constitute a slight amount of material, instead of burning several thousand tons of coal’. Atomic energy became a staple of Japanese science fiction from the 1920s (complete with atomic bombs and bullets), while radium onsen (natural hot-spring baths) were popular for their perceived health benefits.

  Japan’s military, too, took an early interest in the possibilities of nuclear warfare. But late-wartime claims that Japan possessed an atomic bomb, or that a fog-like beam could be fired from a cave inside a Japanese mountain, destroying Washington DC at a stroke, were little more than heart-warmers for a weary population. In fact, Japan’s nuclear weapons programme had always lagged far behind the United States. ‘We lost to the enemy’s science,’ declared the Asahi Shimbun newspaper on 20 August 1945. Weeks later, that enemy hunted down and did away with Japan’s capacity for pursuing atomic research, taking its five cyclotrons to pieces and casting the parts into the waters of Tokyo Bay.

  It fell instead to the British General Electric Company to build Japan’s first nuclear reactor, at Tōkai village in the early 1960s. It was based on the design of a facility then under construction in Ayrshire, Scotland, but with a lower centre of gravity so as to mitigate the risk of earthquake damage. Local protests, fired by memories of the Lucky Dragon 5 incident of 1954, marked the beginning of furious arguments between the government and the nuclear industry, on the one hand, and groups like the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Centre on the other. Officials from MITI (after 2001, ‘METI’, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) took to visiting communities living near proposed nuclear sites and making presentations on the importance to the nation of nuclear energy. Beginning with Tōkai village, they offered to upgrade local infrastructure – moves welcomed by construction firms but denounced as hakomono (empty box) politics by detractors, who wondered what small and mostly elderly rural communities were going to do with football stadiums.

  By the time of TEPCO’s 2011 report, almost a third of Japan’s energy was being generated by fifty-four nuclear reactors – fifteen of them in Tōkai village, which had long since acquired the nickname ‘nuclear alley’. Another popular phrase was ‘nuclear village’ (genshiryoku mura), used to describe the extraordinary combined reach of pro-nuclear advocates across government, business, banking, academia and the media. Despite extensive and expensive cajoling, around three-quarters of the surveyed population in the late 1990s maintained misgivings about nuclear power. But it didn’t matter. There was little prospect of policy change, and such was the regulator’s reputation for warm relationships with the nuclear industry that its response to TEPCO’s late and rather cavalier report on 7 March would probably not be overly draconian or demanding.

  No one will ever know. Four days after its submission, the scenario described in the report as highly unlikely, and very expensive to plan for, began to play out.

  18

  Fragments

  A devastated landscape. Dead trees. Poisoned produce. A defeated population. And yet, in the most unexpected of ways, regeneration. It came down to a boy with an apple for a head, sitting under starry skies with a man whose own head was made of bread, filled with red-bean paste.

  ‘How come you’re so kind?’ asks Ringo Bōya, aka Apple Boy.

  ‘When I see people in trouble, in my heart I just want to help them,’ replies Anpanman (Bean-paste Bread Man).

  Ringo Bōya is paying close attention. He wants to be a hero one day. But so far he has managed only to be selfish, quick-tempered, easily dispirited, and so desperate for grand adventures that he alienates his family and fri
ends by refusing to get his hands dirty in the orchard on Apple Island.

  This other man is the real thing, complete with cape, belt and booties. He isn’t the hero for whom people might have hoped, in these toughest of times. Where Superman’s nemesis substance was kryptonite, not readily obtainable by his enemies, Anpanman’s is troublingly ubiquitous: water. His arch-enemy Baikinman – ‘Germ Man’ – has only to squirt a little at his face, cackling triumphantly at the controls of his tiny airship’s water cannon, and Anpanman falls out of the sky. His friends have to rush in and bail him out: Shokupanman (Breadhead Man), Karēpanman (Currypanman), Meronpanna (Melonpanna), and all the rest. Jamu Ojisan (Uncle Jam) spends much of his time baking replacements for Anpanman’s soggy head.

  Vulnerability and a kindness that never wears thin: these are Anpanman’s superpowers. Ringo Bōya learns fast, returning to the orchard to lavish patient love on a single sapling. When disaster strikes, destroying his hometown and poisoning its crop, the power of a single apple borne by this single remaining tree turns everything around. Enormous fragments of fractured earth-crust rumble back into place; a colossal lithic jigsaw puzzle magically gathers itself together and seals itself at the joints. The world returns to its natural state: clear skies, trees blooming, people smiling.