Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  Anpanman’s creator, Yanase Takashi, was old enough to have served in China towards the end of the war. He saw villagers starving and emaciated comrades staggering and then dropping out of their marching columns. That a war billed as ‘righteous’ could come to this made a pacifist of Yanase, for ever suspicious of traditional heroics. The only reliable righteousness, he decided, lay in compassion and in feeding the hungry. That ought to go for superheroes as well, he thought. Too often they tended to be distant figures, rarely touching anyone’s life.

  The resulting Anpanman character shocked teachers and reviewers at first. Here was a ‘hero’ who sought to soothe distraught children by tearing off a chunk of his own face and handing it to them with a grin. ‘Please, never write something like this again,’ commented one. ‘We don’t need more than a single book of this type,’ said another. ‘Cruel,’ suggested a third. But the verdict from children themselves was quite the reverse, and soon there were more books, a stage show and an anime series.

  The greatest accolade came in the wake of 11 March 2011. An earthquake powerful enough to shift Japan’s main island 8 feet closer to the United States struck off its north-eastern coast, the region known as Tōhoku. A dark, deafening, putrid wall of water came surging inland, at a height of nearly 40 metres in places. Buildings and bridges, cars and people were sucked out to sea. Men, women and children were picked up and scattered across the landscape by a racing wave powerful enough to scrub urban infrastructure from the map. Others were caught in flood waters that appeared tame enough at first, but then wouldn’t stop rising, and pushing and pulling.

  Survivors struggled frantically to reach loved ones by phone, as helicopter news footage showed familiar parts of the landscape suddenly replaced by vast muddy lakes. Claims were emerging of explosions and possible meltdowns at Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant. No one knew how far all this was going to go: how much death, how much harm from radioactive fallout – or how long it would take Tōhoku’s agricultural communities to recover, assuming they ever did.

  Amidst all the tragedy and profound uncertainty, reports began to emerge about how local children were coping. They were singing. A song about how wonderful it is to be alive, even amidst great pain. About the preciousness of existence – so fleeting for all things that even the shining stars will one day disappear. About a hero, his head made of bread, who never stops looking out for people and never gives up.

  The song was the ‘Anpanman March’: upbeat drums and flutes, a chorus of cheerful childlike voices and sentiments that wove a charming sense of adventure with the deepest of human concerns. Yanase had always thought highly of his customer base, crediting them with being able to handle all sorts of ideas and emotions. At ninety-one years of age, he had been starting to think about retirement. But then he heard the reports about children singing in Tōhoku and started receiving letters – including one from a little girl in the disaster zone, who wrote: ‘I’m not frightened; Anpanman will come and rescue us.’ He set to work on three final stories.

  Yanase’s first two themes were restoration and hope. The third and last was homesickness and the rescuing of the homeland. Tōhoku’s long association with apple-growing, now in doubt because of fallout from Fukushima, inspired him to set his story on Apple Island. Powerful images of regeneration were offered up to children and parents alike: a seed that is tended to, and flowers; a tree that sprouts even on the tongue of a terrible killing machine; an aspiring hero who abandons his isolation and reconnects with home. Placing himself alongside his audience for a moment, in the form of Anpanman talking gently with Ringo Bōya under a night sky, Yanase tells them that ‘kindness’ is not banal, not an empty piety. It is the only durable source of strength.

  Some of the children reading and watching Yanase’s crowning creations would later that day have eaten Anpanman curry from an Anpanman bowl, cleaned their teeth with an Anpanman toothbrush and gargled from an Anpanman mug, before changing into Anpanman pyjamas and climbing under an Anpanman duvet. Yanase’s world was a commercial phenomenon. But this revealed more about Japan than a flair for the media franchise. The country had become newsworthy around the world, in recent years, for its apparent decline and confusion of purpose – a stagnant economy, poor job security and worsening work conditions, excessive overtime, a population worryingly reticent about reproduction. And yet in so far as the quality of attention lavished on its youngest members is a meaningful indicator of a society’s underlying health, Japan had long been – and remained now – in more robust basic shape than either local or international critics tended to allow.

  The tsunami of 11 March 2011, hitting the coast in Fukushima prefecture Anpanman, Ringo Bōya and Meronpanna (©Takashi Yanase, Froebel-kan, TMS, NTV 2013) Young children were educated and entertained by some of the world’s brightest and liveliest books and television. Programmes like NHK’s Okāsan to Issho (‘With Mother’), running since 1959, introduced children to the vast and eclectic cultural storehouse that they were set to inherit: folk songs, nursery singalongs, classical instruments, fiendish maths and word puzzles, ballet and kabuki theatre. A correspondence course featuring a little tiger-cub called Shimajirō offered carefully graded books, DVDs and toys to accompany children through their early years – from toilet training and care of younger siblings to tackling the formidable Japanese writing system and understanding the etiquette of train travel, via a ‘Manners Ninja’ whose skill-set included the statuesque stillness expected of a considerate commuter.

  Older children were even more spoiled for choice, thanks to a huge array of manga, anime and games. Kureyon Shin-chan (Crayon Shin-chan) followed the comedy adventures of a precociously outspoken and unashamedly backside-exposing five-year-old called Shinnosuke, or Shin-chan for short. Doraemon was a blue robotic cat, sent from the future to befriend a struggling young boy. One Piece traced the fantastical voyages of Monkey D. Luffy and his Straw Hat Pirates, in search of the world’s ultimate treasure. Meanwhile a company that started out manufacturing playing cards in Kyoto in 1889 had teamed up with an avid insect collector, Tajiri Satoshi, to produce one of history’s most heavily trodden fantasy landscapes. Nintendo’s Pokémon universe, appearing first on their handheld Game Boy console and later in books and anime, was populated by hundreds of species of small creatures to be collected, trained and then enlisted in battles with other trainers.

  By 2011, these and countless other characters had found their way into homes around the world. Japanese childhood had gone global. If 1995 was Japan’s annus horribilis – earthquake, Aum attack, history wars, the parlous state of the economy hitting home – 1996 seemed in retrospect to have begun a new era. That year saw the release of the first Pokémon game, the start of a Tamagotchi craze (a small digital pet on a key-ring), and the signing of a distribution deal between Disney and Miyazaki Hayao’s Studio Ghibli, enabling the latter to play a central, celebrated role in an emerging worldwide Japan boom.

  The Disney deal was briefly imperilled when a US producer suggested to a counterpart at Ghibli that edits to their material might be advisable, to make the stories more accessible for American audiences. He is rumoured to have received a samurai sword in the post, with a note attached to the blade: ‘No cuts.’ The medium aside, this was clearly the right message: foreign critics were enthralled by a culture where the borders between entertainment for children and for adults – and between childhood and adulthood more generally – were allowed to remain so excitingly, provocatively porous. Miyazaki’s Spirited Away went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film in 2003. Doraemon soon found himself influential enough to be accused of political subversion in China, and of corrupting children in India and Pakistan. And in the mid-2010s, One Piece became the most successful manga of all time, second only to Harry Potter as the world’s bestselling book series.

  Alongside Miyazaki, the work of the novelist Murakami Haruki served as one of the principal imaginative portals through which outsiders entered Japan and Japanese l
ife. Becoming synonymous internationally with Japanese literature in the 1990s, while simultaneously accused at home of being neither truly Japanese nor truly literary, Murakami’s work was remarkable for revealing contemporary Japan’s doubts and woes in a way that drew foreign readers in rather than frightening them off.

  Many of the young characters in novels like Noruwei no Mori (Norwegian Wood) (1987) were lonely, lost, bereft of optimism and uninterested in (or incapable of) making plans for the future. They struggled to sustain relationships or even coherent conversations. And yet there was an aesthetic attractiveness and a philosophical depth to their dismay at the world around them, and readers internationally found much that resonated with their own experiences of life. Murakami’s writing, and the broader Japan boom, seemed to represent the latest and most easily accessible instalment of a gift that Japan had been giving the world for a century or more by this point: a wise and forensic look at modernity and what it does to people, combined with visions of alternative ways of living. Murakami himself was heartened to see the direction his country was going in after the wake-up call of 1995. He detected the emergence of a more free-wheeling society, of small-scale entrepreneurs and creative industries, out of the crusty old chrysalis of a complacent, corporate Japan now discredited by economic disaster.

  Japan’s politicians, no strangers themselves to crustiness or discredit, were quick to see the brand-renewal potential in this metamorphosis. Jumping on the ‘Cool Japan’ bandwagon, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs appointed the cartoon cat Doraemon as the country’s ‘Anime Ambassador’ in 2008. When Japan’s Prime Minister appeared at the closing ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, promoting Tokyo’s 2020 Games, he was persuaded to do so dressed as Nintendo’s Super Mario.

  Yet it remained far from clear what this early twenty-first century shift from economic to cultural superpower would ultimately mean for Japan’s standing in the world, particularly in the corners that mattered most. Young Chinese flocking to see a Doraemon film at the cinema, or embarking on tours of hallowed anime sites across Japan, was certainly a useful means of countering the negative imagery they were likely to find in their school textbooks or in the lurid war dramas churned out by Chinese studios. But there were few signs so far of the Chinese population at large warming to Japan as a result.

  The same was true in South Korea. A ban on Japanese pop culture had gradually been lifted across the 1990s, but opinion polls suggested that a clear majority of Koreans still held negative views of their near-neighbour. To Tokyo’s great frustration, Japan’s past on the peninsula, including its army’s sexual enslavement of women and girls, remained prominent in Korean politics and media. Culture and history, Cool Japan and the ‘comfort women’, appeared perfectly capable of coexisting.

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  This apparent disconnect between entertainment and politics in Japan deepened as the triple disasters of March 2011 – earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown – turned into a dramatic and very public test of the country’s key institutions over the weeks and months that followed. Nearly 20,000 people had lost their lives and 270,000 homes had vanished. Three reactors had melted down at Fukushima, spewing radiation into the air and contaminating the surrounding land, groundwater and streams: 110,000 people were forced to leave their homes. Meanwhile politicians and pop stars were enlisted to eat local produce in public, a woefully premature attempt at reassurance, at a time when little was known – and even less was being admitted, by TEPCO and government officials – about the tragedy’s poisonous scale and scope.

  The imperial institution came out of this grimmest of tests with its reputation enhanced. Emperor Akihito broadcast a message of reassurance to the nation, the first since his father’s at the end of the Second World War. He and Empress Michiko, both casually dressed, made visits to evacuation shelters, kneeling to chat with people for whom a few square feet of sky-blue gym mat, bounded by cardboard and vinyl partitions, were all the home they had left.

  Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko visit survivors of Japan’s triple disasters in March 2011 The Japanese Self-Defence Forces, too, saw an improvement in their national standing, after the largest deployment in their history. Reconnaissance flights had been launched within minutes of the earthquake and emergency supplies had begun to flow. Around 100,000 SDF personnel – many wearing uniform patches or helmet stickers bearing the slogan Ganbare Tōhoku (Be Strong, Tōhoku) – were seen by the general public rescuing people, clearing roads and ports and constructing temporary facilities.

  Support from around 24,000 US military service personnel, as part of Operation Tomodachi (Operation Friend), brought gratitude and acclaim for Japan’s long-term and not universally welcome American guests. But there was also controversy over the risks to which people had been exposed. Crew aboard the USS Ronald Reagan recalled the metallic taste of the air on deck as they appeared to pass through the radiation plume. They showered in and ate food cooked in desalinated ocean water picked up off the Tōhoku coast. Of the many who soon began suffering major health problems – from leukaemia to tumours to thyroid malfunction – hundreds tried to sue TEPCO for compensation via the US court system, alleging that it had failed to inform the Japanese authorities of the seriousness of the radiation leak. While the legal back and forth went on, former prime minister Koizumi Junichirō set up a private fund in support of affected personnel, soliciting donations within Japan to help pay for their medical care.

  Where newspaper surveys of public opinion revealed an 82 per cent favourability rating for the SDF response to the crisis, the figure for the government stood at just 6 per cent. A major reason was trust: ministers were widely thought to be covering up past incompetence (their own, and that of their industry allies), while minimizing the extent of the ongoing dangers from the Fukushima power plant. There were calls across the political spectrum for Prime Minister Kan Naoto to exercise some leadership – political, moral, emotional. And there were urgent calls abroad for greater transparency from Japan about how bad the situation was, and might potentially become.

  Alongside obfuscation and slowness of response ran some ill-timed, opportunistic manoeuvrings in the Diet. Kan Naoto, desperately planning behind the scenes for the imposition of martial law and the evacuation of 50 million people from Tokyo – a mere 150 miles south of the Fukushima power plant – soon faced defections from colleagues in his party, the left-of-centre Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). He was eventually forced to resign, with the DPJ’s Noda Yoshihiko becoming Japan’s third prime minister in two years. Just over a year later, Noda was also out. The DPJ were swept from power by a resurgent LDP under a former prime minister, Abe Shinzō.

  Beginning in December 2012, Abe’s second term as premier showed, as Koizumi’s had done before him, just how much a long-serving prime minister could bring their influence to bear on government. ‘Abenomics’ involved huge amounts of government stimulus spending ($100 billion in 2013 alone), the flooding of the economy with money by the Bank of Japan, and the further liberalizing of the labour market, with more women encouraged into work. By mid-2017, the International Monetary Fund was prepared to pronounce all this a success, citing modest growth and an unemployment rate running at just 2.8 per cent – the lowest in more than twenty years.

  But Abe’s ambitions ran broader than gradual economic recovery. Supporters told journalists that Abenomics was inspired by the Meiji-era slogan fukoku kyōhei – ‘enrich the country, strengthen the army’. And the Prime Minister appeared serious about doing both, working to lay the foundations for a militarily more powerful and assertive twenty-first-century Japan. He established a National Security Council, centralizing security policy and removing it from parliamentary scrutiny. He announced a five-year project to expand the armed forces, with drone and amphibious capabilities. And he pushed through a highly controversial State Secrecy Law (2013), under whose terms a government could, with no external or judicial oversight, deem anything it desired to be a secret, thereby preven
ting its disclosure. Investigative journalists could, in theory at least, now be jailed for soliciting secret information – whether or not they were aware of its secrecy.

  The Secrecy Law threatened to worsen what was already a bad situation: Japan had recently been ranked fifty-third in the World Press Freedom survey, thanks to a combination of pressure applied by large advertisers and a culture of cooperative press clubs, in which journalists dealt closely with one another and with officials. Internet news and discussion sites enjoyed relative freedom from these traditional constraints on the media. But a notable trend was the use of that freedom by Japan’s army of netto-uyoku or internet ultranationalists, who spent much of their time rehashing mid twentieth-century controversies, sharing thoughts and ‘statistics’ about alleged Korean criminality in Japan, and goading ‘Abe-chan’ (a generally affectionate but in this case derisory appellation) for not going far enough in his policies.

  The greatest political sensitivities of all surrounded LDP plans to revise Japan’s post-war Constitution: regularizing in law the existence of Japan’s military and in addition – so some planners hoped – rethinking constitutional rights, re-emphasizing Japan’s ‘unique culture’, and restoring the Emperor as head of state. Legislation in 2015 allowing Japan to exercise collective self-defence (coming to the aid of an ally where Japan itself was ultimately in danger) was seen as paving the way for some of these changes. It passed through the Diet amidst chaotic scenes in the Lower House, reminiscent of the chamber scuffles of May 1960. There were once again protests outside the building, drawing tens of thousands of demonstrators.

  The Japanese public at large, whose permission for constitutional revision would have to be sought in a national referendum, remained for now narrowly opposed to the idea. But there were signs that world events might be turning in the LDP’s favour. Japan was first trolled by US President Donald Trump for ‘freeloading’ under the American security umbrella, and then all but abandoned in 2018 amidst a rushed rapprochement between the White House and a nuclear-armed North Korea. China’s premier Xi Jinping had established pre-eminence at home, with his ideology enshrined in the Communist Party Constitution and a presidential two-term limit scrapped in his favour. Now he was working to establish his country’s pre-eminence in the world, the signs of which ran from Chinese-funded football stadiums in Africa to military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea. Amidst all this, Japan’s constitutional peace clause and the ‘higher ideals’ of which MacArthur had spoken in making the case for it were becoming easier to portray as a relic of the early post-war world, perilously out of touch with the times.