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Abe packaged his plans for Japan as part of a ‘significant rebirth’ intended to coincide with the Olympics and Paralympics in 2020. And yet although Abe’s own future as LDP leader looked uncertain, amidst scandals and persistently gloomy poll ratings for his Cabinet (alongside the occasional broadside from Koizumi Junichirō, resolutely anti-nuclear and anti-Abe), there was little sign of imminent change in the nation’s fundamental political arrangements. The year 2020 would mark sixty-five years of the LDP’s existence, during which time it had been in power almost continuously. Brief hiatuses had so far served more to discredit its opponents than to bring them electoral momentum. The LDP had its internal divisions and its legendary factional fights. But post-war Japan had yet to develop a credible two- or three-party system.
Japan’s influential bureaucracy was even more deeply entrenched. A legacy of Meiji-era managerialism, its consensual conservativism and broad, shaping reach had at times encouraged in the minds of politicians and observers alike a conflation of state with nation; of paternalistic, sometimes ambitiously interventionist political and socio-economic leadership with the will of a supposedly unified and purposeful population.
Foreign commentary across a century and a half, much of it read and reflected upon in Japan, played a role in strengthening these perceptions. As the first Asian country to ‘go global’ in the modern Western mould, Japan was often treated as a mirror-image of Western societies: looked to for shining proof that those societies were fit for export and for cautionary illustrations – particularly from the 1990s on – of how they might, if improperly managed, go wrong. The flipside of this deeply self-referential search for ‘Japan’, unmatched in Western approaches to Korea or China, was the rather stark drawing of distinctions between Western and Japanese life found in Ruth Benedict’s work and much of the nihonjinron (‘theories about the Japanese’) genre. The adjective ‘Japanese’ came to suggest something more cohesive and persistent across time – bound up with hard-to-access traditions and deeply ingrained psychological quirks – than was the case with ‘American’ or ‘German’, whose associations by contrast were more complex and more readily updated.
For the people of Japan, there were indeed moments when thoughts turned to the nation as a meaningful entity, in which their identity was heavily invested. August 1945 was one such moment. March 2011 was another. But for the most part, ‘modern Japan’ had emerged, and was constantly sustained, as a by-product of people doing other things: living lives in which family or community or the pursuit of knowledge, pleasure or success served as more intelligible and compelling ordering ideals than the ‘nation’ of their leaders’ wishful and grandiose imaginings.
This difference, between the nation envisaged as a single unfolding story and the sum of countless smaller ones, could be found playing out on the cusp of the 2020 Olympics about 50 miles east of Tokyo. Often billed as the ‘gateway to Japan’, Narita International Airport was gearing up to funnel athletes and spectators into a hyper-modern and environmentally friendly national capital, full of new, energy-efficient buildings, low-carbon zones and cute mottoes and mascots. There would be hydrogen cars, driverless taxis (‘robocabs’) and facial recognition to improve stadium security. Competitor medals were to be struck using precious metals recycled from unwanted smartphones. There were even plans for an artificial meteor shower, generated by having satellites spray glowing pellets into the night sky. As in 1964, so in 2020: a capital would showcase a country defining itself through soft power and high technology. On the basis that first impressions count, five billion yen was spent replacing Narita Airport’s old creamy-beige toilet facilities with brightly coloured new ones, complete with voice guidance systems and heated seats.
And yet just around the corner from the airport lay another gateway to Japan entirely. In July each year, the small city of Narita played host to an event of its own. Tiny temporary stalls lined the road, strings of hanging light bulbs illuminating their wares in the warm dark of the evening. Yakitori – chicken skewers – sizzled in salt and cayenne pepper, wasabi and thick, brown tare made from sweetened soy sauce. There was yakisoba (fried noodles) and takoyaki (minced octopus, mixed with onion and pickled ginger, then fried inside balls of batter). Watagashi (candy floss) and ringo ame (candied apples). Alcohol for the adults. Goldfish games and toys for the children.
The stalls and their thousands of milling customers together helped create a makeshift thoroughfare along which ornate festival floats passed slowly and with tremendous fanfare. Standing precariously on top, and sitting close together along balconies around the side, were elaborately costumed dancers and singers and drummers and flautists, all hauled along on huge ropes by young women and men in headbands and thin, coloured festival coats. The kami (gods) were passing through in their mikoshi (portable shrines). Men appeared to be holding these aloft, but in fact they were just about holding on: kicking their legs and smiling and shouting ecstatically, under the energetic power of the kami within.
Narita’s Gion festival, or ‘matsuri’ – from matsu, ‘waiting [for the gods]’ – was around 300 years old by this point, named after a Kyoto matsuri that was many hundreds of years older still. For a few precious hours, the modern state and the modern nation over which it presided were revealed as utterly contingent. Traffic lights went offline. The tarmacked roads beneath were tramped by wooden geta and rice-straw zori: sandal-like footwear from the Edo era and before. Business attire was left behind in favour of summer kimono crafted in a blaze of colours. The police were employed simply to protect all of this, keeping cars and buses at bay with white gloves and orange glow-wands. Here was something not merely far older than states, or professional politicians, or Olympic PR, but more fundamentally human too. Life lived intensely, shorn of its encumbering practicalities and pretensions. Time out of time.
Except, not quite. Narita’s annual festival was the result each year of haggling between its supporters and the local authorities. What would the route be? How long could the traffic be held up? Could the organizers guarantee that things would not get out of hand? Matsuri elsewhere were often the product of what history and politics had given or taken away: some were desperate answers to rural depopulation, others more optimistic civic innovations encouraged by the success of events like the 1970 Osaka Expo. Traditional paper lanterns suspended from high wires or displayed in wooden frames bore the names of the companies and corporations on which matsuri depended for sponsorship. And everyday social politics fuelled arguments behind the scenes over which roles should fall to the young or old, men or women, this or that individual; who would sit or stand where in the procession; who would pay for the floats, and how much.
Narita Gion Festival, 2017 Olympic visitors who might find Japan’s official 2020 story curiously sterile would glimpse in festivals like Narita’s the real raw material out of which the modern nation had been forged: a never-ending push-and-pull within and between a richly complex civil society and an often rather remote and reactive managerial state, over the enduring concerns of everyday life and over the new ideas and attitudes – arriving from abroad or arising at home, across a turbulent century and a half – that promised or threatened to reshape that life.
The art of exercising political or bureaucratic power lay in separating these pressures into two broad groups: those that could be portrayed as outliers to some necessary core of national identity and purpose, and those that could or must be worked with, permitted in time to become part of that core. Into the previous category, at various points before 1945, had gone socialism, feminism, liberalism, Christianity, votes for women and militant trade unionism. Into the latter, across the post-war years: cooperative industrial relations, a pacifist stance in international affairs, a concern for the natural environment and a world-beating versatility in technology and entertainment.
For people seeking change, this meant that top-down was rarely a realistic direction of travel. It was more likely that incremental, bott
om-up innovations might receive belated recognition and sponsorship from those with power. But the hurdles were many and high. Defenders of the status quo were happy to encourage a collective amnesia about modern Japan’s talent for transformation, and about just how new and even experimental – especially in the context of a millennium and a half of recorded history – much of Japan’s present social and cultural settlement really was.
The varied meanings of the hinomaru flag by the late 2010s made clear how much a national push-and-pull could achieve in changing people’s minds and sustaining multiple points of view. Across East Asia, and for some in Japan as well, the circular red sun on a white background remained powerfully associated with Japan’s imperialist past and its traces in present-day politics. It had once been raised over Nanjing, and was now flown from the windows of black ultra-nationalist sound-trucks, blaring martial music (along with angry accusations against the nation’s quisling politicians) at faintly embarrassed shoppers in Shinjuku and Shibuya, in western Tokyo. In 1999, Japan’s teachers had finally lost their long-running battle to stop the hinomaru from becoming the official national flag, and ‘Kimi-ga-yo’ the national anthem. Some in Tokyo went to court to protest against what they saw as a new nationalistic and authoritarian order to face the flag and sing the anthem in school assemblies. They eventually lost the case.
But this same flag had been deployed with artful ambiguity at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, associated with a peaceful sporting internationalism. And in the early 2000s, Japan’s superstar photographer Ninagawa Mika had claimed it for fashion and pop: posing a model in front of it dressed in a bikini and a diaphanous crimson top, glittery-gold cowboy hat down low over her face, samurai sword slung over her shoulders. By the late 2010s, Japan’s Olympic organizers felt at home enough with the flag to separate ‘Tokyo’ and ‘2020’ in their logo with a bold red disc.
Something similar had happened with mental illness, and with depression in particular. The concept was unknown to most Japanese before public information and pharmaceutical campaigns in the late 1990s and early 2000s encouraged people to think about it as ‘a cold of the soul’ (kokoro no kaze): anyone could ‘catch’ it, it was nothing to be ashamed of, and it was eminently treatable with medication. The number of people diagnosed with a mood disorder in Japan duly doubled in just four years, while the market for anti-depressants boomed: in 2006 – the year that a Basic Law on Suicide Countermeasures was passed, to help tackle the alarming rate at which people were taking their own lives in Japan – it was worth six times what it had been just eight years before. Related talk of kokoro no kea (‘care of the heart’) began to shift the image of mental healthcare in general, from a frightening and stigmatizing institutional intervention to the sort of help with emotions and relationships that to some degree everyone requires from time to time.
Ninagawa Mika’s hinomaru In the workplace, depression went from being unknown, to a personal problem, to a recognized outcome of overwork – for which companies could be held responsible, while government was forced to institute mandatory stress checks at work – finally to the subject of angry scepticism from workers whose colleagues had been signed off sick, thereby lumbering them with extra work. By the mid-2010s, Japan’s suicide rate was at last beginning to fall, but there was talk of ‘fake depression’, along with a rash of high-profile karō jisatsu (‘overwork suicide’) cases that suggested too many companies were still dragging their feet in taming the country’s overtime culture. One case involved a young construction worker who took his own life in March 2017 after putting in 190 hours of overtime in a single month on the 2020 Olympic stadium.
The history of the hinomaru and of depression in Japan showed that argumentation, flexibility and pluralism were built into Japan’s DNA. However much it sometimes suited leaders to downplay all three, as antithetical to the national character, periods of crisis and opportunity tended to bring them out. So it was conceivable that between the lingering trauma of March 2011 and the promise of Tokyo 2020 those seeking to nudge the country in new directions might find some means of doing so. The LDP and its allies had one vision of what Japan ought to look like in 2020 and beyond. But what others were there, and how might they gain a little traction?
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A few weeks after Japan’s triple disasters unfolded, a video was posted to YouTube. A man, in jeans, shirt, sunglasses and a hat, walks into a small, dimly lit room. He sits down on a stool, picks up a black acoustic guitar and launches into a slightly amateurish blues progression. The song is soon recognizable as a cover of ‘Zutto suki dattandaze’ (‘I Always Loved You’), by the singer-songwriter Saitō Kazuyoshi. It featured in a cosmetics advert not long ago. But this is a cover version with a difference. In place of the romance of the original comes furious talk of Japan’s fifty-four nuclear reactors, and of how television adverts have been saying for years that they are safe – when now we all know that they aren’t.
The singer steadily warms to his theme. His vocals pick up. His playing seems to improve. And he builds to his chorus:
It was always a lie!
And now it’s been exposed.
It was always such a lie!
‘Nuclear power is safe’.
Saitō Kazuyoshi would no doubt be consulting his lawyers. For someone to hijack his music in this way risked his own reputation by association, in an industry where the rules on acceptable conduct were very clear. Outright government censorship of music had ended with the Occupation. But the ethics code adopted back in the early 1950s, partly in response to worries about the corruption of young souls, was still very much in force. The body responsible for overseeing it, Recorin (Recording Industry Ethics Regulatory Commission), remained on the look-out for anything that disturbed national or public order, was disrespectful of life or justice, appeared to condone criminal or anti-social behaviour, or was sexually obscene or discriminatory. Record companies, careful of their liabilities and their artists’ public image, checked all lyrics well in advance of a song’s release. Previously rejected lyrics were circulated amongst producers, as examples of what to avoid lest they end up having to re-record their music and reprint their packaging.
Commercial broadcasters, under pressure from large and influential advertisers, imposed severe restrictions of their own: opposing anything, for example, that ‘disgraced the authority of the government’. This cover song would be getting nowhere near a radio or a television – that much was clear. ‘Radiation is on the wind,’ the man was singing, knee pumping away with angry energy, ‘When will the government wake up?!’
Few people would be interested in this sort of thing anyway. Conventional wisdom had it that young Japanese grew up expecting their entertainers to be friendly, companionable and empathic. They didn’t want preachers or agitators.
Or did they? The YouTube cover song ended up going viral, shared and re-uploaded faster than frantic staff at Saitō’s record label could have it taken down. ‘Finally, a protest song!’ exclaimed one fan on social media. ‘His courage is exactly what we needed,’ said another. Saitō himself turned out to be far from upset by it all. He would be launching no legal action – he was the man in the video.
It was a rare and risky thing to have done. Musicians had been known, on occasion, to take political matters into their own hands. The bassist for a band called Les Rallizes Dénudés had helped to hijack the Japan Airlines flight in 1970, and was still living in North Korea nearly half a century later. And yet a part of Japan’s apparent disconnect between entertainment and politics was the fact that protest and mainstream pop generally had little to do with one another. The country boasted the largest music industry on the planet outside the United States, thanks to ‘J-Pop’ acts like SMAP and AKB48. Constant traffic between a honeycomb of musical and fashion subcultures and big corporate backers helped to produce stunning international success stories like Babymetal, an award-winning fusion of idol culture, Japanese Gothic, Punk Lolita fashion and warp-speed heavy metal. But this cre
ative and commercial trailblazing was combined with close control of artists by powerful management companies, both on and off stage.
Musicians working in Japan’s enormous underground scene – ranging across punk, pop, heavy metal, folk and EDM – were less encumbered. But festival sponsors and venue owners could always turn them away if they started to cause trouble. ‘Nine is a beautiful number’ sang a punk vocalist in Tokyo’s Kōenji neighbourhood, renowned for its small music venues, record shops and vintage clothes stores. His was not a genre known for subtle allusion. This was political code. It would be hard for anyone to object to the lyric, and yet fans would understand the reference: to the Constitution’s peace clause – Article 9 – and by extension to Abe’s grand plans.
Saitō Kazuyoshi’s very public YouTube venture was a sign of its times. The disasters of March 2011 were so catastrophic, and claims about safety shortcuts and cover-ups so incendiary, that for a while people thought Japan might be entering a period of real transition. Saitō Kazuyoshi began to perform his ‘cover’ song at concerts, despite initial attempts by his management team to stop him. Sakamoto Ryūichi, part of the enormously influential Yellow Magic Orchestra and winner of an Oscar for the score of The Last Emperor, joined the novelist Ōe Kenzaburō in organizing a ‘Sayonara Genpatsu’ – ‘Goodbye Nuclear Power’ – rally in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park in July 2012. Alongside them was Setouchi Jakuchō, novelist and final client of Kosawa Heisaku, and now, to her many followers, Japan’s modern conscience, exposing the psychological and moral damage done by Japan’s ‘vulgar’ political class. Rallies like these attracted tens of thousands of people – numbers not seen since the Anpo protests of 1960. A veteran of those earlier protests, Sakamoto told the crowds of his pride at seeing Japanese people once again finding their voices.
Japan Story Page 40
