Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  The brief detention by US forces in 2016 of the well-known Okinawan novelist Medoruma Shun – while protesting the Futenma relocation – served as a reminder of how difficult it was to survive as a viable community when your cultural presence went unmatched by a political voice that could not be ignored. Koreans living in Japan knew this only too well. A ‘Korean Wave’ of K-Pop and television soaps washing over the country since the 1990s showed little sign of receding. And major cultural figures like the comedian, actor and director Kitano ‘Beat’ Takeshi were increasingly willing to discuss – and be proud of – their Korean ancestry. But just as the Ainu had lived for many decades with the ambiguity of a ‘Former Aborigines Protection Law’, so the vast majority of people of Korean descent in Japan (numbering more than half a million people in all) were stuck with the notion of ‘zainichi’: Japan-resident. Used mostly for people who traced their family roots back to pre-1945 migration from the Korean peninsula (much of it forced rather than voluntary) and who now possessed permanent residency rather than citizenship, it suggested dwelling without belonging – either to state or to nation.

  Official early twenty-first century rhetoric about ‘multicultural coexistence’ in Japan (tabunka kyōsei) had yet to ease this sense of homelessness amongst some Zainichi Koreans, or to do much about the discrimination they faced. Tabunka kyōsei struggled to compete with a very different idea about the country still found on the streets, online and occasionally in the mouths of prominent politicians: Japan as ‘home’ to a homogeneous people that welcomed any visitor who could produce a return ticket, while tolerating – on sufferance and at arm’s length – the longer-term presence of non- or partially Japanese minorities. In 2014, as Okinawan and Ainu delegates joined the first UN-backed World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, a government committee had to be set up to investigate hate speech against Chinese, South East Asians and particularly Zainichi Koreans. As with Okinawans, many in these three groups continued to find their employment prospects confined to three ‘ks’: in this case, jobs that no one else wanted to do because they were kitsui (physically demanding), kitanai (dirty) or kiken (dangerous).

  And yet popular interest in authenticity and roots is something with which Okinawans and other minority communities in Japan might be able to work – a glue of sorts, binding people together. Of interest too, for Japan’s future, might be an apparent trend amongst young Okinawans towards going beyond assimilation versus differentiation – being ‘Japanese’ or being ‘Okinawan’. People are talking about themselves as both, with the ‘Japanese’ part connecting them with other historically neglected regions of the country such as Tōhoku.

  The possibility of being several things at once can also be a means for people still basically signed up to the idea – and the ideal – of homogeneity to begin to dissect it a little, and for ‘diversity’ to be thought of not in terms of a mainstream and its margins, but the multifariousness of every person’s existence. Advocates for minority rights in Japan feel a pressing need for this to happen. They have found two things indispensable for success in their campaigns: power over how their communities and causes are represented, and change in how others see them and treat them. Disability rights campaigners welcomed Japan’s belated ratification, in 2014, of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It meant that in future, if companies and institutions failed to provide reasonable adaptations to their services – so that disabled people could exercise fundamental rights and freedoms on an equal basis – they could be penalized for discrimination. But physical or intellectual disabilities are still being compounded by a social one: a lingering understanding of disabled people’s place in a community as that of supplicants and grateful recipients.

  Japan’s former outcast communities face a related problem. Once known by names like hinin (‘non-people’) and eta (‘full of filth’), they are referred to in the modern era as burakumin, after the word for the hamlets (buraku) in which they had lived. But many in an estimated population of around 1.2 million do not want to be referred to as anything at all. Their minority status is based not on ethnicity or on a history of which they were proud, but on stigmatization stemming from their work in professions once regarded as unclean. The solution, said some, is for the concept and category of burakumin to cease to exist. By the early 2000s, some in the Buraku rights movement regarded this as having been achieved: decades of government ‘assimilation’ (dōwa) spending on homes, schools and other facilities in burakumin neighbourhoods, alongside compensatory education for Buraku children and social education for the general population, aimed at tackling old stigmas, has resulted in few Japanese thinking about the issue any longer. But in 2016 along came a reminder for rights activists of how precarious a position it was to have to rely on others to alter or forget their prejudices: a new law had to be passed, responding to new forms of discrimination, including the moving online of long-running attempts to locate the postal addresses of burakumin communities in order to vet potential employees or marriage partners.

  There is no shortage, in Japan, of ways in which a person can be many things at once. There is scope for a more vital regionalism to return, moving from a carefully packaged sense of local produce and cuisine (give a person a prefecture and they could name you a meibutsu – ‘famous product’ – which the local airport would likely be selling as a souvenir) towards real devolved power. The global rise of identity movements might end up making contributions of its own: class and gender, sexuality and religion, subcultural hobbies and habits, even shared problems or medical diagnoses – depression and cancer blogs, and online support communities, were springing up around Japan in the 2010s.

  Even food – a serious, and seriously diverse business in Japan – can offer inspiration. There is Chinese ramen; karē raisu (curry rice) from India by way of Britain (married to the long-ago Chinese import of sticky rice cultivation); korokke (croquette) and tonkatsu (pork cutlet) from France; kasutera (castella) cake from Portugal; hamburgers, pizza and spaghetti. Japan doesn’t have a core national cuisine plus tolerated outliers Nor does it have a ‘foreign cuisine problem’. It has a constellation of dishes that made up a recognizably Japanese whole, worked around a common cultural core of treating food with respect: in the choice of ingredients and presentation, in expertise (even culinary lineages) and service in restaurants, and in many a mealtime conversation all but exclusively devoted to what is on the table.

  A demonstration of ‘Robear’ in Nagoya, 2015 Ainu celebrate the Autumn Ritual of Kotannomi, 2014 However Japan chooses to answer the questions it faces in the early twenty-first century, recent history suggests that it would take a combination of effort and artistry and the passage of time for the results to become part of what is a surprisingly – perhaps reassuringly – porous national identity and core. Just as ‘Unity in Diversity’ was best approached as a puzzle rather than a slogan or a piece of hectoring advice for immediate implementation, so an ultimately more significant moment for Japan than the summer of 2020 might well be 30 April 2019.

  The Meiji era, from 1868 to 1912, had seen a country pass through revolution to mourn a restored Emperor on his death. Taishō (1912–26) was associated with democratization, the rise of a mass society and an ill-fated attempt at internationalism. The long and tumultuous Shōwa era (1926–89) encompassed militarism, devastation and a return to new purpose. Heisei, from 1989, had been haunted by memories of the previous era’s ambition and destructiveness, while seeing the fragmentation of much of what that era went on to build. But as the world’s legions of Japanophiles would attest, it had also rendered the country more accessible and more widely loved than ever before.

  Eras and era changes mean a great deal in modern Japan. The former serve as chapters in the country’s story – chronological, but each with a thematic flavour. The latter offer a chance to look backwards and forwards, taking stock of an ongoing search for the nation and mustering fresh resolve. The next era is about to begin. On 30 Ap
ril 2019, Emperor Akihito, great-grandson of the Meiji Emperor, will abdicate. The sun will set on Heisei, making way for yet another new dawn. As it does so, the most valuable reflections on how to sustain a nation – as a set of stories at once discovered and created; a set of clothes that we weave and wear at the same time – are to be found in what adults hope children will grow up to believe.

  All sorts of things happen in life, Anpanman seems to be showing Ringo Bōya as their adventure unfolds. We never know what will come next. But to hold on to hope, and to go forward together, is to find yourself ‘home’ at last.

  Epilogue

  It was a moonlit night in early summer. A thin fog hovered just above where the waves broke on the beach. Fukuji spotted two people walking: a woman and a man. He frowned. The woman was definitely his wife.

  Following them as they headed off towards a cavern inside a nearby promontory, he called out his wife’s name. The woman turned, and smiled. He saw now who the man was. He had been deeply in love with Fukuji’s wife before Fukuji had married her. And he, like her, had died in the tsunami.

  Fukuji’s wife called back to him: ‘I am married now, to this man.’ ‘But don’t you love your children?’ Fukuji cried out in reply. She paused at that, and began to sob. While Fukuji looked sadly at his feet, the woman and the man drifted quietly away.

  More than six years on from the chaos and destruction of March 2011, the waters of the Pacific Ocean lapped gently at the Tōhoku coast; a deep, vibrant blue under a powerful sun. But roads around the Fukushima plant nearby still featured flashing signs at regular intervals. They informed passers-by not of speed limits or weather conditions, but of current radiation levels, measured in microsieverts. These went up and up, as you moved into a zone where you would have to stay inside your car if you broke down, then descended again as you left it for relative safety and normality. What looked like DIY gardening supplies were piled high on either side of the road: tightly filled plastic sacks shaped into taut, rectangular slabs. Inside was radioactive topsoil, stripped off the land in hopes of enticing former residents back to the area. But just as no one in Japan wanted these bags, so few of those residents could yet imagine making this place home again. Cars and corrugated iron roofs rusted amidst tall, untended grass, partially obscuring empty homes on which the paint was slowly peeling away.

  Told to the folklorist Yanagita Kunio, the story of Fukuji and his wife became number ninety-nine in his Tōno no Monogatari (The Legends of Tōno), published in 1910. One hundred and one years later, in the wake of a new tsunami, people in Tōhoku had again seen and felt the presence of ghosts. Men and women dressed in winter coats, at the height of summer, walking on the beach. People hailing taxis, asking after a loved one, or checking ‘Have I died?’ before disappearing from the back seat. One survivor reported receiving a call on her mobile phone, using the ring-tone reserved for a close relative who had passed away. Another watched as a toy truck belonging to her lost child pushed itself haltingly around the room.

  Writers in Tōhoku began collecting these accounts. They were the folk-tales of tomorrow. Fleeting moments of contact, with loved ones to whom goodbyes had not been said, seemed to these new chroniclers entirely natural. Certainly, fear was out of the question. As one put it, ‘Thousands of people had just died at a stroke. What was left to be scared of?’ Another wondered whether, now, as in Yanagita’s day, urban Japanese might be in need of what this sparsely populated region, with its rugged, dramatic landscape, had long offered: exposure to nature, bestowing on people a closer apprehension of life’s coming and going.

  Reverend Taniyama Yōzō, a Buddhist monk and pioneer of disaster care, heard plenty of ghost stories. He also chanted sutras, removed rubble or made tea, depending on a person’s needs. ‘There may be things that Buddhism doesn’t hear, or see,’ he said. ‘We should listen.’ His friend Reverend Kaneta Taiō took the same approach with his triple entendre ‘Café de Monk’: a disaster-area drinks service run out of a pick-up truck, where a monk played Thelonious Monk records and listened to people express their monku – their complaints about life – in their own ways.

  ‘Complaints’ was a gently witty understatement. Kaneta had witnessed suffering so intense and so completely disorienting that it sometimes drew from people words and gestures that seemed to him diamond-like in their purity and preciousness – ‘more beautiful’, he recalled, ‘than a sutra’. There were many other forces besides suffering in Tōhoku’s landscape, some seeping slowly southwards towards Japan’s major cities, and all unpredictable in their eventual consequences for the country. Sadness. A visceral anger, quiet but not likely to dissipate quickly. A profound mistrust of power. And an energy and determination to reconstruct, but not on the old terms.

  At the Peaceful Love Rock Festival, in Koza City, Okinawa, the sun was going down, a warm evening was settling in, and a crowd of adults and children were drinking and fanning themselves, mopping their faces with hand-towels. A pudgy, balding man took to the open-air stage – an IT consultant from Tokyo. But there was something familiar, from another time and place, about the tight white trousers and white vest, the moustache and the exaggerated strut, the toying with the stem of a microphone stand. The man sat at a piano, a spotlight found him, and a hush came over the crowd as he began to work away theatrically at the keyboard:

  I’ve paid my dues, time after time …

  The ghost of Freddie Mercury, after a fashion. Drenched in sweat, and rising now from his seat as the key changed and the rest of the band joined in. He unfurled a huge Union Jack behind his shining head and across his back – and then revealed its reverse, to delirious cheers: the Okinawan flag. From one angst-ridden island nation, eastward across a vast continent to another, and down south here to a third; raising Ryūkyūan spirits just yards from a military base. ‘We are the champions, my friend …’

  Further north, the calm of morning. At the uppermost tip of Tōhoku, Mount Fear looms out of the landscape. Winding your way up its steep, densely wooded side, you arrive eventually at a plateau. Sulphur and incense mingle on the air. Here, in the caldera of an active volcano, lies one of Japan’s fabled gateways to the underworld. A still, lonely lake, surrounded by a craggy, lunar landscape of blasted white-grey granite. Gentle puffs of steam, all but invisible, rise from gaps in the rock.

  At the back of a small tarpaulin shack nearby, a woman sits in simple white robes, twisting and rattling a string of highly polished horse-chestnut beads in her hands. Her eyes closed, she mumbles away without pause, as though to herself. I was so surprised to have died there I was looking forward to getting out of hospital and then I woke up here I’ve wanted to visit you in your dreams thank you for coming to find me don’t worry I’m fine I’m looking out for you gosh but I was so surprised to have died how annoying here I am …

  Kneeling in front of her, in tears, are her clients. Stretching away from the tent, back in a line across the courtyard, are families waiting for their turn: to reach grandmothers, grandfathers, parents, brothers and sisters.

  In the car park sit the very latest models: bodywork dewy, windscreens misted, as the sun sits on the horizon. Some of the consultations with the itako, or shaman, are being recorded on video camera. People tap away at smartphones in the queue. But what this woman in the tent is doing renders even the 1,200-year-old Buddhist temple in whose grounds she sits positively youthful by comparison.

  Both traditions survive because they understand change, taking on new forms when they must. A senior monk here has joined a recent publishing trend for clerical self-help. But he doesn’t believe in the solidity of books or streamlined bodywork, or perhaps even the temple’s wooden walkway, standing on rickety stilts a foot or so above hot, sulphurous rocks, water trickling around them warm and yellow. You are not, today, he says, who you were yesterday. The same will apply tomorrow. People insist on making futile distinctions about death, he adds – either ghosts exist, or it’s all about grief; either we appear again somewhere else,
or we don’t – because on the whole they have yet to understand life: its reality, and also its unreality.

  Away from the temple, amidst the steam, stones of grey, white and black are piled up in several places – a metre high, several metres wide. At first sight, they look like deposits of rubble. In fact, they are cairns, dedicated to people who have led the shortest of lives. Young couples mill around, saying little.

  Poked into the tops of the cairns, alongside statuettes of Jizō – protector of children and voyagers – are toy plastic windmills, in bright, glossy shades of pink and blue and yellow and white. Something for babies and children to play with, on the other side.

  The very lightest of touches. In humour and feeling. In a taste for life’s variety and vitality. In a talent for ‘maybe’, given an unknowable world.

  A light breeze passes through, and the little coloured windmills respond: turning, squeaking into the silence. They come to a rest again. But never for long.