Yamashita Kikuji, The Tale of Akebono Village (1953) (© Gallery Nippon/Photo: MOMAT/DNPartcom)
Nakamura Hiroshi, Sunagawa #5 (1955): a sketch and the finished work (© Nakamura Hiroshi, image courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo)
Nakamura Hiroshi, Gunned Down (1957) (© Nakamura Hiroshi, image courtesy of The Koriyama City Museum of Art)
Anti-Anpo protestors in 1960 (© Courtesy and Copyright Keisuke Katano); ‘We Dislike Ike!’ (© Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Hijikata Tatsumi on stage (© Onozuka Makoto, Courtesy of Keio University Art Center)
Hi-Red Center’s ‘Be Clean!’ (Hirata Minoru Archive)
Mishima Yukio: (© Bettman/Getty Images)
A danchi housing complex in Tokyo, 1967 (© The Mainichi Newspapers/Aflo)
An advert for ‘potato mash’ (Courtesy of Morinaga)
Protestors confront the Chisso company president (© The Mainichi Newspapers/Aflo); Uemura Tomoko and her mother, Uemura Ryoko (© The Mainichi Newspapers/Aflo)
Miyazaki Hayao, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982) (© Studio Ghibli)
Asahara Shōkō in custody (© JIJI PRESS/AFP/Getty Images)
Okinawans protesting against the rape of a schoolgirl in 1995 (©TORU YAMANAKA/AFP/Getty Images)
Mao Zedong and Tanaka Kakuei, 1972 (© Bettmann/Getty Images)
Neo-Gōmanism Manifesto Special: On War (Courtesy of Gentōsha)
Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō – as Elvis (© ZUMA Press Inc/Alamy Stock Photo)
The tsunami of 11 March 2011 (© SADATSUGU TOMIZAWA/AFP/Getty Images); Anpanman, Ringo Bōya and Meronpanna (© Takashi Yanase, Froebel-kan, TMS, NTV 2013)
Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, March 2011 (© Newscom/Alamy Stock Photo)
Narita Gion Festival, 2017 (Courtesy of Scott Ritchie)
hinomaru (Mika Ninagawa) (mika 2004 C-print © mika ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery)
Anti-nuclear protest leaders (© Aflo Co. Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)
A demonstration of ‘Robear’ (© JIJI PRESS/AFP/Getty Images); Ainu celebrating the Autumn Ritual of Kotannomi, 2014 (© The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images)
Acknowledgements
Writing a book seems to involve drawing deeply on the generosity and patience of others while eroding – temporarily, one has to hope – those same qualities in the author. To everyone who has helped me, and put up with me – thank you. What follows are just a few of the countless contributions that people have made to Japan Story.
For their academic mentoring, I am forever in debt to the inspiring examples set by Martin Conway, Judith Brown and ‘Ptp’. Ann Waswo introduced me to the extraordinary richness of Japanese studies, while Teikyo School United Kingdom put me in touch for the first time with Japan itself: working with impossibly lovely pupils and students, wielding impossibly advanced mobile phone technology (while braving the centrality to British cuisine of the humble potato), did much to fire a young man’s curiosity about their country.
That curiosity would not have gone far without the award of a scholarship from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation in 2004. The chance to live and study in Japan for a couple of years, and to actually be paid to do so, seemed then – and still seems now – a fantastically good deal. My deepest thanks go to the Foundation’s Trustees, to Kono-san and Marie Conte-Helm for looking after me on the scholarship, and to Jason James and Susan Meehan for maintaining the relationship since.
I owe a great deal, in recent years, to the students and staff in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. To my students in particular for your energy and joy; for the questions and insights that I scurried away and scribbled down; and for basically teaching me how to teach – thank you. May you all find gainful employment. And may you stay out of trouble.
Getting to know a new country involves its fair share of hurdles, and Japan is no exception. Having clipped my shins on some, and clattered to earth over others, I am all the more grateful to those who helped me clear the ones that I did. Akihito Suzuki at Keio University has been tireless in his encouragement of younger scholars. For buying me expensive sushi, for taking me through a list of people I really ought to have heard of already, and for everything else since – thank you. Junko Kitanaka, also at Keio, sets the very highest standards in studying culture and mental health, and is unfailingly warm and generous in helping others to try to meet them – for which thank you, Junko. Yorio Kosawa and Makoto Takeda got me started studying religion and the psy sciences in Japan. I hope their delight at seeing my expression, when first faced with the quivering, live-dissected fish we shared, served as some small compensation for their efforts. For later conversations about mental health and its place in the bigger picture of modern Japan, I am grateful to – amongst very many others – Takashi Ikuta, Fumiaki Iwata, Setouchi Jakuchō, Takeshi Kanaseki, Toshihide Kuroki, Kunihiro Matsuki, Yujiro Nagao, Yuji Sato and Shin’ichi Yoshinaga. For their trust in granting me access to the personal documents of family members, I owe thanks to Yorio and Makoto Kosawa, and to Nachiko and Atsushi Nagai.
Few academics write for colleagues alone. But sharing our ideas with a wider public often rests on a great deal of help from others. Alongside patient and forensic editors at various UK and Japanese publications, I owe a huge amount to the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council: their fabulous ‘New Generation Thinkers’ scheme allowed me to embark on an extended apprenticeship in broadcast journalism, and helped to broaden considerably the scope of Japan Story. Mohit Bakaya, Matthew Dodd, Hugh Levinson and Robyn Read have offered me no end of opportunities to develop and share my Japan ideas, while Sheila Cook, Bob Howard, Luke Mulhall, Fiona McLean and Keith Moore have been saintly in their patience as essay and documentary producers.
For steering Japan Story through its planning stages and into the arms of Allen Lane, I am very grateful indeed to Robyn Drury and Martin Redfern at what is now Northbank Talent Management. First-class documentary and picture research came courtesy of Enzo DeGregorio, Lesley Hodgson, Leo Howard, Yoshi Inoue, Hirō Saso and Yoshiyuki Wakida. My thanks also, for assistance with images, to Rosina Buckland, Timothy George, Marty Gross, David Humphries, Ninagawa Mika, Okamura Marie, Okamura Mihoko, Scott Ritchie, Jordan Sand and William Wetherall. Hiromi Sasamoto-Collins and Chris Perkins offered invaluable comments on the manuscript. My editor Simon Winder knows what my promises are worth when it comes to meeting deadlines, but has never let it dampen his enthusiasm for this project nor compromise his care in reading drafts and shepherding the whole thing through to completion. To Simon, and to everyone involved with the production of the book – including Ellen Davies, Matt Hutchinson and Jane Robertson – thank you for making the process so smooth and so enjoyable. For helping to fund the research on which the book is based, I am grateful to the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the University of Edinburgh and the Wellcome Trust.
To anyone who has scanned down this far and spotted a name missing that really should have made it into even these much-abbreviated lines, rest assured that in the time since this book went to press I have probably had night-sweats over this and other omissions. Please accept my sincerest apologies, and of course my grateful thanks.
Finally, to my family, and especially to my wife Kae and our three children – Shoji, Yocchan and Hana: thank you for everything, and I’m sorry this all took so long. Let’s go and play in the garden.
THE BEGINNING
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ALLEN LANE
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Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published 2018
Copyright © Christopher Harding, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover: Nagaoka no yado, from the series Tales of Ise, 1903, by Kajita Hanko.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Lonard A. Lauder Collection of Japanese Postcards
ISBN: 978-0-141-98536-7
Japan Story Page 49
