Japan Story Read online

  Christopher Harding

  * * *

  JAPAN STORY

  In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present

  Contents

  List of Maps

  A Note to the Reader

  Prologue: Harumi and Heisaku

  PART ONE

  Weaving, Tearing (1850s to 1910s) 1. Japan Goes Global

  2. Blood Tax

  3. The Dancing Cabinet

  4. Happy Families

  PART TWO

  Resistance is Fertile (1900s to 1930s) 5. Contesting the Cosmos

  6. Haunting the Orient

  7. Great Escapes

  PART THREE

  Leading Asia/Leaving Asia (1920s to 1940s) 8. Self Power, Other Power, State Power

  9. Theatre

  10. Divine Bluster

  PART FOUR

  Modernity 2.0? (1940s to 1960s) 11. Afterlives

  12. Blue Note

  13. Bright Life

  PART FIVE

  Twisted Visions (1950s to 1990s) 14. Exhibitionism

  15. Pulling Strings

  16. Moving Mountains

  PART SIX

  Raising Spirits (1990s to 2010s) 17. Telling Tales

  18. Fragments

  Epilogue

  Chronology

  Bibliographic Notes

  Illustration Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  To my parents and to my wife

  With love and gratitude

  For all the things I can think of

  And all those a more perceptive son and husband Would have noticed by now

  List of Maps

  Japan’s view of the world

  Japan’s prefectures

  Japan’s main cities

  Japan in East Asia, c.1905

  The Japanese Empire at its greatest extent in 1942

  A Note to the Reader

  Japanese names appear in this book in the standard Japanese order of family name followed by given name. Where a Japanese scholar is publishing in English, their name appears in the standard English language order of given name followed by family name.

  Macrons are used to indicate elongated vowel sounds except in the case of place names that are well established in English (e.g. Tokyo).

  Passages have been set in italic where events, conversations between historical characters or storylines from Japanese literature are being paraphrased or condensed.

  English translations of Japanese book titles have been given in brackets after the Japanese. Those books that have also been published in English appear in italics. The date of the original publication in Japanese is given in brackets after the title.

  PROLOGUE

  Harumi and Heisaku

  My kimono, the colour of rust. Central Tokyo, cars whizzing around me. Sitting inside a car with my friend, a mountain of boiled eggs in front of us. My sister’s sickroom. Standing, staring at her water-blue futon as she sleeps. She’s frowning. Flowers in a garden. Someone’s fingers. Three men in a coffee shop. Flowers again – a field of yellow flowers. Inside a plane. A banyan tree. An Indian bookshop, shelves heavy with books. I worry they’re going to spill down on top of me. A man removing his glasses …

  Harumi stopped speaking, and opened her eyes. A face appeared briefly in a dusty shaft of daylight: tired but noble, framed by thin grey hair. A black scarf was tucked inside a kimono of dark silk.

  ‘You’re ill. You’re suffering.’

  The man’s words were slightly slurred and indistinct; his eyesight had mostly gone, years before, and now a series of strokes were eating away at his powers of movement and speech. And yet this was the softest voice that Harumi had ever heard. She wasn’t being handed a diagnosis, nor being idly discussed as a case study. She was being seen, in a way no one – herself included – had ever managed before. Many years later Harumi remembered that voice as sending cool water coursing through a mind and body so desiccated, so brittle, that she feared the lightest of touches would break her.

  The voice belonged to Kosawa Heisaku, a devout Buddhist and Japan’s first Freudian psychotherapist. Sitting in a chair behind Setouchi Harumi, who was lying on his couch, he stayed mostly silent as she allowed thoughts, images, fantasies and worries to tumble out of her, at random and uncensored, into the musty wooden stillness.

  Harumi and Heisaku: two lives – overlapping for a few brief months in the mid-1960s – which together spanned most of Japan’s tumultuous modern era. As a boy in the early 1900s, the young Heisaku’s heart had been set racing by the crackle of gunfire resounding across the fields near his home. Japan’s new professional, conscript army on manoeuvres, immaculate in European-style uniforms and tiny, tight moustaches, had been hurriedly established a generation before, amidst the menace of heavily armed Western steamships materializing off the country’s coast. This army’s stunning victories over China and then Russia were already immortalized in vivid posters and commemorative postage stamps pored over by the young boy and thousands like him. A little over a century later, an octogenarian Harumi would protest against her country’s faded sense of purpose. A precipitous return to nuclear power after triple disasters in 2011 – earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown – threatened, she would say, to further shake people’s confidence in Japan and its leaders. Proposed revisions to Japan’s pacifist constitution, opening up the prospect of renewed self-assertion in East Asia, seemed to her a poor and dangerous substitute for real political direction.

  Heisaku and Harumi: two lives lived at the reflective, apprehensive fringes of modern Japan. Harumi was in her forties when they met, a novelist approaching her lowest point just as all around her the heyday of the akarui seikatsu – the ‘bright life’ – animated a city many of whose neighbourhoods had been reduced to ashes and bone just twenty years before. Tokyo was now the pulsating centrepiece of Japan’s ‘economic miracle’. Music and fashion filled the bars and streets, critics hailed a golden age of literature and cinema, and brand new super-fast shinkansen trains were being rolled out just in time to serve as a symbol of Japan’s progress as the world’s athletes and sports fans limbered up for the city’s hosting of Asia’s first Olympic games.

  Harumi had in recent years come through the ignominy still attached to divorce. She had successfully battled accusations of pornography against her early writing – literature remained for the most part a man’s world, with intimate writing by women not always welcomed. And she had built friendships amongst Tokyo’s celebrated community of writers and artists. She would soon stand next to Mishima Yukio as he rang the bell at the home of Kawabata Yasunari, his hand clenched white-knuckle tight around a congratulatory bottle of sake as he steeled himself to celebrate with Kawabata the Nobel Prize in Literature that he felt should have been his. Harumi had found richness too in her relationships with the tangle of competing men who inspired one of her greatest works: Natsu no Owari (‘The End of Summer’).

  And yet of late she had started to worry her friends. A wry, probing conversational style had become more and more intense, verging on the obsessive. She would start talking and be unable to stop, sometimes running on for a whole night. One day she came close to injuring herself absently trying to walk up the descending escalator in one of Tokyo’s exclusive department stores.

  The old consulting room to which all this had led her, with its ageing couch and chair, testified to a life of great industry drawing to a marginal, faintly disappointed close. Heisaku’s bookshelf proudly announced the latest psychological insights of the 1930s, 40s and 50s – a series of exciting new dawns already for the most part forgotten by a newer generation of psychologists and therapists. Outside, beyond the curtained window, lay the Tokyo suburb of Den-en-chōfu. Japan’s pre-war attempt
at the British and American ‘garden city’ ideal of affordable houses set out along wide tree-lined streets had long since turned into a celebrity- and politician-infested Beverly Hills.

  Over the last thirty years, Heisaku had ministered to hundreds of people both here and further afield. Farmers and brothel-owners, civil servants, schoolgirls and sushi chefs had all passed across the couch on which Harumi now lay. He had failed, however, to claim his nation as a whole for Freud. Even now, with American culture cascading through Japan’s music and film scenes, its schools and universities, its fashion and forms of politics and commerce, somehow America’s fascination with psychoanalysis and therapy was failing to rub off. Through his window this increasingly frail man looked on in puzzlement as his fellow Tokyoites said ‘yes’ to pop, television and short skirts, and mostly ‘no’ to the inner world that Freud had so vividly opened up for him.

  Puzzlement there may have been for Heisaku, but not surprise. His two heroes in life – Sigmund Freud and a medieval Japanese Buddhist saint called Shinran – both taught that people, even entire societies, become deeply attached to particular images of themselves, to the point where they can’t or won’t see anything else. They get hooked on particular stories about who they are and what they are for. It is easy to see why. A good story offers purchase on life. It helps to herd the happenings and anxieties of past, present and future into some coherent, meaningful whole. But cherished stories can become so powerful that people suffer in serving them – and suffer too if forced to probe or part with them. And though a story may give shape to a single life or nation, it risks doing so at the cost of a steady loss of the ability to see, think and imagine otherwise – about one’s self or one’s home.

  The world outside Heisaku’s window – peaceful, prosperous, lively and safe – provided fuel for a particularly compelling story about Japan. It was a powerful force in the country’s mainstream politics and media, widely accepted abroad (indeed, partly fashioned there), and altogether too good to give up. It was a story, almost a morality tale, of successful, hard-won modernization. A modest Asian country rises rapidly and purposefully to a parity of sorts with the advanced seafaring empires of the West; briefly, it descends into corruption and cruelty and is deservedly crushed; but then it soars again, becoming Asia’s economic giant. Modern state-builders, imperialists and militarists make way for a peaceful supremacy fashioned from high technology, the sweat of pliant salarymen, and later a ‘soft power’ of tourism and cherry blossoms, intelligent anime and cutesy pop.

  Japan’s dramatic rise, fall and resurgence across the twentieth century was real enough. But this by itself didn’t explain a seemingly unshakeable commitment at home and around the world to this one story about Japan, all but eclipsing a wealth of conflicting, complicating evidence emerging from the late nineteenth century onwards. When the post-war boom years finally turned to bust in the 1990s – fears for their financial future, compounded by apprehension over China’s rise and later the tick-tick-tick of a demographic time bomb (ageing society, low birth rate) – there was a deep sense of shock amongst people in Japan. This was not the country that politicians and much of the media had led them to believe they were living in, and working for. There was surprise abroad too, combined with a stubborn commitment to the modernization story. Coverage of the country’s struggling economy was offset by a continuing, fascinated association of ‘Japan’ with neon signage, bustling commuter hubs, quirky habits and fads, and the latest things to be achieved with moulded plastic and electronic circuitry. Even the country’s social problems seemed ultra-modern: young people exchanging human relationships for animal-petting cafés; robot care-givers for the elderly.

  Where did this story derive such power? First, from an investment in Japan by outsiders of tremendous hope; a need, born in the latter half of the nineteenth century but never really disappearing, to see vindicated there the claims that Western-style modernization and modernity had made for themselves: rapid progress in understanding and controlling the physical and social worlds, albeit with jolts and reversals along the way; ever-improving standards of living; and the eventual banishing to museums, memorials and history books of all that is wrong or unsettling in human thought and behaviour. A second source was the great hope invested by many Japanese in closing the gap between what mid nineteenth-century critics (Japanese and Western alike) insisted was a feudal backwater and the major industrial, trading and military powers of Europe and America.

  Japan ended up serving as modernity’s poster-child not once but twice. First around the turn of the twentieth century, when the Western world was tickled and gratified by the sight of besuited ex-samurai suddenly going about civilized urban business, from banking to tram-riding to democratic politics. And then for a second time, in the ‘bright life’ era of Harumi and Heisaku’s meeting. The period in between, with its bloody ideological and military conflicts, was relegated to the status of a bump in the road. The popular phrase ‘dark valley’ said it all – a troubling but temporary stretch of terrain, passed through and left behind.

  Western observers tempted to paint Japan in primary colours extolled, alongside the thrillingly modern, a culture marked by depth and subtlety of insight, from its pre-modern poetry to its film-making. Here was a second influential story about Japan, developed, as the modernization story was, through a combination of Japanese and Western efforts. It told of a land especially blessed, perhaps by the gods, with a distinctive genius emerging in its people and their culture across enormous stretches of time, preserved by seeking always to balance the reception of outside ideas with a clear sense of what makes Japan ‘Japan’.

  China long weighed heaviest with the tellers of this second story. Acutely aware of Chinese influence on Japanese culture – from rice cultivation to written language, from Buddhist thought and architecture to the values by which people lived and rulers ruled – some sought to create a clear distinction between the ‘rationalistic Chinese’ and the more intuitive, poetical Japanese. Others pitted an understated Japanese refinement against the commercial grasping and general barbarism of odiferous early modern European traders, pointless trinkets filling the holds of their enormous ocean-going vessels.

  Modern Western technology, from steam power to machine tools, gave the boldest of these storytellers little more than momentary pause for thought. It was soon claimed that such astonishing material advancement could only have been purchased at the cost of the Western soul. With help from Western romantics who fell hard for what they soon discovered of the philosophy and aesthetics of the ‘East’, there emerged in this story of national exceptionalism a promising sub-plot: a spiritually bankrupt ‘West’ is saved by a far-away Asian country where intuitive wisdom and closeness to nature have always been properly valued and preserved. In Japan, modernity would be achieved without the tragic side effects so obvious in Europe and America – the greed, the arrogance, the slums.

  In the middle decades of the twentieth century, with the United States first on Japan’s doorstep and then for seven years actually across the threshold and running its affairs, much was made of the gulf between American and Japanese ‘selves’ and psychological types. Differences were explored and speculated upon between American versus Japanese family structures, parenting styles, norms of behaviour, even toilet habits. Americans were said to be individualistic and assertive, head-based this-or-that people; Japanese preferred the warm embrace of the group, of rules, and also of ambiguity, raised with a ‘both-and’ sensibility that Westerners were liable to mistake for passivity or an inability to make decisions.

  Where poets, intellectuals, politicians, soldiers and psychologists had all helped to weave versions of this second story down the years, by Harumi and Heisaku’s time major contributions were on the horizon from the worlds of mass media and tourism. People at home in Japan and abroad could barely believe the pace at which the country bounced back from wartime devastation. As the Tokyo Olympics opened to great international fanfare in
the autumn of 1964, and Ian Fleming bestowed on Japan the singular honour of serving as backdrop for a James Bond book – You Only Live Twice, complete with fantasy love interest ‘Kissy Suzuki’ – a market began to open up, both domestic and international, for scholarly insights into what made the Japanese tick. Japanese travel and advertising companies began to encourage locals and visitors alike not just to see something of the country – but to see it as special.

  These two stories were not merely interpretations of events in Japan. Much in the country’s modern history turned on their power actually to shape reality: operating separately or in uneasy combinations (could the country be a beacon of a universal modernity and yet ‘unique’ at the same time?), while suppressing rival accounts of ‘Japan’ – of people and projects and movements that didn’t quite fit.

  *

  Harumi sought out Heisaku because her own story was starting to kill her. As it melted gradually away on his couch, she experienced not so much a loss as an unburdening. In place of ikiru, to live, she discovered ikasareru, to be lived or lived through. In place of umareru, to be born, was umaresaserareru, to be borne forth, by something. And in place of her plans and schemes and everything she usually paid attention to in the world, all the rest of life: rich, active and forever moving her along. After years of living within a single story, Harumi learned to imagine otherwise about herself – and radically so.

  Over the next ten years she moved from Freud via Carl Jung and Christianity to Buddhism, shaving her head and taking the vows of a Buddhist nun. With the new name of Setouchi Jakuchō she became one of the best-known Buddhists in Japan, finishing one century and beginning the next as the scourge of her country’s underperforming politicians and a comforter of the distressed. She often credited Heisaku with inspiring her personal style, used in her public talks and one-to-one meetings. And though most Japanese came to know her name, while few knew Heisaku’s, the two of them shared the same calling: ministering to modern, malfunctioning stories.