Japan Story Read online

  This was spiritual and psychological work ideally suited to the country and the age in which Harumi and Heisaku met. People have always sought, told and lived according to stories. But there was a rare urgency and intensity to this across much of the modern era in Japan. In the mid-1800s, a country that had previously controlled its contact with the outside world was forced dramatically to ramp up those relationships – ‘opened up’ to the West at gunpoint, during the high noon of European colonialism and the early years of American expansionism. Acute strategic insecurity and a cascade of incoming ideas – from science and technology through to philosophy, politics and the arts – brought two related and enduring crises: of independence and identity.

  Japan’s great novelist Natsume Sōseki likened his country’s experience here to a person who is awakened by a fire-bell and jumps out of bed. It was a shock that shaped the decades to come. People were subject to unprecedented interventions in their lives from leaders motivated by ambition and anxiety for Japan’s standing in the world. The rhetoric of national emergency was an almost constant feature of life right up to the mid-1900s. These leaders were intent upon harnessing new technologies – from a nationwide network of classrooms to factories, discussion groups and broadsheets – in order to impress upon people the threat from abroad and the need to meet it by building a unified and purposeful modern nation. The devastation of Japan’s mid twentieth-century wars did not put an end to these hectoring intrusions; they took on the gentler, more intimate form of a deeply influential mass media – newspapers, radio and television – whose critics charged that it combined wide reach with a narrow notion of the nation.

  Alongside being pressured to play their allotted part in an evolving national story – on pain, depending upon the times, of being deemed selfish, anti-social, un-Japanese, or even treasonous – people in modern Japan had to sift for themselves a dizzying array of insights about the world, domestic and foreign, historical and contemporary. The opportunities and difficulties involved were felt earliest and most acutely in rapidly changing late nineteenth-century cities, and in particular by a burgeoning middle class whose members strove to fashion rationales that could bring order and contour to the unwieldy present, and offer reassuring projections for the future.

  Tokyo’s transformation by the early 1900s was treated by enthusiast and critic alike as paradigmatic, a sign of things to come for the rest of Japan. Leafing lovingly through ‘One Hundred Famous Views’ of that great city, completed by the woodblock print artist Hiroshige as recently as the 1850s, a pessimist might glance out of the window and conclude that the bitterest of exchanges had been made. The soft burble of river water washing languidly along beneath willow trees and rainbow-curved wooden bridges, past the occasional family on foot, paper umbrellas in hands – for the screech of iron-wheeled rickshaws, the incessant clop and clatter of horse-drawn buses, the din of traffic. A crystal-clear sky above low-rise homes and welcoming, open-fronted shops, its spaciousness deepened rather than disturbed by the birds and kites that dotted it by day and the glow of lantern light from below at night – for an ever-worsening chaos of construction, of mixed styles and materials and qualities, eating up street space and thrusting ever upwards, their façades sprouting national flags, shop signs and advertising posters, telegraph lines spooling outwards from the brickwork to form a thickening lattice with the tram wires running above the streets. And the people! You rarely saw more than handfuls at a time in Hiroshige. But here they were pouring in from across the country, bustling and jostling, dodging around the tram traffic and hurriedly getting on with who knew what …

  This was not merely a problem of under-planned urbanization or a rather prosaic dislike of the new. Where the early architects of Japan’s modernization story saw in the city proof of progress, others detected imposition and imposture. They encountered modernity not as a natural development but as a ‘thing’, a foreign import. They tried to touch it and trace its contours, recall its ‘before’ and identify its potential ‘after’; probe its logic, and search for any space that might be left – uncontaminated – around or beneath it. Like Indian contemporaries scouring their cultural landscape for pockets of life free from the taint of British colonialism – the privacy of home life, spirituality, the feted purity of women’s hearts – Japanese novelists, philosophers, ethnologists and others sought some means with which to survive this interloper.

  There was keen interest from the country’s commentariat in those who couldn’t or didn’t want to cope. An individual’s distress, it was thought, could be read alternately as a sign of society’s success or of its taking a wrong turn. From the 1870s, Japanese newspapers debated shinkei suijaku (nervous exhaustion, or ‘neurasthenia’) and its relationship with the challenges of modern life: new kinds of bureaucratic tasks; an ever-quickening pace of life into which people were bullied and then trapped; the pressure to dress, eat, read and behave in certain ways; and various public responsibilities in building up the nation. Attention later shifted to hanmon (existential distress), thought to affect the young especially, and by the early 1930s one could find talk of sarariman no kyōfu: the anxiety of Japan’s first generation of salaryman, whom a consumerist society pressured into wanting more than he could afford. His lot in life was to shuttle on crowded trains between an insecure job where his skills were treated as commodities rather than gifts, and a home life marred by an atmosphere of ‘icy separation’ from a wife who blamed him rather than society for her dreams going unfulfilled. One could see the desperate fallout from this, claimed the author of Sarariman: Kyōfu no jidai (‘Salaryman: Age of Anxiety’) (1930), in men’s ‘boisterous dancing’ in the new urban dance halls, or in their ‘silent endurance’.

  All sorts of physical, dietary, spiritual and psychological ‘cures’ were advertised for addressing modernity’s ills. They were joined in the 1930s by extreme political ‘solutions’: the violent removal of creeping Anglo-American influence in Asia, responsible, it was felt, for alienating people from their cultural roots. And yet Japanese distress was not, as the ideologues promised, eliminated through force of arms. For all the world-class achievements in science and sport, technology, business and the arts that soon filled the pages of post-war newspapers, the parsing of people’s pain for clues to society’s ills went on. Particular attention was paid to the young, from school refusal in the 1960s to hikikomori in the early twenty-first century: men (for the most part) who physically avoided or rejected society by shutting themselves away at home. As Japan prepared to host the Summer Olympics for a second time, in 2020, karō utsubyō and karōshi were never far from the headlines – people made to strive so hard for some civic or corporate ideal that they worked themselves into depression, and even to death.

  Here was a nation wrestling with itself across more than a century and a half, searching for the right guiding story or stories. The process played out across politics and music, art and philosophy, conflict at home and abroad, family and work life, dance and religion, literature, folklore and film. It is still going on.

  This book explores those struggles, reflecting along the way on stories in general: how they are seeded and how they grow and spread like vines, supporting or entangling whole societies; how they take unexpected turns; how they may be lost and recovered. This seems, in the early twenty-first century, to matter more than ever. We know now the unpredictable paths that modernization can take, the surprising range of flavours in which ‘modernity’ comes, and the frightening speed at which national purpose can unravel and people, or peoples, be forced to think again. Modern Japan offers a compelling case study in the sort of wrestling that lies behind – and ahead – of us all.

  *

  At the end of each session Harumi would pause by Heisaku’s front door for a moment, stepping back into her shoes. ‘He would compliment me on my kimono or my handbag,’ she later recalled – ‘alas, never on my looks …’ These were basic gentlemanly gestures for a man of Heisaku’s generation. And yet H
arumi found that they were the final, essential element in each of their encounters: somehow a reminder that she was being seen in a much broader, richer way than she was usually able to see herself – a reminder that there was more there to see.

  Stories are a very human compromise. We cannot simply inhabit them, unquestioning, but nor are we able fully to discern them, see around them, and so decide for ourselves how tightly they should grasp us. To live and flourish somewhere in between requires, for nations as for individuals, effort without end. But, as Harumi found, this is the only home we have.

  Kosawa Heisaku (1897–1968) and Setouchi Harumi (1922–), pictured in the 1960s.

  Part One

  * * *

  WEAVING, TEARING

  (1850S TO 1910S)

  1

  Japan Goes Global

  The encounter ended with the gift of a small piece of white cloth. The American Commodore Matthew C. Perry delivered it to his samurai interlocutors along with a message that he had crossed the Atlantic, sailed around Africa and India, and finally crept up the coast of China to convey. Written on vellum, bound in blue silk velvet, and presented in a box of rosewood and gold, it was from his president, Millard Fillmore. The President gently and respectfully encouraged his ‘great and good friend’ the Emperor of Japan to open up his country – to trade, to friendship and to the supply of passing American vessels with fuel, food and water.

  The choreography of Perry’s visit, in July 1853, was more forceful than his president’s prose. Reading up on Japan in the New York Public Library, he had come to believe that only firm displays of power and intent would get through to its people. So when he stepped ashore near the entrance to Edo Bay, he did so in the company of one hundred sailors, one hundred Marines, and two military bands. Perry marched up the beach with the two largest and most threatening-looking men of his squadron by his side, both given extra weapons to wear for the occasion.

  Hosts far outnumbered guests. Thousands of samurai were arrayed along the beach and up a nearby hill; on foot and on horseback, armed with swords, spears and guns. But they struck Perry as a small and effeminate bunch, drawn up in ragged formation with local villagers allowed to gawp through the gaps at their foreign visitors. Perry thought that his own men, by contrast, exuded strength and discipline, despite some being kept up the night before by the sound of Japanese carpenters hurriedly constructing a pavilion in which to welcome them. Cannon fire advertised the advanced military might lying just out to sea. Here, on the beach, the proud strains of ‘Hail, Columbia’ completed the effect.

  Then came the piece of cloth. In the midst of all the red-carpet ceremony – drawn out by the laborious back and forth of interpretation via Dutch – the message conveyed by the handing over of that single object cut right through. Should you refuse my president’s generously expressed requests, Perry made clear, there will be a war. And you will need this to surrender with.

  Point made, and promising to return for an answer the following year, Perry led his four towering vessels out to sea. Hulls coated in pitch, and two spewing smoke from their funnels, they soon entered into Japanese folklore as the kurofune, the ‘black ships’ – omens of dark days ahead.

  Japan’s ruling Tokugawa shogunate and its allies were in disarray. They had avoided outright conflict with the Americans, 200-year-old flintlocks resting unused (and possibly unloaded) in samurai hands as the very latest in steam-powered technology cruised away into the distance. But their hold on Japan’s borders and internal politics alike had been slipping for some time now. These exquisitely rude and troublingly persistent foreigners, likened by one Japanese commentator to ‘flies around a bowl of rice’, looked like being the final straw.

  How different it had all been at the beginning. In the second half of the 1500s, three great warlords had worked steadily to stitch the country back together again under one rule, following centuries of rivalry and conflict between powerful regional lords. Tokugawa Ieyasu was the last of the three, winning a decisive battle at Sekigahara in 1600 and receiving from the Emperor in Kyoto three years later his formal appointment as Shogun: ‘barbarian-subduing generalissimo’. He proceeded to subdue Emperor, provincial rivals and foreign powers alike.

  With the Emperor, Ieyasu employed culture as political chloroform. Japan’s capital, Kyoto, was to remain a place of refined study, ritual and poetry – and very little else. Anything that looked like debate or the pursuit of power would attract the unforgiving attentions of Tokugawa samurai retainers. A large contingent was soon quartered within menacingly easy reach of the Imperial Palace, in a new residence built by the ever-vigilant Ieyasu: Nijō Castle was constructed with ‘nightingale floors’, designed to emit a bird-like squeak when stepped on – depriving would-be assassins of the element of surprise.

  The Tokugawa shogunate had its main base in a former fishing village called Edo, which underwent rapid development from the early 1600s as a centre of national power. Hilly areas were flattened out, watery ones filled with earth. Thousands of labourers were conscripted to ransack a far-away peninsula for its granite. They brought the enormous pieces to Edo by barge, and then honed and stacked them to form a steeply angled defensive perimeter, nearly eleven miles long, for an enormous castle compound. Life within those walls, whose tops passers-by had to crane their necks to make out, remained largely a mystery to an expanding city population whose homes and shops and livelihoods were arranged around them. Few would ever get close to the intricate corridor networks, the screens of gold leaf and delicate brushwork, and the fragrant, polished wood amidst which Japan’s first family set about forging and ruling a nation.

  Japan’s regional lords (daimyō) – around two hundred of them in the early 1600s – were kept in line via a signature Tokugawa mix of persuasion and coercion. An alternate attendance system (sankin kōtai) required daimyō and their staff to reside every other year in this emerging de facto capital, inside sprawling homes newly constructed outside the castle compound – the more loyal they were, the closer they lived to those soaring structures. Edo was soon a city of half a million souls: samurai residing in the ‘high city’; those who served their needs populating the ‘low city’. During the year they spent back in their largely independent domains, with their own up-and-coming castle towns, daimyō were required to leave their wives and children behind in Edo – effectively as hostages.

  Along with the obvious surveillance advantages of sankin kōtai – the system was set up so that at any one time, half of all daimyō would be in Edo, and mostly within sight of the castle – came the benefit of all but bankrupting many of these lords. They were forced to make ruinously expensive journeys with a large retinue (some had more than a thousand retainers and servants in tow) to and from ruinously expensive Edo residences, which considerations of relative status forced many to build and furnish in grand style. In addition, the shogunate required contributions of money and labour from daimyō: towards building a bridge, a shrine or a castle like Nijō, or else shoring up coastal defences. In return for all this, the shogunate recognized and guaranteed domain (han) borders, meaning that daimyō need worry much less about their neighbours than they had in recent centuries.

  When it came to foreign powers, the Tokugawa strategy was careful management backed by threat of force. Iberian traders and missionaries had been active in Japan in the second half of the 1500s, the latter rapidly gaining themselves a reputation – the Jesuits in particular – for being at least as interested in politics and lucrative trade as in matters purely religious. By 1600, convert numbers were close to 300,000 (according to missionary tallies), boosted as they were elsewhere in Asia through mass conversions required by powerful figures of people under their control. In Japan’s case, that often meant daimyō, moved by some mixture of the gospel and prospective gains from Portuguese trade. Amidst worries about loyalties being undermined by mixed allegiances, along with rumours that Europeans had started selling Japanese women into slavery and dressing their spies up as
missionaries (scoping the country out for an invasion attempt), the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi had ordered the expulsion of all foreign missionaries back in 1587. Ten years later, he crucified twenty-six Christians at Nagasaki, including six non-Japanese: a warning to all the rest.

  After a short hiatus, the new Tokugawa shogunate took up the theme. Fresh persecutions were launched in the 1610s, while an Edict in 1636 expressed the shogunate’s position with particular clarity:

  No Japanese ship nor boat whatever, nor any native of Japan, shall presume to go out of the country; whoever acts contrary to this shall die … All persons who return from abroad shall be put to death. Whoever discovers a Christian priest shall have a reward of 400 to 500 sheets of silver. All Namban [‘southern barbarians’: Portuguese and Spanish people] who propagate the doctrine of the Catholics, or bear this scandalous name, shall be imprisoned. The whole race of the Portuguese with their mothers, nurses, and whatever belongs to them, shall be banished to Macao.

  Christian churches and monasteries were burned, incoming missionaries executed and wealthy convert families exiled. From the 1640s onwards, the business-minded Dutch found themselves the only acceptable Europeans: less hungry than the Catholic Portuguese for converts or for the country’s gold and silver – another concern for the shogunate was the trading away of its precious metals. But even the Dutch had to be wary of overstepping the mark. The drill onboard their vessels entering Nagasaki Bay was the same every year. Sailors prepared to surrender their guns and ammunition to the authorities, together with the ship’s rudder and sails. Bibles were nailed down into wooden barrels, not to be retrieved until the ship left Japanese waters again.