by Anna Sherman
When everything else has vanished Yoshimura Hiroshi, cited above, for Yokokawa-Honjo as ‘the Drunkard’s Palace’, and on the importance of names – of any trace – when everything else has gone’ (Ō-Edo toki no kane aruki, pages 41–2).
Shiba Kiridoshi: Tokyo Tower
the largest of all the bells in the capital S. Katsumata, Gleams from Japan (Routledge, 2011), pages 342–3. Gleams is a compilation of articles written for Japan’s Tourist Association during the 1930s: ‘S. Katsumata’ was a pseudonym. The current bell is not original to Zōjō-ji.
Kawase Hasui Kendall H. Brown’s Kawase Hasui: The Complete Woodblock Prints (Hotei, 2003). (The ‘emotionally vapid, creatively stunted’ quote was Brown’s, page 23; also the description of the tram ‘that never seems to come’, page 592.) Lawrence Smith, The Japanese Print Since 1900: Old Dreams and New Visions (British Museum, 1983), includes a critique of Hasui as a limited artist of ‘glib, picturesque but shallow tourist art.’ For further sources, Helen Merritt, Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: The Early Years (University of Hawaii Press, 1990). Also, ‘Poet of Place: The Life and Art of Kawase Hasui’, in Amy Reigle Newland’s Visions of Japan: Kawase Hasui’s Masterpieces (Hotei Publishing, 2008).
The great Tōkaidō highway, which connected Kyoto and Edo, began and ended near Zōjō-ji See Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensō-ji and Edo Society (Harvard University Press, 2000), page 103: Zōjō-ji helped create a ‘“magical” cosmology for Edo. These symmetrical locations at the city’s principal gateways constituted a liminal world within the shogunal capital, where religion and entertainment were fused and the social evils and defilement emanating from the inner city were dissolved…’
Jizō who oversees life’s transitions Taken from Hank Glassman’s The Face of Jizō: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2012), page 188.
foreigners were reminded to ‘leave your boots at the door’ For bad behavior in the Shiba temples, see Rudyard Kipling: ‘Distances are calculated by the hour in Tokyo. Forty minutes in a rickshaw, running at full speed, will take you a little way into the city; two hours from the Ueno Park brings you to the tomb of the famous Forty-Seven, passing on the way the very splendid temples of Shiba, which are all fully described in the guide-books. Lacquer, gold-inlaid bronze work, and crystals carved with the words “Om” and “Shri” … In one of the temples was a room of lacquer panels overlaid with gold-leaf. An animal of the name of V. Gay had seen fit to scratch his entirely uninteresting name on the gold. Posterity will take note that V. Gay never cut his fingernails, and ought not to have been trusted with anything prettier than a hog-trough…’ (Hugh Cortazzi and George Webb, editors, Kipling’s Japan: Collected Writings, Bloomsbury Academic, 2012, pages 180–1.)
All figures of Buddha were removed from the main hall of the temple From James Edward Ketelaar’s Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton University Press, 1990), page 122. Ketelaar describes the enshrining of the Three Creator kami and the Imperial Ancestor Amaterasu in the Tokugawa family temple as ‘a true ideological coup-de-grâce; in one stroke the Tokugawa bakufu was defaced and the Buddhism it had elevated to the status of a national religion was cast aside.’
For the early encounters of European and American visitors with Japan, I also drew on Mary Crawford Fraser’s eloquent memoir, A Diplomat’s Wife in Japan: Sketches at the Turn of the Century (Hugh Cortazzi, editor, Weatherhill, 1982), and the second edition of Ernest Satow and A. G. S. Hawes’s A Handbook for Travellers in Central and Northern Japan (John Murray, 1884).
Arsonists burned down the main temple on New Year’s Day, 1874 See John Reddie Black’s Young Japan: Yokohama & Yedo. A Narrative of the Settlement and the City from the Signing of the Treaties in 1858, to the Close of the Year 1879. With a Glance at the Progress of Japan During a Period of Twenty-One Years (Oxford University Press, 1968), volume 2, page 411. ‘The new year had hardly been ushered in, when in Tokio the fierce alarum bells rung out their startling peals, not the less appalling because they are so frequently heard. The great temple of Zojoji, Shiba, had been set on fire by incendiaries, and in the space of about an hour it was totally consumed … The wooden frame campanile in which the great bell was hung, was destroyed, and the fine toned bell fell, and has never been re-hung to this day. It was one of the four celebrated bells of Japan, only one of which remains suspended – each of the other three having been damaged by fire…’
The M-69s become miniature flamethrowers Quoted in A. J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), page 215.
‘When one weeps, the other tastes salt’ A Japanese friend, on reading Arthur’s translation, said, ‘The problem is, he tried to translate everything. You have to leave some things unsaid. What about, (愛する人の涙 しょっぱい)?’
Daylight Savings Time: The Occupation
‘The Sorting That Evens Things Out’ In Chuang-tzu: Textual Notes to a Partial Translation (A. C. Graham, SOAS, 1982). Quoted in Sources of Chinese Tradition, volume 1 (William Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, editors, Columbia University Press, 1999), pages 99–101. ‘This chapter [deals with] matters of knowledge and language, life and death, dream and reality…’ That like the sun ‘simultaneously at noon and declining, a thing is simultaneously alive and dead’, was a paradox of the fourth-century BCE philosopher Hui Shi.
the seven-year Allied Occupation of Japan This paragraph is condensed from Cary Karacas’ excellent chapters ‘Blackened Cities: Blackened Maps’ and ‘The Occupied City’ in Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps (Kären Wigen, Fumiko Sugimoto and Cary Karacas, editors, University of Chicago Press, 2016). Also, Lucy Herndon Crockett’s Popcorn on the Ginza: An Informal Portrait of Postwar Japan (William Sloane Associates, 1949).
Language, too, reflected the new order See Nanette Gottlieb: ‘Matsuzaka Tadanori … silenced criticism of proposed reforms by pointing out the window at the ruins of Tokyo and asserting that the devastation had come about because the people of Japan had not had the words to criticize the military – what they saw was hard won evidence of the need to democratize the language.’
Gottlieb adds that in those unsettled days of the immediate postwar period, the general mood was one of ‘revulsion for the xenophobia and the reactionary conservatism and ultra-nationalism of the war period; there was a yearning for things that were modern and western and rational’ (‘Language and Politics: The Reversal of Postwar Script Reform Policy in Japan’, Journal of Asian Studies, volume 53 #4, November 1994, page 1178).
Firebombs wiped out newspaper and typeface factories; in 1945, new typeset matrices were needed, so as an economy measure the print media supported an overhaul of the country’s language system. Before World War Two, newspapers used a font ‘of some 7500 kanji, actually almost double that number if we count pieces of type which combined kanji with furigana.’ (John DeFrancis, Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, University of Hawaii Press, 1989, page 142.)
For statutes and the Constitution written in colloquial Japanese, see Kyoko Inoue, MacArthur’s Japanese Constitution: A Linguistic and Cultural Study of Its Making (University of Chicago Press, 1991), page 29 and page 31 note 35.
palanquin, inkstone, and desire Examples taken from Christopher Seeley, A History of Writing in Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2000), page 152. For foreign loan words banned during the 1930s, see Nanette Gottlieb, Kanji Politics: Language Policy and Japanese Script (Kegan Paul International, 1995), pages 87–8. The list included baseball, radio announcer, shower, slipper, spanner, bolt, and handle. ‘The aim was not just to prevent the use of foreign words belonging to the language of the enemy, but also to prevent foreign ideas from entering along with them.’
Quiz. Body-building. Leisure. OK. Examples taken from Leo Loveday, Language Contact in Japan: A Sociolinguistic History (Oxford University Press, 1996), page
76. Loveday includes an amusing list of words left off the Ministry of Education’s new list of kanji for general use, issued in 1946: ‘Dog appeared, but cat did not; pine, but not cedar’ (page 141). ‘In place of profusion, complexity and tradition, now reigned restrictions, simplicity and convenience’ (page 147).
‘the marvelous new pidgin terminology of the moment’ John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War Two (Norton, 2000), page 105.
Tokugawa Tsunenari, in conversation with me, had a matter-of-fact explanation of why Daylight Savings Time was so resented during the Occupation: ‘When the office opens at nine, everyone gets in for nine. Then at 5 p.m., you’re officially off, but usually people stay much longer, until eighteen or nineteen or so, just to clean up all the work. But if the start time is an hour earlier, then sixteen o’clock is off time, but – the sun is still up! So Daylight Savings Time means you’re working an hour extra. It’s a question of overtime. I used to work until 10 or 11 p.m. in the office … I had so many things to do. For that kind of salaryman, starting at eight would mean you were working an hour free of charge.’
Ichigaya: Postwar Prosperity
The Jetavana Temple In his note on this famous passage, Tyler writes: ‘The Japanese reader must always have heard in the opening lines the familiar boom of a bronze temple bell, but scripturally these bells were silver and glass. At the Jetavana Vihāra (Japanese: Gion Shōja, built for the Buddha by a wealthy patron) they hung at the four corners of the temple infirmary and were rung when a disciple died. At the Buddha’s passing, the twin-trunked sal trees that stood around where he lay, including their yellow flowers, turned pure white’ (The Tale of the Heike, Viking, 2012, page 3).
I’d seen fortune-tellers before According to the anthropologist Carmen Blacker, the word for divination in Japanese is ‘ura or uranai, a term which appears to indicate primarily “that which is behind, and hence invisible”’(Divination and Oracles, Michael Loewe and Carmen Blacker, editors, (Shambhala, 1981, page 64).
Blacker wrote several interesting articles and books on Japan’s pre-modern belief systems, focusing on shamans, oracles and divination. Some rituals – fortune-telling by means of turtle divination, or the interpretation of dreams – became extinct during the medieval era. Others lasted into the mid-1960s and beyond. Blacker found vestiges of these traditions in professional healers who possessed gantsū, or ‘second sight’: ‘No sooner was her patient seated before her than the image of a fox, or a resentful ancestor, would appear before her seeing eyes…’ Cures included reciting The Heart Sutra, or performing certain ceremonies. Other ascetics Blacker interviewed claimed to be able to see ‘whether a tree or a stone were holy or not’ (The Collected Writings of Carmen Blacker, Edition Synapse, 2000, page 61).
In The Catalpa Bow (Routledge, 1999), Blacker writes: ‘Our familiar human world is no more than a narrow segment of the cosmos which now confronts us. Beyond it lies a further realm, altogether “other”, peopled by beings non-human, endowed with powers non-human, whose whole order of existence is ambivalent, mysterious and strange. Between these two worlds there is no ordinary continuity. Each is contained, like a walled garden, by its own order of being, and separated by a barrier which represents a rupture of level, a break in the ontological plane. This barrier the ordinary man or woman is powerless to cross. They cannot at will make the passage to this other perilous plane, nor can they see, hear or in any way influence the beings who dwell there.
‘Ordinary men and women are powerless to deal with these perilous and ambivalent forces. Certain special human beings, however, may acquire a power which enables them to transcend the barrier between the two worlds. This power bears no relation to the physical strength or mental agility with which we are ordinarily endowed … It is a special power to effect a rupture of plane, to reach over the bridge and influence the beings on the other side…’ (pages 20–1).
the writer Mishima Yukio took a four-star general hostage here My sources for Mishima are John Nathan’s Mishima: A Biography (Da Capo Press, 2000) and Henry Scott Stokes’ The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (Cooper Square Press, 2000). For Mishima’s own stylized portraits of himself, Confessions of a Mask, Meredith Weatherby, translator (Peter Owen, 1960) and Forbidden Colours (Alfred H. Marks, translator, Penguin, 2008). The 1985 BBC documentary The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima is also useful, and Paul Schrader’s 1985 movie Mishima.
James Kirkup Tokyo (Phoenix House, 1966), pages 155–8.
A military court Nakazato Nariaki, Neonationalist Mythology in Postwar Japan: Pal’s Dissenting Judgment at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (Lexington Books, 2016), Part 1: ‘Pal and the Tokyo Trial’, especially pages 9–13.
Also Yuma Totani’s The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Harvard University Press, 2008). ‘The physical immediacy of the court [in Tokyo] was essential for the trial to achieve its educational function, that is, to give history lessons to the Japanese public…’ (page 10).
For Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals as a model for the Tokyo Tribunal, see Totani, pages 8–10 and page 265 note 7: ‘A Japanese contractor later recalled a photographic image of the Nuremberg court, which was presented to him as the model he should follow.’
The Tokyo Tribunal and its legacy remain controversial. Critics have cited the Tribunal’s dispensation of justice that amounted to ‘political expediency for the victor nations’, because of its failure to address the Imperial Army’s germ-warfare units, its use of poison gas against Chinese combatants, and the victor nations exempting themselves from prosecution for war crimes. The first generation of trial analysts regarded the Tribunal as a success while its critics characterized it as ‘a pseudo-legal event’ (Totani, page 246). Recent historians like Awaya Kentarō, with access to new archival records, however, argue that the Tribunal was ‘neither a revenge trial nor a just trial, but one that fell somewhere in between’ (Totani, pages 247–8).
In 1968 and 1969, university students took over their campuses, sometimes taking their professors hostage The era was known for its photo essays. Watanabe Hitomi’s Todai Zenkyotō (Shinchosha, 2007) is a good one; if nostalgic. It includes an essay by the leader of the student revolts. Also, Yoshimoto Takaaki’s The End of Fiction for the counterculture’s most articulate criticism of Japan’s post-war establishment. For the Shinjuku protest in a foreign policy context, see Thomas R. H. Havens’ Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965–75 (Princeton University Press, 1987), pages 126–7.
Nick Kapur has argued that the Japanese authorities used the 1964 Olympics as an opportunity to shut down Tokyo’s open spaces. ‘If you look at pictures of big train stations in the 1950s – in Shinjuku and Shibuya – you can see really broad open spaces where street cars were pulling in and out. [But in the 1960s] these train stations were chopped up and subdivided, and other plazas were cut by highways. [The authorities] cut down public space and gave people less room to have large street protests. In front of the National Diet, they put a huge median in front of the big road [between passersby and the House of Councilors and the House of Representatives] and police booths every ten meters. Even today, they keep people away.’ (Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo, Harvard University Press, 2018. Quotes taken from podcast on newbooksnetwork.com/21 September, 2018.)
Mishima’s contemporary and sometime adversary Terayama Shūji For Terayama Shuji’s beliefs on revolution and art, see the chapter ‘Cultural Outlaw in a Time of Chaos’ in Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2005), pages 31ff.
Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro’s memoir, The Making of the New Japan: Reclaiming the Political Mainstream (Lesley Connors, translator, Curzon Press, 1999, pages 164–7), includes a tribute to General Masuda Kanetoshi, the four-star general whom Mishima held hostage, and who was forced to watch Mishima commit suicide. After the fall of Saipan, Masuda walked
in as a colleague was disemboweling himself. ‘It is hard not to feel a sort of karma in the fate of the inspector general who … once again observed a second tragedy.’ After the incident, Masuda retired, blaming himself. ‘“I had met with Mishima on three occasions but had not thought him to be brooding to such an extent. I think that if I could have talked to him quietly, on a one-to-one basis, things might have worked out very differently. When public opinion will allow it, in the future, I intend to meet with the bereaved families and ask them to let me visit the spirits of the dead.”’
‘By chance,’ Nakasone wrote, ‘I had received some wild duck meat from the Emperor and I gave it to him. Masuda accepted it reverently and took it for a last dinner with his subordinates.’
For Nakasone, Mishima’s death was ‘neither an aesthetic event nor an artistic martyrdom, but a philosophical protest, a death in anger at the nature of the age.’
It is possible to visit the old Barracks. Gashes that Mishima’s sword left in the doorframe are still visible, and General Masuda’s office has been left as it was.
The War Crimes Tribunal chambers are intact, too.
The writer and film critic Donald Richie remembered his last meeting with Mishima From Donald Richie’s Japanese Portraits (Tuttle, 2006), page 31.
anyone could have his own pocket watch See Yulia Frumer, Making Time, for how the possession of a European jishingi (a term used to refer to both marine chronometers and pocket watches) ‘was enough to cast the glow of sophistication on the owner, even if he or she did not understand how to read time off the foreign dial.’ Frumer further quotes indignant Japanese intellectuals who complained about how such owners played with their timepieces ‘for fun’, without appreciating their jishingi as expressing ‘heaven’s movement’ (pages 175 and 194).
See also Shibusawa Keizō, Japanese Life and Culture in the Meiji Era (Obunsha, 1958). ‘The pocket watch was first introduced as a gift from Commodore Perry to the shogun. An article on Yokohama, written in 1862, mentions that Westerners were always consulting little round silver timepieces, which sold for around five ryō apiece…’ (page 41).