A Japanese Mirror

by Ian Buruma

  Why is their father not stronger than Taro’s? What is the point of going to school if they are to end up bowing and scraping to the boy they can easily beat in the playground? The father tries to explain that he has to pay the bills, that they all have to eat, after all. What can one do about it? That is the way the world is.

  The boys then go on hunger strike. Better not to eat, than to bow. Papa, at his wits end, pathetically whines to his wife that he does not want them to be ‘wretched salarymen like me’. The humiliation of the father in this film is not that he does anything wrong, as, for instance, the father in De Sica’s ‘Bicycle Thieves’ who has to steal to eat. On the contrary, he makes a fool of himself by doing what is in the circumstances right. He behaves entirely as expected. To survive in the salaryman world he must obey his boss, especially in Japan where such hierarchical relationships are far more important than personal merit. Like the bicycle thief, he too is a victim of society; both men are robbed of their dignity. The difference is that the bicycle thief never lost the respect of his son, and De Sica obviously thought society was at fault and consequently had to change. Ozu did not think in terms of right or wrong. For him, as for many of his countrymen, Japanese society was the human condition: sad, yes, comical, maybe, but what can one ultimately do about it … ?

  There are of course examples of dramatic fathers trying to assert their authority in the manner of the Meiji patriarch, but this is almost invariably resented by his family. Frequently his wife will join the children in ganging up against him. The most famous example in the post-war Japanese cinema must be Kinoshita Keisuke’s ‘Broken Drum’, made in 1949. The father is Tsuda Gumpei, a self-made man in the construction business, the usual occupation of a post-war nouveau riche. He is a strict paterfamilias demanding absolute obedience from his family: he orders his daughter to marry the son of a business backer; he will not allow his elder son to start his own business and he forbids his younger son to become a musician.

  Kinoshita cleverly shows how the family atmosphere around the perfect mother is immediately poisoned by a resentful gloom as soon as father appears on the scene. But times have changed, these being democratic days, and the elder son decides to disobey his father. He leaves home, followed by his mother (who could not possibly live without her son), and the rest of the family, including the daughter who breaks off her forced engagement.

  As a result the father loses his financial backing and his business fails. Tsuda Gumpei, the autocratic martinet, suddenly finds himself all alone, a sad old man deserted by those he ruled. But even the most pompous, unfeeling, authoritarian father is not all bad and a show of sincere repentance soon brings the family together again. Now that father is shown to be a pathetic loser, all ends well.

  ‘Broken Drum’ was made at a time when enthusiasm for the new ‘demokurashi’ was at its peak. Kinoshita suggests that the fall of father Tsuda is a peculiarly modern phenomenon; that there is no room for Meiji authoritarianism in modern ‘individualistic’ Japan. In the sense that the façade of patriarchal authority, which enjoyed a strong revival during the fascist period, has fallen down, this is probably true. After all, the old martinets had lost the war and the shame of this was hard to wipe out.

  The psychiatrist Kawai Hayao described such a case in real life:

  The father of the delinquent young boy had been a courageous soldier in the Imperial Army … At first the child was doing quite well, but when he reached the age of rebellion, he became uncontrollable. The father then gave him everything he wanted. The ‘strong father’ who had faced the enemy without flinching couldn’t handle his own son. As a member of a large group he was strong, but as an individual he proved to be weak.8

  I doubt if this is only a question of post-war ‘demokurashi’. The positive eagerness with which the family in ‘The Broken Drum’ rallies round the father when he is down suggests perhaps that it is there that they really want him: as an idol to protect, worship even, but not as an authoritarian boss. The ideal Japanese father-figure never was a dictator, not in the home and not in the state. Power in the hands of one person is resented.

  Where Ozu’s fathers are pathetic in his early, pre-war films, such as T Was Born, But …’, the older fathers, always played by a great character actor called Ryu Chishu, in his later work are sad and lonely. Ryu Chishu in films such as ‘Late Spring’ is taken care of by his daughter, who, in many ways, is more like a mother.

  It seems the ideal father, as in yakuza films, is always old, yielding and remote. The ideal father-figure, in short, is perhaps better off dead. The highest respect the father ever gets in Japanese entertainment is as a spirit in the family altar or a gang boss on his death bed. One of the most common scenes in television soap-operas is of the son, often with his mother, on his knees in front of the family shrine, praying to the fatherly spirit for inspiration. For only in death can he reach the right degree of purity to serve as a shining example.

  12

  Souls on the Road

  A large number of popular heroes are drifters, outsiders with no fixed abode, forever going on to the next place. Susanoo, the unruly Wind God, spent much of his life as a lonely exile. Yoshitsune, who started life as a loner, ended it as a fugitive in the unhospitable regions of northern Japan. The ronin, who make up the majority of samurai heroes, were ‘wave men’, wandering around more or less at random. ‘The Bored Bannerman of the Shogun’, following the direction of a casually tossed stone, is of course the classic example of a drifting hero. Not to mention Takakura Ken roaming around on his horse. Or Kobayashi Akira, hero of the ‘Bird of Passage’ (‘Wataritori’) series, travelling in Western gear with a guitar slung across his back, like an Oriental cowboy.

  Even the most popular foreign heroes in Japan are drifters. Charlie Chaplin’s tramp is still an institution in Japan, more than any other comic character, native or foreign. (His status was so high that assassinating him was seriously considered at one point during the war; surely, it was thought, that would make the Americans give up the fight.) The most often revived Western in Japan is ‘Shane’. Besides having all the right ingredients for a grade A Japanese tear-jerker, including a cute little boy, it has Alan Ladd as the lonely drifter forced to ride off into the sunset after a heart-rending goodbye. (Takakura Ken himself played the Alan Ladd part in a Japanese copy of ‘Shane’ only a few years ago.)

  Possibly this taste for travelling is rooted in the theatrical tradition. As was the case in most countries, the earliest Japanese actors were drifters, despised for being outsiders and idolized for acting out people’s fantasies. Travelling and acting take one away, however temporarily or vicariously, from one’s cosy, but often restricted social environment. Exotic locales are the stock in trade of the story-teller.

  Many early story-tellers and dancers travelled around ostensibly to spread the Buddhist faith. Even today entertainers move around the country to perform at temples and shrines on festival days. Travelling and religion are of course intimately connected.

  One of the earliest forms of travel in Japan, as in many countries, was the pilgrimage. Travel is a well-used religious metaphor for life itself. And it is still deemed to be beneficial for the soul to make a grand tour of famous temples once in one’s lifetime. To prove one has been there, the temples, for a fee – nothing is for nothing in Japan – issue special stamps, so that one can die in peace and ascend to Heaven with a full stamp-book.

  It is hoped that somehow the holiness of sacred spots will rub off on the visitor. Which is why people presumably bring gifts and tokens to those who stayed at home: some of it might rub off on them too. Nowadays it appears that foreign culture has taken the place of religion, with trips to Paris and London offering the same rewards to the soul as the temples did in the past. Louis Vuitton bags and Burberry raincoats have taken the place of temple tokens.

  What concerns us here, however, is not the modern tourist but the fate of the lonely drifter, the heroic vagabond. Actually the most popular vagab
ond of contemporary Japan is, at first sight, hardly heroic. He is a tubby, middle-aged man dressed like a pre-war market salesman: a loud, chequered suit, a woollen waistband, an undershirt, wooden sandals and a shabby hat. His full name is Kuruma Torajiro, but he is popularly known as Tora-san. Tora-san is arguably the most beloved character in the history of the Japanese cinema. He is not much liked by ‘interi’ film buffs, but keeps drawing a huge popular audience. People who never go to the cinema will go and see the latest Tora-san movie. In a series that goes on for ever in endless variations of the same story, Tora-san is single-handedly keeping a film company alive. There have been more than thirty sequels since 1969 when the first Tora-san film, ‘It’s Hard To Be a Man’, appeared.

  Staffed by the same company of actors, except for the traditional guest star, and the same director, Yamada Yoji (who also made the copy of ‘Shane’), a new film comes out twice a year to coincide with the two most important Japanese holidays: New Year and the Buddhist festival of the dead, O-Bon, in August. Both dates are regarded with religious reverence and Tora-san is there, each time, in a new incarnation, like an ancient festival god. He is an ikon of popular Japanese culture like no other.

  Tora-san is as Japanese as, say, Bourvil was French or Arthur Lowe as Captain Mainwaring English. Too clumsy to be heroes in the conventional sense, they share an essential goodness which is as reassuring as it is unreal. They are national clowns making fun of what their audience think is most typical of themselves. Though no Englishman was ever quite like Captain Mainwaring, he did represent something with which the British like to identify.

  Typically, being French, Bourvil was neither upper-class, nor proletarian, but a bon bourgeois. And so, in his British way, was Mainwaring. The Japanese hero, however, is firmly working-class. With his golden heart, his quick temper, his easy sentimentality, his zest for life, his slyness, his failures and his fast verbal humour, he is the mythical Everyman of urban Japan. Like Mainwaring, he is also a complete anachronism.

  Everything about Tora-san, his clothes, his language, his outlook on life, suggests the long lost world of artisans and small merchants, large families and tightly knit neighbourhood communities where the policeman knows the beancurd-maker and values are fast and firm. His is the pre-war world of the shomingeki, the sentimental dramas of teeming working-class life, or, going back even further, to the Edo period, the world of the rakugo story-tellers, verbal comedians whose art it was to make people laugh at themselves.

  The actor playing Tora-san, Atsumi Kiyoshi, was actually still part of this world. He began his career as a traditional vaudeville comedian in just the sort of places where story-tellers still thrived, patronized by a now almost vanished artisan class. His perfectly timed mannerisms were shaped and honed by their discerning laughter.

  The original idea of the creators of Tora-san was to make him a tough yakuza but, softened no doubt with time, he ended up as an amiable tramp, wandering about selling trinkets at country fairs. He has a base, however, to which he returns between trips. It is an idealized home, as anachronistic as the man himself (there is not even a television set in the room, a complete anomaly in modern Japan): a small, folksy Japanese restaurant in a dusty row of wooden houses bordering on an old temple. It is the Japanese equivalent of the old English village where the vicar comes to tea and the sun always shines for cricket.

  Tora-san’s family are his uncle and aunt, his sister Sakura, her husband and their little boy. The only other characters in this artificial paradise are the kindly priest at the local temple, and the next-door neighbour, a blustering but kind-hearted character given to making tactless remarks. This cosy little group, always worrying about Tora-san’s latest escapades, is meant to represent all the traditional virtues of the Japanese ‘common man’s’ life. They are hard-working, warm, without a hint of evil and malice, pure in their hearts, and blessed with those unique Japanese antennae, always sensitive to each other’s feelings which never need to be spoken.

  The key word here is yasashii (gentle, meek, kindly), that term so often used by Japanese to describe their mothers, as well as themselves as a nation. The British are proud of their breeding, the French of their culture and the Japanese of being yasashii. The director of the Tora-san films often explains in interviews that his aim is to show the ‘yasashii quality of the Japanese people’. One of the central myths of Tora-san’s world is that everybody is kind, meek and gentle.

  To be fair, even the one foreigner ever to appear in a Tora-san film, an unlikely character selling medicine at Japanese fairs, had only goodness in his heart. This foreigner, incidentally, was as mythical as Tora-san himself, embodying all the Japanese clichés about foreigners. For a start he was American (all foreigners, at least all white foreigners, are American); he was forever bumping his head (because foreigners are so large); he was bluntly outspoken (because foreigners always are); and he had an inordinately long nose (because all foreigners have). Still, he was yasashii, though sadly lacking those Japanese emotional antennae. As Tora-san himself said in the film: ‘They [foreigners] can’t understand unspoken feelings, unlike us Japanese.’

  Tora-san’s home is above all a self-enclosed little world, friendly but impossible for outsiders to penetrate. There is no room for strangers here, so even the restaurant seems permanently bereft of customers. It is a comfortable womb-like world, small, warm, and once one has left there is no return. It is perhaps significant that the second-favourite word, after yasashii, to describe the Japanese themselves is the Japanese-English term ‘wet’, as opposed to foreigners who are ‘dorai’ (dry). What is meant is the contrast between warm, human feelings and cold reason.

  Tora-san’s mythical home is like a childhood memory of something that never really existed, except (who knows?) in the warm, wet womb. Many Japanese become quite sentimental about their childhood home, their furusato, literally ‘the old village’. A large number of drinking songs are elegiac memories of that lost world:

  The evening sun is red

  Myself I feel so sad

  Hot tears stain my cheeks

  Goodbye to our village at the bottom of the lake

  Cradle of our childhood dreams1

  This type of nostalgia is especially strong among urban cinema audiences, many of whom live a long way away from their furusato. Shochiku, the production company behind the Tora-san series, is well aware of this. According to the head of the publicity department, ‘advertising is mainly aimed at shop-assistants, manual workers and students leading lonely lives away from home’.2

  As in most if not all industrial nations there has been a steady migration of people from the country to the large cities. A young farmer wrote about this, stating that:

  Children from farm families who have left the village to become useful toilers for the city think of the village only as a place that supplies them with nostalgic memories. But could it be that nostalgic memory is simply a sign of vacuity? … the consequence of their inability to become urbanites even though they live in the big city?3

  Animosity towards the spread of pollution – in every sense – caused by big cities has played, and continues to play, a large part in Japanese politics: from pre-war ‘agriculturalist nationalism’ to the protests against the new airport in Narita. There is also the underlying theme of many popular films. The ‘Bird of Passage’ series, starring Kobayashi Akira, the Oriental cowboy, for example. Like many Japanese drifters he is a typical small-town boy, fighting for small-town values.

  As the critic Hatano Tetsuro has noted:

  Whenever anything resembling his small-town home is threatened with destruction the fighting begins. His principal driving force is nostalgia for the values of the countryside. Evil is the artificial environment of the flashy cabaret or gambling hall. When he disappears in the final scene of every film during a traditional Shinto festival, he becomes the archetypal drifter who has lost his village home.4

  The location of Tora-san’s home is cleverly chosen. Although
it is in a suburb of Tokyo, it could just as well be a street in any village or town which was not bombed flat during the war. It is neither city nor country – or rather, it is both. The point is that it evokes the kind of nostalgia described above. Tora-san’s home can only exist in the never-never land of dreams.

  And dreaming is what Tora-san’s drifting is all about. Something lost or impossibly far away is always more desirable to the romantic mind than the prosaic here and now. The home, at least in the imagination, is something to be longed for rather than lived in. Nostalgia for home, finally, comes down to nostalgia for mother.

  Many poems in the Manyoshu, a compilation of seventh-century verse, express this sentiment beautifully:

  Oh, for a sight once more of my dear mother now –

  When the ships are ready

  By the shore of Tsu no kuni

  And I go forth.5

  Compare this to the refrain of the theme song of Takakura Ken’s gangster film series (the one in which he rides out of jail on a horse) ‘Abashiri Bangaichi’:

  My body drifts and wanders

  But in the dim lights of home

  I can see mother, but then she fades away.

  Times have changed, sentiments have not.

  Tora-san’s mother is no longer alive. Instead he has his sister Sakura, who is the ideal Japanese mother-figure. All his letters, written in a quaintly formal style – another anachronism – are addressed to her. She is the only one who understands him and her worried frown becomes deeper in every film. Her husband, typically, is a totally insignificant figure, whose only function is to laugh when the others do, or look worried when his wife is. For the rest he fades into the paper doors.

  Being cut off from home, from the mother in particular, is the only road to freedom, but it is also the cruellest fate imaginable for a Japanese. Thus the lonely drifter elicits a great deal of sympathy from his audience. The fact that wandering heroes are also often, though by no means always, failures, like Tora-san, makes it even easier to feel sorry for them. The vulnerable traveller, like the passive lover, is the ideal victim of the frightful fickleness of fate.