Book Reviews
Most of these are reviews of books on some aspect of Japan, and almost all of them appeared in the Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo, in edited form. Here they are in their original form.
2010
- Peter O’Connor: The English- language Press Networks of East Asia, 1918–1945, Kent: Global Oriental Publisher 2010
- PDF: The English- language Press Networks of East Asia
1980
- Review of ‘The Happy Elephants’ by Bernard Levin, 1980.
- PDF: ‘The Happy Elephants’ book review
2000-2001
- The Constant Gardener by John le Carré, (Hodder & Stoughton). Daily Yomiuri January 21st 2001, p15.
- Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy by Osamu Dazai, translated by Ralph F. McCarthy (Kodansha International). Daily Yomiuri 4th March 2001, p15.
2001-2002
- Traditional Japanese music and musical instruments by William P. Malm (Kodansha International), Daily Yomiuri 8th April 2001, p.23.
- Rough Living (Arakure) by Tokuda Shūsei (translated by Richard Torrance) (University of Hawai’i Press). Daily Yomiuri 27th May 2001, p.18.
- All Worldly Pursuits by Hillel Wright (New Orphic Publishers), Daily Yomiuri 27th October 2001, p.20.
- Letters from the End of the World: A Firsthand Account of the Bombing of Hiroshima by Toyofumi Ogura, translated by Kisaburo Murakami and Shigeru Fujii, (Kodansha International), Daily Yomiuri.
- Tariki: Embracing Despair, Discovering Peace by Hiroyuki Itsuki, translated by Joseph Robert (Kodansha, 2001), pp.229, Daily Yomiuri, January 13th 2002
- Blue Nippon by E. Taylor Atkins (Duke University Press, 2001) pp.366, Daily Yomiuri, March 3 2002.
2002-2003
- Emperor of Japan: Meiji and his world, 1852-1912 by Donald Keene. Daily Yomiuri May 26 2002, p.7.
- Tokyo Central: A Memoir by Edward Seidensticker. Daily Yomiuri, July 21 2002, p.20.
- Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe. Daily Yomiuri, August 4 2002, p.20.
- The Last Fox: A Novel of the100th/442nd RCT by Robert H. Kono. Daily Yomiuri, August 25 2002, p.20.
- The Japanese Mind, edited by Roger J. Davies and Osamu Ikeno (Tuttle). Daily Yomiuri, September 8th, 2002, p.23.
- The Japanese Community in Pre-war Britain: From Integration to Disintegration by Keiko Itoh (Curzon Press, Richmond, UK), in Japan Forum, Vol. 14 (3) November 2002, pp.491-493.
- Japan Encyclopedia by Louis Frédéric, (Harvard University Press). Daily Yomiuri, December 1 2002, p.20.
- Perfectly Japanese by Merry Isaacs White (Berkeley: University of California Press). Daily Yomiuri, December 15th 2002, p.20.
- The GI War Against Japan by Peter Schrijver (Basingstoke UK: Palgrave, Macmillan). Daily Yomiuri, January 12th 2003, p.20.
- ‘I am just going outside’: Captain Oates – Antarctic Tragedy by Michael Smith (Spellmount Publishers, UK). Daily Yomiuri, March 16th 2003, p.20.
2003-2004
- The Diaries of Sir Ernest M. Satow, British Minister in Tokyo, (1895-1900): A Diplomat Returns to Japan. Edited and annotated by Ian Ruxton. Edition Synapse, Tokyo. Daily Yomiuri, June 29 2003. p.20.
- Autobiography of a Geisha, by Sayo Masuda, translated by G.G. Rowley (New York: Columbia University Press), Daily Yomiuri, p.20. Sunday 5 October 2003.
The Constant Gardener by John le Carré (Hodder & Stoughton), pp508)
More or less charming, ‘studiously handsome’, Justin Quayle seems no more than that saddest of failures, the upper middle class cuckold, when John le Carré first brings him into view through the eyes of Quayle’s superior at the British embassy in Nairobi, Sandy Woodrow. Quayle’s much younger wife, the impulsive, life-enhancing Tessa, has just been murdered and her driver beheaded on a trip to ‘Leakey country’ on the edge of Lake Turkana, in the company of an African, Dr. Arnold Bluhm, who has gone on the run. Quayle’s feeble shock at the news of his wife’s awful death, thrown at him like a punch, plays in tight sequence in Woodrow’s view:
He saw how the last remnants of Justin’s departed youth drained out of him as, like some kind of sea creature, his pretty face closed and hardened, leaving only seeming coral.
Damned by that ‘pretty’, Quayle looks close to being written off right from the start of John le Carré’s latest novel, “The Constant Gardener”. Yet, both Quayle and Woodrow soon undergo a massive bouleversement, in which Woodrow steps aside and the ineffectual Quayle, the gardener of the title, becomes the chief protagonist.
Before her death, Tessa Quayle had been conducting a private inquiry into the nefarious activities of various multinational pharmaceutical companies, and had become a high-profile activist on behalf of the African poor and sick – “Everything from wiping babies’ bottoms to acquainting para-legals with their civil rights,” as her husband proudly puts it. Dr. Bluhm is a high-profile medical expert in Kenya’s aid community. His disappearance after the murder and his undefined relationship with the beautiful Tessa soon attract huge media interest.
To escape the press, Justin Quayle is sequestered in the basement of the Woodrow family villa, but Quayle shows unexpected mettle, putting his life and his honour on the line in a search for his wife’s murderers that takes him to Europe and Canada and back to Africa. Quayle becomes steadily more believable and absorbing as he wanders deeper into the sleaze and cynicism of the international drug business. His about-turn from charm school cuckold to avenging angel is a central achievement of this novel.
A second but far from secondary achievement is the character of Tessa Quayle, le Carré’s strongest female character since Katya of “The Russia House” (1989). Tessa’s sheer passion and idealism blaze from these pages with an intensity we have almost ceased to expect in the thriller genre. This late in his career, John le Carré has pulled off the enviable trick of creating a dead character who is continually in a new stage of development, whom we know has been brutally murdered and raped, and yet manages to exude a kind of radiant example without freezing into cliché.
The real strength of the novel lies in the characters of Tessa and Justin, and in the gradual recovery by Justin of his own and his wife’s honour. Even so, “The Constant Gardener” loses impetus under the weight of Tessa, then Justin’s and presumably le Carré’s fierce preoccupation with the international pharmaceutical companies and their ruthless activities in Africa. At times, these preoccupations are barely supported by the strength of Justin’s conviction. Few can feel comfortable over the use of Africans to test new products, of African hospitals as dumping grounds for expired medicines, but problems arise from this very indignation: first, in the broad brushwork used for some of the drug company executives in the story, which results in mere caricatures of grasping capital; second, in the sheer quantity of detail.
Even le Carré’s most devoted readers will find their attention wandering as Justin moves diffidently from document to document and the outlines of an international conspiracy emerge. The effect of so much raw detail is both to heighten the sense of Justin the bumbling, amateur investigator, and to dull his deeper potential as a character. Perhaps, as so often happens with an author of such proven calibre, le Carré’s editor has allowed him too much leeway. “The Constant Gardener” might have been a tighter, more memorable read at 400 instead of 508 pages. However, our sense of an unending paper chase is relieved by a host of gracefully drawn minor characters. Readers will savour the Nairobi Embassy jobsworth’s reply to the detective who asks him if Tessa Quayle was a nymphomaniac: “I’m afraid that question is a little above my pay grade”.
All in all, John le Carré’s eighteenth novel is a successful venture. At 70, with Kennedy and Krushchev and other actor managers of the Cold War repertory fading into mothballed myth and some even beginning to miss the old certainties of life under communism, the master of the postwar thriller has lost neither his touch nor his focus. By concentrating his considerable powers of characterisation on the elevation by tragedy of a man so second-rate and so familiar, le Carré’s has created a powerful parable of what might have been. In “The Constant Gardener”, for all the virtues of his attack on multinational medicine, John le Carré does again what he has always done best: shown that character, however flawed, bumbling and unworthy, can still rise and beat the system – but only just.
Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy by Osamu Dazai, translated by Ralph F. McCarthy (Kodansha International)
Dazai Osamu’s short life was so full of waste and mess, and his literary career, which barely lasted fifteen years, so haphazard, that it comes as a real surprise to see how productive and accomplished he was as a writer. From energies diminished by tuberculosis, a complicated emotional life and a busy schedule of drugs and drink, Dazai somehow found the strength to keep pushing out his difficult, contorted stories and novels right up to the final leap into a swollen stream in the summer of 1948.
The better part of Dazai’s work has long been available in translation, but some strays and oddities have lingered outside the reach of western readers. This collection of short stories translated by Ralph F. McCarthy, first published in 1993 and now available in paperback, goes some way to make good these omissions. The seven stories published here have been taken from different stages of Dazai’s career, with the earliest, “Romanesque” (Romanesuku), dating from late 1934, and the latest, the title story “Blue Bamboo” (Chikusei) from April 1945.
“Blue Bamboo” is a powerful retelling of an old Chinese tale, about an ineffectual, henpecked scholar, Yu Jung, whose pretentious yearning to escape current difficulties – not the least of them his wife – and recast his life as a crow in the company of the beautiful crow maiden called Blue Bamboo, are exposed and rejected and thrown back in his face. In the end, Yu Jung returns to a sort of domestic contentment, albeit with his harridan wife transformed into the sweetly complaisant Blue Bamboo (but without the beak and feathers).
This is a wonderful entertainment, economically and powerfully drawn. Dazai writes like an angel, providing stunning set pieces of natural and geographical description as the two ‘crows’ traverse the skies over ancient China. The timorous Yu Jung’s adventures are delivered without archness. The warnings in the story, against confusing learning with moral superiority, against mortals trying to mix with the gods, are clearly stated, but they never threaten the balance of the tale.
“On Love and Beauty” (Ai to bi ni tsuite), a story from early 1939, is another
success. The storytellers are the five precocious, affected children, three boys and two girls, of a wealthy family. Their father having died some years earlier, the children are in the habit of passing their evening making up stories around a single character. In “On Love and Beauty”, the chosen character is an elderly man.
The youngest son very nearly kills the story at birth with a survey of the theories of a university professor of mathematics, stuffed with references to Gauss and Freiheit, which suddenly runs out of steam on the notion of convergence. The eldest daughter energises the narrative by plunging the professor into the crowds of a summer’s night in Shinjuku, a bedraggled, perspiring figure in a wrinkled yukata. Depressed by the sound of an old classmate’s voice on a beer hall radio, the professor has too much to drink. He buys a fortune from a girl, which cheers him although it only reads ‘Just as you wish’, and returns to the crush of the streets. The second youngest son has the professor run into his dumpy ex-wife and her dog. After a desultory exchange between the couple, the youngest daughter takes up the story. The professor buys some flowers, something he has never done in his life, and hurries home to present them to a photograph of his ex-wife, taken when she was young and beautiful. This forbidding resolution leaves the eldest son no room for invention, so he delivers a homily on the importance of personal description in a narrative and sketches the professor’s appearance.
The charm of “On Love and Beauty” lies as much in the family who tell it as in the story itself. Within a year of publishing it, Dazai returned to this family of storytellers with “Lanterns of Romance” (Roman doro) and brought in the children’s grandparents for good measure. Readers will find this second visit to the storytellers’ household well worth making.
In a perceptive aside in a recent piece on the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal (London Review of Books, 4 January 2001) the critic James Wood points out that ‘magical realists’ such as Rushdie, Grass and the most recent Pynchon only borrow from the real while essentially evading reality, whereas Hrabal is ‘both comic and human’. Dazai too is fantastic, but he is never inhuman and never, in Wood’s phrase, ‘parasitical on the real’. Whatever dark trail ran between his sumptuous beginnings and his sodden end, whatever or whoever caught his attention, Dazai never lost his focus on the real; although effecting such a loss, given that his focus was largely on his own weaknesses, sometimes appears to have been his only reason for living.
Traditional Japanese music and musical instruments by William P. Malm (Kodansha International)
Early in 1956, William Malm, then a graduate student researching the music of kabuki, was asked to write a coffee table book on hōgaku, the traditional music of Japan. Eighteen months later, the young author (he was only twenty-eight at the time) turned in the manuscript of what was to become the standard reference work – in Japanese and in English – on the subject, “Japanese Music and Musical Instruments”, published by Tuttle in 1959. Forty-two years later, Professor Malm has brought a lifetime’s scholarship to bear on this revised edition. The result has been well worth the wait.
For this reviewer, the great benefit of the revision is the clarity and accessibility of the text. Malm provides deep, considered scholarship for the musicologist, yet manages to retain the interest of the general reader in this survey of the evolution and scope of Japanese music, ‘not only as it relates to dancing and singing, but also in its instrumental development’. The revision has also benefited from the author’s broader musicological background in not only the music of Japan but also the entire musical culture of the eastern Pacific.
For Malm, hougaku is more than scholarship. The author delights in the living reality of hougaku, in hearing snatches of yōkyoku, the music of the Nō, dating from the fifteenth century, from the man who repairs his car, or spotting a strap hanging salesman practicing a kōta lyric at the end of a day on the road. Such experiences and such perceptions dust off Japan’s musical traditions and bring them off the library desk to the world of the ordinary reader.
Sometimes, Malm seems too keen to make hōgaku come alive for his fellow Americans. Referring to the court form of imayō (or ‘contemporary’ songs) of the Heian period, and the way many different poems were imposed on one melody, he makes an analogy with the way that “John Brown’s Body” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” share a tune with other texts, but the analogy is strained by formal differences between poetry, lyric and melody, and between the worlds they inhabit.
Nevertheless, the author’s restless habit of seeing and making connections often bears fruit. For example, a little earlier in the same section, he compares the Buddhist ‘missionary’ purpose of the imayō with the Bowery hymns of the Salvation Army. This sounds like an unexpected juxtaposition, but when we take into account the early 1920s history of brawling confrontation between pre-war rightist Buddhist sects and the Salvation Army, in which the two groups tried to drown each other out with their separate chants, Malm’s words seem more apposite.
“Traditional Japanese Music and Musical Instruments” is clearly organised along thematic lines, with each chapter a self-contained essay. Whether you wish to learn about a specialised aspect of Japanese music, about court music, the systems of notation, kabuki music, the music of the Ainu, music as an expression of Japanese culture or as a tool of religion, the construction and origins of instruments, or to get an overall grasp of the progress of hōgaku from a Chinese word-oriented tradition to today’s multiplicity of forms, this book is the place to find out. It’s all here, a lifetime’s vast enthusiasm conveyed without mystery or affectation, with useful references to some of the best scholars in the field, (including Tokyo’s own Richard Emmert on Nōgaku).
Here is Malm on Western and Japanese systems of notation.
In Western music the space of one octave contains twelve possible pitches. Played in succession, they are called a chromatic scale. These notes also exist in Japanese (or Chinese) music theory. In Western music, seven of these twelve notes are chosen to form a normal scale. The Japanese scales also consist of seven notes, but only five of them are considered vital. In Western music one can take a given scale structure (for example a major scale) and start it on any one of the twelve notes. It is in this way that C major, E-flat major, F-sharp major, etc. are constructed. In Chinese music theory such a process is also possible, but one standard Japanese theory (unfortunately there is more than one due to sectarianism) allows scales to begin on only five pitches out of the twelve (p69).
Here is a model of compressed explication. A clear understanding of the fundamentals of Japanese notation and of the requirements the system has to fulfil, is absolutely essential from an early stage, if we are to grasp the even trickier instrumental systems given later on in the book – each instrument has its own system, and there are sometimes more than one, depending on the technique followed and the period of the piece. (Anyone who thinks the Japanese lack individualism should study the competing techniques and theories of hōgaku). Malm manages to convey these complicated essentials without either talking shop or talking down to his reader.
This excellent survey is accompanied by a beautifully produced CD giving a generous sample of forms and referred to in the text. Read, listen and enjoy.
Rough Living (Arakure) by Tokuda Shūsei (translated by Richard Torrance) (University of Hawai’i Press), 2001
Tokuda Shūsei’s “Arakure” was first published in serial form in the Yomiuri shinbun in 1915. This speaks for the breadth of Shusei’s contemporary appeal, for in early Taishō the readership of the vernacular Yomiuriwas just edging up to one million, neck and neck with the Asahi. Eighty-six years later, in this translation by Richard Torrance, “Rough Living” provides a vivid account of ordinary life in late Meiji Japan, centred on the ups and (mostly) the downs of Shusei’s indomitable heroine, Oshima.
Tokuda Shusei (1872-1943) gathered most of the material for his major naturalistic novels (of which “Rough Living” was the last) from domestic events and routine encounters near his home in the Morikawa district of Hongo in Tokyo. Shūsei’s wife, from whom he drew material and characterisation for both “Ashiato” (Footprints, 1910) and “Kabi” (Mould, 1911), had been a maid in the house next door. In “Rough Living”, Oshima’s brightness and impetuosity and many details of her life were drawn wholesale from a woman he came to know well over many years, his wife’s sister.
The effect was to create a sort of plot of whim and impulse. Even in our post-modern knowingness, when those we admire are said to be ‘focused’ and those we scorn are said to have ‘lost the plot’, few of us set and follow a defined course in life. In 1915, by modelling his central personality so closely on such a dynamic living person, Shūsei seems to have been trying to bring the essential randomness of modern life into the heart of his fictional frame. His faithfulness to the detail and personality of his real-life ‘Oshima’ is the key to the fluid, organic sequence of events in “Rough Living”, and to the energetically unfocused viewpoint personified in Oshima’s erratic progress through life.
Although Shūsei sometimes provides only the faintest of clues to the nature and sequence of events, the temporal structure of the book is finely woven, running from Oshima’s birth in 1884 in the Ōji region (now part of Tokyo) to a new stage in her life around 1910. We learn about Oshima’s early suffering at the hands of her mother and her adoption at the age of five by the Mizushima family of paper makers, following a chance meeting on a river bank where Oshima’s father considered asking her to drown herself. At sixteen or seventeen, Oshima is tricked by her Mizushima foster parents into marrying their lumpish nephew, Sakutaro. She soon runs away and marries a widower, Tsuru, but the alliance founders, and Oshima miscarries Tsuru’s child after being physically attacked by her (Oshima’s) natural mother. After a brief period as a servant, Oshima goes to Tochigi where she is held responsible for debts run up by her brother. Oshima falls for Hamaya, a young innkeeper, but Oshima’s natural father, fearing for her reputation, takes her home to Oji.
Oshima’s fortunes improve following a stay with an aunt in Tokyo, where she works as a seamstress. During the 1904-5 war with Russia, Oshima settles down with a tailor, Onoda, and together they execute lucrative contracts making winter uniforms for Japanese soldiers. When demand falls, Oshima saves the day with a win on the lottery. With this windfall, Oshima and Onoda set up their own tailoring business. The prosperous, go-getting Oshima gains a flamboyant reputation for dressing in Western clothes and using a bicycle to distribute leaflets advertising her business. Onoda has an affair but Oshima soon sees her rival off, only to discover a new attraction, in her turn, to a young employee in her shop. With the death of her old inn keeping lover in Tochigi, Oshima resolves to leave Onoda and set up a new home and a new business with her handsome young employee.
In “Rough Living” Shūsei rejected his own mastery of the popular genre and the conventions of serialised fiction (end on a cliffhanger; avoid characterisation that doesn’t support the plot) in order to let his story go wherever Oshima takes it. As a result, all the characters seem to live their lives in the same emotional compartment, like a one-set play (or an Ozu film). There are no undercurrents or sub-plots circling to fruition: everything is on the table. In the absence of such narrative underpinnings, “Rough Living” carries an air of extemporisation and risk.
However, Shūsei’s stripped-down approach brings memorable rewards in terms of character and atmosphere. Oshima’s impetuousness breaks down walls and accelerates developments. If her heart isn’t in it, it simply doesn’t happen in “Rough Living”. This brings character to the fore, but not only character (and not only Oshima’s character).
The second valuable consequence of Shūsei’s focus on his random heroine is that in “Rough Living” he provides readers with such a strong sense of a society in the grip of massive change. For all their wrongheadedness, for all their faults, the way people behave in “Rough Living” seems intuitively right. In “Rough Living” Tokuda Shūsei gives us a new woman before the ‘new woman’ was a recognised type, and he sets her in late-Meiji, when everything was renewed. Today, reading about Oshima’s vanished world, you can’t help feeling, “Yes, that’s the way it was.”
All Worldly Pursuits by Hillel Wright, (New Orphic Publishers) 197pp.
Hillel Wright’s “All Worldly Pursuits” runs from the late 1960s to the present and is set around Vancouver and off the coast of Hawaii and, finally, in Kawasaki, Japan. The novel follows the trajectory of Wiley Moon, poet, fisherman, stripper’s agent and above all, hippie, through marriage, divorce and life as a single parent, and affairs with Laura Larsen, a fishing boat skipper’s wife and, finally, with Mayumi, a Japanese girl thirty years his junior.
Readers with a taste for nautical adventure will find much to enjoy in the early chapters on Moon’s fishing career. The salt all but sprays from the page, and Hillel Wright does a nice line in ocean jargon. But Wiley Moon is no Captain Haddock. He flenses and stows the yellowfin, but his head rings with poetry and the Zen Masters, for Wiley is as hip a hippie as can be. At the far end of the 1960s, when it seems even the halibut boats had names like “Purple Haze” and “Mama Cass”, and we meet him as a cook-deckhand on a Hawaiian tuna boat, Wiley is so proud of his “killer weed” he offers it to his fellow deckhands – (“It reminded Frank of the smell of skunk cabbage in the spring”).
In these early chapters, Hillel Wright shows a sure hand in developing his intractably free-spirited central figure. This is no mean achievement, as Wiley shows little desire to connect with his fellows and an impish relish for situations in which he has as little in common with others as possible. Such remoteness suits Wiley’s life at sea, but it fails him in his marriage and, five years later, in his affair with Laura Larsen.
Laura has spent too much of her life waiting at home while husband Holgar hunts the perfect halibut, to allow Wiley anything but the shortest leash, and eventually they part.
At this point, the real failure lies as much in the writing as in the affair itself. Wright seems to have wanted to have Wiley Moon meet his other half, and to have Laura fit the bill, and he provides Laura with suitable credentials: a yearning for someone as unlike the lumpish Holgar (“a liability in her personal cycle of growth”) as possible, and an interest in art to match Wiley’s poetry. The clincher should have been that Laura had also been a hippie, “swept up in the excitement of sexual freedom, cultural revolution and social reconstruction which was orchestrated by psychedelic
rock music and flavoured with the sweet smell of marijuana”. However, this and other
frayed skeins of banalities, far from highlighting Laura’s mystery and experience, only serve to stale her character and to drain romantic tension from the affair with Wiley.
“All Worldly Pursuits” promises much in the early chapters, but then it depends too heavily on Wiley Moon and Laura to draw in the reader and carry the story forward. The sheer aridity of the central romance seriously weakens the narrative, and Wiley’s last love, the inventive and nubile Mayumi, arrives too late to rescue the second half. This is a pity, because Mayumi fairly lights up the page, and one finds oneself wishing Wiley had met her earlier, or that Laura had developed a renewed passion for husband Holgar, or for halibut – anything to keep her and Wiley apart.
Even so, Hillel Wright has something to tell us and his novel of recollection deserves serious attention. His writing, like recollection itself, is very uneven, but there are sequences of surprising power and even beauty.
Letters from the End of the World: A Firsthand Account of the Bombing of Hiroshima by Toyofumi Ogura, translated by Kisaburo Murakami and Shigeru Fujii. (Kodansha International), 198pp.
At 8:15 on the morning of 6 August 1945, America dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. When the bomb exploded, Toyofumi Ogura was walking into town from the outskirts of Hiroshima, his wife Fumiyo was standing outside Fukuya’s, a department store in the city, and their seven-year-old son Kinji was at home in the suburbs.
Shocked but unhurt, Ogura returned to find his home flattened and burnt-out, but empty. For two long days, he wandered through the city, marvelling, offering directions, asking questions and taking notes and above all working his way through the lines of the dead and ‘living dead’ in search of his family. Finally, on the evening of 7 August, a chance message brought him to Fumiyo, swathed in bandages and lying in the yard of a school in the suburbs. To Ogura’s dismay, their son Kinji was not with his wife, and she had no idea of his whereabouts, so off he went again to search for his little boy. In the small hours, he found Kinji, burned but alive, staying with his wife’s sister. Elated, exhausted, Ogura returned to the schoolyard to tend to his wife, but thirteen days later, Fumiyo Ogura became one of the estimated 140,000 victims of the bomb.
Ogura survived to publish his experiences of 6 August and its aftermath, “Zetsugo no kiroku” (1948). His account took the form of a series of letters to his dead wife, for, as he explains in a preface to this excellent translation, “I had been seized with the desire to inform her of the events leading up to and following her death”.
When Ogura’s account first came out, John Hersey had already published his long article, “Hiroshima” in the August 1946 New Yorker, and as a book two months later. However, GHQ, the Occupation authority, prevented publication in Japan, and did not relent until 1949. Ogura’s Zetsugo no kiroku was thus the first eyewitness account of the bombing of Hiroshima available to the victims and their compatriots.
GHQ allowed Zetsugo no kiroku to come out because it blamed Japanese, rather than American militarism for the events leading to Hiroshima. Even so, Ogura’s account has a great deal in common with Hiroshima, which at the very least led Americans to question the necessity of the atomic bombing of Japan.
Hersey’s account worked outwards from a personal level, following the fortunes of six survivors of the blast. Ogura’s odyssey through his nuclear wasteland also takes a low-key, personal approach, and his soft-spoken chronicle mirrors the flat documentary style of Hiroshima. Like Hiroshima, (which benefited greatly from editing by the New Yorker’s psychotically literal Harold Ross), “Letters from the End of the World” does not carry an ounce of excess fat or show the faintest streak of purple. This is a chronicle of true events, but Ogura has paced and plotted his experiences meticulously. The result is a work of considerable literary artifice, yet at no cost to its inner logic or truth. Throughout, Ogura maintains a chilling politeness and restraint. There are no demanding abstractions. Everything is clear. The effect is to convey the author’s internal horror intact.
The comparison with Hersey’s masterpiece is worth making. Both were quietly furious books by middle class intellectuals, written primarily with the author’s compatriots in mind. However, Hiroshima has sold three million copies and been continuously in print for fifty-two years, whereas Zetsugo no kiroku sold well in Japan but has only recently become available to Hersey’s main audience. Given our current fascination with even more original paths to mass destruction, “Letters from the End of the World” is unlikely to attract more than a fraction of the attention granted to Hiroshima, but it is still one hell of a book.
Tariki: Embracing Despair, Discovering Peace by Hiroyuki Itsuki. Translated by Joseph Robert (Kodansha), 229pp.
The late, great Lord Longford was often taken to task by the British press for campaigning for the release from life imprisonment of his friend, the child murderer Myra Hindley. As a Catholic, Longford could never bring himself to condemn Hindley outright, but neither could he impress upon others his notion of her true worth. On one memorable occasion, having exhausted all sophisticated rhetoric in Hindley’s defence, Longford turned on his interlocutors and declared, “We are all shits, all of us!”
Hiroyuki Itsuki may have yet to encounter this blunt estimate of the human condition, but it would surely have appealed to his own notion of human worthlessness, and of the possibilities for redemption that stem from it. Like Frank Longford, Itsuki refuses to divide people into “the opposing camps of good and evil” because he recognises that everyone carries both within themselves.
Itsuki’s father was a schoolmaster in Korea who reached the pinnacle of his teaching career in 1945, the year of Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War. In quick succession, Itsuki senior lost his status and his wife, turned to drink and went to pieces. Thrown into life at the deep end, the thirteen-year-old Itsuki somehow kept his brother and sister and his tottering father upright in the awful undertow of Japan’s retreat from East Asia.
Tariki: Embracing Despair, Discovering Peace is shot through with vignettes from these early years, sharp backward glances that illuminate and reinforce Itsuki’s bleak outlook. Of his father, he writes, “It [teaching] was hard work for a young man in his twenties, and photographs show him with a little moustache, like Hitler’s – no doubt an attempt, though somewhat strained, to look older and give him some authority” (p31). At the end of each day, Itsuki’s father used to burn moxa on his weak leg and let out a heavy sigh. Itsuki hears in that remembered sigh “the very essence of the human condition” because, as he sees it, “It is important to have hope, but also despair” (p41).
In this realisation lies the core of the book, an acknowledgement of the value of negativity. Itsuki attributes his own survival not to purity of heart but to sheer self-centredness and a willingness to climb over others in order to get ahead. As he sees it, we have to live in this world, however vain and empty, and we will or even must get our hands dirty if we want to live well.
As Itsuki sees it, only in the knowledge of our own worthlessness can we gain
the humility to value compassion, the kindness of strangers, the deep unstinting well of a parent’s love, the random gifts of life. Gautama Buddha himself travelled the road from a negative to an absolutely positive state, and Itsuki refers to him as “the ultimate negative thinker”. Between these extremes, between the worst of times and the best of times, is tariki, translated here as “Other Power”. Tariki is the manifestation of Amida Buddha’s commitment to save us through the kindness of strangers. It is the second wind that keeps us going towards the end of an ordeal, the blessing in the midst of malaise.
Itsuki is one of Japan’s most successful novelists and thinkers, but his work is not well known to Western readers. “Tariki” should change that, for Hiroyuki Itsuki has given us nothing less than a road map for our own existential revolution. This alone would make “Tariki” worth a close reading. The power and the controlled grief of the author’s recollections come as a huge bonus and make this a book to read and read again.
Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan by E. Taylor Atkins (Duke University Press), 366 pages, 17 plates
Japanese jazz. Isn’t that a contradiction in terms, like French rock ’n’ roll or British food? After all, the Japanese don’t swing. These salary men and office ladies are just too uptight. Or are they? Maybe they really do swing but only when they think nobody’s looking. Or maybe they just think they don’t.
Such speculations wouldn’t cost the average jazz buff much sleep, but average is clearly not the word for E. Taylor Atkins, who has made a book out of his passion for Japanese jazz. And what a book it is.
As Atkins tells it, jazz was a key element of what a contemporary catchphrase described as ‘erotic grotesque nonsense’ (ero guro nansensu) in the Taisho era. Jazz music bubbled and seethed for a long decade in the entertainment districts of Kobe and Osaka but it only entered the national consciousness with the 1929 hit, the “Tokyo March”, when Waseda professor Yaso Saijo’s lyrics (those were the days when literature specialists could actually write) challenged the worker ant image of Showa Man:
Vast Tokyo is too small for love.
Fashionable Asakusa, secret trysts…
Long-haired Marxist boys, ephemeral love of the moment…
Shall we see a movie, shall we drink tea, or shall we run away on the Odawara Express?
This was more than enough to interest the authorities, and even the Yomiuri Shinbun ran solemn editorials questioning the moral hygiene of the “Tokyo March”. Hot and fast, jazz soon became a metaphor for Japan’s participation in global trends. The subtext was whether Japan should allow herself to be engulfed by Americanism or Modernism (virtually interchangeable terms at the time). The existence of a home-grown jazz spirit was barely acknowledged in this debate, but as Atkins points out, whereas America’s Jazz Age soon succumbed to the grimness of the Great Depression, hard times in 1930s Japan kick-started a whole new Jazz Age.
The joint was jumping in early Showa Japan. Jazz was in the headlines and in the cafes, in the films, in the literature of the time and in the dance halls – after a fashion. Customers bought books of tickets, which they gave to the ‘taxi’ dancer (so called because they were for hire) of their choice. The “taxi” dancers’ were paid commission on the number of tickets they collected. To keep the dancers dancing, the customers buying dance tickets and the dance hall earning, the musicians hurtled through tunes at maximum speed, with little chance to stretch out and improvise.
If Blue Nippon were only a history of Japanese jazz, Atkins could afford to rest on his laurels. But his preoccupation is with the trickier question of authenticity. In the early 1960s, black militancy obliged some US jazzmen to put down Japanese jazz and its practitioners. After all, these Japanese dudes had no African ethnicity, had never been slaves and hardly knew their collard greens from their corn pones. Even as late as 1993, saxophonist Branford Marsalis was notoriously sceptical of his own Japanese audiences’ appreciation: ‘Somebody told them it’s necessary and that we’re good. So they come and scratch their heads and clap and they leave’.
If authenticity in jazz has to mean blackness or strung out whiteness in an irreproducibly American social context, then obviously Japanese jazzmen are out of contention. Fortunately, as Atkins shows, for every put-down, there have been plenty of American jazzmen who thought the Japanese could swing, including Cannonball Adderley, Donald “Duck” Bailey, and Japanese jazz’s most enthusiastic champion, Miles Davis. Even so, for most Japanese jazz musicians, the problem has not been American opinion but their own ambivalence about the authenticity of their jazz culture.
Authenticity itself being something of a fetish in Japan, E. Taylor Atkins has struck a rich vein. Like bop itself, Blue Nippon suggests more directions than it can ever take and asks more questions than it can possibly answer. What more could you ask of a book about jazz?
Emperor of Japan: Meiji and his world, 1852-1912 by Donald Keene (Columbia University Press), 922pp.
Here he comes again, the mighty Keene. Who or what is he having for breakfast today? He has already consumed the entire Japanese canon in four long sittings (Seeds in the Heart, World Within Walls, and the two volumes of Dawn to the West). He has gobbled up the No, Tsurezuregusa, Kabuki, the best of Dazai and Mishima, Kyoto, the Japanese aesthetic, Bunraku. You name it, Keene has done it in thirty or more volumes, many more if you add his Japanese writings, countless forewords and lectures and his own elegantly guarded memoirs. Now he has taken on the Meiji emperor. At an age when most of his contemporaries are counting their teeth, has Donald Keene finally bitten off more than he can chew?
On the face of it, Meiji as a subject is beyond even this biographer. Meiji did not keep a diary. He wrote only a handful of letters, and his signature survives only on state documents. There are official volumes recording Meiji’s activities as emperor in considerable detail, but these are contradictory, as are the memories of court officials.
However, Meiji did write over 100,000 pieces of poetry, mostly tanka, that contain traces of autobiography and seem to have been almost his only outlet for personal feeling. The indefatigable Keene, determined as he is to ‘find’ Meiji with this biography, appears to have read every line (the index of first lines at the back must be a biographical first for a ‘royal’ subject).
Keene also digs hard for clues in Meiji’s education, which for much of his early youth centred on calligraphy and the composition of tanka under his mother’s tutelage, rather than any specifically princely preparation. Meiji was edgy and tended to fumble his speeches in the presence of foreigners, but his later education embodied the shift in the zeitgeist from anti-foreign joi to the eager (some said too eager) embrace of foreign ideas. Starting in the early 1870s, the young man began receiving instruction in the Japanese translation of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. He also took up two lifelong passions, riding and drink.
As with all of Japan’s modern emperors, (the current incumbent excepted), the big question has always been, to what extent did the emperor rule, as opposed to reign? Even under the shogunate, we can see Meiji intervening in important situations, such as the suppression of Christianity in Nagasaki, but his role, that is, the degree of personal volition that he expressed during the Meiji Ishin, the Renovation of Imperial rule, is unclear from Keene’s account. Meiji may have put his name to a call for the murder of two Matsudairas, but his most urgent appeal for action against the shogunate, though using the royal pronoun (chin), was signed by others.
The character of Meiji matters greatly to the ongoing discussion of Japan’s imperial house. Some historians maintain that a straight line can be drawn between the heightened nationalism of the 1930s and a sort of backroom blueprint for deification drawn up for Meiji’s ancestors and descendants by the brilliant group of leaders around him: Ito, Okubo, Kido, Yamagata and Iwakura. Reading Keene’s account, few historians will see Meiji as an active influence on the deification of the Imperial house, but equally few will see him as a mere cipher controlled by the group around him. From early in his reign, Meiji expected to take part in all key government decisions, but although he put duty ahead of his own wishes to the day of his death, his role in the wars against China and Russia was conciliatory and gentle, far from the martial image we have come to expect.
One of the pleasures of Keene’s account, and a real contribution to our understanding of Japan’s early modern politics, is the privileged view it affords us of the manoeuvres around the person of the emperor. For all his dedication to administrative affairs, Meiji was not above the occasional revolt against the obligations that went with his role. We can learn from Keene’s observation that, on one occasion of imperial pique, ‘he may have resented being manipulated by men who, although they pretended to worship him, gave no consideration to his wishes’ (p584).
Kings and queens, shahs and tsars, sultans and emirs and emperors are after all, only human constructions, gods designed by a committee. So when the events of his time are set aside and we are alone with Meiji, whom do we see? Meiji’s frugality, his robust sense of humour, his forbearance, his dedication to work and his terror of self-indulgence (“I love Kyoto. That’s why I don’t go there”) are all discussed, confirming Meiji as the noblest and perhaps the most likeable of Japan’s modern emperors. However, Keene does not avoid Meiji’s womanising or his love of drink (he seems never to have suffered a hangover), his stubbornness or his sadistic streak (dropping asparagus on the palace floor for the chamberlain to pick up).
These traits are well documented, but time and again in this portrait, we come up against the limits of available evidence. With little to go on, Keene has too often to infer Meiji’s state of mind: how he may have felt or what he most probably thought in a given situation. When Tokugawa Yoshinobu was persuaded to return his powers to the throne, Meiji’s personal reaction to the formal resumption of imperial rule in January 1868 is unknown. In the fond hope that her sentiments on coming to the British throne in 1815 might cast some light on Meiji’s state of mind on the threshold of his reign in 1868, Keene quotes from the diary of Meiji’s closest royal contemporary, Queen Victoria, but this is unhelpful, simply because she, no matter how royal and young, was not he.
So, has the mighty Keene finally bitten off more than he can chew? In the course of over 900 pages of text and copious notes, his Emperor of Japan does project a closer view, probably the closest we will ever get of the Meiji emperor and his circle. Donald Keene has been criticised for bringing too little of himself to his studies of Japanese literature, but such reticence is well suited to his equally retiring and cautious subject: one might even say that emperor and scholar were made for each other. If he never writes another word, this stunning biography will probably stand as Donald Keene’s crowning achievement, but given this extraordinary scholar’s phenomenal fertility, it is probably too early to say.
Tokyo Central: A Memoir by Edward Seidensticker (University of Washington Press: Seattle and London) 250pp., with 24 black and white plates
Not one of life’s natural warriors, Edward Seidensticker first became interested in Japan when he was searching for a way to get through the last war in one piece. In 1942, the US Navy Japanese Language School transferred to his college in Colorado and offered him a place. After an uneventful war, Seidensticker washed up in Tokyo, sticking around long enough to become a slightly wobbly pillar of the foreign establishment, and a hyoronka, a critic and commentator on just about anything.
None of this would matter much had not Seidensticker, between some great parties, high gossip and literary brouhahas, managed to translate the “best pickings” of modern Japanese literature and thereby to bring before Western readers some of the most exquisite writing they were ever likely to experience.
Waiting for a great writer in post-war Japan must have been a bit like waiting for a bus. Nothing for ages, then three all at once. It was Seidensticker’s good fortune to work intimately with three likely Nobel literature laureates in the 1950s and sixties, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari and Mishima Yukio. Seidensticker knew Kawabata as well as anyone could, and came up with the translations that won him the Nobel Prize. He worked easily with Tanizaki, witness that marvellous title Some Prefer Nettles. He spent quite enough time with Mishima to expect his messy death.
The upside of these Tokyo days makes for some bright gossip. In Oslo with Kawabata for the 1968 Nobel Prize, when Seidensticker remarked after the ceremony that it must be nice to be alone again with Mrs Kawabata, the sage responded drily “that it was about the last thing he wanted”. We are treated to the intriguing possibility that Tanizaki’s unusually small penis dictated the erotic preoccupations of his work. We learn that Yoshida Shigeru, Japan’s early post-war prime minister, believed that among the nations of the world, the British rank first in stupidity, and the Japanese second.
The poet D. J. Enright once wrote that life for the expatriate in Japan is like a hot scented bath with occasional electric shocks. Seidensticker has certainly had his time in the bath, but he had his share of shocks. In particular, his growing sense of the fogged self-indulgence of the 1960 protest movement against the Security Treaty with the US, combined with disappointment in the bright new Japan that the US had helped to bring about.
On May 16 1962, in his regular column in The Daily Yomiuri, Seidensticker announced that he had had enough. “The Japanese are just like other people. They work hard to support their – but no,” he wrote. “They are not like other people. They are infinitely more clannish, insular, parochial, and one owes it to one’s self-respect to preserve a feeling of outrage at the insularity. To have the sense of outrage go dull is to lose the will to communicate; and that, I think, is death. So I am going home.”
Even today, Seidensticker’s declaration still comes up when people talk Japan down. However, one would have to read this delicately crotchety, most exact and honest memoir to learn that, when the time came to leave the country, Seidensticker was, in his own words, “utterly desolate, as people feel when the funeral is over and the house is empty.”
Seidensticker ‘left’ Japan in 1962, but he has been back for part of almost every year since. His closeness to the bundan, the Japanese literary establishment, exposed him to further shocks, with the death of Tanizaki in 1965, followed by the suicide of Mishima in 1970 and of Kawabata two years later. Of the many fruits of his years ‘away’, the bittersweet meditation Kafu the Scribbler and the two-volume account, High City, Low City and Tokyo Rising, are work of a high order. And now he has thrown in this sharp-eyed and deeply felt memoir. It has been a very Japanese sort of farewell, more stated than real, but hugely productive and with considerable benefits all round.
Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe. (Kodansha International), 154pp
First published in 1900, in English, Inazo Nitobe’s Bushido heads that long line of books that have sought to explain Japan and the Japanese according to a single theory or set of ideas. Bushido is still, alongside Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and Chie Nakane’s Vertical Society, one of the better known books on Japan, although today it is read more by Japanese than by the foreigners for whom it was intended.
Nitobe was a paradigm of the westward leaning Japanese. Born in 1862 into a samurai family, he was educated in Hokkaido at the Sapporo Agricultural School by William Clark, famed for his injunction “Boys, be ambitious!” As a young student, Nitobe nurtured an ambition to establish a personal route of understanding between Japan and the West, to become a “bridge across the Pacific. Nitobe embraced Christianity as a young man and then Quakerism while a student of agricultural economics in the United States. Returning to Japan, he occupied a series of posts in government and education, eventually serving as Under Secretary General of the League of Nations in the 1920s.
The term bushido describes the way of the bushi or warrior, the set of values to which samurai adhered: loyalty and devotion to duty, and a perfect willingness to give one’s life for one’s lord. Before Nitobe, both Miyamoto Musashi and Yamanote Tsunetomo in, respectively, The Book of Five Rings (1640s) and Hagakure (1716) had dwelt on the notion of bushido. Not long before the publication of Bushido, Nitobe’s friend, the Christian writer Uchimura Kanzo conceived a Christian form of bushido. However, none of these writers had conceived of bushido as an ethical system, nor did they write about it in English.
Nitobe composed Bushido in a near-perfect representation of the leisured academic English style of the turn of the century, and his command of the language still has the power to astonish. Nitobe frequently reminds the reader of his Japanese origins, but his tone is that of the assured Orientalist, measured and dispassionate, turning over the curiosities of the East in the calm of his study.
Bushido synthesises considerable reading and reference, though there is wider reference to Western than to Japanese or Asian scholarship, with frequent citations of Ruskin, Spencer and other leading lights of the day. The text is scattered with references to Lao Tzu, Mencius, Confucius and others, but on the very issues where one might have expected him to turn to his own national scholarship, Nitobe prefers to cite the dustiest of contemporary Western academics or, if he has to come closer to Japan, the imaginative learning of Lafcadio Hearn.
Nitobe seems to have done everything he possibly could to make Bushido palatable to Western readers, but the result is curiously disappointing. His achievement was to marry, with considerable artifice and great literary skill, Eastern and Western learning in a book subtitled “the Soul of Japan”, yet the book is, in itself, strangely without a soul. A century after it first appeared, Bushido comes across as an admirable construction but a stale, unconvincing read.
Bushido was given rapturous treatment by Western reviewers and scholars throughout the early 1900s. Following Japan’s thrashing of China and Russia in the wars of 1894-5 and 1904-5, British conservatives and militarists raved about “brave little Japan” and Nitobe’s book seemed to perfectly encapsulate the nobility of the Japanese psyche. In 1912, sober journalists waxed elegiac when the hero of the war against Russia, General Nogi, marked the death of the Meiji emperor with his own perfect suicide. Bushido seemed to express the very essence of Japan, and since Japan had been Britain’s ally since 1902, it must be an essence worthy of praise.
Since then, bushido as a term has outgrown Nitobe’s careworn chivalry and taken on a life of its own. By the mid-1920s, following Japan’s suppression of the Korean independence movement, Britain had dropped her old ally and bushido had come to be seen in the West as an elegant cover for military conquest. By 1931, when Nitobe published Japan: Some Phases of her Problems and Development, international opinion had hardened against Japan. The new book was given a hostile reception, not for any inherent fault but because it came from the author of Bushido.
The final indignity came in the late 1950s when the late Lord Russell of Liverpool, known to some British readers as “Lord Liver of Cesspool” for his gloating treatments of wartime atrocities, catalogued the most spectacular Japanese war crimes in a book called, with heavy irony, The Knights of Bushido. Inazo Nitobe must have turned in his grave. He had written Bushido as the central pillar of his “bridge across the Pacific” and now the term was a byword for institutionalised mayhem. But aren’t bridges made to be stepped on?
The Last Fox: A Novel of the 100th/442nd RCT by Robert H. Kono. (Abe publishing), 335 pp.
The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was the most decorated fighting unit in the history of the entire US Army. By the end of World War II, its soldiers had won 18,142 medals for extreme courage, including one Medal of Honor, fifty-two Distinguished Service Crosses, one Distinguished Service Medal, 560 Silver Stars, 4,000 Bronze Stars and 9,486 Purple Hearts. They also won French and Italian honours, including the Croix de Guerre. In June 2001, Bill Clinton hung the Medal of Honor on five survivors and made a further fifteen posthumous presentations to relatives of members of the 442nd RCT.
This is an extraordinary tally, but the men of the 442nd felt they had a great deal to prove. They were all second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) insulted by the doubts internment raised about the quality of their patriotism. Their motto “Go for Broke” was no idle slogan. Out of a total force of around 10,000 men, several hundred were killed, 1,700 wounded or maimed.
The numbers more than prove their commitment, but surely there were some in the 442nd who asked if the nation that interned their family really deserved their sacrifice? The official decision to pit them against German forces on the western front is still intriguing. Were there concerns in Washington about the wisdom of having Japanese Americans face the Japanese enemy in the Pacific?
The history of the 442nd invites all sorts of questions about nation and race, about Japanese Americans and mainland Japanese, and about the way we were nearly sixty years ago. There is undoubtedly a great story here waiting to be written, but Robert H. Kono’s The Last Fox is not it. This war novel begins so badly, you pray that at some point it will improve. But the writing only gets worse. This is pornography for patriots. Unflinching platitudes. Muddy metaphors. Stock reactions. Wooden characters mouthing perfunctory grit.
Here we are at the regimental reunion with rugged Fred Murano, silver maned Chik Tokuhara and other veterans. “The men fell silent as though a door had slammed shut on the inner mechanism that made lighthearted banter possible, even desirable, especially in the circumstances under which they were struggling to treat the occasion like any other get-together – which it was not.” Small wonder they seldom met.
Naples, Italy, comes with a flash of local colour. “The waters of the Mediterranean Sea were calm and belied the violence of war, the remnants of which crowded the coastline in the form of gutted cities.” In the undemanding universe [easy material culture] of The Last Fox, a city is a remnant and a remnant can crowd.
On we follow in this trail of maimed prose and bleeding metaphor, from Anzio and Monte Cassino up to Rome, Pisa and into France. By the time he staggers over the border to the Cote d’Azur, we are as battle hardened as our hero Fred Murano. Then in Nice, Fred faces his toughest challenge in the form of the lovely Renee (who needs accents?), who says, “Take me now, mon cheri!” the way these [those] French girls do (anything in uniform). But Renee’s sultry allure fails to melt frosty Fred. “You don’t understand, Renee. You are like a rare flower,” says he, cool as a Budweiser.
Today, when the very freedoms that men like Fred Murano fought so hard to defend are under assault, the United States once again prepares to make common cause against a fanatical foreign foe. And just as they did before, the Europeans want to look the other way and talk appeasement.
All is not lost, however, thanks to The Last Fox. Instead of waiting for her fair-weather friends to pitch in, the US should go it alone. All it would take is a crateful of copies of The Last Fox dropped on Baghdad Central. No question, faced with three hundred and thirty-five pages of Robert H. Kono’s life-threatening prose, Saddam will soon be begging for mercy. Are you listening, Donald Rumsfeld?
The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture, edited by Roger J. Davies and Osamu Ikeno. (Charles Tuttle), 270 pp.
For most of her modern history, Japan has offered exceptional hospitality to the English language. In the bubble years, Japan’s investment in English-language textbooks, teachers, schools and other resources topped that of any other nation. Yet, despite this commitment, in most standard tests of English fluency Japan is still bumping along at the bottom of the international league.
Students are not the only ones with problems. Makiko Tanaka was one of only a handful of fluent English-speaking foreign ministers since Yosuke Matsuoka startled the world with his Oregon accent in the early 1930s. As for Prime Ministers, one need only recall the legendary Mori-Clinton exchange at the Okinawa Summit in 2000.
Yoshiro Mori: Who are you?
Bill Clinton (wittily): I’m Hillary’s husband.
Mori: Me too!
What are the roots of the problem? In a 1999 interview in Japan Echo, the sociolinguist Takao Suzuki maintained that Japan’s intellectual relationship with the West has been characterized by extraordinary passivity. As Suzuki saw it, Japan has been importing and deciphering foreign texts for so long that the Japanese have forgotten that intercultural communication is a two-way flow. Suzuki connected this historical emphasis on passive reception, not expression, to the failure of English teaching in Japan to produce significant numbers of fluent English speakers.
As if in response to this perceived imbalance, Roger Davies and Osamu Ikeno have compiled the collective writings on Japanese society of twenty-nine fourth year students of cross-cultural communication at Ehime University, Matsuyama. The collection is intended both as a university level textbook for Japanese studies students and, according to the Introduction, for “Japanese students of English who will need to explain and discuss their native culture in English in order to participate effectively in an increasingly globalized world”. Takao Suzuki’s prescription exactly.
Arranged in twenty-eight short essays, the great value of this collection lies in its writers’ keenness to engage in the discussion of Japanese values as a whole, from aimai (ambiguity) to zoto (gift-giving). Where some introductory texts might provide only a self-contained definition of uchi (intimate, family or group) and soto (outside, outsider), the Ehime students show how hedataru (granting personal space to others) can be used to negotiate between the extremes of personal and impersonal contexts. Where most scholars explain gambari (patience and determination) in the context of high school entrance exams, The Japanese Mind relates it to karoshi, (death from overwork).
In the discussion of danjyo kankei (relationships between the sexes) the authors survey women’s loss of status since ancient times, changes in male-female relationships, the advent of ryosaikenbo (good wife, good mother), negative expressions for women, husband and wife relationships and the position of women before and after marriage – all in seven closely argued pages. Twenty-five of the twenty-nine student authors are women, an interesting disproportion that may account for the inspired precision of this particular section.
This integrated approach shows how individual values fit into a social system. By grouping honne and tatemae with haragei (implicit communication) as well as that old stand-by amae (dependence on others’ goodwill), we begin to see how the Japanese get things done – or not, as the case may be. If A doesn’t much fancy a night out with B, she can save B’s face by expressing superficial enthusiasm (tatemae) and at the same time depend (amae) on the quality of B’s haragei to pick up on her lack of interest and suggest another time.
Throughout, the text is a model of plain, clear English – although some might wonder at female primary school students’ appetite for “fairly tales” (p.181). The students and teachers of Ehime University have come up with a book stuffed to bursting with powerful analysis and sparkling intuition. The Japanese Mind works both as an exciting and tightly focused English teaching aid and as the best introduction to Japanese society since Takie and William Lebra’s landmark 1970s reader, Japanese Culture and Behavior.
The Japanese Community in Pre-War Britain: From Integration to Disintegration by Keiko Itoh. (Curzon, Richmond), 2001. x + 230pp.
The Japanese in Britain had much in common with the British in Japan during the fifty-odd years of their pre-war residence. Their numbers were similar, seldom rising above a few thousands. They both published their own newspapers in their own language, occupied their own niche businesses, formed their own clubs, sent their children to their own schools, exhibited a zeal for tennis and golf and the social world around such pursuits, and eventually occupied their own cemetery.
These points of symmetry are blunted by considerable differences in the relationship with the adopted nation. The status of the British residents of Japan was literally exceptional: they could only be tried in their own courts, and they enjoyed many other privileges written into the set of treaties that defined ‘extraterritoriality’, that is, their immunity from Japanese law. Between 1902-1921, both groups were citizens of allied nations, albeit ‘allies of a kind’, but no formal, let alone reciprocal protection extended to the Japanese in Britain, who were subject to British law, with all the uncertainty attendant on their foreign status.
This fundamental difference had plenty to do with the attitude taken by many British residents of Japan towards their hosts. For many Britons the very notion that they were guests, invited or uninvited, was an insulting diminution of their purpose and the benefits brought to the Japanese by their very presence. Throughout the 1890s, Japan’s pre-war British-owned newspapers buzzed with the fears of many Britons over the consequences for Japanese civilisation should ‘extrality’ be withdrawn, concerns that were only very gradually discarded after August 1899, when the revised Treaties effectively ended the Treaty Port system in Japan.
Although their communal experience in Britain was far less traumatic than that suffered by their more numerous and less prosperous compatriots in the United States, the Japanese in Britain lacked the assurance exhibited by their British contemporaries. As Keiko Itoh shows in this account, the Japanese in Britain were not only tactically inclined to integrate with the host community, but innately partial to many aspects of British life and culture. Her history performs a valuable function in surveying the myriad aspects of this integrative impulse among Britain’s Japanese residents from around the 1890s until the late 1930s. One important factor was the social composition of the Japanese, which over the half-century included a very high proportion of ‘elite’ expatriates – government officials, bankers, corporate businessmen and so on – who, backed by Japan’s growing prosperity, built a discreetly worthy social profile in Britain and a strong system of mutual support. Another integrative factor was the scarcity of Japanese women, which contributed to the frequency of marriages between Japanese men and British women. For the latter, this was a huge commitment as they had to take Japanese nationality and were then obliged to report to their local police station as aliens.
Of course, there were limits to integration. Many Japanese stayed within their community and seldom ventured among the British. More interestingly, long experience of Britain’s more critical political culture and direct exposure to press criticism of their own government does not seem to have encouraged even the elite Japanese in Britain to take a more questioning approach to Japan’s policies in China.
The core of Dr. Itoh’s study is her discussion of the ‘independent’ Japanese and Anglo-Japanese community in Britain, made up of small businessmen and self-employed people with no strong ties to institutions in Japan and various specialised niches in Britain, such as lampshade manufacture and chick sexing. This was a vital, thriving community, with its own interlapping economy and behaviour and it was well on its way to becoming a permanent fixture in Britain when the Second World War interrupted.
The corollary to this chapter is the Epilogue, which takes the Japanese pre-war community in its heyday and records its disintegration. As public opinion hardened against Japan in the 1930s, many Japanese lost their jobs at British companies. By 1938, an unprecedented ninety-five or so Japanese were on National Assistance. In the same year, the main Japanese newspaper in Britain, the Nichiei Shinshi, ended a twenty-three year run (just as Kōbe’s far more critical Japan Chronicle came into a Gaimushō subsidy and began to see Japan’s incursions in China in a kinder light).
Many comfortably integrated Japanese were caught in the clutch of circumstance as war in Europe moved closer. The British women who had married Japanese progressed from the status of aliens to that of enemy aliens. Following Pearl Harbor, (which the author, herself a descendant of elite expatriates, spells the British way), 114 Japanese members of the elite business and professional group and a large contingent of seamen were interned at the Taplow Hotel on the Isle of Man. The General Manager of Mitsui Bussan became their camp leader and managed to maintain morale despite or because of a reading diet confined to the Daily Mail, Express and Sunday Pictorial. Some of the independent Japanese hung on and started up again after the war – in the mid-1940s, this reviewer’s mother did piecework painting roses and ferns on lampshades in T. K. Nakamura’s workshop in Howland Street, near the Tottenham Court Road – but the core of the pre-war community had dispersed.
Keiko Itoh has drawn together a great many ideas and a mass of primary material in The Japanese Community in Pre-War Britain. She has written a pioneering contribution to an important but hitherto misty aspect of Japanese and British history, shot through with keen perceptions and sharply drawn vignettes of the behaviour of these genteel denizens of a lost world. Not entirely by default, her book also tells us a great deal about pre-war British society. It would have been interesting to learn more about how these ‘British’ Japanese fared when they returned to their homeland, but that is probably another book.
Japan Encyclopedia by Louis Frédéric, translated by Kathe Roth, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1102pp Frédéric
More compact than its rival, the opulent Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia (1993, CD-Rom 1999), this new Japan Encylopedia is nevertheless a splendid addition to the small but essential body of dictionaries and encyclopedias on Japan. Although published this year, this edition is essentially a translation from the original 1996 French edition. More significantly, whereas the Kodansha encyclopedia was compiled by a large and eminent advisory board and some 1,400 specialists, Japan Encyclopedia is the work of one scholar, the late Louis Frédéric.
Of the two, the Kodansha volume is the more gorgeous production, with page after page of colour illustrations. Louis Frédéric’s maps and illustrations are useful, but none are in colour, a notable omission in any work on Japan, where colour and the sense of colour are so marked. Another key difference is that where the Kodansha encyclopedia provides kanji and romanizations with macrons, the Japan Encylopedia gives romanizations of all key terms, with macrons, but does not give the kanji.
Louis Frédéric seems to have had a thing about encyclopedias, working on his magnum opus, the Encyclopedia of Asian Civilisations through most of the 1970s and finally delivering volume ten in 1984. Working with him on almost every project has been his indefatigable translator Kathe Roth, who has now brought the last fruits of his industry, the Japan Encylopedia, to English readers.
Frédéric’s stated aim in writing this encyclopedia was to bring Japan within the reach of the general public, because “Knowing Japan and the Japanese better is one of the necessities of modern life”. Although in his introduction Frédéric refers despairingly to “the cliched images of Sumo wrestlers, martial-arts combatants, geisha, women in kimono…” he is clearly most partial to traditional Japan, and his encyclopedia deals with even the most familiar aspects of Japanese life with grace and economy.
Frédéric has “tried systematically to give preference to cultural, religious, literary, artistic and historical facts and to biographies…” Thus, politics, for example, is not neglected, but one senses that it is not high on Frédéric’s scale of interests. Any encyclopedia that tells us about Kakuei Tanaka but neglects his dynamic daughter Makiko cannot really claim to offer an encyclopedic view of the Japanese political scene. Journalism is another low-interest area. While the literary and pictorial arts are given superbly detailed and knowledgeable treatment, with full entries, for example, on all the artistic Kumes – Kunitake, Keiichiro and Masao – Professor Frédéric has nothing to tell us about Hiroshi Kume, one of the few journalists to try to open up politics to real scrutiny by television.
As the more ‘Japanese’ of the two encyclopedias, the editors of the Kodansha volume may have felt obliged to tackle controversial historical issues head on. Thus, Kodansha gave a separate entry to the 1927 Tanaka Memorandum, (said to have been Japan’s blueprint for the invasion of China) whereas Frédéric only attends to the infamous document as part of his entry on Giichi Tanaka, who is said to have written it. In another area, Japan’s press history, Kodansha seems a little partial in its description of the Japan Times as “for many years the sole foreign-language news publication in Japan” (it never was), but it does not neglect the historic closeness of the Japan Times to Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Frédéric goes one further, not only referring to the Japan Times as “pro-government”, but also mentioning its takeover of other English-language newspapers in the early 1940s.
Louis Frédéric writes in his introduction, “One does not read an encyclopedia; one consults it” but there are people who read encyclopedias for enjoyment, and I am one of them. Indeed, aimless browsing is one of the great pleasures of the Kodansha volume, but this new encyclopedia is just as readable and just as browsable, and all the more impressive in being the work of a single mind.
Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval by Merry Isaacs White (University of California Press), 255 pp.
It has been a long time since anybody dared to write about the Japanese in a way that might suggest that they’re all the same. That sort of thing was fine in wartime, and quite acceptable in the 1950s, when many Western academics thought of Japan in terms of “What went wrong?” but nobody talks seriously about Japanese sameness any more, least of all Merry Isaacs White. Nevertheless, she seems to have written Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval in order to challenge a perception of monolithic sameness in Japan’s family life.
No foreigner who has known the miserable hulks of council or public housing in Europe or the US can fail to be impressed by the quiet calm of the danchi (housing estate) on a weekday morning. You take in the mothers and children at the kindergarten bus stop, the old people rustling like leaves on the pavement and the older boys wheeling by on their way to baseball and you feel that this is a society based on the family, and that it works.
White is not here to tell us that this is only a surface impression. Her intention is to show that not only is there far less coherence to the Japanese family than official Japan would have us believe, but that the history of exceptions to the one-size-fits-all model goes much further back than anyone would have suspected.
For an anthropologist, Professor White makes a pretty good social historian. Her history of the internal stresses and external pressures managed by the Japanese family covers a great deal of uncharted territory with economy and perception. She shows how in their travels members of the 1871 Iwakura mission to Europe and the United States noted the stability and authority of the Victorian family structure and on their return tried to legislate these qualities into the ie, the Japanese household, alongside their renovation of the authority of the emperor.
Meiji period social engineering succeeded in its primary purpose of elevating and fixing the status of the father and the eldest son in the family, but despite or because of this, Japan’s divorce rate in the Taisho period was still higher than in 1920s Britain, where Victorian values had yet to loosen their grip.
White’s account highlights the tensions between the official framework of the household and the cosier notion of katei, the family, and shows how these became uneasily centred on the autocratic head of the household. Even so, the absolute authority and official status of the pre-war family head were softened by the warmth of family feeling, especially between mother and children. In Japan, the hand that rocked the cradle did not rule the nation, but national homemaking here, as elsewhere, depended in its essentials on the mother. When defeat, national ruin and the 1947 Constitution discredited the authority of the family head, women were in a good position to take over, at least in the home.
Perfectly Japanese really takes off with its description of the modern post-war family. She shows how working mothers juggle the demands of school and kindergarten and low paying jobs and somehow, with the help of neighbouring mothers and aged parents, to get through the week with delicate compromises and near misses but somehow without mishap. Mothers are the real heroines of her account, trying hard to live up to the ideal and to do well by their family, however disjointed it may be.
But this does not mean that fathers come in for a bashing. Merry Isaacs White avoids all polemic and demonstrates a real concern for all the actors in society. If her closely argued, often touching account is anything to go by, the Japanese family is coping with the 21st century, but with difficulty.
The GI War against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II by Peter Schrijvers, (Palgrave MacMillan), 320pp.
When Japan fired the first shots at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, even her more cautious strategists cannot have imagined the extent to which they and ultimately East Asia would reap the whirlwind. Not only four years of some of the most vicious warfare of the century capped by the two dirtiest bombs ever used on humankind, but also the brushing aside of colonial power by a zealous, hugely motivated fighting corps backed by an industrial establishment unparalleled in its coordination and productivity.
As Peter Schrijvers explains in The GI War against Japan, for many GIs the early stages of the war seemed like a state-sponsored tourist trail. Few GIs had much inkling of the world outside their home town, and the journey west was an adventure in itself. The sight of the Pacific Ocean took their breath away. When they took up defensive positions in the Philippines, the GIs were welcomed by natives in canoes, just as Cook and Magellan had been before them. In China, they ran up against people who had never seen Caucasians let alone New Englanders. Everywhere they went the GIs became the focus of huge curiosity.
No wonder the military-issue phrasebooks contained the entry, “Please ask these people staring at me to go away”. But as Peter Schrijvers shows in this thoroughly researched cultural history of the American forces in the Pacific War, this early bewilderment soon became a passion to reform. The degradation and poverty the GIs encountered in New Guineau and throughout China aroused a missionary zeal for systemic change.
In the Pacific, the Japanese followed Sun Tzu’s ancient prescript to hide ‘under the ninefold earth’, operating defensive lines from ‘spiderweb strongholds whose radiating tunnels connected numerous concealed foxholes to large underground shelters’. Many GIs’ worst prejudices were confirmed by an invisible enemy who lived underground and sniped from the trees, and, on Guadalcanal late in 1942, survived on the fleshier portions of his fellow men.
On Okinawa, the American forces abandoned themselves to a long pent-up and escalating rage. Schrijvers’ research, much of it taken from soldier’s own accounts in diaries and letters home, challenges the polite fiction that the Okinawans committed suicide and killed each other in such numbers because homeland propaganda had deluded them into thinking that the Americans would rape their women and kill all their men. US soldiers did rape a great many Okinawan women, and, with itchy trigger fingers and the refinement of napalm in their flamethrowers, did kill a great many Okinawan civilians. As for military fatalities, in two months’ fighting in Southern Okinawa in 1945, the four divisions of the XXIV Corps took exactly 90 military prisoners.
Did the ordinary grunt know what he was doing when he began pushing the Japanese back across the Pacific and the British back to the Home Counties? [Did the ordinary grunt realise when he began pushing the Japanese back across the Pacific that he was also pushing the British back to the Home Counties?] Many GIs rejoiced in the fact that they were bringing American hegemony to East Asia. American soldiers took their notions of a sinful, stagnant Asia Pacific from Europe, but liked to see themselves as envoys of what Schrijvers calls ‘the pre-eminent redeemer nation’, the ultimate model for any aspiring nation throwing off the colonial yoke. As US power crossed the Pacific, the desire to enlighten and regenerate took on more and more force, until a tidal wave of Bible-bashers, sanitation specialists, would-be anthropologists and outright carpetbaggers finally hit the shores of Japan.
As we watch like fascinated rabbits the headlights of the American world empire round the bend of the year and straighten out for another dominant century, what could be more timely than a retrospective of the people who brought the nation to its current pre-eminence? Peter Schrijvers shows us the Greatest Generation at its best and worst. His achievement in this extraordinary synthesis of massive scholarship and empathetic description is to deepen our understanding of the American century and our sympathy for ordinary Americans.
“I am just going outside” Captain Oates – Antarctic Tragedy by Michael Smith, (Spellmount Publishers), 301pp.
In the annals of famous last words, Captain Lawrence Oates’s “I am just going outside, and may be some time” occupies, alongside King George V’s “Bugger Bognor!” that niche reserved for the most determined avoiders of all sense of occasion. For as all the world has since learned, ‘outside’ the little green tent that housed the demoralised and exhausted members of Captain Scott’s last Polar expedition on March 17 1912 were gale-force winds and a paralysing -40˚C blizzard. Terribly run-down and hobbling in stockinged feet too swollen to fit his boots, Oates cannot have gone far before collapsing into the ice that still holds his frozen corpse.
From the moment Scott’s diaries were found and their contents made known, history’s lamest excuse for leaving the room entered the iconography of heroic understatement. In 1914, when hundreds of thousands of soldiers sat waiting for their own pointless end in the trenches, they were shown Oates’s photograph as if, by some military-issue transubstantiation, it might lend nobility to their passing. Oates’s departure from the tent was described as walking ‘willingly to his death in a blizzard to try and save his comrades, beset by hardship’. Yet, according to Michael Smith’s new biography, Oates’s last walk was as much the escape of a defeated man as it was a sacrifice for his comrades.
Scott chose the 32-year-old captain of cavalry to accompany the final party to the Pole because he wanted an army man and because Oates’s dislike of show appealed to his sentiments.
But Oates was not an ideal choice. In 1912, he was still limping badly from a leg wound he had received in the Boer War. He also suffered from what one of the team delicately referred to as ‘undue perspiration of the feet’. This became a fatal problem at the Pole, where frostbite and moist gangrene set in and worked open old scar tissue from the war wound. With Oates incapacitated, the team lost a quarter of its power to pull the supply sledge, a backbreaking task even in the best conditions. Towards the end, the exhausted group covered as little as eleven miles in as many hours, and this was their distance from ample supplies at the time of their death.
In 1979, Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen exposed the myth of Captain Scott as the tragic hero, laying bare his furtive, inept leadership and vanity. However, the life and character of Oates have remained shrouded in the mystery and legend preserved by Caroline Oates, his formidable mother, who concealed and then destroyed his diary and repelled all attempts at a serious biography.
Did Mrs Oates have something to hide? Oates never married and was supposed to have died a virgin, but in a surprising final chapter Smith tells how in 1900, aged twenty, Oates fathered a child by an 11-year-old Scots girl, Henrietta McKendrick. Immediately after the birth, the baby girl was taken from her mother and handed over to an orphanage in the south of England, where she was named Kathleen Gray.
In 1926, Kathleen Gray learned from the owner of the orphanage that her mother was a woman already known to her, a frequent visitor and benefactor to the orphanage, and that her father was Lawrence Oates. When Kathleen confronted Oates’s mother with the facts of their relationship she was turned away from the doorstep of Gestingthorpe, the country home that had become Mrs Oates’s shrine to her favourite son.
Such revelations may encourage fresh efforts at a biography, but Smith’s promises to be the definitive life. Like Huntford before him, Smith goes into the many failings of character and organisation that dogged the expedition, but he does not write as a debunker. With I am just going outside, Michael Smith has greatly deepened our understanding of the main figures in the heroic age of Polar exploration and drawn what should stand as the most rounded picture we are likely to get of the short, unfulfilled life of Captain Lawrence Oates.
The Diaries of Sir Ernest M. Satow, British Minister in Tokyo, (1895-1900): A Diplomat Returns to Japan. Edited and annotated by Ian Ruxton, with an Introduction by Nigel Brailey. (Edition Synapse), 524 pp.
When one considers the contribution made by Ernest Satow (1843-1929) to our understanding of Japan and his part in promoting the Anglo-Japanese Alliance at the turn of the last century, it comes as a surprise to learn that he was the British Minister Plenipotentiary here for only five years, before leaving to perform the same function in Beijing. But of course, Satow’s effectiveness as Britain’s Plenipotentiary had much to do with his long, eventful stint on her diplomatic team, from his arrival in 1862 as a youth of nineteen, until his departure in 1883.
Ernest Satow’s diaries have long been a valued resource for historians in Japan and in the West. A two-volume translation into Japanese by Shozo Nagaoka came out in 1989-91, but Ian Ruxton’s extensively annotated edition of the 1895-1900 diaries, covering Satow’s tenure as Britain’s Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan, is the first such approach in English. Ruxton’s notes inevitably draw on Nagaoka’s edition, but as the premier Satow specialist among Western historians, he has also undertaken a great deal of independent research in Japanese and English, making this volume an easy and informative read.
Satow was the first and is still the supreme exemplar in that long, quirky line of British scholar-diplomats (sometimes more scholar than diplomat) posted to Japan: John Harrington Gubbins, Charles Eliot, the scholar of Japanese Buddhism, Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, author of a series of scandalous Japan novels under the pseudonym ‘John Paris’, the cultural historian George Sansom and, more recently, Hugh Cortazzi, Margaret Thatcher’s long-suffering envoy in the 1980s.
Arriving in 1862, in the waning years of the Tokugawa Bakufu, the young Satow soon gained perhaps the best inside knowledge of contemporary Japanese politics of any British representative to Japan. By his early twenties, Satow was on close terms and playing an important advisory role with key personalities among the anti-Bakufu forces, conversing without strain with the future leaders of Japan, in their own language.
One can’t help wondering how informal these exchanges can have been. Did Satow sometimes ask Koin Kido, perhaps the most learned of the group, to check his kanji or confirm a reading? Did he check their English? Did they compliment him on his use of chopsticks? Satow was too much the diplomat to say, but he did record a great deal of these encounters in his early diaries, which Ian Ruxton has also edited in a separate volume.
Domestically, the period covered in Ian Ruxton’s annotated edition was peaceful compared to the years of the Meiji Ishin, but as Minister Plenipotentiary (Britain sent no full ambassador until 1905), Satow certainly had his hands full. These were the years of the Hirobumi Ito and Aritomo Yamagata ministries, characterised by a sort of musical chairs between Japan’s emerging constitutionalism, represented by Ito, and a benevolent, emperor-coated dictatorship stage-managed by Yamagata.
Satow favoured the Ito approach, perhaps because it resembled so closely the middling democracy that seemed best suited to British political life. Ito himself, on 16 May 1896, ‘expressed regret that [in Japan] there were not two parties as in England, who could take turn and turn about’ (p.93). In this conversation, both spoke informal Japanese, although Ito was a good speaker of English.
Internationally, these were extraordinary years for Japan, beginning with the successful completion of her war against China (1894-5) and ending with her exemplary participation in the international expedition against the Boxer Rising in China. In these years, Satow also initiated some of the early moves and conversations that led to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, and one of the pleasures of the diary is watching the notion of an alliance approach fruition.
With hindsight, the Alliance can certainly be seen as Satow’s crowning achievement, but it was far from a done thing in these years. For all the informality Satow records here in his conversations with Hirobumi Ito, we should remember that Ito was one of the main obstacles to the Alliance, preferring an agreement with Russia.
Besides recording key domestic and international issues, Satow’s diaries also chronicled regular holiday breaks around Lake Chuzenji near Nikko, where Satow kept a second house with a Japanese woman and their two sons (his position forbade marriage). Here, according to one visitor, “Everything goes like clockwork – but without the tick” in a strenuous routine of climbing, rowing and dining. As a welcome bonus, Ian Ruxton has combined these entries in a section called ‘The Lake Chuzenji Daries’.
Long overdue but well worth the wait, The Diaries of Sir Ernest M. Satow, British Minister in Tokyo, (1895-1900): A Diplomat Returns to Japan finally grants access to a perceptive and privileged view of Japanese history, written from the eye of the storm. Ian Ruxton has performed scholarly wonders in clarifying Satow’s busy, allusive record. One can only hope that his publisher will see fit to reissue this volume in a more affordable form.
Autobiography of a Geisha by Sayo Masuda. Translated by G. G. Rowley (New York: Columbia University Press), pp.186.
Nobody, and certainly not Arthur Golden, ever went broke overestimating the world’s appetite for geisha. Always amused, always interested, these hardy perennials of the Japanese scene have been around for so long that we have almost stopped asking what it is that they do, let alone why they do it.
We know that geisha entertain and play musical instruments at parties and banquets, and that this sort of entertainment is very special and beyond the reach of most Japanese. But perhaps because the games and the musical accomplishments seem to our modern sensibility more than a little insipid, we tend to wonder if a geisha’s well-heeled punters might not expect a more substantial return on their investment.
Sayo Masuda was a hot springs geisha, working in the resort of Suwa in Nagano, from the 1930s, when she was twelve, until the 1950s. In her day at least, hot springs geisha lived and worked at the lower end of the trade, and for them sex was not so much an additional refinement or a remote possibility as part of the deal, to be expected. Meeting this expectation did not mean that hot springs geisha were engaged in common prostitution, for much of their work involved the exercise of hard-earned musical and social skills, but geisha gained ‘points’ when they slept with customers and these went to pay off the debt they had incurred to the geisha house. At the end of the day the distinction between whoring and being a geisha must have seemed fine-drawn.
In this memoir, published in Japanese in the late 1950s and given fresh life in this compelling translation by G. G. Rowley, Sayo Masuda’s experience does little to redeem the demi-monde of Suwa or the family that brought her there. Masuda was born in poor circumstances in 1925, possibly the result of a brief liaison. At a very young age, her mother left her with an uncle who, when she was five or six, sent her to work as a nursemaid with local landowners. When Sayo was twelve, her mother sold her to a geisha house on Lake Suwa. In 1940, after four years training, Masuda began work as a geisha.
Such is the bleak resume of Masuda’s early life. Her account is so devoid of self-pity as to heighten the sense of a personality robbed of all hope, so that what little sense of self remained to her seems to have become focused to a terrible sharpness. The fundamentals of Masuda’s experience were that her childhood brought her nothing but cruelty whereas her adolescent ‘freshness’ commanded such a good price that her virginity was sold not to one but to four different Suwa bigwigs.
These lessons were not lost on her, and if this were a novel, Masuda would be a monster of voluptuous indifference, lording it over judges in nappies, triumphantly reversing the social order. By her own account, she goes some way in this direction by developing a sort of cracked wit and bonhomie that patrons find intriguing, and in patiently making a name for herself and racking up her price and her ‘points’.
Something truer seems to happen when Masuda meets romantic love for the first time. Convinced of her worthlessness, she walks away. But the experience throws Masuda completely and sends flying the whole bitter scaffolding of her experience and her knowledge of men. From then on, she loses all purpose and professional focus, turns to drink and comes close to insanity.
With all the world watching Japan’s imperial project flare so brightly over Southeast Asia, Sayo Masuda’s pithy life and times offer a slice of experience oblivious of yet umbilically connected to the national struggle. When the military adventure turns sour, Masuda’s career as a geisha has also begun to falter. By the time the American conquerors come swaggering in, with every prospect of restoring her fortunes, she has lost all interest in whoring. Describing this trajectory from the bitter pragmatic to the utterly indifferent, Autobiography of a Geisha is one of those rare books that had to be written and therefore has to be read.