Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (6 page)

In Tohoku, the frost and snow of March had given way to flies and mosquitoes. If Rikuzentakata was anything to go by, the clean-up operation had advanced significantly in just five months. The town was still a wreck, but it was a pretty ordered wreck. Much of the rubble had been cleared away or piled into neat mountains. Cars, bent, twisted and crushed almost beyond recognition, were carefully stacked as if ready for sale. Lumber was piled to one side, household bric-à-brac to another. Local authorities were struggling to figure out what to do next. There simply wasn’t enough space in Japan to bury
the millions of tonnes of rubble. In neighbouring Miyagi prefecture alone, rescue services piled up 16 million tonnes, the equivalent of nineteen years of general refuse. In Rikuzentakata, the city grid had been neatly exposed, cleared of debris. A casual observer might have thought this was a new town, with a neat scheme of intersecting roads already marked out. The Capital Hotel stood silhouetted against the flattened landscape, like some post-modern version of the Hiroshima A-Bomb Dome, the solitary and skeletal building left standing near the hypocentre.

I met Sasaki outside the shell of the hotel that used to employ him. I had been given his number by one of the tens of thousands of volunteers who had travelled up to Rikuzentakata, and other similarly devastated coastal towns, to help pile up the rubble and dig out the mud. Sasaki gave me a tour of the hotel’s wrecked interior. His itinerary was as well thought out as if he were an estate agent showing me around a new building and trying to clinch a sale. From the outside, the hotel looked reasonably intact, though the wall of the ground floor had been ripped away in several places. There was a large jaunty logo in red and pink above the main entranceway, but the hotel itself was quite deserted. Inside, it smelt of the sea. There was shattered glass everywhere. Wire and strips of metal dangled from the ceiling. There were piles of splintered wood, and a few pine trunks that had come crashing through the picture windows facing the ocean. We walked up the stairwell, its thick carpet matted with mud and scattered with pine cones. Broken chairs lay everywhere. We headed up, following the same path that Sasaki had taken after the earthquake. There was less mud and rubble on the fourth floor. The fifth floor was basically fine. By the time we reached the roof, Sasaki was pouring with sweat. We looked at the bay and the ocean, calm and unthreatening. He pointed out where the beach and its 70,000 pines had once stood and the single remaining tree. ‘It has become a symbol of our hope,’ he said.

There’s another, less heartwarming, story associated with the 70,000 pines of Rikuzentakata, one that speaks less well of the ability of Japanese to pull together in times of strain. Sasaki told me about it when we went to see his temporary house, a well-built wooden structure situated in the hills a little way from town. On a small table he
had set out watermelon and Calpis, a milky coloured soft drink. A photograph of his wife was on a little altar in the corner, incense and apples placed before her likeness. ‘Please have a seat in my palace,’ he said with a grin, placing a cushion on the floor.

In March, after the tsunami waters had receded and many of the dead bodies had been recovered, the survivors wanted to mark the deaths of those who had perished. Not all had yet been identified. ‘Some entire families were lost,’ he said, studying the floor. ‘So there’s no one left living to look for the bodies. There’s a lot of people like that.’ Their ashes were placed in wooden boxes, wrapped in white muslin and stored in the Fumonji temple, like many Buddhist places of worship built on higher ground, and thus undamaged by the tsunami. Some bodies had been unidentifiable, at least by sight. In June, a corpse had washed up from the sea. ‘He may have been trapped in the rubble and his body dislodged by an aftershock,’ Sasaki said. It took a laboratory technician and a DNA test to determine that the corpse belonged to one of his school classmates.

What better way, thought the survivors of Rikuzentakata, to commemorate the dead than with the fallen pines. The townspeople carved some of the trunks into 340 woodblocks, on which they inscribed prayers and memorials for those who had died. The woodblocks were transported to Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, 425 miles to the south, to be burnt in the August festival on Mount Daimonji. In that great spectacle, giant fires are lit on the hills around Kyoto shaped into the three-stroke Chinese character representing ‘dai’ or ‘big’. The Gozan no Okuribi festival is a ceremony to send off the spirits of the dead, which, according to Buddhist tradition, come to visit their relatives in the hot, sticky weeks of mid-August.

There was a hitch. Residents of Kyoto protested that the woodblocks might be radioactive since Rikuzentakata was just 100 miles from the stricken nuclear plant at Fukushima; it might be dangerous to burn them. Officials refused to include them in the ceremony. Kyoto can be a closed, stand-offish city. It is to Japan what Japan is to the rest of the world. Its residents speak their own dialect, and many regard their culture as purer than that of other parts of the country. Tohoku, poor and marginalized for centuries, did not figure much on their radar. ‘From Kyoto, us northerners must seem like
oni
,’ Sasaki
said, using the word for devil. ‘The terrible thing is, there’s this idea, this image that the radiation fell here,’ he went on. ‘Kyoto is supposed to be the spiritual centre of Japan. We put our effort into writing on those pines and in the end they just looked out for themselves.’

Japan’s
hibakusha
, the survivors of the nuclear bombs, were often discriminated against by neighbours, who feared they might pass on contamination. After the tsunami, there were isolated instances of rescue workers refusing to evacuate people from close to the Fukushima nuclear plant and even evacuation centres turning people away until they had been screened for radiation. As for the 340 woodblocks, they were returned to Rikuzentakata, where they were incinerated in a square bonfire.

Even that was not the end of the saga. Feeling repentant and stung by the public outcry, Kyoto announced it had now changed its mind and was prepared to burn 500 woodblocks of Rikuzentakata pine. New blocks were duly prepared and dispatched. But when they were tested, tiny traces of radioactive caesium, which has a half-life of thirty years, were discovered. Once again, they were considered too dangerous to burn. Futoshi Toba, the mayor of Rikuzentakata who had lost his wife to the tsunami, even offered his apologies to the people of Kyoto for causing them anxiety. It was a dignified gesture. But it was the people of Rikuzentakata who deserved the apology.

Writing in the
Mainichi
newspaper, the columnist Hiroshi Fuse expressed sadness at the sorry affair. ‘Some people have criticized the Kyoto municipal government and the organizer as being “narrow minded” over the latest case, while others have appreciated their decision as “calm judgement not being overwhelmed by emotion”,’ he wrote. Personally he wondered why people were afraid of such minute levels of radiation. ‘I prayed to the Kyoto bonfire of 16 August that firewood from quake- and tsunami-hit areas can be burned in the Gozan no Okuribi festival next year.’
⁵

While Sasaki was telling the story of the rejected pine, I noticed that Toshiki had quietly left the table. When I looked over, I saw he had lit some incense. He was on his knees, head bowed, quietly praying to the photograph of Sasaki’s wife.

Double-bolted Land

Shimaguni

Japan is an island nation. That is a fact of enormous, not to say exaggerated, importance to many Japanese. In the Japanese language, the word for island is
shima
. In written form, it is represented by the ideograph of a bird sitting on top of a mountain as though, exhausted in flight, it had found a place to perch in the vastness of the ocean. The word for country is
kuni
. When the two are run together, they fuse into the magical sounding
shimaguni
, or ‘island nation’. The syllables have a sonorous heaviness about them, like the title of some lost epic. Even in everyday language, the term is occasionally invoked like an incantation, as though its very utterance settles everything. In the presence of foreigners, it can serve as the final word on the subject of Japan.
Shimaguni
. All there is to know – and all that can never be known – about an archipelago whose customs are felt to be beyond the understanding of outsiders.

Few would deny that Japan’s island status has had tangible effects on its history and culture, even if the Japanese tend to make too much of it. To the outsider, Japan can seem a mysterious, even unknowable, place. Before it was opened up by American warships in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japan spent long stretches of its history mostly shut off from western, if not Asian, influence. Both Japan and China, at one stage in their history, banned the construction of seafaring vessels capable of sailing far from land. In Japan’s case, that was largely to prevent its people from being poisoned by foreign ideas, whether those were Christianity or rebellion against the shogun who topped the feudal order. Thus, for a quarter of a millennium, until the country was prised open like a shell, the Japanese government forbade most people from entering or leaving Japan on pain of death.
Under the system of
sakoku
, or closed country, which operated from the early seventeenth century, only minimal contact was permitted with traders from Korea, China and Holland. Dutch vessels were restricted to the tiny man-made island of Dejima. Built in the shape of a fan off the coast of Nagasaki in Japan’s southwest, it was as much a prison as a port of entry.

Even before the period of
sakoku
, the waters that separated the Japanese archipelago from the Asian continent diluted the cultural influence exerted by China over Japan. At its closest point, roughly where the modern-day city of Fukuoka is located on the island of Kyushu, Japan lies some 120 miles from the Korean peninsula. That is nearly six times further than the mere twenty-one-mile gulch that divides Britain from continental Europe. China, the ancient civilization from which so much Japanese culture derived, is some 500 miles away, a formidable distance in centuries past.

•   •   •

Jared Diamond, an American thinker who has written extensively, and controversially, about the effects that geography can have on a nation’s development, argues that Japan’s location – 100 miles from the nearest continent – has had a distinct bearing on its culture.
¹
Despite what many British like to think, the islands that form the United Kingdom have been closely integrated with the continental landmass for hundreds of years. There has not been a single century in the last ten in which British armies have been absent from the European continent. Britain itself has been invaded by Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. By contrast, Japanese armies have ventured onto the Asian mainland only twice, in the 1590s, when the newly unified country invaded the Korean peninsula, and in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Japan annexed Korea and attacked China. Conversely, apart from what may have been a large influx of Koreans 2,300 years ago, Japan has escaped the military conquests that have shaped other nations.
²
The Mongols twice failed to invade, in 1274 and 1281. On the second occasion, the ships of Kublai Khan were wrecked by a typhoon, the ‘divine wind’, or
kamikaze
, from which the name of Japan’s suicide pilots was later taken.

Even after its defeat in the Second World War, Japan was spared full colonization. The Americans, under the command of General Douglas
MacArthur, stayed only seven years and ran the country at arm’s length through a local bureaucracy. That was not even long enough to leave a strong tradition of proficiency in the English language. Even today, Japan scores worse in English tests than almost all other Asian nations. When the Dalai Lama visits Japan, he is sometimes asked what would most benefit the country. Tibet’s spiritual leader never fails to disappoint his audience. Instead of philosophy or religion, he has more practical advice on how Japan can better integrate with the world. ‘Learn English,’ he says.
³

Japan’s position on the extreme east of the Eurasian continent made it a backwater in which concepts developed on the mainland came late and took on their own form, like algae in a stagnant pond. From China, often via the Korean peninsula, came new ideas: written language, Confucianism, Buddhism, architecture, metallurgy and poetry. But once these concepts arrived, they fused with Japan’s nativist traditions to undergo a subtle transformation. Undisturbed by a constant back and forth across land borders, ideas took their own course. In religion, Buddhism melded with animism, ancestor veneration and Shinto beliefs. Today, shrines dedicated to foxes sit alongside temples devoted to the Buddha. Acknowledging their religious syncretism, the Japanese like to say they are born Shinto, marry Christian and die Buddhist. In surveys most describe themselves as atheists. In language too, Japan absorbed Chinese characters developed on the mainland several thousand years ago. By the late Shang Dynasty (1600–1029
BC
), the Chinese were scratching characters on the back of turtle shells as part of royal divination ceremonies. Many hundreds of years later, Japan, which had no native writing system, adapted the same characters to their own, entirely distinct, language. Partly because the fit was imperfect, the Japanese created two more phonetic alphabets known as
kana.
Today’s written Japanese is a mixture of the three scripts, one Chinese and two homegrown.

This cultural appropriation and subtle subversion of outside influence is hardly unique to Japan. But the distance between Japan and the outside world, both physical and psychological, perhaps exaggerated the phenomenon. The Japanese adapt what comes from outside. They mix strips of seaweed or sea urchin in their pasta. They use the term
sebiro
to mean suit, mostly unaware that the word is a distortion of Savile Row,
a London street famed for its men’s tailors.
⁴
More recently, they have taken western technology and modified it. In the inventive hands of Japanese engineers, trains became bullet trains, and mobile phones morphed into powerful computers (and electronic wallets) well before the onset of Apple’s iPhone. Even the humble western toilet, adapted to the Japanese mania for cleanliness, became a high-tech contraption of sprays, massage nozzles and hot-air dryers. Yet the modern rarely supplants the old entirely. In many public lavatories, these lavatorial wonders sit alongside old-fashioned squat toilets just one up from a hole in the ground.

The oceans around Japan are not merely shock absorbers that break the intensity of foreign influence. The sea itself has become part of Japanese culture. Its people have a relationship with their surrounding waters perhaps more intimate than inhabitants of any other large nation. No part of the Japanese archipelago lies more than eighty miles from the ocean, still the country’s main source of protein despite the relatively recent encroachment of milk and meat. Old Jomon mounds, some dating back more than 10,000 years, have traces of fish bones from multiple species, indicating how long the Japanese have been active fishermen.

The influence of the ocean on culture is ubiquitous. Sporting fans eat octopus balls at baseball matches and shopkeepers sometimes offer young children not sweets, but raw shrimp, as a treat. In the same way that people discuss the weather or football in England, the Japanese talk excitedly about the coming into season of a particular fish. In Tohoku and other coastal regions, the years when great tsunamis struck the coast are remembered like the dates of battles. The very language is awash in watery imagery. A lackey or sidekick is a ‘goldfish poo’ trailing behind its master. What we would call a ‘spike’ in English, say in the price of gold, is
unagi nobori
, or ‘surging eel’. (A canned drink by the same name was launched a few years ago.) Prime ministers have been known to compare themselves to fish: one likened himself to a loach, an unflashy bottom-dwelling creature well suited, he said, to muddy politics.
⁵
Even in moments of extreme distress, the ocean may be the first thing that comes to mind. A mother who witnessed the atomic mushroom cloud spreading malevolently over Hiroshima mouthed in horror: ‘It moves like a sea slug.’
⁶

•   •   •

Japan is not a single island, but an archipelago. Its four main islands – Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu – stretch 1,200 miles from the northeast to the southwest, forming an apostrophe on the edge of the Eurasian landmass. That makes Japan roughly the same length as the east coast of America, though its total area is no bigger than the state of Montana. Even then, over two-thirds of Japan’s territory comprises steep mountains that are virtually uninhabitable, while only 17 per cent of its land is arable. Thus, the country’s 127 million inhabitants are squeezed into an area about the same size as Bulgaria. In other ways, though, Japan is not small at all. If it were in western Europe, it would be the continent’s most populous nation by far, with more people than Britain and Italy combined. Economically, notwithstanding two supposedly ‘lost decades’, it remains a giant with an output half as big again as Germany.

Japan’s island status has helped foster the idea that it is somehow unique among civilizations. Of course, it is not the only country to consider itself unique. During the US 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, made it clear he put his faith in ‘that special nature of being an American’. Barack Obama, the US president, has been taken to task for questioning the concept of American exceptionalism. Still, the idea of Japan’s separateness from other cultures has gained currency among both foreigners and Japanese themselves, though many, as we shall see, vigorously, and properly, contest the notion. Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book
The Clash of Civilizations
divides the world into seven categories, of which Japan – alone – has a category of its own.

At its most benign, discussion of Japan’s uniqueness is an attempt to define the country by explaining what makes it different, in the way that all cultures are different from one another. Yet obsession with the idea of Japan’s supposedly uniquely homogeneous, group-oriented society has become a fetish. At its worst, it has slipped into a dangerous assertion of racial superiority. It was, after all, a sense of Japan’s uniquely divine origins and its emperor-centred system – a mythology largely manufactured in the late nineteenth century – that stoked its poisonous sense of manifest destiny in the 1930s and 40s.

It is not only the Japanese who have laboured the country’s supposed uniqueness.
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
, written in
1946 by Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist, painted a picture of the Japanese as ‘the most alien enemy the United States has ever fought in an all-out struggle’. Explaining why it was incumbent to study Japan’s culture so closely, she wrote: ‘In no other war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of acting and thinking.’ The underlying assumption of the book – of a people with codes of behaviour entirely distinct from those of westerners – made it respectable to see Japan as a nation apart. After the war, the success of
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
helped breathe life into an entire genre of writing called
Nihonjinron,
or ‘treatise on what makes Japan separate’. The form had its origins as far back as the seventeenth century but reached an apogee in more modern times. In 1977, Joji Mori, a poet and English teacher, wrote a treatise on Japan’s group-oriented society called
The Shell-less Egg
.
⁷
The book postulated that Europeans and Americans were like eggs with their own shell, self-contained individuals. The Japanese, by contrast, were shell-less – sticky rather than hard, amorphous rather than rigid. They did not, the book argued, conceive of themselves as individual human beings unless defined in relation to family, village, workplace, superiors and inferiors, insiders and outsiders. By the 1980s, when some Japanese became convinced their nation’s unique characteristics would propel it past America to become the world’s economic superpower, whole sections of bookshops were devoted to these self-absorbed tracts.

Nihonjinron
builds on the phoney concept of a racially homogenous society. One only has to look at the faces on a Tokyo or Osaka subway to realize that the Japanese originated from many different parts of Asia. Nevertheless, the idea of a pure Japanese essence persists. This would have it that the Japanese are cooperative, sedentary rice farmers, not garrulous, mobile hunter-gatherers; that they have a unique sensitivity to nature; that they communicate without language through a sort of social telepathy; that they use instinct and ‘heart’ rather than cold logic, and that they have a rarefied artistic awareness. Much emphasis is placed on the advantages of a harmonious society. Taiichi Ono, considered the father of the ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing method that revolutionized Japanese productivity after the war, cheerily told a documentary filmmaker, ‘With a racially homogenous
workforce, it’s much easier to discuss things. In fact, it is perfectly natural for us to have a unanimous agreement in whatever we undertake.’
⁸

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, when I moved to Tokyo as a foreign correspondent, talk of Japan’s uniquely admirable qualities had faded somewhat along with the vigour of its economy. ‘When I hear people talking about
ishin-denshin
, I wonder what they have in their heads,’ Noritoshi Furuichi, an academic, told me, referring to a belief in a unique Japanese ability to communicate non-verbally. ‘The interesting thing about
Nihonjinron
is the extent to which the Japanese want to believe it.’