Category Archives: Japan

by | 10 June 2006 · 4:59 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Tanchou, Momonga, Kuroten

Among the things I’ll miss when I leave Japan at the end of this month are NHK nature shows. The photography is often spectacular, of course, but the spare and clear narrative style, with equally spare but clear captions on screen, are perfect for an obsessive language-learner who watches Japanese TV with denshi jisho in hand—and a mute button within easy reach if it’s a commercial channel. Here are three animal names I learned while watching a show about Hokkaido wildlife recently.

丹頂 tanchou ‘Japanese crane, red-crested white crane’ – The 丹 is ‘red’ (as in cinnabar or vermilion), while the 頂 is ‘crest, peak, summit’, so the prosaic version of the name is ‘red crest’.

ももんが momonga ‘Eurasian flying squirrel’ – A rare, nocturnal creature of the far north whose image graces Estonian postage stamps. It’s possible to write the name much more obscurely in kanji, but I don’t see the point, and neither did NHK.

くろてん kuroten ‘sable’ – There are at least three kinds of てん (a native Japanese word that can also be written 貂): 黒てん kuroten ‘sable‘, 白てん shiroten ‘ermine‘, 松てん matsuten ‘pine marten‘. (These flesh-and-blood creatures are not to be confused with the animé “Black Angel” Kuroten. Nor should ermines be confused with ferrets!)

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by | 2 June 2006 · 12:29 am

Chindonya with Saxophone in Utsunomiya

utsunomiya chindonyaYesterday I met a friend in Utsunomiya, a city regionally famous for its gyoza and its jazz. (It’s the hometown of Sadao Watanabe and it was the home base of a division deployed to China during Japan’s more warlike days.) It’s awfully hard to find much gyoza or jazz in Utsunomiya before the sun goes down, but we did come across a chindonya troupe that included a saxophonist who did a great job of imparting a Japanese feel to her playing.

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by | 28 May 2006 · 11:33 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Imari, Potters, and Abduction

Recently the Far Outliers finally got around to visiting one of Ashikaga City’s principal tourist attractions, the Kurita Museum near the Flower Park, both of which lie in the outlying town of Tomita, one JR train stop to the east.

The beautiful Kurita Museum grounds house not only one of the finest and largest collections of Imari and Nabeshima porcelain (磁器 jiki) in the world, they also include exhibits of international archaeological finds and pottery-making techniques, a climbing kiln (登り窯 noborigama, as opposed to the single-chamber 穴釜 anagama), gift and snack shops, and an off-limits working potters’ village. The Sushi and Maple Syrup blogger has posted a lot of photos from a weekend visit to the Museum (and Ashikaga Gakko) last year.

伊萬里 (or 伊万里) Imari – My sources seem to indicate that Imari is one subset of Arita ware and Nabeshima is another. They were all manufactured in Arita (有田), in Saga Prefecture in northwest Kyushu. Imari is the port (near Hirado in neighboring Nagasaki Prefecture) from which export varieties were shipped, and Nabeshima (鍋島 ‘Pot Island’) is the name of the Saga domain lords who controlled production, guarded secrets, and commissioned works of the highest quality for their peers in Japan.

As porcelain grew in popularity, the Nabeshima Clan took steps to keep their production and decorating techniques a closely guarded secret. They were aided in this effort by the Tokugawa Shogunate and other feudal lords, who commissioned the Nabeshima Clan to make porcelain for only the elite classes — the sale of Nabeshima ware to commoners was actually forbidden, and the number of kilns and wheels was strictily limited by law.

無名陶工 Mumei toukou ‘Unnamed potters’ – The highest point on the grounds of the Kurita Museum is a memorial hall dedicated to all the unknown potters whose work Mr. Kurita so obviously cherishes. Unfortunately, Mr. Kurita’s flowery words of appreciation fail to note that the first of these potters were Korean, and that at least one went by the name Ri Sampei in Japanese (李参平, 1579-1655).

In the early 1600s, Nabeshima Naoshige, the feudal lord of the Sage [sic] Clan, brought a group of Korean potters to Japan, including the potter Risampei, who in 1616 discovered a superior white-stoned clay at Izumiyama (Izumi Mountain, Arita). Wares fired with this earth are called “hakuji” (white porcelain …). Some say this was the beginning of Arita Ware.

拉致 ratchi or rachi ‘abduction’ – This word is much in the Japanese news these days as the government and individual citizens seek to determine the fate of various young people thought to have been abducted by North Korea in order to teach Japanese to North Korean spies. After failing to find the word (under either pronunciation variant) in my electronic dictionary, I had to resort to looking up the individual characters. The first kanji (拉, Sino-Japanese ratsu) is used to indicate the sound Ra as an abbreviation for Raten ‘Latin’ (which is usually written in katakana when spelled in full). But 拉 also appears in the native Japanese verb 拉ぐ hishigu ‘crush, smash, overpower’ and in the Sino-Japanese verb 拉っする rassuru ‘drag along; kidnap’. The second kanji, whose Sino-Japanese reading is chi, is used to write 致す itasu ‘do; send; cause; render (assistance); exert (oneself)’, as in どう致しまして dou itashimashite ‘what have I done (to deserve thanks)?’ (= ‘Not at all / Don’t mention it’).

The Japanese arts website bleu et blanc provides a succinct account of the role of international supply and demand in the early history of Imari ware. (“Blue-and-white” is the English epithet for 染付け sometsuke porcelain. Literally, it means ‘dye added’ but the default coloring agent for porcelain was cobalt, just as the default dye for textiles was indigo, which I recently heard is also effective as an insect repellent.)

Porcelain was first fired in Hizen province of Northern Kyushu in the early 17th century by Korean potters, and most likely by the potter named Ri Sanpei, who was brought to Japan by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in his second invasion of Korea in 1597.

Early examples were somewhat primitive (but now highly prized) white or celadon toned wares, decorated with underglaze cobalt blue, until the 1640s when the first enamels were fired in red, green, blue, yellow, purple, and eventually gold; associated with the first enamels is the famous Sakaida Kakiemon (1596-1666). Before long Dutch traders aggressively sought to obtain Japanese porcelains, whose sources in China had been disrupted due to political turmoil [the fall of the Ming and rise of the Qing dynasties]; they quickly turned to Arita to provide for European demands. The first large order at Arita was placed by the VOC in 1653, and in a short time the area enjoyed prosperity as providers for the European elite, with export production reaching a peak in the 1680s, the beginning of Arita’s “golden age.”

While market demand continued for some time into the 18th century, Arita could not compete with China, who from a near cessation of operations in the 17th century, rebounded in the 18th century. The last official order from the VOC in 1759 was for three hundred pieces, and the VOC itself was dissolved in 1799.

Simultaneously, and more substantially, Arita provided for its own domestic market throughout its long history. Both style and form evolved parallel with artistic and cultural trends, and show the strong influence at different times of Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu), Chinese ceramics, painting trends, and Chinese style tea ceremony (Sencha). Some of these domestic pieces were exported privately and incidentally to the West, however much of upper tier pieces were reserved for use by feudal lords and like members of society. Arita porcelains are remarkable for their rich variations in form, style and subjects.

POSTSCRIPT: To those who think I am suggesting a moral equivalence between contemporary North Korea and contemporary Japan, let me suggest a much better match, one between Kim Il Sung, would-be unifier of a fractured Korea, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, successful unifier of a fractured Japan. That should irritate both Korean and Japanese nationalists.

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by | 25 May 2006 · 9:40 pm

Knowing How to Use vs. Knowing About Keigo

Information presented in the how-to industry confirms that the formal grammar of keigo [‘polite language’] itself is not the central issue for Japanese speakers. Of much greater interest are situations associated with keigo or that call for particular language. In the classes I took at the hanashikata-kyōshitsu [‘how-to-speak classroom’] formal instruction was kept to a minimum. Even when it was included, its function seemed to be as much to lend credibility to the enterprise as to teach. When our formal knowledge was tested in the hanashikata-kyōshitsu, the results frequently brought me up short. As we sat through numerous keigo quizzes, I noticed that a friend, a woman in her thirties, was consistently befuddled when asked to provide, for example, the honorific (sonkeigo) form of iu [‘say’] (ossharu); the humble kenjōgo form for iku ‘go’ (mairu); or the error in Okyaku-sama no onamae wa nan to mōsararemasu ka? ‘What do you say your name is?’ (Mōsararemasu is incorrect because it is an honorific inflection [-araremasu] attached to a humble verb [mōs-u].)

These were tasks that I, as a language student and a linguist, found eminently reasonable and even comforting. But for most of those around me, including my friend, appeared to find such tasks frustrating and artificial. They exhibited consternation at the analysis of language. But at the same time, I never heard my friend err in any of her conversations with our instructors. She may have lacked the confidence in or been suspicious of what educational psychologists term her “declarative” knowledge of Japanese, but she was far from inept in her “procedural” know-how. She just used common sense—and apparently took comfort in the instructor’s excursus on the importance of correct keigo. What she lacked, in my estimation, was confidence in her own ability to apply her common sense to heretofore unknown situations. So to the extent that the hanashikata-kyōshitsu class expanded its participants’ horizons, it served an educational purpose. But from the relational perspective, the proffered advice of how-to does not serve actually to instruct consumers in using language. Rather, it lays out familiar (to the insider) contexts that serve as frames for keigo usage that speakers may not have seen or heard before.

This is surely one way in which native speakers differ from non-natives, as I had demonstrated to me again and again. One aspect of the hanashikata-kyōshitsu that I found instructive was the constellation of contexts and other phenomena that came together in the course of a class—naturally for the Japanese participants, in edifying fashion for me. One example of this was the six-week class called shikaisha yōsei senka ‘training for emcees’. A shikaisha in Japan is the person who chairs the PTA meeting, operates as master of ceremonies at weddings, or in general runs the social event. We were given specific training for weddings and business meetings, but we also did a unit on running outings for work associates. In our case, because it was May, and spring was upon us, we elected to role-play a get-together at a park to engage in hanami (cherry-blossom viewing). I learned that for such get-togethers there are secondary roles that had to be filled, for which the shikaisha was ultimately responsible: the person who made the reservation, the “treasurer” who collected each participant’s contribution, the person who acted as uketsuke ‘receptionist’ for the event. There was also an agreed-upon progression for the event itself, where each person was given a chance to speak in front of the group. Each of us was expected to practice and gain control of the language forms associated with our role. My colleagues were already inculcated in the roles, as well as in the secondary basic communicative practices (who did what when). Keigo emerged as just one aspect of the whole package of what it meant to be a shikaisha.

Such conflation of language and the real world is not unique to Japan.

SOURCE: Keigo in Modern Japan: Polite Language from Meiji to the Present, by Patricia J. Wetzel (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 99-100

If only foreign languages were taught in Japan in the same way as keigo, that is, as an instrument of social interaction rather than as a body of facts to be memorized and tested on.

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by | 25 May 2006 · 1:21 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Noborifuji, Shakunage, Tsurubara

This afternoon the Outliers paid another visit to the Ashikaga Flower Park. We waited until the peak season crowds had cleared and the price had dropped, thereby saving ¥600 each at the cost of missing the Park’s signature exhibit: the huge arbors of purple, white, and yellow blossoms hanging from massive wisteria trees (藤 fuji). But the great profusion of roses (バラ, bara), clematis (クレマチス, kuremachisu), and rhododendrons (シャクナゲ, shakunage) almost made up for it. And so did the chance to learn a little more about plants and their names—in English as well as Japanese.

上り藤 noborifuji ‘ascending wisteria’ – Although we missed the hanging wisteria, we discovered another plant still in bloom whose nickname in Japanese is ‘ascending wisteria’: lupines, also called ルピナス, rupinasu (pictured above). I remember first reading about lupines while devouring a lot of Steinbeck during language school in Monterey, California, but had never really studied them up close, and had certainly never compared them to wisteria.

石楠花 shakunage ‘rhododendron’ – When I checked the labels and read their name in kanji, it took me a good while to figure out that what seemed to be seki+nan+ka ‘stone+camphor+flower’ was actually read shaku+na+ge and meant ‘rhododendron‘. That’s why plant identification labels in Japan usually render the names in katakana.

つるバラ tsurubara ‘rambling rose’ – When we first encountered a long hedgerow with trellises, the flowers didn’t look like roses, but a nearby label identified them as tsurubara カクテル (kakuteru, ‘cocktail’ probably meaning ‘hybrid’). The flowers looked a bit like John Cabot explorer roses, but with golden centers. They turned out to be just one of the varieties of rambling roses (or climbing roses) on display in the park.

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by | 16 May 2006 · 3:24 pm

Sumo’s Battle of the Ozeki

With the only consistent tournament winner and only reigning yokozuna (grand champion), Asashoryu, on the injured list, the competition is tight among the remaining top wrestlers as they reach the home stretch of the Natsu Basho, which ends on Sunday. (Inconsistent ozeki Tochiazuma, who won the opening tournament in January, also dropped out after a string of losses.)

Two veteran Japanese rikishi, ozeki (champion) Chiyotaikai and sekiwake (junior champion) Miyabiyama, share the lead (at 9-1) with the newly promoted Mongolian ozeki, Hakuho. However, both the Japanese veterans are relying on relatively crude techniques, mostly unrelenting thrusts and slaps, as they try to avoid the clinch. They face each other today, so one of them is going to fall off the lead. Hakuho seems favored to win, and he already has the calm, confident gravitas of a yokozuna (more so than Asashoryu, in my opinion).

Just one loss (at 8-2) behind the leaders are Japanese veteran ozeki Kaio (my favorite among the Japanese contenders), Mongolian “Supermarket of Tricks” Kyokushuzan, and the Estonian phenom Baruto (the “Balt”), Kaido Hoovelson, whose ceremonial apron shows a Viking helmet, and who rose to sumo’s Makuuchi division (the “Majors”) after winning the last Juryo (“Triple A”) division tournament with a perfect 15-0 record.

UPDATE, Day 12: Chiyotaikai lost first to Miyabiyama, and then to Kotomitsuki, dropping off the pace at 9-3; while Miyabiyama defeated the struggling Bulgarian Kotooshu to preserve his one loss at 11-1. So Miyabiyama, a veteran Japanese ozeki, remains neck-and-neck with Hakuho, a rookie Mongolian ozeki, in the home stretch, with the giant newcomer Baruto just one loss behind.

UPDATE, Day 13: All three leaders won. Hakuho (now 12-1) pulled down fellow ozeki Kotooshu (now 6-7), who risks demotion if he doesn’t win the next two bouts. Miyabiyama (now 12-1) shoved out Kyokushuzan (now 9-4). And Baruto (11-2) managed to get both hands on (yokozuna Asashoryu’s stablemate) Asasekiryu’s belt, immobilize him, then lift him up and drop him outside the ring. The rookie has done his homework and is winning respect. You might expect a wrestler of his size to just drive his opponents backward out of the ring, but over 13 days Baruto has won by 10 different techniques, many of them defensive moves where he helps his opponent charge down toward the clay or out of the ring.

UPDATE, Day 14: Well, Miyabiyama quickly ended the Estonian rookie’s dreams of winning the tournament during his makuuchi debut, handing him his 3rd loss. Baruto made the mistake of trying to force Miyabiyama’s head down. All that accomplished was to lower the center of gravity and concentrate the weight of the heaviest rikishi still wrestling. Hakuho and Miyabiyama remain at 13-1 and could face a final playoff if both win or both lose on Day 15, when Hakuho gets his shot at Baruto (11-3) and Miyabiyama faces Asasekiryu (10-4). Even if he doesn’t win the tournament, Miyabiyama is sure to win promotion from sekiwake to ozeki, while the Bulgarian Kotooshu (7-7) risks demotion from ozeki back to sekiwake unless he can defeat fellow ozeki Chiyotaikai (10-4) tomorrow.

UPDATE, Day 15: New ozeki Hakuho wins his first tournament after defeating Miyabiyama in a playoff. Both rikishi finished at 14-1 after Hakuho quickly left Baruto (11-4) prone on the clay and Miyabiyama shoved out Asasekiryu (11-4). Miyabiyama is likely to be the newest ozeki at the Nagoya basho in July. Kotooshu (8-7) barely managed to retain his rank by defeating fellow ozeki Chiyotaikai (10-5). However, the two Mongolian komusubi are likely to lose their ranks: small but scrappy Ama (4-11) and middle-of-the-pack Kyokutenho (5-10). Asasekiryu and Baruto may well replace them.

RELATED POSTS: Japundit’s Danny Bloom notes a Japan Times article about the differences between how well foreigners in Japan master Japanese in professional sumo and in professional baseball.

Twenty years ago, the most prominent foreign rikishi (sumo wrestlers) tended to be from Hawaii, which has a large Japanese-American population and close cultural ties with Japan. More recently, however, most foreign rikishi have hailed from Mongolia (Asashoryu), as well as Bulgaria (Kotooshu), Russia (Rohou) and other former Soviet bloc countries. Frequently appearing in TV interviews, the wrestlers do, of course, make the occasional error — but when they speak, they sound like sumo rikishi, and they express themselves in a manner remarkably similar to their Japanese counterparts [yeah, mumbling and inarticulate in both cases–J.].

This language proficiency, particularly among foreign grapplers from countries with only tenuous historical and cultural ties to Japan, has become a topic of academic study. Dr. Satoshi Miyazaki, a professor at the Graduate School of Japanese Applied Linguistics, Waseda University, began his field work in 1997….

“To learn the language, they don’t need a teacher or a dictionary,” Miyazaki says. “They just learn through osmosis. Foreign rikishi are not here to learn Japanese, but to learn sumo. But by learning sumo they have to learn Japanese. That’s their motivation. Many students who learn in classroom studies don’t know what to do with the language they learn. So it’s a matter of identity.”

And Japundit‘s baseball contributor (and NY Yankees fan) Mike Plugh has two informative posts about ironman Hideki Matsui’s wrist injury: a backgrounder, Godzilla vs. Misfortune, and an update on fan reactions in Japan and the U.S., Feeding the monster.

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by | 14 May 2006 · 9:19 pm

Guinness Record for Carp Streamers

On Sunday afternoon, the weather was clear enough that the Far Outliers made a short trip to see the already fading blossoms at Azalea Hill Park (つつじが岡公園) in nearby Tatebayashi in Gunma Prefecture. The white azaleas seemed to be the last to bloom and fade; the gaudier varieties were mostly well past their prime. It was a nice sprawling park, and the crowds were much more tolerable than they must have been the previous weekend.

Among the serendipitous delights we witnessed were the Guinness record-holding display of carp streamers (鯉のぼり koinobori)—set last year at 5,283, exceeded this year at 5,478—and a hothouse (温室 onshitsu) containing a wonderful range of tropical plants that made us nostalgic for tropical islands: palms, banyans, breadfruit, tree ferns, coffee trees, anthuriums, hibiscus, passion flowers, 等 (nado ‘etc.’).

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by | 10 May 2006 · 8:08 pm

Who Really Saved Kabuki After the War?

In the spring 2006 issue of Asian Theatre Journal, University of Hawai‘i professor emeritus of Asian theatre James R. Brandon offers a nice bit of revisionist history in Myth and Reality: A Story of Kabuki during American Censorship, 1945–1949 (Project Muse subscription required). Here’s the abstract:

American censors during the occupation of Japan after World War II unsuccessfully attempted to eliminate feudal themes and foster new democratic plays in kabuki. Contrary to popular myths, kabuki flourished under the Occupation, “banned” plays were rapidly released, the infamous “list of banned plays” was not significant, most American censors were captivated by kabuki, and credit for Occupation assistance to kabuki should not limited to one man, Faubion Bowers. Using archival records, I show that the Shōchiku Company, the major kabuki producer, successfully resisted the democratic aims of the Occupation. Shōchiku’s “classics-only” policy protected Japanese culture from American contamination and inadvertently fashioned the fossilized kabuki we know today.

Brandon’s conclusion enumerates “four proximate causes for kabuki‘s managers to hold aloof from Japan’s modern postwar world.”

First, as we have seen, SCAP was unable to mount an effective program of change. SCAP lacked the will to attack the tightly held world of monopolistic kabuki. American policies were inconsistent, personalized, and affected by rapid turnover of Occupation personnel….

A second reason is that Loyal Retainers, Ichinotani, and Subscription List are magnificent theatre pieces that Shōchiku producers were determined they would not give up. Producers knew audiences hungered to see the old favorites. They didn’t care if SCAP liked these plays or not….

A third reason is that it was psychologically difficult to create new kabuki plays about a ruined, poverty-stricken, postwar Japan. Had there been no war or had Japan been victorious, it seems very probable that the long tradition of staging new kiwamono [‘ephemeral, avant-garde goods’] would have continued in kabuki.…

A final reason kabuki did not modernize is that American theatre officials were quick to embrace traditional kabuki and call it a great theatre art. They did not, personally, want to be responsible for harming kabuki by banning plays…. This reification of the traditional mode of kabuki by highly regarded foreigners strongly contributed to classicizing (koten-ka) and aestheticizing (bijutsu-ka) the art in the decades that followed the Occupation.

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by | 9 May 2006 · 1:09 am

Carp Fan Rooting for the Giants?

Tonight I’m finding myself in the unusual position of rooting for the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, the team I generally love to see lose (like the NY Yankees). Part of the reason is that the Giants are playing against the 2004 merger-created Pacific League Orix Buffaloes, for whom I have no feeling at all.

But the main reason is that the Giants’ pitcher is Jeremy Powell, who used to pitch not just for the sorry-ass Buffaloes, but for the sorry-ass Montreal Expos—for whom I did have a bit of a soft spot when they were managed by Felipe Alou, who came to Japan with the San Francisco Giants when I was a kid. (I not only got their autographs; I also accompanied Alou with my dad on the train to Kyoto to speak at our church.)

I like Powell for four reasons: He’s effective, he’s paid his dues, he’s not arrogant, and he knows enough Japanese to answer the postgame interview questions (in English) before waiting for the translation. (Okay, both the questions and the answers are pretty predictable.) His positive attitude comes across very well in an interview last month with Rob Smaal of IHT-Asahi.

What’s been the biggest change since joining the Giants from the Buffaloes organization?

I think the biggest change is that actual pressure to win–the media puts it on them, the fans put it on them, the Giants are such a well-known team around the world. I also think the team unity here is way better. I just feel like everybody here is so much more professional, so much more into it, it’s exciting.

You had an RBI on Tuesday against the Carp. Since pitchers in the Pacific League usually don’t have to hit, how do you like swinging the bat?

It’s fun. I’m a terrible hitter right now, but I guess that’s not my job. I’ll try to go out there and bunt guys over when I have to. I want to try and help the offense out as much as I can. Like I said, it’s fun, kind of brings you back to Little League and high school again….

When you first came to Japan back in 2001 did you ever think you’d be here this long?

Never. It was really hard for me my first year mentally to adapt to the game over here. Toward the end of the (first) year I really changed my mind and started pitching better.

But I never thought I’d be here this long, no.

Describe your pitching style … what are your strengths as a pitcher?

Definitely I’m not an overpowering pitcher. At times I can overpower guys in certain innings, every once in a while I’ll have a good fastball. For the most part I’m mixing it up, just trying to keep the ball down, trying to establish both sides of the plate with the fastball that I do have. My breaking ball’s been a good pitch for me over here, it’s helped me be successful over here and I’ve gotta have that pitch. I’m kind of in between a power pitcher and a thumber (baseball slang for someone who throws a lot of offspeed and/or breaking stuff), I guess….

Your thoughts on the recent World Baseball Classic … good idea, bad idea?

I think it was a really good idea. I was glad to see everyone get together and play again since they took it out of the Olympics. Baseball is a huge sport and it’s just getting bigger around the world. To play games here, play games in the States, play games in Puerto Rico, at all those different venues–it’s great for the game to have the Japanese team win it and to have all those Japanese players going over to the States and doing well. For me personally, it’s great. I hope all the best for those guys that go over there because it makes the game look better everywhere. The WBC was a good showcase for the game.

Who were you cheering for in the WBC, Japan or the United States?

To be honest with you, I wanted to see Japan do well over there. I didn’t expect them to win it but I knew they’d do well. They have a good team and I just wanted them to do well and compete, and they did so it makes the game look good over here. For me, that’s all the better. I’ve been over here this long now and this is kind of where I made my niche so it’s a good thing.

I might even be willing to forgive Powell for his shutout of the Carp last month.

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by | 5 May 2006 · 3:53 pm

And in the Right Corner, Rikidozan, Representing …

Rikidozan was within striking distance of the top three ranks in all of sumo—sekiwake (junior champion), ozeki (champion), and yokozuna (grand champion)—ranks which were awarded by the Japan Sumo Association, the supreme governing body of the sport. But then Japan surrendered and the sport of the Emperor went into a tailspin….

As he started to feel the financial strain from his sport not turning a profit, Riki quit sumo and took a job in construction. His new employer was a tattooed yakuza gambler from the Sumiyoshi gang and sumo fan named Shinsaku Nita, who had special connection inside the [MacArthur’s] GHQ. Under Nita, Riki supervised construction projects at U.S. military camps, studied English in his spare time, and spent his evenings carousing on the Ginza, where one night he participated in a losing cabaret brawl that dramatically changed his life. His victorious opponent was a visiting Japanese-American Olympic weight lifting medalist and All-Hawaiian Body Building champion named Harold Sakata, who would later gain fame playing the steel-top-hat-flinging villain Oddjob in the James Bond movie Goldfinger.

In the wake of the altercation, the two men became friends and Sakata introduced Riki to a group of American professional wrestlers who were in Japan to promote growth of their “sport” in Japan. One thing led to another, and soon Rikidozan was training and wrestling in the States, where he proved to be more successful than anyone anticipated. Too unsophisticated to do anything more than fight all out, he combined karate chop attack with sumo thrusting techniques to compile a 295-5 record in a year’s worth of competition. Boxing Magazine ranked him in its annual list of the top ten pro wrestlers in the world.

Before departing for the United States in February 1952, Rikidozan had acquired Japanese citizenship and legally changed his name to Mitsuhiro Momota [from Kim Sin Rak]. The government family register now listed the Momotas of Nagasaki as his lawful parents and Omura his officially recognized birthplace. The move was necessary, in part, because his real country of birth was now known as the Communist People’s Republic of North Korea [sic] and was an avowed enemy of the United States. The only way he could get a visa to the United States was to have a Japanese passport. The only way he could get either one was to bury any trace of his true identity. But, as he discovered while wrestling in Honolulu, his first stop, there were other reasons to keep up the charade.

Billed as the “Japanese Tiger,” he found his every move cheered by an audience of almost exclusively Japanese-Americans, waving Rising Run flags and lustily yelling banzai.… For the man known as “Garlic Breath,” that must have indeed been hard to swallow. As were the taunts about Pearl harbor when he wrestled on the mainland, where the matches were racially charged in reverse. There, he found himself appearing alongside assorted Asians passing themselves off as Japanese with names like “Tojo” or “Mr. Moto,” wearing goatees and mustaches and exotic “Oriental” garb of red silk robes with high getas…. Demeaning as it may have been, the fans loved it and the economic lessons were obvious.

Thus, at the end of his U.S. hegira, Rikidozan returned to Japan and solicited support from Nita and others, including the ubiquitous [ultranationalist and head of the Japan Pro Wrestling Association Yoshio] Kodama, and launched his storybook career. It only worked, as Rikidozan well knew, because everyone viewed him as “Japanese.”…

The great Rikidozan deception reached its apogee in January 1963, when Rikidozan was sent to South Korea on a goodwill tour at the request of Kodama and the LDP to help break the ice that still existed between the ROK and Japan and thereby pave the way for the normalization treaty that so many interested parties wanted.

Despite intense anti-Japanese feelings in the ROK, where bitter memories of the long, brutal Japanese occupation and wartime atrocities remained, Rikidozan was a huge hero there. In fact, many Koreans had naturally assumed he was one of them because the Chinese ideographs for Rikidozan [力道山], although pronounced differently, represented the name of a mountain in Korea—a fact most people in Japan remained blissfully unaware of. (The name was subtle way by which Rikidozan could hang onto his identity.)

SOURCE: Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan, by Robert Whiting (Vintage, 2000), pp. 103-106

BTW, the names in this book are handled very sloppily. The index lists “Niita, Shinsaku, 104, 105” for what first appears as “Shinsasku Nita” on 104, and then “Nita” on 105 (and should have been “Shinsaku Nitta” and then “Nitta”). The index lists a trading company name as “Nishho Iwai, 182” for what first appears as “Nishho Iwai” on 182, then correctly as “Nissho Iwai” later in the same paragraph! In contrast, Jesse Kuhaulua‘s name is consistently misspelled both on p. 212 and in the index as Jesse Kualahula. I’m sure there are many more such errors in my copy, the 5th reprint of a new paperback edition published in 2000. I suppose Random House feels it’s good enough for the work of a journalist like Whiting.

UPDATE: Yikes. It gets worse. The index shows “Pyonyang, 107, 295” for what appears once on 107 as “Pyonyang” (where Rikidozan had an elder brother living at one time) and then appears once as “Pyonyang” at the top of 295, followed immediately by a coreferential “Pyongyang” in four successive sentences. The latter placename was apparently too obscure to rate its own spot in the index.

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