Category Archives: Japan

The commander decided to stay put for the night. It would give them time to bury the dead (after first severing their wrists to return hands to their homes). But digging in proved difficult, and after only 30 centimeters water appeared. So they did the opposite, they heaped earth to create a burial mound where they placed the corpses.

With two others, Tsuchikane was then ordered to ossify the wrists and hands by burning them to the bone. In an adjoining house, after sealing it and making sure no smoke escaped outside, they washed the pan from which they had just eaten their hot meal and put it on the stove. First they took commander Miyamoto’s hand from the mess tin and began to grill it. “Shuu, shuu,” it sizzled in the pan, with lots of grease escaping from the hand. Strong smoke with a hideous stench soon filled the room. It got unbearably hot and the three stripped to their loincloths as sweat cascaded down their bodies. One wrist took ages. Their chopsticks got shorter, catching fire many times owing to their efforts of turning the flesh and then burning away the muscle from the bones. The bones picked from the charcoal were transferred to a British tobacco can and passed on to the men waiting outside. They, in turn, put the bones in a white cloth and stored the packages with great care in their service bags.

The soldiers had promised each other to enter Singapore together, even if it were only their remains. They had fought together until today, they had eaten the same rice, they had ducked under the same bullets, and they felt bonds no different from those between brothers. Perhaps the bonds were even stronger through their knowledge of man’s fleeting existence they had experienced each day over the past months.

SOURCE: Guns of February: Ordinary Japanese Soldiers’ Views of the Malayan Campaign & the Fall of Singapore 1941-42, by Henry Frei (Singapore U. Press, 2004), pp. 135-136

Until recently, the city of Sano (佐野) in southern Tochigi prefecture was known throughout the region for its ramen. Its official tourist map is headlined Ramen Town (らーめんの郷) and says that the keywords for Sano City are “Eat, Look, Worship”: くう　みる　おがむ. The back of the map lists the name, telephone number, regular day off, and hours of operation for 69 different ramen shops. The map itself also has textboxes listing 5 local tourist itineraries and 17 local festivals, each with its chief sponsor and annual schedule.

But Sano’s reputation for ramen is now being outshone by its reputation for retail. The Sano Premium Outlets mall sits across National Route 50 (connecting Mito and Maebashi) on the southern edge of town. Old Route 50 runs right through the older part of town, parallel to the JR Ryomo line that used to serve the textile industries along the northern edge of the Kanto Plain. Now the major Tohoku Highway (connecting Tokyo and Sendai) also skirts the eastern edge of Sano. The mall lies at the juncture of these two major traffic arteries, one running north-south, the other east-west. All the long-distance buses make regular stops there.

The Outlier father and daughter recently paid a visit to Sano, arriving in time for lunch at Dai-chan Ramen, well-known enough locally that each of the three successive people we asked for directions were able to help us home in on it. It was a friendly, family-run place, whose daughter my wife had taught. The ramen was good, the portions were ample, and the weather was fairly mild, so we decided to walk the rest of the way to the outlet mall, along a busy, gassy highway lined with rather ghastly strip malls, whose highlight was a billboard advertising the nearby リストランテ　ジアッポネゼ / Ristorante Giapponese, featuring Italian cuisine, not Japanese.

The Sano Premium Outlets map lists, not 69, but 159 shops, ranging from Adidas, Armani, and Billabong to Tommy Hilfinger, Victorinox, and Wedgwood. The lines were longest at Godiva and Cold Stone Creamery. The architecture is colonial America, with two tall, white steeples rising above red-brick walls, and the major thoroughfares linked by Boston, Cambridge, Lancaster, and Princeton Avenues. The shoppers were at least as interesting as the shops. Many were quite stylishly dressed, and there seemed to be an unusually high proportion of middle-aged dowagers with lapdogs and young parents with young kids. Among the first shoppers we encountered was a lady with two poodles, one of which walked around on its hind legs. I was tempted to ask her whether the poodle was also capable of a たち小便 (‘standing piss’), but I didn’t want to embarrass my daughter. I never embarrass my daughter! Well, at least not if I can help it–and I usually can’t.

UPDATE: Ashikaga is locally famous for its soba, not its ramen, but some of the most elegant ramen I’ve had anywhere can be found at the Maruyama hand-made ramen restaurant about a block south and west of the Tobu Ashikaga-shi train station. Its leek and garlic ramen is to die for! Couldn’t resist spooning up all the broth, either. Plus, it’s open on Wednesdays, when most Ashikaga restaurants take the day off.

[Japanese businessman] Omori and his 500 fellow prisoners reached India, after a ten-day voyage. They berthed at Calcutta, and stayed there for three days. At Changi Prison [in Singapore] they had been divided into two batches, and half of the original group from Port Swettenham had not appeared. Nor had they seen their wives and daughters.

After a 70-hour ride, they were unloaded in the middle of nowhere and marched two hours with their bags to the bulwark of an old fort. They filed through a huge entrance on which was written “Pranakila”. Inside, in a large patch of lawn, tents were lined up in rows to which they were assigned, six persons to one tent. One week later their missing families arrived, around 500 women and children, whom British authorities had held in separate camps on Blakang Mati (now renamed Sentosa) and other islands off Singapore.

Life at Pranakila camp near New Delhi, on an Indian diet of curries, lots of beans and gallons of tea, was not uncomfortable. The women had their own quarters with partitions in between and their beds were lined up under the thick stone ramp which acted as insulation against heat and coldness. The men were treated according to the standards of Indian soldiers; they slept in hammocks, and when it got cold they were given hay in addition to a blanket. Slowly their numbers grew to around 3,000 as they awaited the day when they would return home.

SOURCE: Guns of February: Ordinary Japanese Soldiers’ Views of the Malayan Campaign & the Fall of Singapore 1941-42, by Henry Frei (Singapore U. Press, 2004), pp. 58-59

1. You are the lowest in the army; always bow and salute everyone first!
2. When called, respond with a loud voice.
3. Never be later than your comrades.
4. Always carry mop and broom at daily cleaning sessions.
5. Always do the squad leader’s laundry first.
6. Eat all meals within three minutes. Keep toilet visits short.
7. Keep your nails trimmed and your personal shelf tidy.
8. Always be quickest to fall in.
9. In case of insufficient members to line up, bring along one from another unit to make up the numbers.

SOURCE: Guns of February: Ordinary Japanese Soldiers’ Views of the Malayan Campaign & the Fall of Singapore 1941-42, by Henry Frei (Singapore U. Press, 2004), p. 12

I’m now back in Ashikaga, Japan. After a long flight, I cleared customs at Narita in time to get the 15:15 long-distance bus direct to Ashikaga (for only ¥4300!), arriving by 18:00 after only one stop at the Sano Premium Outlet Mall. The traffic was slowest on the dogleg through northeastern Tokyo (past Disneyland), but nearly as bad on strip-mall-lined National Route 50 between Sano and Ashikaga at rush hour. My wife and I celebrated by going out to eat at our favorite local fish (and fine sake) restaurant: うおえ (魚恵)—although I had buta kakuni ‘braised pork belly’ as insurance against the cold in our underheated apartment. We were the only customers at the counter (February is their slowest month) and got to chat with the sushi chef, who learned his trade in San Francisco and Maui.

In the airport waiting for departure I started reading Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow, one of the best I’ve read in a long, long time. During one passage of highly charged conversation that I was reading today, I suddenly recalled my similarly intense engagement with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain during the first month or so of my time studying Romanian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. Here’s one short summary of Mann’s opus:

A young bourgeois man visits his cousin in a mountain sanitarium where he ‘falls ill’ and struggles with the opposing forces of rationalism, faith, aestheticism, and common sense embodied by the other patients before rushing into World War I. The novel depicts the various cultural and intellectual currents swirling around in the soul of pre-World War I Europe.

And here’s how Publisher’s Weekly summarizes Snow:

A Turkish poet who spent 12 years as a political exile in Germany witnesses firsthand the clash between radical Islam and Western ideals in this enigmatically beautiful novel. Ka’s reasons for visiting the small Turkish town of Kars are twofold: curiosity about the rash of suicides by young girls in the town and a hope to reconnect with “the beautiful Ipek,” whom he knew as a youth. But Kars is a tangle of poverty-stricken families, Kurdish separatists, political Islamists (including Ipek’s spirited sister Kadife) and Ka finds himself making compromises with all in a desperate play for his own happiness. Ka encounters government officials, idealistic students, leftist theater groups and the charismatic and perhaps terroristic Blue while trying to convince Ipek to return to Germany with him; each conversation pits warring ideologies against each other and against Ka’s own weary melancholy. Pamuk himself becomes an important character, as he describes his attempts to piece together “what really happened” in the few days his friend Ka spent in Kars, during which snow cuts off the town from the rest of the world and a bloody coup from an unexpected source hurtles toward a startling climax. Pamuk’s sometimes exhaustive conversations and descriptions create a stark picture of a too-little-known part of the world, where politics, religion and even happiness can seem alternately all-consuming and irrelevant. A detached tone and some dogmatic abstractions make for tough reading, but Ka’s rediscovery of God and poetry in a desolate place makes the novel’s sadness profound and moving.

Sure enough, in an author interview posted by Random House, Pamuk mentions Mann as one of his major influences.

AAK: Who are some of the writers and artists who have influenced you?

OP: I am forty-eight, and at this age the idea of influence makes me nervous. I’d rather say that I learn and pick-up things from other authors. I’ve learned from Thomas Mann that the key to pleasures of historical fiction is the secret ar[t] of combining details. Italo Calvino taught me that inventiveness is as important as history itself. From Eco, I’ve learned that the form of the murder mystery can be gracefully used. But I have learned most from Marguerite Yoursenar; she wrote a brilliant essay about the tone and language in historical fiction.