Category Archives: Japan

A little while ago, at 11:29 Japan time, a magnitude 5.0 (Japanese scale) earthquake shook our building slightly. NHK almost immediately cut to earthquake coverage, repeating over and over that the epicenter was around Nagaoka in Niigata Prefecture, that there is no danger of a tsunami, that there have been no reported injuries, and that the eastern Shinkansen trains had already resumed normal operation. The magnitude in Tochigi Prefecture, where we are, was 2.0.

I’m getting superstitious. We spent yesterday in Niigata. But maybe the crucial factor is that the last time we had a big earthquake was the same day we were scheduled to take the Narita Express to go to the airport. Today, we are again scheduled to take the Narita Express to the airport to send our daughter back to the U.S. for another year of university–and a third year of college Japanese. If this pattern holds, then northern Japan can expect another largish earthquake on September 28, when I’m scheduled to fly back to the U.S.

We may have to rethink our tentative plans for a daytrip to Sendai on Monday, the last day our rail passes remain valid. I’d hate to bring that lovely city another earthquake only a week after their last one.

From 1914 to 1919, when Hirohito was in middle school, Professor Hattori Hirotarô became his teacher of natural history and physics. Hattori remained his servant in scientific pursuits for more than thirty years, cultivating Hirohito’s childhood fondness for insects and helping him to develop a keen, lifelong interest in marine biology and taxonomy. Under Hattori’s guidance, Hirohito read Darwin’s theory of evolution as interpreted by the popular writer Oka Asajirô, whose book Shinkaron kôwa (Lessons on evolution) was published in 1904. He may also have read a Japanese translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Around 1927 he was given a small bust of Darwin, which thereafter adorned his study alongside busts of Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte.

In September 1925, during the fourth year of his regency, Hirohito had a small, well-equipped biological laboratory established within the Akasaka Palace. Three years later, during the second year of his reign, he built … the Imperial Biological Research Institute, consisting of a greenhouse and two large laboratories, each with specimen rooms and libraries. Hattori became associated with this laboratory …. Years later Hattori edited Sagamiwan sango erarui zufu (Pictorial specimens of marine life in Sagami Bay), while Sanada Hiroo and Katô Shirô did the colored drawings, Baba Kikutarô wrote the accompanying explanations. Because the re-formed Imperial Household Agency held the copyright, the book was ascribed to Hirohito. Nowhere in the book, however, did the emperor’s name appear, which raised the question, How much of its research had actually been done by him?

Hirohito himself was always very modest about his interest in biology. When Sagamiwan sango appeared, Hattori offered an assessment of his former pupil’s scientific bent in a discussion that appeared in the Sande Mainichi on October 2, 1949. Asked whether the emperor’s studies should be viewed as genuine scientific research rather than the work of an amateur, Hattori replied:

Recently Professor Satô Tadao [of Nagoya University] wrote in the Nagoya newspaper that it belonged to the category of an amateur’s research. Indeed, depending on how one looks at the matter, I think that is true. He never published anything under his own name and ended up furnishing raw data to various specialists. Therefore, from one point of view he is, in the final analysis, probably a mere collector. But I don’t think so. He did not just hand them material he had collected. Rather, he first thoroughly investigated that material himself, and on that point he is no amateur.

Hattori’s assessment makes sense … Taught by Hattori, the emperor became a naturalist and a patron of marine biology, pursuing as a hobby the collection of sea plants and animals, such as slugs, starfish, hydrozoa, and jellyfish.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 60-61

As we were about to exit our 11th-floor apartment, we suddenly felt the building sway slightly beneath our feet and heard the rhythmic rattle of an interior door against its metal latchhook. We retreated back into our doorway, nervous but confident that the newly constructed Japanese high-rise could withstand an earthquake that had not even caused us to lose our footing. Nor had it caused any visible panic in the streets of Ashikaga far below.

It was Tuesday, the 16th of August, and we were just setting out on a complex, minutely scheduled multi-train itinerary that would have us reaching Tokyo station in time to transfer to the same Narita airport express train that an old friend coming up from Osaka was booked on, so that both she and we could meet her daughter who was due to overnight in Narita on her way back from Auckland to London for university. We were all scheduled to arrive by train at 16:25, just about the time she would be clearing customs.

We would all have just enough time to eat a traditional Japanese meal together at the airport hotel before dispersing in three different directions to spend that night: our friends staying at the hotel, my wife going back to Ashikaga for school business the next day, and my daughter and I going to our friend’s parents’ house on the west side of Tokyo so we could spend a little more time catching up the next day.

The first leg of the familiar local train ride from Ashikaga to the nearest bullet train (Shinkansen) station at Oyama gave no hint of any major disruption. Nor did the man who booked our seat reservations for the remainder of the trip. But almost as soon as we headed for the Shinkansen platform, they started turning people away, saying the Northeast Shinkansen (through Sendai) had been shut down. We had no idea why until the station announcements began blaming the earthquake. We were forced to hop on a slow local train bound for Ueno station in Tokyo.

Fortunately, we had gotten an early start in order to have time to book seat reservations, so we still had a chance to make the 15:33 Narita Express (N’EX) from Tokyo. But the sprawling Tokyo Shinkansen station was a complete mess, with no reliable timetables, repeated announcements of delays, and stranded passengers all over the place in the peak summer travel season.

At 15:33, the Narita Express platform was still listing the train scheduled for 14:33, with no indication of the actual times for any of the delayed trains. The harried platform officials assured us that seat reservations no longer mattered, that we could climb aboard any N’EX that came by. So we did, and sure enough, no one on board bothered to check our seat assignments.

We got to the airport close to 17:00, wondering how to get in touch with our friends. We went first to the arrival area outside customs, and were shocked almost immediately to run into our friend from Osaka, who had arrived on the same train we had and was waiting for her daughter’s flight to clear customs. It had been delayed, too–but not by an earthquake!

We had a very pleasant dinner, imagining that the world-famous Shinkansen system was quickly getting back on schedule. When we dispatched my wife, who knows hardly any Japanese, back to the Narita Express station, we had no idea what we had condemned her to. The N’EX had canceled most of its runs, so she had to take a series of slower trains all the way back to Ashikaga, arriving home about midnight.

An hour after my wife left, my daughter and I headed for a N’EX that was supposed to go all the way to Kokubunji on the west side of Tokyo, where our hosts for the night expected us to show up pretty late anyway. But that train was canceled, so we were instead put on a bus for Shinjuku, the major west-side transfer station. As it happened, the bus got to Shinjuku early enough to allow us to jump on a commuter express that got us into Kokubunji much faster than either we or our hosts had expected.

The northbound Shinkansen was still snarled the next evening when we headed back to Ashikaga, but all the local trains and buses provided a very effective–if slower–backup system.

At the beginning of the Taishô period [in 1912], on the day of Emperor Meiji’s funeral, General Nogi and his wife closed the door to their second-floor living room and prepared to end their lives. He had removed his uniform and was clad in white undergarments; she wore black funeral attire. They bowed to portraits of Meiji and of their two sons, killed in the Russo-Japanese War. While the funeral bells tolled, they proceeded to commit ritual suicide. Mrs. Nogi acted first; he assisted, plunging a dagger into her neck, and then he disemboweled himself with a sword. The departed hero of the Russo-Japanese War left behind ten private notes and a single death poem. (The writing of waka death poems was another practice from Japanese antiquity that was revised in the nineteenth century.) In one note he apologized for his action to four family members, including his wife, and acknowledged having contemplated suicide ever since losing his regimental flag in the war of 1877; he also mentioned his aging and the loss of his sons. In another note, to a military doctor, he bequeathed his body to medical use….

Nogi’s death poem, intended for public consumption, told the nation that he was following his lord into death–a practice known as junshi that even the Tokugawa shogunate had considered barbaric and outlawed “as antiquated in 1663.” Conservative intellectuals … interpreted Nogi’s suicide as a signal act of samurai loyalty, pregnant with positive lessons for the nation, and for its armed forces. Nantenbô, Nogi’s Zen master, was so enthralled by the majesty of his pupil’s action that he sent a three-word congratulatory telegram to the funeral: “Banzai, banzai, banzai.” The Asahi shinbun, however, editorially criticized those who called for the establishment of a new morality by reviving bushidô, and asserted that Nogi’s harmful action could teach the nation nothing. Kiryû Yûyû, a writer for the Shinano Mainichi shinbun, went further, not only decrying Nogi’s death as “thoughtless” and “meaningless” but warning presciently that “to comprehend death as loyalty” was a mistaken ethical idea that could only “end up encouraging great crimes in international relations.”

When informed of “Schoolmaster” Nogi’s death by the chamberlain in charge of supervising his education, Hirohito alone of his three brothers was reportedly overcome with emotion: Tears welled up in his eyes, and he could hardly speak. Doubtless he was too young really to understand the general’s action, let alone the harmful effect that his anachronistic morality of bushidô might have had on the nation. But as Hirohito remarked late in life to an American reporter, Nogi had a lasting influence on him, instilling precepts of frugality and stoic virtues of endurance and dignity to which Hirohito never failed to adhere. The brave Nogi was to Hirohito a giver of orders who meant what he said and was willing to lay down his life for his master. Hirohito not only identified with Nogi, he also derived from him the conviction that strong resolve could compensate to some extent for physical deficiencies. In Hirohito’s imaginings, Nogi was to be emulated almost as much as his other hero, Meiji.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 42-43

Japundit‘s Ampontan has posted a fascinating two-part analysis of Koizumi’s unexpectedly effective new broom in Japanese politics. Here’s the beginning of part two:

Yesterday we described Junichiro Koizumi’s unlikely selection as prime minister of Japan. It was unlikely because he ran as a reformer to lead a conservative party that had no interest in reform, but was desperate to survive as an entity. The disastrous administration of Yoshiro Mori—with single-digit approval ratings—had everyone in the party worried that they would get clobbered in the upper house election just a couple of months away.

Mind you, the LDP did not actually expect Koizumi to do too much in the way of reform; they were more interested in someone talking about a new broom sweeping clean than someone actually getting the broom out of the closet. The party elders were confident in their ability to keep things from getting out of hand.

They soon realized they had badly misjudged the situation. The long-suffering Japanese public have been subjected to politicians from the ruling party who don’t pretend to mean what they say, can’t be bothered to hide their disdain for the average voter, and save their remaining passion for their mistresses or money raising. When an eloquent politician appears with enthusiasm, energy, and ideas, and—most importantly—focuses his attention on the public’s concerns rather than trying to convince the public to focus on the politician’s concerns, the Japanese public repays that politician tenfold.

That’s just what happened with Koizumi. Desperate for a leader who acted like a real human being, still recovering from the disillusionment over the crushing of the first reform government during Morihiro Hosokawa’s term as prime minister in 1993-4, and believing that this was the last real chance to reform Japan’s political system, the public rewarded the off-beat, blunt Koizumi with popularity ratings that soared over 80%, unprecedented in Japan.

For the LDP, Koizumi was both a nightmare and a dream come true. Koizumi’s popularity also sent the popularity of the LDP skyrocketing. Under his leadership, the party won a stunning victory in the upper house election when their prospects verged on the hopeless just three months before. During the election campaign, Koizumi himself became the public symbol of the LDP; while the emphasis on an individual leading a party is the de facto standard in most Western political campaigns, it is extremely rare in Japan.

This came at a price for the party, however, and they first realized it with Koizumi’s Cabinet appointments. As we explained yesterday, the LDP is comprised of several factions. The primary objective in Cabinet appointments has been to apportion the spoils among the different factions according to their relative strength. Competence for the job is not a qualification, and neither the prime minister nor the rest of his Cabinet were selected to formulate policy—they were just asked to implement it.

Koizumi ignored these practices. He already represented a break with the past because he was the second prime minister in a row from the same faction. But he alienated the old guard in the party when he appointed to key Cabinet posts allies from his faction who shared his views instead of balancing factional interests. He even appointed economist Heizo Takenaka (second photo) to reform the banking sector and clean up the economy. (And he has succeeded; the worst is over for the banks and their bad debt problems and the stock market has rebounded).

The whole thing is worth reading. So is a recent account in the Japan Times about Koizumi taking the extremely rare step of relieving two high-ranking bureaucrats of their duties.

UPDATE: The series continues with a post about Japan’s New Generation. For many Japanese, the 1990s were a long Decade of Disillusionment after their economic bubble burst in 1989, and the dysfunctionalities of their political system became much more glaring. (The same can be said for the overly Japan-dependent economy of Hawai‘i.) For many North Americans and Europeans, however, the Great Disillusionment didn’t hit with full force until 2000-2001. By now, even the elites are beginning to grasp the dysfunctionalities of politics and economics as usual.

But no one really seems to know what to do about it yet. The major disagreement is between the “What the hell? Let’s try this, then!” crowd and the “Hell, no! You can’t do that!” crowd. In other words, those who don’t know what they can’t do, and those who only know what they can’t do. The other labels really don’t mean much anymore. The tinkerers inspire trepidation; the status quo aunties inspire resignation. Neither group inspires confidence.