Category Archives: Japan

On the few times when we took long car trips in Japan during the 1960s, ours was one of the few private passenger cars on the highway. My impression is that no more than 20% of the vehicles on the highways back then were private passenger cars. And there were very few expressways, so it was like driving the old two-lane national highways in the U.S. during the 1950s. And taking the business route through each town, since bypasses for almost any major town would involve either cutting through the mountain behind it or filling in the sea in front of it.

Well, Japan’s construction state has now done that for cities and towns all over the archipelago. Roads and highways are now full of private cars–and flanked by strip malls with hectares of parking where fields and paddies used to be. It doesn’t strike you so much when you’re traveling around on a rail pass, but if you look carefully out the window of the train, you’ll notice that in the smallest towns, the pachinko parlor has a bigger parking lot than the train station; or that many small cities have an Ito Yokado with ample parking. In the sprawling suburbs, even the combini have parking lots. (Ito, the largest shareholder of 7-Eleven Japan, has just merged the two firms to form Seven&i Holdings.)

I thought I’d look at the public transport and parking situation in Ashikaga, a small city of historic importance, whose similar-sized sister cities include Springfield, the capital of Illinois, and Kamakura, the capital of the Kamakura shogunate (1185-1333), which preceded the Ashikaga shogunate (1333-1573). Its Chinese counterpart is Jining in Shandong, which embraces the hometowns of both Confucius and Mencius.

This gives a sense of the city’s cultural pretensions, which are not hard to understand. Its cultural legacy dates back to the Heian period (794-1185) and Minamoto no Yoshikuni, progenitor of the Ashikaga clan famous for its shoguns. So it has many traces of old money, namely, plenty of well-maintained shrines and temples; a flourishing tourist industry; several art museums (including a world-class porcelain museum); and lots of streets and sidewalks paved with granite or brick flagstones near the tourist sites.

The oldest part of Ashikaga, the original castle town (本城), lies on the hillslopes north of the Watarase River. The JR railway also runs north of the river, and main street (中央通り or just plain 通り) runs parallel north of that. But, while the nicer restaurants, bars, and souvenir shops near the tourist attractions are thriving, a lot of main street storefronts are closed. Nearly half the storefronts on some blocks remain unleased, so that I’ve learned a new kanji combination, boshuu, as in テナント募集 ‘tenants invited’, or ‘space available’. Shop hours are also short during the week, often just 11:00 to 18:00, with longer hours on the weekends, when more tourists as well as locals are on the streets. Exactly two Ashikaga city buses run such long routes far out into the country side, mostly to accommodate old people and hikers, that they can only complete four runs in each direction, at intervals of at least two hours.

Most of the retail action is happening south of the river, which is served by the private Tobu Line railway, with over 60 trains per day in each direction to the JR’s 30. The park-and-ride lot on the south bank of the river is normally jammed with cars, while the north bank always has plenty of spare room. National route 293 north of the river is flanked by city offices and parks, schools, and historic temples. South of the river, it’s flanked by strip malls: big-box retailers, fast-food outlets, and discount specialty stores. As pedestrian consumers trying to stock a semi-furnished Japanese apartment for a year, my wife and I have been thrilled to have within a 20-minute walk such big-box retailers as Yamada Denki and Kojima for home appliances and electronics, Shimachu for home and garden furniture and supplies, and Ito Yokado (now Seven&i Holdings) and Apita department stores, and–most of all–the big Daiso 100-yen store (Japan’s equivalent of the old “five-and-dime” stores).

Except for the well-stocked Fressay Supermarket (now hiring!) down the street, we don’t do any major shopping on our side of the river. We hike to the strip mall, where we could find a Chinese-made rice cooker and an iron for a third the price of their counterparts in the customer-free Panasonic or Sanyo outlets on main street.

But the old north side of town is fighting back with three weapons, two old, one new.

First, it is going back to what once made the town famous even before those Ashikaga shoguns–education. The Ashikaga Gakko is billed as the first university in Japan. Contemporary Ashikaga north is just littered with schools, public and private, from preschools to an Institute of Technology. In the evening, the old town is awash in cram schools, now more elegantly named zemi (ゼミ ‘seminar’) than juku (塾). Other than scattered restaurants and bars, there’s not much happening after dark in old Ashikaga except cramming to get into a better class of school, with mothers lined up at the curb to pick up the younger students after class.

Second, the north side of the Watarase river offers a heavily publicized, dense network of hillside shrines and temples connected by tree-shaded hiking trails, which offer nature lovers a much wider range of flora and fauna–especially insects–than do the flat Kanto plains on the south side. The Ashikaga ハイキングコース (‘hiking course’) attracts a lot of visitors, especially retirees. Many of the temples and shrines have little boxes where pilgrims can get their guidebook “passports” stamped so they don’t forget where they’ve been.

Third, the northside merchants have become keenly aware of the importance of offering parking to their customers. It’s amazing how many tiny eateries and storefronts on bigger thoroughfares have a big “P” or “P あり” or “駐車所” (‘parking lot’) out front, usually with an arrow pointing around back to where a small house or vegetable garden used to be. If you walk the back streets, you see the same thing, plus a lot more small parking lots where houses or shops used to be. Some of them are for customers, others for car owners who rent them by the month. The Ashikaga sightseeing information page also gives a lot of parking information, including the number of car and bus slots at each temple or shrine.

All in all, I’m glad to be on the older and more walkable north side, but close enough to the river to walk to the strip mall and back in a couple of hours.

(Chopstick Sensei has some related thoughts from Gunma Prefecture, which borders Ashikaga to the south.)

UPDATE, 24 September: Well, another exploratory walk to the far side of Ashikaga’s little Higashiyama rise has revealed the vastest parking lot yet, and on the north side of the Watarase River! The lot serves both the huge Torisen supermarket–which broadcasts some in-store messages in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Urdu/Hindi (I think, in any case not Portuguese), and carries among other things “non-oil” tuna, whale meat, Skippy peanut butter (a rare find in Japan), and fair selection of foreign wines in the ¥750-1500 range–and the even more gigantic Keiyo D2 (ケーヨーデイツー), the latter as big as any WalMart I’ve ever seen. Ashikaga’s D2 branch was built in March 2004, most likely to serve the community employed by Sanyo and other businesses in the new Otsuki Sukedo Industrial Park (大月助戸工業団地), which stretches up the nicely treelined east bank of a confluence of rivers that drain the mountain valleys of northern Ashikaga City. Big strip malls stretch up the other side of the river, with chain stores such as a Home Center, Off House (used goods), and Denny’s. Here’s a summary of what an International Market Research report concludes about the growth of home centers and changing domestic markets in Japan.

The continuing growth of Japanese home centers was confirmed by recent official government data. The number of home centers in 2002 increased 27.9% from the 1999 Survey, and the number of employees working at home centers increased 51.6% over the same period. Due to the steady growth of the Japanese do-it-yourself industry and the recent boom in pets and gardening, both sales and numbers of home centers have increased in Japan. Japan’s large-scale home center market offers good potential for U.S. products.

Tochigi Prefecture, in which Ashikaga is located, is named after 栃の木 (tochi-no-ki), the Japanese horse chestnut, Aesculus turbinata Blume, a close relative of the Ohio buckeye, Aesculus glabra, and the European horse chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum L. Marronnier, the French name for horse chestnut shows up in would-be glamorous commercial names here and there in the prefecture. I’ve seen it in Nikko, Utsunomiya, and Ashikaga. For some reason, “Horse Chestnut” does not seem to have the same appeal, or at least I’ve yet to see it in our Tochigi travels.

Much, much more on this subject can be found on an Imaginatorium web page authored by Brian Chandler, one of the hundreds of English teachers in Sano, judging by their literary output on the web and in print.

The Japan Racing Association (JRA) has 10 racecourses (seven running clockwise, three counter-clockwise) [emphasis added] and two training centers (Miho Training Center and Ritto Training Center). Roughly 3,450 races are held mainly on Saturdays and Sundays, for a total of 288 racing days a year. The number of racing starts per year is approximately 47,382. The JRA holds two types of races: Thoroughbred flat races and Thoroughbred jumping races, with flat races comprising 95 percent of the racing calendar.

SOURCE: Masa-aki Oikawa, “Epidemiological Aspects of Training and Racing Injuries of Thoroughbred Racehorses, and Corresponding Countermeasures,” Japan Racing Journal 10 (2002)

When I channel-surfed through a bit of horse-racing on Sunday, the Niigata race looked normal to me, with the horses running counterclockwise, but the next races showed horses running clockwise at Sapporo and Kokura. This surprised me, but apparently it wouldn’t surprise many Australian horse-racing fans, or those anywhere else in the Commonwealth.

I never realized that North Americans were so unicircuitous, and I look for Canadian tracks to begin running anti-counterclockwise.

The Japanese government regulates the classification of consumer waste and recyclables very meticulously. In 2001, it even passed a law “requiring retailers and manufacturers to take back used air conditioners, televisions, washing machines and refrigerators”–the first such “take-back” law, according to the industry journal WasteAge.

My impression is that about 30% of Japanese industry is packaging, and another 30% is deconstruction of consumer waste. In the grocery stores, you can find a single onion–or lemon, or unwashed celery stalk, or whatever–individually packaged. I suppose the stick-on price tag causes unacceptable damage to the perfect surfaces of the fruits or vegetables on display.

Metal food and drink containers are marked as either recyclable steel or aluminum. Beverage cans are just as likely to be steel as aluminum in Japan, while they are nearly 100% aluminum in the U.S., but Japanese consumers recycle their aluminum at higher rates than Americans do.

The tag on a tiny package of food or drink will carry separate recycle labels for both the paper tag and the plastic container. Plastics are further marked as either PET (polyethylene tenephthalate) bottles, PP (polypropelene), PE (polyethylene), or more generic プラ (pura ‘plastic’) wrap.

The first major hint we got, after we moved into our nice apartment in Ashikaga, that practice might not accord with theoretical ideals was our attempt to find out what to do with general plastics. Communities differ in their recycling capabilities. Not all can handle all categories. The illustrated poster in our lobby (here’s an English example PDF from a major metropolitan neighborhood in Tokyo) gave very detailed instructions about what kind of waste products get picked up on which days of the week or month, but said nothing about general plastics. Nor could we find any separate place for them in the trash room where residents leave their sorted and bagged waste.

Well, it turns out that plastic wrapping in Ashikaga is just another class of burnables. Most public trash bins in train stations broadly classify waste–other than drink containers–into burnables and nonburnables. (Newsprint often has a separate bin as well.) However, people are often extremely careless about what they put in these public receptacles, or frustrated at the lack of other options, and the clean-up crews must spend a good deal of time re-sorting the contents of each bin. The same goes for the variety of items that often end up in the can and bottle bins next to most of the streetside vending machines.

Two plentiful items, styrofoam containers and milk cartons, can only be recycled at grocery stores in most communities, it seems. But the receptacles in front of the stores I’ve seen have required consumers to cut the milk cartons apart, rinse them, and hang them out to dry before putting them in the recycle bins. All other containers, too, are supposed to be rinsed out before recycling. Japanese recycling depends crucially on the country’s abundance of water.

Just as I was finishing up this post, a sound truck drove down the street below our building blaring, not political messages (as is usual in the days before an election), but instructions for how to stop the van and turn over hazardous items like batteries and spray cans.

The Fifty-second Imperial Diet, which had adjourned following Emperor Taisho’s death, had reconvened on January 18, 1927. Hirohito and his entourage lost no time in trying to influence political trends and make the political world aware of his presence.

First, on January 19, 1927, the idea of a fourth national holiday was proposed in the House of Peers as if it had originated there rather than in the court…. A short time later, the Diet approved a bill establishing November 3 as Meiji’s holiday (Meiji setsu), and the sanctioning announcement was made by imperial ordinance on March 3.

The tenth anniversary of Meiji’s death, July 30, 1922, had passed relatively unnoticed by the court and the public, except for visits by the regent [Hirohito] to Kyoto and the Momoyama mausoleums. Why now the new holiday? Because Hirohito’s enthronement was in the offing, and his entourage needed every device it could muster to invest him with greater charisma and blot out Taisho’s image. Hirohito could hardly be sent back in time to participate in great victories that had been won when he had been only four years of age. But Meiji could be transported, via the new holiday, and the appropriate fanfare, to a new generation and era, and Hirohito thereby made to shine brighter, if only by reflected radiance.

Due to the official mourning for Taisho, the first national celebration of Meiji’s birthday could not begin until the following year [1927]. The honoring of Meiji therefore would occur during the enthronement and deification of his grandson, the noncharismatic Hirohito, whom the press was describing already as the new “incarnation of Emperor Meiji.” Before the year of mourning for Taisho had even ended, the public had grown accustomed to thinking of the preenthronement emperor as the new Meiji, and as the grandson who would perfect the imperial legacy.

Later, intending to remind the young emperor of the toil rice cultivation required, and so identify him in the public mind with the plight of the rice farmers in a period of agricultural depression, Kawai invented a new court ritual. He suggested that Hirohito cultivate rice within the palace precincts. Hirohito agreed and a field was prepared inside the Akasaka Palace grounds for this purpose. On June 14, 1927, Hirohito received rice plants from different regions of the country and staged his first rice-planting ritual. Later, after his enthronement, he moved his residence to the palace, and seventy and eighty tsubo (280 and 320 square yards) of dry and wet field, respectively, were reclaimed for the purpose of ceremonial rice planting. A small mulberry grove beyond the wet fields was also prepared for Empress Nagako to engage in sericulture, thereby identifying her with Japan’s most important export commodity, silk.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 182-183

We initiated our Japan Rail Passes 3 weeks ago with a same-day roundtrip by bullet train from Tokyo (東京 ‘east capital’) to Shizuoka (静岡 ‘calm hill’) in a fruitless effort to view Mt. Fuji (富士山 ‘rich gentleman mountain’). Not once did we see any mountaintops–all being obscured by clouds and haze. I don’t know how many times as a kid I strained in vain for a glimpse of Mt. Fuji as we passed Shizuoka on the train. (I have seen it on other trips, but only from afar.)

On Monday, I made a final day trip by rail pass to see one other famously beautiful place, the Matsushima (松島 ‘pine island’) bay and islands near Sendai (仙台 ‘hermit platform’）. (My wife was tied up with obtaining her work visa, and my daughter had left on Sunday to return to college in the U.S.) Matsushima was spectacular–as lovely as Miyajima (宮島 ‘shrine island’) in my estimation–even though I didn’t get a chance to see all the best views.

In between, we made a roundtrip from Tokyo to Sapporo (札幌, an Ainu name whose kanji meanings are arbitrary), with a day trip from Sapporo to Asahikawa (旭川 ‘rising-sun river’). We had to pay extra for the sleeping berths going up.

We also made day trips from Ashikaga (足利 ‘foot profit’–the second kanji is never read kaga except in this placename, so perhaps kaga formerly meant something less favorable, like ‘swelling’ or ‘carbuncle’) to Niigata （新潟 ‘new lagoon’, but with a rarer pronunciation for ‘new’）, Nikko (日光 ‘sun shine’）, Utsunomiya （宇都宮 ‘sky capital shrine’）, and twice to Narita airport. I think we got our money’s worth. I’ve got a few travelogues to write up now.

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.