やくざYakuza

(The news media and officialdom refer to the gangs as “暴力団/boryoku dan” [violent organizations].)

We were driving across the mountains of Kyūshu when I had my first close encounter with the Yakuza, the traditional gangsters of Japan. That was during my first summer in Japan, when I had a week’s holiday from my teaching job at the Kumamoto YMCA. I was driving more slowly even than my normal cautious pace, as I was still getting used to Japanese traffic mores, and the ‘Yamanami’ Highway across the centre of Kyūshu is a winding challenge at the best of times.

A car overtook us and its horn gave a sustained, reproachful honk as it surged past. Y leaned across and gave an answering blast on our horn, before realizing that the car that had passed us was a long, white, American limo with darkened windows. Only Yakuza drive cars like that in Japan. Before we had time to regret our response, the limo stopped right in front of us.

I slammed on the brakes. The car ahead was motionless for what seemed an eternity. Then it slowly started to move forward… and stopped again. After another interminable period, it slowly eased away in the direction of Oita, leaving us thanking our lucky stars.

We might have been helped by my obvious foreignness, with the Yakuza being unsure how to deal with someone who couldn’t understand their choice argot.

In my sixteen years of living in Kumamoto, I have never spoken directly with an active yakuza. I have played cricket with a retired Yakuza, but that is another story. I would never risk emulating my friend Alan who has rebuked a yakuza for tossing a can from his Mercedes… and lived to tell the tale.

They are always there, in the shadows of one’s daily life, rather like the “love hotels”--physically present but socially absent; often seen but never referred to, unless absolutely necessary.

Other foreigners, rather than Japanese friends, have been my main informants about the Yakuza. Georges, the owner/chef of a small French restaurant near the centre of the city, was one who was not forgiven because of his foreignness. We were dining at his restaurant Le Papillon one night around 1990 when I saw that he had a black eye. He explained he had been beaten after refusing to subsidise his local gang with protection money.

More recently, I heard another similar story involving a Japanese friend called Yuri (not her real name). A solo mother of three teen-age children, Yuri had, with help from her parents, started a small, restaurant on the fringes of the main shopping area. Soon after opening, she had been visited by Yakuza who were interested in offering her protection, and in sampling her selection of Awamori, the powerful Okinawan alcohol. . She coolly explained that she was running a restaurant, not a bar, and that she hoped her ex-policeman father would ensure that the police gave her whatever protection she needed. A couple of nights later, one of her clients, an American teacher, who was parking in one of Yuri’s parking places, found that all of his tyres had been punctured.

She didn’t give in though, as far as I know, and I don’t think that there have been other incidents since then. One never knows, of course. The people who pay quietly are never going to tell you about it.

There is a temptation to compare the Yakuza with the Mafia in Italy. There are similarities. The conviction (later reversed on appeal) of the former Italian Prime Minister, Gulio Andreotti, for a Mafia-related murder certainly has no parallel in Japanese politics, but there is no doubt about the pervasive links between the political establishment, particularly the LDP, and the Yakuza.[1]

The conservative forces of the Japanese power structure can rely, not only on soft and hard cops, but also on the “violent organizations” when things get tough. When demonstrations against the U.S. Japan Security Treaty were at their height around 1960, the Japanese P.M. is reported to have asked for help from the Godfathers to ensure the safety of Eisenhower on his planned visit. In the end, Eisenhower did not come but the “義理/giri”, the debt created by that request, ensured that the gangs were not challenged by the state for decades after that.

In the late 1980s, I soon realized that the parallels between the Mafia and the Yakuza were far from complete. Even in Sicily, the Italian Mafia is a shadowy organization, lurking behind respectable facades and dubious businesses. In Japan, the gangs make little attempt to stay in the shadows. Cycling to work each day, I passed the chapter headquarters of one of the local gangs, complete with gang insignia over the building. Kaplan reported that most big gangs had their own magazines, complete with haiku corners.

One of the first things my Japanese family told me was to be extra careful not to go near a Yakuza car. The slightest contact would mean having to pay thousands of dollars in “compensation”. There seemed to be an acceptance that the police would not be much help if you got into trouble with Yakuza.

In the newspaper I would read about attempts by various citizens’ groups to prevent gangs from setting up headquarters in their neighbourhood. In our own neighbourhood, the presence of a gang headquarters was passively accepted, and I never heard of any dissatisfaction being expressed at their presence. They do not have gang insignia on their six story building. It’s only when you see twenty or so of the gang lined up outside the building to facilitate the entry or exit of one of the bosses that you know who the occupants are. They exude male menace, even though nowadays they are more likely to be dressed in T-shirts and trainers than the sharp suits of the previous generation. They spill out across the road and stop traffic with a peremptory wave of a four-fingered hand, until the operation is complete.

These days there are no gang-insignia on the building. There was a Boryokudan Countermeasures Law passed in 1992 which seems to have forced the Yakuza to be more discreet. Even if you did not see them gathered outside the building, the gold-lettered message on the window would give pause: “何でも買います/Nandemo kaimasu” [We deal in anything] is one of the phrases I remember. Needless to say, the “shop” is never open.

Unless a grand entry or exit is in progress, there is seldom any sign of life in the building; only the Mercedes parked in the ground-floor garage, and the occasional light.

I don’t know which gang they belong to, but their ambience extends to the surrounding buildings. The little “stand-bar” called “Yuki”, with the old military flag of Japan for decoration is not the kind of place you would drop in for a casual drink.

Across the railway line from the gang building, a large, twelve storey block lay abandoned for most of the post-bubble nineties. It seemed to be the embodiment of the reluctance of banks to foreclose on yakuza-connected mortgages. During the early nineties, the murder of four bank executives in quick succession dampened the enthusiasm of the financial community for chasing up such loans. In late 2002, however, there was a burst of activity: the old building was demolished; a new apartment block was put up on half of the land, and parking machines installed on the rest. Somehow, and I don’t know how, the Gordian knot had been cut.

As with the Italian Mafia, there is a fine gradation between obviously criminal activities like protection rackets and the well-laundered building investments which provide a bridge to respectability for the children of gang members.

Kaplan and Dubro’s book about the Yakuza was never widely distributed in Japan, even in its English version, and was never published in Japanese. One does not trifle with the Yakuza. The fate of the film director Itami Juzo provides a salutary lesson for those brave enough to try and tell the truth. After dissecting various aspects of Japanese films in a series of funny satires, Itami turned his attention to the Yakuza in Mimbo no Onna [The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion]. Soon after it was made, he was attacked and badly injured by a knife-wielding gangster. He was never the same again and his enigmatic, “suicide” in Dec. 1997 provided a chilling coda to his courageous career. (For an article voicing suspicions that Itami may have been murdered see: http://vikingphoenix.com/news/stn/1998/stn98001.htm)

They may be gangsters whose prime occupation appears to be business but they see themselves as the inheritors of samurai tradition and their values are as much the result of the feudal relations between 親oya (parent or gang boss) and kobun (child or follower) as of any purely commercial calculations. Yakuza must be prepared to suffer and even die for their boss, and they routinely accept long-prison sentences and even physical mutilation as the price of gang affiliation.

One of the reasons the gangs continue to thrive in Japan is their ability to keep their activities within tolerable bounds. For most people they are a potential rather than an actual threat. When violence does occur it is more likely to be between gangs than directed against the public.

One inter-gang killing occurred within a hundred yards of our house in the late eighties.

A car was stopped at the traffic lights outside our local Higo Bank when a motorcyclist drew up alongside and shot him dead through the window. I read about it in the Kumamoto paper. Several weeks later, I was stopped at the same lights. Someone had put a bunch of flowers on the side of the road in memory of the murder victim. A burly man was standing over the flowers, urinating on them, glancing over his shoulder from time to time.

There have been no further such incidents, and the Yakuza are likely to continue to occupy their time-honoured niche beside the railway line for some time to come.

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[1] “Yakuza” by David Kaplan and Alec Dubro ( David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: The Explosive Account of Japan's Criminal Underworld. (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1986), provides a potted history of the gangs and of their political links.

Funerals (葬式/soushiki)

I was at the university when Susumu died. S, Y’s brother, called me. I got on my bike and was down at the hospital within twenty minutes. When I arrived, Y was crying and caressing the calm old man. He was ninety-six but when she said, “Suteki na otoko”[“You’re a handsome man/素敵な男],”… otoko mai” [“a fine-looking figure of a man”], it seemed to be no more than the truth. “Mimi ga ooki shi, hana ga takai…”(”Such big ears… such a high nose”) --both positive attributes for Japanese people, suggesting respectively good luck and good looks.

He looked at peace, relieved after that awfully prolonged last day or so, when only a mechanically pumping machine had been keeping the breath in him. He looked himself once again.

I wished I’d been able to see my own father like that. He had died a few months before, and by the time I’d made it back to New Zealand, he’d been made up by the undertaker so that he looked like an actor playing a Renaissance pope rather than the gardener and chess-player we wanted to remember.

I’d thought then, that there was perhaps no help for it, that the makeup might have been necessary to hide some ghastly physiological changes. But Susumu was to remain just as calm and as completely “normal” during the next couple of days without any makeup whatsoever.

He was taken home from the hospital that afternoon and placed in the zashiki, the tatami floored front room where an impromptu altar had been erected behind the coffin.

The tsuya [通夜/wake] was the next day, not at home as would be in the country, but at the funeral parlour. The main ceremony, open to everybody, was in a big hall, but there was a light meal in a kind of private room within the building. There was food (vegetarian as always at a Japanese funeral), and drink, but no-one got gloriously drunk, they way they do in Ozu movies, or they way they had at the wake for Yuki, the partner of our Italian friend Rosanna, who had had a fatal stroke not long after leaving his Yakuza gang.

The funeral directors had come to the house on the afternoon that Susumu had died. The extended family were all there, cousins from Aso and the one surviving brother. The family seemed obliged to go for the most expensive options in the glossy catalogue of funereal possibilities. On such a day no-one wanted to appear such a cheapskate as to suggest that money should be a consideration when choosing the kind of hearse, or the concentration of gold leaf on the coffin. So Susumu had a two, rather than a one-priest funeral. That was still one less than the number of Zen priests at the funeral of the father of Y’s sister-in-law. K’s father had been a seventh generation Aso doctor, while Susumu was a largely self-educated country headmaster. I’m sure he was satisfied with two.

Between his death and cremation, Susumu was never left alone for more than a moment or two. Like most Japanese, Y’s family accept that the soul remains in the body until cremation and that, even after death, the soul needs company.

The Buddhist funeral service lasted about fifty minutes and consisted of Buddhist sutras, delivered in a rhythmic chant, to the accompaniment of percussive gongs. It was completely unintelligible to the congregation, and there were not even the bilingual prayer books which used to make the meaning of the Latin mass accessible to Catholics. Those Japanese people I have asked have said they are grateful not to be able to follow the words of the sutra, as not understanding allows their thoughts to wander freely.

After the prayers, several of the mourners gave speeches.

T, as chounan [長男/eldest son], spoke for the immediate family. He read a long, autobiographical poem which Susumu had written some years before. It had a narrative swing to it and a pronounced rhythm. It seemed to come from way back in time, to be a Japanese equivalent of Arnold’s “The Scholar Gypsy” or Brian Merriman’s Gaelic poem, “The Midnight Court” [“Cuirt an Mheadhon Oidhche” ].

In the poem Susumu told of his sorrow at the death of four of his seven children, of his delight in the surviving three. He wrote that he felt that the three living children were like the three legs of a tripod which, although weak alone, could support a huge pot when combined.

K, the only grandson, spoke of the loving care he had always had from Susumu. (When he was a child, Susumu would carry him off to bed each night, after he’d fallen asleep in front of the T.V.)

An eighty-year-old former pupil stood in front of Susumu’s photo and, speaking directly to his teacher, thanked him, as he’d done so many times, for giving him the start which had helped him to go on to become a teacher himself, and then an educational entrepreneur, the owner of a chain of kindergartens and tertiary colleges.

After the funeral, the immediate family accompanied Susumu to the modern municipal crematorium, miles out of town. The atmosphere there was rather like a large and sombre air terminal. Everyone was dressed in black, each group huddled around the photo of the beloved deceased. The airport analogy was rather grossly underlined by a large electronic notice board which announced names, room numbers, and “departure times”.

There was a final farewell before the furnace doors closed on the coffin, and then a forty minute wait. We were called back to greet the trolley bearing Susumu’s remains which had been wheeled out of the furnace.

The family gathered around, and each took turns at picking up small bits of chalky bone with long metal chopsticks and placing them carefully into a small ceramic urn. I had heard of this from my friend Alan, the veteran of a number of family funerals, but was surprised at how natural it all seemed.

Now Susumu really had gone, and he would be given a new name to match his new status as a hotoke-sama [仏様/Buddha]. Now the elaborate cycle of remembrance dictated by Buddhist practice could begin. For the next fifty years there would be periodic services and family gatherings in memory of the old man, just as there was for Y’s mother, and for her four brothers.

Susumu’s room at the corner of the house looked darker than it had ever been when we arrived home. We threw salt over our shoulders as we came into the house so that we would not be dragged off too quickly to join Susumu in the other world, where, we imagined, he was comparing notes with my own father.

The Right Wing (右翼/u-yoku)

The crowds in Tokyo didn’t seem as dense as I had feared. During the first few days, I didn’t see people being heaved into trains by men in white gloves. That happens only during the rush hours and we were never in the City early enough for that. The shock of the population density, of the sheer numbers of people in Tokyo, really hit me on the first Sunday morning after we’d flown in from Auckland in April, 1986.

We’d arranged to meet an old school friend of Y’s “at Hachiko’s statue” at Shibuya station at 11 a.m. We didn’t have too much trouble finding Hachiko, the bronze statue of a dog, who had waited daily there for her owner, unable to understand that he had died.

I had imagined it would be like meeting at “Canalates”, the fountain at the top of the Ramblas, which is the traditional meeting place in Barcelona. Instead of the five or six people you would see, casually standing around the fountain, at Shibuya there were hundreds of people, all standing very formally, in silent expectation, all facing outwards from the statue, and all ignoring one another. They were also ignoring the huge black lorry, emblazoned with WWII battle flags, emitting an ear-splitting barrage of impassioned rhetoric. On top of the lorry, on a kind of platform, was a man of a certain age, dressed in a paramilitary uniform, like an aged Mishima; he was clearly the source of the harangue.

“What’s he saying?” I asked, amazed that no-one of the captive waiters was betraying, any trace of hearing what was being said, much less any sign that they were annoyed at the mega-nuisance. It was as if Hitler was ranting away at Nuremburg and the assembled multitudes were playing bridge and reading the paper.

This was the first of many “right-wing” [右翼/u-yoku] battle wagons I was to hear and often see over the next fifteen years.

There are laws forbidding the making of such a racket in urban spaces. However, neither the policemen in the nearby “police box” [koban] at Shibuya, nor the hundreds of hapless victims clustered around Hachiko, seemed to feel that there was any alternative to "putting up with it” [我慢する/gaman suru].

Y genuinely seemed not to hear what the speaker was saying, and was perplexed at the task of paraphrasing the rant into her own idiom. Over the years, I learnt that their pet themes are: “Communism”; the Soviet/Russian occupation of the four Kurile Islands (situated between Hokkaido and Sakhalin); and corrupt politicians. The collapse of the Soviet Union hardly dented their fervour, since the Russians took over from the Soviets as the enemy of the Japanese Empire.

One must be careful when using the phrase “rightwing” in Japan, since the Japanese translation “u-yoku” is used almost exclusively to refer to the plethora of megawatt-blasting paramilitary nationalist groups. You will be greeted with puzzled frowns if you refer to the parliamentary conservatives of the LDP as “rightwing”. They are usually referred to as “houshuuteki” [ conservatives].

The right-wingers seem to look back on the period of military domination of Japanese politics with heartfelt nostalgia, and would probably welcome a return to the fascistoid state of the thirties. Their attacks on the corruption of the political class are not always merely rhetorical. Even since the Meiji Restoration, there has been a continual series of political assassinations by paramilitary groups, isolated rightwing individuals, and, during the thirties, by similar elements within the military. Since the end of World War II, their preferred weapon has been the ubiquitous, long-bladed and lethal Japanese kitchen knife. Sometimes a Samurai sword will be used for added dramatic effect.

Kumamoto appears to have had its fair share of u-yoku groups, both historically and at the present time. It would not be a coincidence that the ultra-nationalist hero of one of Mishima’s novels commits “seppuku”(harakiri) while watching the sunrise from Kimbosan, the mountain that overlooks Kumamoto City.

One reason for Mishima’s choice would have been the fact that Kumamoto was the scene of a rising of reactionary Samurai against the Meiji Government in 1876. They were known as the “Shimpu-ren”/ “The Divine Wind Alliance”. Before being defeated, they managed to slaughter the Governor and a number of other high-ranking officials. They also had the first foreign English teacher in Kumamoto, an American Civil War veteran called Captain Janes, high on their hit list. Janes and his wife had fortuitously left for Nagasaki hours before the rising.

The Shimpuren remain the object of discrete veneration. There is a temple dedicated to them in Kumamoto, a few hundred metres East of Kumamoto University, on the main road to Aso. It took me more than a decade to realize it was there, since it falls squarely within the category of “awkward” phenomena which are not referred to in polite conversation, and especially not in the presence of curious foreigners.

Behind the temple, there are neat rows of gravestones, small stone pillars without inscription, each representing one of the fallen Shimpu Samurai.

During the post-war period, the leader of the Socialist party was stabbed to death, while making a speech in 1960. While I was in Kumamoto, the LDP Mayor of Nagasaki was lucky to escape with his life, after an assassination attempt provoked by a public statement saying that the Showa Emperor Hirohito must share responsibility for the evils of WWII.

Pachinko (パチンコ)

My first view of Japan from the air was of the forested hills beyond Narita. Most of Japan is covered in forests; a much higher proportion than in New Zealand, where most of the hill country has been turned into pasture, and only the bits that are steep or inaccessible have been left.

We were met at the airport by the father of Yukio, who was one of Y’s friends from Italy. Mr. G. had recently retired from the Ministry of Health, but still worked there part-time. He was there with a chauffeur-driven Nissan Cedric-- a sleek, black limo with lace covers on the seat backs.

We zoomed along the “expressway” in the kind of Wodehousian, foppish extravagance suggested by the car’s name. A little bell pinged cheerfully from the direction of the dashboard. Y explained that it was there to warn you that you were over the speed limit. There was obviously little danger of a cop indulging in the lèse-majesté of pulling us up.

In the genkan (entrance?) of Mr. G’s house, I was startled by the array of footwear lined up before me. (It’s hard to translate genkan. It’s almost never as grand as a hall, and is usually just a place where you can leave your shoes, before stepping up into the slipper-only zone beyond.)

I knew Mr. G and his wife were the only occupants of the house, but there were at least six pairs of shoes in the genkan. One pair had the word Jacket embossed in loud letters on the uppers.

This was my first taste of the decorative use of foreign words in Japan. Even those Japanese people who understand English do not read such “design” words, and find it hard to understand the disorientation (sic) of Westerners when they see slippers in a supermarket branded Jesus Christ, or a sign over an ice-cream stand reading “Dipper Dan’s Bum Pancakes”.

Even after our motorway journey from Narita, we were still only halfway into central Tokyo, and the next day it took us more than an hour and half to negotiate the bus and train which got us to Ueno, the big station linking Tokyo to the North East.

And it seemed to take us almost as long to get out of the station, even though Ueno is not nearly as vast as some of the other big stations like Tokyo or Shinjuku. When we finally emerged from a labyrinth of tunnels, we were at the entrance to a kind of street market. Two shops into the market, I saw what is usually translated as a Pachinko parlour. Nothing could be more remote from the image of calm elegance conveyed by the word parlour than the clattery cacophony produced by hundreds of electronically souped-up pinball machines, surrounded by hundreds of glazed-eyed aficionados, and clouds of cigarette smoke.

Pinball too is an inadequate translation for these high-tech creations which bore no more resemblance to the machines I’d fed pennies into at Caroline Bay in the fifties than a DVD player does to an old valve radio, or an AK47 to a breech-loading musket.

The parlour is rather like a third-world, ball-bearing factory, with gamblers instead of workers.

If you decide to have a go, you buy hundreds of steel balls in a basket, feed them into a trough and they are automatically spewed out in a seamless, clattering trajectory into the complex maze of the machine’s front panel. If the balls find their way into winning holes, they get returned to be used again. If they find one of the “Jackpot” holes, the machine seems to suffer a nervous breakdown, and a cascade of ball-bearings pours out, to be gathered by the delighted punter into more plastic baskets.

On that first visit to the parlour near Ueno, we bought no more than a few hundred yen worth of balls. It still seemed expensive when converted into New Zealand dollars.

We almost immediately hit a minor jackpot, and I wanted to stop while my beginner’s luck still held. We went to the counter at the back of the parlour, and were given some plastic tokens, rather like the ones we used to get in a cornflakes packet in the fifties. Y was given some kind of explanation, and we headed out of the parlour, crossed the street, and went down a dingy alley, until we reached a little booth, which was literally a hole in the wall. Y handed the woman the tokens and received about 3,000 yen in cash. This was about ten times our initial investment.

Y told me that the elaborate procedure we had just negotiated was the result of the fact that playing Pachinko for money was illegal, and we were doing what millions of Japanese people were doing every day to avoid the legal prohibition. It seemed a pretty transparent way of getting around the law, especially when you think that the yen equivalent of billions of dollars are paid out each year by pachinko parlours, in what is the most popular form of recreation in Japan, after television. It’s as if all the TABS in New Zealand were giant neon-encrusted palaces, often as big as the Civic Theatre in Auckland, and all were being run as illegal operations by syndicates of bookmakers.

Presents (お礼/Orei)

At a dinner party in Titirangi, Y listened to the New Zealand potter tell how he had been put to the test by his “living treasure” sensei (teacher). After a successful exhibition, the teacher had taken him, the gallery staff and some of those who had purchased his work, out on the town after the exhibition closed. “You will pay,” he said firmly. It was a predictably expensive evening as they went from expensive Kyoto ryotei (exclusive, traditional restaurant) to expensive bar It would have been thousands of dollars worth, but the potter knew he had to pay without protest.

The next day, when his teacher met him at the studio, he handed him a plain envelope. When he opened it later (one must never open such an envelope in the presence of the donor), he found almost as much money as he had spent the night before. He told this story as if it were a classic test in Japanese culture which he had passed.

Y was not so sure, although she said nothing at the time. Most of the money would probably have come from the other partygoers, and she felt that the potter should still have given his teacher something more as an “o-rei”, an untranslatable expression which refers to something given in recognition for something previously received, and which covers a minefield of complex situations for the unwary and wary alike.

Y remembered the impact on her neighbourhood when an American family, who had been wonderfully kind to a girl from Shin-oo-e (her neighbouthood), wrote to ask them to stop sending presents in recognition of their kindness. They explained, “Instead of sending us more presents, please be kind to some foreign girl who visits Japan.” This made a lasting impression, because it was a radical break from the tight reciprocity involved in the Japanese concept of “o-rei”. Y explained the American’s attitude in terms of the Christian idea of the brotherhood of humanity.

Now that we are living in New Zealand, she finds it a relief to be away from the almost endless cycle of gift and counter-gift. Money is the usual gift for weddings, funerals and when a friend or family member leaves on a journey. The receiver is obliged to give a counter-gift, not of money, but of something worth about 40% of the original gift.

At our wedding party, the counter-gift was handmade pottery. When Y’s father died, the guests were given a packet of green tea. Travellers will bring back souvenirs which may range from key-rings to sheep-skins. It is the obligation to spend hundreds, and in the case of honeymooners, thousands of dollars, which makes Japanese tourists such boons to the economies of countries like New Zealand which happen to be high on the list of “romantic” destinations. (No longer! –2007.)

When tightly scheduled package tourists are strategically dropped for an hour at an isolated souvenir shop in Takanini, the tourists will buy, at a frenzied pace, the scores of giri (obligatory) gifts that haunt every moment of sightseeing until the complete list has been ticked off. Such cycles of reciprocal gift-giving, while obviously a delight to anthropologists making links with the Trobiand Islanders and their elaborate exchanges of shell necklaces, also provide powerful stimuli to the contemporary consumer economy.

Apart from the situations I’ve already mentioned, end of year (o-seibo) and midsummer (chūgen) presents provide 40% or more of the annual income of the prestigious department stores whose distinctive wrapping paper is as much a part of the gift as the contents. While other middle-ranking department stores in Kumamoto have been closing as the economy stagnates, Tsuru-ya, “the” Kumamoto store for such gifts, goes from strength to strength.

While Westerners will bring a bottle of wine or (in Spain) a cake, when invited for a meal, a Japanese person will be loathe to embark on even the most momentary visit without bringing something, whether it be a jar of Fortnum and Mason’s jam or a box of petit-fours from “7/14”, the French patisserie we are fortunate enough to have near our house.

Every gift has to be slightly “special”, needless to say. The result is that ordinary Japanese people buy and consume many more luxury foods and fruits than Westerners of an equivalent income. Hence the plethora of $10 apples and the $100 water melons which are shipped all over Japan from Ueki, just north of Kumamoto.

Where perishables are concerned, one can only enjoy them, or share them with the family next-door. If the gift is more durable, like wine, or sealed fish-eggs, it may become the Japanese equivalent of the Trobiand shell necklaces, and be passed through a number of hands. One is always afraid that the wine which you give to Miwa, may have been given by Miwa to Keiko, who gave it to Mayuri, who in turn gave it you…

Where there is a hierarchical relationship, gifts tend to flow upwards in a less than reciprocal manner. To those who have will be given. Although teachers are paid for their work, the socially ordained gratitude of the pupil to the teacher has traditionally meant that country teachers like Y’s father never went hungry in time of war or famine.

Although money may sometimes be an acceptable gift, it must always be concealed in an envelope when being handed from person to person, and received unexamined. Receipts may be sent later, but it would be inconceivably vulgar to open an envelope and count the money when it is received. Like the medieval English barrister, who could never see money but who was quite happy for it to be dropped into the hood of his cape, the modern Japanese professional would find it demeaning to be seen to be too overtly concerned with money. As a result, many quite large transactions are left vague and unstated.

When Y, who is a classical singer, asks a pianist to travel from Tokyo to accompany her in a recital, there is no direct discussion of the “o-rei”. She has to estimate the appropriate sum to put in the envelope from consultations with other singers or teachers. There is always the risk of an unpleasant surprise, but as the envelope is never given until after the performance, there is nothing one can do.

When I was invited to play a role in some theatrical productions, I had no idea how much, or even if, I would be paid. When the productions were city-sponsored, and therefore more bureaucratic than usual, there might be a four month interval before the arrival of the envelope.

In the academic world, the foreigner may face the same uncertainty. A “foreign teacher” may spend twenty hours correcting a long research paper and be rewarded, not by a professional fee, but by a recycled bottle of wine. The only acceptable recourse is to be “too busy” when the same academic produces his next chef-d’oeuvre for “polishing up” a year later.

While employees seem to have largely abandoned the custom of giving presents to their boss, tenants often give their landlords o-seibo (end of year presents). The attitude that employees should be grateful for the fact of employments persists. When the “foreign teachers” at my university, the Prefectural University of Kumamoto, were refusing to accept employment conditions that were based on nationality, we were told that we should accept such conditions out of gratitude for being offered jobs at all.

Sumo (相撲)

Along with the shakuhachi, sumo provided something to talk about when I had almost no Japanese language. Sitting in a coffee bar between classes, at 5:30 p.m., any day that a sumo tournament was on, I could exchange names of favourite and least favourite wrestlers with the “master” and other customers, and feel that we were living in the same world.

The fights might be over in seconds, and seldom lasted more than thirty seconds. Most of the “rikishi” [wrestlers] looked podgy and soft, but you soon realized that lightning reflexes and steel strength lay concealed beneath the layers of blubber.

Some though, and especially the grand champion Chiyonofuji, were obviously fit and muscly, and, in the case of Chiyonofuji, a little too muscly.

With all the scandals about the use of steroids, I couldn’t stop wondering whether the huge neck and shoulder muscles owed something to the stuff that was destroying the integrity of so many sports. Y was appalled that I could suspect anything of the kind, and took it as proof of my incorrigible cynicism. Chiyonofuji and the other lads seemed to incarnate all the honour and decency of the traditional Japanese male, and any attack on them was an attack on Japan--and her.

I read that Chiyonofuji had been given steroids as a medical treatment after a shoulder injury and that meant that both of us could retreat from the argument with honour intact. Yes, he had taken steroids but he could have done it with honourable intent.

There were aspects of the Sumo world which remained troubling. One ex-wrestler, who had made allegations of extensive match-fixing, died in mysterious circumstances. The fact that Chiyonofuji’s wife had yakuza connections was known, but seldom alluded to.

For all that though, there is much in Sumo which remains the antithesis of the spin-driven worlds of politics, show-business and sport. The wrestlers never argue with the referee, and usually manage to accept victory and defeat with the same stoic calm.

Below the belt tactics are rare enough to be memorable. Most sumo holds and throws will do no real damage. The most damage can be done by the “tsupari”, the open handed thrusts or slaps to the head which can have the force of a punch. I was shocked one night when I saw Hokotoumi, who was an ozeki [the second hightes rank] at the time, whack an opponent on the side of the head with his open hand. He broke his opponent’s eardrum. I was even more upset that he won the fight and escaped without sanction. Y and her family were sanguine, refusing to believe that he had evil intent, and thinking it was so rare and event that it was not worth worrying about. So it proved. In fifteen years I have not seen a sequel which was as bad.

Not all sumo rikishi could meet the psychological expectations of their profession. One, too speedily promoted to yokozuna [the highest rank], after barely satisfying the vague promotion requirements, quickly fell apart under the strain of a series of bad performances. After hitting the “mother” of his stable, the wife of the head trainer, he was unceremoniously forced to retire, and joined a sport more suited to his character-- pro-wrestling.

As a foreigner, coming from the largest Polynesian city in the world, Auckland [Tāmaki-makau-rau], I felt an immediate empathy for the giant Samoan-Hawaiian, Konishiki, who reached the top Sumo level at about the time I arrived in Japan.

His huge bulk (sometimes he weighed 270 kgms), was a dubious benefit. If he got his weight in the right place, he could push anyone out. But, with shaky knees and a high centre of gravity, he would easily topple. Smaller, faster wrestlers could literally run rings around him and, as he trundled across the ring in search of an elusive opponent, would give him a shove de grace from behind.

After he had been so despatched by Mae-no-umi, one of the smallest and most entertaining rikishi, Konishiki ruefully reflected for the media: “He was there in front of me-- and then he suddenly disappeared. I thought he might have gone to buy some lunch. [弁当を買いに行ったと思った。].”

It was that kind of self-deprecatory humour, combined with huge stick-at-it-ness in the face of continual injury, which won over that section of the sumo public which may have had reservations about the first foreigner ever to reach the rank of ozeki.

His claim that his failure to be promoted to yokozuna was the result of racism was the one exception to his endless patience in the face of the difficulties of being a foreigner in the hierarchical, demanding sumo world. Technically he may have been right, but his case was far from clear. While it was true that X had been promoted after similar achievements, the Council were probably correct to tighten the requirements after X’s lamentable record as a Yokozuna. The fact that Akebono, another Polynesian, was soon promoted to yokozuna did much to undermine Konoshiki’s case.

He battled on for years, continuing to fight with dignity long after being demoted from Yokozuna, and, in retirement, has turned his performing skills to lucrative advantage as one of the highest paid stars of the television advertising world.

I have been only once to see sumo. A mother-in-law of Y’s sister in law’s sister in law managed to get some mid-week seats for the Novemeber Bashou (tournament) which was always in Fukuoka, a couple of hours away from Kumamoto. All agreed it was appropriate for me to take a day off my part-time lecturing job at Kumamoto University.

It was worth it. The television camera gives you a fight-centred view of sumo, but when you are there, you can really see the world of all the people who work around the ring: the towel holders, the salt suppliers, the referees and so on. Y’s brother managed to befriend one of the salt suppliers, and was given one of the salt baskets which provide the handfuls of salt which the rikishi toss into the ring before each bout. Salt was still caked to the bottom of the basket as a reminder that we had actually been there.

Y, as the only girl in a household of men, after her mother died, was as much a sumo connoisseur as her brothers. For years, she and her brothers would continue in their attempts to demonstrate all the holds and throws which we had seen on the small screen.

Y has done much to export sumo-consciousness. Whenever we have been on a beach or mountainside, she has always organized impromptu sumo matches, to the delight of people the world over.

Shrine (お宮/Omiya)

There are Shinto shrines all over Japan. I don’t think you could walk for two hundred metres in any village or town anywhere without coming across at least one small shrine in honour of the Gods. Most are unmanned, with only a collection box to help towards the maintenance. Many will be built near a particularly impressive rock, or perhaps a grand old tree (神木/shinboku/divine tree). All but the smallest are marked by a torii, an entrance arch, made of wood or, in the case of the grandest institutions, of reinforced concrete.

Apart from their spiritual function, shrines provide a refuge for trees. In most cities, the shrine precincts are, along with primary school grounds, the only places where trees are safe from property developers and urban planners. Amid the jumble of post-war suburbs, with almost no parks or other public spaces, only the shrines provide a haven from the relentless logic of the modern city. There the passer-by can relish the presence of three hundred year old camphor trees [楠木/kusunoki], and the birds that make their homes there.

In the modern city, however, not even the shrines are secure. Most have yielded to some extent to economic pressures, and are now only a fraction of their former size. One day, about ten years ago, I was travelling by train across the Shirakawa river in Kumamoto, when I saw that an avenue of trees leading to a shrine was being felled. Only a few trees nearest the shrine building were left.

Of course, this kind of thing had been happening for centuries, but I had never seen it. One grand old shrine in the centre of the city is almost completely given over to parked cars, with just a few embattled trees surviving.

Only the grandest shrines are staffed by priests and maintained properly. In Kumamoto City, there are four of these leading shrines: Fujisaki Shrine [藤崎神社], Kengun Shrine [健軍神社], Izumi Shrine [泉神社], and Katou Shrine [加藤神社].

Kengun Shrine is in the suburb of the same name, Kengun, [健軍ーit literally means “building the army”], and, as its location would suggest, it exudes the kind of militarist nationalism which links it to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Yasukuni houses the souls of all the Japanese war dead, including the so-called “Class A War Criminals”.

Katou Shrine is within the precincts of Kumamoto’s great castle, and is named after Katou Kiyomasa [加藤清正], the first daimyo (feudal lord) of Kumamoto, and builder of the castle. He sits at the bottom of the hill leading to the castle, in a bronze reincarnation wearing an enormous, sword-like hat at least as long as the rest of him.

Fujisaki Shrine backs onto the Shirakawa River, with a fine avenue of twisting pine trees and stone lanterns leading out to Route Three, the arterial highway cutting through the centre of the city. A slight detour would take me past the shrine on my bike route from home to the city.

Fujisaki used to play a key role in the world of sumo [相撲]. For hundreds of years, every new Yokozuna (Grand Champion) would come to Fujisaki for a blessing. This custom came to an abrupt end forty years ago when the fees demanded by the shrine led the Sumo federation to stop the visits.

Most of the six hundred and fifty thousand people who live in Kumamoto City visit one of these four grand shrines, either on New Year’s Eve or during the following three days. They receive a blessing, and toss money onto one of the huge tarpaulins which supplement the collection boxes for this most auspicious of periods.

On New Year’s Eve night, only the sacred mirror at the centre of the shrine is visible to the public. In search of divinity, the visitor finds a mirror.

I have visited all but Kengun Shrine at New Year, but most often I have been to Izumi Shrine because it is there that our Komparu Noh group does a special New Year performance each year.

The Noh stage is at the opposite end of Suizenji Kooen (Park) from the Shrine, and in daytime, the link between the two is obscured by the lake and the gardens in between. At midnight on New Year’s Eve though, the link is tangible.

As I sat on the Noh stage waiting for my dance to begin, I could see the flickering of the shrine lanterns and the glint of the reflections in the shrine mirror. Some years, it was below freezing point, and the number of Noh dancers would outnumber the spectators.

At half past eleven, the priests from the Shrine would cross the park, climb the steps onto the stage, and bless the performers.

One year, I noticed that Haruhisa [not his real name], one of my Noh comrades, was trying to stay as far away as possible from the priests, and was the last to get up, after bowing for the swinging-paper blessings. He told me later that he was afraid of being recognized by one of the priests. A year or two before, he had been one of a group from a multi-national theatre group which had ended a post-show party by going for a three a.m. dip in the pristine waters of the lake between the Noh stage and the shrine. The priest, who had been roused from his slumber by the carousing actors, had kicked them out and, as Haruhisa could remember his face, he was afraid the recognition would be mutual.

Within the shrine world there are various specialties. Those which have red arches are called Inari Shrines[稲荷], and are dedicated to the Fox God, the patron of all those involved in business, who need the kind of cunning intelligence associated with the shape-shifting fox.

There is one shrine which I was always keen to show visitors on our way to visit Mt. Aso. It lies just to the east of Kumamoto City, on the flatland surrounding the Shirakawa river. In Y’s family, the shrine is called the “chinchin” shrine. “Chinchin” is the familiar Japanese word for the genitals of either sex, and has no English translation.

In this case, the two-metre-long, wooden phallus on display outside the shrine building suggests that The Willy Shrine would probably be a reasonable translation. The wooden frontspiece is lovingly carved, with such realism that it could be used in the sex education of thirty metre tall giants.

The phallus on display is fifty years old, its predecessor having been washed away in the great flood of 1951. Amid the tragedy of that flood, I can imagine some down-river residents drawing some slight comic relief from the sight of a huge willy, cruising majestically down the flood-swollen river.