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.
No comments:
Post a Comment