Bullying (いじめ/Ijime)

Bullying (いじめ/Ijime)

Bullying is a word which covers a multitude of sins, ranging from name-calling to near murder. It has long been endemic in Japanese schools and the bouts of hand-wringing which follow the suicide of a victim of bullying never seem to result in any systematic improvement. It seems hard to imagine that children will ever stop being violent to one another when they themselves are the regular victims of teacher violence.

The school system is infused with that violence. Although corporal punishment has been against the law for decades, children are regularly hit by teachers, especially when they are at middle school, between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Perhaps because it is illegal, teachers don’t use straps or cane but rather slap kids about the head with the open hand, rap their heads with their knuckles or, in the worse cases, kick and punch them.

I have not taught in Japanese schools but what I saw in the prefectural theatre at a concert one afternoon confirmed what I had heard from teachers and friends. Y and I had been given tickets to a rakugo (a kind of sit-down comedy) performance, which had been arranged by one of the local high schools. I saw a teacher come up behind a boy and give him a powerful clip across the back of his head with his open hand. I didn’t see what the boy had done but it was enough to explain why a number of kids die each year from that kind of assault.

Physical Education teachers are notorious for such teacher violence. One of Y’s family was slapped repeatedly around the face by his Phys. Ed. Teacher, because he had forgotten to bring his gym clothes to school. Together with the parents of other children who had been the victims of the same teacher, his parents contacted the local newspaper which ran a story about the teacher’s methods of discipline. As far as I know, he continued in his job without any official reprimand.

If the child’s father had not been a teacher himself, and known that the Phys. Ed. Teacher was more violent than the norm, I doubt if the incident would have made it into the newspapers.

The violence between children seldom makes the news unless it results in death, whether directly, or because the victim has been driven to suicide. The reluctance to talk about unpleasant things, particularly in front of outsiders, means that most of the anecdotal stories of school violence have been told to me by other foreigners, in particular from AETs (the young foreign graduates brought in as assistant language teachers in Japanese schools).

I heard of one of the worst incidents from James W., an Australian teaching in a girls’ high school in Kumamoto City. James had been in the staff-room after school. when he and the other teachers there heard groaning from the corridor. They found a girl lying in a bloody mess, semi-conscious on the wooden floor. She had been beaten to within an inch of her life by some classmates with whom she had fallen out.

She survived. The shocked parents of the girl talked to the headmaster and, when they heard that the police had not been contacted, insisted that the attack be reported. The headmaster did everything he could to persuade them against this. He told them that it would reflect badly on their daughter, that she would not graduate from high school and would have trouble finding either a job or a spouse. The parents caved in to such pressure.

The seriousness of the assault though, meant that there was dissatisfaction among the staff at the suppression of the attack. At the next staff meeting, several teachers questioned the headmaster. He became angry and stormed out of the meeting. My Australian friend then ruefully observed that the attack itself was then forgotten as the teachers were now upset because of the headmaster’s behaviour.

Another AET friend was working in a high school in Amakusa, the island area in the south of Kumamoto Prefecture. A young woman teacher had been attacked in class by a fifteen year old student. He pushed her to the ground and kicked her repeatedly before being restrained by classmates. The headmaster of the school visited her in hospital with flowers. He persuaded her not to report the attack to the police, not only because it would reflect badly on the school (and him). but because it would damage her own career prospects.

Such incidents are seldom reported in the official statistics, providing further evidence that there are indeed “lies, damned lies and statistics”.

Any casual visitor to Japanese schools will be impressed by the tidiness, diligence and discipline of the children. The darker side is seldom visible. One of the reasons for the violence is the size of the classes which, in spite of declining school rolls. remain large by the standards of most other developed countries. Classes of 45 and 50 are not uncommon in middle schools, and the draconian discipline is, in part, a result of the desperate attempts of teachers to maintain an environment where learning is possible.

Needless to say, any evidence of individuality is regarded as a threat to the learning environment. One of the friends of my Noh teacher runs a Jazz bar in the city. At one of Tsuiji sensei’s annual parties, the friend was lamenting the poor performance of his only son at middle school. His reports said things like “秀美君は、個性がありすぎます.” [Your son has too much character.]

I said that I had heard that the schools were very severe in their enforcement of regulations about hair length. The father said, “It’s not just the length of the kids’ hair. They even count the number of hairs on each kid’s head.”

All this was familiar territory for me, after my years in the Irish Catholic New Zealand school system, where corporal punishment was not so much an underground practice as one of the key educational techniques, honed to perfection by the Christian Brothers on the poor of Ireland. I had vivid memories of “brothers” pacing up and down between the rows of boys at morning assembly, looking for evidence that some might have evaded the barber on his once-every-three-weeks visits to the school. I often surprised Japanese friends by saying that the their school system was familiar to me. They imagined that New Zealand schools were like American public schools, with students being encouraged to express themselves and to debate current issues from an early age. Forty years ago, at least, Catholic schools in New Zealand were little better than Japanese schools at encouraging children to think independently. Both systems were designed to produce adults who would accept the social hierarchies without question.

Puns (しゃれ/share), Religion and Superstition

While a lot of Catholic practices seem superstitious to Protestants, Catholics were taught to make a very clear distinction between religious practice and mere superstition. Anything which involved the intervention of God, or the intercession with God of the Virgin Mary, or of any of the saints, was not superstition. Any belief in the autonomous power of other supernatural agents was regarded as superstition.

In a culture, like the Japanese, where practice is only tangentially linked to belief, such distinctions are seldom discussed. There is little concern as to whether a lucky or unlucky practice is linked to a “true” religious belief. There tends to be simply a pragmatic acceptance that some practices may ward off misfortune and, as long as they are not too onerous, should be followed, “just in case”.

The most socially pervasive superstitious (is there a less derogatory word?) practice in Japan is the organization of activities according to the list of unlucky and lucky days. Most Japanese diaries, or agenda, classify every day of the year on a scale which indicates whether it is appropriate for certain activities, especially important events like marriages or funerals. For instance, some days are called “tomo-biki” or “friend-pulling”.

Funerals should never be held on such days as this would invite the death of other people, who would be “pulled” into the other world to accompany the departed one.

The fact that these classifications are printed in most “normal” diaries is an indication of how pervasive the judgement of lucky and unlucky days is in daily life in Japan.

Individual belief seems irrelevant. Even if one family which was organising a wedding might feel strongly against such prescriptions--I have never heard of one--the fact that most guests would be upset if the wedding was on a inauspicious day would ensure the family would go along with normal practice.

I have never heard Japanese people say, “Don’t be superstitious!” when someone gives them advice about lucky or unlucky behaviour. Although there are obvious economic consequences to the existence of a number of taboo days on the calendar, with weddings being crammed into the luckiest days, and the wedding “palaces” being deserted on the bad days, I have never heard any suggestion that the lucky calendar be abandoned.

Many of the common practices seem to derive, not from any specific religious traditions, but from a feeling for the magic power of words. For example, the Chinese-based word for “four”, 四-“shi” sounds identical in Japanese to the Chinese-derived word for death, 死-“shi”.

Wherever possible, the number four is avoided in social interactions. While money is a common present when one is attending wedding, one has often to think carefully whether one should be stuffing thirty or fifty thousand yen into an envelope, as forty would be out of the question. For funerals in Kumamoto, the choice would be between three and five thousand yen ($50-$70, 2002).

On the positive side, eight is generally thought to be lucky, since the Chinese character for eight, 八, spreads wide from a peak (“sue hirogari”—lit. “the ends spread out”) and this is considered fortunate. I can see a link between that shape and the　 spreading gables of a wealthy house, It also looks like part of the Chinese character for rice 米, an important measure of wealth in Japan, at least until the Meiji period.

The list of do’s and don’ts is never complete, and even adult Japanese can be caught out doing something that might offend someone. Y once made the mistake of taking a pot plant as a present for her sister-in-law’s father, who was in hospital with pneumonia. Her elder brother intercepted it in the corridor of the hospital, narrowly averting embarrassment. Pot plants have roots, suggesting permanence, which in turn implies that the patient may have more than a temporary stay in hospital.

One tradition that is universally known is the belief that one should eat 鰻,unagi [eel], on one of the hottest days of the year. The reasoning is: the day is called “ushi no hi”; the word “unagi” contains the same sound “u”; hence, one should eat “unagi” on that day.

The use of paper in Shinto rites may be based on a similar pun: the Japanese words for paper, 紙, and for god, 神, are pronounced in the same way,　“kami”.

These traditions seem, like so many aspects of Japanese culture, to be coolly, rather than passionately observed. I have never heard of Japanese people dying or becoming sick because of dread at the breach of one of these traditions. On the other hand, the use of Shinto priests for something akin to exorcism is not uncommon. Two friends lost one of their twin boys at birth. The surviving twin had severe and chronic health problems which lasted for several years. A friend of the family suggested calling a Shinto priest. The priest came, and did a series of incantations to pacify the spirit of the dead twin, who, the priest explained, felt sad and lonely, and was trying to take his brother with him. After the priest’s visit, the boy’s health improved.

Although we have not had any similar reason to call in a priest, I would not protest if Y wanted to do so. I have bowed my head many times to receive a blessing from a Shinto priest, who waves strands of folded paper, hanging from a kind of wand over the heads of the people standing before him. No priest has ever wanted to know whether I believed or not, nor wondered if I was “Shinto”. Only once, when I went with the Noh actors for a blessing before the Takigi (torchlight) Noh, did I ever have the feeling that a Shinto priest was uncomfortable at my presence. I may have imagined it. Shinto is a cool religion in a way that my brand of Irish Catholicism certainly was not.

Japanese people who practice Shinto and Buddhism seem unconcerned about whether they are better than other religions, and never seem remotely interested in “converting” people. The persecution of Christianity during the Edo period seems to have been political rather than religious in motivation, inspired mainly by the fear of the ruling elite that the new beliefs would destabilize the established order.

However, there have on occasion been outbreaks of the kind of religious strife that is all too familiar to Europeans to those living in the Middle East. I have seen evidence of the attacks on Buddhism during the early Meiji period. In our explorations of the countryside around Kumamoto, I had often encountered Buddhist statues whose calm demeanour was somewhat compromised by their lack of a head. There is one famous collection of five hundred Buddha, one fifth of whom are headless. There is a notice saying that many lost their heads during a severe earthquake in the early nineteenth century.

I accepted the explanation without question until, years later, I came across another series of headless Buddhas on another mountain side. This time though, there was a different explanation. A large noticeboard explained that the statues had been mutilated during the nineteenth century by gangs of ultra-nationalists, who considered Buddhism un-Japanese and who were trying to promote the ancestral folk religion, Shinto, as the official religion of the renascent Japanese state.

The priest who had written this belonged to the minority Shingon sect of Buddhism, and was obviously an exception to the cultural norm of reticent forbearance in the face of ill-treatment. (Part of his noticeboard was taken up with a long account of the refusal of the authorities to take any action regarding the rape of one his family members.)

At some point after that brief Meiji-period outburst of anti-Buddhist passion, the state must have decided to accept that Buddhism could be accepted as Japanese, just like that other foreign import which has come to be seen as a defining aspect of the Japanese national identity, the Chinese writing system.

The great popularizer of Japanese religion and thought, Shiba Ryoutarou, has done much to demythologize the ancient character of contemporary Shinto. State Shinto was manufactured by the Meiji regime out of the decentralized folk religion and was used to support Japanese imperialism and militarism.

Pre-Meiji Shinto survives, however. Walking through the forest on the slopes of Mt. Aso one winter’s day, Y and I came across a tiny Shinto stone shrine, almost invisible among some bushes, with the carving of a snake on the one side. In front of the stone, someone had left an egg as an offering to this deity of rural fertility.

On the hill behind Kumamoto University, there is what Y and I have always called the “brain shrine”, a triad of enormous boulders with a crude little concrete “shrine” and collection box in front of it. There is a pile of pebbles in front of it, each with a student’s prayer written on it: “語学しますように. 神様助けてください/

Gogaku shimasu you ni. Kamisama,tasuketekudasai. /

[“May I pass [my entrance exams]. Help me, God!”

“Let me be accepted for medical school!”]

It is in these mountain shrines, rather than in the bombastic bellicosity of militaristic “state-Shinto” shrines like Yasukuni Jinja in Tokyo, that the ancestral spirit of Japan can be sensed.

State Shinto has more to do with Europe than Japan, as the young Meiji leaders felt they had to create a European-style state if they were not to be dominated, like China. by the European cabals.

古臭い！/Furukusai! [It stinks of age!]

“I hate Japanese films; They’re so depressing.” That was my brother-in-law S., who was born in 1945. The two Chinese characters used in his name mean “Off to war!” He was born in the dying (sic) days of the Pacific War, just after his father, who was a veteran of the war in China, had once more received his call-up papers. The father didn’t expect to return. After making his way from the road less mountain village of Ubuyama to the prefectural capital, Kumamoto, he was told he wasn’t needed after all, and lived to see his youngest son reach the age of fifty-five.

For the children of the post-guerre generation, there was a pall over so many aspects of traditional Japanese culture. Jazz, rock, Western classical music, “I love Lucy” and “mei-ken Lassie/ (“Beloved dog Lassie”) were the staple cultural nourishments of Y and her two brothers, once they had moved to the city and managed to get a television, around 1960.

And it wasn’t only the younger generation. Y’s mother loved the theatrical “professional wrestling” programmes just as much as her children. Fifteen years before, she had been drilling with other village women in the use of the nagenata, the traditional weapon which would protect them against the American invaders.

The rest of the world has a pervading image of Japan as a nation which values its ancient culture and meticulously maintains its shrines in their ancestral form, and its theatre in its fourteenth century idiom. I soon found the dialectical opposite of this stereotype. During my first week in Japan, the “master” of a coffee bar near Shizuoka Railway Station explained what a fantastic place Japan was: “It’s really up to date. We really like new things. As soon as anything gets a bit old, we chuck it away.” He made an eloquent gesture, as if throwing some of his expensive cups and saucers over his shoulder.

Months later his attitude was confirmed by a group of doctors who were among my first students of English. They had all been children when the war finished, and had known the hunger of those years when children were not ashamed to beg from occupation troops. One night, they asked me what I thought about Japan. At one point in my rambling reply, I said, “One thing that has surprised me is the extent to which Japan seems like new colonies, like the U.S. or New Zealand, rather than the more traditional European countries.” One of the doctors said, with obvious gratification, “Thank you very much.” That was even more of a surprise. I had felt I was honestly voicing something that they would not be happy to hear.

None of Y’s immediate family had even been to a Noh performance until she took me to see the Spring Noh soon after we arrived in Kumamoto.

One day after I had started to learn Noh, I told S about the next performance, and asked if he wanted to go. He laughed and said that it was the last thing he wanted to do. Noh, he said, was “furukusai” (stinking of age).

There are, many more S than people who like Noh enough to go to a performance. And yet, there are enough of the latter to maintain a living performance tradition, even in provincial cities like Kumamoto.

The traditions are not the exclusive preserve of the educated middle class. As I cycled around Kumamoto I saw that teachers of traditional calligraphy could also work as bicycle repairmen, and that working-class parents were just as keen to ensure their children went to university and learnt ikebana [flower arranging] as the local doctor.

Class divisions seem of less significance than in any of the European countries I have known. Whether one’s grandfather was a peasant or a samurai seems to count for little among the students of today. As in most countries, there has been a huge recruitment from the peasantry to the educated caste. Unlike European countries, Japan retains very little of its hereditary bourgeoisie.

The Americans carried out a huge redistribution of land in the late 1940s, and the generations that have followed show little no resentment. Nor has there been the kind of move to reverse the confiscations as in Eastern Europe.

Just as the hairdresser or the carpenter may be a teacher of ikebana, the doctor or the professor may be an aficionado of enka, the sentimental, popular song tradition. On New Year’s Eve, most families in Japan, regardless of wealth or standing, watch a four hour television extravaganza featuring a vast array of well-known performers, ranging from Western opera singers to enka idols, from teeny-bopper rock groups to Jazz veterans. I couldn’t imagine such catholicity of taste in any equivalent Western show.

Festival (祭り/matsuri) Boshita! (Beat them!) /Continuity and Change)

Alan Booth wrote of the intoxication of a matsuri (festival) in the North of Japan, in his Roads to Sata. Once I got over comparing them with Spanish fiestas, I could enjoy Japanese matsuri in their own terms, spectacles for the populace, rather than the transformation of a whole city into a festival. (The first scenes in Marcel Carne’s classic, Les Enfants du Paradis [The Children of the Gods] will give you a good idea of what I mean.)

Like Spanish cities and towns, every place in Japan has its main festival, though without being as clearly defined as the fiesta mayor in Spain. In Kumamoto, there is no doubt that the big one is the matsuri of one of the two main Shinto shrines in the city, Fujisaki-gu.

A big procession heads out from the shrine at around six in the morning of the second Saturday in September, meanders through the city, and ends up in Shin-machi,[New Town] (one of the oldest areas, in the shadow of the Castle), and disperses. After a few hours of “asobi” [lit. “play” --having a good time], the procession reassembles and heads back the way it came.

I am not sure of the order but the main components of the procession are: the “Gods”, (three I think), who ride in ceremonial wagons; “samurai” in full armour, some riding and some walking; horses, huge beasts from the mountains of Aso, which are distributed throughout the procession, each with a team of attendants, who try and keep them from going berserk, while provoking them to do just that, with raucous bugle calls, and by feeding them sake; and finally the “groups”, each representing some organization, perhaps the Old Boys/Girls of a high school or a company. Each group has fifty of so people, all dressed in a festive uniform, and all chanting and dancing their way through the streets.

Participating can be an expensive business. Once you add on the cost of the pre-dawn session to the uniform and the affiliation fee, a young girl may pay 30,000 yen ($500NZ—2002 exchange rate!) for the right to start out on her day of fun.

I was disappointed to find that the rest of the population simply watches the parade go by, and hours later, watches it go back again. They may also throw coins in the direction of the passing Divine carriages. (The link between money and religion is even more overt in Shinto than it is in Christianity.)

As the parade marches through the street, the participants chant the same short phrase with indefatigable energy. For the first ten years I was in Kumamoto, it was “Boshita! Boshita!” which means “We beat them! We beat them!” The “we” is the Japanese who were identifying with their seventeenth century forebears who, under the warlord Hideyoshi　Toyotomi, invaded and occupied Korea.

I had been teaching a course about Northern Ireland and colonization to my students, and could see obvious parallels between the “Boshita” parade and the Orange Parades in the North--except that in Kumamoto the presence of the 700 strong Korean community was discrete to the point of invisibility. It occurred to no-one that I spoke to that the “Boshita!” chant might upset Koreans.

In the early nineties though, the chant suddenly changed, from “Boshita” to “Dookai! Dookai!” (“How was it?”), an anodyne phrase, obviously chosen for its inability to give offence to any ethnic group. After the battles and knife edge negotiations in Northern Ireland over the tiniest details of the Parades, it was intriguing to see that there was neither resistance nor even discussion about the change of the 400 year old chant. I would imagine that most of the young people on the procession this year had no idea that “Dookai! Dookai!” was not an ancestral tradition.

My Noh studies gave me an insight into another usually unknown aspect of the festival. Even the participants usually have no idea of the real purpose of the procession, nor of what happens during the hours the Gods are in Shinmachi [New Town]. In fact, when everyone else heads off for some refreshments and a rest, the Gods are taken up a side street and lined up in front of the Noh stage where I practised every week. There they watch a full programme of Noh and Kyougen, beginning with an okina Noh, one which is performed for the Gods.

Between the Gods and the stage there is room for no more than a couple of hundred spectators. The seats are always taken well before the performance starts around nine in the morning, so there is no need to advertise. The fact that the whole festival is built around the Gods’ expedition to see Noh is known by few people in the city.

While the Boshita parade is full of male sound and fury, the August O-Bon (All Souls’) festival in the neighbouring city of Yamaga is the quintessence of traditional femininity. The core of that festival is the “bon odori”, the dance of around a thousand Yamaga women, on the Friday and Saturday nights of the Buddhist festival. Each woman wears a light-coloured summer kimono, and a paper lantern lit with a candle on her head.

The sight of a thousand women dancing with the grace and dignity worthy of their ancestors, slowly moving in a vast circle, of the mass of swaying lanterns set against the black summer sky, to the accompaniment of taiko [drums] is profoundly moving.

I remembered the Sardana,　the equally grave circle dance of Catalonia. (There is a superb photograph of the Sardana in a country village taken during the lean years of Franco in Josep Pla’s book Catalunya.)

Several years after first seeing the Yamaga festival, I took two friends, a Franco-Korean couple who were in their first year in Kumamoto, to see it. I got the shock of my life to find that the music had been transformed into a synthesized mess of muzak, and the power of the swaying lanterns subverted by massive TV screens showing the performance live to the people who were already there.

I looked around me but could discern no sign of anyone sharing my consternation. It was as if nobody had noticed any change. People seemed just as happy as they had been two years before when I had first been at the festival. While people in Kumamoto do have a profound love of tradition, they also tend to be passive in their acceptance of whatever media-influenced perversions are decreed by the publicity departments of the local bureaucracies.

International Marriage (国際結婚/kokusai kekkon)

For those who like weddings, one of the attractions of an “international marriage” is the chance to have two ceremonies rather than one. Y. and I were married in my parents’ garden in New Zealand in 1984. There was a beautiful calligraphic message from her 80 year old father for the ceremony
At that time, I hadn’t met anyone from Y’s family. We had met in Europe and come to New Zealand after spending a year together in Turin where she was studying classical singing. After the wedding, Y went back to Japan for a month before starting rehearsals in a production of Rigoletto.

Her father and brother came to New Zealand at the end of 1984. After a couple of days of seeing the sights of Auckland, S, Y’s brother, said to me that his father was a lot happier about our marriage now that he had seen what New Zealand was like. He had been worried that I did not have any money, but he could see that in New Zealand you could be happy without much money.

We moved to Japan in April 1986. After arriving in Tokyo, I went out for a meal with an old friend from university, M. He took me out to a restaurant run by a kamikaze pilot.
It was miles out in the suburbs. We were the only non-Japanese clients. No-one took any notice of us and M said that was a measure of how normal the presence of Westerners had become. He said there would have been a lot of fuss, twelve years before when he had first arrived in Tokyo.
M: “You realize that now Y’s here, you’ll never get her to move away again. Japanese women are like that. However happy and glad to be in other countries they are, once they get back, settled in their home environment, they never want to move again.”
I laughed. Martin had spent only for a few minutes with Y. It seemed incredible that he should be predicting the behaviour of someone he barely knew. Years later, I thought ruefully back on that conversation. It was sixteen years before we lived in New Zealand again.
Y’s family made huge efforts to ease the difficulties as we settled into life in Kumamoto. M’s wife was also from Kumamoto but her family were adamantly opposed to the match, and refused even to meet him when they visited Kumamoto together. We have heard a number of similar stories, sometimes involving the virtual kidnapping of a Japanese spouse and children. I would estimate, though, that such couples are a tiny minority. The difficulties that people in international marriages face arise more from the dynamics of the relationship than from the peculiar factors involved in intercultural relationships.
The extra difficulties involved in such relationships are balanced by the greater importance given to marriage in Japan compared with Western countries.

When we arrived in Kumamoto,there were two groups of women in intercultural marriages. One, called the “Foreign Wives Association” consisted of women who had married Japanese men. The other consisted of Japanese women married to foreign men. We met several families involved with the latter group within the first week or so that we were in Kumamoto, and they were to become some of our closest friends.

小泉八雲[Koizumi Yakumo]/Lafcadio Hearn/Patrick Hearn (1850-1904)

Lafcadio Hearn was the son of a Greek mother and an Irish father. His father, Charles Hearn, was a British army officer serving in Greece. “Lafcadio” was the name he adopted when he arrived in the U.S. He was leaving behind his “real” name “Patrick”. It is a measure of his success that one can scarcely imagine him being called “Pat Hearn” much less “Paddy Hearn”.
Hearn was born on the island of Lefkada (the source of “Lafcadio”). After a couple of years in Dublin, his mother had what is now called a “nervous breakdown” and was sent back to Greece, never to be seen again. Patrick was consigned to his Catholic aunt, and was sent to a Catholic boarding school in the North of England.
He migrated to the U.S. at the age of nineteen, became a successful journalist--specialising in the sub-Poe grotesque, travelled to Japan on an assignment when he was forty, and never left. He got a job teaching at a school in Matsue, on the Sea of Japan coast.

Hearn loved it there but, after staying for less than a year, accepted a job at The Fifth High School (fifth on a national grid) in Kumamoto, hoping that the winter would be less severe. He was three years in Kumamoto, working as a “Foreign Teacher”.
After Matsue, he found Kumamoto disappointingly modern and Western. Hearn took Japanese nationality, adopted the name Koizumi Yakumo (Koizumi being the family name of his wife), and died in Tokyo, after increasingly unhappy years teaching, first at the Imperial University (now Tokyo University), and then at the private Waseda University.

Hearn is perhaps the most famous foreigner to have played a role in Japan’s domestic history and looms large both in Kumamoto and in Matsue.

As two of his many successors in the rank of “Foreign Teacher”, both sharing his dislike of Western imperial arrogance, and of the apostolic zeal of many Christian churches, my friend Alan and I have felt ourselves living in the long shadow of the little Irishman; Alan much more than I, as he has been a long-serving “Foreign Teacher” at the same university where Hearn taught, over a century ago.
Although too remote an ancestor to cause anxiety, Hearn’s prolific writings, and his extraordinary ability to elicit fascinating information with limited Japanese, make it difficult for any “Foreign Teacher” to avoid feeling that one’s own achievements pale in comparison.
Hearn published an average of a book a year all the years he was in Japan. Seeing them together in all their collective bulk at the Hearn museum at Matsue left me in awe of his diligence.

For all of his anti-imperialism, Hearn was quite happy to identify as a Englishman in the best “West-British” style. When his son Kazuo was born, he wrote to a friend in the U.S. that he took after his father, with his “English looks”. I discovered this when I was asked to do the role of Hearn in a play about his life in Kumamoto.
It was written by a local playwright, Ogata Jun. The Japanese script has Hearn writing with pride about his son’s “Irish looks”. I checked with Alan, who is one of the leading Hearn scholars, and learned that the “English” in the original letter had been changed to “Irish”.

Although a precocious admirer of Yeats, whose poems he introduced to students in Kumamoto within years of their publication, Hearn seems to have been profoundly ambiguous about his Irish identity, and the paucity of references to his homeland contrasts with the volumes he wrote about his beloved Japan.

It’s ironic then that the performance of the play was immersed in the music of the Chieftains, and that the Irish Ambassador flew down for every major Hearn function in Kumamoto or Matsue. One puzzled Irish ambassador was reported in the Kumamoto as wondering why Hearn was so popular with Japanese people. Prof. Nakajima, the chair of the local Hearn research group, replied, “We like him because he liked us” [Kumamoto Nichi Nichi Shinbun circa 1994].

Hearn was too complex a man to ever remain the simple fan of the “faery land” of his first day in Yokohama. [See the Penguin anthology of Hearn’s writings.] In his letters to other Western correspondents, he reveals a jaundiced perspective on the academics and bureaucrats who had so much power over him. He jokingly writes that the main task of a “Foreign Teacher” is “to keep the clams happy”. Today’s students are hardly more vocal than the ‘clams’ of a century ago, but they do not share the thirst for knowledge of their “senpai”, (“seniors”/predecessors) of the Meiji period.

Hearn appears to have been an inspirational teacher, and the prospect of following him at Kumamoto and then at Tokyo was a cause of great anxiety for the young writer Natsume Soseki, who felt that he was being selected, not on his merits, but merely because he was Japanese. (Soseki was one of the first generation of Japanese students who had been educated at the new Imperial University and his appointment in Hearn’s place was part of the assertion of academic independence that accompanied Japan’s growing assertiveness on the imperial stage.)

For all that Hearn’s choice of Japanese nationality has been a source of pride to succeeding generations of Japanese people, it was not without its ironic cost. At that time, “Foreign Teachers” earned salaries many times that of their Japanese colleagues. Hearn noted with some satisfaction that he earned more than the Governor of the Prefecture. At the Imperial University, his change of nationality was used as an excuse to reduce his salary by eighty per cent. For all his sympathy for Japanese determination to maintain national independence, Hearn saw this as impossible to accept with dignity, and left for the private Waseda University, where he died shortly afterwards.

Dignity was not the only issue. He was supporting a large household, his wife and children, his wife’s parents and even her adopted parents, not to mention several retainers.

He remained an outsider, unable to hold his own socially in Japanese-speaking environments, till the day he died.


[I am grateful to Dr. Alan Rosen of Kumamoto University for introducing me to Hearn and for generously pointing out some of the mistakes.]

能ーNoh.

During the first week after we arrived in Kumamoto, Y took me to a Noh performance in Suizenji Park, For centuries, the park had been the private garden of the Hosokawas, the Daimyo (feudal lords) of Higo, or Kumamoto as the province is now known. I have a vivid memory of Hagoromo being danced by an old man. I was struck by the ability of the frail, tremulous body to convey the angelic beauty of the dance to win back the hagoromo or “feather cloak” from the fisherman.

A year and a half after that, I was introduced to Tsuiji sensei by Greta, who had taught at the YMCA with me the previous year. Greta was a passionate Noh student, devoting every ounce of energy to her studies, and teaching English just enough to pay the bills. Greta and a Canadian friend, Jane, had been learning from Tsuiji sensei for about a year. I was welcomed by Tsuiji sensei to one of his Friday night classes, and he invited me to join as a student.
There were many reasons to accept. Tsuiji himself was (and is!) a gentle, unpretentious man with a hearty laugh and endless patience. He loved Noh with a single-hearted thoroughness that I could admire but not emulate.
Apart from the year and a bit that we were away in France, I have learnt from Tsuiji sensei ever since. Through him, I have been a member of the school of Noh that he is affiliated to, the Komparu, or “Golden Spring” School. For the first year or so, the foreigners were given special treatment, being exempt from the normal membership duties and fees. When I realized that was happening, I asked to be treated the same way as everyone else, and have been, as far as that is plausible in a society like Japan, where foreign participants are still few (written 2002).

Unlike Greta, I have had an intellectual, rather than an emotional admiration for Noh, and have devoted no more of my time to it than most of my Japanese companions, that is one session a week, with the occasional extra practice before a “Noh kai” or a performance. The Komparu Noh calendar consists of Spring, Summer and Autumn gatherings, with other special events like Takigi or torchlight performances for the Kumamoto Castle Festival in Autumn, and for the annual Fujisaki Shrine Festival. Some of these are Komparu gatherings. Some are in combination with other schools, which are active in Kumamoto, in particular the Kita and Kanze schools.

The typical programme for a Komparu performance would be something like this:

1) a number of shimai: extracts from well-known Noh plays, the equivalent of arias in European opera;
2) A kyougen, a short, comic play, usually based on a Edo period household, with husband-wife-servant relations figuring prominently;
3) a Noh play, somewhat less than an hour in length.

This programme would be about three hours long. When the schools combine, there will be several Noh plays, and the performance may last seven or eight hours. In that case, it becomes rather like a five-day cricket test. People come and go depending on their interest in the programme, and their relations with the participants. Many will nap at some time during the performance.

Alan, a friend and mentor, wondered why I was bothering learning Noh, since it was so difficult for a foreigner that there could be no question of achieving any level of understanding or competence, especially when I was devoting so little of my time to it. I could see his point, but since I was enjoying it, I did not worry about how much progress I made.

Tsuiji sensei, whenever he talks about his experience teaching non-Japanese students, always says that we have brought home to him the theatricality of Noh, the fact that it is first and foremost theatre. The tendency in Japan is for Noh to be seen as something apart, with minimal connections to other forms of theatre.

Noh crystallized in the fourteenth century, under the dynamic influence of an actor called Zeami who followed his father, Kanami in providing the basis for the Noh repertoire, and a body of theory which, even today, is inspirational to Japanese performers. Their two names combine to form the name of one of the Kanze School, which is one of the largest.

The goal of a Noh student is to reach the point where you perform the leading (shite) role in a Noh play. I still haven’t done that.
In fact, the only time I have performed in a full Noh play was in a minor role in Greta’s farewell performance of Hagoromo around 1990. “Farewell” because it was just before her return to the U.S,--where she has continued to do Noh-influenced theatre ever since.

From the first lessons, I enjoyed the lack of what I came to see as the performance anxiety of Western theatre. Whenever I had acted, whether in lesson, rehearsal, or play, in Western theatre, I had always felt worried by the question: “Are you good?” “Is this a good performance?” While something of that anxiety remains in Noh, it is much less. In the Western theatre I had done, I had always felt that the important component of a performance was the part brought by the actor, the individual genius which creates the role.
In Noh, there is almost no worry about that individual component. All your energy and concentration go to learning the role, guided by the model provided by the teacher. That model is determined in great detail, down to the finest finger position, to the angle of fingers from the wrist. Paradoxically, and this was something I remembered from mime classes in Barcelona, the more a performer strives to match an abstract model, the more inevitably individuality will shine through.
I delighted in watching a succession of “shimai” by actors, all trying only to “do it right”, and yet managing to “express themselves” in a way that would delight the teachers of any New York theatre workshop.

I came to realize that the duty of the Noh actor was not to “be good” as a performer, but rather, to be the adequate vehicle for the play which you were transmitting, along with the other people around you: the chorus, the musicians, and all those who had worked to prepare the theatre and make the performance possible.

Like the Irish traditional music performers I so admired, the Noh performers received the pieces from their teachers and felt a duty to pass it on just as they had received it. I remember Sean Potts of the Chieftains saying that you had to pass on “the bones” of the tune, whatever the flesh that an individual performer might choose to add.

For all that there is an impression of a conservative, unchanging tradition passed down over the centuries, I soon realized that there is lot of variation in the Noh tradition. Even within the Kumamoto area of Komparu, different teachers provide noticeably different patterns for their students.

Greta found it very difficult when she had to do lessons from K sensei since Tsuiji sensei could not teach her to play the drum, a skill which was necessary for her to get a teaching licence. She soon found that the two teachers were giving her conflicting directions regarding the position of her hands while dancing. She had to remember the two sets of instructions and vary them according to whose class she was doing.

Although all the schools have a national structure, and most are clearly focussed on the “iemoto” (lit. “head of the house”), the Kumamoto section of Komparu enjoys a level of autonomy which reflects both the strength of the local tradition and the weakness of the national structure. This is a mixed blessing. While local teachers, like Tsuiji sensei, benefit from a kind of federal-style autonomy, they perhaps are deprived of the stimulus of frequent contact with top-level performers.

Over the fifteen years that I have been there, I have generally been impressed by the co-operative and harmonious way in which the Komparu people work together. Each performance requires a huge amount of preparation and physical work, not to mention money. For each Takigi (torchlight) Noh performance at the beginning of August of each year much work is needed:lanterns have to be made from bamboo which has been cut in the shrine grove; marquees set up, and. some years. a whole new stage must be built—and all of this in the 30 degree plus heat of a Kumamoto summer. After two days of such labour, Tsuiji Sensei will then have three hours of performance, leading the chorus, and preparing each of his students for their five minutes of shimai.

The only authority I can see being referred to during all this work is the authority given to those with experience and expert knowledge. There are moments however, when the winds of jealousy and strife wrack even the world of Noh. The death of a teacher has produced tense relations as his authority is passed to his students.

Tsuiji sensei has always been completely untouched by the accumulative instincts of so many of those involved with the traditional crafts of Japan. So many of the tea ceremony and flower arranging hierarchies appear more like pyramid-selling schemes than artistic circles. I had thought such practices were not to be found in Komparu until one of my Noh friends switched his allegiance from another teacher to Tsuiji Sensei. We learned he had been paying large amounts of money to the other teacher over the years to obtain various “certificates”, the main function of which was to provide income for the teacher and for those above him in the hierarchy. As a low-ranking civil servant, on a secure but modest salary, X. was ill-able to afford the fees involved, often more than a $1000, and had been paying them without telling anyone, even his wife.

One straw finally broke the camel’s back, and he made Tsuiji his Noh companion as well, after many years of friendship and doing modern theatre together. I realised once more how fortunate I had been in my own choice of teacher.