神楽/Kagura (Divine Music)

Kagura is the oldest form of theatre in Japan, the source of both Noh and Kabuki [歌舞伎]. Kagura began when the Goddess Amaterasu, who was sulking in her cave, was enticed out by the dancing of another goddess, Ama-no-Uzume. While Noh and Kabuki have been primarily the domain of professional performers, Kagura has remained folk theatre, something that country people do at certain times of the year.

It survives in several of the counties in Kumamoto, and I had seen it at Hirakawa, the home village of Y’s father.

There is almost no dialogue; it consists of short, dance-mime plays with masks,costumes and strong, rhythmic music played on fifes and drums. Devils, red-masked with fiery ginger locks, rush around and frighten children.

The quasi-federal division of Japan into “prefectures” means that you seldom hear of events or places, however close they might be, if they happen to be in another prefecture.

Takachiho is a mountain county, just across the border from Aso [阿蘇], the volcanic zone at the Eastern end of Kumamoto, our prefecture.

Someone had told Y that there was Kagura in Takachiho[高千穂], and we decided to go. However, no one in Kumamoto could tell us anything about it.

Takachiho was further into the mountains than Hirakawa and I thought that their kagura would be that much deeper and more significant. Unlike the hour-long kagura in Aso, the performances in Takachiho come in massive, mid-winter binges, each lasting from sunset to the following sunrise. These sessions take place three or four times a year.

There seemed no point in arranging accommodation since the show was to last all night. We decided to travel up in the afternoon and catch a bus back the following morning. We caught the train up to Tateno [立野], on the western entrance to the Aso Caldera, changed to the private Takemori [竹森] railway,and then caught a bus up, over the eastern rim of the caldera into the mountains of Miyazaki [宮崎].

The bus driver told us where to get off, and we soon found the kagura. We had arrived too late to see the procession to the local shrine which preceded each performance.

The performance took place in one of the local farmhouses. One of the sides of the house had been opened, and a kind of platform built outside. One of the rooms of the house was used as the stage, with the spectators watching from the adjoining room, or from the platform outside.

By the time we arrived, the performance was already underway. It continued without a break for the next fourteen hours. There were no more than ten performers, and many of them were no longer young. Even though only two or three might be on stage at any one time, it was still a marathon, demanding enormous stamina.

Apart from plays involving demons and gods, there were domestic dramas, involving jealous husbands and domineering wives, all presented in rhythmic pantomime.

There was no shelter for the audience, except for the lucky few who could squeeze into the house. Although there was neither wind nor rain, it was soon bitterly cold. The only protection against the elements came from several braziers, and from the staple alcohol of rural Japanese men, shouchuu [焼酎]. It is the Japanese equivalent of poteen, distilled from potatoes but, unlike its Irish cousin, legal. I don’t usually drink it, but in those circumstances found it irresistible. It was heated in long, bamboo sticks, which were thrust green into the coals of the fire, and drunk directly from the bamboo, which was passed around the circle of freezing spectators. The bottom of the stick was charred and obviously had a limited lifespan, but the mountains are full of bamboo.

As the night wore on, the amount of shouchuu consumed by both performers and spectators reached a threshold point, beyond which performance values ceded before a pervading sense of benevolent camaraderie.

. The content of the plays became more sexually explicit and had the audience falling about in their enjoyment. By three or four in the morning, I realised that ring-ins were standing (dancing?) in for the home team of performers and, before long I was being asked to take a turn on the stage.

I was kitted out as a devil, which, with long nose and flaming red hair, gave credence to the legend that he and his fellow Japanese demons had Celtic ancestry. I did Te Rauparaha’s haka, like so many Pakeha, drawing on Maori culture at key moments.

We spoke to one of the performers. I said how wonderful it was that this ancient tradition had been carried on unbroken for what must have been more than a thousand years. He said that it wasn’t exactly unbroken as it had died out in the early twentieth century, and had been revived only after the war.

I said it was a pity that so few people in Kumamoto knew about the Takachiho kagura, and asked if they ever came to Kumamoto. The kagura man said they had never been to Kumamoto to perform. However, my image of an isolated, rural community was shattered a few moments later when he said that they went to Paris every year to perform in a world arts festival there. Takachiho/the World. Like Butoh, Ninagawa and Suzuki Tadashi, you have more chance of seeing Kagura in the capitals of the culture world than you do in most Japanese cities.

I have only the haziest of memories of the last few hours at Takachiho, and may have fallen asleep huddled on the tatami in a corner of the house. At nine o’clock we caught the bus back over the hill to Kumamoto.

High Schools and Cram Schools (高校と塾/Koukou to juuku)

As New Zealand newspapers publish the list of the top academic achievers at high school, it is obvious that the Asian kids are generously represented. There are not too many Japanese names among them, but that is because the top Japanese kids are more likely to stay at home than their Korean or Chinese counterparts.

All over East Asia there is a passionate acceptance by all families that educational achievement is a key to success in life. This attitude pervades all social classes and contrasts particularly with the feeling of some English, working-class parents that educational aspirations are a kind of betrayal of one’s class and family.

I was amazed by the sacrifices that Japanese working class parents will make for the sake of their kids’ education.

In Japan, unlike New Zealand, free public education ends, not at the end of high school, but with graduation from middle school at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Entrance to a public high school is competitive. Only a small proportion (perhaps 20 or 30 per cent) of children will get into a low-fee public school. The rest must go to a private school paying up to $10,000 (NZ) a year.

Most of the kids who get into public schools come from middle class families, with the ironic result that the wealthiest families get their kids into the élite but cheap public schools, while working class families have to pay large amounts of money to go to even inferior private schools.

I have never heard any Japanese person express anger at this apparent inequity. Apart from the obvious advantage of having university-educated parents, middle-class children have another advantage in the competition to get into a public high school--money. Although most kids go to cross-class, almost free, public elementary and middle schools, money gives middle class parents an advantage when it comes to the after-school “juuku” [cram schools], which are a vital component of the preparation for the entrance exams for high school and university.

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.