First Read - 6 March 2015

- The knife attack yesterday on U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert (Link) immediately brought to mind the much more serious stabbing of U.S. Ambassador Edwin Reischauer in Tokyo on 24 March 1964 (Link). However, seemingly only to my mind, as a Google News search of "Reischauer" in katakana returns nothing more recent than reports of the visit of Dr. Kent Calder of the Reischauer Center.

For those historically minded, Dr. George R. Packard, the author of book in the above link and Ambassador Reischauer's special assistant, is still with us. Someone should try to contact him for historical perspective -- especially because he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the Ampo disturbances.

- For those of us who were wondering, "When only about 33% of those in their twenties vote in national elections, what is the point of lowering the voting age from 20 to 18 years-of-age for national referendums on constitution revisions?" the Liberal Democratic Party let the other shoe drop yesterday. The LDP unveiled plans to have all definitions of adulthood lowered to 18 years of age -- in particular the right to charge (and presumably, in the case of murder, execute) youths 18 and 19 years-of-age as adults. "With rights must come responsibilities (gimu)" intoned LDP policy research chief Inada Tomomi, repeating the conservatives' mantra regarding the Constitution.

That this proposition comes amidst then nation's horror at the murder of 13 year old Uemura Ryota by a gang of youths led by an 18 year old is a mere coincidence.

The Komeito and opposition parties are deeply skeptical about the LDP's plans, saying that changing the legal definition of childhood goes far beyond discussions the parties have had on the subject of altering the franchise. (Link - J)

Just what the LDP has been thinking on the issue of lowering the voting age, aside from a bizarre, "if we can lower the voting age AND change the education system to inculcate hyperpatriotism, making younger voters more ready to vote for us AND we can hang the killer of Uemura Ryota, we will be invincible!" is a mystery.

Then again, what the other parties cooperating on the bill lowering the voting age are thinking is equally mysterious.

As for Inada, a wild, wild guess: though no hint of this has escaped Abe Shinzo's lips, he wants her or Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Taka'ichi Sanae to succeed him as prime minister.

Flowers For Korekiyo

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Today is the 78th anniversary of the 2/26 Incident (Ni-ni-roku jiken). (Link)

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has been relying on Takahashi Korekiyo as the guide star and historical anchor for his Abenomics economics policies (Link). Do you think the PM has sent flowers to the old man's grave today or to his statue in the park next to the Canadian Embassy, the site where the soldiers found him and killed him?

I was trying to think the other day of what Abe could do to demonstrate that his 'escape for the postwar regime' is more than just a glorification of the Meiji State. "What could he do to repudiate the course the country took under the Meiji Constitution?" I asked myself. "Perhaps he could reverse a historical wrong, proving that he is not in thrall to the myth of a virile and respected pre-1945 Japan."

I tried to think how far back in time one would have to go for Abe Shinzo to be able to admit, "OK, what the government did there was wrong."

"If not apologies for the invasion of China, not the assassination of Zhang Zuolin, not the annexation of Korea, how about a partdon of Kotoku Shusui, tried and executed in 1911 for the High Treason Incident of 1910? That was a domestic affair so there are no implications for Japan's current fraught relationships with its neighbors. And since it all happened over a hundred years ago, who could have any problem with it?"

Then I had to clap my hand to my forehead:

"Idiot! Of course there is someone who would have a problem with it. Member of the House of Representatives Hiranuma Takeo, Abe's Best Friend Forever and the co-leader of Abe's Sosei Nippon movement (Link) is the adopted son of Hiranuma Kiichiro - the prosecutor of the High Treason Incident defendants!"

One hundred and three years on...and hopeless impediments to realistic and healing assessments of history are still with us.

And now the sun is going down.

Suggested Exhibition #2

If you find yourself in the vicinity of Ogikubo Station on the Chuo Line and have a few minutes to spare, you might want to walk up to the Suginami Historical Museum's Amanuma Branch Museum (Suginami kuritsu kyodo hakubutsukan bunkan) for a tiny exhibit of mass-produced toys and toy making in the period prior to, during and immediately after the Occupation.

The impact of the march to war upon the toys children play with is not something that often comes to mind when one considers the social history of the Meiji, Taisho and early Showa periods. Big changes came not just the permissible and suggested themes of play but in the materials as well, with metal disappearing from toy making very early during Japan's adventure on the continent, the tin and iron sucked up into industrial production for the war. By the very end, toy makers were reduced to making toys out of celluloid and thin strips of bamboo.

Particularly fascinating are the pair of Occupation era propaganda films on the postwar birth of a workshop toy making industry. Waste (empty tin cans) from the U.S. military's canteens and clubs became the raw material for an almost entirely hand-powered process producing toy cars for export.

A whole world of asides ("And into tin toys beat our trash/nations shall learn war no more"; "Japanese were exporting cars only a few years after the surrender, only these were made of tin"; "Yeah, and that must have been the last time an American bigshot could be smiling at a display of Japanese cars ready for export"...) come to mind as one watches the films, which are showing in a continuous loop on the video monitor next to the staircase.

Lovers of historical irony will probably like the jellied alcohol-fueled model nuclear power station in the later postwar section of the exhibit, as well as toys of the 1930s proclaiming Japan's military might.

The exhibit runs through December 1. There are special programs on the 20th of this month and on November 3.

Information on the bunkan (Japanese only) can be found here.

A Saturday In The Showa Era

On Saturday, the Tokyo Shimbun (the capital district’s unabashedly lefty hometown newspaper) published a cryptic* senryu:

栄誉賞
つぎはボクだと
卵焼き

Eiyosho
tsugi wa boku da to
tamago yaki

The People’s Honor Award
Next on the list is me
Says fried egg

Of course, readers of my post on the response to the announcement of the government’s intent to bestow People’s Honour Awards upon Nagashima Shigeo and Matsui Hideki would know that the food item has reason to feel hopeful.

At noon, in the train, I checked my ancient mobile phone for news. In the headlines was the death from illness of Murata Katsushi, the Sumiyoshi-kai gangster who fatally stabbed Japan professional wrestling hero Rikidozan in 1963 (Link - J). Nearly a full 50 years had passed since the commission of the crime that killed the most prominent (albeit sub-rosa) and admired member of Japan’s North Korean community.

In the course of the afternoon in Odaiba, Tokyo’s urban beach (no swimming due to the coliform bacteria counts – though these high counts are probably the product of the huge numbers of waterfowl that reside there) I stopped in at Daiba Icchome, the Showa era retro indoor shopping arcade in the Decks Tokyo Beach shopping mall (Link). I did not enjoy the experiment, though it must be terribly convenient for populist and low brow media giant Fuji Terebi to have a mall of Showa junk just across the street ("Hmmm...we have an hour of airtime and no budget...hmmm...I know, let's go across the street and document our no name and no talent talent saying the word natsukashii over and over again!").

I only caught the tail end of the Showa Era, during the Bubble Years before the fall. Having departed a still hippy inflected Northern California, the late Showa seemed a time of noise-induced intellectual and spiritual catatonia, redeemable only by in retrospect** by ironic/proud singing of the Regain theme song. (Link)

For those like the prime minister, who is not only a child of the Showa but of privilege, the sights and sounds of the Showa evoke nostalgia. For me, they give me a headache, reminding me only of the cacophony, the hubris and the grime.

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* Cryptic according to Tokyo Shimbun standards, that is. The senryu that The Asahi Shimbun publishes are so allusive the paper publishes a key. Otherwise, the poems would be nearly indecipherable.

** Yuki no shirushi would not be released until the tail end of 1989, when the Showa Emperor had already gone to meet his ancestors. However, the song was the embodiment of the mad ethos of the last years of the Showa and became a hit song just weeks before The Bubble burst.

Image: Beach at Odaiba on April 13, 2013
Image courtesy: MTC

Imperator

Hmmm...Tommy Lee Jones as General Douglas MacArthur...with a script seemingly by someone from the George Lucas School of Overstating the Obvious (There is a right time to set a spark to a powder keg?)

(Link - video comes on in a few seconds' time)

Strangely, I do not think that MacArthur would have had any problem in knowing what to say to a god.

As for guessing games, Nishida Toshiyuki, who has been running himself ragged crusading for his native Fukushima, plays...I'm guessing, Yoshida Shigeru?

Ibu Masato plays...the Showa Emperor?

Nakamura Masatoshi (featured in the clip) plays...an impossibly wooden and black-haired Shirasu Jiro?

The film opens in U.S. theaters on March 8. Japan release will not be until the summer. (Link - J)

Speaking of Tommy Lee Jones -- his BOSS commercials in the wake of 3/11, where Mr. Jones signs up for another stint on Earth, were uplifting at a hard time for this blessed land -- a damn difficult thing for a canned coffee commercial to be.

It's Complicated

Of course, it is not only the spring days of Chinese diplomats which are being ruined by blunt instructions from the ministry back home. Japanese diplomats based in New York are also being told to issue dumb statements, inflaming issues best left alone.

It seems the brilliant strategic campaign being waged on the Palisades Park, New Jersey comfort women monument, briefly described in a long post earlier this week, has, in the immortal words of the Showa Emperor, "developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest."

Or so says The New York Times (Link).

Many, many thanks to read MK for the follow up on this misguided adventure.

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Not My Friend

The World Uighur Congress is holding its triennial conference in Tokyo this week, the first time the conference is being held outside Germany or the United States, the home-in-exile of the movement's leader and former delegate to the People's Congress Rebiya Kadeer (Link). The Chinese government is, true to form, completely beside itself over Tokyo's hosting this conference. The conference's opening , along with the recent waking up sleeping dog that should be left to lie, the status of the Senkaku islets, poisoned the atmosphere at the weekend's vitally important trilateral meeting. (Link - J)

It is hard to not feel some sympathy for the Uighur cause. A host of nation states emerged out of the collapses of the Chinese, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in the period 1912 -18, only to be reabsorbed in their successors in the world-wide descent into madness of the late 1930s and 1940s. Almost all of these absorbed nations have since been reestablished as independent and autonomous states, with the exceptions being the continental Asian states on China's periphery: Tanu Tuva, Tibet and East Turkestan. The Tibetan and Uighur claims on their homelands are being undone by the irrational (the Cultural Revolution) and rational (urban development) destruction of the physical traces of their distinctive cultures and mass Han Chinese immigration into these formerly undesirable areas. That the Han immigrants, sick of the altitude (in the case of Tibet), the lack of water and isolation will likely move out again in a few generation's time is pretty much a given, but hardly a salve for the present generation of Uighurs and Tibetans. (Link)

[The Tuvans, due to the extreme isolation of their land, the lack of a demographic need for ressetlement of Russia's population -- which is indeed collapsing at an alarming rate -- and the lack of Russian government interest in stirring up trouble with any of its dozens of ethnic oblasts or republics, given what has happened and is still happening in the Caucasus Region, have shown zero interest in reestablishing their independence, limited as it was.]

However, the Uighurs are courting real disaster by coming to Tokyo. Their hosts here are not a coalition of conservative and liberal organizations and individuals, as would be the case were the conference being held in the U.S. or Germany. Instead, their hosts and likely underwriters of the costs of holding the Congress in Tokyo -- where the hard yen would blow the budget of any normal non-profit - are the most retrogressive of this blessed land's hard right wing. The above linked article's mention of:

"Several members of the Japanese political opposition participated in the opening session and expressed support for the Uighur cause."

is a very bad sign. Arch-conservatives parliamentarians Hiranuma Takeo (Link - J) and Fukuya Keiji (J - personal blog) and three other Diet members have been reported as having attended sessions of the conference. Fellow traveler Yamatani Eriko (possibly one of the attendees) and other MPs have hosted their own gatherings publicizing the Uighur struggle for self-preservation and self-determination. (Link - J)

[Incidentally, several of these MPs made a Golden Week pilgrimage to Palisades Park, New Jersey, to buttonhole the mayor there into removing a monument commemorating the Comfort Women (Link). All the members of this expedition into enemy territory -- ironic really, given that during the Bubble Years, Palisades Park and its neighboring town of Fort Lee were home to the expatriate Japanese community -- documented this brave endeavor (Link - J and Link - J), part of the GWOSG (the Global War On Symbols and Gestures*). Given that the present population of Palisades Park is 50% Korean-American, the mayor told the visiting members of the Diet they were wasting their and his time. (Link -J)**

These same Diet members were flabbergasted when they visited Washington, this time to publicize the plight of the families of the DPRK abductees, only to be greeted by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and the Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell telling them, "We here in the U.S. have our own abductee problem of young American citizens being abducted to Japan, often against the custody rulings of U.S. courts (Link - J)." Hiranuma's blood pressure probably hit the roof, which is bad for him, as he has already had one debilitating stroke.]

As for the claims that disgraced Air Self Defense Forces Chief of Staff Tamogami Toshio has attended conference sessions or that members of the attending Uighur delegation visited Yasukuni Shrine, these seem to be inventions of Chinese news organizations (I invite evidence of my being wrong here).

[Later - Reader MP has pointed to the Channel Sakura coverage of the conference (Link J and U - You Tube). Not only was Tamogami Toshio present, he addressed the conference, as did Hiranuma, plus a long list of the usual suspects: members of the House of Representatives Shimomura Hakubun and Takaichi Sanae and author and critic Sakurai Yoshiko. Tamogami clocks in at 7:28 into the broadcast.

As for the visit to Yasukuni, it is hard to argue with the video of Kadeer's visit to the shrine starting at 10:45 in the broadcast.

Interesting how the mainstream media did not report these two stories.

To the members of the Chinese news media, my apologies.]

The association of Japan's ultra right and Islamic nationalism goes back a long way. As scholar of Japan's historical relations with Islam Michael Penn reminded me in a private communication, Japanese support Islamic self-determination movements was a staple of 1930s Japanese involvement in Asia, though by private rightist organizations, not the Imperial government (Link). This support was often carried out under the rubric of Pan-Asianism (Yoshikawa Yukie has produced a comprehensive survey in English of pre-1945 Pan-Asianist writing. Scholars of China will likely fault the paper for its unfortunate indiscriminate switching from pinyin to Wade-Giles and back again) which a cynic would, in the Uighur case, put down to a de facto desire to keep China weak.

One hopes that Kadeer and her movement realize that joining hands and accepting the support of Japan's right, because of historical resonances, is a one-way ticket to illegitimacy.

The signs, however, are that she does not:

"The 63-year-old leader said the international community seems more interested in trade with China than in human rights. But she noted that Japan’s support in hosting the general assembly illustrated a growing awareness of the Uighur issue."

Not exactly, Madame President.

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* To which South Korean organizations, with their crusades to rename the Sea of Japan and their bolstering of South Korea's de facto hold on Tokto/Takeshima through full-page ads in U.S. newspapers, are hardly strangers to.

** Which is not to say that the visit of the arch-conservatives to Palisades Park did not have any affect. According to the Sankei Shimbun, the government of Japan has lodged a formal protest against the monument. (Link - J)

Another Long Journey Ended

While the rest of the planet can mull over the deaths of writer Christopher Hitchens, freedom fighter, playright and leader Vaclav Havel and super-dictator Kim Jong-il, Japan can mourn the passing from TV land of Tokugawa Mitsukuni. After 42 years of wandering Japan in mufti, halting mayhem and doling out justice with the aid of his magical tobacco container -- or more properly the crest on his magical tobacco container -- Mito Komon will grace our screens no more. The TBS fictionalized life of the legendary second daimyo of the Mito han, the longest running TV drama in Japanese history, had its final broadcast last night.

On a night otherwise dominated by the death of Kim Jong-il, the old wanderer managed to garner a 14% audience share (J).

Not bad for a serious contender in the "hokiest show on Earth" contest.

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Statue of Mito Komon in front of JR Mito Station, Mito City, Ibaraki Prefecture.

Photo by MTC

The Imperial Y Chromosome To Get Some Competition (Maybe)

In the course of the debate during the Koizumi era on whether or not the Imperial House Law should be changed in order to allow Aiko, the only child of the Crown Prince and his wife Masako, to ascend the throne as a female empress -- a debate cut short by the birth of a son, Hisahito, to Prince Akishino and his wife Kiko -- one lawmaker declared the plan to have a female emperor an abomination due to the sacred nature of the imperial line's Y chromosome (E).

Well, it looks as though the holy Y-chromosome adherents are going to have a run in with a determined opponent: a bureaucrat concerned that he and his successors might lose control of a part of the nation under their supervision.

In this morning's press conference, Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu revealed that Haketa Shingo, the head of the normally reflexively conservative Imperial Household Agency, has importuned Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko to lead a change in the Imperial Household Law to allow princesses to retain their nobility after marriage, making their children potentially eligible for throne. Currently, princesses who marry outside the imperial line -- which is all of them since the dramatic pruning of the Imperial line by the authorities of the U.S. Occupation to a pair of branches, namely the descendants of the Showa emperor and his brother, Prince Mikasa (still kicking around at age 95) -- lose their nobility.

Haketa's plea has a sound basis. Currently, the holy imperial Y chromosome is in desperate straits. While there are seven living heirs to the throne under the current law, only one, Hisahito, is under 45 years of age and only three, Hisahito, his father and the Crown Prince, are under 60.

On the other hand, the Imperial Family has been, for the last forty years, a prolific producer of daughters (the Yomiuri Shimbun has a helpful chart for all this on the side of its article on the subject here - in J only). There are currently eight princesses, six of whom are legal adults, the most recent addition being Akishino's eldest daughter, Princess Mako.

Fujimura, in his press conference, indicated that the government is unlikely to rush into revising the Law any time soon. He only spoke about the matter to confirm that the conversation had taken place.

Why this should be the top news of the moment, or of any consequence, is that pretty much alone among public institutions, the Imperial Family has performed flawlessly since the disaster of 3/11. The Emperor, not the Prime Minister, delivered a prime time address to reassure the nation in the aftermath of the disaster, the first time the Emperor had ever given an address to the country on live television. He and the Empress, despite their advanced ages and numerous health problems, have visited the disaster areas and displaced persons centers on numerous occasions, with the Crown Prince and Princess (a rarity in her case, as she normally stays cloistered inside the Crown Prince's Residence) and Prince Akishino and his wife performing similar public visits to comfort and encourage the survivors.

With imperial institution relevant again and with so many young women of marriageable age (the oldest, Princess Akiko, is 29), the bureaucracy, at least, has decided its time to dump the holy Y chromosome rigmarole and get the Imperial family's numbers up again.

One wonders whether one can hear the sound of black trucks with loudspeakers on them revving their engines...


Later - Reuters has noted the revival of the significance of the Imperial Family, if in a different context (E). Tip of the hat to Tokyo Times for this reference.