SOUL FLOWER UNION LIVE AT THE BIG CAT IN OSAKA

Amerika Mura in downtown Osaka is where the night owls go... Bars and restaurants, pubs and clubs, coming down from the northern side you take the Midosuji subway line from Umeda. The Midosuji line is of note because of the unseemly behaviour of some of the passengers. It used to be easy to see why there were female only carriages during peak hour. On day I saw a homeless man harassing a young female office worker as she stood in the doorway. No-one in the carriage came to her help her. She finally snapped and walked away but he stood there until another young woman got onto the carriage and the started all over again. It is hard to tell who to feel more sorry for, the young women who are being so blatantly sexually harassed or the homeless man who was to all intents and purposes invisible?

 

The Big cat is easy enough to find and like most shows in Japan the concert started early at about 6.30. The band is popular in their native Osaka and there was a big turn-out. There were a few other foreigners in the audience but mostly the audience were Japanese. I had first seen Nakagawa Takashi on TV when he had put a smaller unit together called Soul Flower Mononoke Summit which played Ching dong (street songs) from the war period played on old instruments of the non-electric variety. This was after the Kobe earthquake which had devastated parts of the region. Thousands died and my wife's parents were without gas for weeks and had to visit friends so they could have a bath. The band did lots of performances in the street to bring music to the people. For Nakagawa it was about playing music from the heart and through this kind of traditional music he also wanted to reconnect the Japanese people with their past free of its associations with the war and emperor worship.

Soul Flower Union was a congolomeration of two bands from the '80s, Mescaline Overdrive featuring Itami Hideko and Nakagawa's old band Newest Model. The combination of male and female members in the new band made for a more exciting blend of costume, nostalgia and genre hopping music ranging from Celtic swing, folk, reggae to rock and roll. With his 1970s style side burns, Nakagawa was an uncompromising songwriter prepared to take on the enemies of peace wherever he found them. Highly political, he wrote songs about East Timor and the Middle East in an effort to raise awareness of the plight of various minority groups caught up in military conflicts. He has also written about social injustices in Japan such as the problems (or even existence) of the burakumin (the untouchables) and on the album Screwball Comedy he had written a song about the right-wing Tokyo governor, Ishihara Shintaro, 'The Man Who Said No'.

SCRAPS FROM A READING JOURNAL

Carl Jung: Quoted in The Age newspaper 19/5/1990

"Are we our dreams, or are our dreams us? A Japanese poet once dreamt he was a butterfly, and ever after he wondered if he was a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamt he was a man?"

Saigyo

"The mind for truth
Begins, like a stream, shallow
At first, but then
Adds more and more depth
While growing greater clarity."

Mishima Yukio: The Golden Temple

"He did not try to assert his individuality by perceiving something that he and no-one else could see, but saw the object just as anyone else would see it." (p 246)

Natsume Soseki: Kokoro

"As a matter of fact, country people tend to be worse than city people. You said just now that there was no-one amongst your relatives that you would consider particularly bad. You seem to be under the impression that there is a special breed of bad humans. There is no such thing as a stereotype bad man in this world. Under normal circumstances, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. That is what is so frightening about men. One must always be on one's guard."

Natsume Soseki: The Three Cornered Hat

“Life is an inescapable rat-race in which you are constantly being spurred on my materialistic values to wrangle and squabble with your neighbour...The poet and the artist, however, come to know absolute purity by concerning themselves only with those things which constitute the innermost essence of this world of relativity. They dine on the summer haze, and drink the evening dew. They discuss purple, and weigh the merits of crimson, and when death comes they have no regrets. For them, pleasure does not lie in becoming attached to things, but, in becoming a part of them by a process of assimilation” (87)

Natsume Soseki: The Three Cornered Hat

“Anywhere that you can find railway train must be classed as the world of reality, for there is nothing more typical of twentieth-century civilization. It is an unsympathetic and heartless contraption which rumbles along carrying hundreds of people crammed together in one box. It takes them all at a uniform speed to the same station, and then proceeds to lavish the benefits of steam upon every one of them without exception. People are said to board and travel by train, but I call it being loaded and transported. Nothing shows a greater contempt for individuality than the train” (181)

Extracts from an overview of contemporary Japanese culture in The Age newspaper from the 1990s...

 

"There's a death wish operating through Japanese literature" says Masao Miyoshi, a Japanese literary scholar (Accomplices of Silence). "Writing in Japan is always something of an act of defiance. Silence not only invites and seduces all would be speakers and writers, it is in fact a powerful compulsion throughout the whole society... Yet there have been those writers who refuse to be seduced (Kobo Abe, Hirase Inoue, Shusaku Endo (Japanese Graham Greene), Shohei Ooka, Otohiko Kaga, Saburo Shinogawa). In addition says Tokyo professor Shoichi Saeki, "The Japanese literary scene is now showing a return to ancient times where women were engaged in creative writing. Today, women writers both young and old are very, very active.

 

Yuko Tsushima, (A Bed of Grass) examines the roots of family distress and fake nostalgia... Taeko Tamioka, 57, "is a poet turned novelist celebrated for her unflinching analyses of social despair. For these women, says anthropologist Yukiko Tanaka "writing is the anithesis of the selfless submission described by Japanese authors. Women writers have needed great courage to surmount the many obstacles to their attempts at such self assertion.

 

... The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice, Sando the Bailiff, Uegetsu, Tokyo Story, Yojimbo, Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Narayama... Part of the appeal of these films lay in their strangeness: Japan seemed not just another country but a different world full of mystery, elegance, violence, surprise."
 

Shushin - Dotoku

"Again the aim was to instruct youngsters in the importance of respect for the common good. In a sense, it is what makes the Japanese education system truly Japanese... Individuals are diverse, but academic achievement is a group endeavour. Everybody is expected ot learn and everybody does."

Murakami Haruki: Norwegian Wood

The guitar... "Still, I like the instrument. It's light, simple, straight forward, like a warm little room, nice and cosy."

George Ohsawa: Jack and  Mitie in the West

"Japanese, Chinese and Erewhonian are all similar languages. In them there is no thought of possession and certainly none of monopolization. Thus, there are no quarrels. Such distinctions are the beginnings of all arguments." (p 56)

"I love sensorial beauty, but I love ugliness much more; the weak, sick, and ignorant much more than the strong, healthy and wise. I love the ingrate, the thief, and the assassin. That's why I am so happy. There is nothing to hate, nothing to attack, nothing to destroy, I love everything." (p 152)

"Dualism is one of the most serious diseases of man, a partial blindness that allows him to see only the spiritual or only the materialistic. It is a form of schizophrenia that produces all kinds of evil and that finally destroys itself." (p 52) 

"Japanese films such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai etc are quite highly admired in the West. But in Japan they are considered to be second rate stories for the masses - those with sensory and sentimental levels of judgement." (p 90)

 

Fukuoka Masanobu: The natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy

 

"People in the small, humble villages of which Lao Tzu spoke were unaware that the Great Way of man lay in living independently and self sufficiently, yet they knew this in their hearts... there is no need for philosophy in the farming village. It is the urban intellectual who ponders human existance, who goes in search of truth and questiuons the purpose of life." (p 30)

 

Tanazaki Junichiro: Some Prefer Nettles

 

"Had she not been his wife he might have been able to look on her as a play thing, and the fact that she was his wife made it impossible for him to find her interesting." (p 101)

 

Humphrey McQueen: Tokyo World

 

On Murakami's Norweigan Wood: "I's quite erotic, comic in places, but depressing. Almost everyone dies, or goes mad or both. At its worst Norwegian Wood could be described as a Mills and Boon rewrite of The Magic Mountain." (p 285)

 

"Are Japanese atrocities in World War Two the vindication of a half century of White Australian policy, Australian nationalsim, Australian militarism? What went wrong? Were Japanese attitudes the result of deficiencies in Japanese character or the result of western racism?" (p 84) 

 

Jack Kerouac: Haiku

 

"The sound of silence

Is all the instruction

You'll get."

 

Oe Kenzaburo: Prize Stock

 

"Inside a sticky black bag my hot eyelids, my burning throat, my searing hand began to knit me and give me shape. But I could not pierce the sticky membrane and break free of the bag. Like a lamb prematurely born I was wrapped in a bag that stuck to my fingers." (p161)

 

Oe Kenzaburo: The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away

 

"The small childthat is himself has just noticed that his own hands are grotesque, alien, terrifying "things" and, unable to throw them away, stands paralyzed. Immediately he pales, his eyes recede into their sockets and roll upward, exposing the white, while the skin around his eyes beads with sweat like delicate milk. His beautiful mother in her early thirties, her manner unlike that of the people in the valley beacause she has grown up in China, holds out her own hands and tries to distract the child, "Look, mine are the same, the same human hands." (p 39)

 

Ian Buruma: A Japanese Mirror

 

"I myself have worked as a lowly assistant to as a photographer in Tokyo, whom in the traditional artisan style, we had to call Master. Neither the Master, nor his assistants would tell me what to do, let alone how to do it. One had to "learn with the body" as they called it. One acquires the kata (the paper form) by sharpening one's instinct, by making mistakes and being humiliated. "But you never told me..." is never an excuse in Japan." (p 56)

 

"Heroes are by definition reactionary, fighting with their backs against the walls of history." (p 162)

 

Edward Seidensticker: Low City, High City

 

"Kawabata used to say that, though he found abundant sadness in the culture of the Orient, he had never come upon the bleakness that he sensed in the West." (p 209-210)

 

"The literature known as modern... is obsessively, gnawingly intellectual. If a single theme runs through it, that theme is the quest for identity, an insistence upon what it is that establishes the individual as individual... The rebellion against the family and the casting of the authoritarian father into nether regions... (p 250)

 

"Modern literature is altogther more national and cosmopolitan than Edo literature... Modern literature calls to mind not specific places like Shibuya and Kanda but that great abstraction 'suburbia'" (250 - 251)

 

Katai Tayama: Quoted in Injurious to Public Morals by Jay Rubin

 

"Dopp generally looks upon women with contempt.  There has been a tendancy in Japan since the beginning of Meiji to admire women, but of late it seems the tide has been turning and we have begun looking down on her again. There seems to be signs of this new tide in Europe as well. As far as I am concerned, the Japanese have always known woman for shat she is and have always taken an extrremely natural and proper attitude towards her.The post-Restoration tendency to admire women was nothing but a brief attempt to imitate Europe. The Europeans have always over-valued woman and worshipped her quite indiscriminately, but I suspect that they, too, have begun to wake up too late. be that as it may, I for one wish to express my complete agreement with Doppo's view of women... I fully recognise that there is a beauty in women to which none can ever aspire. But we can never recognise her true beauty until we realise fully that she is a thing to be despised. This may seem irrational, but it is not in the least." (p 62)

 

"... it is precisely the writer who has the ability to convey a sense of inner vitality and curiousity through powerful images, who contributes to the liberalization of society. If Natsume Soseki has emerged as Japan's greatest modern novelist, it is not because of the speeches his characters deliver, and certainly not because of any doctrines or slogans they spout, but because of the indelible imagery with which he conveys his view of the world - in otjer words, what he shares with a sensualist like Tanazaki (the second most likely candidate for "greatest") rather than with a liberal theoretician like Yoshino Sakuya." ( p 183)  

 

Karel van Wolferen: The Enigma of Japanese Power

 

"A popular sub-category of nihonjinron theories concerns the Japanese language, which is widely thought by Japanese to be particularly difficult to learn, not because of its insanely complicated writing system, but because it possesses a "spirit" unlike any other language..." (p 347)

Hal Porter: The Actors; An Image of the New Japan 1968

"Aware of the power of the white man, the Japanese are never free of – and cannot ever hope to be entirely free of – an internal warfare between rage and admiration, arrogance and servility, contempt and jealousy, a jealousy resembling that a crystal necklace might have for a diamond one. The thought of a white man is so heavy to the Japanese that he seems more than real. To a Westerner, on the other hand, the quicksand Japanese seem less than real, with a directness and naivete appalling to them, makes no bones about saying so" (p 87-8).

Interview with Ueno Chizuko and sandra Buckley in Broken Silence

‘Our primary goal is to not to be like men but to value what it means to be a woman. This aspect of Japanese feminism is deeply rooted in the history of the women’s movement in Japan as well as the individual experience of women. The emphasis on mothering over the individualism of American feminism is a characteristic shared by East Asian and some European women’ (280).

Ueno Chizuko: Nationalism and Gender (2004)

First wave feminism in Japan was not an ‘imported ideology brought from the West. Translations as a means of introducing culture always includes a screening process. From when it was first established, Japanese feminism  held an affinity for Scandinavian maternalism and rejected Anglo-Saxon individualism and egalitarianism’ (27).

 

Murakami Haruki on junbungaku, quoted in Jay Rubin: Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2003)

 

‘In Japan, with its relatively homogenous population, different literary customs have evolved. The language used in literary works tends to be the kind that communicates to a small group of like-minded people. Once a piece of writing is given the seal of approval with the label junbungaku – “pure literature” – the assumption takes hold that it only needs to communicate to a few critics and a small segment of the population. There’s nothing wrong with writing like that, of course, but there’s nothing that says that all novels have to be written this way. Such an attitude can only lead to suffocation. But fiction is a living thing. It needs fresh air (202).

Totman: The Green Archipeligo (1998)

‘Foreigners, and some Japanese as well, often speak fondly of a special Japanese “love of nature” that can be credited with this early modern forest recovery. To so argue, however, invites the tart query: did they love nature so much less during the ancient and early modern predations? More seriously, to advance this “love of nature” as an explanation would be to misconstrue terms. The “nature” of this sensibility is an aesthetic abstraction that has little relationship to the real “nature” of a real ecosystem. The sensibility associated with raising bonsai, viewing cherry blossoms, nurturing disciplined ornamental gardens, treasuring painted landscapes, and admiring chrysanthemums is an entirely different order of things from the concerns and feelings involved in policing woodland and planting trees…. (178)

MURAKAMI HARUKI: THE RAT TRILOGY PART ONE

The Rat trilogy starts with Hear The Wind Sing first published in 1979. The book (and Murakami's career) starts off with the observation, "There's no such thing as perfect writing..." Central to his understanding of good writing is the career of an obscure writer by the name of Derek Heartfield. The narrator informs us that, "His style is difficult, the stories impossible, and the themes infantile." Heartfield's weakness was, we are informed, that he "never got a clear picture of who he was fighting..." There is little evidence of fighting in this early stage of the series. We are introduced to the Rat, who is a regular at J's bar, drinking beer and eating peanuts. Essentially he is bored and rails against the rich... of whom he is one. Together with the narrator the Rat is a drifter unable to feel any substance in his life.

Despite not being a reader the Rat writes a novel of which the narrator says it has two points to recommend it, there is no sex scene and no-one dies. Following the sinking of their boat, a man and woman find themselves afloat in the ocean. The woman decides to swim and find an island... The Rat prefers to float and drink beer. The sense of ennui in the novel fills the lives of Murakami's characters. When the narrator puts a drunk girl from the bar to bed and stays overnight there is no sex scene but she doesn't believe him. It turns out eventually that she has had an abortion and her life is on hold. She is not the only one to struggle with life. The narrator describes the three girls he has slept with in his life, the last of which, a French major, hanged herself.

Seemingly untouched by these experiences, the novel is an amoral expose of the lives of young people who care little about what the reader make think about them. Murakami touches on the years of student protest in Tokyo during which the narrator himself was a student. His front teeth were bashed in by a riot policeman but rather than being an innocent victim he describes how he himself was involved in animal testing at the university and had killed "thirty-sex cats and kittens in two months." Numbers take on an added significance in the life of the narrator. Given the insubstantial nature of his life, the narrator says "putting a numerical value  on everything would enable me to transmit something to others." He realises, however, that no-one else will be interested in how many cigarettes he smokes or the size of his penis. This strategy turns out to be a dead-end...The only things that matter to him are music and food.

When we get back to Derek Heartfield, his life seems to be a validation of the ennui in which the narrator and the Rat are trapped. The narrator crows about his "cynicism and derision and wit and paradox." Significantly he has written a book of short stories called, "The Wells of Mars." This is probably the start of Murakami's career as a writer. No-one has any idea of why these wells were dug. They avoided water and after tens of thousands of years "not one block was out of place after tens of thousands of years." As a result of following the well passages that were dug to "curve along the warp of time" a young space vagabond reaches the surface of the planet... This journey has apparently taken him a "good fifteen billion years." Conversing with the winds he asks if they have learnt anything... The response is a laugh after which the young space vagabond shoots himself. His death is no different to the indifference with which the Rat and the narrator arm themselves except in relation to music and food and the loyalty the Rat feels towards the Chinese barkeeper, J. From this point on, however, Murakami's characters will be drawn to wells into which they climb in order to discover something deep inside themselves.

The novel does conclude with a breezy DJ on the radio NEB pop request line who reads out a letter from a listener and momentarily drops his patter to tell his audience, "I Love You All" but the novel ends with the narrator moving back to Tokyo. The narrator subsequently takes a trip to America to visit the grave of Derek Heartfield and he leaves the reader with a pearl of wisdom courtesy of Heartfield, "Compared to the complexity of the universe, this world of ours is like the brain of a worm." That's much more like the real ending to this novel!

The second novel in the trilogy Pinball, 1973, starts with the narrator's confession that his love of people telling him stories about faraway places was "almost pathological." More significantly is his observation that, "It was as if they were tossing rocks  down a dry well: they'd spill all kinds of different stories my way, and when they'd finished, they'd go home pretty much satisfied." Murakami's characters from the 'young space vagabond' onwards are all drawn to a well of some description. The impulse to pull the trigger being restricted, however, to Murakami's early fiction. In this novel there is also a return to reminiscences about the days of student unrest... In keeping with the story about the wells of Mars two of the people who share stories with him are from Saturn and Mars. One of them, the guy from Saturn, explains how heavy the gravity is and then how he is going to start a great revolution. In the meantime the narrator is given the best seat in order to listen to Haydn's Sonata in G Minor.

The narrator explains that at times he feels like he has been put together from two different puzzles... He tries to drink the problem away but often wakes up feeling worse. Then he wakes up one morning to find himself sleeping between two twins. The duality he experiences in his own consciousness is in this way given external representation which leads to a discussion about what names he should give them. He observes, "Where there's an entrance, there's got to be an exit." But of course there are exceptions like mouse traps. This leads to a story about a well... The well was in a small town where Naoko grew up... It was a region witrh freezing cold rain and a "table of sweet groundwater." Near the station lived a well digger who was an "ill-natured man of fifty or so, but when it came to digging wells he was a bona fide genius." When Naoko was seventeen the well-digger was killed by a train. After that sweet water wells were hard to come by in the town. The narrator notes, however, "I like wells, though. Every time  I see a well, I can't resist tossing a rock in. There's nothing as soothing as the sound of a pebble hitting the water in a deep well." The narrator informs the reader that this story is also the story of the Rat and that "September, 1973, that's where the novel begins. That's the entrance." With a sense of foreboding he continues "We'll just hope there's an exit."

For the Rat it appears there is no exit, he left home when he went to university and then dropped out of university.. Murakami explains that the Rat had "... any number of reasons for dropping out. The wiring to those reasons had gotten impossibly tangled up, and when things heated up past a critical point, the fuse blew with a bang." The idea of wiring and fuses leads to the episode where a repairman comes to the narrator's apartment to change the switch panel. The repairman is of course impressed when he finds the twins in the narrator's bed and he asks the narrator later "... that must take some doing, eh?" The Rat of course cannot be so easily fixed... And as the repairman explains to the twins "if the mother dog dies, then the puppies die too." In the midst of the gathering gloom, the Rat is drawn to a beacon on the beach where he often went in childhood at dusk. Whilst he knows the path out there by heart he is always filled with loneliness on the way home. He knew a woman who lived near there but he lets this relationship go. Ultimately he feels that "whatever lay waiting 'out there' was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly make a dent in." Unlike the narrator, the Rat is not a 'survivor'.

In Hear the Wind Sing, the first book of the trilogy, the narrator confesses to having killed cats and kittens at the university. In Pinball, 1973 the narrator and the Rat have a discussion about a cat that had its paw crushed. Significantly the Rat seems unaware about the narrator's experiences at the university because he wants to know, '"Who'd want to do that to a cat's paw?" Significantly the narrator replies, "You said it. Not a reason in the world to crush a cat's paw... It's just senseless and cruel. But y'know, the world's full of that kind of mindless ill will." He seems to have forgotten his own 'mindless ill will'. He appears to have had a change of heart and at the twin's insistence, even the switch panel is given the last rites... The narrator hastily drawing on his knowledge of Kant to provide a prayer. He notes that "The obligation of philosophy is to eradicate illusions born of misunderstanding..." There is a sinister note, however, when he tells the office girl that he is late because he was "playing with a cat."

The title of the love comes from thre narrator's love of pinball and, in particular, a rare model called the 'Spaceship'. To introduce this part of the story the narrator tells us that, "On any given day, something claims our attention..." This leads to the observation that, "We're always digging wells in our heads. While above the wells, birds flit back and forth." In a sense we are as alien to ouselves and to each other as if we came from Saturn or Venus and the wells we were digging were on Mars... The twins arrive and inevitably they will leave. There is no explanation and those that look for an explanation, like the Rat, are destined to fail. The narrator is a 'survivor' because is content to observe things without making any real attempt to form any deep attachments... And even when he comes face to face with the piball machine he misses so much, he is confronted by the "familiar board. Deep blue space, a spilled-ink ultramarine. And in it, tiny white stars. Saturn, Venus, Mars... while in front there floated a pure-white spaceship." Significantly inside the spaceship a "family gathering appeared to be in progress." But the narrator walks away without even playing a game, his clothes smelling of dead chickens... The sense of alienation is overpowering.

At the end of the novel, the Rat leaves town. Sitting alone in his room, the Rat observed "his own body lose its physical presence, grow heavier then become numb."Having been drawn to the beacon since childhood he feels that there is "Nothing to explain to anyone anymore... No doubt the bottom of the sea is warmer, more peaceful and puiet than any town..." So while the narrator experiences his own sense of weightlessness in outer space, the Rat is being drawn to the bottom of the ocean.

HAMAYA HIROSHI AND THE FURUSATO

I first 'discovered' the photography of Hamaya Hiroshi in a newspaper article published in the late 1980s in Japan. It was published in either of the two English language newspapers The Japan Times or the Yomiuri Shimbun... The article talked about Hamaya being a 'lensman of principle' and that he had won the Hasselblad prize in 1987. The photos in the article showed children making their way through the snow protected by straw and an onsen deep in the mountains where the bath was lit by candles. These images conjured up a romantic image of Japan that foreigners like myself longed to see. Coupled with the fascination I had with Japanese animation like Akira and Astro Boy (Atomu) and the fast life of a city like Tokyo, I had an equally strong longing for what the Japanese refer to as the furusato. This is a term that means 'hometown' and it has come to refer to the Japanese nostalgia for the past during a period of intense globalisation and kokusaika (internationalisation). Homely images of the countryside have come to represent the true essence of the culture (and the self)... These images reassure the Japanese people and give them a touchstone with which to keep faith when everywhere esle their sense of identiy is bing threatneed...  Hence the popularity of actors like Atsuki Kiyoshi in the long running Otoko wa Tsurai series or Sugawara Bunta in the Toraku Yaro series. These archetypal characters belong to the furusato, the Japanese homeland of the mind, and hence, their relevance or significance can't be measured by the usual standards. 

 

At about this time there was another article in the newspaper that  was about how a Japanese company was the first firm in the world to lease land in China. All land technically belonged to the state but foreign investment was needed to speed up urban development. So the National People's Congress eliminated the prohibition against leasing land. Whilst this was done, it was also stressed that public ownership would remain dominant in China and that its socialist character would not be lost. 

 

So the world was changing and changing rapidly. Miyazaki Hayao had made his first animated feature in 1984, Nausicaa, which evidenced the shift in concern from nuclear to environmental catastrophe. In 1988, at the time I was reading about Hamaya Hiroshi, Miyazaki had made Tottoro, a quintessential anime about the furusato. The lush greenery of summer in the countryside and the old house where two young girls and their father wait for their mother to recover in hospital is filled with magical creatures like the tottoro which counteracts the sterility of modern life. A few years later, in 1997, Murakami Haruki was to end his years of disengagement and challenge what he described as the 'black magic' of gurus like Asahara Shoryu who, had ordered the members of  his cult group Aum Shinrikyo to attack the Tokyo subway system with Sarin gas. Murakami descrribed the novelist's art as 'white magic' and he intended to use this to address the same issues of sterility and spiritual vaccum but in order to heal people rather than exploit them for personal gain.

 

Hamaya Hiroshi preceded these developments by several decades. In the post-war period, his aim was to capture on film images of a Japan that were fast disappearing. Over the years I collected a number of his books which I discovered in a great second hand photography book shop in Kanda, Tokyo, called Book Brothers. I bought a copy of the 1959 book Kodomo Fudoki which looked at a variety of games played by children. These are taken around the country and feature children dressed up as Kamen Rider or else in traditional costume and in one photograph crossing a stream by ropeway to get to school. These are images that would not be out of place in the Kaneto Shindo film The Island. Another book I bought was Shi no Furusato published in I958. This book captured images of the countryside, the sea, the city, traditional clothing not to mention workers in busy city streets. Hamaya Hiroshi didn't restrict his activity to Japan, however. In 1958, he also published Mitekitta Chugoku about his travels in China. There were lots of images of places and people at a time when China was being left behind by Japan in the race for modernity and economic development. In 1967 Hamaya Hiroshi published American America, which I suppose was an attempt to document the blueprint Japan and then China would adopt to bring their economies into the future. The images I like best are of the hippies in California. There are a lot of images, however, that focus on decay and the passage of time. If this is the future it hasn't escaped from the clutches of time. The fleeting nature of the future is perhaps due to the the futility of trying to evade time. A shortcoming in the future that the invention of the furasato would try to address. The old and the new appear side by side in all of these collections but it is the people who are really the subject of these photographs. They straddle both worlds neither of which appear to have any permanency. The future appearing to age more quickly than the past... The 1982 collection Tabi is the culmination of his work since the 1950s recording images of the Japanese people from strip clubs to shrines, the streets to the family home, the office to the factory and the environment itself from the mountains to the fields and the rivers and the coastline. I kept buying them until I came across a copy of Nippon no Retto and asked the price, at 150,000 yen (about $1,500 Australian, the price of a return air fare) I lost interest. I was given a pair of white gloves for an inspection but I felt too pressured with my backpack by my side to peruse it with any sense of leisure.

 

In 1997, when I went back to Japan to teach on the JET program, I took one of the Hamaya Hiroshi books I had bought in Tokyo, to the classroom. These junior high school students looked at the photographs and asked if they were taken in China. The poverty was something with which they couldn't identify. Hannan City, in southern Osaka, was itself going through major development at this time. The new international airport had just been built on reclaimed land in the bay and a new fifty floor tower had been built in Izumi Sano. The local economy, however, was debt stricken and it would emerge later that there had been corruption (dango) in the tendering process for some local developments and some of these developments had subsequently stalled. Houses stood empty and brand new schools had only a handful of students.  The cabbage patches which had dotted the landscape were starting to disappear and be replaced by apartment blocks. The fishermen were still fishing in some of the towns closer towards Wakayama and many of the local festivals were still talking place, but the population was changing and even here the old ways were being lost. Blinded by the prosperity of the 1980s, the past was receding and the furusato was becoming the stuff of fiction rather than fact. Hamaya Hirsohi had preserved images of the past but the children of the future were unsure how to read them.