Arriving in Japan during the period of the bubble economy, in the 1980s, I was struck by the technology and the fast pace of life. I had already discovered the literature of Tanizaki and Soseki, Kawabata and Mishima, not to mention the films of Akira Kurosawa. The prescient anime Akira (1988) with its howling mobs, crazy cults and corrupt politicians had not yet been made so my knowledge of anime was restricted to the likes of childhood favourites like Atom Boy (1963), Gigantor (1963) and Prince Planet (1965). Later came the animation of Ghibli Studio especially the gentle film Tottoro (1988), which generated a nostalgia for a simpler time. The Ghibli film Hotaru no Haka (1988), however, was a warning that not everything in the past would allow for an easy exercise in nostalgia. This was a bleak look at the devastation of war framed by a narrative centred on two homeless, starving children.
Exploring the city on the various train networks, I found my way to coastal areas, mountain areas, huge parklands, dormitory suburbs where housewives aired the bedding on tiny balconies attached to their apartments and bustling shopping strips hidden in tiny streets in the older parts of town. The dormitory suburbs were by and large defined by the tower blocks built in close proximity to the stations. These were generally devoid of life during the day. The older parts of the city, however, had their own very much lived in character. Where new towns are defined by absence the old towns are defined by the presence of people whose lives blend in with the graffiti and the ancient electrical and plumbing installations that draw photographers looking to capture the soul of the city.
It wasn’t long before I noticed how the homeless congregated in the railway stations and parks, sitting out the days while the world carried on around them. There was little or no interaction between them and the busy commuters or shoppers. If one of the homeless collapsed at the foot of an escalator the commuters just lifted their legs a little higher as they got off to avoid contact. Each and every person seemed to exist independently in their own bubble sealed off from the world by their Sony walkman. No-one else existed except as some kind of object like a power pole that needed to be avoided or a pedestrian crossing that needed to obeyed. If contact was made then a quick bow sufficed and off they went. It was a wordless environment.
I caught a train into Tokyo one morning from a dormitory town in a nearby prefecture. For part of the journey, there were plenty of seats and I read my book. Then the carriage filled up. The young woman in front of me, dressed in the attire of an office lady, was pressed closer and closer towards me by the weight of the other passengers. Eventually, after I had put my book down, she was pressed hard against me and so we shared our body temperatures, our breathing and our sweat as we stayed glued to each other until we arrived at Tokyo station. Not a word was spoken. It was an intimate encounter that stayed with me long after she left with the other passengers. I sat in my seat watching the perspiration dropping from the windows before I felt ready to confront the crowds outside.
It is not just adults who ride the trains, however. One day a young school girl was being harassed on the train by an older Japanese man. The man was well dressed and should have known better. But in this wordless environment he was in free fall. And nobody said anything. He was just a figure in a passing carriage glimpsed through a window. Was it really happening? Most of the other passengers were asleep or listening to their Walkman as he groped the young girl in a sickening cocoon of silence until a foreign woman got out of her seat and intervened. Whatever code of silence operated on Japanese trains, she wasn't having a bar of it. She forced the man to leave the girl alone and then got off the train at her usual stop. The next day, when she got off the train, there was the girl with her mother waiting at the gate to thank her.
One day passing through a busy station two homeless men stopped the endless parade of passing commuters in their tracks. They had seen each other in the distance and had started calling out. They then began crawling towards each other across the crowded expanse. Wordlessly, the crowd parted to let them through. It was like the last request being given to a condemned man. The crowd formed a circle and watched as the two men laboriously made their way to the centre and then embraced. Show over, the crowd weren't interested in the formalities that followed. The spell broken, they dispersed following timetables that had been temporarily suspended as if there had been an earthquake or flooding from a typhoon. The bubble economy and the pursuit of unending economic growth had been briefly punctured by the ‘real world’ but required no comment.
In the post-bubble world, the sleepwalkers have awakened. The reality that they have awakened to is that economic miracle has ended. In its place there are significant social issues that need to be dealt with such as; social withdrawal, the ageing population, the falling birth rate, the rights of the LGBT community and the rise of China. The vagabond and the beggar who had symbolised the poverty of the post-war years following defeat in World War Two were back. But they weren't the ghosts of the past, they were real and they represented the failings of the present not the past.
The tramp and the vagabond had been dismissed during the years of economic growth as a necessary sacrifice. They were the equivalent of the loveable Tora San, who hadn't been able to keep up with the times. Tora san, the Chaplinesque figure who couldn’t settle down. The black sheep of the family doomed to spend his life looking in from the outside at family life and the beginnings of a new prosperity in the post-war democratic era. In this new world the Samurai put down their swords and emerged as an army of salary men giving total obedience to their companies. After the failures of World War Two and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, this was a chance for redemption. Conformity was taken to a new level and no sacrifice was too great. Tora san and a more innocent world was left behind and his audiences shed vast quantities of tears for him (and themselves).
In the post-bubble period, the relationship between Literature and popular culture has become closer as they engage with the lives of strugglers and the battlers rather heroic or epic narratives that lend themselves to nation building. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995), Haruki Murakami Haruki looked at the horrors of the war in Manchuria. He poked and sniffed around disturbing the national amnesia that was the preference of the ruling political classes. In Almost Transparent Blue (1976) his contemporary Ryu Murakami had taken a confronting look at drug taking and sexual relationships between Japanese women and a group of African American soldiers on a base located near Tokyo. Later came his opus From the Fatherland With Love (1984) about the invasion of Kyushu by North Korean forces who make the Japanese authorities look weak and devoid of spirit. It is the homeless and the vagabonds who find the strength necessary to push back the invaders.
Apart from these masculinist tusslings, the novelist Banana Yoshimoto has made a career of writing about healing since the novel Kitchen was first published in 1988. Together with the psychologist Kawaii Hayao, she has a shared interested in the writings of Carl Jung, especially in his prescription for people to reconnect with nature to in order to cure neurosis. The disconnection from nature, they argue, has led to a spiritual emptiness in urban Japan. Hence, despite material prosperity, the society has suffered in a moral vacuum due to problems like social withdrawal, the prostitution of school girls and acts of significant violence. Alarmingly, the spiritual vacuum was filled during the 1990s by the rise of cults like Aum Shinri Kyo. The film-maker Juzo Itami parodied this phenomenon in the satirical film A Taxing Woman 2 in 1987. His death in 1997, which may been have been the result of gang violence due to his satirical films about the yakuza heralded the arrival of Beat Takeshi, a television comedian, whose violent films restored the honour and dignity of the yakuza. Meanwhile, harder-edged female novelists from Amy Yamada Amy to Hitomi Kanehara engaged with the ‘reality’ of modern life while Yoshimoto pursued a gentler approach focussed on healing.
Fast forward to 2020 and the economic miracle has been well and truly left behind and the homeless, in particular, are now no longer invisible. In the late 1990s I took a book of photographs by the photographer Hiroshi Hamaya into some Junior High School classrooms. Hamaya had travelled the country in the post-war period photographing the lifestyle of local communities before they disappeared during the reconstruction period of the economic miracle. One book featured the games that children played. The children were poor and had no shoes on their feet. Forty years later, on the other side of the economic miracle, their grandchildren thought they were Chinese. Prosperity alienated them from the generation of their grandparents. They couldn’t recognise images of their own country.
In recent years, poverty and homelessness are once again the subject of literature and are being featured on the big screen. In 2003, Kon Satoshi’s anime Tokyo Godfathers focussed on a bunch of homeless misfits who create their own family unit to provide a sense of belonging in a harsh and uncaring world. When they find a baby in the trash they take on the responsibility of returning the baby to its parents.The films of Kore-Eda Hirokazu such as Nobody Knows (2004) and Shoplifters (2018) have also focussed on the lives of the homeless and struggle for survival in an urban environment that pays them little attention. The novel The Homeless Student (2007), was based on the experience of a thirteen year old living on the streets. It was a massive bestseller and was followed by a manga and a number of film adaptations. In 2008, Kawakami Mieko wrote about the challenges faced by Japanese women. Her novel Breasts and Eggs drew attention to the challenges of pregnancy and the alienation that women experience living in their own bodies. And in The Convenience Store Woman (2016), Murata Sayaka looked at the pressure put on women to conform to socially prescribed gender expectations. As the protagonist is pressured to conform, it is the duplicity of the people around her which is most apparent.
During the economic miracle the homeless were begrudgingly allowed to build their cardboard homes in Shinjuku station until they caught fire. They then went back to being ‘homeless’. Back to being invisible, they were shunned like the burakumin in the Edo Period and the Korean labourers forced to work and live in Japan during and after World War Two. Like the Comfort Women, forced to provide for the sexual needs of Japanese soldiers during the war, they were an inconvenient truth. Now there is no ignoring them as film and literature focus on them in an attempt to understand a changing, post-bubble, society.
While the Japanese celebrate their ability in 2020 to protect the elderly from the Corona virus, social conformity has been exposed as a double edged sword. With the shrinking of the economy and the shrinking of the population, Japanese society is ageing at an ever faster rate and regional areas and smaller islands are becoming depopulated. When sacrifices were made for economic growth, not all of those who made sacrifices were acknowledged. Fighting for recognition in a nation obsessed with animation and children with magic powers, the invisibles are making a reappearance. And the children will be relieved. They have been carrying the burden for too long. The burden of living in a society that doesn’t care.
And since the earthquake in Kobe (1995), and the tsunami in Tohoku (2011), the Japanese have come to see how thin the veneer of safety is in the modern world. Climate change has opened everyone’s eyes to how vulnerable we are in the face of bushfires, drought or typhoons. We can all become homeless overnight. The economic miracle and the illusion of endless growth has been shattered. The spell has been broken and the challenge now is to look after ourselves and to look after the environment.
