FICTION AND FUROSHA: VISIBILITY IN JAPAN

 

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.

BACK TO FEUDALISM

In the land of the of the Rising Sun people are facing the spectre of No Future. After two and and fifty years of isolation in the pre-modern period, the nation made modern technology their own. Despite the military period that ended in atomic catastrophe, they arose from the ashes phoenix-like and triumphed. That is now all in the past. A twenty year recession followed the bubble and the dream of holding the Olympics a second time looks unlikely. Any talk of it being merely postponed is questioned by a dubious population with little faith in their leaders. This lack of faith has plummeted even further with prime minister Shinzo Abe, who had the big idea to post two face mask to each and every person to lower infection rates during the virus. But, due to poor quality, these have had to be recalled. The country is in a shambles due to the government's ineffectiveness in the face of the virus. Some pachinko parlour are still open despite infection rates soaring in Tokyo. Imagining a return to normal on the other side is now becoming difficult. The government has also offered each person a thousand dollars to tide them through the crisis. But this is not enough. Especially compared to the one thousand, five hundred dollars being given to businesses for workers stood down during the crisis in Australia and New Zealand. The land of the Rising Sun, the locals argue, will no longer qualify as a developed country. The pace of life will slow down as they ease into life as a backwater not unlike the period of self-isolation in pre-modern times. Some would argue, however, this was the period of their greatest cultural achievements. It remains to be seen. Not sure what Godzilla would have to say! No more nukes!

SAYAKA MURATA'S 'CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN'

The idea of someone working in a convenience and finding this is the place where they feel most comfortable is a revelation. Going to Japan for the first time recently a young friend listed the following items as what they would  like to bring home with them to Australia; convenience stores, vending machines and onsen.

The convenience store in Murata's novel is not just a haven for foreigner's looking for snacks, however, it is also a haven for those Japanese who don't fit in. For their former school mates and families it is incomprehensible that this kind of shift work for high school and college students can become a fulfilling job for an adult.

The work itself is menial and low-skilled. Shift workers need only memorise where the products go on the shelves, how to manage the register during rush hour and how to speak to customers. To do these things with any more than basic zeal or diligence is absurd. There are no plaudits to be won by excelling in the job. In fact to excel this kind of jobmis to be marked out as one of the strange ones. And in Japanese society this must be avoided atcall costs.

This bleak commentary on so-called 'normal' society in Japan is not bitter. It is life affirming and the protagonist Keiko has an answer for most of the problems her friends and family present her with. In fact, it is Keiko who proves resourceful when others struggle. Shiraha observes that, "we are all animals..." and that "this is a dysfunctional society. And since it's defective, I'm treated unfairly."

Keiko notices 'water dripping through his fingers' and takes him to a nearby family restaurant. She gets him a jasmine tea but only drinks hot water herself because she 'didn't really feel any need to drink flavored liquid.' Later he is angry at her because he wanted coffee.

Keiko is as distanced from any need for self pity as she is from the basic comforts that the people around her need. Keiko exists in splendid isolation but makes herself essential at work and is happy to play the part of the 'convenience store worker'. When she proposes to Shiraha to solve both their problems. She is sick of being asked when she was going to get bbn married. Shiraha is resentful but moves in with her. Keiko is bbn glad when he has a shower because he stinks.

OSONAE

A big lipsticked face appears
In front of your eyes,
Your ears twitch
But you remain resigned.
The face buries itself in your fur,
It wants a kiss -
Unblinking you stare into space.
The face withdraws,
In its place, a green vegetable
Is put in your cage.

The crowds gather
At the big Buddha
Down by the sea,
They leave their votive offerings;
Sake and rice wine
Oranges and green tea.
The Big Buddha
Stares unmoved,
The crowd swells
As more people arrive.

YOSHIMOTO BANANA AND ME

'NEW WAYS OF BEING' : WHY YOSHIMOTO BANANA MATTERS FROM AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE

When I first read Yoshimoto Banana"s 'Kitchen' it was a book that immedately drew attention to itself because it covered theses such as sexual diversity, alienation and coming of age. I read the book in English and after studying Japanese at university and living and working in Japan for a couple of years I read the book in Japanese. I started a Masters degree and decided to make a comparison of the original text and the English translation. The point of the comparison was to look at how a story changes when it is translated from one language to another. How we speak is central to how we communicate.

By this stage in my life I was working full time as a high school teacher and had married. My wife was from Osaka in Japan. The school I was teaching at had many students from an Arabic background. There was a lot of tension in the Australian community and media at the time due to the first Gulf War. Teaching was a challenge and as the school struggled with the racial mix of the student population I continued with my Japaese studies at Swinburne University.

At that time schools and the wider Australian society were very conservative. Issues to do with bullying, sexism and sexual diversity were not well understood and generally hidden. To be called a 'fag' was a common insult and the word 'gay' was used as a general term of disparagement. It was a bleak environment in terms of sexual diversity. And yet the great irony is that the Arabic Australian community was under seige. By the time the second Gulf War came along and especially after the terrorist attacks on the WTO towers in New York Islam was the most feared religion in Australia. Muslim girls had their scarves pulled off in public and were spat upon. Banana Yoshimoto's novel seemed like it had come from another world and yet things were slowly changing.

Capital punishment had been banned and homosexuality decriminalised and anti-discrimination laws were passed in the 1970s but schools were still very traditional institutions in which boys were boys, girls were girls and 'fags' despised. Teachers saw their role as being defined by the subjects they taught and there was only limited attention paid to the well being of students.

The big change came in the new millenium. The school I had spent fifteen years in finally closed. It had been shrinking each year during that time and a relocation and three name changes and two separate mergers had done little to change public perceptions about the school. It was still known as 'Beirut High School' and Anglo families sent their children to different schools. It had effectively become a ghetto. Eventually right wing commentators in the media sniffed that something was up and Andrew Bolt used the school to make one of his attacks on Muslims on the Herald Sun newspaper. It was a relief when the school community voted to close the school.

At my new school which was three kilometers away things were very different. The students achieved good results and the community valued the school. The whole school felt calm and there was no need for a police presence to help build better comminity relations. After the Cronulla race riots in Sydney there was also a perveption more needed to be done to build a cohesive society. When students started celebrating sexual diversity on 'Rainbow Day' I had my doubts but change was the order of the day. Change that Yodhimoto had written about in her novels fifteen years earlier.

'Rainbow Day' is a celebration of sexual diversity. When students supported by shool services started celebrating this day I was sceptical. The world Banana Yoshimoto explored in her novels seemed very distant to the world I was living in. The characters in novels like 'Kitchen' seemed isolated and their concerns far removed from the mainstream. Little by little, over a ten year period, I realised that Rainbow Day was far from being of limited interest to only a few. The Safe Schools coalition and Same Sex Marriage plebiscite showed that there were huge social changes taking place in Australia. In surveys young people saw equal marriage rights as their number one political priority. Some heterosexual couples even argued against marriage unless everybody enjoyed the same rights.

With the advent of 'Rainbow Day" and the Safe School coalition there are also more fundamental changes to the way schools work as institutions. The idea that boys are boys and girls are girls was being questioned. Yoshimoto Banana identified and explired these issues three decades ago. And while I first read the books and responded to them on an rmotional level, my focus in my Ph D thesis was on the ecocritical aspects of her writing in her later work. Looking at 'new ways of being' from a post-human perspective. A better topic would have been to explore the ways in which these novels were exploring new ways of being in terms of exual diversity and how social change allowed society to be more flexible and recognise the rights of individuals even in conservative rule based settings like schools. In Australia, the issues Yoshimoto Banana explores in relation to sexual diversity, domestic violence and abuse and the need to focus on well being and healing are now core issues rather than add ons that schools struggle to address.

When I started teaching in 1989, teachers focussed mainly on the content of their subject areas. Today teachers are expected to consider the whole child. The well being of the child is seen as being central to their academic progress. This means more than just expecting a student to ignore bullies or sexual harassment. There are now expectations that teachers create a learning environment that supports all students. To do this teachers are now asked to start using non- genderbinary pronouns in classrooms. They are also expected to recognise that not all students come from traditional families. Teachers are also expected to recognise signs of bullyong and take steps to prevent this from happening. They are expected to educate students about the importance of schools being safe for all students and caution them about the use of homophobic language. Uniforms are no longer labelled as 'boys' and 'girls' uniforms but as 'summer' and 'winter' uniforms. Finally there are toilets labelled 'boys', 'girls' and 'unisex' for those students who identify with neither gender or are transitioning.

And so the world I live and work in in Australia has slowly started to recognise the 'new ways of being' that Yoshimoto Banana started to explore iin her writing in the late 1980s. When I first read her work there was some reluctance to take it seriously as literature. It was criticised for being 'lightweigth' and superficial.. After discussions with my Ph D suprrvisor Darren Tofts at Swinnurne University I argued that her writing should be seen as an example of a relatively new genre that had emerged in the postmodern landscspe referred to as 'paraliterature'. It engaged with ideas like literature but in a language close to that of everyday use. My focus was on the reconnection with nature in her later writing due to the negative affects of living in modern urban environments. Now, based on my experiences teaching in high schools for the last thirty years, I think it is the 'new ways of being' that she explored so early in her career that are the most relevants aspects of her writing given the social changes that have occurred in recent years. In Australia these are social changes that I could not imagine wgen I first started reading Yoshimoto Banana. This is why I believe she is the biggest selling Japanese novelistr in the Heisei period. Her achievement is far more substantial than her critics first imagined.

SUKITA MASAYOSHI: THE SHOOT MUST GO ON

The Japanese film festival is on again and this year one of the highlights is the documentary The Shoot Must Go On about the eighty year old Japanese photographer Sukita Masayoshi. Born in Nogata, a small mining town in Fukuoka prefecture on the island of Kyushu, Sukita moved to Osaka and became a photographer before moving to Tokyo. He was however to be drawn to London by his love of music and the emerging glam scene created by musicians like Marc Bolan – here of course he discovered the great inspiration of his life, David Bowie. There are the photos from 1972 of David at the Rainbow theatre and then later on, in Berlin and later on, on tour in New York. There are also the photographs of David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Japan in 1977. There are lots of photos on the Hankyu train line between Osaka and Kyoto as well as photographs taken in and around the city of Kyoto that Bowie came to love. There are also photographs from the set for the Jim Jarmusch film Mystery Train and interviews with YMO whose album cover for Solid State Survivor was created on mahjong table at Sukita's studio. This game was big at the time so, in bright red uniforms designed by Takahashi Yukihiro, they sat down at the mahjong table but as there were only three of them Sukita brought in a human mannequin to be the fourth player.

Out of all his photographs, including the photographs of Bolan, Bowie and Iggy Pop not to mention a procession of various Japanese rock stars, it is a photo Sukita took of his mother sitting outside the family home in Nogata before going to participate in the local summer festival of which he is most proud. She is wearing a sedge hat and yukata, the profile is from the side and you can’t see her face. But this is the one photograph that he says brings together the best elements of his photography in a single image.

At age eighty Sukita is thinking of retiring. He might go back to Kyushu and live. In a 2016 shoot at the Royal Albert Hall he took photos of Iggy Pop's final tour for Post Pop Depression. Iggy stayed after the show for photos with the fans and he was praised in the media for turning the Albert Hall into an intimate club for the night. Sukita observed that in the early days photographing Bowie it was amazing how close the fans could get to him. There were shots of him performing in his underwear with the fans literally at his feet. By the eighties there were cameras with cranes going backwards and forwards in front of the stage and a huge distance had opened up between the performers and their audience. For Sukita who liked to photograph the interaction between the artist and their audience this was a cause for regret.

'MANBIKI KAZOKU' AT THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, 2018

The Japanese film 'Shoplifting' by director Hirokazu Kore-Eda, a Melbourne Film Festival, quickly sold out this year. The queue to see the film stretched from the front of the Kino cinema to the steps and then up to the level on Collins Street above. The film had already won a number of important awards and was a 'must see' for fans of Japanese cinema. The poverty that the film explored was perhaps a novelty for many young cinema goers who see Japan as a first world economy. Those who have seen the films of the post-war period know that, for an older generation of film goers in Japan, it would bring back memories from not a not so distant past when the country was devastated by war.

In 'Shoplifting a young boy is shown teaching his young 'sister', a new addition to the household rescued from an abusive household, how to steal food from the local shop. Towards the end of the film the shopkeeper, who is forced to close, gives the boy some snacks and tells him not to teach her to steal. He has known all along how the young boy and his 'father' come to his shop in order to steal food but he has turned a blind eye. When the family is discovered by the authorities, they are living in an apartment that belonged to an old woman who died. To avoid discovery they bury her in the house. The body is subsequently discovered as is the body of the husband of the young woman who plays the role of the 'mother'. There is a media storm and the 'mother' takes responsibility and goes to prison. The film looks at how these people living below the poverty line in a big city like Tokyo survive. It looks at how they have to break the law in order to survive. The way these individuals form a 'family' unit in order to survive is reminiscent of the anime 'Tokyo Godfathers' by Satoshi Kon. This is another grim look at the Japanese under-class who largely remain invisible in everyday Japanese discourse despite their obvious visibility. This film puts them front and centre in a  film designed to prick the social conscience of a nation in which failure isn't an option and hasn't been since the twelfth century.

Another island nation built on a fault line that explores similar social dilemmas in film is New Zealand. In the film 'Boy by director Taika Waititi there is a similar family group experiencing poverty. While the grandmother is attending a funeral her son comes home from prison having formed a gang with a couple of mates. He proceeds to dig up a paddock where he has buried treasure. As more and more holes are dug his son dreams of joining the gang. He begins to steal marijuana from a crop next door for his father. This leads to a visit from a rival gang and a few heads are busted. When the grandmother finally comes home the children busily cover the holes in the walls of the house with their art work. The father finally visits his dead  wife in the cemetery is rescued living under a nearby bridge after he falls into the water. 

Both families in these two island nations are fringe dwellers but they all have their dreams and in their own way look out for each other. Whether state intervention or institutionalisation is the answer is doubtful. The young people and the adults who care for them form relationships that are caring despite the blatant disregard for the law. In both cases there is an absence of 'adult' figures apart from the grandmothers. The problem is that their 'children' have failed to become independent and self supporting. As a result the next generation experiences a debilitating poverty from which it is hard to imagine that they can escape.