Wrong About Japan Read online

  “No.”

  And he did not yet know the performance would be four hours long! As he said to me later, “How could you do that to me?”

  Yes, I’d broken my promise about the Real Japan. But I’d foolishly hoped he might somehow become interested in an art form which once had been as disreputable as manga was today. After all, Kabuki was considered so deviant that it had been banished up the river to Yoshiwara, although the actual nature of the Yoshiwara Pleasure Gardens was not something I wished to discuss with my son in any detail.

  “There’s a fighting scene,” I said. “With ladders.”

  “Great.”

  Bored and restless, the poor boy endured play after play, expecting each one to be the last. And while I could not possibly admit it to him, I was not always fully engaged either. Yet there was one play, Sono Kouta Yume mo Yoshiwara, we both liked, and even though Charley now insists all this is entirely my own invention, I remember how he stilled as his attention was seized.

  Gonpachi is brought to the execution site on horseback, then pulled off the horse. A severe official dolefully recites the details of his crimes before asking him if there is any last statement he wishes to make. This being Kabuki, Gonpachi naturally wishes to speak, launching into a long and passionate confession. Born into a good samurai family he had committed a murder in a moment of passion and fled to Edo. Then, in Yoshiwara, he fell in love with a geisha. Now, everyone understands that such affairs are an expensive business, so he had fallen into debt and from there to robbery.

  He now repents and asks everyone to pray for his soul.

  The geisha arrives as the speech ends, having slipped away from Yoshiwara to say good-bye. Beautiful, pitiful, she begs the officials to let her share a drink of water with her lover, and one of them relents. Only then does the geisha reveal that she has a knife. My foreigner’s heart leaps with hope when she cuts the ropes binding Gonpachi, but then the guards rush in. Gonpachi struggles to defend himself, warding off the guards’ staves in such a way that they make a cross, an echo of the crucifix on which he is condemned to die.

  In the second act we discover that all of this had been a terrifying dream. Gonpachi had fallen asleep in a palanquin, and now wakes to find himself in the Yoshiwara Pleasure Gardens. What an enormous relief! I had inhabited his remorse, felt the merciless weight of Tokugawa law, but now the gardens are so beautiful, so bright, so alive with flowers. It is the very opposite of the Western tradition where the hero dies in the last frame after merely dreaming of a happy life.

  Now a letter from the geisha is delivered, in which she begs him to hurry to her side, and so off he goes—one more leaf drifting on the waters of the floating world. The program notes explain that his happiness is overlaid with a certain gloom, but I was left refreshed and delighted, wondering if the brothels of Yoshiwara could have really been so beautiful.

  Charley denounced the experience as the worst four hours of his entire life, even worse than when he cut his heel on a broken bottle and received his stitches under inadequate anaesthetic. He, however, was the one who later brought up the subject of Yoshiwara. Was it still there? Could we see it?

  I would have loved to visit the Yoshiwara of the Genroku era, which Howard Hibbett describes so eloquently in The Floating World in Japanese Fiction. Here, in a luxurious setting, merchants and sufficiently prosperous samurai enjoyed sparkling, vivacious company that could be found nowhere else in Japan. The chief pleasure quarters—the Shimabara in Kyoto, the Edo Yoshiwara, and the Osaka Shimmachi—were made up of large groups of buildings, some of them magnificent, which served as the fine restaurants, the exclusive clubs, the leading salons of the day. Not least were the great “teahouses,” as brothels were often called, where famous courtesans joined the candlelit banquets and parties given by men of fashion. One such house, the Sumiya, in the Shimabara, still stands and has been designated an Important Cultural Property. This establishment is not only a handsome and spacious one, from its reception hall to its vast kitchen, it is also in the best of taste: a delightful garden, sliding panels decorated by the foremost painters, a distinctive screen pattern and style of metal fittings for each room. The general effect is chaste and aristocratic, rather than voluptuous or rococo. Despite my son’s worldly comments about “entertainment districts,” I judged it best to withhold these fascinating details.

  “It’s all gone,” I answered him. “Bombed flat during the war—Yoshiwara, and Asakusa, and Ueno, too.”

  What I didn’t tell him was that Yoshiwara had been in severe decline long before the war, and that what had once been the subject of plays, novels, and Hokusai woodcuts had by now become a district of gangs and massage parlours.

  In 1939 Yoshiwara boasted three hundred and twenty brothels. When the firebombing was over, only ten were left standing. The American army of occupation swiftly established Special Recreation centres in the few unbombed factories, and price lists were posted on the quartermaster bulletin boards: 20 yen—a buck and a quarter—for the first hour. 10 yen for each additional hour and all night for 50 yen. if you pay more, you spoil it for the rest. The MP’s will he stationed at the doors to enforce these prices. Trucks will leave here each hour, on the hour. NO MATTER HOW GOOD IT FEELS, BE SURE TO WEAR ONE.

  “He’d be sad,” said Charley, as if reading my thoughts.

  “Who?”

  “What’s-his-name. Gonpachi?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He would.”

  5.

  It is Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we Westerners remember, somehow obliterating from our collective memory the firebombing not only of working-class Shitamachi but of the more upscale Yamanote and, finally, of all Tokyo, a catastrophe movingly dramatized in Grave of the Fireflies, one of the most powerful anime yet produced. The director, Isao Takahata, is the business partner of the much more famous director Hayao Miyazaki, whose work includes Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, but Grave of the Fireflies, the story of a teenage boy Seita, and his little sister, Setsuko, is equal to any of Miyazaki’s great films. Seita and Setsuko’s father is serving in the navy, so when their mother is killed in the fire-bombing they are abandoned in a burning world. At first they stay with their aunt, but she is so lacking in affection, so loudly resentful of the expense of housing them, that they decide to look out for themselves, living in a cave by a stream. What starts as playing house becomes more and more serious as Seita is reduced to stealing in order to feed his sister. Ultimately, he cannot look after her and she dies of malnutrition. Seita painfully makes his way back to the devastated Tokyo, where he becomes yet another lost child and dies in a crowded railway station.

  It was this film that led us to our meeting with Mr. Yazaki, not because he was an animator—he was not—but because he had been Charley’s age at the time of the firebombing. This was really all I knew about the very pleasant, very articulate Mr. Yazaki. I never questioned him about his life as an adult, a writer, an intellectual, and never, in fact, understood how he might know my agent, Paul Hulbert, or exactly what chain of relationships had persuaded him to talk about these few months of childhood to an untidy Australian about whom he, in turn, must have known almost nothing.

  He was a story; I was a writer; and that was our relationship. If I use only his family name it is because I cannot translate the first name on his business card.

  “My friend,” said Mr. Yazaki, “is the novelist who wrote Grave of the Fireflies, the novel on which the film is based. Not surprisingly, there are some points of connection between his life and the novel. For instance, he was evacuated to Kobe during the war while his sister stayed in Tokyo. She was killed in the firebombing, and all throughout his life—he’s three years older than I am—he has felt guilty that he was not in Tokyo to help her. Perhaps this affected the novel.

  “My own experiences,” said Mr. Yazaki, “were different, but there are some points of similarity, as you’ll see.

  “The normal Japanese school year starts in April, but 1944 was not
normal, and after only a month my class was evacuated from Tokyo, the whole sixth grade, to Nagaoka.

  “Was I afraid? Not at all. I was about Charley’s age. I was with my teachers, classmates, all my best friends. We were living in a Buddhist temple. And perhaps you don’t know this, Carey-san, but in Japanese culture, a temple or shrine is considered a sanctuary for children. No one bothered with air-raid drills. Why would we have needed them?

  “It was one of those perfect summer days right at the end of the rainy season. We swam in the river and chased dragonflies. Back at the temple, we had our dinner and then a bath and we were just getting down to our homework when the first bomb dropped. It wasn’t like you think—no whistle, no big bang, just a noise like very heavy rain. You were talking about Grave of the Fireflies. Well, it was like that. These were incendiary bombs, and suddenly the whole world caught on fire.

  “Though we had no training, we were like schoolchildren on a class trip. We behaved like a class, and this is why we had no injuries or loss of life. There were five adults with us, and they led us out of the temple and up the hill. We looked back down and saw our temple burning, all the houses around it too.

  “We stayed shivering in the woods all that night, and when it got light we stayed there, waiting for the fires to stop. We were hungry, but when we came out of the forest there was nothing left, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep. There was nothing to do but go back to Tokyo.

  “I often think: If we had not been bombed, we would have lived in Nagaoka all through the war; I would never have experienced the Tokyo bombing on March 10 the following year. A third of the children I knew were killed, but they would still be alive.

  “I came home to Setagaya-ku—that’s in the Yamanote district, in the southwest of Tokyo. My mother was living there, also my younger sister, and my father, who was never conscripted by the military. He was a publisher, and his company had been ordered to produce reading material for the armed forces.

  “No, he wasn’t involved in manga, although it’s true that manga was used as propaganda by the army.

  “Now that I was home, I could go back to my original school, but all my old teachers were in the army. As a matter of fact, I didn’t go to school too often. Everyone was expecting a big air raid on Tokyo. I was often told it was too dangerous to use the train. The Americans had retaken Saipan and Guam, so they no longer needed aircraft carriers to launch attacks on our country Their air supremacy was complete.

  “You might think I had some happy moments in all of this. I was only twelve years old, after all, but you have to remember I had already been bombed once. What I remember is that we had lots of air-raid training. It was a tense, anxious time. When sirens went off in the middle of the night, we would rush into the shelter in our backyard.

  “There were plenty of air raids during the next nine months, all targeted at bases and ordnance factories. But then, on March 10, the Americans decided to bomb Shitamachi. You know what I mean? Downtown, where you are staying now. Asakusa, Ueno, the working-class area of Tokyo—also the most densely populated. The houses in Shitamachi were very close together, the families big.

  “The bombing began at eight o’clock at night. And although it was quite a distance away from us, the noise was enormous and the sky was red all night.

  “We lived in a traditional two-storey Japanese house with a tiled roof and drainpipes, so it was no great difficulty for me and my friends to climb up the drainpipe and sit on the roof—and from there we had a very good view of the bombing. As I said, the Americans had already destroyed anything which could have fired back at them, so now they owned the sky. Some of their aircraft were fitted with powerful searchlights so they could illuminate their targets. The scene looked very frightening, but it was exciting too.

  “My parents didn’t know where I was and they were worried, but then they heard us shouting, Look, there’s another one! Look at that! It took them a long time to understand that we were on the roof. Then they got really angry. You see, the Americans had low-flying fighters and if they’d seen us they’d have strafed us. Naturally, I got a hiding.

  “Officially, one hundred twenty thousand people died in that raid, but there were really a million victims if you count everyone who lost a home or was injured or orphaned. You were in New York, Charley, when the terrorists struck the World Trade Center. Three thousand people died, and that was an enormous number. You know what that was like, so now imagine what one hundred twenty thousand is like.

  “The next day we saw the first of the people fleeing from downtown. But the traffic went both ways. People from Yamanote went to Shitamachi with food and blankets. We had downtown friends who came to live with us. Still, all our friends who survived were also victims, because they had lost a parent, or both parents, or a brother or sister, and if they wanted to go back to downtown they often couldn’t reach their destination. Shitamachi was burning and burning and burning.

  “After this raid, my younger sister was evacuated to a city called Mito, northeast of Tokyo, where my mother’s mother lived.

  “As for me, I was twelve and therefore was expected to work in an ordnance factory. I was sent to a place in Mikawa—on the Arakawa River, in Shitamachi— I guess you would call it a foundry They melted scrap iron and poured it into ingots and reused it for weapons, guns, bombs. So they’d bring in loads of scrap iron from the bombed buildings, and my job was to separate the iron from the less useful metals. Most of my day was spent carrying heavy metal from one place to another. Since I had no idea what I was doing, I made many mistakes.

  “There were a number of home-guard soldiers who supervised the work and decided on punishments. You have to remember that it was an age of militarism, so if you made a little mistake you were punished immediately and severely.

  “To be honest, I didn’t mind being hit. What was worse, they often punished everyone for one person’s error. For instance, everyone might have to go without a meal. They were hungry times anyway, and missing a dinner was very difficult. Sometimes they’d make everyone work another couple of hours, which was probably less cruel than it sounds now. We children had been brainwashed into thinking that we were ‘citizens-in-waiting,’ about to go out and fight for our country. So we were mentally prepared for this treatment.

  “Then the factory was attacked.

  “We heard the air-raid warning and rushed outside. We were used to seeing fighter planes. They always accompanied the bombers, but in this case there were only fighters. Though we thought the target was the factory, it was the workers they wanted. And as we ran across the rough ground to the riverbank, they already had us in their sights. They came in so low we could see the pilots’ faces as they strafed us. A few hours before I’d been eating with these boys and men, working and joking with them, but now my friends’ flesh was flying through the air, ripped apart by machine-gun bullets. Twenty of us escaped to the banks of the Arakawa. Seven of us died. This would have had a profound effect on a grown man, but on a twelve-year-old boy, I cannot describe the shock. If you don’t mind, I’d rather not discuss this anymore.

  “I know that on the night of the big bombing raid on Shitamachi, my parents had been anxious that Yamanote would soon suffer. For a while I thought they had been wrong, but on May 25 it happened. As before, it was at eight o’clock.

  “Once again I would hear that sound like heavy rain, and since each incendiary is like a number of bombs, when one hits the ground you don’t know where it’s going to explode. You see this very clearly in Grave of the Fireflies. It’s all around you. In a situation like this, people don’t grab hold of each other’s hands and hide together. They look out for themselves. The first set of planes drops its bombs, then a second lot drop more bombs, and maybe you choose to hide under a tree in a park. If you’re lucky, no firebomb falls on that tree and you survive. But there’s no logic that tells you where to go to hide. You could have chosen a tree at the other side of the park and you’d be dead.

  “The ir
ony of it is that our house wasn’t hit at all during the bombing. If we had stayed there, we wouldn’t have seen the horrors we did.

  “Until the night of a Yamanote firebombing, my family were resigned to the fact that I would go to fight. Now they had seen war with their own eyes, all they could think of was finding me somewhere safe to hide.

  “At the beginning of June, my mother took me to a city in Yamanashi Prefecture. Kofu was a resort, completely surrounded by mountains, one of which is Fuji. In Kofu, my father thought, it would be impossible to be attacked from the air. The bombers would have to go over and between mountains, down into this basin. So my mother bought a house there and we lived there together. Given my father’s important role in propaganda, no one insisted that I continue to work in a factory. In any case, there were very few factories left.

  “July 7 is the day of the festival of Tanabata— you write a wish on paper and you tie it to a piece of bamboo. I can’t remember what I wished for, but it certainly was not what happened on that night.

  “Apparently the American air force had planned to attack Niigata with B29 bombers but then they discovered that the weather was bad, so they attacked Kofu instead. Though Niigata is a big industrial port town, all Kofu had was one factory manufacturing aircraft parts and one very small garrison of elite special forces. Somehow these soldiers knew, even before the sirens sounded, that the bombers were coming. So they ran away, leaving the rest of us completely undefended. On that day I understood that the army was not there to protect people after all.

  “It’s not so much the sirens I remember as the lights. The Americans had been able to land forces and set up huge searchlights on a hill above the town. One minute it was a lovely silky Tanabata night, next thing we were less than insects, the whole town caught in a blinding white light.

  “Our house was on the very edge of the town with nothing but rice paddies for neighbours, so I ran to where there were no buildings worth bombing. In all the panic, I was separated from my mother, but we’d been looking after this younger kid—he’d lost his parents in the Tokyo attack. This little boy trusted me, depended on me, so there was no question I had to protect him. I even waited while he gathered up toys, carrying them with him as we ran out into the dark. As for my toys, I lost them all.