Wrong About Japan Read online

  “We stayed together in the rice paddies until the Americans had destroyed Kofu. Since the town was small, it took only two or three hours until no building remained.

  “When I made my wish on Tanabata, three hundred thousand people were living in Kofu. Next morning, one hundred thousand of them were dead. You cannot imagine what it was like to go back. The streets were full of dead bodies and we had to walk over them. Many were still burning, and you could see their smouldering red-pink flesh. There were people who died standing up, completely charred and dead.

  “And I thought that it was no longer a matter of winning a war or losing a war. This was the end of the world, or even worse. Maybe hell was something like this.

  “I couldn’t go back to Tokyo, because it was being bombed every night. Obviously, I couldn’t stay in Kofu because there was nothing left. So my mother decided to send me to Mi to, where my sister was, and then she went back to Tokyo to be with my father.

  “This was when I wished I had died in the first air raid, so I would not have had to experience all these terrible things. However, I went to Mi to, where I would be safe—and guess what happened?

  “Three days before the end of the war, Mito was shelled by the American navy. Fortunately, my grandmother’s house was very close to the coast, so the shells passed overhead. But the noise was horrific. It felt like an earthquake and the earthquake was happening every second. The house shook and shuddered. There were pauses in the shelling, though never a pause we could calculate. We’d think it was all over, and begin dinner again, but then it would start and go on and on and on. We knew why they were shelling us. They were getting ready to land their troops.

  “I went to school most days. We spent our time making bamboo spears we could use to kill the American soldiers when they invaded. Because our school was about an hour and a half from my grandmother’s place, I was sometimes too frightened to come home alone and often spent the night at school.

  “Suddenly, on August I, the ships disappeared from the coast. It was a very quiet, peaceful time. Then, on August 15 the war ended. This current prime minister is too young to know anything about the war, so this is why he feels he can visit the shrine of the army’s war dead, and why he thinks we should change the constitution so Japan can have an army once again.

  “When I talk to young people, they all say war is bad, war is frightening, but if you ask if they would defend their country, they all say yes. This attitude is very different from mine.

  “How about you, Carey-san, I don’t suppose you experienced the war?”

  “Not really, Mr. Yazaki, but I do remember playing with Japanese army occupation money as a child.”

  Mr. Yazaki was silent a moment. I had no idea what he was feeling.

  “I am thinking,” he offered, “about the people in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Palestine, and I think about how it is for those children. We read a book called A Farewell to Arms, but when will we finally say good-bye to them?”

  6.

  Heart of Animation

  Beats in a Robot Boy

  By James Brooke

  TOKYO, April 6— Back in 1951, Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese cartoonist, dreamed up Astro Boy, a lovable robot with laser fingertips, search-light eyes, machine guns in his black shorts, and rocket jets flaming from his red boots.

  To make the 100,000 horsepower tyke seem really futuristic, the artist gave his creation a truly far-out birth date: April 7, 2003.

  Tokyo may not yet have flying cars, but Astro Boy’s official birthday on Monday marks the coming of age of Japan’s animation industry. No longer marginalized, the bare-chested rocket boy with the spiky hair, known in Japanese as Tetsuwan Atom [literally Iron-Arm Atom] is being hailed with fireworks, costume parades, intellectual seminars, an exhibit in Parliament and a $1 million diamond-and-ruby likeness in a downtown department store display.

  “We Japanese want to live alongside robots, that is why we love Astro Boy,” said Takao Imai, a 72 year old lawyer, dressed in a white smock and a white wig of cotton curls to look like Professor Elefun, Astro Boy’s eccentric scientist protector.

  This appeared in the New York Times well after our return from Tokyo, but that quote—we Japanese want to live alongside robots—recalled again this common but inexplicable enthusiasm.

  At first I had been tempted to regard the robot as a kind of mechanised Godzilla, a metaphor for the technological might of the atomic bomb. This, however, was undercut by my discovery of a wild and terrifying cartoon produced two years before Hiroshima, titled Kagaku Senshi Nyū Yōku ni Shutsugen su (“The Science Warrior Appears in New York”). In it, a giant robot with vast spiked feet stamps flat the buildings on Manhattan whilst it puffs steam or smoke or poison from every hinge and hole of its Tin Man body. Though the bomb could not explain the robot, one cannot escape the impotent rage, and even obsession, that the image conjures up. When Commodore Perry broke through the wall that had surrounded Japan for two hundred years, he perhaps engendered passions suggested by the robot, but I kept this notion to myself. Because once I was in Japan, I understood that, as a foreigner, I could never know the truth.

  Certainly I saw the effects of World War II in almost every anime we watched, in the continually crumbling cities, in those ever-present preternaturally powerful children who threatened to obliterate the universe, and most particularly in the series Mobile Suit Gundam, whose creator we set off to meet one sunny summer’s day. We were accompanied by my friend from the English Agency, Paul Hulbert and—this was a complete surprise— Takashi, who appeared from behind a newsstand near Asakusa Station. My son immediately brightened.

  “Charley, did you invite him?”

  “Dad, please. You don’t know what this means to him.”

  I looked at Takashi. His tension was palpable, his cheeks a heightened rosy colour. He smiled at me, although what that meant I could not guess.

  “But we haven’t asked Mr. Tomino,” I told my son as we boarded the subway. “This interview has taken months to arrange. They’re very formal about all this.”

  Poor Takashi was not insensitive to my feelings. On the train he stood a little apart, very erect in his bearing.

  “He won’t ask questions, Dad. He just wants to come. Don’t be so mean. Mr. Tomino is his hero.”

  I saw his point. If Charley had endured Kabuki for me, I could handle whatever ripples Takashi’s presence might cause. Having resolved that he should come, I was surprised again when, during the short walk from Kichijoji Station to Sunrise Studios, he vanished.

  It is the nature of tourism that one returns not only with trinkets and postcards but also with memories of misunderstandings, hurts ignorantly inflicted across the borderlines of language and custom. At Kichijoji Station, it seemed I had acquired one more. As it turned out, however, Takashi Ko, second lieutenant of the third battalion, was simply unable to confront his creator. Still, the bad taste lingers: social anxiety had made me less generous than I should have been.

  Sunrise Studios occupies an office building of no particular charm, and it was not until we entered the second-floor studio that we met the twelve-foot-high plastic robot. Here, at last, I saw my son’s face take on that complete and utter blankness which reveals his deepest secret pleasures. Who could believe we were here? Which of his friends would even believe it possible?

  We were led into a meeting room where we were seven in all, one boy and six men, most notably Yoshiyuki Tomino himself, a youthful sixty years of age, slim, balding, with large eyeglasses and that curious combination often seen in artists, an obvious sensitivity linked with a paradoxically unbending will.

  My friend Paul brought to the table not only extraordinary fluency in Japanese, a highly educated literary sensibility but also an intimate familiarity with manga.

  In addition, there was Irie-san, a senior editor of Kodansha, the giant publishing firm that produced much of the printed material, some of it physically immense, generated by Mobile Suit Gundam. He was a man with an untid
y mop of hair and such obvious kindness and intelligence that it was with him more than anyone I met that I felt my lack of language most acutely.

  There were also two Sunrise executives whose cards I have, typically but regretfully, since lost. For some doubtless simple reason, everyone at this meeting was Mr., never san.

  Charley had bought one of Mr. Tomino’s books to be autographed and he gravely, gracefully obliged, choosing a large fat gold pen. There would be a price for this.

  “So you like Gundam?” Mr. Tomino asked in English.

  “Yes.”

  This, in my son’s view, was payment enough. But Mr. Tomino was pressing him like a fifth-grade teacher. What exactly had Charley liked about Mobile Suit Gundam?

  Six pairs of adult eyes were on him.

  “I like the story line,” he admitted, “and how it’s complicated.” He paused. Mr. Tomino nodded encouragingly Three tape recorders turned. “The characters are complicated too,” he said, then turned to me for help.

  I asked Mr. Tomino when he had thought of making an anime or manga.

  As I spoke, Japanese translations of questions I’d submitted prior to the meeting—most of which I had by now forgotten—were being passed around the table.

  Mr. Tomino lowered his eyes and began to speak in a soft, musical voice which seemed, to my ear, at variance with his animated manner.

  “Mr. Tomino doesn’t even want to make an anime now,” Paul translated in a very English-sounding English that gave no indication of his Greek blood or his Japanese life. “Mr. Tomino,” he said, “just wants to make films.”

  Mr. Tomino moved the sheet containing my questions a few inches to the left and then spoke for a minute or two.

  “Gundam was launched just to sell toy robots,” said Paul at last, “to create a product that people would buy. There is no real inspiration behind it. He made Gundam because it was his job to make Gun-dam. And before Gundam, he made lots of animations which were also used to advertise robot toys.”

  If Charley was disappointed by this news, he did not reveal it.

  Mr. Tomino explained further, and Paul conveyed the explanation: “You see, Mr. Tomino was also very interested in science fiction, so he wanted to make something that was like a movie and that could incorporate these robots. That was his job. But when he was asked to make Gundam, the only condition he had was that the robot should be twenty metres tall. Then the toy makers wanted him to have a one-hundred-metre robot.”

  I wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing but missed my chance to ask.

  “That,” said Paul, “gave Mr. Tomino a logical problem. A hundred-metre robot would be very heavy.”

  “Too heavy,” Mr. Tomino said in English.

  “If it was to stand and walk on a normal asphalt road,” Paul explained, “that was a problem. There was another problem: the toy makers wanted to set the story on Earth, but Mr. Tomino wanted it in space.”

  “In the universe,” insisted Mr. Tomino.

  “But the toy makers were adamant,” Paul soon translated. “They needed the planet Earth, they said, in order to show how huge the robot was. So Mr. Tomino compromised. He created the Space Colony, which had mountains and rivers and things that were of more earthly scale. But not even that was enough, so in the end he was forced to bring Gundam to Earth. Of course he was resistant—in Mr. Tomino’s mind, the Mobile Suits were things that couldn’t work, couldn’t even move on this planet.”

  What did all this mean to Mr. Tomino? It was impossible to guess. In any case, he slid my list of questions back a few inches to the right. In the original English, my second question had read: “Charley and I were always interested in watching Mobile Suit Gundam. However, we continually wondered what we were missing. What might be obvious to a Japanese viewer but inaccessible to us?”

  Mr. Tomino closed his eyes and made a long mmmmmmm sound before he answered.

  “There is nothing you are missing,” Paul translated, “and the reason is that Mr. Tomino made sure there wouldn’t be anything like that at all. For instance, he tried to avoid having ethnicity and so he replaced common sense, which is based on culture, with general sense, which is a kind of universal sense that all human beings have.”

  Huh?

  “Mr. Tomino tried to remove all cultural elements.”

  “Perhaps,” I suggested, “he is being universal in a Japanese way.”

  Mr. Tomino was nice enough to laugh.

  “But when a character speaks,” I insisted, “and they speak the Japanese language, surely the way they speak must communicate some social value? If so, we foreigners can’t hear that. Might a character’s voice not suggest a place of birth or a level of education?”

  “Ahhhhh” said Mr. Tomino, as if I had understood nothing.

  “Mr. Tomino thinks,” said Paul, “that there is maybe something in your own character which is interested in national identity. As for Mr. Tomino, he has avoided it completely. He has always tried to make his characters as standard and as universal as possible by not giving them local colour or national colour or ethnic colour.”

  “I suspect Mr. Tomino will disagree,” I said, “but there is no escaping the fact that you have invented a big war story and that type of story affects children’s emotions a great deal. On one side of the equation, you give them a sense of power. When they vicariously become Gundam pilots, they have great might. But when they are children in a war, they are terrified, if not traumatised forever.”

  “Well,” Mr. Tomino explained through Paul, “in order to have a story that would involve the toy maker’s products, the suits and the weapons, it was necessary to have a story involving armies. And if you have armies and weapons then you need to have battles.

  “And then the toy manufacturers wanted the characters to be children, because children will buy the toys. But it is true,” Paul interpreted, “that the theme of having the battlefield and children is a very interesting one for Mr. Tomino. He can remember something about World War II and of course he heard stories from his father and his father’s friends. At that time in Japan you had to go to military academy when you were sixteen, to war when you were seventeen. Boys became adults between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Also, you must remember there had been samurai who fought on the battlefields when they were as young as thirteen.

  “Thinking about it historically,” our interpreter continued, “there is nothing very unusual about having such young boys taking part in a war. In fact, the last two world wars were the first major conflicts where children did not fight. Perhaps that was a mistake made by adults.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Being able to fight in a war is an expression of one’s citizenship. If you are an adult, you do it as a responsible citizen. But if you are a child—these days, I mean—war makes you either a victim or an accomplice.”

  This was getting way too Japanese for me. I told Mr. Tomino I did not quite get this point.

  “‘Victim’ and ‘accomplice’ both have to do with crime, but ‘citizenship’ has to do with public duty and responsibility.”

  This reply shocked me a little, but delighted me too. Here, after all, was evidence of the intensely different cultural view Charley and I had suspected was buried deep in anime. Here was all the good stuff Mr. Tomino had told me did not exist.

  “You see,” Paul translated again, “in the time since World War II, we’ve completely forgotten what happens to children during wartime and the parts they have played. So Mr. Tomino has no qualms at all about having children in a fighting role in the story. That’s how it’s been throughout history. The public responsibility the responsibility of all citizens, is very great.”

  “It’s a burden,” Paul said, and I was briefly confused as to whether he was translating or giving his own opinion. “And that’s something he wanted to include in Gundam. At the same time, when the children put on the Mobile Suits it’s not something that’s cool and logical and rational—it’s when a child becomes
a hero. It has to do with glory and it has to do with honour.”

  “Japan,” I said, “has been a society in which honour plays an important role. Would Tomino agree that this actually makes Gundam very Japanese?”

  “Yes.”

  “Also,” I suggested, “if you’re Japanese and watching Gundam, you will think about samurai more than once?”

  “No.”

  “No?” I asked, incredulous.

  Mr. Tomino closed his eyes and shook his head.

  Now I regret not introducing Takashi to him, and also that I did not ask how, for God’s sake, he could say that Gundam Mobile Suits are not exactly like samurai. But I had reached that point that can arrive easily in an interpreted interview—locked inside my skin, lost in space, emotionally disconnected from my fellow humans.

  The interview, of course, continued.

  To Takashi, waiting on the street outside, it must have seemed forever.

  7.

  Not so far from the ancient temple of Gokokuji we met our first real otaku. Yuka Minakawa was an attractive, gym-toned young woman in a yellow dress and fuck-me heels who came clicking so sexily toward us across Kodansha’s banklike foyer. Could this be an otaku? Yes, absolutely. Could it be a woman? I didn’t think so. I glanced at Charley.

  “It’s okay” he said. “I get it.”

  “Are you cool?”

  “Dad, we live in the West Village.”

  As our eccentric little party crossed the foyer, Charley looked at me poker-faced and said: “Finally, the Real Japan.”

  Of course to think that manga and transsexual otakus are somehow more authentic than temples is wrongheaded, but this actually was our Japan, and we liked it here.