Japan Abandoned, 1939

On July 26, 1939, the United States, having repeatedly protested Japanese actions in China, notified the Hiranuma government that it intended not to renew the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, scheduled to lapse in January 1940. Up to that point the Roosevelt administration had pursued a policy of gentle appeasement of Japan, but its basic Asian policy had always been to maintain the imperialist status quo embodied in the Washington treaty system. Thus it had consistently refused to recognize any changes Japan had brought about by force in China. Roosevelt had also propped up China's national currency by making regular silver purchases--a policy that would eventually lead him to join the British in providing foreign exchange so that Chiang Kai-shek could stabilize his currency, counter the proliferation of Japanese military currencies in occupied areas, and go on fighting. Now, however, anticipating that war would soon break out in Europe, the United States put Japan on notice that serious economic sanctions could follow further acts of aggression. Thereafter, if Japan's leaders were to continue the war in China, they would have to take more seriously the reactions of the United States, on which they depended for vital imports needed to wage war.

"It would be a great blow to scrap metal and oil," Hirohito complained to his chief aide-de-camp, Hata Shunroku, on August 5, shortly after the American move:

Even if we can purchase [oil and scrap] for the next six months, we will immediately have difficulties thereafter. Unless we reduce the size of our army and navy by one-third, we won't make it.... They [his military and naval leaders] should have prepared for something like this a long time ago. It's unacceptable for them to be making a commotion about it now."

But of course Hirohito did not enjoin his chiefs of staff to end the China war, or to reduce the size of anything; he simply got angry at them for not having anticipated the American reaction.

A few weeks later, on August 23, 1939, while the Japan-Soviet truce to end the fighting on the Mongolia-Manchukuo border was being negotiated in Moscow, Germany signed a nonaggression pact with its ideological enemy, the Soviet Union--which contravened the 1936 Japan-German Anti-Comintern Pact. After a fruitless three-year quest for "collective security" with the West against Germany territorial expansion in Europe, Stalin had declared Soviet neutrality and, in a secret protocol attached to the pact, made a deal with Hitler to take over the Baltic states and eventually partition Poland. Stunned by this diplomatic reversal, and unsure how to interpret the enormous strengthening of both German and Soviet power that Hitler's alliance with Stalin portended, the Hiranuma cabinet resigned on the morning of August 28.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 353-354

The latter half of this book seems much better than the first, probably for two reasons: (1) The documentation is far richer, so Bix doesn't have to overinterpret thinly sourced material. (2) Parts of it have been published before, so it is likely to have undergone more revision in response to referee comments. The chapter entitled "Prologue to Pearl Harbor" is excellent, but I think I'll refrain from excerpting it.

Russian Repatriates from Hawai‘i, 1917

A reader, John Wilmer, sent a link to a website full of long lost far outliers that immediately sucked me in. Here are a few excerpts from the introduction and translated applications for repatriation from Hawai‘i to Russia in 1917.

At the beginning of the 20th century Hawaii sugar plantation owners began to recruit laborers of European background. Former Secretary of the Territory of Hawaii and Director of the Bureau of Immigration, Alatau L.C. Atkinson, and a somewhat questionable Russian entrepreneur A. V. Perelestrous, traveled to Harbin, Manchuria to recruit Russian workers, primarily from the area around Vladivostok. Perhaps as many as 2,000 Russians and Ukrainians came to Hawaii.

The idea for repatriating Russians living aboard began right after the February Revolution in Petrograd. Vil'gel'm Vasil'evich Trautshold, a career diplomat who had served as a Vice Consul in Hakodate (1906-12), as a Consul in Dairen and General Consul in Harbin (1914-17), was sent to Hawaii from September 1917 to March of 1918. The costs of repatriation to Russia were borne by the new government....

Podrez Sergei Konstantinovich. Born Oct. 6, 1878. He was a peasant from the village of Dubki IUzhno-Ussuriisk uezda Primor'ye oblast. In Harbin he was a tailor's shop and worked as an agent for the Singer Co. In 1910 he came with his family to Hawaii. Before repatriation from Honolulu he was a construction worker on the local prison. He left Hawaii alone in 1918 after he divorced his wife Elena Ermolaevna, 33 yrs. old (she was a mid-wife). They had four daughters ages two to sixteen, and had refused to leave with him. The court in Honolulu told the husband to pay $6 wk in alimony.

Kolesnichenko Demid (Dmitrii) Borisovich. Born Aug. 16, 1883 in the village of Kotliarka Kiev guberniia. In Nikol'sk-Ussuriisk he was the owner of a workshop were he considered that he "received more money for his work." (than Hawaii) He was a reserve junior non-commissioned officer in 1905. He came to Hawaii through Harbin on the ship Korea in 1910. His wife Pelageiia Nikiforovna, b. 1889 and three children from the ages of 4 to 8. Two of these were born in Honolulu. He mostly worked on sugar plantations on Oahu, but his last work was as repairman for horse-carriages ($4.75 day). He wanted to return to his parents in Nikol'sk-Ussuriisk. Trautshold noted: "drinks."

Riazantsev Fedor Petrovich. Born in 1865. He was a peasant in the village of Orlovka Tifilissk guberniia. Dukhobor Minister (Svobodnik). In 1899 he finished three years of exile to Tifiliisk for publicly destroying weapons (a religious principle). After that he emigrated with his parents to Canada and lived in British Columbia. In Feb. 1917 he came to Honolulu with his family. His wife ("spiritual sister"--Dukhobors don't get married) Pelageia, b. 1872, and their two sons aged 12 and 23 yrs. old returned to San Francisco because it was difficult to find work in Hawaii. In Honolulu Fedor was a temporary worker for building the water-works ($2 day). He said to Trautshold: "I know about freedom [i.e., the revolution] in Russia, and the Dukhobors want to ask the government to give us land to settle where we can live without animals." Dec. 16, 1917 he returned to Russia.

Legacies of Japan's Biochemical Warfare

By May [1939], when the major transport center of Hsuchou fell, the Japanese army was using chemical weapons whenever they could be effective in turning the tide in closely fought battles. "Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 301," sealed by Hirohito on May 15, 1939, authorized the carrying out of field studies of chemical warfare along the Manchukuo-Soviet border. What the content of those studies was remains unclear. In July 1940 Hirohito approved Prince Kan'in's request to authorize the use of poison gas by the commander of the Southern China Area Army. A year later, however, in July 1941, when the army moved into the southern part of French Indochina, Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama issued a directive explicitly prohibiting the use of gas. Presumably Hirohito and the high command were concerned that gas not be used against Western nations that could retaliate in kind. Their well grounded fear of American possession (and forward stockpiling) of chemical weapons continued to deter them from using such weapons down to the end of World War II.

Hirohito also sanctioned during 1940 the first experimental use of bacteriological weapons in China. It is true that no extant documents directly link him to bacteriological warfare. But as a methodical man of scientific bent, and a person who questioned what he did not clearly understand and refused to put his seal on orders without first examining them, he was probably aware of the meaning of the orders he approved. Detailed "directives" of the Imperial Headquarters that the army chief of staff issued to the Kwantung Army command in charge of biological warfare, Unit 731, were as a rule shown to the emperor; and the Army Orders of the Imperial Headquarters--Army, on which such directives were based, were always read by him. Biological weapons continued to be used by Japan in China until 1942, but the full consequences of this Japanese reliance on both chemical and biological warfare would come only after World War II: first, in the Truman administration's investment in a large biological and chemical warfare program, based partly on transferred Japanese BC discoveries and technology; second, in the massive American use of chemical weapons in Vietnam.

Though no documents directly tie him to it, another feature of the brutal Chinese war for which Hirohito should be charged with individual responsibility was the strategic bombing of Chungking and other cities, carried out independently of any ground offensives, and using many types of antipersonnel explosives. Starting in May 1938 and continuing until the beginning of the Pacific War, the Japanese naval air force initiated indiscriminate bombing against China's wartime capital of Chungking and other large cities. The bombing campaign was uncoordinated with the army's strategic bombing of Chinese cities. First studied by military historian Maeda Tetsuo, the navy's air attacks on Chungking anticipated the German and Italian bombing of cities and strategic bombing of Japan's own cities that the United States initiated during the last stage of the Pacific War. At the outset the navy deployed seventy-two bombers (each with a seven-man crew) and dropped incendiary as well as conventional bombs. In their first two days of raids, they reportedly killed more than five thousand Chinese noncombatants and caused enormous damage. Two months later, in retaliation for this indiscriminate bombing, the United States embargoed the export of airplane parts, in effect imposing its first economic sanctions against Japan.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 362, 364

The aerial bombing of Guernica took place on 26 April 1937, almost exactly a year before the first Japanese bombing of Chungking.

Watching the Japanese Elections

Jonathan Dresner at Frog in a Well has a nice summary of how effective Japan's Postal Savings system has been since it was first created back in the Meiji era.

The Postal Savings system was a fundamental institution in the Meiji modernization, enabling reliable low-cost long-distance transactions (including remittances from overseas, which is where my research comes in) and accumulating small deposits into a pool of capital that was agressively used for investment in railroads and other heavy industrial development.

I know I've been relying on the post office ATMs while I've been in Japan these past six weeks, since a lot of combini don't give equal access to accounts overseas.

My first comment on the recent election is that it provided me a great opportunity for language-learning that kept listening and reading skills in synch. The constant repetition of restricted sets of visual and oral clues with each new set of results (enough to keep me watching) gave me time to look stuff up in my handy-dandy new Canon WordTank: 当選の当 (short for 'elected')、確実の確 (short for 'called')、比例の比 (short for 'proportion[ally elected]')、圧勝 ('pressure=overwhelming victory')、plus a lot of surnames and placenames that I'm always a little shaky on.

Two more points: (1) Koizumi seems to be creating the equivalent of Blair's New Labour or Clinton's DLC (which is where I feel most comfortable on the political spectrum). Can we call the current LDP the New Tories? (Please, not Neocons!) (2) The DJP really got wiped out in Greater Kanto. I'm right now in Ashikaga, on the border of Tochigi and Gunma, where all but one out of maybe 18 wards went for the LDP. You can see the economic growth (industrial parks, tract housing, strip malls, big box retailers, lots of cars and parking) all around the edges of the Kanto plain.

Japan: A "Third Beer" Country

This summer, the major Japanese brewers have all been pushing their new "third beer" products. I was motivated to sample them by the relative price--about ¥600 for a six-pack, as opposed to at least ¥1200 for malt beer.

The "third beer" boom was sparked by Sapporo, which launched a beverage called Draft One in February 2004. Made with protein extracted from peas, Draft One's selling point is its light taste and drinkability. Meanwhile, Kirin's Nodogoshi Nama, made with soybean protein, touts its good flavor and crispness. Asahi's Shin Nama, which uses soy peptide and a yeast that the company also employs in beer making, offers a dry finish. And Suntory's Super Blue, which contains low-malt beer mixed with liquor distilled from wheat, has a crisp, refreshing taste.

Determined to avoid the high taxes imposed on beverages made using malt as a raw ingredient, the brewers went to a lot of trouble to find alternatives. Sapporo, the pioneer in this market, experimented for four years with a series of ingredients that included two types of millet and corn before hitting on pea protein as a raw ingredient.

I've now sampled all of the above-listed "third beers"--plus Sapporo's new low-calorie, "high fiber" Slims--and the only six-packs I could finish were Sapporo's Draft One and Asahi's Shin Nama. And if the weather hadn't been so hot and muggy, I'm not sure I could have accomplished even that much.

Now I guess I'll have to sample a couple of Japan's "second beers"--the low-malt happoshu. But, except in really hot weather, I prefer my beers flat, dark, and bitter, not sudsy, pale, and yeasty. I could drink Guinness for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if I never had to get any work done.

Bix on Irresponsible Japanese Decisionmaking

At the imperial conferences Hirohito presided over and approved decisions impacting not only the destiny of Japan but of China and other countries affected by Japanese policy. Since these conferences were usually convened after the liaison conferences [between the top government and military leaders], at which all the interested parties had reached decisions in which the emperor shared [passively or actively?--J.], he already knew the contents of the matters to be "decided." Essentially the imperial conference was designed to allow him to perform as if he were a pure constitutional monarch, sanctioning matters only in accordance with his advisers' advice but not bearing responsibility for his action [so in this context "sanctioning" = rubberstamping--J.]. At these meetings, civilian ministers wore morning clothes and military officers full-dress uniforms. The theatrical element of these affairs should not obscure their great importance, however. Nor were all imperial conferences the same, and the emperor's lips were not sealed at all of them [so they *were* sealed at most of them?--J.].

The imperial conference was the device for legally transforming the "will of the emperor" into the "will of the state." And because everyone who participated in its deliberations could claim to have acted by, with, and under the unique authority of the emperor, while he could claim to have acted in accordance with the advice of his ministers of state, the imperial conference diffused lines of responsibility. In that sense it was the perfect crown to the Japanese practice of irresponsibility, for it sustained four separate fictions: (a) that the cabinet had real power; (b) that the cabinet was the emperor's most important advisory organ; and (c) that the cabinet and the military high command had reached a compromise agreement on the matter at hand, providing the emperor with a policy that he (d) was merely sanctioning as a passive monarch [so here too "sanctioning" = rubberstamping--J.]. Reality was quite different: a powerless cabinet, an emasculated constitution, and a dynamic emperor participating in the planning of aggression and guiding the process, by a variety of interventions that were often indirect but in every instance determining. [Notice any actors missing from the "reality"? That's right! A dynamic military planning its own aggressions--not just "participating in" the planning--and directly or indirectly forcing the government to react with new policies that ranged from bad to worse.--J.]

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 328-329

Look, I have no interest in excusing Hirohito for his manifest sins of omission, and am fully prepared to believe that he exercised malignant leadership on many occasions. (Nor do I care one way or the other whether the Japanese imperial throne is preserved or abolished.) But I just find Bix's arguments to be more tendentious than convincing when he tries to make the case that Hirohito was a more active than passive sinner.

POSTELECTION AFTERTHOUGHT: It's interesting how much criticism newly (and overwhelmingly) reaffirmed Prime Minister Koizumi gets for *not* making decisions in the unaccountable backroom manner described above, which has long characterized Japanese politics.

Reckless Japanese Admirals in Shanghai, 1932

Tensions in Shanghai had begun after Japanese residents took umbrage at a Chinese newspaper article, on January 9, decrying the failure of the assassination attempt on the Shôwa emperor. Nine days later army Maj. Tanaka Ryûkichi, hoping to divert foreign attention from the army's operations in northern Manchuria, instigated an attack by a Chinese mob on a group of Japanese Nichiren priests. The Imperial Navy found this incident a tempting chance to demonstrate its prowess to the army. The Shanghai fleet was quickly reinforced and on January 28, 1932, marines under Rear Adm. Shiozawa Kôichi went ashore and that night challenged China's Nineteenth Route Army--a 33,500-man force stationed in the vicinity of the International Settlement, which ran along the waterfront. In the ensuing battle the Chinese gave the Japanese marines a good thrashing. Unable to retrieve the situation despite reinforcements from the fleet, the navy had to call on the army for help. But the Chinese army still held firm and again inflicted heavy losses. The high command in Tokyo then organized a full-fledged Shanghai Expeditionary Force under General Shirakawa and reinforced it with two full divisions. Intense fighting ensued; the Chinese finally fell back, and Japan was able to announce a face-saving cease-fire, followed by an armistice, negotiated with British participation on May 5, 1932, which also ended the Chinese boycott.

The Shanghai Incident should have awakened Hirohito to the recklessness and aggressiveness of his senior admirals--the very officers he and the court group regarded as sophisticated, cosmopolitan men of the world. Driven by service rivalry, they had deliberately sought a confrontation with Chinese forces in the heartland of China, knowing that problems with the United States and Britain were sure to result. Equally important, this incident was an unlearned lesson for both military services. Neither army nor navy drew any new conclusions from the heavy losses they incurred in this first large battle with a modern Chinese army. They continued as before--utterly contemptuous of the Chinese military and people, whom they saw as a rabble of ignorant, hungry peasants, lacking racial or national consciousness, that could easily be vanquished by one really hard blow. Hirohito himself may have held that view privately. But the emperor was more aware than his commanders of Japan's vulnerability to economic blockade. Going out of his way, he told Shirakawa to settle the Shanghai fighting quickly and return to Japan. At Shanghai, Hirohito acted decisively to control events; in rural Manchuria, on the other hand, he was pleased to watch passively as his empire expanded.

At Shanghai, both during and after the fighting, Japanese officers and enlisted men alike exemplified the pathological effects of the post-1905 battlefield doctrine of never surrendering. Captured by the Chinese in February 1932, Capt. Kuga Noboru was returned to Japan in a prisoner exchange; he committed suicide to atone for his capture. Praised for his martial spirit by Army Minister Araki, Kuga was later enshrined at Yasukuni. From this time on, officers who survived were openly pressured to commit suicide. A plethora of books, movies, and stage dramas glorified the "human bombs" and "human bullets" who fave their lives on the Shanghai front. These tales heightened the popularity of the army at home, while also reinforcing its mystique abroad. [Bix later (p. 346) notes that Japanese combat casualties numbered, on average, twice as many dead as wounded during the China war.]

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 250-252

So much for the conventional wisdom that the Imperial Japanese Navy was much less inclined toward war than the Imperial Japanese Army.

Hirohito's Role in Military Adventures, 1927-28

On March 24, 1927, soldiers of China's Nationalist Revolutionary Army pillaged the Japanese Consulate in Nanking and assaulted the consul; they also attacked buildings housing the American and British Consulates. Later that same day British and American warships on the Yangtze River bombarded the city. The Japanese press immediately sensationalized the Nanking Incident, in which six Westerners died, Japanese rights were violated, and no Japanese troops had been dispatched. Against this background, in the middle of the official mourning period for the Taishô emperor, Hirohito sanctioned Japan's first military interventions in China's civil war. Twice, on May 28 and July 8, he gave his consent to the army's dispatch of troops to China's Shantung Province, ostensibly to protect Japanese residents from assaults by Kuomintang soldiers on their way north toward Peking. Less than a year later, on April 19, 1928, he consented to another deployment: this time five thousand troops of the Sixth Division, under Gen. Fukuda Hikosuke, to the port of Tsingtao, Shantung, a center of Japanese textile capital and once a Japanese protectorate. He did so after first asking Chief Military Aide Nara whether the intervention would lead to another massacre of Japanese lives such as had occurred in the Russian city of Nikolaevsk (now Pugachev) in 1920. Nara said that it would not.

When Gen. Fukuda arrived in Tsingtao, however, he decided on his own initiative immediately to proceed inland (by rail) to Tsinan. There, a few days later, the first of several clashes occurred between Japanese and Nationalist soldiers. Later, on May 8, Hirohito sanctioned without hesitation the dispatch of reinforcements to Tsinan. The Tsinan affair dragged on into early 1929, during which time seventeen thousand Japanese troops unleashed a reign of terror on the Chinese citizens of the city, wrecking chances for Sino-Japanese rapprochement. For Hirohito this incident was yet another example of Tanaka's inadequacy as a prime minister.

Less than a month after Hirohito had sanctioned a fourth deployment of troops to Shantung Province, on June 4, 1928, senior staff officers of Japan's Kwantung Army, led by Col. Kômoto Daisaku, assassinated the Chinese warlord and territorial sovereign, Chang Tso-lin, on whom Prime Minister Tanaka had based his Manchurian policy. This incident (and the prime minister's alleged mishandling of it) pulled Manchuria into the turmoil of Japanese and international politics. For the young emperor and his entourage, it provided the opportunity they had long been seeking to remove Tanaka and his entire Seiyûkai cabinet.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 214-215

This passage illustrates what I find so frustrating about Bix's central argument: that Hirohito wielded actual power as commander in chief of the Japanese military--or, more weakly, that he could have if he had decided to! But it also shows why I'm determined to keep plodding through the remainder of the book. (I'm roughly halfway through its 688 pages of text.)

Notice the verbs (which I've boldfaced) that Bix uses to describe Hirohito's 'actions'. He sanctioned and consented, and once even asked a question before consenting. Sanctioned is one of those verbs that can mean anything from 'strongly advocated' at one extreme, to 'rubberstamped' at the other. It is by far the most common 'action' that Bix attributes to Hirohito during his involvement in key decisionmaking. In most cases, Bix is reduced to accusing the emperor not of acting wrongly, but of failing to act--more specifically, of failing to rein in a military that was out of control by calling for the punishment of criminal behavior by its officers. Note the unsanctioned actions of Gen. Fukuda and the Kwantung Army officers, which I've italicized in the passage cited above.

Despite Bix's repeated, often tendentious, explications of the silent emperor's thought processes and intentions at each indirectly documented event, Hirohito never seems to be the initiator of any military action. Instead, he comes across as an irresolute, squeaky nag on his ceremonial white steed, who on nearly every occasion accepts the recommendations of his advisors. His most aggressive actions seem to be directed at civilians, when he dissolves the cabinets of unsuccessful prime ministers. Meanwhile, the military literally gets away with murder. Instead of a commander-in-chief, Hirohito acts more like a nagging national mother-in-law to each new prime minister.

On the other hand, Bix does a thorough and convincing job of answering the question, "What did the emperor know and when did he know it?" Hirohito was well informed about all key events. And Bix's narrative also recaps clearly the step-by-step road to war between Japan and the U.S., countering two prevalent myths along the way: (1) That the U.S. pushed Japan into war while Japan was willing to compromise. In truth, every escalation of U.S. sanctions was in response to new levels of Japanese aggression in China, and Japanese refusal to compromise on China. (2) That Chiang Kai-shek's army saved its ammo while Mao's communists bore the brunt of the anti-Japanese resistance. If anything, it was the reverse during the 1920s and 1930s. The Nationalist army fought well against the Japanese in a number of earlier engagements, even besting them on occasion. If China had had an air force that could bombard the Japanese homeland the way the Japanese bombarded Chinese cities, it might at least have fought Japan to a draw.

At least those are my impressions after reading the first half of Bix's tome.

The Wild Pigs of Ashikaga

One day last weekend, an early morning walk turned into a full morning's hike along mountain trails near our apartment. We started at Ashikaga's Orihime Jinja, a textile industry shrine established in 1937.

FIRST DETOUR: Orihime is 織姫 'weaving princess'; textiles are orimono 織物 'woven things'. Orihime is the heroine of the Tanabata story. "The legend was probably imported from China in the Heian Era (794-1185), and its associated Tanabata Festival has developed through the centuries. The story involves the stars of Vega and Altair and their apparent proximity to the Milky Way." Although July 7 marks Tanabata in much of Japan, Ashikaga and other northern cities follow Sendai in celebrating it on August 6-8.

Behind the shrine's parking lot were markers of several trailheads, and we saw some old folks setting out for hikes. So we kept going. The first sign we saw as the trail left the parking lot was a warning about イノシシ (inoshishi 猪 'wild boar') on the mountain trails. We hesitated for a moment, but then forged ahead. Near the top of the first crest, near the upper parking lot, we encountered an old lady who was so excited about having seen two wild pigs that she had to tell the first people she met, even if they were foreigners. (My Japanese is just good enough to get people talking, but not good enough to follow more than the gist once they get wound up. I need subtitles when the vocabulary gets away from me.)

"I saw two inoshishi," she said, "They were so cute. Don't worry. They're used to people and won't attack."

"What do they eat?" I asked.

"They live on fresh roots, fallen fruit, and the food left on graves."

SECOND MEANDER: Sure enough, a few days later, we saw another sign warning about inoshishi, this time at Hôrakuji (1294), a temple that served as a model for the much more famous Ginkakuji (1460) in Kyoto, both built by Ashikaga clan leaders, as was the more spectacular Kinkakuji (1397). It asked people not to put food on the graves in the large cemetery behind the temple that climbed halfway up the same hillside we had hiked.

We thanked the lady for her advice and set out on a well-traveled trail. We never saw any inoshishi, nor did the other people we queried as they were returning. But once we got to the shrine at the top and decided to take a less travelled path back, we began to see constant signs of pigs rooting beside the trail. We never saw--nor even heard--the pigs themselves, but when the path turned out to be a little less well beaten than we had hoped, we were sometimes heartened to see that at least the pigs recognized it as a human thoroughfare likely to attract the odd bit of food waste. Near the end of the mountain trail, as we slowly approached civilization by way of overgrown cart trails past overgrown vegetable gardens, we even saw a real pig wallow at a bend in the road, with the water still murky from recent use.

It's good to see that even larger Japanese animals are making a comeback, even if they do make pests of themselves from time to time.

FINAL TRAIL OFF: According to an abstract in PubMed, there are two subspecies of wild pig in Japan, Sus scrofa leucomystax and S.s. riukiuanus (the latter from the Ryukyus), both more closely related to the Far Eastern (S.s. ussuricus) than to the Middle Asian (S.s. nigripes), Transcaucasian (S.s. attila) and European pigs (S.s. ferus).

Nichiren and Japan's National Spirit, 1924

Seeking to resist the democratic current and build up the waning imperial authority, on November 10, 1923, the Kiyoura cabinet adopted a "cultural policy" based on the regent's [i.e., Crown Prince Hirohito's] Imperial Rescript on the Promotion of the National Spirit. Prime Minister Kiyoura thereupon formed, in February 1924, a Central Association of Cultural Bodies in response to Hirohito's call for the improvement of thought and "the awakening of the national spirit." Invited to the association's convocation meeting to discuss a national campaign against "dangerous thoughts" associated with the labor movement and the Left were representatives from Shinto, Christianity, and Buddhism, including the leaders of Nichiren.

The sect, founded in the thirteenth century, was enjoying its golden age of influence and growth, and two of its leading proseltyzers--Honda Nisshô and Tanaka Chigaku--immediately seized upon this "national spirit" campaign to draw up an appeal asking the court to issue a rescript conferring on Nichiren, the founder of their religion, the posthumous title of "Great Teacher Who Established the Truth," so that they could then use it for prosletyzing purposes. After the court granted Nichiren the title, Imperial Household Minister Makino is alleged to have declared: "This decision was due to the emperor's benevolent awareness that the present ideological situation in Japan requires better guidance by sound thought, and especially, firm religious belief."

In fact the imperial house, controlled by Makino and Hirohito, awarded the title because it considered the social situation bad enough to warrant the services of the most passionate enemies of Taishô democracy, the Nichiren believers. When Honda went to the Imperial Household Ministry to receive the award, he met Makino and told him that the Nichiren religion "is the banner of an army on the offensive in the 'ideological warfare' of the present day." Honda also expressed his patriotism and boasted about the Nichiren sect's antidemocratic, anticommunist nature." That Buddhism (or the faith of Nichiren believers, many of whom were upper-echelon military officers and civilian right-wing ideologues) had to be called on to supplement emperor ideology indicates that the official creed was never able to exercise a controlling influence on all groups in Japanese society.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 163-164

Guidance: Welcome it is all of you!

The following sign at Shin Sapporo Station Bus Terminal no. 22 was helpful and befuddling at the same time.

Guidance: Welcome it is all of you!

A visitor going to "a village of reclamation" takes a bus for "Kaitaku no mura" of the 22nd number from a departure home of here and please take it to a terminal.

Because I can be more late by traffic circumstances from the departure time, please understand it. Then please spend pleasant time.

Ha Jin on Settling the POW Hunger Strike

In addition to the issue of repatriation, our leaders also accused the American side of some other serious violations of the [Geneva] convention. To be fair, I didn't feel that our captors treated us badly. At least we were sheltered and had food. Most of the wounded prisoners had access to medical treatment, though conditions still had room for improvement. About six thousand people had been crowded into a small compound, with no disease springing up, because sanitation had been adequately maintained. Some inmates had even gained a little healthy color, especially some cooks whose cheeks had grown thicker. We often joked that the latrines in the compound were better equipped than those in our barracks back in China. Seats had been installed in them, and at the centers of the rooms were washing facilities--faucets for running water and metal basins set into round concrete tables. On the whole, I had to admit that the Americans were generous, at least materially. Besides food, each POW was given at least one pack of cigarettes a week, and sometimes two packs. I saw with my own eyes that American medical personnel treated injured civilians at the Pusan prison hospital. Here in every compound the United Nations had set up a program for civilian education that distributed books among the inmates, offered courses in mechanics, science, and Christianity, and often showed movies. Unfortunately our compound, controlled by the Communists, wouldn't have anything to do with such a program. Whenever a prisoner reported that he had lost his blanket or mat, he would be issued another one, since there was always a surplus of these things within the compound. Sometimes this would even apply to uniforms. Such replenishment was unthinkable in our own army, in which you would be disciplined for the loss. Back in China I had never heard of a soldier losing his bedroll.

[Chinese POW leader] Chaolin had a sharp tongue. The moment the [American] major finished reading [the Geneva Convention booklet], Chaolin said, "Obviously our treatment falls short of the standard set by the convention. For example, we Chinese don't eat barley, which is fed to livestock back home. But you have made barley the staple of our diet, and most of the time there isn't enough barley for everyone. Each man can have only two bowls a day, and the calories are way below the minimum need of the body. What's worse, there's very little vegetable in our diet, and meat is absolutely a rarity. If your country has difficulties, please notify our country. I'm sure China will send over shiploads of rice, meat, and eggs to keep us from starving.

What he had said about barley wasn't wasn't true. No Chinese would feed animals barley, which we didn't like as much as rice but which tasted better than corn or sorghum, the principal foodstuffs in northern China. Having heard my translation, General Bell reddened and said, "I will take your unusual Chinese dietary habits into consideration and try to solve this problem. If you always feel hungry, I suggest that you stop the hunger strike now, which will increase your fellow men's misery and waste food. As for the medical conditions, I will see what I can do."

War Trash, by Ha Jin (Vintage, 2004), pp. 157-159

The Parking Lots of Ashikaga

On the few times when we took long car trips in Japan during the 1960s, ours was one of the few private passenger cars on the highway. My impression is that no more than 20% of the vehicles on the highways back then were private passenger cars. And there were very few expressways, so it was like driving the old two-lane national highways in the U.S. during the 1950s. And taking the business route through each town, since bypasses for almost any major town would involve either cutting through the mountain behind it or filling in the sea in front of it.

Well, Japan's construction state has now done that for cities and towns all over the archipelago. Roads and highways are now full of private cars--and flanked by strip malls with hectares of parking where fields and paddies used to be. It doesn't strike you so much when you're traveling around on a rail pass, but if you look carefully out the window of the train, you'll notice that in the smallest towns, the pachinko parlor has a bigger parking lot than the train station; or that many small cities have an Ito Yokado with ample parking. In the sprawling suburbs, even the combini have parking lots. (Ito, the largest shareholder of 7-Eleven Japan, has just merged the two firms to form Seven&i Holdings.)

I thought I'd look at the public transport and parking situation in Ashikaga, a small city of historic importance, whose similar-sized sister cities include Springfield, the capital of Illinois, and Kamakura, the capital of the Kamakura shogunate (1185-1333), which preceded the Ashikaga shogunate (1333-1573). Its Chinese counterpart is Jining in Shandong, which embraces the hometowns of both Confucius and Mencius.

This gives a sense of the city's cultural pretensions, which are not hard to understand. Its cultural legacy dates back to the Heian period (794-1185) and Minamoto no Yoshikuni, progenitor of the Ashikaga clan famous for its shoguns. So it has many traces of old money, namely, plenty of well-maintained shrines and temples; a flourishing tourist industry; several art museums (including a world-class porcelain museum); and lots of streets and sidewalks paved with granite or brick flagstones near the tourist sites.

The oldest part of Ashikaga, the original castle town (本城), lies on the hillslopes north of the Watarase River. The JR railway also runs north of the river, and main street (中央通り or just plain 通り) runs parallel north of that. But, while the nicer restaurants, bars, and souvenir shops near the tourist attractions are thriving, a lot of main street storefronts are closed. Nearly half the storefronts on some blocks remain unleased, so that I've learned a new kanji combination, boshuu, as in テナント募集 'tenants invited', or 'space available'. Shop hours are also short during the week, often just 11:00 to 18:00, with longer hours on the weekends, when more tourists as well as locals are on the streets. Exactly two Ashikaga city buses run such long routes far out into the country side, mostly to accommodate old people and hikers, that they can only complete four runs in each direction, at intervals of at least two hours.

Most of the retail action is happening south of the river, which is served by the private Tobu Line railway, with over 60 trains per day in each direction to the JR's 30. The park-and-ride lot on the south bank of the river is normally jammed with cars, while the north bank always has plenty of spare room. National route 293 north of the river is flanked by city offices and parks, schools, and historic temples. South of the river, it's flanked by strip malls: big-box retailers, fast-food outlets, and discount specialty stores. As pedestrian consumers trying to stock a semi-furnished Japanese apartment for a year, my wife and I have been thrilled to have within a 20-minute walk such big-box retailers as Yamada Denki and Kojima for home appliances and electronics, Shimachu for home and garden furniture and supplies, and Ito Yokado (now Seven&i Holdings) and Apita department stores, and--most of all--the big Daiso 100-yen store (Japan's equivalent of the old "five-and-dime" stores).

Except for the well-stocked Fressay Supermarket (now hiring!) down the street, we don't do any major shopping on our side of the river. We hike to the strip mall, where we could find a Chinese-made rice cooker and an iron for a third the price of their counterparts in the customer-free Panasonic or Sanyo outlets on main street.

But the old north side of town is fighting back with three weapons, two old, one new.

First, it is going back to what once made the town famous even before those Ashikaga shoguns--education. The Ashikaga Gakko is billed as the first university in Japan. Contemporary Ashikaga north is just littered with schools, public and private, from preschools to an Institute of Technology. In the evening, the old town is awash in cram schools, now more elegantly named zemi (ゼミ 'seminar') than juku (塾). Other than scattered restaurants and bars, there's not much happening after dark in old Ashikaga except cramming to get into a better class of school, with mothers lined up at the curb to pick up the younger students after class.

Second, the north side of the Watarase river offers a heavily publicized, dense network of hillside shrines and temples connected by tree-shaded hiking trails, which offer nature lovers a much wider range of flora and fauna--especially insects--than do the flat Kanto plains on the south side. The Ashikaga ハイキングコース ('hiking course') attracts a lot of visitors, especially retirees. Many of the temples and shrines have little boxes where pilgrims can get their guidebook "passports" stamped so they don't forget where they've been.

Third, the northside merchants have become keenly aware of the importance of offering parking to their customers. It's amazing how many tiny eateries and storefronts on bigger thoroughfares have a big "P" or "P あり" or "駐車所" ('parking lot') out front, usually with an arrow pointing around back to where a small house or vegetable garden used to be. If you walk the back streets, you see the same thing, plus a lot more small parking lots where houses or shops used to be. Some of them are for customers, others for car owners who rent them by the month. The Ashikaga sightseeing information page also gives a lot of parking information, including the number of car and bus slots at each temple or shrine.

All in all, I'm glad to be on the older and more walkable north side, but close enough to the river to walk to the strip mall and back in a couple of hours.

(Chopstick Sensei has some related thoughts from Gunma Prefecture, which borders Ashikaga to the south.)

UPDATE, 24 September: Well, another exploratory walk to the far side of Ashikaga's little Higashiyama rise has revealed the vastest parking lot yet, and on the north side of the Watarase River! The lot serves both the huge Torisen supermarket--which broadcasts some in-store messages in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Urdu/Hindi (I think, in any case not Portuguese), and carries among other things "non-oil" tuna, whale meat, Skippy peanut butter (a rare find in Japan), and fair selection of foreign wines in the ¥750-1500 range--and the even more gigantic Keiyo D2 (ケーヨーデイツー), the latter as big as any WalMart I've ever seen. Ashikaga's D2 branch was built in March 2004, most likely to serve the community employed by Sanyo and other businesses in the new Otsuki Sukedo Industrial Park (大月助戸工業団地), which stretches up the nicely treelined east bank of a confluence of rivers that drain the mountain valleys of northern Ashikaga City. Big strip malls stretch up the other side of the river, with chain stores such as a Home Center, Off House (used goods), and Denny's. Here's a summary of what an International Market Research report concludes about the growth of home centers and changing domestic markets in Japan.

The continuing growth of Japanese home centers was confirmed by recent official government data. The number of home centers in 2002 increased 27.9% from the 1999 Survey, and the number of employees working at home centers increased 51.6% over the same period. Due to the steady growth of the Japanese do-it-yourself industry and the recent boom in pets and gardening, both sales and numbers of home centers have increased in Japan. Japan's large-scale home center market offers good potential for U.S. products.

Hirohito as a New Father, 1925

On December 25 Hirohito became a father. He ordered [Imperial Household Minister] Makino to arrange a series of court lectures for him and [Empress] Nagako on child rearing and child psychology. Four years before, on becoming regent, Hirohito had put Makino on notice that someday he and Nagako intended to rear their children in the palace and not entrust them to servants [as emperors had previously]. His mother, Makino, and genrô Saionji had resisted, but by persisting Hirohito had gotten his way, making clear to Makino and others that he had no higher priority than his own "household." He now had the satisfaction of seeing Nagako breastfeed their own children, starting with daughter Teru no miya, and raise them until the age of three. And because the wedding had been used as the occasion to reform the old system, whereby women of the inner court household lived in the palace instead of merely serving there during the day, Nagako was not surrounded by uneducated ladies-in-waiting who Hirohito feared might exert a harmful influence on her, not to mention leaking to outsiders any improper remark he might make.

In this way Hirohito secured a sphere of private life free of constant surveillance. This achievement came about through his total ending of the practice of imperial concubinage and cutting back the numbers of ladies-in-waiting. These actions did not make him a court reformer, however, any more than his public performances during the regency made him a "child of Taishô democracy." Even in his young manhood Hirohito was a champion of nationalism and tradition against Taishô democracy. This was true also in his attitude toward the three wars Japan had fought since 1894. Though proud of those victories, he was open to the viewpoints of those in his entourage who had attended the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the Great War, and understood the dangers of renewing a naval race and expanding too vigorously in China.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 145-146

A Glimpse of Life Upriver from New Orleans

Here's the beginning of an email message broadcast to a list of retired Baptist missionaries to Japan (and some of their offspring). It originates from central Mississippi, about halfway between Memphis and New Orleans.

My telephone was out until today so I have been unable to send information about the storm. Electricity is off and will be off for several days, but I am now using my generator. I share it with my cousins during the daytime but use it at night. I can keep it going if I can purchase gasoline tomorrow.

Our area has many trees down (especially old oak trees), but little damage otherwise. Our church is home for about 150 evacuees from New Orleans and other areas. About fifty others come to eat at our food line. Since they do not expect to return to their homes for several days, we will not have Sunday School on Sunday. Each family has a private Sunday School room and the kitchen serves three meals a day. We will have only Sunday morning worship service that day.

Tochigi-ken, the Buckeye Prefecture

Tochigi Prefecture, in which Ashikaga is located, is named after 栃の木 (tochi-no-ki), the Japanese horse chestnut, Aesculus turbinata Blume, a close relative of the Ohio buckeye, Aesculus glabra, and the European horse chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum L. Marronnier, the French name for horse chestnut shows up in would-be glamorous commercial names here and there in the prefecture. I've seen it in Nikko, Utsunomiya, and Ashikaga. For some reason, "Horse Chestnut" does not seem to have the same appeal, or at least I've yet to see it in our Tochigi travels.

Much, much more on this subject can be found on an Imaginatorium web page authored by Brian Chandler, one of the hundreds of English teachers in Sano, judging by their literary output on the web and in print.

Hawai‘i in Japan

Even before coming back to Japan, I knew that every year for the past few decades at least a million Japanese citizens have visited Hawai‘i, many more than once. But I've been surprised again and again by the depth and breadth of Hawai‘i connections all over Japan.

Hawai‘i-roasted Lion's coffee, Kona coffee, and Hawai‘i macadamia nuts and chocolates were available in the first small grocery store we shopped at in Shinagawa station in Tokyo. And, of course, every train station travel agency displays plenty of flyers for Hawai‘i vacations. We've noted a lot of aloha shirts and Hawai‘i T-shirts--at least in August--and not just on yakuza types. We've seen T-shirts plus aloha shirt combinations for sale in Ito Yokado, a nationwide discount department store. (The layered look is quite popular with young people here.) T&C Surf Design stuff is ubiquitous. (I've even seen it on wooden geta.)

One of the most prominent restaurants in Ashikaga, right on main street near the JR train station, is a Royal Host franchise with a full-on Hawai‘i theme and hibiscus logo, as if were lifted right out of a Waikiki hotel oriented to Japanese tourists. It offers Kona coffee, macadamia chocolates, orchids and pineapple on the plate, a "Big Island" four-kinds of meat dinner, and even Loco Moco on the menu. Loco Moco is even mentioned on the banners out front. When we ate there one day, I ordered their cold noodles, which turned out to be a passable attempt at Korean-style nengmyon, complete with sliced apples, sliced boiled egg, (mild) kimchee, and a subtly sesame-flavored broth. They're open from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., and seem to attract regular customers of all ages.

But even more impressive are the chance encounters that turn up surprisingly deep connections.

The travel-happy owners of our favorite okonomiyaki restaurant in Ashikaga have been to Hawai‘i six times--and to Bali twelve times! The many Indonesian artifacts in their store prompted me to inquire.

Yesterday, my wife and I went up to the immigration office in Utsunomiya and stopped at a coffee shop called Akai Tori ('red bird') on the way back, just as we passed Futaara Shrine. The place was filled with Hawaiian collectibles from the 50s and 60s. The owner had been to Hawai‘i five times

The most poignant tale came from a widow running a small Ainu craft and souvenir shop at the small Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Museum in Asahikawa on Hokkaido, which has had an official visit from a Maori delegation, but none from Hawai‘i's Kanaka Maoli. While we were poking around her neighbor's shop, she began talking to our daughter, whose Hawai‘i connections prompted a sweet but sad story. Her husband had made many trips to Hawai‘i as an Ainu woodcarver when Shirokiya department store in Ala Moana shopping center held its annual Asahikawa food and crafts fair. He brought his family along a few times, and the son ended settling in Hawai‘i after marrying a local girl. His mother had attended his Hawaiian wedding and--too few years later--sadly returned to attend his funeral as well. He died in his 40s. His mother kindly dressed our daughter up in an Ainu robe and headband so we would take a photo, all free of charge--although we did buy the headband, which was embroidered by the widow herself.

Ha Jin on Chinese Cannon Fodder in Korea

One afternoon during the "airing grievances" session [among Chinese POWs in Korea], the medic said something almost incredible, though there must have been some truth to the story. He told us: "When our former division suffered heavy casualties near Wonsan, we rushed over to evacuate the wounded men. There were hundreds of them lying on a hillside. I was naive and just went ahead bandaging those crying for help. But our director told us to check the insides of the men's jackets first. If the insignia of a hammer crossed with a cycle was there, that man must be shipped back immediately and given all medical help. So we followed his orders. All those men who had the secret sign in their jackets were Party members. We left behind lots of ordinary men like ourselves."

The audience remained silent for a good minute after he finished speaking. I knew the medic and didn't think he had made up the story. Wang Yong broke the silence: "The Reds used us like ammo. Look at the GIs, they all wear flak vests on the battleground. The U.S. government cares about their lives. How about us? How many of our brothers could've survived if they'd put on the vests like the GIs? Recently I came across an article. It reports that General Ridgway says the U.S. forces could abolutely push the Communist armies all the way back to the Yalu, but he won't do that because he doesn't want to sacrifice thousands of his men. Just imagine: what if the People's Volunteer Army could drive the Americans down to the Pacific Ocean? Wouldn't Mao Zedong sacrifice every one of the Volunteers to accomplish that goal? You bet he would. Didn't he already send us here to be wasted like manure to fertilize Korean soil?...

Wang's analogy of us to human fertilizer revived thoughts I had been thinking for a long time. True enough, as Chinese, we genuinely felt that our lives were misused here, but as I have observed earlier, no matter how abysmal our situation was there were always others who had it worse. By now I understood why occasionally some Korean civilians were hostile to us. To them we had come here only to protect China's interests--by so doing, we couldn't help but ruin their homes, fields, and livelihoods. From their standpoint, if the Chinese army hadn't crossed the Yalu, millions of lives, both civilian and military, would have been saved. Of course, the United States would then have occupied all of Korea, forcing China to build defenses in Manchuria, which would have been much more costly than sending troops to fight in our neighboring country. As it was, the Koreans had taken the brunt of the destruction of this war, whereas we Chinese were here mainly to keep its flames away from our border. Or, as most of the POWs believed, perhaps rightly, we had served as cannon fodder for the Russians. It was true that the Koreans had started the war themselves, but a small country like theirs could only end up being a battleground for bigger powers. Whoever won this war, Korea would be the loser.

I also realized why some Koreans, especially those living south of the Thirty-eighth Parallel, seemed to prefer the American army to us. Not having enough food supplies or money, we had to press them for rice, sweet potatoes, any edibles, and sometimes we stole dried fish and chilies from under their eaves, grabbed crops from their fields and orchards, and even dug out their grain seeds to eat. By contrast, the Americans had everything they needed and didn't go to the civilians for necessities. Whenever the U.S. troops decamped, the local folks would rush to the site to pick up stuff discarded by them, such as telephone wires, shell boxes, cartridge cases, half-eaten bread, cans, soggy cigarettes, ruptured tires, used batteries. We thought we had come all the way to help the Koreans, but some of us had willy-nilly ended up their despoilers.

War Trash, by Ha Jin (Vintage, 2004), pp. 301-303

Japan Horse-racing Trivia

The Japan Racing Association (JRA) has 10 racecourses (seven running clockwise, three counter-clockwise) [emphasis added] and two training centers (Miho Training Center and Ritto Training Center). Roughly 3,450 races are held mainly on Saturdays and Sundays, for a total of 288 racing days a year. The number of racing starts per year is approximately 47,382. The JRA holds two types of races: Thoroughbred flat races and Thoroughbred jumping races, with flat races comprising 95 percent of the racing calendar.

SOURCE: Masa-aki Oikawa, "Epidemiological Aspects of Training and Racing Injuries of Thoroughbred Racehorses, and Corresponding Countermeasures," Japan Racing Journal 10 (2002)

When I channel-surfed through a bit of horse-racing on Sunday, the Niigata race looked normal to me, with the horses running counterclockwise, but the next races showed horses running clockwise at Sapporo and Kokura. This surprised me, but apparently it wouldn't surprise many Australian horse-racing fans, or those anywhere else in the Commonwealth.

I never realized that North Americans were so unicircuitous, and I look for Canadian tracks to begin running anti-counterclockwise.

Ha Jin on Belief vs. Belonging

I believed in socialism, which I felt was the only way to save China. I had seen how my country had been ruined by the Nationalists. Inflation, corruption, crime, poverty, all the evil forces had run amok in the old China. I remembered that a distant uncle of mine had once ridden a bicycle loaded with two sackfuls of cash to a grocery store and spent it all, but returned with only forty pounds of sweet potatoes. How could common people have continued to live under that regime? By contrast, shortly after the Communists came to power, people in dire poverty were relieved, usury and market cornering were banned, and criminal gangs disappeared. For better or worse the Communists had brought order and hope to the land.

To my surprise, one afternoon Ming said to me about my application for membership in the United Communist Association, "They may not let you in." This implied that they had been instructed to turn me down.

"Why?" I asked.

"Probably because you translated hymns for Father Woodworth. Also, some people said you often read the Bible alone."

"For goodness' sake, you know I just mean to improve my English. I stopped having anything to do with Woodworth the moment I found out his true colors." ...

Then it dawned on me that to the Communists, my association with Father Woodworth must have amounted to a moral relapse, which revealed my "petty bourgeois outlook," a phrase they often used to criticize an educated individual like me. However, I wasn't applying for Communist Party membership but only for that of a mass association. There was no reason for them to reject me. On second thought, I wondered why I was so eager to seek their approval? Why worry so much about joining that organization? Perhaps I dreaded isolation and had to depend on a group to feel secure. Why couldn't I remain alone without following anyone else? One should rely on nobody but oneself.... I'd better stay away from the herd.

No. If I mean to return to China, I have to take part in the pro-Communist activities; otherwise I'll cause more trouble for myself. Whether I join them or not, they'll never leave me alone, so I mustn't stand aloof. Either you become their friend or their enemy. The Communists don't believe anyone can remain neutral ...

War Trash, by Ha Jin (Vintage, 2004), pp. 122-123

Theory and Practice of Japanese Recycling

The Japanese government regulates the classification of consumer waste and recyclables very meticulously. In 2001, it even passed a law "requiring retailers and manufacturers to take back used air conditioners, televisions, washing machines and refrigerators"--the first such "take-back" law, according to the industry journal WasteAge.

My impression is that about 30% of Japanese industry is packaging, and another 30% is deconstruction of consumer waste. In the grocery stores, you can find a single onion--or lemon, or unwashed celery stalk, or whatever--individually packaged. I suppose the stick-on price tag causes unacceptable damage to the perfect surfaces of the fruits or vegetables on display.

Metal food and drink containers are marked as either recyclable steel or aluminum. Beverage cans are just as likely to be steel as aluminum in Japan, while they are nearly 100% aluminum in the U.S., but Japanese consumers recycle their aluminum at higher rates than Americans do.

The tag on a tiny package of food or drink will carry separate recycle labels for both the paper tag and the plastic container. Plastics are further marked as either PET (polyethylene tenephthalate) bottles, PP (polypropelene), PE (polyethylene), or more generic プラ (pura 'plastic') wrap.

The first major hint we got, after we moved into our nice apartment in Ashikaga, that practice might not accord with theoretical ideals was our attempt to find out what to do with general plastics. Communities differ in their recycling capabilities. Not all can handle all categories. The illustrated poster in our lobby (here's an English example PDF from a major metropolitan neighborhood in Tokyo) gave very detailed instructions about what kind of waste products get picked up on which days of the week or month, but said nothing about general plastics. Nor could we find any separate place for them in the trash room where residents leave their sorted and bagged waste.

Well, it turns out that plastic wrapping in Ashikaga is just another class of burnables. Most public trash bins in train stations broadly classify waste--other than drink containers--into burnables and nonburnables. (Newsprint often has a separate bin as well.) However, people are often extremely careless about what they put in these public receptacles, or frustrated at the lack of other options, and the clean-up crews must spend a good deal of time re-sorting the contents of each bin. The same goes for the variety of items that often end up in the can and bottle bins next to most of the streetside vending machines.

Two plentiful items, styrofoam containers and milk cartons, can only be recycled at grocery stores in most communities, it seems. But the receptacles in front of the stores I've seen have required consumers to cut the milk cartons apart, rinse them, and hang them out to dry before putting them in the recycle bins. All other containers, too, are supposed to be rinsed out before recycling. Japanese recycling depends crucially on the country's abundance of water.

Just as I was finishing up this post, a sound truck drove down the street below our building blaring, not political messages (as is usual in the days before an election), but instructions for how to stop the van and turn over hazardous items like batteries and spray cans.

Reinventing the Japanese Monarchy, 1927

The Fifty-second Imperial Diet, which had adjourned following Emperor Taisho's death, had reconvened on January 18, 1927. Hirohito and his entourage lost no time in trying to influence political trends and make the political world aware of his presence.

First, on January 19, 1927, the idea of a fourth national holiday was proposed in the House of Peers as if it had originated there rather than in the court.... A short time later, the Diet approved a bill establishing November 3 as Meiji's holiday (Meiji setsu), and the sanctioning announcement was made by imperial ordinance on March 3.

The tenth anniversary of Meiji's death, July 30, 1922, had passed relatively unnoticed by the court and the public, except for visits by the regent [Hirohito] to Kyoto and the Momoyama mausoleums. Why now the new holiday? Because Hirohito's enthronement was in the offing, and his entourage needed every device it could muster to invest him with greater charisma and blot out Taisho's image. Hirohito could hardly be sent back in time to participate in great victories that had been won when he had been only four years of age. But Meiji could be transported, via the new holiday, and the appropriate fanfare, to a new generation and era, and Hirohito thereby made to shine brighter, if only by reflected radiance.

Due to the official mourning for Taisho, the first national celebration of Meiji's birthday could not begin until the following year [1927]. The honoring of Meiji therefore would occur during the enthronement and deification of his grandson, the noncharismatic Hirohito, whom the press was describing already as the new "incarnation of Emperor Meiji." Before the year of mourning for Taisho had even ended, the public had grown accustomed to thinking of the preenthronement emperor as the new Meiji, and as the grandson who would perfect the imperial legacy.

Later, intending to remind the young emperor of the toil rice cultivation required, and so identify him in the public mind with the plight of the rice farmers in a period of agricultural depression, Kawai invented a new court ritual. He suggested that Hirohito cultivate rice within the palace precincts. Hirohito agreed and a field was prepared inside the Akasaka Palace grounds for this purpose. On June 14, 1927, Hirohito received rice plants from different regions of the country and staged his first rice-planting ritual. Later, after his enthronement, he moved his residence to the palace, and seventy and eighty tsubo (280 and 320 square yards) of dry and wet field, respectively, were reclaimed for the purpose of ceremonial rice planting. A small mulberry grove beyond the wet fields was also prepared for Empress Nagako to engage in sericulture, thereby identifying her with Japan's most important export commodity, silk.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 182-183

Japan Rail Pass Travels

We initiated our Japan Rail Passes 3 weeks ago with a same-day roundtrip by bullet train from Tokyo (東京 'east capital') to Shizuoka (静岡 'calm hill') in a fruitless effort to view Mt. Fuji (富士山 'rich gentleman mountain'). Not once did we see any mountaintops--all being obscured by clouds and haze. I don't know how many times as a kid I strained in vain for a glimpse of Mt. Fuji as we passed Shizuoka on the train. (I have seen it on other trips, but only from afar.)

On Monday, I made a final day trip by rail pass to see one other famously beautiful place, the Matsushima (松島 'pine island') bay and islands near Sendai (仙台 'hermit platform'）. (My wife was tied up with obtaining her work visa, and my daughter had left on Sunday to return to college in the U.S.) Matsushima was spectacular--as lovely as Miyajima (宮島 'shrine island') in my estimation--even though I didn't get a chance to see all the best views.

In between, we made a roundtrip from Tokyo to Sapporo (札幌, an Ainu name whose kanji meanings are arbitrary), with a day trip from Sapporo to Asahikawa (旭川 'rising-sun river'). We had to pay extra for the sleeping berths going up.

We also made day trips from Ashikaga (足利 'foot profit'--the second kanji is never read kaga except in this placename, so perhaps kaga formerly meant something less favorable, like 'swelling' or 'carbuncle') to Niigata （新潟 'new lagoon', but with a rarer pronunciation for 'new'）, Nikko (日光 'sun shine'）, Utsunomiya （宇都宮 'sky capital shrine'）, and twice to Narita airport. I think we got our money's worth. I've got a few travelogues to write up now.

Earthquake Blogging

A little while ago, at 11:29 Japan time, a magnitude 5.0 (Japanese scale) earthquake shook our building slightly. NHK almost immediately cut to earthquake coverage, repeating over and over that the epicenter was around Nagaoka in Niigata Prefecture, that there is no danger of a tsunami, that there have been no reported injuries, and that the eastern Shinkansen trains had already resumed normal operation. The magnitude in Tochigi Prefecture, where we are, was 2.0.

I'm getting superstitious. We spent yesterday in Niigata. But maybe the crucial factor is that the last time we had a big earthquake was the same day we were scheduled to take the Narita Express to go to the airport. Today, we are again scheduled to take the Narita Express to the airport to send our daughter back to the U.S. for another year of university--and a third year of college Japanese. If this pattern holds, then northern Japan can expect another largish earthquake on September 28, when I'm scheduled to fly back to the U.S.

We may have to rethink our tentative plans for a daytrip to Sendai on Monday, the last day our rail passes remain valid. I'd hate to bring that lovely city another earthquake only a week after their last one.

How Little Hou Created the Walking Telegraph Code

Day after day we racked our brains, but still couldn't find an adequate transmission method [to communicate remotely between prison compounds in Korea]. Little Hou was truly a smart fellow and engrossed in the code work most of the time. When he was eating or taking a break, he would mention to us one possibility and another, but none of them would work. Then one morning he hit on a brilliant idea, namely to simplify the Morse code as much as possible, to the degree of letting one dot or one dash stand for a numeral. This would not only speed up the transmission, but also reduce confusion. Based on this conception, he and Mushu created the Walking Telegraphic Method: the sender of the message would stand behind the window of the war criminal's cell [= the isolated cell in which Commissar Pei, the leader of the Chinese POWs, was held]. If he walked to the left side, it meant a dot; if he walked to the right, it denoted a dash; if he hunkered down below the window, that indicated the beginning of a new group of numerals. One dot meant 1, one dot plus one dash--2, two dots plus one dash--3, two dots--4, three dots--5, three dashes--6, two dashes plus one dot--7, one dash plus one dot--8, two dashes--9, and one dash--0. As a rule, every four numerals represented a word [probably = Chinese character]. After the receiver jotted down the numerals, he passed it on to the code man, who could decipher them with the aid of the codebook Little Hou was making. In reverse order to our cell, the war criminal's room had a window facing Compound 6, so they could send and receive messages from within the room. This method would definitely resolve the problem of transmission. How excited we were! We wanted to shout for joy, but we didn't dare. We only lifted Little Hou on our shoulders and walked a few rounds in the cell. Then he returned to working on the code.

When the lead in the pencil was worn down, Mushu would bite the tip sharp. As the main worker, Little Hou didn't get enough sleep, his eyes bloodshot. We worried about him, but couldn't do much to help. Without a dictionary, we couldn't remember all the essential words, but we managed to come up with over eight hundred common characters. This wasn't bad. The code shouldn't be too elaborate; otherwise it would be difficult to master. So we aimed at fewer than one thousand characters. Whenever an often-used word came to mind, we would tell Little Hou. The penciled pages looked complicated and incomprehensible to me, but Little Hou could trace what he had done to avoid repetition.

Finally a booklet--loose sheets of toilet paper bound by a shoelace--was completed, which listed all the codes and gave instructions about the Walking Telegraphic Method. We put a title on the cover: The Pei Code.

War Trash, by Ha Jin (Vintage, 2004), pp. 224-225

Multilingual Japan

One big difference I've noted on this, my first extended trip back to Japan in 20 years, is how much more multilingual the nation is. I don't mean so much that more Japanese seem to speak foreign languages better than at any time since 1945--though I suspect that is also likely to be true.

What has struck me instead, on our attempts to get maximum usage from our rail passes, is the much greater quantity of signage in Chinese and Korean--and some Russian in Niigata--designed to help tourists speaking those languages. Many goods imported from other Asian countries also list instructions or ingredients in both Chinese and Korean.

But another thing that has struck me is that most Japanese now seem to expect foreigners to speak enough of the host country language to conduct simple transactions such as making purchases and asking directions. And I've been very impressed by the many people I've queried in my limited but sometimes deceptively fluent Japanese who've communicated very effectively in simplified and maximally redundant Japanese designed to get through to foreigners with limited proficiency.

Of course, a few bumpkins still just repeat the same thing more loudly when dealing with non-Japanese-speaking foreigners, but many people I've met have proven quite adept at effective foreigner talk in Japanese. The flip side of this--the hound that no longer barks--is the near absence of the reaction I used to get so often 20 or 30 years ago: Elaborate praise from strangers on hearing my first few words of Japanese. I've only encountered that reaction once or twice in the past 3 weeks. Nor have I encountered the speechless panic that used to overcome so many Japanese when a foreign face approached them to ask for information. Now, when speaking Japanese, the panic is more on my side, as I anticipate the inevitable hurdles of inarticulateness that are sure to trip me up the longer the conversation goes on.

Another reaction that has mercifully become much rarer is the kneejerk shouts of ハロ、ハロ (hah-ro, hah-ro) from groups of Japanese schoolboys. The only such reaction I've noticed on this trip has been from a group of uniformed middle-school boys touring a Japanese shrine in Sapporo who greeted us with ヘロ、ヘロ (heh-ro, heh-ro). The girls who followed greeted us instead with a civilized 今日は (kon-nichi-wa).

UPDATE, 23 August, 23 September: Yesterday my wife applied for her alien registration at the Ashikaga city office, where I learned that Japan will conduct a national census on 1 October 2005. The notice was posted in the following languages, in the following order: English (in larger type at the top), Korean, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Tagalog, Indonesian/Malay ("Sensus nasional dilaksanakan"), Farsi/Persian (I think), Vietnamese, Hindi, Burmese, French, German, Russian, Malay/Indonesian ("Sensus Penduduk"), Arabic (if not Persian).

The same office also offered a Tochigi International Association flyer for "Consultation and Information Services" with contact information listed in the following languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Persian, Thai. The local prefectural lending library, however, had nothing substantial in any other language than English, but had many volumes of classic literature translated into Japanese from English, French, German, Russian, Korean, Chinese, German, Spanish, and Italian (roughly in that order, by quantity).

The Battle Death Blame Game

When a man died, there had to be blame. [1LT] Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame [the dead soldier] Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.

In the field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.

SOURCE: The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien (Broadway Books, 1998), p. 177

Hirohito: Mere Collector or Amateur Scientist?

From 1914 to 1919, when Hirohito was in middle school, Professor Hattori Hirotarô became his teacher of natural history and physics. Hattori remained his servant in scientific pursuits for more than thirty years, cultivating Hirohito's childhood fondness for insects and helping him to develop a keen, lifelong interest in marine biology and taxonomy. Under Hattori's guidance, Hirohito read Darwin's theory of evolution as interpreted by the popular writer Oka Asajirô, whose book Shinkaron kôwa (Lessons on evolution) was published in 1904. He may also have read a Japanese translation of Darwin's Origin of Species. Around 1927 he was given a small bust of Darwin, which thereafter adorned his study alongside busts of Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte.

In September 1925, during the fourth year of his regency, Hirohito had a small, well-equipped biological laboratory established within the Akasaka Palace. Three years later, during the second year of his reign, he built ... the Imperial Biological Research Institute, consisting of a greenhouse and two large laboratories, each with specimen rooms and libraries. Hattori became associated with this laboratory .... Years later Hattori edited Sagamiwan sango erarui zufu (Pictorial specimens of marine life in Sagami Bay), while Sanada Hiroo and Katô Shirô did the colored drawings, Baba Kikutarô wrote the accompanying explanations. Because the re-formed Imperial Household Agency held the copyright, the book was ascribed to Hirohito. Nowhere in the book, however, did the emperor's name appear, which raised the question, How much of its research had actually been done by him?

Hirohito himself was always very modest about his interest in biology. When Sagamiwan sango appeared, Hattori offered an assessment of his former pupil's scientific bent in a discussion that appeared in the Sande Mainichi on October 2, 1949. Asked whether the emperor's studies should be viewed as genuine scientific research rather than the work of an amateur, Hattori replied:

Recently Professor Satô Tadao [of Nagoya University] wrote in the Nagoya newspaper that it belonged to the category of an amateur's research. Indeed, depending on how one looks at the matter, I think that is true. He never published anything under his own name and ended up furnishing raw data to various specialists. Therefore, from one point of view he is, in the final analysis, probably a mere collector. But I don't think so. He did not just hand them material he had collected. Rather, he first thoroughly investigated that material himself, and on that point he is no amateur.

Hattori's assessment makes sense ... Taught by Hattori, the emperor became a naturalist and a patron of marine biology, pursuing as a hobby the collection of sea plants and animals, such as slugs, starfish, hydrozoa, and jellyfish.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 60-61

Quake-Snarled Bullet Trains

As we were about to exit our 11th-floor apartment, we suddenly felt the building sway slightly beneath our feet and heard the rhythmic rattle of an interior door against its metal latchhook. We retreated back into our doorway, nervous but confident that the newly constructed Japanese high-rise could withstand an earthquake that had not even caused us to lose our footing. Nor had it caused any visible panic in the streets of Ashikaga far below.

It was Tuesday, the 16th of August, and we were just setting out on a complex, minutely scheduled multi-train itinerary that would have us reaching Tokyo station in time to transfer to the same Narita airport express train that an old friend coming up from Osaka was booked on, so that both she and we could meet her daughter who was due to overnight in Narita on her way back from Auckland to London for university. We were all scheduled to arrive by train at 16:25, just about the time she would be clearing customs.

We would all have just enough time to eat a traditional Japanese meal together at the airport hotel before dispersing in three different directions to spend that night: our friends staying at the hotel, my wife going back to Ashikaga for school business the next day, and my daughter and I going to our friend's parents' house on the west side of Tokyo so we could spend a little more time catching up the next day.

The first leg of the familiar local train ride from Ashikaga to the nearest bullet train (Shinkansen) station at Oyama gave no hint of any major disruption. Nor did the man who booked our seat reservations for the remainder of the trip. But almost as soon as we headed for the Shinkansen platform, they started turning people away, saying the Northeast Shinkansen (through Sendai) had been shut down. We had no idea why until the station announcements began blaming the earthquake. We were forced to hop on a slow local train bound for Ueno station in Tokyo.

Fortunately, we had gotten an early start in order to have time to book seat reservations, so we still had a chance to make the 15:33 Narita Express (N'EX) from Tokyo. But the sprawling Tokyo Shinkansen station was a complete mess, with no reliable timetables, repeated announcements of delays, and stranded passengers all over the place in the peak summer travel season.

At 15:33, the Narita Express platform was still listing the train scheduled for 14:33, with no indication of the actual times for any of the delayed trains. The harried platform officials assured us that seat reservations no longer mattered, that we could climb aboard any N'EX that came by. So we did, and sure enough, no one on board bothered to check our seat assignments.

We got to the airport close to 17:00, wondering how to get in touch with our friends. We went first to the arrival area outside customs, and were shocked almost immediately to run into our friend from Osaka, who had arrived on the same train we had and was waiting for her daughter's flight to clear customs. It had been delayed, too--but not by an earthquake!

We had a very pleasant dinner, imagining that the world-famous Shinkansen system was quickly getting back on schedule. When we dispatched my wife, who knows hardly any Japanese, back to the Narita Express station, we had no idea what we had condemned her to. The N'EX had canceled most of its runs, so she had to take a series of slower trains all the way back to Ashikaga, arriving home about midnight.

An hour after my wife left, my daughter and I headed for a N'EX that was supposed to go all the way to Kokubunji on the west side of Tokyo, where our hosts for the night expected us to show up pretty late anyway. But that train was canceled, so we were instead put on a bus for Shinjuku, the major west-side transfer station. As it happened, the bus got to Shinjuku early enough to allow us to jump on a commuter express that got us into Kokubunji much faster than either we or our hosts had expected.

The northbound Shinkansen was still snarled the next evening when we headed back to Ashikaga, but all the local trains and buses provided a very effective--if slower--backup system.

Bix on Hirohito and General Nogi's Suicide, 1912

At the beginning of the Taishô period [in 1912], on the day of Emperor Meiji's funeral, General Nogi and his wife closed the door to their second-floor living room and prepared to end their lives. He had removed his uniform and was clad in white undergarments; she wore black funeral attire. They bowed to portraits of Meiji and of their two sons, killed in the Russo-Japanese War. While the funeral bells tolled, they proceeded to commit ritual suicide. Mrs. Nogi acted first; he assisted, plunging a dagger into her neck, and then he disemboweled himself with a sword. The departed hero of the Russo-Japanese War left behind ten private notes and a single death poem. (The writing of waka death poems was another practice from Japanese antiquity that was revised in the nineteenth century.) In one note he apologized for his action to four family members, including his wife, and acknowledged having contemplated suicide ever since losing his regimental flag in the war of 1877; he also mentioned his aging and the loss of his sons. In another note, to a military doctor, he bequeathed his body to medical use....

Nogi's death poem, intended for public consumption, told the nation that he was following his lord into death--a practice known as junshi that even the Tokugawa shogunate had considered barbaric and outlawed "as antiquated in 1663." Conservative intellectuals ... interpreted Nogi's suicide as a signal act of samurai loyalty, pregnant with positive lessons for the nation, and for its armed forces. Nantenbô, Nogi's Zen master, was so enthralled by the majesty of his pupil's action that he sent a three-word congratulatory telegram to the funeral: "Banzai, banzai, banzai." The Asahi shinbun, however, editorially criticized those who called for the establishment of a new morality by reviving bushidô, and asserted that Nogi's harmful action could teach the nation nothing. Kiryû Yûyû, a writer for the Shinano Mainichi shinbun, went further, not only decrying Nogi's death as "thoughtless" and "meaningless" but warning presciently that "to comprehend death as loyalty" was a mistaken ethical idea that could only "end up encouraging great crimes in international relations."

When informed of "Schoolmaster" Nogi's death by the chamberlain in charge of supervising his education, Hirohito alone of his three brothers was reportedly overcome with emotion: Tears welled up in his eyes, and he could hardly speak. Doubtless he was too young really to understand the general's action, let alone the harmful effect that his anachronistic morality of bushidô might have had on the nation. But as Hirohito remarked late in life to an American reporter, Nogi had a lasting influence on him, instilling precepts of frugality and stoic virtues of endurance and dignity to which Hirohito never failed to adhere. The brave Nogi was to Hirohito a giver of orders who meant what he said and was willing to lay down his life for his master. Hirohito not only identified with Nogi, he also derived from him the conviction that strong resolve could compensate to some extent for physical deficiencies. In Hirohito's imaginings, Nogi was to be emulated almost as much as his other hero, Meiji.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 42-43