Letter from Tokyo, II: Yasukuni, Yakuza, yesterday

What distinguishes Tokyo from other prosperous Western cities are its crows – hundreds of them, big black ubiquitous birds that caw even in the quietest dawn. They are like the natives – unobtrusive, not dangerous like those in Sri Lanka. Over there, they are a nuisance; they scatter the garbage, steal fish, scraps of meat in the markets. Babies should never be left alone for the crows are known to pick their eyes. They are clever, nasty – they swoop on people then drop their sh-t. This is not fiction – I was bombed by a crow when we were living in Colombo. Besides, the Japanese cover their garbage with nylon netting as they are laid on the sidewalks. There is an effort to curb the crow population. Whatever, visitors need not worry, these birds are well behaved.

Ah Shinjuku! How many times have we been lost in this labyrinthine station – Tokyo’s largest and most complex, surrounded by posh department stores, shops, eating places, cozy cafes and cultural hangouts. Here, too, are huddled Japan’s first skyscrapers, including City Hall.

We visited the Toyota Foundation on the 37th floor of the Mitsui building, one of the first skyscrapers to go up in the district, a dark, stark edifice, with distinctive crisscrosses on its sides as braces to bolster the building against earthquakes. In the month that we were there, we experienced three. Kazue Iwamoto has just finished putting out the foundation’s 30-year history, together with Yoshiko Wakayama who passed away recently. Wakayama had visited the Philippines many times as program officer and had assisted Filipino institutions, academics and private individuals in programs that promote indigenous culture and modernization. One of Toyota’s executives, Shiro Honda – no relation to the famous car manufacturer – was described by the late Andrew Gonzalez as the brightest young Japanese he had met when he was stationed in Manila. Toyota’s outreach is enhanced by helmsmen like him.

Filipinos who toured Tokyo in the Fifties will remember the Nichigeki Theater in Ginza for its bare-breasted girlie shows. It was also here where Bimbo Danao, the Filipino singer, crooned to the adulation of many, particularly teenagers. I recall Nichigeki as one place where Filipinos of a bygone era were exposed not just to kinky Japanese mores but to the casual way with which Japanese culture treats sexuality. I remember the middle-aged matrons giggling at the sight of those bare breasts, and my own guide saying that one particular showgirl must be a relative of the stage manager because she had less endowments.

All these come to mind because the other afternoon, I passed by the old soft-porn theater below the Shimbashi station. Here, for a thousand yen, we can drool over the latest soft-porn movies. The theater is small; it sits not even a hundred. The clientele is mostly middle-aged men. Soft porn is also available in some of the closed circuit TV in hotels. In this country, porn does not attract attention; as in Europe, adult theaters are quite empty.

There is speculation though that quality soft-porn movies may yet be the "in" genre, now that Kurosawa is gone and the industry is moribund. This is not so with the animated cartoon – the Japanese excel in it.

As in all affluent societies, a high human cost is exacting its toll. The gap between those who have made it and those who haven’t is widening. In the demographic equation, a falling birth rate – the polls show less interest in sex – will burden young wage earners who will have to pay more for the support of an aging population.

A new phenomenon all over Japan is the perplexed condition of hundreds of young people who escape from the crippling competition that pervades the society. Way back, they resolved this social blight by "evaporating." All of a sudden, a person would disappear, go elsewhere to start a noodle shop, free from stifling restrictions and responsibilities.

Now, these youths shut themselves up in their rooms, refusing to come out – not for days, but months or years. Fortunately, they have families to feed them.

But what of this horror story of a couple who starved to death because they were too proud to go outside to beg for food. What happened to the many homeless who inhabited the underpasses? I was told they were dispersed; some now live in the parks. I did see one homeless with all her worldly goods bundled around her in a passageway in the Shimbashi station.

The crime rate is also climbing – alarming to the Japanese, but not to this Manilan numb to the daily mayhem in this ugliest of Southeast Asian cities. Break-ins in homes unattended during office hours, or left for days by trusting homeowners on a weekend vacation – these crimes are attributed to organized gangs, to immigrant Chinese.

Even the Yakuza, the unique criminal organization, has undergone changes, no longer engaged so much in prostitution, gambling and protection rackets. They are now above ground in business, investing particularly in the electronics industry. One leader has even gone on television to expound on esoteric Yakuza life, explaining how important women are in their sleazy world for they can be trusted not only to keep secrets but to be life companions.

Japan has the highest suicide rate anywhere and it, too, is on the rise. At any time, those trains that keep miraculous time may suddenly stop because someone threw himself on the tracks.

The Japanese tradition of suicide is an honorable way by which failure is atoned. But hara kiri is not the popular way to go; they jump off buildings, or blow their brains out if they have a gun, which is difficult to obtain in Japan. And most of the time, they do this to protect someone upstairs, a powerful politician or businessman.

Now, Donald Richie, the American cultural commentator, announces the release of a film 30 years after the suicide of Yukio Mishima, the novelist whose death had embarrassed many Japanese, not because of its gore, but because it was considered even by them as bizarre. Western critics have pointed to his themes and his form as the most westernized in the post-war generation. Mishima championed militarism and even built his own personal army of some 100 men and engaged in bodybuilding. He had shot a black and white film – a short 30-minute dramatization of the young officers in the Thirties who committed suicide as penalty for their attempted coup. The film is called Patriot; Richie, who had some part in its filming, recounts the narrative. Mishima acted out one of the officers and how he and his wife committed hara kiri. It is a chilling and sincere prequel to the end which Mishima himself chose. The film is available in DVD but there are no English subtitles. Two documentaries on how the film was made accompany the film. Richie’s contribution is the background Wagnerian music.

Edward Seidensticker, 84, America’s foremost student of Japanese literature and translator, is in town; he has given up his eyrie in Honolulu to be in this city whose history he has so affectionately recorded in two books. It is often said that Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s first Nobel Prize winner in literature, would not have gotten that prize if Seidensticker had not brought him to the western world with his translations of his novels. It is not just Kawabata; he also translated Mishima, and those classics of Japanese literature, The Tale of the Genji, and The Makioka Sisters.

The other week, Seidensticker autographed his latest book, The Snake That Bowed, based on the works of Okamoto Kido, a kabuki writer in mid-19th century Edo (the old name of Tokyo). It is a detective story, but as Ed says, he chose to do the book for it brings glimpses of the Tokyo that is long gone.

I met Seidensticker in the late Fifties. I remember having sake with him at his favorite Ginza café. As a district then, Ginza still had several wooden houses, all of which have been replaced by steel and stone. It was not unusual to see so many women then walking in Ginza in their resplendent kimonos, come winter or summer. I have been a month in Tokyo and I saw only four, mind you, four women in kimonos. And one man with a fan in elegant Japanese attire.

That afternoon, we were drinking cold sake; it was five and I asked to be excused for I was going to have dinner in the house of a Japanese writer we both knew.

When I mentioned his name, Ed Seidensticker flared. "That SOB," he said hotly, "I have known him for so long – you met him only recently, and he is inviting you to his house for dinner! He has never extended that invitation to me."

By then, I knew it was some honor to be invited thus, for the Japanese rarely invite people to their homes. If they meet socially, it is at some restaurant or coffee shop. It is understandable – most Japanese homes are tiny, with little space for socializing.

I thought about it for a while then I asked Ed to bring forward his arm. I laid mine beside his, and said: "Can you not see why? I am brown, you are white. The Japanese look at Asians with a sense of superiority. They look up to Caucasians…"

He immediately mellowed as the truth dawned on him.

After more than half a century of visiting Japan almost annually, I finally go to Yasukuni, the Shinto shrine devoted to Japan’s war dead, some 2,400,000 of them, including dozens of Okinawan youths and more than a dozen convicted war criminals of World War II, General Hedeki Tojo, prime minister during the war among them. It is late Sunday afternoon, our last day in Tokyo. An old friend, Matsuyo Yamamoto, and her assistant, Shoko Aoki, accompany us.

Jan, as her non-Japanese friends call Yamamoto, is a long-time crusader of women’s and children’s rights; she edits a magazine, and holds regular seminars to spread the word. Like a few of her generation, she had evangelized for a noble and pacifist Japan. I have known her for ages as a friend of the Filipinos and, incidentally, as a translator of Nick Joaquin’s fiction and mine.

Yamamoto reads the signs alongside the broad walk. One warns visitors that they are not allowed in the shrine if they are merely curious and do not observe piety for the dead. Yet another displays the brands of donated sake, and another mentions the dead in the naval battles off Zamboanga, Davao and Rabaul in the South Pacific, that they were eulogized the month previous. Another sign quotes a letter from a young officer now deified.

At the souvenir shop, attendants in white and red, the official Shinto garb, attended to customers. Close by, another sign states that not even the emperor can go beyond it on a horse; he has to approach the shrine on foot.

They were there, the disciplined locals with their guides holding aloft the inevitable banner, a sprinkling of foreigners. Those with special permission enter the inner sanctum; the herd pays homage at the foyer.

At a dilapidated canteen near the gate, a squad of old veterans, one in his flannel dark green uniform, are singing, accompanied by a harmonica player. Much later in the late afternoon, they gather in formation before the shrine, their flag raised. Then their leader barks out orders.

Hearing those guttural commands, a chill wave of memory washed over me, and for a moment, it all came alive, the long buried feelings, the abject fear and the magma of hatred. My wife, who was then 13, paused, too. Their house in Iba, Zambales during the Occupation was close to the Kempei-tai headquarters, and she heard the screams of prisoners as they were tortured. In remembering, she whispered to me, "They were very cruel."

I did not tell this dear friend with us how I felt then. I recalled, too, another friend, the novelist Hirabayashi Taiko. She and her husband were socialists. They had opposed the war and were persecuted by the Tojo government. I still remember her pithy comment on Japanese politics, that "There are no socialists in the Japanese Socialist Party." Thirty years ago, she visited Manila. She wanted to see Fort Santiago, which was then emblazoned with all those signs marking where the Japanese committed their bestiality. I did not have the heart to bring her there, but she went there just the same on her own.

It was dusk, the shrine museum was closing, I knew, as written by those who saw, that inside was a blatant distortion of history, that their invasion of China and Southeast Asia was for the good of the people of Asia, and the enshrined Filipino heroes of that war were their collaborators Jose P. Laurel and Benigno Ramos.

For all the closeness with which Japan regards the United States, why then does Koizumi continue visiting Yasukini? Why then does the Tokyo Mayor, Ishihara, continue spouting those strident anti-American noises? All these discordant squeaks are expressions of that strong and ever assertive nationalism which a benevolent American Occupation never thralled. It is a nationalism which many Japanese share, to tell everyone that their progress is not so much a result of collaboration with the United States and American patronage, but the reward of their industry, initiative and sense of nation.

But I no longer see those trucks with loud speakers exhorting the Japanese to confront America, and blaring all that music, those songs that we heard during the Occupation. Will we never see again those demonstrations in the major streets of Tokyo, the crowds snaking through and shouting Ampo Hantai? Not likely.

Japan is now campaigning to win a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, a seat Japan as a world power richly deserves. It is also mounting a campaign to win confidence in Africa by showering that continent with aid, which it sorely needs. And according to surveys, it is now the most liked nation in the world, with exceptions from China and Korea.

On the other hand, Chinese nationalism, which opposes Japan’s UN ambition, is obviously supported by its government. That nationalism springs from memories of its humiliation when China was divided into spheres of influence by the West and Formosa and large chunks of Chinese territory were taken by Japan, onwards to the Sino-Japanese war, the rape of Nanking which the Japanese deny.

Then, there is South and North Korea as well, occupied by Japan for 50 years, still smarting from memories of that harsh Japanese rule. Such vehement feelings are not assuaged by Koizumi’s visits to Yasukini, in spite of the pro-American stance of his government. The Germans have, long ago, come to terms with Hitler’s legacy, with the holocaust and the Western powers no longer harp on this past, but why is it not the same with the Japanese?

Much of the reason lies with the Japanese themselves, in their continued ambivalent, look at World War II and its origins, in the failure of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s regime to charge outright Emperor Hirohito for his responsibility in World War II.

Every time I visit Japan, I am awed by Japanese achievement, such simple things like their magnificent trains running on the dot, the cleanliness, the orderliness of its cities, the efficiency of its systems – and yes, of course, that irrefutable fact that without natural resources other than the grit of her people, it has achieved the world’s second largest economy. With a land area of which only 25 percent is arable, it surpasses us in food production with our better climate and more land.

We visit that jewel of urban renewal, Roppongi Hills, and shoot up the Mori building, and 52 stories high, we gaze at a 380-degree view of Tokyo on a late May afternoon. Spread before us is the world’s largest, most exciting metropolis, the quilt pattern of neighborhoods, the green splotches of parks, including the Imperial Palace in the resplendent heart of Tokyo. How this burg had really changed from the flat, arid cityscape five decades ago.

Roppongi Hills is now the most exclusive address in Tokyo, with its classy boutiques and gourmet restaurants.

A friend noted that Toyota is now the world’s biggest car manufacturer. I told him an American motor company executive also said it as the best car in the world. He gushed, "Isn’t that amazing?"

I said. "No, if the Philippines became the world’s largest car manufacturer, that is amazing."

Behind such achievements, of course, is a vigorous spirit, inculcated in its people. And all are not rich, or "middle class" as their own perception indicates, for everywhere are ordinary people, in ordinary homes, pursuing ordinary lives.

Talking with a segment that is sophisticated, in positions of knowledge and even power, I can see a bit of the chauvinism that led them to war, perdition, and miraculous recovery, and yet again, that irrepressible ambition to be on top.

What will I tell them, particularly those whom I regard with warmth, except this: in their dealings with so-called Third World people, never should they be arrogant – always, that quiet politeness that has always characterized their own dealings with themselves, for these Third World people have nothing but their pride, and because of this paucity of self-worth, they are often reckless and will cut off the nose to spite the face. With the powerful West that is their equal, to whom they are often superior, yes, they can be proud, arrogant even. And why not? This, too, they can afford.

Our tradition in freedom enables us to speak with candor. We bow before no one, but I personally do before those who have achieved on their very own a greatness, which I would like my countrymen to possess and to hold.