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Japan: An Antipodal Prospect

by Malcolm McSporran

Wanted: Caucasian male model to be Jesus. Tall and thin, preferably with own long hair and beard, but make-up possible. No experience necessary—the Japan Times.

"All the news without fear or favour," and the position filled conceivably by a tall thin Japanese male model, his clay history sculptored mask occidentalised by a plastic surgeon, the both sharing in Japan's new millennium, already swollen in its first fraction by the fantastic plagiarism, Now, even, her mentors' usurped. In Kawasaki, a schoolboy churlishly removes his friend's head with a pen-knife, and a woman university student has been incareerated in jail for four months because the authorities do not know her name and cannot charge her. She contends that it is a violation of her constitutional right to be held on these grounds and that failure to provide information as to her identity indicates professional negligence by the police: her youth and martyred dedication represent freshness and a hope, despite the destructive dissent of which she is part. This is the scalpel as it is needed, a necessary exorcism of technological madness. The Australian writer Hal Porter wrote in The Actors—an acerbic image of the new Japan—"like monkeys trying to catch the moon they are building super behemoth tankers of 200,000 tons. They will catch this moon. They intend to stop at nothing. They have, in a sense, already stopped at nothing. They use the knife on themselves. It is no longer the knife of the suicide they so revere, and yet it is used suicidally. It carves on their bodies like a knife whittling an image of renunciation and self-destruction, a caricature creature never seen on earth before. That this blade must cut also in the arteries of the mind seems to me the ultimate horror."

Now it is Spring. Young European executives tell me, with a mixture of irritation and superciliousness, that spring is the demonstration season and offer witless apocryphal tales of Sunday sun gatherings to protest against the price of apples, what a gas, and the metamorphosis of radical leaders at 25 to conservative bastions (there are a million more convincing Gagers to refute this middle-class reassurance). But in three days Okinawa Day falls and, in fact, every decent cock-fearing honkey shivers fearfully. My god, yes! Uncle Dan Riddiford, summon the home guard at the yellow peril-ness of it all. Seventy universities throughout the country have closed or had to suspend classes. A policeman was killed last week on Okayama campus. Premier Sato cuts university budgets in an attempt to establish responsible leadership, as he sees it, by fiscal discipline. The Education Ministry wants to advise school authorities on criteria for punishing radical students. Meanwhile pot and hash are everywhere—American thug school-children stay on high. The Metropolitan Government are removing, on request from the Police Department, 670,000 square metres of paving blocks, replacing them with missile-unadaptable asphalt. Block heels are in for the Summer. On my Shinjuku nights for weeks, while Japanese pursue their obsession(al) entertainment, and jazz cries through the colours, pinball cacophony, live rabbit-sellers and smells, grim City Council men tear up the stones. In Shinjuku too there is the underground to Russia and Sweden. GI's on R&R are urged to run right out and desert, as many do, while the Far East Network offers propaganda crap over the radio—reassuring messages from decorated sergeams who talk about the American fighting man being at the base of the American structure, and the evil of 'Charlie', after all, isn't be just a two-legged animal. Expatriate Americans can be larger than life, almost grotesque, removed from comfortable context. Old Ike, the grand-daddy of every marine, oh yeah, smoking grass like good guys in the paddy fields, and shooting each other up with a genius beyond Miles Minderbinder's wildest double-deal.

Fabled oriental inscrutability is only obvious in the anonymity of the streets. Otherwise I feel latent hostility behind the obsequiousness . . . lest we forget, we haven't. . . . Europeans love to theorise on the differences between the obliqueness of the oriental mind, laced with subversive deception, and comparative occidental lucidity. An agonising dichotomy for the Japanese; they must subscribe to western power plans to satisfy their manic own, but hate us for it. And it seems so right. The hatred, I mean. The student revolution seems so right in a country that needs a lacerating douche. Things are made tough for idealists when cigarettes are called Peace and Hope, and their cars, Sylvia, Sunny and Cedric. The small group of extremists who harangue outside the Soviet Embassy, outnumbered threefold by the law, excite, and we shrill cries of affirmation. You know "I'm with you ... me blood brother"—execrable pidgin semantics. Any invocations are healthy—a line which, of course, leaves me open to charges of irresponsibility. But it's all with reason; tomorrow is the 17th Anniversary of the San Francisco Peace Treaty which separated the Ryukyu islands from Japan and put them under U.S. term expires and the pact thereafter will be extended automatically unless either side decides against it. Militants are making the day an opportunity for an offensive to press the Government into secession from America. They demand either immediate and unequivocal return of Okinawa to Japan, which would seriously disrupt America's defence pattern in Asia, or for the Okinawa bases to have the same status as U.S. bases in Japan proper; that is, to be non-nuclear. Sato, too, wants return, but nationalists fear coercion by America. Still, he pleads convincingly "One million inhabitants of Okinawa who are part of our nation with a proud history and a high cultural standard, find themselves today, more than 20 years after the war, still under the administration of a foreign power." South Korea and Taiwan whimper, like the sycophants they are, because Okinawa is pivotal in their defence; they advocate the return to Japan, with nuclear bases intact, but U.S. policy against Japan's rearmament precludes this. So the M.P.D. advises that tomorrow they will use 12,000 men to defend sacrosant parts of the city (American Embassy, Government buildings), and too, "A new public security force will make its debut to gather evidence on demonstrators." Debut for godsake. Riot police plan to patrol Japanese National Railway stations to prevent travel by armed groups. Perhaps they don't realise that in 24 hours every central station will have been seized. And [unclear: Eu] [gap — ] [unclear: s] are already unnerved by the electric [gap — ] forerunner of nervous predictions for [gap — ] year when it's really gonna be rough [gap — ] I rise at the thought of armies [unclear: massit] [gap — ] [unclear: e] Tokyo night, gather-ing in an [unclear: arsena] [gap — ][unclear: dynamism]

Smog is not [gap — ] [unclear: word]; sometimes it is like a veil and [gap — ] told that at the end of a high [unclear: Sum] [gap — ] [unclear: ay], one can peel the grime. It [unclear: polani] [gap — ] sun, encompasses far city perspective [gap — ] strangles. Everywhere there are people [gap — ] [unclear: s] so many, making the carnage of [unclear: Ues] [gap — ] after a weekend in calculable—still [gap — ] [unclear: ls] function in the filth. A park is perh [gap — ] w-peopled but the oil-black canal or [gap — ] [unclear: ge] washing the shores of noise issues [gap — ] [unclear: hitic] poison.

The rallies [unclear: pl] [gap — ] [unclear: for] Okinawa Day were called by the [unclear: Ja] [gap — ] [unclear: cialist] Party, the Japan Communist [unclear: Part] [gap — ] affiliated organisations for the [unclear: reversi] [gap — ] Okinawa—the radical student bodies, [gap — ] War Youth Committee, and Zengakuren [gap — ] not invited. The [unclear: fana] tical passion of [gap — ] [unclear: nts] here contrasts with the half-hearted [gap — ] of student crusades in New Zealand, [gap — ] [unclear: rked] difference between social and politi [gap — ] [unclear: imates] notwithstanding. The various [unclear: rev] [gap — ] [unclear: is] in Japan are primar-ily political and [gap — ] [unclear: cessarily] admirable, but the nationalist [gap — ] [unclear: ent] for one displays all the conviction [gap — ] [unclear: ergy] unknown since the emergence of [unclear: E] [gap — ] states in the 19th cen-tury. Even if [gap — ] Mazzini. All day the tension grows [gap — ] European schools are closed and the [gap — ] [unclear: en], in turn, closeted in their hermetical [gap — ] [unclear: led] apartment. Shops lock early in the Kasumigaseki and Ginza areas, windows barricaded, and barbed wire in some places. Soon the glass will be in shards from the senseless assault. There is some action around 5. We are there against unanimous advice. Seared a little. Perhaps a white gauze face mask, which the Japanese, a most considerate race, wear at the hint of a germ-spreading cold. The inevitable spectators are massing. Thirty army trucks with militia, I swear, siren roll throught the central street. The Embassy is surrounded, passersby questioned. We settle at the crucial intersection opposite a posse of riot policeman, absurd in their leather gauntlets, visored crash helmets, and simian symmetry. The armour shields must be untrue.

Spy helicopters serrate the falling sky and the ominous expectation stirs adrenalin. The squad's P.R. man ask us to leave. Please cooperate with your police force, reminiscent of earnest New Zealand fuzz in similar circumstances. We politely demur. What are you doing? Waiting unconvincingly for a friend. American? Spat not Students? — already classified as agitators by implication and involvement, but our sturdily English flight bags give us deliverance. On the hill between a shrine park and administration buildings, armoured trucks with water mounted cannon test—their petty jaculations no sop to our fever. We are further questioned, and mention 'left wing student'—an arbitrary but convenient esperanto distinction, watching his fixed smile waver and his querulous retreat.

It is as I imagine Berlin at gray dusk in 1962. Nothing has happened but the situation is tensile like the reports of armed readiness in any cold war camp. Not suddenly nevertheless, in time, we left the fortified area and moved to the Ginza. Where it was happening. The Ginza, the heart, disrupt with boulders, a police box, windows crashed out, burning, as are cars, and then the mob, sweeping us up gladly, but jesus its tear gas and paving stones and the cops in a wall, behind them another of machines but the first effective because man shields hold the line, despite their anachronism they nurse cops so what do we do but vault them, forgetting the billy clubs and water cannon and the whole night insanity meaning and the damned gas, gas damn you, die, hanging heavily in the non-air—a dry emetic Haying caustic lungs, snot and tears streaming. Shells are fired in flat trajectories sometimes hitting a student chest high—we are in a column snake walking, a thousand deep zig-zagging and the snakes turn to jitterbug waltz back, better left to Fats Waller and happier times, the sad hymns redolent of great sacrifice, and these people almost crucified in their protest—defiance and fuck, ineffable pain in the raised arms—not supplication but declaration.

The city is saved. In six hours trains will begin running again, only the statistics— 800,000 passengers inconvenienced—remind us that this is behemoth living. Kamikaze Joe, as the foreigners with wintry wit call a taxi driver, emerges from his subterranean secret. 937 students arrested—'gee Alvin, these kids mean business' a hidden beauty observes.- I can't make conclusions nor will I condone or condemn the activists—their feeling demands more than superficial observation. I am impressed by their passion. 'Mind you, these Japs are cunning little buggers.' Tomorrow is the Emperor's birthday. Happy birthday. Remember Iwo Jima and that guy's hand you shot off. It belonged to my friend's father. How do you think he feels?