Tag Archives: Tokyo

Advent Sunday, 2012

I work at an Anglican school, and every year, on the Friday afternoon before Advent begins, we have a short service for the lighting of the tree. We don’t get a special Christmas tree every year, instead we decorate the large conifer at the top of the drive. The chaplain leads us in prayer, we sing a carol (It Came Upon A Midnight Clear, sung to the American tune which always reminds me of Home On The Range), the tree is lit and the choir sings Joy To The World. We stand at the top of the drive, effectively blocking the way out of school and so swelling our numbers with any girl on her way home but lacking the gall to wriggle through the throng. Before the short service we are issued with candles inside paper cups, this year handed out with warnings to hold the cup carefully; it seems the hole in the bottom was a little big and to hold only the candle would be to invite danger. I had never noticed before, but after the tree was lit I saw a member of the office staff inside the tree; I imagine he had been tasked to flick the switch and was then stranded but illuminated, wondering where he should go.

So the tree is lit, and while all the shops seem to think it’s Christmas already, I am looking forward to Advent. School has been particularly hectic recently; we are in the middle of speaking tests, so I suppose that’s not surprising. Squeaking through the tests with my little froggy croak has entertained the girls no end but has been quite a frustrating experience, and I shall be glad to finish everything and stop talking for a while. We have two more weeks of work; tests, grades, preparation, and then I fly back to the UK for Christmas there.

Today I have been struck by sounds; this occurred to me when I heard the 5 o’clock chimes, which are broadcast every day, as far as I know all over Japan. I have always believed that it is a traditional way to alert schoolchildren to the time and that they should be on their way home. I think every ward in Tokyo plays a different melody. I have also read, however, that it is a way for the ward office to check that the emergency announcement system is working (in case of earthquakes etc.), but I prefer to think it’s a service to Japan’s children. I sat here listening to the chimes and thought about other sounds that I had heard today.

Earlier this afternoon, when I was on my way home, I saw a crow sitting on a railing near the station. Japanese crows are very big, not easily intimidated, the kind of bird to sit calmly on a railing only a metre or so away from you, regarding you with darkly glittering beady eyes and occasionally cawing in a raucous and territorial way. This one let me take its picture, it’s quite dark but I shall include it anyway:

My day started with a quiet service at church, space and peace after a long week. On the way home I stopped at a 2nd-hand bookshop and bought a copy of The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki. It is the same edition I read when I was at secondary school. I re-read it when I was living in Japan in the early nineties, and I have been feeling the urge to read it again. To find a worn copy with the same cover I remember from 1987 almost makes me feel like I have found my own copy again! I shall look forward to reading it over the holidays and blog about it later.

The end of another weekend. I have spent time with good friends, in person and on the phone. Despite my inclination to sleep away part of this afternoon, the universe conspired against me and instead I had a long chat with an old friend, a much better way to spend the time. I feel connected and my batteries are re-charged; I’m ready for another week.

Right where I’m supposed to be

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It seems like it’s that time in the term, that time of year, when ‘where has the time gone?’ becomes ‘how am I going to get everything done?’ and it’s all too easy to stay at home doing piles of marking or feeling guilty about not doing piles of marking. So I decided that this afternoon I would not to succumb to either hours of wielding a red pen or sitting at home casting around for what I have been reliably informed is ‘displacement activity’, but that I would go out and meet a friend for coffee. What made this post bubble up in my mind, though, was not the hours spent putting the world to rights, but the journey home.

10:30 and I needed to get back to Shibuya station to catch my train home. I briefly considered waiting for a bus, but must admit it was a flicker of consideration really, before I flagged down a taxi. It wasn’t a long journey, basically a minimum-fare trip straight down Roppongi Dori, but the taxi driver turned round several times to check where I wanted to be dropped off. Since the station is big and has a number of entrances, I told him that any would do; not a satisfactory answer. He turned round again to ask for more clarification. Just as I was starting to wonder, ‘What kind of taxi driver are you?’ he added to his apology for not being clearer about directions, ‘I’m from Tohoku.’

I asked him how long he had been in Tokyo (6 months), whether his relocating had any connection to the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake (yes), and if he had been a taxi driver in Tohoku (no). It was just a 5-minute taxi ride, but it was also a few words that stopped me in my tracks. ‘I’m from Tohoku.’ A whole life behind a sentence. I wonder what he has been through in the last 18 months.

On the train down to Jiyugaoka it was quite crowded, but not squashed. Just enough that it was a little difficult to find a strap or bar to hold onto. Twice, a woman about my age, standing with her young son, almost went flying as the train slowed down. I was tucked into a corner, but reached out and caught her. The first time she smiled but said to her son that she was embarrassed. The second time I grabbed her she laughed out loud and held onto my arm for a moment as we nodded at the perils of commuting.

A transfer at Jiyugaoka and I was almost home. At 11 the train was still full enough for some people to be standing up. Near Ookayama the lights in a university were still blazing, Tokyo seemed hours away from sleep. I walked home under a clear sky full of stars with Pizzicato 5 turned up loud on my iPod. Some days I get lost in work, today was not one of them.

Shintaro Ishihara, sigh

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So, Shintaro Ishihara, Governor of Tokyo since 1999, probably Japan’s most famous right-wing politician, has announced today that he is stepping down as Governor so he can start a new political party with fellow right-wingers. In the BBC article you can read here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20078481, it states:

‘The veteran politician is known for making controversial and nationalistic comments.’

Well, that’s the understatement of the day. The man has made a career out of it. Gov. Ishihara probably came to the attention of a lot of people outside Japan when he published the book ‘The Japan That Can Say No’ in 1989, which argued that Japan should stand up to the US and forge a new kind of relationship, since the one that existed was born out of the post-war occupation and was more like a parent and child. He argued that Japan should interact with the US differently, since it was no longer the defeated country it had been in 1945. He had already been a well-known person in Japan for many years by then, having won a prestigious literary award before he had even graduated from university. The novel was made into a film (from a screenplay he wrote himself) and featured his brother in one of the roles.

He entered politics in 1968, and was active in national politics for over 25 years. Although he was always a popular politician, he never led his own faction within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and failed in his bid to become the leader of the party. He resigned from national politics in 1995 right after the Aum sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway and in 1998 ran as an independent candidate for the Governorship. Since then he has made a career of being an equal-opportunities offender, regularly making comments that one or more section of society finds objectionable. He is always unrepentant and as far as I know he has never apologised, though he has sometimes attempted to parse his utterances into something less offensive or to hone his attack on one particular group.

I am loathe to start quoting his offensiveness here, since it is easy to track down elsewhere on the Internet, but it is fair to say that he has reserved some of his most objectionable comments for China. As Governor he also went out of his way to irritate Beijing, e.g. by inviting the President of Taiwan or the Dalai Lama to Tokyo. Most recently he was the instigator of the disagreement over the Senkaku / Diaoyu Islands. He announced in April that he wanted to buy the Senkaku Islands from the private Japanese citizen who somehow claimed to own them, and raised a large amount of money from private donations to do so. To prevent him from doing this the national government bought the islands instead, and from there we get to the situation we find ourselves in today, which I wrote about in a previous post, https://tokyopurplegirl.com/2012/10/13/senkaku-diaoyu/.

Shintaro Ishihara, as leader of his own political party, is probably hoping to challenge the established parties in the general election that has to be held by the end of 2013. While it has been unpleasant to have him as the Governor of this great city, the idea of him as the face of Japan on the international stage as Prime Minister of Japan is worse. The man is a bigot. He has said deeply offensive things about the people and cultures of many countries; about women; about gay people. He has denied history and said last year that the tsunami was ‘divine punishment’ for Japan’s greed and materialism.

In his announcement of his resignation as Governor, he singled out the language of the Japanese Constitution as being ‘ugly Japanese . . . imposed by the occupying army’ and has criticised what he sees as the pacifist aspect of the Constitution, commonly known as Article 9, in which Japan renounced war and the means to wage it. The Japanese Self Defence Forces (SDF) are in direct contradiction to this. Article 9 has been under attack for a number of years, and there are grassroots groups all over Japan, some affiliated with religious groups of different faiths, some secular, but all working to protect it. A Japan with Shintaro Ishihara as the leader of a major party or the Prime Minister would put Article 9 in jeopardy.

Unfortunately, Ishihara is also a skilled politician, he knows how to tap into populist sentiments, and since he has been elected as Tokyo’s Governor four times there are clearly a lot of people who agree with him or are at least willing to give him their vote. However, he is divisive and offensive, and I shudder to think how he would impact Japan’s relations with its neighbours in Asia and beyond, to the rest of the world.