Republic or Death! (16 page)

While I was there, a right-wing group turned up in a fleet of sound trucks, blasting patriotic slogans at passers-by (there are dozens of these groups, known as
uyoku dantai
, in Japan, many with links to the Yakuza). There were about twenty men, all in blue boiler suits. They got out and marched to the front of the shrine waving a huge Japanese flag in front of them, the red sun at its centre. In any other country, someone would have shouted at them to clear off, to stop politicising the shrine and spoiling everyone's Sunday. But no one said a word. No one even tutted. They just acted as if the men weren't there, stepping out of their way, then carrying on snapping photos of the cherry tree – a perfect demonstration of the Japanese attitude that it's best not to say anything if at all possible.

I tried speaking to some of the right-wingers afterwards, but even they did not want to draw more attention to themselves than they already had. ‘We're just a club,' one pleaded. ‘We meet once a month, come here with the flag and then go for a drink. It's a hobby. Please don't ask me anything more.' Then they drove off, five black trucks with their speakers ready to go, followed by a white one painted with the message: ‘Sorry for any inconvenience caused.'

The same attitude surrounds ‘Kimigayo'. Everyone here knows it's controversial, and they just don't want to be seen as stirring things up by talking about it. Half the people I tried to meet would only talk to me on the condition ‘no politics'; the other half would agree to talk, only to then go out of their way to avoid giving an opinion.

‘What do you think of “Kimigayo”?' I'd ask.

‘Ahhhh …' they'd sigh, then spend ten minutes talking me blandly through its history in the hope I'd forget I ever asked their view. In fact, the only people who did not seem affected by this embarrassment were the teachers who hate it.

*

Kimiko Nezu clasps my hands between hers when she walks into the cafe in Suid
ō
bashi – a part of Tokyo filled with flashing games arcades that give everyone's skin a fluorescent glow – then she apologises for not speaking English and bows, apologises again and bows some more. It's such a warm greeting it almost makes me forget why I've arranged to meet her. Kimiko, sixty-five with greying hair and a slight hunch, is the godmother of anthem protest here; a teacher who has been disciplined more than anyone else in the country. She's been fined, suspended, moved to schools three hours' commute from her home in the hope she'd quit, and made to attend endless ‘re-education' classes. She's been protested against and sent a small knife blade in the post – a traditional death threat. And her story illustrates better than anyone else's why ‘Kimigayo' is such a problem here.

Kimiko grew up in the mountain town of Yamakita, an hour or two's drive west of Tokyo. Her parents were tangerine farmers and, like many rural girls in the 1950s, she had no desire in life apart from to become a good wife and mother to an exceptionally large family. Unusually, she sang ‘Kimigayo' at school (‘Every time I heard it, I felt so aroused – is that the right word? – because I felt proud to be Japanese. People always told me we were richer than other Asian countries. Luckier, happier'). I say ‘unusually' because hardly any schools sang the anthem back then due to its controversial past.

‘Kimigayo' goes back as far as the seventh century, a poem used throughout Japan not only to toast the emperor, but to show respect to others. People would recite it at the end of meals to thank the host, or sing it to express their gratitude after signing a business deal. It only got its current nationalist associations when it was set to music in 1869 by John William Fenton, a British bandleader who was in Yokohama teaching soldiers to play brass instruments. One day he asked his pupils if Japan had a national anthem he could learn. They looked at him confused, so he explained what one was, then offered to compose Japan one if they could find him suitable words. They picked ‘Kimigayo' and Fenton set it to music based on a traditional tune he'd heard one of the soldiers playing on the biwa, a Japanese lute. One of its first airings was before the emperor and thanks to the positions Fenton's pupils later obtained, his song apparently soon took on the status of the anthem in the army and navy, the two places that mattered most.

Fenton's effort was overhauled in 1880 because it turned out to be completely unsingable if you were Japanese – ‘Japanese is not a tonal language, but it has its highs and lows, and he got it completely wrong,' Professor Kazuo Fukushima, the director of Japan's Music Historiography Research Institute, told me – but after the rework it grew in prominence, especially as Japan's ruling elite tried to create a modern country headed first by the bearded, stern Emperor Meiji, and later by his son, the diminutive, bespectacled Emperor Hirohito. Those rulers wanted Japan to become a superpower to rival the US or UK and that meant having a song like them too, one that could be played at all official functions and taught to its children.

By the 1930s, the anthem was everywhere. When the country's troops were fighting abroad, they'd turn and face Japan to sing it, and when they colonised somewhere like Korea they'd force everyone there to sing it too. But its use was heaviest in Japan's schools, where teachers were encouraged to make pupils think that dying for the emperor was the most honourable act someone could do. They'd sing ‘Kimigayo' to praise him almost every day, leaping to their feet whenever its first note was struck to avoid a beating.

During the Second World War, over 2 million Japanese soldiers died, many, as one historian wrote, almost ‘devouring themselves' by undertaking suicide missions. They had fought without question, partly because ‘Kimigayo' had burrowed its way into them when they were younger and made them believe in total duty to the emperor. When the war ended, many teachers felt so culpable for having sent so many boys to their deaths that they formed a union with the slogan: ‘Never send our children to the battlefield again'. One of its founding aims was to oppose the anthem. It was almost as big an issue for them as pay. After that union was formed, ‘Kimigayo' simply disappeared from schools. When Kimiko was a child, most would not have dared sing it for fear of the union members. I can only think her school was so rural, the union didn't bother recruiting there.

*

Despite the opposition, Japan's government never considered changing the country's anthem, unlike the Second World War's other defeated powers. In 1945, Germany had quickly realised it was no longer a good idea to sing the first verse of the ‘Deutschlandlied' as its anthem, especially given its opening:

Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,

Über alles in der Welt
.

Few foreigners were going to understand that wasn't actually a call for world domination, but had been written in 1841 to encourage German states like Prussia to unite under one flag. West Germany's politicians tried out several other songs until deciding it would be simplest to use another verse of the ‘Deutschlandlied' instead. They picked the third, calling on Germany to ‘Bloom in the glow of happiness'. I rather wish they'd picked the second, which praises ‘German women' and ‘German wine', but that was understandably deemed too sexist for the world stage.

Italy similarly overhauled its anthem after the war, dumping the sprightly, instrumental ‘Royal March' after it voted to become a republic. They replaced it with ‘Il Canto degli Italiani', a tune so rambunctious it should have been the country's anthem all along – as full of emotion as a group of Milanese arguing over football.

Both Italy and Germany also made sure their respective fascist anthems were never played again – a decision that could have been made on grounds of taste as much as politics, since both feature some of the worst words ever put to song (the Italian Fascist Party's ‘Giovinezza' spends half its time telling ‘the youth' to ‘shout hoorays' for Mussolini).

But Japan kept ‘Kimigayo'. Even the Americans, who occupied the country for seven years after the war, did not attempt to force a change, the ruling General MacArthur believing they needed Emperor Hirohito's personality cult to help them push through reforms. So after Hirohito renounced his divinity, the US played down his role in the war then sent him out on tour, his song in tow.

Kimiko's views on the anthem did not change until she got to university, but the change was sudden. It was the seventies and Japan's teenagers were as idealistic as those anywhere else, and on one of her first days on campus she looked at a bulletin board and saw posters complaining about the treatment of Korean and Chinese people in the country. She spoke to some friends about it, and discovered that Japan had once colonised both countries. She was so embarrassed she had known nothing about such events that she started reading book after book on Japan's wartime history. ‘I read what we did and it was just such terrible things,' she says. ‘I was horrified. I started thinking: My dad went to China in the war. Did he massacre people? Did he use comfort women?' She went home as soon as she could to question him, and ended up doing so for three days and nights, her face sometimes inches from his. She remembers grabbing him by the neck at one point, shaking him, frustrated, exhausted with his answers.

‘He insisted he hadn't actually been at the front line, that he had just been preparing food for people. He told me that over and over again. But I was eighteen. I didn't believe him. I was certain he'd done something. Killed people. I kept thinking that I was only born because he'd survived the war, but there were thousands of people in China who weren't born because of us. They could have had a life like mine.' She decided she could never respect the anthem after that, the flag too (it had the same associations). ‘It was already twenty-seven years after the war and people were talking about it like it was the past. But to me, those issues were right now. It was my father. It was me.'

*

Kimiko became a teacher and every once in a while would give her students a lesson on Japan's past, telling them about the ‘real meaning' of the flag and anthem. That didn't actually cause her any problems until 1989, when Japan's education board issued guidelines saying ‘Kimigayo' ‘must be played' and the flag ‘must be raised' at entrance and graduation ceremonies, the two moments that are meant to be the most memorable of a child's life – for their parents at least. The change had been coming for a while – politicians had long argued the country's economic success was dependent on its children being proud to be Japanese, dedicated to working for its growth – but its immediate cause was the fit of patriotism that followed Emperor Hirohito's death that January. Why wouldn't children want to remember him with the anthem? What better way to welcome the new emperor – Hirohito's ever-smiling son, Akihito – than with song?

Hardly any schools actually complied with the guidance at first. In fact, things just got silly. There were reports of principals playing the anthem on Walkmen and singing along alone, so they could tick the box saying it had been played. Others played it the moment the school's gates opened so that no one was in the hall to hear it. Some complied with the flag rule by flying one at the bottom of their playing fields, behind the trees where no one could see it. One school even flew a set of ‘carp streamers' – fish-shaped windsocks – instead. They put a baby red carp in the middle of several adult white ones, mimicking the risen sun flag almost perfectly.

Kimiko's school did not even bother making those concessions. It only started flying the flag five years after the rule came in, and the first time it did, Kimiko ripped it down, apparently with the full backing of students and parents (‘My students were about to do it – they were protesting at the principal – and I had to act first. They couldn't get in trouble'). Her school would never have dared play the anthem, she says. Forcing teachers to put up with the sight of the flag was one thing; making them open their mouths and sing another entirely. But then two events changed everything.

*

Tokorozawa is a commuter town an hour's train ride north of Tokyo. It's a place where you can't imagine anything exciting happening. I visited for a day and the most exciting thing I saw was a ‘doggy styling' salon. I walked in expecting to find a poodle mid-shampoo or Labradors in curlers, but there was just a bored middle-aged man desperate for custom. But Tokorozawa's always been known as a liberal town, particularly because of its local high school. That school's slogan is ‘
Jiy
Å«
, jishu, jiritsu'
(‘Freedom, autonomy and independence') and children there do not have to wear uniform – a rarity in Japan. They can even style their hair how they want. Most dye it orange, making it one of the few schools in the world where ginger people are celebrated rather than mocked.

In 1997, it was the only school in Saitama Prefecture that wasn't even making a cursory effort to follow the anthem rules, almost a decade after their introduction, and so the region's government decided things had to change. It installed a new principal, Uchida Tatsuo, who, only a week after arriving, announced the anthem would be played at the following day's entrance ceremony. The news sparked a mini-crisis, teachers saying he couldn't just walk in and do this, and the school's pianist refusing to attend. The next morning, the teachers called a meeting to convince him to change his mind, but Tatsuo simply walked out halfway through, marching off to the hall where parents and students were already waiting, giving one child a ghetto blaster and telling him to follow. Tatsuo got up on the stage and was about to introduce the anthem when someone cut the school's PA system. He then tried to play the anthem out of his ghetto blaster, only to discover someone had stolen the tape. Flustered, he stood on the stage and apparently started singing by himself. Students, teachers and parents streamed out in protest. Tatsuo, to his credit I suppose, carried on going to the end.