Republic or Death! (18 page)

But for some reason he does not want to defend them to me. I requested an interview with him months ago, but was told he didn't do one-on-one meetings with writers. I was then told I could attend one of his daily press briefings instead, but when I turned up his press secretary looked so shocked it was as if he had never been expecting me to actually do so.

‘Can you come back tomorrow?' he said. ‘And please, no political questions.'

‘But he's a politician,' I replied.

‘I know, but just ask him personal things.' There was a pause. ‘Please.' The man looked so desperate I said the condition was fine. And it was, really, because what I most wanted to ask Hashimoto was personal: why does this anthem mean so much to you that you push these rules? Was there one time you heard it that was so emotional you can never forget it?

I returned to his press briefing the next day genuinely excited. This was going to be my breakthrough moment in understanding the ‘Kimigayo' rows, I thought, as I joined three dozen reporters on the fifth floor of a bland government office. That excitement veered slightly towards confusion when Hashimoto walked into the room in a white jogging outfit, looking more like he was ready for a game of squash than to meet the press, two bodyguards flanking his sides. But I introduced myself, and my interpreter Miki asked him the three questions I'd prepared. Hashimoto stared back at her intently as he answered slowly and assuredly; the three dozen reporters started typing out his every word as if what he was saying couldn't have been more important. I stood there expectantly, thinking I'd got a scoop. Why else would everyone be typing so furiously? Then he finished, smiled and moved on to someone else. Miki leaned over to me. ‘He didn't really answer you,' she whispered. ‘He said he can't speak personally, only as the Mayor of Osaka or the head of the Japan Restoration Association.'

‘He said that for
every
question?'

‘Well, he changed his wording each time, but basically…' Miki smiled in the way Japanese sometimes do to hide embarrassment.

It's at this point I'd like to say I simply laughed at Hashimoto's skill – a politician who knows how to avoid a difficult question when he comes across one – and then listened politely to what he said next, maybe then congratulated his press secretary for warning him in advance about what was coming. But I didn't. Instead I rudely interrupted the next journalist and asked a rather long, somewhat angry question that could neatly be summed up as: ‘Why would anyone vote for you if you won't answer straightforward questions?'

Hashimoto didn't take it well. ‘First of all, I would like foreign journalists to only do news-gathering activities after they have accurately grasped the facts,' he said. ‘We are not ordering people to sing. We're just ordering teachers, who are public employees, to stand up when they play the national anthem at important occasions.

‘If teachers do not comply with rules for a reason of their thought or conscience, education cannot hold. What would happen if students, for the same reason, claimed the right to not do homework? Or to not go to school? Or to do violence to others? Order could not be maintained. Government officials make an oath to comply with laws when they are hired and they must follow them regardless of their conscience.

‘I am proud of the anthem with its long history and tradition. I am ashamed of the situation we have in Japan where we have to set up these kind of rules while other nations' teachers stand up spontaneously. That isn't normal behaviour, I think.'

*

Over the next few days I met other people who I thought might be able to shine a light on why the anthem laws are so needed. I spoke with Seiya Numamori, an official at the city's education board, who, with a broad smile and slicked-back hair, told me children had to be exposed to the anthem so they could engage with the world. Children cannot understand other cultures if they don't understand their own, he said. ‘We want to try to motivate children to sing by teaching them the meaning and importance of the song. So if teachers are expressing their personal view to children by not standing, that is intolerable.'

I also met Mitsuhiro Kimura, the head of the ultra-nationalist organisation Issuikai, the sort of group that spends its weekends shouting at strangers to have more samurai spirit and greater respect for the emperor. His office was filled with pictures of Yukio Mishima, the brilliant novelist who in 1970 committed ritual suicide after failing to wrest power from meddling politicians in a coup (he wanted the emperor to have political control over Japan once more). Mitsuhiro insisted he had never protested against the teachers as he respected their views, but at the same time he couldn't understand why anyone wouldn't stand. ‘The teachers who go against “Kimigayo” don't admit the historical fact that the Japanese people want this song. It's deep in our soul. After the war, left-wingers set up a committee to find a new anthem, but they couldn't come up with a good enough one. I always tell these people, “If you deny ‘Kimigayo', you need a replacement. And what happens if the Japanese people refuse to accept yours?”'

I asked how often he sang the anthem. ‘I suffer from stress, so I sing it in the bath, just to relax.' I decided it would be impolite to ask him how often he bathed.

I also spoke to people in the street, just asking them why teachers should stand and sing this song. A girl near Osaka's castle got out her phone and played around with a translation program for a while. ‘Common sense!' she shouted triumphantly after finding the right words. ‘It's common sense.' All her friends agreed.

But I didn't feel as if I really understood why the public had such a casual attitude to the issue until I met Michael Cucek. Michael's an American political consultant who has lived in Tokyo for more than twenty years. He speaks Japanese and is married to a Japanese woman. He is the closest a foreigner will ever get to being an insider in this country, but thankfully he does not have to watch his tongue or worry about causing a fuss like an actual Japanese would. We met for lunch in a place called Sugamo, a Tokyo suburb that's known as the ‘old person's Harajuku'– a fashion destination for people over sixty, featuring shops that sell nothing but walking canes or sunhats in fifty-seven shades of grey. Walking around it on a weekday is like being attacked by a horde of grandmothers, especially if you are over six foot and they keep on bumping into your waist.

‘Most people here feel that the anthem debate was captured by the ultra-left – the communists – decades ago,' he said, ‘and the arguments that teachers make against it just don't stand up. I mean, “Kimigayo” is based on a poem, written ostensibly to the emperor, and was associated with the emergence of Japan as a political and military power in the world. But it doesn't talk, like America's does, of “bombs bursting in air” or anything remotely militaristic. So the association is not with the words, but with the people who used to sing it.

‘So if you protest against “Kimigayo”, you're protesting against people who don't exist any more! That's basically it!'

He gave me a whole list of other reasons why the public doesn't care about the anthem laws: Japan's strong group mentality; the charisma of politicians like Hashimoto who blame teachers for the ‘spiritual dilution' of Japanese society; the rise of China making people fearful of a new war; the popularity of the imperial family following the Fukushima disaster (they travelled everywhere trying to bring hope to victims of the tsunami). But ultimately, he said, people accept the laws because they just can't see why people are complaining about a short, poetic song sung in ancient Japanese.

‘You should really be talking to geologists,' he added as we finished eating. ‘If anyone should have a problem with the song it's them. I mean, stones gathering together to become rocks? That's not how it works, is it?'

*

A few days later, I decided to visit Yokohama, the place where the anthem was written back in 1869. Today it's one of the world's largest ports and wherever you look there are cranes taller than any of the city's skyscrapers, unloading shipping containers. It's supposedly its own city of several million people, but it's only a short train ride from Tokyo, and if you look out of the window on your way there, you would be hard pressed to guess where Tokyo ends and Yokohama begins.

In 1853, American ships arrived just south of here, pointing cannons at the coast and firing a few warning shots to show what they could do, before ordering the long-isolated Japanese to open up to foreign trade. Japan reluctantly accepted a trade treaty the next year and Yokohama had the shock of being turned from a sleepy fishing village into a port and foreigners' encampment. The wealthy whites put themselves up in the Yamate district, a hilly area overlooking the city, renaming it the Bluff. There's a museum there today, next to a foreigners' cemetery, which gives you an idea of what life was like back then. There are photos of English-style churches, tennis and rowing clubs, of Japan's first brewery and its first ice manufacturer too. All the women are in bonnets or pinafores, and there isn't a man without a hat. It looks like Victorian England, in other words, and life for the original composer of ‘Kimigayo', the British bandleader John William Fenton, must have been that of an English gentleman, full of promenading and concerts in the park. To be honest, you don't have to visit the museum to realise that. The Bluff today is a museum piece in itself. There are rows of clapboard houses each with their own neat rose garden, private sports clubs with pretentious names (the school's football pitch is called the Lawn) and quaint cafes that sell old-fashioned sundaes and cream teas. The Japanese come here to paint watercolours and imagine they are in imperial England, turning their noses up at the vulgar city below.

Fenton does not seem to have been the type to turn his nose up at anybody, and enjoyed nothing more than trying to teach his Japanese students to play their new instruments. He used to meet them at the My
ō
k
ō
ji Temple, just off the Bluff, and gave them lessons four times a day. They would stand there looking every bit the Japanese soldiers – even wearing swords – while he would be in an immaculate three-piece suit, long sideburns and bushy moustache. He had only taught them for a few months before writing the anthem, and some say that's the reason ‘Kimigayo' is so simple: it was written for beginners.

My
ō
k
ō
ji Temple today is different to any other temple you'll find in Japan, with dark purple sashes draped across its entrance and an art deco logo – a deformed ‘M' – stencilled everywhere, making it seem more like a place for worshipping 1930s design than the gods. Inside, an ornate altar rises up towards gold lights, although it's really the pair of drums at the front of the room that dominates the space, reminding you that sutras are chanted – and banged – out daily. While I was there, I got talking with the temple's guard, a thirty-one-year-old in a dark blue robe called Masa Ikeda. He spoke perfect English, and turned out to be a former Japanese ballroom dancing champion – he waltzed across the car park in case I didn't understand – who had once moved to London to try and make it as a professional (‘It was a lot harder than in Japan,' he said, explaining why he was back). He told me he loved ‘Kimigayo', and couldn't be prouder to work at the song's home. Hearing the anthem reminded him of the days when he won contests, ‘and it's about Japan – our family, our relatives – and that community's very important. It says Japan should last for thousands of years and I'd like that to happen.'

He sounded like everyone else I'd met – quietly nationalist and far prouder of being Japanese than, say, a British person is of being British. Whether that is because of how people are taught here, or how newspapers report, or just because people genuinely love being Japanese with the distinct culture that entails, I don't know. So I asked for his view on the teachers and expected him to say, like almost everyone else here, that they should stand without question, but instead he said this: ‘I'm sure they have their reasons for sitting. They are different to me, I'm different to you and I'm also different to the next Japanese. No one can do anything about that. That's just the way the world is.'

To hear a man in a temple basically say ‘Why can't everybody get along?' should have felt like the most clichéd moment of my trip, but in a country where no one seems to want to compromise, or put the individual before the group, I found it instantly refreshing. I wanted to immediately call Osaka's mayor, Hashimoto, and insist he met this man. I wanted to get all the teachers down here so maybe they wouldn't feel so strongly about the anthem either. And I wanted to call the girl who told me it was common sense for teachers to stand and tell her that this sounded far more like common sense to me.

As I strolled back to the Bluff I found myself wondering if Japan's anthem rows – and those of other countries too – say more about the importance of national anthems or the absurdity of them; whether the fact politicians (typically of the right) manipulate and use them for their own purposes means they can never really be enjoyed or respected by the majority of people (that'd certainly explain why so many people I met in France and the US seemed turned off by them). ‘Kimigayo' is a beautiful song that's been compromised by politics and it's sad that people like Hashimoto, who claim to be its defenders, either don't seem to realise or don't seem to care.

*

A few weeks later an email arrives from my interpreter Miki. She seems to have become an anthem buff since we met, scanning the internet for information about ‘Kimigayo' that I might find useful. She's sent me a copy of a magazine interview with Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo – the man who was responsible for the city's anthem crackdown in 2003 that made Kimiko Nezu's life so hard. In the piece he is asked about Japan's imperial family, to which he gives a short three-sentence answer that says everything about the absurdity of what's happened in Japan. ‘I'm not interested in the [royals] very much,' he says. ‘I don't sing the national anthem and when I have to, I change the words so I sing to “My Japan” rather than [to the emperor]. When I sing like this everybody looks at me.'