Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (34 page)

The essay appeared in an edited Festschrift published in 2005
.

*  *  *

O
n January 17, 1947, a clever letter published in the
Asahi Shimbun
under the title “What's Fashionable in the Capital Now” offered a snapshot of life in Tokyo less than a year and a half after Japan's defeat. The vignette was simultaneously lively and bleak—a nice mirror, in every way, to the ambience of the time.

Those who peopled this cityscape bore little resemblance to the “hundred million” whose hearts had supposedly beat as one a few years earlier, when the militarists controlled the scene and the emperor's soldiers and sailors were engaged in a mad campaign to create a new “Greater East Asia” imperium.
Ichioku isshin
(one hundred million, one heart) was surely the most overworked slogan of the war years. The
Asahi
's letter writer, by contrast, portrayed a society in which a myriad hearts seemed to be working at cross-purposes. Japan's vaunted social harmony was nowhere to be seen.

Pistol-wielding robbers, gangs of thieves, pickpockets, swindlers, runaway prisoners, kidnappers, murderers, and “fake police detectives” prowled these streets, alongside prostitutes, black market
operatives, purged ex-officials, and a horde of functionaries who had totally reversed their expressed views about right and wrong. Dark deeds took place in bright daylight. Prices were rising so fast that postcards with the postage printed on them quickly became out of date. (What to do? Buy a sheet of supplemental stamps, cut them with scissors, paste them on with glue.) Disruptive strikes and demonstrations were erupting everywhere. People played the lottery, looking like cheerful Ebisu, the god of good luck, when they won—and like Enma, the scowling guardian at hell's gate, when they lost.

The transportation system was a horror. Robbers worked the railways as they worked the streets. The trains ran late or were canceled entirely, largely because of the shortage of coal. They broke down and had dreadful accidents. (“Don't let your beloved child travel,” the writer warned.) Deliveries did not arrive on time. Fake edibles—pickled garnishes with misleading labels, “imitation cakes without sugar, saké and soy sauce diluted with water”—were being sold. Consumers were confronted with “light bulbs with short lives, pencils that break when sharpened, knives that don't cut even when sharpened, screws that bend when turned.” This was but a fraction of what could be told. Japanese society, alas, threatened to “go on descending, descending, into a bottomless pit.”
¹

What made this satire particularly droll was that it was a takeoff on a famous fourteenth-century parody of the same title—an anonymous lampoon that ridiculed the sorry state into which the capital city of Kyoto had fallen during the so-called Kenmu Restoration, when civil war plagued the land. Times changed and did not change, and the possibility of ransacking the past for language and precedents usable in the present made the sting of defeat more bearable. Past, present, and future were inextricably linked in defeated Japan.

“What's Fashionable in the Capital Now” is a small example of what I have characterized elsewhere as the “bridges of language” that enabled many Japanese to navigate the transition from war to peace with a certain sense of continuity—even, indeed, with a
sardonic sense of humor.
²
Wartime Japan tolerated homespun jokes alongside satire of the enemy, and periodicals such as the monthly magazine
Manga
(Cartoon) kept a substantial cadre of housebroken humorists and cartoonists employed right up to (and through) the surrender. In the crushing sanctimony of the holy war, however, it was taboo—and seriously hazardous to one's health—to openly mock such targets as the state and “national polity,” or the ruling groups, or the vaunted “Yamato spirit” that purportedly made every Japanese an obedient subject tingling with patriotism, loyalty, and filial piety. The fragile but venerable tradition of public satire and self-mockery that had taken root in late feudal Japan and carried over to the early twentieth century was one of the more minor casualties of the war. It was also one of the first “traditions” to recover.

At an elemental level, this recovery involved little more than the inventive reapplication of proverbs and catchphrases. “Thanks to our fighting men” (
heitaisan no okage desu
), one of the most pious expressions of the war years, for example, became almost overnight a caustic allusion to how the country had fallen into such miserable circumstances. Other well-known sayings proved similarly adaptable to explaining the national disaster. “The frog in the well doesn't know the ocean” (
i no naka no kawazu taikai o shirazu
), a hoary old saw, now was evoked to belittle the militarists and nationalists and their fatuous wartime proclamations about “spiritual strength” and “certain victory.” Merchants, politicians, and other opportunists who quickly swallowed the bitterness of defeat and began catering to the U.S. occupation forces confirmed the old saying that “the burning sensation is forgotten once things pass your throat” (
nodomoto sugureba atsusa o wasureru
).

“Proof surpasses theory” (
ron yori sh
ō
ko
, a rough equivalent to “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”) found ubiquitous application amid the rubble. One magazine, for instance, used this as a caption for a photograph of burned-out buildings. In its New Year issue of 1946, the pictorial weekly
Asahi gurafu
(Asahi graphic) made grim use of another familiar expression by printing a photo of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima with the caption “truth
that emerged out of lies” (
uso kara deta makoto
). “Sailing with the wind” (
ete ni ho o ageru
), a phrase with counterparts in every culture, was used to characterize everything from a commitment to democracy to the most crass opportunism.
³

Even the rapacious black market, which constituted much of the “real” economy from the time of surrender until around 1949, contributed to the humorous redirection of pious set phrases. While Emperor Hirohito spent an inordinate amount of time agonizing over the sanctity and preservation of the regalia associated with his dynastic line (the sequestered mirror, sword, and jewel), black-market toughs made a stab at charisma by flaunting their own “three sacred regalia”: aloha shirts, nylon belts, and rubber-soled shoes. This was a witty, irreverent appropriation of imperial pretensions indeed—an irreverence that indirectly said something about the throne's waning mystique.
⁴

The black market also inspired a suggestive revision of the lyrics of one of the country's most popular and sentimental children's songs, “Big Sunset, Little Sunset” (“Y
Å«
yake koyake”). In this instance, moreover, we can see the seeds of postdefeat cynicism in the war years themselves, for “Y
Å«
yake koyake” had also inspired at least one subterranean presurrender parody. The original song (dating from 1923) opens as follows:

During the war, however, as Japan's leaders continued to spout the rhetoric of ultimate victory while the country's plight became more and more palpably desperate, even children gave voice to
disillusion. Apparently inspired by the fact that many temple bells had been melted down to feed the war machine and thus were no longer to be heard, the lyrics to “Big Sunset, Little Sunset” underwent such mocking revision as this:

A third stage in this lyrical metempsychosis appeared in the form of a letter to the
Asahi
in 1947, a week before “What's Fashionable in the Capital Now,” under the title “Big Black Market, Little Black Market” (“
Ō
yami koyami”). The new lyrics, a pithy mix of cynicism and idealism perfectly in tune with the times, ran as follows:

One of the more popular and ritualized forms of mocking misery in defeated Japan derived from the annual New Year's practice of playing “syllable card” (
iroha karuta
) games. Dating from around 1800 as a children's game, this originally involved associating the elements of the cursive hiragana syllabary with the opening syllable of well-known proverbs or sayings. This quickly evolved into a game in which a set of 96 cards—half with the sayings written on them (each beginning with a different syllable), the other half decorated with illustrations of each particular saying (with the opening kana syllable itself appearing in one corner)—was scattered on the floor. The textual cards were picked up at random and read aloud, and participants competed to find and pick up the illustrated card that corresponded to what had been read. This was a literate and frequently raucous amusement, and it encouraged many variations. Since there was no fixed collection of proverbs or sayings that had to be used, the makers of
iroha
sets were free to introduce their own associations, and even to create their own catchy phrases.

The game apparently originated in the Kansai area (Kyoto and Osaka) and was quickly adopted (and adapted) in Edo, where the feudal lords congregated in homage to the shogun. It reflected the culture and inventiveness of the townspeople rather than the samurai, however, and, among other things, revealed how widely and
vertically
literacy had spread during the long era of warrior domination. Many proverbs used on the cards were Chinese in origin, and introducing them to children's play obviously served a certain didactic or hortatory educational purpose. As a product of commoner culture, however, the early card sets often revealed a certain detachment from the pious platitudes and moral injunctions of the ruling groups. Contrary to what one might expect, the virtues of loyalty and filial piety (
ch
Å«
and
k
ō
) that so obsessed the chattering ruling classes were most conspicuous by their absence from Edo-period
karuta
sets.
⁷

By and large, the early nineteenth-century
iroha
cards produced in the Kansai area appear to have featured short and sweet aphorisms about wasting time and energy. Typical examples are “driving a nail into rice bran,” “putting a clamp on bean curd (
tofu
),” “shooting a gun in the dark,” “giving a gold coin to a cat,” “looking over a fence when blind,” “putting in eye drops from the second floor” (a Kansai gem indeed!).
Iroha
cards in Edo, by contrast, were apparently strongest on exhortations to be sharp and wary—such as “inattentiveness is the great enemy” and “look around three times before having a smoke.” Confucian pieties—or, more precisely, the pieties of Confucianists—sometimes received decidedly oblique acknowledgment. For example, “reading the
Analects
but not knowing the
Analects
” (
“Rongo” yomi no “Rongo” shirazu
)—one way of referring to “a learned fool”—was the saying chosen for the syllable
ro
in one late-feudal set of syllable cards. While commoner children in the waning decades of warrior rule apparently were spared indoctrination about filial piety in their little card game, they did on the other hand learn about “old people who ought to know better” (
toshiyori no hiyamizu
).

What did these youngsters learn about the venerable samurai from their
iroha karuta
? Not a great deal, it seems, although they did encounter the well-known observation that “the samurai uses a toothpick even though he hasn't eaten” (
bushi wa kuwanedo takay
ō
ji
). This does not exactly seem to have been designed to promote awe of the ruling class. Similarly, it is doubtful that card-playing greatly enhanced religious piety among youngsters. On the contrary, their New Year's Day play reminded them that “even a sardine's head seems precious if you believe in it” (
iwashi no atama mo, shinjin kara
) and that Buddhist priests were inclined to give “inept and longwinded sermons” (
heta no nagadangi
). At the same time, however, under
ko
they might encounter the harsh Buddhist injunction that “a child is an encumbrance in all three stages of existence” (
ko wa sangai no kubikase
). Other aphorisms offered these young people a very hard-nosed and pragmatic mixture of the sacred and profane. Under the syllable
chi
(here read
ji
), for example, the card game
might remind them that “money can affect your fate even in hell” (
jigoku no sata mo kane shidai
).