5
Legends of Common Culture

I have argued that cartoons and vaudeville dialogue occupy a place at the periphery of common culture in Japan and criticize the all-pervading middle-class smugness of the era of economic prosperity from their particular vantage point. I have discussed why Japanese comic strips, which began as an imitation of their U.S. counterpart, deviated from the U.S. pattern and developed into an art form which can voice resentment and criticism, and suggested that picture-card showmanship and the lending libraries were a crucial influence. I turn now to mainstream common culture, as represented by the Great River Drama on television.

Television was introduced to Japan on 1 February 1953, one year after the termination of the U.S. Occupation of the main islands of Japan.⁵⁹ There were then, due to the Korean War, signs of swift economic recovery. Television would have been a dangerous weapon for the ruling class to give to people, had it not been for the economic recovery brought about by the Korean War. As it was, only once in its history did television accelerate resentment against the government. This was during the May and June protest of 1960, when people were informed of round-the-clock developments in parliament and left their supper tables to join the demonstration. I can recall no other instance of television helping to organize mass resentment against the government. During the Vietnam War, Japanese television, on the whole, took a critical stand and sided with demonstrators against the Japanese government’s co-operation with U.S. policy, but the major target of their criticism was U.S. policy and not the Japanese government itself. In the main, television in Japan has expressed the contentment of the people at large.

Table 1: Changes in Number of TV Reception Contracts with NHK, 1954–1982

In 1953 there were 1,000 television sets in Japan. They were located mainly in big restaurants and tea houses, where people went to watch television. In 1979, 27 million families owned television sets. Thus 95.3 per cent of Japanese have access to television in their homes while some families have three to four television sets at home, one for each member of the family. Why so many? Is it not too much of a luxury?

According to a poll only 5.9 per cent of Japanese consider colour television unnecessary to their lives. In contrast, 20.7 per cent of U.S. citizens, 25.1 per cent of Canadians, and 33.9 per cent of the British consider colour television unnecessary to their lives (these figures are based on a world survey conducted in 1979 and published on 1 January 1980 in the Yomiuri newspapers).

From the time of the Meiji Restoration until the end of the Fifteen Years’ War, in an ordinary citizen’s life there had been many tests of loyalty by which undesirable subjects were exposed and rejected. After the surrender and during the Occupation, there was a span of time during which there were very few of these loyalty tests. Each family was no longer required to place a Japanese flag in front of the house to prove to the neighbourhood that it was the house of a loyal citizen. Children brought up during the Occupation did not recognize the Japanese flag when it was hoisted on the top of public buildings at the end of the Occupation. When the national anthem, Kimi ga yo, was sung again, many primary schoolchildren recognized it only as a sum wrestling song because it had only been played on the closing day of formal wrestling matches. In 1980, fewer than one-tenth of the houses in Tokyo flew a Japanese flag on national holidays.

National feeling had to be expressed in postwar Japan with other means than the national flag, the national anthem, the Imperial Edicts, and compulsory military training. In the post-Occupation period, especially after Japan had entered its period of swift economic growth, the television broadcasting of a song contest by NHK Television at the close of the year seems to have been a major national symbol.

Kimura Tsunehisa, a photo cartoonist, had a keen sense of this function of the song contest as early as 1970. He combined NHK Television’s national advertisement with a recruitment advertisement by the U.S.A. and used it on the front of the newly erected NHK national broadcasting station.

In 1980, ten years after the photo-montage shown opposite, the

19 The NHK Song Contest of 1953. After this year, the contest came to be held on New Year’s Eve, rather than in the New Year.

20 Photomontage by Kimura Tsunehisa

NHK Song Contest was still the most popular television programme of the year. Many Japanese still visit the Meiji Shrine for the New Year ceremony, but the overwhelming majority spend the last hours of the year watching the NHK Song Contest on television with their families. This forms the final impression of the year that they have experienced, and the star singers of Japan are their chosen champions. In 1978, the programme had 77 per cent in the popularity rating.⁶⁰

21 NHK End of Year Song Contest, 1982

Other popular programmes are the NHK serialized dramas, which occupy 15 minutes each morning and roughly correspond to the four seasons of the year, and NHK Great River Dramas which continue throughout the year on Sunday evenings. These television dramas, which we will come back to later, should be seen in the context of the history of film in Japan. Here, as an interlude, we will make a brief detour to the history of movies in Japan.

Edison’s cinematograph was first introduced to Japan in 1897, and was shown in Osaka on 15 February of the same year. The first movie made in Japan was shown in Tokyo, at the Kabukiza Theatre on 20 June 1899. But it was in the Taish Period that movies became part of Tokyo citizens’ lives. This was the age of silent movies. There emerged professional ‘live talkers’ who would accompany the silent scenes. They used colloquial Japanese, putting in whatever they felt fitted the occasion. kura Mitsugu (1899–) became an independent ‘live talker’ in 1912, when he was only 13, and by the time he was 18 he was earning Yen 300 a month, enough to support ten families. He formed his own movie company with the money he saved.

‘Live talkers’ served to fit Western movies into the context of the everyday life of Japanese city dwellers in the 1910s. Movie makers in Japan, however, were not satisfied by such a compromise. True to the ideal of perfect imitation characteristic of the Taish Period, they sought to establish, alongside their studios, a training centre for movie actors and actresses, with Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928) at its head. The actors were required to follow the example of modern living—how to sit on a Western chair, how to walk in Western attire, how to use a knife and fork—set by Western movies and seen and closely scrutinized by the public. When the school was established, Osanai invited Slavina to be chief of the acting division and to teach students how to dress, sit, eat and walk. Slavina, formerly Countess Ludovskaya, had escaped to Japan from Russia after the Revolution of 1917, and her daughter, Kitty Slavina, became the first Japanese movie star.

In his autobiography, Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) recalls a relative who taught the use of the spear.⁶¹ Anyone could tell that this man was good at handling a spear, because he always stood with his waist conspicuously low. For this reason he looked short, but his posture was not considered remarkable since it was common among the samurai class. It was only after 1906 (that is, after the Sino-Japanese War) that such a posture came to be a laughing stock. Yanagita went to Tokyo Station just after it was built in 1914, and saw a throng of young men at the exit, all with their long legs shown off in well-pressed trousers. He was impressed by the fact that a new age had arrived. To keep the balance in the lower part of the body and to put a strain on one’s belly was the ideal posture of a samurai when sitting, standing or walking. But now the fashion for young men was to stand straight and to look so light that a breath of wind could blow them away.

Yanagita does not mention farmers. But farmers, who constituted the majority of the people, also kept the balance in the lower part of their bodies so they could crouch at their work in the fields. Movie makers, as the leaders of fashion, had the task of training new stars in the new posture.

In the following Shwa Period, 15 years of war encouraged a practical, mechanized way of life. After the surrender, the fashions set by the Occupation remained for some time, although only as unattainable goals. But the following swift economic growth drove the agricultural population into factories and service areas so that by 1960 the majority of Japanese lived in an urban environment. Television dramas, therefore, unlike the early movies of the 1910s and 1920s, do not introduce new ways of life, but reflect actual living conditions. In this way the Great River Dramas on television differ in function from movies of the early period.

22 NHK Great River Drama Ak Rshi, on the theme of the Forty-seven Faithful Retainers (1964)

Certain themes are constantly repeated in television dramas. The avenging of their lord by 47 faithful retainers led by ishi Kuranosuke, called Chshingura, had long been a favourite theme for both kabuki plays and movies. It was prohibited by the Occupation, however, and was not seen in the theatres for some time. It suggested too bluntly the possibility of a plot against the life of General MacArthur by the subordinates of the generals who had been hanged.

Since Japan’s main islands recovered their independence, there has been a revival of the cult of hard work—a workaholism or, rather, a work-ism. At first the ideal was a desperate bread-winner’s striving for the sake of his family. Gradually it became the hard-working mood prevailing in a company. Through this cult of hard work as practised in the collective enterprise, Japan succeeded in climbing the ladder of success in the international market. For this prevailing mood, the Chshingura, or team of 47 faithful retainers, was a fitting symbol. In the Great River Dramas on NHK television the 47 faithful were used more than once by different script writers and won high popularity ratings.

In contrast to the prewar years, generals, admirals and prime ministers did not feature much in the minds of the people. Those who attracted the genuine respect of the Japanese people as a whole were baseball players, like , Nagashima, and Harimoto, who worked hard for their teams to win in the pennant race, and singers, like Misora Hibari and Miyako Harumi, who rose from the lower station of society to the highest through talent and hard work. Of these (Chinese), Harimoto (Korean) and Miyako (Korean) are not Japanese. They thus also broke down a barrier of social discrimination by winning respect in the fields of sport and entertainment. The imperial system was given television attention when the Crown Prince married a plebeian girl, but with this exception it has not functioned as a source of popular solidarity. It was the heroes of baseball and popular song who daily contributed through the medium of television to the sense of satisfaction in being Japanese in the 1960s and 1970s. The climax of this sense of solidarity was the NHK Song Contest, the closing television show of the year, in which not only major singers but also major movie actors and sportsmen form the committee to rate the songs and determine the winning team.

All this is part of a mechanism which produces unity—in fact, too much unity. Devices to counteract this trend towards unity are found in the comic arts, especially manga and the vaudeville dialogue of the Master and the Servant, manzai, whose aim it is to aggravate discord in the team and to make the work of the team a laughing stock and an object of criticism. According to the pattern set by the story of the 47 faithful, there is no room for criticizing the aim of the communal enterprise. It parallels the case of humble clerks employed by a company, who are dedicated to the task of increasing the company’s sales. Manzai and comics hint at the possibility of criticizing such communal aims, including national aims. They thereby criticize the world of mass media in Japan dedicated to economic expansion and restrain it from resorting to military means to back it up.⁶²

Apart from the story of the 47 faithful, which took place in the middle Edo Period, the most popular Great River Dramas have been set in the period of the Meiji Restoration or of the Fifteen Years’ War. The public has found something worthy of contemplation in these two periods.⁶³

The NHK morning dramas, each televised for 15 minutes at breakfast time for about four months, provide some contemporary drama concerned with the life and death of a modern boy or girl. Almost all of these dramas incorporate the Great Earthquake of 1923 and the Great War of 1931–1945, each incident serving as a turning point in the formation of the hero’s or heroine’s character. For those who have grown up in twentieth-century Japan, the inclusion of these two experiences, especially the Fifteen Years’ War, was essential. Without drawing this in, the mural of contemporary Japan would have no unity of design. Although the ruling party and the government were consistent in their efforts to keep the Fifteen Years’ War from public scrutiny, they could not prevent the government-sponsored NHK’s Great River Dramas from always being concerned with the facts of the Fifteen Years’ War. Otherwise the dramas would not hang together.

The Evening Star, Hatoko’s Sea and Weathercock all depict the role the war played in the ordinary citizen’s life. All imply that the war brought little but disaster and ended in catastrophe. The Meiji Restoration had long been stereotyped in prewar government propaganda to glorify members of the Meiji government. Men

23 Niji (The Rainbow) (1970), portraying an ordinary housewife who cheerfully lives through the hard times spanning the prewar and postwar periods, while performing the role of a dutiful daughter-in-law bringing up her children

such as Takano Chei, who had little to do with Emperor worship, were made martyrs of the Emperor cult. Japan’s surrender and subsequent occupation freed writers from identifying the Meiji Restoration with the Meiji government. They came to see the Meiji Restoration as a process much larger in scope and conception than the Meiji government which was its final product.

Shiba Rytar (1923–) is typical of the novelists who have written Great River Dramas on the theme of the Meiji Restoration.⁶⁴ In many of his novels he chose as the principal characters men who died before the Restoration actually took place and whose design for the future did not exactly coincide with Meiji Japan, such as Sakamoto Ryma, Yoshida Torajir, Takasugi Shinsaku, mura Masujir, Saig Takamori, Et Shinpei and Shiba Rykai. Even when he set a novel during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, he chose principal characters like General Nogi and General Kodama, who carried through to the

24 Ai yori aoku (Bluer than Indigo) (1972)—about a girl who marries in the middle of the Pacific War, is widowed at 18, and her unflagging struggle to survive during and after the war with her son.

25 Hatoko no Umi (Hatoko’s Sea) (1974). Thirty years of postwar Japan is portrayed through this story of a girl, told from the time she was orphaned in the war and wandered into a beautiful port on the Inland Sea.

26 Kumo no Jtan (Carpet of Clouds) (1976) portrays the stormy life of a woman in the Taish and Shwa periods who tried to realize her dream of being as free as a bird.

27 Kazamidori (Weathercock) (1977). Set in Taiji (Wakayama Prefecture) and Kbe, this drama has a strong international flavour. It is the story of a woman who marries a German baker and exerts herself establishing a bakery, while experiencing the difficulties of being married to a foreigner.

Meiji era something of the spirit of the dead founders of the Meiji Restoration. General Akiyama Yoshifuru and Admiral Akiyama Saneyuki are exceptional in that they were post-Restoration figures, but these commanders shared the spirit of the Restoration, spending their life force in the Russo-Japanese War and leaving the political arena with the end of the war. Shiba’s use of the case of Sakamoto Ryma is an important example. This man was something of a republican, influenced by the American Revolution. He was so interested in trade that he did not propose himself as a member of the revolutionary government, preferring to travel around the world as a member of a world trading company. It was through this trade that he brought together two prosperous fiefs engaged in ideological conflict and procured from them the English rifles to bring down the feudal Tokugawa regime. Shiba emphasized such seeds of republicanism in the movement which began the Meiji Restoration as a basis for reconsidering the plan finally put forward by the Meiji government. The two Great River Dramas based on Shiba’s novels were broadcast in the late 1960s to 1970s. In both Here Goes Ryma and The Gods of the Flower Seeds, Shiba tried to portray the movement towards the Meiji Restoration in its process of ferment.

In a highly developed capitalist society, the art form most accessible to the general populace is advertising. Popular arts, therefore, tend to be drawn towards contemporary advertising and to take on its character.

Advertisements, like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, provide standard phrases which can be either used or mocked. Akita Minoru, the mastermind of the vaudeville dialogue, made an elaborate file of jottings from advertisements and turned out a copious number of parodies based upon them. Advertising applies pressure, and parody based on advertising provides the means to free oneself at least momentarily from that pressure. It creates an attitude of independence and opposition to the system. As successors to Akita Minoru, three authors of best-sellers and idols of youth culture—Inoue Hisashi, Itsuki Hiroyuki and Nosaka Akiyuki—produced catch-phrases for advertisements and have twisted them later to a different use.

Suntory, a Japanese whisky manufacturer, had an excellent advertising team, from which there emerged two winners of the Akutagawa Award, the major prize for novels in Japan, Kaik Takeshi (1930–) and Yamaguchi Hitomi (1926–).

Kaik wrote the following advertisement for whisky:

We want to behave like humans.

Drinking Torys whisky, we want to behave like humans.

Because we are humans.

During the period of the most marked economic growth, this advertisement was on the lips of breadwinners throughout Japan, and this short advertising interlude was the most popular television item in Japan at the time, surpassing in coverage even the Great River Dramas of NHK Television.

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A little earlier in 1961, Kaik produced the slogan, ‘Drink Torys and go to Hawaii.’ At that time the Japanese people still had the notion that a trip to Hawaii was an extravagant affair, something which an ordinary citizen would not plan in the course of a normal lifetime. Now, the advertisement says, some drinkers of Torys would be lucky enough to be given travel expenses to Hawaii. To couple a trip to Hawaii with the cheap brand of whisky called Torys would draw a smile from the television watcher for its striking contrast of luxury and economy. But by then, though unnoticed by most of the Japanese, a new era was at the door. Very soon, the inflation in the major cities in Japan was to become so flagrant that it would be cheaper for a newly married

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couple—a clerk and an office girl—to plan a honeymoon in Guam or Hawaii than to spend three to five days in a choice resort hotel in Japan. The value of Torys, which is still a moderately priced whisky in Japan, is no longer so when viewed compared with the cost of living in European countries.

Looking back over this period, during which he produced so many advertising slogans, Kaik says: ‘At that time, I felt the rhythm of the whole age beating within me.’⁶⁵ These short advertisements shown on commercial television were the literature of 110 million Japanese.

In the age of monopolistic capitalism, there has been a polarization of literature: popular literature has been increasingly drawn toward commercial advertising, and pure, refined literature towards a kind of science. In the United States, the latter thrives under the auspices of the various foundations, and is therefore under a more indirect patronage by capital than popular literature. Modern Japanese literature, since its humble beginnings, has not developed far in this direction. It is more as the literary output of professors of modern European literature that the erudite branch of the pure novel has prospered in Japan.

A third literary pole is journalism. This form of literature has a prehistory in the Japanese detective novel, which became highly popular after 1960, with the works of older authors such as Matsumoto Seich (1909–), and younger authors such as Morimura Seiichi (1933–), both of whom produced best-sellers. The total sales of Matsumoto’s novels have surpassed 20 million.

The detective novel began in Japan with Kuroiwa Ruik (1862– 1920). Atrocity, written in 1889 when Kuroiwa was 27 years old, is an exercise in applied logic. It is divided into three parts, ‘Doubt’, ‘Conjecture’ and ‘Solution’. The story begins with a corpse and two detectives who try to solve the mystery. One is an empiricist bred in the pre-Meiji police tradition. The other is a rationalist employed by the Meiji government. They work independently, but both reach the same conclusion. The younger detective uses a microscope to guess the nationality of the killer from the wavy hair in the grasp of the dead man. The publication of this mystery story post-dated similar works by Edgar Allan Poe, but preceded the popular detective stories of Conan Doyle.

The story was so unpopular that the author never attempted another, except for a science fiction novel which he wrote towards the end of his life. Instead, he concentrated on the translation of Western novels, which made him famous and enabled him to start a new newspaper, Yorozuchh . The editorial of this paper, along with Kuroiwa’s translation of Western novels, and Sanytei Ench’s transcription of a vaudeville ghost story, Botandr (1884), in the Edo Period tradition, set the pattern for the modern Japanese detective novel.

From this tradition sprang the works of the extremely popular postwar detective novelist, Matsumoto Seich. Although a group of writers such as Edogawa Ranpo continued the Edgar Allan Poe tradition from the Taish Period through to the postwar period, it was only after the 1960s that detective stories gained millions of readers and television viewers. The detective in Matsumoto’s mysteries has nothing of the laboratory air but rather tries to solve the mystery like a social scientist with field notes. In a way, he carries on his youthful ideal of proletarian literature, which had died under the suppression of the wartime government and was now free from the ideological restraint of the political parties.⁶⁶

After his early success as a mystery writer, Matsumoto went on to write a social history series, in which he tried to solve mysteries of the Occupation period, mysteries of the prewar Japanese government, and mysteries of the ancient governments of Japan. In the occupation series, he tries to take over the role not only of the police but also of journalists in revealing the causes of major incidents such as the murder of 12 bank clerks on 26 January 1948, allegedly committed by the artist Hirasawa Sadamichi. According to Matsumoto, the crime was committed by someone connected with germ warfare, then in the custody of the U.S. Occupation.⁶⁷

Matsumoto’s overwhelming popularity is a consequence of the inadequate development of journalism in Japan. Many of the scandals that shook the cabinets during the years of high economic growth, such as the Lockheed bribe case which brought down the Tanaka cabinet,⁶⁸ the kidnapping of Kim Dae Chung from a Tokyo hotel, and the bribing of the Japanese Korean lobby by the South Korean government, were exposed in Japan only via the U.S.A.⁶⁹ The Japanese journalist Nishiyama Taikichi was arrested for exposing the secret agreement on the mode of payment at the time of the return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972. Japanese journalists withdrew their support from Nishiyama in the subsequent trial when it was revealed that Nishiyama had obtained the news through his amorous relationship with a secretary in the Foreign Office. This impropriety was seen to outweigh the political impropriety of a secret deal on Okinawa.⁷⁰ Set against such a background, the success of the mystery writer Matsumoto Seich in his Black Fog Series has been an invaluable service to the history of reporting in Japan.