1. Hiromichi Kumazawa: Sent letters to various public officials declaring he was Emperor in 1920, and continued protesting his imperial lineage thereafter while running a general store in Nagoya. In 1945, his petition to MacArthur was spotted in the messy GHQ headquarters by a reporter for Life magazine and he became internationally famous for a short time. Lost many of his supporters in 1947 when he formed a political party, at which point he made the unusual claim that the Takenouchi Documents were real and had been stolen from his household by a wandering komusō during the Meiji period. His death in 1966 went unreported in the West.
Prominent supporter, Masanori Arita: Shady right-wing character who supported Kumazawa from the 1920s and cared for him until his death. Became private secretary to fascist underworld power broker Ryoichi Sasakawa who is a well-known philanthropist in Africa. It is unknown if Arita is still alive.
Apparent relative, Terumoto Kumazawa: Claimed that Hiromichi Kumazawa was adopted and that he was the true ruler of the Kumazawa household. (There are four other Kumazawas claiming to be the true Kumazawa Emperor, whom I will not list here.)
2. Tatsukichirou Horiwaka: A mysterious person who was rumored to be the illegitimate child of the Meiji Emperor. Actual place and time of birth unknown. Advocated for Pan-Asianism during the kindai, was involved in the Treaty of San Francisco for unknown reasons, and joined the World Federalist Movement after 1945.
Pretended daughter, Princess Kaoru Nakamaru: Journalist who interviewed business leaders, authors such as Norman Mailer, and world leaders such as Saddam Hussein for PBS in the 1980s, later Illuminati researcher and founder of “Taiyo no Kai” (organization of unclear purpose). Notable Japanese 2012 theorist who has written roughly a dozen books about 2012. Despite her claims it is not generally believed that she is actually Horikawa’s daughter.
3. Yoshimaki Miura: Caused a stir in 1955 by proposing that the Imperial Palace did not belong in Tokyo according to a philosophical system which he himself invented. Many government officials discussed this claim. Also, he claimed to be the true Emperor descended from a previously unknown Hokuriku Court.
4. Toyohiko Nagahama: Claimed to be the descendant of Emperor Antoku who died in 1185, making him certainly the longest of these to get around to staking his claim. Like Kumazawa, he never took on the styles of an emperor or tried to make enemies with the Showa Emperor, but only acted as a friendly old man trying to make the truth known. He never petitioned MacArthur and was thus only famous on the little island of Ioujima, Kagoshima where he lived. Locals referred to him as “Emperor Nagahama”.
Unknown relation, Masakaze Nagahama: Claims to be next in line to the noble and majestic Nagahama lineage, and has started a society to that effect.
5. Jikouson: Founder of the political(?!) cult “Jiu“. When the Showa Emperor renounced his divinity in 1946, Jikouson claimed that the kami which had taken up residence in the Emperor, Amaterasu, had now moved into her, and the Jiu headquarters became the Imperial Palace. Consequently she invented an original Japanese era, constitution, and flag, and named her prominent followers the Ministers of Defense, Culture, etc. in a virtual cabinet. The GHQ spied on her group to ensure it was not a nationalist organization.
There are about a dozen other pretenders but none are so interesting.
Posted: November 6th, 2011 | Japan | 2 Comments »
Imari Kawanami Shipyard is one of Japan’s most famous haikyo, or abandoned structures. It graces the cover of at least one book about haikyo and is known for its rocky outcrops into the bay and its amazing portholes that challenge photographers with their captured sunlight.
In November 2011, the City of Imari will demolish the shipyard.
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Posted: September 23rd, 2011 | Japan | No Comments »
新日本人に訊け！
Yoshinori Kobayashi
Asuka Shinsha, 2011
Yoshirin’s goal here was to interview six foreigners who became Japanese citizens, to ask them what they find so special about Japan, and what direction they hope Japan will take in the future. Obviously he picked people who immigrated to Japan as a political decision and not for mere social reasons. The book is intellectually strong because all of his guests already understand the importance of Japan’s self-identity and its role in the world. Rather than ranting about the need to destroy Japan, as some less socialized and more hate-filled expats do, they discuss how they would strengthen it.
However, while reading the book I realized that it could have been stronger if he added to this mix some ordinary folks who got Japanese wives and are contributing to the gene pool. After all, Japan’s self-identity is determined by its people, so how can we ensure that allegiance to Japan is preserved for children of mixed ethnicity, as Yoshirin hopes it will be for those of Ainu and Burakumin descent? Ordinary expats may be uneducated about Japanese history and how society functions, and would disturb the book’s structure, but through exposure to much greater minds we might get them to open up about their own experiences and hopes.
I will focus on the interview with Bill Totten, since he’s the sole representative of the Anglo-Saxon race. The other interviewees are two Chinese, a Taiwanese, a Tibetan, and a Zainichi Korean, who discuss issues in their own countries that I have little grounds to comment on, but many of the ideas Bill discusses, both on the American and Japanese sides, are things I’ve researched and thought about myself, and the way he orders them into a coherent whole made me consider how I arrange them in my own head. In general, I found the talk rather inspiring, and I wish my Japanese was good enough that I could take it in fully.
Yoshirin opens by informing us that unlike the other interviewees, Bill’s spoken Japanese was rough and lacked fluency, and he had to correct it. There are plenty of smart white expats who never achieve fluency; I worry that I may find myself among them in the future, and certainly I recognized some of my own grammatical simplicity in Bill’s language. I think this is due to the richness of readily available Western media, which can often supply us with news about Japan and even advanced research into Japanese history and culture. If we interact too much in English, we risk missing out on the equal richness and complexity of Japanese society. Anyway, Bill seems to agree with me on that theoretical point, and his Japanese was good enough to have a dynamic conversation with Yoshirin, which is much more than I can say of my own.
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Posted: August 25th, 2011 | Book Reviews, Japan, Kokoro | No Comments »
“SUNSET JAM”, said the poster at my local 7/11. An event would be held at an imitation German castle that an insane development company had built in the woods in the middle of nowhere, in a location barely accessible by bike over several hills of unkempt road. There was a place and time on the poster, but no description. What kind of music? Who would be performing? Only the enigmatic letters RGP, surrounded by illegible English, distinguished the event on an otherwise completely unmarked poster. Well, whoever it was was promising “FREE FOOD FREE DRINK” (actual meaning: all you can eat, all you can drink). I was also intrigued by the fact that there was only one poster for this, as far as I could tell, in the entire town. Were they trying to keep people away?
Anyway. That evening, there was another event in the city, but it started after 10pm and was quite far. I figured that, worst case scenario, I could duck out of SUNSET JAM, power bike through the wilderness back to town, and hop on the last train. The only unacceptable option was staying home on a Friday night. I did not know what I was getting myself into.
The first hour and a half of the concert was fairly boring. There was a tent, a horrible DJ pressing the “scratch” button on a synthesizer way too many times, some staff hovering around, drinks, and food. I was all by my lonesome for some 20 minutes, and wondered whether the event would be canceled. As time went on, some couples and families shuffled in, all of them wearing ridiculous faux-American T-shirts, one with dyed blond hair, and all seeming to know each other. The DJ kept telling us to eat and drink. I felt oddly like he was fattening us up to feed to his unearthly children.
Then the belly dancing began. Completely out of nowhere, the music stopped and some half-naked women went up on the stage and started dancing around. Wait, what kind of event was this? Why didn’t they advertise this on their poster? My cynicism dropped away and as I drank my free beer I was plunged into a universe of the surreal. The belly dancers hopped off the stage and mingled with the audience. One of them was extremely good. I did not know that rural Japan had so many belly dancers.
Then they were replaced, just as suddenly, with a African drum team in Mexican dress. A simple but undoubtedly un-Japanese beat rose out of the tent, causing drunk people to spontaneously rise from their seats and move to the dance floor. Men waving bottles of a clear, fizzy drink I had never seen before gathered under the stage, occasionally grabbing the drum from their buddy on the stage and hitting it a couple times.
When I started dancing the men slammed into me, grabbing my shoulder to dance together, hitting me on the back, inviting me to hit back and basically creating some sort of mock battle under the stage. I was strongly encouraged to grab one of their fizzy drinks and chug the whole thing. At some point I did. The drumming went on and on, building to a crescendo and collapsing again. I’m not sure how long this part of the “concert” lasted. I missed the last train, obviously, and was taken back to my apartment by some partygoers. My bike is still up there in the mountains.
I am unsure whether I accidentally ate dinner with a countryside pagan cult.
Posted: August 20th, 2011 | Japan | No Comments »
97% of my village in Japan uses an ordinary cable provider with access to dozens of channels. My apartment complex does not. Instead, I am hooked up to something called a テレビ共同受信施設組合 terebi kyoudou jushin shisetsu kumiai, or “Cooperative Television Reception Facility Union”.
Basically, I live in a valley that gets no TV. Some group, unknown to me except for the message I just received from their president, strung some wire up to the top of a mountain and put an antenna up there, which was connected to households around the are to create a Cooperative Television Reception Facility. This is, I guess, a lot cheaper than using the cable provider.
These things are apparently common both in urban and rural Japan. But they are only as good as their reception, and I just got a letter in my mailbox informing me that one of the channels broadcasting from over the bay can no longer be reached, and they have replaced it with another one.
I get a total of 8 TV channels this way, two of which often broadcast the same content. There is no option to buy more. This is the situation for many people in Japan, which is why the policies of the big channels, for example Fuji TV’s pro-Korean bias, are very important.
Posted: August 13th, 2011 | Japan | 2 Comments »
Today was an Earth Cycle Day of the Ox (土用の丑の日 doyo no ushi no hi). On this day Japanese people eat eels. And the full story is even better than this two-sentence summary.
The old Japanese calendar, drawing on the Chinese tradition, used the elements to distinguish between seasons. As everyone knows, there are five elements: earth, fire, water, gold, and wood. The latter four of these were assigned to the four seasons. The fifth became the Earth Cycle, which was assigned to the last 18 days of each season. Thus, all five elements got an equal share of the year.
So much for seasons. Months are irrelevant to this discussion, so I’ll pass over them. How about weeks? They revolved around the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Hare etc. There was also the rokuyo system but I won’t get into that either. Anyway, 12-day week, 18-day Earth Cycle, so most years there are two Days of the Ox in every Earth Cycle.
What does this have to do with eels? Well. The prevailing theory is that the Edo period teacher and inventor Hiraga Gennai was approached by some eel vendors having trouble selling their goods in the summer of 1822, even though eel is a traditional summer food. He drew up some slogan boards saying “Eat Eel on the Earth Cycle Days of the Ox”, apparently since ox (ushi) begins with the same syllable as eel (unagi). Why not just every day of the ox? Well, the summer Earth Cycle happens to dip into the hottest days of the year, so the sign would remind people that eel was a good food to eat in that weather.
The slogan boards were an instant hit, and the advertising spread throughout the country–in 1822. The calendar was reformed, the months were renamed, the complicated association with the elements was forgotten, the 12-day week was exchanged for a 7-day one–in the 1870s. Western buildings sprang up throughout Japan–in the 1880s. Baseball, curry, and steak became popular foods–in the 1890s. The empire conquered Korea and Taiwan, entangled itself in unwinnable wars, and lost everything. America took over for a few years and left. Cars were manufactured. Robots were invented. And in the 21st century still, every year the restaurants and grocery stores post up signs: “Eat Eel on the Earth Cycle Days of the Ox!”
Few people in Japan know what the terms Earth Cycle or Day of the Ox mean these days. Most likely nobody at all could tell you when an Earth Cycle is off the top of their head. (The Cycle has been neglected; lacking an official astrological recalculation, it is slowly drifting backwards into July and will reach early July by 2100.) But the saying remains.
The World’s Top 5 Most Obnoxiously Long-Lived Advertising Slogans
5. “A peach / Looks good / With lots of fuzz / But man’s no peach / And never wuz / Burma-Shave”, etc. (1927)
4. “All The News That’s Fit To Print” (1896)
3. “Ivory Soap: 99-44/100% Pure” (1891)
2. “They come as a boon and a blessing to men, The Pickwick, the Owl and the Waverley Pen” (1869)
1. “Eat Eel on the Earth Cycle Days of the Ox!” (1822)
Posted: July 21st, 2011 | Japan | No Comments »
This weekend I stumbled on Takeo’s Soga Shrine (武雄市素鵞神社), which is right on the main street of Takeo but appears neglected. It’s certainly such an impressive site that it could use a caretaker, but the honden is obviously a prewar construction, and other than some “historic site” style maintenance from the city there are no signs of human involvement here.
In a sense this is what drew me to the shrine– nature is much a more powerful force here, even viewed from across the street, than humanity could ever hope to be. Check this out. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: April 24th, 2011 | Japan | 1 Comment »
アマテラス様
All facts from 「日本神話とギリシア神話」 Japanese and Greek Myth by 大脇由紀子 Ōwaki Yukiko （明治書院、２０１０）. All opinions are mine.
- Fact: Japanese did not have a word for “myth” until Basil Hall Chamberlain invented one in 1887. What they instead had was an official history that ranged from cosmic to national in nature. Not even those skeptical of that history borrowed the word “myth” from English; it took a foreigner to do that.
- Opinion: It is thus only natural to wonder, what is the meaning-function of the word “myth”, and why was it not invented in Japanese? In this book, one of the figures mentioned is Empress Consort Iwanohime, simply because she is mentioned in the official histories Nihonshoki and Kojiki. Her life has no supernatural aspect to it.
- Opinion: Japanese Wikipedia suggests the word 神語（り） kangatari was used to refer to myths in the Middle Ages, but a check of academic literature shows that it actually referred to recited poetry, five examples of which can be found here. Also, the true reading appears to be kamugatari. In ancient Greece, indeed, “mythos” was a term used for any recitation. Perhaps our use of the word “myth” is at its very heart a misunderstanding.
- Fact: The author makes a fascinating comparison between Iwanohime and Hera: both individuals were said to have intense jealousy directed not only at their closest relations but at other individuals who associated with them.
- Opinion: Certainly Iwanohime’s jealousy could have served as a cultural standard in the same way that Hera’s jealousy did in Greece. It is fascinating to imagine in this way the world that the writers of Nihonshoki and Kojiki may have lived in. But does that mean Iwanohime was a “mythical” figure, or a god, in the same way that Amaterasu’s story can be pigeonholed as myth? Perhaps it is better to view these figures in the same way the Japanese did: as characters in the official history.
- Fact: The exiled hero Yamatotakeru is shown as wandering all over Japan, much like Odysseus, except that the Odyssey doesn’t fall into the category of “myth” in this book for some reason…
- Opinion: In this book kami is defined as “a word encompassing beings with incorporeal power beyond human knowledge.” Aliens??
- Opinion: I bought this book to learn the full extent of parallels between Japanese and Greek mythology, but it seems like most elements can be dismissed as coincidence. The most confounding parallel is the one any student of mythology should know: the Greek story of the rape of Persephone is extremely similar to the Japanese story of Izanami’s death.
- Fact: When discussing this, the book quotes from Spirited Away (remember Chihiro starting to disappear and eating the food?). Mayhaps Ghibli movies are a better re-presentation of Japanese mythology than anything I could hope to write myself.
- Fact: But the book references Naruto as well…
Posted: April 6th, 2011 | Japan, Secular-Religious | 2 Comments »
The short version: If you support one of the corporations on this list you are giving aid to a group of professional bullies who pretend to care about whales but are actually solely interested in harassing villagers.
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Posted: April 5th, 2011 | Japan, Res pueriles | 3 Comments »
I just watched yet another program on Ninomiya Sontoku, aka Kinjiro, that considers him as a statue. Schools throughout Japan have Kinjiro statues, as do some other institutions and many private individuals. These statues were handed down from previous generations and most people don’t quite know who Kinjiro was besides someone who read a lot of books. I know some variety shows do discuss him as an actual person, but they seem to mostly rattle off stats and figures and argue over whether he was a bureaucrat or an economist, or some asinine thing. I’ve never heard anyone tell the following story:
When Kinjiro was born, the family were really in hard straits. To add to their distress, when Kinjiro was five years old, the Sa[kawa] River overflowed its banks and washed away his father’s land, leaving them in abject poverty.
[...]
When Kinjiro was about twelve years of age, he went to work for a year with a farmer in the neighborhood. At the end of the year, before starting for home, he received, in addition to his board and lodging, a Japanese kimono and about two yen. His mother expected him early and was waiting for him, but when at night he had not returned, she became quite anxious. Shortly after dark he came rushing in, all out of breath, and full of excitement. When his mother reproved him for being late, he told her that in the morning he had received from his master a kimono and two yen, and had immediately set out for home. On the way he had met a man with a lot of little pine trees for sale. The poor man was very disheartened, because he had not succeeded in selling a single tree, and told Kinjiro that unless he could find a buyer he would be very much distressed. Kinjiro was sorry for the man, and an idea struck him whereby he could not only help the man, but could at the same time do the whole commimity a good service. As we already know, the Sa[kawa] River sometimes overflowed its banks. Kinjiro thought if a couple of rows of pine trees were planted along the banks of the river, and once took root, it would remedy this difficulty. So he bought all the trees and spent the remainder of the day planting them. He felt sure his work would have its reward. To-day those trees are large, and not only support the river bank, but add much to the beauty of the scenery. They stand as a living monument of little Kinjiro’s thoughtfulness.
“Just before the dawn: the life and work of Ninomiya Sontoku” by Robert Cornell Armstrong (1912)
Let’s put aside the fact that Kinjiro gave the fruits of a year’s labor to save a local farmer. What is clear is that the problem Kinjiro solved is one that was also faced by the people of Japan in the 1960s. Rivers in Japan frequently overflow and damage riverside structures. Or, at least, they used to. Nearly all the rivers in Japan have been filled in completely with concrete. Nobody ever thought to plant multiple rows of trees on the riverbanks. The Sakawa River itself has been dammed, and Kinjiro’s surviving trees were almost chopped down by thoughtless bureaucrats; the townspeople saved them.
Kinjiro was beloved by the people of his area because of his wisdom and his big heart. The people of Odawara City where he was born still remember him fondly today, referring to him as “Sontoku-sama”, and honoring the trees he planted there. A few websites therefore relate the story of the planting, but nobody seems to have made this connection with the state of Japan’s rivers today. Would that we had more like Kinjiro, and fewer building statues of him.
Posted: February 11th, 2011 | Kokoro | No Comments »
