May 2013: CMA CGM Dalila, offshore of Yokohama, Japan

The flat sea glimmers like a disco ball and it’s warm enough to sit outside without a puffy coat. All day long there have been whale sightings. … WHALES! The watchmen called me in the gymnasium where I was playing ping pong with Ian and Cloyd, crewmembers from the Philippines. WHALES! Each time I’d race to starboard or port side and scan the sea, squinting for a splash of a fin or tail. Finally this evening I saw the whales on port side, basking in the warm, peach light of the sunset. We saw two that floated like black logs along the calm surface. And another on the starboard side, the perfect outline of a tail descending into the deep.

In 2013, I quit my publishing job in New York City to travel around the world as a passenger on container ships. My trip was generously supported by a fellowship from my college for recent graduates who demonstrated a “strong desire to travel and a deep love of beauty.” I planned to talk to crews, communities, and organizations involved in maritime shipping, and to raise awareness of the industry’s rising social and environmental impact. In truth, my motives were far more selfish. I was in awe of container ships, and drawn to the unpredictability of the ocean. I was also compelled to do something a little reckless, just for me. Mostly I wanted to be far away.

I had been living two separate lives for some time. In my hometown of Seattle, I was a mostly closeted version of myself, so as not to bring any embarrassment or discomfort to my devout Greek Orthodox family. In New York, there was another version of me, figuring out who I was and what I wanted out of an adult romantic relationship, and on the verge of falling in love with a woman. I hoped that time on a big, slow-moving boat might give me space to reimagine how I would navigate the future.

A view of Marsaxlokk Port, Malta. During her journey, the author often walked around the ship, past rows of multicolored containers. Courtesy of author.

July 2013: Westport Business Center, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

It is 12:25 in the morning and I am waiting in an empty business center in Port Klang. It’s a cement box of a building with scuffed walls, cold metal chairs and tiny television sets playing American westerns. … I’m not certain I am where I’m supposed to be. Hopefully my ship will arrive in the next hour and I can begin the immigration process and board the boat before sunrise. Earlier in the day I was told it would be here at 8 p.m., and then later, 11 p.m. When I arrived at 11 p.m., I was told the boat would not be here until 1 a.m.

As a passenger on a container ship, you are the least of anyone’s concern—insignificant in comparison to the millions of dollars’ worth of cargo on board. There is a lot of time for quiet reflection—with no cell service and only intermittent access to email. Days are punctuated by mealtimes but are otherwise entirely free of programming. On the ship I had a surprisingly spacious cabin with a double bed, desk, loveseat, and coffee table, my own bathroom, and one porthole looking out over the containers. I spent my mornings reading on the couch or writing diary entries at my desk. Sometimes I took a break to climb the several stairs to the bridge, where officers and crew take turns manning the ship, to stare out at the sea or pester whoever was on watch with questions.

In the afternoons I could walk around the perimeter of the ship, past the rows and rows of multicolored containers, a half-mile distance around. After lunch, I often slept. Some afternoons I ran on the ancient treadmill in the “gymnasium,” a small room with some athletic contraptions from the ‘80s. Or I’d play ping pong with any off-duty crewmembers.

The officers were from the countries where the ships were flagged—in the case of this trip, France and Germany. The crew were mostly from the Philippines, but there were others from Romania, Russia, and Kiribati, an island I had never heard of. All of the officers and crew that I met were men.

July 2013: CC Rigoletto, Straits of Malacca

There is one other passenger on board, Victor from Sweden. It’s so cute because no one has really introduced themselves to us, but nearly everyone we’ve passed lets us know that there is a barbeque on deck tonight. They are roasting a whole pig and there will be tiger prawns and merguez sausages as well! This will be the last barbeque for a while because we will be passing around India and it is the monsoon season. I think they are going all out for the occasion. Every day the menu is posted on a printout taped in the stairwell to the mess hall. And every day someone pastes up a different photo of a scantily clad female celebrity between lunch and dinner. Day 1: Cameron Diaz. Day 2: Christina Aguilera. Ironically, the steward also includes on the printout the name of the saint who is celebrated each day.

Before my trips I had assumed I would be one of few women, if not the only woman, on board. I was careful in my dress not to invite any unwanted attention. And when asked, I avoided all conversation around my personal and romantic life—I certainly never revealed that I was dating a woman. One day I was playing ping pong with one of the officers, and he asked me why I never wore skirts—then jokingly threatened to steal all my trousers while I exercised so that I’d have to wear a skirt to dinner.

In some ways, the journey amplified my inclination to hide and my growing frustration with the disconnect between how I presented myself to people of my past, and to strangers, and who I really was. Even thousands of miles away from everyone I knew, with the entire space of the ocean and the anonymity of an experience unshared, I was still building a wall. I had the courage to do so much alone, and yet even alone I didn’t have the courage to be me.

One remarkable day—the day we sailed through the Suez Canal in the first hazy blue light of dawn—the beauty of the experience was punctuated by an email from my family. They were planning a wedding for my sister, a big fat Greek wedding, and I just couldn’t be happy. I was mourning the love and support I feared I would never receive from my parents, and felt guilty for my lack of joy for a sister I loved so much. Waves of anger and jealousy and anxiety swelled up so strong that I felt sick to my stomach. That day, I vowed not to be the same when I returned.

Elena Legeros aboard the CC Rigoletto on the Straits of Malacca, during a barbecue on deck with the ship’s crew. Courtesy of author.

August 25, 2013: MSC Uganda, offshore of Boston, United States

Today will be my last day aboard and it could not be a more glorious day. There isn’t a breath of wind and the sea is a shimmer like static on a deep blue TV screen. We are ahead of schedule and at midday we came to a complete halt in the middle of the ocean and I went outside to suntan, taking dips in the pool of icy seawater. Every time I go outside I sniff to see if I can smell the smell of the Cape. My phone is getting intermittent service and I can hear the Boston-based coast guard over the radio in the wheelhouse.

It’s been nine years since my voyage. In that time I’ve moved from New York to Seattle to Los Angeles to San Francisco. I married the woman I love, and we’ve had two children together. We recently decided to move our family to Long Beach, where we rented an apartment that looks out over the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two largest ports in the United States. Long Beach drew us for a variety of reasons, but I was excited to be so close to the container ships.

These days I feel rooted on land and glad to be close to my family—the one I grew up with and the one I’m building. I don’t feel the pull to venture far away, but I love to see the ships in the harbor, to think about where they came from and where they’re going. Sometimes I check online to see what they’re carrying and the route they’ve taken. I think about the officers and crewmembers on board and how long they’ve been away from their families. I’m reminded of my smallness, both relative to the size of these ships and the expanse of the world they sail. But I’m reminded of strength, too: the strength I found in the middle of the ocean, not in the face of any danger or adversity but with the space and time to discover it fully.

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But if you look more closely, you’ll find clues to the regional rage and global controversies that plague this place. The shrine is dedicated to all those Japanese soldiers who sacrificed their lives on the battlefield since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, most of them during World War II. On the face of it, there is nothing offensive about this: Every nation must mourn its war dead.

But among the pines and the cherry trees lurk messages and monuments that prolong a deep denial about the country’s past sins.

Not far from the shrine stands a monument to the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal, long honoured by Japanese nationalists. He was the only one of the 11 global judges in the Tokyo war crimes trials of 1946 to suggest that all of the Japanese defendants should have been found not guilty. And, tucked away behind the shrine, another memorial silently salutes to the Kenpeitai—the military police who terrorized civilians in the countries Japan conquered during the Second World War, and inside Japan itself. There is vast and undisputed documentation of this much-feared organization’s human rights abuses; its closest equivalents in the West would be the Nazi SS or the Soviet NKVD.

To muddy the waters even further, the war museum on the site, with an entrance just 100 feet from the shrine, tells stories that few reputable historians would recognize as true: The displays here blame Chinese provocations for Japan’s invasion of China, and American trade sanctions for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. They even suggest that Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia stemmed from a selfless desire to liberate the Asian people from European rule, rather than an entirely selfish imperial desire.

Perhaps worse than these historical distortions are the museum’s omissions. There is no mention here of the enforced sexual slavery of thousands of Korean “comfort women.” Nor is there any record of the medical experiments on Chinese civilians, the starvation of people in Indonesia, or the massacre of women and children in Manila. These events are well known all over the world and have been repeatedly proven—not only by foreign historians, but by Japanese ones. But they are entirely absent from the museum.

All of these things send the political message that Japan did nothing wrong in World War II and does not need to take responsibility for its actions. This is why a Chinese man tried to set fire to the gates of the shrine in 2011. That is why a South Korean man threw a bottle of paint thinners into the main hall of the shrine in 2013, or why another set off a bomb there in 2015.

There is another reason for attacks and controversy: the very souls housed here. This is not merely because the Yasukuni Shrine honors ordinary Japanese soldiers. Since the late 1950s, it has also openly and explicitly venerated the souls of convicted war criminals.

The problem began in 1959 after the shrine held a mass memorial for Japan’s war dead. In the years since the war, more than 2 million souls had been enshrined here: This ceremony was meant as a final way of marking the past and allowing the nation to move on.

Until that point, Japanese war criminals had always been excluded. The enshrinement process involves inscribing the names and other details of the dead in the symbolic registry of deities, which is housed in a building behind the main shrine, away from the general public; without this information, enshrinement cannot take place. Not wishing to honor those who had brought shame upon Japan, the government had always avoided passing on these details to the Yasukuni priesthood, therefore eliminating any war criminals from veneration.

Even within the government, however, there were those who did not like this policy. The Ministry of Health and Welfare, which was responsible for liaising with the Yasukuni Shrine, consisted largely of ex-military men, many of whom disagreed with the verdicts of the war crimes trials. In the spring of 1959, the ministry secretly started providing the priests at the shrine with the details they needed.

Over the next eight years, some 984 so-called “Class B” and “Class C” criminals were enshrined. These men had been personally involved in the mass killing, exploitation and torture of prisoners and civilians around Asia. The process took place without fanfare, partly in order to avoid any kind of public backlash, but also to avoid any accusations of a merging of religious and governmental affairs—something banned under the post-war Japanese constitution. According to Higurashi Yoshinobu, a political scientist at Teikyo University in Tokyo, the shrine did not even seek permission from the families of those they enshrined, some of whom were deeply ashamed of what their relatives had done.

If the enshrinement of Japan’s Class B and C war criminals was a sensitive matter, then the enshrinement of its Class A criminals was even more controversial. These men had not personally conducted atrocities, but were rather the top brass: those who had been convicted at the Tokyo trials for masterminding and initiating war. For many years their enshrinement was stalled by the head priest, Tsukuba Fujimaro, but after his death in 1978, the new head priest, Matsudaira Nagayoshi, reversed course. In a secret ceremony on October 17 that same year, he enshrined all 14 Class A criminals.

None of these steps were justified. In the 1960s and 1970s, far more Japanese opposed the enshrinements than supported them. Even Emperor Hirohito did not seem to approve of them. Between 1945 and 1975, he visited the Yasukuni Shrine eight times, but once the Class A war criminals were enshrined he never visited again. After he died, his successors followed suit: Neither his son nor his grandson has ever visited the shrine.

Unfortunately, Japan’s prime ministers have not been quite so tactful. Over the past 40 years several have paid their respects here, always claiming they are coming for personal reasons, but also because they know that the more nationalist elements in their electorate will approve. Every time they do so, it causes a storm of outrage among Japan’s neighbors. The most recent visit was by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in December 2013, but it caused such controversy that Abe was not tempted to go again until after his resignation last September.

Other senior members of the Japanese government also visit the shrine regularly. In 2020, despite worsening relations with China and South Korea, four government ministers insisted on paying their respects. The day they chose to do so was probably the most diplomatically sensitive day of recent years—the 75th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in 1945. A spokesman for South Korea’s foreign ministry immediately expressed “deep disappointment and concern” for their insensitivity.

It is difficult to see how the situation might be salvaged now. The shrine authorities could start by removing the memorials to the Kenpeitai and Pal—but they are unlikely to do so of their own accord. And there is no sign of the popular protests against monuments that have happened recently in so many other parts of the world. Likewise, the museum that stands next to the shrine could change its provocative and questionable narrative of the war. But none of this would solve the central problem, which lies with the shrine itself.

Some people have suggested “de-enshrining” the spirits of Japan’s war criminals or moving them to another location. But the priests at the shrine insist that this is impossible for theological reasons: Once the souls of the dead have been “merged” here, they cannot be separated again.

What they neglect to mention is that it would also go against the whole political ethos that has been pursued by the shrine authorities ever since the 1950s. The priests here are not interested in guilt or innocence, which they consider a distraction from what is truly important. This deeply conservative institution, which is steeped in traditions of self-sacrifice and martial glory, is trying to keep alive a vision of Japan as a warrior nation. Nothing else matters—not even reconciliation.

Nowadays, most people in Japan accept the shame of their collective history, but would dearly like to move on. Last summer, at the 75th anniversary of Japan’s surrender, Emperor Naruhito openly expressed his “deep remorse” for his nation’s role as aggressor in World War II. Like the vast majority of Japan’s population, Naruhito was born after the war and is more concerned with the problems of the future than with trying to keep alive the poisonous values of the past.

“Looking back on the long period of post-war peace,” he said at a secular memorial service elsewhere in Tokyo, “reflecting on our past and bearing in mind the feelings of deep remorse, I earnestly hope that the ravages of war will never again be repeated.”

Most of the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the shrine would also like to move on. They would like to enjoy the Yasukuni Shrine as a peaceful oasis in an otherwise bustling city, to remember their ancestors without having to think of the actions of war criminals, or to worry about the possibility of an arson attack or a bomb.

But it is unlikely that Japan’s neighbors will ever be able to leave the past behind while the sins of the past remain unacknowledged here. The same is true for the Japanese themselves. While the shrine authorities propagate an atmosphere of misdirection and denial, neither the people who visit nor the spirits of the dead can ever fully be at peace.

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Cats are everywhere in Japan. While it is easy to see they are well-loved, Japan also fears cats. The country has a long, often terrifying history of folklore involving monstrous supernatural cats. Japan’s magic catlore is wide and deep—ranging from the fanciful, magical shapeshifters (bakeneko) to the horrendous demonic corpse-eaters (kasha). That’s where I come in.

I began researching Japan’s catlore while working on the comic book Wayward from Image comics. Written by Canadian Jim Zub with art by Japan-based American penciler Steve Cummings and American colorist Tamra Bonvillain, Wayward was a classic story of shifting societal beliefs that tackled the age-old question of whether man creates gods or gods create man. It pitted Japan’s folkloric yokai against rising young powers that would supplant them. One of our main characters was Ayane, a magical cat girl of the type known as a neko musume. Ayane was built of cats who come together in a mystical merger to create a living cat avatar.

As a Japan consultant, my job on Wayward was to create supplemental articles to complement the stories. This meant I researched and wrote about things as varied as Japan’s police system, the fierce demons called oni, and the fires that ravaged Tokyo between 1600 and 1868. And, of course, magic cats. I researched Japan’s catlore to incorporate in Ayane’s character. Normally, my work was one-and-done: As soon as I finished with one topic, I moved onto the next. But cats, well… I guess you could say they sunk their claws into me—and they haven’t let go yet.

Studying folklore means following trails as far as you can go with the understanding that you’ll never reach your destination. The further back you peel the layers of time, the mistier things become. You leave what you can prove and enter that nebulous realm of “best guess.”

Take the fact that cats exist in Japan at all. No one knows exactly when and how they got there. The “best guess” is that they traveled down the silk road from Egypt to China and Korea, and then across the water. They came either as ratters guarding precious Buddhist sutras written on vellum, or as expensive gifts traded between emperors to curry favor. Most likely both of these things happened at different times.

But for our first confirmed record of a cat in Japan—where we can confidently set a stake in the timeline and say “Yes! This is unquestionably a cat!”—we must turn the dusty pages of an ancient diary.

On March 11, 889 CE, 22-year-old Emperor Uda wrote:

“On the 6th Day of the 2nd Month of the First Year of the Kampo era. Taking a moment of my free time, I wish to express my joy of the cat. It arrived by boat as a gift to the late Emperor, received from the hands of Minamoto no Kuwashi.

The color of the fur is peerless. None could find the words to describe it, although one said it was reminiscent of the deepest ink. It has an air about it, similar to Kanno. Its length is 5 sun, and its height is 6 sun. I affixed a bow about its neck, but it did not remain for long.

In rebellion, it narrows its eyes and extends its needles. It shows its back.

When it lies down, it curls in a circle like a coin. You cannot see its feet. It’s as if it were circular Bi disk. When it stands, its cry expresses profound loneliness, like a black dragon floating above the clouds.

By nature, it likes to stalk birds. It lowers its head and works its tail. It can extend its spine to raise its height by at least 2 sun. Its color allows it to disappear at night. I am convinced it is superior to all other cats.”

As you can see, be they emperor or peasant, cat owners have changed little over the millennia. I will tell anyone who will listen that my cat (the monstrous beauty of a Maine coon called Shere Khan with whom I coexist in constant balance between pure love and open warfare) is superior to all other cats.

While cats were initially traded as priceless objects in Japan, unlike gold or gems or rare silks, these treasures were capable of doing something other valuables could not—multiplying. Cats made more cats. Over the centuries, cats bred and spread until by the 12th century they were common all over the island.

That was when they began to transform.

Japan has long held a folk belief that when things live too long, they manifest magical powers. There are many old stories explaining why this is true of foxes, tanuki, snakes, and even chairs. However, cats seem to be somewhat unique in the myriad powers they can manifest—and their multitude of forms. Perhaps this is because they are not indigenous to Japan. Whereas Japanese society evolved alongside foxes and tanukis, cats possess that aura of coming from outside the known world. Combine that with cats’ natural mysterious nature, their ability to stretch to seemingly unnatural proportions, how they can walk without a sound, and their glowing eyes that change shape in the night, and it’s the perfect recipe for a magical animal.

The first known appearance of a supernatural cat in Japan arrived in the 12th century. According to reports, a massive, man-eating, two-tailed cat dubbed the nekomata stalked the woods of what is now the Nara prefecture. The former capital of Japan, Nara was surrounded by mountains and forests. Hunters and woodsman regularly entered these forests around the city for trade. They knew the common dangers; but this brute monster was far beyond what they expected to encounter. According to local newspapers of the time, several died in the jaws of the nekomata. Massive and powerful, they were more like two-tailed tigers than the pampered pets of Emperor Uda. In fact, the nekomata may have actually been a tiger. There’s speculation today that the nekomata legends sprang from an escaped tiger brought over from China, possibly as part of a menagerie, or it was some other animal ravaged by rabies.

With the close of the 12th century, stories of the nekomata and supernatural felines went quiet for several centuries. Then came the arrival of the Edo period, when Japan’s magical cat population truly exploded.

Beginning around 1600, the country experienced a flowering of art and culture. Kabuki theater. Sushi. Ukiyoe wood block artists. Geisha. The first printing presses in Japan. All of these Edo period phenomena led to a flourishing industry of reading material for all classes—in many ways, a forerunner of manga. And as writers and artists soon found out, the country was hungry for tales of magic and Japanese monsters called yokai. Any work of art or theatrical play tinged with supernatural elements became a sure-fire hit.

In this golden age, a new species of supernatural cat appeared—the shape-changing bakeneko. As Japan urbanized, cat and human populations grew together. Now, cats were everywhere; not only as house pets and ratters but as roving strays feasting off the scraps from the new inventions of street sushi and ramen stands. And with them stories followed of cats able to transform into human shape. Japanese houses were mostly lit by fish oil lamps. Cats love to lap the oil, and at night, in the glowing lamplight, they cast huge shadows on the walls, seemingly morphing into massive creatures standing on their hind legs as they stretched. According to lore, cats who lived preternaturally long evolved into these bakeneko, killed their owners and took their place.

Not all bakeneko were lethal, however. Around 1781, rumors began to spread that some of the courtesans of the walled pleasure districts in the capital city of Edo were not human at all, but rather transformed bakeneko. The idea that passing through the doors of the Yoshiwara meant a dalliance with the supernatural held a delicious thrill to it. Eventually, these stories expanded beyond the courtesans to encompass an entire hidden cat world, including kabuki actors, artists, comedians, and other demimonde. When these cats left their homes at night, they donned kimonos, pulled out sake and shamisen, and basically held wild parties before slinking back home at dawn.

These stories proved irresistible to artists, who produced illustrations featuring a wild world of cats dancing and drinking late into the evening hours. The cats were depicted as anthropomorphic human-cat hybrids (although the bakeneko were capable of shapeshifting into fully human forms, too). They smoked pipes. Played dice. And got up to all kinds of trouble that every hard-working farmer wished they could indulge in. Artists also created works replicating cat versions of popular celebrities from the world of the pleasure quarters.

While bakeneko are the most numerous and popular of Japan’s magical cat population—and certainly the most artistically appealing—magical cats also lurked in darker corners.

Take the kasha, a demon from hell that feasts on corpses. Like the nekomata and bakeneko, the kasha were once normal house cats. But, as the story goes, the scent of dead bodies filled them with such an overwhelming desire to feast that they transformed into flaming devils. With their necromantic powers they were said to be able to manipulate corpses like puppets, making them rise up and dance. The kasha story still remains part of the culture in terms of funeral services. In Japan, it is customary after the death of a loved one to hold a wake where the body is brought home and the family gather. To this day, cats are put out of the room where the wake is held.

Some cat creatures, like the neko musume, were thought to be cat-human hybrids. They were said to be born from a cat’s curse on makers of the traditional instrument called the shamisen, which use drums stretched from the hides of cats. A shamisen maker who got too greedy might be cursed with a neko musume daughter as revenge. Instead of a beloved human daughter, they would find themselves with a cat in human form who was incapable of human speech, ate rats, and scratched their claws.

Perhaps the most persistent of the Edo period supernatural cats is the maneki neko, known in English by the sobriquet “Lucky Cat.” While truly a creature of commerce, this ubiquitous waving feline has folkloric origins—two of them, in fact. Gotokuji temple tells of a fortuitous cat that saved a samurai lord from a lightning strike during a terrible storm. The lord gave his patronage to the temple, which still exists today and happily sells thousands of replica cats to eager tourists. The other origin is of a poor old woman whose cat came to her in a dream and told her to sculpt a cat out of clay to sell at market. The woman marketed both her cat and her story, selling more and more cat statues until she retired rich and happy. These same cat statues are still sold worldwide today as the Maneki Neko. Obviously, both origin stories can’t be true, but that doesn’t stop the sales from rolling in. It’s not unusual at all to trace back a folkloric story and to find someone trying to make a buck on the other end. As the earlier artists discovered with their bakeneko prints, cats have always been good for sales.

The more you dig into Japan’s catlore the more you’ll find, from the gotoko neko, an old nekomata that mysteriously stokes fires at night or turns the heaters up in households in order to stay warm, to the cat islands of Tashirojima where cats outnumber people by more than five to one, to the endangered yamapikaryaa, said to survive only on the remote Iriomote islands. Most of these are born from the Edo period, however many are expanded folklore and real-world locations. Japan’s catlore continues to spread and I have no doubt that new supernatural forms are being born even now.

For me, Japan’s catlore has been nothing short of catnip. The more I learned the more I wanted to know. After I finished my Wayward research, I kept diving deeper and deeper until I had piles of translated folk stories and historical texts on Japan’s cats. I had no plans to do anything with it; it was a personal obsession. Finally, though, my publisher noticed, and said, Hey, I think we know what your next book is going to be about. Thus Kaibyō: The Supernatural Cats of Japan was born, a book I never intended to write, and yet to this day, remains the most popular thing I’ve ever written. Even after it published in 2017, I knew my journey into Japan’s catlore was hardly finished; I don’t think it ever will be.

I think Shere Khan approves.

The post The Mystical, Magical, Terrifying Supernatural Cats of Japan appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But pressure from athletes and national sport bodies finally forced Bach’s hand. Olympians—including big-name stars like U.S. decathlete Ashton Eaton, reigning Olympic pole vault gold medalist Katerina Stefanidi of Greece, and Canadian hockey standout Hayley Wickenheiser, who is also a member of the IOC and its Athletes’ Commission—demanded postponement. Then Canada announced a de facto boycott, vowing not to send its athletes to Tokyo, soon followed by Australia, Germany, and Portugal. With the five-ring dominoes falling, the IOC and organizers in Tokyo relented to reality on March 24, issuing a joint statement that the Games would in fact be delayed.

It was the first time in the history of the Olympics that the Games were postponed. But it was not the first time Tokyo had its Olympic experience scuppered by calamity. In 1940, too, the city had been slated to host the Summer Olympics—before misguided IOC management exacerbated external circumstances and got in the way.

It’s a pattern we’re likely to see again, because the Olympics are rooted in arrogant fantasies about the power of the Games to soar above the rules and limitations of other human enterprises. The Olympics could not transcend war in the 1940s, and it can’t transcend epidemiological science today.

The modern Olympics were the brainchild of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat who believed that the rigorous discipline and outward displays of masculinity embedded in sporting culture could help reinvigorate France after its humiliating drubbing in the Franco-Prussian War. In 1894 he assembled a hodgepodge of officials from sports organizations in Europe and North America along with a gaggle of fellow aristocrats—including the King of Greece, the Prince of Wales, and a Russian grand duke—to restore the Olympics. The Games were built on a bedrock of contradictions: the Olympics were to symbolize peace but were also a way to toughen up “a flabby and cramped youth” for war, as the Baron put it. The Games were anchored in a rhetoric of inclusion even as Coubertin railed against the participation of women. The Olympic rings were to represent the continents of the world linked in peace, but the Games were organized by nation, thereby encouraging chauvinism.

The first Olympics were staged in Athens in 1896, and for years thereafter they were attached like a sporty barnacle to the more popular World’s Fair. It wasn’t until the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm that the Games finally achieved solid footing.

In 1936, the IOC picked Tokyo to host the 1940 Games, over Helsinki. It was a controversial choice. In 1931, Japan had aroused international consternation when it invaded Manchuria and installed a puppet government. The IOC’s oft-proclaimed aim of fostering peace and goodwill apparently didn’t outweigh its desire to spread across the globe—Tokyo would be the first city in Asia to host the Games. Rome had also expressed interest in hosting the 1940 Olympics, but behind the scenes, the Tokyo bid team cut a deal with Benito Mussolini: Il Duce backed their bid in exchange for a promise of Japanese support for Rome’s effort to secure the 1944 Games. In the end, IOC members chose Tokyo over Helsinki by a vote of 37 to 26.

But imperial aggressors are going to aggress—and many within Japan viewed the Olympics as “an opportunity to demonstrate Japan’s growing imperial might, to stake a place on the world’s sports fields as well as its battlefields,” as sports historian David Goldblatt has noted. Japan attacked China in July 1937, setting off the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Critics from the international community—like the Japanese Peace Society and the American League for Peace and Democracy—demanded that Tokyo be forced to relinquish the Games. Athletes from France, Great Britain, and the United States threatened a boycott. But the IOC didn’t budge. It was never particularly bothered by Japanese bellicosity, and doubled down on its support for Japan by handing the 1940 Winter Games to Sapporo in June 1937, even as threats of war filled the air. The IOC averred, as it still does, that when it comes to the Olympics, politics, and sports shouldn’t mix.

The IOC also seemed smitten with Tokyo’s dedication to honoring Olympic tradition. Grandiosity and pomposity are the IOC’s id and ego—and Tokyo bidders had plans to spend 10 million Yen (more than $61 million today) to enlarge stadiums. The Tokyo Prefecture plunged an additional $100,000 into the city’s bid, no small sum at the time (it would be nearly $2 million today). Tokyo also planned to repeat the Olympic torch relay, a ritual instituted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis at the 1936 Berlin Games.

Hitler initially derided the Olympics as “a plot against the Aryan race by Freemasons and Jews.” But De Coubertin’s rhetoric could be persuasive in Nazi circles. The Baron wrote that “the athlete in antiquity honored the gods. By doing the same today, the modern athlete honors his homeland, his race, and his flag.”

Such talk of homeland, race, and flag chimed with Hitler’s political project—and propaganda minister Josef Goebbels convinced him that the Games would bathe the swastika in the Olympic glow on the world stage. The Germans concocted the Olympic torch relay, which wound its way from Olympia, Greece to Berlin, as a way not only to magnify the Olympic spirit but also to spread the Nazi gospel. In the final days of the relay in Germany, the torch bearers were exclusively blond and blue-eyed, textbook exemplars of the supposed Aryan “master race.” De Coubertin deemed the performance “gallant and utterly successful.”

In promising to continue the tradition, the hosts in Tokyo fortified the IOC’s good favor.

But Tokyo 1940 was not to be.

Tellingly, the Japanese, not the IOC, pulled the plug. As Japan funneled more resources into the fighting in East Asia, the country’s Minister of War, General Gen Sugiyama, insisted that Tokyo withdraw its Olympic responsibility in order to focus on the war. Eventually, leaders in Tokyo issued a statement that read, “We deeply regret to have to abandon temporarily the privilege of holding the first Olympics in Asia.” They added, “We promise to make every effort to bring the 1944 Olympics to Japan as we firmly believe peace will return to the Far East before long.”

The IOC shifted the 1940 Summer Games to Helsinki, and the 1940 Winter Games to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany, thus demonstrating the Olympics had no qualms about the Nazi regime. Eventually, both 1940 Games were canceled after Russia invaded Finland in 1939. The Olympics wouldn’t be held again until 1948 in London.

Much has changed in Olympics Land since the 1940s. The Games are much bigger, with the Summer Olympics now convening some 11,000 athletes. In the process, the Games have been transformed into an expensive, money-making behemoth; an exercise in trickle-up economics that typically sends public dollars from a city or country to well-connected economic and political elites that organize and broadcast the Games.

The economic stakes are higher for host cities. When Tokyo postponed in 2020, it had already plunged billions more than intended into the Olympic project. During the bid phase of the Tokyo Games, the price tag was $7.3 billion, but today, according to an audit carried out by the Japanese government, the Olympics are on pace to spend more than $26 billion. The recently announced postponement will add another $2 to $6 billion in costs, say Japanese media. And we should expect that number to climb.

Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso recently suggested that the Olympics were cursed every 40 years—from the 1940 Tokyo cancelation, to the boycott-plagued 1980 Moscow Games, to the Tokyo 2020 postponement. But the problem is nothing so magical: What has truly cursed the Olympic Movement is its dismal combination of outsized ambition and subpar leadership.

Just as the International Olympic Committee mismanaged wartime politics in 1940, it has mismanaged its response to the 2020 pandemic. Bach, the IOC president, claimed he was slow to act to postpone the Tokyo games because he was listening to people like President Donald Trump, who contended things would be back to normal by mid-April. That Bach would listen to Trump instead of experts from the World Health Organization and other medical bodies who refuted that rosy outlook, should be alarming to anyone who cares about athletes and the Olympics, let alone wider public health.

City officials who agree to host Olympics are already signing up for problems; questionable spending, militarization of public space in the name of security, and the displacement of existing homes or businesses to build facilities. The gamble is that the Games will somehow rise above these problems, and transform a place. The fact that these wishes rarely come true is why anti-Olympics activist groups pop up in nearly every city that contemplates hosting the Games.

These activist groups are coming together to create an international counter-Olympics movement of their own. NOlympics LA, which is leading the charge against the Los Angeles 2028 Games, worked last summer with anti-Olympics activists in Tokyo to stage the inaugural transnational anti-Olympics summit, featuring activists from Olympic host cities around the world, past, present, and future.

The way the Tokyo 2020 pandemic postponement transpired will only stoke these anti-Olympics groups. And if history is any guide, the 2021 Games—assuming they can be held in our age of coronavirus—will almost certainly provide additional grist for critiques of the Olympic movement.

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With the possible exception of opium during the Opium Wars, no drug has ever received a bigger stimulus from armed conflict. “World War II probably gave the greatest impetus to date to legal, medically-authorized as well as illicit black market abuse of these pills on a worldwide scale,” wrote Lester Grinspoon and Peter Hedblom in their classic 1975 study, The Speed Culture. Whether in the air or in the trenches, the war enabled the rapid proliferation of a synthetic stimulant that was particularly well-suited to sleepless work and intense concentration.

Amphetamines—often called “pep pills,” “go pills,” “uppers,” or “speed”—are a group of synthetic drugs that stimulate the central nervous system, reducing fatigue and appetite and increasing wakefulness and imparting a sense of well-being. Methamphetamine is a particularly potent and addictive form of the drug, best known today as “crystal meth.” All amphetamines are now banned or tightly regulated around the globe.

While produced entirely in the laboratory, amphetamines owe their existence to the search for an artificial substitute for the ma huang plant, better known in the West as ephedra. This relatively scarce desert shrub has been used as an herbal remedy in China for more than 5,000 years and is often ingested to treat common ailments such as coughs and colds and to promote concentration and alertness—including historically by night guards patrolling the Great Wall of China.

In 1887, Japanese chemist Nagayoshi Nagai successfully extracted the plant’s active ingredient, ephedrine, which closely resembled adrenaline; and in 1919, another Japanese scientist, A. Ogata, developed a synthetic substitute for ephedrine. But it was not until amphetamine was synthesized in 1927 at a UCLA laboratory by the young British chemist Gordon Alles that a formula was available for commercial medical use.

The Benzedrine inhaler hit the market in 1932 as an over-the-counter remedy for asthma and congestion. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Alles sold it to the Philadelphia pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French, which brought it to market as the Benzedrine inhaler in 1932 (an over-the-counter product to treat asthma and congestion), before introducing it in tablet form a few years later. “Bennies” were widely promoted as a wonder drug for all sorts of ailments, from fighting depression to obesity, with little apparent concern for or awareness of their addictive potential, and of the risks of longer-term physical and psychological damage. And thus, the stage was set for large-scale pill pushing to reach the battlefield when the next war broke out.

German, British, American, and Japanese forces ingested large amounts of amphetamines during World War II, but nowhere did the drug’s use have a more long-lasting societal impact than in Japan. The Japanese imperial government sought to give its fighting capacity a pharmacological edge, and so it contracted out methamphetamine production to domestic pharmaceutical companies for use during the war effort.

The tablets were distributed to pilots for long flights and to soldiers for combat, under the trade name Philopon (also known as Hiropin). In addition, the government gave munitions workers and those laboring in other defense-related factories methamphetamine tablets to increase their productivity.

Japanese called the war stimulants “senryoku zokyo zai” or “drug to inspire the fighting spirits.” Defense workers ingested these drugs to help boost their output. In the all-out push to increase production, strong prewar inhibitions against drug use were swept aside. It is not difficult to understand why. As researchers such as political scientist Lukasz Kamienski have documented, total war required total mobilization, from factory to battlefield. Pilots, soldiers, naval crews, and laborers were all routinely pushed beyond their natural limits to stay awake longer and work harder. In this context, taking stimulants was seen as a patriotic duty.

Kamikaze pilots took large doses of methamphetamine, via injection, before their suicide missions. They were also given pep pills stamped with the crest of the emperor. These consisted of methamphetamine mixed with green tea powder and were called Totsugeki-Jo or Tokkou-Jo, known otherwise as “storming tablets.” Most kamikaze pilots were young, often only in their late teens. Before the injection of Philopon, the pilots undertook a warrior ceremony in which they were presented with sake, wreaths of flowers, and decorated headbands.

Although soldiers from many countries returned home from the war with amphetamine habits, the problem was most severe in Japan, which experienced the first drug epidemic in the history of the country. Many soldiers and factory workers who had become hooked on the speed during the war continued to consume it into the postwar years, when it was easy to get the drugs because the Imperial Army’s post-war surplus was dumped into the domestic market.

These stockpiles of the drug then brought about other dramatic changes in Japanese society. Upon surrendering in 1945, the country had massive stores of Hiropin in warehouses, military hospitals, supply depots, and caves peppered throughout its territories. Some of the supply was sent to public dispensaries for distribution as medicine, but the rest was diverted to the black market rather than destroyed. There, the country’s Yakuza crime syndicate took over much of the distribution, and the drug trade would eventually become its most important source of revenue.

Pervitin, a methamphetamine brand that German soldiers used during WWII, dispensed the tablets in these containers. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Any tablets not diverted to illicit markets remained in the hands of pharmaceutical companies. In the wake of the traumas and dislocations of the war, a depressed and humiliated population offered an easy target. As Kamienski noted, “The pharmaceutical industry advertised stimulants as a perfect means of boosting the war-weary population and restoring confidence after a painful and debilitating defeat.” The drug companies mounted advertising campaigns to encourage consumers to purchase over-the-counter medicine sold as “wake-a-mine.” The product was pitched as offering “enhanced vitality.” In No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth, journalist Frank Owen reports that these companies also sold “hundreds of thousands of pounds” of “military-made liquid meth” left over from the war to consumers, who did not need a prescription to purchase the drug.

With an estimated 5 percent of Japanese people between the ages of 18 and 25 taking the drug, many became intravenous addicts in the early 1950s.

Another driver of the epidemic was the existence of large, new U.S. military bases on the islands, which had never previously been occupied by a foreign power. National newspaper Asahi Shinbun wrote that U.S. servicemen were responsible for spreading amphetamine usage from large cities to small towns. Indeed, the Japanese government’s Narcotics Section arrested 623 American soldiers for drug trafficking in 1953. However, according to historian Miriam Kingsberg, most drug scandals involving U.S. soldiers garnered little coverage by the major papers out of “deference” to “American-Japanese friendship.”

Surging methamphetamine use led to increasingly strict state regulation of the drug: The 1951 Stimulant Control Law banned methamphetamine possession, and penalties were increased three years later. But these increases did not stop the rise in arrests for amphetamine abuse, which jumped from 17,500 people in 1951 to 55,600 in 1954. During the early 1950s, arrests in Japan for stimulant offences made up more than 90 percent of total drug arrests.

In an anonymous survey by the Ministry of Welfare in 1954, 7.5 percent of respondents reported having sampled Hiropon. Meanwhile the Asahi Shinbun published an estimate that 1.5 million Japanese were methamphetamine users in 1954, out of a total population of some 88 million.

The high rates of amphetamine use in Japan started to subside by the late 1950s and early 1960s, once economic growth began to create more jobs. Nevertheless, methamphetamine would remain the most popular illicit drug in Japan for decades to come.

The post The World War II “Wonder Drug” That Never Left Japan appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A comprehensive survey of Hatakeyama’s work is the subject of a new book, Excavating the Future City, co-published by Aperture and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. In these remarkable photographs, we see new urban landscapes arising from the rubble of the past. We perceive that our ability to recreate our world, over and over again, is limited only by the power of our imaginations.

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But the worst, we are told, is yet to come, because both countries have extremely low birth rates. Harvard sociologist Mary Brinton calls this “a demographic time bomb.” Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin says simply, “We are a dying country.”

Could all the experts be wrong?

Yes, and the reason is robots.

Conventional wisdom has long held that countries need enough young people to fill all the jobs left behind by retirees, and to create macroeconomic growth to finance all those retirements. A shrinking nation will have a very difficult time achieving any of those aims.

What does it mean to be shrinking? To sustain a developed country’s population, the birth rate needs to be 2.1 children per woman. In Japan, the rate is 1.4. In Italy, it’s 1.39, the lowest in Europe. In the United States, the rate is 1.86, but that’s supplemented by significant immigration. So while much of the developing world is experiencing an unsustainable population explosion, the conventional wisdom is that many Western industrialized countries face a sustainability problem from too few births.

That’s certainly the perception in Japan. This summer, the Japanese government made headlines by reporting that its population fell a record amount in 2016, by a total of 308,084 people, to 125.6 million. But the truly eye-catching number was this: Annual births dropped below one million for the first time since the government began its survey in 1979. By 2045, Japan is projected to lose 900,000 people a year, which is more than the total population of Indianapolis. Compounding the labor shortage, Japan has very strict immigration controls.

The Italian picture also is bleak, but in different ways. In Italy, fewer Italian babies were born in 2014 than in any year since the country was unified in 1861. This has been offset, recently and partially, only by an inflow of migrants, mainly fleeing Africa and the Middle East. For the last three years, the number of arrivals has been 580,000, but that’s still less than one percent of Italy’s 60 million population. Then there’s the unanswered question of where the new arrivals will work. Italy’s stagnant economy has produced high rates of unemployment, particularly among the young.

And that’s before another future trend takes hold: a devastating loss of employment due to exponential technological advances. In a groundbreaking paper published in 2013, Oxford’s Michael Osborne and Carl Frey concluded that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs are at risk of being taken over by “computerization” in the next decade or two. The futurist Martin Ford framed the problem in more frightening terms, proclaiming, in a popular book, “The Rise of the Robots.”

But while these two trends—declining births and new robot “births”—might be regarded as individually ominous, the fact that they are happening at the same time offers reason for hope. Could robots replace the workers who aren’t being born in Italy, in Japan, and across the developed world?

Such a replacement is not a radical idea—or a new one. As early as 1933, legendary economist John Maynard Keynes predicted the replacement of workers by machines, with massive unemployment “due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”

The 2013 Oxford study was motivated by this prediction. It assessed the probability of job loss over the next decade or two in 702 detailed occupations in the United States. The least vulnerable jobs (less than 1 percent at risk) include athletic trainers, oral surgeons, and anthropologists. The most vulnerable jobs (at 99 percent risk) include telemarketers and data entry keyers.

The CEO of Daimler-Benz has been more explicit, predicting: “In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans” and “70-80 percent of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years.” There also will be some new jobs created by new technologies—but it’s unclear how long it will take them to materialize.

If this vision of the future proves true, there will be casualties, as no revolution is bloodless. The Industrial Revolution terrorized textile and agricultural workers, and the computer revolution hollowed out the middle class of most Western industrialized nations.

But the best kind of country to be during the rise of the robots is a country with a declining population. In Italy and Japan, rather than having massive numbers of human workers displaced, robots may do the work that otherwise would have gone undone.

Of course, it will be crucial for countries to strike a balance—to make sure the robots come on line at roughly the same rate that populations decline. This could mean imposing heavier taxes on families that have too many children, or excise taxes on firms that automate too quickly. The revenues would go to retrain workers for jobs that can’t easily be automated. In some cases, nations could mandate human labor for some jobs, or guarantee a universal basic income, as some countries are now debating.

The 2013 Oxford study says that workers also will have to acquire creative and social skills, areas in which computers lag behind. The bad news is that few countries are adjusting their schools and training centers in order to meet the needs of today’s technology, much less the technology of the future. Across the Western world, companies report having millions of jobs for which they cannot find qualified candidates.

If societies don’t educate people to take those new jobs, they will be filled by robots. Or by nothing at all.

The post How Robot Laborers Could Restock Italy and Japan’s Dwindling Workforce appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One of his legs had been amputated. A begging bowl before him, he bowed as low as he could to Japanese families coming to see the newly arrived pandas. A few placed coins in his bowl quickly and moved on. It was a shockingly sad sight, with an aura of shame, silence, and neglect surrounding him.

I reacted strongly in part because I had recently visited China. There I was struck by the self-confidence exhibited by the men and women of the military, whether walking down the street or in military formation. The people, in turn, spoke with respect and pride of the older generation who had fought in what they called “our” People’s Liberation Army.

Watching this former Japanese soldier, I found myself thinking: Whether a country wins or loses dictates society’s response to war. Of course, this is not a new observation, nor is it unique to Japan. But that does not lessen the power of the phenomenon, or the pain of defeat experienced by a Japanese society that puts so much emphasis on collective effort and shame.

A lost war created a particularly shaken culture of quiet despair in Japan. So when I am asked today, after living in Japan for 10 years, how it is that many Japanese still refuse to acknowledge their country’s role in bringing misery to so many people through its 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and later occupation of greater China, Singapore, the Philippines, and elsewhere during what the Japanese call The Pacific War, I think of that old soldier whose presence brought such distress to his fellow Japanese.

For several years my wife and I interviewed dozens of ordinary people for a book about Japan during World War II and the American Occupation. These conversations helped me see the old soldier again, this time from the viewpoint of Japanese still struggling with a legacy of shame mixed with forgetfulness.

Through them I could hear those families walk by the old soldier asking, “Why are you here to remind us of our loss and humiliation?” “Why did you come back but not my father, my brother, my son?” And why, to put a hard point to it, did he not commit suicide like so many others?

I came to realize that the soldier represented a depth of shame that sowed seeds for the generations that came after the war. And that shame was both infectious—touching younger generations who had no experience of the war—and normal.

This peculiar normalcy of shame mixed with faded memory has been encouraged for decades by the Japanese national elite in the political, education, business, and journalism fields. One reason for this is that many of the elite are themselves direct descendants of war era leaders. They are not predisposed to have their family members, or the names of their companies, affiliated negatively with either the atrocities, or the loss, of that war.

The Japanese media rarely challenge the government directly. With the exception of a few representatives from the press, such as the “Asahi Shimbun,” most have avoided analyzing critically what happened during the war so as not to lose access to government and business officials.

Kiichi Kawano is a former kamikaze pilot. Scheduled to fly out on a mission the day after the war ended, he has built a private museum in his basement to memorialize his comrades who died. Photo by Edgar A. Porter

The people’s willingness to follow the example of these elites should come as no surprise, for in the years immediately following the war, hunger and despondency stalked the country. The elites, in concert with the American Occupation forces, put their efforts into rebuilding the country. There was little energy left to reflect on the past, even if anyone had been predisposed to do so.

As factories and homes were built, or rebuilt, and infrastructure put in place, Japan experienced a growing optimism. By the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the country was justly proud of its achievements. The shame brought by the war never disappeared, but receded into the background of public discourse, where it lay for decades in the minds of many.

But not all. Despite the absence of any vibrant public debate, there have always been those who insisted on uncovering uncomfortable truths about their history. These efforts typically came from the grassroots: Local historical associations publish memoirs of war survivors and construct war memorial museums (almost universally called Peace Museums), and progressive teachers have gone beyond the authorized texts to guide their students on discoveries about the war years. Authors such as novelist Shusaku Endo and historian Eri Hotta have tackled painful and secretive war events.

Finally, individuals such as the ones we interviewed for our book have shined a light on those terrible years, climbing over the wall of shame and silence to educate as best they can, with limited resources and often without the encouragement of family or community.

But all of these efforts exist at the margins, because the national narrative still has a chilling effect on getting to the deeper, more complex story.

Two former soldiers we spoke with showed the difficulty of piecing together a more complete story. The first man spent part of a morning sharing with us the lives of both his family and himself as a combatant during the war. But toward the end of the interview, when we asked him to pose for a photo holding a family heirloom battle flag his brother had carried during the war, he refused. He said it would be disrespectful and shameful to have his photo taken with the flag, as it would seem to honor Japan’s defeat.

The other man told us of his disbelief and desolation when, in Indonesia at the end of the war, he heard that Japan was defeated. Upon returning home after over a year as a detainee held by allied forces, he shuttered himself in the family home. The depression and shame brought on by the startling failure of their cause, and his humiliation that he had lived when so many of his friends had died, only began to lift two years later. Even after leaving his house, he could not cope with seeing American Occupation forces walking around his town of Beppu. He occasionally fought with them, landed in jail, and spent years in and out of trouble.

He explained that he only began to confront his anger and shame when his granddaughter asked him to tell her what he did during the war. It was a class assignment from her teacher, one of those few who pushed the students to get out and learn more about their own history.

Japan’s reluctance to address its history directly places it in a large camp of like-minded states. Growing up in the American South, my textbooks never honestly described the history or horror of slavery. The Chinese government censors many details of the Cultural Revolution and the full story of the Tiananmen protests and eventual killings of 1989. Under Putin, the Russian government discourages discussion of Stalin’s brutality, such as the authorized population displacements and famine of the 1930s. And Turkey to this day refuses to acknowledge the full extent of its slaughter of the Armenian people in the early 20th century.

But Japan need not remain in this camp. It can follow another model, that of its former ally, Germany.

The German government has established Documentation Centers around the country which detail, without ambiguity, the development and consequences of National Socialism and the Nazi Party. In Japan the closest examples of Documentation Centers are the small, community-based Peace Museums dotting the country. Unlike the German centers, however, the message in these museums is mixed. While all emphasize the need to learn from the horror of the war by promoting world peace, they avoid in depth discussion of how, and why, Japan went to war. Instead they honor their own civilian and military dead, following the general story line of Japan as victim.

While Japanese children still study texts that mention the war only briefly, German schoolchildren find an honest and transparent rendering of the role Nazis, and by inference members of their own families, played in the deaths of millions of people. It is not left to individual teachers and private citizens to fill this void.

I think that the aging soldier I saw at the gate of the Tokyo Zoo 40 years ago represented both the past and future of Japan. Going off to war he was a hero. But upon return he only served as a reminder of the misguided and horrific tragedy orchestrated by the militarist government of war time Japan.

Through truth telling and reconciliation, current and future generations can uncover layers of hidden history and be freed of the national shame and humiliation. We encountered many Japanese who want to move in this direction. What they hope for is a national leadership that will find inspiration from them and follow suit.

The post What Losing a War Does to a Nation’s Psyche appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Hawaii no Hana” starred Katsuhiko Haida and Hideko Takamine as Hawaiian royalty who had been promised to each other in marriage as children. She flees the island before the wedding and doesn’t return until years later. Then she falls in love with a man she believes is a commoner, but it turns out he’s really the prince who was once betrothed to her. They live happily ever after.

Exhausted by the war and living under U.S. occupation, the people in the audience were unsure of their future, and “Hawaii no Hana” offered escape and a small measure of assurance that things might be better. But what really made the musical a huge hit was the aura of Hawaii. Takamine, a major movie star at the time, danced the hula. Haida, along with his brother, Haruhiko, and the Moana Glee Club, were popular acts in Hawaii, making records that sold in Japan, including a Japanese language rendition of Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon.” They had their own radio show, and during the ’30s all of Japan’s major cities had dance halls that played Hawaiian music. Japanese people had been migrating to the islands since the late 19th century to work on plantations, forming their own communities in the process. But during the war, all Hawaiian music was banned in Japan since Hawaii was a territory of the enemy.

When Americans juxtapose Japan and Hawaii in the same thought, most likely they think of Pearl Harbor, a place that has no real purchase on the Japanese imagination since the associated destruction is so completely alien to their conception of Hawaii as land of carefree recreation. In fact, many younger Japanese, even if they know about the sneak attack, probably don’t know that Pearl Harbor is in Hawaii. The USS Arizona Memorial is not something that’s usually mentioned in sightseeing brochures or on TV travelogues in Japan.

Even the people who attended “Hawaii no Hana” didn’t think about Pearl Harbor. They wanted to forget all that. The musical helped jump-start postwar Japanese popular music, according to Yujin Yaguchi, a University of Tokyo professor, who wrote the book, Akogare no Hawaii (Longing for Hawaii). Two years later, in 1947, singer Haruo Oka had a smash hit with the song, “Akogare no Hawaii Koro” (“The Hawaii Route I Long For”), a jaunty tune about a fictional cruise ship that went from Japan to the Pacific islands. The song contained no Hawaiian music elements, but the lyrics about an exotic land far from everyday cares made a distinct impression.

Singers of Akogare no Hawaii Kōro.

Hawaii’s tropical charms were thoroughly imprinted in the nation’s consciousness, but almost no one living in Japan at the time had ever actually been to Hawaii. Even after the occupation ended in 1952, Japanese people were effectively banned from going overseas due to currency exchange laws. Even if they could afford to travel, and very few people could, they were limited by how much money they could take out of the country.

Hawaii-related entertainment of those years imparted how unattainable the islands were as a travel destination. “Akogare” implied a place you will probably never visit, and the movie adaptation of the song, starring superstar child actor Hibari Misora, was not filmed on location but rather in Japan. The shots of Hawaai’s Diamond Head and the beaches of Honolulu were derived from stock footage. The thing you can’t have becomes all the more desirable and during the 1950s Hawaii retained an image that transcended the usual trappings of a vacation resort. In a country that was rushing headlong into a loud, gray, oppressively busy industrial future, Hawaii was the place where all worldly cares evaporated.

Consequently, when the government eased foreign exchange restrictions and started allowing overseas travel on April 1, 1964, the first place people of means wanted to visit was Hawaii, and not just because it was relatively close. Years of long-distance acculturation had rendered the 50th state a familiar paradise.

In a way, it was even more familiar than their own tropical islands. The southern Ryukyu archipelago, which includes Okinawa, was controlled by the U.S. military until 1972, which meant Japanese people needed passports to go there as well. Besides, Okinawa carried with it tragic associations since it was the only part of Japan that suffered a land invasion.

For decades, the vast majority of Japanese workers couldn’t afford to go to Hawaii, unless they were lucky enough to get on the popular game show “Up Down Quiz,” whose grand prize was an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii. In the ’60s, a 7-day package tour cost 360,000 yen while the average starting monthly salary for a college graduate was only 20,000 yen. It wasn’t until the mid-’70s, when starting salaries rose and tour prices fell with the introduction of Boeing’s jumbo 747, that middle class Japanese began traveling to Hawaii in respectable numbers. Still, a five-night trip to Hawaii was, for most Japanese, something they would have to save years for. And it wasn’t until 1994 that the average monthly salary outstripped the average cost of a package tour: 192,000 yen and 186,000 yen, respectively.

Two things kept the romance alive over the years: the Japanese-related resident community of Hawaii and the Japanese media. Outside of aboriginal Hawaiians and Americans from the mainland, Japanese and Japanese-Americans made up the largest ethnic population on the islands, and they catered to Japanese tourists with an acute understanding of what made them different from other visitors. Tourists from Japan could spend a long period of time on the islands without ever having to use English or, for that matter, emerging from their comfort zone of Japanese food and activities. Well-to-do Japanese bought condominiums there as vacation homes.

Movie poster for the Japanese version of the film Blue Hawaii.

Hawaii became the preferred destination for celebrities who needed time away from the usual sort of attention fame brings in Japan, but, inevitably, the Japanese media followed them. By the late ’80s, the “Hawaiian Travel Special” was a fixture on every TV station during the long New Year’s holiday break, with features showing famous Japanese actors and pop stars relaxing on the beach, fishing, and eating exotic food. In recent years, major music acts have put on large stadium concerts in Hawaii and set up package tours, complete with local transportation and accommodations, for their fans from Japan. Local Hawaiians rarely attend.

Since 1988, when Japanese citizens no longer required visas to visit the U.S., Hawaii has increasingly been an easy, affordable destination, especially now with the dollar lingering around the 100 yen line. However, the number of Japanese visitors has decreased over the past two decades. It peaked in 1997 at 2.2 million and was down to 1.5 million in 2015. This drop has been of great concern to the Hawaiian tourist industry, but it isn’t as bad as it may seem.

Young Japanese are not traveling abroad as much as their parents did at their age due to financial limitations and a more insular temperament. While all outbound travel has decreased steadily over the last ten years, only travel to Hawaii has seen a slight increase. The main reason for the upturn is repeaters, whose numbers are climbing as the huge baby boom generation reaches retirement age. Members of this cohort have disposable income and grew up during the most intense period of Hawaiian-longing. That’s why, despite the overall travel decline, every Japanese airline is boosting flights to Hawaii and they’re all operating at 80-90 percent capacity.

It is often said among Japanese themselves that Japan is not a place to relax; it is a place for work, for fulfilling the obligations that come with living. This mindset is a legacy of the postwar “industrial miracle” that changed Japan from a destroyed country into one of the world’s most powerful economies. The long hours and selfless devotion to company and family paid off, but at a huge price to Japan’s collective peace of mind. In many ways, “longing for Hawaii” is still the highest representation of freedom from worry and stress.

This mindset was revealed on a recent TV program, which profiled a matchmaking service that brings together single Japanese women and unattached men of all ethnic backgrounds who reside in Hawaii. One young Tokyo woman who enrolled in the service said her hometown is “too frantic to live in.” Though Tokyo is one of the safest, most orderly capitals in the world, any Japanese person watching the show will understand exactly what she means. As the center of Japanese business and government, Tokyo is inescapably crowded and hectic.

When asked if her parents objected to her looking for a foreign mate, she answered, “Not at all. They like Hawaii, too.” Obviously, whatever cross-cultural difficulties her parents might have with regard to their daughter’s non-Japanese spouse would be balanced out by her living situation. They could visit her any time, and everybody wants an excuse to go to Hawaii.

The post The Attack on Pearl Harbor Didn’t Stop the Japanese from Dreaming of Hawaiian Vacations appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Do you remember when we left Hawaii after dad died and moved to the family home in Kyoto?” my youngest aunt would say, referring to the brusque relocation of the three sisters and their mother immediately after their father died of a massive stroke four years before the war began.

They thought they were going home, but found themselves caught between two conflicting worlds. “Japanese soldiers would harass us at every train stop,” my aunt recalled, “taking away our rations because we were American, so we discovered how good the roots of weeds and grasshoppers were when we cooked them in shoyu and oil.”

“Yes, but the soldiers didn’t last long,” my mother would correct her, “all of them were sent to war—even the old men and young boys—except for those annoying intelligence officers who kept interrogating us. Food was gone, too. That’s why mother went to the family temple in Fukui where there was rice.”

“You two were so selfish then,” my oldest aunt would tell her sisters, “but you were young. After our sad dinners, I’d be upstairs and you thought I was asleep. You’d hide a small piece of mochi or nori and you’d grill it over the charcoal that kept the house warm. You didn’t realize the smell of any food woke the rest of us up, and we would hear you trying to be so sneaky … bad girls!” This would send them into gales of laughter.

The stories would cycle again and again, I would sit with my mom and her sisters at the light green Formica dining table, surrounded by banana trees and their lilting voices and laughter, feeling privileged to be a part of their closed group, rapt at each retelling. I’d use each of these times with my aunts and mother, by then in their 40s, to color a fuller picture of the Imamura family history—of lives torn apart and torn between homes, between identities, and between the two sides of the vast Pacific. Their oldest brother, a Buddhist bishop sent to California to start a temple and an institute for Buddhist Studies, would later help communities of other internees resettle into a country that had distrusted them, imprisoned them, and allowed their businesses and farms to be taken; the second brother, a Harvard graduate, married into a wealthy Japanese family (which meant taking their name) and helped lead their kimono factories before working as an interpreter in a U.S. consulate after the war. Their youngest brother, a Keio University graduate whose dream job as a political reporter for the Mainichi News transformed into an embedded war correspondent with the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia, would later focus on U.S.-Japan relations in his reporting and would build ties between the countries through his support of professional baseball.

Author’s mom and younger aunt who identified as Hawaii-born Japanese Americans. Photo circa 1930s.

 
The three sisters, for their part, worked in the English-language section of a women’s university library, keeping their bilingual skills up so that they would be ready to act as translators and coordinators for the Occupation of Japan, accompanying rising Japanese political leaders to the U.S. to be trained in the ways of democracy. Across their different careers, the Imamura siblings were all encouraged by their father to be the Bridge People: connectors fluent in the history, language, culture, and values of both nations, whose skills and perspectives made their roles connecting Japanese and American worlds both inescapable and honorable.

Though the laughter of my mom and aunts’ after-dinner conversations fills my memory, I remember just as well when they’d go quiet.

A hush would fall as my mom recounted how, as a high school student in Kyoto, she sat in her university class listening to the school intercom announcement of the Japanese offensive on a U.S. Pacific naval base.

“When I heard they had attacked Pearl Harbor,” she’d say, “I started to cry because that was my home. Through my tears I felt all of these eyes slowly turn towards me. I was American. They all suddenly realized it.”

The sisters’ cadence would also slow as they spoke of their eldest brother, Kanmo, painting the picture of a scholarly, quiet, and handsome man—the 18th generation member of our family to become a Buddhist bishop. His life, they would reflect, was the hardest from the beginning. Kanmo was born in Hawaii, but sent back to Japan when he was four years old to be raised as a bishop. His childhood was a lonely life at the temple without the family: tutored by priests and a step-grandmother who was distant and cold. He would tell me, years later, how he would walk alone between the temple and the house in the winter, the Sea of Japan’s cold air blowing through his priestly robes, wondering why he couldn’t be in Hawaii with his family. He would return to Hawaii to be the priest at the largest plantation temple in Wahiawa, and would realize his father’s dream of growing a temple and study center in California to support the Japanese community there.

Just as Kanmo started to expand the temple programs, the war began. Soon he found himself supporting Japanese-American families in the internment camps, helping those forced away from their homes over unfounded allegations of conflicting allegiances (especially ironic for those who had sons proving their loyalty with blood and body in 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe, a battalion where young Japanese-Americans prominently served). Three of my uncle’s children would be born in the sand-filled winds of the Gila River internment camp. At the end of the war, he saw his mission as providing shelter, food, dignity, and spiritual support to those released from the camps, often with nothing more than a train ticket and $30 in their pocket, to reclaim the businesses and farms taken from them. He would spend the rest of his life building interfaith study centers and programs for the disenfranchised, and returned to his birthplace to become the Bishop of the Headquarters of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temples of Hawaii.

Author’s oldest uncle with his wife and first child at the Gila River Internment Camp.

 
The sisters spoke with reverence for their middle brother, Shinshi, too. The hard-working Harvard graduate, had dreams of working for the American government. His hopes were dashed—as fate would have it, he was the only of the siblings not born in Hawaii, and his Japanese birth disqualified him from service. His ambition took him elsewhere though— Shinshi would become the head of General Motors in Japan, another form of bridge-building.

The youngest brother, Tokushi, a basketball prodigy in his school days in Hawaii, had an improbable gig straight out of college: he was an American reporter embedded with the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma and Shanghai. Tokushi would go on to become the political editor for the Tokyo-based Mainichi Shimbun, one of the top newspapers in the country. But he didn’t forget his American roots, and spent his free time doing such things as recruiting Japanese-American baseball stars like Wally Yonamine for Japanese teams or coordinating a trip for Helen Keller, the first U.S. Goodwill Ambassador sent to Japan after the war. The bilingual jokester also managed to stay friends with his McKinley High School pals in Hawaii, and somehow remained the quintessential “local boy” among them, despite the miles that separated them. I still remember the bright energy that would fill the room whenever my aunts and mother spoke of him.

I knew the night was winding down when the sisters would turn to talk of their mother, a Buddhist bishop’s wife who herself came from a long line of bishops and abbots, poets and publishers, and military rulers from a Shogunate that rose in the 14th century and waned by the 17th.

“Do you remember her practicing for the citizenship test when we were growing up in Hawaii, memorizing the entire Emancipation Proclamation?” my oldest aunt would start, “It was so funny to hear her pronounce ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ and to hear her recite ‘…all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.’”

“Her favorite movie scene was in Gone With The Wind,” my oldest aunt would recount, “and Scarlett’s defiance when she says, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”

In Japan at the end of the war but desperate to return to Hawaii with her children, grandmother Kiyo Imamura made her way back to Hawaii—“the birthplace of the ‘Bridge People,’” as she called it—to end her journey.

My family is not alone, of course. All second-generation Americans reconcile the norms and values of their family’s culture and of American culture, to the enhancement of each one. Such bridge-building replenishes and enriches our national fabric, reminding us of the universal relevance of our core values and adding texture to the American story. In Hawaii, where the host culture of Native Hawaiians accepted waves of immigrants through interracial marriage and linguistic and religious tolerance, cultural bridge-building is practically the state’s mission statement. Hawaii may seem far away from the mainland, but it couldn’t be closer to the American understanding of how diversity creates strength and unity.

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