Japan after the 2004 Asian Tsunami

‘Why Give?’ asks Brad Williams. What factors should be considered when interpreting Japan’s US$500m pledge of emergency assistance in the wake of the Dec. 2004 Asian Tsunami? A figure behind only Australia (US$810m) and Germany (US$674). Leaving aside the development of humanitarian sensibilities among the Japanese public since the mid-1990s, far more interesting are the politico-diplomatic forces and objectives influencing the sum, constitution and deployment of Japan’s relief package.

Battling for the accruement of political capital, states engaged in ‘competitive compassion’ directly following the disaster. Doubling the United States’ pledge, Japan announced US$30m in aid, before themselves doubled by China’s US$63m. In response, the US increased its offer to $350m, before Japan’s final announcement of US$500m (similar one-upmanship occurred among European states), as one MOFA official stated “We cannot present a lower figure than the US”. In addition to national pride, Japan found an opportunity to assume a prominent international role divorced from the taint of militarism. Tokyo was of course conscious of the ‘China factor', Southeast Asia representing ‘a key arena in the contest for regional leadership'. With cutbacks to Japan's ODA budget caused by the continuing recession, China, having changed course after the 1995 conflicts for sovereignty over the Spratly Islands gained significant influence, coming off the better in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis by refusing to devalue its currency and saving the region from further recession. Japan on the contrary came under criticism by Malaysian PM Mahathir for ‘lack of urgency in distribution’ of aid. Learning from the experience, and operating with the assistance of myriad NGOs (particularly Japan Platform (JPF), an aid implementation entity created Aug 2000 after the failures of 1997, and receiving significant public funding) Japan was able to announce on the 21st of January 2005 that ‘it had finished disbursing emergency assistance’.

Eschewing the ‘chequebook diplomacy’ of earlier years for ‘visible assistance’, Japan deployed 1,800 SDF personnel in afflicted zones (concurrent with the 1,000 serving in Southern Iraq), ‘Japan’s largest overseas disaster relief deployment’, promoting internationally the image of the SDF as a legitimate relief organization. Furthermore the situation enhanced the notion of ‘burden sharing’ and interoperability with US forces, ‘foreseeing future joint operations’. Williams writes, ‘Public approval of the SDFs tsunami disaster relief activities has provided the impetus for the Japanese government to re-examine the submission to the Diet of an amendment to the SDF Law that would elevate overseas operations to the status of a ‘primary duty’ alongside home security’. Even the Japan Communist Party for the first time approved the overseas deployment of SDF forces.

Finally, Tokyo sought to use the tsunami as an opportunity to promote her bid for a permanent seat on the UNSC – Koizumi in fact raised the issue with Kofi Annan at the special ASEAN meeting in Jakarta on January 6th, Finance Minister Machimura similarly conveyed this to several of his South Asian counterparts. At the summit Koizumi announced Japan’s transfer from the competing US-led ‘core group’ to the UN-centric emergency assistance framework, ‘deflecting the criticism of foreign policy being too US-oriented, also [highlighting] the important place of the UN in foreign policy’. It is interesting to note Japan’s ‘double hedging’ – with $250m distributed bilaterally to specific recipients, and the other $250m funneled through UN-affiliated entities. Japan’s bid for a UNSC seat that year was unsuccessful, representing ‘the failure of Japan’s economic power to achieve an important diplomatic objective’.

Australia’s contribution of AU$1 billion, the greatest pledge of all nations, was distributed through a newly created bilateral organization (AIPRD) ‘reflecting Canberra’s desire for cooperative relations with a stable Indonesia’. It is sobering to reflect on this while noting that only five years later, in the wake of controversies over refugees and renewed media interest in the refusal of the Indonesian government to officially acknowledge the 1975 execution of Australian journalists at Balibo on the East Timor border, it appears that Australian-Indonesian ties are worse than ever.

Firearms in Tokugawa Villages

According to David Howell’s recent article in Japanese Studies, at any one time there were around 150 000-200 000 matchlock muskets circulating within peasant villages during the Tokugawa period, many being produced in Sakai and Kunitomi in Ōmi Province (Shiga Prefecture). Not targeted during Hideyoshi’s katanagari, guns weren't consistently regulated by the Shogunate until the 1650s. While ‘illicit weapons’ were confiscated, the exceptions became imagined as farming implements rather than weapons and categorized as hunter’s guns (odoshi teppō) and farmer’s guns (ryōshi teppō) for frightening and slaying animal pests (boars and deer). After the repeal of Tsunayoshi’s ‘laws of compassion’ shortly after his death in 1709, farmers were permitted to use live ammunition and their guns reclassified as ‘two-season’ or ‘four-season’. Unlike hunter’s guns, essential for their occupation and afforded greater importance, farmer’s guns were officially considered expediential and temporary, and were formally ‘borrowed’ from the government. By the early 18th century for practical reasons gun licenses were regulated by village authorities (for transferring the licenses of dead/incapacitated gun holders, and managing firearm ‘borrowing’ and repairs).

There were of course many unregistered guns floating around, many being unofficial replacements of damaged ones. Inspection tours were carried out in the Kantō region in 1838-40, responding to the threat of masterless samurai, unregistered commoners (consistently assumed to be criminal) and assorted ruffians. Rather than directly targeting warumono, these tours sought to dry up the pool of hidden, unlicensed firearms in villages, and in this were largely successful. In actual practice mainly damaged guns were confiscated with the remaining unlicensed ones entrusted to village officials who would proceed to request valid licenses for them.

From the early 1810s, but more particularly after the 1840s peasants occaisionally engaged in vigilante action, and sent requests for licenses for firearms for self-protection (yōjin teppō) in the face of escalating warumono violence. Capable villagers in Kōzuke and Musashi were officially enjoined to provide support in the repression of the 1864 Tengutō Insurrection, and the Bushu Outburst in 1866, and at other times to assist the Kantō Regulatory Patrol. Early in that decade bakufu edicts encouraged villages to react with necessary force in emergencies. ‘In the true spirit of micromanaging Tokugawa bureaucracy, the edict included instructions concerning the banners each village force would display and pointers on the preparation of bentō lunches’. Even so, there is little evidence of peasants actually using firearms to kill anyone. After the Restoration, the Meiji state placed tight restrictions on farmers’ gun ownership, with only a minority of professional hunters awarded licenses by 1876.

Tange on Tange

Paul Noritake Tange, the son of Kenzo Tange spoke about his father’s work at the Art Gallery of NSW on Wednesday evening. You could feel the importance and wealth emanating from this fellow. He kept things simple, interesting, and often amusing, but it lacked the personal anecdotes I was hoping for. Still it’s interesting how your perception of what appears to be a concrete rectangle with windows can change entirely once you’re told the philosophy behind it.

The four points underpinning Tange’s works are; a rejection of functionalism (that is, a genuine spirit and aesthetic must lay behind utility), unity between technology and traditional design, attention to the layout of urban space, and the importance of open-air space for communication (of the agora/piazza sort. In fact an open area before the TMG building is directly modelled on Michelangelo’s Capitoline Hill).

On the incorporation of traditional structural features, look at the Kagawa Prefectural Government Office; just how the level roofs and windows reinterpret the beams and posts of buildings like the Ise Shrine and Katsura Villa, with a strong emphasis on light and shadow. Though light was used most stunningly within the Tokyo Olympic Stadium and St. Mary’s Cathedral.

Finally, too, I understand his notion of a ‘linear city’, which baffled me when earlier studying his 1960 Tokyo Bay plan. Simply, looking at the rapid radial growth of the Tokyo metropolis, he envisioned instead a model that allowed the urban centre to expand horizontally along a central ‘spine’, extending as needed, and allowing for cleaner transportation through the centre. The 1960 plan of course fancifully pushed the heart of the city into Tokyo Bay itself.

- - - - - - - - - - - - Residential

------------------------------------ City Centre Spine

- - - - - - - - - - - - Residential

He also spoke about recent projects. The Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, completed last year, was Tange Associates first competition-winning design since Kenzo Tange’s death. It is a 50-story building containing three schools. One priority in design was based in that principle of communication, the corridor and schoolyard reinterpreted as large atriums every three stories, opening in three dimensions (one reaching another by a balcony or staircase). It’s elliptical form comes from this also, allowing for greenery and open space at the structures base, and the tapered top meant to reveal more sky, the same reason that the TMG Office rises in twin towers rather than one heavy block. It’s shape was also intended to differentiate it further as a school from ordinary office buildings. The name comes both from its shape, and alluding symbolically to its purpose as a school to nurture the potentiality of children. He was proud, he said, when taken directly there by a taxi driver after asking for “that strange new building”.

'Mutual Understanding'

‘The dire need for better ‘mutual understanding’ is frequently and enthusiastically endorsed. But wakatte kudasai means ‘please understand’ in the sense of ‘please accept my explanation, regardless of whether it has any basis in fact’. It connotes acceptance or tolerance. ‘Understanding’ in this Japanese context is another word for agreeing. True ‘understanding’ of people or things implies accepting them the way they are, as long as you are not strong enough to change them. If you have strength, the other party will show ‘understanding’ by a certain degree of adaptation to your wishes…Japanese are often well aware of the political connotation of ‘understanding’ in their usage; as a newspaper editor warned, the time is gone ‘when we were able to enjoy the often beautiful misunderstandings – and ignorance – of the foreigners’’.

Karel Van Wolferen - The Enigma of Japanese Power, 1989. pp.10-11

Samurai Loyalty

Today I browsed a short article published last year by Olivier Ansart, one of my own professors, regarding the changing interpretations of chu or ‘loyalty’ among 17^th and 18^th century samurai thinkers.

There was no consensus in moral discourse of just what chu consisted, though all interpretations involved a personal relationship between individuals (in this context between lord and retainer), differing however in scope, depth and intensity. The more emphatic crafters of bushido ideology (like Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Daidoji Yuzan, Izawa Banryu) maintained that chu required absolute obeisance, the samurai ‘belonging to his master, not himself’. Ogyu Sorai believed that such a condition was only suitable for ‘wives and concubines’, defining chu as ‘doing things for others as we would ourselves’.

Ansart presents several cases demonstrating debate over the application of the concept. Concerning the actions of the ancient Chinese Tang and Wu, who denouncing their kings as tyrants murdered them to found their own dynasties of Shang and Zhou, while Yamazaki Enzai could not conceive the possibility of a lord deserving of retribution, Kumazawa Banzan ‘argued that remonstrance and subsequent martyrdom was the only possible behaviour and manifestation of true loyalty’. Yamaga Soko and Hayashi Ranzan believed a wicked lord opened themselves to punishment and Sorai maintained the inevitability of leading family’s displacement. ‘They all accepted the idea of chu as devotion of a servant to his master, but diverged on visions of scope, the conditions and limitations of this devotion’.

Over these centuries, the idea of loyalty was challenged philosophically whilst also being effected by social pressures. Despite some resistance, it was apparent that chu was simply one element within a greater universal morality, thus in situations it necessarily vied with other moral and ethical obligations. That is, recognition of the conditionality of loyalty (e.g. as against the maintenance of personal honour, or need to place the good of the state / population above obedience to one’s lord). The question of ‘divided loyalties’, such as between father and lord, also largely remained unresolved.

The social conditions of the Tokugawa era significantly shaped people’s understanding of chu. With the Pax Tokugawa came a ‘quasi-unanimous exaltation of loyalty’, likely resulting from greater economic dependence of retainers on their daimyo, and daimyo (whose inheritance of their fief was contingent on an oath of loyalty) upon the shogun. ‘Chu became a mere moralistic veneer on a conduct that was largely imposed by rational self interest’. The emergence of a money economy further reshaped human relationships, coming to demonstrate the ubiquity of contractual relationships ‘based on mutual benefit and quest for profit’. Samurai were necessarily submerged in the commercial world of the chōnin and so naturally come to see themselves as offering a service in exchange for a salary. ‘The old concept of loyalty had been undermined by the facts of life in Tokugawa society’. Ansart, however, suggests that chu managed to survive by shifting to a connection that couldn’t be tested by the daily realities of ‘power relationships and shifting interests’ - to the imaginary relationship between subjects and the Emperor.

Adoration and Castration

A few weeks ago I read an article by Kinya Tsuruta, ‘The Images of Westerners in Modern Japanese Fiction: Adoration and Castration’ from a 1988 collection The Walls Within.

Tsuruta suggests that based in their general unfamiliarity with Westerners, early 20^th century Japanese authors tended to either demonize or idealize their white characters. Novelists would caricature physical features (eye colour/hair/odour), with the ‘implicit assumption that external appearance confers information about internal character’ – thus by emphasizing the physical differences between Westerners and Japanese, the point was made that Westerners were also unlike Japanese in modes of thought and behaviour, enhancing the perception of distance between the two. By dehumanizing / animalizing Westerners, readers more readily accepted unrealistic portrayals of unpredictable ‘discontinuous (sub-human) foreigners’. This wasn’t confined to negative images. In some women’s writing white men became the sincere, gentle and passionate ‘knights in shining armour with a ticket to a Western utopia’, unsurprisingly the positive depictions of men’s literature focused more on sexualized physical aspects of white women.

Tsuruta explores the inferiority complex found within postwar literature. Western models replaced Chinese not only in the realms of technology and administration, but also culture and aesthetics, and the typical Japanese body seemed especially far flung from the ideal of Greek statues, creating ‘a sense of physical inferiority unmitigated by Japan’s subsequent economic success’. The immediate postwar situation however meant that ordinary Japanese acquired first-hand experience in dealing with Westerners, and so literary treatment required more definite, realistic consideration, no longer utilizing these characters as ‘clever literary devices or vague symbols’.

Included was this interesting quote from Gregory Clark, “The Japanese are quite open to thoughts and cultures from outside, but they are closed to people from the outside. The French are the reverse; they are open to people but not to foreign cultures”.