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Japan Today
23-06-2025
- General
- Japan Today
Japan leads world in a number of ways ... but not all good
By Michael Hoffman 'Japan as number one' – you'd think we were back in the 1980s. Japan entered that decade the world's third largest economy; by 1988 it was second largest; would it supplant the U.S. and be first? A matter of time, thought many Japanese and more than a few Americans – Japanese with pride, Americans with varying degrees and combinations of fear, mistrust, envy, admiration and occasional spasms of outright loathing. A generation earlier Japan had been rubble; now the nation that had defeated it was itself facing defeat. It was a challenging and tense moment. It passed. Japan's bubble burst, America's fortunes revived, and 40 years later Japan finds itself an aging, sagging, it's not too much to say doddering, has-been. Number one? Number four, economically speaking, and if a second economic miracle is on the horizon, it needs a visionary to see it. But there's more to a nation's life than its economy, and Shukan Gendai (June 23) boldly declares, 'The Japanese are number one in the world' – in a number of ways, not all of them good but that's not the point; distinctiveness is, and give Japan its due: after a century and a half of 'modernization,' 'Westernization' and various other forms of trashing its own past and large swaths of its native culture, Japan remains Japan – which is to say distinctive, which is to say unique – number one, if you choose to put it that way. To start, as Shukan Gendai does, with the obvious: it's the world's longest-living nation, one of the safest, arguably one of the cleanest, and possibly the trimmest, only 25 percent of its population being overweight as against 70 percent of Americans and just over half of Europeans. Thank rice for that, says the magazine – a point to which we'll return in a moment. Another 'number one' leaps off the page at us: Japan is the nation most protective of nature. Really? That too invites a pause for reflection. Let's consider sex in the meantime. Japanese couples are 'the world's most sexless.' Marital sex, broadly viewed, is tepid, occurring on average 45 times a year, according to a global survey by the condom-maker Durex. What would Greeks think of that? They're the world leaders at 164 times a year, roughly as far above the world average (103 times) as the Japanese are below it. Not surprisingly, Japanese seem to be the world's least satisfied with their marriages and their romantic lives in general, 24 percent declaring themselves satisfied versus the world average of 44 percent. But then there's this, proof if any were needed of the old silver-lining-behind-every-cloud adage. Unerotic and unsatisfactory Japanese marriages may be once the novelty wears off, but there are grounds – at least Shukan Gendai finds some – for declaring them possibly the world's most harmonious. The evidence? Marriage counselors claim more than half their clients – 53 percent – consult them as couples rather than as individuals. Husband and wife visit the marriage counselor together, and togetherness… well, is its own reward. Japan is said to be the least religious of nations. Not so, says Shukan Gendai. On the contrary, it leads the world in belief in 'spiritual entities' – not God in the monotheistic sense, or gods in the classical Greek or Roman mode, but real nonetheless, to believers, (or better to say, if 'belief' is too forceful a word for what is going on here, to those breathing the air that nurtures those spirits who are no less real and possibly more so for being, most of them, nameless, formless, undefinable; impossible, in short, to pin down in the way the West likes to pin down its existent beings and things.) Japan is different, roots of the difference going back to ancient Shinto and its 'myriad gods' – kami in Japanese, a word which 'God' or 'gods' translates most inadequately; 'spirit' or 'spirits' conveys their amorphousness better. Ambiguity, a Western vice, is a Japanese virtue; Japan may be the world's most ambiguous nation. So much the better if it is, and better off it may well be for rejecting 'the West's tendency to call everything either black or white.' In philosophy it's known as the Law of the Excluded Middle: either a proposition is true, or its negation is true. A statement is either true or false, a being either existent or non. Why impoverish life by rejecting contradiction? Japan embraces it and is the richer thereby. Kami were (still are, if Shukan Gendai sees true) everywhere; they did everything; not by accident was this 'the land of the gods.' Kami were 'birds, beasts, trees, plants, seas, mountains and so forth,' wrote the early-modern Shintoist Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801); human too, sometimes. They came and they went; here today, they might be gone tomorrow; amorphous yes, but 'all things in this world, such as the changing of the seasons, the falling of the rain and the gusting of the wind, as well as the various good and bad things that happen to countries and people, all are entirely the august works of the gods,' wrote Norinaga; there were some 'that shone with the luster of fireflies and evil kami that buzzed like flies,' says the 8th-century chronicle 'Nihon Shoki.' That's part of the heritage Japan rejected as it modernized – maybe not completely. Shukan Gendai at any rate finds traces of it in the Japanese character even today. And on that note we can return to rice and nature. Rice traditionally was sacred; so was nature. The one was more than food, the other more than natural. It was (they were) supernatural, alive in ways lost to us. What we gained in mastery and abundance we lost in sacredness. The gods fled – or perhaps didn't, not all of them, not entirely; they drop by from time to time to see how we're doing, sometimes declaring themselves, more often not. Individuals never fully escape their childhood, nor nations their past. The facts remain: rice consumption has declined steadily since the 1960s, lagging now behind bread as a breakfast choice, and as for nature, the Japanese can respond as they like to surveys measuring their reverence for it, the visual evidence is plain: they reverence concrete more. © Japan Today
Japan Today
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Today
Need for baby hatches in Japan seems greater than ever
By Michael Hoffman 'Lonely childbirth' is the English title Spa (June 3-10) gives its report. Can a deeper loneliness be imagined? A girl, a teenager, perhaps in her early 20s, a child herself, at an age when 'knowing the facts of life' means knowing what fun they are. That's a start. The childish mistake is thinking it's the end. Suddenly grownup reality rears its ugly head. It's a rude awakening. 'Aoi Tanaka' (a pseudonym), now 21, recalls hers for Spa. She was 19, a high school graduate, adrift in Tokyo after arriving from the country to attend vocational school. She dropped out to pursue a night life centered on 'underground idol' bands that play small venues and interact with fans. Her funds ran out. Seeking easy money and finding an easy way to it, she slept her way to financial solvency – so far so good – and – grim anticlimax – pregnancy. You'd think she'd never heard of it. The truth sank in slowly. Her period, she explained, had always been irregular, She'd feel something moving inside her but her belly scarcely swelled; she was a full eight months gone before she visited a gynecologist. Who was the father? Who knew? What next? Ditto. It was too late for an abortion. She'd have to give birth, but as to raising the child, 'What kind of mother would I be?' Like her own mother, perhaps, who seems to have borne her under similar circumstances and, though she did in fact raise her, was, in her chronic poverty, constant desperation and occasional violence, a negative example at best: 'I didn't want to be to my child what my mother was to me.' Her ward office counseled adoption. It seemed best. The child – a boy – was born. 'I tried to spend as little time with him as possible,' she says, 'so that love wouldn't grow in me, but when the time came to part I held him tight and yes, I cried. I hugged him and sobbed, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'' She still is, and if her sorrow hasn't changed her lifestyle much, it has at least made her more careful. An unsettling reflection of unsettled times is a recent succession of incidents of infanticide and infant abandonment. Spa mentions two: a teenage high school student arrested in Nagano Prefecture in April on suspicion of murder of the infant she'd just given birth to at home, and, a month later, a young woman in her early 20s, charged with abandoning her one-month-old on somebody's veranda – hoping perhaps in her despair that it would fall into kindly hands. 'Circumstances were likely such,' speculates Dr Takeshi Hasuda (of whom more in a moment), 'that the felt need for absolute secrecy was the overpowering consideration. Alone, in labor and in pain, bleeding, panicking, they are not capable of normal judgment, so that they may be driven even to murder.' What to do, and who to do it? Japan's government, notoriously slow to address issues that in more traditional times were family matters, remained numbly inactive as more and more cases of this sort roiled the social waters. Someone, somewhere, at some point, sufficiently moved and with sufficient energy and influence to seize the initiative, would have to take the first step. It happened at last – in the Kyushu city of Kumamoto. In 2006 the director of the local Jikei Hospital was Taiji Hasuda (1936-2020). His notion, inspired by similar facilities then common in Germany, was a 'baby hatch.' Mothers in unwanted pregnancies, or others acting on their behalf, could deposit newborn infants or even, as the case may be, somewhat older children – anonymously. No questions asked. The hospital would see to the child's medical needs and arrange either adoption or placement at an orphanage. It would, Taiji hoped, at the very least save infant lives and offer mothers an alternative to desperate infanticide. Authorization granted by the pertinent local governments, the 'Stork's Cradle' baby hatch opened in 2007. (The stork's long bill and innocent white coloring makes it the perfect folkloric baby-bringer, a natural and culture-spanning answer to a small child's question 'Where do babies come from?') Among the first children to 'come from' Stork's Cradle was one Koichi Miyatsu – of whom more in a moment. Takeshi Hasuda, to return briefly to him, is Taiji Hasuda's son and Jikei Hospital's current director. He carries on his father's work. It's a lonely undertaking – absolutely so until this past March, when a Tokyo hospital opened the nation's second baby hatch – the 'Baby Basket' – along the lines of Stork's Cradle, which as of March 2024 had taken in a total of 179 children. How many of them would have perished otherwise? There is no knowing. Does the hatch's existence offer a too-easy path to the casual skirting of responsibility? That and other ethical issues swirl. The distressed mother's right to anonymity is one thing. What about the child's right, later in life, to know his or her origin? That too must enter the equation. 179 children, no doubt 179 stories, encompassing so vast a range of emotions – even within one child, let alone 179 – that generalization is impossible. As for Miyatsu, 'The day I was left there was the day a new chapter of my life began,' he told AFP News a year ago. Not, as it happens, the first chapter. He was five months old when his mother was killed in an accident, and going on three when the relatives caring for him left him at the hatch. 'I have no recollection of the moment when I was dropped off… but the image of the hatch's door is seared into a corner of my brain.' Two years earlier he had told the Yomiuri Shimbun, 'I was saved because of (Stork's Cradle).' He has reason to be grateful. In short order he was adopted by a couple whose love needed no blood ties to awaken it. Now 21, he is a student at Kumamoto University and a founding director of 'University for Kids Kumamoto,' in which capacity he addresses local elementary and junior high school kids 'about the importance of life,' as Kyodo News reported last December. It's a vast subject – one on which he has a unique perspective. © Japan Today
The Guardian
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Harris Yulin, character actor and Broadway star, dies at 88
Harris Yulin, a character actor with more than 100 film and TV credits, has died at the age of 88. According to Deadline, his death was announced by family and his manager. He died on 10 June of a cardiac arrest in New York City. The Los Angeles-born actor appeared in films including Scarface, Ghostbusters II, Training Day, Rush Hour 2, Night Moves, Doc, Final Analysis, Multiplicity, The Hurricane, Bean and Clear and Present Danger. He was also known as a stage actor appearing on Broadway in productions of Hedda Gabler, The Price and The Diary of Anne Frank. He also directed a number of shows including The Glass Menagerie and won a Lucille Lortel award for his work behind the scenes on The Trip to Bountiful. On the small screen, Yulin's credits included Cagney and Lacey, Little House on the Prairie, an Emmy-nominated turn on Frasier, Entourage, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The X-Files, Billions, And Just Like That and 12 episodes of Ozark. Before his death, Yulin was preparing for a role in TV series American Classic with Kevin Kline and Laura Linney. The series is focused on a Broadway actor who suffers a public meltdown. 'Harris Yulin was very simply one of the greatest artists I have ever encountered,' said the show's director Michael Hoffman who had previously worked with Yulin on Michael Keaton comedy drama Game 6. 'His marriage of immense technique with an always fresh sense of discovery, gave his work an immediacy and vitality and purity I've experienced no where else. And what he was as an actor, he was as a man, the grace, the humility, the generosity. All of us at American Classic have been blessed by our experience with him. He will always remain the beating heart of our show.'
Edinburgh Reporter
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Restless Natives
There are those of us from a certain generation that grew up with Restless Natives. I remember it being screened on Channel 4 while still at St Mark's Primary School in Oxgangs. The next day my classmates were buzzing with tales of the Clown and the Wolfman riding on a Suzuki motorbike and holding up buses. They presented a new kind of Scottish hero from just down the road in Wester Hailes. Part of it was seeing characters with accents like yours, they were modern day folk heroes robbing the rich to literally throw money around Edinburgh council schemes. Forty years later the story returns with a new stage production which arrives in Edinburgh this month at Leith Theatre exactly four decades after the film premiered in Edinburgh's ABC cinema in June 1985. Original Restless Natives screenwriter and now lyricist Ninian Dunnett and director Michael Hoffman invited Sarah Galbraith to be part of an original workshop for the new musical version just after Covid-19. The role she was invited to play had a certain amount of heft thanks to the great character actor Ned Beatty who played American cop Bender. In the original film he gets involved in the police chase to capture Will and Ronnie. (This time around Bender remains American but he has changed gender.) 'I didn't know they were going to switch the role' said Sarah of Bender's transition from male to female, 'but like the character, I was an American in Scotland.' Galbraith is now based in Falkirk with her husband and daughter. 'Later I asked Michael Hoffman and he explained that he hadn't really thought about it, but decided it would be great for this version. They've developed this brilliant story around her and the reason she really wants to catch these boys is because of issues with her dad. It's a cool transition.' While the original film is packed with Scottish banter and humour, it was also political with an undertone of Scottish nationalism. It's fair to say anti-Thatcherite themes were more obvious. Ms Galbraith said: 'The production does have a moral compass, there's dialogue where the characters talk about tourists spending £20 on a pair of plastic bagpipes while they are underpaid. Will's moral compass kicks in and he wants to give the money away to help people. The scene where money is fired out of these cannons to his community with people picking up the money is very powerful. Ronnie goes more off the deep end and is more into the badness (of robbing). It's really all about how you 'stick it to the man' and make more of yourself than what was ever expected of you.' The production has been successfully touring Scotland where certain audiences have cheered when the classic line is recited 'I hold up buses'. Edinburgh is central to the story with locations such as Wester Hailes, Princes Street, North Bridge and Salisbury Crags all included in the original film. The bus station scene was said to have been filmed in Glasgow but the yellow Bar-Ox (a teenage gang from Oxgangs) spray paint on the escalator suggests otherwise. Now north Edinburgh will become part of the story when Restless Natives arrives at the regenerated Leith Theatre. Sarah said: 'We are looking forward to arriving in the capital where the story is set. It's a home-grown Scottish musical, there are lots of jukebox musicals now but as well as the original Big Country material there's new music written by Tim Sutton. The sounds very much belong in the 80s in terms of the Big Country guitar riffs as well as the kinds of sounds you might recognise from an advert or something that could only be from that time.' The much loved Big Country soundtrack amplified the Scottish underdog spirit of the film, and Will's fascination with Rob Roy also added a further swashbuckling romance. The musical, much like the original film, suggests it's time for Scotland to produce new stories and heroes. Sarah added: 'The tourists are no longer interested in the original Scottish heroes. They want to know about these new ones. As the policeman says at the end 'spending is up, tourism is up; you're bigger than the Loch Ness Monster'. These boys become the Scottish heroes of the times'. Ned Beatty was persuaded to take on the original role of Bender for £25,000, a kilt and a Scottish holiday. Ned Beatty Photo courtesy of Studio Canal Sarah agrees there are resonances with herself and the character. She arrived in Scotland after growing up in New Jersey and meeting her husband while singing on a cruise ship. She said: 'I was about 15 minutes from New York and my thing growing up was Broadway shows. In those days you could get tickets for the last row for around $15. My idol was Lea Salonga who was the original voice of Jasmine in the Disney film Aladdin, I would go and see her in Miss Saigon and Les Misérables, really anything she was in'. Sarah achieved something of an American dream when she met Lea and became her backing singer for UK tours and a subsequent Christmas tour of the states. She will carry on in that role later this year. 'I met my idol and now I sing backing for her'. Sometimes dreams do come true. Restless Natives is at Leith Theatre from June 7 to 21 2025 A still from the original film courtesy of Studio Canal Sarah Galbraith – an American in Scotland 'Restless Natives' Musical Scotland Tour 40 years on from their last ride (the original film was released in 1985), this hilarious and faithful new adaptation is produced by the same creative team behind the beloved classic Scottish film. PHOTO Colin Hattersley Like this: Like Related
Japan Today
01-06-2025
- General
- Japan Today
As a society we seethe with irritation: What can we do about it?
By Michael Hoffman Come, let's be frank with one another: what irritates you? This person, that thing, this situation, that sound – oh, that sound, that grating sound! 'We're losing control of our emotions,' writes psychiatrist Hideki Wada in a booklet, published by President Books, titled 'How to Cultivate an Unemotional Heart.' 'Emotional' is a literal but somewhat misleading rendering of kanjoteki, whose meaning here seems to be 'prone to' or 'vulnerable to irritation' – which emotion, together with its kissing cousin, anger, are corrosive, physiologically (they weaken the immune system ) and psychologically (they make us miserable). Who wouldn't be free of them, if they would but free us? They won't. 'Anger is the emotion that surges most readily in us,' writes Wada – 'more than happiness, more than sadness. Moreover, anger is the emotion that translates most readily into action' – to our ultimate chagrin if not ruin, for actions performed and words uttered in anger are seldom well chosen and often blow up in our faces. It so happens that as I write this my neighbor across the lane is attacking his lawn (and me) with one of those unmuffled naked-motor grass-cutting blades that raise the most head-splitting, soul-crushing racket – disturbing him, it seems, not at all, which is odd, given what it's doing to me. There he is, calm personified in the eye of the storm, the very picture of leisured serenity, you'd almost think he was in Zen meditation, so unhurried are his movements, and as for progress, that hardly seems to be the goal at all, so little is he making. Curious enlightenment. Advise me, Dr Wada! (You are right: anger surges very readily indeed.) What should I do: Go out and give him a dose of my rage? Oh, the pleasure it would give me to jolt him rudely out of his trance! The more rudely the better. But it's hardly neighborly, maybe not even civilized; pleasure would give way to regret, regret to pain, and who's the loser in the end? – he, armored in tranquility and laughing at me for 'losing control of my emotions,' or me out of control and all too keenly aware of making a fool of myself? Better perhaps to go for a walk and come back later, after he's done. But isn't that being a little too easy to get along with? Or – a third possibility – approach him with rage suppressed and sweet reason foremost, appealing to his humanity, his understanding, his sense of community, in short all the higher faculties said to characterize our species, suggesting maybe some grass-cutting alternative, a manual lawn mower or even a newer quieter model of motorized blade. That's probably best – but those of us prone to irritation wouldn't be if that came easily to us, would we? No, rage begets enraged speech or no speech at all. (Or how about this: say, with scarcely concealed sarcasm, 'I'll even pay for it myself!' – if that doesn't shame him, nothing will. But what if nothing does?) What does the doctor say? 'My first defense against irritability,' he says, 'is' – if possible – 'to avoid irritating situations.' Take a walk, in short. It's in fact what I do, coming back to quiet restored. Good. And yet not. Something's missing; the challenge issued (unconsciously but still) remains unanswered, irritation persists, less edgy but not much less irritating. And what of all the other provocations out there? We'd be walking all day 'avoiding' them, avoiding one only to blunder into another no doubt, drawing the only conclusion possible: irritation is unavoidable. As a society we seethe with irritation. Wada cites road rage, an increasing hazard. Today's rager might be tomorrow's victim and vice versa. Whose character is proof against it, in a mass society that has no time for nuances of individual character? Everyday life plants us cheek by jowl with masses of people who mean absolutely nothing to us and to whom we mean nothing. How can perfect strangers' little ways fail to irritate us – he jammed against you in the train with his face that, for no good reason but no less for that, rubs you the wrong way; she at the supermarket checkout extracting coins one yen at a time while you grind your teeth waiting your turn behind her; the boss, subordinate or colleague at work who in all innocence (or perhaps not) says just the wrong thing at just the wrong moment in just the wrong tone with just the wrong expression on his or her face, and so on and so on, instances multiply faster than the typing fingers can type them or the tongue give them utterance. If one could only be alone! But isolation is no defense. The three years of the COVID epidemic proved that. 'The government response to it,' Wada writes, 'was shaped by epidemiologists who advised isolation on epidemiological grounds – not,' he adds, 'by psychiatrists who know the psychological price to be paid.' Soaring alcoholism and suicide figures bear him out. Stress, strain – it's everywhere. Whoever gets to the end of the day in a state of tranquil contentment has won the prize of prizes and deserves heartiest congratulations, but the facts conspire against it. Fact of facts: This world was not made to my specifications, or yours; it doesn't suit us, nor we it – in short, we have no control, or at most very little, over our environment beyond the four walls of our houses or rooms, retreat into which, as noted above, has its perils. We're barraged by sounds that make us cringe, sights that revolt us, words that offend us though not (most of the time) meant to. There's the parked car with the engine running, driver asleep oblivious; the motorbike hotrodders roaring by just as you're dropping off to sleep (or any other time!) – those irritations at least are justifiable on environmental and social grounds. Others are not: dogs if you don't like dogs, katakana English such as that which litters Wada's booklet (shichiuashon, furasutorashon, kurozuappu for close-up, mesodo for method, etc), ubiquitous background music filling shops, streets and heads whether your head likes it or not – what's more irritating than music you can't turn off? The very garbage trucks emit beeping nursery-rhyme melodies as they make their rounds. Stupid, foolish – why make mountains of a molehills? It's nothing. Surely a mature adult can learn to cope with – and all to too often must cope with – much worse than even the worst of these minor irritations? Surely you can reason down your feelings by recalling how very much more serious the real problems of life are? And surely there are enough of those to make inventing new ones out of nothing idiotic? True, true. But feelings are peculiar creatures. They refuse to be reasoned out of existence. They mock reason. They say, 'You're right, reason's right, I'm wrong – and I don't care, I win anyway!' And so they do. Wada's advice boils down to this: Take a deep breath, take a step back, take a walk here, have a talk there, look receptively outward rather than obsessively inward. The first of these, the deep breath, is physiological: The cerebral cortex, reason's seat within the brain, is fed, he explains, by oxygen; the symptoms of anger (the surging emotions, the loss of self-control, the loss for words, the reckless disregard for consequences) are 'the brain's warning that it needs oxygen.' Feed it. Is it that simple? Really? Maybe, maybe not. If it were, Wada and his fellow psychiatrists – they number an estimated 17,000 nationwide – would be out of business, wouldn't they? © Japan Today
