20 Years of Tokyo Journal (1981 - 2001)

When the first thin and decidedly unglossy issue of Tokyo Journal was launched on the magazine racks of the city back in April 1981, Reagan was in power in America, Thatcher in the UK, and Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. The cold war was at its height with Soviet tanks having recently rolled into Afghanistan against protests from the West. Here in Japan, the prime minister was Zenko Suzuki, and those gaijins that you think have been here far too long were just starting to arrive.

Over 13 prime ministers later, Tokyo Journal is still here. In terms of British PMs or US Presidents, 13 takes you back as far as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Despite the minimal effect that most of Japan's leaders have had, this still represents an enormous amount of water under the bridge.

In that time TJ’s ever busy staff has covered just about every aspect of Tokyo life you would dare to mention, and a few others you wouldn’t. All this with a multinational crew of misfits, oddballs, and stowaways lacking in local language skills, journalistic training, or even the ability to read their own notes. Luckily they knew how to write. After twenty years on the loose, it’s time to round up the usual suspects.

In the Beginning

The first issue cost 200 yen, a veritable fortune in those days, and contained 24 fun-packed black and white pages. But even in those days this was a rag distinguished by its good taste and love of fine writing. Gordon Hunter's article from July 1982, "The Obama Connection," focused on the perpetual gaijin fantasy of sleeping with a Geisha. Of course, in those days, your average journalist still had a few hang ups about reporting racy stuff like this. Luckily Gordon wasn’t one of them. All he needed was a little warming up:

I forgot just who did what, but once we got down to ‘Business’ and were doing what we both did best, the situation eased considerably. I wasn’t out to make my quota, but I was determined to live up to my reputation as a gaijin, not to mention getting my benefactor’s money’s worth. For her part, it was her first time in the business to break ten minutes at a stretch, having been fed a steady diet of Japanese men, who are rated among the world’s worst lovers. (Ask any hooker in New York.) Anyway, we broke a lot more than the ten-minute mark. Between the two of us, we might have put an appendix on the Kama Sutra. She threw caution and professional ethics to the winds; in the end, she swore she wouldn’t be able to work for the next two nights. And if my claim to fame as the size king of Obama had been dashed that night, I soon became the undisputed top tekunishan. Not that I kissed and told, but apparently she was seen ambling bow-leggedly down the hall to her room the next morning and this story became the talk of Obama within the week.

The editor who let this thinly disguised piece of jism slip through was none other than Don Morton, who now writes film reviews for Metropolis magazine. Besides his editing duties, Don was also one of the top contributing writers in the early days of TJ. His article from July, 1983, ‘Take a Little Dandelion Root and Call Me in the Morning,’ shows the positive attitude to the Orient that has kept him here for so long:

Consider the Western doctor in a rowboat on a pond. By rowing, the doctor can effectively create movement and can eventually cross the pond. In contrast, the oriental doctor’s boat is beached by a river. With a simple, judicial push, the boat is launched into the river, here representing the body’s life force, and moves along with it.

This is also a fine example of the use of metaphor, a device which TJ writers have constantly fallen back on in a desperate attempt to get a handle on the often inexplicable nature of reality here in Japan.

But words are cheap. What the readers want is blood, sweat, and tears. Accordingly, Don felt he had to go the whole hog with Oriental medicine and have himself turned into a human pin cushion, visiting an acupuncture doctor, a sobering experience for most squeamish Westerners.
'That’s it. Your first sample acupuncture session.’ says Ron as he pulls out the last needles. ‘You may, during the rest of the day, think that I left one or two of the needles in. But tomorrow you’ll feel great!’ I did feel great the next day. But I often feel great.

The Bubble Years

By November 1986, when Maggie Kinser’s less complimentary article on Japanese medicine appeared, TJ had a different editor, Glenn Davis, and reflecting the optimism of the Bubble Years had swelled to a glossy 500-yen mag with 128 pages, some of them in color.

Kinser’s article ‘Getting High in ‘Drug-Free’ Japan’ had everything to do with the high costs of this economic success, comparing ‘pick-me-up’ drinks like Yunkeru and Lipovitan D to hard drugs:

Japan says 'No!' to doragus. But on their own terms, the Japanese are no innocents. If you want to get high in Japan, without getting busted, the only term you need to know is kusuri. It’s a convenient term, doubling as both the English word ‘medicine’ and the more sinister word 'Drug.'

But viewing small bottles with caffeine-charged vitamins as on a par with crack cocaine tells us maybe more about the writer than the phenomenon described. Perhaps Kinser’s problem was culture shock, the phenomenon of being unable to cope with what is considered normal in foreign environs. Robert J. Collins’ ‘More About Culture Shock’ from May, 1987, tried to introduce some scientific method into this fuzzy realm:

Now then, do people moving to Japan for the first time experience ‘culture shock’? Yes. How do we know? Because everyone says so. There you go. Proof.

Now, if only quantum mechanics or string theory could be so lucidly explained!

Collins broke the idea of culture shock into two factors - level of involvement and anticipation. The highest degree of his 10 levels of involvement would be a foreign wife of a Japanese husband, probably a fisherman. The weakest degree of his 3 levels of anticipation could be expected from someone who had never been outside their own hometown before:

The 5-B person, wife of a foreign businessman in residence who arrived in Japan with at least conceptual foreknowledge (or foreboding) of what to expect, will probably survive. The realities, compared to theoretical expectations, at least provide a standard for measurement. (‘I knew it would be crowded on the subways, but I’m now being fondled by eleven people.’) Yet, that’s only ten more than anticipated.

A complex and scholarly thesis, then, that could have stretched into an academic career. But ultimately, Collins spiked his own guns by focusing on the one factor we know cancels out all the others:

My grandfather, a wise and well-traveled man, put the issue in perspective for me many years ago: ‘If you can’t eat the food, go home.’ I find myself considering his advice more often than I care to admit. I’m still here, but I despise natto.

East was increasingly meeting West as Davis Barrager’s article in the August 1987 issue, ‘Love is a Many-Cultured Thing,’ explored the phenomenon of intercultural relationships and mixed marriages, and the way that some traditional parents try to stand in the way:

An educated young Caucasian of good family, for example, and the daughter of his Japanese landlord fell in love and went to his homeland, where they lived together. Discovering this, her parents sent her sister to persuade her to come home and care for her suddenly ‘Ailing’ mother. And home she went.

The Japanese film industry was also trying to muddy the waters of international romance. Jim Bailey’s ‘Lifting the Lid on Japanese Movies’ from November 1988, looked at, among other things, the way the movie industry consistently portrayed the Japanese as, willingly or unwillingly, a race apart:

Seen through Japanese eyes, World War II is but another link in a long chain of victimizations and misunderstandings, a chain which now lengthens to include kaigei rokei (foreign location) films depicting the modern, postwar Japanese as a naive people at the mercy of the outside world. In Kamisama, Naze Ai ni mo Kokkyo ga Aru No? (God, Why is There a Border in Love?), a Japanese photographer in love with a girl he meets in Switzerland, is deported from the country on trumped up charges. In Howaito Rabu (White Love). a Japanese woman goes to Spain to study flamenco dancing, bears a child out of wedlock, becomes a common prostitute, and meets a violent end. The photojournalist hero of Yoroppa Tokkyo (Trans-Europe Express) endures insults to the Japanese as ‘yellow monkeys,’ survives a roughing-up by a muscle-bound bouncer, and is even refused by a Parisian prostitute who tells him, 'No Asians.'

Old fashioned parents and the movie industry were not strong enough to hold back the flood of international love breaking down the borders of Japan. Gaijins, mainly men, were falling head over heels for Japanese women. The problem was the sweet, demure image Japanese females had overseas. The only way to combat this was to show Japanese womanhood in a new, brutal light. For the July 1989 issue, Don Morton decided to take a close-up look at the bone-crunching world of Japanese Women’s wrestling, running into the antithesis of Madame Butterfly in his article, ‘Bubblegum and Blood’:

Up the walkway came the lady wrestler you thought they’d stop short of. Hair done stylishly up in a razored lightning pattern on her bare head, and her trademark, a swastika ‘tattoo’ on her forehead, the legendary Dump Matsumoto. swaggered into the arena. Dump’s swagger makes Sylvester Stallone look like he’s in a ladies’ kimono.

About to Burst

Just when the Bubble looked like it was about to pop, TJ focused on another example of the Japanese female shuffling out of her demure, kimono-clad role. This time the rise, in the face of enormous opposition, of Japan’s career women.

In his article for the June 1990 issue, ‘The Pink Collar Noose,’ Richard Kaufmann painted a bleak picture of Japanese industry’s continued sexual inequality despite the fact of massive labor shortages for career-path openings:

Most women enter a Japanese company as ippan shoku: an employment umbrella that indicates less pay, shorter hours (8-5) and short-term expectations. It is virtually synonymous with OL-dom: the ubiquitous, uniformed Office Lady whose major tasks include serving tea and decorating the office (with her presence). She has an unwritten agreement with her employer to work for a maximum of five years and, when not otherwise engaged, to focus her energies on finding a husband.

To succeed as a career woman, Noriko Nakamura, the founder of the Japan Association for Female Executives, suggested habits of mind that flew in the face of Japanese society:

Put a high value on yourself, your own ideas and opinions; make eye contact; develop your own interests outside of work and family; cultivate your talents and skill, because if you expect the company to do it for you, you’ll never make it.


POP!

But rather than allow this to happen, Japan's male business elite decided to put women back in their place by having a massive economic coronary, thus increasing the pressure on womenfok to stay at home and leave the diminishing number of jobs to the menfolk.

January 1991’s TJ had Gregory Starr at the editor’s desk and the new logo with the backward 'K’ This issue also featured Rachel Swanger’s ‘Princess of the City,’ a look at the Miss Tokyo beauty pageant. Sanctioned by the metropolitan government, this was a confused beauty contest located somewhere in the no-man’s land of sexual politics. After fighting off an attempt to ban it by a socialist deputy in the Tokyo Assembly, the competition got into full swing. Instead of raw sex appeal, which was re-categorized as ‘Health,’ more civilized virtues, like ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘Internationalism,’ were required:

Miss Shibuya, a gutsy little Waseda student with shoulder-length hair and the support of the crowd, which seems composed primarily of her friends, heeds the call of internationalism: ‘I give you my speech in terrible English. I am so nervous. I am so glad to enter this important contest.’ But when the actress-turned-professor Eiko Muramatsu asks her for her favorite English proverb, her eyes squint and then widen with confusion. Hers is not high-tea English. It’s the English of Roppongi record shops. She nearly faints before blurting out, 'Don’t worry, be happy.'

Needless to say the poor wee thing didn’t win. But that didn’t stop internationalization. One of the greatest forces here, as usual, was sport. In the March, 1991 issue TJ carried an excerpt from ‘Slugging it out in Japan’ a book written by Warren Cromartie of Tokyo Giants fame with the help of TJ staffer Robert Whiting. Even in 1985 attitudes were changing:

Our best pitcher and coolest dude was the round-faced plumpish Suguru Egawa. He was a nice guy and his attitude was more like an American major leaguer than any other Japanese player I’d met. He thought that all the training and all the strict rules of the Giants – ‘no beards, no long hair, suits and ties on the road – were basically bullshit. He thought that words like ‘fighting spirit’ and ‘guts’ were nonsense. He was a real professional.

The glamour of baseball was seriously overrated, however:

I had a little chair in front of my little locker which I could hardly sit on. Guys were taking off their clothes a few inches away from my nose. A guy named Komada, a 6' 3" outfielder, had the next locker. He would be standing next to me, changing into his uniform; then, all of a sudden, he would bend over and moon me unintentionally. I’d be putting on my socks and there would be his big rear end six inches from my nose.

July 1992’s TJ was also interested in naked rear ends with Swede, Kjell Fornander’s expose on Japan’s porn industry, ‘Risque Business,’ in which he met Kenji Hayami a veteran of over 1,200 porno shoots:

"You meet each other in the morning," Hayami told Fornander, "Say hello, work, then say goodbye. They pass by like dolls. I’ve become a kind of Pavlovian dog: I know when it’s time, but otherwise I don’t think about it."

The article also tried to explain why women were gravitating towards the porn industry. Some even saw it as fashionable:

Yoshimura at CineMagic has a simpler reason for AV’s popularity as even a short-term career: he believes today’s youth have no morals. The desk in his Shinjuku office is thick with applications, each with a photo attached.
Many of the women are remarkably beautiful. A few show their breasts or pose in underwear. ‘These are from only the past few months,’ Yoshimura says. He holds up one of the applications. ‘This one is from a housewife with two children.

Bubble Hangover

Perhaps it was this decline in moral values that Kokichi Saito and Koji Kogo were concerned about, or maybe they just saw the economic downturn as an opportunity for their extreme brand of politics. The leaders of the Seishinkan – ‘Organization for a Clean Country,’ one of Japan’s far right parties, were however kind enough to allow Dan Papia to clamber aboard their sound trucks for his August 1992 article, ‘The Right Stuff.’ Keeping an open mind, Papia found, with true TJ journalistic integrity, that this wasn’t such a black and white story as you might imagine, but then again maybe he had other reasons for presenting both sides of the argument:

On one of my visits to the Seishinkan, I meet a member named Namiki, who wears a punch-perm and has only four and a half fingers on one of his hands. Saito introduces him as a Seishinkan member but his official title is ‘Adviser.’
“He used to be a yakuza, but he quit,” says Kogo. He pauses, apparently lost in some melancholic thought. “The problem is that even when you quit you can’t get your fingers back again.”

A different kind of fascism was on display in David Duckett’s ‘Animal House’ article from October, 1993. Going under cover for a week, Duckett reported on the living hell of a particularly bad gaijin house. You couldn’t get more blood, sweat, and tears than this.

Following the murder of Poncho, the former manager’s pet monkey, a new, tougher manager, Ken, was drafted in:

Ken is a real doll. A sturdy six-foot-four, he looks like Barbie’s Ken and was dubbed ‘G.I. Joe’ by residents. He likes the job title of ‘Fascist Troubleshooter.’ Ken is the very antithesis of his charges, most of whom are a Techno crowd who survive by hostessing, busking, or street selling, and have no qualms about living in a pigsty.

Ken, whose agenda, consisted of turning the house into ‘A home for good people with working visas’ had his work cut out for him with the kind of oddball characters the house was famous for. One girl tenant remembered a not untypical incident:

"A woman, four-foot-eight and blonde, knocked on my door at 3am. I opened it bleary-eyed and saw this woman with a blonde wig down to her knees, wearing rubber shorts with a massive dildo attached, high heels and a whip. She said, 'So, what does it take to get your attention?'"

Of course, critics might say this is merely muck-raking, sewer rat journalism, but in David Duckett’s hands such muck invariably turned to gold.

With Japan’s economy slowing down, Tokyo lost much of its appeal as the place to drop in and make a fast buck. As for Tokyo Journal, the tone became a little more serious, reflecting the changing times. One of the most serious and well-researched articles we ever ran was ‘Bad Blood,’ Philippa Bourke’s expose of the AIDS-infected blood scandal that blighted the lives of up to 2000 hemophiliacs. This article reveals how terrifyingly short-sighted and complacent medical professionals can be. Dr Takeshi Abe, one of the country’s top hematology specialists, was reluctant to admit that Japanese could even contract the AIDS virus at the Fourth International Symposium on Hemophilia Treatment:

Included in his report for the congress was the fact that there were no other reported cases in Japan, and an almost xenophobic statement. ‘It was suggested,’ Abe wrote, ‘As a possibility that this obvious difference between Western and oriental countries might be caused by some racial factors in sensitivity.’

After the Kobe Earthquake and Aum Shinrikyo

With the Kobe Earthquake and the Sarin Gas Incident striking Japan in quick succession in 1995, the flavor was definitely for serious news stories. In the March 1996 issue another hard-hitting article focused on the problem of Tokyo’s homeless. Joji Sakurai’s ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’ dealt with the City’s two-faced attempts to clear the homeless from West Shinjuku’s ‘Corridor 4’ tunnel, where dozens had been living in makeshift cardboard homes sometimes for over a year.

Instead of just brutally kicking them out, the Metropolitan government decided to build a 1.3 billion-yen moving walkway as a pretext for removing the homeless. Sakurai described the heavy-handed police action:

One by one, the protesters are dragged out of the passageway into the cold morning air, where a crowd of onlookers has gathered to observe a truly bizarre scenario: 850 battle-ready cops and security guards flailing at some 200 sick and aging homeless people.

Besides such in-depth reporting, one of Tokyo Journal’s main functions has been to enable our readers to get the best out of the city in cultural terms. Over the years, we have featured some fine musical and artistic events, such as the unlikely collaboration of the world renowned celloist, Yo-Yo Ma and the legendary kabuki dancer, Tamasaburo Bando performing Bach’s music for the film.

‘Flash of Genius,’ Martin Richardson’s article and pictures, in the December, 1995 issue, captured the unusual chemistry at work that day:

Roll camera. Action. The notes rose and Tamasaburo uncoiled. Soon the discussions, the interviews, the ‘hemming and hawing’ as Ma put it, made sense in the collaborative performance. Forgotten were Tamasaburo’s troubled musings on the Bach pulse: for the rhythmic ‘Gavotte’ movement, he actually made a virtue of the beat by wearing a drum and striking it with unbridled glee. In the poignant ‘Sarabande,’ the kabuki master was at his tragic best. Then in the ‘Courante’ he was a whirl of movement, snapping with his fan before finishing. ‘With a flash in his eyes,’ Ma recalls. ‘That was frightening as it should be. That was an amazing dramatic movement.’

One art that Tokyo Journal has supported perhaps more than anyone else has been the unique dance form of Butoh. In August 1998, Mayumi Saito investigated ‘The Changing Face of Butoh,’ talking to some of the top practitioners such as Ippei Yamada, as well as foreign collaborators like the Russian ballerina, Ksenie Ivanenko:

‘Butoh released me from the strict rules of classical ballet. Maintaining high tension on stage was a norm I had always taken for granted. However, as Yamada told me to relax, I started to reconsider the meaning of dancing and my definition of self.’

Someone else who can relax a lot more than before is yokozuna and sumo legend, Akebono, who recently retired from the game. When TJ spoke to him in October, 1999, he was still at the peak of his powers. James Nelligan asked him about the highlight of his career:

'The first time I wrestled Takanohana. I was new and guys in my stable said: 'You cannot beat him.' I went out there and one crack to his jaw and it was all over.'

To Infinity and Beyond

Blood, sweat and tears - and plenty of smiles - Tokyo Journal has seen them all. The English-speaking community in Tokyo may come and go, with people leaving and arriving every day of the week, but through 20 years of change, one thing has remained constant ‘Tokyo Journal’s mission to keep a handle firmly fixed on this, one of the World’s most exciting cities.

Tokyo Journal
April 2001