My encounters with Japan
My encounters with Japan
Prof. Abhijit Guha
Prologue
To a Bengali born and brought up in India Japan is not a very well known country like England or United States of America but not an almost unknown one like Liberia or Lesotho. I came to know about Japan and its native name Nippon as the ‘country of the rising sun’ from my school geography book. It was rather curious for me learn that the Japanese also take rice like the Bengalis but technologically much more advanced than us in the making of sophisticated gadgets, like cars, at a much lower price, which they sell in the world market. My father once told me that the Japanese cook rice in hollow bamboo, which they take with fried prawn in cylindrical forms and they even eat bamboo! That was really curious for me. Later, I came to know about Marshall Arts of self-defence of Japan like Judo and Karate, which became popular in Kolkata during my school and college days. I viewed a classic Kagemusha, a 1980 film by Akira Kurosawa a little later, which took me to the feudal Japan and real fights of the shadow warrior(a thief who was made to impersonate the warlord) in the celluloid.
Poster for
Kagemusha. Source: https://www.teepublic.com/de/pin/6400971-kagemusha-kurosawa-poster-samurai-japan
(accessed on 21.05.2022).
By that time, I read
one of the most wonderful descriptions of Japanese culture and literary works
in a Bengali book by the famous litterateur Buddhadev Bose (1908-1974) in his
travelogue Japani Journal (1962) and
was surprised to find that the landmark poetry and novels written by women
poets and writers of Japan dated back to the 11th century--- much older than
Europe and America. Much later, I was charmed to learn the interest of the
Japanese scholars in studying Maoism in Nepal and India when I was invited by
Professor Masahiko Togawa of Hiroshima University to participate in an internal
research seminar at Kathmandu on the Maoist movement in Nepal and India in
2011.Togawa’s deep anthropological knowledge on rural Bengal surprised me, and
he knew Bengali quite well. At the same time, I also came to know that the
Japanese are exquisitely artistic and famous for their paper folding and flower
arranging arts named Origami and Ikebana respectively, which I might have seen
in some exhibitions in Kolkata.
Cover page of the
book by Buddhadev Bose. Source: https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.5594/page/n1/mode/1up?view=theater(accessed
on 21.05.2022)
Viewing Akira Kurosawa and reading Ruth Benedict
I did not view any
Japanese film, till then in the mid 1970s at Kolkata. By that time it also came
to my knowledge that the ghastly and most devastating incident of human history
occurred in Japan by the explosion of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by
the United States of America. School history also taught me that one of our
greatest freedom fighters Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose got military help and
assistance from Japan to fight against the British colonial rule in India and
his predecessor and mentor, another great revolutionary of India, Rashbehari
Bose, lived in Japan and married a Japanese lady. The image of Japan in my mind
in the younger days of my life was mixed with curiosity, awe and mystery. How
could this country of the rising sun challenge the western powers with
technology but at the same time develop the art of self-defence without arms
and remain artistic with Origami and Ikebana? What is the essence of Japanese
personality? How modern Japan looked like? It was at this juncture that I had
the opportunity of viewing the famous Japanese film Dersu Uzala made in 1975 by the legendary filmmaker of Japan, Akira
Kurosawa(1910-1998) at
Japanese poster for
the Japanese/Soviet co-production, Dersu Uzala
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7656791(accessed
on 18.05.2022).
Dersu acted like a magic in my young psyche which took me closer to the famous
Bengali novelist Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay’s(1894-1950) Aranyak(Of
the forest),(composed between 1937 and 1939 and published in 1976) which was an
autobiographical fiction of a lone traveller in the desolate forests of north
Bihar. Dersu also provided me the counterpoint and the pleasing contrast to the
technological sophistication of modern Japan. Rabindranath Tagore would have
liked the film than anybody else! But further contrasts waited for me during my
student life at the University of Calcutta. I saw the Japanese-American movie Tora! Tora! Tora! at a renowned Cinema
Hall, Globe in Kolkata with superb sound track, which literally shivered and
shaken me when I viewed the Japanese surprise attacks by suicide bombers on the
large American warships on Pearl Harbour in 1941. Is this the Japan, I was trying
to understand? How could the themes depicted by Akira Kurosawa in Dersu Uzala and surprise attacks on
Pearl Harbour
Source: https://www.bookdepository.com/Chrysanthemum-Sword-Ruth-Benedict/9784805314913
& the, Theatrical release poster of Tora! Tora! Tora!
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18470590 (accessed on 18.05.2022).
shown in Tora! Tora! Tora! could be
juxtaposed to realize the Japanese personality? By that time as a student of
anthropology in the university, I read about some of the works of the
celebrated American cultural anthropologist, Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) who
studied the Japanese national character for the War Office of Information of
the United States of America. American military intelligence at that time was
desperately trying to understand the Japanese mind and culture and their future
behaviour in the war. Accordingly, the US Office of War Information assigned
Ruth Benedict to provide answers to their question. Benedict could not visit
Japan to apply the participatory field methods to know Japanese character but
she interviewed many immigrant Japanese in USA and also by delving deeper into
huge archival materials (literature, newspaper clippings and films) she
published a book entitled The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese
Culture in 1946 after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in 1945, although the
report written by Benedict on Japan for the War Office of Information was
finished just before the atom bomb was dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki(Kent
1999: 191). The book was a bestseller in Japan and now regarded as a modern
classic in anthropology despite serious criticisms (see for example, Ryang
2002:87-116). The main point Benedict wanted to make in the book was that
contradictions characterised Japanese personality. Let me quote Benedict:
Both the sword and the Chrysanthemum are a
part of the picture. The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive
and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, insolent and polite, rigid
and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and
treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways (Benedict
1946:2).
According to Benedict, these contradictions however do not tell the whole story, because the Japanese situational adaptability is the supreme power of their culture. The most important Japanese virtue is self-responsibility. At the end of her book Ruth Benedict explained:
Self-responsibility is far more drastically
interpreted in Japan than in free America. In this Japanese sense the sword
becomes, not a symbol of aggression, but a simile of ideal and self-responsible
man. No balance wheel can be better than this virtue in a dispensation which
honors individual freedom, and Japanese child-rearing and philosophy of conduct
have inculcated it as a part of the Japanese Spirit. Today the Japanese have
proposed 'to lay aside the sword' in the Western sense. In their Japanese sense,
they have an abiding strength in their concern with keeping an inner sword free
from the rust which always threatens it. In their phraseology of virtue the
sword is a symbol they can keep in a freer and more peaceful world
(Benedict1946: 296).
Modern Japan in a Japanese film
The debate on this famous book continued in
anthropology (see Hendry 1996:603-617) to which I will not go into the details
in this article. I would rather return to my encounter with Japan through a
film. I viewed this film in 1993 shown by the Midnapore Film Society and
reviewed it in the Cine News in Bengali (Guha 1993). The name of the film is The
Hours of Wedlock directed by Kichitaro Negishi(1950-)
that was released in 1986. This is one of the most wonderful films in the
tradition of realism I had ever seen. With only five main characters and
virtually without any outdoor scene the film described the crises in the family
life of modern and urban Japan almost in an anthropological fashion. But unlike
Ruth Benedict’s search for a ‘pattern’ through a ‘Japanese Spirit’ the film
dwelt more on the contradictions in family life in modern Japan. The camera
moved rather slowly among the characters--- a husband having extra-marital
relations, his loyal wife and the loving children. I could still recollect the
final freeze frame shot when the wife got fully prepared for the final
separation, which she communicated to her sons and advised them to behave in a
‘normal manner’. At this moment the husband entered the scene and declared that
he was no more having the extra-marital relation but by the time the mutual
trust between them had already been broken. The wife was drinking tea from a
cup but her hand came down... and stopped with a freeze shot! Modern Japan may not always be what Ruth
Benedict viewed through her image of ‘self-responsibility’ as the ideal for a
man who kept his ‘inner sword free from the rust’.
Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to Mr.Shyamalendu
Krishna Maity, Working President and Mr.Satyajyoti Adhikari, General Secretary
of the Midnapore Film Society for inviting me to speak on the occasion of the
show of the Japanese film Ballad on 21st May 2022 at Midnapore Film
Society organized jointly by the Society and the Consulate General of Japan,
Kolkata to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the diplomatic
relations between India and Japan. I feel deeply honoured. I specially thank Mr.Siddhartha Santra for
inspiring me to write this article. This is the elaborated version of my talk. Last
but not the least, I express my gratitude to Professor Abhijit Dasgupta of the
Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University for
introducing me to Professor Masahiko
Togawa about my interest in Maoist movement in India and I am greatly indebted
to Professor Togawa for his warm Japanese hospitality at Kathmandu. Last but
not the least, I thank my brother Santanu Guha for reading the draft of this
article and reminding me of some of my important memories on Japan. A shorter
version of this article was first published in Chalachitra Barta:A Film Movement Journal (vol.
53. July 2023(p.1 & 4-6) published by Midnapore Film Society. I owe my debts
to the editorial board of the aforesaid journal.
References cited
Benedict, R. (1946). The Chrysanthemum and
the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, Mariner Books.
Hendry, J. (1996). The Chrysanthemum
continues to flower: Ruth Benedict and some perils of popular anthropology, in
Jeremy MacClancy and Chris McDonaugh, eds., Popularising Anthropology, London: Routledge.
Guha, A. (1993). Japane dampatya jiban: asian
daityer paribarik daridra.(In Bengali). Cine News, July & August, Serial
no. 135. Medinipur.
Kent.P.(1999). Japanese perceptions of “The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword”. Dialectical Anthropology, 24(2):181-192.
Ryang, S. (2002). Chrysanthemum's strange
life: Ruth Benedict in postwar Japan. Asian Anthropology, 1(1): 87-116.
Comments
Post a Comment