Reflections on yesterday's seminar - jishuku

Some thoughts from yesterday's seminar and readings.

Jishuku - voluntary self restraint.   According to the readings it was being practiced after the Kanto earthquake and a central purpose seems to be 'teaching the children'.  I have heard the same thing after the Tohoku earthquake... teaching the children.  A genarationally imposed custom? I wonder how widespread  jishuku was after the Kanto daijishin?  Was it just a Kanto thing? How about the 1896 Sanriku tsunami?  Was there national jishuku? Is it a long held tradition that has been widened as the sense of what is near and known about also widens or is it a Meiji nation building construction - as is suggested by those who see the aftermath of the Kanto Daijishin as containing the origins of Japanese miliarism?  I don't know the answer to any of those questions.  How old is the word?  There is not really an equivalent word in English.   Jishuku does build a spirit of common experience which can  unite people.  It also accords respect to those who have died and who are suffering terrible losses.

Jishuku doesn't affect everyone equally though.  For people like Tokyo Governor Ishihara urging restraint makes little material difference to his life.   The same is true for university professors, teachers, police, government workers who have steady salaries and almost no chance of losing their jobs - a year with a few less atsumari means more money to go overseas in the summer....  But for the people who rent kimono for graduations, the men and women who run bottle shops (off licences), for the restaurant owners, for the hotel staff who have their shifts cut when atsumari are cancelled  their burden is quite disproportionate.  It's been pointed out in other places that restricting consumption constricts the supply of tax revenue, and there is an awful lot of tax revenue that is needed at the moment.

Had it been up to me, I would have let graduations and the like go ahead, perhaps toned down, but have then as a vehicle for something constructive... like fundraising or have collection of goods that are needed and in short supply up there.  I have been through my cupboards here and pulled out all the boxed gifts from weddings and funerals - new sheets, towels, blankets etc to send to a friend in Morioka who is involved in distributing things on the coast.  A collection like that at an entrance ceremony... now that's a productive idea..

This video below was put out by an Iwate sake brewer after Gov. Ishihara urged jishuku. The brewer is urging people to enjoy Tohoku sake through the hanami. 

Charlie Brooker's media critique

This is brilliant illustration of some of the media reporting that occurred during the earthquake.
It's one thing to report on misery, another to feast on it.



(reposted)http://ponkanchan.blogspot.com/2011/03/very-funny-very-apt-media-critique.html

A protest from the park (reposted)

During the week people have been handing out fliers outside the university about a protest against TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Co. who run the nuclear plant in Fukushima) and the use of nuclear power that was scheduled for today.  The protests started at Hosei university in Ichigaya (perhaps with an agenda aside from nuclear energy), and moved to  Hibiya Park. I don't really go protests that are ANTI... being  FOR  something seems a lot more constructive .... nonetheless I went in to have a look.  

Part of the reason I wanted to take a look was because there has been rumblings that Japanese media and NHK in particular are censoring the protests, not including them in news reports.  I wanted to see for myself what the situation was. 

Being  overly bourgeois, or just a product of the 1990s university system where there didn't seem a whole lot to be protesting about, my only experience of large scale student protests was in Xuzhou, China in 1999 when  the US  bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia (Yugoslavia) (and was grounded by the university there as a result.....)   In Xuzhou the protests were orderly and on a phenomenal scale - tens of thousands of students marched - genuinely outraged by the bombing, but the protests were sanctioned by the government. 

Today was a rag tag bunch of students carrying professionally made anti nuke banners.  There were a few signs that identified where students were from - Tohoku University, Hiroshima, Okayama.... in total there would not have been many more than 100 protesters.  The police outnumbered protesters by 4:1 and over all perhaps as much as 8:1.

Tulips in Hibiya Park

Setting out from Hibiya Park

Lots of people in suits seem to be taking an interest.... hmmm

Police buses, the police - with the yellow and white stripes
greatly outnumbered protesters.

More police buses

Police standing by as the protesters pass by - more police
here than there were protesters.

Spot the protester...

The extent of police presence troubles me.... the uyoku (right wingers)  are permitted to drive around in black vans being intolerant - particularly of Russia and China. So long as they don't park outside the target embassies to spout their bile on megaphones, they are permitted to  go along as they like, it seems, this is a democratic country with free speech after all....  The level of police presence today seems very intimadatory not to mention unnecessary - if there is such a surplus - why aren't they doing shifts on the Sanriku....

From what I can see though, despite the situation in Fukushima, I suspect most people in Tokyo would opt for nuclear power over no aircon.... I am not quite sure why public interest is so low.

Does schmalz like this really breed solidarity....?

Music is often integral to developing group consciousness and solidarity - from Liverpool's You'll Never Walk Alone  to The Internationale - music unites people with common purpose.  And group consciousness is surely needed in Japan if the Sanriku is to recover - at the moment, perhaps taking a lesson from the Australian govt, the Japanese govt. is considering raising the consumption tax to pay for the reconstruction, At the same time, songs and performances are age old ways to raise money. Well before  Band-aid stormed into public eye, the Salvos have been using songs as an established way  to raise money for charitable works. Despite the potential,  is hard to see much merit in this song.


.. Fukushima baby I love you.....I need you.... a cheesy new song that features each prefecture in Japan expressing their love of Fukushima.....

I took a trip Fukushima the year before last and concluded that despite being quite beautiful, it was a no mans land between urbanised Kanto and exotic Tohoku: s not far enough from Tokyo to be romanticised on JR posters like Akita's kiritampo and Aomori's Nebuta and yet it was too far to be fashionable like Nasu or Nikko in neighbouring Tochigi....

The part of Fukushima I have actually spent time in,  as opposed to simply passing through on the train or expressway,   is around Aizu and the Tadami sen - very pretty, I will try to dig up some photos. The Tadami sen and the Banetsu are both on my to do list.   Also Iwaki which  looks pretty from the kosoku.

This song does no justice to Fukushima, nor to music... dripping in saccharin, and schmalz, I try to give benefit of the doubt and not assume blatant self promotion & insincerity....

And a PS on this... what is is with the Tohoku prefectures having no words and just signboards ?

Usually Fukushima doesn't make it into Tohoku promotion....as this JR East map indicates.
http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/routemaps/tohokushinkansen.html#category01

Wisteria Island

As part of course requirements I am colonising cyber space with another blog...

It will possibly come as a relief to the faithful few that read the blog I have been keeping for the past year and a half, that earthquake matters will be siphoned off to here.
I feel like a bit of a fraud reposting material that I have posted already... but at a personal level I don't really have that much more to say about the earthquake. I am looking forward to the change to contextualize it in academic frameworks.

This is the link to the article from my blog, (article pasted below) which in turn is a repost from an article that I wrote for the Guardian the night of the earthquake.

http://ponkanchan.blogspot.com/2011/03/earthquake.html

 For anyone inclined to masochism, there are a series of posts that follow on from that blog post that relate to the earthquake. They were written in part to allay concerns of friends and family overseas, and let them have an idea how the situation was in my little part of Japan.   I have been in Tokyo since the earthquake and never considered leaving,  I had just got back to Japan after a month in Aus. and I didn't feel unsafe at any stage. My sister arrived with her family early Sunday morning after the quake - I advised them travel was safe,  though there would be aftershocks.  At the time they left Australia the situation in Fukushima was not known to be as bad as it was.   Because she has three primary school aged children, I kept the television off for the week until the kids had gone to sleep. Despite the situation they enjoyed their holiday.  I have a deep affection for Tohoku, but perhaps in part because of limited video media exposure,  I don't feel traumatised the way that some people seem to be.

I traveled to the Sanriku about 4 years ago.  It's a really beautiful part of Japan.  I find it so hard to believe the death toll is so high.  The night I wrote this article, I truly believed the high awareness of tsunami in the area would mean that people would be on high ground, and despite the devastation in the towns would survive.  I didn't imagine that evacuation centres would be swept away....

I hope that out of the trauma and devastation, that the Sanriku will rise again as a place that is better equipped to meet the needs of the people there.

The earthquake

This is an article I wrote that was published in the Guardian today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/11/tokyo-earthquake-tsunami-japan#start-of-comments

Tokyo's sober calm

The aftershocks in Tokyo and eastern Japan continue into the night.
The quake struck at 2.46pm and seven hours later, there have been more than 70 aftershocks. In Tokyo it started off as barely perceptible movement, escalating to intense shaking that had me trying to push back plates that were falling out of the cupboard in the dining room. At the same time as I was grabbing plates, I watched the sugar bowl in the kitchen crash down from a shelf knocking cups on the bench to the floor. Without doubt it was the most serious shaking in the nine years I have been here.
Emergency mode. Most importantly gas off. In both the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 and the 1995 Kobe earthquake, fires claimed many more lives than falling buildings. Next, turn on the television and internet to see where the earthquake's epicentre is. Japanese television begins to broadcast earthquake information within seconds. If the shaking is strong but the epicentre near, it may not be a serious earthquake.
But when the shaking is strong and the epicentre far you know the shaking is much worse in other places. This time, the epicentre was off the Sanriku coast in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures, 300km from Tokyo. At Richter 8.8 it's reported to be the largest magnitude earthquake in Japan's history. The settled areas of the picturesque Sanriku coast have low-lying fishing villages with an acute awareness of tsunami. The tsunami flood gates and inundation zone warning signs along the coast are a stark reminder of the 1896 Sanriku tsunami in which more than 20,000 people died.

Television news showed the tsunami inundating the coastal towns. As the cars bobbed around like flotsam, it wasn't clear how many of them contained people or whether the high ground was high enough, or near enough.

The trains are still out of action in Tokyo, but there is a sober calm. Many Tokyoites have opted to spend the night at their workplace. Tonight my husband, along with many of his colleagues, are staying put in their central Tokyo office until tomorrow, by which stage the trains will probably be running again. Some of his co-workers chose to walk home: part of Japan's earthquake damage-minimisation strategy is ensuring people know how to walk home from work in the event of a mass transport failure. Public buildings have been opened in central Tokyo tonight to accommodate people stranded in the city.



There is an eeriness in the air, but a spirit of camaraderie as well. Three of my neighbours have dropped by to check things are OK, whether my husband was able to come home and whether I knew how to reactivate the emergency switch that cuts off the gas supply in a major earthquake. I appreciate it. In Tokyo most people are going to bed shaken and on edge but thankful. But living here there is always a lingering sense that one day, we are going to have a big one too.

Warning signs for the inundation area

Fishing nets along the coastline

Tsunami gates