The reinvention of a nation

When Japan hosts the Rugby Union World Cup next year, and still more so the summer Olympics in 2020, all eyes will be on its omotenashi (hospitality), perhaps its technology, certainly its efficiency, but there will be little thought of symbolism. Not so for the 1964 Tokyo games, when the Olympic flame was carried up its last 160 steps by a 19-year-old named Yoshinori Sakai, who had been born, near Hiroshima, on the day the atomic bomb was dropped. ‘Atom Boy’ bore twin messages: that Japan had been a victim of an unbelievable horror; and that it was now reborn as a modern, democratic state.

The running theme of Christopher Harding’s elegantly written and compelling history of Japan’s past century and a half is that of competing narratives, which bring with them a sense of a country battling to forge, or perhaps preserve, its identity as it emerged from a two-century-long period of prosperous, peaceful but technologically backward isolation. A cultural historian at the University of Edinburgh, Harding traces these stories not just in events and in politics, but in poems, novels, films, philosophy and even psychotherapy.

As such, his focus is largely on those who were critical of, or alienated by, the course the country was taking at various times. This brings in some familiar characters, such as the quixotic novelist-patriot Yukio Mishima, who in 1970 staged a futile and pathetic coup d’etat which ended in his ritual, stomach-cutting suicide. There are also colourful protestors and malcontents whose names have been largely forgotten, including a teacher, Hideko Kageyama, known as ‘Japan’s Joan of Arc’, who in 1885 became the first woman in modern Japan to be imprisoned for political activism when caught carrying explosives to Nagasaki for a revolutionary movement.

We also, however, meet other, more refreshing souls, such as the pair Harding frames the book with: Heisaku Kosawa, who from the 1920s onwards blended Buddhism with Freudian psychotherapy; and the novelist Harumi Setouchi, who became the elderly Kosawa’s patient in the 1960s, and now lives as a Buddhist nun under the name of Jakucho Setouchi.