Silk and straw

21st July 2008

Whenever the reading lists for Japanese studies are pulled out, Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum And The Sword is almost certain to be featured.

Though criticisms have been levelled at the anthropologist's most famous work, it's still worth studying, if only for the impact it has had.

But equally worth reading is Dr Junichi Saga's Memories Of Silk And Straw. Even when passed through the filters of interviews and translation, it lets you hear the voices of ordinary Japanese in a way that Benedict's book doesn't.

Unlike her work, it's short on theory. It just presents a fading generation as best as it can - and lets you make your own mind and your own theories up.

So I'll just tell you a bit more about the book and leave you to decide for yourself if it's something you want to look into.

...

‘My mother once told me that I only just avoided being killed the day I was born.’

Thus begins one of the life stories in Memories Of Silk And Straw, a book of reminiscences collected by Japanese doctor Junichi Saga.

Based in Tsuchiura, a small town about an hour by train from Tokyo, he would end his day by putting a tape recorder in his medical bag and going to interview the elderly.

He spoke to hundreds of them, piecing together what life there was like before World War II.

Many of them talked about the widespread poverty that made it common for people to go about barefoot and hungry – and to kill newborns they couldn’t feed.

But in the case of Mrs Fumi Suzuki, whose mother told her that the start of her life was nearly the end of it, it was her looks that were her undoing. Apparently, she was so ugly that her parents and grandparents decided that she wouldn’t be able to find a husband and so asked the midwife to get rid of her.

The woman wrapped the baby tightly, covered her face and left her to suffocate.

But after a while, the mother noticed the bundle of rags moving and when they unwrapped it, found the newborn still alive.

They decided that it would be bad luck to try to kill her again so they let her live. She went on to get married at 20 and survived into her 80s to tell Dr Saga her tale.

Her story, together with 60 others, was published in 1981.

Dr Saga then pushed for an English translation because ‘the stories revealed something about modern Japan very little understood by the rest of the world, and perhaps not even by the Japanese themselves. Namely, that the Japan which now prides itself on being an advanced, high-technology nation had, until only recently, a very different type of society; and that indeed it was this very society, backward though it may have been, which created the basis for what Japan has become today’.

He saw in Tsuchiura the kind of small town found all over the country and in its elderly, a generation who had experienced centuries worth of change compressed like an accordion into about 50 years.

Part of that change was the abolition of feudalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. But even after the laws dictating class differences vanished, a ghost of them lingered in people’s minds.

Mrs Mineko Toyama, born in 1903, remembered walking as a child with her grandmother one day when they met a woman who used to work for her family as a maid.

She ‘looked slightly shocked for a moment, then fell quickly to her knees and bowed with her forehead touching the ground’. Even though her old employer had been the wife of the local magistrate, ‘no passer-by, whether he’d known who my grandmother was or not, would have been particularly surprised at this spectacle’.

Though you’re not likely to see people kneeling like that in the streets of modern Japan, the reflexive ordering of the world into hierarchies remains.

In the same way, the work ethic of the present can be traced back to a world where people began the day not with the cock’s crow but before it.

Tofu makers were some of the earliest to rise: They were up before 2am to grind soya beans, squeeze milk from them and when it had set, went from door to door to sell it.

Children had to work too and those who living on farms would till the rice fields from half past four in the morning. One man who did this said: ‘By the time the six o’clock siren sounded I would hardly be able to move another step; but it was still a while before I got my breakfast so I’d just do my best to carry on’.

His stoicism might have been remarkable but it was by no means unique. Even childbirth hardly interrupted work.

Mrs Tai Terakada, born in 1899, recalled how her mother went into the mountains one day to chop wood and returned with something wrapped in her apron.

Thinking that it was fruit, she asked: ‘Have you got something nice for me?’

Her mother laughed and said: ‘Yes, I’ve brought you back a little baby sister.’

Alone in the mountains, her mother had given birth to the child, cut its umbilical cord with her knife then carried it home. But she didn’t want to leave the pile of branches she’d cut so she lugged that back too.

When recording this story, Dr Saga does not say what he, as a medical man, thought of this and the women who had to deliver their own babies because the midwife couldn’t reach them in time.

In his introduction to the book though, he dwells on the hardship of that period. But, he adds, ‘amid all the poverty and unhappiness of those days, there also existed a strange kind of serenity which today seems to have been lost’.

If you also feel that serenity is missing, try spending some time with Dr Saga’s people. Get into a boat with lake fishermen who can tell you what mood the sky is in by reading the clouds and listening to a faraway sea. Or else join hands with the neighbourhood children and walk around town, inviting people to a birthday party.

It may be dark when you leave the party for home but if it’s a summer evening, fireflies will fill the air like sparks blown from a fire.

From behind you comes the sound of bare feet slapping on the path – you turn to see a rickshaw, its lanterns swinging from side to side.

It may scare the frogs into silence but they’ll start up again once the rickshaw goes and besides, the moon, less easily startled, will wait over the distant mountains until you find your way home.