Flying the friendly skies

THE COMMON MISCONCEPTION that Koreans and Japanese have difficulty being civil to each other, much less associating on amicable terms, continues to be eroded by the facts, as I often point out here. There’s no better proof that ties are growing than that regional businessmen believe it and are putting up the cash to back up their beliefs.

Here’s a brief excerpt from a Nishinippon Shimbun interview with Kim Soo-chun, the president of the relatively new Air Busan airline based in that South Korean city.

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- How do you view the market for the Fukuoka line, where you will begin service on 29 March?

Busan is the gateway to the southeastern part of South Korea, and Fukuoka is the gateway to Kyushu. Interaction between the two regions will increase in the future as the supranational economic sphere develops. Therefore, we see it as a promising market, and that’s why we selected the flight between the two cities as our first international route. For now, we’ll be flying one roundtrip daily, but in five years we hope to increase that to four or five. We think the demand will be there as trips for business and tourism continue to rise.

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Air Busan’s fares will be 30% less than those of Korean Air, which already provides service on the 50-minute route. They’ve already surpassed KAL in boarding rates for their flights to Seoul and to Jeju.

Relations between the southern part of the peninsula and Kyushu are already in flight. Now it appears they’re set to soar.

Hands across the Sea of Japan

IT’S A RELIABLE rule of thumb that a nation’s political class is more often the problem than the solution regardless of the matter at hand. The reliability of that rule continues to be borne out by the behavior of the Japanese in Kyushu and the Koreans on the southern part of the peninsula. While the politicos vaguely talk the talk about the importance of good bilateral relations, folks on the ground continue to walk the walk and do the job themselves. Here are two more examples—one of people at work, and the other of people at play.

At work

Busan’s Ulsan region in South Korea resembles Kyushu in that it is the center of flourishing auto and shipbuilding industries. The Ulsan region, however, is home to 1,500 companies in the industrial textile sector that supplies products to both. Many of the firms have created a niche by producing items for car interiors and specialty textiles, and they are eager to develop ties and do business with Kyushu’s auto industry.

To help them make their pitch, the International Footwear, Textile, and Fashion Expo in Busan has invited representatives from Kyushu auto companies to attend the three-day event starting on the 19th. Business and opinion leaders on both sides of the Korea Strait are excited about the potential. The Nishinippon Shimbun described that potential in two stories on the Expo and the specialty textile industry in the Ulsan region that covered half a page.

They quoted Paek Mu-hyon, the chair of a textile industry group in Busan:

“We want to promote technical ties and business with Kyushu’s many auto companies and use high-function Japanese and Korean products to compete against China, which is increasing its presence as a market and production region.”

Who needs summit meetings about East Asian entities when the private sector demonstrates this much enthusiasm to achieve the same result on their own?

At play

Here are two events that go together like ice cream and cake. The first is the Yamaga Lantern Dance, a festival from Yamaga, Kumamoto, in which hundreds of women dance to a stately traditional folk song while dressed in summer yukata and wearing lighted lanterns made of paper and glue on their heads. (Here’s a previous post with photos.) The second is the Seoul World Lantern Festival, which is underway in that city right now and will run until the 15th. Those of you near Seoul and willing to visit will have a chance to have your ice cream and cake and eat it too, when the women from Yamaga perform on Saturday and Sunday.

Yamaga officials say the dancers visit such Asian cities as Shanghai and Singapore once a year, but this is the first time they’ve been to South Korea since 1993. Held on the banks of the Cheonggyecheon, the Lantern Festival is one of the attractions of the 2012 Visit Korea Year. The events feature performances from South Korea, Japan, and China, and the area is decorated with displays of both real lanterns and lantern-like objects. During the Yamaga performance, the streets will be lined with candles in bamboo holders and traditional Japanese umbrellas. In addition to the group from Yamaga, a group from the Nebuta festival in Aomori will also participate.

The lack of coverage given by the overseas media to this flourishing cross-strait interaction notwithstanding, the only remarkable thing about this activity is that it isn’t remarkable at all—it’s a fact of daily life. Regional and local politicians have enough sense to either get out of the way and let it happen, or lend a helping hand from behind, rather than elbowing their way to the front to pose for photo ops.

Now if the national politicians would only get the hint that grand schemes aren’t necessary when people are allowed to act naturally without interference. Everyone else already has.

But how long can she hold her breath?

ANOTHER SMALL STEP for Japanese-Korean amity was taken last week during a forum in Toba, Mie, convened by female divers to discuss their efforts to register their way of life as a UNESCO intangible cultural property. For centuries, women in both countries have dived without mechanical aids to catch abalone and other shellfish for a living. Japan and South Korea are the only countries in the world where it is a tradition for women to engage in this income-generating activity, and the working women of both countries have been forging closer ties in recent years. The Koreans initially approached the Japanese, as described in detail in this previous post. That they should work together is only natural—both groups of divers have a long tradition of working in each other’s country. And Toba was a natural place to meet, as half of the Japanese female divers live there.

While most of the ama attending were from Japan—63 came from nine prefectures—one of the Jeju Island haenyo participated, as well as a Korean researcher. The women shared their experiences in addition to discussing strategies for receiving UNESCO recognition. One participant said she had been born and reared in Tokyo, but was so eager to do the work she moved to Chiba. The Korean woman sang the traditional haenyo song.

Another diver who showed up and spoke at the forum was 19-year-old Omukai Chisaki, who is perhaps the first female abalone diver contracted for work because she catches the masculine eye as well as she catches shellfish. Ms. Omukai, hired specifically to serve as a tourist attraction, dives for abalone and poses for snapshots during the summer months in Kuji, Iwate. Perhaps she offered her fellow divers tips on cosmetics that retain their luster after long hours toiling underwater and the most fetching angle to place the goggles on the head when being photographed.

Omukai Chisaki

Speaking of photos, the accompanying screenshot shows why she was a hot topic this summer among Japanese weekly magazines and TV programs, despite the caption that says she is shivering. The shared culture meant that she also generated considerable buzz across the Korean Strait. A South Korean news report on Ms. Omukai’s summer job ranked fourth in total hits as a search topic in library computer systems on the day it appeared.

The elites won’t like to hear it, but it’s no surprise that cuteness provides more juice to bilateral relations than a boatload of summit meetings and academic conferences. Perhaps sending UNESCO officials to see Ms. Omukai in action would seal the deal for the organization’s approval. Seeing is believing, after all.

Stamps across the sea

THERE THEY GO AGAIN! If those two keep at it, before long people will start to get the idea that Japan and South Korea don’t hate each other after all.

Tiny photo of tiny stamps

I’m talking about the city of Busan in the southeast corner of the Korean Peninsula and Fukuoka City in Kyushu, a three-hour boat ride just across the Korean Strait. Long-time friends know we can’t go a few weeks on this site without a story about how the two cities refuse be deterred in their efforts to get neighborly with each other, whether between governments, institutions of higher education, grassroots organizations, or private companies.

In fact, this year is the Fukuoka-Busan Friendship Year, and one way they’re celebrating the amity that’s breaking out all over is with the first joint issue of commemorative postage stamps by the two countries.

This week the Kyushu branch of Japan Post and the Busan postal authorities in South Korea unveiled their respective versions of the stamps. The illustrations on both countries’ stamps feature scenes of tourist attractions, local festivals, and other delights. Later this month, Fukuoka will issue 15,000 sheets of 10 80-yen stamps (worth about $US 0.85 each) in a commemorative frame to be sold for JPY 1,200 (about $US12.90), while Busan will sell sets of 14 250-won stamps by application only (worth about $US 0.20 each). Because Japan Post will sell only those stamps it issues and not handle the Korean stamps, the Nishinippon Shimbun will help out in Japan by selling sets of both countries’ stamps with explanations of the sites depicted.

If the national governments of the two countries need advice on how to go about enjoying each other’s company for fun and profit, the two local governments would surely be glad to help out. After all, they’ve only been at it for more than two millenia.

The Japanese dream?

THE NISHINIPPON SHIMBUN is running a multi-part feature examining the approaching centenary of the Japan-Korea colonization/merger next year. One article this week focused on 81-year-old Kim Yong-un (金容雲), who was born and grew up in Japan and first set foot in his ancestral homeland at the age of 17.

This introductory paragraph is directly under a photograph of Prof. Kim.

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The Koreans Who Came to Japan

“An estimated 2.10 million Koreans were in Japan when the war ended in 1945. Most of them had come to Japan voluntarily looking for work after the merger. Of those, 90% were from the southern part of the peninsula. Some of them were subject to the citizen mobilization of 1944.”

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The following is the text of the article. It is unclear whether this is a synopsis of an interview or whether Prof. Kim wrote it himself. In either event, since Prof. Kim is fluent in Japanese, it is likely that nothing was lost or modified in translation.

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My father came to Japan on the Shimonoseki-Busan ferry in 1917, after the Japan-Korea merger. To use a modern expression, you might say he had the Japanese Dream; he dreamt of succeeding in Japan.

He was a landowner in a farming village in South Cholla, but the village was impoverished and didn’t produce much. A Japanese man who settled there discovered that the land was suited for the cultivation of pears and peaches, however, and he successfully created a fruit orchard. This inspired my father, who came to believe that he might be able to accomplish something in Japan, so he moved there.

He worked at first as a laborer in Shinagawa, Tokyo, but he later operated a small casting foundry. He seems to have had leadership ability, and he brought some relatives over from Korea to work in the plant. He got on well with the local police, and easily received their authorization for his relatives’ passage.

I was born in Tokyo in 1927, so that made me a zainichi kankokujin (Korean resident in Japan). When the name-change program came into effect in 1940, my father was reluctant, but he thought a Japanese name would make things easier. The Japanese name he adopted (Kanemitsu 金光) was convenient for business, and I didn’t have to continually explain my background at junior high school.

As far as I was aware, there was no great opposition to the name change program among Koreans in Japan at the time, even though they came from a different country.

But I was subject to some discrimination as a primary school student, which might have been the reason for the effort to hide our origins. We knew that some Japanese mothers didn’t want to have Korean children seated next to their children in the classroom, and that would hurt a child’s feelings. I didn’t particularly like it when my mother came to sports day dressed in the chima chogori, the traditional costume for Korean women.

Our family returned to Korea after the war. Eventually I began lecturing in mathematics and the theory of civilization, and I became a professor at Dankook University.

Actually, I was slightly acquainted with Kim Dae-jung, the hero of Korean democracy. We shared a similar world view, and I was asked to serve on the committee that drafted his speech when he assumed the presidency in 1998.

It is true that in his autobiography, he says that the period of Japanese rule “was filled with humiliation and hardship”. That might have been the case for his generation who stayed in Korea, but for me, I think it was evenly divided between the bad and the good.

Postwar Korean textbooks that deal with the name change program say that our names were taken from us by force. For the Koreans in Japan, however, it wasn’t as one-sided as that, as you can see from what I previously said. The same is true of the land survey from 1910-1918, which the textbooks treat as the ultimate thievery. In this operation, the Japanese took the land whose ownership was unclear and developed it. Before we went to Japan, my mother lamented that our land holdings were reduced because part of my father’s land was converted into dykes.

But at that time, the land next to ours was managed by one family group, and no registration papers (were needed). It is a fact that the land was left undeveloped because the ownership was unclear.

Were those bad times, or were they not? That question is tantamount to asking “if…” about historical matters, and simplistic judgments are not possible.

Afterwords:

* Prof. Kim is the author of 醜い日本人　「嫌韓」対「反日」をこえて (The Ugly Japanese: Transcending hatred of Korea and anti-Japanism), which is published in Japanese. There are reports he will publish a new book this month in both Japan and South Korea claiming that his research shows the Korean language is derived from the old Silla language, and that the Japanese language is derived from the old Baekche language.

* The card on the lectern in the photograph of Prof. Kim reads, “Korea-Japan Exchange Symposium”.

* Japanese sources suggest the 1940 name change program was optional based on Japanese law.

The multiple exposures of early Joseon films

THOSE FOLKS interested in the history of Japan, Korea, and international cinema have been delighted by the discovery and restoration during the past five years of the first movies filmed in Korea. Made during the period of Japanese colonization/merger, the films were assumed to have been lost. For that matter, most of Japan’s prewar movies also no longer exist, and the Korean finds are rarer still.

The content of the films themselves is intriguing, to say the least. Here’s a quick translation of an article that appeared in Monday’s edition of the Nishinippon Shimbun about a screening and symposium that will be held in Fukuoka City on Saturday. I’ve appended some more information that I found on Japanese-language websites. The word choice in the article follows that of the author, Prof. Shimokawa Masaharu of the Oita Prefectural College of Arts and Culture.

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Since 2004, films made on the Korean Peninsula during the latter part of the colonization period that were thought to have been lost have been discovered in the storage areas of the China Film Archives in Beijing and other locations. The Joseon films of the colonization period are referred to as the Dark Age in South Korea, and it’s not just because the country had become an Imperial vassal state. The films themselves were lost, which agonized those people interested in the field and who wanted to study the history of the medium’s development in South Korea. The work to find these films began after 2000, primarily at the Korean Film Archive in Seoul.

Scene from The Crossroads of Youth

What was the truth of the Joseon colony? Was it plundered, or was it developed? That question is the focus of the historical conflict between the two countries, but one has the sense that emotions based on ethnicity have superseded an investigation of the facts. The realism and impact of the movie medium might well have the power to destroy stereotyped historical interpretations. The Joseon films that have been discovered seem to offer a new perspective for research into the colony during the war.

These movies include the oldest extant Joseon talkie, Mimong (迷夢 or Delusion, 1936, Yang Ju-nam, director); Homeless Angels, a story of urban street children, 1941; Volunteers, a story of wartime mobilization (1941, An Seo-yeong, director); and Korean Strait, 1944. They are sold in South Korea in a series of DVDs called The Excavated Past.

When I watched the DVD given to me in October 2007 by someone involved in the project, I was surprised by the unexpected scenes that unfolded before my eyes. Homeless Angels starts with a night scene of streetcars in the thriving downtown area of Jongno, Seoul. Then a barmaid, her patron, and the street children appear. In Springtime on the Peninsula (1941) modern Western buildings rise from within a traditional Korean residential district. All the movies unquestionably show a city in the midst of modernization.

Some scenes are difficult to understand. The female lead in Volunteers is Mun Ye-bong (N.B.: 文芸峰, an obvious stage name; the hanja mean artistic peak). After liberation she became an actress in North Korea. She was 24 at the time of the filming, and her beauty recalls Joseon white chinaware.

The last scene is puzzling. She is seeing off her fiancé, who has volunteered for military service. She picks up a Japanese flag that has fallen in the street and regards it with a cynical smile. The camera moves in for a close-up of her face that continues until the movie ends. The meaning of this scene is not clear. (The scene drew the most attention when it was broadcast on NHK television in the program, Korean-Style Cinema: The remnants of opposition.)

The dialogue in the films was entirely in Japanese after 1944. Before then, the dialogue was a rough mixture of Japanese and Korean. Was the prohibition of the Korean language a policy that was due more to the war than to colonization? That question rises to the surface. The place name 京城 (Keijo) often appears in the movies’ subtitles, but the actors invariably say Seoul. The popular theory that the name Keijo was forced on the people while Seoul was forbidden seems to be false.

Heitai-san (Soldier/honorific, 1944, Bang Han-jun, director) will be shown at Kyushu University in Fukuoka City on the 18th. Its theme of the “prosecution of the holy war” is a continuation of the themes of Volunteers and Korean Strait. This will be the film’s first screening in Japan. Following the movie will be a symposium in which Prof. Choi Gil-sun of the University of East Asia will participate. He holds that these works, which had been dismissed as propaganda films, should be understood in the context of the period and for their policy intent as part of the research into the colony. Arima Manabu of the Research Center for Korean Studies will also participate. He says the rediscovered Joseon films will excite those who want to know more about the Korean colony and Japan in the modern era.

I hope this symposium with the participation of such distinguished researchers is successful.

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Prof. Shimokawa seems particularly interested in the films with a wartime text, which is understandable, but some Japanese are drawn to other aspects of the movies. One such focus of attention is the depiction of the emergence of a modern, urban consumer culture in Korea during this period.

One example is the 1934 silent film Crossroads of Youth. This was a major discovery for two reasons. First, it is the oldest known silent Korean film in existence, and it was made at the peak of the silent era on the peninsula. (The first talkie was made in 1935.) Second, it has been reproduced from an original print that had been in private hands since liberation. All the films found in other countries were copies of the originals.

The Crossroads of Youth looks at life in Seoul from the perspective of a man and his younger sister who move to the capital from their hometown. The opening scene depicts wealthy young businessmen playing golf.

Director An Jong-hua made 12 films from 1930 to 1960, but this is the first one to have turned up. Part of the film was unrecoverable and only 74 minutes remain. The restoration work was performed in Japan.

Another example is the film Mimong, or Delusion, which is the oldest surviving Korean talkie. Only 48 minutes remain of this remarkable movie.

Mimong tells the story of a middleclass housewife who lives in Seoul with her husband and daughter. Her husband grills her about the details of a visit she made to a downtown department store. Fed up with being treated like a “bird in a cage”, as she puts it, she abandons her family. She later meets another man and moves into a hotel room with him. Not long afterwards, however, her romantic interest shifts to a traditional dancer.

She then makes two discoveries. First, her live-in lover at the hotel is not a man of means, as she had thought. He is actually a delivery boy for a clothes cleaner. Second, she finds out that he has been breaking into other rooms at the hotel to steal the guests’ money and valuables, so she coolly reports him to the police.

After hearing that the dancer has left Seoul, she jumps into a taxicab and directs the driver to take her to Seoul Station. She urges the cabbie to step on it, but he gets reckless and runs over a pedestrian, who turns out to be the woman’s daughter. Shamed by her wicked ways, the woman takes poison at her daughter’s bedside.

Forget the plot line and consider this: Life in Seoul during the period of colonization/merger must not have been so harsh as to prevent the 1930s Joseon version of a Desperate Housewife from having enough money and leisure time to gad about in department stores and taxicabs and hop from bed to bed.

Granted, some of the Depression-era movies made at the same time in the United States depicted a lifestyle beyond the means of the theater patrons. Yet those lifestyles, and other more modest but comfortable lifestyles–in which young married women in the cities could afford to shop in department stores–existed nonetheless.

It’s possible that the heroine of Delusion was a patron of the Seoul branch of the upscale Japanese department store Mitsukoshi, which opened there in 1930. Private sector retail operations don’t expand overseas unless they expect to turn a profit. The woman might even have been one of those in the second illustration who chose to stand and hang on to the strap while riding the bus, rather than sit on an open bench–all the better to show off their new watches and rings.

But here’s the most important point: These films are being openly screened in Japan, available to the public free of charge, and discussed at symposiums by Koreans and Japanese together. Scenes are shown on Japan’s quasi-public television network. The work to restore some of them is being done in Japan. Nor are they subject to a ban in South Korea. Anyone with a DVD player can buy a set, take them home, and watch them.

And no one’s making a big fuss over it, though the Japanese are less prone to public self-congratulation than people in some other countries. The newspaper article ran on page nine, just above the fold on the left-hand side.

Fukuoka-Busan: The gateposts of the Asia Gateway

IT’S A CURIOUS PHENOMENON that the farther people are from Japan and South Korea, the more likely they are to think folks in the two countries get along like dogs and monkeys, as the Japanese say about dogs and cats. If the articles and snide asides that the print media offer as infotainment are to be believed, it’s taken as a given in the West that the Koreans and Japanese can’t stand each other, and it’s mostly Japan’s fault.

But that’s not the picture that emerges in the part of the world where the two countries are closest to each other. It’s a mere three-hour boat ride or 50-minute flight across the Korean Strait separating Kyushu and the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula. Here in Kyushu, it’s no big deal to eat a leisurely breakfast while listening to a Busan radio station, and then follow that with a leisurely lunch in Busan. In fact, I’ve done it myself.

It’s not as if I’m a trend-setter, either. That trip has become an everyday occurrence for people in both countries. The sister cities of Fukuoka City and Busan know better than anyone that their bread is buttered on both sides, and they’ve been working together to whip up more tempting treats.

That’s why the two cities have embarked on their Asia Gateway campaign for encouraging people in both regions to drop by and set a spell, and in the process drop as much money as they can afford. They took the next step in the campaign today when they launched the joint Asia Gateway website. Their concept for the overall tone of the site is that the two cities are actually “neighboring towns” where people regularly travel back and forth, rather than cities in foreign countries that people visit occasionally for business or pleasure.

Considering the state of modern transportation and the real people I’ve seen traveling across the strait, that’s no exaggeration. For starters, young single women in both countries think nothing of hopping on the boat for a weekend cross-strait shopping expedition.

The website is jointly managed by the Nishinippon Shimbun and the Busan Ilbo newspapers. The homepage is in both languages, and from there visitors can access the separate Japanese- and Korean-language content. The section created in Fukuoka for Koreans contains videos of local attractions popular with Koreans, as well as blogs. There’s also a map of the Tenjin district in Fukuoka City, Kyushu’s largest commercial area, translations into Korean of Nishinippon Shimbun articles, and information on the Kurokawa Hot Springs in Kumamoto, another destination popular with Korean tourists.

The ties between the two areas aren’t PR dreamed up by the respective Chambers of Commerce. Coming soon to the site is an interview with a bi-strait married couple. The husband is Japanese and lives in Fukuoka City, while his wife is Korean and lives in Busan. Now that’s my idea of bisexuality!

Later this month, Busan plans to add more information in Japanese about their tourist attractions and Korean-style fortunetelling.

But you don’t need yuk hak to get a glimpse of the future in this part of the world, and now you’ve got more to go on than the English-language press. Just take a look at the Asia Gateway website and see for yourself.

Afterwords: The interview with the married couple is already supposed to be up there, but I couldn’t find it. Perhaps in the next day or so.

The pictures of Japan inside your head

WALTER LIPPMAN ONCE OBSERVED that the popular conceptions of people, places, and events outside the range of our direct experience are informed by pictures inside our heads, and that these pictures are often created by journalists incapable of seeing beyond the pictures in their own heads.

As long as we realize that the prime directive for the print and broadcast media has always been to entertain rather than to inform, the damage will be no greater than that caused by the stories we habitually tell ourselves in our daily lives anyway. The problems arise when the journalistic drones start believing the pictures they create and cause real trouble by spreading falsehoods among people without the means to educate themselves otherwise.

While this phenomenon exists in the print and broadcast media everywhere, it is endemic in the overseas English-language media dealing with Japan. The pictures in their heads amount to a full-blown hallucination.

Here are brief descriptions of three newspaper articles that appeared today, all about the preparation of food. What sort of cognitive dissonance is created with the pictures in your head when you read them?

Japanese cooking school in Seoul

Shunted off to the side of page 11 in the Nishinippon Shimbun was a brief article covering the announcement that the Nakamura Culinary School of Fukuoka City will open a Seoul branch in September to provide instruction in the preparation of Japanese cuisine and Western confections. Licensed chefs in both fields will teach the classes assisted by Korean interpreters.

The school will offer two courses—one for prospective chefs, and one for professionals already working as chefs. The course for the pros will be limited to 24 students, and will include 132 hours of instruction over a six-month period. In addition to the school’s regular instructors, food preparers at well-known Japanese hotels, ryotei (traditional Japanese restaurants, very expensive) and patisseries will also be used as teachers for the course.

The Nakamura Culinary School thinks it sees a business opportunity because there has been a surge of popularity in Japanese food in South Korea over the past few years. More than 1,000 South Koreans came to Japan last year alone to learn how to prepare Japanese food at local culinary institutes.

But the sharp depreciation of the won caused attendance to dip this year. School head Nakamura Tetsu decided to offer instruction in Seoul to make it cheaper for the students. It’s also easier for the students to learn from courses conducted in the Korean language. (Instruction at cooking schools in Japan is of course entirely in Japanese.)

The article notes this is the second cooking school to open a South Korean branch, after Osaka’s Tsuji Culinary Institute.

Now how does this—and the many other similar stories I’ve presented here—clash with the pictures in the heads of people who have been entertained with tales about how the Koreans and the Japanese just hatehatehate each other?

Incidentally, the Fukuoka Asian Urban Research Center conducted a survey by questionnaire in February and March of residents in the major cities of South Korea to determine the city’s name recognition and its image in those areas. The survey found a name recognition of greater than 80% for their sister city in Busan, South Korea. That percentage soared to 95% for Busan women in their 20s and 30s.

The reason cited by the center for that stratospheric percentage among young Korean women was the frequency with which they or their friends hop across the Korean Strait to go shopping in Kyushu.

That doesn’t surprise me at all, but then I live near Fukuoka City, have seen and met many of those same young women, and know how easy it is to travel between the two cities because I’ve done it myself. Forgive me for believing the picture inside the dim cave of my own head.

The reggae izakaya

Takeo in Saga is a town of about 50,000 people roughly midway between the two slightly larger towns of Saga City and Sasebo, Nagasaki. It takes about a half hour to get from Takeo to either city, and an additional hour or so to travel to either Nagasaki City or Fukuoka City.

Buried even further in the back of today’s Nishinippon Shimbun was a blurb about a new dish being served at a “reggae izakaya” in Takeo called Nuf Nuf. (An izakaya is a traditional Japanese eating and drinking place.)

Nuf Nuf is run by 36-year-old Koga Manabu. The photo accompanying the piece showed a man with a genial smile and a knit tam covering what appears to be an impressive growth of dreadlocks.

Mr. Koga created a new dish that his customers think is quite tasty. He started with Sicilian rice, added wild boar meat, and used locally grown lemongrass as a flavor enhancer. He said he slices the boar meat very thin to neutralize its distinctive odor.

He offered it first at a trial tasting party on 31 May, and it went over so well he put it on the Nuf Nuf menu. He serves it with soup on the side and charges JPY 800 ($US 8.14), which sounds reasonable.

I’ve never been to Nuf Nuf, but I know people who have—including a Jamaican woman who enjoyed living in Saga for several years. She told me Koga Manabu was a nice guy and the food was good.

But aren’t the Japanese supposed to be xenophobic islanders turning even more inward and nationalistic? What’s this about some guy in dreadlocks in a town in the middle of the sticks creating new recipes using Sicilian rice? He’s going to ruin all those pictures in your head of Japanese who can’t abide foreigners or bear to put any kind of rice past their lips other than the plain but pure white variety grown on the islands.

Robo-chefs to take over Japanese kitchens

That’s what the headline in the New Zealand Herald said, and who are we to quibble with a source chosen as the Best Media Website in 2007, 2008, and 2009 in the Qantas Media Awards?

Here’s the first sentence in the article:

“They’ve got ones that clean, and others that pour drinks, so it was only a matter of time before Japanese inventors came up with robots that can cook.”

Just out of curiosity, have you seen one of those robots cleaning a house or pouring your drinks anywhere?

Neither have I.

But the best media website for three years running says it was just a matter of time before those robot-mad Japanese inventors came up with robot chefs.

Various prototype robo-chefs showed off their cooking skills at the International Food Machinery and Technology Expo in Tokyo, flipping “okonomiyaki” Japanese pancakes, serving sushi and slicing vegetables.

When did machines start to have “skills” instead of functions? And when did either machines or people start to “flip” okonomiyaki? Is poetic license the reason they’ve won that string of awards? It certainly isn’t because the person who wrote that article has seen anyone make those “Japanese pancakes”.

The real story here is that the Japanese have a knack for automating different types of labor that the biens pensants once lamented as dehumanizing, particularly on assembly lines in auto plants.

Robots are also efficient, dependable, show up for work sober and on time, and don’t have labor unions that demand retirement packages preventing the company from making a profit on the cars they manufacture. Ask the management personnel who used to work at General Motors, assuming you don’t have to chase them down on the golf course while they enjoy their severance packages.

“We all know that robots can be very useful. We want to take that utility out of the factory so that they can be used elsewhere,” said Narito Hosomi, president of Toyo Riki, manufacturers of the pancake-cooking robot.

Well, why not? Isn’t this just a logical progression from machines that mix carbonated water and flavored syrup in on-site dispensers at restaurants to give customers the soft drinks they order? Or the machines at any other plant the world over that manufacture and package food products in processes that are almost entirely automated?

Take a few seconds to think about it, and it turns out to be just the normal course of events in the development of any kind of technology. People come up with different ideas, spend the time and money to make them a reality, and see if they fly in the marketplace. If their ideas are useful, they make a profit. If not, they might be able to apply the new technology to different fields. It makes the world turn around that much more smoothly, and it’s even worth an article in the daily paper.

But how much more entertaining it is to create pictures in peoples’ heads of Robo-Chefs Taking Over Japanese Kitchens to flip okonomiyaki, presumably leaving the human Japanese to march around their rabbit hutches plotting new ways to conquer the Korean Peninsula! This time for sure! Taking an occasional break for sex with their inflatable dolls, of course.

If the media thinks they have to provide fictitious images to their consumers for the sake of entertainment, when the real information is much more entertaining, more enlightening—and much less dangerous—that’s the business model they have to live with.

But it’s too bad for them the soaring number of media bankruptcies and disappearing ad revenue isn’t just a picture inside their own heads.

Matsuri da! (106): The Korean divinity at a Shinto shrine

SOLDIERS BRING HOME all sorts of souvenirs when they return from foreign battlefields—unusual rocks from uninhabited beaches, Luger pistols, hachimaki headbands, severed ears and other body parts, unpleasant diseases, and war brides speaking unfamiliar languages, to mention a few.

The kachigarasu

Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded the Korean Peninsula twice in the 1590s, and his staging area and jumping off point was located in what is now Chinzei-cho in Saga. He had the Nagoya Castle built there in just five months; after the Osaka Castle, it was the largest in Japan at the time. In those days, the area was part of the Nabeshima domain, ruled by Nabeshima Naoshige. A skilled military leader, Nabeshima’s epigrams and deeds were recorded in the classic samurai how-to manual Hagakure by Tsunetomo Yamamoto, an attendant of the daimyo’s grandson Mitsushige.

Nabeshima accompanied Toyotomi on his Korean excursions and brought back two unusual souvenirs. One was a type of black-and-white magpie known in Japanese as the kachigarasu, which is still found in Japan almost exclusively in Saga and Fukuoka.

Though the bird resembles the karasu, or the all-black crow that lives throughout Japan, it is of a different genus and species. The Koreans call it the kkachi, so the etymology is very clear. They like to nest in utility poles—there are probably some right now peering down on the street in my neighborhood—which gives the Kyushu Electric maintenance men a spring- and summer-long headache.

Nabeshima’s second war souvenir was a Korean ceramist named Lee Sam-pyeung, who arrived in 1598 and would later revolutionize ceramics production in Japan from his base in Arita, Saga. Because he couldn’t find the proper type of clay in the area to make the sophisticated Chinese/Korean type of porcelain already in demand in Southeast Asia and Europe, Lee initially worked with a group of 12 Korean ceramists to make what is known as Karatsu ware.

That changed in 1616, when Lee struck kaolin—the ceramist’s equivalent of gold—at Mt. Izumi in Arita. That’s where he built the first noborigama, or climbing kiln (sometimes called dragon kiln) in Japan required for firing fine porcelain. It was the first of two strokes of exceptional luck for the Japanese ceramics industry.

The second occurred when the Ming Dynasty in China collapsed in 1644. The European nobility and wealthy merchants were buying enormous quantities of Chinese porcelain, but the turmoil at dynasty’s end caused many kilns to shut down. Some were damaged in the battles between the dynasty and the Manchus. The succeeding Qing Dynasty government then stopped trade altogether from 1656 to 1684. The end of supply from China spurred the Dutch East India company to turn to Arita porcelain to fill the prodigious demand. The Dutch were the only foreigners allowed to maintain a presence in Japan at the time, and they had an office on Dejima, a small island off the city of Nagasaki. (Land reclamation operations later made it part of the city itself.) As a result, an enormous amount of porcelain was shipped from Arita to Europe from then until the mid-18th century.

Two factors drove this demand. The first was that in Europe in those days, porcelain was a beautiful and exotic rarity from distant places barely imaginable for most people. The first porcelain manufactured on the continent was in Meissen in 1709. The production techniques existed only in Asia, so porcelain items were considered treasures. Deliveries took several months over the Silk Road or in sailing ships. Some even thought porcelain had magical properties, and believed it would become discolored and crack if it came into contact with poison.

The second was that the only people who could afford to indulge themselves with porcelain purchases were the European and Ottoman Turkish nobility, and the wealthiest of the merchant class. The customer base may have been limited, but those customers had plenty of money to spend on whatever struck their fancy. Their passion for collecting became a mania that was almost degenerate in its profligacy. One German Elector traveled to the Amsterdam docks to buy immense quantities right off the ship. Their frenzy culminated in the creation of porcelain rooms, in which the entire chamber was filled with porcelain displays from floor to ceiling, and sometimes included the ceiling. The rooms often had mirrored walls to enhance the effect. A single room wasn’t enough for Augustus the Strong, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. He built the Japanisches Palais in Dresden, a palace for holding and displaying the more than 20,000 pieces of Chinese and Japanese porcelain in his collection. (It was never used for that, however, and became a library instead.)

Though the huge shipments to Europe ended in the mid-18th century, Arita is still one of the premier ceramics-producing areas of Japan. Every year during the Golden Week holidays, a period in which five public holidays fall from 28 April to 5 May, the town holds a ceramics fair in which the entire business of the residents is given over to selling ceramics and porcelain from their storefronts or stalls in the street. That includes barber shops and cafes as well as the ceramics merchants and producers who do it for a living.

The 106th Arita ceramics fair ended last week, and this year 1.13 million visitors just as eager as the 17th century nobility to buy porcelain (for much cheaper prices) flocked to the town with a population of slightly more than 21,000 in an area of 27.09 square kilometers, 70% of which is wooded. It was the second-highest number of visitors in the history of the event, with the highest coming in 2003. It was also the seventh straight year that more than one million people came. The organizers thought the economic downturn and fears of influenza would depress attendance, but a special discount on expressway tolls during the holidays in conjunction with the introduction of a new electronic toll collection system seems to have encouraged people to make the trip.

Shinto festivals have long been held to coincide with commercial events, and vice-versa, so it’s not unusual that the Tozan Shinto shrine in Arita-cho would hold one of their festivals on the 4th. The tutelary deity of the shrine, which is said to have been founded in 1658, is the Korean ceramist Lee Sam-pyeung. There is also a monument to Lee at the top of the mountain behind the shrine, where the ceremonies are usually held, but rain forced it indoors this year. About 100 people from Japan and South Korea were in the procession and witnessed a performance of kagura (Shinto dance), as shown in the photo.

One of those watching from South Korea was Kim Gi-hyeong of the South Korean Ceramics Culture Association. He said:

“We pledge to keep alive the pioneering and creative spirit of Lee, and bring forth a more beautiful friendship between South Korea and Japan.”

It’s curious that some people are so anxious to claim that the Japanese are either ignorant of or loath to honor the Korean contribution to their culture, and that other people are so ready to believe it. That means one of the many positive aspects of Japan-Korean relations they overlook or ignore is this Shinto shrine and event honoring a Korean ceramist who lived 400 years ago and whose life’s work and lucky strike still enrich everyone in the area today—which the Japanese readily acknowledge.

Here are two brief YouTube clips showing the shrine, with Japanese voiceovers. (Number one and number two) It’s Sunday night, and I’m not up for doing a transcription/translation, but they’re worth viewing even if you don’t know Japanese. Both show the unique ceramic installations at the shrine, including the underglaze blue (sometsuke in Japanese) on the torii. The first also includes shots of the monument to Lee.

The entire range of Arita ware is offered for sale during the fair at reduced prices. Those prices get progressively lower every day, so some rather attractive pieces can be bought rather inexpensively on the last day. The items sold include both the finest quality porcelain as well as leftover odds and ends. My first year in Japan, in 1984, I visited the fair and purchased for pocket change a surplus tea mug specially produced to commemorate the anniversary of a small Shinto shrine elsewhere in Kyushu. It was sitting in a crate along with some other remainders. Now it’s sitting on my desk, and I still use it to drink tea.

The Buddhist temple Koreans built in Japan

THERE’S NO TELLING what’ll turn up when someone sticks a spade into the ground in Japan. In Okinawa, as we saw in this recent post, the diggers might strike undetonated bombs or artillery shells buried since the Second World War. More often, however, what they’ll uncover are fascinating glimpses of periods dating back more than a millennium.

Digging a hole

That was demonstrated again last week when the Education Committee of Hirakata, Osaka, and the city’s cultural treasure research and survey association announced they had discovered a trench used to cast iron and bronze utensils at Kudara-ji, a Buddhist temple in that city.

Here’s where it gets interesting: The temple was built in the latter half of the 8th century by members of the Baekche royal family from the Korean Peninsula who fled to Japan. In fact, it was named for them: the Chinese characters for Baekche (百済) are read Kudara in Japanese.

One of the three ancient Korean kingdoms, Baekche was located in the southwestern part of the peninsula, an area that still maintains close ties with Japan. It wound up the loser in frequent battles with Silla and Goguryo, the other two kingdoms. Some members of its royal family dashed across the Korea Strait after the kingdom’s defeat by Silla and their Chinese allies. Japan sent a substantial military force to fight with Baekche, and it’s estimated that as many as half of that force did not return home after being beaten. Meanwhile, the transplanted Baekche royal family is credited with introducing the Chinese writing system, Buddhism, and the advanced technology of the period to this country. Indeed, one of the Baekche kings, Muryeong, was born in Kyushu. (He ascended to the throne after his elder brother was assassinated.)

The researchers think they’ve discovered the remnants of the facility used to build the temple and make the implements used there. Only a handful of these facilities have been unearthed nationwide, so scholars consider the find important because it may shed light on the structure of the temple buildings of the time.

The committee said they found a pit 2.5 meters in circumference at the northeast section of the site used for the placement of casting molds. In addition to iron and bronze utensils nearby, they found about 300 shards from a melting furnace which is thought to have been used for casting.

They also found the remains of six posts, which they think formed a gateway at the northern wall. About 500 meters to the north of that gate is the site of ruins in Kinyahon-machi. The researchers say the find tends to confirm the close connection between the latter district and the Baekche royal family, which was given preferential treatment by the Japanese state at the time–including intermarriage with the Imperial family.

City officials noted that in addition to aiding research into temple structure of the period, the discovery is important because it provides further support for the idea that the Baekche royal family enjoyed great influence in that area from the Nara period to the Heian period (covering the 8th century).

There is another significant aspect to this story that city officials might have mentioned had they been disposed to do so. Namely, some ungenerous expatriate foreigners in Japan, as well as some South Koreans misinformed by the political and media axis in that country, labor under the belief that Japanese do not care to be reminded of their ancient ties with the Korean Peninsula and the impact those ties had on their culture.

Yet this story about a temple named after Koreans was openly and widely reported in the Japanese news media. The reports also noted that archaeological excavations have been conducted at this site since 1932.

Or, to take it to another level of detail, the Baekche kingdom itself was founded by people who headed south down the peninsula from Manchuria. So who’s your daddy, daddy-o?

All of which suggests that the Nippo-crits might be less informed on this subject than the Japanese public they hold in such disdain.