Kyoto University seeks approval to use iPS cells in treatment for damaged knees

Kyoto University said Wednesday it has asked for government approval to conduct a clinical trial that involves transplanting cartilage made from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to treat damaged knee joints.

Under the plan, a team led by Noriyuki Tsumaki, a professor at the university who specializes in cell induction and regulation, will culture iPS cells to create cartilage tissue and transplant it into knees. The university said it submitted the plan to the health ministry on Nov. 7 for a review by its special panel.

The team has already tested the treatment on a rat and found it to be effective. It has also confirmed that the treatment carries low risk of rejection, fibrosis reaction or causing cancer, it said.

A board set up at the university approved the plan in October.

It is hoped that the new treatment will help treat patients who have damaged or degenerated cartilage due to injuries or illnesses.

Cartilage tissue covers joint bones and absorbs shock. A joint cannot move smoothly if part of the cartilage tissue is damaged due to injury or if it turns fibrous due to aging.

While there is a treatment in which normal cartilage tissue is transplanted, it is hard to secure enough tissue and part of the tissue tends to turn fibrous.

(Source: JT)

When ‘Japanese only’ rules were OK, and other odd Supreme Court cases

Yes, reading about the court’s orotund rulings can be a tough slog, even for us professionals. But if you spend enough time sifting through the gravel pits of grandiloquent legalese you find the occasional gem, writes Colin P.A. Jones, a professor at Doshisha Law School in Kyoto, on the JT. Read on: 

Did that headline grab you? I hope so. Because we really need to clickbait more of our online readers. How else are we supposed to get them to digest and discuss an article about Japanese Supreme Court cases?

Yes, reading about the court’s orotund rulings can be a tough slog, even for us professionals. But if you spend enough time sifting through the gravel pits of grandiloquent legalese you find the occasional gem. Today’s column will introduce some quirky things Japan’s top court has decided (including the case in the shameless teaser headline).

The case of the cat corpse and the night soil
First, my personal favorite: In 1992 the court had to decide whether putting a dead cat painted red in a fire chief’s desk drawer and dog feces in his coat pocket, “thereby hindering his ability to receive reports from his subordinate officials or perform the duty to decide various matters scheduled in the morning on that day,” constituted “force” for purposes of banging up the joker who did it for the crime of “forcible obstruction of business.” Of course, it did: conviction upheld. Nice that they made that clear, though.

Stretching the letter of the law
Reading criminal cases makes you numb to the reliability with which Japanese courts find a way to arrive at a conviction or uphold one on appeal. Occasionally, though, a judge takes a stand for justice, the presumption of innocence and clarity of law.

This involves some effort. Supreme Court judgments are researched and initially drafted by subordinate research judges staffed to the court. Judges who want to write their own dissenting or concurring opinions, however, are on their own. Some former top jurists even report having their proposed separate opinions disdainfully returned by researchers, full of red-lining.

This is why it seems bizarre to see, in a case from Nov. 20, 2008, Judge Mutsuo Tahara writing an extended dissent from a judgment affirming the conviction of a man for the obscene act of “stalking a female customer at a shopping building and taking photographs of her buttocks in trousers with his cellular phone.” Available in all its glory on the court’s English website, his dissent includes a phrase rarely seen in Supreme Court jurisprudence: “I will examine the act of ‘looking at’ another person’s ‘buttocks,’ which precedes the act of taking a photograph of the same.”

Accepting that it “is true that the act of ‘looking at another person’s buttocks’ can be judged to be ‘obscene’ if it means ‘looking at’ the buttocks while putting one’s face close to them,” Takahara goes on to explain why simply taking bum snaps from a respectable distance does not constitute “obscenity.”

To be fair, police overreach through strained interpretation of the law is a problem everywhere. But it’s still odd to see this particular case being chosen as the place to draw that line.

In a similar vein, in 1978 the court took a stand against City Hall. A municipal authority had sought to shut down a “soapland” quasi-brothel by approving the construction of a playground nearby, which would then make operation of the soapland illegal (because … the children!). The court found this to be a tortious abuse of government power and the aggrieved plaintiff to be entitled to damages.

Abuse of power was also at issue in a 2002 case in which the court actually invalidated a village mayoral election. The incumbent mayor had used the powers of the office to prevent the town hall from issuing to a challenger a family registry extract, one of the documents required to apply to stand for election. Running unopposed, the incumbent won until the courts decided a do-over was required.

When doubt is unreasonable
A 2007 criminal case is sometimes cited for guidance as to what the “beyond a reasonable doubt” evidentiary standard for criminal convictions means. A man going through a messy divorce “made an explosive by connecting a considerable quantity of (chemicals) … with a detonating device consisting of an ignition heater, battery, etc., and putting it into a file case, and then putting this case into a nonstandard-size postal envelope.” He then mailed this to his mother-in-law.

Where justice rules?: The Supreme Court of Japan's gray exterior belies some of the quirky cases that have been heard within its walls. | VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, CC BY-SA 3.0

The murder attempt failed and the man was caught and convicted. The Supreme Court’s opinion shows the fine level of detail Japanese courts (usually lower ones) feel necessary to put in their judgments. A week before the parcel was delivered, the man had “by using the computer situated at his residence, accessed and browsed internet websites that provide information on the methods for producing explosive substances … and methods for making detonating devices” and “purchased acetone and other chemicals … in the quantity that seems to have been used to produce the explosive.” There is also a long description of the stamps used, the color printer on which the address label had been printed, the postbox into which the package was dropped and so on. It almost reads as a manual on how not to send a letter bomb.

The appeal was grounded in the conviction being based only on circumstantial evidence, there having been no confession. Conceding the accused had in fact purchased the chemicals, his lawyer argued it had been used for other things. Also, it was possible that he didn’t purchase at least 10 of the 24 stamps used. And so forth.

The court wasn’t having it, declaring that the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard did not mean that judges could not convict in the face of the possible existence of abstract alternatives or contrary facts.

He was asking for it, guv
The courts are more forgiving of police when they stray from the righteous path. In a 1997 case, the police had executed a search warrant on a residence and found illegal drugs. When presented with evidence of his guilt, the occupant said “Sonna aho na” (“That’s ridiculous”), which earned him a sound beating.

Considering whether the drugs should be excluded as evidence, the court acknowledged that “although the illegal acts by the police officials were committed at the scene of search, the violence occurred after the article of evidence was discovered and it was induced by the accused’s remarks.” Conviction upheld; apparently the beating was his fault too.

Guilty no matter what
A classic is the 1948 case where the court first ruled on the constitutionality of the death penalty. In a judgment containing the memorable phrase “the life of a single person is heavier than the Earth,” the court nonetheless upheld the appellant’s death sentence. At the time, the U.S. Occupation authorities were preparing to hang Hideki Tojo and other former Japanese leaders for war crimes, so any other conclusion would probably have been inconvenient.

A 1996 case affirmed a conviction for violating a proscription on the capture (hokaku) of birds using a bow and arrow (yumiya). The offender had used a “Western-style bow” (crossbow or yōkyūjū). As a former Dungeons & Dragons aficionada, I was disappointed by the lack of discussion into whether a crossbow was the same as a Japanese longbow. Instead, the court focused on whether you could still be guilty of “capturing” a bird if your arrow (I know, “bolt”) missed. Of course you could: conviction affirmed.

The court has been more discriminating when it comes to swords. Japan not only has famously stringent gun control, but tight sword control also. How tight? In a 1996 case, the court considered an appeal over a conviction for having a “cutting tool … for use at a traditional ritual of cutting food.” The court didn’t care that it was just a big cooking knife rather than a sword: conviction upheld.

Not all swords are created equal
The real discrimination came in the headline case, a 1990 case under the same law, which contains an exception allowing possession of swords (tōkenrui) that have cultural or artistic value and are registered with the authorities. The implementing regulations, however, only recognize Japanese swords (Nihontō) as eligible for registration.

The case was brought by someone seeking to register a Western saber. In a surprisingly long judgment (seven pages including a dissenting opinion) the Supreme Court declined to expand the exception to grubby Western swords. It explained that, after Japan’s defeat in World War II, Occupation authorities had sought to disarm the Japanese people completely. But the Japanese government had been able to wheedle an exception based on the aesthetic worth of Japanese swords, which are made using unique techniques that entitle them to special treatment as cultural artifacts in a way other swords are not. Two of the five judges dissented because the law itself clearly applied to all swords and the more restrictive implementing regulations should thus be invalid.

Forcing a confession
Finally, there is the only interesting civil case I have come across, a 2001 appellate judgment in a tort case brought by the developer of game software against a vendor of game-mod (modification) devices.

The software at issue was “a love simulation game in which the main character … becomes a student of a fictitious high school, selects his favorite schoolgirl from among the characters in the game and, with the aim of receiving a confession of love from this schoolgirl on the graduation day, steps up efforts through studying, incidents, events, etc., he experiences during three years, to develop his capabilities that deserve to receive a confession of love from his favorite schoolgirl. … The story is supposed to unfold based on the assumption that no schoolgirls appear until the values of the apparent parameters reach a certain level.”

The heinous game-mod devices ruined this wholesome game by making some schoolgirls appear prematurely and enabling players to skip straight to graduation and unfailingly reach “a level that is necessary to receive a confession of love from the player’s favorite schoolgirl.” Judgment for plaintiff upheld — without any creepy dissents. Who says there is no justice?

Japan’s geisha battle to protect their future

Masamito from the Japan Times gives  a rare look into the world of geisha and how they are sustaining their ancient traditions in modern times. Read on: 

On a chilly evening earlier in November, geisha Kikuno and her two apprentice maiko host an event that gives guests an opportunity to experience a dinner party with traditional female entertainers.

The atmosphere at Sushi Isshin, a restaurant in Tokyo’s Yushima district, is boisterous as the guests chat among themselves or with their neighbors. The entertainers, who are visiting from Nara, invite the guests to sip on sake and enjoy a full-course sushi dinner served by second-generation owner Hirosada Okamoto.

However, a hush descends on the crowd when the three hostesses begin their performance, with Kikuno dancing gracefully to the soft plucking sound of the shamisen.

Home and away: Kikuno (center), her maiko apprentice and three other geisha from Kochi and Ehime prefectures traveled to New York to promote geisha culture. | KOTARO OHASHI

The guests applaud enthusiastically once the performance comes to an end, and the hostesses turn their attention to games. The games aren’t particularly difficult, but they’re often accompanied by a song and the loser is required to down a cup of sake. With Kikuno leading proceedings, the guests laugh loudly as each loser throws back their drink. It’s a scene reminiscent of a college party, albeit with wildly different participants.

At the conclusion of the evening, the guests shuffle out onto the street contented. Kikuno also looks satisfied, having proven to be a charming host with a dry sense of humor.

The evening is part of her Kagai Restoration Project in Ganrinin, which she launched in 2012 to revitalize geisha culture in Nara’s Ganrinin district, where she has been the only active traditional female entertainer for the past 15 years.

“It’s not enough just to continue doing what we have done in the past. I have a responsibility toward the younger girls,” Kikuno says. “Speaking as someone who has been part of this world for a long time, I want to give something in back.”

Kikuno has been involved in geisha culture for about 30 years. She describes herself as being a bit of a tomboy with short hair at school, and she initially had little interest in becoming an entertainer. Kikuno had just completed junior high school when she was scouted to become an apprentice through her aunt, who was running a teahouse for geisha at the time.

Kikuno’s training began at the age of 15, when she learned such things as how to fold and put on a kimono and how to sit with her legs folded beneath her. She was instructed to avoid spending time with her family and friends as well as shun pop music, because it would affect the way she could hear notes on a shamisen.

Dressed to the nines: Geisha Kikuno launched Kagai Restoration Project in
Ganrinin in 2012 to revitalize geisha culture in Nara. | KAZUHIRO TAKAHASHI

“I was completely isolated from the world,” Kikuno says, “but I was only 15 at the time and accepted it for what it was.”

Her days were filled with nagauta and kouta music lessons as well as classes on tea ceremony, flower arrangement, calligraphy and Japanese dance.

In the evenings, she was instructed to sit in the corner of a tatami room in a kimono and watch the geisha in the teahouse entertain. She learned when to change ashtrays, pour sake and how to converse with guests.

“At first, I just sat and watched, but it was interesting,” Kikuno says. “Men who had arrived with stern looks on their faces soon began loosening up after drinking and talking to the geisha.”

Kikuno made her debut as a maiko at the age of 18 and her life instantly became more hectic. She would put on her makeup and kimono and attend dance lessons in the morning. This was typically followed by a lunch party, after which she would go to a nagauta lesson and then attend an evening party, finding time to eat light meals in between. After 8 p.m., Kikuno would return to her teahouse and attend to guests until about midnight.

Kikuno recalls being so physically exhausted that she would collapse once every six months or so after suffering from such ailments as a hernia and liver damage.

She became a geisha at the age of 23. As the years passed, the other geisha in her circle retired or quit and, before she knew it, she was the sole geisha in Nara.

“I noticed a drastic drop in dinner parties about 17 years ago but no one did anything about it,” Kikuno says. “Some say it’s possible to be a geisha forever, but people grow old and their looks deteriorate. A geisha’s customers will eventually stop coming if they don’t offer something else, like being an excellent dancer or a great conversationalist.”

Kikuno (center), her maiko apprentice and three other geisha pose for a photo alongside members of the Hanaakari orchestra in New York. | KOTARO OHASHI

Experienced entertainers
Geisha culture dates back to the Edo Period (1603-1868). Some of the oldest and most prestigious karyūkai geisha districts in the country are Kyoto’s Gion Kobu and Kamishichiken, and Tokyo’s Asakusa, Kagurazaka and Shinbashi.

Sumi Asahara, a journalist who has been covering geisha for the past 20 years, finds the culture fascinating.

“These women are unique in the sense that they’re true masters of hospitality,” Asahara says. “They’re skilled in various traditional performance arts and they know how to entertain a guest.”

It is estimated that between 40,000 and 80,000 geisha operated nationwide in the early Showa Era (1926-89). Through her research, Asahara estimates that about 600 geisha are currently active in some 40 districts nationwide.

“Places that existed 20 years ago have since disappeared and the remaining geisha areas have lost their vitality,” Asahara says. “It is natural as more and more traditional restaurants close due to fewer customers and the entertainers’ age. Everyone is struggling to preserve this culture.”

Thirty years ago, geisha numbers in Niigata Prefecture were dwindling.

Renowned for its abundant rice paddies and thriving trade, Niigata served as a distribution hub on the coast of the Sea of Japan. With so many merchants coming to Niigata, traditional Japanese restaurants and their geisha flourished from the Meiji Era (1868-1912) to the early Showa Era. At its peak, researchers believe there were about 400 geisha in the Furumachi district of Niigata, but that number had dropped to about 40 by the mid-1980s.

But according to Susumu Nakano, a Niigata native and director and executive adviser of Bandai Silver Hotel, no apprentices in Niigata had started training for about 20 years, putting the youngest geisha in their late 30s. Like many other geisha districts, traditional Japanese restaurants had begun to close and fewer patrons supported the women.

In a bid to halt the slide, Nakano founded Ryuto Shinko, a groundbreaking corporation that hires women and trains them to become furisode and tomesode, terms unique to the company that mean “apprentice” and “geisha,” respectively.

“Businesses that lack successors will disappear … and we wanted to do something to preserve a culture that is valuable to us,” Nakano says. “Traditional arts and culture cost a lot of money to maintain … and that was when I came up with an idea to use the Takarazuka business model (as an example).”

The all-female musical theater group Takarazuka Revue was established in 1913 in Hyogo Prefecture by Hankyu Railway Co. founder Ichizo Kobayashi. The group is actually part of the rail company and, as a result, each member of the troupe is also an employee.

A former tomesode of Ryuto Shinko (center) and two furisode make waves with towels in Niigata Prefecture. | COURTESY OF DAIICHI PRINTING CO.

“The answer was to create a production company like Takarazuka to hire young women as “talents” and train them (to become furisode and tomesode),” Nakano says. “Without patrons to support (geisha culture), I proposed that we unite as one and become one huge supporter.”

Ryuto Shinko was established in 1987 with the financial backing of about 80 local companies. The company offers social security benefits, provides allowances for dancing and music lessons, and covers the cost of the entertainers’ kimono and wigs. The company also dispatches the women to events.

Nakano says that it was hard to attract women at first because the job wasn’t something that was on the radar of many high school graduates.

Ryuto Shinko was forced to offer a salary that was nearly twice that of regular first-year company employees, as well as provide accommodation.

“Those formative years were difficult,” Nakano recalls. “We talked to various young women and tried to persuade them to try it out for a year. We told the women … that everything would be provided for them.”

Thirty years on, Ryuto Shinko typically attracts between one and three new recruits each year, Nakano says. More recently, college graduates have joined the company and some continue to work after marriage and having children.

“Founding a company was the only way for this culture to survive,” Nakano says. “And if we hadn’t done so, the Furumachi geigi (geisha) and its rich history would no longer exist.”

Geisha Megumi (center, back) poses with other geisha in Hachioji. | COURTESY OF GEISHA MEGUMI

‘Seeking someone cheerful’
In the west Tokyo city of Hachioji, meanwhile, another group of businesses came together to support the local geisha community — in particular, an entertainer named Megumi.

Megumi was born into a family that had no ties to geisha culture. However, she was asked if she was interested in becoming a geisha after meeting her future mentor at a Japanese restaurant where Megumi worked as a waitress. She was 22 years old.

“Everything was new to me, so everything was wonderful,” Megumi says. “I didn’t even know that such a world existed. Everyone took care of me and welcomed me into this world … and I felt that I had finally found a place where I belonged.”

In the years between the Meiji and early Showa eras, Hachioji thrived on its textile industry. And as the city flourished, so too did its Nakacho geisha district, with more than 200 female entertainers operating in the neighborhood at its peak.

After World War II, however, women increasingly stopped wearing kimono and began dressing in Western-style clothing.

Hachioji’s geisha population faced certain extinction, with only 10 entertainers working in the industry in 1999, writes Asahara in “Geishashu ni Hanataba O: Hachioji Karyukai, Fukkatsu” (“Flowers for Geisha: The Revitalization of Hachioji’s Geisha District”), which was published by Fuuseisha Corp. in June this year.

“The relationship between garment shops and geisha was so intimate that the district’s prosperity was directly affected,” Asahara writes in her book, which details the manner in which Hachioji’s geisha district has made a comeback. The book documents Asahara’s decade-long reporting in the district.

Megumi continued to be the youngest geisha in Hachioji’s Nakacho district despite being well into her 30s at the time.

In 1999, she decided that she needed to find some new recruits and created an advertisement seeking candidates.

“Seeking someone cheerful who likes kimono,” the poster said. “Age up to around 30 years old; no experience necessary; an hourly wage of ¥3,000 or more; and free kimono rental. Part time OK.”

“I felt that many girls out there, like me, didn’t know about this world,” Megumi says. “To be honest, I didn’t start out on a mission to revitalize the geisha community or anything like that. Rather, I just wanted other women of my generation to know about geisha … and to attract a colleague, because everyone else around me was my mentor’s age.”

By coincidence, Hachioji Kurobei ni Shitashimu Kai, which was named after the Kurobei (Black Wall) street district where geisha once flourished, was also founded by local businesses in 1999 for the purpose of preserving geisha culture, says Shingo Fukuyama, current chairman of the group. Like the corporation in Niigata, businesses in Hachioji were also concerned with the decline of geisha culture in the city and decided to do something about it.

Fukuyama, owner of local liquor shop Tsuruya, says there are currently about 150 active members of the supporters’ group, including some women.

“To be honest, there’s nothing in it for us,” Fukuyama says. “We are not doing this to get something in return. We just want to support traditional Japanese culture and the geisha who have devoted themselves to doing something unique in this area.”

Megumi opened her own okiya boarding house for geisha in 2001, the first such establishment to open in Hachioji in 20 years. Three geisha at the lodging have since gone on to open their own boarding houses and in the 18 years since Megumi first put up the advertisement, Hachioji has seen its geisha population almost double. And last year, for the first time in more than half a century, a hangyoku apprentice called Kurumi made her debut.

In 2014, Megumi started Hachioji Odori, a dance performance featuring geisha, which played on stage to a full house at Hachioji Icho Hall. The second performance was held in May this year.

Her activities have even helped take geisha in Hachioji overseas to such locations as Australia’s Cowra, Hawaii and Shanghai. They’ve also performed in the lobby of a hospital, as well as at elementary schools.

Geisha Megumi 

Megumi even appeared in the German film “Fukushima, Mon Amour,” a fictional story inspired by her actions following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku. After the disaster, Megumi had taken a shamisen to a geisha in northeastern Japan who had lost everything.

“It is important to learn the traditions of a culture, but it is also important to continue evolving with the times,” Megumi says. “Through change, I think we are able to continue this culture.”

Asahara says the geisha district in Hachioji has recovered to some extent but the things that have worked there won’t help everyone, adding that change is also difficult to bring about if many active older geisha prefer to do things in a traditional manner. “Each geisha district needs to come up with its own way to revitalize the culture,” Asahara says. “It is very difficult to re-create a culture once it is gone, so it is important to do something about it while it still exists in order to hand it down to the next generation.”

Passing the baton
Back in Nara, Kikuno is also trying new strategies. Using the internet, Kikuno has begun to reach out to geisha from other parts of Japan that are also struggling to attract a new generation. Traditionally, geisha don’t collaborate with groups outside their geographical areas, but Kikuno understands that it’s time for her to take a different approach.

Kikuno also has a more personal reason for launching the Ganrinin project: She wishes to avoid dying alone. She has watched several geisha who don’t have an apprentice grow old without anyone to look after them.

She pauses at length, eyes welling with tears, when recalling the plight of her shamisen teacher of 15 years, who passed away surrounded by just a few of her students.

“Luckily, we were able to hold a funeral for my teacher, but there are geisha out there who can’t organize this on their own,” Kikuno says. “Elderly geisha end up dying in solitude, and I do think that could happen to me someday. That’s why I want to connect with other geisha.”

In February 2016, she hosted the inaugural Naramachi Hanaakari event and invited geisha from eight districts to perform their local dances. The event also included a symposium that featured experts discussing the rich history of geisha culture.

Just last month in October, she was joined by one of her maiko and three other geisha from Kochi and Ehime prefectures on a trip to New York to perform at the first Hanaakari project abroad.

Kikuno stresses the importance of preserving the good parts of the geisha culture but also the need to evolve, enter new territory and try various things.

Because of her determination and creativity, three maiko and one trainee are now working in Nara. What’s more, one of her maiko, an apprentice named Kikukame, is set to become a geisha in January. Kikuno will finally have another geisha with whom she can work together side by side.

“Like many other traditional arts and occupations, the world of geisha needs someone to pass the baton to the next generation,” Kikuno says. “As someone who has chosen to be a part of this world, I believe it is my fate as well as my duty to do so.”

Sumi Asahara’s tips on geisha terminology and manners

• Geisha are female entertainers trained in traditional Japanese performance arts, including dance and shamisen. They are sometimes also called geigi or geiko.
• Maiko are geisha apprentices, although the term is mainly used in Kyoto and surrounding areas. In Tokyo, they are called hangyoku.
• Karyūkai and kagai are both words used to describe geisha districts nationwide. They both begin with the kanji for “flower.”
• Call them by their stage names such as “Megumi-san” or “onee-san” (“older ma’am”). Even if the geisha is 100 years old, never refer to her as “obasan” (“middle-aged lady” or “obāsan” (“old lady”).
• Always wear socks or stockings. Never stand on a tatami mat with bare feet.
• Dress code should be business casual or more formal.
• Don’t forget to offer some sake to the geisha.

After 45-year wait, repairs finished on all 1,001 bodhisattva statues in Kyoto

Preservation and repair work has been completed on all 1,001 statues of 1,000-armed Kannon bodhisattva at Kyoto’s Sanjusangendo Hall, ending a 45-year wait.

The last set of overhauled Buddhist statues was installed at the popular sightseeing spot on Friday.

It took 45 years to repair the statues, which are designated as important cultural properties, and each was taken out of the hall in turns.

“When the weather is fine and the rays of the morning sun come in, they look most beautiful,” said Seiko Tabuchi, a senior official at Myohoin, the temple that manages Sanjusangendo Hall. The brightness is “completely different” from before the repair work began, Tabuchi said.

The last set of overhauled Kannon bodhisattva are placed at Kyoto's Sanjusangendo Hall on Friday, ending a 45-year cleanup job. | KYODO

The preservation and repair work started in 1973, using the Cultural Affairs Agency’s subsidy program for such properties and national treasures. Annually, between 15 and 30 statues were overhauled, but about 40 per year were repaired starting in 2013.

The work mainly involved cleaning off dust and preventing gold foil from peeling off the relics, the oldest of which date from the latter years of the Heian Period (794 to 1185).

It cost about ¥920 million to repair all 1,001 statues.

Friday’s installation brought together all of the statues except for five that are on loan to museums in Kyoto and elsewhere.

(Source: JT)

How a love of Japan led me to stop dating its women

Damian Flanagan, a British academic, concludes that the only way he can truly enjoy and develop his love for Japan is by excluding his love life from the equation. Read this wonderful article on JT: 

It’s exactly 50 years since the famed Summer of Love when the “Turn on, tune in and drop out” generation shed their clothes, put flowers in their hair and, at festivals like Woodstock, overturned prim morality and ushered in a sexual revolution that would soon make its influence felt around the world.

During that summer, the 27-year-old John Lennon — already married — decided to lend his support to the London exhibition of a Japanese artist called Yoko Ono, and pretty soon the world’s most famous Anglo-Japanese union was created.

Such cross-cultural marriages may have been pioneering in the late 1960s, but these days they are overwhelmingly commonplace. A couple of years ago, when I was promoting a book on Yukio Mishima, I was interviewed in London by a Japanese journalist who suddenly asked me whether I too had a Japanese wife. When I told him that my significant other was Australian, he laughed at my eccentricity and remarked that in his experience, 90 percent of Western male scholars of Japan, when they had a wife, tended to have a Japanese one.

I can’t argue with his observation: Nearly all the heterosexual Western men I know in Japan have Japanese wives. Indeed, the overwhelming attraction of Western men to Japanese women has over the past 50 years been much commented on. In Japan, Western men have a cachet that seems to far exceed that of Western women, whose romantic life in Japan may perhaps be less advantageous.

But I do not want to get into too much trouble playing with stereotypes. There are plenty of Western women who find life partners in Japan. Such women are often adventurous, and it is that which can make them exceptionally attractive. However, it is the Western geeky male who genuinely believes he has hit the romantic jackpot in Japan.

Feminists understandably tut and roll their eyes at the depiction of Japanese women as passive and obedient sirens of sexuality, and occasionally cite the combination of Japanese women and Western men as a classic example of conservative gender roles and cultural stereotyping. Is the fact that I have rejected such a union a sign I crave liberated Western women — even the extreme, ballsy Australian variety — over retiring Japanese girls?

Er, actually no. I have no particular problem with the combination of Japanese girls and Western men — and yet long ago I found myself living in Japan and never dating Japanese women. Why?

You might think at this point I am about to revert to the standard narrative that the cultural background of a partner should be irrelevant when you meet Mr. or Ms. Right. But actually I am going to argue the reverse: that it can often be highly relevant depending on your personal circumstances.

I admire the grace and beauty of Japanese women and am more than aware of their considerable diversity, from demure kimono-clad Kyoto ladies to the unfettered, boisterous personalities so associated with Osaka. I realize you can find everything in Japanese womanhood, from power-dressing politicians and brilliant authors to tech entrepreneurs. If my circumstances in life were slightly different — if, say, I was living in a Western country working for a Western firm, or if I was looking to form a bridge to Japanese culture — I have no doubt that having a Japanese partner would add a fascinating extra dimension to my life.

The reason, however, that long ago I found myself seldom aspiring to be in a relationship with Japanese girls has to do with the manner in which I connect with Japan itself, a culture in which I have always searched for a version of personal freedom. Somewhere in the cultural differences between Japan and the West I felt that I could define my own personal sense of self.

Having a Japanese partner, I repeatedly discovered, unbalanced this sense of freedom. No longer was I in control of my relationship with Japan; now I tended to feel more like a prisoner in a relationship with a foreign culture from which I could not escape. The only way I could truly enjoy and develop my love for Japan, I concluded, was by excluding my love life from that cultural relationship.

Let me take you back to the beginning, though, when in my mid-20s I came to study and live in Japan as a graduate student. Like so many other Western men in Japan, I soon discovered that at the age of 25 I was dating a drop-dead gorgeous Japanese girl of such loveliness that I had to pinch myself to believe she could be interested in my shabbily dressed self.

Having endured undergraduate years in England where I was barely able to find a girlfriend of any description, this sudden transformation of fortunes should perhaps have been enough to have immediately made me seal the deal with the heavenly Japanese girlfriend, who was only too keen to settle down together. But somehow I dithered, feeling (correctly) that my romantic career was only just beginning.

There were several reasons why I started losing interest in dating Japanese women, but the main one was my deepening involvement with Japanese culture.

In my early relationships with Japanese girlfriends — I’d dated a Kyoto University student when I was 20 — I’d followed the standard pattern of being the curious Western male being introduced to the intricacies of the Japanese language and culture by a helpful girlfriend. But by my late 20s — when I was a graduate student in Japanese literature at Kobe University — I’d discovered that the dynamic of that type of relationship had started to fail.

Slowly it dawned on me that my language and cultural proficiency had finally come to the point where I no longer needed to be “tutored” by a girlfriend. Liberation!

By then I felt quite comfortable — indeed, slightly bored — in an exclusively Japanese world. I was spending all week in university libraries, taxing my brain, reading Japanese books. The last thing I wanted to do in my spare time, at the weekend, was indulge in more “Japanese.” I wanted an entirely different kind of distraction and stimulus. I wanted to head off to the bars and clubs of downtown Osaka and hang out with exciting girls from all over the world.

And there were so many of them! During this phase, I briefly dated girls from the Philippines, China, Korea, Thailand and Nepal.

My feisty Korean girlfriend was a constant source of cultural bewilderment to me, exploding into a fury if I did not fulfill her strange demands — she once took off a stiletto and hurled it across a train station foyer at me — and yet suddenly switched to mawkish tenderness. The Nepalese girlfriend would tell me about her “uncles” in the Himalayas and leave me dreaming about making hazardous trips into Kathmandu airport to visit her family.

After all the excitement of these girlfriends, my periodic return to the arms of Japanese girlfriends seemed like interludes of Zen-like stillness. And yet pursuing a relationship with someone from another East Asian country was never really an option — I was too devoted to my studies in Japan to have time for another major cultural commitment.

I eventually moved out of my East Asian period and into my “New World” phase, dating American, Canadian and Australian girls. I found my New World girlfriends exciting and stimulating and yet never mentally tiring or a distracting cultural commitment. I enjoyed halcyon years of flying home to the U.K. via the U.S. and Canada, exploring Vancouver, San Francisco, Dallas, Winnipeg, Washington, D.C., and New York.

The New World girlfriend, I concluded, was the perfect match for me. I found that the nationality of the girl I was dating greatly affected my mental mood and how I thought about things.

Japanese girlfriends, for example, were nearly always quite keen on the idea of moving back to the U.K. with me. But I, in contrast, was always keen to remain firmly established in Japan. On the other hand, when I returned to the U.K. during every holiday, I did not particularly like the idea of being constantly regarded wherever I went as someone whose sole point of identification was “Japan.”

But my romantic wanderings, modest as they were, eventually reached a conclusion when I met my Australian girl in Osaka. A sizable part of her appeal — her openness, fun, lack of airs and inhibitions — lies in the Australian inside her calling out to me.

I wanted to have a separate life in Britain that was unconnected to Japan — I wanted to be in control of my relationship with Japan, to stop and start it as I pleased. And if I had an Australian girlfriend, I had not only a separate “British” identity, I also had my “Australian” life as well. I was, I liked to tell myself, a citizen of the world, not a slave and spokesman of Japanese culture.

In my Australian partner, I have connected to worlds I would have never otherwise have known, of school years in the beating heat and sun-burned earth of provincial New South Wales. On a daily basis I find something expansive and liberating about living in the same house as someone brought up on a continent on the other side of the world so climactically different to my own soggy island of Britain. There is “another world” I can always escape to without taxing my mind and while speaking in my own native tongue.

And yet, crucially also, this is a relationship that allows me to pursue, without distraction, a great passion of my life: my love of Japan. My Australian alliance is not a rejection of Japan; rather, it is that which daily enables me to devote much of my energy, without flagging or a feeling of oppression, towards Japan.

It is ironic for me — lover of an Australian woman — that I constantly feel lukewarm about traveling to Australia itself, a country I often prefer in fond imagination than long-haul, sweltering reality.

I can appreciate the 50-year-old zeitgeist of the Summer of Love, although Woodstock happened before I was born. And while having many years ago retired from dating Japanese women, my love affair with Japan grows stronger every year.

What the West can learn from Japan about the cultural value of work

Here's an interesting read on NYT magazine written by John Lanchester on what the West can learn from Japan about the cultural value of work. I feel it's not just the West, but other countries can also learn from this little country. Read for yourself and decide:

A few weeks ago, in a Kyoto tempura bar, I watched a lone chef, a man in late middle age, cooking behind a counter for his 11 customers. The set menu had 15 items on it. That meant that at any given moment, he was keeping track of 165 pieces of food, each subject to slightly different timing and technique. He wrote nothing down and expended no apparent effort. It was a demonstration of total mastery. This didn’t look so much like a job as a life: His work was his whole being.

That’s a thing you notice in Japan, the deep personal investment people make in their work. The word shokunin, which has no direct translation, sums it up: It means something like “master or mastery of one’s profession,” and it captures the way Japanese workers spend every day trying to be better at what they do.

Shokunin culture can have a side that, to those of us raised on a more brutally capitalistic worldview, verges on the ridiculous. Outside the Sanjusangendo temple in Kyoto, I saw a man standing with a yellow glow stick, pointing pedestrians toward the sidewalk instead of to the parking lot nearby. Presumably, if a vehicle had come, he would have pointed it toward the lot. “That guy is basically a sign,” my son said. He was right — and this was a job you often see in Japan, often in relation to vehicular access: a person performing a job that in any other developed society is either automated away or ignored.

On another occasion, while waiting at a bus stop in the seaside city of Kobe, I found myself watching a group of five men who were drilling a hole. Or rather, one of them was; the other four were watching him. For the whole 30 minutes, that’s all they did. But they didn’t do it reluctantly, or while checking their smartphones, or gossiping, or anything. It was like a demonstration: “All other techniques for watching a guy dig a hole are incorrect. This is how you watch a guy digging a hole.”

“People whose jobs involve literally doing nothing,” an American teacher said to me after I got off the bus and described this scene. At the time, though, I was left thinking something different: that what I saw were people who had a strong feeling that their work was meaningful. For these workers, the value they attached to work wasn’t simply its economic value to them. A train conductor bows on entering and exiting a train compartment; a department-store worker does the same thing coming or going from a shop floor, whether observed or not, whether the store is heavingly busy or almost deserted. It’s clear that there are deep cultural differences at work here, not all of them benign; the reason Japanese has a word for “death from overwork” is because it needs one. You could even argue that work has too much meaning, is too freighted with consequences for individual identity, in Japan.

Among economists, Japan is a byword, a punch line, a horror story. The boom of the late ’80s and early ’90s — during which it became popular to imagine a Japan-dominated economic future, the subject of Michael Crichton’s thriller “Rising Sun,” for instance — was followed by a spectacular stock-market crash. The Nikkei share index hit a high of 38,957 on Dec. 29, 1989. Over the next two decades, it fell 82 percent. Twenty-seven years later, it is still only at less than half that 1989 value. Property values crashed along with share prices, which turned large parts of the financial system into zombie banks — meaning banks that hold so many bad assets that they are essentially broke, which means they can’t lend money and therefore cease to fulfill one of a bank’s central roles in the modern economy, which is to help keep the flow of credit moving.

The Japanese economy ground to a halt. Inflation slowed, stalled and turned to outright deflation. Add Japan’s aging and shrinking population, contracting G.D.P. and apparently unreformable politics, and you have a picture of perfect economic gloom.

It doesn’t feel like that when you visit, though. The anger apparent in so much of the developed world simply isn’t visible in Japan. A student of the culture would tell you that public displays of anger are frowned on in Japan; a demographer would point to the difficult prospects faced by young Japanese, paying for an older generation’s lavish health care and benefits that they are unlikely ever to enjoy themselves. The growth numbers would seem to imply a story about stagnation. But unemployment is almost nonexistent — at 3 percent, it’s among the lowest in the developed world. The aging of the society is visible, but so is the distinctive liveliness of the various youth cultures. I’ve been to plenty of stagnant places, and lived in one or two as well, and contemporary Japan isn’t one of them.
Why? A big part of the answer, I think, lies in the distinctive Japanese attitude toward work — or more specific, toward meaning in work.

Work is good, but meaningful work is better. I wonder whether our shiny new Western world of work — post-manufacturing, un-unionized, gig-based, insecure — offers as much sense of meaning as work once did, or as it still seems to in Japan. In Derek Walcott’s epic poem “Omeros,” a wide-ranging reimagining and mash-up of Homer’s Aegean and the contemporary Caribbean, he writes admiringly and respectfully of his protagonist, Achille, a St. Lucian fisherman. Achille is a man “who never ascended in an elevator,/who had no passport, since the horizon needs none,/never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter.” Near the end of Walcott’s long, meditative, elusive poem, that line gave me a jolt. What’s so bad about waiting tables? Is there really something so lessening, something analogous to begging or borrowing, about being a waiter?

The answer to that question for lots of people is yes. This isn’t a general human truth about workers at all times and in all cultures, because there are places where waiting and where service in general are deeply respected jobs. But it’s apparent that the new service work has many people doing things that aren’t congruent with their sense of their identity. A life is the story of a life, and that story, for many, has become one of decline and loss, of reduction in self-esteem. The tension in status between different types of work is one theme of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” — indeed, that is essentially what his struggle is, the gap between the narrator’s sense of what he should be doing, as a writer, and what he actually does all day, as a homemaker: “Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards.”

It’s sometimes said that the value of manufacturing work is exaggerated, and that we should just get used to the idea that most jobs are now in service industries — which is probably true. But unionized manufacturing work gave a sense of community and meaning that more atomized, more modern, more service-based work struggles to do. It doesn’t matter that many of those old jobs were boring, or brutally repetitive, or dangerous, or made workers sick — or, like coal mining, all of those things simultaneously. In the 1937 speech where Franklin D. Roosevelt called for “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work,” he stressed that “the overwhelming majority of our population earns its daily bread either in agriculture or in industry.” Hard manual work created tangible products, and that tangibility was part of what made the work seem meaningful. Miners and autoworkers, laborers in the clothing and electrical and transportation industries, had a social cohesion based on the fact that they worked and sweated and lived and suffered together, creating a tangible product that seemed to them imbued with national, even world-historical, significance. I won’t pretend that I wish I did that kind of work, but I envy the feeling of cohesion and solidarity shared by people who do.

The danger is that a class identity founded on collective labor is replaced by an identity founded on resentment, further destabilizing our politics. As Japan shows us, there are worse things for a society than calmly growing old together.

p.s: John Lanchester has written eight books, including the novel “Capital” and, most recently, “How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say — and What It Really Means.”