Author: Toshio Aritake

Chino, Japan, Oct. 29, 2020—In a court hearing on Oct. 8, 2020, Kozo Iizuka, a former Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry senior official who killed a young mother and her daughter in an automobile accident in Tokyo 1-1/2 years ago, pleaded innocent saying that his Toyota Prius developed ‘some kind of abnormality,’ causing the vehicle to run at high speed and slamming into the two victims. Prosecutors said in the hearing that they have proof that the vehicle’s control system showed negative to the defect claim.
Toyota keeps its lips zipped tightly toward the allegation saying that the automaker is watching the court proceedings. The automaker’s silence against the allegation is sparking speculation that it weighs its relationship with the ministry and the Japanese government at large as vitally important for its business.
The accident drew national attention not only for its ghastly scene of the bodies of the 31-year-old mother and her 3-year-old daughter, who were crossing the green traffic light when Iizuka’s Prius hit and run over them at extraordinary high speed but because the driver was the head of the powerful ministry’s top science and technology institute and was not arrested, sparking a barrage of public criticisms of the government to have handled the case for ‘a high-class Japanese.
Iizuka, 89 served as the head of the powerful ministry’s Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), which the U.S. government watched as one of key threats to U.S. technology in the 1980s for its lead role in developing Japan’s industrial policy. AIST was founded in 1948 as Japan’s top governmental research entity charged to collaborate with the private sector in practically all advanced tech areas including the environment, human science, manufacturing, geology, and standards and certification. It was restructured into the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (Sansoken in Japanese, and also abbreviated as AIST) in 2015 and currently has more than 3,000 officers at its Tsukuba headquarters north of Tokyo.
It’s natural for police who rushed to the accident scene at Ikebukuro in Tokyo past noon time of April 19, checked Iizuka’s driver’s license and asked his occupation, to have judged the old man as belonging to a special class and so they did not take the customary procedure of arresting a suspect who caused a serious traffic accident. Iizuka has never been arrested for the accident since then.
At the Oct. 8 hearing at Tokyo regional court, Iizuka apologized to the two deceased victims’ bereaved family members as well as those of other victims, yet, challenged the prosecutors’ claims saying, ‘I did not keep stepping on the accelerator pedal. It is my belief that some kind of abnormality occurred (in the Prius) and caused the car to speed out of control,’ according to Japanese media reports.
The prosecutors claimed in the hearing that the vehicle’s control system was functioning properly and that they have data that Iizuka was stepping on the accelerator pedal when the car was speeding and that he was not stepping on the brake pedal.
A Toyota Motor spokesperson said the company had no comment to release and that it would watch court proceedings.
The Tokyo district court hearing, which was the first since the accident, came at a time when the Japanese auto industry sorely needs government support to shift to a new technology and environmental stage. Even the mighty Toyota cannot move to the next stage without government support for developing driverless vehicles, traffic modal innovations, electric vehicles and next-gen power trains, as well as other technologies. So Toyota must behave like a trustworthy, subservient private-sector company for years to come. Plus, the Covid-19 pandemic is far from put under control, so it cannot be complacent about its short-term business performance.
What Toyota ideally needs to do, as its CEO Akio Toyoda often reiterates, is to shed the mundane and distance itself from the Japanese bureaucracy, and transit to the next-gen areas, like Tesla is doing. In this vein, Toyota has years to go to catch up.

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TOKYO, Oct. 22, 2020—To innocent foreigners, one of the first images of the Japanese people is deep bows and soft voices coming from a polite demeanor. Not a misleading image of the country of ‘kenkyo’ – a philosophy of being modest and humble. Yet poring deep down into history shows the Japanese did not necessarily acquire this manner naturally: it can be traced to the old hierarchical societal practice of coercing people to pay respect to senior samurai warriors, a feudal bureaucratic tradition that was firmly established as a societal norm after the Tokugawa shogunate samurai clan took over the entire country in the 16th century and has survived to date.
This bureaucratic philosophy has come to sap Japan’s passion, creativity, global views and many other virtues. Increasingly, being kenkyo has been misinterpreted in modern Japan and begun to embrace other human traits that almost sound excessive and unique to this country: Assume and act by thinking what the counterpart would think, feel and react (Sontaku), or read the air before you say something or take action. Sontaku is a Buddhism teaching having become a dead word for centuries and the same for this and other teachings traits. Their revival coincided with Japan’s fresh bureaucratization of society, from government administration to private lifestyles, over the past decade or so.
In a country that treasures conformity and unity, Japanese rarely open up about their views and aims, excluding a few such as famous athletes and successful business folks. Before standing up and saying something at meetings, Japanese often look around to make sure that they are with the crowd. It’s the reason why Japanese commuters heading to offices wait for the lights to turn green to cross the street even though there’s no traffic. In the current global Covid-19 pandemic, the herd mentality works as a plus helping to keep infections low as practically every single person of this country of 126 million population wears a face mask. But where competition matters, especially of borderless nature, being kenkyo can be a big drag.
‘Japanese are kenkyo (modest and humble),’ Ai Miura, a female racing car driver said in a radio talk show in early October 2020. ‘It’s a great virtue. It helps keep the country united and crimes low. But if you look at it from a different angle, we look like being a bunch of stereotypes.’ Whereas non-Japanese drivers and engineers would fight and try to prevail over others in their teams to win races, Japanese opt to do what they are told to do and do not bother to cross their boundaries, she said. ‘Wa (harmony) is great but in competition, that’s not enough’ – that’s what I as a writer have learned.
Kenkyo derives from the teachings of Confucius. It was known to have been introduced to Japan in the 6th century and came to be actively utilized as The Textbook virtue during the Tokugawa clan’s Edo period (1600 to 1853) and applied broadly to every walk of human life from politics to family matters.
Confucius teachings urge improving human ethics –be loyal; paying respect; be benevolent to others; practice righteousness; express gratitude; be polite; improve knowledge; and trust (do not deceive) others. The Tokugawa shogunate family interpreted the Confucius teaching to keep the country stable and war-free under its control. Being loyal, which the Confucius meant to be loyal to other people, was reinterpreted to mean ‘loyal to the master.’ Paying respect twas meant to have respectful heart for others was changed to ‘respect your parents and seniors. Be polite, which originally was meant to revere God, was changed to mean being polite to seniors and others.
The Confucius teachings were compiled by his students as the Lunyu (Rongo in Japanese) and its Japanese renditions had been actively taught during the Edo and into the modern period through the end of World War II in 1945. So it was considered in post-war Japan as the textbook of Japanese militarism and totalitarianism.
Rongo is regaining popularity among young Japanese. The national broadcasting station, NHK, even offer programs teaching Rongo to school children. New books are being released frequently on how to study Rongo and Confucius. They are taught to be modest and humble and restrain from expressing themselves and do not expect returns to favors they extend to others.
But it would be difficult to live zen priest lives for long, and that may be the reason why a growing number of young people are pumping irons in the gym and running madly from early morning to build up their bodies, looking at their muscles in the mirrors and taking photos of themselves with smart phones to post them in facebooks and other SNS sites.
It’s how Japan’s competitive edge is being eroded in the business, technology, diplomacy and numerous other areas – competitive passion restrained by kenkyo philosophy and energy is buned at gym.

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Chino, Japan, Oct. 13 – It’s not going to be an industry shaking story like Carlos Ghosn sneaking out of Japan while on bail. It will hit Japanese newspaper front pages and may play big in Thai and Asian publications for a day or two. That’ll be it.

Mitsubishi Motors is dying a gradual death, and the Mitsubishi group won’t come to its rescue nor its alliance partner Nissan Motor, which is also struggling to survive.
So who would buy Mitsubishi, the smallest of Japanese passenger car makers? Industry insiders say there is no other but Toyota Motor, which already has Daimatsu and Hino under its wings and equity stakes in Subaru and share technical alliance with Suzuki. U.S. makers have no interest plus they are also struggling. Europeans aren’t interested either for similar reasons plus having seen what happened to Daimler when it held controlling share.

Mitsubishi’s destiny would be known when its stock price drops well below 200 yen in Tokyo. It was barely above the threshold October 13.

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TOKYO, Oct. 11, 2020—Two Chinese Coast Guard boats Oct. 11 morning crossed into Japanese territorial waters around Taisho Island, one of Senkaku Islands, trying to approach Japanese fishing boats operating there, apparently to intimidate the fishing boat crew, and a Japanese Coast Guard ship intervened between the ships, a spokesman for the 11th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters said.
It was the first time since Aug. 28 that Chinese coastguard ships entered the Japanese sovereign waters around Senkaku, the spokesman said. It also marked the 18th time that Chinese coast guard ships invaded into Japanese waters around the islands.
The two Chinese patrol ships crossed into the Japanese waters near Taisho Island, one of Senkaku Islands, at 10:47 or 10:48 a.m., Oct. 11, where Japanese fishing boats were operating, and chased after the Japanese vessels repeatedly. The Japanese coast guard ships warned the Chinese ships to leave the waters, and as of late Oct. 11, the two Chinese ships were idling at a location about 4-5 nautical miles south of Taisho presumably to resume their chasing operations when the Japanese coast guard ships leave the area, the spokesman said.
In response, the Japanese government formed a special office reporting directly to the prime minister Oct. 11, the government said.
On Oct. 3, the Chinese government posted on its website that it had opened a digital museum showing with videos and photos of Chinese sovereignty over the islands. Japan’s Suga cabinet said Oct. 5 that it had lodged complaints with the Chinese government. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman brushed off the Japanese complaint saying that the islands are Chinese territory and that the Japanese claims were ‘illegal.’
China’s maritime expansion in search of resources and footholds is accelerating to the point of becoming almost unstoppable. Not only is Chinese coast guard ships spotted more frequently around Senkaku, dozens of Chinese fishing boats are operating there, sometimes invading into Japanese waters and approaching Japanese fishing boats dangerously closely, according to recent Japanese media reports.
Across the Pacific, along South American coastal lines, hundreds of large Chinese fishing boats were ferociously catching fish, including Equador coasts, and around Galapagos Islands, this summer.
Japan’s Sankei newspaper reportedly recently that the Chinese are hacking into Japanese coast guard and fishing boat radios to find times and spots around Senkaku when the Japanese are not there, so that the Chinese can perform shipping operations under Chinese coast guard protection.
Chinese ships, including coast guard ships and some fishing boats, are believed to equipped with guns and weapons but it was not independently confirmed by the Japanese government.

Skirmishes?
As the U.S.-China relationship is set to further strain after the November presidential election, theories go that conflicts are unavoidable and Senkaku can be one of the possible locations in the vast East China Sea. In a Senkaku conflict, if ‘something happens, the U.S. military based in Okinawa and 7th Fleet ships can reach there immediately,’ one theory holds.
The U.S. has repeatedly said until about 10 years ago that Senkaku Islands were Japan’s undisputed sovereign territory.

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TOKYO, Oct. 12, 2020—Becoming a Japanese government employee once was the most-coveted career path for students. It guaranteed job and income security for life plus a post-retirement post at government-managed public entity and later at a business. New grads might not think so now. The 2019 annual report released by the National Personal Agency showed a significant drop in the number of applicants, including those for so-called career jobs at the Ministry of Finance and the Foreign Ministry.
Aggregate applicants numbered 124,666 in 2019, shrinking 4.6 percent from 2018, according to the report released on June 5, 2020. The number was a steep dive from the 1995 peak of 330,686. Applicants hit a record low of 110,043 in the global financial crisis year of 2008 and rebounded to 155,231 in 2012. Since then, it has been hovering around 135,000.
The 2019 data showed that the number of applicants seeking so-called career posts – the jobs for making national policies and programs — shrank 11.0 percent from 2018.
Over the past several years under former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s administration, a succession of scandals erupted, most notably, the Moritomo and Kakei scandals that surfaced in 2017. Neither scandal was of the Donald Trump size but was sufficient to attract Japanese media attention to Abe’s alleged close ties with the figures implicated, one of them arrested and charged for larceny
In both cases, career bureaucrats were allegedly actively involved working closely with and for Abe: Nobuhisa Sagawa, director-general of the Ministry of Finance’s Treasury Bureau, and other senior government officials. Sagawa resigned his post in 2018, and to this day, he is believed to have not taken up the next job.
If acting like a commander and issuing orders to career bureaucrats is Abe’s administrative style, Sagawa and other bureaucrats had failed to challenge the prime minister and demonstrate the Japanese bureaucracy’s neutrality and independence in government administration as their predecessors once managed to do to gain foreign acclaim – with pride and arrogance of samurai descendants.
It then was no surprise that petty crimes and scandals involving bureaucrats have been splashing media front pages almost every week since then: Hiromu Kurokawa, the Prosecutor-general, playing a game of mahjong betting money with Asahi Shimbun newspaper editors in April and May 2020, and education ministry officials that had influenced the university entry exam of sons of business executives, among the countless.
This may be one of the reasons why fewer Japanese students, particularly male, apply to become bureaucrats, but there are many more reasons. We’ll learn the reality over the coming few years. In the meantime, young and bright students are heading for Goldman Sachs, other foreign banks, Accenture, and other foreign businesses.

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Chino, Japan, Oct. 6, 2020 – On a late September night, I was rushed by ambulance to a local general hospital for what later turned out to be a no life-threatening physical condition and stayed one full next day to make sure of full recovery. The stay confirmed my theory that hospitals, including ones hundreds of kilos away from major urban centers, have become bureaucracy-infested to the point of affecting future Japanese medical and pharmaceutical development as medical practitioners spend far more time for documentation than treating patients.
After arriving at the hospital, I was examined and given initial due treatment. As I was breathing a sigh of relief in an emergency room staffed by half a dozen doctors and nurses, one of the first things they asked me was whether I had with me a National Health Insurance certificate that all residents in Japan are supposed to hold. I replied affirmatively.
Doctors checked my blood pressure, run an EKG test, took blood samples and all other protocols that an emergency room patient gets. BP was higher than normal understandably but other data showed no abnormalities except a slightly over-active kidney condition. To stabilize, the doctors gave me a mild saline IV drip.
That treatment done, the doctors asked my medical history, family and other pieces of information. The chief physician asked me whether I wanted to stay overnight. Since I wanted to make sure of full recovery, I said yes. Half an hour later, a nurse came to explain about my hospital stay asking me to sign a paper ‘the In-Patient Treatment Plan.’ I obliged and signed the document that detailed my conditions, treatment, an expected hospital stay.
A while later, I was moved to a bed adjacent to the emergency room. There, a different nurse came and explained what kind of tests to run, how and what kind of treatment they plan to give me in every conceivable detail. He then handed me the ‘Treatment Plan’ that detailed more than what he explained, such as ‘fluid management’ and ‘treatment assistance.’ Whatever they were.
As I tried to catch sleep, a separate nurse visited me and she did some explaining and asked me to sign yet another document, this time, ‘the Hospital Release Assist Plan’ that outlined a set of practices needed for release.Then finally, I was moved to the general in-patient bed area.
But that was not the end of paper stacking! Next morning, a nurse visited my room and handed me the ‘Release Treatment (Instruction) Plan,’ which asked me to return to the hospital to see the doctors in charge should ill conditions grip me again.
The last time I stayed at a hospital was nearly 20 years ago, for a few days of examinations. I recall the only paper I had to sign was one on admittance and was given a simple in-hospital life needs such as bringing your own toothbrush, razors and headsets for listening to the radio or watching the TV.
I did not bother asking the hospital whether documentation work was affecting the productivity of doctors and nurses. One thing that I learned was that my medical bill was much higher than I had anticipated and that I should make efforts not to become sick or injured!

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TOKYO, Sept. 12, 2020—The Japanese media, which so ruthlessly attacked PM Shinzo Abe’s policies, from population growth to the corona virus face masks, earlier this month flip-flopped in support of the outgoing prime minister reporting that their opinion polls showed a sharp rebound of popular support, so high that the data suggested voters want Abe to come back quick as Japanese leader.
The polls that key Japanese newspapers and television stations took this week (all of them from Sept. 2 to 6) showed jumps of as much as 26 to 27 percentage points compared with August when the data were at rockbottom lows.
Even the supposed-to-be anti-establishment Asahi newspaper’s polls put Abe’s popular support (support strongly and support to certain degree combined) as high as 71%. The national TV network JNN’s similar poll was 62.4 percent, up 27.0 pints. Respondents cited Abe’s economic, diplomatic, social welfare polities for reasons of positive support. In August, they gave bad marks on the three Abe policies.
Even before the latest polls, the media’s data collection methods looked questionable, influenced greatly by anecdotal comments of television personalities, so-called critics, commentators and economists. What seemed to have driven the media to give Abe strong support rebounds was that two of his successor candidates coming from rival ‘factions’ of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party – former defense secretary Shigeru Ishiba and former foreign minister Fumio Kishida – both failed to collect enough preliminary in-party votes, so the media gave the polls rebound to Abe in support of Abe’s appointee and current chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga, in virtually snugging up to the soon-to-be-formed Suga cabinet, so that the media can remain part of the establishment.
Another takeaway from the polls is that the Japanese public has become far more conservative and pro-power and pro-bureaucracy than ever before. Like the LDP members who support Suga, but not Ishiba or Kishida, they don’t want change and feel cozy with what Abe has been doing, which Suga at the Sept. 12 news conference, promised to do.
Not only they are loath to and fearful of change but they also have licked the sweet taste of ‘nostalgia’ by backpedaling to what Abe did for them, giving them two so tiny face masks for each household that no adults can wear, a stingy $900 corona virus relief check per person. The public worries that Ishiba or Kishida may not give them such sweeteners, however small they may be.

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TOKYO, Sept. 10, 2020―It was during the Meiji Restoration Period, well over a century ago, that the last samurai fought and died by sacrificing their lives for the people burdened by high taxes and heavy debt. Since then to date, hardly any souls like them have emerged and stood up against the Japanese establishment, and probably won’t appear for a long time.

Those samurai were not like the dapper, mucho-looking, sword-swinging warriors, the images of Toshiro Mifune in the Seven Samurai and Tom Cruise in the Last Samurai in screenplays. Senior　warriors of the last samurai bunch carried swords and rifles but the rank and file were armed with bamboo lances and still others carried hoes.Their uniforms, if they were lucky to be wearing, looked like those of the Chinese red army.

Whatever they were, the peasant samurai were highly motivated about fighting against the Meiji government seeing it as the reincarnated bureaucracy establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate feudal period. The samurai were resolved to toppling the establishment to capturing political power for the poor farmers devastated by tumbling silk prices. They were aware that their forces were no match to the Meiji government firepower and that they would be easily defeated, but they hoped that their acts would spread to the rest of the country.

Most of those thousands of peasant samurai were shot and stabbed and killed, captured and imprisoned, hanged, and fined, in an uprising crushed in barely a week’s time between October 31 and November 9, 1884. The Meiji government, fearing the farmer uprising’s rippling impact nationwide, labeled the incident as ‘brutal acts of violence committed by an army of thugs.’ As ordered by local officials, Chichibu village folks kept the incident almost secret for almost a century, especially about the cadre of the incident’s planners, many of them sons of fairly well-to-do farming houses, and the leader, Eisuke Tashiro, who was a self-proclaimed Yakuza gangster leader who was widely known as warm-hearted, caring ‘big man.’

Fast-forward to the present time, there’s not a single person who can tell stories of the Chichibu Incident, and most descendants of the peasant samurai also had passed away, carrying with them records, manuscripts and photos of the first Japanese civil rights movement into oblivion. It’s a perfect scenario written by the Meiji government for the current Japanese government to prolong the prosperity of the bureaucracy at the cost of the public.

Japan’s first civil rights movement

In the late 1870s to the early 1880s, farmers across Japan were suffering badly, barely being able to feed their families as they were saddled by income taxes as high as 60 percent and high interest rates on repayments on loans they were encouraged to borrow by the Meiji government for increasing mulberry and silk cocoon production. Silk yarn and silk fabric were Japan’s first main export goods to Europe and the United States so the government set the policy of raising production and exports for accumulating much-needed foreign currency to finance military buildup.

The accommodative yet high interest rate monetary policy first seemed to work in enriching the business and people for a year years but it sparked serious inflation eventually, so the Meiji government tightened the money spigot later,causing farm goods prices, including mulberry and silk cocoon, tumbling and small farmers to sell their farm lands as well as their daughters to brothels.

During this tumultuous period, what became Japan’s first civil rights movement erupted in several localities, including Fukushima and Niigata, in which the Meiji government committed cruel repressive acts against liberal-minded people. Chichibu was one of those hot spots.

In 1883, three Chichibu farmers representing smaller farmers filed grievances with a local office for loan repayment relief but they were stone-walled. Hearing that, a few young, flamboyant farmers joined a new political party, the Liberal Party founded in 1881 with the hope of submitting bills to amend laws to parliament. 

The last samurai

Soon afterwards, Eisuke Tashiro, who was known as a self-proclaimed Yakuza head and for his warm treatment of even strangers, together with other farmers founded a political party, Konminto (rescuring troubled farmers party), to rescue debt-plagued farmers, and the two party members began collaborating and they ultimately made Tashiro the head of Konminto.

Konminto’s credo was, for rescuing farmers, that loan companies agree to give a moratorium to farmers and lower repayment interest rates, and they will burn down properties of those that refuse to agree. Konminto executed its policy with its army that under Tashiro as commander-in-chief had a rudimentary military-like structure. Its Five Codes of Conduct: The Soldier shall be executed when he: 1. looted; 2. raped women; 3. engaged in excessive alcohol consumption; 4. committed arson in personal vengeance, and; 5. engaged in personal matters by disobeying commander orders.

On November 1, 1884,, Tashiro and his commanders formerly formed the Konminto army in Shimo-Yoshida village in Chichibu with some 3,000 peasant militia under its command. The soldiers in platoon formation trotted in neat lines with each platoon carrying different weapons – rifles, bamboo lances and hoes, Japanese swords, messengers, and sother functions modeled after the French army. To the blare of the horn, they walked to Omiya, not farm from the present Chichibu rail station, seizing police headquarters, and thrashing and burning loan companies and procuring 2,980 yen in cash for Kominto’s war chest by issuing ‘receipts’.

But it was a short-lived victory march. The Meiji government dispatched troops and by November 8, Konminto solders were overwhelmed and on November 9, many were shot and killed and those survived fled.

Tashiro fled and had been in hiding for a few months but was caught and sentenced to capital punishment on Feb. 19, 1885. Tashiro removed a straw hat given him by the court exposing his serene, dignified face to the judge, when sentence was read, according to old newspaper accounts. His execution took place at Urawa prison in the morning of May 30, 1885. He refused to be blindfolded giving a serene grin to eyewitnesses and then walked and stood on the board, his final link to this world, as the prison warden tied a rope around his neck. He did not change his composure when the board was kicked, his body hanging by the rope.

Within a few minutes, he was dead but not what he taught the people of Chichibu: Stand up for human rights and against injustices and evils of society. Tashiro and his fellow Konminto members were the reason why the people of Chichibu had been keeping Chichibu Incident memorials clean. But in the current gen-x and gen-z era, few people talk about it or offer flowers to those that died in dignity.

Meiji Restoration for the bureacracy

Lacking follow-up movements of the uprising, the Chichibu Incident arbitrarily catapulted the Meiji government to accelerate its military buildup policy helping accumulate vast quantities of naval forces and fire power in a run-up to the 1894 war against China and 1904 war against Russia, and further military buildup in the 20^th century. To enrich the war chest, the government ignored what the Chichibu farmers pleaded and continued taxing heavily and banks and financial companies ruthlessly collected high interest on loans to silk cocoon and rice farmers. It was not uncommon that borrowing rates were 20 to 30 percent a year.

The Meiji period is punctuated in Japan as a revolutionary period for the topping of the 260 year reign of the Tokugawa shogunate to a new government purportedly made up of lay people. It is actually ‘a restoration’ period for the samurai class that suffered a downfall of wealth and in societal status during the 260 year peace time. The Meiji Restoration movement was engineered by the Satsuma (Kyushu) and Choshu (now Yamaguchi) samurai clans. They were briefly engaged in a battle but in the early Meiji period, formed an alliance with the oath to the emperor and eventually established the Meiji government while annihilating other samurai clans that backed the Tokugawa shogunate.

Either way, civil wars and battles fought during the Meiji period amounted to the infightings between and among different samurai clans, not necessarily for the wellbeing of farmers and the public. Over time, the Satsuma and Choshu clans morphed into a solid bureaucracy stronghold that is carried over to the present period. It’s a reason why the absence of follow-up uprisings to the Chichibu Incident contributed to strengthening the bureaucracy hold of the government.

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Chino, Japan, Aug. 24, 2020—August 22nd marked the 76th memorial of the torpedo-sinking by an American submarine of the Tsushima-maru, a merchant ship carrying nearly 1,788 mostly civilian passengers including school children. Survivors and bereaved of nearly 1,500 victims of the sinking of the ship have been observing the memorial annually but what differentiated this year’s anniversary was an unusually extensive reporting of the incident by the Japanese media and stories told by the survivors, some of them probably for the first time.
The ship was en route to Kagoshima from Okinawa on the Aug. 22, 1944 night, when it was torpedoed by the USS Borfin, and sank after 10 minutes, according to the Tsushima-maru memorial museum. The incident was not reported in Japan because of the gag order to the survivors and related parties by the then-imperial government. The gag order survived as a sort of ‘voluntary restraint agreement’ for a long time even after the war ended in 1945. So it was a little surprise that the incident had been underreported for much of the post-war period.
Over the past few years, though, the incident has been drawing media interest and in 2020, key Japanese media entities carried features. NHK, the national broadcasting station, broadcast a special in which some survivors were interviewed. The national daily Asahi reported about the incident too　 in a feature article, quoting 86-year-old Kiyoshi Uehara as saying that he was ordered by police ‘never, to anybody, about Tsushima.
A succession of articles that the media carry over the past few years seems to be drawing the interest of Japanese young generations who for long have been viewed by older ones as apolitical and essentially pro-American.
‘If the (U.S.) ambassador (to Japan) offers flowers (to the Tsushima-maru vicitims…,’ an anonymous person posted a comment on the Yahoo Japan website. ‘Annihilate, including women and children… That’s the American way,’ wrote another.

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CHINO, Japan, Aug. 22, 2020—I was not surprised to learn today that a Japanese civilian, one Mr. Tadao Yoshida, was (at least according to my research) the first and only Japanese civilian who had received, in post mortem, an American president in his funeral services.
And Mr. Yoshida seems to have been the only Japanese, including civilians, government officials and military personnel, who received in his eternal sleep an American president as a guest of honor.
President Jimmy Carter attended the funeral services of Tadao Yoshida, the founder of YKK Co., the world’s largest zipper manufacturer who died in 1994 at 84 years old, as the first and only American leader to offer eulogies to a Japanese civilian.
When Carter visited Japan for a G8 summit in the 1980s, he met Yoshida, who explained his philosophy, the Cycle of Goodness, to the U.S. president. Carter was so impressed by the philosophy that he began associating with Yoshida frequently. The philosophy, or theory, goes something like, no one prospers without giving benefits to others.
The Carter Center website quotes the former president reporting on the ‘Trip Report, Japan & China September 3012, 2003’ as saying that Carter had 12 meals at his favorite yakitori restaurant in Tokyo’s Roppongi since 1975, including some with Yoshida.
‘We had supper with Trustee Tad Yoshida and his family at the same little yakitori restaurant that we habitually visit. According to the plaques around the table, this was my 12th meat there, beginning in 1975,’ Carter wrote, expressing friendship to Yoshida.
What about the Japan-U.S. relationship in the contemporary time between peoples of all walks of life in the two countries? Even before Donald Trump became the president, the bilateral interfacing was weakening fast if not breaking down in response to the emergence of not only China but also other Asian economies while Japan’s standing had been eroding also for its own making. After the coronavirus pandemic, Japan’s presence in the world has took a dive for its inept handling and failure to develop vaccines fast enough.
What now to the Carter-Yoshida-like relationship? It probably won’t be reincarnated because of divergence of interest on the part of the two countries and, in the business world, moves to repatriate business activities to home countries.

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