Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:
Book
title: Norma Field. 1991. In the Realm of a Dying Emperor. NY: Pantheon Books.
Main
points:
Prologue:
After her high school education Norma Field left Japan for Los Angeles where
her father lived with his Scottish-immigrant mother. It was the first time for
Norma to meet her American relatives.(7) In 1988 she reversed track and arrived
with a daughter, a son and her husband to live in her Japanese grandmother’s
house in Japan for a year. This place was where she was born. (8) During that
period, Emperor Hirohito’s dying meant that questions would be
asked on how many days should the stock exchange companies, or the banks, or
the government offices be closed for ‘self-restrain’ reasons.
(21)
- in addition to the national promotions of
‘self-restrain,’ during the Hirohito’s dying period, numerous preparations were
made for the day of the unthinkable itself: movie theaters etc. asked about
whether they should be closed to the convey mourning. (21)
-journalist, when reporting, were still under the
spell of the ‘chrysanthemum taboo’, so called after the 1960s episode of
right-wing attacking writers who were
deemed guilty of transgressing the imperial honor.(23)
- the 19th century Emperor system was
hardly ancient. The new system snatched the young emperor Meiji from the Kyoto
- Part I.
Norma grew up in the shadow of American military base during the occupation
period and the ensuing Pax American. The Olympic village of the 1964 Tokyo Games
came from a site called Washington height where the author went to school for 6
years. (36) Her serious introduction to America
- author’s mother was married to her father at the
American consulate in Yokohama in 1946. (38) Norma grew up in Tokyo with
parents, maternal grandparents, and unmarried aunts. (39)
- in 1988 an Okinawan man was put on trial for
having removed and burned a Japanese flag during the national athletic meet of
1987. He published a book to talk about it. (40) Like an unidentified seed fortuitously exposed to
optimal condition of germination and growth, bits of information came to light
drawing social attention during the ensuing months when people were under the conditions
of ‘self-restraint”.(40)
- Norma went to Okinawa
about one months after Hirohito’s funeral, in late march 1989. (40) Yomitanson, the village where the flag burner
Chinbana Shoichi lived, was approximately one hour’s drive from Naha of Okinawa.
(42) Norma visited Chinabana Shoichi, her new friend Toshiko severed as the driver
for the trip. (42) They went to the Hanza supermarket, Chinbana Shoichi’s
store. (43)
- the visiting group (Norma and Toshiko) exchanged
greeting with Mr. Chinbana, the father of Shoichi. The son of Shoichi was also
there, and also the wife of Shoichi- Yoko. (44) Shoichi was instantly likable,
his burning of the Rising Sun flag at a national athletic event as a deliberate
gesture of civil disobedience that had caused a chain of reaction: arrest,
detention and trial on the one hand, death threat and village besiegement by
right-wing groups on the other. (45)
- Shoichi wrote that he had no intention of being
‘judged’ by the court. Rather, he thought of it as an occasion to ‘pass
judgment on the Rising Sun [flag].”(48) Okinawan felt betrayed because mainland soldiers
had driven them from their shelters to certain death or killed them with their
own hands during the last months of the war, and that Hirohito had chosen to
prolong the war. (51)
-Shoichi on October 26, 1987 climbed the flagpole
and turned his cigarettes lighter on the Rising Sun. (53) One of the goals of
Shoichi and his defense team in court was to remind the nation that the Rising
Sun was nowhere documented as the official flag of Japan. Major Yamauchi of the
town referred the incident only as a trespassing. Yet the indictment drawn up
by the state referred the flag as a national flag. (53)
- it is the memory of Okinawa’s disproportionate
suffering in the war - suffering easily forgotten insofar as they were never known by the rest of Japan in
contrast to the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - that complicated the
status of the flag in Okinawa.(54)
- the secret of death and suffering of the Okinawan
was buried for 38 years. It was broken in 1983 by three man. The most senior of
them was Higa Heishin; the second was Shimojima Tetsuro while the third was
Chibana Shoichi. (60)
- in Japan not only could the education ministry
dictated the use of the flag and the Anthem, but they too screen textbooks for
all grades and levels in schools.(62) During the war, being an Okinawan was
often a reason sufficient enough to put the civilian themselves at risk in the hands of Japanese troops.(63)
- the atrocities on civilian perpetrated by the
Japanese army and the collective suicide committed by Okinawan civilian were in
separable. Ienaga Saburo and his supporters emphasized the former, while the
Education ministry dramatized the latter when talking about war memory. (66)
- at present (1991), in Okinawa and in the rest of
Japan, to adopt the narrative of Okinawan victimization by the Japanese, and
the latter’s victimization by the American had the effect of disregarding
the history of Japan’s aggression in Asia. (66) Such disregard had reinforced
inattention to the far more subtle repression exercised by insisting on the
model of post-war economic success in Japan. Inattention spelled the loss of
critical capacity. It was the sensibility to the ways of such inattention
overlapping with oblivion of the past that compelled Shoichi to resist the
imposition of Rising Sun. (67)
- Okinawa today presented the disheartening yet
familiar spectacle of those who had been treated as second-class citizens and who
were embracing the values of their oppressor: the marvelous rate of school
observance of the Rising Sun flag, the establishment of cram school to produce
first-graders who could handle calculus, and the reduction of the many dialects
in Okinawa. (72)
(to be continued)
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