Analogue Archives No.1

A few 35mm flicks from winter.

Burakumin in the 1960s

Michael Rogge, a Dutchman, has a wealth of fascinating 16mm clips of Showa-era Japan and the Far East, including this one of those left behind by Japan’s speedy post-war economic development.  Interesting to see Burakumin acting as street bookies for bicycle races – along with leather tannery and undertaking, another example of Buraku involvement in jobs deemed taboo.

Some of the shots of the destitute don’t look so different to the less salubrious parts of Osaka today.

Zainichi Koreans: Foreign in Japan?

Yeong Jin speaks in the same staccato Kansai-ben as the other three ossans at the small izakaya table in the bowels of an Umeda hotel.

He sups his draught beer and chews his kushiage skewers with the same satisfaction as Messrs Tanikawa, Nishiguchi and Tsunoda, and  (as he admits) has the same love for the Hanshin Tigers as any self-respecting Osakan.

Yet despite being the archetypical Kansai man, Jin is certainly not the same as other Japanese.  Despite being born and bred in Amagasaki, west Osaka, he doesn’t have the right to vote, and must carry a registration card whenever he leaves his house.  He is a Zainichi Korean, one of the 515,000 who cannot take the citizenship of the country of their birth.

In Japan, where nationality is determined by blood, the lottery of one’s ancestry still determines much.

Jin’s parents were brought to Osaka during the war to work in the factories of Kansai, and, like many, did not return to the Korean peninsula on its independence.

“I can’t hide who I am,” he says “I am Korean by blood but Japanese by breeding.”

Such confused identity – and the discrimination which accompanied it – was borne with dignity and stoicism by Jin’s generation.   From the 1960s to 1980s Zainichi Korean groups gradually secured basic rights to social welfare and pensions, and exemption from fingerprinting on re-entry to Japan.

Director of the Osaka Zainichi Foreigner Association, Jin has been involved for over thirty years in the struggle for Zainichi Korean rights. But as he approaches retirement, the battle for equal rights has still not yet been won.  He worries that his children – like he unable to participate in political life – will still face the same feeling of exclusion as him.

“There is a problem inherent in Japan that leads to foreigners being treated as they are.  The attitude of law and politics must change.”

Yet here is the rub: for the necessary legislative and political change to come the Zainichi Korean movement, as a voice for all foreign residents in Japan, must remain strong and continue to lobby the government.  Yet despite being “motivated by their experiences of discrimination” its leaders are ageing.  It is unclear how regeneration will occur, and seems certain that as the ancestral identity of the third and fourth Zainchi Korean generation fades, youth participation in groups such as the Mintōren and Mindan will decline.

The movement is weakening, and with it hopes for the securing of the most basic of human rights: suffrage.  Jin’s good mood darkens slightly at the thought.  “The Zainichi problem won’t be solved in my time.”

Names changed at request of interviewees

大阪人

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Some recent shots of residents of my fine city.

Hosono Building: The Story of Osaka 1936-2010

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Osaka is by no means a beautiful city.  Lacking the old-world charm of Kyoto or futurism of Tokyo, its sea of drab concrete boxes and lack of green space is guaranteed to disappoint even the most optimistic urban aesthete.

Not that it has always been this way: during its early twentieth-century heyday Osaka was at the vanguard of architecture in Japan, when structures heavily influenced by European modernists movements sprang up across the city.

Osaka’s postwar decline was not sympathetic to tradition.  Many of the Edo-era machiya merchant houses were destroyed in the war, while during the rush to the future of Japan’s post-war development the preservation of historic buildings was not a priority.  Improbably, a number of these retoro-biru (retro buildings) remain hidden between featureless office blocks or tucked under the brutal raised freeways which sweep over the city centre.  Notable examples include the Fujihara Building, which wouldn’t look out of place in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and Nakanojima’s 1930s Bank of Japan.

At the west end of the Nagahori Avenue, too distant from the city centre for many visitors to reach and yet not close enough to the docks for much industry to occur, an expanse of anonymous office blocks vie for space with car showrooms.  It is a nondescript area.  But look closely: there is one major, unique characteristic.

The Yūutsu of Shin Sekai

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Shin Sekai is an island, hemmed in on all sides.  To its east lie the grubby cages of Tennoji zoo, where cranes nest precariously in the dense undergrowth that smothers the enclosures.  To the south the hushed lanes of Tobita Shinchi, Kansai’s biggest red light district, and the day-labourer ghetto of Nishinari.  Further west is a derelict theme park, its rollercoaster motionless.  A bubble in downtown Osaka, in permanent geographical quarantine.

Enter from the north, under the once-futuristic arch, and head past the seedy sentō offering saunas and massage (cheap rates! pay by the hour!) and izakaya touts shouting over the spastic din of the pachinko parlour.  Go down the passage lined with sepia shots of 1920s Osaka, bypassing mahjong rooms, and past the oden vendor tickling the chin of his tabby cat perched on the counter, flicking a suspicious glance.  Eventually Shin Sekai becomes Dobutsuen-mae shotengai, a claustrophic warren of stained tiles and watery flourescent lighting. Tantalising vignettes of a Japan that never left the Showa era appear with every step: wan men sup cold beer and tear at kushiage at an oily counter; a weathered face croons a long-forgotten karaoke hit in an empty bar.  Salarymen, already drunk in the velvety dusk, stagger towards Tobita, stepping over the tramps in the gloom at the mouth of the tunnel.  An elderly couple hold tightly onto one another as walk in the dark, as in love as they were fifty years ago.

There is an intangible weight in the air, a heaviness as deeply settled as a freezing midwinter fog.   Despondency permeates the arcade, hounding the lonely bars, enveloping the senses and swamping the mind with a deadweight gloom.  It is a communal melancholy borne with dignity: the yūutsu of Shin Sekai.

Tsuruhashi: Osaka Noir

Korean town: the tunnel which snakes out from the subway, under the towering JR track and eventually away into the night is cavernous and lined with skewer joints, drinking holes and pachinko parlours.  Plumes of grey smoke from the countless grills envelop the homebound replicants, manufactured by mega corporations for use in menial work, who walk with hunched heads and wear the weary faces which betray the monotony of another day at the desk.  It looked as if they had been given the same instruction: heads down, stride out, don’t linger here.  

A Saturday Stroll

The Buraku King

The leather sofa and presidential desk suggested the office of a multi-national corporation CEO; this impression, though, immediately obliterated by a giant stuffed eagle, mid-squawk, perched upon a chest high branch with its impressive wings spread for take-off.  I could barely stop looking at it, my admiring gaze torn away by perhaps the only object capable of upstaging such a fantastic piece of taxidermy: a life-sized porcelain lion sat roaring on a round mat, regal and fearsome, a fanged beast to complement the winged one behind it.

On the corner of the desk was a head-sized crystal ball, sitting smudgelessly on a small cushion; some papers flapping softly in the gentle aircon; a heavy crystal ashtray.  A spotless hinomaru two metres square was draped in front of the window, while a huge dresser dominated the right of the room.  There stood a triptych of large framed photographs: in the middle, the Emperor mingling in a crowd; to his left a kimonoed beauty; to his right another shot, this time with a grinning politician.

At last….

Life in the mighty city of Osaka – a burgeoning, non-stop Japanese metropolis and sensory smorgasbord – has been filling my head with ideas for some quite some time.  Until now though the trio of stimulation, motivation and production has proved a stubborn one to unite.  But hallelujah! this morning, apropos of nothing, triangulation occurred, and a blog is born.

I’ll be sporadically updating my new baby with thoughts, vignettes and photo.  Her name is Naniwa Notebook, after the downtown district in which I reside.  Why don’t you stop by and say hi sometime?