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For a princely sum

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Yesterday, Futagoyama Oyakata, who wrestled under the name Takanohana from the mid-60’s until 1981, passed away from mouth cancer at the age of 55. His death rated front page mentions of the Tokyo dailies, and retrospective looks amongst Japan’s TV networks. Though not a big man physically, he was able to make it up to Sumo’s second highest rank of Ozeki, and stay at that rank longer than anyone else, past or present (50 bashos, or tournaments, covering a span of roughly 9 years). Due to his good looks and charisma, and his prowess at defeating men much bigger than himself, he was immensely popular during his time, and was known as “The Prince of the Sumo World”.

His passing and the requisite tv reports and retrospectives remind me of the kind of coverage that attended his son, also wrestling under name of Takanohana, when the latter retired from Sumo two years ago, which was the spur that got me interested and quickly hooked on this sport. (Here is my blog entry from that time.) Hopefully in the next few days or so there will be an extended look at his career like the kind I saw for his son, so that I can better understand his sumo and his appeal.

That this prince sired not just one but two boys who would later rise to the rank of Yokozuna (Grand Champion), eclipsing their father, and carry on the Hanada Dynasty, is certainly a big part of the legend. But it is also what, for me, makes the story all the more tragic.

When his two boys, the aforementioned Takanohana (II, for simplicity’s sake) and his brother Wakanohana (III, for the record), entered their father’s heya (stable) at the ages of 15 and 16, respectively, he said in effect, “From now on, I’m no longer your father but your coach,” basically disowning them as children (oyako no en o kiru in Japanese). At Takanohana’s retirement press conference in 2003, he said “Now I hope we can talk to each other like father and son.” Later that year, he was diagnosed with mouth cancer.

When brother Wakanohana retired from Sumo he also left the Japan Sumo Association, cutting his ties with Sumo’s governing body. He was quoted at the time as saying that in no way shape or form would his own sons ever have anything to do with sumo. And when he was asked, after his father’s passing yesterday, what his first image of his father is, he said it was of a coach hitting him during sumo practice.

By all accounts the family is a dysfunctional mess. Even as heya mates and the only brother Yokozuna pair in history, the two brothers were barely on speaking terms. (Their has been some closing of this gap recently, no doubt hastened by their father’s condition, though their interaction, as seen on TV at any rate, is still rather awkward). Their parents divorced in 2001, and if interviews with the pair’s mother (Noriko Fujita, now a TV “talent”) are to be believed, she and her son Takanohana don’t really speak to each other. Conspicuously, she has not been heard from amongst the flurry of family and sumo dignatories interviewed on TV for the last day.

As you would expect, that the elder Takanohana was only 55 when he passed away yesterday has only served to make the story more tragic for the networks. But left unsaid, for now at any rate, is just how young the elder Takanohana was as a father, how much of his adult like was spent not as father but as a taskmaster coach to his two boys, where even to use a phrase like “tough love” would imply too familial a relationship. I suppose he knew what he was doing, leading his boys to the top, creating in the process the “Waka-Taka” boom that so captivated the Japanese public in the 90’s. But at what price?

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Aberration, or yet another symbol of what is wrong with Japan?

Gen Kanai points to this article by Norimitsu Onishi for the International Herald Tribune about Monday’s train derailment in Osaka which has left 96 people dead (as of this writing) and hundreds injured. Onishi wonders if the ultimate blame for the accident might not lie with Japan’s attention to punctuality, which he claims borders on the obsessive.

Gen thinks Onishi “hits the core issue” and on the surface of it it does seem a compelling way to explain the accident, but count me as someone who finds the article’s conclusions just a bit too pat, especially this soon after the accident. The driver’s body appears to have been found as of this writing (according to this New York Times article) so we will probably never know what his motivations were, why was he speeding (if in fact he was), etc. It may well be that we was trying to make up lost time, but to state that “This disaster was produced by Japanese civilization and Japanese people” (a direct quote by a railway worker interviewed by Onishi, to be fair, but it is this quote that he hooks his argument on) sounds like someone looking for easy answers and convenient scapegoats while bodies are still being pulled from the rubble.

If in fact the driver was worried about being reprimanded a second time for overshooting a station, to the point that he was dangerously speeding, that to me seems the product of an inexperienced (only 11 months on the job), young (23) driver, not of an obsession with punctuality. I don’t think we can automatically assume that an older, more experience driver would have acted the same, as if each driver was cut via the cookie cutter.

Despite Onishi being the New York Times’ Tokyo bureau chief and therefore someone who should know better, I can’t help feeling he’s playing to the Western audience of the IHT/NYT here, one all too ready to lap up preconceived notions about a neurotic Japanese culture, hell-bent on perfection, inflexible to the point of being robots, incapable to seeing the bigger human picture, and so obsessed with punctuality that it’s willing to risk the lives of 600 people to make up a mere 60 seconds, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. At this rate, it shouldn’t be too long before the theory is advanced that the accident was caused by the driver’s wish to commit seppuku to atone for the guilt he felt at causing his passengers to be a minute late for work.

The reality on the ground is of course much different, not something easily compartmentalized and explained. I’ve used the commuter train system every day of the three years I’ve been here, and while not a common occurence, delays do happen, announcements are sometimes vague, and questions to station staff are occasionally met with shrugged shoulders. But the fact of the matter is that in those three years, I’ve been late to work on account of a train delay all of TWO times (and mind you, both times station staff handed me an “excuse slip” to give to my employer). This is not something to be defensive about, however, but something to be celebrated. The system, as extensive and complicated as it is, shuttling millions of people to and from work and school every day, by and large on time, works — let’s not look this gift horse in the mouth. One accident of this scale in 40 years, as tragic and destructive as it was, needs to be looked at for what it is, an aberration in what is generally regarded as the world’s most efficient train transportation system.

But aberrations don’t sell newspapers, or provide closure to the victims’ families, and so the hand-wringing and second-guessing pundits come forth to peddle their theories before a receptive audience. For Onishi’s readers in America and elsewhere, they’re not seeking closure of course but rather a justification of their own inefficiencies and in the process a sense of cultural superiority which says that somehow a system that works so well, that is so attuned to the needs of its customers, can’t possibly be the product of normal, psychologically sound individuals, but instead must be the inhuman machinations of some monolithic, dystopian Other out here in the Far East. This artificial polarization allows Monday’s train tragedy to be co-opted as some sort of divine comeuppance.