17.7 Seminar on Japan in the 21st Century

Slim Novel 17 - http://adventuresofkimi.blogspot.com - See Homepage
  
Another Sunday Seminar, this one the first Sunday of 2013 and as usual held in Professor John Edwardes's Homat apartment in Tokyo. A very aged but brisk Professor Edwardes clinks his liberty bell in right hand at 1:01 PM to call the usual seminarans to order.
   "Gentlemen, ladies and young master, my son: Today, Seminar deals with where we expatriates and fellow travelers live - Japan." A shifting in chairs is heard since the subject had not previously been announced and this seems a surprise. Eddie interjects "Didn't we years ago back in the Bronx at your Hunter College office deal with Japan?"
   "Not really." replies Edwardes, "We dealt with the Japanese; also it was mostly the ancient history. Now I want to deal with today's Japan as we expatriates experience it - and also the changes. I think you, Eddie, will be expert there."
   "This is going to be interesting, I think,?" comments Ms Harumi the local communist but also someone who has seen the 3 Japans to be described - immediate pre-war 1930's & wartime; immediate postwar & Occupation; and modern Japan since 1960.
   Edwardes turns to Harumi, "Dear Old Miss," he says in a joke that would be insulting if they and the other seminarans did not know each other so well. "Suppose you start off with pre-war?"
   She stands revealing a 90-year-old, still very slim, flat chest, flapper body in sack dress and says, "May I defer to my friend and colleague here," a nod to her left indicates Kimura, Editor Emeritus of The Nippon Times, seated next to her, a very old man in the formal black suit he wears for Seminar. "Just to remind about ancient history."
   Kimura stands, "The important point to remember is that the Japanese islands first inhabitants were the Ainu, a Siber-origined people with pre-caucasoid features. It explains the rather much hairiness of Japanese compared to fellow orientals like Koreans, Chinese and Tibetans. The Ainu came many millennia ago and like the American Indians were stone-age hunter gatherers but warlike and they passed the warlike on to us Japanese. Then the oriental invasion, which brought the Japanese language, was by proto-Koreans who came through Korea a few millennia ago in a gradual invasion followed by civilized Chinese who a little more than 1000 years ago brought the written language and established a civilization. The Ainu were pacified by war and killing and intermating so that year 1000 AD saw a Chinese type court in Kyoto but everything north of Tokyo still Ainu controlled wilderness. Followed hundreds of years of warring states until the late 1400's when the warlords, finalized by Ieyasu Tokugawa, established what we could recognize today as the first semblance of the Japanese.
   "The Tokugawa 300+ years of rule, exactly from 1500 to 1868, made us the Japanese: a people of mixed racial characteristics united by a common culture, Confucianism, and a written Chinafied language and who controlled the access of western imperialism and teaching. Of most importance was the early Tokugawa's destruction of Christianity and pacification of Buddhism - the first seen as a wedge for European domination and the 2nd a warlike Chinese/Korean influence. This has set our basically anti-religion attitudes that have fostered science. Another good aspect of Tokugawa rule was the subordination of the China-type emperor system to Confucian order, which meant peaceful development under centralized government. The particular manners of the Japanese today - the seeming excessive formalism and duty bound relationships are all Tokugawa developments we Japanese should be thankful for."
   He sits and Harumi takes over.
   "In 1868 a movement of warlike samurai, unhappy under the peaceful control of the Tokugawa, by violent revolt substituted the rule of the emperor system and the country regressed into war. The modernization of Japan often credited to this so-called revolution would have progressed without it; the Tokugawa had already signed the treaties opening Japan to the west and had long before established at Dejima Island a controlled input of western learning. The fall of the Tokugawa coincided with a speeding of modernization. More importantly it began Japan's imperialistic warlike period that ended with its defeat and the atom bombings of 1945 and the Occupation."
   Eddie takes over. "In brief, the Occupation represented reform from above based on defeat of the emperor system brought on by its own stupidity. The foreign new shogun, MacArthur, under orders originally from the Franklin Roosevelt, New Deal in Washington DC, gathered a group of socialist oriented scholars and set about producing a Utopia of state control. The constitution outlawed war and limited the army to self-defense within Japanese territory. Women were liberated by being given the vote, and nearly free abortion on demand in any doctor's office without government regulation. Divorce was the equivalent of an anti-Muslim rule - A woman saying I divorce you and getting it at once at almost no cost. And the status of women, as shown previously by frequent women-beating husbands, improved after the war to its never being allowed. Also a social medical health service was made available at low cost universally and it included dentistry and all drugs that were dispensed at hospitals and doctors office, doing away with the Rx pharmacy system. Finally an alternative people's bank - postal savings was established making private banks unnecessary though they still continued. This Utopian situation started in 1946 and the Occupation ended 1959 although the actual ending treaty was 1952."
   He turns it over to Professor Edwardes. "Thank you, Eddie.  Unfortunately - How I hate that word - the right wing politicians of Japan today, prodded at first by U.S.A. Reagan republicans, have been busy rolling back the goods of the Occupation. They got rid of postal bank savings returning private banks monopoly. They introduced an American Rx pharmacy system replacing the lower cost, more convenient system where hospitals and doctors dispensed the medicines directly. Now they are working to replace the No War constitution and crimp women's abortion right and make Japan another USA. Well, anyway we expatriates have benefited and my one-million-hours of good life, thanks to Physician's Notebooks will come to an end some time in 2014.  So, as the once famous Mad Magazine Alfred E. Neuman was wont to say What? Me, worry?"

  And so it went until the end of 90 minutes; then Edwardes rings his little liberty bell and a door opens to the kitchen where wife Yuko has prepared the biggest pizza ever seen, cut in the exact number of slices as the number of seminar participants. Also pure water, heaps of fresh fruit and vegetable and sushi galore.
        End of Seminar. Next: 17.8 The One Million Hour Old Man's Wisdom