Heisei Era
Emperor Akihito is retiring (abdicating) in April 2019, bringing an end to the Heisei Era which began when he ascended the throne in 1989. The Emperor surprised the nation and the government by announcing his desire to retire last year in a televised address to the nation. There was no legal framework for a Japanese emperor to abdicate because no living emperor has given up the Chrysanthemum Throne in at least 200 years The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe crafted a one-time only law just for the Emperor, to make provisions for his retirement and succession by his eldest son, Naruhito. When Naruhito comes to the throne a new Era name will be chosen. Japanese commonly use the Western calendar for telling time, but they also still use the Era system. I was born in Showa 37, for example, the 37th year of the reign of Emperor Hirohito. Application forms in Japan give us the option of using the Japanese dating system (“wareki”) or the Western dating system (“seireki”) when writing personal information. I like to surprise officials by using the wareki.
My life in Japan corresponds almost exactly with the Heisei Era, so now that Emperor Akihito is abdicating it gives me a chance to reflect on my life in Japan and Japanese life during that time.
The greatest change by far has been in the field of electronics and electronic communication. The Internet, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Starbucks, cell phones, digital cameras, e-mail, Facebook and other social media didn’t exist when I arrived. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s each one arrived and immediately began evolving. Back then, high school girls were enamored of “pokeberu” pagers, and they wore “loose socks.”
There was tamagochimania.When I came to Japan,Japanese commuters were very quiet, talking little, and the majority of them were quietly reading cheap paperback novels or “manga” comic books on the trains. They are still quiet today, but now the majority are looking at their iPhones, playing games, reading emails or short text messages, or some other iPhone thing. I used to admire Japanese literacy, but now I don’t know what to think. Nostalgia for evidence of their former appearance of literacy, I suppose. I read on the trains all the time, but recently I was surprised to see a young Japanese woman reading a large, hardcover novel. I did a double-take.
My first apartment in Tokyo came equipped with a telephone. It was a rotary telephone. There were still many public telephones in those days. There are still some today because by law at least one public telephone has to be within a certain proximity of every train and subway station in the country. But in those days train stations featured entire walls given over to host a bank of public phones. In addition - something many young Japanese simply don’t know now - when I came to Japan there was still a variety of color-coded pay phones - red, yellow and blue - each designed to accept a certain currency denominations. Many people today have no idea what I’m talking about.
When I came to Japan Emperor Hirohito had just died. Prime Minister Noburo Takeshita had just resigned in the wake of the Recruit Scandal (bribery), and Chiyonofuji was the reigning sumo Yokozuna under challenge from the Hawaiian behemoth Konishiki. Tsutomu Miyazaki was murdering little girls, Odaiba was still under development, the Rainbow Bridge across Tokyo harbor was opened (1993), old man Shunichi Suzuki was still the Governor of Tokyo (he was Governor of Tokyo from 1979-1995), and the new Tokyo New City Hall in West Shinjuku was under construction (it opened in 1991). Ikebukuro’s Sunshine 60 building (built on the site of Sugamo Prison, where seven Class A war criminals were hanged in December 1948) was still the tallest building in the land when I arrived. Takako Doi, rising to the zenith of her career, was a symbol of the “ona no jidai,” the most powerful female politician in Japanese history. I loved Takako Doi. If any woman could be Prime Minister of Japan, it was her. She was smart, tough and wily. The blue-hued ¥500 notes that were discontinued in the late-1980s were in their final months of circulation, and vending machines still accepted them as they were retooled for the ¥500 coin. Since then I have seen several generations of vending machines and electronic station ticket gates, each one an incremental advance over its precursor. At first, train station staff were still individually punching paper tickets with a hole punch. Similarly, the famous Japanese bullet trains have undergone several generations of advanced models.
18-year-old talento Rie Miyazawa, fresh out of high school, scandalized people with her fine art nude photo book, “Santa Fe.” (I own two copies of it.) Then, she caused more scandal with her engagement to the young sumo star, Takahanada (later re-named Takanohana). No woman who appeared in a nude photography book could marry a sumo star.
I remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in cup noodle and energy drink television commercials here. In particular was his partnership in the early-1990s with Rie Miyazawa for the V&V energy drink ads. Known as “Schwa-chan,” his catchphrase was “daijou-V,” a wordplay on “daijoubu” (“okay” in Japanese) and the "V" in energy drink he was selling, Alinamin V.
Many other celebrities have appeared in strange Japanese television commercials. I remember Michael J. Fox doing Pepsi ads. Bruce Willis also made some, but Tommy Lee Jones’ long-running canned coffee ads are perhaps the best because of their cleverness and dead-pan humour.
The Oedo Line subway in the capital didn’t exist yet. Not by that name, anyway. While it was under construction it was called the “Number 12 Line.” It was christened “Oedo Line” by Governor Shintaro Ishihara. I never liked that name. Better to call it simply the “Edo Line.”
I don’t recall ever seeing a station platform safety gate or barrier in those days. It took a terrible accident at Shin-Okubo Station on the Yamanote Line in Tokyo, in which two Korean men were killed by an oncoming train while trying to rescue a Japanese drunk from the tracks, for train companies to get with the safety program and start a vigorous safety gate campaign.
“Tachi-shoben,” public urination, was still fairly common. I haven’t seen that in a long time. The same is true of spitting in public. Gobs of spit everywhere really irked me in those early years. Most of all was the work place smoking. I used to work in an office that featured a blue cloud of tobacco smoke hovering overheard. I bought a charcoal filter gas mask and made no secret about wearing it at my desk. Like “tachi-shoben,” loudly sucking teeth is a predominantly male activity, something which I endured a lot of in the old days, but which I haven’t encountered in a long time.
In December 1990, Toyohiro Akiyama became the first Japanese in space aboard a Russian rocket. Not a scientist, Akiyama was a TV journalist performing an adventurous joyride. The first Japanese scientist in space was Mamoru Mohri, aboard the American Space Shuttle in 1992, and again in 2000.
By the mid-1990s, former Chairman of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party Shin Kanemaru was under investigation and then indictment for tax evasion in the Sagawa Kyubin corruption scandal. Kanemaru was an old school dinosaur and a poster-boy for corrupt Japanese factional politics. Bringing him down was like brining down an elephant in a big game hunt. Sadly, he died of brain cancer before he was convicted. I don’t mean that it’s sad that he died of brain cancer. I mean it’s sad that he escaped conviction. The criminal!
Predictably, there are many karaoke parlors in Japan. But in the 1990s there seemed to be an equal number of ubiquitous soaplands. I realized recently that I haven’t seen or heard about a soapland in a looooooong time! Soaplands are like erotic massage studios in North American. A Japanese girl will take a bath with a male customer and while doing so will masturbate him to orgasm. But no penetrative sex. That’s illegal. The decline of soaplands is indicative of the general decline in the commercial sex business, and even of sex in general. More and more young people have less interest in dating, sex, marriage and children than they do in their digital devices and their personal hobbies. The declining birthrate and corresponding shrink in population are further signs that Japan is becoming a sexless society.
Without a choice of international supermarkets, many foreigners here relied on care packages from home, or else the Foreign Buyers Club in Kobe. Christmas decorations were available then, but Halloween was not yet a thing. In Harajuku, Takeshita-dori was only half the story. In those days Inokashira-dori was closed to traffic every Sunday so that electric bands could take over the street. I took thousands of photographs.
There has been a revolution in banking since then. When I arrived, ATMs were isolated inside banks. After 3:00 p.m. they were not accessible when the banks closed. There were no ATMs in convenience stores, department stores and stations. 24-hour access to money didn’t exist. And, ATMs did not accept foreign credit cards, bank cards or debit cards like many of them do now. Unfortunately, I got caught a couple of weekends with no money and had to spend my days at home with no food, only drinking water and waiting for the banks to open on Monday morning.
In early 1990, Heavyweight Boxing Champion Mike Tyson was knocked out in the Tokyo Dome in one of the biggest upsets in boxing history. Tyson went on to have other troubles in the 1990s, but I remember his great fall in Tokyo to a boxer named Buster Douglas. I knew that history had just been made in the same city where I lived. I didn’t witness it, but just being in proximity to it made me think.
I remember when U.S. President George H.W. Bush, exhausted and suffering a fever from influenza, collapsed and vomited on Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa during a state dinner in Tokyo. I learned the news from an American acquaintance who told me, “Change all your dollars into yen, because Bush just collapsed.” I thought he meant that the President was suddenly and unexpectedly abandoning his trade negotiating position!
Throughout the 1990s there was an ongoing Japanese government committee investigating the notion of moving the capital city to a more rural location - or, at least, moving some ministries out of the city - as a measure to retard the risk of massive damage from a large natural disaster like an earthquake. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent (billions of yen). But when Shintaro Ishihara became Tokyo Governor the entire project was quickly and quietly scrapped. Today many people probably don’t remember it.
The bubble economy had burst, but the yen was very strong. Young Japanese could afford to travel abroad and indulge in many luxuries. At home, the indulgent, pleasure-seeking hedonism was encapsulated in the Juliana’s Tokyo hardcore techno discotheque. Juliana’s featured young women. Men participated in the dance party, too, but it was overwhelmingly a display of the feminine. Open form 1991-1994, Juliana’s burned out quickly. Today the building is a department store, but many middle-aged mothers who used to dance there return just to wander nostalgically about the premises. Juliana’s was legendary.
I remember the 1991 eruption of the Mount Unzen volcano on Kyushu island. It was big news when the collapse of its lava dome caused a pyroclastic flow that killed 42 scientists and journalist who had been studying the mountain - including the French volcanologists Josephine and Maruice Krafft (a married couple).
Also in 1991 was the murder in his Tsukuba University office of Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. It has always been thought that the murder was connected to the Rushdie novel and the 1989 fatwa proclaimed by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie’s murder.
In 1994 the Kansai International Airport opened on a man-made island in Osaka Bay. Since then, the land has slowly been sinking. It's not a problem yet, but …. In addition, Haneda Airport in Tokyo was opened for international flights. Since the opening of the New Tokyo International Airport (Narita) in Chiba Prefecture in the mid-1970s, Haneda was assigned mostly domestic airline duties. But that slowly changed in the 1990s as first one international flight was allowed to take off and land, and then another, and then another …
I was titillated by the 1994 story of a couple who were prevented by the Japanese courts from naming their son "Akuma," meaning Devil, or Demon on the grounds of social unacceptability. It raised the issues of family rights and family privacy, individual rights and the right of parents to name their own children. At the time I thought it was just a Japanese thing, but then I learned that other countries also have naming laws. In particular, that same year I read in the news here about a couple in Quebec, Canada who were similarly barred by provincial courts there from registering their child under their name of choice.
Of course, there was the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe that killed over 6,000 people in January 1995. It frightened many of us into thinking what a major tremblor in the capital would be like. Then we found out on Friday, March 11, 2011 when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck. In March 1995, came the deadly sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by the Aum Shinrikyo religious sect. The charismatic, blind leader of that sect, Shoko Asahara, and six other Aum leaders were finally hanged in the summer of 2018 on the same day. Japanese like to execute criminals in groups as a strategy to minimize bad publicity. The sect was competent enough to produce sarin gas in its own labs, but not competent enough to properly release it. By lucky chance only a small handful of people died as a result of the sarin. It could have been thousands, which was Aum’s intent. Shoko Asahara’s intention was to save people by killing them sort of thing.
Hideo Nomo became the first Japanese major leaguer to permanently relocate to Major League Baseball in the United States, debuting with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1995. Although he was not the first Japanese person to play baseball professionally in the United States, he is often credited with opening the door for Japanese players in Major League Baseball - people like Hideki Matsui, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Irabu and Daisuke Matsuzaka - due to his star status. Nomo exploited a loophole in his Japanese contract to free himself to play in the MLB. Japanese contracts are notorious. For his cleverness Nomo was condemned in the Japanese media as a traitor - that I, until he achieved success in America, after which he became a hero.
At the Nagano Winter Olympics in 1998, snowboarding was introduced as an Olympic sport. Leading up to the 2002 World Cup co-hosted by South Korea and Japan. The two countries squabbled about whether to call it the “Japan-Korea World Cup” or the “Korea-Japan World Cup.” That was the year Tokyo commuter trains began numbering their stations to augment the existing Chinese, Japanese and English signage to try to make it easier for non-Japanese-speaking foreign tourists to negotiate the commuter trains. I always thought (and I still think) it was a dumb, counter-productive idea that makes the train system more confusing, not less. My experience has been that if you use your head, give yourself lots of time, pay attention to the signage, and periodically ask strategic questions of train station staff or Japanese commuters, it’s fairly easy to get around Tokyo and Japan.
I remember the Charisma Man comic strip form the 1990s. Most young foreigners here today don’t know about Charisma Man. His story goes like this: Charisma Man is a foreign English teacher in Japan who appears as a superhero to young Japanese ladies who think he is outrageously good looking and cool because he’s a foreigner. He’s living the foreign guy’s dream among Asian women. But like all superheroes, Charisma Man has his fatal flaw, his kryptonite. Charisma Man’s kryptonite is Western Woman. Whenever Western Woman appears in the comic frame we see Charisma Man for how he really is - a skinny, short, weak, repugnant nerd.
In 2005 in Amagasaki, near Osaka Station, a rush hour train derailment caused the deaths of over one hundred passengers when a commuter train, speeding on a curve and trying to keep to its schedule, derailed, and crashed into the carpark basement of an adjacent building. The front cars crumpled like an accordion. The incident highlighted the dangers associated with the Japanese obsession with punctuality.
There has been a slow evolution of Japan’s military / self-defense forces. With about a quarter million men and women in uniform, Japan has a large military. They are well-paid and equipped with the best equipment. But don’t use the word “military” with Japanese. They will always argue that it’s a “self-defense force” as if that’s a difference. The dream of conservative politicians is to amend the war-renouncing Article 9 of the (American-written) Constitution to “allow Japan to be a nation like any other.” That hasn’t happened (yet), but there were some significant developments during the Heisei Era. The first of these was the decision to deploy Japanese troops overseas in support roles, not combat roles. The second of these was the 2015 Japan commission of the first of two planned Izumo-class helicopter carriers, the largest combat vessels Japan has built since the Second World War. Incidentally, it approaches the size of some WWII aircraft carriers. In 2018 the government approved plans to convert the ship(s) into full aircraft carriers capable of launching a certain class of jet aircraft.
Japan’s traditional sense of ethnic homogeneity began to crack. From 2002-2013 a foreign-born (Finland) naturalized Japanese politician, Marutei Tsurunen, sat as an elected member of the House of Councilors, the upper house of Japan’s bicameral parliament called the Diet. In 2015 Airana Miyamoto became the first mixed-race Miss Universe Japan beauty contestant winner ever. Her father is African-American. She received a lot of criticism from social conservatives. Similarly with a famous model / actress who became popular in the 2010s, Rola, another mixed-race woman. Her father is Bangladeshi. I don’t like her looks. Her face it too narrow, angular and hard. Her skin is too pale, and her huge nose is too beaky. But I could be wrong.
In 2006 a constitutional crisis over Japan’s system of imperial male primogeniture was narrowly averted with the birth of Prince Hisahito to the Emperor’s younger son, Prince Akishino. The Crown Prince and Princess have only one child, a daughter, Princess Ai. And, for a long time Prince Akishino had only two daughters. Until 2006 the Emperor had only granddaughters, no grandsons, so the male succession was in jeopardy. The male succession ended with Prince Akishino. It went: Emperor Akihito, followed by his son Prince Naruhito, followed by his brother, Prince Akishino, followed by Princess Ai and her children if the government amended the law to allow for female succession. And that is what the government was preparing to do in the mid-2000s. Then, suddenly, Prince Akishino and his wife produced a male heir, Prince Hisahito, who is twelve years younger than his next oldest sister. It looks suspicious to me. Crown Princess Masako seems to have had trouble conceiving, and since it looked like she and the Crown Prince would have no more children after their daughter, it looks like someone pressed the younger Prince Akishino and his wife into having another child - and making sure it was male. This kind of jerrymandering is not at all unimaginable. Right now the succession is secure for the coming decades, but the dwindling size of the Imperial family and its dwindling male presence definitely cloud the family’s future. Unless, of course, the law is changed to abolish male primogeniture and allow for female succession as the English royal family did in 2015, allowing succession by age regardless of sex.
100 shops (dollar stores) did not exist yet. Garbage was not yet separated by category for recycling. Instead, we could still freely put “sodai gomi,” large garbage like furniture out on the street for pick-up. When I arrived in Japan it was still possible for a guy to furnish his apartment with things he picked from other people’s garbage.
Through much of the 1990s, Tokyo was plagued by Iranians visa-overstayers who hung out at certain commuter stations in the capital looking mischievous and unsettling. Koreans were doctoring the 500-won coin - the same size as the 500-yen coin, but slightly heavier - to use fraudulently in Japanese vending machines. Slowly, older model vending machines across the country were replaced with newer, slimmer models that did not stick out into the street so much. The variety of vending machines has declined. Alcohol vending machines disappeared after convenience stores were allowed to sell distilled liquor. Machines that sold schoolgirl uniforms and underpants to fetish-seeking men have disappeared. So have the pornographic magazine machines and the electric battery-dispensing machines. And more.
Those were the days!