Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
4-5-4 Shibaura, Minato-ku,
Tokyo 108-0023
My life in Japan is contiguous with the Heisei Era. A retrospective of Japanese life in the Heisei Era is resonant with me because it touches many of my personal experiences here. My 1980s were occupied mostly with study - seven years of university. My leap into adulthood, employment and independence came with my arrival in Japan. My plan was to travel farther, to get as far away from my Canadian hometown as I could get without approaching it again from the opposite direction - to discover the diametrically opposite antipode and reside there. Tokyo is not it, but when I arrived here I discovered a country of the living: a place to be human.
Rainy Season. I wasn’t prepared for it.
Recruit Scandal.
Doi Takako and the “ona no jidai.”
The investigation, arrest and prosecution of the child murderer Miyazaki Tsutomu. His case introduced the term “otaku” to me.
I was riding the Marunouchi Subway Line in Tokyo about 90-minutes before Aum Shinrikyo released deadly gas there.
Attempts by prime ministers and cabinet ministers to dismiss homelessness as a lifestyle choice in the face of legions of homeless people sheltering in major train stations in the capital.
Yukio Aoshima ran a delightfully minimalist election campaign for the Tokyo Governor’s office - and won!
When Hideo Nomo cunningly escaped his rigged Japan League contract in order to play Major League Baseball he was openly vilified in the Japanese press as a traitor - until he was successful, when he was immediately eulogized as a hero.
The yen was sky-high on money markets and Japanese ladies were dancing their money away at Juliana’s.
Kogyaru culture and loose socks. Street music in Yoyogi Park every Sunday.
A sick American president vomiting on Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa.
I got to see Chiyonofuji wrestle.
Writing. 196 of my letters printed in The Japan Times.
Published in The Japan Times on Sunday on Sunday, July 1, 2018 as "One life amid the Heisei era."
I forgot to mention Miyazawa Rie's nude photo book, Santa Fe (1991). Miyazawa was a teenage model and at the age of 18, as soon as she was finished with high school, she and released this book of nude photographs shot in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It caused some controversy at the time, Japanese people wondering what it meant or what is said about young Japanese womanhood that this is the sort of thing they do directly out of school. I have two copies of the book. It's not erotic. Bound collections of full-frontal female nude photography is a genre in Japanese culture. Is it pornography? Maybe.