Syria: Lest we forget

Syria: Lest we forget

I don’t normally touch on non-Japan related issues, but the civil war in Syria is too important not to comment on. While it is out of sight, having largely disappeared from our newspapers and evening bulletins, we should not let it slip out of mind as well, condemning hundreds of thousands to be part of a forgotten catastrophe. The civil war that began in March 2011 shows no sign of abating. The UN estimates there to have been 70,000 deaths in the conflict, around half of which were civilian. A staggering two million people, ten percent of the population, are thought to have been internally displaced and live as refugees in their own country. Another million have made their way out of Syria and sought asylum elsewhere, mainly in Turkey and Jordan. President Bashar Assad and his Ba’ath party forces are aligned against a range of competing, disunited opposition groups, from the Islamic fundamentalist Nusra front to the secular National Coalition. Both sides are entrenched, neither looks to be able to achieve a victory.

In September 2010, I spent ten days travelling through Syria. The following is an account of the places I visited as they were then, and as they are now.

Aleppo

I crossed the border into Syria from Antakya in Turkey by bus, heading for Aleppo in northern Syria. I had hit across the idea of travelling across Europe to Syria overland. When people ask why I chose Syria, I usually say something about wanting to see the edges of the old Roman Empire in the deserts where the remains were best preserved. I do love history, and it sounds reasonable enough. But I still don’t quite know why I chose to go to Syria, other than it seeming like something of an adventure and being far enough away to count as a challenge. Whatever the reason, on that bright morning in the southernmost extremity of Turkey I boarded an old bus with lime green seats and brown velour curtains, terribly excited at the prospect of reaching the much storied city of Aleppo by mid afternoon. Syrian border formalities were disorganised but friendlier than I had expected; the only real trouble came after we had crossed the border. The bus was supposed to go to Aleppo, drop off passengers and then make for Damascus, two hundred miles south, but after asking for a show of hands from people going to Aleppo and discovering there to be only five of us, the driver decided that it was really quite a large detour and he’d rather skip Aleppo and give himself more chance of getting home in time for tea. So, he struck a fairly one-sided deal with the Aleppo group, offering us half our ticket fare back if we got on the bus and caught a local minibus the rest of the way to Aleppo. It wasn’t much of a choice as he made it clear that he wasn’t driving to Aleppo in any instance, and he was supported by the other thirty or so people on the bus who must also have had a nice tea awaiting them in Damascus.
Luckily, the Syrian public transport system worked splendidly; five minutes after being dropped off, an old minibus bound for Aleppo pulled up. It was one of the old Japanese minibuses that seem to make up the majority of public transport infrastructure across the Arab world from Syria to Morocco. The minibus sped across an arid desert landscape dotted with low rise stone houses. Occasional towns came and went, each main street a huge informal meeting place for men to drink tea and smoke, the thick water tobacco smoke wreathing each in an ethereal shroud from which he conducted his affairs. Large pictures of President Assad peered owlishly down on the traffic from gantries rigged over the road, the only sign of the dictatorial burden the nation groaned under. Each town seemed lively and harmonious, with an air of neighbourliness evident even from the window of a speeding bus.
And speed it did; our driver was another one who had no time to lose in returning home for tea. Other cars are left in his wake as the old Hiace engine whizzed, clanged and rattled furiously at his bidding, overtaking now on the inside, now on the outside, and now, when there is no room to overtake two slow lorries on the road, on the shrub-dotted sand that makes up the verge. A policeman was one of my fellow passengers, and he shouted at the driver to slow down. The driver retorted that it was his minibus and he would drive how he wished; the policeman took out a pair of handcuffs and shook them gently, threateningly, by the driver’s face. We slowed down.
Arriving in Aleppo was a bewildering, brilliant surprise. Compared to Turkey, everything was less familiar and more exciting. Arabic script prevailed, rendering me instantly illiterate. Ahead was a market square and a high, ancient wall; the fabled Aleppo Souk. To the left was the only point of reference I had in the city; the Aleppo clocktower, built in 1899 by the Austrian architect Charles Chartier; a reminder of how cosmopolitan Aleppo was in the era around the end of the Ottoman empire, when Agatha Christie, Charles Lindbergh, Theodore Roosevelt, T.E. Lawrence and Charles De Gaulle all sipped drinks at one time or another in the bar of the Barons Hotel.

A less famous visitor to the Barons hotel bar

The souk, the largest covered market in the world, was a labyrinth of passages in which all sense of direction and time is left at the entrance. People have traded here since the 14th century, when the silk road brought silk from Iran, spices and dyes from India and paper and fabric from China to be sold to the Mamluk elites. Aside from the acceptance of credit cards, little seemed to have changed. The division of the souk according to crafts had been maintained across the centuries, and the main method of transporting goods under the ancient stone arches was still the humble donkey. The smells of aromatic woods, spices and dyes mingled with the breakneck sales patter of the stallholders and constant bustle of traffic in that enclosed otherworld to take you back in time, as if each stone archway pushed the calendar back a decade.

Wide load in the Aleppo Souk

With friends outside the bathhouse in the Aleppo Souk, now occupied by rebel fighters.

Emerging from the souk brought a no less memorable sight in the form of the Aleppo Citadel. Sited on an artificial mound with a 45 degree slope all around, a twenty metre deep moat and a single, monumentally fortified gateway, it was intimidating enough to look at as a tourist, but to imagine being a soldier in a company charged with storming the castle was a truly terrifying thought. The walls of the main gate and outer battlements were fully six feet thick, presenting an unbroken facade of immovable stone and defensive arrow slits. In its heyday, the sides of the mound would have been faced with limestone, dazzling prospective attackers and adding blindness to their already considerable list of disadvantages. Anyone who did breach this dizzying list of obstacles would then have been faced by a vaulted entrance ramp which twisted and turned six times before reaching the inner gate. Machiolations (also known on less formal occasions as murder-holes) in the vaulting allowed the defenders to pour hot oil and water on the attackers from above. It is no surprise that the castle was never taken by force; what is surprising is that anyone dared to try.

The only entrance to Aleppo Citadel. If someone asked me to storm this, I think I would have very quickly remembered a pressing engagement elsewhere.

The current citadel is largely a 13th century construction, though the citadel area has been used for defence since the third millennium BC. Aleppo is a city that astounds with its age, and preservation. The clock tower mentioned above is considered new, being a mere hundred years old, and the city itself is thought by archaeologists to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the world, with evidence for habitation reaching back to the sixth millennium BC, only very shortly after people in the fertile crescent started farming and got the hang of collective living at all. The city and its dry climate preserve ancient artefacts so well that a Polish archaeologist I met at the citadel complained that he was looking for evidence of material culture from before the Roman invasion in 64 BC but kept digging up Roman coins and helmets. I don’t know many places in the world where an archaeologist would be disappointed to find ‘only’ Roman remains and nothing older.

A short distance outside the city is another historical highlight; the Church of St. Simeon Stylites, dating from the fifth century. Simeon Stylites were a spectacularly odd fellow. He followed the life of a religious hermit, but found that even in a cave in the desert, his reputation was such that people would seek him out to ask for his religious teaching. As a hermit, he was rather unhappy about this state of affairs, and took the somewhat bizarre decision to live on a small platform atop a pole, where it would be impossible for people to bother him. This had rather the opposite of the desired effect, and crowds came from miles around to see the hermit living in the sky. At this point it might have been sensible to try and choose a less obvious form of anonymity than living on top of the tallest structure for miles around, but Simeon was not one to give up on such a wonderfully eccentric idea. Rather than coming down, he gradually increased the height of the pole until he was living fully fifty feet above the ground. This caused even more visitors to call, and his life of religious contemplation was constantly interrupted by petitioners shouting from ground level for his advice. Evidently a pragmatist, Simeon struck a deal with the crowds; he would come down and preach twice a day, in return for being left in peace the rest of the time. This seems to have suited all parties, and he lived on his pole for 37 years until his death in 459, upon which the church was constructed around the pole. Unfortunately centuries of relic-hunting visitors chipping away at the famous pole has left it barely worthy of being called a stump, let alone anything grander. However, the grandeur of the fifth century church ruins around it still remains, as does the magic of being in one of the oldest churches in the world.

The remains of the church of St Simeon, and the remains of the pole he lived atop for 37 years

Aleppo indeed wears its history well. People live in it, not around it; in 2010 the souk was as alive as it must ever have been, the citadel area was busy with people congregating in cafes to talk over tea and sweets, and in every row and alleyway of ancient houses life pulsed busily indoors and out.

Aleppo streetscape

Aleppo sweets, each one drenched in honey and ridiculously delicious

Today, in April 2013, a ceasefire was announced in Aleppo. The reason was not because the Syrian government has come to an accord with rebel groups, not because all sides have decided to abandon the madness and go home. It was simply a temporary truce to allow the Red Crescent to pick up bodies, shot by government snipers in the street. Until now, it has been too dangerous to retrieve them, so they lay there, decomposing, unable to receive a burial, unable to be mourned. The living eke out an existence as best they can, waiting for hours in line to receive a bread ration or some clean water while mortars and shells tear the sky apart overhead. The passages and alleyways of the souk which once took the visitor back in time are now ripped apart, the fourteenth century stonework strong enough to make an inviting base for both government and rebel fighters. The traders have long since deserted their pitches, and the only shouts to be heard are those ordering an attack or a retreat as fighting for each area of the souk continues with unabated ferocity.
The citadel, which surely most Aleppians thought had seen its last fighting during the Ottoman Empire, is again a sought after military target on high ground in the centre of the city. Its walls still stand, but the imposing fortified entrance was partially destroyed in August by shells and explosives that its medieval builders could scarcely have conceived. Government forces now control the citadel and are using it as both a lookout point and artillery compound, from which rebel districts are bombarded to break resistance to the regime. After these areas have been reduced to rubble, the army and the Mukhabarat (secret police) comb the destruction for survivors and rebel fighters, and take them away to be tortured and shot.
A short walk down the road from the citadel stands the Umayyad mosque, just over the road from a shwarma shop where I stopped for lunch back in September 2010, and fell into conversation with the owner about Manchester United’s newest signing, Javier Hernandez. I very much doubt that he is still in business, and if he is he doubtless has more pressing concerns than the vagaries of the premier league transfer window.

The Umayyad Mosque at evening prayers

The mosque was also an early target for government troops for its surveillance opportunities from the eleventh century minaret, the tallest free standing stone tower in the world of such an age. Each side’s facade shows off a different style of the period, making it an exceedingly important example of Seljuk architecture. However, historical merit counts for little in the fog of war. After President Assad’s forces took the mosque, on October 10 last year rebel groupings tried to overcome the mosque by blasting holes in its mosaic-covered 13th century walls and storming through. However, they were repelled and forced to retreat, attacking now only with sniper fire from surrounding neighbourhoods.
It is this sniper fire which has truly killed off normal life in Aleppo, as it did in the similarly intractable conflict in Yugoslavia in the mid 1990s. The mundane sounds of social life have been muted, the fabric and colour of the city washed away. Both rebel fighters and ordinary civilians have taken to using underground tunnels where possible to get around town, though these hastily built warrens carry the very real danger of collapse, especially when mortar fire lands nearby. Tens of thousands have left this fine old city, whose heart is being ripped out street by street, whose people are being shelled, shot and starved every day they manage to survive another day of life.

Hama

Unlike Aleppo’s forsaken thousands, I was able to leave in the comfort of a highway bus, the main means of intercity public transport in Syria. I was heading for Hama, the fifth largest city in Syria after Damascus and Aleppo, famous for its huge wooden noria (waterwheels) dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The largest is over twenty metres in diameter.

The king of noria

The waterwheels served the vital function of channeling water from the Orontes river into aqueducts which provided water for irrigation in the surrounding farmland. There is much debate as to their origins; the earliest evidence of noria in Hama is from the later Byzantine period of around 1000 years ago, but a mosaic dating from the 5th century at nearby Apamea shows a noria-like construction, suggesting an even earlier origin than the end of the first millennium. These days the noria are purely decorative, and the continuous creaking of those lumbering wooden giants as they turn sounds a mournful protest across the centre of Hama, as if they are objecting to still having to work at such a great age.

Noria from afar

Hama’s more recent history also provides some clues about the current conflict. Hama was the centre of the last sustained challenge to the Assad regime; from 1978 to 1984 the Sunni Muslim population rose against the Baathist regime, then led by the current president’s father Hafeez Assad. The conservative Sunni of Hama considered the secular, nationalist Alawite sect that the Assad family adhere to as heretical, and the Sunni group known as the Muslim Brotherhood began a concerted guerrilla campaign against the government from 1978. This included one nearly successful attempt on Hafeez Assad’s life in 1980, when Muslim Brotherhood guerrilas attempted to gun down the president during a state visit by the president of Mali. In 1982 he took bloody revenge on the Brotherhood in their stronghold of Hama by declaring war on the city a week in advance, and declaring that anyone who failed to evacuate within that period would be considered a rebel. The army, the Mukhabarat and the airforce descended on the city, led by the president’s brother Rifaat Assad. Planes bombed rebel districts to allow infantry and tank units to march through the rubble. The army shelled areas of fierce resistance for three weeks before combing the ruins for survivors. Tunnels under the city were pumped full of diesel fuel and set alight. The journalist Robert Fisk estimated casualties to be around 20,000, while Amnesty International gave a figure of 25,000. Rifaat Assad himself boasted of having killed 38,000.
After the Hama Massacre, membership of the Muslim Brotherhood was made a criminal offense and Hafeez Assad continued down the road of repression and state sponsored violence for the rest of his reign. This helps explain why the younger Assad is holding on to power even as the country goes to hell in a handcart; his father survived a six year insurgency, albeit on a more limited, single city scale. The current conflict has continued for two years, and Assad may still believe he can manage some kind of decisive victory which allows him to claim victory and further crush the battered country under his vicious rule, though it is hard to see how given the fractured nature of the fighting, with districts and even streets within towns and cities divided by allegiance to the rebels or the government.
He is also in a situation where realistically all he can do to give himself the best chance of survival is to stay in power and try to fight his way out. The murder of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya will have served as a signal lesson that, if the rebels gain the upper hand he and his clique can expect no mercy, and even escape would likely lead to imprisonment and a high profile trial at the International Criminal Court; he has few friends left in the international community, and perhaps none who would risk becoming a pariah state for giving him shelter.
I wonder if he ever wishes he had stayed in his previous life, which might not have given him the same power, but would certainly have brought less mayhem and suffering to the world. For Bashar Assad was never meant to follow in his father’s footsteps; that duty was placed squarely on the shoulders of his older brother Basil. Basil joined the army after university, rising to the rank of commander and taking charge of presidential security. From 1984, he began to accompany his father on presidential visits both at home and abroad receiving the classic education of a dictator in waiting. The national press eulogised him as the brave, pure successor to the presidency.
Meanwhile, Bashar Assad was allowed to pursue his own role, free from the responsibility of future political office. He trained as a doctor, working for four years in Tishrin, the largest army hospital in Syria. In 1992 he moved to London to do postgraduate research in ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital, and settled into a comfortable life in the city. Love also bloomed in England when he met his future wife Asma al-Akhras. The comfortable life of a surgeon in London, perhaps with a lucrative Harley Street surgery, awaited the younger Assad.
On January 21st 1994, everything changed. Basil Assad collided with a roundabout while driving to the airport in fog for an early morning flight. Not wearing a seatbelt, he was flung through the windscreen and killed instantly. In this instant, Bashar’s comfortable future in the medical profession was erased, his life turned on its head by a momentary but fatal lapse in his elder brother’s concentration. Hafeez Assad called him back to Syria immediately, where he was put on the fast-track to the succession always intended for Basil. He entered the military and rose in five years to the rank of Colonel, with his father ensuring he was always surrounded by sympathetic fellow Alawites. Simultaneously he engaged in public life and government, culminating with his taking charge of relations with Syria’s most important neighbour Lebanon.
In 2000, Hafeez Assad succumbed to a heart attack, and Bashar became president in June with a level of popular support seen only in dictatorships (97.2%). While there were hopes for liberalization and democratization under the English speaking, western educated Assad, the paths he chose eventually led to the present, where he fights to keep a semblance of control over a country torn asunder beneath him, to ensure the survival of his regime and himself. So, is it too much to imagine that occasionally he wishes he were back in London troubled only by a tricky eye procedure or tube strike?

Krak Des Chevaliers

Hama’s waterwheels sounded me a sad farewell as I left the city, but my heart was full of childlike enthusiasm as I was on the way to one of the places I had most wanted to visit in Syria – the unsurpassable Crusader castle known as Krak des Chevaliers (castle of the knights). Lawrence of Arabia once called it

“perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world, which forms a fitting commentary on any account of the Crusading buildings of Syria”

It was built in three stages, reaching its current extent over one hundred years after the first limestone block had been laid by Raymond II, Count of Tripoli and son in law of King Baldwin of Jerusalem, in 1142. The final stages of construction were the outer keep and the central chapel. The construction of the outer keep created a corridor fully 137 metres long which invaders would have to pass through to reach the inner keep, all the while being attacked with projectiles and boiling liquids through murder holes in the walls on each side. Attackers would also have had to notice a sharp hairpin bend in the passage to reach the inner gate, as going straight on would have brought them out in a no-man’s land between the inner and outer walls of the castle, where death and destruction could be freely brought down upon them. Like the Aleppo Citadel, it is no surprise that it was never taken by force, instead being lost only when the crusaders left the Levant entirely after the fall of Acre in 1291. Historian Hugh Kennedy called the defensive structures of the Krak “the most elaborate and developed anywhere in the Latin east … the whole structure is a brilliantly designed and superbly built fighting machine”

The Krak from afar; the classic crusader castle

The chapel is a small but beautiful building in the centre of the huge complex. Its barrel vaulted roof is more typical of Norman design than thirteenth century Gothic, and it would have been considered old fashioned in contemporary France. The crusaders were at the forefront of technology when it came to castle construction, but their churches understandably lagged behind the latest architectural styles of Western Europe.It is in the chapel more than anywhere in the castle that you can still imagine the presence of those crusader knights in the 13th century, praying for success in their missions to retake the Holy Land the night before riding out to battle. On one side of the church, a more modern Gothic vaulted corridor still survives, and it is striking to consider that the very same vaulted arches might be found in any of the older Oxford colleges or adorning a monastery nestled in a remote valley somewhere in rural Languedoc.

Chapel of the Krak des Chevaliers

The Krak des Chevaliers is another great monument which has suffered depredations in the civil war which it was not built to withstand. Its importance in defending the Homs Gap, which links the large central city of Homs with Tripoli and the sea, is still relevant today. After rebel soldiers took shelter there in the first months of the uprising, the Syrian army shelled it, destroying some of the inner defenses and part of the beautiful chapel with its precious thirteenth century fresco remains. It will take a lot to destroy the monumental Krak, and we can but hope that even the might of a modern military offensive may not be enough to lay down the great old beast.

Damascus

After touring the Krak and pretending to be a Crusader knight, I was finally ready to see Damascus, oldest capital city in the world, and the city that first bus driver from Turkey had been so eager to reach. Like so much of Syria, Damascus overflows with history, and having survived these six thousand years past, it will surely live through the current conflict despite enduring some of its fiercest fighting. I got on another gaudily decorated bus (peach coloured curtains paired with lime green seats) which came with its own travelling salesman. He walked up and down the bus every five minutes peddling goods that ranged from ice-cream to toothbrushes. In fact, on closer inspection they were the only things he was selling. Presumably they came as a set; after the sugary hit of a nice scoop of vanilla a quick brush makes sense, though as the temperature in the bus was approaching 30 degrees he seemed to be doing a much brisker trade in the latter than the former. Discussion with my fellow passengers revealed that while the man who sold me the ticket assured me the bus was going straight to the centre of Damascus, his version of ‘central’ was somewhat akin to Ryanair’s, and that the nearest I could be dropped to the capital was on the ring road skirting it. Bus travel in Syria is always something of a lottery, but the unbounded kindness of Syrians ensures that no matter how far you end up from your intended destination, someone will put you back on the right track, and if the first person you ask doesn’t know the way he can be relied on to find someone who does. I speak no Arabic (beyond being able to ask furtively if a newsagent might stock some illicit beer behind the counter), but I never felt lost, confused or threatened once thanks to the kindness of Syrian strangers. So it was that when I got off the bus, fellow passengers would not let the bus continue until they had put me safely in a taxi heading for the actual centre of the city. The journey to the old city where I was staying proceeded uneventfully through the outer reaches of town, until the taxi driver pointed to an older looking stretch of wall, a gate over the road crowned with a plain white minaret.
“That’s 2000 years old. Roman. It’s called Bab Sharqi (The Eastern Gate)”
he said matter of factly, as if pointing out a telephone box or public convenience.
And so it is in Damascus, which “measures time not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and prosper and crumble to ruin”
as Mark Twain wrote in 1869 in ‘The Innocents Abroad’. Bab Sharqi is only one third the age of the city as a whole, which was first populated at least four thousand years before the Roman invasion by Pompey Magnus in 64 BC. Damascus was part of the territory of Hyksos, who harried and overran Lower Egypt in the seventeenth century B.C., and some of the earliest Egyptian writing to survive comes from the Amarna letters, diplomatic correspondence between Damascus, then called Dimasqu, and the Egyptian administration. History is a constant here; “old Damascus is by right, the Eternal City”, to let Mark Twain do to the talking again.
The old city presented its credentials as I walked through the gate; a row of shops on one side that would not have looked out of place in any of the last five centuries, and on the other side an Armenian church that provided a timely reminder of Syria’s two thousand year old link with the Christian religion. Ten percent of the Syrian population is Christian, though that simple statistic obscures the dazzling variety of denominations that make up that fraction; joining the Armenian Catholics in the church by Bab Sharqi are Syriac Catholics, Maronites, Melkites, Chaldean Catholics, Syriac Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Christians.

In the civil war, thus far there has been an impressive lack of religious intolerance or victimisation, though very recently the BBC reported that two senior clerics, the heads of the Greek Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox church in Syria had been kidnapped by militants in a rebel held area near Aleppo, though they were thankfully released the next day. The allegiance of the kidnappers is not known, and we must hope it is not a sign of religious conflict becoming enmeshed in the existing Gordian knot of war.

Damascus streetscape

A street covered with vines to shade strollers from the sun

A bakery

The road leading down from Bab Sharqi is called Straight Street, which sounds somewhat prosaic, but the familiar magic of Damascus returns when you hear that it was down this same street that the blinded Paul was led after his conversion. Straight Street leads straight to the main souk, called Medhat Pasha souk after the Ottoman governor who ordered its renovation and roofing in the middle of the 19th century. All along the Medhat Pasha souk and its ancient offshoots, shops no wider than a bicycle sell nuts, dried fruits and spices out of enormous jute sacks grouped together on the ancient cobbles.

A Damascus perfumier pulling in the crowds

The souk at night during a festival

A beautiful Damascene door

Shafts of light piercing through that lead roof talk of earlier conflict; in 1925, an uprising against the French mandate put in place in the aftermath of World War One brought French military might down on Damascus, and the souk was machine-gunned from the air to quiet the rebellious natives, giving it something of a cheese grater appearance.

The roof of the damascus souk, complete with holes supplied by the French

In the most recent conflict the souk has been quiet aside from demonstrations early on in the uprising, perhaps because any street called Straight Street is likely to make sitting ducks of anyone unwise enough to try fighting in it.

Halfway along the souk, I went to one of Damascus’s most famous shops. Bakdash has been serving ice-cream to Damascenes for over one hundred and thirty years, and even today fluffy, snow white mounds of ice cream are pounded by huge wooden mallets wielded by men with biceps like balloons. They advertised different flavours on the menu, but I didn’t see anyone order anything other than a booza, a pistachio covered mastic flavoured ice cream that tastes something like pine smells. I have no idea whether they have been able to continue the venerable tradition through the civil war, but rumour has it that they continued to sell ice cream even as the French biplanes were strafing them overhead, so perhaps there is room for optimism.

Bakdash’s famous ice-cream

At the end of the souk is the gate of the Temple Of Jupiter, a Roman stone edifice that would be a site of national importance almost anywhere else but in Damascus is just another incidental speck of history.

The Gate of Jupiter, now outside the Damascus souk but once entrance to a huge roman temple on the site of the current Umayyad mosque

Opposite is the Umayyad Mosque, Syria’s largest and oldest mosque; indeed, in this city of superlatives it should come as little surprise that it is the oldest continuously used mosque in the world. The sixth Umayyad caliph, Walid I decreed that a mosque be built on the site of the old Byzantine cathedral in 706, less than a lifetime after the death of Mohammad.

The Umayyad Mosque’s huge central courtyard and 12th century minaret.

It is a monumental construction. The central courtyard would be comfortably large enough to old a rugby match, though perhaps the two eighth century domes at each end would be a hindrance to the free flow of play. The interior courtyard walls are decorated with gold leaf mosaic depicting trees, landscapes and the Barada river that flows through Damascus. While much of the work has been restored over time, some of the mosaics in the Western vestibule date from the original decoration of the mosque in 715. I cannot express how astonishing I find it to think that, one thousand three hundred years ago, an artist etched a pattern on a wall, plastered small tiles and stones into the pattern and decorated parts of it with gold leaf, then stepped back to admire his work and reflect on a job well done, and be satisfied that he had done his God proud with such fine handiwork. Over the following centuries the Vikings roamed and ransacked Europe, the Black Death annihilated possibly one fifth of all people in the world, Gutenberg invented his printing press and clever chaps in Italy reformed the basis of all knowledge and called it the renaissance. Trains, telegraphy, the industrial revolution, modern medicine, flight and space travel and a thousand other things all came into being, and all the while some pieces of stone stayed, unmoved, undamaged, affixed to the wall of this remarkable building for me to stare at in wonderment well over a millennium later.

Decoration inside the Umayyad mosque



“In Damascus there is a mosque that has no equal in the world, not one with such fine proportion, nor one so solidly constructed, nor one vaulted so securely, nor one more marvellously laid out, nor one so admirably decorated in gold mosaics and diverse designs, with enamelled tiles and polished marbles.”

commented the Arab geographer Mohammed al-Idrisi in 1154. Eight and a half intervening centuries have done nothing to make the sentiment less true.

Another surprise about the Umayyad mosque is its lively inclusivity. The bones of John the Baptist (Yahya to Muslims) are said to be interred here, and many Christians also visit to pay their respects, the most august of them being Pope John Paul II who visited in 2001, becoming the first pope ever to set foot inside a mosque. Adherents to any other religion are welcome too, and the atmosphere inside this and every other mosque I visited in Syria was a long way from the forbidding piety I had expected. Children ran around playing football or tag, ladies chatted in aisles and men relaxed and napped in the courtyard.

Football and chat in the Umayyad mosque

It is this very openness that allows the Umayyad mosque to transcend religion, and become the beating heart of Damascus.
Opposite the mosque, I stopped to rest tired legs at a lively looking cafe. As so often happens in Syria, a man sitting nearby turned to say hello. He was perhaps in his late fifties or early sixties, with a splendid grey moustache wider than his face, and accompanied by his wife. He was a mathematics teacher by profession, but he spoke English very well, and he told me about his life and family. He had come into the centre of town with his wife to buy a toy for his grandson’s fifth birthday, and he proudly showed me the toy robot he had picked up in the souk. Politics is not an acceptable topic when the Mukhabarat might be listening, so we stuck to Syrian history, of which citizens are understandably proud. He told me that Damascus’s old city held over five thousand houses from the Ottoman Empire, almost all of which were architectural jewels in one way or another. He touched on the French occupation before the second world war, but abruptly stopped when we got to the post war period.
“I should stop there”
he said, evidently not willing to speak about Syria after 1966 when it came under Ba’ath party rule. It was the only sign I saw in Syria of oppression, of a lack of freedom of speech or thought. He returned then to the distant past, talking of the Romans, Seljuks and Crusaders with a passion and depth of knowledge remarkable for someone trained in mathematics, and with a kindly patience that became one of my most enduring memories of the Syrian people.
My companion’s wife whispered something to him, and he explained that he had to leave to go and see his grandson. We said our goodbyes, and it was only when I left half an hour later that I found he had paid for my drink and sweet as well. He was typical of the Syrians I met across the country, who simply wanted more people to visit and appreciate the wonders Syria had to offer, and were kind enough to share their knowledge and help those who had visited in any capacity they could.

Just outside the mosque is the tomb of Saladin, and one wonders what he would make of people from all over the world coming to the city he tried so hard to defend from the west and their righteous armies of religion during the Crusades. Eight hundred years ago, he fought more than two years of almost daily conflicts with England’s Lionheart, Richard I during the Third Crusade (1189-1202). Despite being mortal enemies, Saladin and Richard enjoyed a warm and chivalrous relationship that sets at odds the brutality of many combatants in the medieval Holy Land; when Richard was ill, Saladin sent him fine fruits and delicacies, and when Richard’s horse was killed in the Battle of Arsuf Saladin sent him a fine Arabian steed. In return, Richard went so far as to propose that Saladin’s brother marry his sister Joan, Queen of Sicily, and Jerusalem be the wedding gift, though the offer was rejected.
Having successfully defended Jerusalem from Richard’s army, they negotiated safe passage for the remains of the Crusader force and Jerusalem’s Christians to Acre, destroying once and for all the European dream of bringing Jerusalem back inside the empire of Christendom Far from being reviled in Europe for this, Saladin became a celebrated example of knightly virtue. When he died in 1193, he possessed not enough money to pay for his funeral, having given the majority of his wealth to the poorest of his subjects.
So perhaps Saladin would not mind so much the stream of Western visitors to his tomb and the mosque; certainly a much greater threat comes from the Syrian conflict. While the centre of the city has thankfully been spared the destruction that Aleppo’s historic monuments have suffered, fierce fighting has destroyed outer districts, causing rebel fighters to shelter in increasingly central locations. The army will not give ancient monuments a second thought in their efforts, and it is fearfully easy to imagine a noose of fire tightening around the 350 acres of the old city, with its thousands of precious monuments, palaces, mosques and houses, the area about which Tahir Shah wrote;

“For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.”

Just outside the city stands the mountain of Jebel Qassoon. When I visited it was a popular sightseeing spot, and the night view from its summit is truly impressive, with the city radiating out from the unmistakable open space of the Umayyad Mosque in the centre of the panorama. It was also an exceedingly popular spot for trysting couples, away from the prying eyes and disapproving murmurs of the city. If a young Damascene says that he ‘went to Jebel Qassoon last night’, the chances are it was not solely to enjoy the view.

Though, you have to say the view is rather good

Today, alas, that romantic opportunity is lost to Syrians. As with the citadel in Aleppo, the high ground was soon taken by government forces, who have blockaded the mountain and stationed artillery atop it, within easy reach of the city centre. One can only pray that the mortars and missile launchers will not be used against the old city as an alternative to tanks which cannot negotiate its narrow, twisting alleyways of shadow and stone.

Damascus is in great danger, of a modern and terrible kind which it has not faced before. I will leave the last word to Mark Twain, in the hope that he was correct when he wrote

“She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.”

Bosra and Deraa

My final stops in Syria were Bosra and Deraa in the extreme south of Syria by the border with Jordan, and the origin of the current conflict. Bosra is home to a fine Roman amphitheatre of the mid second century, when the Empire stretched to its largest extent and enjoyed its days of glory under the wise rule of the Five Good Emperors. It is the largest and most complete Roman theatre in the Middle East, and is unusual in having been built on level ground rather than into a hillside as was typical. In Roman Syria’s heyday, fifteen thousand spectators would have enjoyed the classic works of the likes of Juvenal and Horace played out on the basalt stage. Records covering the administration of Bosra in these days reveal that the theatre would once have been draped in silk hangings to protect audiences from summer sun and seasonal showers, while perfumed water was also evaporated during a performance for a final touch of luxury.

The Wembley Stadium of Roman Syria

The stage at Bosra’s amphitheatre

The structure is so solid and imposing that when the Islamic rulers decided to build a fortress in Bosra in the 14th century, they could think of no better solution than to build a reinforced wall around the theatre and declare it a castle; it was these later ramparts that have helped to preserve the theatre so beautifully to the present day. In the space between the theatre and the walls, later generations have arranged local artefacts such as tablets and gravestones, the Greek and Latin script another reminder, as if any were needed, of the great age of this town and country.

Latin inscriptions at Bosra

If anyone better educated than me can translate, I’d be fascinated to know what this says.

A fraction of the famed Roman Eagle, under which they conquered the known world, lying around in the Bosra theatre

Unfortunately, the cities where the rebellion started have come in for some of the heaviest punishment from government forces. It was in Deraa, the “cradle of the revolution” and Bosra’s near neighbour, that the revolution began in March 2011. Protests began in response to the arrest and torture of several teenagers for writing anti-government graffiti. Demonstrators clashed with police, and intensified after Friday prayers on March 18th when thousands took to the streets. The local Ba’ath party headquarters were burned down on the 20th, and in response police used live ammunition on the rebels, killing fifteen. The following Friday, the 25th, similar protests spread nationwide, with 100,000 marching in Deraa, and tens of thousands engaging in pro-democracy demonstrations length and breadth of the nation in cities such as Homs, Hama, Baniyas, Jasim, Aleppo, Damascus, Deir-ez-Zor and Latakia. From June the first armed rebel militias began to appear, and in July they had evolved and coalesced far enough to announce the formation of the Free Syrian Army, helped by large numbers of deserters from the regular army, where morale sank with every order to fire on unarmed Syrians. A number of soldiers were also court martialled and execued for refusing to fire on civilians when ordered. In August the Syrian National Council was formed to unite opposition voices, but even today it remains a fractious patchwork of political groups, long term exiles, grass roots demonstrators and militants. Since the formation of an opposition army, protests have been replaced by armed struggle, with every city in the country being torn apart to a greater or lesser extent by the fighting. Ceasefires proposed by notables such as former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan were roundly ignored on all sides, and the international community is both divided and understandably shows no signs of wanting to send troops into such an insoluble conflict. The United States, United Kingdom and France among others have recognised the rebel Syrian National Council as the sole legitimate government of Syria, and provided it with non lethal aid in the form of communications equipment and medical kit, while Britain has also provided intelligence from bases in Cyprus. Recent rhetoric has opened the door to military goods also being supplied from the US. Meaningful international action such as sanctions against the Assad regime have run aground on the shoals of Russian and Chinese suspicion; both veto any action which they see as violating Syrian sovereignty, with the Russian Foreign Ministry emphasizing the conflict as an internal matter where the international community has no right to interfere.

The most recent development, and a truly worrying one, is the claim by a senior Israeli intelligence official that chemical weapons have been used by the Syrian government in Aleppo. Syria is one of very few countries not to have signed an international convention banning chemical weapons and is estimated to hold large stockpiled of mustard gas and sarin. President Obama has declared that the use of chemical weapons would be a “game changer”, so if it is confirmed military intervention by the US may be on the cards, though I am sceptical about the popular will to intervene in another Middle Eastern quagmire.

In September 2010, I was able to get on a bus from Deraa, in the same square that would see six months later those first protests that set alight the tinderbox, and head over the border into Jordan. Since then, five hundred thousand Syrians have followed in far, far less comfortable conditions, increasing Jordan’s population by around 8% and creating what Jordanian officials have called one of the greatest crises Jordan has faced in recent history. Yet, those Syrians in Jordan, living in refugee camps, carrying their lives in a bag and not wanted by the host country, those are the lucky ones. Those still in Syria, especially those in the cities, face death or injury by doing nothing more than going about their daily lives. The UN High Commissioner for refugees estimates that half of the population, a staggering ten million people, will need humanitarian aid to survive by the end of the year. Unesco estimates that half of those in need will be children. Unfortunately, with the civil war dropping from public view the vast sums of money promised to Unesco and Unicef in a January fundraiser in Kuwait have signally failed to materialize, leaving relief operations desperately underfunded.

I will not pretend to have any solutions to the civil war, and I have no idea how it will end. All I can say is this; I have mentioned Syria’s long history many times already, and I believe it provides a glimmer of hope for the future. Such an ancient country will surely not disintegrate now, having survived every crisis that Earth could throw at it over the past six millennia. I believe, and sincerely hope, that even though the fabric of Syrian society is being ripped from all sides, it will not be torn apart.

I’ll return to the proposition that I began with. The civil war has continued for over two years. It has stopped being a feature of our news, and of our everyday concept of what is happening in the world. However, hundreds of thousands are dying, and millions are denied their basic human right to a life free of violence and fear. The least we can do is declare that we will not forget Syria.




Mori Ogai: The Demands of the Day, Part 7

“At the beginning of the Taisho period, on the day of Emperor Meiji’s funeral (September 13th, 1912), General Nogi and his wife closed the door to their second-floor living room and prepared to end their lives. He had removed his uniform and was clad in white undergarments; she wore black funeral attire. They bowed to portraits of Meiji and of their two sons, killed in the Russo-Japanese War. While the funeral bells tolled, they proceeded to commit ritual suicide. Mrs. Nogi acted first; he assisted, plunging a dagger into her neck, and then he disemboweled himself with a sword.”

Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

 

The death of Emperor Meiji and subsequent suicide of General Nogi Maresuke was the last turning point in Ogai’s life. Nogi was a hero of the Russo-Japanese war, but something of a tragic one. As well as losing two sons in the war, he had already requested permission twice to commit suicide from the emperor; once in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 when he lost the flag of the imperial army, and once after the battle of Port Arthur in the Russo Japanese war (the same battle in which Ogai had distinguished himself) when he felt his victory had come at the cost of too many Japanese lives. His suicide was hotly debated in the popular press; some felt it was a reaffirmation of Japanese traditions of self sacrifice and ultimate loyalty, while other newspapers railed against it in editorials and columns, saying that it was a return to darker times, an unnecessary relic of a best-forgotten feudal past. On the day of the suicide, Ogai simply recorded in his diary

“I half believe it and half doubt it”

From this point on, Ogai would write only historical novels exploring traditional Japanese themes such as loyalty, self sacrifice and suicide, though certain aspects of his earlier work carry through to this later part of his career; the way he ponders deeply issues of society and history in novels such as Ka no yo ni (As If) can be seen as a precursor to the historical novels written after General Nogi’s suicide. While Ogai did not retreat wholesale into a bygone age, he did begin to write about Japanese culture and history for its own sake, rather than simply as a comparative foil to Western thought. The effect of Nogi’s death can be seen in the speed with which he wrote his first historical novel; he records sending it to the literary magazine Chuo Koron on September 18th, a mere five days after the suicide. It is called Okitsu Yagoemon no isho (The last testament of Okitsu  Yagoemon), and it deals directly with suicide through the story of a retainer who decides to kill himself after murdering a man in an argument and thus bringing shame on his lord. Ogai is sympathetic to Okitsu in this story, but does not portray him as free of blame, and he also implicitly criticises General Nogi for having not obtained permission to commit suicide. Just three months later in Abe Ichizoku (The Abe Clan) he provides a more textured view of ritual suicide and concludes that while junshi (committing suicide after the death of a master) is a tradition with deep historical roots, it can only be considered in certain very specific circumstances, with approval from ones family, and most importantly the lord in whose name one intends to kill oneself. Whereas Okitsu Yagoemon is written as a single person’s testament, Abe Ichizoku is a more layered treatment, with explorations of junshi from several different points of view; as Doris Bergen suggests, “it is almost as if Ogai were taking a “junshi poll” for those Japanese readers still reeling after the suicide of General Nogi.”

While these stories broke new ground for Ogai in terms of subject matter, some of the themes discussed in part 6 can also be seen here; Chojuro Abe in Abe Ichizoku is torn between duty to his lord and a desire to atone for what he has done, and the suicides themselves are implicitly being compared against a Western model; can an old Japanese custom such as junshi have any place in the modern, westernising Japan of the 1910s? Essentially, by creating historical fiction based on the 17th century, he tried to address the debate raging in the 20th.

 

Following the death of the Meiji Emperor, Ogai gradually reduced his workload as Army Surgeon General. From 1910 Ogai had become embroiled in a fierce argument with the vice-minister for the Armed Forces, Ishimoto Shinroku, about who had the final authority to appoint personnel to the Army medical corps. Ishimoto was also the vice minister who had formally reprimanded Ogai in 1909 after the publication of Vita Sexualis. Tired of incessant politicking and battling with his superiors, he resigned from the post of Surgeon General in  November 1915, though in the end he did manage to keep the right of appointment of army medical personnel in the hands of the Surgeon General after his foe Ishimoto died in 1912. There is also evidence to suggest that Ogai was unhappy about the lower status accorded to him as a medical man in the army rather than a soldier; his eldest daughter Annu recalled in later life that after the Russo-Japanese war she went for an evening walk with her father, who was wearing his military uniform. While they were walking, three boys saw Ogai’s uniform and high rank of lieutenant general, and ran over to him. However when they saw the words ‘Army Medical Corps’ on his uniform, they lost interest, saying ‘Ah, he’s just a doctor, not a real soldier’. Ogai was so upset by this he didn’t say another word throughout the rest of the walk home.

 

His retirement enabled him to take on other posts related to his resurgence of interest in history and historical fiction; from December 1917 until his death in 1922 he served as head of the Imperial Museum in Tokyo, in 1921 he was appointed the first chief of the Imperial Museum of Art, and between August 1918 and October 1921 he made regular trips to Nara to witness and advise on the opening of the Todai temple archive called Shosoin, to this day one of the largest and most important repositories of Japanese historical documents. 

 

We should not presume that Ogai’s sudden change of course into historical writing suggest a rejection of the new ideas coming into Japan; he continued to translate foreign works in this period, and the translation from German of Goethe’s “Faust” that he completed in 1912 remains to this day the standard Japanese version of that work. Rather than a rejection, Ogai was using the past as a mirror of the present. The end of Meiji seemed to be the end of the transitional period for Japan that Ogai had expended so much effort thinking and writing about in the previous years, with the suicide of General Nogi the final flickering of a dying candle of the past. To see how Japanese values and traditions could fit into this new, post-Meiji framework, the best method was to study and articulate the virtues of the Japanese past, and consider how they could be used against the limitations and possibilities of the future. It is for this reason that so much of his historical fiction is concerned with modern values.

 

Ogai’s interest in the concept of junshi did not end after the publication of Okitsu Yagoemon and Abe Ichizoku, but his works did become more general pieces of historical literature rather than focusing on suicide in particular. Okitsu Yagoemon and Abe Ichizoku are both based on the Hosokawa clan, the leading clan in northern Kyushu where Ogai had been exiled between 1899 and 1902, and it seems very likely he had carried out research in this period which allowed him to write in great depth about the Hosokawa clan and the other great feudal families of Kyushu. Rather than the romantic love that was the trademark of Ogai’s earliest work and some of his late Meiji publications too, his historical novels tend to deal with issues he found more profound and fundamental at this stage of life;  fidelity, loyalty, honesty and filial piety among others. The novels often focus on families the generation after or before some important historical event; through this device Ogai can use the event to propel the action, but without describing it directly, allowing him to look more closely into the motivations and values of his characters. Among the most notable works of this time are Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Bailiff, 1915), Takasebune (The boat on the Takase River, 1916). Takasebune is about a boat on the Takase river which ferries convicted criminals to their execution, and allowed Ogai to meditate on death, the death penalty and even euthanasia, for which there is no official law in Japan to the present day. Meanwhile Sansho Dayu is an 11th century tale, based on real events, of the kidnapping of the wife and two children of a virtuous governor. The wife and children are then sold into slavery, and the bulk of the story concerns the children’s quest to escape and reunite the family. 

 

Ogai’s quest in this novel to keep to the historical facts while weaving a tale worthy of publication caused him to think deeply about fidelity to history in his writing, and one month after the publication of Sanshu Dayu he published an essay called Rekishi sono mama to rekishi banare (History as it is and history ignored) which outlined his approach to historical fiction and the historical method. He states that his friends argue about whether his work can really be called fiction given that it is based on historical personages and events. He counters that he looks for what is “natural” in history, and having found it sees no need to alter it. He sees Sansho Dayu as fiction because history is merely used as a point of departure; however he distinguishes himself from similar authors by asserting his aim of objectivity, leading to a rational, considered work. However, it is clear from the essay that he didn’t feel he had achieved this aim in Sansho Dayu. Feeling a need to depart from the story and simply convey the essence of the work, to avoid a simple retranslation of the story into the modern vernacular, he alters the story but in the end finds the finished product distasteful, and vows to stick more closely to historical fact in future. In his own words

“As I disliked changing the reality in history, I became bound by it in spite of myself. I wrote ‘Sanshō Dayū’ using history as a point of departure. When I looked over what I had written, I somehow felt that using history in this fashion was unsatisfactory. This is an honest confession on my part.”

 

As a result of this conclusion, that history is better told as it is, Ogai started on a series of biographical works, choosing as his subjects quite obscure later Edo period (1603-1868) doctors. He was to finish three of these; accounts of the lives of Shibue Chusai (1805-1858), his teacher Izawa Ranken (1777-1829) and Izawa’s colleague Hokujo Katei (1780-1823). The freedom he gained after his resignation allowed him to spend several months researching each one, and they are consequently Ogai’s longest works; a paperback copy of Shibue Chusai is over 400 pages long, more than three times longer than his longest completed work of fiction. Ogai came to feel a bond of kinship with Shibue, and again the concept of doing one’s duty makes a strong showing in each of the biographies. However, these were not biographies in the traditional sense; they appeared in serialised form, with the three biographies in total taking up 632 instalments. Each instalment has the feeling of a mass of facts rather than a biography as we know it today, and the scholar Marvin Marcus has commented that had they not been published in his own publication, Subaru, they would almost certainly have been stopped for lack of readership. Another unusual aspect of this work is that Ogai is never far from the narrative; the biography is interspersed with Ogai’s own descriptions of the intellectual process of writing a biography. including a sorrow at lost documents, a joy at others rediscovered, and his reasoning about available materials.

 

Ogai’s frequent trips to the Shosoin repository at Nara, and his work as the head of the Imperial Museum gave him ample opportunity to research his biographies. In 1922, he visited to prepare for the visit to Shosoin of none other than the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII of Great Britain. However, he had shown symptoms of kidney problems since the previous autumn, and was not fully fit to make the arduous journey and prepare for the visit. He took to his sickbed a number of times during the trip and in the end had to return early to Tokyo. He was diagnosed in June with atrophy of the kidneys, and weakened by the condition had also begun to develop the symptoms of tuberculosis. There was no cure for either disease available at the time, and it was clear he would not last long. Retiring to his bed, Ogai summoned his lifelong friend Kako Tsuruto to his bedside and dictated his will on July 6th. On July 9th, just after sunrise, Mori Ogai passed away aged sixty. His ashes were first interred at Kofuku Temple in central Tokyo, but in 1927 his grave was moved to Zenrin temple in Mitaka, now a part of the Tokyo sprawl but then an entirely separate city. His bones were divided and half were taken to his birthplace of Tsuwano, and both graves still stand. In accordance with his will, his gravestone is plan and unornamented, reading simply;

“The grave of Mori Rintaro”

 

So passed one of the most remarkable personalities of that remarkable Meiji era. He was survived by four children; his eldest son Oto, from his first marriage to Akamatsu Toshiko, became a doctor in Taipei Imperial university (Taiwan being a Japanese protectorate between 1895 and 1945), while all his children from his second marriage to Mori Shige became writers. His eldest daughter Mari became a famous novelist in her own right, while Annu and Rui became essayists and commentators. Of Ogai’s grandchildren, more than half either went into the fields of medicine or writing, though none could emulate their famous grandfather by achieving eminence in both. Some of Ogai’s grandchildren are still alive, a valuable link to the past. For example Oto’s youngest son Mori Joji became a poet and scholar of English Literature, and aged 82 is still Emeritus Professor at my own institution, Waseda University. 

 

It is not just in his descendants that Ogai survives. His works are still read by every high schooler in Japan, and his interpretation of Western culture in the Meiji period still ranks as one of the most important single intellectual contributions to Japanese culture in that turbulent age. He had no disciples to continue his work, preferring the open atmosphere of literary soirees and salons to closed teacher-pupil relationships, but all the great subsequent prewar writers such as Natsume Soseki, Nagai Kafu continued his work, developing the modern Japanese written language and continuing to interpret foreign ideas for the Japanese reading public. 

As well as his written work, his translations introduced the Japanese to authors and playwrights such as Goethe, Heine, Strindberg and Ibsen, and philosophers such as von Hartmann and Vaihinger. His translations of famed European drama helped create the modern Western theatre in Japan, and his poetic work too helped bring a new colloquial, modern language to Japanese prosody. His critical work and essays too are still read and greatly valued to this day. 

 

We must also not forget that he reached great heights in his medical career too, and while his mistakes on beriberi were grave, his work on improving hygiene, diet and living conditions in the army saved many thousands of lives in the Sino Japanese and Russo Japanese wars of 1894-5 and 1904-5 respectively. Finally, I still find it astonishing that he managed to simultaneously reach the position of Army Surgeon General and become one of the foremost writers and thinkers in modern Japanese history. To have managed either would have made him well known, but to have managed both is surely worthy of celebration, and, might I venture, an appearance on a Japanese banknote one day soon?

One might counter that while Ogai was clearly brilliant, he was not a first-rate human being. He divorced his first wife acrimoniously, was a domineering father and left behind a girl who loved him in Germany. This cannot be denied; however, if we measure Ogai by his own standards, he achieved his goal. He met the demands of his day.

Mori Ogai, The Demands of the Day, Part 6

Ogai returned from the Russo-Japanese War in January 1906. As a result of his efforts to improve hygiene and reduce communicable diseases, he was promoted to Surgeon General in October 1907, the highest medical position in the army and the peak of his already impressive career. His failure to correctly deduce how beriberi was transmitted did not hold his military career back, as he was backed up in his mistaken views by the rest of the army hierarchy. Between his return and his promotion, Ogai did not publish any fiction, but spent time both writing and listening to poetry in groups such as the Tokiwa Circle set up by his friend Kako Tsuruto, which was also attended by such luminaries as the future prime minister and field marshal Yamagata Aritomo. Kako had been friends with Ogai at Tokyo Medical University, and is thought to have been instrumental in persuading Ogai to join the army as a physician. Their career paths were remarkably similar; born seven years before Ogai in 1855, Kako graduated as a doctor in 1881, and like Ogai went to Germany to study medicine, completing 2 years of study at Berlin University before returning to Japan in 1890. Kako’s speciality was diseases of the ear, nose and throat, and he set up Japan’s first ENT clinic soon after his return. Like Ogai, he was also a successful literary figure, publishing both dense medical tomes and poetry anthologies in the half century between graduating and his death in 1931. Indirectly, we have already met Kako in this narrative; he was said to be the model for the character of Aizawa Kenkichi in ‘The Dancing Girl’, the protagonist’s friend and confidant. Inspiration for the more forbidding figure of Count Amakata came from Yamagata Aritomo; a photo of Yamagata should suffice to demonstrate this side of his character.

Kako appears in other guises in some of Ogai’s later works too, such as the student Koga in “Vita Sexualis” (1909), and judging by their shared experience as soldier, doctor and writer, and the appearance of Kako in Ogai’s novels throughout his literary career, their friendship was of deep importance to both men.

The same period was a difficult one personally for Ogai, as his son Furitsu was born in August 1907, but was a sickly child destined not to see his first birthday; he died five months later in January 1908 from whooping cough. Then in February Ogai’s younger brother Miki Takeji (real name Mori Tokujiro), a well known scholar of Kabuki, died of tuberculosis aged 40. However, this double tragedy did not prevent Ogai from resuming a workload that would have crushed a less able man. He restarted his lectures at Keio University on Western art and literature, where he also encouraged the novelist and scholar of French literature Nagai Kafu to apply for a professorship. He also served as an advisor on Western art to the newly formed Ministry of Culture, continued to produce translations of operas, philosophical works and fiction, and promoted the work of young writers such as Hiratsuka Raicho and Higuchi Ichiyo (whose likeness now adorns the 5000 yen note, an honour not as yet accorded to Ogai). These concerns were of course in addition to his work as Army Surgeon General. Most importantly, he also embarked on his most productive period of writing to date. The years from 1909 to 1912 were marked by continued literary experimentation from Ogai, as he wrote numerous short stories and novellas which illuminate different aspects of his life and personality, and which show Ogai’s experimentation with various literary devices which he would reuse and refine in his later years. In these stories we can find countless examples of Ogai’s life and experience informing his fiction; his first failed marriage in Hannichi (Half a Day), the death of Furitsu from whooping cough in Konpira and his years of exile from the army in Kokura in Asobi (Play). We also see Ogai himself reflected in many of these stories, often obliquely. Many of these stories were published in the literary journal Subaru (The Pleiades), including his most controversial novel, Vita Sexualis.

Five of these works were published in 1909 alone; Tsuina (Exercising Demons), Hannichi (Half a Day), Hebi (Snake), Konpira and Vita Sexualis. In each we can see one or several characters illuminating an aspect of Ogai himself; in Tsuina, he is thinly disguised as Professor Ono, a professor of Western philosophy. The story itself is more of a philosophical essay than a true short story, but the classic Ogai motifs of the author as bystander remain.

Vita Sexualis, the longest of Ogai’s 1909 works, was published in July 1909 in Subaru. In the strict Japanese social environment of the time, its subject matter of a professor’s sexual awakening and experience caused immediate controversy, and after one month the journal and the story were banned. Ogai earned a formal reprimand from the army for having been censored. Kazuji Ninomiya, the critic and translator of Ogai into English, suggests that Ogai knew he would be censored in the strict moral climate that prevailed in Meiji Japan, but wanted to write the book as a challenge to the naturalist tendency of his peers. Ogai, along with Natsume Soseki , objected to the subordination of reason and intelligence that they saw in naturalism, and Ogai penned Vita Sexualis to explore the role of human agency in the sexual life of a single character. It almost goes without saying that the main character is a university professor whose life is very similar to Ogai’s.

Of the shorter works of 1909, Hannichi and Konpira are the most familiar to us as works of literature. Hannichi is a ruefully humorous account of the difficult marital relations between Dr. Takayama Shunzo and his wife, relations further soured by Takayama’s mother who lives with the couple. Driven to distraction by their poor relationship, both dote on their daughter Tama. An element of autobiography is clearly present, a dark sketch of Ogai’s marital issues with his second wife, but the thread of humour woven into the story prevents a slide into melodrama or despair. Konpira, meanwhile, is more heart-rending, dealing as it does with another university professor, Ono Tasuku, failing to pay respects at the eponymous Konpira shrine in Shikoku when he is visiting the region, and his children subsequently falling ill with whooping cough Indeed, the harrowing descriptions of the professor’s children, Yuri and Hansu, are so painfully detailed that surely only a trained physician like Ogai could have conceived them. The professor is again a bystander, helpless in the face of his childrens’ illness and unable to come to terms with it through the Western philosophy that is his field. Ogai’s philosophical views on the West and modernisation are lightly sketched here in the interplay between the western-oriented professor, and his more traditional wife who reprimands him for having not appeased the gods by visiting the shrine of the title. Ogai concludes the story by saying that while his wife is somewhat proven correct by events in the story, “it would be better if Professor Ono were not to become a devotee of Konpira Shrine too”. 

 

This issue of east versus west and old versus new would be a central tenet of many later works such as Moso (Daydreams) Ka no yo ni (As If) and Fushinchu (Under Reconstruction) written in 1911 and 1912 respectively. Ogai was certainly not the only author to tackle this issue; Natsume Soseki, who spent three unhappy years in London between 1900 and 1903 and seems not to have been particularly happy anywhere, also wrote and lectured on the clash of civilizations he and his contemporaries lived through. Soseki is often considered the foremost modern Japanese writer, and passes the banknote test with flying colours; his face adorned the 1000 yen note for a full 20 years between 1984 and 2004, though even there he seems to stare mournfully out, as if recalling the passing of a much loved family pet.  While both Ogai and Soseki saw problems with the Western culture coursing through Japan, Soseki was more resigned, seeing it as an unstoppable flood. In a famous speech he gave in 1911 called ‘The opening of Modern Japan’ (gendai nihon no kaika), he stated;
“The adoption of Western culture in Japan must necessarily be superficial. However, it cannot be stopped. It cannot be reversed. It cannot be helped. That is all I have to say.”

Ogai was more pragmatic. He realised that indiscriminate adoption of Western culture would result in Japanese culture being overwhelmed my a mere slavish imitation of occidental thought and ways. For Ogai, the best option was for the minds of the people to act as a kind of gatekeeper to Western culture, adopting that which could be of use, particularly in fields of science and technology, while maintaining the cultural traditions of Japan as far as possible in any program of reform. In Fushinchu, the protagonist Watanabe meets a German ex-lover in a restaurant that is under reconstruction; he then later alludes to this by saying;

“Japan is still backward…it’s under reconstruction, you see”.

For Ogai, Japan essentially had to be remade in a form which incorporated those useful aspects of Western culture and learning. This is more specifically described in Moso, where the narrator, again a reflection of Ogai himself, is living in Germany. While he longs to return to Japan, he regrets that he will have to live in a country that was

“not yet equipped for the kinds of serious scientific research I had to undertake or for the opening up of new fields within that discipline”.  

 

However, he believes that Japan can adopt this aspect of learning

“I still venture to say ‘not yet’. I refuse to believe the Japanese are a race of such hopeless incompetents. I have always felt, ever since those earliest days, that the time will come when the fruits of scientific research carried out in Japan will be exported to Europe.”

Ogai then comments on those areas in which Japan should steer its own path, away from Western ideas. With regard to architecture and the possible introduction of skyscrapers into Japan, he states

“I argued that the more people live in a confined space such as a city the higher the death rate, especially among children. Rather than taking all those dwellings that were now built side by side and piling them on top of each other, it would make far more sense to improve the water supply and the sewerage, I said.”

 

With this emphasis on water supply as a public health issue, we can clearly see the influence of his time in Germany spent studying under Pettenkofer that we looked at in part 2.

 

With regard to diet, also, the narrator rejects the westernizing tendencies of his Japanese friends;

“There was also a debate about improving the Japanese diet. They wanted to stop people eating rice and make them eat lots of meat instead. I advised them that it would be better to leave the Japanese diet as it has always been, because rice and fish were so easy to digest”

I find these arguments appealing because of Ogai’s pragmaticism, perhaps the result of his scientific background. He does not reject the Western approach because of a reactionary conservatism and belief that the Japanese way is innately superior, but because the western idea suggested is not practical. It is this kind of ‘gatekeeping’ that he believed could be used in order to reconstruct Japan, making it stronger and able to keep pace with the West. He saw himself as the kind of intellectual figure required to perform such a duty, using his literature as a medium.

 

This concept of ‘duty’ is another that permeates Ogai’s work from his earliest published fiction. Fumizukai (1890), mentioned in part four of this study, is the story of Ida’s conflict between duty and self-interest in terms of her marriage. Over twenty years later, in this period of productivity in the years either side of 1910, Ogai is still exploring the concept of one’s duty, to oneself or to a larger group. In Seinen (Youth), Ogai’s full length novel serialised in Subaru between 1910 and 1911, the protagonist Koizumi Junichi comes to realise his duty of conscious determination; through this realisation he is able to break off a doomed love affair, and emerges as a mature man. Koizumi’s duty is self-understanding. In Ka no yo ni (As If), the protagonist Hidemaro is a writer of history, whose duty is to untangle history from myth in order to place his historical writing on firm foundations, which he manages through an intense mental effort. As Hidemaro states in the story;


“Man should act as if duty existed. I intend to act that way.”

In Ogai’s best known work Gan (The Wild Geese) also, duty imposes itself on the narrative almost from the start. The novella follows a student, Okada, and his interactions with a young woman kept as a mistress by a despised moneylender, Suezo. The mistress is kept by Suezo but pines for Okada despite them only meeting directly twice in the course of the novel. Her conflict is between her duty to stay with Suezo, who supports her and allows her in turn to support her ageing father. Ogai symbolises this duty with the device of two caged birds which Suezo gives his mistress to entertain her; the title of the work refers to her longing to break free of her cage and fly free like the wild geese she sees from her window. Throughout there are also subtle references to the changes taking place in Japan too; the narrator lovingly describes Okada’s walks around Tokyo University on which he encounters the mistress, but also notes the changes, the destruction and rebuilding taking place in the early Meiji period when the novel is set.

This suggests Ogai was well aware that one’s duty was not an easy thing to carry out, but required careful thought and tireless action. The substance of one’s duty for Ogai is also the title of this study; the demands of the day. These words come from Ogai’s favourite quotation;

How may one come to know oneself?
Never by contemplation, but only by action
Seek to do your duty, and you will know how
it is with you. And what is your duty?

The demands of the day.

 

The quotation comes from Goethe, the great German writer for whom Ogai maintained a lifelong admiration, in ‘Maxims and Reflections’. It is quoted in Moso, where Ogai proclaims his belief that fulfilling one’s duty in this manner is the surest way to self knowledge. His duty being, as we have seen, to act as a cultural gatekeeper for Western ideas, he believed passionately that any intelligent action needed to be based on patient understanding and rational enquiry. This aspect of Ogai’s work was thrown into sharp relief by the increasingly strict moral climate that came about in the later Meiji period, when Ogai’s belief in rational enquiry was shaken by the late Meiji government’s increasing authoritarianism and insularism. As he states towards the end of Chinmoku no to (The Tower of Silence) with regard to banning subversive Western books;

“In every country and every age, crowds of reactionaries lurk behind those who walk new paths awaiting an unguarded moment. And when the opportunity arises they inflict persecution. Only the pretext changes, depending upon the country and the times.”

 

It is clear that Ogai saw himself as one of those walking a new path. In the same story, he states

“Knowledge advances by breaking down convention. Knowledge will die if it is constrained by the customs in any particular era or country.”

He was also brave enough to directly challenge governmental repression, despite being a central figure in the establishment. In an essay of April 1911 in the magazine Bungei no shugi (The doctrine of literature), one of the last things he wrote before the death of the Meiji emperor, he wrote



“We must be very wary of the government persecuting artistic freedoms by attaching the vague label of ‘individualism’ to anarchism and socialism. Any nation which holds back the free development of art and learning has no hope of prosperity.”

Through his characters, Ogai tells us that we must all do our duty, as he will do his by breaking down conventions, enhancing knowledge and acting as midwife to a syncretic Japanese culture and thought. At times Ogai’s work seems to suggest his resolve faltering in this regard. In Ka no yo ni Hidemaro at times seems overcome with the difficulty of absorbing the mass of Western thought, seeing all philosophy of Nietzsche and Ibsen as necessarily diminished and warped in the Japanese interpretation. In Fushinchu and Moso, the Japanese protagonists worry about whether Japanese culture can survive the western onslaught at all and shades of Soseki’s pessimism seem to enter the narrative. Finally, Chinmoku no to, Ka no yo ni throw into relief the anti-intellctual chauvinism that emerged in reaction to these problems of assimilation. However, to fight these obstacles were his demands of the day. In the words of Ogai scholars Sanford Goldstein and Kingo Ochiai, 


“He saw the chaos in Japan, the chaos of the old and new in collision everywhere, and he attempted, through science and literature, to give his country the harmony, the order, it needed.”

At the same time as exploring these manifold ideas, he also found time to experiment with other forms. He wrote a stage play, perhaps inspired by the dramas of Ibsen, Strindberg, Wedekind and others that he had earlier translated into Japanese. The play, Kamen (Masks), is about death and human resolution; the reactions, both philosophical and personal, of a family to the death of their patriarch Sakichi. Again, Ogai uses his medical knowledge to great effect when describing the symptoms and diagnosis of tuberculosis. He also wrote two surrealist short sketches, Sakazuki (Cups) and Sanbashi (The Pier), the latter of which is notable for being the first of Ogai’s works to be translated into English, in a 1918 anthology called Paulownia. Another experiment was Kinka (The Gold Coin), a humorous tale about an old rogue, Hachi, who has no money, a difficult wife, and simply wants to get enough cash together to be able to buy a drink. Ogai’s skill as a writer lies in getting us to sympathise with Hachi even when he breaks into a house in order to get enough money together for his much needed wine, and it is perhaps the work which conforms best of all to the idea of a complete, enclosed short story. One longer experiment was the unfinished novel Kaijin (The Ashes of Destruction), the beginnings of a deep psychological study of the protagonist, who is of course a disguised version of himself (though not, in this case, a university professor). The reason for the work remaining unfinished lies not in Ogai’s death, but in the death of the emperor Meiji in 1912, which sent him in an entirely different literary direction that we will explore next time, when we take Ogai to the end of his life in 1922.

Murder on Dogenzaka by Edogawa Rampo: A Translation

This is a translation of a short murder mystery by Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965), the Japanese mystery and thriller writer. Hope you enjoy it!

Murder on Dogenzaka (1924)

Part 1: The Facts

It was a hot, humid evening in early September. I was sipping an iced coffee in the White Plum Cafe halfway up Dogenzaka. At the time I had just left school and didn’t have anything you might call a profession, so I passed the time reading at my lodgings. When I grew tired of my books, I’d go for a stroll around town and make a circuit of some inexpensive cafes. The White Plum was just down from my lodgings so I’d pass it each time I went for a walk, so it was the cafe I most often found myself in. I would generally stay for a while, and nurse one or two cheap cups of coffee as I never had either the money or appetite for a meal. I would usually stay for a couple of hours, though I never became friendly with any of the waitresses. The cafe just provided a brighter, nicer place to sit than my lodgings.
That humid evening was the same as any other. I had settled in to my usual seat facing onto the street and had been sipping on my iced coffee for about ten minutes while looking languidly through the window. These days Dogenzaka is a big, bustling street, but at the time it had just been widened, and many of the shops which had been there previously had either closed down or moved to another part of town, so there was a lot of vacant land on both sides of the road which made it feel somewhat desolate. Directly across the road from the White Plum Cafe was a shabby old second hand bookshop, which had been the object of my somewhat vacant gaze these last ten minutes. In the normal course of things I wouldn’t have given it a second glance, but I had recently found out that the wife of the bookshop’s owner was a childhood friend of Akechi Kogoro, a recent acquaintance who had left something of an impression on me. He was quite a character, with a fierce intellect and a passion for detective novels.
As I remember from the two or three times I had gone into the bookshop, the owner’s wife was a beautiful lady, and while it was hard to pinpoint exactly what made her so appealing, she had a sensual charm that drew men towards her. She always minded the bookshop in the evening, so she was sure to be there now as well, and I had been watching to see if she might come out to the front of the shop. However, for these ten minutes she hadn’t ventured out to where I might see her, and nor had any customers gone in or out, so I gave up and was just casting my gaze over to the watch shop next door.
Suddenly, in the bookshop, I saw the hole in the door connecting the back room of the shop and the front slam shut from the inside. You might be asking what kind of door has a hole in the middle; well, it was the type of door that a carpenter would call a ‘double slat’ door, where the large central part of the door that would normally have paper pasted across it is replaced by a double layered lattice of wooden struts. Each strut is about 5 centimetres wide, and the two layers of the lattice can either be made to line up, allowing the owner of the shop to keep an eye on the shop between the gaps in the lattice, or made to overlap, creating a wooden screen which can’t be seen through. As this had just been shut whoever was in the back office wouldn’t be able to check on the shop through the door, which was very strange. As well as being an invitation to shoplifters, it would also have prevented air flowing through the shop, making for an uncomfortably stuffy back office. The more I thought about it, the odder it seemed, and I found I was unable to look away from the bookshop. I felt something odd must be going on in there.
Thinking of the woman in the bookshop, I recalled some of the rumours that circulated about her among the waitresses at the White Plum. They said that when they bumped into her at the bathhouse, they all noticed that her body was covered in bruises as though she had been hit repeatedly, though outwardly there seemed to be no discord between her and her husband, so it seemed hard to believe he was responsible. Another of the waitresses had seen that the wife of the noodle shop owner two doors down from the bookshop was also covered in the same kind of marks. I presumed that if the rumours were true it just showed the cruelty of their husbands, and didn’t dwell on it further. Alas, readers, I was very wrong about that; as you shall see, those bruises held the key to all that followed.

I watched the shop like this for around half an hour. I felt in my bones that something strange was happening over the street, and that i’d miss something if I looked away for even a moment. Then by chance Akechi Kogoro, who I mentioned briefly earlier, passed by outside the window. He was wearing his customary summer kimono, with wide vertical stripes, and walking in his odd way, with both shoulders shaking as if he was coughing violently. When he noticed me, he bowed lightly and came inside the shop, ordered an iced coffee and sat down beside me. As soon as he noticed I was watching something intently, he followed my gaze over to the bookshop and settled his eyes on it too. He didn’t seem to need an explanation, and simply joined me in staring across the road. While watching we kept up a conversation of sorts, and while I can’t remember everything we spoke about, it certainly had to do with Akechi’s favourite topics, crime and detective work.

“Do you think it’s possible to commit the perfect crime? One that you are certain to get away with? I think it probably is possible. Take the murder in ‘The Lion’s Mane’ by Conan Doyle. If someone committed a crime like that, he would never be found out. After all, there are no detectives like Sherlock Holmes in real life!”
said Akechi, asking and answering his own question in the same breath.
“I’m not so sure”, I replied. “If a criminal can conceive and carry out a crime, it stands to reason that a detective would also be able to conceive it, and if he can conceive it, he can find the culprit.”
We discussed it a little further, but soon enough we both became silent, somehow engrossed by the bookshop across the street.
“You’ve noticed it too, I take it”, I asked.
“The people stealing books from the shelves at the front of the shop?” answered Akechi immediately. “Of course, I noticed it when I came in. That’s the fourth person to steal one since I arrived. I wonder what’s happened to the woman minding the place?”
“It’s the fourth person since you came thirty minutes ago, but I’ve been here over an hour now, and no-one has come out from the back office. Can you see that shutter in the middle of the door at the back? About an hour ago, that was slammed shut from inside.”
“Maybe the person minding the shop went out for something?”
“No, it can’t be that. Since the shutter was closed, nobody has gone in to the back office, nobody’s come out, and the shutter hasn’t been opened once. I suppose someone could have gone out through the back door, but even then it would be very strange to leave the shop unattended for so long. Perhaps we should go over and check that everything is all right?”
“Yes, even if there’s nothing wrong, we should check and at least let them know people are helping themselves to the books.”
As I left the cafe, I was morbidly excited at the thought of going to what might be a crime scene of some sort, and I could see that Akechi was experiencing a similar emotion.

The bookshop was of the kind you often see, with shelves up to the ceiling running along the walls left and right, as well as at the back of the shop, and a rectangular ‘island’ of shelving in the centre of the shop that came up to around chest height. At the back on the right was a gap around one metre wide in the shelving where the till sat, and behind that the double slat door leading to the back office, with shutter still firmly closed in the central panel. In this small gap was a chair where the owner or his wife would sit to operate the till and watch the shop. Akechi and I went over to the till area, and shouted towards the back office to see if anyone was there, but no reply came. Could the owner really have been so negligent as to leave the place unattended? I pushed open the sliding door to the back office a little and peeped through the gap. The light was off and it was very dark, but I could make out a vague outline of something on the far side of the room.
“We should go in and check”, said Akechi from behind me.
The two of us crowded into the small back room, and Akechi found the light switch next to the light and flicked it on. At that moment, we both let out an involuntary, stifled shout as we noticed the dead body of a woman sprawled in the corner of the room.
“It’s the owner’s wife”, Akechi gasped. “It looks like she’s been strangled”, he added, approaching the body. “We need to tell the police. I’ll go to the phonebox and call them. You stay here and keep watch. We shouldn’t tell the neighbours, or they’ll all tramp in here and disturb the crime scene.”
With that, he ran off to the public telephone, which was about half a block away.
I had read many detective novels since my youth, and felt familiar with the theories of crime, murder and detective work, but now I was faced with the reality of a crime scene, and a murder at that, I had no idea what to do, so I just looked around the room thoroughly as I awaited Akechi’s return.
It was a smallish room, about two and a half by three and a half metres, and to the right was a tiny enclosed garden and an outdoor toilet. As it was summer, the doors to the garden were wide open allowing me a view of the whole place. Through an open door to the left was a small bathroom, and next to this the back door was firmly closed. On the other side of the bathroom door was a narrow staircase and a cupboard. It was the kind of small, cheap row house that are ten a penny in this part of town even today. The woman’s body was by the wall on the left side of the room, with the head facing towards the front of the building. I didn’t want to interfere with the crime scene in any way, and moreover I had no wish to approach a corpse, so I stayed by the door where we had entered. But as it was such a small room, even if I tried not to look at the body it would somehow enter my field of vision. She had on a chrysanthemum-patterned indigo blue summer kimono, and had fallen on her back. Oddly, the hem of the kimono had been rolled upwards leaving her legs exposed up to the thigh. There were no signs that she had resisted either on her body or nearby. Around her neck was a livid purple mark where she had evidently been strangled.

The bustle of the street outside. The sounds of people chatting in high voices, the clatter of wooden geta slippers on the pavement, a drunken voice singing tunelessly, all unaware that behind a single sliding door lay the body of a woman, murdered in cold blood. It is a cruel world indeed, I thought as I listened to the sounds outside.
“The police are on their way” said Akechi, out of breath from running to the phone.
“I see” I replied. Just saying those two words was suddenly a great effort, and the two of us looked at each other, saying nothing more.
Soon enough the police arrived. Two men came in, one officer in uniform and one man wearing a suit, who judging from his possessions and general bearing was a doctor of some kind. I later discovered that the uniformed man was an inspector from Kagura police station, and the man in the suit was the police doctor from the same station. I explained to the inspector the evening’s events up to that point. He asked me to explain about the closed shutter in more detail, so I recalled events as clearly as I could.
“Akechi here joined me in the cafe at half past eight exactly – I remember as I looked at the clock in the cafe when he came in. So, it must have been near enough eight o’clock when the shutter was closed from inside. At that time, the light was on. So, at eight o’clock someone must have been in here moving around.”
While the inspector listened to me and took down notes, the police doctor examined the body. When I finished speaking, he said
‘She was strangled. The murderer used his hands; we can tell from the bruising around the neck where pressure was exerted with the fingers. There’s also a small amount of bleeding which was caused by the killer’s fingernails lacerating the skin as he strangled her. Given that there is the mark of a thumb on the left side of the neck, we can say that the murderer strangled her with one hand, and is right handed. Time of death is just over one hour ago. Obviously, there is no chance she is still alive.”
“Strangled from above, it looks like”, added the Inspector. “But, given that there are no signs of resistance, she must have been attacked suddenly and with overwhelming strength.”
The inspector then asked us about the whereabouts of the bookshop owner. Of course, we had no way of knowing what had happened to him, but Akechi suggested asking the owner of the watch shop next to the bookshop if he knew where he might be. The conversation between the inspector and the watch shop owner was as follows;
“Do you know where the owner of this place went?”
“Well, as I understand he runs a temporary night stall selling books, so he’s out at the market because of that. He only gets home from that after midnight, if my memory serves me right”.
“Where is this stall?”
“He often goes to the market at Hirokoji, over towards Ueno, but whether he’s gone there tonight, that I couldn’t tell you I’m afraid”
“About an hour ago, did you hear anything unusual from this shop?”
“Something unusual?”
“You know, a shout, a commotion, something like that. Anything to suggest a woman being murdered next door!” said the inspector, displaying a trace of emotion for the first time.
“Oh, no, I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.”
Meanwhile, the news had spread around the local area about the murder, and a crowd of passersby had crowded into the bookshop. Then the woman who owned the tabi sock shop on the other side of the bookshop came in and supported the watch shop owner’s assertion, saying she too had heard nothing unusual all evening.
There was the noise of a car stopping in front of the shop, and several people bustled into the shop. They were from the public prosecutor’s office, and by coincidence they had arrived at the same time as the chief of the Kagura station, and the famed detective Kobayashi. The inspector who had arrived earlier proceeded to relay the details of the crime to the new arrivals, and Akechi and I were called upon to tell our stories once again.
“Let’s shut the front door, for a start”, said the detective Kobayashi suddenly. He was dressed in a black woollen suit jacket with white trousers, and looked a little like a low ranking company worker trying too hard to look smart. He pushed the onlookers outside and started his investigations. While he was investigating, he seemed to forget the presence of everyone else in the room, as if they were excluded from his line of sight. From start to finish, he worked alone, and it seemed as if the inspector, the police chief and the rest of us were merely there to observe and admire Kobayashi’s actions and methods.
First, he went to look at the corpse. He took particular time looking at the neck of the victim, but in the end he declared to the assembled policeman;
“The marks left by the finger are perfectly normal and display no unusual characteristics.The murderer was a normal man who strangled the victim with his right hand. The body yields no other clues.”
After that, Kobayashi said he wanted to remove the clothes from the victim to search for more clues, and Akechi and I were obliged to leave the room. We waited in the front of the shop, and while I don’t know exactly what their findings were, I overheard them mention that the woman’s body was covered in bruises. I commented quietly to Akechi that the rumours circulating among the waitresses at the White Plum must be true.
After this examination had finished, we refrained from going back into the back room, instead looking in from the till area in the front of the shop. Luckily for us, as the discoverers of the crime scene, and because we needed to provide our fingerprints to the police, we weren’t asked to leave the shop entirely. Well, perhaps it would be more correct to say we were being held there as suspects by the police, but it allowed us to observe the investigation. Kobayashi’s activities weren’t limited to just the back room, and he checked all rooms inside and the outside of the shop while we waited by the till for any developments that might involve us. As the inspector and public prosecutors had set up shop in the back room, and Kobayashi had to keep returning to inform them of his progress, we managed to overhear all the results of his investigation. As he did this, the public prosecutors scribbled down Kobayashi’s findings in their notebooks.
In the room where the body lay, despite his best efforts Kobayashi failed to turn up any footprints or any other trace of the culprit save for one thing.
“There are fingerprints from when the light was turned off”, said Kobayashi as he sprinkled a white powder on the ebony switch. “The light must have been turned off by the culprit. By the way, which of you two turned on the light when you came in?” he asked, turning to Akechi and I. Akechi responded that it was him.
“In that case, we’ll need your fingerprints too. Lets remove the light switch so we can take it for testing. But don’t touch the switch!” Kobayashi instructed the inspector.
Then Kobayashi went upstairs to the first floor. He checked there for some time, and no sooner had he come down as he announced that he was going to check the passage at the back of the shop. This took around fifteen minutes, and when he came back still clutching a torch in one hand he was accompanied by someone. It was a man of around forty dressed in a grubby black crepe shirt and khaki trousers that were no cleaner.
“There’s no chance of finding any footprints from the back alley. Perhaps because it doesn’t get any sunlight it’s very muddy, and while I can make out the vague marks left by a pair of geta slippers, it’s impossible to tell even whether they were left by a man or a woman”, stated Kobayashi flatly. “Anyway, this man”, he continued gesturing to the person who had accompanied him in, “owns an ice cream shop just opposite the entrance to the alleyway. As there’s only one way in to the alley, if the criminal left by the back entrance, this man must have seen him come out on to the street. So, let me ask you”, Kobayashi turned to address the ice cream shop owner, “Did you see anyone go in or out of this alleyway at around 8 o’clock this evening?”
“No, not a soul. Not even a cat or a dog”, replied the ice cream shop owner confidently.
“I’ve had my shop here for some years now, and I’ve noticed that generally no-one uses that alleyway after it gets dark. It’s so muddy, if you can’t see where to put your feet you’re likely to fall, or at least get your shoes dirty.”
“And none of your customers went into the alley?”
“No, nobody. Everyone who came tonight ate their ice-cream in the street in front of the shop then went back along the main road. I’m positive of that.”

So, if we are to believe the ice cream shop owner’s testimony, if the criminal did leave by the back door of the bookshop, he didn’t leave from the only entrance the alley afforded. I know he didn’t leave through the front of the shop because I had been watching so intently from the White Plum. Where in the world could he have escaped from? Kobayashi had two theories. Firstly, he might still be hiding in one of the other buildings in the row which backed on to the same alleyway. Secondly, he might have fled from the first floor somehow. However, while there was a way of getting from the first floor onto the roof, and from there onto the rooves of adjoining houses, the window at the front of the house had a fixed shutter which showed no sign of having been tampered with and certainly not removed, and as for the back window, in this heat almost all the houses around had their back windows open, and many were hanging out their washing on the balcony or going out with a chair to enjoy the evening breeze, making it very difficult to flee from there without being seen.
At this point the assembled policemen gathered together briefly to discuss their next course of action. They decided to visit all the houses which backed on to the alleyway to ask if the owners had seen or heard anything. There were only eleven houses facing the alley, so it wouldn’t be too time consuming. Meanwhile a smaller group stayed behind to check the bookshop thoroughly once more, to see that nothing had been missed.
Unfortunately the result of these labours was not just that the investigation didn’t progress, if anything it provided information which made the case even more difficult to fathom. The sweet shop owner two doors up from the bookshop had been relaxing that evening by playing the bamboo flute on his balcony at the back of his shop, and he had been there from sunset until just now when the police had come round. He was in a perfect place to see if anything had happened at the first floor back window of the bookshop, but had seen nothing untoward all evening.
Well, readers, the case has reached an interesting point, hasn’t it? Where did the criminal enter the shop, and how did he leave? Not from the back door. Not from the back window either, and certainly not through the front of the shop. Is he even real? Or did he disappear in a puff of smoke?
The mystery of the case doesn’t end there, either. Two students from the local engineering school who were renting a room nearby had been passing the shop at around eight o’clock, and while they both seemed very honest, their witness statements served only to confuse the investigators more. This is what they said to the inspector,
“At about eight, I was standing in front of the bookshop, reading a magazine from that shelf. Then, there was a noise of some sort from the back of the shop, so I looked in that direction. While the door itself was shut, the shutters in the middle of the door were open and through the gaps I could see a man standing there. However, at the same time as I looked up to see his face, he closed the shutter, so I can’t tell you anything more about him. But, from the way he tied his kimono he was certainly a man.”
“Do you remember anything else about him? His height, the pattern of his kimono, anything like that?”
“I only saw his lower half, so I’ve no idea how tall he might have been, but his kimono was black. I suppose it could have had thin stripes or some other pattern, but it looked black to me.
“I was with my friend at the front of the bookshop reading” said the other student when asked for his statement. “I also heard a noise, looked up and saw the shutter being closed from the inside. But, he was wearing a white kimono. No stripes, no pattern, just a plain white kimono.
“Isn’t that impossible? One of you must be mistaken”, said the inspector with a troubled face.
“I’m certainly not mistaken”, said the first student
“Well, I wouldn’t lie in a case like this”, came his friend’s rejoinder.
What can the two student’s testimonies mean? The sharper readers might have thought of something already, and I picked up on the same thing at the time, but it seems the police and the public prosecutors didn’t dwell very deeply on it at the time.

At this time, the bookshop owner, having been found and notified of the terrible incident, came into the room. He was a delicate looking man who somehow didn’t seem like a secondhand bookshop owner. When he saw his wife’s body, he began to cry, and was unable to speak for some time. Kobayashi waited until he had regained some composure, then began asking questions. However, to his disappointment, the bookshop owner had absolutely no idea who might have killed his wife.
“She was never the kind of person to anger anyone, she had no secrets”, he said through his tears. He also checked the safe and the money in the till, and confirmed that nothing had been stolen from the shop at all. Kobayashi asked about their family history, perhaps hoping to dredge up some long forgotten feud, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
The questioning continued fruitlessly for some time, until finally Kobayashi asked about the bruises that had been found on the wife’s body. The bookshop owner hesitated for a long time, but eventually admitted that he was responsible. Kobayashi asked why he had done it, but despite repeated questioning, nothing would induce the bookshop owner to explain himself, and he was eventually led away in floods of tears. After all, he had been at his night stall all evening, so even if he was guilty of domestic violence, he had a strong alibi for her murder, and his grief had seemed all too real. He was not for the moment a suspect in the case.
At this point, the investigation finished for the evening. Akechi and I gave our full names and addresses, agreed to make ourselves available for future questioning, and were sent on our way home. It was already past one o’clock in the morning.
If the testimony of all the witnesses is true, and the police haven’t missed anything in their investigation, this really seems like an insoluble crime. As I found out later, the next day Kobayashi continued his investigations, but could progress no further than on the first evening. All the witnesses seemed reliable, and none had any reason to lie. Nor could any information be dredged up from the eleven neighbours who had been questioned. Kobayashi even went back to the victim’s hometown to see if he could uncover any long simmering resentments there, but found nothing. Finally, he also checked thoroughly the only thing that constituted ‘evidence’ from the crime scene; the light switch. However, the only fingerprints on it were Akechi’s, from when we had first entered the back office and he had turned the light on. It seemed that Akechi had been overexcited when he went to switch on the light, and had touched it so many times that the criminal’s fingerprints had been erased.
When a famed detective like Kobayashi puts his heart and soul into an investigation like this, and still can uncover no clue, not even the faintest of leads, as to the murderer’s identity, perhaps you can say it’s the perfect crime?
Readers, perhaps while you were considering this case, some famous detective stories from the past came into your mind? Poe’s ‘Murders In the Rue Morgue’ perhaps, or maybe Conan Doyle’s ‘Speckled Band’? Perhaps you were thinking that, as in these cases, the murderer wasn’t a person, but a wild animal of some sort; and orangutan or poisonous snake from India perhaps? The thought did briefly cross my mind too. But, this too must be impossible. After all, I’m sure there’s no such animal around this part of Tokyo, and as well as a witness seeing a man at the scene of the crime, there was no evidence to suggest the presence of an animal, and no witnesses to one either. Recall also that the marks on the victim’s neck were made by a man’s right hand. No, the perpetrator of this crime was certainly as human as you and I.
As Akechi and I returned home that evening, we spoke excitedly all the way. He said
“You know the murder of Rose Delacourt, the one that became the inspiration for Poe’s “Rue Morgue” and also Leroux’s “The Mystery of the Yellow Room”? Even though that was more than a century ago, still nobody knows who the culprit was. That sprang to my mind this evening. The way that the killer seems to have disappeared without leaving a trace of himself, it’s very similar in that respect, don’t you think?”
“I suppose you’re right. It’s certainly very strange, this murder straight out of a Western detective novel happening right here in Tokyo! I’ve no idea whether I can do it or not, but I’ve half a mind to look into the murder myself, and see if I can come up with any answers”,
I replied.
At this point, our paths diverged, and as Akechi turned off down a narrow lane, I watched him, shoulders shaking as he walked, and his thick striped summer kimono seemed to be thrown into sharp relief by the darkness. For some reason, the image left a strong impression on me.

Part 2: The deduction

Around ten days after the murder, I went over to visit Akechi at his lodgings. What had we done, what had we found, what conclusions had we reached over those ten days? Perhaps, reader, you can already guess what kind of conversation Akechi and I had that evening?
Until that point I had only ever bumped into Akechi at the cafe or around town, so it was the first time I had visited him at home. He rented a room above a tobacconist, which I found without much trouble, so I went in and asked the woman there whether Akechi Kogoro was at this address.
“Yes, he lives here. Please wait a moment, I’ll call him now”
She went to the stairs in the back corner of the shop and shouted up the stairs for him. Akechi came down the creaky staircase, and looked a little surprised to see that it was me, but quickly recovered his composure and invited me upstairs to his room.
When we got upstairs to the room, it was my turn to be surprised. I had hardly taken a step inside, when I let out a gasp – it really was the oddest room I had ever seen. I knew he was something of an eccentric, but this space was truly astounding. It was around two and a half by two and a half metres, and aside from a small space in the centre of the room where the tatami mats were visible, every inch of floor space was covered with books, here in neat piles, there in disorganised mountains. There was no furniture at all as far as I could tell, and I had no idea how he could sleep here. Also, there was nowhere that the two of us could sit down. If I moved at all, I was worried I would disturb the whole precarious edifice and bring a wall of books crashing down on us.
“Sorry about the mess. I don’t really have any chairs or floor cushions, but please find a soft-looking pile of books and sit down” said Akechi, somewhat sheepishly.
After some searching I managed to find such a stack, and sat down at last, but I was so amazed by the room that I was unable to speak for several seconds, instead just looking around me in wonder.
I feel at this point I should explain a little about this Akechi Kogoro, who has been so central to the story so far. But he was a fairly recent acquaintance of mine, and I had no idea about his background, how he managed to get enough money to eat and live, what his purpose in life was, or anything like that, but I know he didn’t seem to have any particular occupation, and seemed to be quite the man of leisure. If you were forced to label him as something, perhaps you’d call him a scholar? Though if he was a scholar, it was a strange sort of study for sure! I remember he had once said;
“I am a student of the human condition”,
but at the time I had no idea what he meant by that. One thing I was sure of, though, was that his passion and knowledge of crime and detection was enormous.
He was around the same age as me, so probably no older than 25. He was on the thin side, and as I mentioned previously, had the odd habit of shaking his shoulders while he walked. In fact, it’s an odd comparison, but his walk, his face and voice were all very similar to the old author and storyteller Kanda Hakuryu. Reader, if you can’t picture Kanda Hakuryu, just imagine the most personable and intelligent face that you can, put long, unkempt hair on it and you’ll be close enough. Talking of his hair, Akechi also had the habit of curling a lock of it around his finger while he was talking to people. He didn’t seem to worry much about his clothes, and always wore the same simple cotton kimono with vertical stripes, simply tied at the waist.
“I’m impressed that you found this place, it’s not easy” said Akechi, playing with a lock of hair and looking at me intently. “Anyway, about that murder on Dogenzaka, have the police made any progress? Caught anyone?”
“Actually, that’s what I came here to talk to you about”, I replied
Not really sure how to broach the subject I had come to talk about, I spoke hesitantly;
“I’ve been thinking about the case for the last ten days, to be honest. Not just thinking, actually. I did some detective work as well, at the crime scene and around. In the end, I came to a conclusion. I thought I’d come to share it with you.
“Oh, really. Impressive work! Tell me all about it.”
It didn’t escape my notice that as he said this his face took on a knowing look, followed by a relaxed, possibly even scornful appearance. This helped me to put my reservation to one side, and I continued more confidently.
“A friend of mine is a newspaper reporter, and he’s a good friend of the detective, Kobayashi, who is investigating the murder. Through that friend, I’ve been able to keep up with the progress of the case in some detail, but the police are floundering. They don’t know how to continue. Of course, they keep working on it, but they’ve found no decisive clue or piece of evidence. Take that light switch, for one. They’ve checked it several times, but only your fingerprints are on it. They seem to think that your prints have obscured or erased the criminal’s prints. When I heard that the police had run into this problem, I decided to try and check it for myself. What do you think my findings were? I wanted to tell you before going to the police.”
Since the day of the incident, I’ve been puzzled by something. Perhaps you remember it too? The two students who saw a man in the back room of the bookshop, their statements were the same, apart from the colour of the man’s kimono. One said it was black, one said it was white, and they were both adamant they were telling the truth. No matter how fleeting the glance, or how poor one’s eyesight, to mistake black for white is surely impossible? I’m not sure how the police interpreted it, but I think both the students were correct. Do you see? The criminal was wearing a black and white striped kimono, one of the ones that you often borrow when you stay at an inn in the countryside. So, how did one student see black, and one white? Well, you remember that they saw the criminal through the latticed shutter in the middle of the door. So, as they were in different places in the bookshop, it’s possible that one student looked through the shutter and saw only the white stripes, and understandably presumed that the whole kimono was white, whereas the other student looked from a different place and saw only the black stripes, with the struts of the shutter hiding the white from his view, and again presumed the whole kimono was black. It’s certainly a coincidence that they were standing in exactly the right place for this to happen, but as it was just for a moment it’s certainly possible, and as far as I can tell there’s no other explanation for it.”
So, we’ve discovered that the criminal’s kimono must have been in a black and white striped kimono, which narrows down the investigation considerably, but is not enough on its own to nail down a culprit. The second piece of evidence I considered is the light switch. My reporter friend told me that Kobayashi hadn’t been able to find anything, so I tried a little experiment, and my hunch paid off. By the way, do you have an inkstone somewhere? Could I use it for a second?”
Akechi passed me an inkstone, and it still had some ink in the well. I put my right thumb lightly into the ink, took a piece of paper from the pocket of my kimono, and pressed down on the paper with my thumb, leaving a thumbprint. Then I let the ink dry for a few seconds, and once again pressed the same thumb into the ink, and carefully added another print over the first one, in a different direction. When I did this, you could clearly see two overlapping thumbprints on the paper
“The police seem to think that when you turned on the light, you covered the criminal’s prints and erased them, but as I’ve just shown you with the ink, this is impossible. Even if you put one print on top of the other, you can still make out the original fingerprint between the lines of the second. It doesn’t matter how hard you press, you can’t erase the original.
So, if we accept that it was the criminal who turned out the light, his fingerprints must be on that switch. I wondered if the police had missed another set of fingerprints between the lines of yours, but according to my reporter friend, they checked that too but still only found your prints. So, you are the only person who touched the switch all evening – before the murder, after the murder, only you put your fingers on that switch. Why the prints of the bookshop owner weren’t there I’m not sure, but I imagine it’s because the light had never been switched off before that.”1
So, what does this tell you, Akechi? This is what I think. A man wearing a striped kimono – perhaps a childhood sweetheart of the victim, who later broke his heart and drove him to murder – knew the bookshop owner was going to be at his night stall, and attacked the woman while he was away. She didn’t resist so she must have known her assailant. After he had killed her, to delay the discovery of the body he turned off the light and went to flee, but as he did he noticed the shutter in the door was open, so went over to shut it before running. By chance the two students had just come into the shop and saw this. Then the killer fled out from the back, but realised that his fingerprints would be all over the light switch, and he needed to somehow erase them. With the students in the shop, though, he could hardly risk venturing back into the room where he had committed the murder, and it was then that he hit on a brilliant idea. He would become the discoverer of the crime. If he did that, he would naturally be able to turn on the light without arousing any suspicion, and later he wouldn’t be suspected when his fingerprints were found on the light switch. On top of that, as the discoverer of the crime, he’d be less likely to be a suspect, so it would really be a case of killing two birds with one stone. Then he could watch the police at work, and even be bold enough to give a witness statement. What’s more, his scheme has gone entirely to plan! Ten days later and the police haven’t got the faintest idea how to proceed.”
Akechi listened to me carefully. I had expected him to interrupt me as I was speaking, or at least to change his expression, but to my surprise his face remained impassive. He simply listened in silence, playing with a lock of hair as usual. I was amazed at his calm, and for want of any response I continued with my explanation.
“You’re probably going to ask how the criminal could have got into and out of the room unseen. Of course, if I can’t explain that then the rest of my explanation falls apart. Well, I investigated that as well. As we saw that evening, there was no clue as to how the criminal either entered or left the room. But, he did commit a murder in there, so he must have got in and out somehow. So, we must conclude that the police missed something in their investigation. It will pain them to learn this, but it seems their detective skills are not up to mine.”
It’s actually quite simple. What I think happened is this. The police checked the bookshop and the back room very thoroughly, and we have no reason to doubt the eleven neighbours who saw nothing on the night of the crime. So, we have to conclude that rather than escaping in the traditional sense, the criminal actually hid in plain sight; somewhere that he could be seen, but where no-one would suspect him of the crime. As I considered how he could do this, I thought of the noodle shop, Asahiya, two doors down from the bookshop. You’ll recall that on the right of the bookshop was a watch shop and then a sweet shop, while on the left is a tabi sock shop and then a noodle shop. Anyway, I went into the noodle shop and asked if anyone had come in just to use the toilet at around 8 o’clock that evening. You know that place – there’s a single straight corridor from the entrance all the way to the back door, and the toilet is just outside the back door. The criminal went in, pretended that he wanted to just use the toilet, went out of the back door, into the back door of the bookshop, committed the crime, and then came back through the back door of the noodle shop as if he had come back from the toilet. This way he could get into the alley without using the entrance where the ice cream shop owner was. For the noodle shop owner, someone going in to use the loo would be an everyday thing and wouldn’t draw his attention. In fact, when I mentioned this to my reporter friend, he said that Kobayashi had spoken to the noodle shop owner, but hadn’t got any information from him about it; someone using the toilet was so unexceptional he didn’t even mention it to the police. But, when I asked the owner directly if he could remember someone coming in around eight to use the toilet, he said there had been, but luckily for the criminal that evening his wife hadn’t been around to help so he had been busier than usual, and couldn’t remember the face, dress or build of the man who had come in. I must say, Akechi, That really was a clever idea of yours.”

I paused for a moment, to give Akechi a chance to say something. I was sure he couldn’t remain silent given what I had just said. But, he remained as silent as a stone, and there was no sound aside from the faint rustle of his hair as he continued to twist it round his finger. There was nothing for it. Out of respect for him I had spoken indirectly up to now, but the time had come to stop beating around the bush.

“Akechi, you must know what I’m saying. All the evidence points to you. I didn’t want to doubt you, I don’t want to accuse you, but all my investigations have led to you, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I tried to find anything to exonerate you – I checked whether any of the eleven neighbours owned a striped kimono like yours, but none of them do. Unfortunately for you that kind of summer kimono is quite unusual to see around here. The trick with the light switch, and using the toilet in the noodle shop, too, they were both very clever tricks, and only an expert in crime and detection like you would have been able to think of them. Finally, the thing that really gave you away was your relationship to the victim. You told me once that you knew her when you were a child. But, when you gave your statement, and when detective Kobayashi questioned you, you didn’t mention it once.
So, I wanted to ask you for your alibi. Anything to point the finger of guilt in another direction. But there’s no chance of that either, is there? That evening, when you saw me in the White Plum and came in for a coffee, I asked you where you had been. You told me you had just been strolling round the neighbourhood for about an hour. Even if someone had seen you on your walk, it wouldn’t necessarily help you, because you could still have popped into the noodle shop on the way to pretend to use the toilet. If only you had been somewhere else, visiting an aunt across town, anything! Tell me, Akechi, am I mistaken. Please, if you can, defend yourself.”
Well, readers, what do you imagine Akechi Kogoro’s response to have been? Do you think he slumped back in defeat? No, he did not. Instead, he punctured my ego immediately by letting out a loud, slow, long laugh. Then, seeing my injured expression he pulled himself up.
“Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh, but you’re so serious!” he said by way of excuse. 
“Your explanation is very interesting. I’m happy to have found a friend like you. But unfortunately your explanation is just too superficial, too material. Take my relationship with the victim. As you say, we knew each other as children, but did you take any time to check what kind of relationship we had, to consider the deeper psychological aspect of the case? Whether we were ever in love with each other? If we were, whether I was still upset and seeking revenge over it? I don’t think you considered anything of the sort. The reason why I didn’t mention my relationship with her to the police is simple. Even though I knew her, I knew nothing about her that could possibly have any relevance to the case. We were only friends for a few years, long ago before we even entered school, and I hadn’t seen her since.”
“In that case, how do you explain the fingerprints on the light switch?”
“Do you think I’ve been completely idle since that day? No, I’ve been quite active too you know. I went over to Dogenzaka every day, especially to the bookshop. I spoke to the owner, and asked him quite a lot. I told him that I once knew his wife, which seemed to help him open up to me, so I got quite a lot of information from him – much the same information, it seems, as you got from your journalist friend. I heard about the fingerprints too, and it piqued my curiosity so I also checked what could have happened. Well, I couldn’t help but laugh – it turns out that the filament in the bulb had just broken, so the light went out. No-one turned it off. We presumed that it was the killer, but actually no-one knew what time it went off, and it could have been several minutes after he left the room that it went. When I turned the light switch, I didn’t actually turn on the light – I just moved the bulb and reconnected the filament, so it came back on.2 So, of course there were no-one’s fingerprints but mine on the switch. You said that you saw the light on through the shutter from the cafe, which means that it must have disconnected after that. These old light bulbs often go of their own accord, even while they’re on.”
As for the issue of the kimono colour, your explanation is…” his words tailed off as he rummaged in a pile of books and pulled out a tattered old volume from somewhere near the bottom.
“Have you read this book? ‘On the Witness Stand’, by Hugo Munsterberg. Published in 1908, I think. Try reading the chapter ‘Illusions’, the first ten lines or so.”
As Akechi put forward his defence, I gradually realised my own failures in investigating the crime. I took the book and read the start of the chapter as I had been told. It read something like this

“Last year, a case came to light in which a car had been stolen. In court, several witnesses were called to the stand and swore under oath to tell the truth. The first witness said that the road in question had been dry and dusty when the incident happened, whereas the second said it had been slick with rain after a recent shower. The first person said the car had been travelling quite slowly; the second testified that he had never seen a car driven so quickly. The first person said there were two or three other people on the road at the time, whereas the second stated there had been men, women and families all down the road. Neither witness had reason to lie, and they were both gentlemen of good standing in the community.”

After I finished reading, Akechi directed me to another chapter in the book, called “The Memory of the Witness”
“The last example was a real criminal case, but this is an experiment that Munsterberg carried out to see what people remembered of sudden events. It has a connection to the colour of the kimono that we’ve been wondering about it, so have a read.”
I started to read about the experiment.

“The year before last, I carried out an experiment in Gottingen. I held a party for various academics; lawyers, psychologists, physicists and others. In other words, all people whose professions depended on close observation of phenomena. At the time, there was a carnival happening in the city. During the party, the doors opened suddenly and a carnival performer in bright, gaudy clothing came rushing in, as if possessed by madness. He was chased in by a man brandishing a pistol. In the middle of the hall the intruders faced each other and yelled insults. Then the performer lay down on the floor, and the man with the pistol stood on him, pointed the pistol downwards, and shot. Both of them then ran out of the room. The whole commotion lasted less than twenty seconds. Aside from the host, nobody knew or had any reason to suspect that it was all set up for an experiment. The host then brought everyone together, and asked them all to write down a truthful account of what they had seen, as it would be helpful for the police when he called them. As you might have guessed, the witnesses testimonies differed hugely in their accounts of the same event. Of the forty people in the room, four said that the man with the pistol wasn’t wearing a hat. Of the other thirty six, around half said he was wearing a silk hat, around half said he was wearing a trilby. As for his clothes, some said he was wearing red, some dark brown, some light brown, and some went for striped. They all remembered a different set of clothes to the ones they had actually seen – in fact, the man wielding the pistol had been wearing white trousers with a black overcoat, and a large read necktie, with no hat. We must conclude that memory, when all things are equal, is easily fallible, because it is affected by the associations, judgments, suggestions, penetrate into every one of our observations and taint out memory and our recollection of events.”

“Munsterberg’s prose might be a bit of a slog, but he’s exactly right”, said Akechi as I finished reading. “People’s observation and memory is not something you can truly rely on.
As in this case, the witnesses to the event were all scholars, intelligent people, and they couldn’t even agree on the colour of the intruders’ clothes. I think it’s the same case for those two students. Both believe they saw what they said they saw, but one of them or perhaps even both of them are mistaken. They might well have seen something, but I’m sure it was not a man with a black and white striped summer kimono. It certainly wasn’t me! Your theory about the stripes being seen from different angles through the shutter is an interesting one, but when you think about it doesn’t it seem a little unlikely? Too perfect, if you see what I mean. Rather than your coincidence, couldn’t you believe that I’m innocent of the crime?”
Finally, we’ve got the issue of the man who used the noodle shop’s lavatory. In this instance, I agree with you. The criminal must have hidden in plain sight, as you put it, and the only way he could have got to the bookshop and out again is through the noodle shop. Unfortunately, I went to the noodle shop and checked for myself, and the conclusion I reached is exactly the opposite to yours. In fact, nobody went in to use the toilet at eight o’clock. There was no such person.”

Reader, as you have seen, Akechi thus demolished my arguments about the witness statement, the fingerprints of the criminal, and how the criminal had got in and out of the bookshop without being seen, and so made the case for his innocence. But denying that someone had gone in to use the toilet in the noodle shop – was he denying that a crime had been committed altogether? I had no idea what he was thinking, so I asked him outright.
“Do you know who committed the murder?”
“Yes, I do”, he said as he continued to play with his hair. “My methods are different to yours. Looking at the physical evidence is only going to get you so far in detective work. The best way to solve the case is to get into the mind of people, to look into the depth of their heart and understand their motives. But, this depends on the skill of the investigator. In any case, I looked at this case from the opposite angle to you; the psychological angle.
The first thing that caught my attention was the fresh bruises all over the victim’s body. Soon after that I heard that the wife of the noodle shop owner had similar marks all over her body. I think you know that already. But, neither of them seem to have violent husbands. Both the noodle shop owner and the bookshop owner seem to be quietly intelligent men going about their business. I couldn’t help think that beneath the ordinary exterior lay a secret of some kind. So, first I tried to find out what it was from the bookshop owner. As I said, by saying I was an old friend of his wife I was able to get to know him very quickly, so I felt able to broach such a delicate matter as his wife’s injuries. By contrast, I got quite the opposite impression from the noodle shop owner, who seemed guarded and distant. Also, I didn’t have a way in like I did with the bookshop owner, so it was very tough to come to any conclusion about him. But, using a certain psychological method, I was able to find out what I needed in the end.”
Are you aware of the ‘association’ method of psychological diagnosis? Did you know it’s also used in the investigation of crime? You give a number of simple stimulus words, and time the suspect’s association of ideas to the words. But, unlike what the psychologists say, I don’t think the stimulus words have to be limited to simple ones like ‘dog’, ‘house’ or ‘river’, and you don’t necessarily need a stopwatch to time the responses. To someone who has the knack of the associative method, it doesn’t have to be so rigid and formulaic. When you think about it, the famous detectives of the past were developing this method unknowingly, using just their own intuition, long before psychology began as a discipline. Somebody like Ooka Echizen3 would be a perfect example. Alternatively, in literature you can look at the detective Dupin in Poe’s “Rue Morgue”, when he explains what his friend is thinking simply from the movement of his body. Holmes also uses the same methods in Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Resident Patient”. They’re all examples of the same technique, but the psychologist insist on complicating matters with machines and mechanical methods because they don’t have the same insight into the human condition, and then claiming the method as their own!
Anyway, I’ve digressed a little, but I tried this method when I was talking to the noodle shop owner. I just talked about very everyday things, and noted his unconscious reactions and verbal responses to my words. But, this is a very delicate procedure; if the subject is in the least suspicious, the experiment becomes flawed and its conclusions unreliable. Anyway, I don’t want to bore you with the methods as it was quite complex, but the results were clear. I had found the murderer.”
But, I don’t have a shred of physical evidence for this, so there’s no way I can go to the police with it. Even if I told them I don’t think they’d act on my suspicions. More than that though, there’s another reason that I’m not trying to act on knowing the identity of the murderer. I don’t think he had any evil intent. I know it seems like a ridiculous thing to say, but in this case I think the victim and the killer were cooperating with each other. You might even argue that the victim persuaded her assailant to kill her.”
I tried looking at this idea from several different angles, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out Akechi’s line of thinking. By now I had forgotten my shame at having accused him after what I now realised was such a shallow investigation, and simply wanted to hear him explain himself.
“Anyway, let me elaborate. The murderer was the owner of the Asahiya noodle shop. He could easily have gone out of the back door of his shop, round to the bookshop to commit the crime, and back again without his customers noticing anything unusual. To impede the investigation, he made up the man going to the toilet at eight o’clock. But that wasn’t in his plans from the beginning, you know. It’s our fault, in a way. Whichever one of us it was, we asked him if someone had gone into the toilet at about eight, and he simply took the idea and used it. In a way, we’re almost his accomplices! He probably took us for policemen. Returning to his motives for the murder, though, this case for me really illustrates how dark, grotesque secrets can be hidden behind the facade of the outwardly normal everyday lives we all lead. It’s the kind of behaviour that we can only really discover in the world of nightmares.”
The owner of the noodle shop followed in the footsteps of the Marquis de Sade. He was a sexual sadist, and by cruel coincidence, the woman in the bookshop two doors down was his Sacher-Masoch, his willing victim. With the cunning of two people who share a perversion, they began an affair. Now perhaps you understand what I meant when I said this crime was cooperative. Within their own marriages, they could barely indulge their twisted desires at all, which were not shared to anything like the same by their spouses, though the fresh bruises on both the bookshop owner’s wife and the noodle shop owner’s wife show that they both tried. But, they could not satisfy their urges like this. So, when they found each other, a partner with the same desires, not more than ten yards away, it is easy to imagine how they could have immediately developed a deep understanding. However, the results of this chance meeting, this twist of fate, were tragic. Through the synthesis of their passive and active roles, their depravity gradually multiplied until that fateful evening ten days ago, in an outcome that surely neither of them expected or wished for when they first met. She persuaded him to kill her. An awful tragedy.”
I shuddered involuntarily as Akechi reached his conclusion. What a bizarre case!
Then the woman from the tobacco shop brought the evening paper up to Akechi’s room. Akechi took the paper, opened it at the local news section, and let out a deep sigh.
“Ah, in the end it seems he couldn’t live with himself. What a coincidence, just as we were talking about it ourselves, the proof comes in the newspaper”, he said, passing me the paper. I read the section he was pointing at, a short article not ten lines long on an inside page. The headline read;


“Local noodle shop owner found hanged; police suspect suicide”

.





Economics 101 with Abe Shinzo

Today we’ll be looking at the economic policies that Abe Shinzo has stated he will follow since becoming Prime Minister of Japan on December 16th. I’m going to talk about 3 things:

1. A brief introduction to Abe Shinzo
2. His proposed economic policy
3. The possible economic and political consequences of such a policy

Abe Shinzo: the basics

•Abe Shinzo became Prime Minister on December 16th. His Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a majority of seats in the lower house, and with its coalition partner the New Komeito (the political arm of Buddhist organisation Soga Gakkai), won more than two thirds of all seats in parliament – this allows it to overrule the upper house to force through bills should it want to.

•However, this does not mean Abe has a mandate to govern. His party won 3 million fewer party votes (the electoral system is such that citizens vote for either a party or a certain candidate) than it did in 2009, when it was thrashed by the now-in-opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). However voter turnout was so low that this was enough for a convincing victory. This represents a rejection of the DPJ, not a mandate for the LDP

•In addition, Abe’s credibility is damaged because he made such a poor stab of this job last time. Between September 2006 and September 2007, he served as Prime Minister; a year that was marked by gaffes, scandal, and a series of ministerial resignations. He resigned in some disgrace and the public do not generally remember him fondly. Thus, the bounce that a new government’s popularity generally enjoys is likely to be quite small this time round.
What does Abe plan to do about the economy now he’s in power?

To combat the deflating economy, he will;

•Raise the inflation target to 3%, even though the current 1% looks out of Japan’s reach. To do this, he will ask the BOJ to underwrite construction bonds (bonds whose expenditure does not have to be written off during the same fiscal year, not necessarily on construction).

•Drive interest rates below zero (inflation and interest rates are inversely proportional – as interest rates drop, people borrow more, then spend more, creating inflation)

•This easy money would weaken the yen, making Japanese exports competitive again, give a bounce to the stock market and return Japan to levels of inflation commensurate with other major developed markets.

This all sounds great. Are there any economic problems with this strategy?

Unfortunately the old maxim is true – a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially where Shinzo Abe and economics are concerned. The economic problems of the strategy are manifold;

•The current BOJ head is strongly opposed to the idea. Masaaki Shirakawa called the idea foolish – however the election for the post of BOJ governor is up for re-election in March, and Abe no doubt hopes to get someone more amenable to his plan in the job – Kazumasa Iwata possibly, with fellow supporter Yasuhisa Shiozaki for the Ministry of Finance portfolio? However, even with his two thirds majority in the Lower House of the Japanese parliament, Abe cannot force through the appointment of his favoured candidate – the upper house will still need to approve whoever he puts forward.

•Under current law the plan is illegal. The BOJ cannot currently directly underwrite bonds issued by government; they can only purchase them on the secondary market. No major developed economy allows its central bank to do so. Abe has gone as far as suggesting restricting the independence of the BOJ, which it won in 1998, to push through such a change

•Japan has the largest public debt in the industrialised world at more than twice GDP. As inflation increases so must bond yields, but Japan depends on its sub 1% yields to carry out the normal economic functions of government. Increasing inflation to 3% would push JGB yields unacceptably high, and borrowing would become much more difficult for the government. It should be noted that even at the height of the bubble in the late 1980’s, Japan’s inflation never rose above 3%.

•As Governor Shirakawa has pointed out more forcefully than he points out most things, negative interest rates would be disastrous for the smooth functioning of the money market and render the BOJ impotent in providing liquidity. In an unusually forthright retort to the Abe plan, he said ‘There is no case of a central bank in an advanced country undertaking a negative rate policy.’

•While the yen would weaken under these circumstances helping exporters, Abe should remember that a strong yen is not all bad – it certainly helps Japan pay for all the oil and LNG (liquefied natural gas) it needs to import just to keep the lights on.

•Abe does not understand the genie he is letting out of the bottle. Such excessive monetary easing would lead to speculation in currency and money markets which he would be powerless to control.

•Deflation is a symptom, not a cause of a poor economy. Japan needs much wider fiscal reform to increase demand from all sides – less insularity and more flexible labour markets might be a good place to start.

Oh dear…what about political issues?

Slightly less of them, but by no means are they insignificant

•Abe’s policy recalls the ‘bad old days’ of the LDP, when pork barrel spending from central government kept rural MPs in power, but left Japan with costly white elephants like the Yanba Dam, Joetsu Shinkansen and Ibaraki Airport (which currently has a grand total of two scheduled daily flights – for comparison, Heathrow has over 1300)

•These policies provide easy pickings for political opponents, and when he is elected you can be sure the DPJ will not stay silent – they will oppose him at every turn, making it very hard to continue the work of government.

•The US is also unlikely to approve, mostly because it will make it much harder to be firm with China about currency manipulation when its closest security partner in Asia is doing much the same thing.

•Abe has also stated on record that he will take a firmer line with China and will resume visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Japan’s war dead – this is likely to ratchet up tensions with China that have caused Japanese exports to China to fall and trade flows between the two nations to shrink.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Abe’s plans for the central bank are undemocratic, imprudent and likely to lead Japan back over the recessionary cliff rather than pull it away. As the saying goes, to a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail. Abe’s hammer is monetary easing, and he seems to think that it can cure all problems. For Japan’s sake, I hope he picks up an Economics 101 textbook soon and realises that hijacking his central bank is not a good idea. While it seems likely that his proposals will be watered down by the strength of opinion against them, the LDP manifesto for this election is still likely to pledge an inflation target of at least 2%.

Mori Ogai, The Demands of the Day, Part 5

Ogai went to war in April of 1904. The Russo-Japanese war has been called ‘the first great war of the twentieth century’, and its pattern of rival empires failing to come to a peaceful resolution over territory which both saw as within their sphere of influence would become depressingly familiar over the following decades. In the Russo-Japanese war, the territory first argued and then fought over was Manchuria. Russia had been a major player in the region since leasing Port Arthur (modern Lushun) from Qing dynasty China. The port was of great strategic importance to Russia as their only warm water port on the Pacific, and they followed up on this development of infrastructure by building a railway from Port Arthur to Mukden, Harbin and on to join the newly built Trans-Siberian railway. After the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, as part of the eight member international delegation to relieve the imperiled foreign troops trapped in Beijing, Russia sent troops into the imperial capital. At the same time they stationed 177,000 troops in Manchuria, ostensibly as a temporary measure to protect their railroad to Lushun, though as this would have given them an excessive one soldier for every 5 metres of railroad track, it was clearly an invading army disguised as the world’s largest transport police. As expected Russian plans for evacuation of their troops from Manchuria were delayed and postponed until they dropped any pretence and announced their intention to stay in 1903. Japan`s prime minister, Ito Hirobumi, tried to negotiate with the Russians, but the Russian government did not believe that the Japanese would go to war against a power so much larger than itself. Japan, meanwhile, felt strengthened by an alliance with Britain that would bring Britain into the war on Japan`s side if any other power allied with Russia. Diplomacy had failed. Japan attacked Port Arthur on the 8^th February 1904, three hours before formally declaring war on Russia. The war was fought on land and sea, with Japanese supremacy at sea in the battles of the Yellow Sea and Tsushima (largely due to weaponry with a marginally greater range than the Russian naval guns, allowing them to bombard the Russian fleet while staying just out of harm`s way) backing up victories on land in the Battle of Mukden and the Siege of Port Arthur. The Japanese victory, and place at the top table of world powers was enshrined at the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905.

But, we must return to the role of Mori Ogai before he disappears into the mass of humanity that fought in the conflict. He was the chief medical officer in the second division of the Japanese army, sent to the Liaodong peninsula in April 1904. The great controversy of Ogai`s conduct in the war revolves around his handling of beriberi, which was rife among the troops in the army. Ogai is strongly criticized for sticking to his theory that beriberi was a bacterial infection, rather than a deficiency of vitamin B12, or thiamine, leading to the deaths of thousands of soldiers in the Russo-Japanese war when a simple change in diet could have saved the majority. I will not attempt to revive Ogai’s reputation here, as science has proved him to be entirely mistaken. However, I would like to put Ogai`s actions in some context; he was not a lone voice arguing for the bacterial cause of beriberi while the rest of the scientific community had come to their senses and realized its true nature. As late as the 1920s, professors such as Hayashi Haruo at Tokyo University, one of the highest centres of learning in the land, were still performing experiments to try and show that diet and beriberi were not causally related.

However, the link between beriberi and diet had been postulated as early as the 1880s by Takaki Kanehiro, a naval doctor. In 1880 he began to search for reasons behind the high incidence of beriberi in the navy. He had just returned from five years of medical training in St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, and had been schooled in British traditions of social medicine. He began to look for the cause of the disease in diet, housing, bedding, and conditions on board ship. He noticed that officers, with a varied diet of meat and vegetables, rarely developed beriberi whereas the common sailors, with a diet primarily consisting of white rice, were much more susceptible. He concluded that a protein deficiency was a possible cause, and stipulated a more western-style diet of bread, meat and vegetables. However the sailors were not impressed by what they say as a forced adoption of western ways, and there were many cases of sailors hurling their rations overboard en masse. So Takaki used a technique known to parents of fussy children everywhere; he kept the white rice favoured by the sailors, but secretly added barley to it to increase its protein content. This was by no means a novel treatment; adzuki beans and barley in place of white rice had been prescribed as a remedy for beriberi by Chinese herbalists of the Sui dynasty in the 6^th century. Indeed, it was the very age of the technique which caused doctors like Ogai and his contemporaries to reject it.
Takaki recorded incidence of beriberi in the navy before and after his diet was introduced. In 1878, 1485 out of 4528 navy personnel contracted beriberi, with 32 dying from it. Just six years later, the figures were 3 beriberi cases among 8472 personnel, and not a single death. All this was more than a decade before Christian Eijkman made a similar proposal in the Dutch East Indies, though he would get a Nobel Prize for his work. Takaki got no such recognition, though he does have an Antarctic peninsula named after him, which is more than most of us can claim.

You may well wonder how it was that fully 20 years after the conclusion of Takaki`s experiment, Mori Ogai was still fiercely resisting the theory that beriberi was a dietary disease even as the army`s soldiers were falling down around his ears. There are a number of reasons, but all revolve around various rivalries within Japanese medical circles. Firstly, his work was criticized roundly by army doctors, rivalry between army and navy being as old as armies and navies themselves. Ishiguro Tadanori, surgeon-general of the Japanese Imperial Army, rounded on Takaki, saying that his statistics were unreliable and that beriberi was a contagious disease which flourished in damp and insanitary conditions. Four weeks after Takaki`s results were published, Dr Masanori Ogata of Tokyo Imperial University released a paper in which he claimed to have found the bacillus which caused beriberi, and his research was much more widely promulgated in the popular press than Takaki`s.

There was also rivalry between the British and German schools of medical thought. German medicine emphasized the importance of laboratory work in proving scientific theories. British medicine was more social in outlook, and relied more heavily on epidemiology and statistical research, perhaps as a result of Florence Nightingale`s pioneering work in using statistics and data to show the role hygiene played in army health in the Crimean war. Thus Takaki saw his statistics on beriberi and diet in the navy as proof of the causal relationship. The German-trained Ogai, along with his superior Ishiguro and many others, strongly disagreed, commenting in print that `Experimental knowledge, using microscope and microtome, is the highest art for producing scientific knowledge`. Statistical data did not constitute scientific fact for these men, and Takaki`s tables would not convince them otherwise.

There was a third rivalry in play, which split the medical authorities along similar lines to the second but was nevertheless separate; between those who believed that traditional medicine was a relic of the past, and those who believed it still had something to offer alongside newer Western techniques. For those in the former camp, the idea of using barley to treat beriberi was old fashioned, dangerous, and based on nothing more than superstition and guesswork from a prior age. For those in the latter, western and traditional medicine were more like two approaches to the same problem, which could complement each other in certain cases.
Finally, there was a social factor at work. White rice, highly polished to remove the entirety of the husk from the grain, is much more expensive than barley or brown rice, and thus was seen as a reward to the armed forces for their sacrifice and struggle. The family of an ordinary soldier back in the civilian world would most certainly not have been able to afford such a luxury. It was thought by many in the armed forces that any attempt to replace white rice with other foods would merely be seen as a cost-cutting exercise by the troops, leading to dissatisfaction at best and full scale revolt at worst.

While this puts into context Ogai`s refusal to countenance barley as a remedy for beriberi, it cannot excuse it. The Russo-Japanese war was the first overseas war Japan fought in where more soldiers were lost to enemy action than disease. This was in no small part due to Ogai’s work on improving army medicine and hygiene. However we must stand against this the 27000 deaths from beriberi in the army, compared to well under 1000 in the navy.

In 1905, one of the most celebrated Meiji era chroniclers of Japan, the writer Basil Hall Chamberlain, wrote `Things Japanese`, a kind of encyclopedia of Japan for the curious Western world. In the section on beriberi, he states that recent scientific advances have proven the disease to be dietary. He notes the example of “the peasantry, who often cannot afford either rice or fish, and have to eat barley or millet instead, suffer much less than the people” A foreign scholar with no medical training had realized the true nature of the disease while Ogai still stuck to his outdated theories; the final proof, if any were needed, that Ogai made the biggest mistake of his career with regard to the transmission of beriberi, one that caused hundreds if not thousands of preventable deaths.

Next time, we will look at Ogai as he furthered his writing career with a burst of creativity in the last years of the first decade of the 20^th century.

Mori Ogai: The Demands of the Day, Part 4

After Maihime, Ogai published two more novels in short succession; Utakata no ki (A Sad Tale), mentioned in part 2, and Fumizukai (The Courier) in January 1891. Fumizukai is particularly interesting for a detailed psychological portrait of Ida, a German noblewoman who escapes a loveless arranged marriage by entering the Saxony court in Dresden. She does this by entrusting a letter to Kobayashi, the narrator of the story, which he delivers to Ida’s aunt, a countess at court. A number of themes from Maihime and Utakata no ki are also visible in Fumizukai, such as the use of Kobayashi as a bystander, observing but not propelling the action, Ida’s conflict between duty and self fulfillment, and the recreation of Ogai’s experiences in Germany at court balls and in military circles. These themes link the three stories and also provide a common thread with these early works and those Ogai would write more that 20 years later, in his second great burst of creativity after 1910. It must be remembered that these short stories were experiments, written at a time when almost no literary works were devoted either to the psychology of the protagonist or to the significance of a Japanese experiencing European life. As such we can see them as personal experiments which allowed Ogai to come to terms with one aspect or another of the European culture which had so enchanted him and his personal understanding of the Japanese and Japan in the brave new world of the Meiji era. He would revisit many of these themes more fully at the end of the Meiji era from 1910 onwards.

These early stories were also the only works of fiction Ogai wrote in classical Japanese; this was the norm for literary composition at the time, but it bore little resemblance to the nuances of contemporary speech. As a result these works feel more modern when read in translation than in the original. In the 20^th century, Ogai would use modern written Japanese, and can be considered one of the finest early adherents of the modern vernacular style. To explore his favoured themes further, he would have to first create the tools for the job.

It is scarcely surprising that Ogai wrote little in the decade either side of the dawn of the 20th century, largely as a result of his burgeoning medical career, but also because of personal issues. In September 1890 Ogai’s short-lived marriage to Toshiko Akamatsu came to an end after eighteen months, shortly after his first child Oto was born. The divorce damaged his friendship with Nishi Amane, the philosopher who had taken Ogai in as a youth so he could study in Tokyo. Amane had been the nakodo (ceremonial matchmaker) in the marriage, and was a close friend of Toshiko`s father, Noriyoshi Akamatsu. Thus far, Ogai’s record with women is less than stellar, with one disastrous love affair and one failed marriage behind him. We might speculate that Toshiko was less than impressed by the attitudes and actions expressed in Maihime, though that might be to anachronistically endow women with the power to seek a divorce in late 19<sup>th</sup> century elite circles. More convincing evidence has recently come to light in the form of a letter from Ogai to Noriyoshi Akamatsu explaining his reasons for the divorce. In this letter, Mori stated that he was `absolutely incompatible with Toshi[ko] in temperament`. The story behind the discovery of the letter can also be seen here.

After 1891 Ogai’s literary output was confined to the work he could do in his spare time, and was published in the literary magazine he had founded, Shigarami Soshi. This included a translation of The Improvisatore, a love story based in Italy by Hans Christian Andersen, which took Ogai nine years and was published in instalments from November 1892. The translation was much lauded and had a great influence on many Japanese literary figures such as Masamune Hakucho and Bin Ueda, who travelled round the Italian locations mentioned with a copy of Ogai`s translation in hand in the early 1900s. Even Ogai’s work on Shigarami Soshi stopped in 1894 after he was called up to serve in the Sino-Japanese war and the magazine was wound up.

Ogai`s military rank and standing had improved rapidly since his return from Japan. From August to December 1889 he took charge of an experiment on changing the composition of army rations to improve the health of the common soldier, and was thus at the forefront of the new science of nutrition. At the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century it was only just becoming known that a lack of certain foods could cause health problems and even death. It was generally thought that all food was of equal value to the body, and that all of it contained some unspecified matter that supported life; `the universal aliment`, as it was known. A pound of beef was thought to have the same benefit as a pound of potatoes or any other food. The link between lack of a certain vitamin and illness was proven only in 1897 when Christian Eijkman showed that feeding mice unpolished rice instead of polished rice could prevent beri beri (disagreements between Ogai and his colleagues would lead to the greatest controversy of his career during the Russo Japanese war in 1904-5). This was the beginning of an understanding of deficiency disease, and it won Eijkman the Nobel Prize for Medicine even though he had no idea what it was in the unpolished rice which served as a determinant of wellbeing. The word `vitamin` itself was only coined in 1912 by Casimir Funk after he isolated thiamine, or vitamin B1.

After successful completion of the rations experiment, Ogai wrote the Army Hygiene Manual for the army and was promoted to Army Medical Officer First Class (equivalent to the rank of Colonel). He was sent to Dalian in Manchuria in the Sino-Japanese war as Chief Medical Officer for the Central Lines of Communication, which gave him a chance to put into practice the methods he had worked on experimentally, and allowed him to develop an idea which he later expanded on in a new version of the Army Hygiene Manual; that the greatest enemy of an army is in many cases not the enemy, but preventable diseases running rampant through the mass of soldiers. These ideas and their implementation led to an impressive reduction in army disease between the Sino-Japanese war in 1894-5 and the Russo-Japanese war 1904-5. This was of course not all down to Ogai, for he would not take the top role in the Army Medical Corps until 1907, but his role was clearly a highly important one given his scientific experience.

After the Sino-Japanese war, Ogai was stationed in the new Japanese colony of Taiwan for four months, accompanying Kabayama Sukenori, the first Japanese governor of the province. In his diary Ogai notes how his brother Miki Takeji came all the way to Ujina in Hiroshima prefecture to see him off and pass on the regards of the rest of the family, who were very worried about Ogai’s safety overseas. This is one of few human touches that are mentioned in the diary or anywhere else, and all the more refreshing for it; his diary and the recollections of his children paint a picture of a stern, fairly cheerless man, so small nuggets like these serve to remind us of his human side. Takeji (real name Mori Tokujiro) was also a very interesting figure who one feels would be more famous if it were not for the achievements of his older brother; he also worked as both a doctor and writer, and it is said he was even more precocious than Ogai in his youth. He became a well known author and critic of Kabuki plays, perhaps delving into the study of this most traditional of Japanese art forms to distance himself from the heavily Europeanised style of Ogai`s fiction. He is currently undergoing something of a revival in Japan, and in 2004 a collection of his dramatic criticism was published for the first time by the Iwanami Shoten company.

On his return from Taiwan, Ogai soon rejoined the literary world. In January 1896 he published the first edition of a new literary magazine, Mezamashigusa, with his friends Koda Rohan and Saito Ryoku. Like his earlier magazine Shigarami Soshi, this would be the vehicle for many of his subsequent works of translation and fiction. He also used the magazine to promote his theory of literature; he was a strong supporter of idealism, believing that fiction should be used to develop ideas (in Japanese, riso) and discover those ideals which underpin reality. In this we can see the influence of the German Hegelian philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, who Ogai translated and who would inform Ogai’s own forays into literary criticism. He used his magazine not only to promote idealism but also to attack realism and its proponents; this led to one of the most famous debates in Japanese literary history when Ogai wrote an article in Shigarami Soshi assailing one of the greats of the Meiji era, Tsubouchi Shoyo, for his promotion of realism. In his 1895 work Shosetsu Shinzui (The Essence of the Novel) Tsubouchi put forward his theory that artists and authors must report ideas rather than generate them, this being the sole purview of the philosopher. Tsubouchi believed that through this reporting of ideas the reader or viewer could find their own thoughts and opinions reflected. He thus valued this reflection of ideas, which he called botsuriso or “submerged ideas”. Ogai reacted strongly to this, and so the botsuriso ronso or “submerged ideas debate” began, with Ogai publishing his opinions in Shigarami Soshi and Mezamashigusa and Tsubouchi blowing the realist trumpet in his own periodical, Waseda Bungaku (Waseda Literature). The debate was made all the more thorny by the differing concepts each had of the central concept of riso; we can translate it freely today as “idea” or “ideal”, and as an expert in English literature (he was the first person to translate the complete works of Shakespeare into Japanese, and did such a good job of it that many modern translations do little more than update Tsubouchi`s first effort into more modern Japanese) it is likely that this is how Tsubouchi interpreted the word. However, riso was a very new word in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, very much open to interpretation, and Ogai saw it as embodying a much grander concept, the Hegelian concept of an Idee – a concept which has been variously rendered into English as “The absolute idea” or “absolute knowledge”, which clearly distinguishes it from the semantic limits Tsubouchi placed on the word. There is a great profusion of translations of this concept in the Meiji era; Nishi Amane, whom we have already encountered in this narrative, chose the Buddhist term kannen (meditative thought) to translate the English `Idea`, while Inoue Enryo coined riso, as used by Ogai and Tsubouchi, in his Tetsugaku Yoryo, “The Basics of Philosophy”. By the end of the Meiji era rinen (lit. “thought of principles”) was being used to describe the overarching Hegelian concept of Idee. A good history of Japanese thought in this period could certainly be written based entirely on changes in the words used to describe new concepts It was a time of such great change that even the words used in the great controversies of the age were not set in stone and had to be fixed by each participant as they saw fit, like two eighteenth century gentlemen having to make their own guns before they could participate in a duel on the heath at dawn.

In the last years of the 19^th century, Ogai continued to work on his translations, publishing his version of von Hartmann’s Die Deutsche Aesthetik seit Kant (German Aesthetics since Kant) among others, and continued his medical work on public hygiene, setting up a committee for public health with Aoyama Tanemichi (Aoyama cared for Ogai`s close friend from Munich, the artist Harada Naojiro, in the last year of his life) and publishing a book based on the committee`s research, Koshu Iji (On Public Health) in 1898. In 1899, Ogai was `promoted` to a medical army rank equivalent to Major-General. However this was very much a sideways promotion; Ogai`s superiors certainly did not see him as the model of a modern Major-General; rather, they saw his literary pursuits as detrimental to his work, and not fitting for an upstanding military man. He was sent to Kokura in Kyushu, around 600 miles from Tokyo, partly to cool his heels and think about what he had done, and partly to remove him from the literary circles and groups that he so energetically participated in while in the capital. Ogai himself referred to the period as his “Kokura exile”.

Again, he didn’t allow himself to be idle in this period, but his literary output was very limited. He used the period to finish a translation of Clausewitz’s “On War” which he had previously lectured on in Berlin, which was then used across the Japanese army. One of his duties was to oversee the medical tests carried out on army draftees across Western Japan, and he took the opportunity to visit many of the great historical sites of the regions as he travelled. This experience would serve him well when he became director of the national museum in Tokyo in his later years. It was also an important time for his personal relations; he made two close friends in Kokura, Fukuma Hiroshi and Ankokuji, who would later appear in his short story Futari no tomo (Two Friends). In 1900, his mother arranged his second marriage, to Araki Shige, a 23 year old lady 18 years Ogai`s junior, and when Ogai was made the chief medical officer of the first division of the Imperial Japanese Army in 1902, effectively ending his period of exile, they moved back to Tokyo together. In 1903 his second child Mari was born (all of Ogai`s children were to have names derived from German; Otto, Mari, Ann and Fritz), and he released a translation of the Spanish philosopher Baltasar Gracian`s Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (The Art of Worldy Wisdom) through the German version of the same work. However any further literary progress was halted by the Russo-Japanese war which began in February 1904 over the two empires` competing ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. This conflict was to be both the peak and the nadir of Ogai`s medical career, the scene of both his greatest triumph and his greatest failure, where he would be responsible for both saving the lives and causing the deaths of many thousands of soldiers. We`ll look at this next time.

Mori Ogai: The Demands of the Day, Part Three

Ogai found love in Berlin, but his original purpose for going to the great capital was to meet with Kitasato Shibasaburo, a physician studying in Berlin under Robert Koch, the famed microbiologist. Kitasato cut an impressive figure, tall, rotund and possessed of a powerful voice; when he later founded the Institute for the Study of Infectious Disease at Keio University his students affectionately nicknamed him Donner Sensei, or `Thunder teacher`. It is instructive that even into the twentieth century German was still so prevalent as the language of medical instruction that students used it as a humorous nickname for their rambunctious professor.

Ogai mst have impressed, for Kitasato soon introduced him to Dr. Koch. Koch was a brilliant scientist who isolated the causative microbes behind some pretty nasty diseases; tuberculosis, cholera and anthrax. He would later win the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1905 and became known as one of the founders of the discipline of microbiology along with Louis Pasteur. In short, Ogai could not have wished for a more qualified mentor. Koch was actually a rival to some extent of his former mentor Pettenkofer, as they disagreed fiercely over the mode of transmission of microbial diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis. Koch believed in the contagion theory, which stated that microbes were passed from person to person by transmission through human contact or the spread of the disease through media such as water or food.

Meanwhile, Pettenkofer adhered to the miasmic theory of disease which held that diseases were transmitted through bad air, despite Dr. John Snow`s landmark work in disproving that theory during a cholera outbreak in London more than thirty years earlier; the miasma theory was so entrenched that Snow`s eminently sensible conclusions were widely ignored. Ironically, Pettenkofer`s laudable efforts to have Munich equipped with a proper sewage system worked brilliantly at reducing cases of cholera not because it prevented miasma, as he presumed, but because it removed the contaminated water that was spreading the disease, thus doing much more to prove Koch`s theory right than his own. Before long the contagion theory was proven beyond doubt, but we cannot deny the good work Pettenkofer did, even if it was under a misguided scientific theory. It is lucky that both Kitasato Shibasaburo and Ogai himself came more strongly under the influence of Koch than Pettenkofer, or the history and efficacy of bacterial medicine in Japan might have been very different.

Koch invited Ogai to enter his Institute for Study of Infectious Diseases (it really was `his` institute, as it was renamed and still exists as the Robert Koch Institute), and Ogai gladly accepted and threw himself into the comparatively new discipline of microbiology.

In general Ogai`s time in Berlin might be considered a more `public` period; like Dresden, he threw himself into the cultural life of the capital, and also came to the notice of his superiors in the Japanese government, which would pave the way for his later successful career in military medicine. In September, he went to the 4<sup>th</sup> World Convention of the International Red Cross in Karlsruhe, accompanying the Japanese delegate Ishiguro Tadanao as his interpreter. He then continued on to Vienna, where the World Medical Hygiene convention was being held. These may sound like dull assemblies of dry doctors and crusty scientists, but in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century hygiene was the single most transformative aspect of medicine one could study. Microscopic life had been proven by the work of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke in the 17<sup>th</sup> century, but scientists had not yet established the connection between the life they saw proliferating through their microscopes and the diseases which swept through the ever-growing cities. Joseph Lister`s use of antiseptics in surgery and Florence Nightingale`s work in the Crimean War had proven a link between cleanliness and improved public health, but the link was as yet improperly understood, and it was this link that the likes of Koch, Pettenkofer, Kitasato and Ogai were researching. Hygiene in the late 19^th century was as hot a topic as stem cell research or genome mapping is in the early 21^st. It is fascinating to consider that man had invented the electric light and the telephone before discovering the apparently axiomatic fact that germs kill people.

Ogai`s participation in the Hygiene convention was highly rated by Ishiguro, who then held the post of Surgeon General in the Japanese army, the highest medical position in the army and one that Ogai would later fill himself. Ishiguro was impressed by Ogai`s fluency in German, and he invited Ogai to give a German speech at a New Year Party to be held by the Yamatokai in Berlin on January 1^st 1888. The Yamatokai was an influential group, formed to improve contacts between high level bureaucrats in Germany and Japan, so there a number of important eminences would be listening to Ogai`s speech. The Japanese ambassador to Germany and future Prime Minister Saionji Kinmochi commended the speech highly; Kinmochi was a fascinating character who spoke French and German fluently and was the first Japanese to study at the Sorbonne. His Paris days were abruptly cut short when during the Paris Commune of 1871, he had to flee for his life to Switzerland after his tutor was shot in a street battle they stumbled upon during a post-prandial stroll. He would later become the most liberal voice in the militarist governments that characterized Japan in the 1930`s, courageously promoting peace despite being well on in his eighties and suffering repeated assassination attempts.

Another attendee at the lecture was Tamura Iyozo, a senior lieutenant in the Japanese army who studied at Berlin Military University before being embedded in a German army unit to take part in manoevures outside Dresden; Tamura seems to have been the model for Kobayashi, the main character in the third of Ogai`s early novels, Fumizukai (The Courier), who is similarly embedded in a German army brigade. After hearing Ogai`s address, Tamura asked him to give a lecture on Carl von Clausewitz`s famous military treatise `On War`, which Ogai delivered on 18<sup>th</sup> January. This is again proof, as if it were needed, of Ogai`s huge capacity for research and retention; as well as following his usual schedule of research at the University, he read a dense military tome in German and absorbed its contents to such an extent that within two weeks he was able to give an hour long lecture on its contents, and take part in a question and answer session conducted in both German and Japanese, to great acclaim from Tamura himself and other audience members.

In the spring of 1888 Ogai also managed to join a German army medical team, giving him direct experience of the German practice of military medicine for the first time. By now, the theory and practice of military medicine were beginning to come together for Ogai, and this may have been behind his decision to return to Japan in order to collate his ideas and put them into practice in the Japanese army; the student abroad would become the teacher at home. So it was that after finishing his stint with the German forces, he accompanied Ishiguro Tadanao from Berlin on July 5^th, 1888, and back to Marseilles by way of London and Paris. Ishiguro had already promised Ogai employment at the Japan Military Medicine College in Tokyo, and later also employed him at the Japan Medical University, also in Tokyo. We can see strong similarities between Ishiguro and the character of Count Amakata in The Dancing Girl, Ogai`s first novel. Ogai`s last glimpse of Europe came on July 29^th, 1888 when his ship left Marseilles for Yokohama.

Once back in Japan, Ogai continued his usual ferocious workload, and his literary and medical careers blossomed simultaneously; by early 1889 he was employed in four teaching posts, for as well as the medical roles that Ishiguro secured for him, he also taught classes in fine arts at both Tokyo Fine Arts University, then as now Japan`s most prestigious art university, and also at Keio University, set up in 1858 by Fukuzawa Yukichi to promote Western learning. He also threw himself into a literary career. It is as though he was attempting to encompass, through fiction, translation or poetry, all he found in Germany that had touched him and so stimulated his own creativity. In 1889 alone he founded a literary group called the Shinseisha (New Voice Society) which produced a literary magazine called Shigarami Soshi which he edited until 1894 when the Sino-Japanese war broke out. His first published work was released in the popular Kokumin no tomo (People`s Friend) magazine; called Omokage (Vestiges), it was a translation into Japanese of 17 poems from the pens of Byron, Shakespeare, Goethe and Heine among others. He also found time to get married; in July 1889 he was wed to Akamatsu Toshiko, daughter of the famed admiral Akamatsu Noriyoshi.

However, we must turn to a previous love affair to find the inspiration behind Ogai`s first work of fiction, a romantic novella called The Dancing Girl.

Published in early 1890, The Dancing Girl tells the story of the love affair between a Japanese man and a German woman, the eponymous Dancing Girl. The Japanese character is called Ota Toyotaro, but the events of the novel are semi autobiographical at the very least; just how closely the events in the story mirror Ogai`s actual experience has been a matter of lively debate for scholars both Japanese and Western for many decades.

In the story, Ota is a law student sent to Germany to study European legal matters. He enrols at Berlin University, and one day encounters the weeping Elise on his way home. She has been dismissed from the theatre group she dances with, and has no money to bury her father who has recently died. Ota helps Elise, giving her some money for funeral expenses, and a relationship forms between them. Ota is forced to leave the university and loses his stipend as a result, but stays in Germany to be with Elise. His friend, Aizawa Kenkichi, tries to help Ota by introducing him to Count Amakata, a high ranking diplomat. Ota accompanies Amakata on a trip to Russia as an interpreter, and on returning to Berlin Amakata offers Ota the chance to return with him to Japan and work for him there. Ota is torn between his love for Elise and his duty to work for his country, but eventually agrees to return to Japan when he is struck by the thought that if he doesn`t go with the Count, he may lose the chance of ever returning home. When he tells Elise of his decision, she is sent into hysteria, and becomes `as simpleminded as a child`. The novella ends with Ota leaving her mother a small sum to look after Elise, and the child she is carrying, Ota`s child. If a more emotionally torrid story has ever been written, I do not know of it.

It stands as a heart-rending story. Ogai uses his medical knowledge to great effect when describing the psychological breakdown of himself and Elise, which is strikingly modern. He delves relentlessly into Ota`s psyche, and in so doing wrote the first truly readable `I-Novel`. I-Novels were a new style of Japanese literature which entered deeply into the thoughts and emotions of the protagonist, exploring their own feelings far more than the events which drive the story. The first example of this kind of story is generally considered to be Ukigumo (Floating Clouds), by Futabatei Shimei. This may be something akin to blasphemy in the field of Japanese literature, but reading Ukigumo, in the original or in translation, is a hard slog. The main character (there are only four) is an unsympathetic chap who seesaws between emotions apparently without rhyme or reason, and ends up in a lather of indecision, unable to do anything about either his lost job or his lost lover. Like many transformative works of art, it paved the way for what came but was not a classic example of it.

Maihime is a much more readable prospect in comparison. In Japanese, the writing style is old fashioned, but the deep characterization is not allowed to impede a fast moving plot, and we feel considerable sympathy both for the dilemma of the protagonist and the cruel treatment Elise endures at his hand.

The bare bones of the story are true. In real life, the girl with whom Ogai had an affair actually followed him to Japan; no small matter for a young woman on her own, of uncertain means, in 1888. She only stayed for a month after completing her two month journey, however, so her reunion with Ogai cannot have gone well. After she left in October, she seems never to have had contact with Ogai again, and remains only as various characters in Ogai`s novels, of whom Elise in The Dancing Girl is the most explicitly portrayed.
An interesting postscript to Elise`s story is that a Japanese writer residing in Berlin, Ichika Rokuso, believes she may have found evidence of who the real Elise was. Basing her search on her name in the novel, Elise Weigert, and other details such as her address and profession, Rokuso believes she has found a record of her, one “Elise Wiegert” in a list of baptized believers kept at a church in Berlin. The full story can be found here as reported in the Asahi newspaper.
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105240136.html

Without Elise, we can never know if Ogai would have embarked on such an amazing literary career. Perhaps he would have devoted himself to medicine and the army, though his prolific works suggest that the urge to write was well entrenched for many years before his fateful Berlin sojourn. We shall see how that career developed next time, with portions of creative genius interspersed with decades of silence. As ever, Ogai will take neither the easy nor the predictable path.

Mori Ogai: The Demands of the Day, Part 2

At the age of 19, Mori Ogai was a qualified doctor, fluent in four languages, with the intelligence and energy to make the world seem very much like his oyster. However, his initial choice of future career was denied him by the inflexibility of Tokyo University`s rulebook; he was deemed too young to enter their research department, despite being patently bright enough to withstand any academic rigours that postgraduate study could hurl his way. He joined his father`s medical practice, but harboured hopes of continuing his study in Germany, which as we saw last week was the world leader in medical science at that time.

Luckily, during his academic career he had made some influential friends. His classmate Koike Masanao wrote a letter of recommendation to the deputy chief of the Army Medical Corps asking him to employ Ogai in a position more suited to his prodigious talents than the mundane demands of his father`s suburban surgery. Koike`s intervention saw Ogai assigned to the Tokyo Military Hospital as a deputy medical officer. He remained a regular visitor to the Nishi household that he had stayed in as a younger boy, and he would often stay there for long periods drawing landscapes in the garden. His sister Kimiko later recalled that he seemed most at ease at these times, and would often sing quietly to himself as he sketched away.

Six months after enlisting, Ogai was summoned with seven colleagues back to Tokyo University, to form a research group devoted specifically to military medicine. They studied the advances in this field of the Prussian army, dominant in Europe since its victory over France in 1871 in the Franco-Prussian War, and in less than a year presented a twelve volume paper to the Chief of the Medical Staff covering all aspects of military hygiene, diet, and medicine as well as incorporating detailed examinations of the funeral arrangements of dead soldiers during wartime, military accounting practices and the compensation of soldiers injured in the line of duty. The Chief of the Medical Staff, impressed and perhaps a little intimidated at the mountain of manuscript, recommended Ogai to continue his study in the areas of military hygiene and bacteriology. To this end he was ordered to go to Germany in the summer of 1884 with the wonderfully vague instructions to learn what he could about those subjects at whatever universities or establishments he saw fit.

The voyage to Germany

Ogai left Yokohama in August 1884, and arrived in Marseille the same October, upon which he travelled to Leipzig and began his studies at the university. The effect of his time in Germany cannot be underestimated. He threw himself into European literature, devouring not just the German classics by Goethe and Schiller, but also the canon of great European literature, reading works by authors as diverse as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov in German translation, giving this the same disciplined attention as he lavished on his medical studies. Life was not all about work academic slog, though. He also enjoyed the cultural freedoms available in Germany, taking part in the evening round of dances, theatre and opera, and moved among the highest levels of society. It was in this period perhaps that Ogai developed what would become a central tenet of his writings; that of being a detached bystander. While he enjoyed participating in the cultural life, he also knew he would never be a true member of the German elite, and responded by keeping a certain distance from proceedings that he would bring into many of his novels; throughout, he observes and participates in events but preserves the ability to study them and himself with a characteristic detachment; a position he was later to refer to as that of the bystander. He also naturally grew much more aware of himself as a Japanese, a theme which later worked its way into his literature in the same way as it did with his Meiji contemporaries; Futabatei Shimei, Natsume Soseki and Nagai Kafu. In Ogai`s case this manifested itself initially in a fierce polemical argument carried out in German newspapers with the renowned geologist Heinrich Naumann.

The Naumann debate

Naumann had spent ten years in Japan, set up the Geology Department at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce (a year before the founding of the United States Geological Survey) and travelled ten thousand kilometres across every prefecture in Japan in order to create the first geological survey of the archipelago. On his return to Germany, he wrote a number of articles in the Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper critical of the wholesale, unthinking embrace of new Western ideas in Japan, and the consequent decline in traditional Japanese culture. He characterized it as a backward, barbarous place, not yet advanced enough to fully understand European civilization, let alone adopt it as their own. Ogai responded forcefully to this in the press, stating that Japan was no more backward than most of Europe, and in some areas of public life was much more advanced. He pointed out the relative peace and stability that had reigned in Japan for the past 300 years, compared to the religious and political wars that had torn countries asunder in Europe over the same period.

However, Naumann`s other argument that Japan was a mere unthinking mimic of Japanese society was harder to refute; after all, Ogai had been sent to Germany for the sole purpose of absorbing Western knowledge, and Naumann had been employed in Tokyo on a handsome salary for the same reason. From then on, Ogai became ever watchful of the way Japan imported foreign ideas and culture, and this would also inform a great deal of his later work, notably the short stories Moso (Daydreams) and Fushinchu (Under Reconstruction). Upon his return to Japan he would be sternly critical of what he saw as superficial Westernization and insisted upon respect for tradition. As he wrote in Moso, Japan needed to get `back to the roots and off with borrowed clothes`. The Naumann debates gave Ogai both the focus and the impetus for much of his fiction.

This was one of the major themes in both Ogai`s work, and Meiji literature in general; it could scarcely be otherwise given the great change occurring throughout. However, it would take Ogai some years to collect his thoughts on the issue and set it down in writing. He wrote comparatively little while he was in Germany, though he did keep a diary throughout the period which provides much of the detail we have about his life in this foreign land; sadly the diary is only available in the original Japanese (Doitsu nikki) and German translation. In Leipzig between November 1884 and October 1885, he kept a comparatively low profile, lodging in an apartment on Liebigstrasse owned by one Frau Vogel near the university and researching medical hygiene under the supervision of Dr Franz Hoffman at the Leipzig University Hospital. He took occasional trips to Dresden with a German friend some sixty miles away, and recorded in his diary his wonder at the city`s artistic and architectural heritage. When his year`s study came to an end in Leipzig, these trips must have influenced him for it was Dresden where he was to spend the coming months, and Dresden where he was to transform from a diligent but penurious student into a young, confident man about town who reveled in the hedonism of high society.

In addition to beginning his research Ogai was invited to participate in a four month long conference on military medicine which had King John of Saxony as its nominal chairman. The conference was attended by four star generals, highly respected doctors and aristocrats alike, and Ogai recorded understandable astonishment in his diary at the parade of aigretted spiked helmets and lavishly medallioned uniforms which passed for standard garb in this rarefied social atmosphere. Ogai was initially helped through the complex etiquette of this outpost of the German royal court by Wilhelm Roth, the surgeon general of Saxony, and a fellow student and army surgeon called Keirke, whose first name is sadly unrecorded; we do know however that he excelled at languages, and picked up Japanese steadily as his acquaintance with Ogai deepened. Ogai came to be a frequent attendee at dances and plays at the royal court, and he must have cut a very rare dash as a cultured Japanese man in the intimate circles of Saxony nobility. An anecdote from Ogai`s diary illustrates how unfamiliar the Japanese were to Germans at this time; he recounts the tale of a Japanese friend hiking in the Saxony countryside who stayed in an inn on the Elbe river. In the morning, the landlord expressed surprised that the bedsheets had not been stained yellow by the guest`s oriental skin.

Art and Study in Dresden and Munich

In Dresden Ogai also spent a great deal of time watching manoeuvres at Albertstadt, the huge town garrison. He took detailed notes on their procedures for evacuating injured soldiers from the battlefield, which he would later apply to great effect in the Russo-Japanese war. He also passed many hours in the company of Raphael`s Sistina Madonna and many other masterpieces in the Alte Meister, Dresden`s major art collection, and would have doubtless been inspired by the rococo and baroque city centre; a collection of buildings that was widely known as The Jewel Box until the Royal Air Force paid a visit in February 1945.

After the medical conference finished, it was time for Ogai to resume his peripatetic lifestyle and he moved on to Munich, the capital of Bavaria in March 1886. In his diary he recorded the difference between the militarism of Dresden and the artistic atmosphere that prevailed in southern Germany under the unstable but undeniably art-friendly King Ludwig, who famously built Neuschwanstein, the epitome of fairytale European castles. Ogai went to Munich to take up a position as researcher under the famed professor of chemistry and hygiene, Max von Pettenkofer. Pettenkofer was a highly competent and committed (perhaps too committed) scientist who once tried to test a theory about the transmission of cholera by self-administering the disease and studying the results until he became too ill to sit at his desk and write. He had also, more sensibly, made great advances in public health by advocating the construction of a modern sewage system throughout Munich. Ogai may have been brilliant, but he was also extremely lucky to have had some of the finest medical minds in Germany, like Pettenkofer, as teachers and mentors throughout his time there.

Harada Naojiro; friend and inspiration

Ogai`s sojourn in the Bavarian capital was as much an artistic experience as an academic one. There were more Japanese in Munich than Dresden or Leipzig, and he became friends with the painter Harada Naojiro and politician and noble Konoe Atsumaro. Harada in particular became a close friend, and when he passed away in 1889 it was Ogai who wrote a moving eulogy for him in the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun. It appears that Harada represented for Ogai a life freed from obligation to country or family and devoted solely to the creation of art. Harada certainly had a naivety with regard to worldly matters; rather than cultivate ties with the rich and noble in the hope of securing a lucrative portrait commission, he would wait for them to find him, and on the rare occasions they did he would not even set a fee for the portrait, but allowed his sitter to pay what they thought it was worth. So it was that with less artistically minded clients he would often recoup little more than the cost of materials involved.

Ogai would later portray Harada in one of his earliest short stories, Utakata no ki (A Sad Tale), where he appears in the thinnest of disguises as the Japanese artist Kose. The story links the lives of two artistic idealists, Marie and mad King Ludwig, and draws them into tragedy together, with Kose forced to observe helplessly, the prototype of Ogai`s `bystander` , foreshadowing the kind of figure who will come to play such a central role in many of the stories he would write two decades later. The subject matter, too, about art and spiritual loss, shows Harada`s influence clearly; without him, the story would likely not exist.
Another character in the same story is the German artist Julius Exter; Ogai does not even bother to veil his identity with a pseudonym. It turned out that Ogai used Exter`s real name because when the story was first published in 1890, he did not expect that anyone would know the young artist`s name, especially in Japan. Exter, however, did go on to become a professional and respected painter in later life, and his beautiful full length portrait of Harada of 1884 today hangs proudly in a Munich collection.

Ogai`s next and final stop in Germany was Berlin, where he arrived in April 1887. The capital was to become a turning point for both his literary career; it was here that he embarked on the torrid love affair which would be the inspiration for his first short story, Maihime (The Dancing Girl). We shall come to this turning point in Ogai`s life next week, and see how it formed the crucial spark of inspiration for him to write his first novel and change the course of Japanese literature and the language itself after his return to Japan in 1888. Don`t miss the next exciting episode!

Mori Ogai: The Demands of the Day, Part One

Between 1850 and 1900, Japan underwent a change as drastic as any nation has undergone in half a century anywhere on earth. The insular nation of 1850 was rocked first by its forced opening to the west at the hands of the American navy in 1853, then by the internal struggles that led to the Shogun relinquishing power in favour of the emperor in 1868. In the years that followed, every aspect of the state changed as a result of the tsunami of foreign ideas that washed over the nation. The shogunate dictatorship became a constitutional monarchy. The country itself got bigger, with Hokkaido and Okinawa (then called the Kingdom of Ryukyu) incorporated fully into the nation for the first time, and the capital city moved 400 kilometres east from Kyoto to Tokyo. Railways, baseball, sociology and the waltz were just a few of the things introduced to Japan in the 1870s alone.

With this great transformation came a slew of great men in all the fields and disciplines you can think of. It`s hardly a scientific measure, but a nation`s banknotes are generally reserved for its worthiest of worthies, and all the people I can think of who have ever been on a Japanese banknote; Fukuzawa Yukichi, Higuchi Ichiyo, Nitobe Inazo, Ito Hirobumi, Natsume Soseki, Iwakura Tomomi and the rest, were active during the reign of the Meiji Emperor from 1868 to 1912.

Mori Ogai was unique even among this embarrassment of notables for rising to the top of two entirely different fields, medicine and literature, during this golden age. To put into context how remarkable this is, imagine if Shakespeare had found time to discover the circulation of the blood between writing sonnets, or if Alexander Fleming had picked up a Nobel Prize for literature before turning to biology and discovering penicillin. He bestrode old and new, east and west, art and science like none other in the Meiji period. This is a short outline of his life, split into parts to spare the reader the effort of ploughing through this literary atrocity in a single sitting.

Mori Ogai (his real birth name was Mori Rintaro, but we will stick with Ogai throughout to avoid confusion) was born into a wealthy family in Tsuwano in south-western Japan in 1862. His father was the physician to the daimyo (chief) of Tsuwano domain and as the eldest son Ogai was expected to become physician in turn, these being hereditary posts in feudal Japan. He was therefore given the best education that could be bestowed upon a boy in such a rural area of Japan; from the age of four he began studying classical Chinese texts and the work of Confucius, and from six he began the study of Dutch under the tutelage of his father; Dutch had long been the only language in which one could seriously undertake a study of medicine in Japan. The first western physician to teach in Japan was the German doctor Franz Philipp von Siebold in the early nineteenth century, but he taught solely in Dutch, and all the early medical books upon which Western medicine was based at this time were from the Netherlands. They entered Japan through the Dutch trading outpost in Nagasaki and were devoured by early converts to the new Western learning. Indeed, in this period the Japanese word for Western learning was rangaku; literally, Dutch study.

The house where he was born still stands in Tsuwano today at the southern end of the picturesque valley which envelops the town, and the modern visitor can easily imagine that Ogai`s early years must have been pleasant, if academically rigorous, in this quiet castle town. It is a very peaceful place, where carp swim in streams flowing beside the main streets, and even the ubiquitous Japanese telegraph pole seems to have been banished, giving the town a nebulous charm seldom seen elsewhere. It was no larger in Ogai`s day than it is now; the valley sides have always prevented expansion and trapped the town in a pleasantly soporific state of calm. Judging by his wish to be buried in a simple tomb near his birthplace Ogai seems to have liked the town; his descriptions of it in the early chapters of the semi-autobiographical novelVita Sexualis describe to the same bucolic quietude that the modern visitor encounters today. In the novel, he recalls that `red camellias could be viewed beyond the wall surrounding our house, and next to the rice granary citrus plants sprouted their pale green buds`.

Just like the subject of the last biography on this blog, Jokichi Takamine, the young Ogai showed great promise in both his linguistic and scientific studies and he was perhaps lucky to have a father who encouraged his son to follow the Western canon of medicine; daimyo physicians had used traditional Japanese medicine (kanpo) for generations, and not all were as perspicacious as the elder Mori in realizing the importance of the new techniques.

Ogai`s study of Dutch ignited a lifelong interest in the West, and far from being weighed down by such a heavy load of learning at such a young age, he seems to have relished it. Records from the Yorokan academy that he attended show that the tutors there estimated him to have the intelligence of a fifteen year old at the age of just nine, and his father is said to have bemoaned the fact that after just three years of study Ogai was just as proficient at Dutch as he was after a lifetime. Recognizing the boy`s precocious talent, his father took him to the new capital of Tokyo at the age of ten in order to give him access to the higher education that was unavailable out in the sticks.

Once in Tokyo it soon became clear that German, not Dutch, was now the language required to pursue the study of medicine. The nation`s centre of gravity had shifted eastwards (Tokyo literally means `Eastern Capital`), and with it the language of medicine shifted from the Dutch influence in Nagasaki into the hands of the groups of German doctors who had begun to gather, practice and teach in Tokyo. German, not Dutch, was now the language du jour of the medical profession. Far from being discouraged, Ogai seems to have welcomed the development as a favourable opportunity to learn another tongue.

Even today the German influence is plain to see in the number of Japanese words related to medicine which come from German; mesu for scalpel, karute for a medical record and gibuzu for a cast to give just a few examples. They also borrowed the German word for a ski slope, Gelände, and a sleeping bag, Schlafsack. All this gives the strong impression that the Germans in Japan were all outdoorsy medical types who liked nothing better than setting up a hospital and then going to enjoy healthful pursuits in the mountains. The Dutch, by contrast, furnished Japanese with its words for alcohol, beer, coffee, dance and holiday, and presumably enjoyed their time in Japan far more than the Germans.

Ogai entered the Shinbun Gakusha, a famous German language academy attended by many members of the nobility. Due to the difficulty of commuting to the school from his father`s house across town, he lived for four years with Nishi Amane, an old family friend from Tsuwano. Nishi was a philosopher and scholar who, among other achievements, was the man who introduced Western philosophy and aesthetics into Japan (as well as the Japanese words for these, tetsugaku and bigaku) and the first recorded Japanese freemason. Ogai`s later works are deeply philosophical, and it is interesting to speculate that his interest in this area might have first been stimulated by hearing the discussions of Nishi and his fellow academics at the family home. Nishi was deeply impressed by his young lodger, and it is speculated that he may well have helped to pay the high school fees necessary at the Shinbun Gakusha, as they would have otherwise taken well over half of his father`s salary. The links between the two families would be severed acrimoniously a decade later, but living with Nishi must have been one of the most exhilarating intellectual experiences of Ogai`s formative years.
Armed with his new knowledge of German and what must have been staggering self-belief, the following year at the age of eleven Ogai lied his way onto the preparatory course at the Tokyo School of Medicine (now the medical department of Tokyo University) by pretending to be thirteen, the youngest age at which they would consider taking a student. His precocity apparently knowing no bounds, he passed up the grades as a medical student into the medical program proper, by which time all the lessons were taught solely in German. He also found time to keep diaries in German and Dutch, read the latest literature ferociously, and took extra classes in classical Chinese poetry. Indeed, his skills in Chinese were so great that he would often write lecture notes in Chinese, and translated stories and poems from Japanese and German into Chinese for his own amusement. To call him precocious is something of an understatement.

He graduated a fully qualified doctor at the age of nineteen on July 4th 1881, making him to this day the youngest ever medical graduate of Tokyo University, a record unlikely ever to be broken. We will leave him, then, hurling his mortarboard skywards on this proud day; next week we will take him into the army, to Germany, and to love, literature and scandal.