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The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 8 | Issue 37 | Number 5 | Article ID 3411 | Sep 13, 2010 1 A Dialogue With The Japanese People--The Life and Work of Inoue Hisashi  日本人との対話−−井上ひさしの仕事と人生 Roger Pulvers A Dialogue With The Japanese People--The Life and Work of Inoue Hisashi Roger Pulvers "One person can do a little. Two can do a little more. Three people together can do even more for others." Inoue Hisashi made this simple statement on Japanese television on 7 October 2004 from Bologna, Italy, a city with a radical political tradition that he had been fascinated by for 30 years. To my mind, it symbolizes his motivation for his writing and his faith in the goodness of human nature. Inoue, Japan’s most brilliant and popular modern playwright was, above all, a humanist. Where did his inspiration come from? “I will never get out of my mind,” he told me back in the mid-1970s, “the suffering of the people of Tohoku who streamed into Tokyo for many decades before and after the war looking for work, uprooted and having to scrounge around for sustenance.” The primary theme running through his writing is the plight of the weak and their struggle to keep their head above water in a heartless society. He never let his gaze slip from society’s dispossessed. He strove to give the underdog the benefit of the doubt and the tools to rectify their helpless circumstances. “I want to show people who have little power the way to use their ingenuity alone in order to make their presence felt and gain some advantage in their misery,” he said to me. It is precisely these humanistic themes that run through his more than 60 plays and 40 novels. In addition to these, he published in excess of 50 books of essays and miscellany, virtually all of them permeated by a scholarly approach to subject. One more personal reminiscence, if I may. In the early 1980s, while working as literary editor at the Mainichi Daily News, I decided to translate and serialize his historical novel on the life of Luis Frois, the Portuguese missionary of the 16 th century, Waga Tomo Furoisu (My Friend Frois). (The translation was subsequently published by Inoue’s theatre company, Komatsuza.) This novel, needless to say, includes many references to the names of ships and the like, all of which were in katakana in the text. It was long before the era of the internet, when these things could be readily looked up. “I’m having trouble with the historical references,” I said to Inoue on the phone. “Could you send me a few of the books or whatever you used for research?” “Sure. I’ll get them out to you by courier,” he replied. A few days later a huge box of books was delivered to my home. Every volume had scores of lines highlighted. I phoned him again. “I received the books, and thank you so much.

A Dialogue With The Japanese People--The Life and Work of Inoue … · temperament and style as Matsuo Basho, Higuchi Ichiyo, Natsume Soseki, Miyazawa Kenji and Dazai Osamu to generals

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The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 8 | Issue 37 | Number 5 | Article ID 3411 | Sep 13, 2010

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A Dialogue With The Japanese People--The Life and Work ofInoue Hisashi  日本人との対話−−井上ひさしの仕事と人生 

Roger Pulvers

A Dialogue With The JapanesePeople--The Life and Work of InoueHisashi

Roger Pulvers

"One person can do a little. Two can do a littlemore. Three people together can do even morefor others."

Inoue Hisashi made this simple statement onJapanese television on 7 October 2004 fromBologna, Italy, a city with a radical politicaltradition that he had been fascinated by for 30years. To my mind, it symbolizes his motivationfor his writing and his faith in the goodness ofhuman nature. Inoue, Japan’s most brilliantand popular modern playwright was, above all,a humanist.

Where did his inspiration come from?

“I will never get out of my mind,” he told meback in the mid-1970s, “the suffering of thepeople of Tohoku who streamed into Tokyo formany decades before and after the war lookingfor work, uprooted and having to scroungearound for sustenance.”

The primary theme running through his writingis the plight of the weak and their struggle tokeep their head above water in a heartlesssociety. He never let his gaze slip fromsociety’s dispossessed. He strove to give theunderdog the benefit of the doubt and the toolsto rectify their helpless circumstances.

“I want to show people who have little powerthe way to use their ingenuity alone in order to

make their presence felt and gain someadvantage in their misery,” he said to me.

It is precisely these humanistic themes that runthrough his more than 60 plays and 40 novels. In addition to these, he published in excess of50 books of essays and miscellany, virtually allof them permeated by a scholarly approach tosubject.

One more personal reminiscence, if I may.

In the early 1980s, while working as literaryeditor at the Mainichi Daily News, I decided totranslate and serialize his historical novel onthe life of Luis Frois, the Portuguese missionaryof the 16th century, Waga Tomo Furoisu (MyFriend Frois) . (The translat ion wassubsequently published by Inoue’s theatrecompany, Komatsuza.) This novel, needless tosay, includes many references to the names ofships and the like, all of which were inkatakana in the text. It was long before the eraof the internet, when these things could bereadily looked up.

“I’m having trouble with the historicalreferences,” I said to Inoue on the phone. “Could you send me a few of the books orwhatever you used for research?”

“Sure. I’ll get them out to you by courier,” hereplied.

A few days later a huge box of books wasdelivered to my home. Every volume hadscores of lines highlighted. I phoned himagain.

“I received the books, and thank you so much.

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But, my God, did you really do such prodigiousresearch for the Frois novel?”

“Well,” he said, “I sent you only about one-thirdof what I used. Want the rest, too?”

“No, no! It’s enough. Thank you!”

Inoue, who loved books, established a librarycalled Chihitsudo, or “Late Writer’s Hall,” in hishometown, sending them a whopping 100,000volumes. Inoue was notorious for keepingdirectors, actors and publishers waiting for hisscripts and manuscripts (hence, “Late” Writer),due to the fact that he delved deeply intominute historical detail for every one of hisworks, and was generally unable to deliver ontime. He spent most days at home in his studyporing over books, often not going out of thehouse for weeks. He was essentially a shy andvery reserved man. He didn’t like partying. Hehad disdain for Japanese men who easilybecame inebriated and lost their inhibitions. (This disdain stemmed, in part, from hisaversion to the behaviour of his stepfather, aman, by his account, who became crude andviolent when he drank.)

Despi te the scrupulous at tent ion todetail—particularly in the kind of language aparticular character in a particular era orsetting would use—Inoue never lost sight of thebig picture. And the big picture for him was hisdialogue with the Japanese people over theirhistory, culture and future.

In his plays he took up the lives of famousJapanese people, from writers as disparate intemperament and style as Matsuo Basho,Higuchi Ichiyo, Natsume Soseki, MiyazawaKenji and Dazai Osamu to generals (NogiMaresuke) and monks (Dogen). These arewarts-and-all portraits. Inoue was intriguednot by those elements in their personalities andcharacter that set them apart from ordinarypeople, but rather those that bound them to thecommonplace. These characters, with theirquirks and foibles, resonated with audiences,

forming a human-based—as opposed to aconceptual, sociological or ideological—notionof what it means to be Japanese in our day andage.

This character-centred humanist approach setInoue apart from most of his contemporaries,such as Terayama Shuji and Kara Juro. Themoment I saw his play “Dogen no Boken” (TheAdventures of Dogen) in 1971, I was attractedto his ingenious use of language, his cuttinghumour and his radically critical take on thenarrow orthodoxies of Japanese culture. Andyet, Inoue was somehow left out of criticaldiscussions about the revolution that Japanesetheatre had undergone in the 1960s. Becausehis dramaturgy was ostensibly less iconoclasticthan that of the playwrights mentioned aboveand because he was, thanks in large part to thesoft humour in his works, reaching wideaudiences, he was not easy to categorize as an“underground” playwright.

“You are an amazing humorist,” I said to himwhen I first met him in December 1974.

“Thank you. But that’s not such a good thing inJapan. Japanese critics prefer very seriouswriters. They look down on humour.”

The critics long failed to see that lurkingbehind Inoue’s wonderful wordplay and theclever situation-comedy-like skits within hisplays was a slyly hidden and sharply honedblade aimed straight at the heart of ruthlessauthority. Ironically, now that he is gone, manypeople, looking over his entire body of work,have begun to see just how deftly he wieldedhis Juvenalian whip. Humour to Inoue wassatire; satire, a weapon in the hands of theweak.

Even the villains in his plays are treated withthe psychological respect he feels they, as fully-drawn characters, deserve. One of hisfavourite novels was Charles Dickens’ DavidCopperfield; and he shared with Dickens theastute inner depiction of evil, not only in its

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effects but also in its causes.

Inoue Hisashi was born on 17 November 1934in the small town of Komatsu, now Kawanishi,in Yamagata Prefecture. His father, whoaspired to be a writer, died when he was five.

“The only memory I have of my father,” he toldme, “was of him carrying me on his back as wewent into the subway at Ueno on a trip toTokyo.”

His mother sent him off to board in Sendai at aschool run by the Catholic order of the De LaSalle Brothers. From there, armed with arecommendation from the brothers, he enteredSophia University in Tokyo. But he then wasfar from the studious person he turned out tobe, spending more time—and learningmore?—at the Furansuza, the vaudeville FranceTheatre in Asakusa, where he cut his teeth onwriting dialogue for the actors. The trendyareas of Shibuya, where Terayama had set uphis Tenjo Sajiki Theater, and Shinjuku, whereKara Juro was pitching his red tent, were theseminaries of the new theatre. But for Inoue,Asakusa, with its shitamachi, or low-city,culture was homeground. It was also the areaof the city where many of the uprooted ofTohoku had drifted to and remained.

His initial popularity came from being co-author of scripts on the children’s televisionshow, “Hyokkori Hyotanjima,” set on an islandof the same name, which ran on NHK televisionfrom 1964 to 1969. In 1969 Teatro Echomounted a production of his first play,“Nihonjin no Heso” (The Belly Button of theJapanese). This was a comedy with music andsongs, a genre that dominated his works for thestage from then on.

His early radio work must be noted, too. In1964, NHK produced his play about a smallregion in Tohoku called Kirikiri that declaresindependence f rom Japan, “Kir ik i r iDokuritsusu” (Kirikiri Goes Independent). Seventeen years later, in 1981, he published

this as a novel that quickly became a bestseller. Again we can see in this book Inoue’sapproach to satire. The residents of Kirikirispeak their thick version of the Tohoku dialect. This novel is an attack on the centralizedculture of Tokyo imposed on people all aroundJapan. It is Inoue’s bittersweet revenge struckin the name of all of those poverty-strickenpeople compelled to leave their Tohoku homein search of a decent living in the nation’scapital.

In the 1990s, Inoue began to turn his vision inthe direction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Inthe introduction to the published version of hisplay “Chichi to Kuraseba” (The Face of Jizo), hewrote,

"Hiroshima. Nagasaki. When these two arementioned, the following opinion is increasinglyheard. 'It's wrong to keep acting as if theJapanese were victims. The Japanese were thevictimizers at the time in what they did in Asia.' The second sentence is certainly on the mark.The Japanese were the perpetrators of wrongthroughout Asia. But as for the first sentence, Iremain adamant that this is not the case. Thisis because I believe that those two atomicbombs were dropped not only on the Japanesebut on all humankind."

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Face of Jizo in a 2010 performance.

Father (Tada Toshi) and daughter (Kato Kay).

With this statement, he turns the tragedies ofHiroshima and Nagasaki into the tragedy ofJapan, transforming that, in turn, into a tragedyfor all humankind. When he died, he wasplanning a similar drama set in Nagasaki.

In the months before he died on 9 April 2010,he was working on a play set in Okinawa. Hesaid, “We Japanese must come to terms withwhat happened in Okinawa during the war andwhat Okinawa represents for us today.”

I saw him for the last time on 3 October 2009,at the opening of his play about the life anddeath of the proletarian writer, KobayashiTakiji, “Kumikyoku Gyakusatsu” (SuiteSlaughter).

“You look great,” I said.

“Really? I’m falling apart at the seams. Whoknows, Roger, maybe I’ll have another 10years, maybe more.”

As it turned out, a couple of weeks later he wasdiagnosed with the lung cancer that killed himsix months later.

There is an expression in Japanese about justsuch a person. It is yonin o motte kaegatai(There will not be another like him.).

The voice for reason, peace and hope that hesymbolized will project—if I may use a wordfrom the stage—far beyond the stage. If itmanages to cross over the oceans and to beheard by people in other countries, then mydear, dear gentle friend Inoue Hisashi willcome to represent the generous, open minded,kind hearted and peaceful face of this country.

What more could be asked of any writer?

Epilogue: Inoue Hisashi, Nature and “The

Water Letters”

In September 2010, The Japan P.E.N. Clubhosts the annual International PEN Congress,whose wide variety of lectures, readings andsymposia will feature guests from Japan andoverseas.

The theme of this year's congress of thewor ldwide assoc iat ion o f wr i ters i s"Environment and Literature" — specifically,the ways that "literature can express andportray the environment as something whichexerts such a controlling influence on humanlife."

This year marks the 75th anniversary of thefounding of The Japan P.E.N. Club, whose firstchairman was the father of Japanesenaturalism, the novelist Shimazaki Toson(1872-1943).

For the official opening on Sept. 26, thecongress is staging Inoue's play, "The WaterLetters," and copies of the work's English-language translation will be handed out toforeign participants and guests. (I should notehere that I have done the translation.)

The choice of "The Water Letters" is apt, notonly because it delivers a profound and movingstatement about human beings in their globalenvironment, but also because Inoue waspresident of The Japan P.E.N. Club from 2003to 2007. Yet although he was passionate aboutthe protection of our natural environment, thatdidn't become a major preoccupation of hisuntil relatively late in life.

Inoue began h is wr i t ing career as acommentator on purely Japanese matters, someof them relating to the Tohoku region ofnorthern Honshu from which he hailed. Hewrote dozens of plays and novels on historicalthemes, taking up famous people in history andilluminating the social and familial pressuresthat shaped their destinies. Though he traveledwidely around Japan, he made only a few trips

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overseas, the longest being a nearly six-monthstint in Canberra in 1976, where he researchedand wrote "Kiiroi Nezumi" ("The Yellow Rats"),a novel about Japanese prisoners of war inAustralia.

Inoue and Pulvers pore over a map ofAustralia in 1975 prior to the former's visit

to Australia

But Inoue, whom I had the privilege of knowingwell for more than 35 years — and in whosehome I lived for the better part of a year —was, curiously, not the sort of writer to bedescribed as an "internationalist." Heapproached human nature from a particular,provincial Japanese angle that shot sharpsideways glances and made pointed criticalstabs at the Japan represented by centralizedpower in Tokyo.

An indoors' man, Inoue was a dedicatedbookworm who read more voraciously thananyone I have ever known. He was a staunchchampion of Article 9 of the Constitution,according to which Japan renounced "the rightof belligerency" and also its right to maintainarmed forces for anything more than self-defense. In addition, in many conversations, heexplained to me his belief that Emperor Showa

should have taken personal responsibility forJapan's war crimes.

But Inoue, for most of his life, wasn't drawn tonature, the source of inspiration for so manywriters and poets throughout the ages. Instead,he immersed himself in the subject of howpeople interrelated with others. Yet I believethat, in the early 1990s, something began totransform him. Perhaps it was the collapse ofthe economic model of seemingly unendinggrowth that came with the burst of Japan'sbubble at that time; perhaps it was anincreasing awareness on his part that Japan didhave a part to play in international peace andthe ecology movement then coming to the fore.

However, throughout the 1990s, as Japancontinued to be stymied for solutions to itseconomic and social problems, Inoue becameincreasingly concerned about its place in theworldwide ecology movement. He premiered"The Water Letters" in his predominantly ruralhome prefecture of Yamagata in 2003 — adecision that also reflected his typical approachto universal problems as being local ones, too.

The play centers on a group of letters read tothe people of Yamagata, urging them, in theend, to link the fate of their own water withthat of the waters of the world.

The people reading letters about how wateraffects them are the following: A brother andsister in Uzbekistan who are forced to leavetheir village because the Aral Sea is drying up;an old man bemoaning "the endless stretch ofmud and the feeble flow" of his belovedColorado River in the United States; a 12-year-old Chinese boy who is scared because theYellow River "just vanishes away the closer itgets to the sea"; and a girl in Mexico Citywhose school is teetering on its foundationsbecause the government has been pumping uptoo much underground water for the city's 20million inhabitants.

In addition, theatergoers hear from a man who

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lives in the Maldives, an island state in theIndian Ocean that's threatened by rising sealevels; a woman in Venice researching thesinking of her city; two little children in Chadwho must walk 22 km a day to fetch and bringhome two pails of water from a well; and auniversity student in Paris who decries the tollthat acid rain is taking on the city's statues.

"What about Japan?" she asks the audience."Are the bronze statues of Yamagata alsocorroding away?"

In this way, Inoue links people in Japan withpeople around the world.

"Earth is the planet of water," he writes. "Ourplanet is blessed by water. We are given life byits powers. But more than that, we were bornof water and that 's why we are waterourselves."

In the mid-Edo Period (1603-1867), a scholarfrom the city of Sendai named HayashiShihei(1738-93), wrote, "The water of theSumida River (in Tokyo) is linked to the waterof the Thames" — succinctly stating, at thattime when Japan was a closed country, how, ifanything connects Japan to the world, it iswater.

Similarly, in "The Water Letters," a Japaneseaid worker in Afghanistan says, "The waterhere flows into the Kabul River and from thereinto the Indus River and then into the IndianOcean. Without a doubt, the water is carried inthe ocean currents to Japan."

With its references to global problems we allface this very day, "The Water Letters" carriesthe perfect message for a congress concernedwith environment and literature.

In his later years, Inoue was turning hisattention to the problems of the world. But hisfeet were forever planted in his nativeYamagata. "The Water Letters" are sent fromhim to Yamagata — and then, in a brilliantflash, back to whoever may be listening aroundthe world.

This essay appeared in “Japanese Book News,”Fall 2010, published by the Japan Foundation,with supplementary materials drawn from hisarticle in The Japan Times on September 12,2010.

Roger Pulvers is an American-born Australianauthor, playwright, theatre director andtranslator living in Japan. He has published 40books in Japanese and English and, in 2008,was the recipient of the Miyazawa Kenji Prize. In 2009 he was awarded Best Script Prize atthe Teheran International Film Festival for“Ashita e no Yuigon.” He is the translator ofKenji Miyazawa, Strong in the Rain: SelectedP o e m s(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1852247819/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20).

Recommended citation: Roger Pulvers, "ADialogue With The Japanese People--The Lifeand Work of Inoue Hisashi," The Asia-PacificJournal, 37-5-10, September 13, 2010.

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(http://www.amazon.com/dp/184467133X/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)

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