Japan
Kendo in Tokyo University
If you want to make it big in Japan, it is a very good idea to be the Emperor or failing that to have attended Todai - Tokyo University. Fortunately for me, one of my guides and interpreters was doing post-graduate medical studies there when I visited so I got a very personal grand tour which included an hour looking at medical specimens which gave me nightmares for weeks. One display was the tattooed skin of a long dead Yakuza. The Yakuza - Japanese gangsters - are big on tattooing. While watching this Kendo session - which is, in effect, practice sword fighting with bamboo swords, and appropriately fast, vicious, skilled and violent - I was reminded that a great uncle of mine had fought against the Japanese in World War II. At the time I was researching Rules Of The Hunt, the second Hugo Fitzduane novel.
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Traditional Japanese bath
Western baths are long and relatively flat. Japanese baths are vertical and more like barrels. I ran across this one in a house in Kamakura my guide Aki Nakata took me too and immediately realized it had a role to play in the story. The thing about such traditional baths is that they are heated by lighting a fire underneath them. Too much heat and you end up steamed, simmered and very dead. Not a nice way to go.
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Aki Nakata - one of my two Japanese guides
I don't speak a word of Japanese although by the end of my trip I was able to spend an evening with an entirely Japanese group and feel comfortable and have the sense of what was being said. Overall it was a difficult but immensely rewarding trip and no small reason for its success was Aki Nakata seen here with two friends as we went to research the kind of house a Japanese major Japanese industrialist might have lived in. Aki - a post grad medical student at Tokyo University - was a class act, a renaissance man. Truly accomplished. I was exceptionally lucky to meet him. On top of everything else, he was a martial arts expert.
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Memorial to the Hanged
The Japanese did not treat Allied prisoners of war well so there was a reckoning when the prisoner of war camps containing American, British, Australian and other Allied soldiers were liberated. Many Japanese guards were either shot or hanged out of hand without much due process. It was all too understandable. In comparison, the treatment of the Japanese by US occupying forces was relatively lenient and laid the ground work for the prosperous Japan of today. However, a small number of senior Japanese officers and civilians were tried and executed. What you see here is a memorial of their execution. The prison itself was torn down and a major development called Sun City built. Bizarre? The thought crossed my mind. But I must tell you I was received most graciously when I visited Sun city - which is featured, in fictional form, in Rules of the Hunt.
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Traditional Japanese dwelling
Japan as I am sure you know, was a closed society until US Commodore Perry and his 'Black Ships' in the mid nineteenth century forced Japan to open up to the West and trade - or be shelled. This was not quite so brutal as it sounds since Western shipwrecked sailors seeking succor as they stumbled ashore in Japan tended to be executed. In response to this 'gaijin' invasion, the Japanese traveled the World trying to catch up in technology and, as a byproduct, abandoned much of their traditional Japanese design and imported some truly ugly Western ideas. Be that as it may, this truly beautiful family dwelling pre-dates that period and it is as harmonious inside as from the exterior. I was especially interested because I lived in an Irish thatched cottage at the time. I loved my cottage and it served me well - but I would have swapped.
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