On the coronary heart of Tokyo’s Aoyama cemetery is a monument devoted by the town’s former governor, Shintaro Ishihara, to the overseas diplomats, consultants and advisers who helped to propel Japan into the fashionable age.
It’s a touching memorial that might really feel significantly extra honest if, simply earlier than its look, Ishihara had not threatened to dig up many of the foreigners’ stays and transfer them to cheaper plots elsewhere.
However this pressure of mischief was the trademark of a person who understood the powers of agenda-pushing and self-aggrandisement granted by working one of many world’s high cities. Ishihara was a nationalistic novelist-turned-politician who made brazenness, defiance and offence-giving an artwork kind. However he imprinted his character on the metropolis like none earlier than or since and his stint as Tokyo governor, between 1999 and 2012, reveals some uncomfortable truths concerning the metropolis.
Since Ishihara’s dying final week on the age of 89, Japanese media has dwelt closely on the phrases and deeds of a dragon who, whereas extremely efficient in banning diesel vehicles from the streets or declaring struggle on havoc-causing crows, appeared greatest fulfilled when respiration fireplace close to probably the most explosive kegs.
It’s “virtually against the law”, he as soon as informed an interviewer, for girls past childbearing age to proceed dwelling. French, he declared, in a lawsuit-provoking quip, mustn’t depend as a world language as a result of it renders the quantity 80 as “4 twenties”. The appalling lack of life and property within the 2011 earthquake, he concluded, was punishment for Japan’s egoism.
These have been simply the phrases. In maybe his most infamous gambit, Ishihara crafted a plan in 2012 whereby the Tokyo authorities would purchase, from a personal Japanese proprietor, a big a part of a disputed island chain generally known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.
Dread of the form of flag-waving stunts Ishihara may try as soon as Tokyo’s governorship prolonged to a important geostrategic maritime asset compelled Japan’s central authorities to purchase the islands itself. The acquisition plunged diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Beijing into a protracted, embittered silence.
To Japanese liberals, overseas residents and people satisfied of Ishihara’s harmful malevolence he was a deplorable and scary power. He made a straightforward cipher for broader worries about Japan’s worst propensities. Within the early 2000s, Ishihara drew up an order that made the taking part in of the nationwide anthem obligatory at ceremonies in Tokyo colleges, and punished lecturers who wouldn’t co-operate.
His three comfy re-elections have been prepared proof, to these searching for it, that for each celebrated drop of cool, progressive Japan there remained within the background a sea of unrepentant misogyny, xenophobia and nationalism.
But this view massively underestimates each Ishihara and his metropolis. Throughout his 13 years as governor, Japan’s nationwide politics blundered by 9 prime ministers from throughout the political spectrum. The capital’s repeated embrace of its governor throughout that turmoil expressed a craving for stability greater than an endorsement of his agenda.
On the identical time, Tokyo’s voters noticed Ishihara’s verbal outrages not as gaffes (within the sense of misspoken or misjudged clangers) however because the script of somebody who had thrillingly jettisoned the filters that restrain regular Japanese discourse. You didn’t should agree with something he mentioned (although many might need) to search out the mere saying of it deliciously subversive.
Tokyo additionally sensed that Ishihara’s defiance was greater than an act. In 1989, he co-wrote The Japan That Can Say No, with the founding father of Sony. The ebook was printed on the peak of the nation’s bubble and sought to articulate the assertiveness (significantly in the direction of the US) which, within the authors’ view, Japan had now earned. Ishihara grew to become governor of Tokyo on the finish of Japan’s first “misplaced decade”, when confidence was decrease and the zeal of a confirmed believer that rather more spectacular.
For all of his offended previous man rhetoric, there are large sensible legacies of his ambitions for the town and willingness to confront any obstacles to realize them. The 2020 Olympics have been, for higher or worse, an Ishihara mission. Much more lasting, although, is the battle he waged with the central authorities and US navy to be allowed to open the air above his metropolis, reworking Tokyo’s Haneda airport into a real worldwide hub and ending the capital’s lengthy and ludicrous reliance on the distant Narita.
Tokyo’s citizens embraced Ishihara for his boundary pushing and his refusal to bounce to anybody else’s tune. Japan’s present reflections on his life are a reminder of how a lot the place secretly adores a insurgent.
leo.lewis@ft.com
