Showa Stories

[Mulboyne]

This site (Japanese) is full of small pleasures. It has sections on each year of the Showa era with details of hit songs, the cost of daily items and brief summaries of some of the main news stories of the time. Japanese news archives are still quite rudimentary even for the Heisei era so it is only through sites like this one that we can get an online glimpse of some of the main talking points from earlier periods. This link, for instance, will take you to story summaries from the first four months of 1935 which happens to take in the death of Hachiko. The news snippet adds the interesting sidenote that the faithful hound managed to get a fox terrier called Debbie pregnant while he was waiting outside Shibuya station, which doesn't get quite so much coverage in the official histories.

Another story from January describes how an attendant at Nagoya became suspicious of three women travelling together in a sleeping car, not least because one was dressed as a man. On further investigation, the "man" turned out to be Fumiko Masuda, daughter of a well-known Osaka financier, with actress Eriko Saijo and also a "maid" who was a nurse from Kyoto. Masuda has seen Saijo on stage at the Shochiku theatre in Osaka the previous year. In December, she had sold some shares belonging to her mother and used the money to seek out Saijo. They spent some time together and the actress went as far as to engage the "maid" while they stayed at a Kyoto Hotel. Fearing such behaviour would see them discovered, Masuda sugested they travel by train where they were indeed unmasked. Less than a week later, Masuda had again cashed some of her mother's assets, fled the family home leaving a note asking that "no-one try to block my chance at happiness", and headed to Saijo's house in Yoyogi, Tokyo. From there, at the end of January, they moved to the Kojimachi Mampei Hotel and, sharing a bed, they swallowed sedatives in an apparent failed suicide attempt. Masuda vehemently denied being a lesbian but apparently couldn't get over her infatuation with Saijo and within a few weeks had once again gone missing.

There's also a report on the arrest of leading members of the notorious "Cat Gang" which had been terrorizing the cafe's of Nippori. "White Cat Hayashi" and "Tortoiseshell Ichikawa" were among those caught in the round-up. As well as taking cat names, the gang members all had cat tattoos on their right arms. Then there's story there about 73 year old Yasujiro Yamamoto who took the bar examination fourteen times over a fifty year period and failed on every occasion. His second son decided he would study for the bar and even though his wife and eldest son tried to reassure Yamamoto that there would be no shame in a father and son studying together, the blow to his self-esteem drove him to a breakdown and he disappeared one evening. The article notes that he was also rumoured to have a lover which might have played a part. And then there's another lawyer, Kawamura, who did pass the bar exam but only after twenty years of studying while he held down jobs as a policeman and postman. Retiring from the post office, he spent 500 yen of his 700 yen leaving allowance repaying debts and set up an office in Osaka in March of 1935 to practice law. He soon realized, however, that his lack of personal connections and tight financial situation would only bring in an income of 40 yen a month against the 65 he had earned as a postman. Within weeks, he had committed suicide.

That's just a small taste of what you can see on one page. If you like that kind of thing and your Japanese is up to it, it's worh browsing around some of the other years.

[omae mona]

That is a fascinating web site, Mulboyne! Hey, I managed to track down the report of the first ever suicide at the Keio Plaza Hotel (in 1971). A 3rd year high school student opened the emergency exit and jumped because he was stressed out about exams.

As we know, it took many years before this pastime became open to foreigners (circa 2004).

[Mulboyne]

I was just recalling some of these stories again on Twitter and looked back at the link for 1935. Somehow, I missed the one about how the founder of Nakajima Aircraft Manufacturing, Chikuhei Nakajima, used to have pet lions. Nakajima started with bulldogs but moved to lions as a hobby after he read that Alexander the Great had them.

Nakajima Aircraft may not be a familiar name now but it was bigger than Mitsubishi at one stage. Nakajima himself was not for the war against America, predicting that if the US mass-produced bombers, they would reduce the country to rubble. Nevertheless, he committed his company's resources to the war effort. He died in 1949 and, in 1950, the company was split into 12 different firms and forbidden by GHQ to produce aircraft. It became Fuji Heavy (Subaru etc) and a whole host of other manufacturing names which still live on.

Katerina was a lioness at Ueno Zoo donated by the Emperor of Ethiopia. When she had cubs, Nakajima obtained two of them, a male and female, by donating an Alaskan fur seal in exchange. He had his private secretary walk them in the Ginza which proved a crowd-stopping spectacle. There were no animal control laws at the time but police used obstruction laws to move him on.

One day, when they were 2 years old, a maid opened his cage to feed Echi, the male cub. He leapt out, mauling the 35 year old widow of the gatekeeper. The maid got a pole and held him at bay before Echi turned on her and caught her arm. He ran loose on Nakajima's estate in Ushigome, near current day Ichigaya, but was eventually caught without getting outside. The women survived the attack but needed hospital treatment for scratches and bites. The Tokyo Asahi Shimbun gave over a front page to the story with a huge headline and Nakajima was obliged to give his lions to a zoo to defuse the scandal.