It’s the New Year, Let’s Fight
The end of the old year and the beginning of the new are monumentally important events in Japan. On New Year’s Eve, thousands of Japanese flock to Buddhist temples to hear the tolling of the bells called joya no kane. The temple’s big bronze bell is tolled 108 times, one for each cardinal sin in the Buddhist universe. It’s believed that hearing the bells purifies you of your sins and allows you to start the new year fresh and clean.
If at all possible, I go to the bell ringing each year, since it never hurts to be on the safe side. A few temples now have Web sites that let you ring the bell virtually, which I’ve tried; it’s not the same.
After the temple bells are rung, huge throngs of people make pilgrimages to Shinto shrines to pray for good fortune in the upcoming year. No one works for three, four, or, depending on the calendar, five days; many people return to their hometowns, and the streets of the business and government districts grow quiet and deserted.
Before any of this happens, however, the most important ceremony in company life takes place. Usually held in the first half of December, the bonenkai is a “forget-the-year party,” and in many cases, given the amount of alcohol consumed, it is not an idle threat. Everyone—employees and bosses—is supposed to let his hair down and have a good time. For the Yomiuri’s Urawa office this has traditionally meant getting into a drunken brawl. My first bonenkai was no exception.
It was held at a local izakaya with the usual menu: fish (raw and cooked), yakitori, tofu, pickles, rice balls, and, since Urawa was famous for catfish, catfish tempura. Generally speaking, the Japanese don’t eat catfish (the flavor isn’t subtle), but I was happy to see something on my plate that reminded me of home.
The first act went reasonably well. All the freshmen were requested to do some kind of entertainment. Someone did card tricks, someone twisted balloons into animals. I managed to push a 500-yen coin up my nose, which was considered an incredible feat. It was at the party after the party where things got weird.
We left the restaurant and were heading toward a hostess club when Kimura, the right-wing, emperor-worshipping head of the Kumagaya branch office, seemed to get wound up. Kimura was a short, stocky fellow with a tight-permed hairstyle reminiscent of the yakuza from my internship story. When he was sober, he was a great guy. He was a mean drunk, however, and he’d been putting it away all night. He kept picking on me as we entered the next izakaya, and once we were sitting down, he looked over at me and sneered. “I look at you, Adelstein, and I can’t figure out how we lost the war. How could we lose to a bunch of sloppy Americans? Barbarians with no discipline, no culture, and no honor. It beats me. Long live the Emperor! Tenno ni banzai!”
In my five-plus years in Japan as a college student, I don’t think I’d personally met any nationalists. I knew they existed. I knew that Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s major writers, was a bodybuilder, gay, and a nationalist. I’d seen the right-wing groups driving their black vans around town, blaring imperial marching music from loudspeakers. But I didn’t really know how to deal with Kimura. What was I supposed to say? “Sorry we won the war”?
I make it a rule never to argue with drunks, so I just kept nodding and saying noncommittal, typically Japanese things like “That’s certainly one way of looking at it” or “Maybe that’s how it happened.”
In the early 1990s, historical revisionists and emperor-worshipping guys like Kimura were generally regarded as lovable kooks whom no one took seriously. At the time that Kimura was carrying on, I didn’t take him seriously either.
Yoshihara and Chappy managed to pull my ass out of the fire by switching seats with me a couple of times, but Kimura kept following me around like a pit bull chasing a squirrel. As we stumbled to a hostess bar, Kimura tapped me on the shoulder.
“I read in the company newsletter that you do wing chun. That’s like some kind of Chinese martial art, right?”
“Right.”
“Yes, that’s the Japanese martial art started by Doshin So. It’s a really interesting fighting style.”
“It’s the best fighting style in the world. It’s a Japanese martial art.”
“I’m sure it’s a great martial art. I prefer wing chun; it just suits me better.”
“Shorinji kempo is the best.”
I turned my back on him and started walking toward our next stop with Yamamoto. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kimura launch a roundhouse kick at me.
As a martial artist, I generally suck. Wing chun, my choosen disipline at the time, is the martial art famous for the one-inch punch, a short-distance impact strike using the bottom two knuckles of the hand for the final impact. After years of wing chun, there were only three things that I could do correctly. The short-distance punch was one of them.
Without thinking, I turned and blocked the kick and punched him full in the chest, knocking him on his back. It was an extremely lucky punch. It was like hitting the sweet spot on a tennis ball; there was a pleasant thwack on impact, and Kimura actually lifted off the ground for a nanosecond.
For an older guy, Kimura was pretty lithe. He sprang up and grabbed me, putting my head in an armlock and wrestling me to the ground. Meanwhile, everyone in our group came rushing over to watch the excitement. Shorinji kempo has some great joint holds, but by relaxing into Kimura’s lock, I was able to get out of it, and I returned Kimura’s favor by gouging him in the larynx. While he was choking, I rolled up on top of him and in a drunken fury was getting ready to palm-heel his nose into pulp when Odanaka, a senior reporter and a generally lovable roly-poly kind of guy, pulled me off Kimura. He asked me if I was okay and brushed the dirt off my clothes.
Kimura was holding his hand to his throat and was about to lunge for me when a couple of other reporters restrained him. He was yelling obscenities.
“Hey, you threw the first kick!” Odanaka screamed at him. “What are you complaining about? You’re supposed to set an example.” Odanaka was one of the few guys who would stand up for the younger reporters. It took guts to scold a senior reporter in the Yomiuri hierarchy.
At that point, Saito walked into the fray and jabbed Odanaka with his index finger. “Why don’t you shut up. Let ’em fight it out. This is good stuff.” He laughed as he motioned for the other reporters to let go of Kimura, who was now foaming at the mouth.
“What kind of boss are you?” Odanaka yelled at Saito. “You can’t let senior staff pick on the freshmen! You should be lecturing Kimura. You’re such an asshole—you little dwarf.”
At those words, Saito took a swing at Odanaka, and Odanaka responded by almost popping him in the jaw. Now the crowd had divided into four groups: one to restrain Kimura, one to restrain Saito, one to protect me, and another one to keep Odanaka from punching Saito into a bloody mass.
I ended up walking home with Yamamoto and a couple of other reporters. We stopped at a fast-food restaurant, Yoshinoya, for a bowl of rice topped with beef. I was a little worried that maybe I’d lost my job.
Yamamoto assured me that that was not the case. “Hey, that’s what bonenkai are all about. Tomorrow, everyone will have forgotten. Well, not really, but nobody will talk about it, so you shouldn’t either. By the way, nice punch. If you could write articles as well as you fight, you wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass.”
He was right. The next day it was as if the night before had never happened. I never discussed it with Kimura, and we got along better than we had before. He started to call me Jake-kun affectionately, and I made sure never to discuss politics with him.
I thought my year would end on a quiet note, until December 29, when Yamamoto and I were the only ones in the Saitama police press club. He was reading comic books on the sofa, and I was typing up an article on aloe plants blooming in the winter. Over the fire department radio band we heard of a fire spreading in Kawaguchi, so I hopped into a taxi and went to the scene.
By the time I got there, the fire had been contained. I was taking notes when I heard over the CB in the fire truck that there was another fire just seconds from where we now were. As the firemen rushed to their trucks, I ran ahead to the park where the fire was supposed to be happening.
As I turned the corner at the entrance to the park, I almost bumped into a walking tower of flame in human form. I got so close that my eyebrows were singed. The figure walked in a circle around a seesaw in a slow, robotlike fashion while people from the neighborhood tossed buckets of water on him and sprayed him with extinguishers. A group of children gathered in a circle around him, watching the whole proceedings with fascination. I got a faceful of fire-retardant foam in the confusion before the man collapsed in a ball on the ground in a fetal position. The area smelled like kerosene, burned hot dogs, and hoisin sauce.
The man was still breathing. You could hear him wheeze, see his chest move. He took five more breaths, and then he died.
For a second there was total silence. Even the kids were quiet. You could hear the hum of traffic from a few streets away and the crackling of skin and nothing else. Then everyone started talking about what to do.
The firemen showed up two minutes later. One of the medics tried to find a pulse but singed his hand on the body, yelping in pain. Another medic brought out a stethoscope and put it where you would guess his chest had been. He pronounced the man dead on the spot and draped a blue tarp over the body. The police hadn’t arrived yet.
I called the office and let them know where I was, then started asking people in the crowd what had happened. The three elementary school children who had watched the entire thing brought me up to speed. The man, dressed in a blue work suit, had ridden into the park on his bicycle with a red plastic canister of kerosene in the basket. He had stopped, poured the kerosene over his head, and taken out a box of matches. He had had trouble lighting one, since they were soaked in kerosene, but had finally found a dry one, picked up a rock, and lit it off that. The moment he touched his chest, he burst into flames.
The kids tried to describe the sound but got into an argument as to whether it sounded like firecrackers or more like a pachi-pachi sound. They used the word to describe a man on fire, hi-daruma (hi means “fire,” and daruma refers to the legless, armless Buddhist icon). They didn’t seem fazed or shocked by the self-immolation in the least. For them, it was just an interesting incident.
I talked to one of the firemen on the scene.
“It’s a shame,” he said. “We see a lot of these things around this time of the year. People who don’t want to face the new year. Makes for a busy holiday, for us anyway.”
“Seems like a painful way to go.”
“Nah, not usually, since you lose consciousness. But if you don’t die immediately, it’s a terrible way to go. You just linger on in excruciating pain while your body gets infected, and then you die of your own toxicity. So his timing was good.”
He hauled the corpse into the back of an ambulance and wished me a happy new year.
I went off to the local police station to get the official details.
The victim was Hikoki Harasawa, age forty-eight, birthday on January 5. Not only was he facing a new year, he was looking at another birthday as well. He lived about five minutes from the park. His neighbors said he’d lost his job when a car parts factory closed down; he’d been jobless for months. It was still hard for me to imagine that a man would light himself on fire just for this. Later, when I began investigating yakuza loan-sharking schemes, I discovered what had probably put him over the edge: serious debt to seriously dangerous people.
I called Yamamoto at the press club.
He had one question: “Is the guy famous?”
I said he wasn’t.
“Then drop it,” Yamamoto said.
I went back to Urawa and picked up a gift for Ono, the big boss. He’d just had his first child, so we’d made a gag T-shirt with the image of his face in a WANTED poster with the crime of fathering children without a license. I took the T-shirt and my gift to his apartment.
Ono was tickled with the gifts and asked me to stay a bit. His wife brought us a couple of Budweisers. After a sip, Ono screwed up his face. “Do you like this American beer? This was on sale, so I thought I’d try it. It tastes terrible!”
“Yes, it tastes terrible,” I laughed. “Piss and ashes. That’s how we described it in Missouri.”
“Piss and ashes! Nice. I like that. It’s exactly what this tastes like.”
We poured the beer into the potted plant, opened two cans of Asahi beer, and chatted amicably. It was good to be alive and well in Japan.