Evening Flowers

The Japanese have words for sadness that are so subtle and complicated that the English translations don’t do them justice.

Setsunai is usually translated as “sad,” but it is better described as a feeling of sadness and loneliness so powerful that it feels as if your chest is constricted, as if you can’t breathe; a sadness that is physical and tangible. There is another word, too—yarusenai, which is grief or loneliness so strong that you can’t get rid of it, you can’t clear it away.

There are some things like that. You get older and you forget about them, but every time you remember, you feel that yarusenai. It never goes away; it just gets tucked away and forgotten for a while.

There is a beautiful children’s song, written by the artist Takehisa Yumeji, called “The Evening Primrose.” The evening primrose is a yellow, sometimes white flower that blooms only at night, then tinges with red in the morning and withers. The song is almost impossible to translate because it says more in what it does not say than in what it does. Any translation would be an interpretation. But here’s mine.

Every now and then, you meet someone who nurtures you as a person or, in my case, as a reporter. I suppose that I always come across as a stray dog that people feel a need to take in, to nurture. Mami Hamaya took me under her wing when I first got to the shakaibu. She had been a police reporter as well. When I started on the Fourth District beat, she was the only one to actually give me some useful contacts. I don’t know why we hit it off, perhaps because we were both minorities within the department. From early 2000, we spent a lot of time working together. I thought of her as an older sister of sorts.

Hamaya looked a lot like Velma, the girl with the thick-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses on the old cartoon Scooby-Doo. She had her hair in a Beatles cut and had a button nose. She would usually forgo a skirt, wearing only slacks and a collared shirt to work, dressed a little like a guy. She was tough and hardworking, as is every woman in the National News Department. There is a macho vibe to the whole department, and women are few in number. In 2003, there were six or seven females out of a hundred reporters in the department. To survive in the shakaibu women have to put up with the same lousy hours as the men, they’re expected to pour the drinks for their male counterparts on social occasions, and they can never complain. In many ways, they have to work harder than the men.

One particular phone call sealed our friendship.

I was at work on the day shift, which basically involved sitting around the newsroom answering the phone and waiting to dispatch people and orchestrate panic when and if something happened. For about nine hours. At that point in time, I was a member of the yu-gun (reserve corps), an elite special forces unit of the National News Department that mobilized for breaking stories and had the freedom to run around writing about anything interesting during a slow news period. I was also responsible for working on the feature “Safety Meltdown,” a long-running series about how crime rates were rising in Japan, why, and what it meant for the country. Even though crime rates were still ridiculously low, the police clearance rate (ability to solve a crime) in several categories of felony had hit an all-time low. It was a hot topic.

The day was flat and quiet, and nothing of any particular importance was on the horizon. Then the phone rang, with an irate Yomiuri Giants fan on the other end. He didn’t like the current coach. I told him that we were the news department of the paper and that we were neither the sports department nor the managers of the Yomiuri Giants. I suggested he call elsewhere.

He gave me his name and then demanded I give him mine. I did—sounding it out in Japanese style.

“Jei-ku A-de-ru-su-te-in.”

The caller was not pleased.

“Is this some kind of trick? Who the hell are you?”

He demanded my name several times.

“I’m a reporter for the Yomiuri. I’m also a foreigner.”

“You’re not a foreigner. You’re some kind of machine, designed to trick people and make them hang up.”

“I assure you that I’m not a machine. I’m a human being; a non-Japanese human being.”

“A foreigner, huh. No wonder you don’t get what I’m saying. Put someone else on.”

The only other person nearby was Hamaya. She nodded her head and asked me to give her the phone.

“Hello, this is Hamaya. I believe that Jake already answered your question.”

The caller was now fuming.

“First a gaijin and then a woman? Put a man on the phone.”

“I’m sorry,” said Hamaya in a sticky-sweet voice, “the only people working today are either foreigners or women. Or foreign women. I guess we can’t help you.”

Then she hung up on him.

I liked Hamaya.

Whenever I submitted a feature, an article that I’d put together on my own, Hamaya would look it over for me and make suggestions. The formulas for standard news articles and in-depth analyses were quite different, and I had a tough time wrapping my head around feature articles that departed from the standard reverse-pyramid format.

She had a black sense of humor and a nice, gentle way of poking fun at me, especially my atrocious table manners. She was not particularly pretty, but she was one of those women who mysteriously become more attractive the longer you know them.

Hamaya and I were both assigned to the information technology coverage crew. Japan was in the middle of an IT bubble, and “Internet,” “hacking,” and “computer virus” were the big buzzwords. The IT crew was assembled from a cross section of the newspaper, including science, economy, culture, and business reporters. I was assigned to cover the underbelly of IT: viruses, hackers, DOS attacks, Internet fraud, illegal sales over the Net, child pornography, yakuza incursions into the industry, the misuse of prepaid telephones, and anything else remotely unpleasant that was connected to the latest technological advances in Japan and the world.

I was a self-taught computer geek. I started on a Mac but made the switch to Windows and spent a brief period of my life obsessed with first-person shooting games. I learned how computers worked so that I could squeeze as much juice out of my rig to play games such as Blood and Thief at a higher resolution. My motives were wrong, but my results were good.

Hamaya was assigned to the section after me. She could barely use e-mail, and I suddenly found myself in the position of teaching my teacher. Hamaya was a good student, and I never felt uncomfortable with our temporary role reversal. I loaned her books, explained terms to her, showed her how to work the various Net browsers and make bookmarks. In turn, she’d read my features, make suggestions, and point out my grammatical mistakes. I could also count on her to cover my ass when I needed it.

When I got news that Beni was about to be born on September 17, 2000, Hamaya kicked me out of the office and took over my half-finished article before I could even ask her to do it.

I was allowed to take two days off for the birth. A week later, one of the IT coverage crew reporters needed a photo of a baby for an article on cloning. Hamaya immediately volunteered my child.

“Jake, it’ll be an auspicious start for the kid. Besides, I want to see the little bugger. We’ll all go.”

So we got in a taxi with a Yomiuri photographer and made a run to Saitama Prefecture, where Sunao was staying with her mother. Hamaya was very good with the child. When Sunao let her hold Beni, I saw her smile as I’d never seen her smile before. She glowed.

Hamaya had sacrificed a lot for the job. Most of the women in our department had. She’d missed chances to get married and was past the age where she could have a child safely—assuming she could ever find enough free time to date someone.

The photographer snapped the photo while Beni cried away, and the next day Beni, as part of a montage, was on the front cover of the Yomiuri next to a headline that read: “Cloning: Are We Going to Create a Superhuman Race?”

Hamaya put a total of twenty-eight copies of the edition on top of my desk the next day, separated into four bundles, neatly held together with plastic string. It was a great memento and a keepsake.

One of the problems with Japanese newspapers, and maybe Japanese companies and the government as well, is that you are never allowed to do the same job for very long. There are constant personnel changes, just for the sake of change, which hurts job continuity and makes it very difficult for a reporter to have his or her own specialized field of knowledge. The lack of a byline on most stories also hurts a reporter trying to get recognition as an expert on a certain subject matter.

Hamaya’s field of expertise was the mentally disabled, especially involving the appropriate measures to be taken with them when they broke the law. She was also an enthusiastic advocate for the handicapped, an area where Japan is still decades behind the United States in terms of social intergration.

The law and how it should deal with the mentally ill was being discussed heatedly in the late 1990s. Some people loudly asserted that officers of the law should have stronger authority to forcibly incarcerate mental patients.

What sparked the debate occurred on July 23, 1999. A Japan Airlines plane leaving from Haneda (Tokyo International Airport) was hijacked by a mentally ill individual. He stabbed the captain of the airplane during the crime, and upon his arrest a huge debate as to whether his name should be released to the public ensued. Because he had a history of mental illness, and because he had been a patient in a mental hospital, most newspapers did not report his name—as was the custom in these cases. However, on the twenty-seventh, The Sankei Shinbun, the most conservative of the daily newspapers, began referring to him by name.

The prosecutor’s office did not submit the man to a formal mental competency evaluation before prosecuting him, implying that it believed he was mentally capable of being held criminally responsible. By August 10, even Nihon Television, the Yomiuri’s sister news station, was reporting his real name.

By the time he was formally charged, almost every news agency was using his real name. In fact, his psychological problems and medical history were revealed in great detail by several media outlets.

Hamaya vigorously opposed publishing the man’s name and expressed her dissatisfaction at the way the story was being covered.

“You know, we’ve all developed a mob mentality. All the reporting coming out pretty much implies that if someone is being treated for a mental illness, they’re one step away from committing a horrible crime.”

She told me this over lunch in August, and I didn’t agree with her, not at first. I still had my police-beat mind; I was thinking like a cop. Punish criminals. Don’t rehabilitate them. All mental illnesses are faked by crafty thugs to avoid jail time.

However, when she brought me up to date on his history and the kinds of calls that were flooding into mental health clinics, I began to see her point.

All of us in the Japanese media at the time were taking one case of a mentally ill person performing a horrible crime and extrapolating it to imply that all mentally ill patients were capable of or likely to commit similar crimes. In many ways, the coverage reinforced many old prejudices about the mentally challenged and encouraged discrimination.

However, that wasn’t the mood of the public, it certainly wasn’t the tone of the newspaper, and Hamaya had too much integrity to back down or change her articles to fall in line with an unstated company policy.

This got her labeled as a troublemaker. A radical. “She’s as crazy as the nuts she’s defending.” That was when things started to get hard for her.

On June 8, 2001, a thirty-seven-year-old male, Mamoru Takuma, charged into the Osaka University of Education Ikeda Elementary School and stabbed twenty-three children, killing eight. Takuma was believed to be mentally ill, but under the course of the investigation it became apparent that it was a premeditated crime committed out of spite and that he had deliberately been faking mental illness in the hope of not being charged. Once again, the incident made people associate mental illness with violent crimes, and Hamaya continued to voice her opinion that our coverage should not support that prejudice and one incident should not be a vehicle to make blanket statements that all mental illness is faked to avoid punishment. It was a reasonable approach, certainly, but it created unreasonable reactions within the department.

Hamaya’s writing on the subject did not go down well with some of the senior editors. Her integrity and passion for her subject were seen as defiance.

On September 12, at a meeting, it was announced that she was being more or less kicked out of the National News Department and assigned to Human Resources. The department chair, Kikuchi, had requested her transfer on August 29. Hamaya was allowed to make her parting greetings, and her voice cracked so badly that she was hard to hear. She almost cried, but she managed to hold herself together.

I don’t know what it is about the department that makes people want to stay so much. Maybe it’s like a bad marriage: the more years of your life you’ve invested in the damn thing, the harder it is to get a divorce. You don’t want to feel that you wasted your time. Maybe it’s the feeling of knowing you are the elite of the news reporters. Maybe it’s that the job becomes your identity, your life, and your reason for getting up in the morning. If you take that away from someone, it’s going to hurt.

Hamaya and I went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Aoyama that night. The department chair had called her a month before and told her that he was going to move her to the Yomiuri Weekly, a Yomiuri-owned publication. Hamaya told him, “I want to stay in the National News Department. If I leave, there is nobody who can properly handle reporting on the mentally and physically disabled.” She said that the boss had not been happy with her reply; he’d regarded it as insubordination.

A few days before the department meeting, he called her to his desk and told her point-blank, “You are leaving the department and being assigned to Human Resources. You either accept this or resign or be fired. You will never work again as a reporter while you are in this company. That’s all.”

And he dismissed her without another word.

She wasn’t given a reason or an explanation. All I knew was that it was as if someone had beaten her up. We were sitting in the restaurant, and after she repeated those words, “You will never work again as a reporter,” she totally broke down. She cried so hard I thought she was choking. She put her head on my shoulder, and I let her cry until she couldn’t cry anymore.

I think it helped.

“Look,” I said in the most comforting voice I could muster, “the department head is a jerk—he won’t be around forever. You just have to wait it out. You’re a good reporter. You’ll write again. It’s just a matter of time.”

She asked me if I thought that was really true. I didn’t, but I lied. I reassured her that it was just a matter of time. I didn’t know that things wouldn’t change. I strongly suspected they wouldn’t, but you want to leave people some hope. Maybe I should have told her what I really thought. Maybe I should have told her to get the hell out of the Yomiuri and work for another newspaper where she might be appreciated. I don’t know.

It’s hard to keep in touch with people at the Yomiuri. You may be working at the same company, but when you’re on the police beat, you’re a stranger to your own department. You live, eat, and sleep in the TMPD headquarters. The head office becomes a distant memory. It was especially hard to see Hamaya because now she wasn’t even in my department. But we kept in contact.

The chief editor of the IT coverage section held a lavish dinner party at his apartment, inviting former reporters as well, and we got to sit around and trade gossip and talk shop for a few hours. I took some good photos of Hamaya pretending to punch out various people. We were supposed to go out for dinner and catch up later that week, but I was busy covering a story and had to cancel on her. She seemed a little disappointed. I promised to reschedule a few days later.

I called her but didn’t get an answer.

I don’t remember the exact date anymore. I had to copy some materials in the company library, and I stopped by the head office. The department was unusually somber as I passed through. Kikuchi, the department chair and boss, was at his desk with some senior management having a conference in hushed tones. I went into the hall to get some coffee, and another female reporter came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. She looked excited, as if she had a juicy secret to tell me. She was smiling.

“Hey, how’s it hanging?” I asked her, trying not to burn my tongue on the coffee.

She leaned in and whispered, “Have you heard the news about Hamaya?”

“No. Good news, I hope. Is she coming back to the shakaibu?”

“You really don’t know?”

“I haven’t talked to her since last week. No, I really don’t know. She’s getting married? She’s got a boyfriend? Enlighten me.”

“She killed herself,” she said, almost tittering.

“Right. What, did she commit seppuku in the cafeteria?”

“No, she really killed herself.”

“What? How?”

“They say she hanged herself in her apartment. Her parents found the body today. The weekly magazines are already nosing around asking questions. You should be careful.”

I didn’t have a single thing to say. It felt as if I had been sucker-punched in the stomach.

“Are you okay?”

She must have asked me three times before I could answer.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks for telling me.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”

“I didn’t, but thanks.”

I politely made my exit, and I went to the bathroom and puked.

I wished that a weekly magazine had called me. I would have told them that Hamaya hadn’t killed herself, she’d been driven to suicide by one carelessly cruel sentence, “You’ll never work as a reporter again.” To a serious, dedicated journalist, those words are already a death sentence.

I went to the funeral. It was a miserably hot day. I showed up late and left early. I saw Kikuchi there and although I knew it wasn’t his fault, I wanted to slug him. I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t want to even begin thinking about whether I’d failed her as a friend. I’d been so high on having a good run of scoops that I think I probably only half listened to what she had been saying a few days earlier. Maybe if I had paid attention or called her back sooner, maybe it would have made a difference.

The next day I had lunch in the police headquarters cafeteria with my police-beat partner and gave her a summary of the funeral. She and Hamaya had gotten along well.

She told me, “You know, Hamaya was really good to me when I started in the City News Department. She showed me the ropes, told me the unwritten rules. She was the most enthusiastic, dedicated reporter I know.”

I told her it had been the same for me.

“Yeah, and she knew her stuff. Environmental problems, mental health issues, and the problems of the handicapped. The Environmental Agency even sent a telegram expressing their condolences that was read out loud at the funeral.

“That’s the one thing I remembered most about the funeral. So many people, all of them influenced, affected, impressed by this woman. She had been a good reporter.”

“Well,” she said, “the reward for her hard work was getting dumped in the Human Resources Department. It must have been tough.”

“Tough?”

“Well, here she is, a good reporter, a great reporter even—and the company strips her of her position and removes her from reporter work. Now when hiring time comes around she has to deal with all these idealistic young women who just got into the department and tell them what a great company the Yomiuri is. I was there at one of these pep talks we give to the new recruits before they start working, and some of the girls didn’t even realize Hamaya had once been a reporter. As far as they were concerned, she was just some middle-aged woman in HR.”

The day after the funeral, I checked my company e-mail account, something I rarely did. I had an unopened e-mail from Hamaya.

It was sent about two days before she killed herself. I have never opened it. I’ve never had the courage. I don’t want to know. I think I have a copy backed up on a hard disk somewhere. I’m not going to look for it.

What’s yarusenai?

It’s that one e-mail you never replied to and will never open. It’s the bad advice you gave and the phone call you should have made and everything that came out of it. It’s thinking about the friends that you suspect you might have been able to save.