100 years after nationalist icon Nogi Maresuke committed ritual suicide

The first hint of the season’s change had the cicadas alighting. Yasuda Saburo was monitoring his email via cell phone when one landed on the touchscreen and lingered, as if to study its reflection, before lifting off. It left behind six dusty footprints, which Yasuda wiped away with the hem of his shirt. Onstage, the din of the musicians’ warm-up subsided.

Yasuda Saburo and son Kenzo had been to Tokyo just once before. This second visit was occasioned by the 100th anniversary commemoration of General Nogi Maresuke’s ritual suicide. It occurred at Nogi-jinja, erected in 1923 on the site of the home where Nogi committed “junshi.” Nogi is enshrined there as “kami.” As the first notes of the orchestra’s koto resounded and the audience quieted, Saburo said, to no one in particular: “Nogi is here.”

For Saburo, print-shop owner and son of an itinerant calligrapher, General Nogi is the emblem par excellence of the Japanese spirit. In 1912, when the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito died, an awed hush descended on Japan’s contested ideological landscape; whatever one thought of the Meiji Restoration, it nonetheless represented Japan’s emergence in the world, accomplished with alacrity and carefully attributed to the emperor’s divinity by Meiji ideocrats.

Two weeks later, Nogi’s suicide (along with wife Shizuko) plunged the nation into a century of ambivalence. In 1970, writer-celebrity Yukio Mishima’s spectacular suicide at Tokyo SDF headquarters in Ichigaya occasioned a restaging of the Nogi debate. Today, Nogi’s life and death remain touchstones for nationalist zealots and conservative politicians.

The orchestra had finished by the time Helen Kenyon of Woodbridge, England arrived at the Sept 13 commemoration. She browsed the gift shop. Behind her, the audience observed a series of ceremonies. Officiants hurriedly donned priestly garb and purified themselves in the shrine’s hallways. Kenyon next descended a staircase into the small museum that houses Nogi’s personal effects. When she emerged, she fell in at the end of the procession to Aoyama Reien, Nogi’s final resting place. Among the priests at the front of the procession was Yu. (At least we’ll call him that; shrine officials declined to name individual priests). He had been selected to direct the graveside ceremonies.

After ritual offerings had been placed and purification ceremonies performed at the cemetery, attendees were asked to form a line outside the iron fence that delineates Nogi’s grave. Each visitor (or pair) received a sakaki branch from Yu. They bowed, clapped, offered Nogi silent praise. Camera shutters clattered and lens barrels clanked against the bars of the fence as photographers ringed the gravesite. The humid blur of Aoyama’s skyscrapers punctuated the scene. Saburo and Kenzo were among the first to worship, Helen among the last. Inside the fence, she solicited confirmation of the proper ritual gestures from Yu before she performed them.

For Kenyon, 29, it was a resonant moment in a sidelong journey through Japanese culture that has brought her into contact with the nationalist thinkers who worship at Nogi’s altar. Nogi was the subject of her undergraduate thesis, and she’d soon like to return to her research. But she never shared her thesis essay with the Japanese scholars who helped her; she was afraid that Nogi the man, as she’d come to know him, would have unsettled their attachment to Nogi as “kami.” “I detected some sadness towards the end of Nogi’s life. A letting go. He must have felt weak, completely … and helpless.”

Kenyon departed the ceremony after making her praise. Work had been busy lately; she is one of two in-house translators for a five-campus university system and has been asked to develop a database that will facilitate the hiring of a temp worker to replace her. She is uncertain of whether she’s long for Japan. On her last trip home to England, she found herself bowing, thanking and apologizing habitually.

When the ceremony concluded, the priests loaded the ritual items into a minivan, then paused for a brief rest before walking back to the shrine. They bought drinks at a pair of vending machines.

“What looks good?” another priest asked Yu. “Beer,” Yu said. Laughter. “But never on the clock,” said Yu. He bought peach nectar.

Across the street from the shrine, one of the priests leaned down to pick up a discarded bottle near the edge of the sidewalk. The nearby traffic light turned green and the taxi idling on the other side of the railing raced its engine. The priest came up sputtering. “Give me a sip of your juice,” he said. “I taste gasoline.” “Otsukare-sama,” said Yu.

Saburo and Kenzo took photographs in front of the shrine’s main torii before leaving. They crossed the street and paused at the base of a skyscraper, necks craned. They examined the nameplates that announced the businesses inside. They entered the building, stood in the lobby, and took the elevator up.

© Japan Today