The Race

It was 1958, and one of Nissan’s most promising engineers, Kuniyuki Tanabe was in California, testing the limits of their Datsun, more a boxy truck than a passenger car. Tanabe was one of a team of four, the first of hundreds of teams of engineers that would eventually test and modify their Japanese-made cars on the roads of America.

Scrimping and saving to ensure they could eat and sleep, they invested all their waking hours figuring out how to improve the performance of their car, maintaining the faint dream that one made in Japan could one day be sold in the USA.

As David Halberstam explained in his fascinating book, The Reckoning, [1] about the American and Japanese car industries in the 20^th Century, the leader of this team, Teichi Hara, felt overwhelmed “trying to test two little Japanese vehicles, and around him was nothing but cars, thousands of them, all bigger and faster than any he had ever seen, all roaring past him on the grandest highways he had ever seen.”

Over weeks the team tinkered with the engine, the transmission and the breaks, gradually improving the car’s acceleration and drivability. Then one day, while the team was test driving on the San Diego Freeway near Bakersfield, a couple of Americans came up alongside in a Volkswagen. The Americans stared at the Japanese, and the Japanese stared at the Americans, and before Tanabe knew it, the race was on.

Back and forth they went, one car taking a little lead and then the other, until they came to the big slope, not a steep hill but steady and punishing for a small car. Tanabe decided to go to third gear and give it all the power he had. Gradually the Datsun began to pull away from the VW. At first it was a small edge and then the length of the car, and then the VW began to slip back. We can beat the Volkswagen, he kept thinking. What a good engine, what a tough little engine. Then it dawned on him: If we can beat the Volkswagen in a country where people are still lined up to buy it, we will be all right in America, we poor little Japanese.

The post-war years in Japan during the economic miracle were heady years for many Japanese. They started with so little. And as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. For the Japanese, much of that invention, much of that innovation, was fueled by long nights deciphering magazines and journals in English and other languages from the outside world. A select few had a chance to go overseas.

Like the Meiji period, the government allowed business leaders and engineers to travel to foreign nations to learn. The US government was particularly helpful. In the midst of the Cold War, the US wanted to make sure Japan became a strong symbol of freedom, an anti-communist bulwark. As Jeff Kingston explained, “Unhindered access to the US market and technology also played a key part in Japan’s growth spurt. The US market provided the crucial economies of scale while licensing of US technology on favorable terms saved Japanese companies enormous research and development expenses. US companies were inclined to license their technology because the business operating environment in Japan was not favorable for foreign firms.” [2]

Established by the Japanese government, with significant support from the US government, the Japan Productivity Center (JPC) “between 1956 and 1966 sent more than 600 inspection groups to the United States, in which more than 6,000 people took part,” wrote Martyn Smith, in his book Mass Media Consumerism Japan. [3] “The groups were made up of small business leaders who studied various aspects of American manufacturing methods. While these groups did study and import industrial technical skills and know-how to Japan, in the late 1950s marketing techniques were by far the most important productivity tool the technical group personnel brought back.”

 

The Wrestler

Japan had high hopes for wrestling at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. And in fact, Japanese wrestlers won five gold medals, becoming overnight heroes for their country. Osamu Watanabe, famously known as The Animal, won an incredible 189 consecutive wrestling matches in his career, including his gold medal match in the freestyle featherweight class.

But one of the lesser known of the wrestling heroes was Yojiro Uetake, who moved to the United States in 1963 and competed for Oklahoma State University. Uetake wasn’t asked to come back to Japan to compete for the Olympic team as he was no longer on the Japan radar, so he paid his way back to Tokyo in the early summer of 1964. When he arrived at the training camp to select wrestlers to represent Japan in the Olympics, Uetake said his sudden appearance made others uncomfortable.

The selection process required him to wrestle six others competing in the bantamweight division. And the competition was strong: Hiroshi Ikeda (1963 bantamweight world champion), Tomiaki Fukuda (1965 bantamweight world champion), Masaaki Kaneko (1966 featherweight world champion), Takeo Morita (1969 featherweight world champion). But the Japanese from Oklahoma swept through the competition and finished 6-0, sealing his selection to the 1964 Olympics.

At the start of the Tokyo Olympics, the wrestler from the Soviet Union, Aydin Ibrahimov, was considered a strong favorite to win gold in the bantamweight class of the freestyle wrestling competition. As it turned out, Uetake met Ibrahimov in the semi-finals and in the heat of the battle, Uetake’s left shoulder popped out of its socket. His coach pressed hard on Uetake’s arm and popped his shoulder back in. “I didn’t feel anything,” Uetake told me, but he went on to tackle Ibrahimov twice to win 2-0. “When you are in the Olympics, tension is very high. I was simply so excited I didn’t feel any pain. Of course, after it was all done, it hurt a lot!”

Uetake had plowed through the competition to this point. But to win the gold, Uetake had to defeat Huseyin Akbas of Turkey, the reigning 1962 World Wrestling Champion. And to that day, no Japanese had ever beaten him. Uetake understood that he only needed a tie to win the gold medal, but in such cases, a wrestler can become passive, he thought, so he needed to get aggressive.

Uetake wanted to take Akbas down by grabbing his left leg but was cautious because Akbar was fast and known for turning that attack to his advantage and flipping his opponent. It seemed to Uetake that Akbas was staying away while Uetake was trying to find the right opening. In the second round, the referee briefly stopped the fight to warn Uetake to attack and gave Akbar a point. That was the only point Uetake had given up so far in his Tokyo Olympic competition, but with little time left he had now fallen behind.

 

Born in Japan, Made in the USA

The Japanese in the lower weight classes were feared for their speed and strength, which the press would duly note. “They are as pliable as cats and as strong as bulls. Again and again it becomes obvious that the Japanese win because of their speedy reactions and their enormous leg strength.”

American wrestler, Dave Auble faced off against Uetake in the semi-finals, but he said he was simply outplayed. “Everything I tried to do, he was a split second ahead of me. It was a blow out. It was devastating. I was totally demoralized. He won by a decision. I don’t know how he didn’t pin me. I had never had a match like that, even against world champs.”

Uetake was born in Japan. But he was also made in the USA. He was a part of that limited but growing number of Japanese who were allowed to go overseas to learn. In the case of the 20-year-old, a national high school wrestling champion in his hometown of Oura, Gunma, Uetake’s journey would take him through Stillwater, Oklahoma.

The commissioner of the Japanese Wrestling Federation and 1932 Olympian in wrestling, Ichiro Hatta, was eying Uetake as unvarnished wrestling talent. He thought that American would be a place he could learn and grow. Hatta knew that, because he had done the same.

In 1929 Hatta visited the US to educate Americans about the growing sport of judo. Since judo was not an Olympic sport, he switched his focus to wrestling and competed at the Los Angeles Olympics. He did poorly translating his judo techniques to wrestling, but knew he had to do a better job.

According to a 1958 San Francisco Chronicle article, [4] Hatta returned to the US to play baseball at Washington State University, and then trade judo expertise for wrestling expertise in freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling. Hatta did such a good job training Japanese wrestlers that the article stated “the Japanese were the best lightweight wrestlers in the world, up to 147 pounds.”

In 1963, Hatta fulfilled a promise to Myron Roderick, American Olympian at the Melbourne Games in 1956, and in the 1960’s head coach of the Oklahoma State University (OSU) wrestling team, to send a promising Japanese wrestler to OSU. Uetake didn’t know anything about the US, but he knew he was headed to the dominant NCAA wrestling team in the United States throughout the remainder of the 20th century.

Yojiro, or Yojo, as Americans called him, moved to the U.S. reluctantly. After all, he couldn’t speak English. But at least Stillwater, Oklahoma had the small town feel he was familiar with in Gunma – people were friendly. And he liked the food, particularly hamburger steaks and gravy, fried chicken and ice cream!

Fortunately, Uetake knew how to control his weight so he could compete for the Oklahoma State University Cowboys. And compete he did, like no other Cowboy in its hallowed history. Yojiro Uetake never lost a match, winning three straight individual Big 8 and NCAA wrestling championships from 1963-1965, going an incredible 58 – 0 in collegiate competition.

What was the secret to his success?

Uetake had a great relationship with his coach. “He was a very strong wrestler,” Uetake said of Roderick. “He was passionate, strong in fundamentals and technique, and I really liked his focus on getting take downs. ‘Take ’em down and let ’em go’, he would say about how to get two points quickly.” The admiration was mutual. According to Roderick’s wife Jo Ann “Myron always said that Yojiro had natural talent and was by far the best wrestler he ever saw or coached.”[5]

Uetake also had a great relationship with the OSU football team, taking health and physical education courses with them, including future Dallas Cowboys star fullback, Walt Garrison. “He was one of the greatest athletes I ever saw,” Garrison said. And apparently Garrison and his teammates saw a lot of Uetake because the football coach not only allowed him into the practices, he allowed him to practice with them. Uetake credits football training, like running inside ropes, hitting tackling dummies in quick succession, moving side to side, and fast-paced push-ups and sit-ups, for helping him hone his technique. “Tackling from a squat is great for wrestling as we are in the same stance, where we need to be ready to attack, hit and get back, and get ready again,” Uetake told me.

Living in America had a profound effect on the young wrestler. Not only was he coached by Roderick and taken under the wing of the OSU football team, he learned how to build his own style of training. At the time, the NCAA did not allow coaches to train their wrestlers during the summer season. Instead, Uetake had to work to supplement his meager funds. “I would go to the Delta and Grand Junction in the Colorado mountains, which was like a desert. And to keep in shape, I’d come up with ways to train.” Uetake told me that he would have to lift very heavy bales of hay, but he’d do it in a way to work on specific muscles. He also maintained his feel for combat by actually tackling trees.

If he was in Japan, Uetake said, he would be wrestling all the time, and following the directions of his coach. And he would never have developed his own way of training or learned how to best take advantage of his own body and physical gifts. “I did this myself,” he said. “Roderick taught me how to focus, but I learned a lot on my own.”

All of that training, all of that innovation, finally came into play in the final 3 minutes of the gold medal match between Uetake and Akbas. Down 0-1, Uetake wanted to go for Akbas’ leg, but the Turk was matching Uetake’s moves and shifts. With only 2 minutes and 40 seconds remaining, Uetake’s instincts took over. He could not remember what happened next, except that he used his speed and guile to grab Akbas’ leg and bring him down to the mat.

Two points.

Gold medal.

Tossed into the air by his teammates, Uetake was no longer an unknown. He was an Olympic hero – on two continents.

The Marathon Sprint that Broke the Hearts of the Japanese

Abebe Bikila entered the National Stadium like he owned it. The lithe Ethiopian, a member of the Imperial Bodyguard of his nation, was about to meet expectations at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics – to become the first person to win marathons in two consecutive Olympiads.

The first time Bikila won, he was an unknown, and made headlines by running barefoot on the roads of Rome in 1960 to take the gold. When he crossed the finish line in Tokyo, amazingly over 4 minutes ahead of the second-place finisher, the audience erupted in applause, and marveled at how fresh Bikila was – so fresh in fact that he did calisthenics and jogged in place as if he were readying for the start of a second marathon.

The fact that Bikila was so far and away in a class by himself meant that the real competition in the marathon was for second. And in the race for second, Japan was ready to explode in celebration.

Like the Brits, with Brian Kilby and Basil Heatley, the Australian Ron Clarke, the other Ethiopian Demissie Wolde, as well as Americans Billy Mills and Buddy Edelen, the Japanese had a trio of strong marathoners in the competition, Toru Terasawa, Kenji Kimihara and Kokichi Tsuburaya.

At the 10K mark of the 42K race, Clarke was setting a pretty fast pace at 30:14, with Jim Hogan of Ireland and Bikila following. Around the 20K mark, Bikila took the lead and never looked back. The race for 2nd was on, with Clarke and Hogan about 5 seconds behind Bikila, and a second pack including Wolde, Tsuburaya, Jozsef Suto of Hungary and Antonio Ambu of Italy.

With about 7 kilometers to go, Bikila, Hogan, Tsuburaya and Suto were in front of the pack, with Heatley rising to fifth. Dehydrated and exhausted, Hogan dropped out of the race despite being in position for a silver medal, leaving the Japanese from the Self Defense Force, Tsuburaya, in second.

Heatley was advancing and could envision a bronze-medal finish behind the Japanese runner. “I didn’t expect to catch him,” he said, “but he was a target.”

Shortly after Bikila had finished his cooling-down exercises, Tsuburaya entered the stadium, and the crowd went wild. At their home Olympics, Japan had medaled in wrestling, judo, boxing, weightlifting, gymnastics and swimming, among others, but not in track and field. Tsuburaya was about to change that with perhaps the most significant silver medal at the Games in front of the biggest crowd he had ever experienced.

And yet, soon after Tsuburaya entered the stadium, so too did Heatley, only seconds behind. Just before the final curve of the stadium’s cinder track, Heatley turned on the jets and sprinted by his rival. For a 2nd place battle that took over 2 hours and 16 minutes, Tsuburaya lost his chance for silver by four seconds.

Writer Robert Whiting was watching the event on television, confident that Tsuburaya would make Japan proud with a silver medal only to see that expectation burst before the eyes of an entire nation, as he explained in The Japan Times[6]:

The cheering for Tsuburaya was building to a crescendo when suddenly Great Britain’s Basil Heatley came into view and proceeded to put on one of Olympic track and field’s great all-time spurts. He steadily closed the gap in the last 100 meters, passing Tsuburaya shortly before the wire, turning the wild cheering in the coffee shop, and in the stadium, and no doubt in the rest of Japan, into one huge collective groan.

Bob Schul, who three days earlier, became the first American to win gold in the 5,000-meter race, watched the end of the marathon with his wife, Sharon.

Abebe entered the stadium to great applause. He finished and went into the infield and started doing exercises. Finally the second guy, Tsuburaya came, and the crowd roared. But so did Heatley of England. Sharon asked if Tsuburaya could hold on to 2nd place. I said I didn’t think so. Heatley caught him about 150 meters before the finish. And the crowd became very quiet. The Japanese guy was going to get third. And when he did finish, the stadium did erupt.

Tsuburaya’s very public loss of the silver medal had to have been the source of pain, not only for the runner himself, but for the nation as a whole. Still and all, Tsuburaya’s run supplied one of the Games’ highlights for Japan. His bronze was Japan’s only medal in athletics, an achievement beyond the nation’s initial expectations. Writer Hitomi Yamaguchi[7] wrote of this pain and pride in a 1964 article:

Tsuburaya tried so very hard. And his efforts resulted in the raising of the Japanese flag in the National Stadium. My chest hurt. I applauded so much I didn’t take any notes. Since the start of the Olympic Games, our national flag had not risen once in the National Stadium. At this last event, we were about to have a record of no medals in track and field. Kon Ishikawa’s film cameras were rolling, and newspaper reporters were watching. People were waiting and hoping. So when Tsubaraya crossed the finish line, we felt so fortunate! When I saw the Japanese flag raised freely into the air, it felt fantastic. Tsuburaya, thank you.

When Kokichi Tsuburaya was a boy in elementary school, he participated in an event common throughout Japan – a sports day, when children compete against each other in a variety of activities, like foot races. After one such race, Koshichi Tsuburaya, the young runner’s father, chewed him out for looking behind him during the race. “Why are you looking back? Looking back is a bad thing. If you believe in yourself, you don’t need to do that.”

Many years later, with the crowd of over 70,000 on its feet and cheering, at the showcase event of the Olympics, people were yelling, “Tsuburaya, a runner is behind you! Look back! Look back! He’s close!”[8] At that moment, was Tsuburaya recalling that childhood scolding from his father? Was he letting down his father? His family? His nation?

 

Never Give Up!

Do your best. Persevere. Never give up.

Ganbare! Akirameru na!

These are values that resonate with the Japanese. You see it in the office worker who stays late to get things done, night after night. You see it in the high school baseball player who dives left and right after dozens if not hundreds of ground balls in the rain. You see it in the artist who tirelessly works the pottery wheel until she gets the exact curvature in the clay she sees in her head.

Kokichi Tsuburaya exemplified those values. And when he drove toward the finish line of the grueling 42-kilometer marathon, spent but on the verge of grabbing silver, urged on by the cheers of a nation, he was giving it his all.

When Heatley accelerated past the depleted Tsuburaya like a biker passing a pedestrian, the growing balloon of hope of an entire nation seemed to deflate in those seconds it took Heatley to get to the finish line.

Tsuburaya was a proud athlete. Whatever he may have been feeling on the inside, he took the loss of the silver medal stoically, determined to do better. As he said in interviews after the marathon, “I will practice hard towards Mexico City.”

Needless to say, Tsuburaya was a product of his national culture. But more relevantly, he was his father’s son.

The seven children in the Tsuburaya household had to work hard, cleaning the house, preparing the bath, cooking, planting the rice, raising the livestock when they hit the age of 10. These were not easy tasks, and the head of the household, Koshichi Tsuburaya, believed that his children needed to be disciplined to ensure they did their chores. He ordered his children around military style, shouting directions like “Attention!” “Right face!” “Forward!” He made them wear shorts in the winter. He made his children repeat chores if they weren’t done properly, and of course he would hit them to make sure they knew they had done something improperly. Training included bayonet skills, just in case.

As a child, Kokichi liked to run, and when his dog ran here and there, little Kokichi strove to keep up with it. But one day when he was 5, Kokichi felt a sharp pain in his legs and his back. The father then noticed that the boy’s left leg was shorter than his right. Knowing how little their Kokichi would complain about anything, the parents took him to the hospital, where they learned that their boy also had tuberculosis arthritis, which causes pain in the weight-bearing joints of the hips, knees and ankles. So from an early age, Kokichi felt pain whenever he ran.

And yet, Kokichi loved to run. He looked up to his older brother, Kikuzo, who ran competitively. Kokichi often joined him, and the elder sibling was surprised to see his kid brother keeping up, despite being 7 years younger. The two would often go for runs in the evenings. But their father didn’t approve of running for the sake of running. “You can’t live off of running,” he would say as a warning to his sons and repeat the refrain every time they came in late from an evening run. In order to avoid their father’s glare, the boys took to sneaking out for a run while Koshichi was in the bath.

Finally one night, Koshichi the father confronted Kokichi the son and asked him, “If you run, will you stick to it?” The boy said yes, to which the father said, in the approving way of gruff dads, “Once you decide to do this, don’t quit halfway through.”

Kokichi never quit. In fact, he took his commitment to running very seriously. In high school, he trained very hard for a national 5,000-meter competition, with the support of a high school teacher who also ran middle distance. They encouraged each other to compete in the big race, but the teacher, Hisashi Saito, was eliminated in the preliminary stages, and Kokichi decided to run and win for his teacher.

He did not win, which was to be expected for a newcomer to the national stage. And yet, Kokichi felt bad for letting his teacher down, and apologized before him with tears running down his cheeks. And like high schoolers who lose the big game, or celebrities who are caught in improprieties, he decided to show accountability in a traditional and very public way – he shaved his head.

When Kokichi graduated from high school, he did something that made his father proud – he joined the Ground Self-Defense Force and became a soldier as his father had been. Japan has a long tradition of long-distance relay races, and Kokichi was slated to join the team representing the Self-Defense Force in a national long-distance race. At the time of the race, however, he was in the hospital with a high fever. On top of that, he kept secret the fact that a slipped disk in his back was also causing him tremendous pain. Despite all that, Kokichi Tsuburaya insisted on running the longest leg of the race.

It was this commitment, this perseverance that endeared Tsuburaya to the public – and that won over his father, who had once believed that nothing would come of his son’s running. His father would often send him letters filled with encouragement, but at the same time expressing concern for his son’s well-being. And when Kokichi returned home from his bronze-medal finish at the Olympics, he discovered that his parents kept all sorts of news clippings, medals and trophies of his accomplishments. He was surprised to learn that his parents could not sleep on the eve of the Olympics, and worried deeply about his health.

 

The Suicide

Tsuburaya was a man of commitment, and he promised he would work hard to ensure he was ready to compete and do better at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Not only did he feel the need to make up for the “loss” of silver, so too did his seniors at Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force.

Tsuburaya did indeed train hard. And yet, somehow, he also found time for courtship. He had a met a girl named Eiko before the Tokyo Olympics, and he wanted to marry her after the Tokyo Games. His coach at the Self Defense Force athletics school, Hiro Hatano, was supportive of the proposed marriage. Tsuburaya’s parents too approved of their son’s plans.

But in 1966, coach Hatano’s reporting officer, Shigetomo Yoshiike, expressed his dissatisfaction with the union, saying that the “next Olympics was more important” (than getting married.) Yoshiike thought it was so important that Tsuburaya focus 100% on his training that he brought Hatano, Tsuburaya’s father, Eiko and Eiko’s mother together to inform them that the marriage to Tsuburaya would have to wait until after the Games. Tsuburaya was not present in that meeting.[9]

Eiko was devoted to Tsuburaya and wanted to wait until they could get married. But Eiko’s mother was no longer supportive, and did not want to wait two more years, worried that at the age of 22, Eiko could lose other opportunities to marry in that period.

In the end, the proposed marriage was broken off. Tsuburaya’s coach and manager, Hatano, was left with the unfortunate task of informing Tsuburaya. Hatano protested these decisions to his own boss to the point where he ended up being demoted and removed as Tsuburaya’s coach. The runner was thus left to train on his own, likely feeling quite alone. Very quickly, injuries began to plague him – first the return of the intense pain of the slipped disc, and then an injury to an Achilles tendon, which required surgery in 1967.

At the end of 1967, Tsuburaya returned to his hometown of Sukagawa, Fukushima for the long holiday break that bridges the old year with the new. Tsuburaya’s father was pained with news that he wasn’t sure he should share with his son. But he decided it would be best to tell him before he found out on his own – that his former fiancé, Eiko, had gotten married. Kokichi replied, “Oh, Eiko-san is married. That’s good for her.” He pretended that he was OK with the news, but his father could tell that his son was shocked and saddened.[10]

Tsuburaya returned to his Self-Defense Force base after his time with family during the New Year’s break. And on January 8th, 1968, he slit his wrists and died in his dorm room.

 

A Suicide Note Quintessentially Japanese

My dear Father, my dear Mother: I thank you for the three-day pickled yam. It was delicious. Thank you for the dried persimmons. And the rice cakes. They were delicious, too.

My dear Brother Toshio, and my dear Sister: I thank you for the sushi. It was delicious.

My dear Brother Katsumi, and my dear Sister: The wine and apples were delicious. I thank you.

My dear Brother Iwao, and my dear Sister: I thank you. The basil-flavored rice, and the Nanban pickles were delicious.

My dear Brother Kikuzo, and my dear Sister: The grape juice and Yomeishu were delicious. I thank you. And thank you, my dear Sister, for the laundry you always did for me.

My dear Brother Kozo and my dear Sister: I thank you for the rides you gave me in your car, to and fro. The mongo-cuttlefish was delicious. I thank you.

My dear Brother Masao, and my dear sister: I am very sorry for all the worries I caused you.

Yukio-kun, Hideo-kun, Mikio-kun, Toshiko-chan, Hideko-chan, Ryosuke-kun, Takahisa-kun, Miyoko-chan, Yukie-chan, Mitsue-chan, Akira-kun, Yoshiyuki-kun, Keiko-chan, Koei-kun, Yu-chan, Kii-chan, Shoji-kun: May you grow up to be fine people.

My dear Father and my dear Mother, Kokichi is too tired to run anymore. I beg you to forgive me. Your hearts must never have rested worrying and caring for me.

My dear Father and Mother, Kokichi would have liked to live by your side.

These were the handwritten words of Tsubaraya, one of two notes he left as explanation for why he took his life. Tsuburaya was a soldier, but he was also a Japanese icon for winning the bronze medal in the marathon at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. As he wrote, he was simply “too tired to run anymore.”

Suicide rates, while decreasing in recent years, have been traditionally high in Japan compared to other countries. Evidence suggests there may be a certain romanticism connected with suicide in the deep recesses of the Japanese psyche. So when some of Japan’s most celebrated writers, Yukio Mishima and Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata, among others, read the suicide note of Kokichi Tsuburaya, they swooned at the simple yet striking words of this athlete. Mishima viewed Tsuburaya’s notes as “beautiful, honest and sad.” And as Makoto Ueda explained in his book, Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, [11] Kawabata was even jealous of the quality of Tsuburaya’s poetry.

Kawabata was deeply moved upon reading this suicide note. After citing it in its entirety, he offered to explain why: “in the simple, plain style and in the context of the emotion-ridden note, the stereotyped phase ‘I enjoyed’ is breathing with truly pure life. It creates a rhythm pervading the entire suicide note. It is beautiful, sincere, and sad.” Kawabata then observed that this suicide note was not inferior to similar notes written by reputable writers, despite the fact that Tsuburaya was an athlete who boasted no special talent in composition. Kawabata even felt ashamed of his own writings, he said, when he compared them with this note.

Mishima, in 1970, and Kawabata, in 1972, would also take their own lives.

 

The Housewife

Akiko Tachibana is a housewife in Tokyo in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Her husband works long hours, her son is a typical aloof teenage student, and she is stuck taking care of her senile father-in-law, Shigezo, when his wife passes away. The novel, The Twilight Years[12], captures a moment when the working mother in the nuclear family realizes she is part of the sandwich generation, reluctantly taking care of both dependent children and aging parents while providing a second income and doing the housework.

The author, Sawako Ariyoshi, captured the angst of the time as women had to grapple with societal norms about the proper duties of the mother and wife, and the enormous burden of having to take care of three generations of family members. Ariyoshi wrote a scene where Akiko reflects on her sister-in-law, Kyoko, who came to Tokyo to help out in the aftermath of her mother’s passing. Kyoko represents the country-side view of the ideal mother and wife, which rankles the urban working mother, Akiko, particularly regarding the use of frozen food in the family diet.

After debating whether or not to work overtime that day, Akiko decided to leave for home at the usual time, for she had not had a chance to go shopping. Her meal-planning had been considerably affected by the two additional mouths she now had to feed. She was no longer able to stock up on groceries and was often at a loss what to cook, as neither Kyoko nor Shigezo cared for easy-to-prepare foods, such as spaghetti and stir-fried dishes.

Yet if Kyoko dislikes such dishes, she ought to make her own, thought Akiko. But Kyoko did not lift a finger around the house, either because she was reluctant to intrude in another woman’s kitchen or because she was reveling in her temporary freedom from domestic duties. However, Kyoko would be leaving for home in a few days, so Akiko would not have to put up with her for much longer. Akiko had been offended when Kyoko, who felt uneasy about frozen foods, would not even agree to taste them. She was irritated by what she saw as a country woman’s prejudice. She herself firmly believed that frozen herrings and clams were far fresher than the supposedly fresh variety.

 

Falling Between the Cracks of a Rapidly Changing Society

Like Ariyoshi, a giant of Japanese literature and Nobel Laureate, Kenzaburo Oe, noticed the values conflict in Japanese society induced by rapid technological change.

At a series of talks Oe gave at the University of California, Berkeley in April 1999[13], he explained at length how Tsuburaya’s suicide note was a striking cultural marker of the 1960s, a reflection of Japan in a state of transition during a period of intense social, economic and political change – more specifically, from large to nuclear families, from fresh to frozen foods, from famine to feast, from obedience to rebellion.

We know from this note that Kokichi Tsuburaya was from a big family. The many names he mentions probably do not evoke any particular feeling in a non-Japanese, but to a person like myself—especially to one who belongs to an older generation of Japanese—these names reveal the naming ideology of a family in which authority centers around the paternal head-of-household. This family-ism extends to the relatives. There is probably no large family in Japan today where children are named so thoroughly in line with traditional ethical sentiments. Tsuburaya’s suicide note immediately shows the changes in the “feelings” of the families of Japanese these past thirty years.

Professor Shunya Yoshimi of The University of Tokyo conducted an online course called, Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, in which he highlighted the stress that people in Japan, particularly in Tokyo, were under due to the rapid socio-economic change taking place. He shared the opening minutes of a 1963 NHK documentary called “Tokyo,” by director Naoya Yoshida, which shows the crowds, the noise, the traffic and the construction through the eyes of a woman whose father was killed in the Tokyo fire bombings and whose mother ran away from home.

Tokyo, unplanned and full of constructions sites, is no place for a human being to live. Only a robot with no sense could live in this rough, coarse, harsh and dusty city that doesn’t have any blue skies. Many people complain like this. But I disagree. I think this city is just desperately hanging along, just like me.

Like that woman in the documentary, Oe also believed Japan in the mid-to-late 1960s was experiencing fractures in a societal veneer of optimism, harmony and perseverance that had propelled the country into its great Olympic year, as traditional relationships and ways of thinking began to break down. Tsuburaya, according to Oe, could no longer bear the rifts in society.

Domestically, 1968 saw the rage of student rebellions, most noted among which were the struggles at Tokyo University and Nihon University. Outside of Japan, there was the May Revolution in Paris, and the invasion of Soviet troops into Prague. In retrospect, we clearly see that the world was full of premonitions of great change.

Against this backdrop, a long-distance runner of the Self-Defense Forces— itself a typical phenomenon of the state of postwar Japan’s twisted polysemous society—turned his back on the currents of such a society, alone prepared to die, and wrote this suicide note.

In the note, the young man refers to specific foods and drinks, he encourages his nephews and nieces to grow up to be fine people; he is overwhelmed by the thought of his parents’ loving concern for him and writes that he knows their hearts must never have rested in their worry and care for him.

He apologizes to them because, having kept running even after the Olympics with the aim of shouldering national prestige, he became totally exhausted and could no longer run. He closed his note with the words: “My dear Father and Mother, Kokichi would have liked to live by your side.”

Tsuburaya was a man of his era, celebrated in 1964 for his accomplishments as an athlete. Today he is also remembered for his eloquence in representing the Everyman in Japan, a poet who is said to have captured the essence and the angst of those times.

[1] Halberstam, D. (1986) The Reckoning, New York, Avon Books.

[2] Kingston, J. (2014) Japan in Transformation, 1945-2010 (Seminar Studies), London and New York, Routledge Taylor and Francis.

[3] Smith, M. D. S. (2018) Mass Media, Consumerism and National Identify in Postwar Japan, New York, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

[4] San Francisco Chronicle, April 3, 1958

[5] Posse; 2015 Vol. 8 Spring

[6] Whiting, R. (2014) Schollander, Hayes were Spectacular at Tokyo Games, The Japan Times; October 17, 2014

[7]  Yamaguchi, H (2014) Tokyo Orinpikku: Bungakusha no Mita Seiki no Saiten, Tokyo, Kodansha

[8] Aoyama, I. (2008) Kokou no Rannaa – Kokichi Tsuburaya Monogatari (The Lone Runner – The Kokichi Tsuburaya Story) Tokyo, Baseball Magazine.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid

[11] Ueda, M. (1976) Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, Redwood City, Stanford University Press

[12] Ariyoshi, S. (1984) The Twilight Years, Great Britain, Peter Owen Publishers.

[13] Townsend Center for the Humanities (1999) On Politics and Literatures: Two Lectures by Kenzaburo Oe” Available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7j63t4c5