Formula 1 and the Japanese Grand Prix

By Louis Walker

Since 1976, there have been 36 Formula 1 World Championship races held in Japan, 30 at Suzuka, 4 at Fuji Speedway and 2 at Okayama International Circuit (as the ‘Pacific Grand Prix’). As the event typically takes a spot towards the end of the season, it’s had its fair share of championship deciding moments over the years, with 13 champions being crowned at the event. It’s no surprise then that the Japanese Grand Prix is a firm favourite among dedicated fans of the sport. Here are some of the most memorable races held in the country.

1976 - Fuji Speedway:

The first ever Japanese Grand Prix proved to be a nail biting end to an eventful season which saw Niki Lauda (Ferrari) leading James Hunt (McLaren) by 3 points, despite Niki missing 2 races after a near fatal crash at the Nürburgring earlier in the season. If you’ve seen the film Rush then you’ll already be familiar with this one (and if you haven’t seen it then you certainly should!). Despite torrential rain and fog making conditions treacherous, the race took place despite complaints from some of the drivers. With the trauma from his Nürburgring accident still fresh in his mind, Lauda would pit at the end of the first lap to retire the car, as he preferred to walk away with his life than risk the conditions again. This left Hunt needing fourth or better to win the World Championship. Hunt led most of the race comfortably before a drying track caused him to lose places (with Mario Andretti’s Lotus eventually winning the race). Then, on lap 64 of 73, Hunt suffered a puncture, with the required pitstop dropping him to fifth. However, on lap 71 he would overtake both Alan Jones and Clay Regazzoni, bringing up to third and winning the World Championship by just a single point.

1989 - Suzuka:

Another championship deciding race, this time between the McLaren duo of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. With Senna on pole and Prost second on the grid, Senna needed to win the race to keep his championship hopes alive ahead of the final round in Australia. However, a poor start meant that Prost instantly took the lead, and the pair would stay like this for the first 46 laps. Then, on lap 47, after getting a run on his teammate through 130R, Senna dived down the inside at the Casio Triangle (a slow speed chicane at the end of the lap). Prost however, had other ideas and turned into the corner as if Senna wasn’t there, with the two of them colliding and grinding to a halt. It seemed to be all over as Prost climbed out of the car, but Senna, not one to give up, managed to get the marshals to push his car so he could bump start it. With a damaged front wing, he had to drive a full lap before being able to pit for repairs, dropping him to second, five seconds behind Benetton’s Alessandro Nannini. It would only take two laps before the McLaren had the measure of the Benetton, and Senna would cross the line in first place. It seemed confusing then when it was Nannini who took the top step of the podium for his first Grand Prix victory, with Senna nowhere to be seen. He had been disqualified for cutting the chicane after rejoining the track following his collision with Prost. Despite both Senna and McLaren appealing the decision, the disqualification stood, and Prost was crowned champion under controversial circumstances.

1990 - Suzuka:

This race would be the mirror image of the previous year’s events. With Prost now at Ferrari after leaving McLaren at the end of 1990, it was he who had to beat Senna to keeps his championship hopes alive before Australia. Senna would again get a poor start from pole and allow Prost into the lead at the start. Neither driver would make it past the first corner though, as another daring move up the inside from Senna would cause both to crash again, this time with terminal damage to both cars, crowning Senna champion on the spot. It was another controversial end to a championship between two bitter rivals. With those two out of the picture, Benetton would once again win the race finishing both first and second with Nelson Piquet and Roberto Moreno behind the wheel. Aguri Suzuki would also put his Lola-Lamborghini into an unlikely third place, becoming the first Japanese driver to score a podium in an F1 race.

2005 - Suzuka:

If there was any doubt as to whether Kimi Räikkönen was a capable driver, this race certainly proved that he was. With mixed conditions leaving the title protagonists at the back of the grid, with Kimi starting 17th, it was always going to be an interesting race. It would be the Toyota of Ralf Schumacher that led the field at the start, but it wouldn’t be long before the safety car was deployed. Takuma Sato and Rubens Barichello collided at the first corner, giving Barichello a puncture. On the exit of the final corner Montoya attempted to go around the outside of Klien, the Canadian pushing the Colombian off the track and heavily into the barriers. Lap 20 saw Alonso drive around the outside of Michael Schumacher at 130R, a highly daring move that paid off for the Spaniard. Räikkönen meanwhile was picking off cars left right and centre, making up five places on the first lap alone. After all of the scheduled pitstops had taken place, he was up to second and gaining on leader Fisichella. Then on the final lap of the race, Räikkönen would drive around the outside of the Renault driver into turn one, taking the lead and going on to win the race. This was arguably Kimi’s greatest race in his career and a fine example of never giving up.

2007 - Fuji Speedway:

The first race to be held at Fuji Speedway since 1977 would prove to be similarly treacherous to its’ inaugural running in 1976. Such were the conditions that the first 19 laps were held behind the safety car. When racing finally got underway, there were many collisions, with Nick Heidfeld’s BMW-Sauber and Jenson Button’s Honda colliding almost immediately. Alex Wurz and Felipe Massa would collide shortly after, with Wurz’s Williams retiring on the spot. Reigning champion Fernando Alonso would also suffer a heavy accident in his McLaren, blaming aquaplaning for his crash. Bizarrely, there would be another crash during the safety car while Alonso’s McLaren was cleared away. Third place Sebastian Vettel rear ended Mark Webber as he slowed behind the leading McLaren of Lewis Hamilton. The crash saw Webber immediately out and Vettel coming into the pits to retire the car. Webber was suitably unimpressed by the incident, especially considering he had been driving the race with food poisoning, even vomiting into his helmet during the initial safety car at the start of the race. Hamilton would eventually go on to win the race with a thrilling duel on the final lap between Massa and Heidfeld deciding fourth and fifth places respectively (if you haven’t seen this footage look for it on YouTube).

2012 - Suzuka:

This last race is included in the list because as of January 2022, it was the last time a Japanese driver stood on the podium in F1, with Kamui Kobayashi’s Sauber finishing an impressive third place. Aside from a chaotic start at the first corner which saw Romain Grosjean collide with Mark Webber, with several other collisions occurring as drivers swerved to avoid the Lotus and Red Bull, the race was largely uneventful. Sebastian Vettel would achieve his second career grand slam, achieving pole position, leading every single lap and finishing with the fastest lap of the race.

The coronavirus pandemic has meant that for the last 2 years, the Japanese Grand Prix has been cancelled. With Suzuka due to hold the race on the 9th of October this year, let’s hope the race can return to the calendar and continue to provide more memorable moments in the future.

Authors of Japan: Yasunari Kawabata

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

The first, and currently only one of two, Japanese nationals to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata is one of the original so-called ‘Big Three’ of Japanese literature. For such a successful writer, the main themes that define his work can be hard to pin down. Having lived through the second half of the Meiji, the entirety of the Taisho era and the first forty years of the Showa era, and therefore through countless important historical events, Kawabata's work was generally apolitical. Even after the Second World War, apart from a few references to it happening, his work remained generally unaffected, especially when compared to his protégé, Yukio Mishima, whose life was greatly impacted by his experience of the war. Though some of his works can feel slightly dream-like and strange when taken at face value, his work generally, apart from one exception, stays away from the supernatural and surreal. The dichotomy between the modern and the traditional, though present, is far less evident than it was in the works of other writers, again, especially when compared to Mishima.

How, then, can we define Kawabata’s work? The answer might lie in his youth. Born into a well-to-do family in Osaka in 1899, Kawabata’s early life was certainly a sad one. Both of his parents passed away by the time he was four, and his sister and paternal grandparents had also died less than ten years later. With almost all of his close family gone, Kawabata was to be heartbroken once more when his engagement to Hatsuyo Ito was broken off due to unforeseen complications. This distance, therefore, both physical and emotional, that he experienced when he was younger, and the impact this distance has on people’s relationships, might be best lens with which to view Kawabata’s work. 

After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924, Kawabata worked as a journalist and was involved in literary magazines and journals such as Hiroshi Kikuchi’s Bungei Shunju and Riichi Yokomitsu’s Bungei Jidai. Kawabata’s first major success, The Dancing Girl of Izu (1926), follows a lonely and melancholic student from Tokyo who meets a group of traveling musicians and falls in love with one of them, the young girl Kaoru. Kaoru’s innocent and child-like antics bring the narrator, a stand-in for Kawabata himself, out of his melancholia and he returns to Tokyo refreshed and in higher spirits. The novel contains two themes, both of which revolve around how the narrator cures his depression. At the start of the novel, the narrator is lonely and miserable, but after his interaction with the musicians, particularly with the young Kaoru, he returns to Tokyo refreshed. It is his time with the musicians that cures his depression, thereby showing the importance, to Kawabata, of social interaction, something which he was personally lacking in his youth. It is worth stressing that the student leaves Tokyo, a huge sprawling industrial city, for Shimoda in the far more rural land of the Izu Peninsula. This leads back to a theme common in the writings of almost every Japanese writer of the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras; the constant dichotomy of the modern and the traditional. Does swapping the smoke and factories of Tokyo for the cool sea breeze and mountains of Izu parallel the misery of the narrator and the youthful innocent of Kaoru? 

Both of these themes are appears again in another of Kawabata’s work. In my personal opinion, Snow Country (1948) might be one of the greatest pieces of Japanese literature ever written and its opening scene provides one of the clearest example of the modern-traditional dichotomy. The novel starts late at night with the nouveau riche Shimamura making his way by train through the dark snow-covered mountains of Niigata to the remote onsen town of Yuzawa. The imagery of the industrial coal-powered steam train making its way through the dark and frozen land of Tohoku, a heart land of traditionalism, seems to reverse the accepted narrative of ‘old good, new bad’. The warmth and light of the train, the new, cutting its way through the cold and dark mountains, the old. Though it would be foolish to think that Kawabata’ is attempting to fully reverse this accepted point of view. As the novel progresses, Shimura’s complex relationship with Komako, one of the Geisha of the onsen, possibly mirrors Japanese society’s complex relationship with the balance of the modern and the traditional. Shimura and Komako is comparable to the unnamed narrator and Kaoru, though is not the same. As for the narrator and Kaoru, though they are not allowed to pursue each other romantically, their relationship is clearly defined, and their story ends far more positively, whereas Shimura and Komako’s relationship is remains ambiguous, leaving room for conflict. Their story ends with a fire in the town in which one of the passengers on the train, Yoko, perishes. With Shimura and Komako’s relationship still not clearly defined, the end comes in a terrible tragedy and loss of life, possibly foreshadowing Japan’s own final confrontation with the modern against the traditional and the terrible sorrows of war that conflict brings. 

In 1938, the legendary former Go player Hon'inbō Shūsai came out of retirement to play the then up-and-coming prodigy Minoru Kitani. At the time, Kawabata was working as a journalist and covered the game for the Mainichi Shinbun. More than 15 years later, Kawabata adapted a semi-fictionalised version of the game into the novel The Master of Go (1954). On the surface, the novel appears to be nothing than a piece of historical fiction, retailing the epic struggle between an aging grand-master against a young prodigy looking to carve out his own legacy in the world of Go. The American historian and translator Edward Seidensticker thought differently. Seidensticker argued that Kawabata used the game as an allegory for the war between Japan and the West, particularly with the United States. Shūsai representing traditional culture, stood in for Japan, whilst Kitani filled in as the US, a new emerging power posing a threat to the established Empire. Kawabata’s last reference to the modern-traditional dichotomy appeared in the novel The Old Capital (1962). 

Many of Kawabata’s novels concern the idea of love; Thousand Cranes (1952), The Sound of the Mountain (1954), The Lake (1954), The Dandelion (1964) and Beauty and Sadness (1965). But there are two in particular that deserve to be discussed in further detail. The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1930) follows the narrator’s journey through the former entertainment district of Asakusa in Tokyo. Throughout his time there, the narrator meets numerous young prostitutes and brothel workers who explain their way of life and the inner machinations of Tokyo’s dark underbelly. Unlike Kawabata’s other works on love, Asakusa is far more overtly sexual. Although, this is not the only time Kawabata did this. The House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961) follows an old man, Eguchi, who visits a hotel where customers can pay to sleep next to naked girls but are forbidden to engage in sexual activity with them. It is possible that Eguchi is a stand in for Kawabata and that the house represents Kawabata’s inability to truly connect with others; constantly surrounded by people but never able to truly commit himself to them. 

Unfortunately, like seemingly many famous Japanese writers, alongside Dazai, Akutagawa, Arishima and Mishima, Kawabata was another victim of suicide. Mishima's death in 1970 seems to have impacted him greatly and, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, suffered from nightmares and regularly made jokes about his own death. Despite leaving no suicide note, he was found dead in April 1972 after gassing himself. 

Authors of Japan: Takeo Arishima

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

Arishima was born to an upper-class family in Tokyo on March 4th 1878. He had two brothers, Ikuma Arishima and Ton Satomi, both of which also became writers. His son, Masayuki Mori, was an actor and regularly starred in Akira Kurosawa films in the 1950s. Arishima entered the Gakushuin school at 10 years old, and, after graduating, enrolled in the Sapporo Agricultural College in Hokkaido. After a brief time in Imperial Army, he took English lessons and moved to the US in 1903. During his time in the US, he studied at Haverford College and Harvard University, before working briefly as a foreign correspondent for the Mainichi Shimbun. 

Arishima's literary career began in 1910 when his two brothers introduced him to four other writers: Shiga Naoya, Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Yanagi Sōetsu and Nagayo Yoshirō. Together, the six men formed the shirakabaha, 'White-Birch Society' and published a literary magazine of the same name. The two of Arishima's most famous works worth discussing are The Descendants of Cain (1917) and A Certain Woman (1919). 

The Descendants of Cain was Arishima's first taste of fame and its defining theme of one of  is undoubtedly, nature. In particular, the darker crueller side of nature, The story follows the lives of farmers in Hokkaido and the challenges posed by nature that they must over come in order to survive. This was no doubt inspired by his time studying agriculture at university in Hokkaido. The vicious nature is also seen in his later short story The Siblings Who Almost Drowned (1921). 

Arishima's second work, A Certain Woman, is arguably his most famous. The story follows a young woman called Yōko Satsuki. Yōko is pressured into an arranged marriage with a journalist but ends up divorcing him and moves back home. After the death of her parents, she is encouraged by her friends to marry Kimura, a wealthy Japanese expatriate now living in Chicago. On the boat from Yokohama to the US, Yōko meets a married man known as Kuraji and embarks on an affair. By the time they arrive in the US, Yōko decides not to marry Kurama and takes his money before returning home with Kuraji. It is not until she starts living with him that Kuraji's dark persanlity is revealed. He constantly fights with Yōko before disappearing after being hunted by the police. Repeatedly heartbroken, Yōko resigns herself to the idea that she will never find love in the current socially conservative climate of Japan. She dies not long after her younger sister passes away from illness. Yōko is believed to be based on Nobuko Sasaki, who was the ex-wife of his friend and fellow writer Doppo Kunikida. Considering that the novel was written in the 1910s, the themes of promiscuity and sexual freedom were decades ahead of there time, thereby cementing Arishima's place in the list of great Japanese writers. 

Arishima was not, however, confined to just fiction. In 1922, he published the political manifesto Sengen hitotsu, 'A Manifeso', on the plight of the agricultural and working classes. He argued that it was up to the workers to bring about their own salvation and that he, a member of the upper-class, was powerless to help. This may have been inspired by his time studying in Sapporo as well by the plot of The Descendants of Cain. 

In that same year, like many other great Japanese writers, Arishima, alongside his lover Akiko Hatano, took his own life. Hatano worked as an editor for the women's magazine Fujin Koron but was still married. It is believed that the extramarital affair drove them both to suicide. He had attempted suicide once before during his time in Sapporo College with the economist Kokichi Morimoto but had failed. Arishima and Hatano were found hanged in a forest in Karuizawa in Nagano. 

Figures from Japanese History: Kyuichi Tokuda

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

Born in Nago in Okinawa in 1894, Kyuichu Tokuda is most famous for his chairmanship of the Japanese Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s. After graduating as a lawyer from the Nihon University, he participated in formation of the party in 1922 and became a key member of its central committee. By the late 1920s, Japanese society had become increasingly right-wing and started to become dominated by the military. The 1925 Peace Preservation Law expanded police powers and allowed the Imperial government to more effectively silence political dissidents. In 1928, Tokuda was arrested by the Tokkō, the 'Special Higher Police', and imprisoned. He spent time in two different prisons across Japan: Abashiri Prison in Hokkaido and Fuchū Prison in Tokyo. He was, however, imprisoned alongside fellow communist Yoshio Shiga. Together they wrote Eighteen Years in Prison (1948), an autobiography about their experiences in prison. 

After their release from prison in October 1945, Tokuda and Shiga were joined by another communist leader who had been away in China, Senzo Nosaka. Nosaka had been leading Japanese People's Emancipation League, a Japanese resistance movement that re-educated captured Japanese soldiers in anti-fascist and socialist ideology. Together, the three men made up the core of the Japanese Communist Party and led them to relative electoral success in the post-war era. The JCP won 9.8% of the votes in the 1949 election, earning them 35 seats in the diet. 

This success, however, would not last. By the 1950s, the United States was becoming more and more engulfed in Cold War-fuelled anti-communist hysteria. Towards the end of the their occupation, the Americans introduced a new policy of 'reverse course'; communists and anyone believed to harbour communist sympathies, were purged from the Japanese administration. This led to a split in the JCP. One faction, led by Tokuda, wanted to pursue Maoist-inspired guerrilla war that would eventually end in revolution, whilst the other faction, under Nosaka, was happy to continue with more peaceful and democratic tactics. Nosaka continued in his role as the head of the party, guiding it in a peaceful direction, until 1958, when he was replaced by Kenji Miyamoto. 

Tokuda, meanwhile, fled to the newly formed People's Republic of China in October 1950, after surviving an assassination attempt. Though in exile, Tokuda was by no means powerless as he still remained in close contact with the party's more militant faction. Japanese communists, alongside Zainichi Korean and the Zengakuren, a left-leaning anarchist students union, rioted on May Day 1952 in protest against the first Japan-US Security Treaty. Tokuda's faction even attempted to emulate the rural Chinese guerilla movements of the 1930s and 1940s. The Mountain Village Operation Unit, though unsuccessful, attempted to wage a guerrilla war in the Japanese countryside in the hope of finally bringing about their revolution. Members of the unit are reported to have attacked police officers, bombed trains and committed acts of arson. The unit also published the pamphlet, 'How to Raise Flower Bulbs', which contained important information on guerrilla warfare tactics and how to do things such as build improvised explosives and make molotov-cocktails. This pamphlet was used as a template by a later Japanese communist group in the 1970s, the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, and their own bomb-making manual Hara hara Tokei. Tokuda passed away in 1953, his time in charge leaving a dark stain on what was otherwise a relatively peaceful and progressive political party. 

Authors of Japan: Haruki Murakami

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble 

On April 1st 1978, a young jazz bar owner from Kyoto stood in the stands of the Meiji Jingu Stadium watching his beloved Yakult Swallows take on Hiroshima Carp. This baseball match launched the careers of two men, both 29 years old. One of the men was Dave Hilton, a third baseman from Texas, and the other was the young bar owner from Kyoto. That bar owner was Haruki Murakami and watching Hilton play would inspire him to write a novel that would launch him into a highly successful writing career and make him a known around the world by the end of the century. 

Murakami went home that night and began writing immediately, although, he could only afford to work for an hour each night as he had to maintain the bar he ran with his wife, Yoko. It took him four months, but he completed his first book, Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and published it a year later in 1979.  First, in the monthly literary magazine Gunzo in June and then again, as a book, in July. The book was received well; it won the 1979 Gunzo Prize for New Writers and was nominated for an Akutagawa Prize in the same year of it's release. Within Japanese literary circles, Hear the Wind Sing is understood as being an example of an 'I-Novel'. I-Novels are, unsurprisingly, always written in the first-person, and are usually a mixture of fictional prose and an autobiography. Many I-Novels are often grounded in reality; usually a fictional adaption of real events and real people, normally based to some extent on the author's own life. Murakami, however, seems to present completely fictional stories as he merges surrealist themes of the supernatural within the frame of supposedly 'real' I-Novels. Murakami followed Hear the Wind Sing up with two sequels: Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). A fourth sequel, Dance Dance Dance (1988), was released four years later, but it's status as a part of the 'Rat-Trilogy' is debated. These three, or four, books got their name by all revolving, in some way, around a young man called 'Rat'. In Hear the Wind Sing, Rat is a fellow student and close friend of the protagonist as they often go drinking together. In Pinball, 1973, he is recalled in the memories of the protagonist as friend back when they were students in the early 1970s. In A Wild Sheep Chase, Rat is a friend of the protagonist, who this time is a detective not a student, who sends the protagonist a letter explaining that he has accidently unearthed a conspiracy exposing the Japanese economic and political elite. 

Three themes can be seen in this trilogy; youth and the student movement, surrealism and the supernatural and a combination of both into historical fiction. The protagonists of Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball are both students and they both take place, specifically, during the Japanese student protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both of these themes are found in another famous Murakami novel; Norwegian Wood (1987). The plot of all three novels revolve around the lives of the main characters during those relatively unstable times. The past remains an important theme in two other pieces of Murakami's work; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) and 1Q84 (2010). In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the main character explains to a young girl his actions in China and Mongolia during the war in the 1930s and 1940s. 1Q84 is set in an alternate version of 1984 where the protagonist, a killer-for-hire must defeat an evil cult to get back to her own timeline. Despite being set in an alternate timeline, 1Q84 still falls within the theme of the past as there are still numerous references to historical events and figures from the 'real' 1980s. 

It is in the last of these five books, however, that another of Murakami's favourite themes is most clear; surrealism and the supernatural. That which is real and that which is is not becomes extremely blurred in 1Q84. Partially because of the protagonist's struggle to return to her own timeline, the 'real' 1980s, but also because of the references to evil cults, mysterious disappearances and magical powers. Though discussing much about the past, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle also references the supernatural as a curse is suggested as an explanation for the main characters missing cat, and a clairvoyant is consulted to help find it. Whether it's mysterious disappearing twins, clairvoyants or mysterious tattooed sheep, the second third, and quasi-fourth books of the Rat-Trilogy, Pinball, 1973, A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance all contain some sort of allusion to the strange and supernatural. The most surreal of all Murakami's books, however, would be Kafka on the Shore (2002). Other than being named after the founder of the darker side of literary surrealism, Kafka on the Shore explores themes of metaphysics, the debate between free-will and determinism, and the mind-body problem. The book contains two seemingly unconnected stories; one of which is about the titular Kafka Tamura and his journey of running away from home. Whilst the other follows Satoru Nakata, an elderly and  intellectually-disabled illiterate man who goes on the run with a truck-driver after killing a cat-murderer. Nakata flees to the city of Takamatsu in Kagawa, the same place Kafka travels to after leaving home...

And still, in almost all of Murakami's work, the idea of the I-Novel still lurks in the background. Being born in 1949, Murakami would have been a student in the late 1960s and so it's possible that the events of Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973 and Norwegian Wood are all grounded, to some extent, in the memories of his time as a student. And the former soldier in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, was said to have been sent to China during the war, the same as Murakami's own father. So, excluding some of the more supernatural parts of his work, it's possible that Murakami has been greatly influenced by both his own memories, but also by the memories of those around him.

1995 was not a good year for Japan. On January 17th, a massive 6.9 MMS earthquake struck the city of Kobe in the south of Hyōgo Prefecture. This was the worst earthquake in Japan since 1925; more than six thousand people were killed and over forty thousand were injured. Then, two months later, on March 20th, the apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo released highly poisonous sarin gas onto the Tokyo subway. Thirteen people died and over six thousand were injured. Murakami had been living in the United States since 1986, but returned home in the aftermath of the two tragedies. In January 1996, he began interviewing people who been affected by the subway attack. These interviews, along with his own thoughts, were published together a year later as Underground (1997), Murakami's first non-fiction book. In his new book, Murakami criticised the Japanese press for being overly sensationalist and focusing on the perpetrators of the attack rather than the victims. It also helped to shine a light on the Japanese national psyche, as many of the victims revealed that their priority, regardless of their injuries, was to make sure they got to work on time. Three years later, Murakami released another book After the Quake (2000). This was a collection of fictional short stories all set in February 1995, after the Kobe earthquake but before the subway attack. These stories were a departure from Murakami's usual surrealist style of writing as only one contained any obviously supernatural themes. Interestingly, though, none of the characters were directly involved in the earthquake. Instead, it's only something that is mentioned in newspaper or on the television. This, combined with a move to a third-person style, away from his usual first-person, creates a strong sense of detachment from the events, perhaps reflecting Murakami's own sense of distance, as he was away living in America at the time. 

Outside of writing, Murakami's main hobby is running. He started in the early 1980s as a way to keep healthy after spending most of his time at his desk writing. He has ran numerous marathons and completed an ultramarathon around Lake Saroma in 1996. Murakami has also published a memoir of his running career, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008). 

 

Yuki Tsunoda: Future F1 star or another underexperienced rookie?

 By Louis Walker

It’s no secret that when it was announced that Japan’s Yuki Tsunoda was going to be racing for AlphaTauri for the 2021 Formula One season, a lot of people were hyped. He would be the first Japanese driver to race in F1 since Kamui Kobayashi drove for Caterham in 2014, and the first driver to be born in the 2000’s. But after 16 races in 2021, the question still remains: does Yuki Tsunoda deserve to be in F1?

Born in Sagamihara in Kanagawa, Tsunoda’s professional racing career began the same way as most F1 drivers did, in karting. Debuting in the JAF Junior Karting Championship in 2010, he progressed to both the regional and national classes in 2013 and 2014 respectively. While information is scarce on his results in these categories, the experienced gained from karting meant that Tsunoda would eventually graduate to single seater car racing, making his debut in the Japanese Formula 4 Championship at the end of 2016, before racing in the series full time in 2017.

What followed would be the first signs that Yuki had the potential to be a successful racing driver, with 3 wins and 6 podiums earning him a solid 3rd place in the championship in his rookie season. 2018 would prove to be even better, however, as his experience and speed from the previous season resulted in him winning the championship in convincing fashion, with 7 wins and 11 podiums to his name.

Of course, the natural progression after winning a Formula 4 Championship is to land a drive in Formula 3, and that’s exactly what happened. Signing with Jenzer Motorsport for the 2019 FIA Formula 3 Championship, Yuki would have moderate success over the season, with 3rd place at the Monza feature race and a win during the sprint race that same weekend being the highlight of his season. He would finish 9th in the standings with 67 points.

Despite not making a huge impact in his rookie F3 season, Tsunoda would progress to FIA Formula 2 with Carlin for the 2020 season. Whilst F2 is usually a difficult series for rookies to excel in, Yuki would quickly find his feet by scoring a podium in the third race of the season in Austria. 3 wins and a further 6 podiums would lead to him being the highest placed rookie and therefore earn himself the Anthoine Hubert Award, finishing 3rd overall behind Mick Schumacher (who also graduated to F1 in 2021) and Callum Ilott.

With Yuki having a strong backing from Honda (under the Honda Formula Dream Project), and Daniil Kvyat having an underwhelming 2020 season, the door was left wide open for Tsunoda to take the second seat at Scuderia AlphaTauri Honda for the 2021 Formula One season. Expectations were high after his strong F2 campaign. Those expectations were met in the first round at Bahrain, where he would score 2 points on his debut after finishing 9th, and it seemed that all the hype generated pre-season was valid. However, this would be his only points finish in the first 5 races.  Whereas his teammate Gasly would score points in 4 of these races with a best finish of 6th. This was mostly down to a combination of poor qualifying performances hindering his race pace, and multiple crashes of his own accord. Round 2 at Imola saw Tsunoda crash at the start of qualifying, which led to a 12th place finish after starting from the back of the grid.

It wouldn’t be until round 6 in Azerbaijan until he would score more points, picking up the pieces after Lance Stroll and Max Verstappen both suffered heavy crashes after high-speed tyre failures allowing him to score his best result of the season so far in 7th. However, with Gasly finishing on the podium in 3rd, that result was quickly forgotten. Three more points finishes over the next 9 races brings Yuki’s points tally up to 18 so far, compared to Gasly who currently sits on 74 points.

Last time out at Turkey essentially summed up the season that Tsunoda has had. A strong qualifying session in mixed conditions saw him line up 9th on the grid but was once again overshadowed by teammate Gasly pulling in another superb performance to line up 4th. The race would start strong for Yuki, holding off 7-time world champion Lewis Hamilton for the first 8 laps before the Brit was able to pass around the outside at turn 3. Despite this, the Japanese driver felt that he should have done more, saying “I tried to hold him behind for 20 laps. Eight laps is not enough.” A few laps later would see him spin out of the points and finish a disappointing 14th, with Gasly scoring a further 8 points in 6th position.

Tsunoda and Gasly have both been retained by AlphaTauri for the 2022 season, but with Honda pulling out of the sport at the end of this year and only 6 rounds remaining this season, Yuki will have to impress next year if he wants to remain in F1 in the long term and avoid the wrath of Helmut Marko.

Authors of Japan: Yukio Mishima

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

To both historians and literacy critics alike, Yukio Mishima remains an extremely divisive figure. Even after the fifty years since his death, people remain divided over his legacy as both a writer and a public figure. On one hand, Mishima was an incredible writer; only beaten to a Nobel Prize for Literature by his fellow countryman and teacher Yasunari Kawabata. Yet on the other, he represents those in Japan’s Post-War years who refused to abandon the old traditions of the Imperial era. The three main themes that permeate Mishima work, closeted homosexual characters, a strongly romanticised understanding of suicide and staunch right-wing political views, are all deeply intertwined within his own life. This combination of thoughts and beliefs created a type of writer that Japan had never seen before and may never see again.

Born in Tokyo in January 1925 as the oldest son of a government official, Mishima spent the first twelve years of his life living with his grandmother, Natsuko, and extended family. Natsuko was extremely strict and refused to allow Mishima to play sports or with other boys his own age. This meant he spent a lot of his time either alone, or with his female cousins. When he moved in back with his family, Mishima was enrolled in the gakushūin, an elite school originally for the children of Japanese nobility and other upper-class families. During his school days, Mishima read both Japanese and Western mythology, as well as joining the editorial board of his school’s literary society. This was Mishima’s first taste of literature. However, like his grandmother, Mishima’s father was extremely strict, and refused to accept Mishima’s love of writing. Support for Mishima’s new passion came from two sources: his mother, Shizue, and fellow member of the literacy society’s editorial board Zenmei Hasuda. It was at the literacy society that Mishima began to hone his voice as a writer. Mishima’s work relied upon complex vocabulary and a heavy use of metaphors, alongside themes of the natural world and the supernatural, often intertwined with a right-wing flavour. Mishima is understood to be a part of the nihon rōman ha, the Japanese Romantic School, of the 1930s. 

In April 1944, around six months before he graduated high school, Mishima received his draft notice from the army. However, due to poor health, Mishima was incorrectly diagnosed with tuberculosis by army doctors and declared unfit for duty. Like many young men at the time, Mishima had assumed that he would be able to fight, and possibly even die, in the on-going war with China and the West. His parents were extremely relieved to know that their son would be spared conscription, but Mishima’s reaction was less positive. Mishima had been strongly influenced by the ultra-nationalist philosophy that had gripped Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. He held a deep love for his country and a strong, perhaps even fanatical, devotion and reverence to the emperor to such a great extent that he wrote in his diary that he wished to join the tokkō, or ‘Special Attack’, units of the Japanese army. These units included the infamous kamikaze; Japanese suicide pilots instructed to crash their planes into British and American ships during the Pacific War. It’s speculated that Mishima’s guilt stemming from the failure to die his idealised ‘glorious death’ in the war combined with his weak constitution as a child, lead to an overcompensation by the prevalence of traditional Japanese culture in his later works.

After the war ended, Mishima joined the Law Department at the University of Tokyo, at the suggestion of his father, despite his wish to study literature.  Despite this, Mishima managed to juggle both his writing and law studies and graduated in 1947. He then joined the treasury department and began working as a government bureaucrat. After a year at the treasury, however, it was obvious where Mishima’s true passions lay. After persuading his father to let him leave his job in the civil service and pursue writing full-time, Mishima made a name for himself with his breakthrough novel Confessions of a Mask (1949). Confessions of a Mask follows a young boy named Kochan, a physically weak boy who was kept away from boys his own age and later becomes obsessed with the male physique and an almost erotic-sense of the macabre. Later in the story, Kochan develops homosexual feelings towards one of his male friends. He attempts to suppress these urges and tries to force himself to love a woman, Sonoko, though he admits he never truly can. These hidden feelings are the titular ‘mask’ that Kochan believes everyone hides behind. It doesn’t take Edogawa Ranpo to figure out who Kochan was a stand in for.

By the late 1950s, Mishima had risen to celebrity-level fame. His major works at the time included his break-out novel Confessions of a Mask as well as; Tobacco (1946), Middle Ages (1946), Forbidden Colours (1951), The Sound of Waves (1954), The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956) and Kyoko’s House (1959). By 1960, however, Japanese society had gone through some quite radical changes. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party had cemented itself as the strongest political force in the country since the merger between Shigeru Yoshida’s Liberal Party and Ichirō Hatoyama’s Japan Democratic Party in 1955. Meanwhile, the Japanese Communist Party had lost some of its impact since the days of the Mountain Village Operation Units earlier in the decade. Now under the control of the more moderate Kenji Miyamoto, the JCP aimed for more peaceful and democratic means of achieving their revolution and they regularly competed in elections. The position of Japan’s most radical leftists had fallen, instead, to the zengakuren, a left-wing student organisation that had already proved their commitment to the socialist cause in the Sunagawa Struggle. They were complemented in the diet by the Japanese Socialist Party, which had been in opposition since 1948. Since the end of the war, the left had made major gains in both their political and public presence. The big issue facing Japan in 1960 was the US-Japan Security Treaty, or anpo, which would allow permanent US military bases in Japan. The treaty, that was being put through the Diet by the current LDP prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, was met by firm opposition from a wide section of the public and by left-wing opposition groups, particularly the Socialist and Communist parties. In June 1960, hundreds of thousands of protesters, including members of the zengakuren, socialists and communists, marched to the National Diet in Tokyo. The protesters smashed their way in the Diet but were beaten back by a mixture of police and right-wing thugs secretly hired by the government. Hundreds of people were injured and a Tokyo University student and member of the zengakuren, Michiko Kanba, was killed by the police. In the literary world, these protests highlighted the widening gap between left-wing and right-wing writers. To Mishima, the protests had been hijacked by socialists and communists, and he regularly contributed newspaper articles on the anpo debate to the mainichi shimbun. Although he didn’t particularly agree with the treaty, he would rather support a strong right-wing figure like Kishi than the leftists, and was therefore often critical of the protesters themselves, rather than the cause they were actually protesting about.

This wasn’t the only time, though, that politics had spilled over into the literary world. In November 1960, a magazine called chūō kōron published Shichirō Fukazawa’s short story The Tale of an Elegant Dream (1960). The Tale of an Elegant Dream tells the story of a socialist revolution that sweeps Japan and contains a scene where Emperor Shōwa, Empress Kōjun and the young Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko are publicly guillotined in front of a jubilant crowd. Rightists were outraged. They thought it was treasonous to depict the imperial family in such a graphic way. Both Fukazawa and chūō kōron received countless letters of complaints, some even going far as to mail in death threats. The magazine argued that they were allowed to publish whatever they wanted on the grounds of their right to freedom of speech and artistic freedom. Tensions boiled over in February 1961 when a seventeen-year-old ultra-nationalist by the name of Kazutaka Komori broke into the house of the magazine’s president Hōji Shimanaka in an attempt to assassinate him. In the commotion, Komori killed Shimanaka’s maid and severely injured his wife. Concerned that writers had now become a target for political fanatics, the police put Mishima and a few other writers on round-the-clock police protection. Although he did not agree with the narrative, Mishima had recommended Fukazawa’s story to the editors of chūō kōron on the grounds of its literary merits. To rightists, this meant that Mishima had a become valid target.

All of the political chaos that had engulfed Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s, manifested itself in Mishima’s work. Patriotism (1960) is a piece of historical fiction set during the ‘February 26 Incident’, an attempted coup by a rogue faction of the Japanese army that sought to take control of both the military and the government. The story follows a young army lieutenant who is ordered to execute his fellow soldiers for their role in the rebellion. Unable to kill his fellow soldiers, both the lieutenant and his wife commit harakiri. The two major themes in Patriotism are suicide and right-wing politics. Two other of Mishima’s stories share these two themes: The Sound of Waves and The Middle Ages. In a way, these three stories foreshadow Mishima’s own suicide.

On November 25^th 1970, under the pretence of a meeting with an army commander, Mishima and four members of a nationalist paramilitary group, the Tatenokai, barricaded themselves in an office of Camp Ichigaya, a JSDF military base. Whilst wearing a white headband bearing the red sun of Japan that was strongly reminiscent of fanatics of the Imperial era, Mishima went out to a balcony to address a group of soldiers and hopefully inspire a military coup to overthrow the civilian government and restore the emperor to direct power. Mishima’s speech was not well met by the soldiers, and he was repeatedly heckled and jeered. Knowing that his coup would never come to fruition, Mishima returned to the office where, using a traditional Japanese sword he’d bought on a previous holiday to Kumamoto, committed ritual suicide, or seppuku. Mishima had finally died the glorious death he’d written about for more than twenty years and had craved since he was a teenager. His dream was complete, and he was engraved forever in the pages of both Japanese and literary history.