⛩️ #19 The Three Great Train Mysteries

The Headlines, This Week in History, and Much More

It’s 7/7, so tonight, obviously, you should be exposing your books to the night wind.

Huh? We’ll explain that particular tradition later in the mail. For now, let’s get into today’s edition:

THE QUIZ

A picture that Japanese people will recognize instantly. Do you?

Question: what’s going on here?

Answer at the foot of the mail.

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THE HEADLINES

1. $1 = ¥

[😒]

2. No Really, Don’t Mention the Mass Stabbing

[Chinese tech firms cracking down on “extreme xenophobia”, in aftermath of stabbing of a Japanese mother and child.]

3. Thank God, Japan Has a Jet Fuel Shortage

[International airlines not able to ram more flights to Japan into schedules]

THE IMAGE

Image: Library of Congress

Here’s how tourists used to come to Japan: Nippon Yūsei Kaisha, the Japan Mail Steamship Company. Note the Japanese headline read from right to left.

THE LANGUAGE

Symptoms of summer are everywhere now in Japan — let’s look at some of the words you need to know while navigating the heat oven:

• Tanabata (七夕) — the Star Festival (July 7)

  Orihime, a weaver princess, and Hikoboshi, a cowherd, fall in love and start neglecting their duties, pissing off Orihime's father, the Sky King, who decides to separate them by the Milky Way (weaving and cows being very important in those days).

  Then, moved by his daughter's tears, Sky King decides to let Orihime and Hikoboshi to meet once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month…

• Tanzaku (短冊) — colorful pieces of paper on which people write wishes and hang on bamboo branches on Tanabata.

  Typical wishes run the gamut from “world peace forever” to “number 6 to win the second race next week”

• Shōsho (小暑) — “lesser heat” — July 7-8 — the traditional time to move to “summer mode of living” — packing away all your clothes that aren’t breathable and psychologically preparing yourself for the heat (and 5x electricity bills)

• Taisho (大暑) — “big heat” — July 23-24 — schools close for the summer, and the real heat grind begins!

• Natsubaté (夏バテ) — summer heat fatigue

  What happens to all the tourists who arrive in Kyoto midsummer not realizing it’s going to be 38°C and 90% humidity (while all the locals are off at the beach, suckas!!!)

• Doyō (土用) — the dog days of summer

  AKA when even the locals are getting annoyed and can’t wait for autumn to start.

• Mushiboshi (虫干し) - exposing clothes, paintings and books to the night wind to prevent insects and mold. Much more annoying that it sounds, plus not ideal at all — much better to wait until autumn!

• Daikokuji (大黒寺) and Tofukuji (東福寺) — temples in Kyoto where mushiboshi (see above) is a chance to bring out normally hidden treasures.

• Chūgen (中元・お中元) — mid-summer gifts of food sent to people you feel indebted to. Can be selected and forward for you by department stores.

• Chi no wa (茅の輪) — part of nagoshi no haraé (夏越の祓), summer purification rites, the chi no wa is a cogon grass ring through which people pass to spiritually purify themselves.

  Shout out to Kyoto’s Jōnan-gū Shrine (城南宮) for proving once again that the religions were the original marketeers — every year they set up a huge, literal drive-thru chi no wa to bless your car and prevent accidents — for a fee, of course.

THE HISTORY

Happenings from this week in Japanese history:

THE THREE GREAT TRAIN MYSTERIES

1949: Sadanori Shimoyama, president of Japanese National Railways, is ordered by the US military authorities to fire 30,000 employees in an attempt to reduce influence of the Japanese Communist Party.

The next morning, Shimoyama gets out of a car outside Tokyo’s Mitsukoshi department store and tells his driver to wait for him — but Shimoyama disappears.

Until the next morning, when Shimoyama’s body is found in several large chunks, having been hit by a midnight freight train on the Jōban Line.

With the undeveloped forensic medical standards of the time, doctors could not decide whether Shimoyama had been murdered or ended his own life.

This was mystery number one…

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Less than two weeks later, someone tied down the operating handle of an unmanned train, sending it careening into Mikata Station, where it killed six people and injured 20 others.

The Mikata Derailment followed a second wave of JNR dismissals (around 63,000) and seemed an obvious inside job — it required access to the train and knowledge of its operation, and perhaps a tip-off to the four police officers at the station, who had mysteriously abandoned their posts. Train conductor Keisuke Takeuchi was arrested and eventually sentenced to death.

Takeuchi, however, insisted he was innocent, and the sense of a, ahem, railroad job increases with the knowledge that he actually had a great alibi (soaking in a communal bath with a colleague at the time) which his lawyer refused to use in court, claiming it was “irrelevant to the case”, making that lawyer either pornographically stupid, or complicit.

This was mystery number two, and by now the public was frantic with the idea that someone or some group was sowing chaos along the nation’s train lines…

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August. An overnight Tōhoku Main Line train derails, killing three crew members but miraculously leaving 412 passengers unharmed.

Investigators find bolts on the track bolts had been loosened, and a large number of railroad spikes removed on one 25-meter section of rails.

Suspicion fell on the Japan National Railway Union, workers at the nearby Toshiba factory and the Japanese Communist Party, due to persistent protests over the aforementioned staff cuts.

Ten workers from the Toshiba plant and ten Japan National Railway employees were arrested and charged with sabotage resulting in death, but despite seventeen of them being convicted (and four receiving death sentences), they were all eventually acquitted on appeal.

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The Three Great Train Mysteries defined Japan’s summer of 1949. Many people saw a manipulating hand steering the public away from sympathy with the fired railroad workers, and by extension the Japanese Communist Party, which was then making gains in electoral politics.

However, the sense of dispossession Japanese felt with their country still under U.S. military rule may have resulted in that phenomenon observed in all countries under occupation — widespread belief in fanciful conspiracies, and the sense that horrible forces are orchestrating outrages from the shadows.

In truth, what probably happened was a bunch of workers got fired and their remaining colleagues starting taking their frustrations out on the public… after their boss, overwhelmed by despair at being ordered to carry out the firings, took his own life by leaping in front of one of his trains.

More at Tokyo Weekender

David Peace’s novel Tokyo Redux is a fiction based on mystery number one: the death of Sadanori Shimoyama.

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GOLD TO ASHES

1950: A monk at Kyoto’s Kinkakuji burns the Golden Pavilion to the ground.

Much is made of the symbolism of the act, and it becomes the basis for transcendent works of literature from the likes of Yukio Mishima, but the facts themselves are rather prosaic: the monk was a troubled kid whose schizophrenia soon became obvious after the fire.

(The real act of the sublime was the monk’s mother throwing herself to her death from a train into the Hozukyo Gorge when she heard what her son had done.)

THE LINKS

Noteworthy things from his week:

1. Brilliant writer Ad Blankestijn tells you everything you need to know about Japan’s July traditions — which is where we got the idea for the Language feature above.

2. More by Matt Alt on the Tokyo election we covered briefly last week, including exactly what trolls have been pasting up on public billboards.

3. Lotus flower season has started — here’s Burcu Basar with some wonderful photographs from Ueno Park and Mizumoto Park in Tokyo.

THE ANSWER

Question: what’s going on here?

Answer: the boy is hanging a tanzaku (短冊) on which he has written his wish onto a bamboo branch, a ritual performed for July 7th’s Tanabata festival (see The Language section above for more details.)

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