(10:58 PM) | Amish Lovelock:

Amish Lovelock's Height of Good Taste: LDP Election Special

So, tomorrow the ruling Liberal Democratic Party here in Japan is going to choose its new leader. The perfect false choice between three blue-blooded neoliberal politician-managers neatly tweaked to illustrate that the LDP is still the “inclusive” party of national hegemony has been dragged across our television screens for a couple of weeks running. A soap-opera of coalition-making, co-optation and party consensus if there ever was one. Abe Shinzo (on the right in the picture), the most likely to win. Grandson of the man who orchestrated the US-Japan Security Treaty, Abe, in his now bestselling little plug manual published a month before the contest Towards a Beautiful Japan, finds himself repeating the familiar schizophrenic conservatism of his forebears – a blue-hearted Americanism and fervent anti-Asian revisionism that, when summed up translates into US blanket missile defense, constitution revision and the establishment of a new army, and further neoliberal public spending “streamlining” to make it all possible. A friend of mine put it quite well while I was in Seoul last month. It came down the simple fact that because of this latest Tokyo election he’d be paying more tax as Korea would have to keep up with any developments in Tokyo. The menu for the next few years then would seem to be tax all round and lots of guns.

The current foreign minister, Aso Taro (on the left of the picture), another a contender for Koizumi’s position, is playing the “extremist” role to the right of Abe, and Tanigaki (in the center) the “liberal” “traditionalist” role to the left. While Abe will mince his words to retain a degree of ambiguity and make efforts to appear a “reasonable” figure, Aso is having a ball. He is visibly enjoying every moment of the contest being allowed to say whatever he wants wherever. He has so far repeatedly hailed Japanese colonial efforts in Taiwan and South Korea, and recently said of the People’s Republic that it is “a neighbor with one billion people equipped with nuclear bombs and which has expanded its military outlays by double digits for 17 years in a row and it is unclear what this is being used for – China is a serious threat to Japan!” What has struck me however about Aso’s enjoyment in making such statements is that this kind of cocky, tongue-in-cheekiness could be taken as a family trait. Only, a family trait that has been used to different effect in the past.

Aso is the grandson of the first postwar Japanese Prime Minister, Yoshida Shigeru, the initiating force behind the so-called “Yoshida Doctrine” which first put economic recovery under US military protection at the expense of both independence in foreign affairs and fundamental political reform. What I find most interesting though, is the fact that Aso’s uncle, whom he resembles more than his father, is Yoshida Kenichi (1912-1977).

Yoshida Kenichi was a scholar of French and English literature, a translator, critic and novelist. More importantly, for this series at least, is the fact that he was a dropout, a native upper-class English-speaking dandy full of Wilde and Waugh, a heavy drinker, generous, even extravagant with money, and most of all, a lover of good food. All at the same time he was the product of one of Japan’s most premier conservative (now neoconservative) familial dynasties; a product of Japan’s postwar (and thus due to the postwar marriage of convenience with the US occupation authorities, prewar) elite (his mother, Yukiko, too was the granddaughter of the elderly statesman and major architect of the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Okubo Toshimichi). Out of such a family then, comes surely one of the most interesting literary hedonists I’ve come across.

Writing in a style almost completely foreign to normal written Japanese - in extremely long-winded sentences more attune to that of an 18th Century European philologist - Kenichi’s prose repeatedly evokes a sense of wry ressentiment. A kind of profound frustration directed at that which he identified as its cause (his family circumstances and fraught relationships). This frustration, I think, ultimately generates a rejecting and justifying kind sweet morality. Toff morality no doubt, but sweet. Born while his father was working as a foreign diplomat, Kenichi was raised by his maternal grandfather until the age of six, when his father came to “collect the boy.” He then accompanied father on his postings in China, France and the United Kingdom, enrolled in and out of school on the way. Private schoolboydom over, Kenichi was enrolled into Kings College, Cambridge in 1930. There he studied literature under Dickenson and Lucas and began to translate Shakespeare, Baudelaire and Laforgue. After only a year though, he was pulled out, and returned to Tokyo, to be delivered to the Athenee Francais school of French to keep him busy with his hobbies and out of the business of the “alpha males” in the family (and perhaps more importantly out of the war – the most formative experience of others of his generation – yet another source of ressentiment). Despite this distance, however, the general sense of malaise and nihilism which characterizes so many other writers of his generation expressed is present in Kenichi’s work too. Only, for Yoshida Kenichi, nihil came with a wicked smile. He was a kind of Gatsby among the ashes of bombed-dry postwar Tokyo.

His debut as a writer came in 1935, when he published a translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s Memorandum (Oboegaki). After this, along with the literary critics Nakamura Mitsuo and Yamamoto Kenkichi, he co-founded the literary magazine Hihyo (Critique) which would publish a series of articles on modern French and English writers. It was from his late forties though, that his writing became prolific. Standard texts on English and modern English literature, art criticism, translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Cleland, Waugh, Toynbee, Lawrence, Carrol, Greene, the Brontes, Chesterton, Monsarrat, Highsmith, Joyce and Forster, a set of thoughtful essays musing Europe at century’s end, light-hearted essays such as Saisho Ozoshi Hinkyusu (Prime Minister’s Son Falls on Hard Times – a title given by a disagreeable publisher which Kenichi later privately republished with the revised title: Detarameron, or “On Nonsense”), novels such as Kanazawa (1973), a beautiful evocation of good time, food and conversation in the town of the same name and painted only as these things can be experienced under the influence of good alcohol. His last work Jikan (Time, 1976), is a ruminating piece, again on time and its relation to culture and the good life that Kenichi located in pre-20th Century Europe.

Yoshida Kenichi’s close friends read like a who’s who of the postwar Tokyo literary establishment. Ishikawa Jun, Ooka Shohei, Mishima Yukio, Yokomitsu Riichi, the doyen of postwar literary criticism, Kobayashi Hideo, Kawakami Tetsutaro, Maruya Saiichi and many, many others. Living his reputation as an extravagant dandy, however, often brought these friendships under strain. With Mishima, for instance, it is said that the two fell out after Kenichi insisted on naming the price of each item of new furniture Mishima had bought for his new house after inviting Kenichi over for a drink. Granddaddy of J-lit studies in the US, Donald Keene (a man whose strictly political credentials, I think, deserve to be questioned) was also accepted into Kenichi’s crowd in the 40s and 50s. He remembers going with Yoshida to a hotel for drinks at which Kenichi ordered champagne and caviar for all of them. A band was playing and when it stopped, Kenichi called the band leader over, pressed a thousand yen note in his hand (a lot of money at the time), and asked for him to play his favorite piece of music. After repeating this act three times and having downed several bottles of champagne between them, he called him over again, gave him the tip, and declared “nandemo ii ya!” (Anything at all!). On another occasion, after drinking, Keene and English literature scholar Shinoda Hajime were with Yoshida in a taxi heading home when Kenichi shouted at the top of his voice “tomare!” (Stop!) to the driver. After the car stopped, Kenichi leaped outside, no doubt looking for another drinking venue, only to be scooped up by Shinoda (a former Judo champion) and deposited back in the taxi. Again, this routine would be repeated two or three times. Keene remembers Yoshida as “fond of every kind of alcoholic beverage, especially sake. He once described a sake from Niigata as `liquid moonlight.` When he was drunk he babbled happily, sometimes in English, sometimes in Japanese, equally unintelligible in both.”

Apart from the alcohol though, Kenichi also wrote prolifically on food. Whether is be British poached eggs, American bars, Hiroshima oysters, Noto red seaweed, Kofu broiled minnow, Nagasaki karasumi (a kind of biscuit-like snack made by desalinating salt pickled mullet roe and drying it in the sunlight), and cinnamon-like matsutake mushrooms, he was good on food. Here’s a recipe for a black pudding potato cake with poached egg topping, albeit heavily modified from the original, I think Yoshida would have enjoyed:

Ingredients: For the potato cake:125g/4oz fresh breadcrumbs2 eggs, beaten55g/2oz flour225g/½lb mashed potato125g/4oz black pudding, diced25g/1oz chives, chopped pinch of salt and pepper, For the poached egg: 4 eggs (preferably free-range)1 tsp vinegar, For the salad: baby salad leavesFor the mustard dressing:3 tsp grain mustard½ lemon, juice only, extra virgin olive oil

Method1. Combine the mashed potato, black pudding and seasoning together.2. Mould into round barrel shapes, then coat in flour, egg and breadcrumbs and deep-fry in a deep-fat fryer preheated at 180C/350F.3. Gently poach the eggs in simmering water with the vinegar.4. Combine the mustard, lemon and olive oil to form a dressing, season.5. Dress the plate with some baby salad leaves.6. Place the crispy black pudding potato cake onto the leaves, top with the poached egg and dressing and serve immediately.

With only a day to go before we get our new sanitized prick in a suit I for one will be dining out and raising a glass to Yoshida and to any last gasps of the kind of bourgeois self-destructiveness and ressentiment he represented that might be left among our rotten political class. My fear though is that this kind of class implosion is now gone forever.

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