10 April 08 ---en route Tokyo to Kyoto

Well yesterday was a very interesting day. We wandered out of our hotel to a nearby garden hoping to see the last of the cherry blossom. This garden is very famous overlooking the moat to the Imperial Palace. When we were here in 2005 the blossom was just appearing and all the office workers celebrate it in the dark evening by having parties/picnics in the grounds. They are well organised; an advance member of the party stakes out their pitch with carpet/ tarpaulin early afternoon. When the group arrives they all remove their shoes before sitting on carpet. For the most part the partying is noisy but decorous.

This year cherry blossom was early but there was still sufficient left to make a pleasant panorama. But a surprise was yet to come.

Moving on through the park we were in an area not pointed out by our guide in 2005 and almost totally in Japanese with no English signs indicating what it was. At the far end was a large shrine obviously very important. Brenda finally found an English leaflet and we discovered we were in the famous (infamous) Yasukuni shrine. This is the shrine to the Japanese war dead and the source of much Chinese and Korean anger because the former Japanese prime minister Koizumi insisted on visiting despite it honouring war criminals.

I thought a deity was a god but to the Japanese it merely means revered soul. The brochure told us there were 2,460,000 deities honoured there- including 57,000 female deities.

Despite the undertones and implications of the place the gardens are very beautiful. I was intrigued to see a delivery van draw up signage totally in Japanese, not a word of English, but it did carry a Qantas type kangaroo logo. I attempted to ask the driver and his mate what it meant. Some communication difficulty but I gathered it meant “Speedy Service”

I came across two interesting quotations

A poem by the Emperor Meiji
“ In a world where all the seas are brethren
Why, then, do wind and wave so stridently class” ‘
Ponder that – a wealth of meaning- it was written at the start of the Russo Japanese War.

I was also very much taken by the following inscription below a plaque honouring a gentleman in lawyer’s robes

“When Time shall have softened passion and prejudice,
when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation,
then Justice, holding evenly her scales, will require
much of past censure and praise to change places”

Again very meaningful . The words could be consolation to George Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard; or even Adolf Hitler!!

Another leaflet revealed that the lawyer was an Indian judge, Radha binod Pal, much revered in Japan hence the memorial in this shrine. According to the leaflet he was the sole dissenting judge on the Tokyo war crimes tribunal and spoke for dismissal of all charges and all accused to be found not guilty. To me all this was interesting and must be further researched.

Went on to the entrance to Museum for the war dead. Included a Zero fighter and an engine from the Burma Thai railway. Much as in Hiroshima the captions all gave the Japanese version of the Great South Asian War and their struggle to rid the continent of colonialism (although not imperialism one might add!!)

The afternoon saw us on another adventure. I had found on the net a reference to a business exhibiting/selling Netsuke charms. These are amulets all Japanese used to keep their purse/ valuables at their side before kimonos had pockets. (All Japanese – m & f- used to wear kimonos).

Brenda was interested in seeing this so armed only with name of the nearest station and an address Yotsuya 4-28-20-703 we set out to find it. Quite an adventure because the Japanese do not use western style street names and addresses only block numbers that they themselves seem to have great difficulty mastering. Eventually, after many helpful directions, a janitor led s down a back alley to the 7th floor of an office building.

Knocking on the door we found we had it-- pay dirt. A gem of a place despite the surroundings. A Japanese lady, speaking good English, welcomed us and explained she was the President of the company but the owner was French and would be arriving shortly.

M Robert Fleischel duly arrived and was impressed by our dual Australian/French domicile. He explained the history of Netsuke and that his range of items was priced from $200 to $200,0000. I was somewhat nervous when he proceeded to show us the range of items, invited us to handle them and invited us to his exhibition in Paris this September. Charming, but I suspect he thought we were wealthier than we are!
Brenda was taken with them and did make the first purchase for her collection- but at the lower end of the price scale I hasten to add.

Returned to hotel weary but satisfied by another good day. On the way back picked up an excellent French baguette from the food hall of a Setan- a David Jones/ Harrods class department store.

Trawling the net last night I found references to Radha binod Pal
Not quite as clear cut as the Japanese suggested. Yes he did dissent from everything on the grounds that they were show trials with no sound legal basis. However he did recognise atrocities had been committed but they were not all one sided. Was not the only dissenting Judge, so were his French and Dutch counterparts. I think I had already known that the Japanese trials were not a model of jurisprudence. I certainly did not know that the dissenting judgements were suppressed by the occupation authorities.

I also found out that the quote above I was so impressed with was not by Radha binod Pal but is attributed to Thomas Jefferson.

And on that note I will finish.