Closed Circles : Japan Revels in Regional Differences

Natives of the old commercial center of Osaka are so preoccupied with business that instead of greeting one another with “Good day,” they say, “Are you making money?”

People in Tokyo, on the other hand, spend money lavishly, a custom they are said to have acquired in the feudal era, when merchants competed, often with bribes, to be designated “official purveyors” to the ruling samurai class.

Showing off their wealth was the Tokyo people’s way of demonstrating what they considered their superiority over the samurai, as well as over their bargain-hunting cousins in Osaka, according to Prof. Takao Sufue of Meiji University.

Natives of the Tohoku (northeast) region are regarded as taciturn and shy to the point of having an inferiority complex, yet they are disgruntled and prone to complain.

Distinctions Abound

Such character distinctions, real or imagined, abound in Japan, from region to region, prefecture to prefecture, city to city. Although Japan’s 122 million people, crowded into a country no larger than Montana, seem to be homogenous, they revel in their differences, real and imagined. Often they do so with humor.

Tradition, history, geography, old wives’ tales--all tend to sustain regionalism. They have created concentric circles of closed societies, the outermost of which is often perceived by foreigners as the single closed society of Japan.

Keizo Saji, president of Suntory, the giant maker of whiskey and other alcoholic beverages, recently provided a striking reminder of Japan’s provincialism. As a member of a television panel discussing the question of moving the national capital to escape Tokyo’s congestion, Saji lashed out at people who were promoting Sendai, Tohoku’s regional center, as the site of a new capital.

‘Idiots’ Favor Sendai

“There are some idiots,” Saji said, “who argue for Sendai,” even though 60 million or more of Japan’s 122 million people live in the area between Tokyo and Osaka. “Who knows how few live north of Tokyo?” he said. The population of Sendai is 888,000.

“In general,” Saji went on, “that’s the home of the Kumaso (a primitive tribe), and there is no expectation that any significant number of people would live in a region like that. The level of culture there is extremely low. Certainly the new capital should be located between Tokyo and Osaka.”

Saji’s comment ignited a storm of controversy. His comment, the domestic equivalent of former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s 1986 remark that the low intelligence of “blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans” had dragged down the average intelligence level of the American people to “an extraordinarily low level,” prompted the farm cooperative of Miyagi prefecture to accuse him of engaging in “human discrimination.”

“Who does Saji think he is?” roared Shuichi Konno, vice president of the Sendai Chamber of Commerce. Konno noted that although the 1st Division of the old Imperial Army was headquartered in Tokyo, the 2nd Division was based in Sendai.

Much of the criticism was aimed not only at Saji but at all Japanese from the Kansai region, which includes Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. Saji was attacked as representative of the smugness that is widely attributed to Kansai people. He heads the Osaka Chamber of Commerce, which is trying to revitalize the city, Japan’s third largest, as more and more businesses, financial institutions, and cultural activities congregate in Tokyo.

Prof. Hideaki Ouchi of Tohoku University said in an interview that only Kansai people, when traveling out of the region, speak in the dialect they use at home. Tohoku natives, he said, never speak in the Tohoku dialect outside their region, since its pronunciations are ridiculed as hick language.

‘Only a Fringe Area’

Saji’s remarks, Ouchi said, were “a manifestation of a Kansai belief that their region is the real center of Japan,” and that Tokyo, which succeeded Kyoto as the national capital only about a century ago, is “really only a fringe area.”

Saji, in his television appearance, spoke in the Kansai dialect, and telephone calls and letters of protest poured into the stations that carried the program, as well as the offices of Suntory.

Gov. Kikuji Sasaki of Akita prefecture in the Tohoku region announced that lodging facilities operated by his government would stop handling Suntory products. He commented acidly that “Saji seems to believe that no one lives in Tohoku, so he probably doesn’t intend to sell any of his products here anyway.”

Other organizations, including the Miyagi cooperative embracing 110,000 farming families, announced that they, too, would boycott Suntory products. The cooperative’s reaction exposed yet another division that has emerged recently in Japanese society--between farmers and businessmen.

Kiyoshi Takahashi, a cooperative executive, said in an interview that “to insult Tohoku is to insult Japanese agriculture.” He said the cooperative had sent Saji a letter attacking him for allegedly denigrating Japanese agriculture and thus expressing “the type of thinking that leads to . . . reliance on overseas agricultural products.”

Had History Wrong

Historians noted that Saji, apart from insulting Tohoku, had also got his history wrong. The Kumaso tribe--the word means “bear-like attackers”--disappeared in the late 5th Century and, besides, it lived not in Tohoku but on the southern island of Kyushu.

Saji, whose support of music and the arts had given him a reputation as one of Japan’s most cultured business leaders, went to Sendai to retract his statement and apologize. Other Suntory executives expressed regrets to the prefectural governments. Suntory advertising was withdrawn throughout the region for 10 days.

Saji’s reference to the sparse population of the region, where 8% of the Japanese people live in 17.5% of its territory, struck a raw nerve.

Jinzaemon Sugawara, a brewer of sake who also runs a liquor store in Sendai, said that Suntory sales at his shop have plummeted. Tomiko Oi, another bar owner, said she has not sold a bottle of Suntory since Saji’s television appearance.

“The reaction from Tohoku residents was most unusual,” said Nobuaki Aoyama, a reporter in the Sendai bureau of the Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri. “Usually, they bow their heads, let the wind blow over and keep their mouths shut.”

Have a Good Reputation

On the whole, the people of Tohoku have a good reputation in Japan. They are known for their simplicity, purity of heart and shyness, combined with a tradition of giri --repaying obligations--born of mutual cooperation nurtured in the region’s rice paddies.

Tohoku people also take pride in being rural. Takahashi, the farm cooperative official, said with scorn that in urban centers the interests of the individual are emphasized, to the detriment of traditional values.

In 1982, Tohoku people hailed the opening of a 150-m.p.h. “bullet train” to Morioka, in Iwate prefecture, as heralding a new era, but they also organized a movement opposing an influx of Tokyo and Osaka banks, department stores and hotels spurred by the new train. Some big city department stores were able to go into business here only after establishing joint ventures with local businessmen.

But within Tohoku there are the same kinds of attitudes that set Tohoku apart from other areas of Japan. According to Prof. Ouchi, residents of northernmost Tohoku, in the neighboring districts of Tsugaru and Nambu, dislike each other so intensely that they make it a point never to visit each other’s district.

Many Tohoku Dialects

And although other Japanese may refer to a Tohoku dialect, there are, in fact, many dialects in Tohoku, and they tend to divide the region.

Takahashi, the agricultural cooperative man, noted that residents of Akita and Aomori prefectures have distinct dialects and that “we in Sendai can’t understand them at all.”

Moreover, he said, there are sub-dialects in the northern and southern parts of both Akita and Aomori. He said that Miyagi prefecture, which is about 100 miles long and 70 miles wide, has three distinct dialects of its own.

Takao Sufue, the Meiji University professor, points out in his book, “Characteristics of the Prefectures: An Anthropological Observation,” that the traits of natives in each of the six Tohoku prefectures are considerably different.

According to Prof. Ouchi, provincialism in Japan stems from a deep-rooted belief in blood ties to the land. Large numbers of residents in any village are still “linked in some way by blood,” he said, and Japanese believe that if they marry a spouse from their own region--by definition, some kind of relative--they can be at ease about marriage.

Motherly Advice

James A. Michener, in his novel “Hawaii,” tells of Kamejiro Sakagawa, his fictional immigrant hero, receiving advice on marriage from his mother on the eve of his departure from a small village in Hiroshima prefecture.

After ruling out all foreigners, “especially Chinese,” the mother rejects one by one Japanese who have illness, insanity, criminal behavior or an undertaker in the family tree; then Tohoku Japanese, Kyushu Japanese, Okinawa Japanese, outcast Japanese, city Japanese, Japanese from the other side of Hiroshima prefecture and Japanese from the neighboring village.

Finally, the mother concludes, “There are no finer girls in all Japan than those in our village.”

Japanese, Prof. Ouchi said, have experienced relatively little international interchange, and not a great deal more within Japan itself. Indeed, he said, “the only place in Japan where there is a universal mixing of regions is Tokyo,” which itself is the butt of insults as a “concrete desert . . . a place unfit to live” from people in the rest of the country.

Nonetheless, Sendai is beginning to change. A new system of college entrance examinations is attracting more non-Tohoku students than ever before. According to reporter Aoyama, a fashion that starts in Tokyo takes hold here the same day, by virtue of a two-hour ride on the bullet train.

High-Tech Influx

An influx of high-tech industries, including semiconductor plants, has helped stem the outflow of young people, and there is hope that within a few years the Sendai airport, a 40-minute drive from downtown, will be designated an international airport. The runway is being extended to accommodate wide-bodied aircraft.

But in the outlying regions, the population continues to decline. Young farmers cannot find wives. Heavy snow isolates villages throughout the winter.

And, for some, it all seems to be coming full circle. According to Aoyama, there is new criticism about an overconcentration of wealth and power. The critics are Tohoku people, and their new target is, yes, Sendai.