The world suddenly looks like a splendid and hopeful place when sakura starts to bloom, right about this time in Tokyo. It happens without fail every year. But it’s so dazzling it feels unexpected. This morning, an old man was gazing up at a tree, probably the first cherry blossom tree he saw on his walk. His eyes, behind the glasses, I knew had seen so much, and was seeing all of that, again, in the flowers.
3.11 ON OUR MINDS I’m going to share, if I may, some of my stories I did for The Associated Press, covering the tsunami, earthquake and nuclear disasters that slammed Japan in 2011, and my followup stories over subsequent years. I am grateful to all the sources who spoke with AP, to The AP for this experience that has shaped me, and to journalism. Here goes:
My AP Story May 23, 2013 on this: “Keeping the meltdown-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in northeastern Japan in stable condition requires a cast of thousands. Increasingly the plant’s operator is struggling to find enough workers, a trend that many expect to worsen and hamper progress in the decades-long effort to safely decommission it.”
My AP Story March 10, 2010 on soy sauce’s miracle “comeback.” “RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan (AP) _ When the tsunami warning sounded, workers at the two-centuries-old soy sauce maker in northeastern Japan ran up a nearby hill to a shrine for safety, and watched in disbelief as towering waters swallowed their factory.”
I do stories and sometimes photos and video for The Associated Press, the world’s biggest and most trusted news organization. The link to all my stories in 2019 and 2018, and I’m starting anew here with all my AP Stories in 2020, the Year of the Mouse:
My AP Story July 15, 2020, on Nissan showing its first all-new major model, an electric crossover, since getting embroiled in the Carlos Ghosn scandal.
My AP Story July 3, 2020 on Japan formally filing the extradition request with the U.S. on two Americans arrested in Massachusetts and accused in his escape.
My AP Story June 11, 2020 as the saga of Carlos Ghosn returns as Japan seeks the extradition of two Americans, recently arrested in the U.S., and wanted in Japan on suspicion of having helped a criminal escape, meaning that extraordinary flight of Ghosn to Lebanon hiding in a box.
My AP Story June 12, 2020
on the high court upholding a lower court conviction on data
manipulation for Mark Karpeles, who headed a Tokyo bitcoin exchange that
collapsed.
My AP Story May 28, 2020 on how Nissan is closing auto plants, in Spain and in Indonesia, as it sinks into losses for the first time in 11 years.
My AP Story May 6, 2020 on a 16-year-old who cared enough to come up with a free iPhone app to help people record their whereabouts to track possible virus infection.
My AP Story Feb. 18, 2020 on Nissan’s shareholders’ meeting where some began shouting angrily about crashing stock prices, zero dividends and quarterly losses after the Ghosn scandal.
A journal of my poetry, music and other thoughts that I kept from April through May 2020 about living in a post-pandemic world has now been published in the special issue of Ishmael Reed’s KONCH online literary magazine. And what great company I am in.
My AP Story Nov. 25, 2019 on Iwao Hakamada, a former boxer who spent 48 years in prison for murders he says he didn’t commit, taking part in Pope Francis’ Mass at the Tokyo Dome.
In this photo provided by Mario Marazziti, Iwao Hakamada sits in his seat at Tokyo Dome in Tokyo as he waits for Pope Frances’ Holy Mass on Monday, Nov. 25, 2019. Hakamada, a former Japanese professional boxer who spent 48 years in prison for murders he says he did not commit was among some 50,000 people greeting Pope Francis as he entered Tokyo Dome stadium to celebrate Mass on Monday. (Mario Marazziti/Giovanna Ayako via AP)
My AP Story Aug. 19, 2019 on the history behind the worsening ties between South Korea and Japan, a collaboration with my Seoul colleague Kim Tong Hyung.
My AP Story Aug. 21, 2019 on the US Marines chief being worried about deteriorating Japan-Korea ties with My AP Photos.
My AP Story May 25, 2019 on how trade is a big issue during President Donald Trump’s state visit, but the deficit problem is worse with neighboring China.
My AP Story July 1, 2019, co-bylined with my colleague in Seoul Hyung-jin Kim, on Japan’s restrictions on exports to South Korea.
My AP Story May 21, 2019 on how Trump’s checking out sumo during his state visit is proving a head-ache.
My AP Story Nov. 22, 2019 on a court allowing Carlos Ghosn to talk with his wife Carole, whom he has not been able to talk or meet with for eight months.
My AP Story Oct. 24, 2019 on how Carlos Ghosn’s defense team is asking charges be dismissed, alleging widespread prosecutorial misconduct will endanger his getting a fair trial.
My AP Story Aug. 6, 2019 on how Mrs. Carole Ghosn is protesting the restrictions on communicating with her husband.
My AP Story April 17, 2019, in which I interview Mrs. Carole Ghosn. She says her husband is ready for a fight but she fears he may not get a fair trial.
My AP Story June 1, 2019, in which I interview Takashi Takano, a lawyer for Carlos Ghosn who criticized the bail conditions that prevent his client from seeing his wife as violating human rights.
My AP Story June 10, 2019 about my visit to the Tokyo Detention House, where Ghosn was held for 130 days.
My AP Story June 25, 2019 on Nissan’s shareholders meeting where they approve governance steps and keep Saikawa on its board.
My AP Story June 12, 2019 on how proxy companies are advising Nissan shareholders against approving the reappointment of Hiroto Saikawa as a board director.
My AP Story May 29, 2019 on Renault talking with Nissan about the Fiat Chrysler merger proposal.
My AP Story April 3, 2019 about Carlos Ghosn saying he will hold a news conference April 11, noting he is ready to tell the truth about what’s happening.
My AP Story Feb. 15, 2019 on Ghosn’s new power defense: The high-profile cases by Junichiro Hironaka. Yoichi Kitamura, the attorney for Greg Kelly, who was arrested with Ghosn, was also on the defense team of Ichiro Ozawa, one of Hironaka’s acquittal wins.
I am a contributor to this AP Story Feb. 8, 2019, with comments from Ghosn’s lawyer and spokeswoman about his Versailles wedding: Ghosn paid for all expenses, didn’t know the rental would be charged to Renault and offers to reimburse Renault.
Nissan CEO at the news conference in Yokohama headquarters. Photo by Shuji Kajiyama.
My AP Story March 1, 2019 when Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki talks about his meeting with the prime minister on the referendum that rejected the Henoko relocation plan.
I met the former inmate behind this story a few years ago, in 2016, when I was putting together my story “The Very Special Day” with artwork by Munenori Tamagawa. I was thinking of just stapling together printouts, but the visual artist had other ideas. He wanted a real book, and he said he knew someone who knew how to design books, a skill, as it turned out, he had learned in a Japanese prison. I didn’t ask questions. I just assumed he had committed a serious crime because of the long time he had been incarcerated, but felt he deserved to be treated no different from anyone else as he had served his time. I did not even know until he told me his story that he was asserting his innocence. This is his story:
He spent 15 years behind bars for a murder he confessed to, but he says he didn’t commit. His father hanged himself in shame. While in prison, he bit off a piece of his arm in a suicide attempt. Placed on half a dozen tranquilizer pills, he was an addict by the time he finally got out, four years ago.
Fengshui Iwazaki, who has changed
his name to protect himself from the social backlash, is still trying to adjust
to being back in the real world.
“Fifteen years _ that’s a whole
generation in a lifetime,” he says, his eyes clear, child-like, much younger
than his 41 years.
His story underlines the treatment
convicts get in Japan, a society that’s so insular and crime-free most people
don’t know much about what it’s like to live the life of a criminal. The arrest
of Nissan’s former Chairman Carlos Ghosn, charged with financial misconduct, is
helping bring international scrutiny to this legal system, which human rights
groups have long criticized as harsh and unfair.
Iwazaki had never before spoken to
me about his experiences, how two decades ago, he had made headlines as a
murderer.
“It
was as though I was a monster,” Iwazaki recalled.
^____<
Iwazaki and others who went through
Japan’s criminal system say prosecutors and police come up with a story-line for
a confession. While interrogated, Iwazaki was taken to the mountains where the
body had been found and directed to point in the right spots, he said.
His girlfriend had been strangled
to death, and he instantly emerged the prime suspect.
He resisted at first but signed
the confession after three weeks of being interrogated daily without a lawyer
present, standard practice in Japan.
He says he was bullied, his hair
pulled, the table banged. After a while, it was easy to cave in.
He believes the real murderer might
be the man who had adopted his then-3-year-old daughter from a previous
relationship. He had planned to live near her someday, not ever telling her he
was the father, just to be close to her. She died in a car accident while he
was serving time.
Prosecutors say they are merely doing
their jobs and didn’t create the system.
Defense lawyers say suspects sign false
confessions and don’t realize it’s too late to assert innocence later in a
trial.
That’s why it is called “hostage
justice.”
Judges tend to believe the
prosecutors’ story line: the conviction rate in Japan is higher than 99%.
Going against such a powerful
trend takes tremendous courage. Unlike the U.S., prosecutors can appeal, meaning
innocent verdicts can get overturned in a higher court.
^___<
The life of imprisonment Iwazaki describes
is austere, isolated and regulated. Each prisoner gets a tiny cell with a
toilet and bedding, unless the prison gets crowded and cells get shared, a
condition that’s increasingly rare.
Communication among inmates is limited
to the 30 minutes of outdoor exercise, or the evening hours, during which TV is
allowed.
Whenever inmates are transported,
they wait in enclosed booths lined next to each other so prisoners won’t mingle,
called “bikkuri-bako,” or “jack-in-the-box.”
Every morning, the convict changes
into green prison garb and gets marched to a factory within the prison grounds.
Iwazaki did menial work like
placing wooden chopsticks into paper wrapping and packing them in boxes. He also
learned how to work the printing presses.
The toughest time was his
three-year solitary confinement doled out as punishment for being a
troublemaker, he said.
One time, out of frustration, he
smashed a window with his bare hand, which added half a year to his sentence.
He was always curious about why others
were locked up.
One inmate, he learned, had tried
to steal money from an ATM to send his son to college. When a guard found him,
he used a stun gun. The guard had a weak heart and died. And so the charge became
murder while committing grand larceny, a serious offense.
“There are no really bad people in
prison,” Iwazaki says with a conviction that is startling.
^____<
There is little in Japanese society
that helps people adjust to life after incarceration.
When Iwazaki was released, he only
had 1,000 yen ($9). He checked into a hospital, pleading insanity. He was running
out of the pills prescribed at the prison.
He finally made it to Eizo Yamagiwa,
a filmmaker who has devoted his life to supporting prisoners. Yamagiwa, who had
visited Iwazaki in prison, gave him money, and Iwazaki finally made it home to
his mom.
Yamagiwa says only the
authorities’ side of the story gets relayed in Japan, influencing judges and
juries so that trials tend to merely work as rubber-stamps for the prosecutors.
The prison system, he said, is so
devastating most people come out sick and unable to continue with their lives.
He said Iwazaki was an exception
in working hard to live a normal life.
^___<
Iwazaki, who had originally
planned to become a schoolteacher, has had his life forever changed.
Retrials to try to overturn guilty
verdicts are rarely granted in Japan. Usually, totally new evidence such as a
DNA test is needed.
Iwazaki is hesitant even to try.
His case is tough because of the mounds of evidence submitted during his trial,
including his confession. His mother has asked he doesn’t pursue a retrial; she
doesn’t want to think about any of it ever again.
Iwazaki lives alone in a stark
room with a tiny drab kitchen and a bathroom. A desk and two chairs are the
only furniture.
On the walls are two drawings signed Masahiro, a man who died on death row. Done meticulously and entirely by pen and pencils, one depicts a bouquet of red roses, the other, Mary and baby Jesus. No one except for Iwazaki had claimed them.
Iwazaki also drew pictures while
in prison: A big close-up of his open mouth filled with pills, a bird’s eye
view of his cell, an inmate working so hard in the factory he is turning into a
blur.
The drawings were part of a show of “art by outsiders” in April 2019, in Tokyo, a milestone for Iwazaki. While in prison, authorities had forbidden such exhibits.
Iwazaki is also in a training program to counsel addicts. He already works as a counselor, having studied various therapy methods, which he says helps calm him. Completing the training means better pay.
He has also found a girlfriend, a carefree woman who works at a dot.com and is passionate about saving lions in Africa. They plan to get married and maybe have children.
My voice screaming banzai
Ten thousand years banzai
Dying in glee as the divine devil wind
For the crane god whose voice I heard too late
My hand piercing your baby
A glob of meat with my bayonet
Raping girls in the name of comfort
Burning a city like a Sherman deranged
My heart that worships history
To win status as an honorary white
Bleeding streaks from a fluttering red sun
Despising those of the same yellow skin
My voice
My hand
My heart
My voice will never speak that way again
My hand will never act that way again
My heart will never feel that way again
No apology is enough but I promise
And I apologize
Graves are always There
for those Who are still
Alive to Forgive
Accept Reconcile.
They don’t Speak Back.
They don’t expect much
because
they are ready
to be Forgotten
if not
really already
Forgotten.
So when You
Go There, You
will Be Forgiven:
Grave are Gifts
from the Dead
for the Living.
At a temple in Toyokawa, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Photo by Yuri Kageyama.
in NY in 2015 and COMING TO SAN FRANCISCO in JULY 2017
NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA: Meditation on an Under-Reported Catastrophe by a Poet
written by Yuri Kageyama
directed by Carla Blank
Debuted at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York Sept. 11 – 13, 2015.
Music directed and performed by Melvin Gibbs, with Hirokazu Suyama, Sumie Kaneko and Kaoru Watanabe.
The Cast: Takemi Kitamura (Miu) Monisha Shiva (Poet) Shigeko Suga (Yu)
Lighting by Blu
Film by Yoshiaki Tago
A pensive and provocative theater of dance, poetry, music and film:
Fukushima is the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
Radiation is still spewing from the multiple meltdowns, reaching as far as the American West Coast.
Some 100,000 people were displaced from the no-go zone. But the story barely makes headlines.
“News From Fukushima” is a solemn reminder and a literary prayer for Japan.
It explores the friendship between two women, juxtaposing the personal and the intimate with the catastrophic.
[caption id="attachment_1735" align="aligncenter" width="640"] NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA, written by Yuri Kageyama, at La MaMa. From left to right: Shigeko Suga, Monisha Shiva, Takemi Kitamura. All Photos above by Tennessee Reed.
NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA: Meditation on an Under-Reported Catastrophe by a Poet, written by Yuri Kageyama. Directed by Carla Blank. Music by Melvin Gibbs, Hirokazu Suyama, Sumie Kaneko and Kaoru Watanabe. In photo: Monisha Shiva as The Poet. Photos by Yuri Kageyama.
Programs for NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA: Meditation on an Under-Reported Catastrophe by a Poet at La MaMa in New York. Program design by Annette Borromeo Dorfman. Photo by Yuri Kageyama.
And we get a little writeup in the local paper. The New York Times, among other local papers, including Steve Cannon’s “A Gathering of the Tribes,” listed our performance in its Calendar and Spare Time sections. The San Francisco Chronicle also highlighted our work in its Entertainment section.
Our NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA: Meditation on an Under-Reported Catastrophe by a Poet gets a mention in The San Francisco Chronicle.
聴かせて魅せるニュース！『NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA: 報じられない福島の大惨事を詩人が詠いあげる』でMelvin Gibbsがベースを奏でる。
News that enraptures and engages through Sound. A Poet sings of the unreported calamity at Fukushima in NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA, and Melvin Gibbs plays bass. _ Katsumi.
“Yuri Kageyama, with her epic poem, Fukushima, has earned a place among the leading world poets. This poem proves that the poet as a journalist can expose conditions that are ignored by a media that is in the pocket of fossils fuel and nuclear interests. While black collaborators at MSNBC and other media outlets make money for their employers by promoting and gender and class civil war among blacks, stories about how the Fukushima disaster threatens the health of world citizens are neglected, maybe because General Electric, which still has interests in NBC, built the nuclear reactors at Fukushima. Is the Yuricane making up things? Fukushima has had far worse complications than the Chernobyl disaster. Check this out.”
_ Ishmael Reed.
NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA, written by Yuri Kageyama, at La MaMa. From left to right: Shigeko Suga, Monisha Shiva, Takemi Kitamura. All Photos above by Tennessee Reed.
