Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Plates
- List of Maps
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- List of abbreviations
- Notes on translation and anonymity
- Map 1
- Map 2
- Introduction
- 1 Chikuho: A Short Description
- 2 The Chikuho Revivalists
- 3 Idegawa
- 4 A Short History of Coalmining: Chikuho in Context
- 5 The Picture Show Man
- 6 A Culture of Violence
- 7 H-san Mine: Violence and Repression
- 8 The Bathing Master
- 9 Labour Conflict: The Case of the K-san Union Action
- 10 D-san and the Students
- 11 Mizuno
- 12 The Y-san Disaster
- 13 Sono
- 14 Welfare
- 15 Welfare in Chikuho
- 16 A Yakuza Story
- Conclusion
- Bibliographical Essay
- Bibliography
- List of Informants
- Index
- Plate section
5 - The Picture Show Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Plates
- List of Maps
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- List of abbreviations
- Notes on translation and anonymity
- Map 1
- Map 2
- Introduction
- 1 Chikuho: A Short Description
- 2 The Chikuho Revivalists
- 3 Idegawa
- 4 A Short History of Coalmining: Chikuho in Context
- 5 The Picture Show Man
- 6 A Culture of Violence
- 7 H-san Mine: Violence and Repression
- 8 The Bathing Master
- 9 Labour Conflict: The Case of the K-san Union Action
- 10 D-san and the Students
- 11 Mizuno
- 12 The Y-san Disaster
- 13 Sono
- 14 Welfare
- 15 Welfare in Chikuho
- 16 A Yakuza Story
- Conclusion
- Bibliographical Essay
- Bibliography
- List of Informants
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
3.30 p.m. The quiet of the tanjū is shattered by raucous children's songs being played at such a high volume that the melody and lyrics are lost in distortion. Emerging from my house, I notice the small children running out onto the roads in the direction of the carpark, behind the new apartment blocks. I yell at a couple of the children, ‘What's all the noise?’ They yell back, ‘It's the kami shibai man’, without stopping. Like the flute of the Pied Piper, the ‘music’ seems to have a desperate appeal to the small children as they race towards the source. I follow them. In the carpark is a cream-coloured Toyota Corolla station wagon, the back opened, surrounded by about 15 children and a couple of elderly relatives. Standing in the middle of the crowd is a man in his late thirties or early forties. Quite large, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and wearing thick-lensed glasses, his gravelly, high-pitched voice has a remarkable penetrating quality, as he tells the children to calm down.
Set up on the wagon's tailgate is a small wooden frame about one metre square, carved to look like the facade of a theatre stage. Within this frame is a lurid painting of a boy fighting a wolf, blood dripping from the knife in the boy's grasp. The antics of the crowd distract my attention from the painting as I take in the scene that is unfolding around me. The children are all shouting, ‘Ojisan [uncle], I want one of those ones on a stick!’, ‘I want one of those paper thin ones!’ The man is handing out sweets in exchange for ten-yen coins. ‘I've finished it. Look! The middle's still OK.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Undermining the Japanese MiracleWork and Conflict in a Japanese Coal-mining Community, pp. 97 - 105Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994