Asia diary

For women, the sexual revolution has finally reached Japan. Will the Japanese share their love with China?
August 19, 1999

Sex and drugs in Japan

In the autumn, Japanese women will be able to buy the pill legally for the first time-40 years after its introduction in the US. Japan has been the only industrialised country to ban oral contraceptives. But in Japan, a ban does not exactly mean a ban: a high-dose pill has been available for years, supposedly for hormonal treatment but dispensed at a doctor's discretion. Japanese drug firms have been waiting a decade for the government to approve their applications for a low-dose pill. No reasons have ever been given for this inertia, though fear of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases is thought to be high on the list (along with the vested interest of the abortion industry). Advocates of the pill say the authorities fear it will "loosen the morals of Japanese women"-a serious concern in a country where handbills for clubs offering "health" massages and "courses" of sexual indulgence are a routine part of your junk mail. When it arrives, the pill will be available on prescription to women aged 18-35; older women must undergo a health check. By contrast, Japan's worried patriarchs recently decided to stiffen their own morals by approving Viagra for manufacture and import after just six months, an exceptionally speedy move. Theoretically available only on prescription, Viagra already has a burgeoning black market, where one pill can sell for up to 10,000 yen (?50). Almost in tandem came approval for local manufacture of a US hair-growth product, which sold over 500,000 bottles in its first week of release last month. In a land where the government is repeatedly criticised for its tardy responses, the political elders have wasted no time in tackling the two greatest natural disasters that can befall the Japanese male.

The birds of peace

Sino-Japanese relations blow hot and cold. When Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited Tokyo last autumn he presented Emperor Akihito with a male and female ibis, a bird (Nipponia Nippon) once native to Japan but driven to extinction by hunters and the construction industry. The birds did their business and in May a chick was hatched. Hailed as "a symbol of bilateral friendship," the recently named "Yu Yu" ("Gentle") stole the prime news slots from Kosovo and Japanese baseball, emerging from the shell a thousand times in endless replays.

Not so gentle was China's response to new defence laws enacted by Japan three days later, giving the Japanese military a greater supporting role to American forces in undefined areas surrounding Japan, which China suspects includes Taiwan (merely a renegade province in its eyes). The laws also ruffled feathers in other Asian nations, wary of any dilution of Japan's war-renouncing constitution.

But elsewhere the Americans had unwittingly done Japan a big favour. China's plan to build a high-speed rail link between Beijing and Shanghai from 2001 was expected to see some serious bidding from German and French concerns, initially viewed as superior to their Japanese rivals, according to a Chinese railway source. The Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade has changed everything. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi's visit to China in early July included a t?te-? -t?te with Premier Zhu Rongji, who also oversees the ministry of railways. A deal involving Japan's bullet-train technology would stand as yet another "symbol of bilateral friendship."

The road to Nanking

A trip to Nanking was not, in the end, on Obuchi's itinerary. A visit had been planned, but the idea was scrapped when the Japanese government suspected "unforeseen repercussions." In other words, another bout of vitriol over what it calls "differences in historical perception." (China continues to press its demand that Japan acknowledge Japanese "criminal activities" during the war; Obuchi's response just prior to his trip was to nominate the late Emperor Hirohito as his "Person of the Century" for a Time magazine series, prompting street protests in Hong Kong.) Sixty years on, the Nanking massacre refuses to disappear. China puts the death toll from the Japanese rampage in 1937 at 300,000; some Japanese accounts see this as a ten-fold exaggeration, while a handful of politicians deny the massacre occurred at all. Last year Japan's ambassador to the US, Kunihiko Saito, criticised Chinese-American writer Iris Chang's recent bestseller The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, which backs the Chinese figures, as being "contrary to the truth." When Chang challenged Saito to a live televised debate, the envoy declined. But the Japanese public are not likely to be disturbed by the book's revelations: a translation scheduled for release this year was recently terminated by the publishing house Kashiwa Shobo, apparently over the matter of additional commentaries. "Books like this require supplementary notes," the publisher announced, regretting that the author had proved "uncooperative."