Two confirmed dead following Japanese training plane crash
Two Japanese air force members died shortly after their training aircraft crashed last week, the air force chief confirmed on Thursday.
The T-4 plane, carrying two crew members, crashed into a reservoir minutes after taking off from Komaki Air Base in central Japan's Aichi prefecture on May 14.
Autopsies revealed both crew members, aged 29 and 31, died just two minutes after takeoff, according to Air Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff Gen. Hiroaki Uchikura.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation, prompting the grounding of all 196 remaining T-4 training aircraft for emergency inspections.
Witnesses at the time told the NHK national broadcaster that they heard a loud noise like thunder, followed by sirens of police cars and fire engines.
Defence Minister Gen Nakatani previously said the T-4 plane, which operates out of Nyutabaru air base, in the southern prefecture of Miyazaki, was heading back to its home base on an unspecified mission.
Officials previously searched an area near the Iruka pond reservoir, approximately six miles northeast of the base and near the city of Inuyama, where debris from the aircraft has been discovered.
This incident is the latest in a string of defense aircraft accidents in recent years, coinciding with Japan 's accelerated military buildup in response to China 's growing regional influence.
Japan's doubled defense spending has raised concerns that weapons procurement may be prioritised over safety measures.
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The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
The rare version of Christianity heading toward extinction
On this small island in rural Nagasaki, Japan, a community of Hidden Christians gathers to worship what they call the Closet God. In a special room, barely larger than a tatami mat, hangs a scroll painting of a kimono-clad Asian woman. She may resemble a Buddhist Bodhisattva holding a baby, but for the faithful, this is a concealed version of Mary and the baby Jesus. Another scroll shows a man wearing a kimono covered with camellias, an allusion to John the Baptist's beheading and martyrdom. Among the other objects of worship are relics from an era when Christians in Japan were forced to conceal their faith to avoid vicious persecution, including a ceramic bottle of holy water from Nakaenoshima, an island where Hidden Christians were martyred in the 1620s. Little about the icons in the tiny, easy-to-miss room can be linked directly to Christianity - and that's the point. After emerging from cloistered isolation in 1865, following more than 200 years of violent harassment by Japan's insular warlord rulers, many of the formerly underground Christians converted to mainstream Catholicism. Some, however, continued to practice not the religion that 16th-century foreign missionaries originally taught them, but the idiosyncratic, difficult to detect version they'd nurtured during centuries of clandestine cat-and-mouse with a brutal regime. On Ikitsuki and other remote sections of Nagasaki prefecture, Hidden Christians still pray to these disguised objects. They still chant in a Latin that hasn't been widely used in centuries. And they still cherish a religion that directly links them to a time of samurai, shoguns and martyred missionaries and believers. Now, though, the Hidden Christians are dying out, and there is growing certainty that their unique version of Christianity will die with them. Almost all are now elderly, and as the young move away to cities or turn their backs on the faith, those remaining are desperate to preserve evidence of this offshoot of Christianity - and convey to the world what its loss will mean. 'At this point, I'm afraid we are going to be the last ones,' said Masatsugu Tanimoto, 68, one of the few who can still recite the Latin chants that his ancestors learned 400 years ago. 'It is sad to see this tradition end with our generation.' Hidden Christians cling to a unique version of the religion Christianity spread rapidly in 16th century Japan when Jesuit priests had spectacular success converting warlords and peasants alike, most especially on the southern main island of Kyushu, where the foreigners established trading ports in Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands, by some estimates, embraced the religion. That changed after the shoguns began to see Christianity as a threat. The crackdown that followed in the early 17th century was fierce, with thousands killed and the remaining believers chased underground. As Japan opened up to foreign influence, a dozen Hidden Christians clad in kimonos cautiously declared their faith and their remarkable perseverance to a French Catholic priest in March 1865 in Nagasaki city. Many became Catholics after Japan formally lifted the ban on Christianity in 1873. But others chose to stay Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), continuing to practice what their ancestors preserved during their days underground. Their rituals provide a direct link to a vanished Japan In new interviews, Hidden Christians spoke of a deep communal bond stemming from a time when a lapse could doom a practitioner or their neighbours. Hidden Christians were forced to hide all visible signs of their religion after the 1614 ban on Christianity and the expulsion of foreign missionaries. Households took turns hiding precious ritual objects and hosting the secret services that celebrated both faith and persistence. This still happens today, with the observance of rituals unchanged since the 16th century. The group leader in the Ikitsuki area is called Oji, which means father or elderly man in Japanese. Members take turns in the role, presiding over baptisms, funerals and ceremonies for New Year, Christmas and local festivals. Different communities worship different icons and have different ways of performing the rituals. In Sotome, for instance, people prayed to a statue of what they called Maria Kannon, a genderless Bodhisattva of mercy, as a substitute for Mary. In Ibaragi, where about 18,000 residents embraced Christianity in the 1580s, a lacquer bowl with a cross painted on it, a statue of the crucified Christ and an ivory statue of Mary were found hidden in what was called 'a box not to be opened'. Their worship revolves around reverence for ancestors Many Hidden Christians rejected Catholicism after the persecution ended because Catholic priests refused to recognise them as real Christians unless they agreed to be rebaptised and abandon the Buddhist altars that their ancestors used. 'They are very proud of what they and their ancestors have believed in' for hundreds of years, even at the risk of their lives, said Emi Mase-Hasegawa, a religion studies professor at J.F. Oberlin University in Tokyo. Tanimoto believes his ancestors continued the Hidden Christian traditions because becoming Catholic meant rejecting Buddhism and Shintoism, which had become a strong part of their daily lives underground. 'I'm not a Christian,' Tanimoto said. Even though some of their Latin chants focus on the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, their prayers are also meant to 'ask our ancestors to protect us, to protect our daily lives,' he said. 'We are not doing this to worship Jesus or Mary. … Our responsibility is to faithfully carry on the way our ancestors had practised.' Archaic Latin chants are an important part of the religion Hidden Christians' ceremonies often include the recitation of Latin chants, called Orasho. The Orasho comes from the original Latin or Portuguese prayers brought to Japan by 16th-century missionaries. Recently, on Ikitsuki, three men performed a rare Orasho. All wore dark formal kimonos and solemnly made the sign of the cross in front of their faces before starting their prayers - a mix of archaic Japanese and Latin. Tanimoto, a farmer, is the youngest of only four men who can recite Orasho in his community. As a child, he regularly saw men performing Orasho on tatami mats before an altar when neighbours gathered for funerals and memorials. About 40 years ago, in his mid-20s, he took Orasho lessons from his uncle so he could pray to the Closet God that his family has kept for generations. Tanimoto still has a weathered copy of a prayer his grandfather wrote with a brush and ink, like the ones his ancestors had diligently copied from older generations. As he carefully turned the pages of the Orasho book, Tanimoto said he mostly understands the Japanese but not the Latin. It's difficult, he said, but 'we just memorise the whole thing'. Today, because funerals are no longer held at homes and younger people are leaving the island, Orasho is only performed two or three times a year. Researchers and believers acknowledge that the tradition is dying There are few studies of Hidden Christians, so it's not clear how many still exist. There were an estimated 30,000 in Nagasaki, including about 10,000 in Ikitsuki, in the 1940s, according to government figures. But the last confirmed baptism ritual was in 1994, and some estimates say there are fewer than 100 Hidden Christians left on Ikitsuki. Hidden Christianity is linked to the communal ties that formed when Japan was a largely agricultural society. Those ties crumbled as the country modernised after WWII, with recent developments revolutionising people's lives, even in rural Japan. The accompanying decline in the population of farmers and young people, along with women increasingly working outside of the home, has made it difficult to maintain the tight networks that nurtured Hidden Christianity. 'In a society of growing individualism, it is difficult to keep Hidden Christianity as it is,' said Shigeo Nakazono, the head of a local folklore museum who has researched and interviewed Hidden Christians for 30 years. Hidden Christianity has a structural weakness, he said, because there are no professional religious leaders tasked with teaching doctrine and adapting the religion to environmental changes. Nakazono has started collecting artefacts and archiving video interviews he's done with Hidden Christians since the 1990s, seeking to preserve a record of the endangered religion. Mase-Hasegawa agreed that Hidden Christianity is on its way to extinction. 'As a researcher, it will be a huge loss,' she said. Masashi Funabara, 63, a retired town hall official, said most of the nearby groups have disbanded over the last two decades. His group, which now has only two families, is the only one left, down from nine in his district. They meet only a few times a year. 'The amount of time we are responsible for these holy icons is only about 20 to 30 years, compared to the long history when our ancestors kept their faith in fear of persecution. When I imagined their suffering, I felt that I should not easily give up,' Funabara said. Just as his father did when memorising the Orasho, Funabara has written down passages in notebooks; he hopes his son, who works for the local government, will one day agree to be his successor. Tanimoto also wants his son to keep the tradition alive. 'Hidden Christianity itself will go extinct sooner or later, and that is inevitable, but I hope it will go on at least in my family,' he said. 'That's my tiny glimmer of hope.'
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘A knife crime waiting to happen': how Yoshitomo Nara became Japan's most expensive artist
In 2019, Sotheby's sold a painting of a little girl with a conservative side parting, a Peter Pan collar and the most unflinching green eyes – which stare down the viewer. It went for $25m, which makes it Japan's most expensive painting. And it is a knife crime waiting to happen. The girls gaze is as withering as those in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Her eyes follow you as inescapably as Lord Kitchener's in the first world war recruitment poster. But Nara's's painting, Knife Behind Back (2000), is more upsetting than either of those. Most chilling is what we don't see; it's all about the power of titular suggestion. This nameless girl is a variation on a theme that Nara has been developing in his paintings since art school in the 1990s. Inspired by both Japanese kawaii (cute) and Disney twee, his cherubic, cartoonish figures with oversized heads resemble psychotic Kewpie dolls. 'People refer to them as portraits of girls or children,' says curator Mika Yoshitake. 'But they're really all, I think, self-portraits.' In an interview for the Hayward's exhibition catalogue, Nara confirms this. 'When I paint I always think the canvas is like a mirror.' Not just a mirror on society, but a mirror on the artist. These little girls with big heads and bug eyes are a sexagenarian male working out his demons. Nara's characters – which can be seen at the Hayward Gallery's bracing new retrospective, though sadly not the knife girl – have become as iconic as Warhol's Marilyns or Lichtenstein's blonde bombshells, and just as marketable as posters, T-shirts and coasters. But that was hardly Nara's intention in painting them. 'I kind of see the children among other, bigger, bad people all around them, who are holding bigger knives,' he says. Japanese art isn't supposed to be like this. Its purpose, for western viewers at least, is to charm and detach us from reality. A short walk from Nara's current Hayward retrospective is the other Japanese summer blockbuster, Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road. The British Museum exhibition includes the early 19th-century master's bird paintings, heart-catching landscapes and decorous urban scenes from Japan's Edo period. But the blurb for the show rightly suggests how the extremely popular artist tended to favour beauty over realism. And last year's exhibition of Yoshida woodblock prints at the Dulwich Picture Gallery was criticised for air-brushing out Japan's more violent history. The point is not that so much Japanese art has a problem; rather that we westerners do. We yearn for art as garden of delights while the rest of the world is on fire. And galleries overwhelmingly give us what we wish for. We got it during, say, Somerset House's spirited, merch-friendly kawaii exhibition or in Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Rooms at Tate Modern. Only when I visited the Young Victoria and Albert Museum's 2023 show Japan: Myths to Manga have I seen a recent exhibition that has set Japanese art in anything like a satisfying historical context. Nara's art isn't like this at all. It's rough and ready, unafraid to be ugly, snarling with unsubtle anti-nuke agitprop graffiti, sometimes scrawled on old envelopes, and steeped in British and American rock'n'roll. On this last point, it's worth noting Nara especially digs the Ramones. He once did an acrylic painting of a big-headed girl with a raised fist shouting into a mic entitled 'Hey ho! Let's go!' – a quotation from the Ramones' Blitzkrieg Bop. That love for rock'n'roll came early. As a lonely latchkey kid raised by working-class parents in Hirosaki, a remote town at the top of Honshu, Japan's main island, Nara found solace by tuning into the Far East Network, an American station broadcasting to US service personnel at the nearby Misawa military base. He listened to western music on his self-made transistor but didn't (at the time) understand the words. Nara became obsessed with both the music and the cover art of the singles and albums he collected. He was enchanted by the wildflowers on the cover of Luke Gibson's 1971 album Another Perfect Day. He loved John Hiatt's Overcoats album cover depicting the singer songwriter standing waist deep in a lake. This image inspired Nara's lovely 1995 painting In the Deepest Puddle II in which one of his big eyed poppets, this time with a bandaged head (a recurring motif), stands in a pool of water. Throughout his childhood Nara drew and painted. 'Painting,' he told one interviewer, 'was my playmate.' It has remained so. He made his first artwork aged six. 'I made an illustrated kamishibai story about my cat and me travelling together to the north pole, and then going all the way down to the South Pole,' he told the New York Times in 2020. 'I was lonely and animals and music were a great comfort.' Music was and remains both comfort and catalyst: throughout his career he has listened to music in the studio. He would hear a song – say the Clash's Death or Glory or Del Amitri's Nothing Ever Happens – and draw or make a painting, often very loosely inspired by it. He's also made art for bands: The sleeve for REM's 2001 single I'll Take the Rain, for instance, includes Nara's depiction of a crown-wearing dog on a homemade skateboard. In 1988, after graduating from the Aichi University of the Arts, Nara decided to study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. He remained in Germany for 12 years, where he concocted his most characteristic artistic moves: he would often paint a single figure in pastel with thick cartoonish lines. These figures seem innocuous but on closer inspection disclose that they are carrying weapons and wearing expressions like those of a toddler crossly awoken from a nap by an importunate adult. Nara returned to Japan in 2000 to find many fellow artists subscribing to Takeshi Murakami's Superflat postmodern art movement. Its followers drew on manga and anime and what Murakami called the 'shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture'. While Nara was long associated and exhibited with these so-called SoFlo artists, his work was never as ironic. His art has never been celebration nor critique of the otaku sensibility that the Superflat movement critiqued. Otaku is the Japanese term used to describe geeky young people obsessed with manga, video games and computers and withdrawn from the real world. It might seem that Nara's moody staring girls depict just such otaku alienation, but that isn't quite right. While his art expresses obliquely his own loneliness, there is nothing ironic or cleverly po-mo about it. Nara is too ardent, too political and too keen to express authentic emotion to be truly Superflat. 'Punk rock,' he said once, 'taught the 17-year-old me not to think with my top-heavy head, but to feel with my body'. In 2011, his art was revolutionised by natural disaster: 'What really changed the way I work was the tsunami that hit the north-eastern part of Japan in 2011.' The Great East Japan earthquake unleashed the tsunami that damaged reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant and devastated large parts of his home prefecture. For several months he was so traumatised that he could scarcely work. When he returned to his studio, the first works he made were in clay that he worked in a seeming rage. It was as if he was physically attacking the lumps of clay he fashioned into sculptures of yet more innocent and/or troubled little girls. While Nara has always opposed nuclear power (as paintings such as No Nukes, 2004, and After the Acid Rain, 2006, indicate), he became more politically vocal after 2011. He leant his imagery to anti-war and anti-nuclear banners. In an agitprop acrylic on board painting from 2019, a big-headed girl makes her reappearance beneath the slogan Stop the Bombs. Nara is unapologetic about making such political art. 'Now, even in this very moment, there is a bomb exploding somewhere in the world,' he writes on his website. 'But there must also be new life coming into the world in that moment. 'STOP THE BOMBS!' I feel this from the bottom of my heart.' More recent works such as No War Girl and Peace Girl express a similarly pacifist message. Arguably Nara has always been political in a broader sense. Way back in 1994, he made a shocking painting called Dead Flower. A little girl with blood falling from her lips and the words 'Fuck You!' written in blood on her back, has just sawn through a flower with a dripping serrated blade. I imagine that this little horror has just killed the last flower in the world just to keep the bare lightbulb at the top of the picture alight. If so, it's an allegory of climate catastrophe. If not, it's still terrifying. Either way, you'll be able to see it in the Hayward's show as a timely reminder that Japanese art doesn't have to be detached from reality – nor simply beautiful. At the Hayward Gallery, London, from 10 June to 31 August.
The Independent
6 hours ago
- The Independent
Japan's emperor and his family pray in Okinawa for the victims of the island battle 80 years ago
Japan 's Emperor Naruhito and his family prayed on Wednesday in Okinawa for all the war dead in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II that was fought on the southern Japanese island 80 years ago. The commemoration comes as many residents of Okinawa and the nearby islands are increasingly concerned about the possibility of another war as regional tensions with China escalate. Naruhito's father, the 91-year-old former Emperor Akihito, cared especially about Okinawa because of its difficult history, setting an example for his son. The emperor and his wife, Empress Masako, asked their 23-year-old daughter, Princess Aiko, to accompany them on Wednesday's trip in an apparent effort to convey their attention for history on the next generation. It is Aiko's first visit to Okinawa. The three first headed to the island's last battlefield of Itoman and laid white flowers before an ossuary at the National War Dead Peace Mausoleum, where the remains of most of the victims are placed. The Battle of Okinawa began on April 1, 1945 when the U.S. troops, in their push for mainland Japan, landed on the island. It lasted until late June, killing more than 200,000 people. Nearly half of them were civilian residents of Okinawa, including students and victims of mass suicides ordered by the Japanese military, which waged the war in the name of Naruhito's grandfather, late Emperor Hirohito. On June 23, the island will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa, which led to heavy American troop presence on the island, even after the nearly 30 years of U.S. occupation ended in 1972. Naruhito, in his birthday remarks in February, stressed the importance of telling the tragedy of World War II to younger generations, pledging to contribute to efforts to promote the understanding of history and the determination for peace. The imperial family later on Wednesday visited the Cornerstone of Peace memorial, which has the engraved names of about a quarter million war dead on the Mabuni Hill where the battle ended. They also visited a permanent war exhibit at the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum and met with the survivors and families of those bereaved in the battle. Wednesday's visit was Naruhito's seventh visit to Okinawa. He last visited in 2022 to mark the 50th anniversary of Okinawa's reversion to Japan.
