Republic or Death! (15 page)

Meeting Babatunde convinced me that in the US, the anthem is still of importance to at least two groups. There are those who serve, obviously – soldiers, sailors, pilots – who hear the song's message about standing until the end no matter how many bombs are flying your way, and remember why they signed up in the first place. It means a lot to many of their friends and families, too, and given that about 1 in 100 people in America is in the armed forces, that's a significant proportion of the population.

The other group – perhaps the more important – is immigrants. People who've just come to the country, or whose parents did. People who are striving to make it. Everyone in this hall. They hear the song's final line about ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave' and it motivates them, pushes them to take on two jobs, or to study late into the night. These are people for whom the American Dream really matters; who, unlike me, are convinced of its truthfulness.

Perhaps then, Francis Scott Key shouldn't be recognised simply as the man who wrote the anthem, but as America's first great ad-man for helping create that dream in the first place, for giving this country its tagline, its slogan – ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave'. That simple phrase has driven people to travel thousands of miles, to risk everything, just to be part of a country. It is the greatest boast a country has ever had.

But Key deserves the title for more than that. He also in effect named America's flag – the one thing this vast country of diverse states could unite around (although the phrase star-spangled had been around for some time before his song). And even his anthem's first few words, ‘O say can you see', have been one of the greatest gifts ever handed to punning headline writers and advertising firms the world over.

‘The Star-Spangled Banner' is sung at the naturalisation ceremony by Ryland Angel, a British opera singer who became a US citizen years ago. But like any proud professional, he gives it his own stamp, rushing some phrases and drawing out others. It's impossible for anyone to sing along with him, but there's a young woman from Cameroon in the front row who quietly tries to match his every word. The song clearly means so much to her and it's so touching to watch that I want the day to end right here. That's the image I need to leave America with, the proof of this song's continued importance and relevance.

But the ceremony doesn't end, and after some speeches and a message from Barack Obama (‘With the privilege of citizenship comes great responsibilities') everyone is asked to watch an ‘inspirational video'. Images start to fill the screen. There are farmers driving combine harvesters through cornfields, kids playing in the water from exploding fire hydrants, old couples standing outside rural post offices, marines in their white suits on shore leave, college football players, the Golden Gate Bridge, various Chinatowns. Every hackneyed image of American life is flicked up to tell people what they've let themselves in for. The music for this video isn't the anthem, it's ‘God Bless the USA' by Lee Greenwood, a country musician who once travelled to Nashville in the hope of making it big. ‘I'm proud to be an American,' the chorus goes,

Where at least I know I'm free.

And I won't forget the men who died,

Who gave that right to me.

It's one of the schmaltziest, most emotionally manipulative pieces of music I've ever heard. A choir and an orchestra come soaring in halfway through to double up the melody, and there's a sudden key change where the song leaps higher, almost forcing everyone to stand up and pump their fists along. There's even a false ending. It is – as a music snob – one of the worst three minutes I'll ever stand through. But the audience loves it. They wave their flags and sing along, the words helpfully popping up karaoke-style on the screen, and they sway from side to side, Latvians next to Taiwanese, Dominicans with Indians. And I suddenly realise I'm swaying too. Against my will, and against all my sense of taste, I'm carried away on the happiness in this room. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner', which has fought off so many competitors throughout its long life, may have another one to deal with.

 

THE TOWN OF
Sera, a few hours' drive into the mountains east of Hiroshima, is so stereotypically Japanese it's almost as if it were designed by the country's tourist board. A couple of rivers run through it, each lined with cherry trees; children play among the fallen petals. There are fields right in the centre of town – next to the pachinko parlour, behind the hospital – plots that have been farmed by the same families for decades. And there's a bright red temple standing on the hill above everything, as if on guard. It's so peaceful, I'm not surprised when a young doctor tells me no one locks their doors here. ‘Unless I want to … er, y'know … Unless my girlfriend's visiting.'

The only thing breaking the peace is the noise from the local high school: the call-and-response chants of baseball practice and the
slap-slap-slap
of pupils running laps around its track. There seem to be teenagers running that track continually, from first thing in the morning to last thing at night. It's as if their footsteps are powering Sera's generators and they're not allowed to stop. Such dedication has made the school famous for
ekiden
– the Japanese relay form of the marathon. It has won the national championship several times, and even Kenyan runners take scholarships here so they can train while studying. But that success is not the reason I'm visiting. I'm here because of a man called Toshihiro Ishikawa.

In 1999, Toshihiro was the school principal. There's a photo of him inside its main office. He has thick black hair, swept back and side parted, huge square glasses, and he's wearing a dark suit with a patterned tie done up slightly too tight. Before becoming the principal he was a maths teacher, and apparently loved by pupils for always trying to see the best in them, even when they were obvious disasters. He'd often pick up an exam paper, find the one question a pupil got right and then praise them to the heavens for it in the vain hope that this would encourage them to study a little harder. He would write letters to universities lauding students who would otherwise struggle to get in. He never shouted; never yelled. In two days in the town, I didn't hear one bad thing said about him.

He was about to retire when the photo of him was taken – to spend his days sitting in his garden listening to Tchaikovsky records, or Schubert if he fancied a change. He was obsessed with classical piano. He didn't play himself, but his son and daughter did, and he loved nothing more than to hear them practise or to drag them along to recitals. There were other plans he had for his retirement too – his wife, Masako, kept nudging him about skiing holidays, and he planned to rebuild their house from the ground up – but at the turn of the year, he got a call from Hiroshima's school board. At that year's graduation ceremony, they said, he had to do something differently: he had to play Japan's national anthem, ‘Kimigayo', and he had to make sure every teacher stood for it.

That sounds simple enough, but the school had never made teachers stand for the anthem before, knowing almost all would object. One of the sports teachers used to rush out of the hall whenever it was played, as if allergic to it, only to apologetically creep back in fifty-five seconds later as its final note died away. Others also ducked out, or stayed sitting while it was played, or simply refused to attend the ceremonies at all. If students asked them why they objected, the teachers would say the anthem was militaristic, a remnant of Japan's troubled past, and they couldn't see how anyone could respect it. Some would break down in tears as they tried to explain. But the school board had had enough.

Toshihiro spent days, then weeks, trying to convince his teachers to stand for the anthem, worrying what would happen to him, to the school and to the students if he failed. The issue took over his life. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't even escape into his children's piano playing any more. On 27 February, a Saturday, he stayed up all night talking with Masako about what else he could do to change the teachers' minds. She helped him practise speeches and rehearse arguments, telling him not to worry and that soon it would all be over. The ceremony was only a couple of days away, after all.

The next morning, he got up and went into the garden to visit the family grave, just as he did every Sunday. He didn't come back. Masako found him hanging from a rafter in their storehouse.

The school's website lists him as retired.

*

All anthems seem to stir up controversy at some point. Musicians cover them and cause uproar – just think of Jimi Hendrix's feedback-drenched ‘Star-Spangled Banner'. Athletes refuse to sing them and get thrown out of teams. Women's rights campaigners call for them to be changed – in Canada they've campaigned for decades to get one line of ‘O Canada' rewritten from ‘in all thy sons command' to ‘in all of us command' – while staunch nationalists have been known to beat people up for not standing for them. Then there are the rows that emerge when businesses try to make money out of them (Bangladeshi mobile ringtone companies, especially) and find themselves hauled into the courts.

You also only have to glance at news footage of any revolution to know how controversial anthems can get, people singing them continually at each other in an effort to say, ‘We're the ones who really represent this country.' In Ukraine in 2013, when protestors at Independence Square in Kiev were trying to overthrow the pro-Russian presidency, they sang ‘Ukraine's Not Dead Yet' on the hour, every hour. I imagine the line ‘We'll lay down our souls and bodies for our freedom' was shouted particularly loudly. Pro-Russian rebels sang the Russian anthem right back, and when the Ukrainian city of Donetsk tried to break away from the reborn country, its ‘People's Republic' put out a call for a new anthem in the middle of the fighting – an anthem apparently being just as important as soldiers.

There are anthem controversies in all the places you would expect. Israel, for example. There, ‘Hatikvah' – ‘The Hope' – is regularly the subject of complaints, not least because a quarter of the population is Arab and few are keen on singing a song about how their ‘Jewish soul still yearns / … To be a free people … / In the land of Zion'. In India, meanwhile, lawsuits are regularly served against politicians and movie stars deemed to have shown insufficient respect to ‘Jana Gana Mana' (‘Thou Art the Ruler of the Minds of All People').

But no matter how heated such controversies get, none comes close to that around ‘Kimigayo'. It's a conflict that's been going on in Japan's schools for over seventy years. Teachers have lost jobs because of it. They've received death threats because of it. Parents have been left dazed by it, worrying about their children's future. And yes, Toshihiro Ishikawa committed suicide because of it.

*

‘Kimigayo' is really the last anthem you would expect to cause any controversy. It's simple and solemn, without a hint of boisterousness or boastfulness – just forty-seven notes that move slowly and steadily up and down a traditional
gagaku
scale, like an old man patiently negotiating a flight of stairs. It's a beautiful piece of music, which to the Japanese sounds like something played in their imperial court, but to Western ears feels sad, almost elegiac, more suited to a wake than to being sung at baseball stadiums by children in Hello Kitty costumes.

The words are also among the most poetic found in anthems. ‘May your reign / Last for a thousand, eight thousand generations,' it goes – the ‘your' interpreted by most as meaning Japan's emperor –

Until the pebbles

Grow into boulders,

Lush with moss.

That's it. Nineteen words. A single beautiful image, something that could easily be part of a wedding vow – ‘May our love last until the pebbles grow into boulders …' – and nothing more.

It's also surprising that the anthem is such a contentious issue when Japan is a country where people seem to strive to avoid confrontation. You would think everyone here would be too embarrassed to get worked up about a song. I got a perfect illustration of that attitude on my very first day in the country. I visited Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, one of the world's most controversial religious buildings. It's where the spirits of Japan's war dead are enshrined, over 2.4 million of them. That number happens to include multiple war criminals: generals who were responsible for massacres in China and for forcing thousands of Koreans to act as ‘comfort women' (a very euphemistic term for prostitute) before and during the Second World War. There's a museum attached to the shrine that tries its best to claim such things never happened. Whenever a politician visits Yasukuni, the Chinese, South Korean, North Korean and Taiwanese governments protest until they're hoarse. But it's also a place that tourists flock to, largely to take photos of a cherry tree that sits opposite its entrance. That tree is warped, propped up by sticks and wrapped in weeping bandages, but it's the most famous in Japan because it's used to announce when spring comes to Tokyo. Once it blossoms, the world's largest city can celebrate.