The Rising Sun Tribe

Fifteen years after Pearl Harbor, Japan's new younger generation is tall (a statistical two centimeters taller than their elders), tempestuous and troubled. Like the pale young Parisians maundering in existentialism when the tide of war ebbed from the Left Bank, like the Teddy Boys of postwar London posturing on street corners in their shabby pseudo-Edwardian finery like pathetic barnyard roosters, like the slack-jawed worshipers of Elvis Presley and their spiritual ancestors in the U.S., the hootch-swilling hellions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s, the truants of Japan have no place to run but away. Soon after the war, their restlessness was marked by a sharp spurt in juvenile delinquency. Today, after a brief respite, delinquency, violence and sex crimes among the young are once again on the rise in Japan, but beyond this criminal fringe is a whole generation of Japanese youngsters whose only wish is to kick over the traces.

The Cultist. "We are the villains infesting our time of confusion," wrote one young gentleman of Japan recently, "and the weapon we use is our youthfulness." As the most talked-about youngster in modern Japan, 24-year-old Shintaro Ishihara has every right to act as spokesman for his generation. Not yet a year out of college, he is already known as a composer, painter, a movie star whose haircut and clothes are ardently aped by teen-agers from Tokyo to Nagasaki, and the most sensationally successful author in the nation, with four bestselling novels to his credit. Beyond all this, Ishihara is the idol and godhead of a flamboyant and far-flung cult whose youthful excesses have caused Japan's oldsters to shake their heads in horror and despair. This is the cult of Taiyozoku, the "Sun Tribers," the flaming youth of modern Japan.

Red Hair & Crew Cuts. In Ishihara's first novel, Taiyo-no-Kisetsu (Season of the Sun), boys and girls with no other purpose in life than sheer enjoyment found described a way of life exactly to their taste. The cynical, lusty tale of the love life of two brothers and their single girl friend was promptly transcribed into a movie whose uninhibited fidelity to detail would have whitened a Hollywood censor's hair overnight. More books and more movies followed, each proclaiming in brutish simplicity the joys of pointless violence and casual lust. The first novel lent its name to the cult of its worshipers, and the worshipers returned the compliment by doing their best to imitate the book. Mostly the offspring of well-heeled parents, Ishihara's characters and Ishihara's fans alike spend their days and nights in unconscious parody of another lost generation, pouring endless drinks down gullets apparently lined with copper, necking for hours in Tokyo "jazz coffee shops" thoughtfully equipped with high-partitioned booths, helling around Japan's cities and beach resorts in imported MGs or local-made Toyopets.

They belong to a generation whose future is unknowable: only 24% of this year's 140,000 college seniors have jobs in sight. The U.S. occupation taught the Sun Tribers to scorn the way of their ancestors but did not replace it with a direction they could respect. From the Americans they took only the easy externals. Their uniform is as standard as that of a geisha: the "Shintaro" crew cut and aloha sports shirts for the men, with loose-flowing Byronic shirts, zoot coats and pointed suede shoes for city wear; toreador pants for the girls with hair cut like a mop and often dyed red; and over all, an attitude of abandonment and deep to-hell-with-it cynicism.

"Ishihara writes truly what we, the younger generation, are looking for," said a 21-year-old farm boy in Japan last week, but for Ishihara himself the truth was not so simple. A conscientious professional who lives quietly with a pretty kimono-clad young wife in the ancient tradition of his ancestors, the idol of the Sun Tribers tempers his cynicism with hard work: "As an author, I've got to sleep with my generation like a prostitute, but I've also got to climb out of bed occasionally and try to get one step ahead of it."

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