I first visited Japan two years ago. I've been borderline obsessed with Japan for most of my life, so I was, in some ways, too well prepared for what I found when I got there. I was disappointed that I wasn't more culture-shocked; it had been so long since I had traveled overseas that I'd confused the numbed fatigue of being several time zones out of whack with the shock of the new. I wasn't feeling so much novelty as a sense of finally being somewhere where I'd needed to go for quite some time. Japan is an incredibly rich, overwhelming place, and the more context you have for what's going on around you, the more there is to explore. I ended every day drop-dead tired but unable to sleep, filled with a nervous, twitchy energy that left me watching bad Japanese television way into the night. Sometimes I'd be so restless that I'd slip out of my cheap hotel and go down the street to the Lawson's or the 7-11 to load up on Japanese junk food or heavily caffeinated milk tea, then come back to watch, with a Baudrillardian bemusement, Matthew Broderick chasing Godzilla around Manhattan, badly dubbed into Japanese.
After spending some time in Japan, I noticed that underlying the surface Japan of gothic lolitas, oden vats in the convenience stores, vast underground food courts, and plasticky shiny shopping wonderlands wherever the eye came to rest, there was another Japan, one that seemed to have been invisibly stamped "NOT FOR EXPORT". I began to wonder why every watercourse I encountered was paved down to its bed, even when I flashed over it in a bullet train in the middle of a vast expanse of rice paddies. I couldn't figure out why every single subway station in Tokyo seemed to have an exit that popped out next to some vast "culture hall" of indeterminate purpose. And I had no idea why, in a country that is seemingly obsessed with its own past, the Tokyo National Museum felt so neglected and marginal. This other Japan was well cared for but shabby, was made out of cement, and gave off the unmistakable sense that it had never gotten very far removed from poverty, even in the glorious golden years of the 1980s.
Near the end of my stay in Japan, I picked up a book that went some ways towards explaining what I'd noticed. Alex Kerr's Dogs And Demons is a controversial book among the Japanese, but it almost inevitably came up in conversations I'd had with Western expatriates who'd lived in Japan for a couple years or more. Kerr grew up in Japan, and took a keen interest in its cultural heritage; he's spent the past few years renovating a traditional estate in southern Japan, and has gotten to know the rhythms of life outside Tokyo pretty intimately.
The picture Kerr paints is a disquieting one, of a nation in hock to a few powerful interest groups, rapidly losing touch with its cultural heritage because it's ashamed of its shabby past and unwilling to challenge the powerful interest groups that dominate it. Kerr argues that Japan is controlled by a more or less unholy alliance between its mammoth construction industry, its even more mammoth permanent bureaucracy that constitutes the real core of Japanese political power, and the right-wing interest groups which shade imperceptibly into Japan's yakuza, or organized criminal syndicates. He paints a convincing picture of a country where regional governments are stuck with huge "culture halls" they don't need and can't afford to maintain, where nuclear power facilities are run so loosely as to shame even corrupt Soviet regulators, where bad science and questionable politics lead to huge swathes of the Japanese coastline being encased in cement and what looks like giant tank barriers (or oversized toy jacks, depending how poetic your imagination is).
Kerr's book was hugely controversial in the Japanese media, and was given the usual treatment: it was decried as being the ignorant rantings of a Westerner come to demonstrate to the Japanese the "proper" Western way of doing things. Kerr isn't altogether innocent here. He had to be conscious that as a foreigner (and you always remain a foreigner in Japan, even, in the case of the Chinese and Korean minorities in Japan, if you were born there) his criticisms would touch off a firestorm of criticism, and he makes no attempt to make the book anything other than a polemic. At the same time, the criticism of his book was off-base; Kerr's intent was to save Japan, it's true, but his desire was for Japan to return to something approaching its traditional culture and traditional, human-scale notions of beauty and design. He saw in the Japanese bureaucracy something ugly and modern and in a sense transnational, and attempted to persuade readers that Japan ought to return to its own cultural wellsprings before moving on.
Strangely enough, this sentiment also was expressed in a book that received a much better reception within Japan. Shintaro Ishihara is another hugely controversial figure within Japan, and his book The Japan That Can Say No launched a nasty war of words between Japanese and American politicians. Ishihara is the most visible representative of what I'll call the Japanese neocon faction; he represents a resurgent strain of Japanese nationalism that posits as its ideal state a kind of mythologized, hyperromantic feudal Japan that has only existed, perhaps, in the overheated novels of Yukio Mishima. Instead of being a marginalized, embittered author, though, Ishihara is one of the most popular politicians in Japan, being the governor of Tokyo, which is arguably a position of power to rival the Japanese prime minister's. I would even argue that Ishihara has used his power far more effectively than Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, in large part because he has a huge popular mandate from the residents of Tokyo, and has an extraordinarily forceful personality.
Ishihara's book makes a number of sweeping arguments that were bound to cause trouble. He believes that the old United States-Japan alliance makes little sense, given that Japan's biggest market and nearest cultural neighbor is China. Of course, he also believes that a vigorous and powerful Japan would be best equipped to deal with China as an equal, and has been known to stir up trouble by making official visits as Tokyo's governor to Taiwan, which mainland China regards as a breakaway territory. And he also believes that the Japanese left, in concert with America, has spent the last half-century vastly overstating the damage that Japan did to the rest of Asia during World War II. He believes Japan's pacifist constitution, imposed on Japan by a victorious Douglas Macarthur (literally — the current Japanese constitution was largely drafted by Macarthur to an aide one night when he became disgusted with the drafts he was being offered by the provisional Japanese government), is completely out of touch with reality, and needs to be revised to allow Japan to develop military power to match its economic might. He has made a number of exceedingly sticky comments about the need for Tokyo to be prepared for rioting, ill-behaved foreigners in the event of an earthquake, which brings back disquieting reminders of the vigilante gangs that roved the ruins of Tokyo after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, killing anyone they found who spoke with an accent.
All of this, of course, was guaranteed to send right-wing American politicians, no strangers to bellicose, isolationist rhetoric themselves, right over the edge. You're forgiven if you've forgotten or never heard of the explosive controversy that raged around the publication of Ishihara's book in English. It was a storm that was pretty much confined to Washington, and thanks to immediate and sustained diplomacy on the part of both the US State Department and the Japanese foreign ministry (which has, at best, mixed feelings about Ishihara), there were only a few minor outbreaks of the nasty, cheap rhetoric that characterized American-Japanese relations in the late 1980s, when Japan was on schedule to take over for the failing Soviet Union as our most hated foe.
The thing is, I can't write Ishihara off. He's very popular and outspoken — he is, in fact, a demagogue — so clearly he speaks to something in the character of many contemporary Japanese. I visited Yasukuni Jinja, the shrine where Japan's war dead are buried, including several of their convicted war criminals, and when I toured the accompanying museum, I was aghast at how effectively and completely it had been coopted by revisionist, nationalist historians (apparently, both Korea and China were "liberated" from Western colonialists by Japan). There is clearly a vocal minority within Japan who have never reconciled themselves to Japan's defeat in World War II. And yet, I don't think Ishihara's a fascist. I think he contains within himself all the necessary preconditions for fascism, but he hasn't gone over the edge yet.
I say this based on the account of Ishihara given in another book on Japan by a Westerner, John Nathan's Japan Unbound, which goes a long way towards providing context for Alex Kerr's earlier rant, and also providing a more sympathetic view of what ails modern Japan. Nathan's a writer and a translator, and has been studying the Japanese language and its native literature since the early 1960s. He befriended Mishima, translated some of his writing, and wrote a well-regarded English-language biography of Japan's most complex and troubling modern literary giant. He has a novelist's eye for character, and an American journalist's preoccupation with personalities over cultural forces. At the same time, he's vastly more sympathetic to Japan's problems than Kerr, and much less likely to excoriate the Japanese for turning their back on their roots.
But that is, in fact, the problem. Nathan's thesis is that ever since being forcibly opened to the West in the 19th century, Japan has had a recurring problem with its own slippery cultural identity disappearing down the drainpipe. In an attempt to catch up with the West, it absorbed the West's consumer culture and its obsession with economic production, all sloppily overlaid over a heavily reified vision of the traditional conception of the divine mandate of the Emperor and his feudal court. Nathan makes a convincing case that the most devastating act at the end of World War II was not the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the victorious Allies forcing Emperor Hirohito to speak to the Japanese with a human voice — to step down from his throne as a god, and to become a man. In the wake of this Japan has had to reinvent itself as a nation, but no solid core has ever formed to replace the notion of the Japanese as a divinely ordained people, given heavenly grace so that they might better serve their Emperor.
Nathan orients his book around interviews with an astonishing array of important Japanese figures. It's hard to imagine anyone being given this level of access to important people in the United States. The list of interviewees at the end of the book runs several pages long, and includes governors of Japanese states (including Ishihara and Yasuo Tanaka, governor of Nagano, who in some ways is Ishihara's left-leaning complement), CEOs of some of Japan's most powerful corporations, authors, dancers, historians... the list is extensive. Nathan is a believer in telling anecdotal details over numbers, although he uses statistics when he needs to make a point. In my opinion, his complex, nuanced portrait of Ishihara is what forms the core of the book.
However, he uses many other perspectives to illuminate his thesis of a Japan that's stranded without an overriding national identity. He talks about the frankly insane state of Japan's much-vaunted educational system, where unruly children can't be effectively disciplined, and therefore can more or less shut down entire classes through intimidation and unpredictable acts of violence. I wasn't known for being a particularly demure student in school, and kids at my school could get away with a lot, but discipline was never far away, and it's impossible for me to imagine what things would have been like if, as in Japan, our faculty had been explicitly restricted from punishing individual students for wrongdoing.
Nathan then goes on to discuss the slow disintegration of Japan's great modern miracle, its heavy industrial / corporate welfare state. If you haven't been paying attention, Japan has been mired in a cruel and endless recession for the last 10 years, which has forced traumatic changes to its workforce. Japanese workers used to have their careers managed for them for their employers. They accepted this, and the punishing workloads that came with it, because promotion was based on seniority and lifetime employment was very close to guaranteed. This created a very stable but very conservative business culture, and it worked as long as the Japanese were able to pull the Jedi mind trick on themselves that made them believe it was necessary for Japan to recover from the economic devastation it suffered during World War II. The much-vaunted Japanese productivity miracle was mostly a consequence of the Japanese workforce driving itself into the ground for very little pay.
This paid off as long as the Japanese economy continued to grow, and there continued to be slots for senior employees to be promoted to. Unfortunately, when the bottom fell out of the economy at the end of the 1980s, the entire edifice started to crumble. Banks ended up with huge ledgers of bad debt, which they were reluctant to foreclose upon, but companies which were insolvent in all but name had to do something to put their houses in order. Employees were laid off. Business units were restructured. Companies were forced — in what was seen as a very cruel irony — to adopt Western management practices. Middle-aged men who were planning on working for their company — their home — for the rest of their working lives found themselves, cruelly, obligated to resign. Many were unable to cope and simply committed suicide, or continued to mime the day-to-day actions of employees, leaving home early in the morning to mill around aimlessly, spending their days in movie theaters while their wives continued to play their traditional housekeeping roles, continuing as if nothing had changed.
All of which helps to explain something I noticed when I was there, but was unable to completely explain. Young Japan is very different from its adult version. Kids there are a lot like I am — they have huge, overriding obsessions, they buy every gadget and lifestyle accessory related to whatever it is they're into at the moment, and they suck up enormous amounts of popular culture. I've been an avid follower of the Japanese goth scene for years now, and the level of devotion and attention to detail Japanese goths lavish on their lifestyle frankly shames anything the American and European inventors of goth culture have ever done. And the Japanese goth scene is even tinier and more marginalized than its American counterpart; there may be zillions of tiny boutiques selling Puto Mayo's tiny top hats in Harajuku, but there's no Japanese Hot Topic.
I always just assumed the superabundant profusion of youth cultures was due to the current generation of kids being born in the boom years of the 80s, and having parents who spoiled them. I also figured that they were probably unwilling, after witnessing the consequences of the crash and its follow-on recession, to throw themselves into the working world so unconditionally. It was a pretty good operating hypothesis — which, due to my completely inadequate Japanese, has remained uncontaminated by anything so base as research — but I now think it was incomplete, and excessively colored by reading Dogs And Demons. Nathan makes a big deal out of how the Japanese don't know who they are, and how this lack of identity can be crippling in a culture as group-oriented as Japan's (a huge topic, and one for another essay, perhaps). I'm not so sure that a vacuum where cultural identity belongs is so healthy for an individualistic society like America's, either. In both cases, it allows for the simple, comforting lies of jingoism and unthinking patriotism to creep in where consideration ought to reign.
What it comes down to is this: I have a hard time believing that Shintaro Ishihara is any more dangerous, as a focal point for nationalist sentiment and as a politician out doing things in the world, than someone like Paul Wolfowitz, the American Assistant Secretary of Defense who has been so enamored of democratizing the Middle East through shoving over the existing regimes there. Both are primarily driven by ideology, and while Ishihara is a demagogue with profound popular support, he doesn't have his hands on the reins of the world's most effective killing machine. I think that on the whole, Japan's kids are probably less messed up than their American counterparts, although their problems are eerily similar. Everywhere I look in the world, I see two kinds of people: people trapped in the postmodern realm, who have no fixed guideposts of morality, ethics, and ideology, who have to figure out everything as they go along and hope that everything will work out for the best; and people who cleave to what they see as the comforting certainties of the past, while those certainties become less and less relevant to operating in the actual world of the internet, unmanned aerial vehicles, and RU-486. The old dichotomy of progressive versus reactionary ideology has been globalized and fractured under the shock of the new, and what's left behind isn't anything as coherent as ideology and isn't a complete or useful worldview. Whither goest Japan, nobody knows. Whither goest Japan, goeth the rest of the world.