Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

The river, too, presented a sharp contrast to the drab sameness of Japanese cities, where we could think of no waterways with such vibrant life along their shores, but instead only visions of endless concrete embankments. Japan suddenly seemed very far away from the modern world-and the title for a book came to me: Irrelevant Japan. Japan kept the world out for so long, and so successfully, that in the end the world passed her by.

However, as I researched this book, it became clear that Japan's problems are much more severe than even I had guessed. Far from being irrelevant, Japan's troubles have serious relevance for both developing countries and advanced economies, for the simple reason that Japan fell into the pitfalls of both. So the title changed.

The key question is: Why should Japan have fallen into any pitfall, when the nation had everything? It reveled in one of the world's most beautiful natural environments, with lush mountains and clear-running streams pouring over emerald rocks; it preserved one of the richest cultural heritages on earth, receiving artistic treasure from all across East Asia, which the Japanese have refined over the centuries; it boasted one of the world's best educational systems and was famed for its high technology; its industrial expansion after World War II drew admiration everywhere, and the profits accumulated in the process made it perhaps the wealthiest nation in the world.

And yet, instead of building the glorious new civilization that was its birthright, Japan went into an inexplicable tailspin in the 1990s. At the start of the decade the stock market collapsed, and by the end of it the Tokyo exchange, the largest in the world in 1989, was capitalized at little more than a fourth of New York's; meanwhile, GNP growth in Japan fell to a minus, while the United States, Europe, and China boomed.

That Japan's economy stumbled is old news. But the media have reported very little about the distress that afflicts other aspects of the nation's life. Few have questioned why Japan's supposed «cities of the future» are unable to do something as basic as burying telephone wires; why gigantic construction boondoggles scar the countryside (roads leading nowhere in the mountains, rivers encased in U-shaped chutes); why wetlands are cemented over for no reason; why the movie industry has collapsed; or why Kyoto and Nara were turned into concrete jungles. These things point to something much deeper than a mere period of economic downturn; they represent a profound cultural crisis, trouble eating away at the nation's very soul.

In the process of researching this book, it became clear to me that Japan's problems have their roots in the 1860s, when the country first opened to the world. At that time, the nation set out to resist the Western colonial powers, and later to vie with them for dominance – and even though Japan succeeded in becoming one of the world's most powerful nations, the basic policy of sacrificing everything for industrial growth never changed. Over time, a wide gap opened up between the goals of this policy, instituted over a century ago, and the real needs of Japan's modern society. Distortions and hidden debts have accumulated, like water dripping into the bamboo poles that can often be seen in Japanese gardens, until finally one last droplet causes the bamboo to tip over, the water spills out, and the other end of the bamboo drops onto a stone with a loud bonk. How Japan went bonk-falling so quickly from being the economic and cultural darling of the 1980s into a profoundly troubled state in the 1990s – is one of the strange and terrible tales of the late twentieth century.

The external view of Japan differs vividly from its internal reality. «A man seeing an X-ray photograph of his own skeleton,» wrote Marcel Proust, «would have the same suspicion of error at the sight of this rosary of bones labeled as being a picture of himself as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: 'Dromedary resting.' » The Japan that I have described in this book will be equally unfamiliar to many readers. The «land of high technology,» lacking the know-how to test for or clean up toxic wastes. The society that «loves nature» concreting over its rivers and seashores to feed a voracious construction industry. An «elite bureaucracy» that has so mismanaged the public wealth that the health system and pension funds are failing, while the national debt has soared to become the highest in the world.

It is an incongruous picture, shockingly alien if one is familiar only with the seductive outer skin of Japan's manufacturing success. How could the winsome Portrait of a Girl, presented to the world for forty years by Japan experts, have turned out to be Dromedary Resting – ravaged mountains and rivers, endemic pollution, tenement cities, and skyrocketing debt? Why have writers and academics never told us about this?

Since the 1950s, Western observers have come to Japan as worshippers to a shrine. When I majored in Japanese Studies in college in the 1960s and early 1970s, I learned, as did most of my colleagues, that it was our mission to explain Japan to an uncomprehending and unsympathetic world. Japan did everything differently from the West, and this was terribly exciting – for many Japanologists, it seemed to be an ideal society, a Utopia. Even the revisionist writers of the 1980s, who warned of a Japanese economic juggernaut, spoke largely in terms of awe.

Many of my colleagues remain convinced that their job is to present Japan attractively to others, and a high proportion of them depend, in one way or another, on Japan for their livelihood. Let the Japanophile say the wrong thing, however, and he may not be invited back to address a prestigious council; his friends in industry or government back in Tokyo will cease to funnel information to him. So self-censorship rules.

Even stronger than censorship is the power of nostalgia. Japan experts long for the beautiful, artistic, efficient Japan that they continue to believe in, and the unhappy reality makes them cling even more to a vision of Utopia. Incurable nostalgia rules this field, and this is why Zen and tea ceremony experts recite to us many an exquisite haiku demonstrating Japan's love of nature but do not speak of the concreting of rivers and seashore. Similarly, economics professors lavish praise on Japan's industrial efficiency without mentioning that factories are free to dump carcinogenic chemicals into neighboring rice paddies.