groups bravely take on the government or companies in certain isolated cases, but there is no strong movement on a national scale.
Japan's schools are instilling a mind-set in children that accepts every dam as glorious, every new road as a path to a happy future. This locks Japan permanently into its «developing country» mode. When the U.S. Department of the Interior ordered the dismantling of Maine's Edwards Dam (which was more than a century old), church bells chimed and thousands cheered at the sight of their river regaining its freedom. In Japan, where civic organizations continue to raise flags and beat drums to announce the latest civil-engineering monuments, such a reaction would be unthinkable. «Welcome to Hiyoshi Dam!» proclaims
Dams like Hiyoshi are precisely where Japanese children go to learn and play, and they certainly contribute to culture-indeed, they are rapidly
Millions of Japanese who do not have a clear sense of the mechanisms involved nonetheless grieve at the steady disappearance of all that was once so beautiful in their environment. Since I began writing in Japanese ten years ago, my mailbox has been full of letters from people who share my concern: One tells me how his hometown has become ugly, another describes how she came home to find her favorite waterfall buried in a concrete coffin. The letters frequently say, «I feel as you do, but I never dared to voice it before.» In a typical letter to me, Ms. Kimoto Yoko writes: «I have come to realize that Japanese themselves do not realize how ugly their surroundings have become. I was of course one of these people that didn't realize it. When I talked to people around me about the sorts of things discussed in your book, I found I was speaking to people who had no idea of these things. While the place I live in is not Iya Valley, it is still a rural village. And yet here too, I've seen that what was ugly already is becoming increasingly ugly.»
People feel that beauty in their surroundings is doomed and that they are powerless to stop it. The landscape artist Harada Taiji, interviewed in the
The decline of domestic travel in Japan and an explosive growth of foreign travel in recent years indicate a large measure of national malaise. I believe it is possible that most Japanese know, somewhere deep in their hearts, that they are despoiling their own country, but what they know in their hearts they find difficult to think about consciously, given the array of government ideology and misinformation pitted against them. Other factors, too, make it unlikely that environmental destruction will become a mainstream political issue. One is the deep-rooted Japanese concentration on the instant or small detail, as in a haiku poem. This is beautifully expressed in the paintings on the sliding doors at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto: a few parrots, their feathers brightly painted in red and green, sit on gray branches in a landscape drawn in stark shades of black ink on white paper. The Zen message of the painting is that the parrots are the focus of our attention-hence we see them in color, while the background black-and-white trees are nearly invisible to the mind's eye. The architect Takeyama Sei says that it is this ability to «narrow their focus» that leads the Japanese people to ignore the ugliness in their environment. You can admire a mountainside and not see the gigantic power lines marching over it, or take pleasure in a rice paddy without being disturbed by the aluminum-clad factory looming over it.
While human beings may color in what we want to see and leave the rest in black and white, this is not an easy task for a camera. Photographers and moviemakers in Japan must carefully calculate how to frame each shot to preserve the illusion of natural beauty. The Japanese are surrounded by books and posters that feature precisely trimmed shots of nature – mostly close-ups of such details as the walkway into an old temple grounds or a leaf swirling in a mountain pool – with accompanying slogans praising the Japanese love of nature, the seasons, and so forth. Often the very agencies whose work is to resculpt the landscape have produced and paid for such advertisements.
Well-selected words and photos remind the Japanese daily that they live in a beautiful country. They also impress upon foreigners who buy books on gardens, flowers, architecture, and Kyoto that Japan is blessed above all nations in the world with its exquisite «love of the four seasons.» No country in the world has so rich a heritage of symbols and literature extolling nature. Signs for restaurants and bars read «Maple Leaf,» «Firefly,» «Autumn Grasses»; a major bank, formerly Kobe Taiyo Mitsui Ginko (Kobe Sun Mitsui Bank), even changed its name to Sakura Ginko (Cherry Blossom Bank). Myriad ceremonies such as
It is impossible to get through a single day in Japan without seeing some reference-in paper, plastic, chrome, celluloid, or neon – to autumn foliage, spring blossoms, flowing rivers, and seaside pines. Yet it is very possible to go for months or even years without seeing the real thing in its unspoiled form. Camouflaged by propaganda and symbols, supported by a complacent public, and directed by a bureaucracy on autopilot, the line of tanks moves on: laying concrete over rivers and seashores, reforesting the hills, and dumping industrial waste. Advancing as inexorably as the «Moving Finger» of Omar Khayyam, the bureaucracy carves its «concepts» upon the land, and neither our Piety nor our Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all our Tears wash out a Word of it.
3. The Bubble
Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.
(If you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will soon find a way back).
– Horace
We are ready to take a look at the long financial travail Japan has been experiencing since 1990, the aftermath of wild speculation known as the Bubble. The meltdown of the stock market and property prices has wiped away assets worth $10 trillion, with another $3 trillion likely yet to go. These vanished assets are not trivial, for they make up one of the most grievous declines of wealth experienced in human history, the sort of loss that usually happens in war or at the fall of an empire. To see how Japan could have got itself into this incredible situation, we must go back to the heyday of Japanese financial power more than a decade ago.
When, toward the end of 1987, black limousines began lining UP each afternoon in front of Madame Onoe Nui's house in Osaka, the neighbors thought little of it. The cars disgorged blue-suited men carrying briefcases who disappeared inside, sometimes not to emerge until two or three the next morning. Nui operated a successful restaurant, and it appeared that she had expanded her dinner business into earlier daylight hours. Only later did the neighbors learn that Madame Nui's visitors were not coming for the good food. The men in blue suits were coming to pay homage to a shadowy resident of Nui's house, a figure later revealed to be the single most important player in the Japanese stock market at the time. He was Nui's pet ceramic toad.
Toads, as is well known, are magic beings that like badgers and foxes are adept at weaving spells, especially those involving money. People like to have as charms in their gardens ceramic statues of badgers with a jug of wine in one paw and ledgers of receipts in the other. Toads, though less popular, are more mysterious, as they can transform themselves into demon princesses, and they know ancient sorcery from China and India.
The blue-chip Industrial Bank of Japan (IBJ), Japan's J. P. Morgan, especially favored Madame Nui's toad. Department chiefs from IBJ's Tokyo headquarters would take the bullet train down from Tokyo to Osaka in order to attend a weekly ceremony presided over by the toad. On arriving at Nui's house, the IBJ bankers would join elite stockbrokers from Yamaichi Securities and other trading houses in a midnight vigil. First they would pat the head of the toad. Then they would recite prayers in front of a set of Buddhist statues in Nui's garden. Finally Madame Nui would seat herself in front of the toad, go into a trance, and deliver the oracle-which stocks to buy and which to sell. The financial markets in Tokyo trembled at the verdict. At his peak in 1990, the toad controlled more than $10 billion in financial instruments, making its owner the world's largest individual stock investor.
Madame Nui was also the world's largest individual bank borrower. «From the mouth of the toad,» she proclaimed, «comes money,» and she seems to have called considerable Chinese and Indian sorcery into play, for she parlayed a small initial set of loans made in 1986 into a vast financial empire. By 1991, in addition to IBJ, which lent Nui ¥240 billion to buy IBJ bonds, twenty-nine other banks and financial institutions had extended her loans totaling more than ¥2.8 trillion, equal to about $22 billion at the time.
Onoe Nui was riding the success of the so-called Bubble, when Japanese investors drove stocks and real estate to incredible heights in the late 1980s. In 1989, the capitalization of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) stood slightly higher than that of the New York Stock Exchange; real-estate assessors reckoned that the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were worth more than all of California; the Nikkei index of the TSE rose to 39,000 points in the winter of 1989, after almost a decade of continuous climb. At that level, the average price-to-earnings ratios for stock (about 20 to 30 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong) reached 80 in Japan. Yet brokers were predicting that the stock market would soon rise to 60,000 or even 80,000. Euphoria was in the air. Japan's unique financial system-which is based on asset valuation, rather than on cash flow, as is the norm in the rest of the world-had triumphed.
When the crash came, it hit hard. In the first days of January 1990, the stock market began falling, and it lost 60 percent of its value over the next two years. Ten years later, the Nikkei has still not recovered, meandering in a range between 14,000 and 24,000. When the stock market collapsed, so did real-estate prices, which fell every year after 1991 and are now about one-fifth of Bubble-еrа values or lower. Many other types of speculative assets also evaporated. Golf-club memberships, which during their heyday could cost $1 million or more, today sell for 10 percent or less of their Bubble price, and bankruptcy looms over many golf-club developers, who must return tens of billions of dollars taken in as refundable deposits from members.
