Dogs and Demons

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. A few writers have raised these issues in recent years, but they were mainly journalists. American academics and cultural experts have uttered not a peep.

This brings me to a personal confession. This is a passionate book, and the reason is that I find what is taking place in Japan nothing less than tragic. Of course, there is much that is wonderful in Japan-I would never say that foreigners conversant with Japan must attack and criticize it. Nevertheless, we must certainly take off the emerald glasses and see modern Japan for what it is. To do otherwise is to condone and even become complicit in the disaster.

People writing about Japan make a big mistake if they believe that to gloss over its troubles is to «support Japan» and to point out difficulties is to «attack» or «bash» Japan. Japan is not a monolithic entity. Tens of millions of Japanese are as disturbed and frightened by what they see as I am. American friends have asked me, «What drove you to write a book that portrays Japan in such a disturbing light?» The answer is an almost embarrassingly old-fashioned Japanese answer: duty.

I came to Japan as a young boy, and spent most of the next thirty-five years in Tokyo, Shikoku, and Kyoto. As someone who loves this country, it is impossible for me to remain unmoved by Japan's modern troubles, especially the doom that has befallen the natural environment. During the past decade, I have spent untold hours with unhappy Japanese colleagues, who deeply deplore what they see happening to their nation's culture and environment but feel powerless to stop it. Halfway through the writing of this book, I took a trip to Ise Shrine, Japan's most sacred site, with two old friends, both of whom are prominent cultural figures. As we walked through Ise's primeval groves, I asked them, «Please tell me honestly whether I should press forward with this book. It's hard work. I could easily let this subject go.» They answered, «No, you have to write it. In our position, with our every move scrutinized by the media, we aren't free to speak out publicly. Please write it, for us.»

So this book is for my two friends, and millions of others like them. There is a great irony here, for while many foreign experts remain emotionally attached to present-day Japan's way of doing things, a growing and increasingly vocal number of Japanese emphatically are not. They, too, feel nostalgia, but it's for an older, nobler Japan, one that today's Japan denies at every step. As we shall see, much that parades as hallowed tradition is actually new contrivances that would be completely unrecognizable in Edo days or even as recently as the 1960s. People in Japan grieve because they know in their hearts, even if they cannot always express it in words, that their country is no longer true to its own ideals.

A strong streak of dissatisfaction runs through every part of Japanese society, with even a few highly placed bureaucrats questioning the status quo. Commentators in daily newspapers, magazines, and television talk shows here are obsessed with the idea that something is wrong. The title of an article in the influential opinion journal Shincho 45 sums up the mood: «In the 1990s, Japan Has Lost the War Again!» Another opinion journal, Gendai, devoted an entire issue to a series of essays by prominent economists and journalists headlined «As Japan Sinks – How to Protect Your Life and Possessions.» The subtitle was «This Country Is Rotting on Its Feet.» Unhappy and distressed people number in the millions – and they are Japan's hope for change.

For fifty years after World War II, a favorite theme of writing on Japan was «modernization» – how quickly Japan was changing, catching up with, or even advancing beyond other nations. Over time, Japan became Exhibit A in various theories of modernization, with writers fascinated by how traditional education and culture had contributed to making Japan a successful – some thought the world's most successful – modern state. However, it is a central thesis of this book that Japan's crisis of the 1990s springs from exactly the opposite problem: a failure to modernize.

Japan's ways of doing things-running a stock market, designing highways, making movies-essentially froze in about 1965. For thirty years, these systems worked very smoothly, at least on the surface. Throughout that time Japanese officialdom slept like Brünnhilde on a rock, protected by a magic ring of fire that excluded foreign influence and denied citizens a voice in government. But after decades of the long sleep, the advent of new communications and the Internet in the 1990s were a rude awakening. Reality came riding on his horse through the ring of fire, and he was not a welcome suitor. In the world of business, the stock market and banks crumbled; on the cultural front, citizens began to travel abroad by the tens of millions to escape drab cities and ravaged countryside.

The response by the bureaucrats who run Japan was to build monuments, and this they are doing on a scale that is bankrupting the nation. It was the only thing they knew to do. Hence the new title of this book: Dogs and Demons. The emperor of China asked his court painter, «What's easy to paint and what's hard to paint?» and the answer was «Dogs are difficult, demons are easy.» Quiet, low-key things like dogs in our immediate surroundings are hard to get right, but anybody can draw a demon. Basic solutions to modern problems are difficult, but pouring money into expensive showpieces is easy. Rather than bury electric wires, officials pay to have telephone poles clad in bronze; the city of Kyoto spent millions on building a Cultural Zone in its new railway station, the design of which denies Kyoto's culture in every way; rather than lower Internet connection fees, the government subsidizes «experimental Internet cities,» and so forth.

One of the recurring ideas in this book is the concept of «Japan at the extremes.» As Karel van Wolferen documented in The Enigma of Japanese Power, in Japan's political system the actual exercise of power is mostly hidden and widely denied, people dare not speak out, and the buck is passed indefinitely. The «Enigma» lies in how smoothly Japan Inc. seems to work despite a lack of strong leaders at the helm, and many an admiring book tells of how subtle bureaucrats gently guide the nation, magically avoiding all the discord and market chaos that afflict the West. But while the experts marveled at how efficiently the well-oiled engines were turning, the ship was headed toward the rocks. Japan's cleverly crafted machine of governance lacks one critically important part: brakes. Once it has been set on a particular path, Japan tends to continue on that path until it reaches excesses that would be unthinkable in most other nations.

Led by bureaucracies on automatic pilot, the nation has carried certain policies-notably construction-to extremes that would be comical were they not also at times terrifying. In recent years, manga (comics) and anime (animated films) have come to dominate major portions of Japan's publishing and cinematic industries. The popularity of manga and anime derive from their wildly imaginative drawings, depicting topsy-turvy visions of the future, with cities and countryside transformed into apocalyptic fantasies. One might say that the weight of manga and anime in modern Japanese culture – far out of proportion to comics or animation in any other nation – rests on the fact that they reflect reality: only manga could do justice to the more bizarre extremes of modern Japan. When every river and stream has been re-formed into a concrete chute, you are indeed entering the realm of sci-fi fable.

Extreme situations are interesting. Physicists learn the most from accelerated particles colliding at high energy levels not usually found in nature. What happens when bureaucrats control financial markets? One could do no better than study Japan, where one may view firsthand the crash at the end of the road for the most elaborate vehicle of financial control ever devised. What happens to cultural heritage when citizens have been taught in school not to take responsibility for their surroundings? Although temples and historical sites have been preserved, the destruction of traditional neighborhoods in all of Japan's old cities makes a good test case.

Destruction of all old cities? The words come easily, but the fact that such a thing is occurring strikes at the very heart of everything Japan once stood for. «Cultural crisis» is not, in fact, the best description of Japan's problems, for «crisis» implies a moment of truth, when issues come to a head and are resolved, whereas what is taking place in Japan is far more chronic and long-term. «Cultural malaise» is closer to the truth, a malaise that came about because of a severe mismatch between Japan's bureaucratic systems and the realities of modern life. This book is the story of that mismatch, and of how Japan wandered so far off on a lonely side road, removed not only from the world at large but from her own true self.

1. The Land

The Construction State

Our country, as a special mark of favor from the heavenly gods, was begotten by them, and there is thus so immense a difference between Japan and all the other countries of the world as to defy comparison. Ours is a splendid and blessed country, the Land of the Gods beyond any doubt.