Also, in a military culture, slogans are the equivalent of shouts going into battle. Officials preface public activities in Japan with battle cries. In March 1997, the city of Kyoto published the results of its Fifth Kyoto 21 Forum, its title trumpeting, «An Avant-Garde City at the Turning Point of Civilization.» That's the blood-stirring
Every monument and new city plan has exciting slogans to go along with it. Take Okinawa, one of Japan's poorest regions. We hear that the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications is going to develop an Okinawa Multimedia Zone aimed at creating an «info-communications hub for the entire Asia-Pacific region.» Meanwhile, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry is planning something called Digital Island, and Okinawa officials are proposing the Cosmopolitan City Formation Concept.
Yokohama describes itself as «cultivating its image as a 24-hour international cultural city, a 21st-century information city, and an environmentally friendly, humanistic city rich in water, greenery and historical places.» Alas, Yokohama, where trains and buses shut down after midnight, is not «24-hour»; nor is the city international (its old foreign community has largely disappeared); certainly it is not environmentally friendly or particularly cultural; and it is not especially rich in greenery or historic sites. The port does have a lot of water.
Imaginary towns like «Mirage City – Another Utopia» boast even more glamorous slogans than real cities. Mirage City, Isozaki tells us, is «an experimental model for the conceptualization and realization of a Utopian city for the 21st century – the age of informatics.» It will feature «inter-activity, inter-communality, inter-textuality, inter- subjectivity, and inter-communicativity.» In the slogan lexicon, «twenty-first century,» «communication,» «hub,» «center,» «cultural,» «art,» «environment,» «cosmopolitan,» «international,»
Slogans require a certain amount of care in handling, since their true intent is often far from their surface meaning. Take, for example, the term «symbiotic unity,»
There is a lesson here that has profound implications for the way foreign media report on Japan. It is all too easy to accept the slogans at face value and not question what is really going on. For example, the city of Nagoya made plans to wipe out Fujimae, Japan's most important tidal wetland (after the loss of Isahaya), and use it as a dump site. Faced with local opposition, the Fujimae project is now on hold – although the future of the wetlands is far from secure. Yet Nagoya plans to host Expo 2005 based on the theme «Beyond Development: Rediscovering Nature's Wisdom.» How many foreigners will attend Expo 2005, visit charmingly designed pavilions, listen to pious speeches about Japan's love of nature and about «rediscovering nature's wisdom,» and never guess the devastation Nagoya plans for the wetlands right outside Expo 2005 s gates?
In the case of modern Japanese architecture, foreign critics come as pilgrims to the holy sanctuary, abandoning critical faculties that they use quite sharply at home. Consider the following effusion by Herbert Muschamp, the architectural critic for
Try to visit the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in the rain, when the drops form rippling circles within the square enclosure of a shallow pool and the steel wires that rise from the pool in gentle loops make it seem as if the drops have bounced off the surface back into the air, freezing into glistening silver arcs. Or go when it's sunny, go when it snows. Just go, or try to imagine yourself there. Though Nagi is barely a dot on the map, the museum is more startlingly original than any built by a major city in recent years.
The reader will recall that the Nagi Museum is the one that cost three times the village's annual budget, with only three artworks housed in three sections (in Muschamp's succinct description, 'a cylinder and a crescent, both sheathed with corrugated metal, and a connecting rectangular solid of cast concrete'). Inside the cylinder, the artwork consists of a replica of the sand garden at Ryoanji Temple pasted onto the curving walls. «The museum, completed last year,» Muschamp informs us, «is one element of a municipal program designed to strengthen the town's cultural life, partly in the hope of encouraging young people to remain in the town instead of migrating to the big city.» If Muschamp really believes that three works of esoteric contemporary art housed in a tube, a crescent, and a block would keep young people from leaving this remote village, then he might also believe all the other slogans: that Kyoto is an avant-garde city at the turning point of civilization, that Okinawa is an info-communications hub for the entire Asia-Pacific region, and that the city of Nagoya is moving beyond development to rediscover nature's wisdom.
Observers sometimes find that what is most touching about the Orochi Loop is the naive faith of the people of Yokota in the wonders of «technology,» and it brings a smile to city dwellers' lips when we think of how pleased the villagers have been with the Loop's big red-painted bridge, kept lit all night. But the same is true of the international art experts who write about modern Japanese design. What could be more quaint than architectural critics' unquestioning acceptance of weird monuments because they stand for that wonderful thing, «art»?
A friend of mine, William Gilkey, taught piano at Yenching University in Beijing at the time of the Communist takeover in 1949. He told me that when the propaganda and purges started, the professors and intellectuals were among the first to start mouthing slogans about «liberation of the proletariat» and about «sweeping away dissident elements.» On the other hand, the common people of Beijing had better sense: greengrocers in the market simply ignored the political jargon for as long as they could without being arrested.
Likewise, the majority of the Japanese people aren't taken in by the slogans of monumentalism. They don't travel to visit either the Orochi Loop or the Nagi Museum. As we have seen, domestic travel is dwindling and international tourism is skyrocketing for the Japanese. They are not nearly so gullible as bureaucrats and art critics make them out to be. They know what a real museum is, and they know where to find it. According to gate receipts, the museum most frequently visited by the Japanese is not in Japan; it's the Louvre.
Unaware of the mechanisms of the Construction State that drive Japan to build monuments, and ignorant of the real history behind the founding of the Nagi Museum, Muschamp tells us, «It is peculiar, a century after artists rallied around the cause of art for art's sake, to find oneself in a museum created for art's sake. Strange because for what other sake should art museums exist?» If Muschamp only knew!
«A work of art?» wrote Mark Twain in his celebrated essay about James Fenimore Cooper's
It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no life-likeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are-oh! indescribable; its love scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
One could say much the same of the Nagi Museum, the Shonandai Cultural Center, the Toyodama Mosque, the New Kyoto Station, and of course the Orochi Loop. They have no order, system, sequence, or result; no reason for being except government subsidies to the construction industry. A highway loop smashing through a valley, a giant corrugated metal tube plopped in the middle of a scenic village, «new nature» in the form of a bulldozed hill lined with aluminum trees. What are these things, really? A sand garden pasted on walls – the humor is pathetic. Aluminum trees touted as «new nature» – the pathos is funny. Across the length and breadth of Japan, an encrustation of unneeded and unused public monuments tricked up as 1960s sci-fi fantasy – the waste of money is indescribable, the slogans are odious, and the academic jargon used to explain and justify it all a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
11. National Wealth
These days people borrow without the slightest thought, and from the very start they have no notion of ever settling their debts. Since in their own extravagance they borrowed the money just to squander it in the licensed quarters, there is no way for the money to generate enough new money to settle the loan. Consequently they bring hardship to their creditors and invent every manner of falsehood... No matter what excuse some malevolent scheme of yours prompts you to invent, nothing can save you from the obligation of returning an item you have borrowed.
– Ihara Saikaku, Some Final Words of Advice (1689)
Gavan McCormack points out, «Japan is the worlds greatest savings country, but it is also the world's most profligate dissipater of its people's savings.» Despite five decades of continuous growth, making Japan the second-largest economy in the world, the nation is living beyond its means. After seeing the civil-engineering and monument frenzy sweeping Japan, we have a pretty good idea where the money is going. What remains to be seen is the results as they manifest themselves on the bottom line.
In 1990, a cartoon in a Japanese newspaper featured two couples, American and Japanese. The American man and wife, dressed in designer swimwear, were guzzling champagne as they sat in the whirlpool bath of their large, luxurious apartment. In the companion cartoon, a Japanese wife was hanging laundry out on a tiny veranda while her shirtsleeved husband read the newspaper in a cramped kitchen. Under the American couple the caption read «World's Largest Debtor Nation,» and under the Japanese «World's Largest Creditor Nation.»
Since then, the Americans have gone on living well, and the Japanese have gone on sacrificing, but by 1996 their country had become the world's largest debtor nation. Adding in so-called hidden debts buried in Ministry of Finance special accounts, Japan, with a national debt approaching 150 percent of GNP, has no relief in sight, as budgets, set by government ministries on automatic pilot, continue to climb. The Ministry of Finance's support for banks and industry through the manipulation of financial markets has had high costs. Interest rates of 1 percent or lower have dried up the pools of capital that make up the wealth of ordinary citizens: insurance
