Dogs and Demons

It isn't only individuals who are fleeing Japan but businesses as well. The most celebrated example is Honda Motors, which in the 1980s quietly transferred its base of operations from Japan to the United States, which now accounts for more than half of Honda's production and sales. Honda expects exports from Japan to continue to fall in the coming years and is betting the company's survival on cutting loose from Japan.

Hundreds, even thousands of companies are slowly but surely moving their base of operations abroad. This is why Sony was willing to take massive losses in Hollywood (more than $2.5 billion) when it purchased Columbia Pictures: there would be no purpose in buying or developing Japanese movie studios, since the Japanese movie industry has almost completely collapsed. Sony's only way forward was to expand in the United States.

Today's refugees also include top athletes. Nomo Hideo, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers (and later several other teams), epitomizes this new type of Japanese refugee. Nomo was a very successful pitcher for the Kintetsu Buffaloes, but Japan's rigid baseball world limited his prospects. Among other things, he disliked the «endurance exercises» that are a feature of Japanese sports. Endurance exercises, such as hashirikomi (deep running) or nagekomi (deep throwing) basically involve running or throwing until you drop. It's an approach to sports training that has obviously developed from the military-style emphasis on gambare (endurance) taught in the schools, and it is common in most Japanese athletic programs, though it has little to do with developing muscle strength or athletic skill.

When in the spring of 1995 Nomo quit the Buffaloes and in the summer of that year joined the Dodgers, there was a cry of outrage from the Japanese press. The newspapers labeled him an «ingrate» and accused him of loving money, not sports. In short order, Nomo went on to become a sensation in the United States, winning the National League Rookie of the Year Award and being dubbed «the Tornado» by the media. When he was asked what he liked about baseball in America, Nomo explained that Americans really enjoyed baseball, whether they were players or spectators. The key to Nomo's departure lies in the word enjoy, in contrast to endure. Nomo's escape opened the floodgates. In 1997, another star, Irabu Hideki, left Japan to join the Yankees; and in December 1999 the popular player Sasaki «the Devil» Kazuhiro went off to join the Seattle Mariners. So many successful players have left that baseball clubs had to change the rules in order to allow easier departure to the United States. In October 2000, Japan's most popular baseball star ever, Suzuki Ichiro, made his farewells, to a standing ovation from 26,000 fans, as he, too, set out for the U.S. majors. The situation in Japanese baseball was like ballet under the U.S.S.R. – raise a star, and the first thing he wants to do is defect.

Many refugees are people who are at the top of their professions. An inventor like Nakahara Shuji is nothing less than an international technology superstar, and yet he had no choice but to leave Japan. We are not dealing with the poor and disadvantaged here, or with the politically oppressed, such as those who fled Nazi Germany or China after the massacre at Tiananmen Square. It must surely be unique in world history that a free and wealthy society in a time of peace has become unattractive to the brightest and most ambitious of its own people. But this is what the stranglehold of bureaucracies and entrenched systems in Japan is achieving.

The flight of native talent abroad is an old story in Japan, almost a cliche. What is less known is that a significant shift is taking place in the makeup of Japan's resident foreign population. Expats who have lived there for decades are making a quiet exodus. In 1995, Otis Cary, then seventy-four, the dean of Kyoto's foreign residents, announced that he was planning to return to the United States. Cary, who was born in Japan and spent most of his life there, received an award from the emperor for a distinguished career spanning more than forty years as a professor at Doshisha University. Among the foreigners in Kyoto, his name was synonymous with love of the city. Nevertheless, Cary voiced no regrets. «It will be a relief to me,» he said.

David Kidd, a legendary art dealer (forty years in the Kyoto area), and Dan Furst, active in the theater world (ten years), both moved to Honolulu more than a decade ago – and others followed. John McGee, a distinguished Canadian who was head of Urasenke Tea School's International Department, resigned in 1999 and left Kyoto after twenty-seven years. The most common conversation I have these days is with foreign friends from Japan who are moving to the United States, South America, Hong Kong, or Bangkok. The second most common conversation is with the gloomy people who for one reason or another see no way out.

The elite of fast-track investment bankers who were stationed in Japan transferred to Hong Kong and Singapore in the early 1990s, leaving second-string players in Tokyo. Long-established foreign communities in Kobe and Yokohama, dating to Meiji days, have shrunk to nearly the vanishing point, and international schools are closing. There is a clear shift among Westerners from long-term residents to short-term employees who come to Japan to make some money and then move on.

At the same time, the absolute number of foreigners in Japan nearly doubled in the 1990s. But one must look at the numbers carefully. The largest foreign group in Japan is the 640,000 Koreans, descendants of forced laborers brought over in the 1930s and 1940s. Many are third- or fourth-generation residents in Japan, speak no Korean, and are indistinguishable from the average Japanese.

Japan maintains a tight immigration policy, accepting fewer Vietnamese or other refugees than any other developed country, for example, and making foreign spouses wait decades before they are granted permanent residence. Yet there is a need for unskilled labor, and the way to meet this is to welcome South American descendants of Japanese emigrants. The great increase in foreign residents in Japan has been in this group of nikkei, foreigners of Japanese descent, from Brazil and Peru (from 2,700 in 1986 to 275,000 in 1997). While this group includes many intelligent and ambitious young people, very few of them manage to surmount Japan's high barriers to joining the mainstream and carve out successful careers. Sadly, most of them are doomed to live their days at the bottom of the social pecking order, doing work that modern Japanese shun. It will take generations for them to assimilate, and it will not be easy: in the summer of 1999, rightist gangs paraded through the Brazilian neighborhood in the town of Toyota, home of the automobile company and of a large concentration of nikkei workers, demanding, «Foreigners go home!» Even Japanese blood doesn't count for much, it seems.

If you remove Koreans and nikkei laborers from South America from the statistics, the remainder of the foreign population in Japan is minuscule, less than 0.4 percent of the total population. There was a time in the late 1980s when there was widespread debate about allowing foreign workers without Japanese blood into the country. But after the Bubble burst, the government tightened regulations. Japan turned back at the brink.

In the days of sakoku, «closed country» (1600-1869), when the shogunate restricted the Dutch and Chinese to the port of Nagasaki, Dutch traders lived on Dejima, a small artificial island in Nagasaki Harbor connected by a causeway to the mainland. Only with special permits could the Dutch pass over the causeway, and the authorities usually granted these only during the day. At night the Dutch had to return to Dejima, where their guardsmen locked the gate behind them. Modern-day rules that restrict foreigners to certain discrete corners of Japanese society and keep them out of the mainstream can be traced to Dejima. And the dream of a physical Dejima for foreigners has never faded. During the days when I worked for American real-estate developer Trammell Crow, I ran across many national and local development plans that called for getting all the foreigners to move into special apartment buildings designed just for them – often on landfill islands.

Recently a young friend of mine, the child of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, joined a large coffee company as a new employee. The personnel department called him in and told him, «We see that you carry a Chinese passport. It is our policy not to give management positions to foreigners. Please change your nationality.» As this story makes clear, foreigners in Japan cannot expect career advancement.

There is one niche, however, a «Dejima of employment,» that is specially allotted to foreigners. It is the job of creating and selling propaganda. Japan issues such a massive volume of advertisement about itself, for both foreign and domestic consumption, that propaganda production deserves to be considered an industry in its own right. A surprisingly large percentage of the Europeans and Americans employed in Japan are working on selling Japan abroad, ranging from the Western students of architecture and gardens whose job is to preach Japanese culture to the world to thousands of spokesmen retained by religious foundations, banks, and trading houses. Yet of the expats I have known over the years who work for Japanese institutions, only a handful enjoy substantive responsibility. Most work in «international departments,» where their assignment is to polish up speeches or edit newsletters and magazines whose content is largely glorification of their company, industry, town, or art form.

The involvement of foreigners in producing propaganda obviously has an important effect on how Japan is seen by the rest of the world, so important that hardly a book on Japan in recent years has not mentioned it. Patrick Smith (Japan: A Reinterpretation) and Richard Katz (Japan: The System That Soured) refer to these committed Japanophiles as the Chrysanthemum Club.

One of the most fascinating questions about Japan as a field of study is the deep commitment, amounting to religious conviction, that is often experienced by foreign experts. It's a strong testament to the enduring appeal of Japan's arts and society. Typically, a foreigner discovers in Japan something, whether it be modern architecture, cinema, or the school system, that he thinks is of value, and thenceforward makes it his mission to explain it to the world. When he writes about his field he will speak about its good points, since these are what attracted him. What would be the point of criticizing, since the goal is to open people's eyes to the wondrous thing he has found in Japan?

This is what happens: I have a foreign friend who is a cinema critic. He is well aware of the meltdown that has taken place in Japanese cinema and speaks about it quite bluntly in private. But when it comes time to pen an article, he sifts through the dross for a few good filmmakers who have produced something worth looking at in the past decade and writes about the special aesthetic qualities of their work. What his foreign readers see is more praise for the wonders of Japanese film; the deep problems of the field never make it into print.

It's a natural thing to do and, since the goal is to introduce abroad those things that are really praiseworthy in Japan, an admirable one. In that sense, I am proud to number myself a member of the Chrysanthemum Club. When it comes time for me to write my book about Kabuki, it's not going to be about the fact that Kabuki is degrading in quality, losing both its audience and its creative artistry; it will be about the great actors I have known and seen, and about their achievements, which rival the best in world opera or ballet. That's what a Kabuki book should be.

It's a matter of selectivity. Japan experts are not necessarily as blind or worshipful as their writings may lead us to believe. Rather, as well-meaning introducers of Japanese culture abroad, they naturally end up in the role of editors and censors, choosing the striking and beautiful film clips and leaving the rest on the cutting-room floor. In any case, one thing is true: commentators on Japanese culture by and large are not dispassionate reporters; for better or for worse, they are in the position of «selling Japan.» I believe this goes a long way toward explaining why foreign writing on Japan tends to be so admiring and uncritical.

While the Chrysanthemum Club members' dedication to Japan is often genuinely felt, it is also true that many of them owe their livelihood to Japan. Overseas, propaganda can be extremely profitable, especially for Washington lobbyists and Ivy League academics. However, for those toiling in international departments within Japan, propaganda is rarely more than a low- to medium-wage job, a sad substitute for founding one's own business or rising to an executive position in a Japanese company. One needs to be a very committed Chrysanthemum Club member to stick around.

During the 1990s, there was an important shift in Japan's place in the world, and it had to do with the renaissance of China and Southeast Asia. For foreigners coming to Asia during the decades following the war, it was nearly impossible to live securely in China, and for decades Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, and Laos were completely closed. Since the late 1980s, all this has changed. Southeast Asia, though it suffers from severe boom-and-bust cycles, is the scene of frenzied economic activity. There is a wealth of new business opportunities in banking, manufacturing, writing, and other fields, and, unlike Japan, where foreigners are mostly restricted to low-level international-department positions, there are genuine opportunities to advance. In Bangkok, I know dozens of foreigners who own and operate their own businesses; in Japan, only a handful. Perhaps Japan is to be commended for keeping its arts and industry strictly to itself, and not allowing «neo-colonialists» a foothold. Whatever the