special ten-page feature on the top-ten locations for living abroad. The headline read «Escaping Japan. Living Abroad Is Just a Matter of Making Up Your Mind!» «Living abroad is a dream? No, certainly not,» the article begins.«There are people right now living pleasant lives in lands across the sea... A place where just taking a walk in the morning makes your heart beat faster with excitement. Where the bustle of activity in town is not tiring but energizing-surely cities like this exist somewhere in this wide world.» There follow photos and rankings of Edinburgh, Santa Fe, Bologna, Penang, Auckland, and so on, as places for the Japanese to move and start a new life, concentrating on an unspoiled natural environment, large comfortable houses, and a vibrant traditional culture. Sato Sachiko, the wife of a Japanese businessman living in Strasbourg, says, «When I think of returning to Japan, I get depressed.»
Why should she get depressed? The word
I dream of going to a college in the U.S. School is so boring here. All the kids in my class think alike and everybody wants to be in a group. I'm quite sick of it. I like baseball, and when I see how some Japanese baseball players have made it in the States, I really admire them. Japanese players are good too but somehow the individuality of the American players draws me. I know it will be tough, but I'm ready to try. Young Japanese people have no dreams. I don't want to be like that.
This brings us full circle – from the Japanese people's relationship with the outside world to their feelings about their own country. Stalled «internationalization» has very little to do with anything international; rather, the problems spring from troubles within. As Ian Buruma comments, «The main victims of the bigoted, exclusive, rigid, rascist, authoritarian ways of Japanese officialdom are not the foreigners, even though they are at times its most convenient targets, but the rank and file of the Japanese themselves.»
When «young people have no dreams,» when a great inventor gets «no position, no bonus,» when school, work, and sports are a matter of «endure» rather than «enjoy,» when cities and countryside are losing their beauty and romance – that's a case of becoming no fun. And what an incredible reversal of Japan's own tradition this is! This nation had a countryside that was pure romance, as we can see from the haiku of Basho and the ecstatic tales of foreign travelers until very recent times. Even during the strictest days of the old Edo Shogunate, there was ample time and freedom to enjoy life; indeed, Saikaku's merchants and scholars in the «floating world» refined their pleasures to the point that almost every occupation and amusement they touched became high art.
Nor did the fun die out in the nineteenth century. Forty years ago, it was still possible for young entrepreneurs, like the men who founded Sony and Pioneer, to dream of creating new businesses and of succeeding on a global scale. And there was even a time, for several decades after World War II, when Japan was a more hospitable place for foreigners; in fact, the nation's international reputation coasts on the nostalgia of foreign experts for this era of relative openness that lasted right into the 1980s. Everyone can remember how much fun it used to be – one could hardly think of anything less Japanese than being no fun. And yet this is what Japan is doing to itself.
Whatever the foreigners may do or think, it is far sadder to see so many Japanese leaving – or dreaming of leaving – when their country offers so much by way of natural and cultural treasures, as well as one of the world's most affluent economies. It's another case of «a wilted peony in a bamboo vase, unable to draw water up her stem.» The treasures are still in Japan, but people cannot enjoy them. Saikaku says, «Whether you happen to be a businessman or an artisan, never move from a place that you are accustomed to... There is nothing quite as painful to observe as people packing up their belongings while the pots on the stove are still warm.»
15. To Change or Not to Change
The question at the beginning of the twenty-first century is: Can Japan change? The picture is not without hope. Japan has made abrupt about-faces, to the point of completely reinventing itself twice during the past 150 years, and could possibly do so again. But what if Japan cannot change? In seeking an answer, let's take another look at the bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is the core institution of government, for its mission is to intelligently allocate the resources of the state. If it provides that service efficiently, it does its job. Japan's bureaucracy, riven with corruption and guilty of massive misallocation of funds in almost every area, fails this simple but crucial test. An indurated bureaucracy is Japan's single most severe and intractable problem, responsible for bringing the nation to the brink of disaster in the 1990s. The Ministry of Finance, for all its mistakes, is just one of many government agencies, and the damage it has done cannot compare with the Construction Ministry's burying the nation under concrete, the Forestry Bureau's decimating the native forest cover, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry's needlessly damming the Nagara River, or the Ministry of Health and Welfare's knowingly allowing 1,400 people to become infected with AIDS. So angry is the public that the last decade has seen bookstores overflow with books attacking officialdom, from Asai Takashi's 1996 best-seller,
During the past few years, it has become fashionable to speak of Japan's «three revolutions.» The first occurred after 1854, when Commodore Perry arrived with his «black ships» and forced the opening of Japan. Within twenty years, Japan discarded a system of feudal rule that went back almost eight centuries, replacing it with a modern state ruled by the army, wealthy businessmen, and government officials.
After the nation's defeat in World War II, a second revolution took place, under the guidance of General Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. Occupation. MacArthur dismantled the army and broke the power of the prewar capitalists – and in their place the bureaucracy took over, creating the Japan we see today.
It's now time, many believe, for a third revolution, which will differ from the previous two in one important way: pressure from foreign powers sparked both of the earlier revolutions; they did not spring from among the Japanese themselves. This time around, however, there is no foreign pressure. Nobody outside Japan is concerned about the fate of its mountains and rivers; nobody will arrive in a warship and demand that Japan produce better movies, rescue bankrupt pension funds, educate its children to be creative, or house its families in livable homes. The revolution will have to come from within.
It could. Dissatisfaction is rife, as may be gleaned from the many angry and frustrated people who are quoted in this book. Some readers might wonder how I can say such harsh things about Japan. But it is not I who say these things. Fukuda Kiichiro calls Japan a Kindergarten State, and Fukuda Kazuya asks, «Why have the Japanese become such infants?» Kurosawa proclaimed that Japanese film companies are so hopeless they should be destroyed. Asai Takashi titled his book
In the realm of politics, the early 1990s saw unprecedented anger within an electorate that was among the world's most docile. In 1993, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost its majority for the first time in forty years, and an opposition coalition, led by Prime Minister Hosokawa, took over briefly. The opposition, however, was no match for the bureaucrats. When Hosokawa sought financial information from the Ministry of Finance, the bureaucrats stalled, and there was nothing that the prime minister's office could do. Within six months, Hosokawa was out, and former members of the LDP, now scattered into a number of splinter parties, took over again. The electorate settled back into apathy, and at present the old LDP stalwarts are firmly back in power, beholden as before to bureaucrats and large businesses. In the political sphere, the score is Status Quo 1, Revolution 0.
One of the sharpest observations made by Karel van Wolferen is that the Japanese bureaucratic system has never relied on public approval for its legitimacy and power; it works in a separate dimension, far above and removed from the democratic process. As we have seen, even when voters do oppose ruinous construction projects and sign petitions requesting referendums, local assemblies are free to ignore them, and usually do. Outside observers see criticism in the media and hear complaints from average Japanese, and jump to the conclusion that these feelings will be translated into political action. The dissatisfied Japanese people are going to rise up and take matters into their own hands! But so far this has never happened.
Nevertheless, there is movement below the surface. Despite what Marxist theory tells us, the masses rarely start revolutions. The instigators tend to be the educated middle class and disgruntled low-level officials, what one might call «the soft underbelly of the elite» – and the soft underbelly is hurting. Since the publication of
In 1994, I wrote an article lambasting the dreary displays and shoddy interiors of the Ueno National Museum. Soon afterward, at an opening, I met one of the top officials in the agency that runs the museum. He approached me, and I steeled myself for an angry denunciation of my article-only to hear him say that he personally thinks the mismanagement of Japanese museums is a disgrace. But despite his lofty position in the hierarchy there is little he can do. At the moment, the «soft underbelly» is hurting, but even elite managers are powerless against the inertia of their agencies.
The same official did manage to bring in a team of experts from the Smithsonian to give advice on modern museum management. To put most of that advice into practice he will have to wait – as enlightened middle-level bureaucrats and executives across Japan are waiting – for stodgy seniors to retire, or for their department to fall into such disarray that they can finally seize the initiative. This group of would-be reformers are like Madame Defarge in Dickens's
You can hear the drumbeat of coming revolution in the rising level of anger in public opinion, fueled to a great extent by the sheer embarrassment of falling behind. There is considerable chagrin as the gaps between Japan and the United States, Europe, and newly wealthy Asian states widen. The thrust of the educational system is to make people highly competitive, and the hierarchical social structure gets people into the habit of ranking ethnic groups and nations as «higher» and «lower.» Naturally, they would like to stand at the top of the pyramid, and this leads to obsessive comparisons between Japan and other countries. This is where the frustration comes
