Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival
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Half a century later, on New Year’s Day 1946, newspapers carried an imperial proclamation declaring as false the ‘conception that the emperor is divine and that the Japanese are superior to other races and fated to rule the world’. The very terms of the announcement suggest that these were precisely the assumptions of pre-war Japan. Even today, myths surrounding the imperial family have not been expunged. More than 150 gigantic kofun tombs built for emperors between AD 300 and AD 686, are off limits to Japanese archaeologists. Presumably, the Imperial Household Agency suspects they may contain some unpleasant secret, for example the possibility that Japan’s imperial line can be traced back to the Korean peninsula.
Some modern writers and intellectuals have stressed the importance of thinking and acting individually rather than following received practice. One is Haruki Murakami, whose protagonists tend to be loners and drifters. In 2009, Murakami won the Jerusalem Prize, Israel’s highest award for foreign writers. Standing next to Shimon Peres, Israel’s prime minister, he gave an acceptance speech that many interpreted as pro-Palestinian. ‘If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg,’ he said. The speech, with its echo of Joji Mori’s shell-less egg, the idea that Japanese society is communal and sticky, could also be heard as a defence of the individual. It expresses the opposite of the idea that the Japanese are homogenous. ‘Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg,’ he went on in words that implicitly challenged many of the tenets of Nihonjinron. ‘Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system.’22
Chiba, my diplomat friend, said education played a fundamental role in moulding Japanese people’s self-image. ‘There are things we are taught at school, for example that the Japanese bring in things from abroad and then adapt them to how things are done on these islands. That’s our self-image. That’s how we teach our children: that the Japanese are different.’ Such reinforcement through education, he said, could become a mantra. ‘We have to do the same as everyone else or else it’s very shameful. Conformity and preservation of tradition: that sort of mentality is very strong.’ He was sceptical about any notion that this made Japan unique. ‘In the past, we were very different because we ate raw fish. But now everybody eats raw fish, so that’s a point less,’ he said in his tongue-in-cheek style. ‘We have sumo wrestlers, very fat people trying to beat each other up. But now we have Mongolians and Belarusians doing the same thing. So that’s another point less.’ Chiba said the Japanese tended to compare themselves to Europeans and Americans, rarely to fellow Asians. By that measure, it was only natural that Japan should appear an outlier in a world still seen mostly from a European, Judeo-Christian perspective.
That affects not only Japan’s view of itself, but also the world’s view of Japan. It is worth conducting a thought experiment. Imagine for a second that, rather than Japan, Thailand had startled the world in the latter half of the twentieth century by attaining western levels of wealth and technology. In that case, there would have been shelves of books explaining Thailand’s success based on its unique culture, the unique position of its king, its uniquely Thai way of conducting business, the unique properties of Thai cuisine and so on. If we stop comparing Japan with Europe or America and look at it in relation to China and Korea, it suddenly looks less of an outlier. ‘Korea has its own forms of animism, which are not so hugely different and China is full of folk beliefs that often derive from Taoism, which is not a million miles removed from nature worship and Shinto,’ says Ian Buruma, a thoughtful scholar of northeast Asia.23 According to him, the problem is that foreigners take at face value what the Japanese say about themselves. ‘But the reason the Japanese nativists describe their own culture as completely different from China was a form of defensiveness. They were, of course, deeply influenced by China. But precisely because of that, in order to carve out their own space, they have tended to exaggerate the differences.’
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Yoichi Funabashi is one of Japan’s most respected journalists and international commentators. He’s also an old friend. I asked him whether he agreed with those who said that Japan’s sense of unique self-identity had been manufactured in the interests of nation-building and maintaining political power. ‘I think to some extent that may be the case,’ he said. He mentioned a number of books – all written around 1900 – including Nitobe Inazo’s Bushido, the Soul of Japan and Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea. ‘Although they did not use the word Nihonjinron, what they had in common is that they were searching for a new Japan. It’s a revolutionary concept. They believed that tradition was very much relevant to Japan’s future. So even though they learned so many things from abroad, from Germany, France, Britain and eventually the United States, what they sought was a combination of the national soul with foreign expertise. That is what we call wakon yosai,’ he said, using the words for ‘Japanese spirit and western knowledge’.
Japan, he said, lost the balance of those two concepts in the run-up to its military expansionism of the 1930s and 40s. ‘We were intoxicated with Japanese-ism.’ After defeat in the war, some equilibrium was restored as Japan sought to learn again from advanced countries, particularly the US. ‘Now I think we are losing this delicate balance again. This is the Galapagos phenomenon, an intoxication on the part of the Japanese with their own things, their own Japanese-ness.’
The idea of Japan as a Galapagos island, whose culture is perfectly adapted to its own environment but not to the rest of the world, has become fashionable. It has been applied to the business environment, particularly to the creation of products tailored too narrowly to local tastes or local operating systems. ‘This Galapagos-ization doesn’t just apply to mobile phones,’ Funabashi said. ‘It applies to nuclear safety regulations, to English-teaching methods, to almost everything. In my view, this Galapagos mentality is really toxic because it inflates our narcissism, our belief in Japan’s unique way. “We don’t need to learn from other countries. Other countries should emulate our way because our products have been tested by the most picky consumers in the world.”’ He paused for effect. ‘This is a myth.’
I asked what the word shimaguni, ‘island nation’, meant to him. He told the story of when he took six months off to write a travelogue about Asian waters. ‘The more I travelled the Japanese seashore, the more affectionate I became for this small island,’ he said. But then he went to China. He started off in the northern port city of Dalian, moving down the lengthy eastern seaboard to Tianjin, on to Shanghai, the ancient city of Hangzhou and ending up in the Pearl River Delta trading port of Guangzhou in the far south, near Hong Kong. ‘I was struck, overwhelmed even, with the vastness of the Chinese maritime world. That was a rude awakening for me.’ The journey upended Funabashi’s long-held view of Asian geography, that of Japan as a seafaring nation, a lone island, and China as anchored to the great continental landmass. ‘We have to understand the reality that China is a maritime nation too.’
His point made me think of something Hama, the Doshisha professor, had told me. An island nation, she said, could choose either to look inwards or outwards. ‘There was a time when Japan was – though not quite on a British scale – a nation of pirates. We weren’t afraid of going out to sea, we were adventurous and risk-taking. To the extent that we are a maritime nation, I think we ought to assume that there is that underlying trait in the Japanese psyche. But the more we isolated ourselves from the rest of the world, the less of that boisterousness and buccaneering spirit we were able to retain. I like the buccaneering image of shimaguni. But when it is used as shorthand in conversation, it is definitely used to mean an isolated island mentality, inward-looking, not looking beyond your shores.’
Funabashi said it was true that Japan had once been outward-looking but had turned in on itself during the Edo period of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868). However, even in the so-called perio
d of sakoku isolation, the country maintained more links to the outside world than generally realized. ‘Shimaguni can mean an island that separates itself from the world or an island that connects with the world. In Japan’s case, our island mentality makes people tend to believe that we can go back to being a secluded island of peace. But that’s never going to happen, and never did happen actually, not even in the Edo period. It’s a fantasy of Japanese seclusion.’ He paused again. ‘I think it’s dangerous. We cannot go back to the Edo era, we cannot seclude ourselves. One way or another, we will have to live with the world.’
4
Leaving Asia
Island Japan has for hundreds of years had a complex and difficult relationship with the outside world. It was true before Japan’s first contacts with Europe in the sixteenth century, when China – though the admired fount of culture and learning – was resented as an overbearing influence. It was true in subsequent centuries when Europeans brought their ‘wicked cult’1 of Christianity, and later their unequal treaties and threat of colonization. And it is true today in an era when Japan is mistrusted by its former wartime enemies in Asia, and allied to a power halfway round the world, the US.
Even at the height of its economic prowess in the 1980s, when there was overblown chatter about Japan becoming the world’s most powerful economy, it lacked geopolitical clout. Stripped of its right to have an army by its American-written pacifist constitution, it was an economic giant but a diplomatic dwarf. That fact was painfully underlined during America’s first war in Iraq in 1990. Tokyo bankrolled the military campaign to the tune of $13 billion, but when Kuwait published a list of countries to be thanked for its liberation, the bankroller-in-chief was not mentioned.
Frequently referred to as a ‘western power’ – a reference to its advanced economy rather than its geographical location – Japan is isolated in Asia. Some regard it as a client state locked in a semi-colonial relationship with its US master.2 A member of the Group of Seven, a post-war cartel of rich nations now fast losing relevance, Japan has never been admitted into the club that really counts as one of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Nor has it ever taken the leadership role in Asia that its economic dominance once promised. Though its massive investments have helped power economies from Indonesia to Thailand, and though it blazed a development trail emulated by every successful Asian economy, including China, its hopes of a leadership position have been undermined by simmering wartime hatreds.
Japan’s struggle to find a place in the international hierarchy goes back centuries. Its self-imposed isolation from 1630 only delayed the necessity of joining the international discourse. When it finally did so, through its embrace of western learning in the Meiji Restoration, it was initially triumphant: a ‘European’ Great Power in Asian garb. But Japan’s timing was terrible. It became a colonial power just as the naked colonialism practised by the likes of Britain, Spain and Portugal was fading as a ‘legitimate’ practice. Its hopes of becoming the Great Britain of the Orient were dashed. That Japan’s colonial campaign was out of step with history was only compounded by the disastrous miscalculations of its semi-fascist government, whose adherence to the fanatical cult of emperor worship blinded it to the inevitability of defeat. Japan’s near-annihilation by war’s end closed for good any hope of achieving international ‘status’ through military means. All that was left was to take the economic route.
One scholar says Japan’s fraught relationship with the rest of the world has given it ‘a shrill sense of inferiority and a sometimes obsessive preoccupation with national status’.3 Kenneth Pyle, a US historian, describes brilliantly the semi-feudal society that emerged blinking into the glare of western enlightenment following the collapse of feudal Japan in 1868. ‘Japan’s worldview, the way in which it conceived of . . . the world of nation-states that it entered, was a projection of the ideas it held of its own internal society,’ he writes. ‘Its hypersensitivity to its rank in the world owed much to its distinctive honour culture nurtured over centuries of feudal life.’4 It brought into the international system ‘a confidence in hierarchy’. In conversation, he elaborated, ‘If you go back to Meiji, the Japanese are constantly measuring their steps up the ladder: “We are ahead of Turkey now, but behind Spain.” That kind of concern with international status has been more or less a constant theme.’5
Naoki Tanaka, an adviser to former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, once described to me how Japan had turned its back on Asia in its pursuit of international status. ‘After Meiji, our leaders thought that Chinese and Korean leaders were very corrupt,’ he said. ‘In order to survive the pressures coming from Europe, they thought that “leaving Asia” should be priority number one.’6
This sense of Japan’s ‘geographic tragedy’ – a ‘European’ Great Power somehow trapped by location and history – is a powerful theme. In the nineteenth century, as Japan struggled to break free of the intellectual yoke of China, some of its boldest scholars began to conceive of Japan in strongly European terms. Japan wanted to escape the indignity of becoming a colony, a fate to which many of its Asian neighbours, such as the Philippines, had succumbed. Even the mighty China, once considered the infallible centre of the world, had been defeated in the first Opium War of 1839–42, subjected to the indignity of unequal port treaties and eventually ‘carved up like a melon’ by colonial powers. By 1878, European nations and their offshoots controlled 67 per cent of the world’s landmass, a figure that would jump to an astonishing 84 per cent by 1914. The only way to resist this unstoppable force was surely to abandon Asia altogether and become ‘European’ too. That would require industrialization and the adoption of a modern constitution. It would also mean the acquisition of colonies. This was seen as the right, even the duty, of any self-respecting nation aspiring to Great Power status.
It is this process of rejecting Asia but failing – ruinously – to become a successful imperial power that lies at the heart of Japan’s still fraught relations with the outside world. Having tried and failed to join the western club, Japan finds itself in diplomatic limbo, surrounded by the resentful neighbours it once tried to conquer. How this came about is the subject of this chapter.
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Japan’s modernization has proved what was once unthinkable to Europeans, whose colonialism was built on racist theories: non-whites could match or even surpass western nations. For many Asians, though, its achievements have been inexorably tarnished, not only by the brutal facts of its war against its neighbours, but, more subtly, by the belief that Japan had sought to wrench itself free of Asia altogether.
Most of what we know today as Japanese culture had its origins in China. The Middle Kingdom, as its name implied, was the centre of the known world and the origin of all culture, technology, religion and ethics. Rice cultivation was brought from the mainland, via the Korean peninsula, as were techniques in the use of both bronze and iron. From around the first century, some of the many tribal chieftains who ruled Japan sent delegations to Korea, itself under the influence of China.7 From around AD 400, Japan was sending regular missions to imperial China, to Nanjing and then to distant Chang’an, capital of Tang Dynasty China. They returned inspired by all manner of Chinese practices and doctrine, most importantly the teachings of Buddhism (which had originated in India) and Confucianism. The Japanese ‘constitution’ of AD 604, an explanation of ethical codes attributed to Prince Shotoku, is full of Confucian and Buddhist assumptions.
George Sansom, a historian of pre-modern Japan, writes that Buddhism represented not merely a new form of worship, but a comprehensive set of beliefs. ‘It was as if a great magic bird, flying on strong pinions across the ocean, had brought to Japan all the elements of a new life – a new morality, learning of all kinds, literature, the arts and crafts, and subtle metaphysics which had no counterpart in the native tradition.’8 Prince Shotoku commissioned the magnificent Horyuji temple, a miracle of wood c
arving situated between the ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto, in dedication to the Buddha. It stands, perfectly preserved, today. Chinese ideas on tax, land tenure and bureaucratic rank became deeply engrained elements of Japan’s social and political order.
Even then, when there was no disputing China’s cultural superiority, relations were not always smooth. In AD 607, the Japanese ambassador presented credentials to the court of Chang’an implying that the two nations were equal. That was a laughable suggestion to the Chinese court, where Japan was considered a peripheral nonentity.9 The Japanese continued to pay intellectual, if not monetary, obeisance to China. ‘From the beginnings of civilisation in Japan, the model had always been China, directly or indirectly,’ writes Donald Keene, a scholar of Japanese literature. ‘Inevitably Chinese ideas had been considerably modified in Japan, and some Japanese aesthetic and spiritual concepts were never vitally affected by Chinese example; but by and large China was admitted to be the fount of all wisdom.’10
The break with China – for it was nothing less than that – took several hundred years. It began, in piecemeal fashion, during the Tokugawa period, named after the family of military rulers who brought Japan under their control from around 1600 until the Meiji Restoration of 1868. ‘As knowledge of the world grew, the Japanese began to realize that China was not the centre of the world and to recognize the weakness of China,’ the scholar and author Ian Buruma told me. ‘So they thought: “We better start repositioning ourselves.” Japan did not free itself decisively from China’s intellectual yoke until the modernizing Meiji reformers had overthrown the Tokugawa regime itself. That was the year, if one can pinpoint such a thing, that Japan can be said to have ditched its Sinocentrism in the hope of becoming the first ‘European’ power in Asia. It was the beginning of Japan’s spectacular modernization, but also of its eventual descent into militarist adventurism and wartime defeat.