Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

by Pilling, David

  • • •

  It took many years for the Japanese to understand that collapsing asset prices marked more than a temporary setback. Hype about the unique strengths of the Japanese economy – based naturally on the unique virtues of the Japanese people – led many to believe that it was only a matter of time before shares and property prices bounced back to ‘normal’. In the first years of the 1990s, the economy grew reasonably well. Only as the decade wore on, did growth slow and some financial institutions begin to come under pressure. Gradually, it became clear there was to be no return to the good old days. This was the new normal.

  To breathe life into the flagging economy, over the course of the 1990s successive governments implemented several big stimulus packages of the sort that Europe and America tried after the 2008 Lehman crisis. They spent on public works – later derided as ‘bridges to nowhere’ – on tax cuts and on social security. At one point, they even sent shopping coupons, worth around $200 each, to more than 30 million households. If the aim was to return to pre-bubble growth rates, these stimulus packages didn’t work, though no one knows what would have happened without them.5 Whatever the effect, growth in the 1990s averaged just 1.2 per cent – about one-quarter of its rate in the 1980s – and Japan suffered no fewer than three recessions. While living standards held up reasonably well, it was a far cry from what ‘catch-up Japan’ had been used to. Worse was to follow. From 1997, a few big banks, laden with bad debts, started failing. Among the casualties was Yamaichi Securities, none other than the source of trading information for Onoue’s ill-fated toad. Japan faced the very real prospect of serious financial crisis.

  In the political sphere, there had been intimations of crisis in 1993 when, for the first time in four decades, the Liberal Democratic Party lost power. The coalition that replaced it was fragile and divided, and the Liberal Democrats were back in office within a year. Still, nothing would be quite the same again. From that time on – at least until the party was rejuvenated under the extraordinary premiership of Junichiro Koizumi in 2001–6 – the Liberal Democrats could cling on only with the support of coalition partners. Successive governments’ failure to mount anything other than a sporadic response to deepening economic gloom meant that the political system, so stable in the post-war period, limped from crisis to crisis. Over the course of the decade, no fewer than seven prime ministers came and went. It marked the start of a period of political dysfunction that persists to this day.

  • • •

  It was the novelist Haruki Murakami who first put the year 1995 into my head. It is not the most obvious year to pick as the decisive turning point in Japan’s post-war history. One might just as easily nominate 1973, the year of the first oil shock, when toilet paper disappeared overnight from supermarket shelves, as the year when post-war innocence vanished. Growth more than halved, from an average of 9.5 per cent since the 1950s to 4.2 per cent in the 70s and 80s. It was the end of what Shijuro Ogata, my friend from the central bank, had called Japan’s ‘golden era’. Then there was 1989, the year in which, on 7 January, the Showa era ended with the death of Emperor Hirohito at the age of eighty-seven. Hirohito’s reign had begun on Christmas Day 1926. Few reigns could have seen such highs and lows. By contrast, the Heisei era, as the period that followed is known, has proved altogether less riveting, marked as it has been by comfortable affluence, gentle decline, and political and economic drift.

  By many measures, 1990 is the most compelling candidate of all for Japan’s post-war turning point. Not only was that the year the bubble burst, but there were also momentous geopolitical changes. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet empire was entering its death throes. Those political earthquakes ended at a stroke what for Japan had been the comfortable certainties of the Cold War, in which its place in the world order as an American ally in the Pacific had been clearly delineated.

  Murakami, however, thought 1995 was the year I should be looking at. Neither the death of the emperor, nor the collapse of the bubble, nor even the fall of the Berlin Wall had perfectly crystallized for the public the fact that Japan had entered a new era. Rather, he said, it was the twin psychological shocks of 1995 – an earthquake in Kobe and a terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway – that brought home the country’s changed circumstances with absolute clarity. ‘That was the year the post-war myth of the miracle years ended,’ he told me. When the modern city of Kobe collapsed, he said, faith in Japan’s engineering prowess, its very modernity, crumbled with it. More frightening still was the attack by members of a murderous doomsday cult. That shattered the illusion, he said, of a harmonious nation whose people would always pull together in the same direction. Japan’s very social consensus was rotting from within.

  I once spent an afternoon with Murakami in a quiet restaurant called Tamasaka in the Aoyama district of Tokyo. The street, like so many in this city of secret neighbourhoods, had no pavement save for a white painted line, and was flanked in parts by a large, uneven stone wall, which gave the surroundings an almost medieval flavour. A casual observer might have missed the restaurant altogether, so discreet was the sign and so narrow the gravel path leading to its unmarked door. Having removed our shoes, we were directed upstairs to a bare, squarish private dining room with tatami-mat flooring and wooden panels. We sat on cushions on the floor facing each other across a low table set with chopsticks. When the waiter stepped outside and slid the paper-slatted screen door closed with a gentle clunk, we were left together in a room as silent and contemplative as one of the wells in which Murakami’s characters have sometimes found themselves.

  Murakami was wearing a deep blue suit and a collarless shirt. His short haircut emphasized the wideness of his face. There were a few lines around his mouth, but he still looked good for a man in his mid-fifties. He wouldn’t have a lunchtime beer, he said, as he intended to go for a swim afterwards. Murakami had an intense, slightly pensive gaze. He spoke in English. His style was to pause for long periods, weighing up the words, and then to squeeze out everything at once, like toothpaste. Every sentence had a heaviness about it, as though it was his definitive word on the subject. We began our conversation not in 1995, but in the 1960s, in the fast-growth years when Murakami was growing up. ‘My parents expected me to join the system, to go to some big company and to marry a good girl. That’s the course I was expected to follow. But I just didn’t want to live that way,’ Murakami was saying. ‘Japanese society has a kind of power system. If you are part of it, you are OK. But if you are out of it you are not OK. I was out of it by choice. When I graduated from university, I just dropped out.’

  Murakami was born in 1949. His parents were both teachers of Japanese literature. His grandfather on his father’s side had been a Buddhist priest. His maternal grandfather had been an Osaka merchant. A teenager during the income-doubling decade of the 1960s, Murakami had felt from an early age that not all was well with Japan’s economic miracle. Something troubled him about the ceaseless quest for growth and status. His own life had been a rebellion of sorts against the easy certainties into which he had been born. At Waseda University, where he studied drama, he met and married his wife, Yoko, much to the annoyance of his parents. When Yoko went to meet them for the first time, tension was so high she suffered a temporary attack of paralysis.6

  Alongside his studies, Murakami worked in a record shop and, before graduation, started a jazz bar in Tokyo called Peter Cat. Clearly he loved it, though he described it as hard labour. ‘I had to work until two or three o’clock in the morning. It was full of cigarette smoke and drunks. I had to kick those drunks out sometimes. I had to do everything.’ While he was working at the bar, he began to write fiction for an hour every night, eventually producing Hear the Wind Sing, which was published in the literary magazine Gunzo in 1979. He sold Peter Cat and devoted himself full time to writing, winning wider recognition in 1985 with Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a story set in a surreal version of Tokyo i
nhabited by flesh-eating creatures living underground called INKlings. After that came Norwegian Wood (1987), a novel about love and suicide that unfolds against the background of student agitation in 1960s Tokyo. It went on to sell 4 million copies in Japan. Murakami became so uncomfortable with his growing fame that he fled the country, first to Europe and then to the US, where he taught at Princeton. Partly he sought to escape the furore his novels had created. But partly it was to extract himself from the late-1980s excesses of the bubble economy and what he called the mindless ‘Number-One-ism’ overwhelming society. ‘I just wanted to escape from Japan. I was so sick of living here. We were too confident, too arrogant, too rich.’

  Murakami returned from self-imposed exile in 1995. It was quite a year in which to make his reappearance. The first of the twin shocks took place in the port city of Kobe where he had been brought up. At 5.46 a.m. on 17 January, a powerful earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale ripped through one of Japan’s most prosperous cities, killing 6,500 people and injuring thousands more. In After the Quake, a book written several years later, Murakami describes the destruction and chaos of an imaginary temblor.

  Derailments, falling vehicles, crashes, the collapse of elevated expressways and rail lines, the crushing of subways, the explosion of tanker trucks. Buildings . . . transformed into piles of rubble, their inhabitants crushed to death. Fires everywhere, the road system in a state of collapse, ambulances and fire trucks useless, people just lying there dying.7

  Although the disaster was a natural phenomenon, its impact was worsened by man-made decisions. Buildings and highways that Japanese engineers had confidently proclaimed to be earthquake-proof collapsed like cards. Reclaimed land around the city of 1.4 million people turned to mud. The Hanshin expressway, a showcase of modern engineering, crumpled and buckled. Only months before, Japanese experts had gone to Los Angeles to investigate the recent earthquake there. Their arrogant conclusion was that such destruction could never occur in Japan because of the superiority of its building techniques. The damage in Kobe turned out to be far worse.

  Japan’s institutions proved just as fragile as its supposedly unshakeable buildings. In Tokyo, it took politicians several hours to work out what was going on. A cabinet meeting in the morning had been told erroneously that a quake had hit Kyoto, fifty miles from the actual site of the disaster. Communications had collapsed, meaning little information was getting in or out. Authorities dithered about whether they should send in the Self Defence Forces, Japan’s army-equivalent, which was still mistrusted by the public half a century after the war. The rescue response was so haphazard that yakuza gang members, famed for their tattoos and supposed honour code, were reported to be first on the scene with food and blankets. Into the institutional vacuum poured hundreds of thousands of volunteers whose actions began to seed the idea that people, not governments or bureaucrats, were the ones who could get things done. It was an unsettling turn of events for a population that had, by and large, trusted the authorities for four decades to do the right thing.

  ‘The structure of society is very unstable,’ Murakami told me, adding that the Kobe earthquake and the authorities’ ill-judged response to it brought that home. In one of the stories in After the Quake, a collection of short stories that takes place in the weeks between Kobe and the subsequent poison-gas attack on Tokyo, a child has nightmares about ‘Earthquake Man’. In another, a giant frog and an unassuming loan collection officer at a trust bank, Mr Katagiri, team up to save Tokyo from Worm, a malevolent serpent bent on unleashing a second, even more devastating, quake. The blurb on the book jacket speaks of the ‘inconsolable howl of a nation indelibly scarred’.

  As if Kobe were not enough, just two months later, on 20 March, members of a religious cult called Aum Shinrikyo caused terror by scattering deadly sarin poison on the Tokyo subway, injuring thousands of people. Aum was a quasi-religious organization led by Shoko Asahara, the son of a tatami-mat maker who had been born in 1955 as Chizuo Matsumoto. Asahara had begun his destructive career as a peddler of make-believe when he made $200,000 by selling Almighty Medicine – tangerine peel in alcohol – at $7,000 a dose to desperately ill elderly people. In 1984 he had set up the Aum Association of Mountain Wizards, a yoga and health club that became even more sinister when it was renamed Aum Supreme Truth. Asahara stitched together a set of beliefs from Shiva the Destroyer, Nostradamus and biblical notions of Armageddon. He began to predict a nuclear war that would soon lay waste to civilization. Before long he had set about trying to hasten that end. Only paid-up followers of Aum would survive.

  Asahara attracted a better class of cultist. Many were drawn from Tokyo University and other top-flight academic institutions where the bureaucrats – the midwives of the national miracle – had been trained. Members signed over all their possessions to Aum and cut ties with their families. They took part in bizarre rituals, including one in which they paid to drink Asahara’s dirty bathwater, otherwise known as Miracle Pond. Improbably, Aum acquired thousands of members. Asahara sent his lieutenants, known as monks, to search for chemical and even nuclear weapons. Fortunately they never got their hands on the latter. But they did discover sarin, a nerve gas developed by Nazi German scientists in the 1930s.

  On the morning of 20 March, Aum members boarded several different subway lines, each of them rattling towards Kasumigaseki, Japan’s bureaucratic nerve centre. They punctured plastic bags containing sarin, at least one with the tip of a specially sharpened umbrella. As the gas spread through the crowded metro tunnels, thousands fell ill. By the end of that horrible day, 5,500 people had been struck down. Some were left in a vegetative state. One woman, whose contact lenses fused to her pupils, had to have both her eyes surgically removed. Thirteen people, including station staff, died.

  The rise of the Aum doomsday cult was the sort of freak occurrence that could have happened anywhere. Yet Japanese intellectuals, Murakami among them, sought to link its emergence with a broader crisis in Japanese society. In Underground, a book of interviews with victims and perpetrators of the poisoning, he wrote, ‘I can’t simply file away the gas attack, saying: “After all, this was merely an extreme and exceptional crime committed by an isolated lunatic fringe.”’ Rather than seeing the event as ‘Evil Them’ versus ‘Innocent Us’, he raked over mainstream society for clues about what could have led to Aum. ‘Wasn’t the real key,’ he wrote, ‘more likely to be found hidden under “Our” territory?’ To me he said, ‘The cult people got out of that system and they entered the right system, or at least a system they thought was right . . . They decided to live for something good. But they committed a crime.’

  Other writers, including Kenzaburo Oe, Japan’s only living recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, also spoke sympathetically about Aum. Of Asahara’s mad brigade, Oe once told me, ‘They wanted to show the Japanese people how we have reached a dead end in our mental situation, a dead end in our soul.’8 I thought it was strange that two of Japan’s leading authors should have spoken about Aum in such terms. It was true, though, that people had long been looking for inspiration beyond the cult of gross domestic product, which had become a national obsession before the bubble burst. They were not short of alternatives. L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology, the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh all vied for acolytes. In the Japan of the 1980s, dozens of new religions had taken hold, prompting one academic to term the restless era ‘the rush hour of the gods’.9

  ‘Nineteen ninety-five was the most important year after the war,’ Murakami told me.10 ‘It was a critical year, a kind of milestone for our country.’ He fell silent while a waiter placed bowls, dishes and small pots on the table. We listened to the gentle scraping sound of clay against wood. The waiter’s every movement seemed precisely choreographed as though he were performing a martial art. It struck me that his task was a little like the stage hands in kabuki drama, the kuroko or ‘black people’. Dres
sed from head to toe in black, they glided about the stage in full view of the audience, moving props and changing actors’ costumes. Yet, by convention, they were treated as invisible to the spectator’s eye.

  The Japanese are good at role-playing and suspension of disbelief. But 1995, Murakami said, awoke them from their reverie. ‘We believed in our system. We had been getting richer and richer and we thought our system would be stable for ever. We believed that, if you were part of the Mitsubishi Corporation, you would be all right for ever. But after 1995, we are no longer so confident. We have come to think that there is something wrong with our system. It is a time of great change in our way of thinking.’

  For Murakami, the events of that year were connected with the collapse of the old economic model. They marked the violent death throes of a system that he had always felt was somehow rotten. ‘I think the burst of the bubble economy was good for Japan. When we were rich, I hated this country. It was stupid, foolish and arrogant. We were so confident about our system. This system was right. Japan was Number One, stupid things like that,’ he said. ‘The bubble burst and we have problems these days. But I think it’s good. I think our society is healthier than it was ten years ago. Back then, we thought we were right. But now we are kind of cool and we are thinking, What am I? What are we? I think that’s good. It happens in history. I think it is only a matter of time before we recover, economically and mentally.’