For all the talk of isolation, Japan’s companies are now more global than ever. The Toyota you’re driving is as likely to have been built in Tupelo, Mississippi as in Nagoya, Japan. There are some 1.2 million Japanese living abroad – some 140,000 in China alone – altogether twice the number in 1990 when Japan was supposedly at the height of its international influence. Likewise, for all the justified criticism about how closed Japan can be, there are more than 2 million foreign residents living in Japan today, nearly twice the level of twenty years ago.35
As if to underline Japan’s continued relevance, in September 2013 the International Olympic Committee selected Tokyo as the host of the 2020 Summer Olympics ahead of Madrid and Istanbul. Tales of Japan’s never-ending problems and continuing leaks at the Fukushima plant notwithstanding, the committee judged Tokyo the safest bet, rich and stable enough to host the Games with ease. In Japan, the decision was greeted by some as a vote of confidence in the country’s efforts to overcome years of stagnation and revive its fortunes.
Though we have got used to the idea of Japan’s inexorable economic decline, it remains quite comfortably the third-largest economy in the world, the size of the combined economies of Britain and France and three times the size of India’s. It is the richest economy of any size in Asia, its citizens, on average, eight times wealthier than the Chinese.36 For all its many problems, Japan remains the pre-eminent example of a non-western country catching up with advanced living standards.37 It seems a safe assumption that, whether Abenomics works or not, Japan will remain one of the world’s top five economies for several decades to come.
Just as in the 1980s, when Japan was wrongly assumed to be on the verge of economic supremacy, so in 2013 it has been prematurely written off. Two ‘lost decades’ and its manifold problems notwithstanding, reports of Japan’s demise are exaggerated.
Hong Kong, September 2013
1. One of Commodore Perry’s Black Ships, as seen by a Japanese artist. The menacing boats became a symbol of the west’s powerful technology and its imperialist intent.
2. Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835–1901), one of the greatest thinkers of the Meiji era. When he was born, Japan was isolated, hierarchical and feudal. By the time of his death, it was a modern state.
3. Citizens of Edo take their revenge on Onamazu, a giant catfish blamed for the city’s devastating earthquakes.
4. The tsunami sweeps into the northeast coast of Japan. Scenes like this were repeated along a 250-mile stretch of coastline.
5. Ofunato after the tsunami. It was not unusual to see boats washed up many hundreds of feet from the shoreline.
6. Members of the Self Defence Forces were dispatched swiftly to the scene after the 2011 tsunami. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the government had been reluctant to deploy troops still associated with the war.
7. Hiromi Shimodate and Yasuko Kimura scour the ruined landscape of Ofunato a few days after the tsunami.
8. Happier times: Hiromi Shimodate and Yasuko Kimura re-establish Hy’s café in Ofunato’s temporary high street.
9. Seizaburo Sato, 82, works amid the wreckage of his home after the 2011 tsunami. He lost one eye in a previous work-related accident.
10. The author taking notes inside the wreckage of the Capital Hotel, Rikuzentakata.
11. Ippon matsu: Rikuzentakata’s solitary surviving pine has become a symbol of hope, even though it is technically dead.
12. Tokyo after the massive fire bombing of 1945, the most destructive air raid in history. The scenes after the 2011 tsunami were eerily reminiscent.
13. Still from Tokyo Story, a 1953 film by the great director Yasujiro Ozu. As economic growth gathered momentum, the old ways were rapidly left behind.
14. Chewing gum and chocolates, Yokuska, 1959. America’s military and cultural influence persisted long after the occupation ended in 1952.
15. Author Haruki Murakami: ‘If there is a hard, high wall and an egg ... no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.’
16. Cherry blossom against a castle wall in Kumamoto. For the Japanese, the fleetingness of the blossom is the essence of its beauty.
17. Tofu hotpot in Kyoto. Even the simplest dish is treated as art.
18. Foot onsen at a railway station in Kyushu. The Japanese never miss out on an opportunity to bathe.
19. Ginza. A visiting politician told the author, ‘If this is a recession, I want one.’
20. Junichiro Koizumi campaigning in the dramatic ‘post-office election’ of 2005. He threatened to smash his own Liberal Democratic Party but ended up winning it its biggest post-war election victory.
21. Junichiro Koizumi visits Graceland with George W. Bush in 2006. Here, Priscilla Presley looks on.
22. A 21-year-old hostess shows her business card.
23. Natsuo Kirino: ‘Men and women are not on good terms in Japanese society.’
24. Yayoi Kusama with her phallus-filled installation ‘Aggregation: 1000 Boats Show’. Japan left her so disenchanted with men and the male organ that much of her art was dedicated to ‘obliterating’ the offending appendage.
25. Noriaki Imai, several years after he returned from Iraq. To him, the public reaction in Japan was like being told ‘you should have died in Iraq and come back a corpse.’
26. Members of Japan’s Self Defence Forces work on an ice sculpture of Mickey Mouse at the Sapporo Ice Festival. Some seven decades after the war, Japan still has no official army.
27. Anti-Japan protestors take pictures of a burnt Japanese flag in Wuhan, Hubei province. Many in China were angered when Tokyo ‘nationalized’ the Senkaku islands, known as Diaoyu in China.
28. Testing for radiation after the Fukushima explosion.
29. Shinzo Abe waves from a tank belonging to the Ground Self Defence Forces in 2013. As prime minister he has not shied away from defending Japan’s ‘national interest’.
Notes
FOREWORD
1.Pico Iyer, ‘Now is the Season for Japan’, New York Times, 22 March 2012.
2.Interview with author, Boston, May 2011.
3.Quoted by Kenneth Pyle, Japan Rising, pp. 320–21.
4.Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society (2nd edn), p. 13.
5.Iyer, ‘Now is the Season for Japan’.
6.Interview with Masakazu Yamazaki, ‘Live Life to the Full, Knowing that it is Fleeting’, Asahi newspaper, 14 March 2012.
1. TSUNAMI
1.Joshua Hammer, Yokohama Burning, p. 62.
2.‘The Genius of Japanese Civilization’, The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 76, no. 456 (October 1895), pp. 449–58.
3.Hammer, Yokohama Burning, p. 64.
4.Kenneth Change, ‘Quake Moves Japan Closer to US and Alters Earth’s Spin’, New York Times, 13 March 2011.
5.Ibid.
6.Remarks to author, Rikuzentakata, June 2012.
7.European Space Agency, 9 August 2011, http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMV87JTPQG_index_2.html
8.Story recounted to author by Hirotoshi Oikawa, resident of Rikuzentakata, in August 2011.
9.Interview with author, Rikuzentakata, August 2011.
10.Robert Mendick and Andrew Gilligan, Sunday Telegraph, 20 March 2011.
11.Michael Wines, ‘Japanese Town Still Hopes as Reality Intrudes’, New York Times, 22 March 2011.
12.From an account by Kazuyoshi Sasaki, related to author, Rikuzentakata, August 2011.
13.Interview with author, Rikuzentakata, August 2011.
14.Carl Hoffman, ‘Lessons from Japan’, Popular Mechanics, 1 August 2011.
15.Gordon Fairclough, ‘Hope of the Lone Pine’, Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2011.
2. BENDING ADVERSITY
1.‘Japanese Emperor: I am Praying for the Nation’, Korea Herald, 17 March 2011.
2.Report by Rebuild J
apan Initiative Foundation, quoted in Martin Fackler, ‘Evacuation of Tokyo Was Considered after Disaster’, International Herald Tribune, 29 February 2012.
3.Ibid.
4.Tyler Brule, ‘Tokyo with the Dimmer Switch On’, Financial Times, 19 March 2011.
5.Hiroshi Fuse, ‘Saga Over Using Firewood from Tsunami-hit Area in Kyoto Bonfire Shows Cultural Gap’, Mainichi Daily News, 20 August 2011.
3. SHIMAGUNI
1.Interview with author, Los Angeles, January 2009.
2.Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, see pp. 426–49.
3.Story related to the author by Pico Iyer, a biographer of the Dalai Lama, Nara, March 2012.
4.In some ways, it could be argued that Japanese culture is less able to absorb foreign influence than other cultures. As Donald Keene points out, English speakers use the word ‘robot’ with, almost certainly, no knowledge that it was derived from the Czech. But in Japanese, written in the katakana script reserved for imported words, it is for ever preserved as an alien word. See Donald Keene, Seeds in the Heart, p. 10.
5.Yoshihiko Noda, prime minister from September 2011 to December 2012, loved to lower expectations with self-deprecatory remarks.
6.Author’s observation during visit to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, 2006. In another moment of stress, a young kamikaze pilot, foreshadowing Japan’s defeat in war, compared his country, and perhaps himself, to a ‘carp on the cutting board’. The pilot, Hachiro Sasaki, died at the age of twenty-two on a kamikaze mission. Quoted in Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers.
7.Joji Mori, Nihonjin – Karanashi-Tamago no Jigazo (‘Japanese – Self-portrait of a Shell-less Egg’), 1977, Kodansha Gendai Shinsho.
8.‘Nippon: Japan Since 1945’, BBC documentary (conceived and written by Peter Pagnamenta), 1990.
9.See Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power, p. 348.
10.David Pilling, ‘. . . And Now for Somewhere Completely Different’, Financial Times, 15 February 2008.
11.Pico Iyer, ‘Now is the Season for Japan’, New York Times, 22 March 2012.
12.Alan Macfarlane, Japan Through the Looking Glass, p. 197.
13.Interview with author, Kyoto, September 2003.
14.Macfarlane, Japan Through the Looking Glass, p. 220.
15.Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, p. 8.
16.John Dower, Embracing Defeat, pp. 278–9.
17.McCormack, Client State, p. 13.
18.Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 426–49.
19.Jeff Kingston, Temple University, remarks to author, Tokyo, July 2007.
20.Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan, p. 65.
21.Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society (2nd edn), p. 62.
22.‘Japanese Author Murakami Wins Jerusalem Prize’, Agence France Presse, 16 February 2009.
23.Telephone interview with author, January 2008.
4. LEAVING ASIA
1.Description of Christianity in an edict of 1825 issued by the Tokugawa bakufu, cited in Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, p. 266.
2.Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace.
3.Ian Buruma, Inventing Japan: From Empire to Economic Miracle, p. xi.
4.Kenneth Pyle, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose, p. 107.
5.Interview with author, Seattle, April 2011.
6.Interview with author, Tokyo, October 2011.
7.George Sansom, A History of Japan to 1334, pp. 14–15.
8.Ibid., p. 63.
9.Ibid., pp. 51–9.
10.Donald Keene,The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720–1830, p. 27.
11.Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan, p. 3.
12.Ibid., p. 19.
13.Not counting the seven years from 1945 when it was directly controlled by the US Siam, modern-day Thailand, also escaped colonization.
14.Jansen, Modern Japan, p. 64.
15.Ibid., p. 92.
16.George Feifer, Breaking Open Japan, p. 61.
17.Jansen, Modern Japan, p. 277.
18.Keene, 1720–1830, p. 16.
19.Ibid., pp. 147–52.
20.Buruma, Inventing Japan, p. 6.
21.Cited by Keene, 1720–1830, p. 21.
22.The eta today are known as burakumin. Until recently, they were still discriminated against and respectable families would sometimes hire private detectives to ensure that their offspring did not unwittingly marry into an untouchable bloodline.
23.Quoted in Keene, Japanese Discovery of Europe, p. 22.
24.Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan, p. 225.
25.Jansen, Modern Japan, p. 205.
26.Yukichi Fukuzawa, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa (trans. Eiichi Kiyooka), p. v.
27.Ibid., p. 86.
28.Description by the magistrate of Uraga, cited by Feifer in Breaking Open Japan, p. 5.
29.Fukuzawa, Autobiography, p. 109.
30.Ibid., p. 91.
31.Feifer, Breaking Open Japan, p. 4.
32.Pyle, Japan Rising, p. 78.
33.Ibid., p. 75.
34.Ibid., p. 78.
35.Interview with author, Boston, May 2011.
36.Fukuzawa, Autobiography, p. 335.
37.Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea.
38.Buruma, Inventing Japan, p. 31.
39.Quoted in Kenneth Pyle, The Making of Modern Japan, p. 87.
40.Quoted by John Dower, Embracing Defeat, p. 21.
41.For a detailed discussion of the various estimates of war casualties see John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War, pp. 293–301.
42.Pyle, Making of Modern Japan, p. 143.
43.Cited by Jonathan Bailey, Great Power Strategy in Asia: Empire, Culture and Trade, 1905–2005, p. 128.
44.Ibid.
45.Justin Wintle, Perfect Hostage: Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma and the Generals, p. 104.
46.Buruma, Inventing Japan, pp. 46–7.
47.Quoted in Gordon, A Modern History, p. 132.
48.Pyle, Making of Modern Japan, p. 164.
49.Gordon, A Modern History, p. 170.
50.Pyle, Making of Modern Japan, p. 187.
51.Ibid., p. 178.
52.Quoted in Donald Keene, So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers, pp. 16–17.
53.Translated by Keene, So Lovely.
5. THE MAGIC TEAPOT
1.Recollection to author, Tokyo, April 2011.
2.Shijuro Ogata was deputy governor for international relations, formerly one rank below the full-fledged deputy governor.
3.Shijuro Ogata, unpublished memoirs in English, based on Harukanaru Showa (The Distant Showa Years), published by the Asahi newspaper, 2005.
4.Remark to author, Tokyo, July 2002.
5.John Dower, Embracing Defeat, p. 45.
6.For a superb analysis of how propaganda shaped American views of the Japanese and vice versa see John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War.
7.‘Nippon: Japan Since 1945’, BBC documentary (conceived and written by Peter Pagnamenta), 1990.
8.Lunch with the FT, Paul Krugman, 26 May 2012.
9.South Korea has begun to close in on Japan when measured on a purchasing power parity basis, which takes into account the cost of living across countries.
10.Cited in Roger Buckley, Japan Today, p. 85.
11.Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka), 1988.
12.‘Nippon: Japan Since 1945’.
13.The Americans did provide food shipments to relieve hunger and malnutrition.
14.See Dower, Embracing D
efeat, pp. 525–46.
15.‘Nippon: Japan Since 1945’.
16.Quoted in Buckley, Japan Today, p. 5.
17.‘Nippon: Japan Since 1945’.
18.Ibid.
19.Michael E. Porter et al., Can Japan Compete?
20.‘Nippon: Japan Since 1945’.
21.John Nathan’s lovely phrase in Sony: The Private Life, p. 4.
22.Ibid.
23.Ibid.
24.John Nathan, ‘Sony’s Boldness Wasn’t “Made in Japan”’, Wall Street Journal, 11 October 1999.
25.Andrew Pollack, ‘Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony and Japanese Business Leader, Dies at 78’, New York Times, 4 October 1999.
26.Masahiro Yamada, comments to author, Tokyo, February 2005.
27.‘Nippon: Japan Since 1945’.
28.James Abegglen, 21st Century Japanese Management, p. 15.
29.‘Nippon: Japan Since 1945’.
30.Boston Consulting Group press release, 4 May 2007.
31.See for example Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence.
32.That was partly to distract attention from the political turmoil as Japan’s left fought against the right over the US–Japan security alliance and other social issues.
Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Page 40
