Many others were active up in Tōhoku. The exhaustion suffered by local officials and emergency services in the region was testament to their ceaseless, all but sleepless work on behalf of their communities. But civil society showed a purpose and nimbleness that central government seemed once again to lack during the crucial first hours and days after disaster struck. Some sent money into the region. Others travelled there in person to clear dried mud and debris, and to help families settle into temporary housing. Bloggers, Twitter users and crowdsourced citizen science websites like Safecast took up the slack where information from the government and TEPCO fell short, sharing their own radiation readings (from devices placed, amongst other locations, on the tops of schools), along with concerns about unsafe food and its illicit distribution. Later, as the rebuilding process began and testing of agricultural produce showed that lingering public concerns were out of proportion to actual risks – which were very low for most parts of Tōhoku, and falling year on year – non-profit organizations assisted farmers in re-establishing the public trust that the inadequacies of official information had helped to undermine.
The difficulties of building momentum for systemic change quickly became clear. Sakamoto Ryūichi’s outspokenness on the nuclear issue ended up costing him sponsorships and television appearances. He faced a barrage of criticism from people urging him to stick to his day job as a musician. The nationalistic Sankei Shimbun newspaper sneered at ‘a stylish person of culture’ who lived in a pricey condo in New York, yet saw fit to lecture people in Japan about where they got their electricity. And despite widespread public opposition and the deployment by protestors of everything from sound-trucks to SoundCloud in getting their messages across, nuclear restarts continued, while the LDP went all but unchallenged in the Diet. Meanwhile, those who hoped that rebuilding in Tōhoku might persuade central government to make long overdue concessions of power to local authorities – both there and in general – had yet to see this materialize.
Anti-nuclear protest leaders: Setouchi Jakuchō (middle) and Ōe Kenzaburō (left) (2012) Across the later 2010s, an ongoing post-Fukushima opportunity began to merge with an Olympic one. As with Tokyo 1964, so with Tokyo 2020: the Games offered Japan both a platform for fresh national storytelling, in front of an international audience, and the prospect of global embarrassment if its claims rang hollow. This dual potential might end up being squandered. Japan might enter a post-Olympic funk, from which it would take some other, perhaps much less welcome, set of events for the country’s twenty-first century challenges to find clear solutions. But for a short period before, during and after the Games, Japan’s leadership would be susceptible to domestic persuasion and pressure of a kind that no opposition party or political movement by itself looked capable of generating.
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Unity in Diversity
We live in a world that is diverse, rather than homogenous, and the differences among us span wide-ranging areas, from race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, level of ability or other status. Readily accepting these differences and respecting one another allows peace to be maintained, and society to continue to develop and flourish. The Tokyo 2020 Games will foster a welcoming environment and raise awareness of unity in diversity among citizens of the world.
Tokyo 2020 Games Foundation Plan
Japan had, across its long history, been a diverse place in pretty much all the ways that the first line of ‘Unity in Diversity’ proposed. But modernizing leaders had developed a habit of treating difference as a national security issue: enfeebling or corrupting a national resolve without which the country would swiftly fall prey to Western power – military, economic or ideological. In 2005, Foreign Minister Asō Tarō offered a stark account of what critics called Japan’s ‘myth of homogeneity’. Japan, he said, is ‘one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture, and one race – the like of which there is no other’. If diversity belonged anywhere, it belonged in the world of entertainment – in people’s desires to explore and assert a range of lifestyles and identities, sealed safely away in the realms of private or shared fantasy and closely managed consumerism.
Asō was one of a handful of Japanese politicians with a knack for clumsy or controversial comments, from appearing to praise the Nazis to suggesting that Japan’s elderly ought to ‘hurry up and die’. But though few Japanese might have expressed it in the way he did, homogeneity in the sense of shared roots and shared ideals was one of modern Japan’s most successful stories: a myth both in the colloquial sense of something untrue, and in the sense of something powerful enough to create new social and cultural facts on the ground, by shaping common-sense assumptions, thoughts and behaviour across many generations.
In these circumstances, people might be inclined to feel more than usually despairing of a phrase like ‘Unity in Diversity’. Here was boilerplate Olympic banality, no more meaningful than Tokyo 2020’s other two core concepts – Achieving Personal Best and Connecting To Tomorrow – and destined to join the physical detritus of the Games, swept up and disposed of in the hours after the closing ceremony.
Such scepticism would be well placed. ‘Unity in Diversity’ does not offer a straightforward successor to the older story, which boils down to unity versus diversity. It is not a vision of what Japan might quickly become – for many, it will raise the spectre of a collective loss of self. ‘Unity in Diversity’ could be useful instead as a puzzle and a timely provocation, helping to inspire once again in Japan the sorts of searching questions about how nations are built and sustained that had propelled astonishing progress at key points since the 1850s.
By the late 2010s, the time for searching questions had clearly come. Japan’s working-age population was on a steep downward trajectory, with forecasters predicting that by 2040 a full third of a rapidly shrinking population would be over the age of sixty-five. The country’s fertility rate had begun to fall below the level required to maintain the population back in 1974. Economic decline and deregulation had then exacerbated the problem, apparently leaving fewer young Japanese feeling wealthy or secure enough to take the risk of starting a family.
Women continued to suffer inequity in the jobs market, along with the worry that becoming a mother would effectively end their chances of further study or of forging a career. An Equal Employment Opportunity Law had been passed back in 1985, prohibiting gender discrimination in matters of training, benefits, dismissal and retirement, while encouraging firms to improve recruitment practices. But a report more than thirty years later ranked Japan lowest in the OECD for the proportion of women in management positions, lowest for the role of women in politics, and very near the bottom for its gender pay gap.
Japan’s leaders were struggling to find and implement acceptable solutions. Survey evidence revealed a population yet to be convinced of the benefits of immigration. A modest wave of migration back in the 1980s had led to anxious talk of a ‘foreign worker problem’ in Japan. And although attitudes had since softened – helped by revelations in 2001 that this ‘problem’ extended to the imperial family: Emperor Akihito spoke publicly that year of his own family’s Korean roots – people still worried about diluting or imperilling cherished social virtues, from very low crime rates (even in the hardest of economic times) to customary patterns and standards of behaviour which it was thought incomers would struggle with or not bother to learn. Politicians unwilling to risk a serious public debate about immigration were accused of creating backdoors into Japan for desperately needed foreign workers. A Technical Intern Training Programme, established back in the 1990s as a means of transferring technical skills to developing countries via time-limited internships, had since morphed into something resembling a guest worker programme, with poor pay and conditions.
Some in the LDP hoped, in any case, to meet the country’s needs by other means: by getting more women and people of retirement age into work, and somehow raisi
ng the birth rate. And yet here too there were obstacles. The government established one of the world’s most generous paternity leave schemes: up to a year, on nearly 60 per cent of full salary. But fewer than 3 per cent of fathers took up the offer, concerned about appearing cavalier in their work ethic and finding their prospects diminished when they returned to the office. Money was pledged for building more day-care centres, the pace forced thanks to a viral blog post – ‘Drop Dead Japan!’ – by a mother who risked losing her job because she had failed to find care for her child. But residents’ organizations anxious about noise levels and traffic congestion routinely blocked plans for the construction of new facilities.
Humans were hard. Robots, at least, ought to be biddable. Japanese technology firms competed with one another in the course of the 2010s to create cuddly-looking ‘care-bots’ that could lift and assist the elderly and infirm, lead them in a gentle exercise routine, and increasingly interact with them as artificial intelligence research advanced. Alongside helping people to stay in their own homes for longer, and reducing pressure in the labour market (fewer foreign carers required; more Japanese adults freed from family duties to return to paid employment), the likes of ‘Robear’ offered Japanese industry a means of regaining its reputation for world-leading tech innovation, which seemed of late to have drifted across the Pacific to northern California’s Silicon Valley. There was major export potential, too. China’s ageing population was set to render it an eye-wateringly lucrative market for hi-tech care by the middle of the twenty-first century. Middle-aged Chinese presently caught between a love of Japan’s pop culture and an inherited antipathy towards its past and its politicians might end their days being carried around by a Japanese robot or calling a self-driving Japanese toilet over to their bedsides.
But technology was set to be less a straightforward solution to Japan’s demographic woes than part of a fundamental questioning process, a national push-and-pull now under way and heating up, over what the twenty-first century nation should become. The family had been at the heart of state power and national identity in the previous century: a social unit rooted in cooperation, care and a complementarity of roles, fundamental to a person’s sense of self. The nature of those roles and relationships changed over time, but the basic definition of family had largely held across the modern era, as Japan moved from an inter-generational model to a conjugal one.
The question now was this: could – should – this definition of ‘family’ live on, as the shared cultural core across a growing diversity of households? The conjugal family had been in decline since the 1970s. More homes now were made up instead of individuals, childless couples, single parents, or adults forced by circumstances to stay on with ageing parents. Robear was on the rise. Volunteer organizations were offering care and companionship for the elderly, increasing numbers of whom were taking their own lives rather than carry on in loneliness or poverty, or risk becoming a burden to their relatives. With few national politicians willing to champion LGBT rights, more and more local governments around Japan – beginning in 2015 with the district of Shibuya, in Tokyo – were taking it on themselves to offer official status to same-sex couples, for the purposes of renting apartments or consenting to one another’s medical treatment. Did people still want to think in terms of a distinctly ‘Japanese’ family model? And if so, could those core values of cooperation, care and complementarity do the trick, bridging the gap even into an era of the human–robotic household?
What about ‘community’ – another pillar of modern Japan? The old conception was of something tight-knit and exclusive: neighbourhood; workplace; a national community rooted in a combination (shifting over time) of history, custom, blood, spirit and international embattlement. What were the core values here that might help women in the workplace, fathers seeking paternity leave or parents in need of childcare facilities?
If part of the puzzle of ‘unity in diversity’ was how to square the high value that people in Japan had grown up placing on unity with a pragmatic need, now, to embrace diversity, then Japan was enviably well resourced. A range of people across the country had spent much or all of the modern period living on the margins of Japan’s mainstream stories, forced to weigh the sorts of questions that the country as a whole was now asking itself and to engage in a push-and-pull with the state and with society at large. Their experiences were mixed, their answers as yet incomplete. But there was food for thought here, perhaps even the seeds of some far-future Japan story.
Ainu land had for centuries served as the mainland’s savage far-northern periphery. The Ainu were said to live in holes and nests, to drink blood, and to be dangerously swift on their feet. A few Japanese traders and settlers ventured across the Tsugaru Strait in search of salmon, animal skins and cultivable land, but for the most part the island was an exile destination with which domain lords threatened recalcitrant samurai.
Modernity had changed all that. Desperate to secure their new borders and to exercise – partly for international consumption – their responsibility to civilize the poor, the uncouth and the uneducated, Meiji-era leaders had set in motion a mass migration north. They seized Ainu land and destroyed their economy. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Ainu made up just 2 per cent of the population of what was now ‘Hokkaidō’ (‘northern sea circuit’). Many of the Ainu were so mired in combinations of poverty and alcoholism that they were regarded as a naturally ‘dying race’ – as opposed to one being actively killed off.
A ‘Hokkaidō Former Aborigines Protection Law’, passed in 1899, revealed in its very name a degree of confusion and ambivalence about unity and diversity lying somewhere beneath the surface of Japan’s modern story of homogeneity. There were attempts to assimilate the Ainu to a mainlander definition of ‘Japanese’: limited allotments of land were made (generously created from the stolen stock) to turn fishers and hunters into farmers; appearances and styles of dress were aligned with those down south; names were changed; and education was offered in Japanese while Ainu culture was laid to rest in museums. But differentiation and discrimination proved deeply attractive also. Many Ainu children were sent to special ‘Native Schools’, while those who attended general Japanese ones faced constant bullying long into the post-war era – including cries of ‘Ah! Inu!’: ‘Ah – a dog!’
Ainu themselves, across the decades, were divided about how best to further their prospects in modern Japan. Some plumped for a mainlander conception of ‘unity’, moving away from Hokkaidō and leaving their Ainu identity behind. Those who preferred to maintain their own sense of community discovered some of the many ways in which ‘diversity’ could go wrong. An estimated 4.3 million visitors passed through the ‘Hall of Mankind’ at Osaka’s Industrial Exhibition in 1903, gawping at a ‘native Ainu village’ while Ainu adults were paid to provide some theatre: stomping around, shouting and singing, and selling meat. A government tourist brochure in 1941 advised visitors to Hokkaidō to seek out one of two Ainu villages where, if they were prepared to ‘defray the expenses of gathering them and giving them sake’, Ainu would dance and sing for them. Other Ainu, the author warned, preferred to keep a lower profile. ‘You are therefore requested, while looking at them, to refrain from laughing without any reason, or assuming an attitude of mockery.’
Fortunes only improved for the Ainu when they were able to exercise a degree of control over how their past and present were understood in Japan. An Ainu Cultural Promotion Law was passed in 1997, replacing the old Protection Law and marking Japan’s first ever acknowledgement in legislation of an ethnic minority. Old place names were researched, and remnants of Ainu oral literature and craftwork were recovered and revived. In 2008, a Diet resolution officially acknowledged the Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan. Important problems of resource and land rights for the Ainu would take many years to settle. But Japan’s basic understanding of ‘unity’ seemed to have been questioned, and found capacious and robust.
There was less cause for optimi
sm elsewhere in the country. Nearly a quarter of a century on from the rape of 1995 and subsequent promises to relocate US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, relatively little had changed for Okinawans. Relocation arrangements remained stalled: few people wanted a military base opening up near to where they lived. And while new cases came to light of sexual violence against Okinawan women by American servicemen and private contractors, and fragments of military hardware occasionally fell from the skies onto civilian areas below, politicians in Tokyo could do little more than go through a public ritual of protesting to their American allies. The great bane of Okinawan life could not be wished away: condemned to be the lynchpin – and main bargaining chip – in a US–Japan security relationship that neither party could yet afford to dispense with.
Periodic ‘Okinawa booms’ across the 1990s and beyond, in music, food and literature, helped to at least earn the region a recognized place in Japan’s broader cultural mix. But too much of it happened on mainlanders’ terms. The hit song ‘Shima Uta’ (‘Island Song’), in 1993, had used Okinawan musical instruments, notably the sanshin, and acknowledged both the region’s beauty and its troubles. And yet it was by a band – The Boom – who hailed from Yamanashi prefecture, not far from Tokyo. Mainland films and TV dramas set in Okinawa tended to harp on the islands’ rustic charms and laidback lifestyle, conflating poverty with simplicity, and underdevelopment with innocence or a purity of roots – Okinawa remained Japan’s poorest prefecture, reliant on the ‘3 ks’ of tourism (kankō), providing services to US bases (kichi), and carrying out public works projects (kōkyō kōji). Even Okinawan bands like Begin (from the Yaeyama Islands) and Orange Range found there was a fine line between sharing Okinawa’s mixed musical tradition – folk, rock and rap, incorporating influences from South East Asia and the United States – and packaging it commercially for a mainland market in search of accessible authenticity.
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