Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Read online

  I loved that Japanese people always put their hands together to thank their food before they ate it, and the way they apologized before they asked for money in a shop as though payment sullied the otherwise pleasant human interaction. I learned the correct place at which guests should sit at a table – furthest from the door, a position in former times that was safest from surprise attack. I gained an appreciation for small, considerate gestures. My teacher had told me, for example, that it was rude in a business conversation to say that you were busy, since this might imply that you were more in demand than the person to whom you were speaking. I liked it that even cheap restaurants handed out a hot hand towel before you ate and that, when it rained, there was a machine at the department store to seal your wet umbrella in a plastic cover. I marvelled at how social convention trumped laws. The streets were entirely litter-free. No one would dream of answering their mobile phone on the train or in a lift, not because it was illegal but because consideration was expected. Even in the street, people cupped their hands over mouth and phone to muffle the sound of their voice.

  When I got to Tokyo to start my job, I was enthralled all over again. Its urban thrum, theatres and galleries and astonishing variety of restaurants, clubs and bars made it the New York of Asia, only far bigger, with a population, in the greater metropolis, of 36 million people. Yet Tokyo was anything but the faceless conurbation I had imagined. Most big cities have been described as a collection of villages. But Tokyo, more than any other, deserves that description. City neighbourhoods, including the one I moved to in Higashi Kitazawa, are still organized into village-sized units. At festival times, bankers to bricklayers gather to pound rice into soft mochi cakes. At night, they dress in short cotton indigo happi coats, with bare legs and sandals, and heave the local shrine like a palanquin through the narrow, paper-lantern-lit streets. Tokyo is a maze of hundreds of shotengai, crowded little shopping streets with tiny, almost shack-like shops offering homemade tofu, traditional sweets, flowers, sushi, fruit or sacks of rice. The back streets are so narrow they are difficult, if not impossible, to access by car. In most of Tokyo, the favoured mode of transport is the bicycle. The city doesn’t have enough big parks, but the back alleys are a jumble of potted plants and greenery sprouting out of every crack and crevice. Tokyo feels surprisingly close to nature as though the buildings could, at any point, fall back into the soil. In the summer the deafening trill of cicadas drowns out the traffic. Some restaurants turn off the lights and let loose fireflies so customers can watch them flash in the night air. There are little shrines to foxes and fish and even one to eels. One of my most abiding memories is the sight of three blue-uniformed policemen standing outside Shinjuku Gyoen park in springtime, staring up in deadly earnest at the petals of a single cherry blossom. With a scandalous lack of crime to go around, they were examining the tiny pink flower with as much intensity as if they had chanced upon a corpse and a bloodstained knife.

  I set about meeting as broad a cross-section of society as possible, from authors such as Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburo Oe to the prime minister of the day, Junichiro Koizumi. I met industrialists and bankers, politicians and bureaucrats, geisha, kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers. I interviewed people ordinary and extraordinary: car workers and health workers, activists and conservatives, liberal schoolteachers and traditionalist Shinto priests, teenagers and octogenarians. There were many irritants and things to dislike, but all in all I found Japan an enchanting place in which to live, particularly as a foreigner enjoying all the benefits of a smooth-running society with none of the responsibilities. If quality of life meant individually wrapped biscuits and an impeccably maintained aquarium at your local metro station, then Japan won hands down. Where else would it be possible to leave your laptop on a café table safe in the knowledge that it would still be there on your return? What other country had gone through years of severe financial crisis with few obvious signs of social strife?

  There was a relentless pessimism, even sneering bitterness, in much writing about Japan that I found hard to reconcile with the largely comfortable society around me. Though I arrived at the end of Japan’s first ‘lost decade’ and in what was supposed to be a deep recession at the start of its second, there was scant evidence of deprivation, certainly much less than I was used to seeing in my native Britain. Japan had huge problems: an ageing society, a scandalously high suicide rate, school bullying, a large and growing public debt, a stuttering economy and an imploding electronics industry. But there was little sense of crisis (though some people claimed that was precisely the problem). Overall it seemed an affluent, and in many ways a vibrant, society, one comfortable with being both very Japanese and very modern.

  Many people told me that if I wanted to find hardship, I should leave the Tokyo bubble, and visit the poor provincial towns or isolated rural communities abandoned by all but the very old. In my subsequent travels around the country, which took me to nearly all of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures, I certainly came upon pockets of misery, a general foreboding about the future and even outright poverty. There were shuttered high streets and depressed industries and villages full of octogenarians struggling on without much outside help. Some people, especially the young, seemed to be drifting and directionless. But in most places I found a society largely intact and comfortable in its assumptions, albeit one struggling to adapt to new circumstances.

  Whether one sees in another country a glass half full or one half empty may be largely a matter of temperament. If this book occasionally puts a more positive gloss on modern Japan than some accounts, I hope that this will not be mistaken as naivety. The reader will find much that is negative too. Yet the relentless pessimism of much coverage of Japan is, in its way, as misguided as the hopeless boosterism of the 1980s. Then, Japan was said by many experts to be taking over the world with its unstoppable economic machine. Today, the default position is to see a glass not so much half empty, as one cracked on the bottom with the remaining contents fast draining away. Japan, we are told, is unable to rejuvenate and so must continue to sink. Its industry is dying, its women are suppressed, its people are suicidal, its society closed and its debt unpayable. There is an element of truth to much of this, but it does not tell the whole story. Some have sought to present a picture of Japan as almost psychologically sick, based on accounts of its infantile obsessions and hoards of ‘shut-in’ teenagers who never leave the house. But that would be like depicting the US solely as a country of mass shootings, drug addiction and urban segregation, or the UK as nothing more than a class-ridden society with an underbelly of hooliganism and nightly stabbings. These would be gross caricatures. Any country, including Japan, deserves to be seen in more rounded terms. For all its problems, Japan remains a resilient, adaptive society. Its history suggests it has the ability to confront and eventually overcome many of the difficulties it faces – some of which, incidentally, are not unique to Japan as often assumed.

  The way change occurs in Japan has occasionally been compared to the rebuilding of the shrine at Ise, Shinto’s most sacred site, which reputedly dates back to the third century. The shrine is not what one might expect. There are actually 125 separate places of worship, each dedicated to a different deity. All the surrounding woodland is sacred, making Ise less St Paul’s Cathedral and more Hyde Park with gods. Every twenty years, the simple wooden shrines are razed to the ground≈and rebuilt to exactly the same specifications. The question of whether they are two decades – or two millennia – old is open to interpretation. Similarly, Japan has proven itself capable of extraordinary transformation, but always with reference to its past and own beliefs. It can remake itself, but it will use the same material. Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, once told Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s right-hand man, that he thought Japan’s ‘tribal outlook’ made it capable of rapid change. Like other nations convinced of their own exceptionalism, including the US, Japan’s historical ability to transform and rejuvenate in radical
ways is rooted in a strong sense of itself. ‘Japan believes that their society is so different that they can adjust to anything and preserve their national essence,’ Kissinger said. ‘Therefore the Japanese are capable of sudden explosive changes. They went from feudalism to emperor worship in two to three years. They went from emperor worship to democracy in three months.’3

  • • •

  Yoshio Sugimoto, a Japanese sociologist, says analysts are ‘tempted to join either a “Japan-admiring camp”, or a “Japan-bashing camp” and to portray its society in simplistic black-and-white terms’.4 There are foreign observers, including those who have not been able to tear themselves away from the country for years, who regard it as an unredeemably xenophobic, misogynist society, hierarchical, shut off from new ideas, and unable to square up to its own history. Others see some of the things I glimpsed in Kanazawa – social cohesion, a sense of tradition and politeness, a dedication to excellence and relative equality. The two views are hardly irreconcilable. Sugimoto recommends a ‘trade-off model’, which focuses on the ways in which ‘both desirable and undesirable elements are interlinked’.

  Let’s take one tiny example. We may admire the fact that an apprentice of bunraku puppetry – in which three puppeteers manipulate a single doll – takes thirty years to learn his trade. First, he must work the legs of the puppet for ten years before being allowed to take charge of the left arm. After another decade he can graduate to the head and right arm. Only after a further ten years is he considered a true master. In some performances, the face of the main puppeteer is visible to the audience, a sign of his accomplishment, while the heads of his two junior accomplices are covered in black hoods so as not to distract the audience from the action. Such fastidiousness is seen in almost all walks of life. Some sushi masters will not let their apprentices handle fish for years. A bonsai master told me he spent three years, without pay, before his teacher would allow him to prune a tree. Such obsessive respect for detail and decorum helps explain the exquisite standards encountered throughout Japan from restaurant kitchen to factory floor. Only in Japan will you regularly observe people cleaning the grout between tiles with a toothbrush. And yet, we may observe, how stifling of innovation and crushing of spirit it is to insist on such mind-numbing discipline, born of the outmoded idea of an apprentice absorbing received wisdom from an infallible master. The artist Yayoi Kusama, who coats her canvases in uncontrollable outbreaks of polka-dots, once told me that the master–pupil relationship made her ‘want to vomit’. She escaped to the US to pursue her art. It is hard, if not impossible, to reconcile our admiration for the products of Japanese society with qualms about how they are produced.

  To take another small example, we may mock morning calisthenics at Japanese companies as ridiculous, and evidence of ‘groupthink’. In Tokyo, I often looked out amusedly as construction workers in their matching uniforms gathered at a building site for morning group exercises. At the same time, I couldn’t repress a sneaking admiration for a practice that undoubtedly contributed to the health and wellbeing of the Japanese – many of whom remain enviably lean and agile into advanced age – and which ‘democratized’ exercise by removing it from the ghetto of the private fitness club.

  Such trade-offs are present in any society. But they can be a useful way of thinking about Japan. In business, for example, Japanese companies are often criticized for being too reluctant to lay off workers and improve efficiency. This harms shareholders, whose returns are suppressed because a company’s prime concern is not increasing profits. Such practices also cushion the forces of creative destruction through which dynamic economies, such as the US, are constantly shifting labour and resources to more productive areas, breaking down old industries to build up new ones. On the other hand, Japan has a far lower jobless rate than many other countries – about 4 per cent. That means the state pays less in unemployment benefits and society pays less in the social side effects of long-term unemployment, such as higher crime or illness. There may well be a trade-off in terms of lower corporate productivity. Perhaps more ruthlessly efficient economies do better in the long run. But striking an appropriate balance between stakeholder and shareholder capitalism is a legitimate matter for debate in any democratic society.

  The same trade-off model might, at the extreme, even apply to what many identify as perhaps Japan’s greatest flaw, its inward looking ‘Galapagos mentality’. Understandably, this is usually described in a wholly negative light. It has hampered, and continues to hamper, Japan’s proper integration into what Yukichi Fukuzawa, a liberal nineteenth-century thinker, called the ‘give-and-take of the rest of the world’. Japan is too closed to foreign investment and immigration for its own good. On the other hand, Japan’s sense of itself as a nation apart has helped preserve what many most admire about the country. Pico Iyer, who has lived in Kyoto for twenty-five years, told me that what he regarded as the strangeness and delight of Japanese culture would not exist if its society were more open. ‘Having a very strong sense of who is inside the group and who is not is what allows Japan to function so seamlessly and harmoniously,’ he said. ‘The society reminds me of an orchestra in which everyone is playing from the same score and everyone knows her part perfectly, and everything goes beautifully so long as everyone does her bit.’ Not all foreign visitors are so forgiving. David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, once told me a story about when he was living with his Japanese wife and two young children in the claustrophobic atmosphere of Hagi, an old samurai town in western Japan. The mothers at school routinely referred to his children as ‘half’, the standard – and to the Japanese inoffensive – term for someone who is half Japanese. The word upset Mitchell, who spent hours explaining that his children were not ‘half’, but ‘both’, a perfect whole. The Japanese, he concluded, were not good at living on cultural ‘borders or thresholds’. After a year, Mitchell took his young family back to Ireland.

  Sugimoto’s ‘trade-off model’ doesn’t work perfectly. It can set up false dichotomies. Japan could very plausibly be more open and international and just as civil and harmonious. Strong, confident societies can absorb foreign influences – and people – without disrupting their basic equilibrium. Japan would do well to throw open its universities to foreign students and encourage more of its own young people to fan out across the world, as its Meiji pioneers did, in search of new ideas. Perhaps Japan could even find a way of combining better business efficiency with low levels of unemployment, or learn how to foster a generation of rugged individualists nevertheless willing to participate in group calisthenics. Social systems, however, are not always easy to disentangle. Their strengths are often their weaknesses and vice versa. Cultures are not menus from which one can order à la carte.

  Partly for that reason, this book is light on prescription. Those looking for a lecture on how the Japanese should revive their economy or overhaul their ‘mindset’ may be disappointed. For the record, I don’t disagree with some of the standard prescriptions. In my opinion, Japan would indeed be a better place if it were less closed, less conservative, more aware of its recently violent history and more willing to unleash the talents of its women. It would benefit if it could foster a more participatory democracy and stabilize its dysfunctional political system. Doubtless, it should work harder too at generating more economic growth – perhaps through a combination of economic liberalization, more open trade and more aggressive monetary policy. It would be a more dynamic society if it had more entrepreneurs willing to take a risk and an education system that produced more original thinkers. In the medium turn, it may indeed need to raise taxes or cut spending, or both, if it is to clear up its fiscal mess. Yet to say so does not get us very far. It is not as if many academics and policymakers in Japan haven’t said much the same thing. The shopping list of what Japan ‘ought to do’ may be obvious, but it can also be glib and unsatisfying.

  This book, then, will concentrate on Japan as I find it, not Japan as I woul
d like it to be. My assumption is that it is a society in the process of adapting and evolving, albeit in its own, sometimes frustrating, way. And if we should not think of Japan as fixed and unchanging, neither should we treat it as homogenous. Though the Japanese harbour an image of themselves as uniquely harmonious, theirs is a country, as any other, cut across by class, region, gender and age, challenged by subcultures and shaped by structural change. Any utterance that begins with the phrase ‘the Japanese think’ should be treated with utmost scepticism. In deference to that reality, these pages seek to allow, wherever feasible, the Japanese to speak for themselves, in all their diversity and noisy disagreement. Some of these opinions are critiqued along the way, but many are presented more or less unfiltered – as I found them.

  • • •

  Part I of the book, ‘Tsunami’, is an account of how ordinary people, especially in the coastal towns most affected by the catastrophe of 11 March 2011, confronted the disaster. I spent ten days reporting from Japan right after the earthquake and returned many times in subsequent months, as well as in the following year. From interviews and contemporaneous accounts, I try to reconstruct what went on in the terrifying moments right after the tsunami struck Rikuzentakata, a fishing town of some 23,000 residents in Iwate prefecture. I also report my own impressions from the nearby town of Ofunato in the days, weeks and months after the disaster. These chapters introduce the idea of Japanese resilience as witnessed in a single event. For a deeper understanding, however, of how Japan adapts and survives, we need to delve into the history and culture of a country that, constantly threatened by earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and typhoons, has long been ‘primed for adversity’.5

  Part II, ‘Double-bolted Land’, contains a chapter about how Japan came to see itself as a nation apart. Geographically it lies in Asia, off the coast of China, whose national resurgence is the great story of our age. Part of its resilience stems from its own sense of separateness, though I will argue that this is as much a source of weakness as of strength. In the nineteenth century, confronted by the superior technologies of the west, Japan made a decisive break with the Sinocentric world and modelled itself on the ‘Great Powers’ of Europe. It ditched feudalism and modernized. Then it embarked on a brutal and disastrous imperial project, rooted in a racist imperial cult. The upshot was tragedy and near self-destruction. As a consequence, today, Japan stands isolated in its own region, its relations with neighbours, particularly China and South Korea, stalked by history. Neither European nor fully Asian, Japan can seem adrift, its only diplomatic anchor a ‘client state’ relationship with the United States. Even stockbrokers refer to ‘Asia ex-Japan’.