Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Read online

  The influence of the ocean on culture is ubiquitous. Sporting fans eat octopus balls at baseball matches and shopkeepers sometimes offer young children not sweets, but raw shrimp, as a treat. In the same way that people discuss the weather or football in England, the Japanese talk excitedly about the coming into season of a particular fish. In Tohoku and other coastal regions, the years when great tsunamis struck the coast are remembered like the dates of battles. The very language is awash in watery imagery. A lackey or sidekick is a ‘goldfish poo’ trailing behind its master. What we would call a ‘spike’ in English, say in the price of gold, is unagi nobori, or ‘surging eel’. (A canned drink by the same name was launched a few years ago.) Prime ministers have been known to compare themselves to fish: one likened himself to a loach, an unflashy bottom-dwelling creature well suited, he said, to muddy politics.5 Even in moments of extreme distress, the ocean may be the first thing that comes to mind. A mother who witnessed the atomic mushroom cloud spreading malevolently over Hiroshima mouthed in horror: ‘It moves like a sea slug.’6

  • • •

  Japan is not a single island, but an archipelago. Its four main islands – Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu – stretch 1,200 miles from the northeast to the southwest, forming an apostrophe on the edge of the Eurasian landmass. That makes Japan roughly the same length as the east coast of America, though its total area is no bigger than the state of Montana. Even then, over two-thirds of Japan’s territory comprises steep mountains that are virtually uninhabitable, while only 17 per cent of its land is arable. Thus, the country’s 127 million inhabitants are squeezed into an area about the same size as Bulgaria. In other ways, though, Japan is not small at all. If it were in western Europe, it would be the continent’s most populous nation by far, with more people than Britain and Italy combined. Economically, notwithstanding two supposedly ‘lost decades’, it remains a giant with an output half as big again as Germany.

  Japan’s island status has helped foster the idea that it is somehow unique among civilizations. Of course, it is not the only country to consider itself unique. During the US 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, made it clear he put his faith in ‘that special nature of being an American’. Barack Obama, the US president, has been taken to task for questioning the concept of American exceptionalism. Still, the idea of Japan’s separateness from other cultures has gained currency among both foreigners and Japanese themselves, though many, as we shall see, vigorously, and properly, contest the notion. Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations divides the world into seven categories, of which Japan – alone – has a category of its own.

  At its most benign, discussion of Japan’s uniqueness is an attempt to define the country by explaining what makes it different, in the way that all cultures are different from one another. Yet obsession with the idea of Japan’s supposedly uniquely homogeneous, group-oriented society has become a fetish. At its worst, it has slipped into a dangerous assertion of racial superiority. It was, after all, a sense of Japan’s uniquely divine origins and its emperor-centred system – a mythology largely manufactured in the late nineteenth century – that stoked its poisonous sense of manifest destiny in the 1930s and 40s.

  It is not only the Japanese who have laboured the country’s supposed uniqueness. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, written in 1946 by Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist, painted a picture of the Japanese as ‘the most alien enemy the United States has ever fought in an all-out struggle’. Explaining why it was incumbent to study Japan’s culture so closely, she wrote: ‘In no other war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of acting and thinking.’ The underlying assumption of the book – of a people with codes of behaviour entirely distinct from those of westerners – made it respectable to see Japan as a nation apart. After the war, the success of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword helped breathe life into an entire genre of writing called Nihonjinron, or ‘treatise on what makes Japan separate’. The form had its origins as far back as the seventeenth century but reached an apogee in more modern times. In 1977, Joji Mori, a poet and English teacher, wrote a treatise on Japan’s group-oriented society called The Shell-less Egg.7 The book postulated that Europeans and Americans were like eggs with their own shell, self-contained individuals. The Japanese, by contrast, were shell-less – sticky rather than hard, amorphous rather than rigid. They did not, the book argued, conceive of themselves as individual human beings unless defined in relation to family, village, workplace, superiors and inferiors, insiders and outsiders. By the 1980s, when some Japanese became convinced their nation’s unique characteristics would propel it past America to become the world’s economic superpower, whole sections of bookshops were devoted to these self-absorbed tracts.

  Nihonjinron builds on the phoney concept of a racially homogenous society. One only has to look at the faces on a Tokyo or Osaka subway to realize that the Japanese originated from many different parts of Asia. Nevertheless, the idea of a pure Japanese essence persists. This would have it that the Japanese are cooperative, sedentary rice farmers, not garrulous, mobile hunter-gatherers; that they have a unique sensitivity to nature; that they communicate without language through a sort of social telepathy; that they use instinct and ‘heart’ rather than cold logic, and that they have a rarefied artistic awareness. Much emphasis is placed on the advantages of a harmonious society. Taiichi Ono, considered the father of the ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing method that revolutionized Japanese productivity after the war, cheerily told a documentary filmmaker, ‘With a racially homogenous workforce, it’s much easier to discuss things. In fact, it is perfectly natural for us to have a unanimous agreement in whatever we undertake.’8

  By the beginning of the twenty-first century, when I moved to Tokyo as a foreign correspondent, talk of Japan’s uniquely admirable qualities had faded somewhat along with the vigour of its economy. ‘When I hear people talking about ishin-denshin, I wonder what they have in their heads,’ Noritoshi Furuichi, an academic, told me, referring to a belief in a unique Japanese ability to communicate non-verbally. ‘The interesting thing about Nihonjinron is the extent to which the Japanese want to believe it.’

  Indeed the idea of Nihonjinron had not died completely. In 2005, Masahiko Fujiwara, an essayist and mathematics professor at Tokyo’s Ochanomizu University, published a slim volume called Dignity of the Nation. In it, Fujiwara did not argue, as had been common in the 1980s, that Japan’s unique qualities destined it to beat America at its own economic game. Nearly two decades of sub-par growth since the spectacular collapse of Japan’s twin asset bubbles had seen to that. Rather, he harked back to Japan’s supposed essence, captured in notions of samurai honour and codes of practice that would have been familiar to readers of Ruth Benedict. He yearned for a time before Japan had been sullied by contact with western capitalism. His was a call, in sometimes strident nationalistic language, for a return to a prelapsarian, mythical land.

  It was tempting to dismiss all this as the ravings of an eccentric. But in the months following its publication, Fujiwara’s book came up time and again in conversations with businessmen, politicians and bureaucrats. Within a short time it had sold no fewer than 2 million copies. Only the translation of the latest Harry Potter had done better. I decided I ought to hear Fujiwara out for myself. At first, he was reluctant. Somewhat defensive on the phone, he appeared to have little interest in explaining himself to a foreigner. In any case, he was busy. He could not meet in Tokyo, since he spent summers in the coolness of the mountains. In the end, he relented. If I would take the two-hour train ride to Nagano in central Japan, he would talk over lunch.

  We met in a Scandinavian-style restaurant in an airy and verdant valley a world away from the sweltering heat of Tokyo. I took a taxi from the tiny, immaculate station at Chino. Even out here, the driver wore white gloves. The GPS system blinked reassuringly. There was som
ething of the Swiss Alps about the neatness of the surroundings. Fujiwara was waiting for me at the restaurant. In his early sixties and skinny, he appeared slightly gawky, dressed in a check shirt and casual white slacks. His greying hair sprouted hither and thither like untamed weeds. He spoke decent, if slightly strained, English, an interesting touch for someone who advocated the wholesale abandonment of English-language teaching in schools. English was so intrinsically different from Japanese, he said, that it was almost impossible for Japanese children to master. ‘Only one in 10,000 can acquire both languages,’ he said. ‘I spent so much time on English, I now repent it.’ Besides, he said dismissively, failure to communicate preserved the image among foreigners that the Japanese were thinking deep thoughts. Only when Japanese broke the language barrier did they reveal to the outside world that they had nothing to say.

  The first course of our exquisitely presented set lunch was a single prawn, with a few meticulously arranged chickpeas. So precisely did his arrangement match mine that I found myself counting the chickpeas to check whether the kitchen staff had, as I suspected, given us exactly the same number. I never discovered the answer since Fujiwara was in full flow. I had asked why he thought Dignity of the Nation had so caught the Zeitgeist. Japan, he was saying, had been pursuing the chimera of wealth for sixty years. That rush to prosperity had blinded it to the foolhardiness of the capitalist model it was pursuing and, more importantly, to its own virtues. Nearly twenty years of stagnation had brought a sense of perspective. ‘Japan used to despise money, just like English gentlemen,’ he said. ‘But after the war, under American influence, we concentrated on prosperity.’ He harked back to the golden age of the Edo period (1603–1868) when bushido, the ethical and spiritual code of the samurai, spread from the elites to the general population via books and popular theatre like kabuki. ‘People believed in bushido and for 260 years there were no wars,’ he said, referring to the peace established between clansmen under the strict control of the Tokugawa shogun. ‘When bushido started in the twelfth century, it was a kind of swordsmanship, but since there were no wars in the Edo era, swordsmanship became a [set of] values, like sensitivity to the poor and to the weak, benevolence, sincerity, diligence, patience, courage, justice.’

  Much of that had been lost through exposure to what he called the dog-eat-dog values of the west. He cited recent controversies over western companies seeking to bring alien concepts of ‘shareholder value’ and hostile takeovers to Japan. ‘Hostile takeovers might be logical and legal, but it’s not a very honourable thing for us Japanese,’ he said, smiling benevolently. ‘I find the idea that a company belongs to its shareholders a terrifying piece of logic. A company belongs to the staff who work in it. That goes without saying.’

  Another plate arrived, this one a perfectly arranged display of scallops. ‘Chinese dishes, of course, are very delicious. But we pay greater attention to aesthetics. In writing we have shodo and for flowers we have ikebana,’ he said, referring to the calligraphy and flower arrangement that lift everyday experiences above the routine. In England, he had been appalled, though perhaps secretly delighted, to see esteemed Cambridge professors slurping tea from cracked mugs. ‘In Japan, we have tea ceremony. Everything we make into art.’

  Fujiwara blamed Japan’s descent into militarism on its abandonment of samurai values and its embrace of prevailing western thought. In its quest to become a Great Power, it aped the colonial ways of that other island nation, Britain, he said. ‘I always say Japan should be extraordinary; it should not be an ordinary country. We became a normal country, just like other big nations. That’s all right for them. But we have to be isolated, especially mentally. For the past 200 years, after the industrial revolution, westerners relied too much on logical thinking. Even now, they tend to think that, if you really depend on logic and reason, then everything will be all right. But I don’t think so. You really need something more. You might say that Christianity is something that can come on top of those things. But for us Japanese, we don’t have a religion like Christianity or Islam. So we need to have something else – deep emotion. That is something we have had for twenty centuries.’

  Such deep emotion, the sticky albumen of the shell-less society, is said to explain numerous facets of Japanese behaviour, from the way people interact with the each other to, of all things, their supposedly distinct way of hearing insects. Not long into our conversation, Fujiwara, almost inevitably, cited the infamous studies of Dr Tadanobu Tsunoda of Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Dr Tsunoda’s research – and one can almost see the electrodes attached to the heads of earnest volunteers – concluded that the Japanese brain was different from that of most other peoples.9 The Japanese, he found, heard the sound of temple bells, insects and even snoring with the left half of the brain, the opposite of westerners. In Fujiwara’s book there is an excruciating description of how a visiting American professor, on hearing the sound of crickets, asks: ‘What’s that noise?’ Fujiwara feigns to be appalled. How can the professor not recognize this as music? How, he wonders, could we have lost the war to these imbeciles? ‘All Japanese listen to insects as music. When we listen to crickets in deep autumn we hear it as music. We hear the sorrow of autumn because winter is coming. The summer is gone. Every Japanese feels that. We feel the sorrow of our very temporary, short life.’

  I was looking sceptical, but he ploughed on. He explained another familiar, and related, concept, that of mono no aware. This is sometimes translated as ‘the pathos of things’, but can also mean sensitivity to the ephemeral. That is why, he said, in an explanation one hears trotted out every spring, the Japanese love cherry blossom – precisely because its bloom is so fleeting before it gently flutters to earth. ‘If cherry blossoms were in full bloom for six months, no Japanese would love them,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful because it dies within a week.’

  I said I had no doubt that these were important cultural reference points, handed down from parents to children and expounded upon by poets and philosophers. The idea of the fleeting cherry blossom was indeed a beautiful metaphor. But I saw no need for brain-mapping experiments or assertions of Japanese unique sensitivity to explain it. Wasn’t the reaction to insects and cherry blossoms, and no doubt to countless other things, better explained as cultural association? I conjured up my own vision of a cricket match on an English village green. Where a Japanese might see red-faced men in white clothes panting aimlessly around a field, we British felt the beauty of summer, we tasted hops (and cheese and onion crisps) and, in our mind, heard the chatter of happy children. This didn’t make us naturally sensitive to the sound of leather against willow. It was the association of a shared cultural experience.

  Fujiwara partially conceded my point, but he was reluctant to let go of the idea that the Japanese had a unique love of nature. Why did they prune bonsai trees to within an inch of their life then, I goaded? ‘They love nature so much, they want to keep it at hand,’ came back his ingenious reply. Why, then, was a nation of nature lovers so inordinately scared of rain, I pressed? It takes but a scattered shower to bring out a forest of previously secreted umbrellas and the merest few drops – between taxi and kerbside – to send young women screaming at the thought of getting wet. I didn’t mind getting drenched and never thought to carry an umbrella, I said defiantly. Didn’t that make me more in tune with nature’s bounties? I should have guessed the answer even as it was forming on Fujiwara’s lips. ‘British rain and Japanese rain are quite different,’ he replied.

  • • •

  The idea of Japan as an impenetrable island culture is not easy to dislodge. I once wrote an essay in which I sought to refute the notion of Japanese exceptionalism.10 Before I submitted it, I sent it to a friend, Sahoko Kaji, a professor of economics at Keio University who specializes, for her sins no doubt, in the macroeconomics of the European Union. Kaji speaks impeccable English. She is as comfortable in the company of westerners as in that of Japanese and she carr
ies herself as would any modern woman in London or New York. Now in her early fifties, she helped write a slim, tongue-in-cheek volume called Xenophobe’s Guide to the Japanese. In it, she and two co-authors poke gentle fun at Japanese customs – a fondness for ‘love hotels’, compulsive gift-giving, the art of bowing – as well as at foreigners’ misconceptions about what such practices might mean. Given her worldliness and sense of irony, I was somewhat taken aback to receive the following email response to my essay:

  It seems to me the only people on earth that are not worried about understanding Japan are the Japanese. Nobody can ‘understand’ Japan in the western sense of the word, because in Japan there is no absolute.

  I sometimes feel sorry watching westerners trying to define Japan or the Japanese. There are even well intentioned Japanese who use western terminology to ‘explain’ Japan in their usual effort to be nice to guests and foreigners.

  But it is futile. If you meet a Japanese who can define exactly what it is to be Japanese, he/she is not a true Japanese. In Japan, one thing blends into another seamlessly. And importantly, nobody (no Japanese anyway) worries about where the line is drawn. I would agree with the shell-less egg analogy.

  I might add that my sister [a high-flier in the foreign ministry and also a friend] is the most Japanese of Japanese people. Maybe the most Japanese person I know. She has no borderline around her and it never even occurs to her to define anything at all. So you see, it has NOTHING to do with whether you can speak foreign languages or have lived abroad for years.

  I cannot successfully engage in conversation with a westerner without defining things and showing borders. And yet I am certainly Japanese in the sense that I stand back and ‘marvel’ at westerners who keep trying to define this un-definable thing called Japan. Why bother? You cannot do it. I will not attempt it.