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Dogs, Demons...& a Boiled Frog?
During the past few years, it has become
fashionable to
speak of Japan’s “three revolutions.” The first
occurred after
1854, when Commodore Perry arrived with his “black ships”
and forced
the opening of Japan. ... After the nation’s defeat in World War
II, a
second revolution took place, under the guidance of General Douglas
MacArthur and the U.S. Occupation. ... |
It’s now time, many believe,
for a
third revolution, which will differ from the previous two in one
important way: pressure from foreign powers sparked both of the
earlier revolutions; they did not spring from among the Japanese
themselves. This time around, however, there is no foreign
pressure. Nobody outside Japan is concerned about the fate of its
mountains and rivers; nobody will arrive in a warship and demand that
Japan produce better movies, rescue bankrupt pension funds, educate its
children to be creative, or house its families in livable
homes. The revolution will have to come from within. (D&D,
359-60)
Epimetheus & Prometheus
William Sheldon, famed for his studies in
anthropometry, drew a distinction between two fundamental types of
human psychology, inspired by the mythical Greek brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus.
Epimetheus always faced the past, while Prometheus, who brought fire to
mankind, looked to the future. An Epimethean values precedent; a
Promethean will steal fire from the gods if necessary in order to
advance humanity’s progress. ...So far, the psychology of reform has been almost exclusively Epimethean: forced by public opinion, bureaucrats make minimal, often purely symbolic changes, while exerting most of their energies to protect the status quo. Reforms look backward, toward shoring up established systems, not forward to a new world. In general, Japan has settled comfortably into an Epimethean mind-set, and this is central not only to reform but to the overall question of how Japan failed to become a modern country. Modernity, if nothing else, surely means a love of the new. However, as we have seen repeatedly in this book, if new technology was not aimed at export manufacture — like cameras or cars — it never took root. ... At the moment, the trend is toward an increasingly Epimethean bent. Change will get harder, not easier, as the population ages. At the very moment when Japan needs adventurous people to drastically revise its way of doing things, the population has already become the world’s oldest, with school registrations on a strong downward curve. Older people. by nature, tend to be more conservative than younger ones, and as they tip the balance of the population, it will be harder to make changes. Meanwhile, youths, whom one would ordinarily expect to be full of energy and initiation, have been taught in school to be obedient and never to question the way things are. Young people are thinking about shirts printed with bunnies and kitties — with platform shoes to match, and some really amazing makeup and hairdos — rather than about heavy issues like the environment. (D&D, 366-8) Boiled Frog Syndrome How on earth did Japan get itself into such
trouble? Iida
Hideo, a finance lawyer, describes what he calls the Boiled Frog
syndrome: “If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, he
will
jump out immediately and be saved. If you put him in warm water,
he
feels comfortable and does not notice when you slowly raise the
temperature.” Before the frog knows what is happening, it’s
cooked.
The Boiled Frog syndrome is what
comes of failing to change as the world changes. Techniques such
as tobashi
[“creative accounting”] keep the water lukewarm, hiding disastrous mistakes. The
policy of shoring up insolvent firms and wasteful government agencies
at public expense creates no incentive for those in charge to rethink
their mistakes. Meanwhile, the government croons the public to
sleep
with reassuring lullabies about Japan’s unique form of government by
bureaucracy, and its superiority over the degenerate West, exemplified
by Sakakibara Eisuke’s book Japanese-Style
Capitalism as a Civilization. ... Radical change will come only when conditions have grown
completely intolerable, and in Japan’s case that day may never
come. To put Japan’s financial troubles into context, we must remember that
it remains one of the wealthiest countries in the world; the bankrupt
banks and deflated stock market are not going to deprive most people of
their television sets, refrigerators, and cars. From this point
of
view, Japan remains a reasonably comfortable place to live. (D&D,
370-1) ![]()
Technology in Japan is good, but not nearly as good as was once thought; it’s “neither here nor there” — that is, Chuto Hanpa. Because of this mix of qualities, Japan will not crash. There is more than enough industrial power to support the population at roughly present standards. On the other hand, given its deep systemic weakness in finance and technology, Japan is not going to boom. The long-term prognosis is for more Chuto Hanpa, with GNP growth slow, unemployment edging upward, and the debt burden mounting year by year. (D&D, 374-5)
![]() Kawase’s comment was a profound one, for lack of jitsu carries over into every field in Japan today, and can be said to be at the very root of the country’s present cultural malaise. The construction frenzy (building without purpose), architecture (design without context), education (facts without independent thought), new cities (destroying the old), the stock market (paying no dividends), real estate (making no returns), universities (irrelevant to education), internationalization (keeping out the world), bureaucracy (spending without regard to real needs), finance (“virtual yen”), cinema (aimed mostly at children, not at adults), company balance sheets (“cosmetic accounting”), the Environmental Agency (unconcerned with the environment), medicine (copycat drugs improperly tested), information (fuzzy facts, secrets, and lies), airports (bad for people, good for radishes) — there is no other way to put it. It is this that leads me to call Japan a case of failed modernization. ... The cultural troubles are long-term and chronic. There is a way out, of course, and it’s the way of jitsu — getting back in touch with reality. The reality that Japan needs to get back to, however, is not necessarily reality as it is seen in the West but Japan’s own moral and cultural roots. ... The manualized flower arrangements are a denial of everything that flower masters taught for centuries; the bombastic architecture a slap in the face to a long tradition of restraint and aesthetic sensitivity; the smiling baby faces an absurd end to the sophisticated adult culture that gave us Noh drama, Basho’s haiku, sand gardens, and so much more. Most tragic of all, the construction frenzy that is a core part of today’s distorted system is destroying the very land itself, the land that the Japanese have always considered to be sacred. The result of Japan’s war with jitsu has been to tear apart and ravage most of what Japan holds most dear in its own culture, and this lies at the root of the nation’s modern cultural malaise: people are sick at heart because Japan has strayed so far from its true self. The challenge for the Japanese in the past two centuries was how to come out of isolation and assert themselves in the world, and in this they succeeded brilliantly, to the extent that Japan is now one of the world’s most powerful nations. Success came, however, at tremendous internal cost. The challenge of this century will be how to find a way home. (D&D, 382-5) |