JК
Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 235 из 270While artists flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, schools were training the next generation according to a detailed regimen more far-reaching than anything Japan, or the world, had ever seen. By 1980, these students had matured and the story of the Taisho Renaissance repeated itself. A gray curtain-or, rather, a colorful banner decorated with big-eyed baby faces – descended over Japan. Among the artists who dazzled the world so briefly, few have any successors who can hope to duplicate or transcend their achievements. From here on in, it's Hello Kitty, and ikebana flowers glued to tubes of pink jelly.
In the 1930s, the secret police stifled Japan's intellectual and artistic freedom with the help of truncheons and handcuffs. In the 1980s and 1990s, kindergarten teachers, armed only with loudspeaker systems, do the same work much more effectively.
14. Internationalization
Refugees and Expats
When the inside had become so solidly inside that all the outside could be outside and the inside inside.
– Gertrude Stein
On the day that Merit Janow and I had coffee on the terrace of the Oriental Hotel back in 1996 and the idea for this book first came to me, the thing that struck us most forcefully at the time was the vibrant international life in Bangkok – the Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Americans, and Thai intermingling in business and social life-and the lack of anything like this in Japan. No country is as obsessed as Japan with the word international ; you will find it used as a name for everything from hotels to taxis to soap, and you can hardly get through a single hour in Japan without reading, hearing, or saying international at least once. Yet few modern nations have erected such high barriers against foreign people and ideas.
Japanese and foreign commentators take it as a commonplace that with time Japan is becoming steadily more international. But it could be said that Japan is headed in the opposite direction-back to a quiet form of isolation. The doors to real access to Japan remain firmly closed to foreigners; meanwhile, young Japanese men and women with talent and an international mind-set are leaving their country. This emigration has been going on for a long time, but it picked up pace in the 1990s.
Indeed, escapees from Japan's rigid internal systems have been going abroad since the nineteenth century. Often, they are from disadvantaged backgrounds and have suffered disapproval from their families and from institutions in Japan. When they succeed abroad, they are lionized as heroes at home, after which they can return and engage in activities they could not have initiated within Japan.
In the 1930s, the secret police stifled Japan's intellectual and artistic freedom with the help of truncheons and handcuffs. In the 1980s and 1990s, kindergarten teachers, armed only with loudspeaker systems, do the same work much more effectively.
14. Internationalization
Refugees and Expats
When the inside had become so solidly inside that all the outside could be outside and the inside inside.
– Gertrude Stein
On the day that Merit Janow and I had coffee on the terrace of the Oriental Hotel back in 1996 and the idea for this book first came to me, the thing that struck us most forcefully at the time was the vibrant international life in Bangkok – the Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Americans, and Thai intermingling in business and social life-and the lack of anything like this in Japan. No country is as obsessed as Japan with the word international ; you will find it used as a name for everything from hotels to taxis to soap, and you can hardly get through a single hour in Japan without reading, hearing, or saying international at least once. Yet few modern nations have erected such high barriers against foreign people and ideas.
Japanese and foreign commentators take it as a commonplace that with time Japan is becoming steadily more international. But it could be said that Japan is headed in the opposite direction-back to a quiet form of isolation. The doors to real access to Japan remain firmly closed to foreigners; meanwhile, young Japanese men and women with talent and an international mind-set are leaving their country. This emigration has been going on for a long time, but it picked up pace in the 1990s.
Indeed, escapees from Japan's rigid internal systems have been going abroad since the nineteenth century. Often, they are from disadvantaged backgrounds and have suffered disapproval from their families and from institutions in Japan. When they succeed abroad, they are lionized as heroes at home, after which they can return and engage in activities they could not have initiated within Japan.