JК
Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 258 из 270Modernity, if nothing else, surely meansa 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. Society frowns on people who steal fire from the gods. Too much fire too fast would undermine the role of officials in the Cold Hearth Agency, who tell people what to do with their flameless hearths, and it would bankrupt the powerful Hot Stone Cartel, whose existence depends on a lack of fire.
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 young 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 initiative, 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.
Epimethean nostalgia for the past is a natural reaction in Japan, for many of the systems that now slow the nation down were the source of its success only a decade ago. One cannot underestimate the shock that true globalization would bring to a social system and economy like Japan's, which depends so much on being cut off from the world. Mikuni Akio writes:
Under great economic and political pressure, foreigners have been allowed into certain designated sectors of the economy [such as Nissan Automobiles and Long Term Credit Bank]. The government is finding it an expensive proposition to compensate those hit by this first taste of genuine market forces, and understandably quails at the prospect of pacifying the millions who would suffer in a full-scale opening of the economy. Opposition in Japan to further liberalization, deregulation or globalization is thus steadily gathering momentum.
So strong is the longing for the past that there is a good chance that Japan will turn reactionary. The success of the rightist politician Ishihara Shintaro, the author of the popular Japan That Can Say No series and the mayor of Tokyo, augurs for a political step backward, not forward. Ishihara and his group blame Japan's troubles on evil foreigners, especially the United States.
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 young 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 initiative, 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.
Epimethean nostalgia for the past is a natural reaction in Japan, for many of the systems that now slow the nation down were the source of its success only a decade ago. One cannot underestimate the shock that true globalization would bring to a social system and economy like Japan's, which depends so much on being cut off from the world. Mikuni Akio writes:
Under great economic and political pressure, foreigners have been allowed into certain designated sectors of the economy [such as Nissan Automobiles and Long Term Credit Bank]. The government is finding it an expensive proposition to compensate those hit by this first taste of genuine market forces, and understandably quails at the prospect of pacifying the millions who would suffer in a full-scale opening of the economy. Opposition in Japan to further liberalization, deregulation or globalization is thus steadily gathering momentum.
So strong is the longing for the past that there is a good chance that Japan will turn reactionary. The success of the rightist politician Ishihara Shintaro, the author of the popular Japan That Can Say No series and the mayor of Tokyo, augurs for a political step backward, not forward. Ishihara and his group blame Japan's troubles on evil foreigners, especially the United States.