JК
Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 260 из 270«We will go back to sakoku of the Edo period. We Japanese like it that way.»
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 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.
Death at a slow boil is also behind the sad condition of Japan's rivers, mountains, and seashores, as well as the landscapes of towns and cities. Ill-planned development, monuments, and bizarre public works have ravaged all these parts of the national heritage-but the heat doesn't scald, because the propaganda of «ancient culture» and «love of nature» continues to lull the public into blissful unawareness.
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.
In using the word «comfortable,» I would never suggest that Europeans, Americans, or most middle-class Southeast Asians envy such a lifestyle. For the Japanese, cramped low-quality housing, lack of time for private life, and a degraded environment in cities and countryside are so all-pervasive that most citizens can hardly imagine an alternative. Goals set in the 1950s and 1960s – to own television sets, toasters, and cars – froze to where even now they define the limits of Japanese modernism.
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 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.
Death at a slow boil is also behind the sad condition of Japan's rivers, mountains, and seashores, as well as the landscapes of towns and cities. Ill-planned development, monuments, and bizarre public works have ravaged all these parts of the national heritage-but the heat doesn't scald, because the propaganda of «ancient culture» and «love of nature» continues to lull the public into blissful unawareness.
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.
In using the word «comfortable,» I would never suggest that Europeans, Americans, or most middle-class Southeast Asians envy such a lifestyle. For the Japanese, cramped low-quality housing, lack of time for private life, and a degraded environment in cities and countryside are so all-pervasive that most citizens can hardly imagine an alternative. Goals set in the 1950s and 1960s – to own television sets, toasters, and cars – froze to where even now they define the limits of Japanese modernism.