JК
Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 261 из 270As long as people get to keep their toasters, very few will complain if it becomes a little harder to buy a house, or their companies make more severe demands on their time, or their surroundings get alittle uglier. Such things seem such a normal, even predestined and unavoidable part of life that it is hardly worth thinking about. Japan has trained its population to believe in the old military virtues of hard work and endurance. Hence people will bear hardships without necessarily asking how they might avoid or decrease them, especially if the hardships are quiet in the coming.
The best word to describe Japan's modern plight is Chuto Hanpa, which means «neither this nor that» – in other words, mediocrity. Stunning natural scenery exists, but rarely does it truly uplift the heart, for somewhere in the field of vision the Construction Ministry has built something hideous and unnecessary. Kyoto preserves hundreds of temples and rock gardens, but a stream of recorded announcements disturbs their meditative calm, and outside their mossy gates stretches one of the world's drearier modern cities. The educational system teaches children facts very efficiently, but not how to think by themselves or to innovate. The nation has piled up more savings than any other people on earth, and at the same time sunk into a deep quagmire of personal, corporate, and national debt. Everywhere we look is the same mixed picture – that is, Chuto Hanpa. Japan's ability to rescue itself will depend partly on the rate of technological advance in business, but here, too, Chuto Hanpa rules. Despite an industrial structure aimed single-mindedly at international expansion, there is no question that, technologically, Japan fell behind in the 1990s. Again and again, Japanese firms and agencies were slow to see that their industries were entering new paradigm shifts – for example, the shift in television from analog to digital. In the early part of the decade, MITI encouraged electronic firms to pour billions into developing high-definition television based on analog technology. It seemed that another Japanese monopoly was about to be established – and then a small Silicon Valley start-up figured out how to do it digitally, and all the money went down the drain overnight. That Japan bet wrong was merely unfortunate; the most telling aspect of these fiascoes is the attempt by government to force people to continue in the use of clearly outmoded technology. A similar pattern afflicts medicine, where, in an effort to protect domestic pharmaceuticals, the Ministry of Health and Welfare refuses to approve foreign drugs. As a result, the Japanese are denied medicines that are in common use around the world for the treatment of arthritis, cancer, and numerous other ailments from headache to malaria.
The best word to describe Japan's modern plight is Chuto Hanpa, which means «neither this nor that» – in other words, mediocrity. Stunning natural scenery exists, but rarely does it truly uplift the heart, for somewhere in the field of vision the Construction Ministry has built something hideous and unnecessary. Kyoto preserves hundreds of temples and rock gardens, but a stream of recorded announcements disturbs their meditative calm, and outside their mossy gates stretches one of the world's drearier modern cities. The educational system teaches children facts very efficiently, but not how to think by themselves or to innovate. The nation has piled up more savings than any other people on earth, and at the same time sunk into a deep quagmire of personal, corporate, and national debt. Everywhere we look is the same mixed picture – that is, Chuto Hanpa. Japan's ability to rescue itself will depend partly on the rate of technological advance in business, but here, too, Chuto Hanpa rules. Despite an industrial structure aimed single-mindedly at international expansion, there is no question that, technologically, Japan fell behind in the 1990s. Again and again, Japanese firms and agencies were slow to see that their industries were entering new paradigm shifts – for example, the shift in television from analog to digital. In the early part of the decade, MITI encouraged electronic firms to pour billions into developing high-definition television based on analog technology. It seemed that another Japanese monopoly was about to be established – and then a small Silicon Valley start-up figured out how to do it digitally, and all the money went down the drain overnight. That Japan bet wrong was merely unfortunate; the most telling aspect of these fiascoes is the attempt by government to force people to continue in the use of clearly outmoded technology. A similar pattern afflicts medicine, where, in an effort to protect domestic pharmaceuticals, the Ministry of Health and Welfare refuses to approve foreign drugs. As a result, the Japanese are denied medicines that are in common use around the world for the treatment of arthritis, cancer, and numerous other ailments from headache to malaria.