Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

I have written to describe and not prescribe. That said, it would be ingenuous to claim that I have no personal hopes for Japan. For one who loves Japan's culture and its rivers and mountains, the disaster overtaking cities and countryside has been heartrending to witness. I've written this book for my Japanese friends and millions of others who have so far had very little voice in the foreign media, who feel as sad and angry as I do. Although I'm skeptical of Japan's ability to change (the very roots of the tragedy lie in systems that repress change), in my heart I dream of change. Modern Japan is an emotional minefield. Old-line Japanologists, in my view, are so convinced that their duty lies in preaching Japan's glory that these subjects deeply frighten them. People are afraid to open the closet, afraid that the sight of the skeletons inside might undermine what they love about Japan, and fearful, too, lest the high-powered international forums they belong to do not invite them back to future meetings. While this situation has changed in recent years with regard to finance, it is still largely true when it comes to culture. The popularizers of Japanese culture, the people who write about Zen, flowers, the tea ceremony, architecture, design, and so forth, are still writing as if they hadn't noticed that there is trouble in Eden. But there is trouble, and it has happened once before in the past century when a similar process led the nation into disaster. One may easily draw parallels between the collapse of the Taisho Renaissance of the 1910s and 1920s and the Heisei Depression of the 1990s. In both cases, systems of inflexible government and education stifled a generation of freedom and creativity. The same mechanisms that caused Japan to veer off course before World War II – a ruling elite guiding a system aimed single-mindedly at expansion – are at work today. Over the years, foreign observers have looked with envy at the «Japanese paradigm,» in which the goal of the economy is to expand at all costs, and not necessarily to benefit the citizenry. The virtue of this paradigm lies in the sacrifices the people make in exchange for national economic power. But it is time to review this paradigm and take a long look at Japan's concrete-shrouded rivers, shabby cities, stagnant financial markets, Hello Kitty-fied cultural life, and mismanaged resorts, parks, and hospitals, and to see them for what they are. Perhaps Japans twentieth-century history is not that of a nation that has successfully adapted to modernity but one that has twice mal-adapted, with calamitous results.