Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

The key question is: Why should Japan have fallen into any pitfall, when the nation had everything? It reveled in one of the world's most beautiful natural environments, with lush mountains and clear-running streams pouring over emerald rocks; it preserved one of the richest cultural heritages on earth, receiving artistic treasure from all across East Asia, which the Japanese have refined over the centuries; it boastedone of the world's best educational systems and was famed for its high technology; its industrial expansion after World War II drew admiration everywhere, and the profits accumulated in the process made it perhaps the wealthiest nation in the world.

And yet, instead of building the glorious new civilization that was its birthright, Japan went into an inexplicable tailspin in the 1990s. At the start of the decade the stock market collapsed, and by the end of it the Tokyo exchange, the largest in the world in 1989, was capitalized at little more than a fourth of New York's; meanwhile, GNP growth in Japan fell to a minus, while the United States, Europe, and China boomed.

That Japan's economy stumbled is old news. But the media have reported very little about the distress that afflicts other aspects of the nation's life. Few have questioned why Japan's supposed «cities of the future» are unable to do something as basic as burying telephone wires; why gigantic construction boondoggles scar the countryside (roads leading nowhere in the mountains, rivers encased in U-shaped chutes); why wetlands are cemented over for no reason; why the movie industry has collapsed; or why Kyoto and Nara were turned into concrete jungles. These things point to something much deeper than a mere period of economic downturn; they represent a profound cultural crisis, trouble eating away at the nation's very soul.

In the process of researching this book, it became clear to me that Japan's problems have their roots in the 1860s, when the country first opened to the world. At that time, the nation set out to resist the Western colonial powers, and later to vie with them for dominance – and even though Japan succeeded in becoming one of the world's most powerful nations, the basic policy of sacrificing everything for industrial growth never changed. Over time, a wide gap opened up between the goals of this policy, instituted over a century ago, and the real needs of Japan's modern society. Distortions and hidden debts have accumulated, like water dripping into the bamboo poles that can often be seen in Japanese gardens, until finally one last droplet causes the bamboo to tip over, the water spills out, and the other end of the bamboo drops onto a stone with a loud bonk. How Japan went bonk-falling so quickly from being the economic and cultural darling of the 1980s into a profoundly troubled state in the 1990s – is one of the strange and terrible tales of the late twentieth century.

The external view of Japan differs vividly from its internal reality.