The blind gaijin and the Japanese elephant

People from other cultures who write about Japan often sound like The Blind Men And The Elephant. Everybody seems to be talking about a completely different Japan. Some change their opinion over time, arriving with a firm grasp of Japan's trunk but leaving clinging to its tail.



'Japan is very like a wall', said the first blind foreigner. Alex Kerr in his book 'Dogs and Demons' tells us that Japan is ruled by a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy. That this bureaucracy is beholden to the construction industry and devises 'make work' schemes to keep it happy. That these include concreting Japanese rivers and erecting vast, ugly and unnecessary public buildings (including, apparently, Tokyo town hall). That Japan, unlike Hong Kong and Singapore, has failed to attract foreign capital or make an attractive climate for investors. That Japan does not allow for an influx of cheap international labour. That Japan has not developed its tourist industry. That Japan is behind in information technology. That Japanese people are burdened by high prices and personal debt. That their living standards (he cites uninsulated houses) are low. That Japan does not preserve its heritage well enough. That Japan cannot make art films. That Japan is a childish and superficial nation obsessed with 'cuteness'. And so on...

Kerr's book seems to have struck a chord, especially with American readers. On Chanpon, a site where foreigners lament that Japan is 'losing its soul', many readers say they've bought multiple copies of Kerr's book to give to friends, to 'open their eyes' about Japan. On the Amazon site one reader says:

'Ever since I arrived here I've known something was wrong - something was causing me to be utterly disillusioned. I thought it was only culture shock (and it may be, I'm still not sure), but I think it has more to do with what Kerr has written about. The environment I've encountered has been little more than glitzy, pop-culture, flashy trash, with a back drop of construction, concrete, concrete, and more concrete. Unless I can get over the shock and disillusionment, I may end up doing what another reader did: cutting my losses.'



'Japan is very like a spear'. Although Japan has been, for the last sixty years, one of the most peaceable nations on earth, and spends as much on its sex industry as its defense forces, there are always commentators telling us that it's just on the verge of major remilitarization, and about to fall into the clasp of dangerous right wing nationalists. In a debate on blog Neomarxisme between me and two Japan-based Americans, David Marx and Robert Duckworth, Robert states: 'the right wing is a growing presence in Japan. the current fervor over article 9 between the Japan Communist Party (JCP) and the Liberal Democractic Party (LDP) and the imperialistic resonances and undertones are frightening.' People at this point usually mention Prime Minister Koizumi's visits to the Yazukuni shrine, Japan's crimes against its Asian neighbours during the Second World War, and how Japanese textbooks lie about this. There's also a whole industry of books about how Japan has consistently denied the influence of Korea on its culture. (Some trend hounds, however, will tell you that Japan-Korean collaborations are currently fashionable.)

It's worth pointing out that since the 80s there have been fewer hysterically anti-Japanese books like George Friedman's 'The Coming War With Japan' (1992), a piece of sabre-rattling in a trade war made less threatening to America by the Japanese recession.



'Japan is very like a snake'. Some people who went to Japan thinking it would be like living in a copy of FRUiTS magazine found their dreams slipping through their hands with a hiss. David Marx probably won't mind if I cite him as one of the disillusioned. Neomarxisme isn't so much Marxist as Spenglerian, with 'the decline of the west' replaced by 'the decline of Japan' as its persistent theme. Marxy, a Tokyo-based American musician and journalist who used to work for Tokion magazine, is getting his master's in marketing and consumer behaviour at Tokyo's Keio University. Recent entries in his blog have been about how Japanese music journalism refuses to pass judgment on records or analyze lyrics, how Japan uses racist imagery of foreign ethnicities, how FRUiTS-type fashion eclecticism hides conformity, how the Japanese buy into art without understanding it, how the younger generation of Japanese is bland and spineless, how harmony is not the same thing as wisdom, how Japan encourages a taste for the infantile and the pedophile, and how Japan's version of postmodernism is not 'content-based' like the west's is. David arrived in Japan in 1996 with a lot of stars in his eyes. One by one, it seems, they've gone out.

Ah, just got an e mail from David! He adds: 'You know, there's a whole school of Japan "dismissers" called the Revisionists, like Chalmers Johnson (political scientist), Ivan Hall (professor of something, I forget), Edward Seidensticker (translator/literature scholar), Patrick Smith (journalist), Roy Andrew Miller (linguist), Karel von Wolferen (journalist), John Nathan (author/translator), etc etc. The basic argument is: the stagnation of the economy in the 90s shows that not actually being a liberal democracy or having a free market do indeed come back to kick you in the ass. Roy Andrew Miller is the world's greatest linguist on Japan and his books use a very strict Structuralist methodology to show how Japan's belief in self-uniqueness gets in the way of their intellectual progress as a nation. The popular Conventional Wisdom at this point is, well the economy sucks, but Japan is on top of the pop culture game. I think we both agreed to this at some point. My current mission is to prove: yes in the late 90s this was true, but the problems lurking behind Japanese society also hinder with cultural production and meaningful consumption, and now that Japan is broke, the system is falling apart and taking culture down with it.'



'Japan is very like a fan'. The last blind -- or at least partially sighted -- man grasping at Japan is me. And I'm very partial to the place. I think it's 'very like a fan' for a lot of reasons. Maybe because I have fans there who've always made the experience of being in Japan a delight for me. Maybe because I think Japan is cool. Maybe because I like small gadgets that fit in your pocket. Or maybe because I buy Takashi Murakami's line that Japan is 'superflat'; that Japan is the most postmodern society there is, that it's the most anti-metaphysical place there is, that it has a remarkably classless structure, and that it collapses binaries like high and low, past and present, surface and depth. I've written so much about my love of Japan that there's really no point adding more here. Just browse iMomus or Click Opera and count the ways I love the place. In all my time in Japan I can honestly say I've never once wished I was anywhere else. (I'm not incapable of the odd grumble, though.)

I've been a Japan fan since childhood -- the first song I wrote was 'I Can See Japan'. I don't know how I'd feel about Japan if the first book of Japanology I'd read had been 'Dogs and Demons'. I suspect I'd just have found it a very boring, grumpy and ethnocentric read and thrown it down quite quickly. In fact, my first book of Japanology was 'A Japanese Mirror' by Ian Buruma, which I read in 1987, and which influenced my 'Tender Pervert' album quite a bit. Buruma actually reviewed 'Dogs and Demons' in the New York Times Book Review in July 2001. He didn't like it. It's not that he disagrees with Kerr's attacks on Japanese bureaucracy and so on, more that, walking along a Japanese street, Buruma, like me, is lifted to a place where all spleen and all politics seem irrelevant, a place Marcel Proust called 'the liquid stream of happiness'. The Japanology tome currently by my bed is 'Japan at Play: the ludic and the logic of power' (Routledge Japanese Studies Series), kindly sent by Sarmoung of this parish. Play and Japan are probably my two favourite themes in the entire world, so I'm enjoying this book (about drinking, football, pop fans, gay bars, theme parks and tattoo parlours) a lot.

In a couple of months I'll be heading back to Japan to take up my residency at Future University in Hokkaido. Hakodate will be the smallest Japanese town I've ever stayed in. Perhaps it'll feel like grasping another part of the elephant. But, scrotum or tongue, ear or toe, I'm sure I'll find something entirely delightful about it. Call me partially sighted.