Modern Library Chronicles #11: Inventing Japan: 1853-1964

Land of Anthems and Artifice

How sick is Japan, and what is the nature of its illness? Up to about twenty years ago impressions of the country in the West, not to mention Asia, were still determined largely by the behaviour of the Japanese during the Second World War. At the mention of Japan, images of fanaticism and brutality were quick to surface. Just before my first visit to the country in 1980, a friend's father, a former Desert Rat, put it succinctly, wishing me luck and stating he himself would never go there. He had not encountered any Japanese himself, but he knew people who had. Even when what is still referred to as the "economic miracle" was at its height, sparking a whole industry of books on the "Japanese mind" and the arcana of Japanese management techniques, there was clearly something not quite right about these uptight imitators of Western fashion, who lived in rabbit hutches and began their working days with corporate callisthenics.

The notion that they had merely transerred to other arenas their ruthlessness on the battlefield was not unique to my friend's father. (The one Japanese television programme shown in Britain at this time was a sadomasochistic game show called Endurance.) Now that Japan's bubble has burst so calamitously, the prescience of its corporate managers has been revealed as little more than incompetence and greed, its national debt stands at a staggering 700 trillion yen, unemployment at a record 5.5 per cent, and there are eighty suicides a day, the question, curiously skirted in most books about Japan, is finally being addressed.

Outstanding among recent diagnostic works is Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan (2001), an extensive lament for what he terms Japan's "cultural malaise": how the country has lost touch with its aesthetic and spiritual roots and continues to pursue a path at variance from its own traditions. At half the length and with wider historical parameters, Inventing Japan, 1853-1964 by Ian Buruma would appear at first glance to have little in common with Kerr's analysis. But it too is a study in pathology, and as such a perfect prelude to Kerr, starting with the arrival of Commodore Perry's Black Ships in 1853 and ending with the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, symbolic of Japan's readmittance into what would now be called "the international community". This is well-trodden territory, the story usually being that of an isolated and feudal nation's amazing transformation into an industrial power in little more than a century, with an unfortunate aberration into militaristic colonialism.

Buruma's tale differs in its focus on the psychological currents of the times, and on the patterns of behaviour that often determined political developments. Japan's response to its encounter with Western civilization was, as Buruma says, "traumatic". It engendered a clash between the new students of Western ideas and the old Sinocentric modes of thought, and eventually, after a series of homespun theories about "Japanese essence", the deeply blinkered nationalism that led to the savagery of the war. Even those who adopted new ideas were divided; some welcomed them for their own sake, while others saw them as a means to a nationalistic end: once Japan had "learned enough from the barbarians to resist them, the country could safely be closed again".

To identify the remnants of this mentality in modern Japan — in its stringent visa requirements, for example, or in workplace attitudes to foreigners, who are rarely given any real authority — is to recognize the relevance of Buruma's book to observable aspects of Japanese life today. It was only in 1999, after years of struggle by numerous foreigners and against the wishes of the National Police Agency, that Japan finally ended its system of fingerprinting all foreign residents. But it still insists on re-entry permits for most foreign residents going abroad, whether on a business trip to South Korea or a weekend break to Guam, entailing more visits to immigration offices and a 3,000 yen (Pounds 15) fee each time. This essentially racist tax is never discussed in the media and most Japanese don't know about it.

At the root of Japan's neurosis is the unresolved conflict between individualism and its desire to control. Buruma symbolizes this conflict in its early stages in the persons of Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of the most influential of independent educators and intellectuals in the Meiji Era, and General Aritomo Yamagata, a solemn disciplinarian who became Prime Minister in the late nineteenth century and left his military mark on Japan's evolving institutions. Today it is Fukuzawa who is remembered and whose portrait adorns the 10,000-yen note, but at the time it was Yamagata's school of thought that prevailed. It was the armed forces, Buruma notes, and not Fukuzawa's free-speech societies that became "the conduit for modernity for most young men in Meiji Japan". This was the start of the marriage between education and militarism, the continuing if muted influence of which is still visible in contemporary school uniforms and the televised parades of school baseball teams.

Buruma's early chapters are especially good, written with characteristic equanimity and clarity. One evokes the wonderful weirdness of the Taisho Era, in the early twentieth century, when individualism briefly flourished, before it all went wrong and liberals themselves became so enamoured of Japan's "kokutai", or national polity, that even a socialist reformer and Christian convert such as the journalist Sakuzo Yoshino, could become a staunch imperialist and "find no . . . objection to Japanese domination of its neighbours".

But, again, it is the reverberations with contemporary Japan that give the book particular interest. When Buruma writes of the impossibility of being an individual in Japan and notes the failure of intellectuals "confused" by individualism, he is discussing a period nearly a century ago. Today, despite an abundance of apparent individualism, one doesn't have to dig too deep to discover a different reality. Japan still has a rigid system of family registration, under which married couples are not allowed to have dual surnames. New proposals to change this have sparked fears among the old guard that it will encourage, as one government official put it recently, "too much individualism." Whenever people move home they are required to inform the local authorities, as well as the police, who like to know exactly who is living where. Only last August a new law established a national registry network requiring all Japanese citizens to be given an identity number and included in a database of personal information.

Buruma doesn't take this obsession with control into deeper anthropological territory, though it would be tempting to do so — the kimono as an essentially restrictive garment, or the bonsai as the ultimate expression of a reductive mentality. It is still seen most strikingly in the stifling of individual creativity in the education system. In 1987 when Susumu Tonegawa won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for work conducted at the MIT, he stated that he could never have pursued his research had he remained within Japan's hierarchical system. Instead of attempting reforms, the Education Ministry subsequently turned the screws, with orders for all schools to play the national anthem and fly the national flag at graduation and entrance ceremonies, sparking dissent — even suicide — among the more liberal of the nation's teachers.

Likewise, the lack of responsibility in coherent policy-taking that Buruma identifies as one of the prime causes of Japan's lurch towards war, and its failure to stop it, is so prevalent in contemporary Japan as to be hardly worth stating. "Taking responsibility" is the media phrase that accompanies the resignation of businessmen and politicians caught with their fingers in the pot, but the lack of significant punishment ensures that it remains essentially meaningless, and this time-honoured practice continues unabated. This same lack of accountability is what Kerr calls "the defining quality of Japan's modern cultural crisis." He was referring particularly to the mindless construction — absurd theme parks, museums with nothing to put in them, mountain roads leading nowhere that has turned Japan into "arguably the world's ugliest country," and the self serving dishonesty in the bureaucratic process that sanctions it, notably the bid-rigging and bribery which have been daily fare in Japan for years. The Construction Ministry's anthem (many businesses and institutions have them) includes the line "Asphalt blanketing the mountains and valleys . . . a splendid utopia". The words have not changed since 1948. These unchecked excesses — and Japan's lack of a wizard to stop its "sorcerer's apprentice frenzy" — mirror the very problems Buruma identifies in discussing Japan and the Second World War. (About half of Buruma's narrative relates to the War and the 1960s, in fact, are touched on only briefly.)

Another significant symptom of Japan's condition is its victim mentality. Buruma shows it was well in evidence before the War and it is a distinct feature of today's media and school curricula. The fastidiousness which Japanese textbook writers bring to their discussions of the Nanking Massacre, an atrocity well covered by Buruma, is rarely applied to other horrors like the atomic bombings. The local assembly of Kagoshima recently approved a petition by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform to exclude the Nanking Massacre Museum from the itinerary of schools visiting China, and the adoption by some schools of textbooks written by nationalist historians is yet again provoking outrage from the Chinese and South Koreans. It is a perennial farce that shows no sign of ending. Last year a North Korean spy ship sank in Chinese waters after an exchange of gunfire with the Japanese coastguard, resulting in the death of all fifteen crew members. With plans to salvage the wreckage came news that the wheelhouse panelling of one of the Japanese vessels, peppered with enemy gunfire, was to be transported around Japan on exhibition, presumably so that Japanese citizens could see how they had been victimized again.

The role of the media is central to Japan's perception of itself, but it is one area that Buruma, though well aware of the uses of propaganda and censorship, doesn't delve into. Many Japanese news stories are merely fed to reporters by the police or government agencies and ministries, most of which have their own "press clubs" with the power to exclude reporters — a blatant but unchallenged form of intimidation and control. One would not know from the mainstream media that the notoriously corrupt Kanagawa police have a manual on covering up scandals called Guidelines for Measures to Cope with Disgraceful and Other Events. (The EU recently demanded the abolition of these clubs in order to give foreign reporters equal access to domestic news, but any changes will almost certainly be cosmetic.) It is this sort of thing that prompted Kerr to conclude that Japan is a case of failed modernization precisely because it clings to outmoded ways of dealing with new realities. This doesn't square with the prevailing view of Japan as technologically advanced, but then the country that runs hundreds of super express trains on time every day is also one in which half the human habitations are not even connected to mains sewers.

This sort of paradox epitomizes Japan's schizophrenic emergence as a modern nation. As Buruma's title implies, Japan is something of an artifice, the result of deliberate self-creation rather than coherent evolution. (It is interesting to learn that Japan's system of Emperor worship, far from being traditional, is a distinctly modern phenomenon.) All countries evolve in fits and starts, but Japan continues to give the impression of unfinished business from the past. Politicians and social critics are forever talking about "interpretations" of history, as if it were necessary to create a consensus on any particular episode before the nation can move on. This is particularly apparent with reference to Okinawa, returned to Japan in 1972 but effectively still a US military installation, where crimes committed by US personnel are given great play in the media, and less is said of the 170,000 citizens driven to their deaths in wartime by their Japanese military masters. The US-Japan security treaty is a salient symbol of Japan's dilemma, continuing both to benefit the country and hamper its ability to take an independent line, as evidenced again with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's belatedly announced support for the war on Iraq.

At the outset, Buruma quotes the view of Perry's interpreter, the Revd Samuel Williams, of the Japanese as "partially enlightened" and proceeds to show how the struggle for enlightenment has too often been lost. The final chapters include a clear-headed discussion of the pros and cons of General MacArthur's rule and the imposition of demokurashii, a foreign concept that in some ways continues to grate on native traditions, and the epilogue is an eloquent distillation of the symptoms — notably the "monomaniacal" concentration on economic growth — that have led to Japan's unravelling.

What emerges from the book is a picture of a country that has not come to terms with the momentous events of its recent past. Japan is still looking for its place in the world. It has long coveted a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, but despite its generosity with overseas aid continually fails to redress the negative aspects of its image abroad. Last year it granted asylum to only eleven people, and now come revelations that nearly 1,600 inmates have died in Japanese prisons in the past ten years. It continues to attempt to buy votes at the International Whaling Commission; its courts continue to throw out compensation claims by the wartime sex slaves it calls "comfort women"; its prime minister continues to pay homage at Yasukuni Shrine, where Class A war criminals are among the dead, in disregard of the objections of Japan's Asian neighbours. Internally, it is plagued by factionalism, despite its oft-hyped homogeneity, notably in the political world. Even its anti-nuclear bomb movement — the one thing you would think the Japanese could achieve some solidarity on — split into two as far back as 1960. Are fanaticism and brutality still in some respects the salient Japanese characteristics? This would be grossly unfair on the majority of Japanese — individually among the most decent people imaginable — but the question of accountability again emerges. Alex Kerr noted that it was his Japanese friends who asked him to write his book, people who themselves feel powerless to effect significant change in their own country. Buruma, too, concludes by acknowledging the many Japanese who believe that only foreign pressure can change Japan. But Ian Buruma ends on a note of optimism, looking forward to the day the Japanese rid themselves of the psychological baggage acquired in the wake of Perry's arrival. What he does not, perhaps cannot, do is offer a prognosis or a course of treatment.

Anthony Head is a writer and editor who has lived in Japan for twenty years.

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