be killed and taxidermized with pachinko, or with brand-name shopping, or with karaoke. A nation of creators has become a nation of consumers.
This consumerism is the result of a kind of demoralization. Imagine a nation, the culture of which was predicated on the creative use of want. Now remove the want. If the void no longer nourishes, this is because it is no longer there; nor are the master carpenters or the artist masons, and the tea ceremony and the art of arranging flowers have both been transformed from celebrations of emptiness into big businesses.
As to why this should have occurred in a country famed for wringing nourishment from emptiness, I think that the reason—one of the reasons—is that Japanese culture, perhaps because of its long competitive bias, is one of the most pragmatic.
Everything is for use, hardly anything exists for its own intrinsic self. Nature becomes the garden and flowers become ikebana. This surge to create is extremely strong. When there is little to create with, and scant material upon which the searching, pragmatic spirit can exercise itself, ma and the tea ceremony come into being. When more material comes to hand, as at present, there is a natural swing toward the methods of consumption—a lesser destination.
As the empty world implodes in the midst of excess, it carries away with it a certain necessary creativity—a special and precious ability that in large part brought into being that fast-receding culture recognized as traditionally Japanese.
The empty center is still there, but it supports less and less. Its immaculate transparency turns opaque. A new Barthes, in Japan for the first time, might not even notice it. And as the emptiness vanishes, a kind of creativity vanishes with it.
—1992
The Coming Collapse of Cultural Internationalization
The Tokyo taxi driver taking me home was talking away. We were having the kind of conversation that Japanese often have with foreigners. What is your country? Are you married? When are you going home?
Then he suddenly said, “Well, I sure hope you people keep it up. Just keep on pushing. That’s the only way things are going to get any better for people like me who don’t work for the government or for the big companies.”
I was startled. Japan can seem so uniform, so bland, phrases so expected coming from faces so neutral. And yet the people are not really like this, as my driver had just let me know.
Japan is not a homogeneous monolith. There is as much individuality here as there is anywhere else. But it is harder to see and that is why the taxi driver surprised me. He suddenly became visible.
The reason that this diversity is difficult to see is that society—and its spokesperson, the government—doesn’t want it to be seen. From the early reigns of the warlords right down through the various postwar cabinets, Japanese governments have been parental, authoritarian, dictatorial. All have been concerned with the tasks of maintaining public order, of creating harmony and, as they put it, of avoiding confusion.
There have been correspondingly closed ranks to present undivided fronts and to stifle disagreement. Some of these—the centuries of Tokugawa rule, the decade of the Pacific War cabinet—were police states.
These operated through open coercion. This is a process that became learned. Over centuries, overt pressure becomes unnecessary. Under the house of Tokugawa, the Japanese people were repeatedly invited to internalize the expectancies of their rulers and to do so for the sake of creating a unified and peaceful state.
Such pressure is to be observed in other countries as well but perhaps only in Japan is it so visible. There are signs of it everywhere—historical remains cropping up through the surface of everyday life.
A simple example is the continuing prevalence of such a can’t-be-helped expression as shikata ga nai. That, contrarily, it actually can be helped, however, is a thought incapable of expression since there is no such phrase as its lexical opposite, shikata ga aru, in the language. There are many other and more complicated examples of pressure, and the result is a cultural internalization that informs the citizens of just where the line of social acceptability is drawn.
When a country internalizes official dictates—making, in Freudian terms, the parental government into a superego—one of the results is a rigidity of opinion. This is at the same time accompanied by a flexibility of application, for otherwise life would become intolerable.
This internalization helps create a great pragmatism and an attitude tolerant of a wide range of behavior, so long as it poses no threat. Everything is case by case, except for the final case. One learns where to draw the line. And my taxi driver had just stepped across it.
This is something that is now occurring much more frequently. To be sure, it is still the rare Japanese who will speak his or her mind outright in public. The brave mayor of Nagasaki is one such exception and he was consequently shot by a rightist—a political extreme sharing authoritarian concerns. Yet the number of people willing to speak out privately does seem to be growing.
There have, indeed, been some periods when ordinary nonofficial Japanese freely spoke their mind, freed of the Tokugawa mind-set. Film Director Nagisa Oshima has mentioned two of them. One was at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, just after the fall of the house of Tokugawa in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the other was at the end of the Pacific War in the middle of the twentieth. Both periods fostered freely expressed opinion since all major methods of repression and punishment had broken down.
Yet freedom is difficult to live with. Most societies prefer compromise to chaos, and people like peace. Hence, after both of these periods, governments intent on creating national harmony were again back with their advice and suggested guidelines.
If the Japanese now seem to be individually voicing opinion it is perhaps because the process of cultural internalization is again breaking down. The reason would be that Japan is at present undergoing an era of social change and the old parental/authoritarian model is not able to cope with what is occurring.
Just one of the symptoms is the current rift in the Japan–U.S. relationship. One of the causes is the big-brother-like ways of government and business, the assumption that economic prowess is all, that convenience is a sensible national goal, and that all development is invariably good.
One of the results of this rift, and an indication of the breakdown of internalization, is the growing apprehension, seen in the media and in conversation, that purely economic progress has produced some truly negative results.
There are now Japanese citizen’s groups that openly oppose more progress. They are against yet more mercantile-minded world expositions; they openly try to prevent the construction of yet more golf courses; they even buy up land so that it cannot be utilized for development.
It is, to be sure, telling that it is concerned groups that do this rather than concerned individuals. But one of the legacies of a totalitarian repression is the sure knowledge that only a group can counter another group. At the same time, Japan is now experiencing a small but real revolution in the very presence of those groups that disagree with the ways of the major model.
And there certainly remains in the country an old-fashioned element that would still like to expel the foreign and once more slam shut the cultural door. Yet, despite the fact that the door was never really opened (Commodore Matthew Perry merely cracked it), such closure is now impossible. Economically, Japan is a part of the rest of the world. Without trade, the country could not feed even half of its citizens, and one cannot trade from behind closed doors. And so, despite heel digging at the governmental level, Japan will keep on becoming
