New Part Three - July 6:
James Fallows
Alex Kerr
Part Two - June 26:
James Fallows
Alex Kerr
Part One - June 21:
James Fallows
Alex Kerr
Alex Kerr, educated at Yale, Oxford, and Keio universities, is the author of many monographs and articles in both Japanese and English. His last book, Lost Japan, originally written in Japanese, was the first by a foreigner to win the Shincho Gakugei Literary Prize for nonfiction. He lives in Kyoto and Bangkok.
James Fallows is The Atlantic's national correspondent and the author of Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (1996) and of Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel, published this month. To learn about his new book and look through an archive of his recent articles, visit jamesfallows.com.
Previously in Fallows@large:
Working Classes (May 2, 2001)
An e-mail exchange with Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed.
The Work of Words (February 21, 2001)
An e-mail exchange with Christopher Hitchens, author of Unacknowledged Legislation and would-be prosecutor of Henry Kissinger.
Darwin Had It Backwards (January 17, 2001)
An e-mail exchange with Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.
More by James Fallows
More on books
More on foreign affairs
Join the conversation in Post & Riposte.
Atlantic Unbound | July 6, 2001
fallows@large |
Dialogues with James Fallows
.....
From: James Fallows
To: Alex Kerr
Subject: The true Japan - Part Three
Dear Alex:
I started out writing another weather paragraph, but I couldn't finish it with a straight face. For one thing, the weather here in Berkeley is the same old sunny perfection as always. Moreover, starting out this way makes me feel like an American tourist in England pretending to be local by saying "Ta!" (instead of thank you) to shopkeepers and using phrases like "in hospital" or "on holiday." Unlike me, you are a genuine product of the culture of weather paragraphs, so I'll be disappointed if you don't come back with another one. But I must revert to my frontierish American instincts and say, We're down to the last round, and it's time for a summing up.
My plan is to ask you a few questions that I think may clarify your views for those who have followed this discussion but have not (yet!) read your book. And, for the record, I do hope people will get and read the book. It's gracefully written and well-informed. It's full of original observations. It will give American readers a context for absorbing the otherwise atomistic news bulletins they receive about Japan—"economic slump continues" one day, "political reform on the horizon" the next.
My first question is about the fundamental argument you're making in this book. We've discussed a variety of topics that may not seem related to one another. For instance, if you were writing about twenty-first century America, you wouldn't necessarily try to explain George W. Bush's election by describing the office-building architecture of Manhattan. But in our discussion, and much more so in your book, you make a comparable link, plus combining a whole barrelful of different subjects. The one that seems most heartfelt is your aesthetic critique of Japan: why the buildings are so ugly, why Kyoto looks more and more like Houston, and how a visually refined culture began producing dross. But you also have an extended administrative and budgetary analysis of the Ministry of Construction. You talk about the agony of being a Japanese student. You go into the role of the vivid comic books known as manga, as well as the difficulties facing the new "reform" leadership in Japan. What you say about the concrete-pouring industry in Japan could be a magazine article on its own.
The question is: How does all this fit together? Let's imagine that you're on Virtual Book Tour right now, and you have to explain in a paragraph why the political nature of Japan has led to the visual results you describe. If you tell us that totalitarian North Korea has totalitarian-looking buildings, that we can understand. But Japan's not quite the same, is it?
And here's a follow-up question. You explain, both in the book and in a previous dispatch, the difficulties Japan has had in turning off the "catch up" machine. In the mid nineteenth century, and again after World War II, the country devoted tremendous resources to achieving technological and economic parity with the Western world. That meant what Americans would think of as a permanent wartime economy, even when no actual hostilities were underway. The question: did this part of political history necessarily or naturally lead to the concrete-covered landscape you describe? Or was that some kind of unlucky accident?
For the next question, I'm reprising something I asked the first time around, because it remains so fundamentally puzzling. It involves the "natural" design sensibilities of Japan.
Of course it is reprehensible to speak of different cultures as having "natural" traits of any sort. But if you had to identify the single characteristic on which Japan has led the world, it would certainly be the sense of design. Take almost any aspect of Japanese life over the centuries, and you are likely to find breathtaking elegance of conception and execution. Buildings. Clothing. Weapons. Statues. Paintings. Calligraphy. Gardens. Anything else you can name. This is why Western artists embraced Japanese design a hundred years ago—and it is why your main argument about an ugly, kitschy-looking civilization is so startling now.
And my question is, again: How can this be? I ask this time not in a political sense but in a human one. The love of automobiles and guns is not as historically rooted in America as traditional design was in Japan, but nonetheless it's hard to imagine an America with neither guns nor cars—or France without wine, or Italy without pasta. How do you think average Japanese people reconcile what they know to be the glory of their civilization with the way you say they now live?
This next question is a real softball. The latest attention your book has received in the U.S. press was a review by Ian Buruma in The New York Review of Books. Buruma is a longtime, skilled observer of Asia who, despite his other virtues, has never been known for generosity to others on the same beat. (Disclosure: I've had run-ins with him.) You mentioned in our first round your glee, which any book-writer can understand, about having a chance to reply to critics. By his standards Buruma was not that tough on your book. But what do you most wish readers of that review also knew about your argument? And, while you're at it, is there anything you wish you'd added, cut, or stated differently in the book?
Final question: If we accept your argument and analysis, what do you think we should expect from Japan in the long run? That is, does the record of the past decade, in which Japan has stewed in its own problems, tell us anything useful about the next? Obviously none of us knows what's going to happen—but if you had to bet, would you choose more of the same in the next few years, or something basically different?
Thanks for your patience and participation. I look forward to meeting you in Japan, where we can start by discussing the gentle rain.
James Fallows
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