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 | June 26, 2001
fallows@large |
Dialogues with James Fallows
.....
From: Alex Kerr
To: James Fallows
Subject: Re: The true Japan - Part Two
Dear Jim,
We've had a break in the clouds after a solid week of rain. Actually I enjoy the rainy season and always try to plan to be in Japan for it—here in Iya, as the mists come flying out of the valleys, opening up and closing, thinning and thickening with incredible speed, you feel like you're sitting in a boiling cauldron of vapor.
But today it's sunny, the sky is blue, the mud is drying out, the air is crisp. It's only a short window in the rainy season, however. Long damp days—when newspapers get soggy and sag while just sitting on a desk, and you wake up in the morning to find your shoes covered with white mold—are coming again soon.
It's too bad you and I can't correspond solely about the weather! Instead I've got to answer your difficult questions, and this time you've asked the most difficult one of all. It strikes right at the core of the debate over Japan's success and future world role: namely, is Japan fundamentally different from other countries, and is this difference sustainable—maybe even an advantage—over the long term?
I remember back in May, 1989, when I read your article in The Atlantic entitled "Containing Japan." I could hardly contain my excitement. As my memory serves me, you argued that Japan has perfected an economic system that does not follow policies of free trade and rationalized finance that are taken for granted in the rest of the world—and it's useless to expect Japan to change. It won't. Instead, you suggested that America "contain" Japan by taking steps such as requiring reciprocal trade in military contracts, setting up a system of "import certificates," and so on. I was excited because you were the first writer I had come across who openly admitted that Japan was different—and would not change.
Well, your words went almost completely unheeded. American trade negotiators went on insisting that Japan open up to imports; Time and Newsweek continued every year to publish breathless issues about the free-spirited Japanese Youth and how they were going to transform the nation overnight. But Japan never changed. Meanwhile, in America, new Administrations arrived in Washington every few years, each one more ignorant than the last with regard to Asia, and so we never took any serious steps to contain Japan.
And yet America boomed and Japan stagnated. And this is perhaps the core point of Dogs and Demons (the one that most upsets the old-line Japanologists): Japan's troubles are not merely economic, but reflected in a degraded environment and impoverished intellectual and cultural life. All this, in spite of having every "unfair advantage." Why?
I think several things are going on. One has to do with the internal dynamics of Japan's different system. The thing is that it worked all too well. I think it's a case of "be careful what you wish for, because you might get it." Japan's export machine relied on repressing consumers. Well, today they're well and truly repressed. Japanese finance fed money to industry at no interest and did not require companies to make profits. The result is that stocks, bonds, and real estate do not make returns—that is, money makes no money in Japan. And companies don't make profits. Meanwhile, in myriad little ways, Japan resisted a role for foreigners in its culture and economy, and so the foreigners stayed away. Today they don't travel to Japan (Japan is thirty-second in the world as a tourist destination), nor do they live there except in tiny enclaves in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Japan chose to go it alone. This means that Japan is doomed to do everything by itself—re-inventing the wheel constantly.
Remember the story of the polio vaccine which you told in Looking at the Sun? In order to support domestic pharmaceuticals, the Ministry of Health and Welfare prevents foreign companies from selling new medicines in Japan until local firms come up with zoroyaku, or copycat medicines. Zoroyaku means "one after another," because they are produced one after another as reverse-engineered copies, often with poor efficacy or even terrible side effects. In the case of the polio vaccine, it killed dozens of children in the 1980s and yet the government never lifted a finger to stop it. Protected in this way, domestic pharmaceuticals no longer know how to create advanced medicines; nor are there protocols for testing. Japan's doctors get by with second-rate medications, hand-me-downs from abroad, essentially. And Japan's pharmaceuticals have almost no world presence.
Repeat this scenario in thousands of industries and government agencies, and what is happening over time is that everything is becoming zoroyaku. Second-rate roads, hotels, museums, houses—even washing-machines, door hinges, and toothpaste. Japan wanted only Japanese toothpaste, so it got Japanese toothpaste.
All that said, the Japanese system brought tremendous advantages, as we all know, making Japan one of the world's richest and most powerful nations. We could argue the merits and demerits of that system forever.
But there's another thing going on. Let's assume that Japan's system was wonderful, invincible, a model for us all. There was one little flaw: and that was the lack of change itself. Back in the 1980s many thought of this as a strength compared to the chaotic and permissive West. The thing is, as Machiavelli pointed out so long ago, no system, not the finest ever devised in any time or place, can continue to thrive without change.
Most of Japan's modern troubles—the construction frenzy (government budgets on automatic pilot), the financial bubble (securities that yield no returns), lackluster Internet and software industries (companies that discourage creative thinking and give no chances to young entrepreneurs)—came about because of an inability to change. Policies set in motion in the 1950s live on today, despite a huge divergence from both domestic needs and international realities.
America, it turned out, did the cruelest thing of all by doing nothing. With the U.S. not attempting to "contain Japan" (except some half-hearted trade negotiations), the nation felt no need to change. Meanwhile, the world shifted into an entirely new paradigm, not only of wealth creation (which moved away from manufacturing hard goods to software and intellectual property), but also of culture (which blossomed with a new free flow of people and ideas across international boundaries). Oblivious to all this, Japan's government ministries, colleges, and big industry went on doing everything the old time-tested Japanese way. So the stock market collapsed, the mountains and rivers got covered with cement.
So what about the new Prime Minister and his reformist government? Is a big revamping finally on the way? Certainly there's more awareness of the need for change among the public than I have felt in all my years in Japan. Some of the new cabinet's proposals, such as those mandating access to information in public agencies, have the potential to transform the machinery of government.
It's an exciting time to be here. Entrenched bureaucrats will go to surprising lengths to fight these reforms, as we can see in the mudslinging between Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka and her staff, who have released sensitive details of diplomatic talks to the press in order to embarrass her. There's a real fight going on, and it makes for entertaining television, if nothing else.
I would like to be optimistic. But I fear that these heady times of change may be as fleeting as our short spell of sunlight here in Iya. Some long damp days are still ahead. The problem is that Japan is addicted to these old systems. Stop concreting the countryside and millions of people will be thrown out of work. Rationalize securities so that they yield returns, and the value of government bonds plummets, banks fail, the whole financial world could crumble. The pain of withdrawal from the various opiates will be severe, and despite all the rhetoric, I don't know that the public or politicians are willing to accept the pain.
Meanwhile, life here in Japan isn't all that bad. We're not talking North Korea, after all. Most people live reasonably comfortable lives: they have a toaster, a car, a refrigerator, plenty to eat, and the amenities of advanced societies—hospitals, schools for their children, trains that run on time. Even the toothpaste sort of works. There's a deep problem with quality—the houses are cramped, cities ugly, natural environment trashed—but life goes on at a material level that many in the world's developing countries would envy. You wrote back in 1989, "Through the century and a half in which America has been dealing with Japan, 'fundamental change' has always been right around the corner, but change has come only when the country has faced dire emergencies: the need to catch up with the industrialized West in the Meiji era, the devastation at the end of the Second World War."
So are we now facing a dire emergency? I think not. This is why I use the "boiled frog" metaphor for Japan: if you drop a frog in boiling water, he'll be scalded and jump out, but if you set him in lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat, he'll sit there contentedly and get cooked.
Let's think about it. Suppose Japan suffered a truly disastrous economic downturn and the GDP dropped by 20 percent, which is almost inconceivable. Japan would still be one of the world's wealthiest countries! And I'm definitely not predicting anything like such a crash. Rather, I think Japan, with its strong industrial and technological resources, will do just fine—as an exporter of goods. In this respect, Americans are very wrong if they think they can dismiss Japan as a failure economically. It's still a formidable competitor. After all, the entire "different" system, with all its quirks and sacrifices, was set up for one goal: expansionist export industry. That goal is still in place, as is the system to support it.
Therefore the big reforms of Koizumi's administration are likely to amount to a little oiling of the wheels, rather than a thorough overhaul. But who knows? Gorbachev thought he was going to introduce just a little glasnost, and look what happened! When you begin to make reforms in a system as rigid and in some ways fragile as Japan's or the USSR's, there can be some big surprises.
Well, so much for Japan, which seems far away from up here on a mountainside in Iya. It's nighttime now, and the moths are flying in, huge celadon green ones lying flat on our black wooden floors. We only get these on clear nights, so I'll enjoy them until the rains start again.
Best wishes,
Alex
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