The Outnation: A Search for the Soul of Japan

Part One

1

We are all feeling the elephant. We are like the blind men in the fable, one touching the trunk, another the tail, another the leg, saying snake or vine or tree; except that we all have our eyes wide open, staring and intent, so that perhaps we are looking too hard; and there are far more of us than three. For foreigners in general, and especially for Americans, Japan presents itself as a singularity in need of explanation. I have been, for example, to Israel, a coun­try whose culture is as unique and strange as any on God’s crazy planet, but I felt content to watch and sometimes to laugh or shake my head. I felt no compulsion to explain. Japan is no more singular than that, it is no more strange, but we who come here see it as a knot to be untied, a puzzle to be solved; and so we go to work, each putting a hand out to touch, each looking for the whole within which the parts make sense. Of course, as is always the case, no two of us who examine the beast see quite the same thing or look in the same way; but whereas usually we blame ourselves for this and name as culprit the vagaries of human understanding, in the case of Japan we blame the elephant, and call it a mystery. We insist that something there is in the shadows of Kyoto’s gardens or in the dim alleys of Tokyo after hours or in the obscure windings of the Diet’s deliberations that remains dark, a mystery.

2

We have been mystified by Japan for at least a century, but at no time has our mystification run deeper or mattered more than now. Japan is one of the great powers, after years of merely promising that it would be. It has become, de­pending on which patch of the elephant you touch, a threat to other nations or an example to them, a challenge to the so-called Western way or a reaffirmation of the Protestant work ethic, of the Jewish commitment to education, of the strong Catholic family. We used to come to Japan because it was exotic; now we come because it is exotic and im­portant; and indeed we are coming. We are here in droves now, all looking for the real Japan. Is it really a democracy, or is it something else, a regime built on hidden coercion and enforced conformity? Is it really capitalism, is it really a market economy, or is it something new, a third way between Adam Smith and Karl Marx? Is Japan free? Is it benign? Or is it dangerous?

3

Sometimes I fear that, in the din and the crush that we foreigners make, we see and touch mostly each other. I stayed only six months in Japan, but there were moments when I felt that every American intellectual was either in Japan or at home writing about it. For the first time, interest in the beast’s anatomy and internal systems has moved outside the circle of professors and diplomats who special­ize, and into the reading public; and there, the specialists fear, as they look at the recent spatelet of books and articles creating a small but respectable commotion (The Coming War with Japan!), the discussion is getting out of control. Well, out of control is just the way it ought to be. Japan is a major power, and the old relationship with the United States has become suffocating for both parties, and this means we will have to reassess Japan—not as an exotic island on the edge of the world, but as a large and powerful country. And the we no longer means we specialists; it means you and me, the citizens and voters and busi­nesspeople who must learn how to believe and feel about the place. And so in Japan I put out my hand to touch the elephant and I tried to learn how I ought to feel. I came away knowing only how I ought not to feel.

4

I was, and am, a product of the Arizona desert who moved to the East Coast and cosmopolitanized himself, a timid creature who preferred thinking to doing and who had never before lived abroad, a puzzle solver, a professional outsider, a Washington journalist yearning to be free. Washington used to be an exciting and important place. But the world is much bigger than before, and governments generally are less able to exert control. Everyone in Wash­ington feels the blood draining from the governmental cen­ter and the capital growing numb and stiff. In any case, I felt it. Like many journalists, I am incorrigibly a generalist, but to the extent that I am anything, it is a writer on what has been called political economy, the crossflows of money and power. Nowadays if one wants to understand the flow of money or power or even people, one must confront Asia—Japan especially.

5

Also, I wanted an answer. Anyone who reads about Japan is likely to have noticed that there are the people who have been branded Japan bashers (an invidious expression) and the ones who have been branded Japan handlers (also invidious), and you can barely believe they are talking about the same place. Japan is big and powerful and unstoppable and incapable of any but the most technical sort of finesse; it gobbles up foreign markets implacably, it earns mountains of cash, it grows and grows. (What does it want?) But it is also small and vulnerable and hesitant and delicate; it is peaceloving and eager to please; its people are gentle and want nothing more than to get along with each other and to be liked abroad. There are two prevalent pictures, and they aren’t consistent. Yet both seem truthful. Something is wrong. Isn’t it?

6

Is there a mystery in Japan? Or are we just confused? Well, if not a mystery, then a sort of puzzle, like a series of numbers that sum one way when added from the top, another way when added from the bottom. Impossible, but there you are. One night a university student in Niigata tells me that he does not want to go to work for one of the big corporations, but it can’t be helped. He says he went to New York and loved it—felt free there, does not feel free in Japan. Strange, though: he is not exactly complaining; he is matter-of-fact and placid. The truth is that in today’s Japan he could change his fate if he tried, but he won’t try. What does one say about this young man, who has chosen not to choose? Free or oppressed? He himself will not say, and in any case he is no judge. What about the business networks (keiretsu)—ruthless cartels or beneficent mutual­ism? The government bureaucracies—fragmented and rivalrous to the point of collective irrationality, or suave and efficient beyond an American bureaucrat’s dreams? When Japan is experienced from within, it is calming rather than threatening. Experienced from without, it is a juggernaut.

7

I have an idea how to reconcile the two pictures of Japan. In this first part of the book I’ll try to reach it. I want to begin, however, by describing the place: how it looks, how it feels. That is perhaps the best inoculation against the excesses of generalization that I am sure to commit.

8

From far away there is Japan. It is discrete, unitary, has goals and intentions and methods. In the newspapers it is often spoken of as a person: Japan is beating American companies and buying Rockefeller Center, Japan will stop buying U.S. government securities, Japan believes that economic power is the key to national strength, Japan feels shame but not guilt for its wartime misdeeds, Japan does this and Japan thinks that. This is a natural way to talk, but treacherous. There is, after all, no Japan. Enter Japan and almost immediately Japan disaggre­gates. A million pieces fall out of the bottom of the box. What you see around you is a blooming, buzzing confusion. There is the national government, but it is composed of jostling factions and feuding ministries, which agree on little and which don’t run the country anyway (though they try). There is the business sector, but it is composed of companies of every conceivable size and strength and mis­sion. For every great Mitsubishi or Hitachi there are a thousand tiny suppliers and ten thousand little retailers, each doing whatever it does. There is, of course, the Japanese people, but that is not an it but a they. Anything you find to say about the Japanese people applies only to some of them. They are honest? No, there are gangsters and endless money-politics scandals. Hard­working? I met some construction-industry executives who said they prize Brazilian guest-workers (usually of Japa­nese descent) because they work so much harder and more willingly than the natives. Homogeneous? Hardly. Gener­alizations crumble and one is left standing on water.

9

The confusion begins on arrival. Here along the expressway from the airport are landscaped shrubs, carefully trimmed; but they are trimmed not in round bloblike shapes but so that pointy masses stick out irregularly. (Why trim a bush to look like a billiard ball or a sugar cube? It isn’t natural.) Here at the downtown terminal is a taxicab with driver and meter, just like home; but he wears white gloves and he will not cheat you. Here is the taxi radio pouring out senseless Asian babble; yet something about the sound nags, until it dawns on you that this is baseball. The confusion is a cliché; any American, any foreigner, who has lived or worked here will tell you how the cycle goes. Step one, arrival. Step two, This place is so different! Step three, This place is really just like home! Step four, formation of conclusion: Now I think I understand this place. Step five, collapse of conclusion; too many exceptions. Step six, repeat from step two.

10

Asia remains for us Americans a romantic and vaguely frightening place. What we know of it, we know as the alien jungle where Viet Cong and Americans blew each other’s brains out, or as Conrad’s fragrant land of glamour and death. There was not a light, not a stir, not a sound, writes Conrad. The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave. In our hearts we still half expect rickshaws and bowl-shaped haircuts, even in Japan, although we may say and believe that by now we know better. I believed I knew better when I arrived, but I found I was surprised by my ignorance. Japan is not the Asia of Western novels. To find that mysterious Asia now, one has to set out to look for it or invent it, which is just what many foreigners here do. Japan is rather the land of fifty-dollar haircuts on every young man in Tokyo under thirty-five, the land of crisp Eurocut suits, the land of temples and shrines now approximately as hushed and holy as the Bronx Zoo. I am embarrassed to have been surprised by this, but I was. I had heard about the centu­ries-old xenophobia of the Japanese, and about the pointing and gawking that went on whenever a foreigner appeared outside the biggest cities. I had heard that mothers would point you out to their children as they might a giraffe: Yonder white-colored, big-nosed thing is something you must know about, a gaijin, a foreigner. Everyone who came thirty years ago had this kind of experience, and remnants do persist. Sometimes blonde women have their hair stroked on the subway. A boy in Sapporo slyly stroked the hair on my legs (though I am barely any more hairy than the average Japanese); in another place two boys rode by me on a bicycle, and as they passed the older remarked suc­cinctly to the younger: Gaijin. A strapping, all-American college man I met was approached in Nagoya by a school­girl who spoke incomprehensibly to him and then began tugging at the hair on his forearms. Soon he was surrounded by girls, a regular petting zoo, and he didn’t know whether to be amused or offended. Yet these are remnants only, and today even the young children, although delighted by a foreigner (new toy), are never shocked or amazed. They know us from our television and from the hordes of us who have descended recently on their country. In Morioka, a town toward the north, I was walking to a museum, which so far had failed to materialize. Across the highway I saw a few small boys and I called out to them in my tourist Japanese, asking how many minutes to the museum. Go-fun, five minutes, they called back. I thanked them, con­gratulating myself on knowing a little of the language. They shouted back, in English, Five minutes! In a tiny moun­tain town of Kyushu, the southern island, I visited a third-grade class. I asked the twenty or so children—they were the entire third grade in this little country school—how many had traveled outside of Kyushu, and only a few raised their hands. I asked how many had met a foreigner, and all but a few hands went up. Mostly they had met Ameri­cans. The children wanted to know why my nose was so long, but they were not surprised to see such a nose in their classroom. It was I who was surprised: surprised by their ordinariness. I was to be surprised this way many times. Also disappointed, insofar as one hopes to find here the Real Asia, which is to say the Asia of Western myth.

11

If Japan has an aura of mystery that sets it apart from all the other rich industrial countries, that is in no small measure because the Japanese language does not use the Roman alphabet, or anything like it. This is extremely disconcerting, no matter how fully you try to prepare your­self for it. At first I was incapable even of understanding menus and deciphering fare charts in the train stations. One cannot help but feel the society to be in some elemen­tal way closed or unfathomable. I do not believe that I was ever controlled or handled by the Japanese, but the shock of dependence is profound and sometimes it was hard not to feel handled. Pick up a German or Italian newspaper and you can guess at words and make out sentence structure. Even with Russian you can guess a little. Pick up the Japanese paper, and you can’t even tell where words begin and end. You do