In the days of sakoku, «closed country» (1600-1869), when the shogunate restricted the Dutch and Chinese to the port of Nagasaki, Dutch traders lived on Dejima, a small artificial island in Nagasaki Harbor connected by a causeway to the mainland. Only with special permits could the Dutch pass over the causeway, and the authorities usually granted these only during the day. At night the Dutch had to return to Dejima, where their guardsmen locked the gate behind them. Modern-day rules that restrict foreigners to certain discrete corners of Japanese society and keep them out of the mainstream can be traced to Dejima. And the dream of a physical Dejima for foreigners has never faded. During the days when I worked for American real-estate developer Trammell Crow, I ran across many national and local development plans that called for getting all the foreigners to move into special apartment buildings designed just for them – often on landfill islands.
Recently a young friend of mine, the child of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, joined a large coffee company as a new employee. The personnel department called him in and told him, «We see that you carry a Chinese passport. It is our policy not to give management positions to foreigners. Please change your nationality.» As this story makes clear, foreigners in Japan cannot expect career advancement.
There is one niche, however, a «Dejima of employment,» that is specially allotted to foreigners. It is the job of creating and selling propaganda. Japan issues such a massive volume of advertisement about itself, for both foreign and domestic consumption, that propaganda production deserves to be considered an industry in its own right. A surprisingly large percentage of the Europeans and Americans employed in Japan are working on selling Japan abroad, ranging from the Western students of architecture and gardens whose job is to preach Japanese culture to the world to thousands of spokesmen retained by religious foundations, banks, and trading houses. Yet of the expats I have known over the years who work for Japanese institutions, only a handful enjoy substantive responsibility. Most work in «international departments,» where their assignment is to polish up speeches or edit newsletters and magazines whose content is largely glorification of their company, industry, town, or art form.
The involvement of foreigners in producing propaganda obviously has an important effect on how Japan is seen by the rest of the world, so important that hardly a book on Japan in recent years has not mentioned it. Patrick Smith (Japan: A Reinterpretation) and Richard Katz (Japan: The System That Soured) refer to these committed Japanophiles as the Chrysanthemum Club.
One of the most fascinating questions about Japan as a field of study is the deep commitment, amounting to religious conviction, that is often experienced by foreign experts. It's a strong testament to the enduring appeal of Japan's arts and society. Typically, a foreigner discovers in Japan something, whether it be modern architecture, cinema, or the school system, that he thinks is of value, and thenceforward makes it his mission to explain it to the world. When he writes about his field he will speak about its good points, since these are what attracted him. What would be the point of criticizing, since the goal is to open people's eyes to the wondrous thing he has found in Japan?
This is what happens: I have a foreign friend who is a cinema critic. He is well aware of the meltdown that has taken place in Japanese cinema and speaks about it quite bluntly in private. But when it comes time to pen an article, he sifts through the dross for a few good filmmakers who have produced something worth looking at in the past decade and writes about the special aesthetic qualities of their work. What his foreign readers see is more praise for the wonders of Japanese film; the deep problems of the field never make it into print.
It's a natural thing to do and, since the goal is to introduce abroad those things that are really praiseworthy in Japan, an admirable one. In that sense, I am proud to number myself a member of the Chrysanthemum Club. When it comes time for me to write my book about Kabuki, it's not going to be about the fact that Kabuki is degrading in quality, losing both its audience and its creative artistry; it will be about the great actors I have known and seen, and about their achievements, which rival the best in world opera or ballet. That's what a Kabuki book should be.
It's a matter of selectivity. Japan experts are not necessarily as blind or worshipful as their writings may lead us to believe. Rather, as well-meaning introducers of Japanese culture abroad, they naturally end up in the role of editors and censors, choosing the striking and beautiful film clips and leaving the rest on the cutting-room floor. In any case, one thing is true: commentators on Japanese culture by and large are not dispassionate reporters; for better or for worse, they are in the position of «selling Japan.» I believe this goes a long way toward explaining why foreign writing on Japan tends to be so admiring and uncritical.
While the Chrysanthemum Club members' dedication to Japan is often genuinely felt, it is also true that many of them owe their livelihood to Japan. Overseas, propaganda can be extremely profitable, especially for Washington lobbyists and Ivy League academics. However, for those toiling in international departments within Japan, propaganda is rarely more than a low- to medium-wage job, a sad substitute for founding one's own business or rising to an executive position in a Japanese company. One needs to be a very committed Chrysanthemum Club member to stick around.
During the 1990s, there was an important shift in Japan's place in the world, and it had to do with the renaissance of China and Southeast Asia. For foreigners coming to Asia during the decades following the war, it was nearly impossible to live securely in China, and for decades Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, and Laos were completely closed. Since the late 1980s, all this has changed. Southeast Asia, though it suffers from severe boom-and-bust cycles, is the scene of frenzied economic activity. There is a wealth of new business opportunities in banking, manufacturing, writing, and other fields, and, unlike Japan, where foreigners are mostly restricted to low-level international-department positions, there are genuine opportunities to advance. In Bangkok, I know dozens of foreigners who own and operate their own businesses; in Japan, only a handful. Perhaps Japan is to be commended for keeping its arts and industry strictly to itself, and not allowing «neo-colonialists» a foothold. Whatever the right or wrong of it, the bottom line is that Japan is not an attractive location for outsiders (or at least individuals, as opposed to big corporations) to set up shop.
For forty years after the war, Japan was not only «Number One» in Asia – it was the «Only One.» Now, although its economy is still larger than all the other Asian nations combined (including China), the balance is rapidly shifting, and in the process Japan is becoming merely one of many. Foreigners interested in Asia – not only Westerners but Asians themselves – now have a much wider field in which to play out their ambitions.
That it is becoming «one of many» in a revitalized East Asia is a healthy development, and by no means a discredit to Japan. However, this does mean that there is competition for brains, for the people who make international culture spark: bright entrepreneurs, writers, designers, artists, and so forth. The nation will find it more and more difficult to draw the best and the brightest to its shores unless it makes being in Japan more attractive. At the moment, unfortunately, Japan is following the opposite tack. It's becoming harder, not easier, to find an independent position in a Japanese company; and nearly impossible, as before, to strike out on one's own.
Japan's shrinking international appeal is visible in many ways, not least in the sluggish growth of its foreign-exchange program. In 1983, the Nakasone administration announced a goal of increasing the number of foreign-exchange students to Japan to 100,000 by the end of the century. By 1999 there were only 56,000 (a number achieved after several years of decline in the 1990s), despite a steady increase in Japanese government scholarships. And many of the students are in Japan only as their second choice. A conversation with a Taiwanese student in Kobe gave me some insight into the lack of interest on the part of