Traditional cultures everywhere face the problem of how to resist the overwhelming assault of Western, primarily American, civilization. The problem is not limited to Asia or Africa; Europe, too, has agonies over this issue. Some countries choose to erect legal, religious, or customary barriers to the outside world. For those who are studying how to use this model, Japan provides a good test case. Erecting barriers can have unintended effects, for, strangely enough, foreigners can help to preserve the local culture; what was quintessentially Japanese in its material culture might have survived better had there been more foreigners and Japanese with a broad worldview to appreciate it.
One could blame the decline of Japan's countryside and historic towns partly on the lack of foreigners-tourists, of course, but also others who might have an impact on design and preservation, such as resort and hotel operators, scholars, artists, or independent entrepreneurs. In Europe, preservation of natural and historic beauty did not come about as a means of pleasing tourists; it sprang from a long civic tradition among the people themselves, and tourism was a by-product. In Asia, however, modernization came so quickly that such civic traditions had little time to grow up; instead, rampant development is sweeping all before it. One of the few forces standing in the way of the development wave has been tourism. Foreigners living and traveling in countries like Vietnam, where the explosion of tourism is bringing in higher standards of design and service, have directly contributed to the restoration of old neighborhoods and the revival of traditional arts. But by keeping foreigners at arm's length, Japan never really felt the impact of international levels of taste-and thus the conquest of aluminum, fluorescent light, and plastic was complete. It's an anti-intuitive twist, one of the great ironies of modern East Asian history: allowing the foreigners in revives local culture; keeping them out helps to destroy it.
When the Japanese describe their country, they will often use the word semai, «narrow,» «cramped,» «crowded.» The idea is that Japan's landmass is too small to support its population properly. Of course, there are many nations with less habitable land and higher population densities, including some of the most prosperous countries of Europe and East Asia. Taiwan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Belgium have higher population densities than does Japan; Britain and Germany have slightly lower but roughly comparable densities. Semai is not a physical property; semai is in the mind. It's the emotional consequence of Japan's rigid systems, which bind individuals and keep out the fresh air of new ideas from abroad.
The result is explosive. Japan is a nation of people bursting to get out. This has happened before. In the 1930s Fascists in both Germany and Japan defended their expansionist plans by claiming that they needed Lebensraum. After Japan's defeat in World War II, its hunger for its neighbors' land subsided but did not disappear entirely. In the 1980s, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry had a pet project that consisted of sending tens of thousands of Japan's old people to Australia, where they could live in vast retirement cities, the presumption being that Japan does not have the land or the resources to provide a good life for its aging population. But today the emphasis is not on land but on opportunity.
From one point of view, the pressure on talented people and top-notch companies to move out is a strength. It fuels Japan's international expansion. Japanese presence in Southeast Asia is massive, with Japanese factories accounting for as much as 10 percent of Malaysia's GNP. Picking up the Guide to Japanese Businesses in Thailand is a sobering experience: the volume is as thick as the Yellow Pages of a small American city, listing thousands of companies. Shifting their focus overseas may be beneficial to Japanese businesses over the long term. But in the short term it bodes even greater stagnation, because it further reduces business and employment opportunities at home.
One can glean a sense of the hunger to get out of Japan from Newsweek's Japanese edition, August 14, 1996, which offered its readers a special ten-page feature on the top-ten locations for living abroad. The headline read «Escaping Japan. Living Abroad Is Just a Matter of Making Up Your Mind!» «Living abroad is a dream? No, certainly not,» the article begins.«There are people right now living pleasant lives in lands across the sea... A place where just taking a walk in the morning makes your heart beat faster with excitement. Where the bustle of activity in town is not tiring but energizing-surely cities like this exist somewhere in this wide world.» There follow photos and rankings of Edinburgh, Santa Fe, Bologna, Penang, Auckland, and so on, as places for the Japanese to move and start a new life, concentrating on an unspoiled natural environment, large comfortable houses, and a vibrant traditional culture. Sato Sachiko, the wife of a Japanese businessman living in Strasbourg, says, «When I think of returning to Japan, I get depressed.»
Why should she get depressed? The word semai gives us a strong hint, and Nomo's use of the word enjoy instead of endure brings us close to the answer. The school system, the bureaucracy, and the oppressive rules and hierarchies to which they give rise are dampening the Japanese people's spirit. In short, Japan is becoming no fun. Sasaki Ryu, a fifteen-year-old student who was interviewed in Asiaweek in May 1999, sums up the mood in Japan today:
I dream of going to a college in the U.S. School is so boring here. All the kids in my class think alike and everybody wants to be in a group. I'm quite sick of it. I like baseball, and when I see how some Japanese baseball players have made it in the States, I really admire them. Japanese players are good too but somehow the individuality of the American players draws me. I know it will be tough, but I'm ready to try. Young Japanese people have no dreams. I don't want to be like that.
This brings us full circle – from the Japanese people's relationship with the outside world to their feelings about their own country. Stalled «internationalization» has very little to do with anything international; rather, the problems spring from troubles within. As Ian Buruma comments, «The main victims of the bigoted, exclusive, rigid, rascist, authoritarian ways of Japanese officialdom are not the foreigners, even though they are at times its most convenient targets, but the rank and file of the Japanese themselves.»
When «young people have no dreams,» when a great inventor gets «no position, no bonus,» when school, work, and sports are a matter of «endure» rather than «enjoy,» when cities and countryside are losing their beauty and romance – that's a case of becoming no fun. And what an incredible reversal of Japan's own tradition this is! This nation had a countryside that was pure romance, as we can see from the haiku of Basho and the ecstatic tales of foreign travelers until very recent times. Even during the strictest days of the old Edo Shogunate, there was ample time and freedom to enjoy life; indeed, Saikaku's merchants and scholars in the «floating world» refined their pleasures to the point that almost every occupation and amusement they touched became high art.
Nor did the fun die out in the nineteenth century. Forty years ago, it was still possible for young entrepreneurs, like the men who founded Sony and Pioneer, to dream of creating new businesses and of succeeding on a global scale. And there was even a time, for several decades after World War II, when Japan was a more hospitable place for foreigners; in fact, the nation's international reputation coasts on the nostalgia of foreign experts for this era of relative openness that lasted right into the 1980s. Everyone can remember how much fun it used to be – one could hardly think of anything less Japanese than being no fun. And yet this is what Japan is doing to itself.