William Sheldon, famed for his studies in anthropometry, drew a distinction between two fundamental types of human psychology, inspired by the mythical Greek brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus. Epimetheus always faced the past, while Prometheus, who brought fire to mankind, looked to the future. An Epimethean values precedent; a Promethean will steal fire from the gods if necessary in order to advance humanity's progress. In thinking about Japan's future, it's a good idea to briefly step aside from the mechanisms of bureaucracy and politics and look at psychology.
So far, the psychology of reform has been almost exclusively Epimethean: forced by public opinion, bureaucrats make minimal, often purely symbolic changes, while exerting most of their energies to protect the status quo. Reforms look backward, toward shoring up established systems, not forward to a new world. In general, Japan has settled comfortably into an Epimethean mind-set, and this is central not only to reform but to the overall question of how Japan failed to become a modern country. Modernity, if nothing else, surely means a love of the new. However, as we have seen repeatedly in this book, if new technology was not aimed at export manufacture – like cameras or cars – it never took root. Society frowns on people who steal fire from the gods. Too much fire too fast would undermine the role of officials in the Cold Hearth Agency, who tell people what to do with their flameless hearths, and it would bankrupt the powerful Hot Stone Cartel, whose existence depends on a lack of fire.
At the moment, the trend is toward an increasingly Epimethean bent. Change will get harder, not easier, as the population ages. At the very moment when Japan needs adventurous people to drastically revise its way of doing things, the population has already become the world's oldest, with school registrations on a strong downward curve. Older people, by nature, tend to be more conservative than young ones, and as they tip the balance of the population, it will be harder to make changes.
Meanwhile, youths, whom one would ordinarily expect to be full of energy and initiative, have been taught in school to be obedient and never to question the way things are. Young people are thinking about shirts printed with bunnies and kitties – with platform shoes to match, and some really amazing makeup and hairdos – rather than about heavy issues like the environment.
Epimethean nostalgia for the past is a natural reaction in Japan, for many of the systems that now slow the nation down were the source of its success only a decade ago. One cannot underestimate the shock that true globalization would bring to a social system and economy like Japan's, which depends so much on being cut off from the world. Mikuni Akio writes:
Under great economic and political pressure, foreigners have been allowed into certain designated sectors of the economy [such as Nissan Automobiles and Long Term Credit Bank]. The government is finding it an expensive proposition to compensate those hit by this first taste of genuine market forces, and understandably quails at the prospect of pacifying the millions who would suffer in a full-scale opening of the economy. Opposition in Japan to further liberalization, deregulation or globalization is thus steadily gathering momentum.
So strong is the longing for the past that there is a good chance that Japan will turn reactionary. The success of the rightist politician Ishihara Shintaro, the author of the popular Japan That Can Say No series and the mayor of Tokyo, augurs for a political step backward, not forward. Ishihara and his group blame Japan's troubles on evil foreigners, especially the United States. In academia, a quiet sea change is taking place. In the decades after World War II, leftists and rightists argued heatedly over national policy, with leftists often wielding the upper hand in the control of universities. However, by the end of the 1990s the leftists were in full retreat, and nationalist thinking took over the academic vanguard. The new nationalism may prevent Japan from looking inside at what the nation has done to itself.
A popular argument among Japan watchers is that as Japan becomes more international, people's perceptions will gradually come to harmonize with the outside world. There is some truth to this, for while internationalization at the official level has largely been a conspicuous failure, millions of Japanese have traveled and lived abroad. Every organization has at least one, and maybe even dozens of people, with international experience working within its ranks.
On the other hand, it was perhaps naive to imagine that foreign travel would broaden Japanese horizons. One of the most remarkable phenomena of the 1980s and 1990s is the creation of special worlds abroad made just for the Japanese. Most Japanese tourists travel in groups, and their itinerary consists of a «package» – including attractions, hotels, and restaurants that cater only to them. In Thailand, for example, the Japanese have their own entertainment street lined with «Members Only» signs, and even their own crocodile farm, which insulates them from having to deal with Thais and tourists from other countries who visit the ordinary crocodile farms.
Recently, an interviewer questioned veteran Japanologist Donald Richie about a statement in his book Inland Sea (1971) in which he predicted that as the Japanese traveled abroad in greater numbers, they would become more like everybody else. Richie replied, «I meant that when people got out and saw how other people lived and felt, they would not be able to come back with any complacency. I was exactly wrong. I hadn't envisaged Jalpak. The Japanese go abroad in a package; they have their own crocodiles, and their own flags and their own must-see stops. This is the way the vast majority travel, and they are not touched.»
As for refugees and longtime expats leaving Japan, few will mourn their exodus. Their departure from Japanese shores serves only to remove destabilizing influences, and well-heeled «international departments» will quickly replenish the missing foreigners with new ones, better behaved and more manageable than the old. «What is in store for Japan?» asks Kamei Tatsuo, the former editor of the influential opinion journal Shincho 45, with an ironic smile. «We will go back to sakoku of the Edo period. We Japanese like it that way.»
How on earth did Japan get itself into such trouble? Iida Hideo, a finance lawyer, describes what he calls the Boiled Frog syndrome: «If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will jump out immediately and be saved. If you put him in warm water, he feels comfortable and does not notice when you slowly raise the temperature.» Before the frog knows what is happening, it's cooked.
The Boiled Frog syndrome is what comes of failing to change as the world changes. Techniques such as tobashi keep the water lukewarm, hiding disastrous mistakes. The policy of shoring up insolvent firms and wasteful government agencies at public expense creates no incentive for those in charge to rethink their mistakes. Meanwhile, the government croons the public to sleep with reassuring lullabies about Japan's unique form of government by bureaucracy, and its superiority over the degenerate West, exemplified by Sakakibara Eisuke's book Japanese-Style Capitalism as a Civilization.
Death at a slow boil is also behind the sad condition of Japan's rivers, mountains, and seashores, as well as the landscapes of towns and cities. Ill-planned development, monuments, and bizarre public works have ravaged all these parts of the national heritage-but the heat doesn't scald, because the propaganda of «ancient culture» and «love of nature» continues to lull the public into blissful unawareness.
Radical change will come only when conditions have grown completely intolerable, and in Japan's case that day may never come. To put Japan's financial troubles into context, we must remember that it remains one of the wealthiest countries in the world; the bankrupt banks and deflated stock market are not going to deprive most people of their television sets, refrigerators, and cars. From this point of view, Japan remains a reasonably comfortable place to live.