The West has shaped the world we live in. Even now, with signs of a growing challenge from China, the West remains the dominant geopolitical and cultural force. Such has been the extent of Western influence that it is impossible to think of the world without it, or imagine what the world would have been like if it had never happened. We have come to take Western hegemony for granted. It is so deeply rooted, so ubiquitous, that we think of it as somehow natural. The historian J. M. Roberts wrote, in a somewhat triumphalist vein: ‘What seems to be clear is that the story of western civilisation is now the story of mankind, its influence so diffused that old oppositions and antitheses are now meaningless.’ [125] Not quite. Western hegemony is neither a product of nature nor is it eternal. On the contrary, at some point it will come to an end.
3. Japan — Modern But Hardly Western
Crossing a road in Tokyo is a special experience. Virtually every street, seemingly even the smallest, has its traffic lights, including one for pedestrians. Even if there is no sign of a car, people wait patiently for the lights to change before crossing, rarely if ever breaking rank, young and old alike. The pressure to conform is immense. As an inveterate jogger, I found Tokyo posed problems I had never before encountered: the sheer number of lights proved a serious obstacle to that all-important running rhythm, and yet at every red light I found myself overcome by guilt at the thought of making a bolt for it, even though there was not a vehicle in sight, perhaps not even a person. This is a society that likes moving and acting together and it is infectious.
Swimming hats appear on a certain day in all the supermarkets, just like suntan lotion and mosquito repellent, and then duly disappear when their allocated time is up. All schoolchildren wear the same uniforms, irrespective of their school or city, the only variation being according to whether the pupil is at junior high or senior high. Once a product gains acceptance among a critical 5 or 10 per cent of the population, it spreads like wildfire. Whereas it took well over twenty years for 90 per cent of Americans to acquire a colour TV, in Japan the process was compressed into less than a decade, the curve climbing almost vertically around 1970. According to Yoshiyuki, a former editor of the teen magazine Cawaii!, once 5 per cent of teenage girls take a liking to something, 60 per cent will jump on the bandwagon within a month. Although young Japanese are very style-conscious, fashion is marked by a powerful conformity and a lack of individualism, with the same basic look, whatever that might be, acquiring near universality.
Sahoko Kaiji, an economist at Keio University, explains: ‘Here you can leave your car outside in the street, even forget to lock it, and it will still be there in the morning. You can leave your stereo on the dashboard and a smart bag on the seat, and nothing will happen.’ Women happily travel on the metro with their wallets clearly visible at the top of an open handbag; men will stick their mobile phone in the back pocket of their jeans in a crowded carriage entirely confident that no one will steal it. Kaiji continues: ‘People are always nice and friendly and they keep their promises. If you order something in a store and they say it will take two weeks to deliver, they will always phone you if it arrives early, and nine times out of ten it does arrive early.’ You never see any litter anywhere, not even at Tokyo ’s Shinjuku Station, which handles two million commuters a day. The only exception I can recall is when I was at Toyahashi Station near Nagoya, where I saw a small piece of paper on the ground. When I expressed my surprise to my Japanese friend, he said, ‘Don’t worry, someone will pick it up in a minute.’
The Japanese are exquisitely polite. People invariably greet you with a pleasant acknowledgement and a gentle bow. When you arrive in a supermarket or department store, there will be someone at the entrance to welcome you. There is no surly behaviour or rudeness. Your space is respected, whether you are queuing or leaving a lift. You are made to feel that you matter. This idea of inclusivity extends to social attitudes more widely. Chie Nakane, a famous Japanese sociologist, remarked to me: ‘Unemployment is not a problem for the unemployed, it is a problem for the whole of society.’ Japan believes in taking care of the individual. At Tokyo ’s Narita Airport, a uniformed attendant will politely beckon you to the appropriate queue, and on the ground you will find painted footprints, just in case you are in any doubt as to where to stand. You can never get lost in a station or airport, however large, because the Japanese are punctilious in providing directions. This sense of consideration includes an exceptional commitment to punctuality. At a metro station, the train indicator includes not only when the next train is due but when it will arrive at every single station until it reaches the terminus. And it is invariably on time, to the nearest minute, if not second. One could safely set one’s watch by a Japanese train.
On the surface, Japan might look similar to any Western country. But inside it is very different. Or, as Chie Nakane told me: ‘ Japan is outwardly Western but inwardly Japanese.’ [126]
Japan was the only Asian country to begin industrialization in the nineteenth century, the only intruder in an otherwise exclusively Western club. By any standards, it was phenomenally successful in its attempt to emulate the West, industrializing rapidly prior to 1914, and then again before 1939; it colonized a large part of East Asia by 1945, and then overtook much of the West in GDP per head by the 1980s. Not surprisingly, Japan served as an influential economic model when the East Asian tigers began their economic take-off from the late 1950s. If we want to understand the nature of Asian modernity, Japan is the best place to start because it was first and because it remains easily the most developed example. Just because Japan is part of East Asia, however, does not mean that it is representative of the region: on the contrary, Japan is, as we shall see, in important respects unique.
WHERE DOES JAPAN COME FROM?
Japan has been shaped by two momentous engagements with the most advanced civilizations of their time: China in the fifth and sixth centuries and the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Japan ’s early history was influenced by its proximity to China, which was a far more advanced and sophisticated country. Prior to its engagement with China, Japan had no writing system of its own, but subsequently adopted and Japanized many Chinese characters and blended them with its own invented writing system. This was an extremely difficult process because the two languages were completely different and unrelated. In the process, the Chinese literary tradition became one of the foundation stones of Japanese culture. Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism entered Japan from China via Korea more or less simultaneously around the sixth century. [127] Taoism melded with Japanese animist traditions and mutated into Shintoism, while Confucianism became, as in China, the dominant intellectual influence, especially amongst the elite, and even today, in its Japanese form, still dominates the ideology of governance. [128] Confucianism was one of the most sophisticated philosophies of its time, a complex system of moral, social, political and quasi-religious thought, its greatest achievement perhaps being to widen access to education and culture, which previously had been confined to the aristocracy. The Chinese influence was to continue for many centuries, only finally being displaced by that of the West with the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Japan, thus, lived in the shadow of China for some fourteen centuries, for most of that time as one of its tributary states, paying tribute to the Chinese emperor and acknowledging the superiority of Chinese civilization. This left a deep imprint on the Japanese psyche and nurtured an underlying sense of inferiority together with a defensive, and incipiently militant, nationalism. [129]
[125] J. M. Roberts,
[126] Interview with Chie Nakane, Tokyo, June 1999.