Contemporary Issues in Japanese Society

This final section is concerned with those contemporary and controversial issues anthropologists must account for, regardless of their research specialization, if they are to present a viable picture of Japanese society. Debates about the nature of Japan's modernization, a high-tech society versus a traditional one, Japanese identity, the uniqueness of Japanese culture as opposed to the rest of the world, and the politics maintaining the industrial and financial dominance of Japan on the international scene all infuse a researcher's information with subtle biases and ideological orientations if he or she is not aware of these issues. Rather than arbitrarily divide these and other concerns into segmental discussions, they will emerge in the course of what will hopefully be a sweeping perspective of modern Japanese society and the problems it faces both at the domestic and international levels. The initial discussion will provide historical and cultural motives underlying Japan's ambivalence towards outsiders, then survey topics (and scholars interpreting these issues) of more contemporary relevance such as the media, the "new breed", corporate life, the separation of religion and the state, new religions, and "theorizing on the Japanese" or Nihonjinron.

Continuities of Cosmology As philosophers never tire of telling us, since the relation of human beings to reality is indirect, circumstantial, selective, and above all "metaphorical" (Blumenberg 1987), complicated ways of representing and interpreting life's variables are devised from culture to culture. In order to understand fundamental relationships between contemporary Japanese and the way they see and represent the outside world--a view frequently seen as a mixture of ambivalence, fear, curiosity, calculated risk, and longing--it is important to establish historical precedents for the simple reason that they influence not only the politics but the psychology of this perspective as well.

For the early Japanese, the notion of the marebito (stranger-deity) was one of the ready representations used for encompassing what lay beyond the local community. The marebito was a stranger suddenly appearing in a village--such as a peddler, smith, or shaman--who, in spite of outward appearances, was actually a god in human guise and thus beneficial if properly and respectfully treated (see Yoshida 1981 for examples of the range of this folk tradition). Applicable to anyone outside the sphere of the village, this metaphor was most readily applied to Chinese and Koreans--the predominant foreigners in Japan since the 6th century. Bringing with them Buddhism, the tea ceremony, a writing system, medicine, and metallurgy to name but a few of the beneficial imports, it was nevertheless important that they remained foreigners, since by not sharing in the common meanings of local culture, they could, like the deities and cosmological order itself, manifest a negative side at any moment (Ohnuki-Tierney 1987, 1990).

What developed was a "moral and historical epistemology" of a spiritually and technologically superior "Other" (Najita 1989). Just as representations of marebito were ritually brought into the community in yearly ceremonies (such as those rites for the deity Ebisu), so were outsiders accommodated under equally prescribed circumstances, ones usually allowing for a rapid expulsion should their negative side emerge. When the "southern barbarians" from Portugal suddenly appeared in 1543, this concept was a natural philosophy providing a ready way for local people to cope with their awesome strangeness. It was invoked first in encounters with traders and their exotic firearms and later with the Jesuit missionaries and their equally exotic doctrines (see Nelson 1989). The material and technological rewards were too financially lucrative to be ignored by Japan's three great unifiers, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, but in only 73 years the dangerous side of the Portugese (and later Spanish) "stranger-deities" had emerged as strategic links between missionization and its usurpation of feudal codes of loyalty--a causal first step towards eventual colonialization.

The potentially dangerous stranger-deity, who operates without regard for the established norms of the local community, became an obsessive reality for the third generation of Tokugawa leaders. The archetypal means for dealing with these "others", ranging from ostracism, expulsion, or exorcism, were transformed by experience over the course of some 70 years into new laws and social conventions. First, the sakoku (closed country) edicts extended taboo status beyond mere physical contact with the "other" to an entire cosmological domain encompassing the rest of the world. And, whereas past customs dictated an enforced isolation or expulsion of the external threat, the quarantine now encompassed the dominant community. Finally, to keep everyone--from high ranking samurai to itinerant peddlers--firmly in their place and politically powerless, a strict neo-Confucian hierarchy of classes and occupations was imposed: the "shi-no-ko-sho" ranked the military class at the top, followed by farmers, artisans, and finally merchants, with little or no class mobility permitted. To use Marshall Sahlins' terms (1981), the "contextual values" which evolved from dealing with the traders, missionaries, and their agendas worked back in a direct way on the "conventional values" of the entire society, shaping it into an autocratic but relatively stable system that prevailed until the mid-19th century.

It is hard to underestimate the importance of this largely-undisturbed fermentation and rigidification of religious and ethical institutions that became the hallmark of the Tokugawa age. On the one hand, like the periods preceding and following it, the Tokugawa is "suffused with the sense of the dominant Other" and the country's own marginality (Harootunian 1989). And yet, as noted by Robert Bellah, the neo-Confucian system maintained and intensified commitment to its central values of diligence, economy, and innerworldly asceticism, all of which played an important role in the gradual process of political and economic rationalization (Bellah 1957). Japanese scholars echo this view as well, such as Kanji Nishio's assertion that spiritual culture and industrial technology are not two completely different things but developed along parallel paths in Japan, under a Confucian/Buddhist ethic, just as they did in the West under Christianity (Nishio 1982).

By the end of the Tokugawa period in the mid-19th century, pressure from the United States and Britain to formulate trading agreements had reached the point that negotiations (rather than forced compliance) were in the nation's best interests. The reform-minded Meiji government, while blundering into unfavorable treaties, was able nonetheless to orchestrate Japan's entry into the international market in such a way that foreign values and commodities were accepted or rejected according to whether they were perceived to be threatening to traditional order (Lock 1987).2 Technology, and the systems of knowledge and production required to sustain it, clearly belonged to the Western Other. But unlike the situation in the 16th and 17th centuries--when Japanese leaders slowly came to understand the dangerous relationship between technology, trade, and religious doctrine--this time they were prepared with a nation-wide orthodoxy of their own. What Tetsuo Najita discretely calls a need to prevent the "distortion" of Japanese "ethical and aesthetic sensitivities by the expansive epistemologies of positivism and progress" (1988: 12), Karel van Wolferen more bluntly labels an exercise in implementing new methods of control to "inoculate curious minds against the subversions of individualism, liberalism and democracy" (1989: 258).

Whatever its terminology, the entire social code was restructured around the common meanings of loyalty and filial piety, expressed in an ideology having the Meiji emperor instead of a feudal lord as its primary focus. When the rescript on education was issued in 1890, the entire educational system had the emperor as one of its central precepts to motivate national unity. Known as kokutai, a Chinese term appropriated in the early 19th century, it explained the "national essence" in which "religious, political, and familistic ideals are indissolubly merged" (Bellah 1957, Brown 1971). Based in part on an 8th century tenet of saisei-itchi, which fused religious ritual and government, the kokutai doctrine's most evident symbol was the Imperial family's "unbroken" lineage reaching back to the sun-goddess, Amaterasu.

This attempt to establish a continuity by focusing on suitable historical causalities was what Eric Hobsbawm calls an "invented tradition" (1983), one linking the aristocracy and their subjects to a deeper primordial sense of reality sanctioned by the kami themselves. Needless to say, it also functioned as a way of effectively blocking off explanation and questioning about the interpretable nature of the past (see van Wolferen 1989, Upham 1987, Beer 1984 for other examples of this technique). Kokutai became part of the practices and institutions of a social matrix in which individuals found themselves. Any Japanese, foreign power, or special interest group (opposition political parties or religious groups) who opposed this goal- oriented plan of nationalism, modernization, and eventually imperialism was thought disloyal and an obstacle to be overcome.3 As we will see later, "national essence" philosophy is anything but a relic of the pre-war years.

Post War Restructuring and the Emergence of a "New Breed"

It is difficult to comprehend what happened in the minds of the Japanese people at the time of defeat and in the years thereafter (see Havens 1978). Disorientation and depression, coupled with relief that the ordeal had finally ended, produced an aimless lethargy of spirit focused primarily on rebuilding shattered lives in an environment of poverty and hunger. These domestic concerns, as van Wolferen points out, did not encourage the Japanese to repeat Meiji-style experiments with a centralized state nor would the U.S. occupation have allowed such a move. But as the American occupation carried out diplomatic policies as well as provided a shield for rebuilding the economy, a range of new institutions and ideas slowly began to coalesce. At the same time, however, they intersected with some very old ideas concerning the ambivalent duality between the individual (a concept the Japanese were never really able to nurture due to the political atmosphere and the social realities it dictated) and the Other.

Fundamental to the entire period of reconstruction was the persistent attitude of the West's technological superiority. As we have seen through the examples of the marebito stranger-deities of ancient times and the encounters with Europeans and their objectives in the 16th, 17th, and 19th centuries, the "have/have-not" dichotomy was now most dramatically manifested--affirming again the marginality of the Japanese and providing a symbolic model for them to attain in their emerging society: one where they would someday master the same technology and principles that had so efficiently destroyed their empire.

Since pre-war ideas were thought to be responsible for the terrible defeat and crippling poverty, many of them were readily abandoned in favor of those that could bring about rapid recovery and empowerment. According to Harumi Befu (1990) this period of intense self-criticism is the source of what has come to be known as "Japan bashing" (about which more will be said later). For example, traditional notions of the ie or "household", which was the basic component linking individuals to their families, communities, nation and emperor, were now seen as having been instrumental in creating nationalism. Now, the American-style "nuclear family", with its calm emphasis on individual rights and expressive self-realization was posited as more congenial to the new climate of modernization (Lock 1987). At a wider sphere as well, no longer was Japan located at the center of the world; instead, the victorious countries of the West were seen as having achieved the highest social and institutional development, one which now supplied the norms for social and economic reconstruction.

It was in this climate that the new State emerged, magnanimously bestowed by General MacArthur on the Japanese people in a constitution, without any struggle on their part to wrest power away from those who had it (see Part I of this essay). Not only did this reinforce the generally held belief that the people never had the right to take anything away from those in power, it also worked to propagate the kokutai code of ultimate benevolence (van Wolferen 1989). Once again, people could look to the state as a framework on which to base their attitudes of life, and devote themselves wholeheartedly to a nationally held consensus aimed at bridging the deep rift between gritty post-war realities and an ideal future. Just as pre-war kokutai philosophy formulated a forward-looking stance for the good of the national family in realizing their "sacred" calling, the years of rapid industrialization in the 1950's and 60's were dedicated to a (foreign instituted) state and constitutionally-controlled image of the future. Naturally, this could not be achieved without sacrifice and hard work, but since individuals were guaranteed their freedom and autonomy by law and would personally profit by accumulating material wealth and prosperity, a socially and psychologically consensual middle ground was attained whereby the country could be restored. The constitution itself gradually "metamorphosed" from a set of ideals into a fact of life, with premodern, antimodern, postmodern, and supramodern life styles accorded the same validity as that posited by the constitution as "modern" (Nakano 1986). As the Japanese soon proved to an astonished world, a lot of hard work goes a very long way, especially when a big brother like the United States is doing everything it can to encourage stability and maintain the status quo. Writers such as Abegglen (1973, 1985) and Ouchi (1981), among a score of others, have documented this success and posited it as a model for the industrialized West because of its humane use of labor, high morale, good management, and orderly change and reinvestment. Others, van Wolferen (1989), Prestowitz (1988) and Vogel (1979) among them, challenge this view, saying that the Japanese way of managing organizations and companies is intrusive and overly manipulative of its workers' lives. Following Johnson's study of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI, 1982), scholars quickly caught on to the essential characteristic of Japan's reconstruction: that of a tightly knit intercooperation and dependence between the corporate and governmental ruling elites. Parallels are frequently drawn (such as in Taylor 1983) between the paternalistic way Japanese corporations are run and the feudal nature of Tokugawa society's neo- Confucian code of ethics.

However, internal political factions within corporate and governmental bureaucracies, student and social protest movements, and occasional scandals in the government have been sources of conflict in the post-war government's ideal to modernize. While presenting a surface appearance of consensus and harmony (the tatemae ), the essential issue was the exercise of power (the honne ) by varying interest groups, individuals, and in-group/out-group dichotomies (Krauss and Rohlen 1984). What few case studies exist in English- -such as that of Minamata by Upham (1987), of the Burakumin by De Vos and Wagatsuma (1967) or Beer (1984), environmental and teacher/unionization movements by Beer or van Wolferen (1989) or of the ongoing saga of foreign professional baseball players in the Japanese leagues by Whiting (1989)-- highlight a persistent subordination of individual interests to those of the organization. To writers such as van Wolferen and Smith (1983), this amounts to little more than oppression since what recourses are available for dissenting Japanese to challenge the "System" alienates and leads to their ostracism.

Japanese schools were seen as producing well-socialized citizens who could quickly adapt to whatever social role was required of them--yet, as Rolen showed in his study of high schools (1983), cynicism, indifference, and student-directed brutality often accompany what is still the world's highest literacy rate. Factories and corporations provided the illusion of lifetime employment for their workers although it was a reality for only 30% of the nation's workforce (Plath 1980, Vogel 1979). The democratically-elected government gave the appearance of answering to the will of the voting public, with local candidates being turned out or reaffirmed according to their responsiveness in handling local and national priorities, yet very little threatened the grip of the Liberal Democratic Party as representatives and prime ministers came and went with consistent regularity (Ishida and Krauss1989, Ishii 1980, Ward 1968).

To outside observers basing their judgments on GNP, unemployment, and mean income statistics, the 1960's and early 70's brought nothing but smashing success for Japan. The importance of diligence and frugality as guiding principles had shown substantial rewards at the corporate and individual levels (see early Reischauer or Abegglen for this view), with government responsive to protecting those gains. The general excellence of the corporate sector's technological achievements in automobiles, shipbuilding and electronics were seen, by insiders and foreigners, as "clothed in the traditional cloth of bushido ethics" (Najita 1989) stressing loyalty and self-sacrifice to achieve a common good. To draw rigid lines separating what is stereotyped as "tradition" from what is elevated as "modern" is a myopic misreading of the essential foundations upon which cultures are built. Edward Shils (1981) points out that traditional values are often unfairly maligned as detriments to progress--a theory nicely evidenced in a study of a farming village's transformation to a ski resort (Moon 1989).

One would hardly need more conclusive proof of this recurring theme in Japanese society than their economy in the 1960's. Those selective elements of both neo-Confucian and kokutai doctrine appropriated for building an ethical consensus regarding the relation of the individual to his occupation-- the "spirit" of the organization (see Moeran 1983 or Frager and Rohlen 1978 for wide-ranging discussions of seishin throughout Japanese society) blended with a symbiosis of individual "spirit"-- were crucial for Japan's "economic miracle."

And yet, there were signs that the government had increased its bureaucratic and legal powers to such a degree as to render it almost impenetrable to citizen inquiry, much less control (Dore 1980). The decision makers and power elites were seen by some as allocating the lives of the common person for the growth of power and its legitimation, based primarily on ways to optimize the efficiency of their corporate or institutional system's performance. Amerikabyo, or the "American diseases" of expressive individualism and the autonomous pursuit of happiness had been recognized and guarded against before the war with kokutai doctrines. Now, the emerging fissures in the industrial monolith's social supports were grouped by social commentators under the term bunmeibyo, or "diseases of civilization." Among these problems were (and continue to be) sleep disturbances, the "school refusal syndrome", "apartment neurosis", "the kitchen syndrome", "moving-day depression", and a disturbing trend of divorces, suicides, and family violence by children directed at their parents (Lock 1987).

Workers were enjoying more material wealth than ever before, but the moment they tried to negotiate the leisure time to enjoy it informally, apart from the group--whether this meant skipping the evening round of drinks with colleagues (see Atsumi 1979) or a shorter work week--they were chided for being the "nail that sticks up" soon "hammered down" (Plath 1969). Only in formal, organization-sanctioned tourism (both domestic and international) could company-men and upscale families or couples enjoy the three-to-five days of hard-won benefits of their labors. And yet, as Nelson Graburn (1983) has convincingly shown, the organizational aspects of group tourism are composed of informal control mechanisms on interpersonal relations, requiring "send- off" money, souvenirs, and memorial photographs as ways for acknowledging obligations and group connections (see also Moeran 1983).

One of the approaches in documenting the strictures of the post-war lifestyle and the repressed need for liberation is to turn to the astounding rise of adherents to "new religions." Early works (Thomsen 1963, McFarland 1967) frequently linked this "rush hour of the gods" to the disruption of traditional social values and the personal anxiety of living in uncertain times. Yet, to see the "new religions" in such a light is, according to Byron Earhart (1989), like calling them "deviant responses to abnormal conditions" thus reducing them to a single causative factor. Earhart has shown, as few others have, that for a "new religion" to be successful (such as Tenrikyo [in which shamanistic healing is still important], Soka-Gakkai [shamanism mixed with nationalism and materialism], or Gedatsu-kai [family-centered rather than household-centered worship]) , it must carefully blend the innovative decisions of its founders with existing religious and social conditions. By doing so, adherents are given prescriptive rituals for coping with not only their frailties but their aspirations as well.

It is in the nature of these aspirations for leading a fulfilling life where generational lines are most clearly seen. The children of the post- war's workaholic salary men and factory laborers, raised in the increasingly differentiated social environment of the 1970's, have not been as patient as their parents in trying to follow the narrow road of socially sanctioned behavioral patterns. The efforts of their elders placed this new generation in a private haven of security forged out of the hardships of the post-war years. But, because these children had no direct experience of the past as a time of injustice and ordeals, it was no longer sustaining for them to structure their identity and future upon the same civilization and ideology of work as their parents (Miyoshi and Harootunian 1989). Secondly, the "new breed" no longer saw in the society around them the sharp vertical cleavages of the past between what Marilyn Ivy (1989) calls high culture and mass culture, or between dominant and subcultures. With the majority of the population self-described members of the middle class, a growing feeling emerged that current society, while created by the processes of industrialization, was no longer "amenable to management by principles of industrialization alone" (Yamazaki 1983).

For the new generation, the values of self-sacrifice, endurance, and loyalty for the higher cause were still part of the common meaning of Japanese society (as embodied by most Japanese TV dramas [see Buruma 1984]), but even among the vast middle class there was no longer a consensus about the degree to which these values were to be carried. All along, cultural constructions of common meaning had preceded and framed Japan's technological progress by way of informing its ideology and granting it power, but that the culture now generated contests over the meaning of this advance was something few leaders or social architects had anticipated (Najita 1989).

The magic words of intellectual circles in the late l970's and l980's became relativization, diversification, and differentiation (Nishibe 1986). Many people in general but youth in particular began to seek increasing ways of cultural compensation to balance those strictures cloaking (some would say "choking") the achievements they were expected to strive for. They would still be students, salarymen, office girls, and spouses but the degree to which their identity depended on these roles became more and more obscure. An anecdote by the magazine editor who created the term shinjinrui or "new breed" illuminates just this point:

Just when the company was entering an extremely busy period, a 'new breed' employee decided to go on vacation. He returned tan and fit, and when his superior learned that he had taken off to go skiing, he was scolded roundly for his lack of consideration for his fellow workers who had to shoulder his share of the work in his absence. But this scolding made this superior highly unpopular, since the employee, as well as the other workers, saw nothing wrong with going skiing. To them that was more important than any amount of work in the company. (Chikushi 1986)

With "traditional" values in question and a distinct social context lacking--as had been provided by the student movement, Vietnam protests, or Lockeed scandals--the new generation turned increasingly to the media for a sense of identity (see articles by McDonald on film, Stronach on television, and Lent on comics in Powers and Kato, 1989). Terms like "the local era" (in vogue at the end of the 70's to emphasize the diversification of control), "moratorium person" (someone who yearns for an illusory simplicity of a romanticized past--early 80's), the "Peter Pan syndrome" (used for men who refuse to cut maternal ties and assume responsibility for their lives--early 80's) and "schizo kids" (those persons split between traditional values and the need for self-discovery--mid and late 80's) all served as mirrors to reflect a social context in an age that didn't create its own (Okogi 1984).

In short, it may be argued that despite differences in external cultural values--with their fads and fashion trends of punk hairstyles, mini-skirts, and a continued fascination with foreign ideas (all of which are commodified in commercials and advertisements)--the underlying social values have remained essentially the same. To keep up with the latest styles, as well as accumulate those commodities which enhance individual worth and shape identity, the youth of today place equal if not greater emphasis on money than did their parents (Tetsuya 1986). Work, the workplace, and the corporate group are still important for individuals but the only progressive ideology they hold is how quickly individuals attain immediate and tangible rewards. The new "cultural centers" of Japan, according to Moriya (1988), are those mass-marketed activities possible only in a prosperous urban (or suburban) setting. Accustomed to comfort and security, the new generations of the 80's and 90's have no revolutionary leftist leanings as did many students and workers of the late 1950's and 60's--in fact, if the voting records of recent elections are any indicator, they have little interest in politics at all, a fact that has fostered a political vacuum allowing for a resurgence of the right wing (van Wolferen 1989).

The Rhetoric of Revitalization: Nihonjinron

But to many of the older generation in Japan , the acceptance of self- interest as the operating principle of life extends far beyond the pursuit of material goods. It is feared that the emphasis in the 1980's on wealth and individual autonomy (once so valued as Lockean fundamentals at the heart of capitalism) have emptied out the important virtues of self-restraint, concern for the general good, and a certain amount of patriotism needed to sustain the system (Griffith 1989).

To try and arrest this trend of what is seen as dangerous individualism and "diseases of civilization", a movement in both popular and scholarly writing has shown a revival of an early cosmological construct that once again delineates between insiders and outsiders. Called Nihonjinron ("theorizing on the Japanese"), these new writings are based on ad-hoc notions of separateness, uniqueness, and kokutai-style "essences" that make up Japan and its citizenry. Appearing as government rhetoric, historical commentary, social science or even in scientific research, more than 700 monographs alone (not counting the popular press) have attempted to create a kind of civil religion of "Japaneseness" from which few can escape (Lock 1987) and which, in effect, degrade Western ideas of political self-assertion, individual worth, and logical consistency (van Wolferen, 1989). Not only do the ideas behind Nihonjinron emphasize the notion that the Japanese are different, it claims an innate superiority over what the rest of the world has to offer because of the uniqueness of this difference. One of the fears of greater internationalization, as addressed by many Nihonjinron -type writers, is that it will lead to an ambivalence towards Japanese culture that will paralyze its institutions (Aoki 1988).

Functioning as a kind of "everyman and woman" the Japanese of Nihonjinron can be ascribed a single subjectivity for psychology, aesthetics, education, and, most importantly, values. A trend evident in works by such eminent authors as Chie Nakane, Takeo Doi, Shichihei Yamamoto, and Bin Kimura to name but a few (see Peter Dale's critique of Nakane and Doi, 1986), it has been most blatantly represented in the speeches of former Prime Minister Nakasone with his inflammatory remarks on minorities, minzoku , and the Japanese "mission" abroad (see van Wolferen, p. 264 for a full discussion).

The obvious argument is to see this tendency as a reaction to the post- war period of breakneck industrialization and material affluence, and to dismiss it as hopelessly out-of-date rhetoric and nothing more. But leading Japanese politicians and industrialists (most of whom were educated before or during the war) continue to see the world as a dichotomy of beneficial and controlled "inner" essences and threatening but tantalizing "outer" forces which have their roots in Western epistemologies. Several of the Nakasone government's ministers (most notably the Education Minister Fujio) were forced to resign after they publicly voiced opinions--such as how Korea "assented" to its own annexation in 1910--informed by "national essence" ideology. In 1987, though under a new head, the same Ministry of Education explained to textbook authors writing about the constitution the need to shift emphasis from how individual rights are guaranteed to social and national responsibilities (van Wolferen 1989).

1987 also brought the adoption by the Nakasone government of The Fourth Comprehensive National Development Plan, or "Yonzenso", which has the noble task of creating less congested urban areas by redeploying Tokyo-based industries throughout the country. But instead of developing these regional capitals to handle their own international affairs and cultural exchanges, the administrators of Yonzenso--influenced by Nihonjinron writings about eroding social values --intend to limit direct foreign contact to the national and corporate levels. Not only will this policy slow and possibly even prevent Japan from becoming truly international (as, say, Bremen is in West Germany or Edmonton in Canada) it will also limit the competitiveness of redeployed companies in the international marketplace (Tamura 1987). With millions of people and trillions of yen affected by such policies, one can hardly dismiss the "inner/outer" demarcations of Nihonjinron ideology as anachronistic and illusory.

An ongoing controversy that is equally fueled by Nihonjinron rhetorical ideology is that of the separation of religion and the state in the Yasukuni shrine controversy (see Fukatsu 1987) as well as in the use of Shinto ceremonies for groundbreaking ceremonies at a regional governmental level and the newly instigated Kenkoku-kinen-bi or "Constitution Day" (Iisaka 1971). Bills have been introduced five times that would recognize Shinto shrines as non-religious institutions conveying traditional Japanese traditions. If passed, shrines could then be used for "secular", governmental ceremonies, though writers such as Upham (1987), Befu (1990, 1984), and van Wolferen (1989) would be among the first to ring the alarms of a newly revitalized nationalism in which the state (like that of the 7th century) again has religious and political authority. Attempts to call attention to these political and economic ploys, as well as the ideology behind them, have been grouped by the Japanese press (in Japan) into the category of "Japan bashers". In effect, the label creates a defense against criticism of any sort as it implies that critiques of Japan's trading policies or political systems is a racist swipe at the entirety of Japanese culture. The "Gang of Four"--van Wolferen, Prestowitz, Fallows, and Johnson--receive the brunt of the tirade leveled against "Japan bashers", although the Asahi Shinbun recently completed a thirty-five part series as a finger-pointing campaign to identify other culprits as well.

Singularly vitriolic in returning criticism in the form of "America bashing" has been the unofficial translation (paid for by the Pentagon and circulated in 1989) of A Japan that Can Say "No!" (Ishihara and Morita 1989) written by a conservative politician and the director of Sony Corporation. Widely read in its Japanese version, the message to the United States is simple: either clean up your own act--the "structural impediments" of crime, racism, drugs, fiscal irresponsibility, and educational demise--or Japan will look elsewhere for a trading and defense partner. While adding to the escalating tensions between the two countries, cooler heads on both sides realize the immense losses that would occur should the current stalemate over trade and capital investments fester into an all-out economic "war".

If Japan's leaders are to preserve the substantial gains of the last forty years, it will take far more than a campaign of indoctrination that persuades their constituents to withdraw behind barriers of culture and "national essence". These leaders will need courage and foresight to address such pressing domestic problems as the high cost of food and housing (twice as much as in the U.S.), the long work hours routinely observed by Japanese salarymen (500 hours a year longer), the limited time with family that companies expect of their workers (36 minutes a day with their children), and a discontent with the school system as well as how to care for a tidal wave of elderly retirees in the coming two decades. Those other concerns mentioned earlier--value formation, fulfilling expected roles, and establishing an authentic identity--must also receive attention and study.

The leaders of Japan have never been very good about explaining their objectives in a satisfying way. They have communicated with their own people through several manifestations of the same coercive ideology, and with the world community via "things, not words" (Inouye 1989). But, as H.G. Gadamer observes (1987), since technical and ethical know-how both imply a practical knowledge fashioned to the measure of the concrete tasks before them, an honest awareness of history can instruct the Japanese in the ultimate failure of overriding ideologies as a means of motivating its populace. The historical consciousness characterizing contemporary man is "a privilege as well as a burden, the likes of which have never imposed on any previous generation" (Gadamer 1987:89). But it should help the Japanese see how the two centuries of the Tokugawa brought stability at the expense of freedom and how the Meiji and Showa eras brought unity and industrialization at the cost of millions of lives throughout Asia and devastation at home. For Japan, as for post-industrial societies worldwide, new conceptual frameworks are demanded that require flexibility and foresight if a pluralistic democracy of values and social codes are to nurture instead of alienate the coming generations.

2 Among the restricted imports were the woman's suffrage movement, the use of cocaine in medicinal tonics, and a free market for firearms.

3 It should be remembered that the kokutai of this period was largely in reaction to the expansionistic maneuverings of western powers and the forced trade agreements of the mid-19th centuries that Japan spent fifty years trying to escape. By the early1930's, the "A,B,C,D encirclement"--that of the Americans, British, Chinese, and Dutch--was forwarded as the motivating pressure for increasing the fever pitch of kokutai ideology and striking before being struck. The invasion of Manchuria was the most immediate result and was legitimized in the Kokutai no Hongi , a 1937 propaganda booklet issued by the Ministry of Education, which explained the "national essence" as a "vitality" that unavoidably expressed itself by the invasion (van Wolferen 1989: 288).

-John Nelson, Japan Faculty, UT Austin