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Book review: Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival
David Pilling presents an eye-opening portrait of Japan’s peculiar charms
By John Kampfner / The Guardian
Japan and the Art of Survival, by David Pilling.
Is Japan the most culturally specific country on Earth? Each time I go there I marvel at the eccentricities: the taxi and bus drivers with their gloves, the ritual of the onsen bath house and the incessant bowing. Nowhere else induces in me such feelings of amused amazement.
David Pilling is an Anglo expert on Japan. Some might say that’s an oxymoron, but he is at least one of those foreign correspondents who does not have to try very hard to show his knowledge. Pilling spent most of the first decade of the 21st century in Tokyo and went back to cover the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake. The result is an authoritative and entertaining attempt to explain the mysteries of the shimaguni, the island nation, and its centuries-old determination to withstand outside influences.
The story begins and ends with the disaster that struck the coastal city of Sendai and destroyed the Fukushima nuclear station, with consequences for hundreds of miles around. The author points to systemic failures in the nuclear industry, a combination of the use of casual labor and a management culture that encouraged unquestioning loyalty over robust risk-assessment.
Some still struggle to take in the idea that Japan could be anything but efficient. But Pilling helps to explain the extent to which a business model that served the country so well during the great recovery after the second world war has also been at the heart of its more recent economic stagnation.
The postwar Japanese company was modeled as a social organization and most continue to be this to this day. Teams of graduates are recruited each year on the assumption that they will stay with the same firm until retirement. It is, the author suggests, a form of indoctrination, turning them into obedient employees. “It was a career escalator determined not by merit but by length of service, a system that encouraged loyalty and cooperation, not a battle among employees to prove who was most worthy of advancement.”