"Japan is erupting into a different culture"

[Mulboyne]

[Charles]

I recall reading a review of a similar book. The Japanese author complained that the new generation of youths had no respect for the traditions and institutions of the previous generation, how Japan was undergoing pressure from abroad, and he ranted about how this threatened to cause a schism in society that would destroy Japan as he knew it. If I recall correctly, the book was written around 800 years ago.

[Captain Japan]

It's always worth writing an article like this now and again on the basis that it'll generally be forgotten if nothing happens but you'll look great on the off-chance that student riots break out or if there is a military coup.

Optimistic professor trumpets Japan's hidden revolution
Anthony Fensom / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Japan's Quiet Transformation: Social Change and Civil Society in the Twenty-First Century
By Jeff Kingston
RoutledgeCurzon, 358 pp, 28.95 dollars
[quote]How the mighty have fallen. Seventeen years ago, American academic Jeff Kingston departed from an Indonesia wracked by financial crisis to head for Japan, then on a seemingly inexorable rise toward becoming the world's top economic superpower. In London recently to launch his new book, Japan's Quiet Transformation: Social Change and Civil Society in the Twenty-First Century, Kingston was asked whether he was trying to explain how Japan was not the Bangladesh of North Asia.

That this country could sink so low in international esteem, and the reputations of bureaucrats, business leaders and politicians could be dragged through so much mud, would stun anyone whose knowledge of Japan extended only to 1987. But for anyone with even a passing interest in this nation's fortunes over the past decade, it's all too easy to make such a comparison.

The problems have been well publicized: The most rapidly aging society in the world, the highest public debt level in the industrialized world, a decade of falling land and stock prices, declining education standards, rising crime, divorce, suicide, youth delinquency and all-too-frequent scandals involving everyone from elite civil servants to doctors, not to mention politicians and their business associates with their snouts in the trough.

But while it's easy to throw your hands in the air and dismiss Japan as a country drowning in a tsunami of its own making--as many have done--it might be worth paying attention to Kingston's important finding: Something positive is happening here. It's just been happening so quietly, so incrementally, that we all missed it.

Thankfully, Kingston, now a professor of history at Temple University Japan, did not miss it. By tying together the strands of social change during the "lost decade" of the 1990s, he shows how a revolution is taking place in what was long considered a straitjacketed society in which a populace of meek, conformist, corporate slaves kowtow to those in authority.

According to the 47-year-old scholar, mutually reinforcing reforms in the areas of information disclosure, nonprofit organizations and the legal profession are laying the groundwork for a more open and vibrant civil society built on the rubble of a discredited postwar system.

Kingston's work is a stark contrast to the gloomy vision of Japan painted by Alex Kerr in Dogs and Demons, which predicted the nation would continue to stagnate and finally die as obliviously as a frog put in cold water and slowly boiled.

Since Kingston's view differs sharply from the prevailing media orthodoxy, he may have expected a cynical audience at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo, where he spoke recently at an event to launch his book. Telling the assembled hacks that the media had failed to recognize the social transformation taking place, Kingston said the stagnation argument had been overdone--just as the "Japan as No. 1" line was overblown a decade earlier.

According to the author, Japan is on the cusp of a "third great transformation" following the Meiji Restoration and the postwar Occupation. But while the earlier reform revolutions were imposed from above, Kingston said the current changes were being driven by the grass roots, and as such were much more durable and wide-ranging.

Kingston sees four engines of change:

k A growing gap between values and reality, such as government policies that assume stable families with full-time homemakers, compared with the fact that 60 percent of Japanese households are double-income families.

k A globalization of norms, in which Japan is being pushed to come in line with international standards in such areas as banning child pornography and racial discrimination.

k A demographic time bomb necessitating more assistance to working women.

k The collapse of the postwar "iron triangle" of government, big business and the Liberal Democratic Party that he calls "Japan Inc."

But it's not all good news--according to Kingston, the nation still faces significant challenges in dealing with a tanking economy and dysfunctional political system.

However, the author reveals possible solutions for the problems of the past decade. In privatization, he sees the possible death of a construction state that consumes 40 percent of the national budget]

[Mulboyne]

"Critics will always say, 'What about this or that (particular issue) that hasn't changed?' and my response is that a better barometer of change in Japan is not what has not yet changed, but how much has changed so rapidly in just 10 years...What was once unthinkable is now already happening," Kingston said.

That is certainly true. I think I would be more surprised, though, if Japan hadn't changed. What was unthinkable in 1960 was do-able in 1970. Looking at the post-bubble period, I don't think any developed economy looks the same as it did in 1990. With Japan, however, this change gets dismissed as irrelevant by commentators who believe that the underlying faultlines (banking system, government debt, ageing society) still exist to bring about an economic apocalypse. Or else it is overemphasized as a sign of an imminent major turnaround.
"Japan At a Crossroad" will always gets more attention than "Japan Bumbling Along, Evolving"

[Bongo]

Thought the military coup had already taken place.
Considering on of the top JSDF men illegally submitted certain changes they wanted to reform the Japanese constitution at the request of an LDP politician? Just because they don't fire their guns doesn't mean it isn't a military coup!

[tonkatsu]

Sonno Joi!

[goldenboy_ge]

Interesting book.

[emperor]

I bought that book a couple of years ago and only got a about 10 or 20 pages into it - i must take it down off the shelf and dust it off

[Captain Japan]

Tom Plate gets into it...
Waiting for Japan to change -- or can it?
Japan Times
By TOM PLATE

LOS ANGELES -- For as long as I write this column on Asia, which enters into its 10th year next month, I doubt I'll ever witness anything as amusing or telling as the flareup that took place at the close of the University of Southern California's Asia Conference last month.

Until the very end, the two-plus-day event -- on "Japan's New Economy for Foreign Investors" -- had gone swimmingly. Everyone on the panel, from Toshiaki Ogasawara, the well-known publisher of The Japan Times, to the dynamic USC Annenberg School Dean Geoffrey Cowan, had agreed that Japan's economy was indeed a globalized flower garden opening up to outsiders faster than an overnight burst of spring. The consensus in the large hall at the elegant Shilla Hotel in Seoul was seemingly harmonious -- until a single dissonant voice boomed out.

The consensus-breaker was a normally placid Thai businessman who, like a Buddhist monk, ordinarily kept his true thoughts to himself. But he just couldn't take it any more and lambasted the entire panel for being in denial about the reality of Japan. He recounted a recent all-too-typical business trip in which he encountered at every step Japanese brick walls, closed Japanese minds and zipped-up Japanese markets.

If Japan is now trying to convince people it is suddenly entirely different, this foreign visitor wasn't buying.

He mentions "generational cleavage" as well...

[Mulboyne]

"Japan At a Crossroads" will always gets more attention than "Japan Bumbling Along, Evolving"

It took longer than expected but the old, trusty headline has been wheeled out again...

FT: Japan at a Crossroads

Just as Japan's growth engine is accelerating, it is emitting disturbing sounds. This week investigators raided Livedoor, the acquisitive internet group, over possible financial irregularities. Two days later, the Tokyo Stock Exchange had to close early after surging orders overwhelmed its systems. The events have shattered the once-staid facade of corporate Japan. They suggest that while the economy is returning to normal, below the surface it is far from business as usual. What is less clear is whether what is going on is simply the country adjusting to unfamiliar challenges, or betokens structural problems that could hold it back.

The rest of the article is only available as a premium link but, like all articles entitled "Japan at a Crossroads" over the last 30 years, in summary it says "We've noticed a few things take place in Japan recently but, since we don't really know what is important, we can only conclude that anything could happen".

[Mulboyne]

"Japan At a Crossroads" will always gets more attention than "Japan Bumbling Along, Evolving"

This writer also couldn't resist the "crossroads" image. This time talking about war responsibility:

Japan is at a crossroads: One path, paved by those who acknowledge past atrocities, leads to reconciliation, the other, built by those who ignore history, descends further into the oblivion.

That's only two paths, though. I think he means a fork in the road or a T-junction.

[Mulboyne]

[dimwit]

By the way how does culture 'erupt'. My guess is that Mr. Plate is plaguerizing some spam e-mail that was sent his way.

[Taro Toporific]

[Mulboyne]

[nottu]

[Taro Toporific]

Roger Pulvers puts his pundit hat on in the Japan Times:

In Japan, there's a 'quiet revolution' afoot

Even though Pulvers has been here 30(?) years, he just wrote this humor piece.

[INDENT]

COUNTERPOINT
[SIZE="3"]Humor may be universal, but Japan's is largely its smut-free own[/SIZE]
Japan Times. Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009]
Swedes crack jokes about Norwegians, Poles knock the Russians, and though everyone likes a good Italian joke, they're less funny than they used to be thanks to the genuinely grotesque antics of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
But Japanese do not tell jokes at the expense of their neighbors, the Koreans and Chinese.
They also don't tell jokes centering on taboos, other religions, people with variegated sexual preferences or people in power. The dirty joke is virtually unknown here; and when foreign fellows tell them to their Japanese girl friends, the reaction is invariably a swift geeee! (yuk!), followed by sayonara (goodbye).[floatr][/floatr]
So, if you can't make fun of taboos, other nationalities or religions, powerful people or the highlights of sexual proclivities, what's left to be funny about?
The Japanese sense of social propriety dictates that humor in bad taste is vulgar[url=http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20090809rp.html]....[/INDENT]

[Behan]