Viewed Sideways. Donald Richie
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aru, in the language. There are many other and more complicated examples of pressure, and the result is a cultural internalization that informs the citizens of just where the line of social acceptability is drawn.
When a country internalizes official dictates—making, in Freudian terms, the parental government into a superego—one of the results is a rigidity of opinion. This is at the same time accompanied by a flexibility of application, for otherwise life would become intolerable.
This internalization helps create a great pragmatism and an attitude tolerant of a wide range of behavior, so long as it poses no threat. Everything is case by case, except for the final case. One learns where to draw the line. And my taxi driver had just stepped across it.
This is something that is now occurring much more frequently. To be sure, it is still the rare Japanese who will speak his or her mind outright in public. The brave mayor of Nagasaki is one such exception and he was consequently shot by a rightist—a political extreme sharing authoritarian concerns. Yet the number of people willing to speak out privately does seem to be growing.
There have, indeed, been some periods when ordinary nonofficial Japanese freely spoke their mind, freed of the Tokugawa mind-set. Film Director Nagisa Oshima has mentioned two of them. One was at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, just after the fall of the house of Tokugawa in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the other was at the end of the Pacific War in the middle of the twentieth. Both periods fostered freely expressed opinion since all major methods of repression and punishment had broken down.
Yet freedom is difficult to live with. Most societies prefer compromise to chaos, and people like peace. Hence, after both of these periods, governments intent on creating national harmony were again back with their advice and suggested guidelines.
If the Japanese now seem to be individually voicing opinion it is perhaps because the process of cultural internalization is again breaking down. The reason would be that Japan is at present undergoing an era of social change and the old parental/authoritarian model is not able to cope with what is occurring.
Just one of the symptoms is the current rift in the Japan–U.S. relationship. One of the causes is the big-brother-like ways of government and business, the assumption that economic prowess is all, that convenience is a sensible national goal, and that all development is invariably good.
One of the results of this rift, and an indication of the breakdown of internalization, is the growing apprehension, seen in the media and in conversation, that purely economic progress has produced some truly negative results.
There are now Japanese citizen’s groups that openly oppose more progress. They are against yet more mercantile-minded world expositions; they openly try to prevent the construction of yet more golf courses; they even buy up land so that it cannot be utilized for development.
It is, to be sure, telling that it is concerned groups that do this rather than concerned individuals. But one of the legacies of a totalitarian repression is the sure knowledge that only a group can counter another group. At the same time, Japan is now experiencing a small but real revolution in the very presence of those groups that disagree with the ways of the major model.
And there certainly remains in the country an old-fashioned element that would still like to expel the foreign and once more slam shut the cultural door. Yet, despite the fact that the door was never really opened (Commodore Matthew Perry merely cracked it), such closure is now impossible. Economically, Japan is a part of the rest of the world. Without trade, the country could not feed even half of its citizens, and one cannot trade from behind closed doors. And so, despite heel digging at the governmental level, Japan will keep on becoming the only thing it can be: a different kind of country.
Much will be lost, but much of that—traditional Japan—has now become so gentrified, so compromised, that one can only question its assumed validity. Patterns of thought, cultural assumptions, and language itself are changing as the internalization process continues to break slowly down.
What Japan is changing into I cannot even guess. One sort of Japan observer insists that though forms change, the spirit is maintained. You tear down the old neighborhood but build it over again in the high-rise that takes its place. Well, yes, but has the spirit been maintained after an operation that extensive? I feel that something basic has been changed.
I also feel that this is the price that change extracts. And current pressures from both outside and inside the country are changing the kind of Japaneseness that has resulted in a people mostly afraid to speak out because the conceptual framework for being afraid is still in place.
Just who these new outspoken Japanese will be is something I can guess even less. From among the young? Yes, I hope so, but looking around me I seem to see mainly productions of a society that pushes docility: manga-minded, game-addicted boys and girls who wander around in earphone sets. There are many exceptions I am sure, but these super-dociles form the more visible element.
An inarticulate and uncomplaining general public is the answer to the collective wish of society (any society) and consequently of (all) governments. Here we would have ideal citizens, all of them agreeing and all of them contributing in their passive way to the great ideal of unthinking harmony.
Yet, there are dissenters in the ranks, and I think that these will become more numerous as authoritarian ways are becoming more questioned. A chorus of concerned groups and individual voices—Oshima, the mayor of Nagasaki, my taxi driver—are growing in number and in volume.
—1991
Interpretations of Japan
Perceived as somehow different, Japan has long seemed to require interpretation. It is assumed that the country and its culture is not to be comprehended without some sort of mediation, that before the place can be properly understood a theoretical toolkit is needed—models, metaphors, paradigms.
This seems strange. Few other places are thought to need such explication. Yet, one still hears about mysterious, enigmatic Japan though few have ever referred to, say, mysterious, enigmatic Luxembourg.
There are, to be sure, reasons for this, among these that Japan only relatively recently—some century and a half ago—joined what is sometimes called “the family of nations.” Before that it was a hermit empire, closed and by nature unknown. It was perceived as different because it was not a family member. Another reason, however, is that Japan itself early learned to value its singularity; being unique, being difficult to understand—these are qualities of which much can be made during “family” squabbles.
Due to the perceptions of those outside the country and the inclinations of those inside it, there is now an accumulation of well over a century’s worth of interpretations—a whole chronology of attempts. A short perusal of these strata indicates some of the shapes that Japan has assumed in the eyes of others and of itself, those levels of “appreciation” upon which apprehension is even now based.
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A major assumption has always been that each approach presumes a nearer accuracy even though these various interpretations overlap. At the same time prudence is advised. Lafcadio Hearn’s early endeavor is cautiously titled Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation. Perhaps this initial discretion—an attempt rather than a certainty—is the result of even earlier explanations having been so reckless.
One of the first was discovered after Commodore Perry had “opened up” the country. The contents were carelessly examined and the first paradigm was minted. Japan was to be seen as the opposite to the West. The country was what one of the earlier writers called a topsy-turvy land, one in which everything was upside down, a state to be found either disconcerting or delightful. Here is Mark Twain on the subject: “Their coin is square instead of round; their workmen pull the saw and plane, instead of pushing; they begin dinner with tea and confections and close with the heavy work; they love turnips and disallow potatoes.”
In his Things Japanese, one of the first serious attempts to describe Japan to the West, Basil Hall Chamberlain has a whole section on “Topsy-turvydom” in which he lists examples and then says, “It was only the other