Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Read Online Free

does her bit.’ Not all foreign visitors are so forgiving. David Mitchell, the author of
Cloud Atlas
, once told me a story about when he was living with his Japanese wife and two young children in the claustrophobic atmosphere of Hagi, an old samurai town in western Japan. The mothers at school routinely referred to his children as ‘half’, the standard – and to the Japanese inoffensive – term for someone who is half Japanese. The word upset Mitchell, who spent hours explaining that his children were not ‘half’, but ‘both’, a perfect whole. The Japanese, he concluded, were not good at living on cultural ‘borders or thresholds’. After a year, Mitchell took his young family back to Ireland.
    Sugimoto’s ‘trade-off model’ doesn’t work perfectly. It can set up false dichotomies. Japan could very plausibly be more open and international and just as civil and harmonious. Strong, confident societies can absorb foreign influences – and people – without disrupting their basic equilibrium. Japan would do well to throw open its universities to foreign students and encourage more of its own young people tofan out across the world, as its Meiji pioneers did, in search of new ideas. Perhaps Japan could even find a way of combining better business efficiency with low levels of unemployment, or learn how to foster a generation of rugged individualists nevertheless willing to participate in group calisthenics. Social systems, however, are not always easy to disentangle. Their strengths are often their weaknesses and vice versa. Cultures are not menus from which one can order à la carte.
    Partly for that reason, this book is light on prescription. Those looking for a lecture on how the Japanese should revive their economy or overhaul their ‘mindset’ may be disappointed. For the record, I don’t disagree with some of the standard prescriptions. In my opinion, Japan would indeed be a better place if it were less closed, less conservative, more aware of its recently violent history and more willing to unleash the talents of its women. It would benefit if it could foster a more participatory democracy and stabilize its dysfunctional political system. Doubtless, it should work harder too at generating more economic growth – perhaps through a combination of economic liberalization, more open trade and more aggressive monetary policy. It would be a more dynamic society if it had more entrepreneurs willing to take a risk and an education system that produced more original thinkers. In the medium turn, it may indeed need to raise taxes or cut spending, or both, if it is to clear up its fiscal mess. Yet to say so does not get us very far. It is not as if many academics and policymakers in Japan haven’t said much the same thing. The shopping list of what Japan ‘ought to do’ may be obvious, but it can also be glib and unsatisfying.
    This book, then, will concentrate on Japan as I find it, not Japan as I would like it to be. My assumption is that it is a society in the process of adapting and evolving, albeit in its own, sometimes frustrating, way. And if we should not think of Japan as fixed and unchanging, neither should we treat it as homogenous. Though the Japanese harbour an image of themselves as uniquely harmonious, theirs is a country, as any other, cut across by class, region, gender and age, challenged by subcultures and shaped by structural change. Any utterance that begins with the phrase ‘the Japanese think’ should be treated with utmost scepticism. In deference to that reality, these pages seekto allow, wherever feasible, the Japanese to speak for themselves, in all their diversity and noisy disagreement. Some of these opinions are critiqued along the way, but many are presented more or less unfiltered – as I found them.
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    Part I of the book, ‘Tsunami’, is an account of how ordinary people, especially in the coastal towns most affected by the catastrophe of 11