News & Reviews
'Sun' shines a light on Japan's struggles
by Darrell Hartman — October 17, 2006 — San Francisco Chronicle
A modern Japanese lexicon:
Karoshi: death from overwork
Kireru: to experience a sudden fit of violent rage
Tatemae: false face; an adopted demeanor or attitude that hides true feeling.
Asia scholar and former Tokyo journalist Michael Zielenziger returns often to this hit parade in "Shutting Out the Sun," his grim, unsparing portrait of contemporary Japan. The nation that rose from the ashes of World War II to challenge America for global economic top-dog status (the 1982 film "Blade Runner" memorably predicted Los Angeles would be a mini-Tokyo by 2019) has failed miserably, he writes, to recover from the market collapse in the early '90s. In the race for world supremacy, it has been reduced to "a marginal also-ran," while on the domestic front Japanese society is near collapse after two decades of "festering malaise."
Is Zielenziger overstating the case here, or blowing it wide open? Mainly the latter. The media, which prefers to deliver sashimi-thin slices of Japanese pop culture -- a video-clip curiosity here, a mention of (now former) Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's summer trip to Graceland there, or the recent announcement that Princess Kiko has produced a new male heir to the throne makes it easy to assume there's no crisis in sight. But there are plenty of indications that this is not the case. Just look beyond the headlines of that royal scoop, for example: Government officials are quietly hoping the event will boost the country's abysmal birth rates, and one of the reasons the story was so big was that Japan's other princess, Masako, had tried and failed for years to produce a son -- before quietly disappearing from the public eye. She was rumored to be suffering from depression.
In this ailing society, depression is just one of many symptoms that have gone largely unacknowledged. (Alarming suicide rates and the prevalence of bedroom hermits known as hikikomori are two more.) The Japanese, Zielenziger argues, are a people in deep denial. "They prefer to insist that each phenomenon is nothing more than a failure of individual will, rather than any reflection of wider social dysfunction."
Prozac and Zoloft remain illegal there, despite Japan's suicide rate being higher than ours (and their population half as large). Every week in Japan, a nation that prides itself on its wealth and stability, more than 660 people kill themselves. Jumping in front of trains has become so popular that guardrails — and, more poignantly, mirrors — have been installed in the subway system to keep desperate men and women from taking the plunge.
Truth be told, it's more of a man's problem. Without really pursuing the matter, Zielenziger notes that "far fewer Japanese females choose to take their own lives." This same gender imbalance applies to many of the country's most worrisome trends: alcoholism, overwork and rampant bullying at the job, to name three.
But perhaps the most disturbing pattern of all is the self-imposed isolation now practiced by a growing legion of malcontents called hikikomori. Shacking up with their parents and then locking themselves in their shuttered bedrooms, where they do little more than sleep and eat as their muscles go limp and their hair grows long, these sad, misunderstood cases (of which there are, according to Zielenziger's contradictory claims, either 410,000 or between 1 and 1.2 million) seem, as the title of this book implies, a perfect embodiment of the anomie that has descended on modern Japan. And 80 percent of them are men.
The hikikomori phenomenon is in part a product of economic decline -- the word did not exist before the bubble burst. It is easy to see why this extreme response to the "insularity, homogeneity, [and] lockstep conformity" of Japanese society might be more common now that the market can no longer guarantee dutiful, self-immolating students the financial success other generations took for granted. But why are men shutting out the sun while women, who make up a comparable proportion of the workforce, aren't? Zielenziger doesn't really explore this discrepancy, although he does briefly allude to the amae, or dependence, that binds Japanese boys to their mothers and keeps them from developing the self-possession to go forth in the world. The role of the mother may in fact be stronger today than it has ever been: In the infamously demanding corporate culture of modern Japan, it is not uncommon for fathers to go weeks at a time without seeing their own children. On top of that, the idea of the working mom hardly exists. A Japanese woman is expected to give up her job or not have kids.
And many these days are opting for the latter. "Parasite singles" -- women who live rent-free at home and use their salaries to travel and go shopping with their girlfriends -- are the unfulfilled offspring of a society in which consumer fetishes become substitutes for marriage. It's not the fault of females. Zielenziger interviews independent-minded women who find Japanese men immature and stubbornly pre-feminist in their attitudes, and want nothing to do with them. In some villages, the men sit around in bars and play pinball all day. All the young women have left for the city.
Japan may be witnessing a gender eclipse, which makes it a shame that "Shutting Out the Sun" is bent on making one simple point: The country is in deep, deep trouble. In this well-researched volume, Zielenziger has taken a giant subject and flattened it into a blanket argument. At the heart of his thesis lies the fact that Japan "rocketed into the modern world without acquiring the same values, norms, and modes of thinking" that accompanied the West on its long canter into the 21st century. But this is no reason to assume that Japan falls short of the West on all counts. Zielenziger writes, for example, that the country's non-litigious culture allows Japanese corporations to behave irresponsibly, and repeats himself (word for word) when he points out that "the term 'self-esteem' does not exist in Japanese." In neither case does he consider that this atavistic sense of pride might be preferable to the egotism inherent in America's culture of complaint. But in the end, he does give observers of this reticent country good reason to be concerned.
Darrell Hartman is an assistant editor at San Francisco Chronicle Travel + Leisure.
