News & Reviews
Sunset in the Far East
by Gaylord Dold — October 1, 2006 — The Wichita Eagle
A generation ago Japan stood as the most dynamic industrial and financial power in the newly emerging global capitalist world. With its centrally planned economy dominated by manufacturing and banking monopolies, its zooming export economy protected by high tariff and non-traditional trade barriers, and its homogenous, compliant workforce, this nation of 160 million dominated the Asian and Pacific markets. Twenty-five years later, Japan is mired in a deep economic and psychological slump.
Its real estate bubble has burst and its exports have plunged. The yen, protected by government and banking collusion, is vastly overvalued. Its once-vaunted technical and engineering prowess has been overtaken by China and Korea, its mainland Asian rivals. Psychologically and historically unable to alter confining social structures and attached to the corrupt and rigid Liberal Democratic Party, in power since the '60s, the Japanese people seem to have crashed. Japan is aging. Its birthrate has plunged. Marriage is on the rocks, with a majority of young women choosing to live alone, rather than trapping themselves into the loveless straitjacket of traditional roles. Its crowded cities are ugly and inhuman. Materialism without religion and other ailments threaten the very soul of Japanese culture.
So — what has happened to Japan?
This is the fascinating question that Michael Zielenziger, research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, investigates in "Shutting Out the Sun." Written in clear prose, full of surprising insights and fresh discoveries, Zielenziger's new book is a keenly observed catalog of Japanese character and social organization. And it turns out that Japan's extreme homogeneity, its almost fanatical exclusivity and orderliness, its ethnic and racial bias, prevent it from joining the web of nations now toiling toward global capitalism.
Zielenziger first focuses on the 1 million adult males between 14 and 20 years of age who shut themselves in their rooms and don't come out. Called hikikomori, they drop out of school and avoid social contacts. Abetted by mothers who deliver food outside their doors and go away, these young Japanese males are a kind of "lost generation" of young adults, men who are symptomatic of larger social and economic woes. They are a disappointed and paranoid generation, damaged by bullying at school, social regimentation and depression. These lost men don't wish to join their fathers as "salary-men" who slave all day in service to the State and drink all night.
Young Japanese women are lost as well -- refusing to marry and addicted to flashy material possessions like expensive purses and cosmetics -- roaming the neon-bathed streets in packs. And in the vanishing Japanese countryside -- well, everybody is old and getting older.
As Zielenziger sees it, the hikikomori represent a broader psychological plight across a wider Japanese spectrum. He describes the drabness of life in Japan, the ugliness of public buildings, the penury of its housing, the ghastly awfulness of the physical environment where neon signs, telephone wires, repulsive concrete apartment buildings and pachinko parlors obscure the ancient beauty of its historic landmarks. The sterility of these urban surfaces denotes a crisis of the spirit, the stubborn hold of a "construction state," which paves everything over with concrete in order to "make work."
Zielenziger concludes that the incredibly close-knit system that allowed Japan to accumulate so much wealth so quickly also held the seeds of its undoing. Group "harmony" has strangled initiative, infantilizing many of its people. Japan has failed to develop a truly democratic ethos. Japan, he says, is "like a pot full of octopus" unable to see a world separate from its own outsized tentacles.
Consistently engaging and written with a good reporter's eye for colorful detail, "Shutting Out the Sun" is both fascinating and informative. Gaylord Dold is a professional novelist and travel writer who lives and works in Wichita.
Gaylord Dold is a professional novelist and travel writer who lives and works in Wichita.
