It was a year ago in Venice
when I first realized how scrutable the Japanese are. It was the 40th
anniversary of V-E Day, and of course nobody Italian had ever been a fascist.
The Italians were hard at work forgetting their tackier collaborationist pasts.
And the Japanese were trying even harder to prove that they had never lost in
the Pacific. Italy was awash in a tidal wave of “cultural exchanges” from the
Land of the Rising SONY.
The two I saw in quick
succession that afternoon in Venice were as disparate as it is possible for the
same culture to present itself. The first was a really instructive essay on how
Japanese painters Westernized their themes and styles after the Meiji Revolution.
It was simply astonishing—here was a Degas, Nipponized just enough to make it
interesting in its own right; here a Gauguin, with a wee dollop of Japonism.
It was uncanny. It was like
attending a lecture in Art 101 on early Modernism with a pair of slant-eyed
glasses, slightly jaundiced in tint. Man, those cats sure could copy.
But never sedulously.
Transform is perhaps an apter word, just as they imported Chinese characters,
trimmed the ideographs down from 8,000 to 1,800—and voila! A lean and meaner
Japanese script—”easier” to learn than Chinese, much better adapted eventually
for linotype machines as well.
Except that they also
started restructuring their museology—adopting the Western convention of
arranging by medium and genre rather than by “spirit.” In 1983, the self-taught
art historian Yoshinobu Tokugawa (he was a banker before he took over the last
Shogunate’s museum of family treasures in Nagoya), set the Japanese art world
on its (deaf) ear by circulating the Tokugawa treasures internationally (funded
by Minolta) in suites of objects, as required by the Buddhist esthetic—not in
the Western manner of the paintings in one gallery, the prints in another,
photos off by themselves, etc. Tea ceremony objects (vase, scroll, utensils)
derive their meaning together.
The Japanese art world
policy makers I queried about this indictment of the current heir to the last
Shogun dismissed him as something of a crank. But of course the emperor is not.
He knows what gave his traditional art its meaning; the art bureaucracy merely
knows what is currently good for its budgets—distorting the national heritage
but beating the West at its own game nonetheless. In a shame and guilt-driven
culture, saving face, especially after having lost it monumentally as in World
War II, is the most important thing there is. Truth is the first thing lost in
such a war of nerves.
The next show I saw that
afternoon in Venice was on robot toys, that American invention out of which the
Japanese have made an instant mega-industry. Copying our major painters,
copying our major toy makers. But always with an energy and drive that made the
results look almost sui generis. Will the real Japan sit down and explain to me
which was which?
Two days later in Genoa
there was an even more ambiguous cultural exchange on display, touted with all
the publicity skills of the municipality which was sponsoring an entire
festival of Japanese arts. In central cases were the raunchiest 19th-Century
woodcuts this ex-sailor has ever seen. I mean, this was neurotic eroticism.
And encircling it? The most
ethereally spiritual 20th-Century kimonos you can imagine! Ah, Japan—the most
spiritually horny culture on earth.
I was beginning to
understand. Japan is an aerosol culture, keeping the most volatile mix of
contradictory elements under pressure and (most of the time) under control.
Robert Christopher’s The
Japanese Mind (1983) remains the most accessible explanation of this flip-flop
culture which, after Meiji, turned 180 degrees in a flash after three centuries
of enforced hermeticism, and then under Tojo flip-flopped just as dramatically
into the greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere.
Will they flip-flop again?
Are the Nakasone gaffes over American racism and his education minister’s trial
balloon about Japan having got a bum rep for World War II the signs of
something flip about to flop?
Don’t be too surprised. Christopher
explains the “enviable” solidarity of the homogenous Japanese as accruing from
a millennium of expected but unpredictable catastrophes—typhoons, tidal waves,
earthquakes, famines, civil agitations. The beleaguered who don’t stick
together disappear together. It is this mentality that undergrids their
ludicrously one-sided approach to foreign imports.
Take their non-existent
wine industry. Why protect it? I got a clue to this in a strange venue last
fall.
I was attending the Fukuoka
Museum’s biennial symposium and exhibition of Asian art. The artists were
grousing at the symposium that they resented being put up at the city’s premier
hotel when they wanted to meet fellow artists, even if it meant staying over in
the artists’ marginal digs.
The Japanese organizers
were so intent on buttering up fellow artists from Asian countries beginning to
squawk at trade imbalances and revisionist Japanese histories of their 20th-Century
colonial pasts, that they were alienating those they were trying to soothe.
Artists, after all, are neither businessmen nor politicians.
But it was at the
culminating buffet reception that I got my clue. It was a splendid spread, paid
for by the lower newspaper magnate. (Fukuoka has a population of 2 million and
is the economic and cultural capital of Kyushu, the southernmost island. But it
has something of a Third City syndrome—Osaka, the Chicago of Japan, is Second
City to Tokyo’s Onesmanship.)
Oh, what sashimi. Oh, what
sushi. Everything was fit for a shogun until you got to the bar. Trying their
wine, I was on the brink of spitting it out, it was so unpotable.
One curator I have visited
several times, enough to talk to candidly about things, saw my distaste. “It’s
the Bulgarian stuff,” he explained. “They let any wine with 5% Japanese grapes
be called Japanese. But they’ve got a treaty with several Eastern European
countries to let their bulk wine in for tariffs a miniscule percentage of what
you American pay.”
It seemed absurd to me. The
Japanese are on a positive frenzy of proving that they want only the best, yet
they allow the farcical stuff labeled Japanese wine keep out the good
California vino. Are they nuts?
No, just terribly afraid to
fail, and willing to go to great lengths to reduce their chances of doing so.
Saving the prime minister’s
face as well. It is common knowledge that Nakasone has proclivities to
right-wing nationalism. He was the head of the Self-Defense Force when Yukio
Mishima could never have trained his paramilitaries, nor indeed been there at
all, without Nakusone’s good offices.
All potentially
embarrassing to the Ron-Yasu relationship, eh? So what happens when Paul
Schrader’s film Mishima tries to get an import license in Japan? It doesn’t get
it, is what. For months. For years.
The moral of the story is
that when dealing with Japan, never believe what they say, look for hidden
reasons for their behavior. They don’t say what they mean; and they rarely mean
what they say.
I had a serendipitous
encounter that day I inspected the Toyota factory outside Toyoda-shi. The PR
people were obviously puzzled at why a retired American lit professor (even an
ex-automobile factory worker from Detroit) like me was so interested in
understanding the provenance of excellence in Japanese mass production. So they
parried my questions, tried to flatter me by talking about literature instead
of automobiles, and took me to lunch.
As we left the lunchroom,
two American GM executives and their Japanese counterparts entered. They were
there negotiating for the joint GM-Toyota plant in Fremont, California.
Oh, what a mismatch. The GM
duo looked like central casting’s choice for Dorian Gray at the very end. I
have never seen such dissipated looking Yalies! But their Japanese hosts
appeared in the pink, sleek as a thin Sumo wrestler, if you can imagine that
contradiction.
When I spoke of that
encounter at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo, it triggered Oriental
smirks and sniggers. Later a Dutch correspondent explained: “They have finally
whupped you, and it only took them 40 years to do it. They’re obviously elated.”
These recollections and
speculations flooded in on me this week as I finished reading two new books
that are absolutely indispensable to understanding the semi-scrutable, our friendly
enemies, the Japanese. One is Akio Morita’s Made in Japan, his memoir of how
Sony did it, laced with straight talk to both Japanese and American businessmen,
neither of whom is encountering a surfeit of vital truths about themselves and
each other right about now. The other is David Halberstam’s The Reckoning, a
book that illuminates America’s precarious predicament with a clarity I haven’t
felt since reading Max Lerner’s America as a Civilization 30 years ago.
First, the smaller of the
two, Morita comes from a 15th-generation sake-making family outside Nagoya, and
just to see how he slipped out of the first-born’s enthrallment as putative
successor is an absorbing tale of the complexities of modernization in Japan.
And the story of how Sony
made its way out of the debris of postwar Tokyo when the zaibatsu wouldn’t give
it wire for sound recorders (neither would the foreign exchange bank give them
the money to import tape) is simply a stunning epic of the triumph of character
over environment.
And that independence of
character makes Morita an indispensible mentor for those who would turn the
present economic impasse between Japan and America into a greater opportunity
for alleged friends who could quickly become de facto enemies. He chides the
Americans for their whining, for their unwillingness to learn Japanese language
and culture, for their Disneyland Narcissism. And he chides the Japanese for
their mealymouthedness—for their unwillingness to admit that they do keep the
playing field of competition absurdly uneven.
I often find the Japanese
remarkable, sometimes enviable, but rarely likeable. Morita-san is my kind of
Japanese, of which I think I’ve found about five during three long trips there.
He won’t make it any easier
for America to survive the Japanese economic onslaught. But I don’t see how we
can survive it equably without taking his counsel to heart.
Halbertstam’s monumental
epic of the coeval rise (of Nissan) and fall (of Ford) touches so many bases
that I know I’m going to be assimilating his insights for years.
Take his account of the
bitter labor strife at Nissan—MacArthur pro-unionism had the paradoxical effect
of putting Communist labor leaders in vital positions of influence, even
control, of the Japanese automobile industry at the height of our own
McCarthyite madness. The hardball that Japanese union leaders played makes some
of our Teamsters look like pussycats.
And the vaunted womb-to-tomb
security of the major Japanese firms is here revealed as a kind of labor peace
that doesn’t antedate the war. The Boston Globe reported last month that even
the big Japanese firms were beginning to dump this “tradition” as unemployment
rose to 6%.
It is amusing to read that
Nissan invented the name Datsun for the first clunker it exported to America
because it didn’t want to soil its own domestic rep.
On my first visit to Japan
in 1983, Nissan was celebrating its 50th anniversary with a remarkable book, Dawns
of Tradition, that it was distributing free to media and academics in the 125
countries it served in an edition of 500,000. (It costs $10 a pop to print.)
Its theme was that Japanese mass production was high because of two factors: min
gei (literally, people-art, or as we would say, “folk art”) and “living
national treasures.”
The day I visited Toyota, I
sat down to a living national treasure on the bullet train between Nagoya and
Kyoto. The LNT’s son affirmed the Nissan golden jubilee manifesto. For a
thousand years, the Japanese have mastered “negligible” materials like bamboo.
And for several decades they have revered those who create masterpieces in
scores of media.
It was an attractive
hypothesis for an ex-academic like me, nurtured in the Emersonian tradition of
anti-materialism (“Events are in the saddle / in America / , and ride mankind,”
the sage of Concord had intoned.) except that something else not quite so
attractive had caught my eye outside the Toyota factory: a hundred or so high
school students in identical white jumpsuits doing their synchronized PE
exercises.
It could have been a Kafka
scenario for a movie about fascism. All those “humans” with but a single (lack
of) thought.
Halberstam is indispensable
for the dark underside of Japanese export triumphs. He tells me what I never
saw in my “protected” visits to Japanese factories. It is a remarkable
narrative, especially the flak that Nissan’s first West Coast importer got from
his friends and enemies in the Tokyo headquarters. Halberstam demythologizes
our friendly enemies. He also describes with heart-stopping clarity how the
American automobile industry got into the mess from which it has not yet by a
long sight extricated itself.
Consumer binges have
consequences. And the tailfin psychosis that inflicted American producer and
consumer alike in the 1950s and 1960s is spelled out in excruciatingly
fascinating detail.
The eclipse of the American
engineer by the Defense Department—tutored whiz kids is a sad tale of best
intentions backfiring. The closer those MBAs watched the bottom lines, the less
chance the consumer had to get a car that would last. His options narrowed down
to load more options on a car that began to fall apart before it left the
assembly line.
Meanwhile, back on the
peninsula, the Koreans are revving up to whip the ass of their oppressor! And
the Japanese are more worried about their unbrothers in Seoul than their
purported soul brothers in Washington. That’s a real twist!
From Welcomat, December 23,
1986
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