All the Hazards and Threats of Success

By LANCE MORROW

After their miracle, the Japanese fear "advanced nations' disease"

Outside the Ryoanji temple, the newest Japanese surfaces shine. The taxi drivers bustle, sweeping huge feather dusters over their cars, flicking specks from the bright metal. The ritual, a writer once remarked, makes them look like chambermaids in the first act of a French farce. But it is utterly Japanese, a set piece: the drivers handle their dusters like samurai. The scene is a sort of cartoon of the busy, fastidious superego that is supposed to preside in the Japanese psyche. The drivers even wear white gloves. There is probably not a dirty taxicab in Japan.

These taxis in the old capital city of Kyoto wait outside the doors of the ineffable, of another Japan entirely. The Ryoanji temple's Zen rock garden--five austerely abstract boulder mounds set in a sea of curried sand pebbles--is a celebrated spiritual masterpiece. The garden is absolutely still, and yet tense with an obscurely bullying profundity. A guide whispers the sermons in the stones, the allegories: the rocks are, maybe, tigers swimming across the sea. Or they are whales rocking in the deep. Or perhaps they are these mysterious islands themselves: Japan. The abbot of Ryoanji, in a perfect eloquence of abnegation, wrote that the place should be called simply the "Garden of Nothingness."

The Zen silence is shattered. A swarm of schoolchildren in black uniforms enters, frisking and chattering. They horse around obliviously in the timelessness.

Their teacher bellows at them through a battery-powered megaphone: "All right, now: Meditate!"

A Westerner fidgets whenever he is asked to be impressed by nothingness. A Japanese is a good deal more at home with the native mysteries. But Japan almost always involves a certain intellectual wind shear. What one sees when contemplating those islands often depends upon the culture of the beholder.

Somehow that will have to change. The rest of the world must begin to perceive what the Japanese perceive. And the Japanese must reciprocate. The global economy cannot run on so many cultural subjectivities. Japan has become too powerful and too crucially interconnected in the world to be so little understood, or so little understanding. Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, likes to tell his employees that the company is a "fate-sharing vessel." They are all in the same boat. The Japanese for most of their history have thought of their islands as the fate-sharing vessel. The definition of the boat must now be expanded. It must learn to make accommodations for the world at large.

This will be difficult. Japan's culture, always kinetic, is now veering into territory where it has never been before. The Japanese postwar economic miracle is cresting. Japan is a fascinating success, as a business and as a society. It is prosperous and famously homogeneous, safe and civil, bound together by a social contract that is startlingly effective. Yet, paradoxically, Japan's very success has grown threatening, its future shadowed and complicated. The Japanese face new problems, inside, among their densely close-woven tribe, and outside, with the rest of the world.

The Japanese have been known in the past for being able to turn their civilization on a dime. After 215 years of deliberate feudal isolation during the Tokugawa period, Japan threw itself open in 1854. It was, wrote Arthur Koestler, like breaking the window of a pressurized cabin: the Japanese crashed out into the world devouring everything that had been done or thought in the rest of the planet during their long encapsulation (the late Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution). Rarely has there been an ingestion of foreign influence so smoothly accomplished. The Japanese did something of the same thing after World War II. Military fascism did not work. The entire people switched over with amazing cultural equilibrium to democracy under a constitution partly devised by a group of young lawyers on Douglas MacArthur's staff.

According to the stereotype, the Japanese are merely clever copiers of other people's inventions. Now the Japanese find that they are on the verge of joining the leaders of the world. They do so almost reluctantly; the role makes them uncomfortable. Now they must do the inventing. Says Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone: "We must formulate a society for which there is no precedent in any other country."

The new international troubles of the Japanese arise from their doing almost too well at their economic ventures. After 1945, Japan's industrial plant was in ashes. MacArthur said that he hoped eventually to rebuild the country to the point where it would become "the Switzerland of Asia." Today, Japan is the second most powerful economy in the free world. Its trillion-dollar-a-year industrial machine accounts for 10% of the world's output. By 1990, the Japanese may achieve a per capita gross national product that surpasses that of the U.S. As a 19th century French tourist said of another island people, the English: "Mon Dieu, comme ils travaillent!"

Japan's best friends in the world are still the Americans, a fact that should give the Japanese pause. For even Americans view the Japanese with suspicion and ambivalence, with fascination and admiration and resentment intermingled. A poll by the Los Angeles Times last spring found that 68% of Americans favor trade restrictions to protect American industries and jobs. The American trade deficit with Japan could well reach a menacing $21 billion this year. It results partly from superior Japanese competitiveness and products, partly from unfair Japanese barriers to trade, and partly from an overvalued dollar and undervalued yen. Most Democratic presidential candidates, including Walter Mondale, have courted the labor vote by urging new kinds of protectionism. A former Japanese ambassador to the U.S., Nobuhiko Ushiba, said in April that he had "never seen the mood on Capitol Hill as ugly as it is now toward the Japanese." Unemployed Americans focus their anger upon the Japanese, at least when they are not blaming Ronald Reagan. In West Virginia, a charity raised money by selling sledgehammer hits on a Toyota. A recession bumper sticker read: WHEN YOU BOUGHT YOUR JAPANESE CAR, 10

AMERICANS LOST THEIR JOBS.

Other peoples tend to be even more critical. If the protectionist noises in America amount to a sort of restive snarling here and there across the countryside, such sounds abroad are full screams that sometimes translate into government policy. The French last October began funneling Japanese videotaperecorder imports through a tiny customs station at Poitiers. Some 200,000 items were blocked by delays for inspection and other red tape until the ban was lifted in April this year. As other economies around the world feel increasingly threatened, their fears could set off waves of protectionism that might cripple the world economy.

The world looks at Japan through one lens, the Japanese see themselves through another. Japan is a global force with an insular mentality, a superior organism that still harbors the soul of a small, isolated land. Living on their archipelago in the "Pacific Ring of Fire," vulnerable as always to earthquakes and typhoons, virtually unarmed, without any significant natural resources, dependent on the outside world for oil and food, the Japanese have a hard time seeing themselves as any kind of threat. "In our history of 2,000 years," says Taro Aso, a member of the Japanese parliament, "this is the first time that the Japanese have not had to worry about poverty. We are nouveau riche, a nation of farmers a short tune ago. It is difficult to accept international responsibilities when you have an inferiority complex."

The Japanese also argue, correctly in part, that the Americans use them as scapegoats, blaming them for the failures--managerial, cultural--of American business and labor. Says Brookings Institution Economist Lawrence Krause: "The damage that the Japanese do to the U.S. is trivial compared to what we do to ourselves--through bad management and bad planning."

The Japanese approach to other nations has grown far more sophisticated recently. Japanese businessmen have led the way. They have traveled the world and studied its languages. They have worked its trade routes with single-minded energy and curiosity, selling their wares, studying everything, plundering the remotest cultures and factories for information. They are Oriental Vikings armed with cameras and a samurai's resistance to jet lag. Prime Minister Nakasone has displayed a newly extraverted international style for a Japanese leader. He has, among other things, awakened what is for the Japanese the painful subject of their rearming, or at any rate contributing a greater share to the defense of the non-Communist world.

Japanese problems at home are also the complicating side effects of success. Many Japanese fear that they are beginning to suffer from what they call "advanced nations' disease," though the attack is not yet acute. In a recent poll, 89% of Japanese described themselves as happy with their lives. The present undoubtedly looks handsome compared with the bleak aftermath of the war. Many of the men who are now in the middle management of Mitsui and Mitsubishi were babies being fed a grain of rice at a time in 1946. Morita and Masaru Ibuka founded Sony that year by scrounging around the fire-bombed ruins of Tokyo for parts with which to build broadcasting equipment.

But if the Japanese are happy, why does Japan hurt so much in so many different ways? It is as if the Japanese have been singlemindedly intent, since the catastrophic end of the war, upon survival and then success. Now, in the fulfillment of so many of their ambitions, they have raised their eyes and looked about them, and seen that success has a price.

Everywhere in Japan, one senses an intricate serenity that comes to a people who know precisely what to expect from each other. But one also senses--occasionally, distantly--a disconcerted, vaguely frantic emotional vibration, a feeling of dislocation and alienation and incipient loss. The Japanese are almost obsessively aware of their problems; it is possible that they exaggerate them in order to execute a subtle kind of psychological evasion--the domestic concerns relieving them, implicitly, of larger international responsibilities.

Yet the difficulties are real enough. It is a myth much advertised in the West, for example, that the vast majority of Japanese workers enjoy lifetime employment, a fondly cooperative relationship with management and a mutual delight in the company song. True, there is less than 3% unemployment. But, in fact, Japan has a schizophrenic business system, a dual economy. The myth applies to 30% of it, in the high-tech and highly productive companies. But the other 70% of Japanese workers labor in smaller, considerably less efficient industries. There, they receive low wages and few financial benefits, if any. Such workers bounce from job to job within that traditional economy; last year there were 17,000 bankruptcies in Japan.

The Japanese, in their pursuit of commercial success, have neglected a thousand social and civic details. They need the neglected a thousand social and civic details. They need the parks and playgrounds and sidewalks that they never got around to building. Their lives are often almost unbearably constricted. They commute two, three or four hours a day to work from claustrophobia-inducing apartments out in suburban regions that look like an interminable Bridgeport smudging into the outskirts of Albuquerque. Some 75% of the population lives in the narrow Pacific corridor from Tokyo to Hiroshima. Land prices are impossibly high (more than $100 per sq. ft. in suburban Tokyo). Newly married couples despair of ever owning a house (a typical two-room Tokyo apartment measuring 400 sq. ft. costs more than $83,000). The clutter of Japanese life is not only difficult, it is sometimes noxious. Lakes and swamps are polluted. For a people with an exquisite and even rhapsodic appreciation of nature, the Japanese are capable of casually littering and ravaging it.

Even though much of the Japanese gene pool originally derives from Korea, the 669,800 Koreans who live in Japan, some of whose families have been in the country for generations, are subjected to systematic discrimination. They rarely advance to the better jobs in Japanese corporations. The situation of those privately referred to as eta is worse. They are the Japanese Untouchables. Even though they are physically indistinguishable from other Japanese, the 2 million to 3 million eta are frequently relegated to ghettos and menial work. Few marry outside their caste (Japan has a class of private detectives who specialize in checking into these matters), and most are destined to spend their lives in a strange shadow. The reasons for this degradation are obscure. It may be because they are descendants of people who, centuries ago, performed what was regarded as unclean work, slaughtering animals for leather, tending graves. Eta means much filth; the word has been officially struck from the language. The polite term these days for the eta is Burakumin, hamlet people.

One major, if more subtle, Japanese problem is simply actuarial. Japan is getting very old, very fast. In the next 35 years, the country will undergo a stunning demographic transformation. By 2000, 16% of the population will be 65 years old or older, up from 9% in 1980. It will increase to 21.8% by 2020. By comparison, 11% of the U.S. population will be 65 or older in 2000,15% in 2020.

A Confucian society traditionally reveres its aged. The elderly in Japan are still treated with far greater respect than they are in most Western countries. But the burden of providing for them in the future may shake the Japanese conscience. The centuries-long custom whereby sons give their parents a home and care for them in old age is difficult to maintain in a country where housing is so crowded. The Japanese household is getting smaller, embracing two generations, or only one, instead of three. Wives are discovering the pleasures and independence of life without a mother-in-law's demanding, authoritarian presence. A loneliness and isolation, more typical of the West than of Japan, has settled in upon many of the aged. Groups of old people have staged repeated marches on the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Tokyo, demanding more services.

The middle-aged too are feeling afflicted, though somewhat less despairingly. One Japanese writer, Hitoshi Kato, recently quoted a middle-aged steel company executive who sounded rather like the American Man in the Gray Flannel

Suit of a generation ago: "We work hard, but even we don't know what we work for. Those of the war generation experienced hunger, and that spurred them to work with a passion . . . But look at us. The corporate framework is already established, and growth has its limits. The prospects for promotion are limited too. We just work to support our wives and children and meet our mortgage payments."

Some Japanese still choose a traditional form of release: the violence done to oneself. Japan's suicide rate, about 15 per 100,000, is higher than that of the U.S., though lower than those of most North or East European countries. Suicide in Japan was long surrounded by a romantic and aesthetic aura that arose from the samurai tradition. Now it seems an especially unhappy and unheroic spectacle. A group called the Japan Association for the Prevention of Parent-Child Suicide has been established to try to discourage such tragedies. Some 400 occur every year. In recent weeks a man threw himself and his two children into a river, a family of four drove into a river, a mother strangled her child and then took her own life. There is a pattern: the parents cannot pay back loans or cannot endure the financial pressures of their lives. One psychiatrist observes, "Japanese kill themselves for more or less altruistic reasons, not out of egoism or self-pity." And they kill the children to spare them the pain of growing up without their parents. Lately police have found dozens of bodies in the forests around Mount Fuji. People travel from all over Japan to commit suicide there. The place has been named "Suicide Forest." The police have posted blunt notices there that killing oneself is not romantic, that bodies are eaten by animals or decay and can be smelled 50 meters away.

It is their young who most trouble the Japanese. They are a remarkably law-abiding people. Yet at graduation time this spring, more than 10% of the nation's junior high schools were guarded by the police. A group of teenagers in Yokohama not long ago beat several street bums to death. Gangs of motorcycle riders taunt the police on Saturday nights; they blast past the stations and dare police to chase them through the maze of traffic. Juvenile delinquency, historically always low, has increased 80% since 1972. A White Paper issued by the Prime Minister's office concluded of today's youth: "They are devoid of perseverance, dependent upon others and self-centered."

Everyone in Japan talks about the violence in the junior high schools. Students threaten their teachers, even pull knives on them. The Japanese discuss such incidents, curiously enough, without much anger, without the punitive tone one might expect. But they worry. Of course, the violence done in all the schools in Japan in a year probably cannot match what the students in New York City schools commit in a month. Still, the Japanese seem to sense in the rebelliousness of the junior high school students a glimpse of the future, and it frightens them. A country that has lived so long and so successfully on the disciplines of obedience and respect for elders and scholars is shocked and mystified by children who rise up from their chairs and threaten their teachers.

Many Japanese fear that in part the educational system itself is to blame. It has produced marvels of mass literacy (nearly 100%), but also of mass conformity. It rewards dogged rote learning, but not the kind of daring involved in making creative and unorthodox intellectual connections. "Every Japanese child," says one writer, "has a kind of invisible wire rack inserted into its body and mind," like flowers in an arrangement, like a bonsai tree. The Japanese examination system subjects the young to purgatories of cramming. It is one more symptom of a densely determined and obligated life, and some of the young these days are escaping into a sort of minor league anarchy.

At Tokyo's Yoyogi Park every Sunday, groups of momentarily rebellious adolescents come to perform a strange exhibition. They grease their hair into ducktails and put on black pegged pants and leather jackets, or else polka-dot crinoline skirts, and they group around tape-deck machines and dance to rock 'n' roll: boys with boys, girls with girls. In Japan it is always the group, even in rebellion. The spectacle is strangely sweet and sad.

The fascination of the young for things American is wistful and sometimes weirdly askew. But it reflects a larger cross-cultural longing. In some ways, America and Japan are interesting commentaries on each other. The Japanese affinity for Americans represents in part the simple attraction of opposites. The Japanese live an intricate and compact life--119 million of them crowded onto islands the size of Montana. No new blood, or little, has entered the Japanese gene pool for 1,200 years. Americans are a sprawlingly expansive people whose years. Americans are a sprawlingly expansive people whose chromosomes are a genetic brawl, an ingathering from all the tribes of the world. America is an intellectual dream, a reverie of the Enlightenment. The American civic principle is freedom and equality. The Japanese civic logic is mutual obligation, hierarchy, and the overriding primacy of the group. Japan is governed by on, by an almost infinitely complicated network of responsibility and debt and reciprocity: what each Japanese owes every other, and what each owes the entire group. America built a society around the idea that all fates are almost indefinitely reversible, around the idea of moving on, of clearing new land, changing jobs, changing roles, changing identities. The Japanese did not have new frontiers to run to; fates and roles have always seemed more settled there.

The Japanese think of Americans as far-ranging hunters, individualists, carnivores. They think of themselves as wet-rice farmers, rooted for many centuries in the same corner of the same prefecture. Perhaps each culture is wistful for the virtues and attractions of the other. Japan has, in any case, none of that American sense of immense, liberating, heartbreaking distances; Japan is put together like a watchwork, with cunning economy. The small, busy factories hum along flush against the rice fields, with apartment buildings jammed up against the other side. Japan is a very intimate country, with all of the rules and dangers of intimacy. It has been said that the Japanese have cultivated their silences and intuitive communication because they are a people with small rooms and paper walls.

The Japanese are not only intimate with themselves, but with their gods. They have no transcendent God of the Judaeo-Christian kind. The divine presents no forbidding immensities, no snow fields of abstraction, no terrible threats. The ancient Shinto deities, ancestors really, are essentially earthbound; they share the islands with the Japanese, and they can be summoned at a shrine by merely clapping one's hands. It is a friendly religion. But because of Shinto, the very earth and air and trees and mountains of Japan are numinous, filled with preternatural life. One secret of Japanese commercial success may have something to do with Shintoism, with the way that the tribe, and everything it does, achieves mythic importance. A French business executive, Antoine Riboud, remarked, "What struck me first was the degree of seriousness with which the Japanese consider economic activity, as such. They conceive of it as a civic matter, way above the mere quest for profit."

Shintoism has a sort of ethical partner in the Japanese soul.

The American commercial itch went to church with the Calvinists. The Japanese conscience has been shaped by Confucianism, a system of social ethics based on five relationships: father and son, older brother and younger brother, ruler and subject, friend and friend, husband and wife. But Confucianism has a Calvinist spine. It is the moral architecture of Japan, of the Japanese group and the hierarchical systems of address and deference. The Japanese find it easier to deal with one another as unequals than as equals. They must know whether the person addressed is superior or inferior to them in status. The up-or-down vectors of all relationships are crucial. They always exchange business cards on meeting, in order to tune their language to one another's relative status. All this makes for close-woven judgments and the most delicate calculations when the Japanese meet socially.

The language also makes for a certain elaborate vagueness.

In Japanese, the verb comes at the end of the sentence, rather than in the middle. It is thus possible to state the subject and object of the sentence, all the while watching the reaction, and then adjust the verb (which states the relation between subject and object), softening it, for example, if the sentence begins to seem too strong, or displeasing. The speaker may even change his mind and insert a negative at the end, thereby reversing the entire meaning of the sentence, but preserving the human relationship. The Japanese approach to things is essentially one of indirection.

The Japanese have married feudalism to high capitalism, and that union has brought forth a formidable machine. The hierarchical feudal virtues--the emphasis on authority and loyalty and deference--remain in place despite much individual mobility. They legitimize the entire enterprise. Japan is a private club--almost a private race. It is possible to overstate the idea that everything in Japan is done by consensus, the idea that the entire country is a committee. Still, being Japanese is the most important reality in the life of any Japanese. Japan may be the first society to combine the sensibility of the modern mass with the house rules of a small tribe.

A certain quality of the American '50s clings to Japan now, the '50s refracted through the Japanese glass. Terms like conformity recur. The problems of youth violence recall the American Blackboard Jungle. But some of the behavior seems essentially innocent. If Japan is afflicted by its new worries, it remains an extraordinarily successful society by almost every measure. The social muscle tone is firm, the civic climate earnest and naive. If it is true that the Japanese are somehow spiritually located now in the American '50s, are they doomed to endure the sequel, the cultural turmoil that arrived in the American '60s? The Japanese are conscious of the possibility. When they look at what America and Western Europe have done with their economic maturity, they see as much to avoid as to emulate. They see considerable failure: economic, social and moral.

What both maddens and fascinates Americans about the Japanese success is the mystique of it. A shelf of dopesters' literature has been published to explain the Japanese phenomenon. Some is quite discerning, more of it is nonsense. The latter treats the Japanese success as a sort of mystical trick, a performance of managerial jujitsu. A concealed racist premise of these analyses is that--what's this?--a colony of ants has taught itself to waltz. The wonder is not that they do it well, but that they do it at all.

Yet the Japanese are not entirely unhappy about this myth-mongering. It keeps the world at a necessary psychological distance. It also permits a subtle form of cultural intimidation. Mystique has the effect of allowing Japanese business negotiators, for example, to play by Japanese rules, on the turf of Japanese psychology. The Japanese do not like to be understood too easily. It is possible that they do not like to be understood at all. Perhaps they have been studying Stonewall Jackson, who once instructed: "Always mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy, if possible."

Foreigners contemplating the Japanese tend to fall into two schools of perception: there are the elaborationists and the simplists. The elaborationists see an infinitely subtle and refined and complex people whose minds and customs are deeply rooted, reaching back centuries through a thousand lamina tions in time. Most Japanese are elaborationists about Japan. It is part of their cultural self-defense.

The simplists see Japan as a society that is vivid, vibrant and depthless. The Japanese, say the simplists, are a skitteringly nervous, suggestible and insecure people, quick (too quick) to change, given to adopting fads from abroad and Japanizing them. A facile people, living in the present and the immediate future, a sharp trading race. The truth, almost surely, is an amalgamation of the two perceptions. That is only fitting. Japan is a masterpiece of contradictions, of East and West, of exquisite politesse and oafish rudeness, of a certain lacquered arrogance combined with a strange insecurity in the presence of things foreign.

One of the most painful intricacies of the Japanese undertaking is this: Japan, by becoming such an economic phenomenon, has incurred new responsibilities. Yet those responsibilities cannot be fulfilled if the Japanese remain true to some of the characteristics that made them so successful in the first place. The Japanese are both distinguished and confined by their own culture. Their culture is their charm, their force, their secret and their gravest limitation. It gives them both method and identity and an enveloping inhibition. The Japanese attach such total meaning to themselves that for them, few intellectual excursions outside that circle can be significant.

Japan has become an economic superpower, but not yet a cultural or a political or a moral superpower. The deepest questions of the Japanese future revolve around Japan's capacity to transcend the limitations of its identity. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union attempt to export ideals: for better and for worse, they stand for something in the world. What does Japan represent? Does Japan have a universal meaning? Or is its meaning, unlike its products, destined to remain confined to the home islands? Do superior products embody ideals?

The Japanese have set a breathless commercial pace for themselves and for the world. Can they maintain it? The old values are eroding now. In the next decades, the Japanese will be thrown back more upon their cultural reflexes and improvisational gifts. Those talents will determine whether Japan will be remembered as a great civilization, or merely a minutely distinctive one, full of brilliant energy. --By Lance Morrow.

Reported by Edwin M. Reingold/Tokyo

With reporting by Edwin M. Reingold This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.