Japan: The View from America

TITLE: Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
AUTHOR: Michael Zielenziger
PUBLISHER: Vintage

RATING
5/5 "Thin Red Line"; 4/5 "Black Rain"; 3/5 "You Only Live Twice"; 2/5 "Last Samurai"; 1/5 "Karate Kid 3"
SCORE 4/5

It's ironic that Asian and Western criticisms of one another's cultures tend to agree on the facts, but assign them to opposite sides of the pro/con balance sheet. For example, you often get the feeling that American's main beef with Japan is that, well, it isn't America. Your reaction to Mr Zielenziger's 2006 critique of Japan's society will therefore largely depend on your views of America's. Personally, I found the book packed with fascinating details, but in these post-subprime, Lehman Brothers-less times, reading his conclusions and prescriptions feels a bit like getting investment advice from Bernard Madoff.

There is no faulting Mr Zielenziger's ambition. Based on his experiences as a journalist based in Tokyo from 1996 to 2003, he aims to "unravel the unusual ... constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation". The particular thread he teases out to help us understand this cultural kimono is the phenomenon of hikikomori, Japan's estimated 1 million adult social recluses, who as the book's title suggests sometimes go so far as to tape shut their windows, symbolically "shutting out the sun" and, by connotation, the rest of Japanese society. Mr Zielenziger uses this issue as a springboard into a discussion of Japan's wider malaise, grazing omnivorously across such topics as the declining birthrate, the popularity of designer brands, high suicide rates and poor political and corporate governance.

Mr Zielenziger's argument is that social pressures which ensure conformity have stunted innovation and expression, creating an anomic collection of depressives whose only comfort is found in owning the latest from Louis Vutton. Fun fact: One marketing company is quoted as estimating that a staggering 94 percent of Japanese women age 25-29 in Tokyo own one or more LV-monogrammed accessories.

The country's only choice, Mr Zielenziger affrims, is to "undertake fundamental reforms and social adjustments to ... empower the individual, ecourage more risk-taking, flatten hierarchies and induce its people to integrate more effectively with the outside world."

This is too simplistic. Would becoming more American really be the panacea for all that ails Japan? How, for example, are we to take the lament that Japanese invest only 11 percent of their savings in equities, "instead of entrusting the funds to a foreign manager at Merrill or Schwab"? Yes, that would've turned out well. Likewise, I'm not convinced that having "only 40 percent" of large Japanese companies adopt US-style governance is necessarily a bad thing.

To be fair, the depth and breadth of Mr Zielenziger's research clearly puts it a step above most lay accounts of Japanese culture (end notes! a bibliography!). At the same time, this is no scholarly text, and Mr Zielenziger is careful to allow the Japanese to speak for themselves through numerous interviews. This approach makes for a highly entertaining, at times fascinating, treatment of a topic that could easily have been as upbeat as a funeral dirge.

However, the seriousness of his research is sometimes undermined by his breathless prose and excessively credulity at some of his interviewee's statements. Japan's society carries "a dark and destructive seed" we learn, but alas hopes that Godzilla will emerge from it go unrewarded. Much of the chapters on hikikomori is filled with new-age psychobabble of the "I used my son to get back at my relatives" vein. He is also far too glowing in heaping praise on South Korea, which he holds as a paragon of all that Japan is not--despite the fact that the former remains a tightly-lidded, export-fired pressure cooker of a society, much like Japan. Mr Zielenziger's obsession with the role of Christianity in Western culture is unfair to our own humanist and rational traditions, and makes you doubt his reading of Japanese psychology.

Are suicides, fewer babies and sluggish growth the price to pay for stability, order, safety and trains that run on time? I don't think there is a definitive answer, but the question is surely worth more consideration that Mr Zielenziger gives it here. Despite his many insights then, what you get out of his book depends on what you bring in.