Japan, the Sustainable Society: The Artisanal Ethos, Ordinary Virtues, and Everyday Life in the Age of Limits

By John Lie

By the late twentieth century, Japan had gained worldwide attention as an economic powerhouse. Having miraculously risen from the ashes of World War II, it was seen by many as a country to be admired if not emulated. But by the early 1990s, that bubble burst in spectacular fashion. The Japanese economic miracle was over. In this book, John Lie argues that in many ways the Japan of today has the potential to be even more significant than it was four decades ago. As countries face the prospect of a world with decreasing economic growth and increasing environmental dangers, Japan offers a unique glimpse into what a viable future might look like—one in which people acknowledge the limits of the economy and environment while championing meaningful and sustainable ways of working and living. Beneath and beyond the rhetoric of growth, some Japanese are leading sustainable lives and creating a sustainable society. Though he does not prescribe a one-size-fits-all cure for the world, Lie makes the compelling case that contemporary Japanese society offers a possibility for how other nations might begin to valorize everyday life and cultivate ordinary virtues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9780520383531

John Lie

John Lie teaches social theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Book preview

Japan, the Sustainable Society

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Imprint in Asian Studies, established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

Japan, the Sustainable Society

The Artisanal Ethos, Ordinary Virtues, and Everyday Life in the Age of Limits

John Lie

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2022 by John Lie

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

Names: Lie, John, author.

Title: Japan, the sustainable society : the artisanal ethos, ordinary virtues, and everyday life in the age of limits / John Lie.

Description: Oakland : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021035825 (print) | LCCN 2021035826 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520383517 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780520383524 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520383531 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sustainable development—Japan. | Japan—Economic conditions—History. | BISAC: HISTORY / Asia / Japan | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economic History

Classification: LCC HC465.E5 L43 2021 (print) | LCC HC465.E5 (ebook) | DDC 338.952—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035825

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035826

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For Perry and Judy

CONTENTS

Preface

1. From Japan as Number One to the Lost Decades

2. Growth Reconsidered

3. The Regime as a Concept

4. Ordinary Virtues

5. The Book of Sushi

6. The Artisanal Ethos in Japan: The Larger Context

7. The Book of Bathing

8. Ikigai : Reasons for Living

Postface

Notes

Index

PREFACE

What ever happened to Japan?

In the year 2020, many topics other than Japan—the rise of China and the radicalization of Islam; the financial globalization and counterglobalization movements; the intensification of inequality and the resurgence of authoritarianism; transnational epidemics and natural disasters—are rightly deemed to be of pressing and paramount significance. In this context and at this point, one could be forgiven for not even mentioning, much less thinking of, Japan.

A far cry from the 1980s! Given that decade’s shrill debates and vibrant, vituperative discussions about Japan’s impending status as the world’s premier economy, one likewise could have been forgiven for believing that the century ahead was destined to belong to Japan. Today, though, as far as I can tell, no one in or outside Japan subscribes to the conventional wisdom of a generation ago. Fugit inreparabile tempus; or, as we say, tempus fugit, and along with time fly assumptions and expectations of the looming Japanese Century.

The 1980s aside, however, my contrarian view is that Japan stands to be even more significant in the 2020s than it was four decades ago. The rise of Japan in the post–World War II decades was a variation on the rapid, compressed industrialization currently taking place in China—and a reprise of the Eurocentric past, if allowances are made for idiosyncratic variations across national experiences. But what about Japan as a sustainable society? That question alone places Japan at the front lines of the challenges now confronting the advanced industrial societies.

Economic growth entails well-known problems, including the exacerbation of inequality and poverty, not to mention the destruction of the natural environment. Needless to say, many people see it as the master solution to humanity’s manifold problems. For some, belief in economic growth practically amounts to a religion; in contemporary Japan, there are politicians, bureaucrats, and executives who worship at its shrine. Yet it is probably impossible, and almost surely inadvisable, to take the road backward to the Golden Age of rapid economic expansion. Nor should we dismiss the catastrophic potential of contemporary science and technology—most obviously, artificial intelligence and biotechnology—especially because we have already witnessed environmental destruction and other deleterious consequences of earlier scientific and technological achievements. Instead of turning once more to the putative panacea of economic growth, shouldn’t we be asking how we can live in a world without it?

From another angle, triumphs in the area of public health—Covid-19 notwithstanding—have meant that people in affluent countries are living longer, all the while having fewer children, and the counter-Malthusian specter of population decline haunts many politicians and pundits. But population stasis, even decline, may be desirable. The idea of the sustainable society may seem perverse to scholars and policymakers brought up on idolatry of growth, yet it’s an idea well worth pondering at a time when we can no longer expect economic growth to save us—a time when economic growth may actually spell our doom. This is precisely the time for us to reevaluate our faith in growth and to ponder alternative modes of labor and leisure.

When we peel back the scab over postgrowth Japan, we expose the wound left by the excesses of the Bubble decade, and we lay bare the continued yearning for that bygone era of rapid economic growth. But we also find ways of living and working that are viable, if still occluded by the colossal complex of big government and giant corporations. In Japan, beneath and beyond the rhetoric of growth, many people are already leading sustainable lives and creating a sustainable society. Thus, contemporary Japan offers a glimpse or two of what a viable immediate future might look like, a future in which people acknowledge the limits of the environment and the economy, champion meaningful ways of working, and valorize everyday life and ordinary virtues.

Social scientists may find themselves flummoxed by the two empirical foci of this book—sushi and bathing. But it is in just such apparently trivial pursuits and practices that we find, in embryonic form, meaningful and sustainable ways of working and living. My intention here is not to present life in contemporary Japan as a ready-made model for the future of other affluent countries, and certainly not for the future of the rest of the world, but to offer Japan’s sustainable society as one example of how to navigate the perilous present.

One caveat to the reader: when I discuss figures like Marie Kondo and Haruki Murakami, who are well known to anglophone readers, I place the first name first, both in the main text and in discursive portions of the notes, against the Japanese convention of placing the surname first. In the notes, however, for a work published in Japanese, I follow the Japanese publisher’s convention of placing the author’s surname first (though the same author’s first name comes first in the citation of an English translation of his or her work, unless the translation’s publisher follows the Japanese convention, as in the work of Kōda Rohan, for example, whose English-language publisher splits the difference, so to speak, by giving his name as Koda Rohan).

This book was completed in the summer of 2019, after a year of research leave made possible by a fellowship from the Japan Foundation. Takita Ayumi in particular was helpful at the Foundation. Hiroshi Ishida sponsored my stay at the University of Tokyo, as did Hama Hideo and Inaba Akihide for my affiliation with Keio University. I should also like to salute the staff at the Tokyo Metropolitan Library (Main Branch), Keio University libraries, and University of Tokyo libraries, who maintained salutary and salubrious reading environments. I also received financial and infrastructural support from the Center for Japanese Studies, the Center for Korean Studies, and the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. I wish to express gratitude to my Berkeley colleagues, especially Jinsoo An, Kumi Sawako Hadler, Laura Nelson, and Dan O’Neill.

At the University of California Press, Reed Malcom proved once again to be an efficient and effective editor. Thanks also to Steven Baker, Cindy Fulton, Kate Hoffman, LeKeisha Hughes, and others at or with the Press. Alexander Trotter did the index. Two anonymous reviewers made useful comments and criticisms. I cannot thank enough the work of Xavier Callahan, developmental editor and line editor nulli secundus. She saved me from errors large and small, and she vastly improved the prose and the organization of this book.

For encouragement and support in the writing of this book, I am grateful to Michael Donnelly, Kyunghee Ha, Hasegawa Yuki, Hashimoto Setsuko, Imoto Yuki, Xuan Jin, Michael Kowen, Kexin Li, Charlotte Lie, Youngmi Lim, Sigrid Luhr (who drew the graphs), Majima Ayumi, Nakamura Yuki, Nakayama Keiko, Nishioka Yoko, Joohyun Park, Jay Ou, Sonia Ryang, Shirahase Sawako, Takenoshita Hirohisa, Charis Thompson, Watanabe Hideki, Jeff Weng, and Jun Yoo.

Finally, I wish to dedicate this book to Perry and Judy Mehrling, my dear friends for nearly four decades. Their bedrock stability and unmatched hospitality have provided one of the few constants in my itinerant life.

1

From Japan as Number One to the Lost Decades

In 1979, the sociologist Ezra F. Vogel published Japan as Number One: Lessons for America.¹ It had modest sales and a tepid response in the United States. As Vogel recalled seven years later, The general reaction [was that the book was] ‘fascinating and amusing.’ The implication clearly was that the professor had spent a little too much time in the Orient . . . for he vastly overestimated . . . the extraordinary successes of Japan.² A month after the initial publication, when the Japanese translation appeared, Japan as Number One became one of the best-selling nonfiction books in Japanese publishing history. What was fascinating and amusing to Americans evidently had tickled Japanese amour propre. After all, US bombs had smashed Japanese cities to smithereens a mere thirty-four years earlier, but now an American scholar—a Harvard professor, no less—was declaiming Japanese greatness. If there could be some external validation of Japan’s having arrived, the publication of Japan as Number One was it. To be sure, many Japanese readers, or nonreaders, blithely ignored the subtitle, for the course of bestsellerdom is rarely littered with subtleties. Fame was thrust upon the book, which captured the zeitgeist proleptically as Japan embarked on its decade of economic exuberance.

Indeed, the notion of Japan as number one became something of a leitmotif during the Japanese Bubble of the 1980s. By then, Japan’s rapid postwar growth had decelerated, but the newfound Japanese practices of financial and property speculation were creating an era of massive, instantaneous returns, especially after the 1985 Plaza Accord, which led to the strengthening of the yen. Land prices and the stock market seemed to know no upper bounds as fortunes crested on the backs of timely real estate deals or reckless financial gambles. At one point, the value of the Imperial Palace, an indisputably large parcel of prime real estate, was said to exceed the value of Manhattan as a whole, and the value of Tokyo was said to exceed that of the entire United States.³ Easy money was goading Japanese companies and speculators into acquiring one iconic bauble after another, from a van Gogh sunflower painting to Rockefeller Center. The new normal was defined by conspicuous consumption, which could mean popping expensive champagne or sporting designer bags and rococo jewelry. And life on this order of lavishness ushered in not just a climate of fecklessness but also a time of extravagant taste and execrable morals.⁴ Pundits in turn proclaimed the gospel of Japanese greatness; all things Japanese were extolled, from Japan’s unique language to its superior culture. In particular, the Japanese way of doing business, encompassing industrial policy as well as corporate management, heralded a new model for Homo economicus, who was to become Homo japonicus, whether by emulating Toyota’s inventory technique or perusing Gorin no sho (The Book of Five Rings), by Miyamoto Musashi, a sixteenth-century samurai. One ubiquitous commentator, Takemura Ken’ichi, predicted in 1989 that the 1990s would be golden for Japan and that Japan would become a global hegemon by 1995, exercising leadership not only in the economic realm but also at sea and in space.⁵ Blessed it was, indeed, to be alive and Japanese in the 1980s! In that decade, the proverbial Martian visitor might have wondered who indeed had won World War II.⁶ It wasn’t simply that Americans were reading how-to books about doing business the Japanese way; they had also begun wolfing down sushi, previously a repugnant symbol of Japanese barbarity.⁷ It was as if Philip K. Dick had written, not as fiction but as reportage, his 1962 fantasy novel The Man in the High Castle, with its conceit that the victors in World War II were Germany and Japan.⁸

But not everyone was similarly smitten with Japan. In the early 1990s, a critically derided but reader-friendly novelist of the era was writing a thinly veiled fiction-cum-jeremiad about the Japanese economic ascendance and menace.⁹ At the same time, a flamboyant Manhattan property developer was sounding an apoplectic alarm about Japan’s winning the economic war by means of unfair trade deals. He claimed that the Japanese were openly screwing the United States, and he labeled the Japanese practices a disgrace. The Japanese cajole us, he said, they bow to us, they tell us how great we are and then they pick our pockets. We’re losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year while they laugh at our stupidity.¹⁰ Thus was the Yellow Peril of yore, decisively defeated only a generation before, now threatening the self-proclaimed greatest country in the world. The reductio ad absurdum of this Japanese threat, The Coming War with Japan, was published in short order.¹¹

What goes up must come down, of course, and what happens to go up rapidly must come down the same way. Since the late 1980s, there had been rumors and rumblings of an overextended asset-price bubble in Japan, and land prices in Tokyo began to plummet in 1989. The following year, the Nikkei Stock Index took a nosedive and lost more than a third of its value. The speculative bubble had burst by 1992. Cultural manifestations of irrational exuberance continued to flicker for at least five years after this collapse in property values, but economic growth slowed, stopped, and even declined for a time. By 2002, an eminent magazine could report that Japan had suffered the deepest slump in any developed economy since the Great Depression.¹² If the presenting symptom was a struggling political economy, auscultation of the Japanese body politic yielded diagnoses that included not just faulty macroeconomic policy but even a malady presumed to be deeply ensconced in the Japanese psyche.¹³ And as economists deployed all the negative terminology at their disposal—deflation and depression, stagnation and slump—the world’s onetime economic showcase was recharacterized as a basket case. Boosters of the Japanese boom now spoke gloomily of Japan’s lost decade, which over time became Japan’s lost two decades.

Where had the prophets of the Japanese Century gone? No one was talking now about Japan as number one except perhaps as an exercise in nostalgia, and turning Japanese had become the nightmare scenario for other economic powers.¹⁴ In a retrospective discussion about the Japanese literature of the Heisei period (1989–2019), a comment by the novelist Takahashi Genjirō stands out: I cannot but think that Heisei was a period of decline.¹⁵ Decline and fall: for post-Bubble Japan it was all downhill, and all down-and-out. As the influential philosopher Azuma Hiroki put it in 2017, Over the past quarter-century, Japan has become absolutely destitute.¹⁶ Most damning, however, is that a new catchphrase—the rise of China—became the twenty-first century’s version of Japan as number one; few beyond the Japanese archipelago seemed to care about, or even to have noticed, the fate of the once-mighty economic engine.

THE POSTWAR REGIME

What accounts for Japan’s post–World War II economic recovery and growth, frequently described as miraculous? To my knowledge, no one has attributed Japan’s postwar economic success to divine intervention (Emperor Hirohito himself declared his human status on New Year’s Day of 1946); nor is an explanation to be found in the misty Japanese past or in the inscrutable recesses of Japanese culture, tempting though such explorations might be. A more useful approach is to begin by elaborating the dominant narrative, which holds that Japan’s economic recovery and growth in the postwar period were engineered by the postwar regime.

This narrative is not altogether wrong. But it is misleading, dependent as it is on a common reckoning of contemporary Japanese periodization, in which the events and phenomena under discussion stretch roughly from Japan’s surrender in 1945 to Hirohito’s death in 1989.¹⁷ The dominant narrative is misleading because it exaggerates and mischaracterizes not only the triumphs of the Bubble era in particular, and of Japan’s post–World War II economic recovery and growth in general, but also the dysfunctions of the post-Bubble period.

The term postwar regime encapsulates the congeries of institutions and the repertoire of actions that embodied rapid recovery and growth—the Liberal Democratic Party; the infrastructural, developmental state; large corporations; and, as a junior partner, a compliant but diligent labor force. All of them in turn were dedicated to growth as a habit of thought and behavior. The postwar regime of export- and growth-oriented political economy did not become entrenched until the early 1960s, after the collapse of the Nobusuke Kishi premiership, as a consequence of mass mobilization against the US-Japan Security Treaty. But its rudiments had been clear since the 1950s. Working under US hegemony, and in the context of the expanding global economy, Japan embarked on export-oriented industrialization and, in so doing, became Japan Inc. At first, Japan manufactured and purveyed inexpensive and technologically unsophisticated goods (Made in Japan was once shorthand in the West for a cheap, shoddy product), but by the 1980s, with the fabrication of innovative, sophisticated gadgets and widgets, goods of Japanese manufacture had come to stand for class and high quality. At the same time, postwar Japan was experiencing massive population movements that included colonial-settler repatriation and rural exodus, the institutionalization of the patriarchal nuclear family, the integration of the national popular culture, and the crystallization of a Japanese national identity. The postwar regime was the Japan of rapid economic growth (that is, a tautology), and it was precisely in the post–Korean War decade that the idea of growth became firmly entrenched in the Japanese mind-set.¹⁸

The postwar regime did not rise like the phoenix from the ashes of destruction. In the years immediately after the end of World War II, there were many calls for revolutionary transformation, calls that were silenced by the US occupation forces.¹⁹ It would also be misleading to flatten out the full dimensions of the conservative and reactionary politicians of the 1950s: some, such as the Class A war criminal Kishi, yearned to restore features of prewar Japan; others, such as Ishibashi Tanzan and Ikeda Hayato, stressed attaining and disseminating prosperity. By the mid-1950s, however, there were two points on which they agreed, at least in public. Postwar conservatives were at once pro-business and pro–United States in their acceptance of defeat, and therefore in their acceptance of Japanese subservience to the United States. Skeptics notwithstanding, Japan had entered headlong into a war against the United States. Now, in spite of some holdouts, Japan was not so much embracing defeat as embracing the United States, the end of the war, and liberation from the war’s attendant tragedies and miseries. Symptomatically, 15 August 1945 is commemorated as the date of the end of the war (shūsen), not the date of the defeat (haisen). There were those who retained their spiritual allegiance to the prewar regime, with its stress on military power and territorial expansion, but even they eschewed open celebration of martial glory and imperial ambition. As in the case of Kishi, the fate of holdouts from the prewar period was political purge or even imprisonment. For the war-weary masses, the war was rendered as a series of private experiences, whether that meant grieving the dead, nurturing the disabled, or recalling, sotto voce, the war’s hardships. Amnesia reigned with respect to wartime enthusiasms, whether these had involved the war’s purported cause (liberation of the colonized Asian nations) or the course of the war itself (with its frequent celebrations of Japanese military might), but one lesson stuck—the undesirability and inadvisability of war.²⁰ Best to focus on the present and the future and forget the past; recovery was the primary desideratum. A mere two weeks after the end of the war, the charismatic army general Ishiwara Kanji would urge Japan to be the advanced nation for peace.²¹ Not only was the idea of the peaceful nation popular with the people, who had suffered during the war, but it also contributed to the nation’s emerging economic orientation.²²

The emperor was no longer the central gravitational force in Japanese politics. Instead, the erstwhile enemy became the new master, one who did not do unto the Japanese public what the Japanese military and colonial bureaucracy had done to Japan’s hapless Asian neighbors. Emblematic of the Japanese readiness to welcome the occupying forces is the fact that the first guide to conversational English appeared on 30 August 1945 and went on to sell four million copies.²³ The new constitution was thrust upon the Japanese—whatever one may think of the postwar constitution, it was of and by the US occupation forces (drafted hastily by amateurs, to boot) and for the defeated—but it was nevertheless accepted. And this was not just a matter of military might; the former enemy not only was rich but also had such technological miracles as penicillin and DDT (in addition to atomic weapons). There is considerable truth, then, to the claim that Japan was the permanent loser to the United States and would remain a US protectorate.²⁴ Despite persistent nationalist criticisms of the Peace Constitution—Article 9 explicitly eschews a standing military force—it has remained robust precisely because it was a good fit with the pro-American, pro-business thrust of the postwar regime. Pro-American attitudes became hegemonic; expressions of anti-Americanism were almost as grave a taboo as overt denigration of the emperor.²⁵ Being pro-American meant adopting and adapting to the American way, which included unquestionable commitment to capitalist democracy and unwavering support for the US bloc in the Cold War.

Apart from its cardinal principles—a pro-business orientation and pro-American pacifism—the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been cobbled together in 1955 from a menagerie of conservative politicians, represented from the outset a contingent union of convenience. The postwar regime is often called the 1955 system in Japan, not only because the dominant conservative party coalesced in that year but also because the basic elements of pro-growth political economy were evident by then. As Voltaire might have put it, the Liberal Democratic Party was not liberal, was not democratic, and was not even a true party. But it was a perennial majority party, in no small part because of rapid economic growth and because of the party’s hold on rural voters.

The Liberal Democratic Party was closely aligned with the state bureaucracy. Bureaucratic continuity and expansion brook almost no obstacles, not even revolution or defeat. The enthusiastic, progressive vision of the US occupation forces sought to remake Japan into the Switzerland of Asia and thus dismantled Japan’s massive military apparatus, though the onset of the Cold War upended even this restraint on bureaucratic continuity. There was a new rule—no more recitation of the Imperial Rescript on Education and, in its place, a fresh enthusiasm for peace and democracy—but the state apparatus at once expanded and intensified its reach and its penetration into the population. Micromanagement of public infrastructure and other matters—including decrees regarding exactly where post offices would be built and maintained and which subjects would be taught in the final term of third grade—was merely the most visible face of the postwar state.²⁶

The glorification of bureaucratic prowess was especially evident in economic affairs. The Ministry of Finance, the most prestigious and powerful of all the ministries, had long maintained a soft mercantilist position—sustaining a low yen, providing credit, and maintaining growth. In the 1970s and 1980s, especially outside Japan, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) came to be perceived as a repository of omniscient bureaucrats proposing one triumphal industrial policy after another. Indeed, Japan originated a genre unprecedented in world literature—the celebration of bureaucrats.²⁷ For most people, the most consequential of the state’s manifestations was that of the infrastructural state. The bureaucracies, flush with generous budgetary allocations that were in turn assured by the seemingly permanent Liberal Democratic Party majority, would restore areas ravaged by war and—once rebuilding and recovery were complete—build roads and railroads, bridges and tunnels, ports and airports here, there, and everywhere. In addition to its construction projects, the state had its fingers in manifold aspects of everyday life, such as the workings of the Japan Post, whose savings branch, at least where total deposits were concerned, became the world’s single largest bank. Liberal Democratic Party politicians and state bureaucrats alike were pro-business, but an innocent observer might have questioned their commitment to capitalism, at least in its laissez-faire form. State capitalism, bureaucratic capitalism, infrastructural capitalism—no one applied these or other descriptors to the nexus between the perennial ruling party and the powerful state bureaucracy, but any of these terms would have been more accurate than labels reflecting a view of the capitalist state as a kind of libertarian night watchman.

Large corporations took center stage in the theater of economic recovery and growth. The US occupation forces, beyond eliminating the Japanese military, initially attempted to deracinate the economic and social foundation of militarism by dismantling zaibatsu (oligopolies) and enacting land reform. By the time there was evidence of economic recovery, the slimmed-down oligopolies had already insinuated themselves into the Japanese economy as major players (and the remilitarization of Japan had become an explicit US desideratum). Given the impoverishment of Japan, the zaibatsu decided to follow the money, just as they should have, and therefore to export their products to the erstwhile enemy. Operating under the US-led global economy, with relatively free trade, Japanese corporations regained footholds in light industries, such as textiles, and soon scaled the hierarchy of higher-value-added, technologically sophisticated products, moving from black-and-white to color televisions, from transistor radios to cassette players, and from motorbikes to automobiles.²⁸ Not all these enterprises had prewar origins, for there was an entrepreneurial moment in Japanese economic life in the 1950s, but several companies—notably Toyota, Nissan, Sony, and Panasonic—became the standard-bearers of the new Japanese economy. The prewar zaibatsu transmogrified into keiretsu, or conglomerates. It was fortunate that Japan in the immediate postwar decades had virtually no competition inside the US sphere of influence; the economies of Latin America and of the other Asian countries were lodged in the primary sector, and those countries had neither the experience nor the inclination to engage in massive industrialization.

A persistent advantage for the postwar Japanese export drive was the country’s relatively low cost and seemingly infinite supply of labor. In the decades just after the war, repatriated soldiers and returning colonial settlers as well as young rural workers flocked to the cities in droves. Japanese primary-sector employment declined precipitously in the postwar decades as the rural exodus and rapid urbanization transformed the archipelago. Also critical was the fact that the new workers were literate, motivated, and disciplined, most immediately because of their wartime mobilization. By the 1970s, rapid economic growth had made low-paid labor a thing of the past. Many corporations, goaded by labor unions, established new modi vivendi so that the norm became lifetime employment security, a seniority-based wage system, and enterprise-based unions—the vaunted three treasures of the Japanese system of labor relations. This norm applied primarily to the larger companies, but the reality of rapid growth eased tension between workers and managers, and between subcontractors and corporations; in other words, the postwar regime also gave rise to relatively harmonious relations between business and labor.

Critics bemoaned the relatively low wages and the exploitation of many Japanese workers. At the time, a number of Japanese social scientists, inspired by Marxism, would have agreed with the critics. But the new urban workers seemed to rejoice in their escape both from the ravages of war and from the impoverished countryside. And because the Japanese economy was operating at full steam, there was very low unemployment, and wages increased steadily. An economy growing at an annual rate of 10 percent will double every seven years. Although wage increases did not approach the level of accelerated aggregate growth, there was enough prosperity trickling down to satisfy all but the most ideological. Moreover, technological advances—the three divine appliances of the 1950s (a black-and-white TV set, a washing machine, and a refrigerator) and the three C’s of the 1960s (a color TV set; a cooler, or air conditioner; and a car)—simultaneously purveyed convenience and unleashed desire.²⁹ We won’t want until we win had been a piece of Japan’s wartime propaganda, and now it was as if access to that slogan’s promised usufruct had finally arrived. Meanwhile, as new buildings popped up featuring all the modern conveniences, urbanites donned Western clothing to complete the modernization of city life. Structural mobility, both for farmers in the countryside and for workers in the cities, provided a sense of movement and improvement. By the mid-1960s, it would have taken total immersion in Marxist literature to reverse the upbeat national mood of onward and upward. It is not surprising that in this era of rapid economic growth, the emperor-worshipping right-wing nationalists who had dominated the war years became nearly silent and invisible, but it is curious that the left continued so long to rule the Japanese intellectual world. In any event, the postwar regime spelled success for the majority who enjoyed plenitude, and who in turn supported the Liberal Democratic Party and the corporations that were the visible engines of growth.

Thus the postwar regime—the robust rule of a pro-business, pro-American party; a powerful state bureaucracy dedicated to economic growth; export-oriented large corporations; and educated and motivated workers—brought prosperity and stability to Japan, no longer a pariah. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka Exposition were welcomed as validations of Japan’s acceptance by the world at large. Growth had slowed by the 1970s, and there were bumps like the 1973 oil crisis, but in the sustained economic growth engineered and executed by the postwar regime, Japan not only recovered but also prospered.

THE LOST DECADES, OR THE JAPANESE DISEASE

Let’s return now to the received narrative of Japan during and after the bursting of the Bubble. The decline of the postwar regime was coterminous with the death of Hirohito, in 1989, and the beginning of the Heisei period.

In contrast to the previous decades, the post-Bubble decades saw an economic slowdown. In 2000, the novelist Murakami Ryū published Ushinawareta 10nen wo tou (Questioning the lost decade), based on a TV program that in turn was based on Murakami’s blogs. By that time, the phrase the lost ten years had entered the everyday Japanese lexicon.³⁰ Newspaper reports and television documentaries told countless stories of personal loss: the investment that had soured (such as the apartment one could no longer afford but could not sell except at a large loss), the downward spiral from popping Dom Perignon to sipping shōchū (an inexpensive Japanese distilled drink), and so on and so forth. The national mood felt like the day after a wild party, with groggy memories of good times offset by remorse and a migraine. And the hangover did not dissipate quickly. A Keynesian economist might have prescribed government investment to revive the slumping economy, just as the proverbial hair of the dog might be suggested for the morning after. But the sluggishness persisted, and the lost ten years became the lost fifteen years, and then the lost twenty years.

There is a rough-and-ready consensus on the proximate causes of the mania, the panic, and the ensuing crash. The 1985 Plaza Accord is seen as a critical proximate cause: not only did the accord show Japan to be a player in the international political economy, but the stronger yen also contributed to expansionary monetary policy in Japan. Property prices skyrocketed from a launching pad of excess credit, low interest rates, and lax regulatory oversight. And with easy credit chasing fast returns, real estate and the stock market both overheated. When a downturn came, a series of banks, stretched far beyond any prudent standard for lending practices, found themselves facing a credit crunch and then bankruptcy. In terms of historical time, it all happened quickly—from 1985 to 1989 or perhaps 1992. The bad debt that ricocheted throughout Japan ended the reign of easy money and financial speculation; the whales who had gorged on loose credit were soon beached and rotting, and the bursting Bubble spewed its undigested contents all over the weary Japanese populace. The most exuberant manifestation of the Bubble—the bling disco Juliana’s—opened as late as 1991 and shut down only in 1994, as if to demonstrate both the materialist thesis that culture follows the economy and the adage regarding the willingness of the spirit and the weakness of the flesh.

Analysts who share an understanding of how the Bubble ended still tend to diverge when it comes to explaining the persistence of the economic slowdown.³¹ Some cast blame on the Japanese government’s macroeconomic and monetary policy; for these analysts, politicians and bureaucrats had exercised economic and financial oversight to clamp down on the economy instead of either investing aggressively to regain momentum or reopening the spigot of easier credit. Conversely, other analysts suggest that fiscal policy had remained loose while monetary policy was bearing the brunt of macroeconomic problems. Still others point to long-range transformations both in the business environment and in business strategy; for instance, there had been steady decline in corporate investment as well as in Japan’s vaunted commitment to long-term growth, and the creeping conservatism of Japanese managers had failed to anticipate the oncoming digital revolution and the disruptions of information technology. Yet others highlight Japanese wage increases and the intensification of international competition, especially from neighboring Asian countries. As for myself, I would include additional external factors. For one thing, the 1990s were a time of global economic downturn, with one crisis after another, involving the UK pound in 1992, the Mexican peso in 1994, and most Asian currencies in 1997; the Japanese downturn was more the rule than the exception. For another, the bursting of the Bubble coincided with the end of the Cold War and the onset of US-led globalization, and globalization itself was defined by newfound enthusiasm for liberal economic policy, the ascendance of finance, and the revolution in information technology. In the environment of globalization, the United States gained momentum while Japan faltered. But few, if any, advanced industrial countries were able to sustain rapid growth immediately before and after the turn of the millennium. Indeed, after the 2008 financial crisis, the Japanese malaise merely anticipated the generic problem of all the world’s rich economies.

These factors, and others adduced to explain the lost decades, are not necessarily incompatible. Indeed, it is likely that any long-term phenomenon afflicting a large country has multiple overlapping and even changing causes. Yet what interests me here is the shared consensus, in Japan and outside Japan, that the once-mighty Japanese economy had stalled. Foreign analysts who had spent the 1980s looking for positive lessons from Japan’s success now sought negative lessons from Japan’s failure. Only the rare observer has had anything positive to say about the Japanese economy of the post-Bubble decades.

A generalized articulation of the lost decades idea is the notion of the Japanese disease. According to this line of thinking, the trouble is not just with the economy but also with the senescent, sclerotic Japanese body politic as a whole. Two factors encourage such dystopian thinking: first, the indubitable reality that the Japanese population is rapidly aging and may even decline in the near future; and, second, an anti-Malthusian discourse that for more than two decades has been sounding the alarm about the eventual disappearance of the Japanese people altogether.

With respect to the second factor, on 20 March 1995, when the bursting of the Bubble had come to seem incontrovertible, an act of domestic terrorism shattered the comforting assumption that Japan was a safe, secure country. As Haruki Murakami and many others have pointed out, the Japanese archipelago was convulsed when followers of the Aum Shinrikyō cult killed thirteen commuters with a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.³² Earlier that year, on 17 January, another sort of convulsion, the Kobe (Great Hanshin) earthquake, had already shaken the fraying confidence of the Japanese populace. Then, on 3 March 2011, when most people had forgotten about the two 1995 events, came the Tōhoku earthquake (usually called 3/11, after the date when it struck), which also entailed what is referred to as the Fukushima disaster, since a subsequent tsunami led to meltdowns, hydrogen explosions, and radioactive contamination at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The Japanese people are certainly not unaware of the ubiquity of earthquakes in the tectonically unstable Japanese archipelago, but learning about earthquakes from textbooks and earthquake drills is one thing; witnessing the indelible spectacle of destruction and death is quite another. A massive natural disaster would dampen the spirits of any country, of course; for Japan, however, already a downbeat nation by 1995, these two earthquakes, sixteen years apart, were doubly distressing and depressing. In their wake, there has been widespread awareness of just how precarious everyday life can be in the Japanese archipelago. The Fukushima disaster in particular occasioned major reflection on the present and future of Japan; for example, the novelist and translator Ikezawa Natsuki found it necessary to engage in a fundamental rethinking of the Japanese character, and Takemura Ken’ichi, the aforementioned prophet of Japan’s golden future, described Japan as a saigai taikoku (natural-disaster superpower).³³ One can be well aware of the pathetic fallacy inherent in the latter characterization and still be tempted to wonder what is wrong with Japan.

Not surprisingly—indeed, inevitably—the Japanese disease discourse has a corollary—the discourse of the cure or prescription. Perhaps the loudest call for a cure is the demand to restore Japan’s past glory (that is, the rapid economic growth that took place between the 1950s and the 1980s). In 2012, the second Shinzō Abe premiership announced Abenomics, whose quiver held the three arrows of monetary easing, fiscal stimulus, and structural reforms. Designed to encourage both export growth (via a lower yen) and private investment, Abenomics also sought—by constructing roads, railroads, and bridges to everywhere and nowhere—to revive the infrastructural state that had bulldozed and built postwar Japan. In other words, Abenomics was a throwback to the postwar regime, presumably without the excesses of the Bubble years.

The Japanese narrative of decline contains an indisputable grain of truth. Indeed, the very idea of decline is as old as the foundational poetry and myths of the West; and, in the case of postwar Japan, we move from utter devastation at the end of World War II to the Golden Age of rapid economic recovery and growth to, suddenly, the Age of Disease, an epoch of perpetual economic stagnation and perhaps also of societal decline. Any effort to deny this grain of truth would be pointless. To begin with, it would be difficult (though not impossible) to deceive so many people for such a long time: first, from an ethnographic standpoint, seasoned observers would note that there was massive behavioral divergence from the high tide of the Bubble economy and people were no longer ready to bet everything on the stock market or real estate; and, second, the conventional wisdom would continue to paint Japan as a ship that, if not quite sinking, could nevertheless be described as adrift, aimless and languorous. Moreover, if Japan’s domestic pundits (many of whom were cheerleaders of the Bubble years) were to prove untrustworthy, then Nobel Prize–winning economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz would step forward and declare that the Japanese malaise was a consequence of the Japanese economy’s having been crippled by caution.³⁴ Krugman, Stiglitz, and other progressive economists were unlikely boosters of the conservative Abe administration; in fact, there is something of a consensus among Western observers that the heroes of the postwar miracle are the very culprits responsible for the post-Bubble doldrums. A common view is that Japan, in order to revive or resuscitate its economy, must first abandon the regime that brought about the nation’s unprecedented prosperity and then emulate the once-derided laissez-faire orientation of the US economy. This line of reasoning holds that capitalism with Japanese characteristics, if it is to be properly capitalist, must cease to be Japanese. The mathematical edifice of contemporary economics, undeniably ethnocentric, serves as the rationale for the advice that Japan be more like the United States, and it restores the dominant pattern, briefly broken during the heady 1980s, of US advice to Japan. There is no question that the general trend in Japanese political economy since the 1990s has been to embrace more open, and more American, policies in everything from labor relations to corporate governance.³⁵ Paradoxically, the state bureaucracy has been at the forefront in proposing neoliberal policies. The core of state-led economic development, which had putatively conceived and executed Japan’s rapid growth, has now corroded. Japan’s dawn, in August 1945, inaugurated a brilliant arc that reached