A lot has happened (and not happened). I want to start this back up again. The great theological epiphany I was looking for finally occurred (albeit not exactly in the way I thought it would). Maybe I'll elaborate on that later. I'm facing a bit of a time crunch with the end of the semester however, so this review of Shutting Out the Sun by Michael Zielenziger, which I had originally posted on Goodreads, will have to do for now. It is quite relevant to some of what I've had to say before:
Published a year before
the bursting of a bubble that, ironically, plunged the western world
into a nearly identical economic crisis, Michael Zielenziger presented
an incisive yet blinkered account of Japan's 21st-century failings; its
economic stagnation, its crisis of confidence, and the deep scars left
on the psyche of a generation of hopeless young men.
Some 15
years later, after two decades of withering political economy and the
startling rise of western-style hikikomori, it is hard to fault the
author for some of his mistaken presumptions: that this was a uniquely
Japanese crisis born of uniquely Japanese pathologies rooted in its
history and culture, that Japan needed to simply embrace the dynamism of
a competitive and globalized economy in order to recover, and that its
regimented society must embrace liberal pluralism in order to develop a
true alternative to the heavy hand of the state.
The structure
of the book mirrors that of a bewildered youth leaving his room and
exploring the world, beginning with a microscopic examination of
individual families laboring under the stress of hikikomori offspring,
before gradually expanding its focus outward to examine the social and
corporate world and eventually the international relations between Japan
and the rest of the world. Through it all, the heart of this
journalism-turned-book is oriented around its humanistic concern for the
young men the author sought out to understand modern Japan. We learn
about the plight of young men with seemingly little motivation and
direction, who lash out at their parents, who take solitary walks
through Tokyo's sprawling neighborhoods at night, who hole themselves up
in their rooms and find recourse in fantasy worlds, anime, and manga.
Sound familiar?
The theory of the case is that the Japan of the
early 21st century is ruled by a soft managerial despotism that stifles
creative expression and individuality even as it ostensibly guarantees
the freedoms of its citizens. Its 20th-century traumas having not been
adequately grappled with, its booming economy collapsed under the rapid
deflation of an asset bubble, and its mores remain unchanged after
co-opting western techniques of modernization without their
complementary value systems, Japan has become a "hikikomori nation"
incapable of contending with the challenges of modernity and unwilling
to take the hard steps necessary to understand itself. Its national
conglomerates, dense bureaucracy, and parasitical "press clubs" operate
under a revolving door of patronage networks in which responsibility is
widely disseminated and all are left unaccountable, even as rigid social
mores meticulously pick out and remove dissenters from the nation's
midst. The result is a hollow civil society, authoritarian culture, no
effective mediator between individual and state, and near-total absence
of social capital in Japanese society.
There is little doubt
that much of the description is true. Anyone who pierces the thin veil
with which Japan shrouds itself will see just what the author sees: the
replacement of traditional Japanese aesthetic for dreary modernism, its
single-minded devotion to education at the expense of all else, its
stifling mechanisms of socialization, and the deep repression that
sometimes explodes into shocking displays of violence. It is a far cry
from the utopian image projected onto its western japanophiles by the
cultural exports they readily consume. But time has demonstrated that
the author's prescription - a sudden and dramatic individualistic
revolution -misses the mark, and may well do much to land us in the same
place.
The value judgments that inform his critique inform his
solution, which automatically lends suspicion to the value of that
critique. One need only look at the present state of the US and Europe,
where young men retreat from society, take comfort in cartoons and video
games, and in the worst instances engage in mass shooting sprees. Its
people now die the same deaths of despair that the author laments as
peculiarly Japanese. The same transformations in social mores that the
author champions as a triumph of western flexibility in opposition to
Japanese dogmatism now preclude a growing share of young people from sex
and marriage. Inability to reckon with the tradeoffs of privatization
and "shareholder" capitalism deindustrialized large swaths of developed
nations and precipitated the rehabilitation of industrial policy in policy-making circles, precisely the kind of thinking the author
identifies as responsible for Japan's economic stagnation.
Zielenziger
dedicated a few paragraphs towards the end to the notion that the two
extremes of the pendulum, extreme individualism and extreme
collectivism, may both produce social dysfunction. Compared to his
repetitive paeans for the protestant work ethic, he does not dwell on it
nearly long enough. Nor does he take this essential insight to its
logical conclusion: that a planned society and an unplanned society
will, in the long run, produce the same kinds of systemic
dysfunction. Creating thick networks of social trust will be as
challenging in the United States's atomized society as it will be in a
Japan dominated by its inflexible "Iron Triangle". The author gestures
at this but does not follow through. Still, the insights here are
valuable, and the dearth of hikikomori studies makes this a valuable source of information and an intriguing starting point for those who
perceive that our similar conditions are more than mere passing
resemblances. Japan's issues differ from ours only in the temporal
realm. Their state of decay is not different, merely slightly advanced,
and perhaps intertwined.
Addendum: I will have more to say on this, if only because it has sprinkled some breadcrumbs which I suspect will lead me down a rather steep rabbit hole. Zielenziger hypothesizes that it was the progressive embrace of western values, particularly its Protestantism by reformers like Yu kil-chun who in turn inherited ideas passed down to them during their travels by a certain Yankee intelligentsia then under the sway of Spencerism, which led Korea down the path to modernization and the embrace of a more open foreign policy before its subsumption into the Japanese empire. The curious connection between Darwinism and "progressive" notions has been noticed before, and it is a line of inquiry which will yield much to whomever chooses to tug on the strand.
