Three Cheers For Kan

It surely won't win him many fans among right-of-center Japanese voters, but Prime Minister Naoto Kan's decision to issue a formal apology for the suffering inflicted by the Japanese military during World War II on the anniversary of Japan's surrender in lieu of visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine as have his predecessors is a step in the right direction towards improving relations between the country and its Asian neighbors. It's not exactly fair to say that the shrine glorifies the actions of the war criminals among the 2.4 million war dead to whom it is dedicated - in Shinto cosmology, death absolves a person of his or her sins, so honor is paid to the spirits of the dead regardless of their actions in life, and in my experience even moreso than in other cultures it is considered taboo to continue to nurse grudges against those who have left this world. (Incidentally, this seems to apply to foreigners as well - while the Japanese continue to commerorate August 6th and 9th, the dates of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings respectively, as days of national tragedy, I have met very few people in my time who blame Americans for dropping the bombs). But the fact that the shrine makes no distinction between the honorable and the dishonorable dead is a major sore spot for Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, and others who suffered under the rule of militarist Japan during the war years, and understandably so. They neither understand nor share the Shinto preference for letting bygones be bygones and view each visit made to the shrine by a Japanese leader as an added insult given that they have already so vociferously voiced their displeasure with the custom. Continuing to visit it is therefore a needless international provocation for a Japanese leader. It is an act of allegiance more-or-less demanded by the nationalist right, who have been a key component of what has been Japan's ruling coalition over most of the past sixty years, but it is foolish. There are other ways to honor the heroic among Japan's war dead, and as the years go by and Japan becomes ever more connected politically and economically to its neighbors, strained relations with them become a luxury it can less and less afford. Kan's party, the Democratic Party of Japan, realizes this and has made it a major plank of their platform, and hopefully the fact that they have managed to elect a Prime Minister willing to refrain from using internationally antagonistic appeals to nationalism to buy votes will make it easier for Japan's leaders to do the smart and sensitive thing in the future.

A Window Into Modern Japan

Currently I'm in Kobe, the capital of Hyogo prefecture and one of Japan's busiest ports. Because I had a friend living here, it was one of the first cities I visited when I arrived in Japan, and at the time I was struck by the energy and worldliness of the place, an impression which remains undiminished on a second visit. Kobe was one of the first Japanese ports opened to foreign ships by the new Meiji government, in 1868, and that legacy is visible all over the city, in its numerous western-style houses, sleek international hotels, and tree-lined, Europeanesque hillside neighborhoods. Kobe's international character is visible in more than just its architecture, however; the city has a large foreign population, including one of the biggest Chinese communities in Japan, English signage is much more common here than in other Japanese cities, and people not only study foreign languages, but actually use them - last night a Japanese woman sitting next to me on the train apologized to me in English when she needed to squeeze past me to put her bag on the luggage rack, something which would rarely if ever happen in Tohoku, the more inward-looking, traditionally Japanese region in which I live. Even the city's culinary calling card - its world-renowned eponymous beef - reflects its cosmopolitan heritage, the raising, slaughtering, and eating of cows not being a traditional part of Japanese culture. It's one of Japan's friendliest cities, and one of the first places I'd suggest any foreigner without much knowledge of the culture or language visit if they wish to experience a soft landing in the country.

Beneath the bustling cosmopolitan surface, however, there's a bit of a darker resonance to Kobe. Like many of Japan's cities it was pretty well-leveled by repeated bombing raids during World War II, but whereas other Japanese communities have somewhat lost their sense of the fragility of civilization in the largely prosperous decades since the war, in Kobe it remains palpable. This is because of the devastation the city suffered due to what in Japan is referred to as the Great Hanshin earthquake, and elsewhere as the Kobe earthquake, which struck the city at 5:46 AM on the morning of January 17th, 1995. The quake was one of the most powerful to hit Japan in recorded history, and its epicenter was only 20 kilometers from downtown Kobe. The quake killed more than 6,000 people, damaged or destroyed more than 200,000 buildings, and caused more than $100 billion in damage. At the time, this amount was equal to 2.5% of Japan's annual GDP, making it, according to the Guinness book of world records, the costliest natural disaster in human history. The city has never fully recovered - even today it has not regained its status as Japan's busiest port, and wrecked buildings, their owners killed or otherwise unaccounted for in the aftermath of the disaster, remain strewn like forgotten grave sites throughout the rebuilt city. Part of a collapsed pier in the port district, which suffered particularly heavy damage, was left unreconstructed as a memorial to the disaster:

But worse even than the economic and human costs was the psychological toll inflicted on the country by the earthquake and in particular, by its aftermath. The Japanese government, which initially refused offers of humanitarian aid from foreign nations on the grounds that the language barrier and lack of Japanese medical licensing would prevent foreign volunteers from assisting, was widely criticized for incompetence, mismanagement, and bureaucratic lethargy in the wake of its slow, confused response, and political disillusionment grew worse than ever. Even worse, people began to doubt one of the very underpinnings of modern Japanese society. Ever since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan had put its faith in technological progress, and that faith had been rewarded by unprecedented growth and unchallenged status as Asia's premier economic power, both before and eventually after World War II. People believed in technology's power to make life predictable, secure, and safe. In the case of something like an earthquake, they expected technology to give them early warnings, to minimize the damage, and to make recovery quick and easy. None of those things happened. The early warning systems failed. Buildings, highways, and bridges that had supposedly been built to be "earthquake-proof" collapsed. Artificial islands in Kobe harbor, once a symbol of humanity's ability to bend nature to its will, sunk into the sea when the soil beneath them liquefied. And the government's short-term and long-term safety nets failed after all this happened. Hundreds of people were left homeless and without access to food or medicine in the immediate aftermath, and municipal and national authorities proved overmatched by the task of rebuilding the shattered city (only 3% of the real estate of which was insured prior to the earthquake). For a people who felt like they had "made it" - had achieved the material security that wealth and technology can provide - it was a painful and unsettling lesson that the world can never be made completely safe.

Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Japan's most popular contemporary novelist, explored this theme in his short story collection after the quake, published in 1997. In each of the stories, the earthquake and the devastation it caused serve as a recurring symbol of the gnawing dread and anxiety that remain beneath the seemingly placid surface of modern Japanese life, and for each of the major characters, some aspect of the disaster connects to some difficult, painful, or insecure aspect of their own lives. Walking around the Kobe earthquake Memorial Park, you can see what he's getting at.

Kobe was not a city particularly rich in historical sights even before the widespread destruction it suffered during World War II. But as perhaps the city most emblematic of modern Japan, with the visceral evocation of all the society's fears and aspirations it provides, it is still worth visiting. If you don't leave it thinking a bit more deeply about what concepts like progress and civilization mean, you haven't paid full attention while you were there.

Baseball, As Japanese As Okaa-San And Red Bean Pie

I just finished reading You Gotta Have Wa, Japan-based American journalist Robert Whiting’s 1989 non-fiction book on baseball in Japan, and for anyone interested in sociological and cultural differences between Japan and the west, it’s a fascinating read. The way the game fits into the cultural fabric of the U.S., the way it fits into the cultural fabric of Japan, and the differences therein provide a fascinating insight into deeper cultural differences even if you’re not a baseball fan.

We Americans tend to think of baseball as a quintessentially American game, not only in terms of its origins and place in popular culture, but spiritually as well. Over the decades, sportswriters have spilled gallons of ink waxing poetic about the game, about its pastoral, rural origins that supposedly hearken back to a time when America was a more innocent place, its unique nature as a timeless game that’s not over until the last man is out, its capacity to generate quintessentially American larger-than-life characters like Babe Ruth and Pete Rose. It has been thought of as a key bridge between generations of American fathers and sons – just think of Ray Kinsella and his father having a catch at the end of Field of Dreams – and our great teacher of life lessons about defeat, sportsmanship, and perseverance (cf. “Casey At The Bat”, or The Natural). More so than any other sport, it has been considered a barometer of the nation’s social condition; when the Black Sox threw the 1919 World Series, it was so widely considered indicative of a moral rot at the heart of the culture that F. Scott Fitzgerald would use the incident in The Great Gatsby to symbolize the corruption of the American Dream that in his view defined the Roaring Twenties, and when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, it was viewed as one of the first great victories of the Civil Rights Movement. And it’s often been taken as a sign that newly arrived ethnic immigrant communities have truly integrated when they produce their first great ballplayer – as with Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra for the Italians, or Carl Yastrzemski for the Poles. Scandals and disappointments like the 1994 players’ strike and the Steroid Era may have tainted the game’s aura of purity, and faster, more telegenic sports may be catching up to it (or, in the case of football, have already passed it) in terms of popularity, but nevertheless, it retains a unique place in our mythology – the saying remains, after all, that something is “as American as baseball and apple pie."

What Whiting’s book does is show how the same sport has achieved a similarly mythic status in an entirely different cultural context. One Japanese writer quoted in the book states that “if Americans hadn’t invented baseball, we Japanese would have”, and after reading it, one can see why that he would have that sentiment. As a team sport, baseball of course appeals to the Japanese values of teamwork and self-sacrifice for the good of the group. But unlike other team sports, baseball is broken into a series of discrete actions rather consisting of continuous, flowing play. As such, it is neatly amenable to the philosophy of the martial arts, in which personal improvement results directly from devoting one’s self to perfecting a given technique through diligence, focus, spiritual discipline, and lots and lots of repetitive practice. The great Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh perfected his swing by slicing at a strip of paper hanging from the ceiling with a sword, trying with each stroke to shave off as narrow a piece from the bottom of the strip as he could. It’s the kind of exercise you find being written about in military training manuals and treatises on bushido written by Edo-era samurai, but the control necessary to deliver an exact, powerful sword stroke and the control necessary to hit a professional breaking pitch flush on the fat of the bat being similar skills, it was easily transferred to baseball. Other fundamentals of the game – throwing a curveball, fielding a grounder, turning a double-play – require a similar mastery of technique. To become an outstanding player in soccer, hockey, or basketball (all of which have professional profiles in Japan, albeit ones much lower than that of baseball), requires creativity and an ability to adapt to new and different situations on the fly, things which any foreigner who’s spent time in Japan (and many Japanese, for that matter) will tell you are not Japanese strengths. This, more than lack of size or ability, is the reason in my opinion the Japanese do not tend to excel at other team sports (which, with the exception of basketball, do not necessarily even require physical stature as a prerequisite for success). Go to any high school soccer or basketball game in Japan, and you’ll see some physically talented players, but precious few who have developed the instincts to play the game at full speed mentally. But baseball, rather than quick thinking, requires perfecting a set of well-defined skills, and that is something the Japanese are very good at. Thus for them baseball provides a sort of validation of their cultural values.

There's also the matter of gattsu (guts) and damashi (fighting spirit). These have always been prized qualities in the Japanese conception of masculinity, first in the codes of the country’s martial arts and later in the sports they spawned. In traditional Japanese competitions like kendo and karate, the ability to endure pain and fight through exhaustion are considered as or more important than speed or power, and the training they require as disciplines tends to reflect that – rather than focus on helping an athlete achieve his or her peak physical performance, it focuses on ensuring that he or she can continue to fight on even under very adverse conditions. Physical toughness is thought of as something that can be developed, rather than merely an inborn trait, and training methods often border on sadistic. More old-school Japanese managers adapted this approach to baseball, putting their players through grueling training regimens that push them to their physical limits. Fielders field hundreds or even thousands of grounders each day, pitchers throw hundreds of practice pitches even on days when they’re supposedly “resting”, and everyone runs and does lots of other conditioning drills. Many of the American players who’ve played in Japan interviewed for the book find this training grueling and self-defeating, since it exhausts the players and leaves them at less than their full capacity for the actual games, but for the Japanese, being at full capacity isn’t the point – being able to win when you’re at less than full capacity is.

Whiting also goes into a great deal of fascinating detail about how other cultural concepts central to the Japanese worldview, such as “wa” (group harmony) and the relationship between senpai (mentors, upperclassmen) and kohai (protégés, underclassmen) are expressed in the context of baseball, though in those cases the nature of the sport itself matters less. He discusses the modernization of Japan (and the change in Japanese values that has come with it) in the context of the game, finding in iconoclastic younger players like three time Triple Crown winner Hiromitsu Ochiai (who was referred to by the Japanese press as "the gaijin who speaks Japanese" due to his colorful, anti-authoritarian personality) avatars of the “shinjinrui”, or “new breed of humanity”, a postwar generation who supposedly represent the Japan's shift toward a more individualistic and less refined culture. He also tackles the less savory side of the sport – not just the machinations of professional teams and the big businesses that own and operate them, but the troubled institutions of Japanese amateur baseball as well. There’s a particularly fascinating chapter on Koshien, the annual high school baseball tournament that grips the nation every summer, and is something like big-time college sports in the U.S., with the same myths of purity, amateurism, and fair competition between scholar-athletes, and the same realities of big-time money making, exploitation, and academic, recruiting, and gambling scandals behind them. It’s a book that shatters myths as well as explains them, and demonstrates the bad as well as the good things that sports shows us we all have in common.

It is, in short, an excellent book, for lovers of the sport of baseball and lovers of the country of Japan equally. In my observation, some things have changed in the twenty years since the book's publication - I think the old school Japanese approach to life and baseball has been adulterated more than ever by influences from abroad - but some cultural gaps remain as wide as ever, and Whiting has a great gift for illustrating and explaining such disconnects.

The World Disney-fied, Japanese Style

I just returned from my first visit to DisneySea, one of the two Disney theme parks in Japan, and the experience was a very interesting one. Unlike many American kids, I didn't grow up with Disney - my childhood coincided with the decade-long creative fallow period that marked the 80's for the company's animation studio, so its movies were never a fixture in our home library, and I've only once visited one of its U.S. theme parks, Disney World in Florida, and that as a high school student. So I didn't come into the experience with a lot of sentimental baggage or preconceived notions. What struck me about the experience was just how good Disney is at what it does as a company - creating a safer, more sanitary, and more colorful and entertaining version of the world on a miniature scale, and temporarily transporting its customers to it - even in a totally different cultural context. A lot of western companies have failed to penetrate the Japanese market, but in my opinion the primary reason for this is not that the Japanese are excessively nationalistic or protectionist in their economic attitudes, as was often claimed during the "Japan Takes Over The World" hysteria of the 1980's. Rather, it's that they didn't know how to give Japanese consumers the products they want. Disney, which has succeeded spectacularly well in Japan, was one of the exceptions, and to this day it'd be a good case study for anyone interested in doing business in the country.

While there is quite a bit of water in the park layout, despite its name DisneySea is not a marine park, with performing aquatic animals and the like. Rather, it's a straight theme-park built around venues combining shopping, dining, and entertainment and a few flagship amusement park-type rides and attractions, like the neighboring DisneyLand. Its main connection to the sea is a thematic one - it is divided into several different areas, most of which aim to recreate famous waterfront areas from around the world, and several of the rides and other attractions are water-themed. Enter the park and you're in a convincingly recreated portion of Venice, complete with gondolas, weather-beaten Mediterranean-style buildings, and a replica of the Rialto Bridge. Turn left and you're in the New York Port District, circa 1900. Go past there and you're in a re-created Cape Cod fishing town featuring a minitarure New England-style lighthouse and a restaurant selling American food. And so on.

The genius in the park's design lies in the way each of these areas is designed to appeal to the escapist fantasies of Japanese consumers. As a crowded, frequently climactically unpleasant country with a ferocious national work ethic that dictates long hours at school or at the office, Japan can be a psychologically exhausting place to live. As such, foreign environments and lifestyles which are perceived as free of the stressors of typical Japanese daily life hold a great deal of appeal to many of the people here. The American freedom to sprawl out and take up as much space as you like anywhere you want and the leisurely cafe culture of the Mediterranean may only be partially real, as anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in the U.S. or Europe could tell you, but that doesn't diminish the attractiveness of the fantasy for the Japanese, or their willingness to pay to indulge in it. DisneySea hits this market sweet spot exactly.

The real Venice? Beautiful, yes, but also overcrowded, overpriced, and surprisingly decrepit, with pickpockets, rip-off artists, and the fetid smell of stagnant water rising from the canals all everpresent annoyances which diminish its romance. Also, it's far away. New York? Exciting, cosmopolitan, full of neon lights and cultural star-power, but also dirty, dangerous, and frightfully expensive. Cape Cod? Remote, very unlikely to have any sort of tourist infrastructure or staffing catering to Japanese clientele, and thus presenting an intimidating language barrier. Also, you try getting decent sushi there. The Arabian Coast? Are you kidding? A Japanese tourist would make a fine target for a terrorist kidnapping there. For the price of a twenty minute train ride from downtown Tokyo and a one-day entry pass, DisneySea offers to transport visitors to all of these places, at least in their imaginations. And they don't have to deal with foreign money, confront the frightening prospect of interacting with shopkeepers, customs officials, hotel clerks, taxi drivers, and the like in a foreign language, or place themselves too far from the comforts of home to go there. When it's over, you can get back on the train and go right home to your own bed. It's exotic foreign travel, scrubbed of all the dangers, annoyances, and expense that make real exotic foreign travel something of a mixed experience even to those, like me, who live for it. Mix in a couple of well-designed thrill rides and other attractions, and you have all the ingredients for a very enjoyable daytrip for your typical overworked Tokyo office drone. The Disney experience in Japan really is a brilliantly conceived and marketed product, and if you could sell laundry detergent or vacuum cleaners or what-have-you with a strategy that similarly managed to appeal to the worldly curiosity of Japanese consumers without pushing them too far outside their linguistic and cultural comfort zones, I suspect you could make money doing so.

Looking back on my previous visit to DisneyWorld, I'm struck by the thought that it offers a similar appeal to American visitors, although one calibrated somewhat differently so as to appeal to the cultural ideals and fantasies of Americans. We are often cited by foreigners (both positively and negatively) as an idealistic people, with a child-like enthusiasm and energy, and a similarly child-like love for straightforward (or simplistic, depending on your point of view) moral reasoning. DisneyWorld prevents a sort of idealized snow globe version of the world as we Americans like to imagine it - full of clear-cut heroes and villains, with the former triumphing in the end, bright, clean, egalitarian, and safe. I'd like to visit EuroDisney someday to see how the company tailors its brand of entertainment for Europeans.