Information: A Different View Of Reality

Alex Kerr

Men take their misfortunes to heart, and keep them there. A gambler does not talk about his losses; the fiequenter of brothels, who finds his fivorite engaged by another, pretends to be just as well off without her; the professional street-brawler is quiet about the fights he has lost;and a merchant who speculates on goods will conceal the losses he may suffer. All act as one who steps on dog dung in the dark.

-IHARA SAIKAKU,“What the Seasons Brought to the Almanac-Maker (1686))

A countryside of legendary beauty is ravaged, and what was once reputed to be the richest nation in the world runs out of money. To understand how such things can happen, we must come to grips with an issue that disconcerts writers on Japan so badly that when faced with it they ordinarily set down their pens and look away. It is the quality of sheer fantasy.

We have entered a twilight zone where dams and roads carve their way through the landscape without reason and money comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. We cannot dismiss the air of unreality in Japan’s public life lightly, as it is the very air that its officials breathe. The facts about much of Japan’s social, political, and financial life are hidden so well that the truth is nearly impossible to know. This is not just a matter of regret for academic researchers, for a lack of reliable data is the single most significant difference between Japan’s democracy and the democracies of the West. Why have so many students of Japan and commentators by and large ignored the issue of how the nation handles information? I believe it is because our cultural biases run much more deeply than we think. While experts on Japan know all about the commonly encountered difference between tatemae (an official stated position) and honne (real intent), they tend to view the discrepancy as a negotiating ploy. It hasn’t occurred to them that the fundamental Japanese attitude toward information might differ from what they take for granted in the West. But it does differ, and radically so.

Traditionally, in Japan “truth” has never been sacrosanct, nor do “facts” need to be real, and here we run up against one of the great cultural divides between East and West. We can see the two approaches clashing in the Daiwa Bank scandal of 1995, when the Federal Reserve ordered Daiwa’s American branches closed after finding that Daiwa, in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance, had hidden more than a billion dollars of losses from U.S. investigators. MOF reacted angrily with the comment that the Fed had failed to appreciate “cultural differences ” between American and Japanese banking. The cultural difference goes back a long way, to a belief that ideal forms are more “true” than actual objects or events that don’t fit the ideal. When an Edo-period artist entitled his screen painting A True View of Mount Fuji, he did not mean that his painting closely resembled the real Mount Fuji. Rather, it was a true view because it captured the perfect shape that people thought Mount real is far-reaching, and one niay see it at work in the play beween tatemae and honne that dominates daily life in Japan. People will strive to uphold the tatenae in the face of blatant facts to the contrary, believing it is important to keep the honne hidden in order to maintain public harmony.

Tatemae requires an element of reserve, for it presumes that not everything need be spelled out. It relies on communication through nonverbal means, and in interpersonal relations there is much to be said for tatemae, for from it springs the flower of harmony. Tatemae helps to make Japanese society peaceful and cohesive, with a relative lack of the aggressive violence, fanlily breakups, and lawsuits that plague the West. The statistics professor Hayashi Chimio puts the case for tatemae very elegantly:

When people say “There’s no communication between parents and children,” this is an American way of thinking. In Japan we didn’t need spoken communication between parents and children. A glance at the face, a glance at the back, and we understood enough. That was our way of thinking, and it was because we had true communication of the heart. It’s when we took as our model a culture relying on words that things went wrong. Although we live in a society replete with problems that words cannot ever solve,we think we can solve them with words, and this is where things go wrong.

Discreet reliance on tatemae is one of Japan’s truly excellent features,infusing daily life with a grace and a calm that are rare in the fractiousWest. The problem arises when tatemae goes beyond its natural linits. As we saw earlier, when Japan began to modernize after 1868, the rallying cry was Wakon Yosai (Japanese spirit,Western technology). Tatemae, the idea that an unruffledsurface takes precedence over stating the facts, is an old control,”it runs into trouble when it does no-adapt to modern systems. Tatemae is a charming attitude when it means that everyone should look the other way at a guest’s faux pas in the tearoom; it has dangerous and unpredictable results when applied to corporate balance sheets, drug testing, and nuclear- power safety reports.

As we saw earlier,Japanese finance companies lend money to bankrupt borrowers or subsidiaries so that they can continue to pay interest and make bad loans fly off the books. This is tobashi, “flying”-one popular technique for which is to have a bank sell a troubled property to a subsidiary, to which it then loans the money to pay for the property: real-estate problem solved! The docile Japanese press meekly reports tobashi transactions as if they were real ones; one must learn this in order to understand how to read a Japanese newspaper. A headline announces “Nippon Trust sells choice Kyoto site” or “Hokkaido Bank sells assets to write off loans,” and one might imagine that the banks were disposing of assets. However, in both cases the banks were selling to their own subsidiaries in tobashi transac­ tions. The headlines should have read “Nippon Trust fails to sell choice Kyoto site” and “Hokkaido Bank finds no bona fide buyer to help it write off loans.”

The National Land Agency accepts tobashi sales as real ones, which further distorts land-value statistics. Hence while the agency estimates that land prices have dropped in half from their peak, the results at actual auctions show that the fall is more than 80 percent. This is a classic example of an official statistic based on skewed data, but, unfortunately, we have even less to go by in estimating the true situation in most cases.

Tobashi is only one of several techniques of funshoku kessan, ‘cosmetic accounting.” Another technique is, as we have seen, chase value, although they may be worth much less today than what was paid for them. Or unsightly liabilities are simply brushed away, such as pension-fund deficits, which Japanese companies have not had to report, even though they face huge exposure to their underfunded pensions. When all else fails, outright falsification comes into play-with encouragement from the ministries of Finance and of International Trade and Industry. In the Jusen scandal of 1996, when Japan’s seven housing-loan corporations (known as Jusen) went bankrupt, leaving bad debts of 3 trillion yen, former MOF men (amakudari, or “descended from heaven,” because after retirement they descend to the management of companies under MOF’s control) ran six of the seven Jusen, which together had extended loans of which an astonishing 90 to 98.5 percent were nonperforming. In the years before the final collapse and exposure, the amakudari executives guided the Jusen banks in a game of elaborate trickery.‘AtJuso, for example, the bank showed investigators and lenders three different sets of figures for the total of bad loans: Y1,254 bibon, Y1,004 blllion, or 649 bdhon. MOF was aware of the scale of the Jusen disaster as early as 1992, but it must have chosen to work only with the C List, because a report at that time concluded that the Jusen were “not approaching a state of danger.”This decision to put off the reckoning led to the public’s having to pay hundreds of billions of yen more in 1996 to clean up the mess.

Tobashi and “cosmetic accounting’’ are endemic; one could say they are defining features of Japanese industry. As embarrassing as revelations of serious abuses are when they come, MOF cannot do without either, because Japanese banks are addicted to them. Only with such techniques can the banks maintain the capital-to-assets adequacy ratio of 8 percent mandated by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), failing employs so many people to provide for so little social need, creates no wealth, and relies almost entirely on public handouts for funding?

Grandiose slogans cover up this tawdry reality of Japanese cities and their monuments. Slogans have deep cultural roots-words, in ancient Shinto, are magic-and the ideals stated in words sometimes have a greater psychological truth than material reality. One can see this principle in action daily in the business or political world, where people will typically state the tatemae (official position) rather than the honne (real intent); nor is this seen as duplicitous.The tutemue may not reflect objective truth, but it describes the way things are supposed to be, and that is more important.

Also, in a military culture, slogans are the equivalent of shouts going into battle. Officials preface public activities in Japan with battle cries. In March 1997, the city of Kyoto published the results of its Fifth Kyoto 21 Forum, its title trumpeting, “An Avant-Garde City at the Turning Point of Civilization.” That’s the blood-stirring tatemae. The actuality is a blah industrial city that has temples on its outslurts lined with loudspeakers.

Every monument and new city plan has exciting slogans to go along with it. Take Okinawa, one ofJapan’spoorest regions. We hear that the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications is going to develop an Okinawa Multimedia Zone aimed at creating an “info-communications hub for the entire Asia-Pacific region.” Meanwhile, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry is planning something called Digital Island, and Okinawa officials are proposing the Cosmopolitan City Formation Concept.

Yokohama describes itself as “cultivating its image as a 24-hour international cultural city, a 2lst-century information city, and an environmentally friendly, humanistic city rich in water, greenery and historical places.” Alas, Yokohama, where trains and buses shut down after midnight, is not “24-hour”; nor is the city international (its old foreign community has largely disappeared);certainly it is not environmentally friendly or particularly cultural; and it is not especially rich in greenery or hstoric sites. The port does have a lot of water.

Imaginary towns like “Mirage City-Another Utopia” boast even more glamorous slogans than real cities. Mirage City, Isozaki tells us, is “an experimental model for the conceptualization and realization of a Utopian city for the 21st century-the age of "informatics.” It will feature “inter-activity, inter-communality, inter-textuality, inter-subjectivity,and inter­ communicativity.” In the slogan lexicon, “twenty-first century,”“communication,” “hub,” “center,” “cultural,” “art,” “environment,” “cosmopolitan,” “international,”joho Itasshin (broadcasting of information), fureui (get in touch), “community,”“multipurpose,”“Asia-Pacific,” “intelegent,” and words beginning with inter-, inlo-, or techno- and ending with -utopia (or variants: -opiu and -piu) or -polis are favorites.

Slogans require a certain amount of care in handling, since their true intent is often far from their surface meaning. Take, for example, the term “symbiotic unity,” kyosei, used by Hasegawa Itsuko to describe her metal-and-plastic trees. Kyosei literally means “living together,” and it is a rallying cry for modern Japanese architecture, made famous by Kurokawa Kisho, who used it to justify proposals like the one for filling in Tokyo Bay by razing a mountain range. Kyosei, in other words, is exactly the opposite of “symbiotic unity with the environment.”

There is a lesson here that has profound implications for the way foreign media report on Japan. It is all too easy to accept the slogans at face value and not question what is really going on. For example, the city of Nagoya made plans to wipe out exactly what to think and do about everything. Flower schools such as Ikenobo and Hara have taken to diagramming their arrangements. Branch A stands at an 87-degree angle to the ground; Branch B turns away at a 32-degree angle to the right; and Branch C leans at precisely 55 degrees to the left. The tips of the branches must end within a triangle, with sides of such­and-such length.

Foreigners, and even Japanese new to a study of traditional arts, may assume that this rigid diagrammatic approach is a part of the tradition. But the opposite is true. Ikebana was a medi­tative practice, heavily influenced by Zen, taxing to the utmost the artist’s spontaneous skill and sensitive observation of nature. Trying to duplicate a geometric shape was definitely not the point. Ikenobo Senno, the founder of the Ikenobo School and the father of ikebana, in the famous preface to his seminal essay on flowers in 1542, went out of his way to stress that the aim of ikebana was not to enjoy a shape but to bring out the basic a­ture of a flowering branch or tree, thereby mystically pointing the way toward the secrets of the universe.

From this point of view, what we see in modern ikebana books is a denial of everything that ikebana once stood for. The same goes for the modern tea ceremony, which also has manuals demonstrating how to sit and stand at every instant of the ceremony, and where to lay the utensils-exactly so many centimeters from the edge of the tatami, no more, no less. All this has the look and feel of tradition, but it’s definitely not tradition. The rules in these manuals are newly invented, written especially for adults who have graduated from Japan’s postwar schoolrooms.

All of this is not to say that Japan’s culture, modern or traditional, has become hopelessly childish. The great fashion designer Miyake Issey, the inspired flower arranger Kawase Toshiro, the architect Ando Tadao, and other fine contemporary artists have shown a profound understanding of Japanese tradition and combined this with a contemporary outlook. The world rightly admires these great artists, yet back home in Japan they do not represent the mainstream, and in private they despair at what they see going on around them. For every exquisite pleated Issey vest sold in Aoyama, youngsters in Harajuku are buying myriad kakui garments with oversize socks, sailor suits fringed in lace, purses embellished with the smiling face of adorable three-year-old Chibi Maruko-chan, and shoes that squeak. In the time that Ando completes one pure abstract structure, Hasegawa Itsuko and her followers have raised dozens of furyu-type monuments across the land, each a kindergarten- style concatenation of fiberglass, metal cutouts, and plywood. For every lady pleased by Kawase’s simple arrangements of a few flower petals and branches, tens of thousands of Ikenobo followers labor on grotesesque creations of foil and vinyl. The future belongs to them.

Well, not completely. I had an interesting encounter at that ikebana show that illustrates in a nutshell the difference between how the Japanese and foreigners look at Japan’s cultural crisis. As I was walking down the rows of flower arrangements, I came across a young American woman who was studying ikebana in Tokyo and her middle-aged Japanese lady friend whom she had brought along to see the show. “Isn’t the Japanese love of nature wonderful?” the American woman conmented to me. “1 guess so,” I replied. “But I see here some vinyl, here some fiberglass and leaves stapled to painted cardboard. Where’s the nature?”The American ikebana practitioner grew angry.

“Treating flowers this way is traditional!” she exclaimed. The Japanese woman, who had not said a single word, joined in at this point. It turned out that she was not an ikebana practitioner herself; she had come along merely to see the art form that her foreign friend was so enthusiastic about. She had been walking around feeling vaguely uncomfortable, but in such a prestigious location and with her friend oohing and aahing, she had not felt confident in expressing her doubts. Hearing me, she relaxed and gave vent. “Yes!” she exclaimed. “These things are monstrous. This is environmental degradation, that’s what it is!”

The American woman was typical of a phenomenon: the foreigner who converts to Japan, as one might convert to a religion. For her, announcing that flower arrangements of this type were “traditional” had all the weight of quoting the Bible. Tragically, she was unaware of how removed such arrangements really are from tradition; but she exemplified the many foreign writers, especially on culture, who continue to purvey modern Japanese arts to the world as unquestioning devotees. It’s because of the existence of such converts that the real troubles in Japan’s environment, design, architecture, and cinema have never been expressed in the foreign media. For foreign students of Japan, it has been a long and chronic case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

The Japanese woman, however, had a healthy and natural response; she didn’t care about tradition: ugly was ugly. Or, at a deeper level, she instinctively understood what the tradition should have been, and could feel without knowing exactly why that these arrangements were all wrong. The Japanese are not so nostalgic about their own culture that they have become blind to its problems. And in this lies the hope for revitalization and change.

One of the most fascinating phenomena of the new Japan is the explosion of wacky youth fashion, which is hugely influencing young people all over East Asia, and drawing a lot of attention in the Western press. The “look” is by now familiar from many a magazine article: spiky dyed hair, face entirely smoothed in heavy makeup to a shiny copper or caramel complexion, shaved and painted eyebrows, and high clunky shoes-plus lots of cute Hello Kitty accessories. The impact on East Asia is, in a sense, a healthy one, in that Asians are finally discovering their own identities, and the new styles coming out of Japan are in many ways better suited to their local cultures. Terry McCarthy writes: “Despite the marketing muscle of American record companies and film studios,there is an inevitable cultural short­ fall-Asians may watch the American shows, but the bronzed, buffed bodies of Buyuutch are not something that most Asian teens could (or even would) aspire to.” Nineteen-year-old fashion student Watanabe Eriko puts it succinctly: “It’s stupid for the Japanese to compete with Western designers. . . .We should be selling our own Eastern styles to Asia, because Asians have the fashion sense and bodies to complement Japanese designs. Why must we go to Europe to dress tall blondes? Our aesthetic matches black hair and slimmer bodies better.”

The question is whether the new fashion means a cultural renaissance is on its way, as many of its supporters believe, or whether it is just, well, fashion. Ever since World War 11, one of the favorite themes of Western journalism about Japan is the NewYouth, and regularly, about once every year or so, Time or Newsuieek devotes special articles to this subject. The youth are going to change, they are going to overturn the old order, because they wear miniskirts, or because they sport nose rings and dye their hair. It’s a natural inference to make, because in the West free sexual and fashion mores have traditionally been linked to &ee thinking, viz. Woodstock. However, in Japan the situation is dfferent in that such freedoms have always been allowed so long as people toe the line with regard to their families, work, social hierarchies, and so on. In other words, sex and fashion are delinked from politics, This was true even in the seventeenth century, when Jesuit missionaries fresh from imperial Beijing, where most people dressed in drab blue or black, nese directors have not been popular at home, and the ones that had the potential to be were held back or repressed by government censors. Chinese directors began, as Japanese independents did, with niche marketing, aiming their products at foreign festivals. In the next stage, however, Chinese films parted ways with Japanese. They moved out of the art houses and became international hits.

By 2000, U.S. stulos were producing movies by Tsui Hark and Ang Lee in Hong Kong. “What makes Hong Kong cinema successful is its energy and spirit, and I was mindful to harness that,” said Barbara Robinson, the manager of Columbia Pic­ tures Film Production Asia. Meanwhile, Peter Chan, freshly returned to Hong Kong from directing The Love Letter for Dreamworks SKG, announced in May 2000 that he was founding a company to produce Asian films for Asians-and that he would begin by linking up with Thai and Korean directors.

As for Japan, there has never been a successful joint Western- Japanese or Asian-Japanese film, or any highly regarded Japanese film set in another country. There are no crossover directors or producers; and since Toshiro Mifune in the 1960s and 1970s, there has never been a major crossover actor from Japan, as there have been from Hong Kong and China. In recent years, Taiwan-born Kaneshiro Takeshi has made a name for himself in the avant-garde films of Wong Kar-Wai, but he is no match for the big international stars such as Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, and Vivian Wu. Thomas McLain, a film-industry lawyer in Los Angeles, sums it up: “The Japanese entertainment industry is in the dark ages.”

Education is a subject fraught with emotion, given that it is one of the chief means whereby a nation maintains its cultural identity. Conservative politicians and the Ministry of Education vigorously defend Japan’s educational system for doing just that, but the problem is: Which cultural identity is being preserved? As we have seen in the case of ikebana and the tea ceremony, much that masquerades as hallowed tradition today is in fact brand-new.

The uptight manual-bound tea masters of today bear very little resemblance to their playful forebears. Now a tea master has to consult a reference book to tell him which flower to place in the tokonoma alcove during the rainy season. But in early Edo, Kobori Enshu, when his guests entered the tearoom after an afternoon shower, simply took a bucket of water and splashed it in the tokonorna. Students of ikebana diligently calculating the exact angle of each flowering branch may think they are studying “tradition,” but the angles and triangles come from another planet from the mystical world of Ikenobo Senno.

When Nakano Kiyotsugu confessed himself baffled at the new rules that seem to have sprung up in daily life, he was telling us that the rigidly conventional lifestyle of today is in fact something new. Nothing like the strict adherence to rules we see today ever existed in Japan before. For all the shoguns’ attempts at control, the Edo period was a riot of variety and eccentricity. Saikaku and his freewheeling townsmen friends would find today’s incessant announcement of aisatstr greetings, the rules telling everyone what to do at every moment, very much at odds with their experience.

Even at the height of mid-twentieth-century militaristic fanaticism, there was more room in Japan for characterfiul individuality than there is today, as one discovers when one meets older Japanese. People who were educated before the war (now in their seventies and eighties) seem to have kept more of their humanity than students of recent years. Among this older generation, one constantly meets cultured, questioning people, often with a sly sparkle in the eye and a wicked tongue.

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If you read this article please email me at: bmori@calpoly.edu