Bubbling into postmodernity

Elsewhere in the world, the miraculous growth of the Japanese economy was exciting a range of reactions. While the rest of the planet laboured under stagflation, recession, and unemployment in the wake of the oil shocks of 1973 and 1978, the Japanese economy continued to grow through the 1980s
at about 5% per annum – it had weathered the 1970s through a combination of exploiting the elasticity of its so-called ‘dual economy’, industrial restructuring (away from heavier industries), energy diversification, and creative off-shoring. At the end of the 1980s, the Tokyo stockmarket was worth 40% of the world’s market; land prices in Japan were ludicrously high (for a while the land under the city of Tokyo was worth more than Canada).
At one extreme, Japan was represented as a threatening global monster that was intent on forging a massive postwar empire, simply substituting yen for the bullets of the co-prosperity sphere: the phenomenon of ‘Japan bashing’ became commonplace in the USA. At the other extreme, Japan was seen as a mystical and inspiring model for economic development, and a range of populist books were published that claimed to unlock the secret connections between Japanese work ethics, Confucian organization, the spirit of bushido, and business success. The world clamoured around the invented image of  the salaryman-samurai.
Meanwhile, in Japan, despite claims that the vast majority of the population was now a homogeneous middle class with shared life-goals and equal access to the resources of an affluent state, the Japanese society that entered the 1980s and 1990s was still unsure of its place in the world. The Nihonjinron industry boomed, as the Japanese population consumed hundreds of treatises that sought to explain the uniqueness of the Japanese people from ethnic, psychological, sociological, and religious perspectives. The new generation came to be called a new species (shin jinrui). They were confident and proud of Japan’s affluence, but never having known the hardships of the previous generation, they were complacent about the wealth. The banks made casual loans: very famously the Industrial Bank of Japan lent an Osaka woman 2 billion dollars against a small chain of restaurants, which she proceeded to lose on the stockmarket after taking financial advice from her psychic. In the end, it turned out that she had faked the ownership deeds on the restaurants. Corruption in business and politics seemed to be growing, and the people lost faith in their politicians after the drama of the Lockheed Scandal in 1985 and then the Recruit Scandal in 1988, the repercussions of which would contribute to the brief fall from power of the LDP in 1993, for the first time since its establishment in 1955.

This ‘new species’ of Japanese citizen was not content to quietly and selflessly dedicate its life to Japan’s economic growth, and it complained about the long hours of work and the lack of time to enjoy the spoils of Japan’s affluence. The term karoshi (death from overwork) became a commonplace, and emergency hotlines were even established to try to prevent the overworked from breaking down or committing suicide. At the same time, the previous generations complained that the ‘new species’ had lost all social consciousness and discipline, the characteristics that had defined their postwar identities.

Instead of dedicating themselves to a single company in ‘lifetime employment’ arrangements, the new species were increasingly furitaa, seeking freelance work with a sequence of employers to enable them to travel and to fit their work around the demands of the rest of their lives. This emphasis on leisure and ways of forming identities that were not dependent upon work found expression in the creation of multiple ‘micro-masses’ or subcultures: office ladies and college girls adopted a new form of the ‘moga’ (modern girl), defining a subculture in terms of rampant consumerism, and building their identities amidst designer handbags, European shoes, and stylized haircuts. In the 1990s, this movement became associated with the phenomenon of enjo kosai, ‘compensated dating’, which labelled the practice of young girls (often of school age) dating older men in return for being bought the latest consumer

goods. Although, in general, the moga was a leisure-time identity: at work or in school, the same moga would present themselves impeccably in their uniforms. This subculture and its moral experimentation is captured in the work of authors such as Yoshimoto Banana, whose name is deliberately as

ludicrous in Japanese as in English. 

Alongside the moga were other subcultures, such as the iconic ‘otaku’ (geek): usually young men who became obsessively interested in one topic or another – frequently ‘anti-social’ activities such as computer games, anime, or manga, which the otaku would collect in vast numbers, perhaps spending the weekend engaged in ‘cosplay’ reconstructions of their favourite characters.

The development of these new consumerist subcultures touched off what some have referred to as the ‘otaku panic’. Despite evidence that the moga and the otaku continued to function in their jobs and continued to work longer hours than nearly every other society on the planet (with the exception of South Korea), critics argued that these micro-masses demonstrated the ‘hollowing out’ of Japanese society and culture. The older generations feared for the moral and cultural collapse of their

nation. A conservative drive to preserve a more traditional Japan emphasized the need for people to get out of the sprawling urban centres and to ‘discover Japan’ by visiting rural areas, which were still less transformed by the postwar boom. This nostalgia and romanticization of the countryside was accompanied by genuine growth in domestic tourism. However, for creative intellectuals such as Yoshimoto Takaaki (the father of Banana), these social movements revealed that Japanese society was moving through modernity and out the other side, into a postmodern condition in which individuals were no longer slaves to the material expectations of their society, but in which they were free to define the meaning of their lives for themselves. Postmodern Japan was about individual people, and not about Japan at all.

This mood was captured in the work of the world-famous novelist Murakami Haruki, whose important duology, A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance, Dance, Dance provided bookends for the 1980s. One of the central themes of these best-selling, postmodern novels is the way in which individuality is consistently destroyed by the homogenizing imperatives of the system itself. For instance, the eponymous ‘sheep’ is a sinister presence that inhabits the minds of people like a supernatural parasite and gradually eliminates its host’s personality, replacing it with its own; the host enjoys a sense of power and comfort that accompanies this possession, and in particular comes to feel free of any sense of responsibility for his/her actions. As a critique of the totalizing national culture that Murakami and others perceived in Japan, the sheep is a powerful symbol. At some point all the possessed characters must choose whether

to surrender the last vestiges of their personalities to the sheep, or to fight it and expel it. Those who choose the latter become tragic figures: they go insane or commit suicide, while the sheep simply moves on to someone else. In one interpretation, the micro-masses of the 1980s and 1990s appear to be

fighting the sheep. In another, the sheep is not conservative Japanese culture, but rather commercialism itself, in which case the micro-masses are as possessed by it as anyone else.

There is no escape.

This feeling of despair became characteristic of the so-called ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s, after the collapse of the bubble economy and the death of the Showa emperor in 1989. Unable to sustain the artificially inflated and over-confident economy, the stockmarket crashed and Japan’s cultural confidence was dented. Despite remaining the world’s second largest economy and running trade surpluses with nearly all of its trading partners, society’s faith in the sheep and in the politicians (already

shaky amidst the corruption scandals of the 1980s) was shattered. 

At the same time, with the end of the Cold War, there was unprecedented international pressure on Japan to take a more active and leading role in world affairs: Japan’s indecisive (and entirely financial) response to the First Gulf War in 1991 only served to underline the fact that Japan had still not come

to terms with a coherent postwar identity.

The mid-1990s saw a succession of crises that triggered deeper self-reflection about Japan’s identity and role. If the place of Japan in the US-led world order was brought into question during the Gulf War, this question became painfully personalized in 1995 when three US servicemen kidnapped and

raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl. This incident restarted the perennial debate about why the USA should still be allowed to maintain bases in Japan, now that Japan was a powerful country in its own right. In the same year, a group of revisionist intellectuals started the Liberal View of History Group, which sought to revise society’s perception of Japan’s 20th-century history in a way that would allow the Japanese to be proud of its ambitions and conduct during the Great East Asia War. For some, such as the influential writer and critic Kato Norihiro, Japan’s treatment of its past and its identity bordered on being pathological: under pressure from the USA in the postwar period, Japanese society had become sick, masochistic, and schizophrenic – what was needed was a frank discussion about

what Japan’s real identity was. 

However, two other crises in the same year shook Japan even more. In January of 1995 a massive earthquake that killed over 6,000 people and left 300,000 homes in ruins hit the city of Kobe. And then, on 20 March, the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo launched the infamous sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo

underground, killing 12 people and injuring more than 5,000.

The people of Japan were stunned by the sequence of events, and the inefficient responses of the government further undermined public confidence in the establishment. Murakami Haruki attempted to give reason to the madness in two short books about the events. In After the Quake, he provides a cluster of short stories that discuss possible causes of the earthquake: was it a natural disaster in the ‘end times’ to punish Japan for the frivolities of the 1980s? Was it caused by moral decay – by the jealousy of a married women whose husband was cheating on her? Or was it caused by the awakening of a giant worm under the city that had been feeding on greed and hate for several decades?