What’s modern about modern Japan?

For many people today, modern Japan is best recognized as an economic powerhouse. According to many commentators, Japan is today’s most successful industrial (or even post-industrial) economy, combining almost unprecedented affluence with remarkable social stability and apparent harmony. Despite its recent economic troubles, and despite the rapid rise of China, Japan remains the second largest economy on the planet according to most indicators, behind only the United States.
Japanese goods and cultural products are consumed all over the world, ranging from animated movies and Playstation games, to cars and semiconductors, to management techniques and the martial arts.
In many ways, this image of Japan makes it into an icon of ‘modernity’ in the contemporary world, and yet the nation itself remains something of an enigma to many non-specialists, who see it as a confusing montage of the alien and the familiar, the traditional and the modern, and even the ‘Eastern’ and
the ‘Western’. As we will see, part of the reason for this confusion lies in the assumption that whilst modernity generates little cultural dissonance in the so-called ‘West’, in Japan and elsewhere
the trappings of modernity appear incongruous or even inexplicable. At the base of this assumption is the deeply felt entanglement of modernity with European and American history. Indeed, this perceived entanglement is at the core of many of the world’s contemporary protests against globalization

and capitalism: to many people the steamroller of the modern looks like the expansion of the West.

As an example, let’s pause to consider a recent spectacle.

Perceptions of modern Japan: FIFA World Cup 2002

There was a measure of European scepticism when Japan and Korea were chosen to co-host the 2002 FIFA World Cup finals. Was the first World Cup in Asia going to be another World Cup like USA 1994, when it was hosted by a rich country that didn’t really know anything about football (or ‘soccer’) in an attempt to make it more popular there? The European public knew even less about these ‘Far Eastern’ nations than they knew about the USA: they knew about Nintendo, Sony, and Daewoo; they knew about karate and taekwondo; they knew about Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and the Korean War. They didn’t know that Japan’s ‘J-League’ was one of the world’s most lucrative football leagues;

and they certainly didn’t know that Korea would make it through to the semi-finals (where they would lose to Germany), having beaten the ‘Great Powers’ of Italy and Spain on their way, finishing above pre-tournament favourites such as England, Argentina, and the reigning champions, France. In general,

the tremendous passion for (and ability in) football in Japan and Korea took Europe by surprise.

It is interesting to reflect on why the scale of interest in football in East Asia was surprising to so many people. A partial answer resides in the kinds of popular images of Japan to which the ‘Western’ public have been exposed. During its coverage of the World Cup, for example, the venerable BBC produced two beautiful advertising sequences for the games. The first, screened in the weeks preceding the games, was a two-minute segment in the style of ‘anime’, the virally popular medium of Japanese

animation that currently accounts for 60% of all televised cartoons in the world. The short film commenced with a dramatic voice-over that would be familiar to fans of ‘beat ’em up’ video

games and martial arts movies: ‘Every four years great heroes come from the four corners of the earth to compete for the greatest prize known to man . . . ’. In the background, a stylized flicker of kanji (Chinese characters used in Japan) and hangul (Korean characters) pulsed ominously. Then the advert exploded into life as a science-fictional spectacle: a ball is kicked into the air like a rocket; computer screens and neon lights flash and beep as they trace it; a futuristic flotation tank holds a man with a

gleaming, metallic cyborg leg (he turns out to be the superhumanly talented French captain, Zidane); and then a flurry of anime football heroes (none of whom are Japanese or Korean) flash through the streets of a neon-riddled (Japanese) city in pursuit of the rocket.

The two-minute commercial was slick and stylized, full of references to popular culture, and riddled with implications that Japan was somehow a cool and futuristic utopia, a science-fictional realm of cyborgs and computerization of the kind that William Gibson famously depicted in his cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer (1984). In addition, none of the actual football seemed to involve anyone from Japan or Korea, although there were lots of people in the streets watching the foreign football-heroes appreciatively. 

The second sequence was screened during the opening credits of every match. This was a much more romantic montage of images: beginning slowly with a temple on a lake at sunrise, followed by a close-up of the eyes of a Buddha statue, a fluttering Japanese flag, some sumo wrestlers, a fluttering Korean flag, and then some koi carp. At this point, a football is kicked into a light-blur that then guides us through the rest of the images: Buddha again, a cityscape (with neon lights and a temple), a football stadium (with a Brazilian player), some traditional Korean dancing, David Beckham, some more Korean dancing, another sumo wrestler, another temple, a lingering shot of a geisha (or gisaeng), and then a slow romantic shot of Mount Fuji. At this point there is a sudden change of pace, as though we

are being brought into the modern era: a Shinkansen bullet-train explodes into view, more unidentified footballers, more trains, more neon lights and crowded streets with illuminated screens (showing footballers), more traditional Korean dancing, and finally the ball-blur flashes between the uprights of a great torii (sacred Shinto gateway) as though it were a goal.

Of course, the imagery here is cliched and unimaginative, but this is precisely why it reveals so much about the ways in which Japan is represented in the so-called West. Leaving aside the bizarre absence of Japanese football players in these commercials, we see a characteristic mixture of traditional

culture (sumo, geisha, Fuji, Buddhist icons) and hyper-modernity (bullet-trains, neon cities, cyborgs), of the mysterious and the technological. Japan is represented as an enigmatically different ‘other’ that has somehow appropriated (and then transformed) the trappings of modernity that should be so familiar to a

Western audience. The audience is supposed to be affected by seeing a sumo wrestler and a high-speed train in the same sequence.