A review of "
Japan through the looking glass" by
Alan Macfarlane.
We heard the author as a guest on late night Radio 5 last year, talking about his new book, which sounded interesting. So we got it for Christmas. He's a professor at Cambridge University in cultural anthropology who has visited Japan extensively, so we were looking forward to finding out if he could provide any insight to help us make sense of our experiences - or whether conversely, he wouldn't be able to tell us anything we didn't already know. Perhaps most importantly, would he explain the Japanese approach to scientific research?
The author has not lived here for any extended period of time, and does not speak the language, so was highly reliant on the various contacts he had during his visits (which have mostly been stays at a number of Japanese universities). This unfortunately shines though his writing in some places, and made us wonder who was really writing the book, and for whom. For example, he starts on an unfortunate note by quoting a judge who explains that the reason they take so long over their legal decisions is that the Japanese take a nuanced view of things, life is not black and white. However this can hardly be reconciled with the 99% conviction rate, whether or not one accepts the claims that only the guilty are brought to trial. Indeed to anyone who has followed any of the dubious high profile cases here it seems much more plausible that the lengthy delays are caused by the judges agonizing over just how brazen they can be in discounting any evidence of innocence on the flimsiest of pretexts. There are plenty of other places where the book reads like the Japanese intelligentsia explaining away Japan's less admirable qualities, like when he talks about the "separate but equal" status of women here (no, he doesn't actually use those words, but might as well have done).
There are some well-made points: the way that the Japanese have imported all sorts of Western ideas but completely gutted the essential nature of them, often apparently without even realising that they have done so. For example, their "democracy" in which everyone dutifully goes out and votes for the governing party every few years (a year ago, the opposition actually got a majority of the vote in some elections for the upper house, which panicked them into proposing a merger with the govt). But as for his comments about consultation and "
nemawashi", he is either very wrong, or JAMSTEC is a particularly unusual employer! Again, it is easy to envisage some academics talking about the process of "consultation" and consensus-building without perhaps realising what a complete sham the process is, compared to (say) the UK system where the workers do actually have some teeth (backed up by legal force and due process). For example, we have a "worker's representative" here, who is proposed by the management, elected in an unopposed public ballot ("sign here if you approve"), and who dutifully sits through "consultation" meetings in which he is told what the management have decided to do. I asked a colleague about this process, and she said she did not even know who he was but had voted for him anyway...but I'm supposed to be talking about the book, not my own petty grumbles.
A major focus of the book is how Japan's society seems inside-out from the Western perspective, but nevertheless seems to work just as well. Some of his examples reinforce our own experiences, but others seem rather flimsily supported, based on nothing more than an anecdote. Although I'm no great expert, I think his comments about Japanese language are as often wrong as right. Among the latter, I'd noticed myself soon after arriving that my dictionary translates "kenri" as "right, privilege" and that the Japanese appear to have no clear concept of the difference between the two terms (which directly feeds into their understanding - or otherwise - of human rights). But contrary to another of his assertions, it is easy, and indeed common, to communicate in an equal-status manner - and the range of relationships considered "equal status" can be rather broad - although some relationships like staff-customer do invariably use status-laden language.
The underlying theme that runs like a coal seam through the book concerns the tribal nature of society here. I'm not sure how much of this is a synthesis of other writers versus his own analysis. Probably everything has been said before: the skill may be in drawing out the important and useful bits. But anyway, perhaps the cornerstone of his analysis is that (due to its isolation) Japan never went through an
Axial age, at which time (elsewhere in the world) the human sphere started to be considered as separate system from the natural world - and therefore subject to separate ethical rules, initially religious, perhaps now more secular but still moral and prescriptive in nature. Hence no "human rights", and no separation between mankind and nature. Society is still an undivided whole, and laws are more of a guidance for social cohesion, than a rigid structure based on assumed principles. We (or rather, the Japanese) are all part of the same compost heap, with their existence defined only via their relationships to others, rather than in themselves as human beings. Mind you, AA Gill said much the same thing in a rather cruel but very funny article many years ago: "
a Japanese man by himself doesn't think he exists."
As for what else we learnt, or at least came to accept and understand more fully: the Japanese won't change, at least not in the ways that we would like them to. We'd actually got that far by ourselves, but the reasons behind that make more sense to us now, as do various minor events that have happened during our stay here. Ultimately it's hard not to feel sorry for them, trapped in their individually helpless situations, where life is something that happens to them while they don't even bother making other plans. But I have to admit that most of them seem happy enough with it (or maybe resigned would be a better term), and on a practical level, life runs very smoothly.
A paragraph right near the end is worth quoting in full:
It is difficult for me to tell whether I am attracted or repelled by Japan; indeed most outsiders who know Japan feel both these emotions. At times it all seems so beautiful, meaningful, attractive, a return to paradise, Eden, childhood and security. It fulfils the romantic longing for a lost world, Paradise, Atlantis, the Lands of the Grail, fairylands forlorn. Then when one awakes from the dream, Japan seems a savage, childish, conformist and aggressive land, clogging, sticky, regressive, a trap, a siren song leading to shipwreck for the Enlightenment and reason. Japan is full of hybrids, ambiguities, full of attraction and repulsion simultaneously, absorbing people and also rejecting them.
I see that the
Amazon page now has 4 reviews: two think it is is wonderfully evocative and fascinating, one thinks it's too academic, and one says "I'm the only gaijin in the village". That's probably a fair mix of opinions.
