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CKohalyk
2nd April 2003, 02:27
Read all about us

Mar 27th 2003 | TOKYO
From The Economist print edition (http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1667061)

http://www.economist.com/images/20030329/1303AS5.jpg


Triumphalist books about Japan have given way to gloomier tomes

WHEN its economy was booming, cars and electronics were not the only industries in which Japan battled the West. Japanese authors also competed with their gaijin counterparts to churn out treatises about Japanese ways of doing things. On one point almost everyone agreed: the Japanese way of organising society was better, as its juggernaut economy proved.

Needless to say, outside Japan, demand for such books is modest at the moment. But what about in Japan? After a decade of economic torpor, how do Japanese writers see their country now? The swagger that marked books such as “The Japan that Can Say No?E in which Akio Morita (Sony's co-founder) and Shintaro Ishihara (a novelist and nationalist politician who is now governor of Tokyo) trumpeted Japan's rise to world prominence just before the bubble popped, has certainly faded. But Naoki Inose, a popular history writer who gained headlines last year serving on a committee for highway reform, says that many Japanese were never as confident as the bestselling titles of the bubble years encouraged them to be.

For all the affluence that Japan achieved in the 1980s, he argues, many Japanese still felt an underlying anxiety, and were never really convinced that their success reflected fundamental strengths in their society. Even as western and Japanese authors were praising the bureaucratic and business structures that Japan had developed over the previous century, Mr Inose argues, ordinary Japanese remained unsure of where those overweening institutions were taking them. Even if anxieties were lurking all along, however, the events of the past decade have driven them to the surface, and Japan's economic weakness has clearly played a role.

A quick glance at the bestseller lists highlights the change in tone. Tohan, which publishes the most prominent list, compiles separate tables for business books and other sorts of non-fiction. In 1989, one of the few economic worries on the minds of Japanese readers was taxes: four of the top ten business books aimed to help them cope with a new consumption tax. Two other popular business books that year took a stab at forecasting the 1990s, and both of their authors were optimistic. “Nihon no Jidai?E(Japan's Era), by Keitaro Hasegawa, took the prize with its bold forecasts about how Japan would soon be managing the flow of money, people and goods around the world.

It may be unfair to single out Mr Hasegawa just because his book sold more copies than the dozens of others that made similar extrapolations. “It is considered bad form to ask what most of these guys were writing ten years ago,?Esays Peter Tasker, a consultant and writer in Tokyo. Still, it is worth comparing Mr Hasegawa's outlook with that of the top-selling business book now. “Tomorrow's Economics?E published recently by Heizo Takenaka—the economics and banking minister in Junichiro Koizumi's cabinet—also tries to envisage a bright future for Japan; but his optimism hangs on Japan's making a string of tough choices that authors in the bubble years did not predict.

Japan's economy has not been the only source of worry and confusion, however. One of the country's best-known authors, Haruki Murakami, points out that two of the most significant events in Japan during the 1990s were not economic: the Kobe earthquake and the poison gas attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in the Tokyo metro system, both of which took place in 1995. Though one was a natural disaster and the other man-made, Mr Murakami argues, both shook the faith of many Japanese in their society's underpinning.

In “Underground?E which recounts his interviews with the metro attackers and their victims, Mr Murakami tried to examine broadly the cruelty with which Japanese society can treat those who are different. After reading about a victim of the gas attacks who had subsequently been shunned by his fellow workers, Mr Murakami writes, he decided to find out “how Japanese society could perpetrate such a double violence?E

It is hard to say whether this sense of economic and social drift explains the slew of self-help books, several imported, which now line Tohan's non-business list of bestselling non-fiction. In 1989, the list was stocked with home-grown biographies and photograph albums of prominent Japanese, from actresses and divas to Hirohito, who died at the beginning of that year. Such lists can be misleading, however. Books known as nihonjinron, a class of pop-anthropology books that revelled in the uniqueness of the Japanese, were cranked out so frequently, and resembled each other so closely, that they rarely topped the charts of bestsellers. But many Japanese could not get enough of them in the 1980s, paying to read again and again about how their long history as island rice-cultivators had set them apart from the rest of humanity.

A decade of gloom has led some Japanese to give this implicit belief a different twist. “We may be cultivators,?Ea few reformists say, “but it might not be so bad if we acted a little more like hunters.?EAlthough their sense of uniqueness remains, however, the Japanese seem to share at least one trait with readers everywhere: when times are tough, it helps to laugh at someone else. One of the most popular books in Japan now is “Stupid White Men?E by Michael Moore, an American author and film-maker. It dwells on corruption, injustice and electoral shenanigans in the United States.