Dogs and Demons

On the day that Merit Janow and I had coffee on the terrace of the Oriental Hotel back in 1996 and the idea for this book first came to me, the thing that struck us most forcefully at the time was the vibrant international life in Bangkok – the Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Americans, and Thai intermingling in business and social life-and the lack of anything like this in Japan. No country is as obsessed as Japan with the word international; you will find it used as a name for everything from hotels to taxis to soap, and you can hardly get through a single hour in Japan without reading, hearing, or saying international at least once. Yet few modern nations have erected such high barriers against foreign people and ideas.

Japanese and foreign commentators take it as a commonplace that with time Japan is becoming steadily more international. But it could be said that Japan is headed in the opposite direction-back to a quiet form of isolation. The doors to real access to Japan remain firmly closed to foreigners; meanwhile, young Japanese men and women with talent and an international mind-set are leaving their country. This emigration has been going on for a long time, but it picked up pace in the 1990s.

Indeed, escapees from Japan's rigid internal systems have been going abroad since the nineteenth century. Often, they are from disadvantaged backgrounds and have suffered disapproval from their families and from institutions in Japan. When they succeed abroad, they are lionized as heroes at home, after which they can return and engage in activities they could not have initiated within Japan. This is how it was with Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834-1901), the father of modern education, and with Ozawa Seiji in the 1960s, who moved to America after Japan's leading orchestra, sponsored by the national broadcasting company NHK, went on strike against him and refused to play. Ozawa Seiji is one of a number of prominent artists to base themselves abroad. Others include the musician Sakamoto Ryuichi, the composer of the score for the film The Last Emperor; Ishioka Eiko, who won an Academy Award for her costume design in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula; and Senju Hiroshi, the painter whose Waterfall installation won a prize for the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. All of these artists live in New York.

The trend continues. Son Masayoshi, often called Japan's Bill Gates, was born the son of Korean immigrants, a minority group that suffers social ostracism, much of it officially sanctioned. «Being of Korean background, I thought as a child that things might be pretty hard,» Son says. So while still in school he moved to the United States. By the time he went to the University of California at Berkeley, he was already a successful young entrepreneur; he made a million dollars in his early twenties when he sold a pocket-translator invention to the Sharp Corporation. «In the United States, people come from all over the world, all races, all backgrounds,» Son says. «And they're all doing what they want, many scoring huge successes. When I saw that, I became more open. It freed my soul.»

In the early 1980s, Son returned to Japan and founded Softbank, which in one decade grew into Japan's largest software distributor and publisher of computer-related magazines. Winning the right to use his Korean last name took longer (naturalized citizens cannot use their foreign names but must choose from a list of officially accepted Japanese names), but he achieved that feat in 1993, after an extended struggle with the immigration authorities. Today, Son is the golden boy of Japanese information technology and is frequently in the news as he buys up software and information businesses around the world.

While the phenomenon of escapees from Japan is an old one, there is a significant difference between the situation in the late Edo-Meiji period and conditions today. Japan at the turn of the century was a poor, backward nation struggling to throw off centuries of feudal stagnation. It was not free politically, and few Japanese spoke a foreign language or had much experience of the outside world. For educated people, the only way to acquire necessary skills was by going abroad, and it was only natural for farmers and manual laborers to try to escape poverty by immigrating to Hawaii or Brazil.

But Japan is now a free democracy, has few overt controls over the media, and is famed for its high technology. All Japanese study English as children in grade school, and tens of millions of them have traveled abroad. In addition, Japan is rich. It is a situation verging on the incredible that modern Japanese would lack access to up-to-date information or business opportunities within Japan. And yet the flow of refugees continues.

It begins with doctors. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, have more than 350 Japanese doctors in residence at any one time. Each doctor represents the department of a certain hospital in Japan, and when his three-year term is over, his department sends a replacement, a system that has gone on for decades. The reason is that basic research in Japan is understaffed, weakened by bureaucratic inertia, and limited by a lack of freely shared and reliable data.

Not all of these doctors return to Japan. Many of the brightest and most innovative remain in the United States. Dr. Kakere Ken, a specialist in cancer cell division, has been at NIH since 1967. «The reason I stayed at NIH is because I could freely pursue basic research [here],» Dr. Kakere says. «Creative work is valued in American medical research. In Japan, I could only have researched in one narrow category. Also, in [Japanese] institutions, with their vertical hierarchies, there is little exchange between people-this is another difference from America.»

Doctors have symbolic importance because they exemplify the process by which Japan learns from the West. During the Edo period, medicine alone was officially sanctioned as a field of foreign study; scholars flocked to Nagasaki to learn skills from the Chinese and the Dutch. One could say that medicine is the only truly indispensable modern technology. Many of us might enjoy taking a journey to the past for the experience of living with candles and traveling by horseback, but who would be willing to forgo modern medical treatment? From that point of view, medicine is the queen of technology, and it was indeed the only thing from the West that premodern Japan really wanted. Therefore it is all the more surprising that today, nearly one hundred and fifty years since Commodore Perry arrived, medical advances still do not originate in Japan; they continue to come from the West, and Japanese doctors continue to flee to the West and stay there. As one Japanese newspaper put it, «In the field of basic research, human exchange between Japan and America is basically a one-way street-Japan absorbs knowledge from the United States.» Dr. Kimura Shikiko, a woman doctor who has been with the NIH since 1987, says, «The appeal [of an American career] is that whether you are a woman or a foreigner, you will be able to pursue your research based on the merits of your work.» In Japan's medical world, young people, women, the outspoken, and the inventive stand no chance of recognition.

The problems afflicting medicine apply to advanced technology in general. Consider Nakamura Shuji, the inventor of important breakthroughs in blue lasers, the Holy Grail of the consumer-electronics industry. Blue lasers allow for far greater data storage and for images much superior to those available today, but nobody had been able to produce a sustained beam of blue laser light until 1999, when Nakamura developed one that beams light for up to ten thousand hours. His employer, Nichia Chemical, now leases the technology to the electronics giant Pioneer; this may be one of the finest achievements of postwar Japanese technology.

So what happened to Nakamura? Not only was he not rewarded or promoted (he earned $100 each for his five hundred patents in the 1990s) but when he decided to leave Nichia, no Japanese company even made him an offer. He attributes this to the fact that he graduated from a minor university and worked at a small firm in the provinces. In February 2000, he therefore took a job as a researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He says, «No bonus, no big position. This is a Japanese company. So I go to the U.S.A.»

Another example of how hard it is for independent-minded inventors or entrepreneurs to get ahead in Japan is Okabe Nobuya, who runs a company that makes science-fiction effects for movies and television. He invented a program that allows games makers to vary the background scenery on the screen, but he could not interest Japanese manufacturers. «Japan is like the army with everyone in senior-junior relationships,» he says. «But it's not manly to stick around complaining, so I'm finding my own solution.» He took his program to a convention in San Diego and soon had multiple orders. Okabe has since moved most of his company to Hollywood.

Meanwhile, JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization) has set up a fund called Tiger's Gate 2000 to nurture young Internet entrepreneurs in Japan. However, the condition of JETRO's support is that the young tigers move to the United States and learn how to do business there. Okabe sells software in the United States because he cannot find buyers at home; JETRO actually requires that young Internet start-ups leave the country! Such are Japan's up-and-coming entrepreneurs: their success depends on the degree to which they avoid Japan. This is true even for Son Masayoshi, whose high-tech acquisitions were garnered largely in the United States, not Japan. The source of Son's leveraged money has been Japan, but the growth areas of his business are abroad.

It isn't only individuals who are fleeing Japan but businesses as well. The most celebrated example is Honda Motors, which in the 1980s quietly transferred its base of operations from Japan to the United States, which now accounts for more than half of Honda's production and sales. Honda expects exports from Japan to continue to fall in the coming years and is betting the company's survival on cutting loose from Japan.

Hundreds, even thousands of companies are slowly but surely moving their base of operations abroad. This is why Sony was willing to take massive losses in Hollywood (more than $2.5 billion) when it purchased Columbia Pictures: there would be no purpose in buying or developing Japanese movie studios, since the Japanese movie industry has almost completely collapsed. Sony's only way forward was to expand in the United States.

Today's refugees also include top athletes. Nomo Hideo, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers (and later several other teams), epitomizes this new type of Japanese refugee. Nomo was a very successful pitcher for the Kintetsu Buffaloes, but Japan's rigid baseball world limited his prospects. Among other things, he disliked the «endurance exercises» that are a feature of Japanese sports. Endurance exercises, such as hashirikomi (deep running) or nagekomi (deep throwing) basically involve running or throwing until you drop. It's an approach to sports training that has obviously developed from the military-style emphasis on gambare (endurance) taught in the schools, and it is common in most Japanese athletic programs, though it has little to do with developing muscle strength or athletic skill.

When in the spring of 1995 Nomo quit the Buffaloes and in the summer of that year joined the Dodgers, there was a cry of outrage from the Japanese press. The newspapers labeled him an «ingrate» and accused him of loving money, not sports. In short order, Nomo went on to become a sensation in the United States, winning the National League Rookie of the Year Award and being dubbed «the Tornado» by the media. When he was asked what he liked about baseball in America, Nomo explained that Americans really enjoyed baseball, whether they were players or spectators. The key to Nomo's departure lies in the word enjoy, in contrast to endure. Nomo's escape opened the floodgates. In 1997, another star, Irabu Hideki, left Japan to join the Yankees; and in December 1999 the popular player Sasaki «the Devil» Kazuhiro went off to join the Seattle Mariners. So many successful players have left that baseball clubs had to change the rules in order to allow easier departure to the United States. In October 2000, Japan's most popular baseball star ever, Suzuki Ichiro, made his farewells, to a standing ovation from 26,000 fans, as he, too, set out for the U.S. majors. The situation in Japanese baseball was like ballet under the U.S.S.R. – raise a star, and the first thing he wants to do is defect.

Many refugees are people who are at the top of their professions. An inventor like Nakahara Shuji is nothing less than an international technology superstar, and yet he had no choice but to leave Japan. We are not dealing with the poor and disadvantaged here, or with the politically oppressed, such as those who fled Nazi Germany or China after the massacre at Tiananmen Square. It must surely be unique in world history that a free and wealthy society in a time of peace has become unattractive to the brightest and most ambitious of its own people. But this is what the stranglehold of bureaucracies and entrenched systems in Japan is achieving.

The flight of native talent abroad is an old story in Japan, almost a cliche. What is less known is that a significant shift is taking place in the makeup of Japan's resident foreign population. Expats who have lived there for decades are making a quiet exodus. In 1995, Otis Cary, then seventy-four, the dean of Kyoto's foreign residents, announced that he was planning to return to the United States. Cary, who was born in Japan and spent most of his life there, received an award from the emperor for a distinguished career spanning more than forty years as a professor at Doshisha University. Among the foreigners in Kyoto, his name was synonymous with love of the city. Nevertheless, Cary voiced no regrets. «It will be a relief to me,» he said.

David Kidd, a legendary art dealer (forty years in the Kyoto area), and Dan Furst, active in the theater world (ten years), both moved to Honolulu more than a decade ago – and others followed. John McGee, a distinguished Canadian who was head of Urasenke Tea School's International Department, resigned in 1999 and left Kyoto after twenty-seven years. The most common conversation I have these days is with foreign friends from Japan who are moving to the United States, South America, Hong Kong, or Bangkok. The second most common conversation is with the gloomy people who for one reason or another see no way out.

The elite of fast-track investment bankers who were stationed in Japan transferred to Hong Kong and Singapore in the early 1990s, leaving second-string players in Tokyo. Long-established foreign communities in Kobe and Yokohama, dating to Meiji days, have shrunk to nearly the vanishing point, and international schools are closing. There is a clear shift among Westerners from long-term residents to short-term employees who come to Japan to make some money and then move on.

At the same time, the absolute number of foreigners in Japan nearly doubled in the 1990s. But one must look at the numbers carefully. The largest foreign group in Japan is the 640,000 Koreans, descendants of forced laborers brought over in the 1930s and 1940s. Many are third- or fourth-generation residents in Japan, speak no Korean, and are indistinguishable from the average Japanese.

Japan maintains a tight immigration policy, accepting fewer Vietnamese or other refugees than any other developed country, for example, and making foreign spouses wait decades before they are granted permanent residence. Yet there is a need for unskilled labor, and the way to meet this is to welcome South American descendants of Japanese emigrants. The great increase in foreign residents in Japan has been in this group of nikkei, foreigners of Japanese descent, from Brazil and Peru (from 2,700 in 1986 to 275,000 in 1997). While this group includes many intelligent and ambitious young people, very few of them manage to surmount Japan's high barriers to joining the mainstream and carve out successful careers. Sadly, most of them are doomed to live their days at the bottom of the social pecking order, doing work that modern Japanese shun. It will take generations for them to assimilate, and it will not be easy: in the summer of 1999, rightist gangs paraded through the Brazilian neighborhood in the town of Toyota, home of the automobile company and of a large concentration of nikkei workers, demanding, «Foreigners go home!» Even Japanese blood doesn't count for much, it seems.

If you remove Koreans and nikkei laborers from South America from the statistics, the remainder of the foreign population in Japan is minuscule, less than 0.4 percent of the total population. There was a time in the late 1980s when there was widespread debate about allowing foreign workers without Japanese blood into the country. But after the Bubble burst, the government tightened regulations. Japan turned back at the brink.

In the days of sakoku, «closed country» (1600-1869), when the shogunate restricted the Dutch and Chinese to the port of Nagasaki, Dutch traders lived on Dejima, a small artificial island in Nagasaki Harbor connected by a causeway to the mainland. Only with special permits could the Dutch pass over the causeway, and the authorities usually granted these only during the day. At night the Dutch had to return to Dejima, where their guardsmen locked the gate behind them. Modern-day rules that restrict foreigners to certain discrete corners of Japanese society and keep them out of the mainstream can be traced to Dejima. And the dream of a physical Dejima for foreigners has never faded. During the days when I worked for American real-estate developer Trammell Crow, I ran across many national and local development plans that called for getting all the foreigners to move into special apartment buildings designed just for them – often on landfill islands.

Recently a young friend of mine, the child of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, joined a large coffee company as a new employee. The personnel department called him in and told him, «We see that you carry a Chinese passport. It is our policy not to give management positions to foreigners. Please change your nationality.» As this story makes clear, foreigners in Japan cannot expect career advancement.

There is one niche, however, a «Dejima of employment,» that is specially allotted to foreigners. It is the job of creating and selling propaganda. Japan issues such a massive volume of advertisement about itself, for both foreign and domestic consumption, that propaganda production deserves to be considered an industry in its own right. A surprisingly large percentage of the Europeans and Americans employed in Japan are working on selling Japan abroad, ranging from the Western students of architecture and gardens whose job is to preach Japanese culture to the world to thousands of spokesmen retained by religious foundations, banks, and trading houses. Yet of the expats I have known over the years who work for Japanese institutions, only a handful enjoy substantive responsibility. Most work in «international departments,» where their assignment is to polish up speeches or edit newsletters and magazines whose content is largely glorification of their company, industry, town, or art form.

The involvement of foreigners in producing propaganda obviously has an important effect on how Japan is seen by the rest of the world, so important that hardly a book on Japan in recent years has not mentioned it. Patrick Smith (Japan: A Reinterpretation) and Richard Katz (Japan: The System That Soured) refer to these committed Japanophiles as the Chrysanthemum Club.

One of the most fascinating questions about Japan as a field of study is the deep commitment, amounting to religious conviction, that is often experienced by foreign experts. It's a strong testament to the enduring appeal of Japan's arts and society. Typically, a foreigner discovers in Japan something, whether it be modern architecture, cinema, or the school system, that he thinks is of value, and thenceforward makes it his mission to explain it to the world. When he writes about his field he will speak about its good points, since these are what attracted him. What would be the point of criticizing, since the goal is to open people's eyes to the wondrous thing he has found in Japan?

This is what happens: I have a foreign friend who is a cinema critic. He is well aware of the meltdown that has taken place in Japanese cinema and speaks about it quite bluntly in private. But when it comes time to pen an article, he sifts through the dross for a few good filmmakers who have produced something worth looking at in the past decade and writes about the special aesthetic qualities of their work. What his foreign readers see is more praise for the wonders of Japanese film; the deep problems of the field never make it into print.

It's a natural thing to do and, since the goal is to introduce abroad those things that are really praiseworthy in Japan, an admirable one. In that sense, I am proud to number myself a member of the Chrysanthemum Club. When it comes time for me to write my book about Kabuki, it's not going to be about the fact that Kabuki is degrading in quality, losing both its audience and its creative artistry; it will be about the great actors I have known and seen, and about their achievements, which rival the best in world opera or ballet. That's what a Kabuki book should be.

It's a matter of selectivity. Japan experts are not necessarily as blind or worshipful as their writings may lead us to believe. Rather, as well-meaning introducers of Japanese culture abroad, they naturally end up in the role of editors and censors, choosing the striking and beautiful film clips and leaving the rest on the cutting-room floor. In any case, one thing is true: commentators on Japanese culture by and large are not dispassionate reporters; for better or for worse, they are in the position of «selling Japan.» I believe this goes a long way toward explaining why foreign writing on Japan tends to be so admiring and uncritical.

While the Chrysanthemum Club members' dedication to Japan is often genuinely felt, it is also true that many of them owe their livelihood to Japan. Overseas, propaganda can be extremely profitable, especially for Washington lobbyists and Ivy League academics. However, for those toiling in international departments within Japan, propaganda is rarely more than a low- to medium-wage job, a sad substitute for founding one's own business or rising to an executive position in a Japanese company. One needs to be a very committed Chrysanthemum Club member to stick around.

During the 1990s, there was an important shift in Japan's place in the world, and it had to do with the renaissance of China and Southeast Asia. For foreigners coming to Asia during the decades following the war, it was nearly impossible to live securely in China, and for decades Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, and Laos were completely closed. Since the late 1980s, all this has changed. Southeast Asia, though it suffers from severe boom-and-bust cycles, is the scene of frenzied economic activity. There is a wealth of new business opportunities in banking, manufacturing, writing, and other fields, and, unlike Japan, where foreigners are mostly restricted to low-level international-department positions, there are genuine opportunities to advance. In Bangkok, I know dozens of foreigners who own and operate their own businesses; in Japan, only a handful. Perhaps Japan is to be commended for keeping its arts and industry strictly to itself, and not allowing «neo-colonialists» a foothold. Whatever the right or wrong of it, the bottom line is that Japan is not an attractive location for outsiders (or at least individuals, as opposed to big corporations) to set up shop.

For forty years after the war, Japan was not only «Number One» in Asia – it was the «Only One.» Now, although its economy is still larger than all the other Asian nations combined (including China), the balance is rapidly shifting, and in the process Japan is becoming merely one of many. Foreigners interested in Asia – not only Westerners but Asians themselves – now have a much wider field in which to play out their ambitions.

That it is becoming «one of many» in a revitalized East Asia is a healthy development, and by no means a discredit to Japan. However, this does mean that there is competition for brains, for the people who make international culture spark: bright entrepreneurs, writers, designers, artists, and so forth. The nation will find it more and more difficult to draw the best and the brightest to its shores unless it makes being in Japan more attractive. At the moment, unfortunately, Japan is following the opposite tack. It's becoming harder, not easier, to find an independent position in a Japanese company; and nearly impossible, as before, to strike out on one's own.

Japan's shrinking international appeal is visible in many ways, not least in the sluggish growth of its foreign-exchange program. In 1983, the Nakasone administration announced a goal of increasing the number of foreign-exchange students to Japan to 100,000 by the end of the century. By 1999 there were only 56,000 (a number achieved after several years of decline in the 1990s), despite a steady increase in Japanese government scholarships. And many of the students are in Japan only as their second choice. A conversation with a Taiwanese student in Kobe gave me some insight into the lack of interest on the part of

Asians in coming to Japan. When he decided to pursue higher education in Japan, his family was bitterly opposed. «Japan is where poor and ignorant people go,» his parents said. This reminded me of my two groups of friends in Thailand. One consists of farmers in a poor village built on stilts in the rice paddies of northern Thailand, where I often travel on vacation. A surprising number have a sister in Japan or dream of going to work in Japan. My other group of friends are cosmopolitan Bangkok dwellers, affluent, and destined to lead Thailand's big businesses and banks. They travel to the United States, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, or Australia. Japan is almost completely off their horizon.

Why is this? One reason is that Japan, while maintaining a competent standard in many industries, and intellectual or artistic pursuits, does not lead the way in any single field. Nobody would come to Japan to study the leading edge. This is especially true for university education, which, as we have seen, has not been a serious priority for Japan. All the effort went into grade school and high school. As a result, universities do not offer programs that can compete at an international level. When Asiaweek did a cover story in May 2000 on MBA schools, only five Japanese universities made it into the top fifty in Asia, and none into the top ten; they were outclassed by MBA schools in Australia and in Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea. And this was in East Asia, where MBA schools are relatively new and still at a disadvantage to the West. On a world scale, Japan's graduate schools simply fall off the list.

Nor does Japan's supposedly advanced lifestyle appeal much to middle- or upper-class Asians. «To many Southeast Asians living here, Japan is the poorest country in the world – in terms of lifestyle,» saysYau-hua Lim, an Indonesian of Chinese ancestry living in Tokyo. «The Japanese have such pathetic lives. They may think Indonesia is a poor country, but we have larger houses, we can afford a car and a maid. It's easy to go to the beach on weekends. After living in Tokyo, my concept of rich and poor has really changed.»

Who comes to Japan from Asia? Menial laborers, less qualified or poorer students dependent on Ministry of Education handouts, and low- to mid-level employees of Japanese multinationals sent there to study for a short time. The most promising students usually do not come to Japan, or if they do they soon leave; over time, this will surely have an effect on Japan's international role.

Meanwhile, in the place of real internationalization, Japan abounds with Dogs and Demons-type events and programs designed to give the appearance that admiring foreigners are flocking there. Towns and organizations spend huge amounts to host conventions in Japan, and the speeches at these conferences are given prominent space in the media. Japanese magazines regularly feature earnest advice from overseas experts. Living here, one sees token Japanese-speaking foreigners on almost every variety show. Most famous of such programs is the wildly popular TV show Strange Things About the Japanese, hosted by comedian Beat Takeshi, in which a panel of foreigners, fluent in Japanese, debates a Japanese audience and one another with a great deal of sound and fury. The program has a positive side in that it introduces citizens from many countries conversant in Japanese – something new to most viewers. On the other hand, the program is essentially comedy, tending to underscore the position of foreigners as freaks within the society: there is no moderation, and the debate consists mostly of vociferous sound bites shouted by people with plaques around their necks reading «South Korea,» «France,» «Benin,» etc. Reporter Howard French points out, «Although it may open windows on other worlds for its viewers, for some the zoolike aspect of the program, with its raucous, inconclusive debates, might almost seem to advertise Japan's conservative virtues. For all the giddy freedom of foreigners, the disorder subtly recommends the tranquillity of a uniform society governed firmly by rules understood by all.» The speeches, advice, and television debates look and feel exotic, but they have little to do with real involvement by foreigners in Japanese business or culture. It's the voice of Hal again, reassuring everyone that Japan is indeed international.

Considering Japan's stalled internationalization, we come back to the principle of Wakon Yosai, «Japanese spirit, Western technology,» the rallying cry of the Meiji Restoration from which Japan has never deviated. Fukuzawa Yukichi, a pioneer early traveler to Europe in the 1850s, wrote a widely read book about his experiences, in which he described his puzzlement upon discovering that foreigners were free to buy land in the Netherlands. «If a foreigner buys land, doesn't that mean that he could build a castle or a military fort on it?» he asked. That thought hadn't occurred to his Dutch friends, but something like it has never faded from the minds of the Japanese public. There is a fear that allowing foreigners entry into the nation's life would give them terrifying power. And so they have been kept at arm's length.

As we have seen in Japanese education, an attitude of wariness, if not fear, toward foreigners is imparted in the schools. Hence the refusal of many people to rent homes or apartments to foreigners, or the appearance of signs on bathhouses warning them to stay out. The Japanese are so cut off from meaningful contact with people from other countries that they are unaware of ethnic or national sensitivities, as may be seen in the stream of racial slurs made by leading politicians. In May 2000, Ishihara Shintaro, the mayor of Tokyo, publicly attacked Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chinese living in Japan, saying, «Atrocious crimes have been committed again and again by sangokujin [a derogatory term for foreigners] who have illegally entered Japan. We can expect them to riot in an earthquake.» He was referring to the notorious aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, when in fact the opposite happened: angry Japanese mobs rounded up and murdered thousands of Koreans. The important thing to note about this slur was that Ishihara refused to retract it, and that Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan's major daily newspapers, criticized not the governor but the outcry in the media. Ishihara remained more popular than ever, with more than 70 percent of the callers to the city office supporting him.

The lack of foreigners in Japan is not accidental; it results from laws and social frameworks especially designed to keep them out, or, if they are allowed in, to hold them on a very short leash. Bureaucrats restrict the import of goods from overseas, the media (newspapers, cinema, and television) portray Japan as the victim of dangerous foreigners, and business cartels raise high barriers to prevent outsiders from gaining a foothold. Internationalization in Japan is a concept at war with itself, for no matter how much lip service is paid to internationalization, the country's basic policies have been to keep Japan closed.

Plutarch, commenting on Lycurgus, said, «He was as careful to save his city from the infection of foreign bad habits, as men usually are to prevent the introduction of a pestilence.» Such is Japan. In the upper echelons of government and business, though one might find one or two men who did a stint at graduate school at Stanford or perhaps taught at Harvard in an exchange program, there is no one in a position of influence whose mind was shaped abroad at a young age.

The Ministry of Education, having by the end of the century fired all the foreign teachers at national universities who had longtime careers in Japan, and bankrupted the American colleges established in Japan during the 1990s, can breathe easy. It has successfully protected Japan against the «pestilence of foreign bad habits.» Closing the door to foreign influence on education is one of the biggest drags on real change, for with business and bureaucratic leaders all educated to have exactly the same mind-set, new ideas can rarely gain the ears of those who are in power. A truly different point of view cannot reach the top.

Traditional cultures everywhere face the problem of how to resist the overwhelming assault of Western, primarily American, civilization. The problem is not limited to Asia or Africa; Europe, too, has agonies over this issue. Some countries choose to erect legal, religious, or customary barriers to the outside world. For those who are studying how to use this model, Japan provides a good test case. Erecting barriers can have unintended effects, for, strangely enough, foreigners can help to preserve the local culture; what was quintessentially Japanese in its material culture might have survived better had there been more foreigners and Japanese with a broad worldview to appreciate it.

One could blame the decline of Japan's countryside and historic towns partly on the lack of foreigners-tourists, of course, but also others who might have an impact on design and preservation, such as resort and hotel operators, scholars, artists, or independent entrepreneurs. In Europe, preservation of natural and historic beauty did not come about as a means of pleasing tourists; it sprang from a long civic tradition among the people themselves, and tourism was a by-product. In Asia, however, modernization came so quickly that such civic traditions had little time to grow up; instead, rampant development is sweeping all before it. One of the few forces standing in the way of the development wave has been tourism. Foreigners living and traveling in countries like Vietnam, where the explosion of tourism is bringing in higher standards of design and service, have directly contributed to the restoration of old neighborhoods and the revival of traditional arts. But by keeping foreigners at arm's length, Japan never really felt the impact of international levels of taste-and thus the conquest of aluminum, fluorescent light, and plastic was complete. It's an anti-intuitive twist, one of the great ironies of modern East Asian history: allowing the foreigners in revives local culture; keeping them out helps to destroy it.

When the Japanese describe their country, they will often use the word semai, «narrow,» «cramped,» «crowded.» The idea is that Japan's landmass is too small to support its population properly. Of course, there are many nations with less habitable land and higher population densities, including some of the most prosperous countries of Europe and East Asia. Taiwan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Belgium have higher population densities than does Japan; Britain and Germany have slightly lower but roughly comparable densities. Semai is not a physical property; semai is in the mind. It's the emotional consequence of Japan's rigid systems, which bind individuals and keep out the fresh air of new ideas from abroad.

The result is explosive. Japan is a nation of people bursting to get out. This has happened before. In the 1930s Fascists in both Germany and Japan defended their expansionist plans by claiming that they needed Lebensraum. After Japan's defeat in World War II, its hunger for its neighbors' land subsided but did not disappear entirely. In the 1980s, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry had a pet project that consisted of sending tens of thousands of Japan's old people to Australia, where they could live in vast retirement cities, the presumption being that Japan does not have the land or the resources to provide a good life for its aging population. But today the emphasis is not on land but on opportunity.

From one point of view, the pressure on talented people and top-notch companies to move out is a strength. It fuels Japan's international expansion. Japanese presence in Southeast Asia is massive, with Japanese factories accounting for as much as 10 percent of Malaysia's GNP. Picking up the Guide to Japanese Businesses in Thailand is a sobering experience: the volume is as thick as the Yellow Pages of a small American city, listing thousands of companies. Shifting their focus overseas may be beneficial to Japanese businesses over the long term. But in the short term it bodes even greater stagnation, because it further reduces business and employment opportunities at home.

One can glean a sense of the hunger to get out of Japan from Newsweek's Japanese edition, August 14, 1996, which offered its readers a special ten-page feature on the top-ten locations for living abroad. The headline read «Escaping Japan. Living Abroad Is Just a Matter of Making Up Your Mind!» «Living abroad is a dream? No, certainly not,» the article begins.«There are people right now living pleasant lives in lands across the sea... A place where just taking a walk in the morning makes your heart beat faster with excitement. Where the bustle of activity in town is not tiring but energizing-surely cities like this exist somewhere in this wide world.» There follow photos and rankings of Edinburgh, Santa Fe, Bologna, Penang, Auckland, and so on, as places for the Japanese to move and start a new life, concentrating on an unspoiled natural environment, large comfortable houses, and a vibrant traditional culture. Sato Sachiko, the wife of a Japanese businessman living in Strasbourg, says, «When I think of returning to Japan, I get depressed.»

Why should she get depressed? The word semai gives us a strong hint, and Nomo's use of the word enjoy instead of endure brings us close to the answer. The school system, the bureaucracy, and the oppressive rules and hierarchies to which they give rise are dampening the Japanese people's spirit. In short, Japan is becoming no fun. Sasaki Ryu, a fifteen-year-old student who was interviewed in Asiaweek in May 1999, sums up the mood in Japan today:

I dream of going to a college in the U.S. School is so boring here. All the kids in my class think alike and everybody wants to be in a group. I'm quite sick of it. I like baseball, and when I see how some Japanese baseball players have made it in the States, I really admire them. Japanese players are good too but somehow the individuality of the American players draws me. I know it will be tough, but I'm ready to try. Young Japanese people have no dreams. I don't want to be like that.

This brings us full circle – from the Japanese people's relationship with the outside world to their feelings about their own country. Stalled «internationalization» has very little to do with anything international; rather, the problems spring from troubles within. As Ian Buruma comments, «The main victims of the bigoted, exclusive, rigid, rascist, authoritarian ways of Japanese officialdom are not the foreigners, even though they are at times its most convenient targets, but the rank and file of the Japanese themselves.»

When «young people have no dreams,» when a great inventor gets «no position, no bonus,» when school, work, and sports are a matter of «endure» rather than «enjoy,» when cities and countryside are losing their beauty and romance – that's a case of becoming no fun. And what an incredible reversal of Japan's own tradition this is! This nation had a countryside that was pure romance, as we can see from the haiku of Basho and the ecstatic tales of foreign travelers until very recent times. Even during the strictest days of the old Edo Shogunate, there was ample time and freedom to enjoy life; indeed, Saikaku's merchants and scholars in the «floating world» refined their pleasures to the point that almost every occupation and amusement they touched became high art.

Nor did the fun die out in the nineteenth century. Forty years ago, it was still possible for young entrepreneurs, like the men who founded Sony and Pioneer, to dream of creating new businesses and of succeeding on a global scale. And there was even a time, for several decades after World War II, when Japan was a more hospitable place for foreigners; in fact, the nation's international reputation coasts on the nostalgia of foreign experts for this era of relative openness that lasted right into the 1980s. Everyone can remember how much fun it used to be – one could hardly think of anything less Japanese than being no fun. And yet this is what Japan is doing to itself.

Whatever the foreigners may do or think, it is far sadder to see so many Japanese leaving – or dreaming of leaving – when their country offers so much by way of natural and cultural treasures, as well as one of the world's most affluent economies. It's another case of «a wilted peony in a bamboo vase, unable to draw water up her stem.» The treasures are still in Japan, but people cannot enjoy them. Saikaku says, «Whether you happen to be a businessman or an artisan, never move from a place that you are accustomed to... There is nothing quite as painful to observe as people packing up their belongings while the pots on the stove are still warm.»