Tomiko Yoda is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and African Languages and Literature, Program in Literature, and Department of Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts in the Construction of Japanese Modernity, published by Duke University Press.

Harry Harootunian is Professor of East Asian Studies and History at New York University. His many books include Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (with Masao Miyoshi), also published by Duke University Press.

JAPAN AFTER JAPAN

Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3787-4

Contents

Introduction Harry Harootunian and Tomiko Yoda…………………………………………………………………………………..16A Roadmap to Millennial Japan Tomiko Yoda……………………………………………………………………………………….54The University and the “Global Economy”: The Cases of the United States and Japan Masao Miyoshi……………………………………….81The University, Disciplines, National Identity: Why Is There No Film Studies in Japan? Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto……………………………..98Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History Harry Harootunian………………………………………………….122National Subjectivity and the Uses of Atonement in the Age of Recession J. Victor Koschmann…………………………………………..142″Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!”: Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of Colonialism Leo Ching………………………………….167″You Asians”: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary Naoki Sakai………………………………………………………..195Revenge and Recapitation in Recessionary Japan Marilyn Ivy………………………………………………………………………..216The “Wild Child” of 1990s Japan Andrea G. Arai…………………………………………………………………………………..239The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan Tomiko Yoda……………………………………275Representation, Reality Culture, and Global Capitalism in Japan Eric Cazdyn…………………………………………………………299Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre Do Their Ghost-Dance: Globalization and the Nation-State Yutaka Nagahara………………………..331New-Age Fetishes, Monsters, and Friends: Pokmon Capitalism at the Millennium Anne Allison……………………………………………358Otaku Movement Thomas LaMarre………………………………………………………………………………………………….395A Drifting World Fair: Cultural Politics of Environment in the Local/Global Context of Contemporary Japan Yoshimi Shunya…………………415Angelus Novus in Millennial Japan Sabu Kohso…………………………………………………………………………………….439Contributors………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….443

Chapter One

A Roadmap to Millennial Japan

Tomiko Yoda

This introductory essay aims to provide an overview of the context that brings together the chapters in this book: the ongoing discursive construction of Japan during the long economic downturn of the 1990s. A huge volume of commentaries on the malaise afflicting Japan, unleashed particularly from the neoliberal and neonationalist camps, has fed into and shaped the impression of overall national doom. Against this backdrop, the present essay points out a significant degree of complicity between the Japanese neoliberals and neonationalists, despite their apparent disagreements on their attitudes toward economic globalization and the role of nation-states today. I examine some of the representative claims made by the two sides, analyzing the politics involved in their discursive manufacturing of the “crisis.”

In the latter half of the essay I explore some theoretical frameworks through which to make sense of 1990s Japan that counter the widespread tendency to isolate it both spatially and temporally. Instead of defining the 1990s through the recession and its effects, I suggest examining the decade in relation to the broader historical trends of globalization and postmodernization that followed the completion of Japan’s postwar economic modernization. I argue, furthermore, that this perspective helps us understand the profound sense of not only economic but also sociocultural disturbances in Japan with which the decade has become identified.

The economic turmoil of the 1990s has often been cast as both the cause and the effect of the sudden malfunction of the “Japanese system,” which allegedly encompasses not only politics and economics but also the nation’s social and cultural organizations that took shape in the process of its modernization. This essay approaches sociocultural trends in the 1990s not as the effects of such an abrupt breakdown but as a culmination of the historical process by which the apparatus for producing and reproducing the national community has undergone a complex course of decline. In the last section of the essay I discuss how we may analyze the 1990s as a paradoxical nexus of the retreating national order, on one hand, and the widespread eruption of nationalistic sentiment, on the other. The section also examines the dominant currents of the intellectual landscape in 1990s Japan and the nature of the crisis that it articulates.

It is the built-in constraint of the introduction that the discussion here barely scratches the surface of an extremely broad range of issues. Furthermore, an attempt to make sense of events so close to the time of writing and still in the process of unfolding cannot help but be tentative and speculative. While recognizing these limitations, however, I believe that taking a stab at mapping this complex terrain into some manner of coherence may contribute to the discussion of what really is at stake in trying to understand the nation’s turbulent decade.

The recession of Japan in the 1990s acquired an epochal status as it became increasingly identified with the breakdown of the nation’s unique economic system: the growth machine supported by the iron triangle (industry, bureaucracy, and single-party politics) as well as by the ethos of harmony and formidable work ethics of a homogeneous and highly disciplined population. It is said that while this formation underwrote the nation’s “miraculous” high-speed industrialization and growth that made it a poster child of modernization theory and enabled its subsequent rise to the ranks of global economic superpower, it is now strangling the nation with a stagnant economy. Commonly thought to be at the heart of the so-called Japanese disease is the impasse stemming from the giant export-dependent economy that has left its domestic economy relatively underdeveloped. Conditions such as an extremely high cost of living rigged by an overregulated and inefficient import, distribution, and retail structure; the inadequacies of social security; and a tax system that punishes consumption have consistently squeezed the funding from Japanese households into industries as a cheap source of money, mediated largely by commercial banks. Under heavy protection and regulation by the government, this funding mechanism encouraged the banks to overloan and large corporations to overborrow, helping build the capital-intensive heavy and chemical industries that drove postwar industrialization and growth. The bank-corporation nexus, furthermore, was one of the primary means by which the Japanese bureaucracy, particularly the powerful Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, steered the course of the national economy while avoiding more blunt forms of state intervention.

The system, however, allegedly outlived its efficacy in the 1980s and instead encouraged the formation of the speculative bubble and its subsequent collapse. By then Japan was drawing envy from other industrialized nations by its resilient responses to repeated global economic upheavals since the early 1970s. Japan appeared to have pulled off rapid organizational and technological restructuring in the manufacturing sector (becoming an international model for improved methods and quality of production as well as rigorous cost-cutting), and the broad reorientation of its economy away from resource- and labor-intensive heavy industries to high value-added high/mixed technology lines; and it quickly expanded the nation’s international market share in these areas. This resulted in Japan’s huge trade surplus, especially against the United States, which, in turn, raised the value of the yen against the dollar-the trend that the Japanese government, under international pressure, formally censured in the Plaza Accord of 1985.

In the face of the skyrocketing yen that severely cut into the profitability of the Japanese export industry, however, the government attempted to curb the appreciation of the currency by easing its monetary policy. This left Japanese banks overflowing with liquidity, while at the same time the nation’s banking industry was losing some of the traditional clientele, due to the changes in corporate fund-raising methods. Gradual deregulation of the capital market by the Japanese government that began in the 1970s opened broader options for profitable and mature large corporations to acquire funds without the help of banks, through the issuance of stocks and bonds, leading the way in the trend of “financial engineering” (zaiteku).

Many banks, as a result, began lending to higher-risk borrowers, including stock speculators and real estate developers eager to borrow and invest in the burgeoning speculative boom. It has also been pointed out that banks were left with an oversupply of funds because the Japanese government, characteristically, did not deregulate the capital market for individual investors, so that most Japanese households had little choice but to put their money into bank accounts. The lax evaluation standards for lending practiced by the Japanese banking industry fostered through years of its cozy relations with the government and corporate borrowers, together with increased volume of lending on the basis of highly overvalued real estate as collateral, helped pump more speculative investment into stocks and the real estate market.

It is likely that the speculative bubble was tolerated or perhaps even encouraged by the Japanese government in order to facilitate corporate investments necessary to sustain Japanese companies’ competitiveness in the global trade war (made fierce by the volatility of currency exchange rates, the emergence of new competitors in Asia, and the general trend of overcapacity and overproduction in the world economy). By the end of the 1980s, however, the overvaluation of asset prices reached an alarming level, and when the government finally stepped in to cool the economy down by tightening its monetary policy and imposing restrictions on real estate sales, the boom quickly turned into a bust. The banks were left with mountains of nonperforming loans, the volume of which grew rapidly as the industry and the government obstinately refused to admit and confront its magnitude during the early 1990s.

The deterioration of the Japanese banking industry mired in nonperforming loans resulted in a bad credit crunch, but more seriously, the bursting of the bubble economy caused the overall decline of demands and market confidence. Furthermore, many of the standard macroeconomic measures deployed by the Japanese government in the past to stimulate the economy proved ultimately ineffective in the increasingly globalized economic environment. For instance, despite the slowdown of the Japanese economy, a large U.S. deficit kept the value of the yen up during the first part of the 1990s, depressing the profit of Japanese exports. The lowering of interest rates by the Bank of Japan did help depreciate the yen, but it fell short of achieving the intended results: stimulating domestic demands, reviving the asset price, and thus shrinking bad loans. In the globalized financial market, low interest rates in Japan, rather than increasing domestic investment, led to the flow of money offshore in search of higher returns. The availability of Japanese funds and the artificially low interest rate encouraged an investment boom in East and Southeast Asia, contributing to the bubble there, which would later haunt the Japanese economy.

The meltdown of Asian financial markets, beginning with the Thai currency crisis in July 1997 and the severe recession that followed in many countries in the region, dealt a further blow to the teetering Japanese banks with large investments there, as well as to Japanese exporters that had increasingly become dependent on the demands of Asian markets. Meanwhile, after the collapse of a group of housing loan banks (jusen) in 1996, a string of bankruptcies of major Japanese banks and brokerages followed in 1997 and 1998. In the fall of 1998 the crisis in the Russian and Latin American economies aroused an alarm for a genuine worldwide depression, and fingers were pointed at Japan as the trigger of this doomsday scenario. At present, despite monetary and fiscal policies by the state (an extremely low interest rate since 1995 that was lowered to zero in February 1999 and massive stimulus packages sponsored by the government), the Japanese economy has yet to establish a clear prospect for a sustained economic recovery.

The broad outline provided above is a composite of widespread accounts on how and why Japan suffered a serious economic downturn in the 1990s. What concerns us here more than the accuracy of this narrative is the structural nature of the economic troubles that it constructs. The impact of negative psychology and a pessimistic outlook on the nation’s economic future, furthermore, has been compounded by the association between the recession and a diverse set of ominous events and phenomena observed in the nation during the decade. Though they were not directly related to the recession, these occurrences have become closely interwoven with the economic crisis in the popular imagination, underscoring the perception of national peril that encompasses virtually all aspects of Japanese contemporary society.

Before the extent of the banking debacle and its possible effects on the economy were widely registered by the public, there occurred two events that literally shook the nation: the Hanshin earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, both in 1995. The earthquake that devastated one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country not only exposed the precariousness of life in this highly urbanized nation but also became a striking symbol of the government’s bureaucratic rigidity and ineptitude in crisis management. The disproportionate level of hardship that the earthquake brought to the economically, socially, and politically vulnerable segment of the population drew attention to the social fault lines running beneath the surface of the supposedly homogeneous “mass middle stratum society” (chukan taishu shakai).

In the case of Aum Shinriky, the degree of threat that a single cult organization managed to pose to the public safety, and the failure of the Japanese police to prevent the elaborate planning and execution of sarinization as well as other violent crimes perpetrated by the group, shocked a population accustomed to a relatively low crime rate. Many of the core members of the cult were young, well-educated men and women from a seemingly unremarkable middle-class background, including engineers and lawyers trained at some of the top universities. The incident raised a number of lasting questions: How did society fail to instill basic ethical and social consciousness in these seemingly intelligent, serious, and ordinary young adults? And why could it not offer them a more compelling and meaningful vision of their lives and their future than to follow the millennialist delirium of a charismatic cult leader?

The moral panic over the status of the younger Japanese in the latter part of the decade was further reinforced by incidents that were publicized as signs of serious troubles afflicting teenage boys. The discovery of the monstrous murder of children committed by a fourteen-year-old boy who became known as “Youth A” (Shonen A) in 1997 as well as a string of violent crimes by male teenagers in a fit of loss of control referred to as a state of being “sundered” (kireru) were cast as extreme cases of more pervasive problems with Japanese teens. This was only one side of the coin; what was violence in the case of boys was sex in the case of girls. The promiscuity of young Japanese girls and their cashing in on their sexual marketability-young girls selling their companionship and sexual favors to older men in return for money to pay for karaoke bars, luxury designer goods, and mobile phone bills-became widely publicized both inside and outside Japan. Public outrage and puzzlement over prostitution by these young middle-class girls were complicated by the culpability of the adult males who constituted their clientele, as well as by the stark way in which the girls’ actions seem to mirror the commodity fetishism of contemporary Japan and the “anything goes” zeitgeist (some called it the “moral meltdown”) of the decade.

While the nation appeared to need strong and skillful leadership more than ever, the media was in fact saturated with reports of a diverse assortment of “misconducts” (fushoji) of elites affiliated with leading institutions in business, politics, and bureaucracy. The exposure of rampant corruption, greed, and ineptitude among political leaders is, of course, old news in Japan. But the barrage of scandals involving elite bureaucrats was characteristic of the decade. The corrupt ties between bureaucracy and business emerged not only from obvious suspects such as the Ministry of Finance but from a wide array of agencies, including the Health Ministry’s cover-up of its role in approving the importation of HIV-contaminated blood products that resulted in 1,400 hemophiliacs contracting the virus. More recently the Japanese police force was rocked by scandals involving incompetence, criminal neglect, and criminal acts committed by officers. There were also reports revealing the ties between Japanese blue-chip corporations and sokaiya (racketeers who threaten to cause trouble at the annual shareholders’ meetings). The relations between large Japanese corporations and organized crime in general are said to have deepened through the real estate bubble in the 1980s when gangsters were often deployed (presumably through subcontractors) to facilitate large-scale developments in congested cities, providing services such as intimidating reluctant property owners into selling their lands or forcing stubborn renters to evacuate property already sold to developers.

In summary, Japan in the 1990s has come to be widely perceived as the site of an imploding national economic system, a disintegrating social order, and the virtual absence of ethical and competent leadership. Against this background a huge volume of commentaries, finger pointing, and solutions for the national malaise has been churned out by the media. Most notably, a steady stream of critiques from neonational and neoliberal perspectives has substantially informed the public perception of the national crisis.

The Japanese government’s massive bailout of failing banks in the 1990s galvanized a surge of neoliberal criticism of government intervention in the banking debacle in particular and the market economy in general. Reformers argued for the need to foreclose on bad loans and to let insolvent banks and businesses fail, even at the cost of large-scale bankruptcies and unemployment. They insisted that in the end tough measures would hasten the process of recovery and be the right step toward building a competitive free-market economy in Japan. As the decade wore on and the bursting of the speculative bubble catalyzed a much broader and deeper economic downturn, the central target of the neoliberal attack shifted somewhat from the Japanese state and bureaucracy to Japanese corporate governance. Large Japanese corporations themselves were denounced as being steeped in the bureaucratic structure that breeds risk-averse, complacent, and insular culture. They were blamed for weakening the Japanese economy by ignoring the shareholders’ rights to high return on equity and focusing instead on institutional growth and stability, acting as the caretakers of the organizations that give out rewards to loyal corporate stewards. According to the critics, therefore, corporate management too had to undergo rationalization-for example, by swiftly abandoning the lifetime employment system, interlocking shareholding among companies, or adherence to the “convoy system,” in which strong companies aid and protect weaker companies among their affiliates, typically under bureaucratic guidance.

Since the escalation of the trade war in the 1980s the Japanese government had been under fire from Washington to open its market and remove laws and regulations that protected the domestic industries. Though economic liberalism did have strong advocates among elite policy makers in Japan prior to the decade, in the 1990s the U.S. call for market-driven reform in Japan was joined by a broad neoliberal chorus from within the nation. For the neoliberals of the decade, the United States became the exemplar of all that is right and what Japan is not-a society that fosters healthy and dynamic competition, transparency, accountability, entrepreneurial spirit, fairness, and the ability to take bold but calculated risks. In the wake of the Japanese government’s announcement of plans for the major deregulation of the Japanese financial market (so-called Japanese Big Ban), the neoliberal pundits brandished the term global standard-de facto shorthand for U.S. or Wall Street standards and practices-to chastise local deviations from it.

(Continues…)

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