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Early 1978
I am a refugee from Canberra politics and ANU academism, a part-time lecturer
at Tokyo's Sophia University eking out extra income from translations and odd jobs,
and with no visible future.
Early 1979
I am a full professor at Sophia, a regular face on Japanese national television,
quoted heavily in the print media, and launched firmly on Japan’s lucrative lecture
circuit, with an income well above that of an Australian prime minister.
The sudden jump from total obscurity to all-Japan notoriety was rather like the jolt
from a rocket launch.
You can suffer some gravity problems as a result.
A New Lifestyle
I have never been addicted to beautiful living; a childhood upbringing in harsh Australian
countryside took care of that problem a long time ago.Life those days really was
meant to be hard, and unpretentious.
But the extraordinary income coming in from the lecture circuit meant there were
some lifestyle changes.
First move was to get out of our tiny Sugamachi apartment and find ourselves a house,
which we did, in the Akebono-bashi district, also quite close to central Tokyo.
As mentioned earlier, the old traditional Japanese-style house on the site had a
negative value of 3 million yen. But the land was not cheap, even though it was still
pre-bubble years. And much renovation was needed to make the old house livable.
(A few years later we were to build another and more conventional house in the small
garden alongside, and move there, with the old house rented out to the US academic
and Japanologist, Carol Gluck.)
(To my dismay she threw out all the remaining traditional junk in the house - old
wooden shutters etc - and replaced it with chic shoji and trendy kotatsu).
(Later I had to admit she was right, though we disagreed a lot about Japan and its
history.)
Next move was to move out of my office-cell in Sophia and set up a proper office
in the very conveniently located Kojimachi area near the Nagata-cho Diet complex.It
had live-in facilities, and was close enough to Sophia for me to claim I was still
able to provide office hours to students.
(The cells allocated to professors at Japanese universities could not even provide
space for interviews, let alone a secretary. Most academics who hit the publicity
limelight do as I did, which does little to endear them to their less lime-lighted
and cell-confined colleagues. )
The Kojimachi office occupied one floor in the house of a retired banker, Kazuro
Sonoda, brought up in Germany during the war years, fluent in German as a result,
and with certain aristocratic pretensions (his five story house was on some formerly
palace-owned land next to the Akasaka Prince hotel - an ideal location).
The rent was not cheap. But a friendly tax official was to tell me that if I incorporated
myself, I could then write off against tax not just the office rent, but many other
expenses as well.
I was happy to oblige.
(Japan’s tax regime has many such oddities. They are a major cause of Japan’s fiscal
problems.)
I had also hired a part time assistant — a Sophia student called Fujioka who was
supposed to be studying law but seemed to know little more than the Japanese Constitution
- a typical product of Japan’s distorted education system.
But even the expense of an office and a secretary could not absorb the deluge of
funds from the lecture circuit. By a series of accidents I had already begun to find
myself involved in the land business.
For better or for worse, I was to get a lot more deeply involved. It kept me fit
and taught me a lot about flowers, trees and bulldozers. But it was very time and
attention consuming.
Whether or not in the process I did serious damage to a promising career as academic,
writer and commentator depends a lot on whether I could have had such a career in
the first place.
But it was not a deliberate lifestyle choice. It was, as I say, the result of accidents,
and we can begin with accident Number One.
The Boso Peninsula
For years Yasuko and I had enjoyed weekend hikes in the hills and mountains around
Tokyo. We knew vaguely that the Boso Peninsula existed - that it was a large blob
of land just a few miles to the south of Chiba city which itself was just to the
east of Tokyo.
But our hikes has always been to the west and south-west of Tokyo. Like most Tokyoites,
we assumed that Boso was little more than a collection of low hills and nondescript
ocean frontage. To get there one had to pass through a wasteland of factories, steel
mills and scruffy urbanization spreading towards and beyond Chiba city.
Travellers to and from Narita airport just beyond this urban-industrial eyesore are
sometimes warned to close their eyes as they pass through.
But what they do not tell you is that just to the south of all this junk is a vast
and largely undeveloped expanse of lush, semi-tropical hill country jutting out into
a blue Pacific, rimmed by delightful fishing villages and a string of sandy, southward-facing
surfing beaches.
Inland is row after row of deeply-forested hills sprinkled with farms and villages.
The southern end of the peninsula is bathed by a warm current from the tropics, -
the kuroshio - which means it is warm enough to grow flowers and vegetables for the
Tokyo market right through the winter.
Most of all, Boso has space, and depth. Unlike almost anywhere else in Japan (Kii
Peninsula is the one exception) there are hills where you can walk for hours without
seeing humans and country roads where you can drive for hours without seeming to
get anywhere.
It is a paradise waiting to be discovered.
Paradise Sought
By the early 1980’s we found ourselves saddled with two small children. Literally
saddled.
When we went to climb hills and mountains around Tokyo we had to carry them on our
backs.
We needed a piece of countryside for ourselves where we could go weekends, do a bit
of farming maybe, and generally enjoy nature, without being ‘saddled.’
But where, and how?
“Land for Sale” signs are rare in the Japanese countryside. Most Japanese farmers
seem to believe that selling part of the family estate is a sin against the ancestors
who looked after and developed that land for centuries before them.
Besides, very few urban Japanese want to buy genuine countryside land anyway. It
is seen as a haven for snakes, ghosts, bugs and landslides. Worse, it is lonely and
unfashionable.
Japanese like their land to be flat, developed and surrounded by other Japanese.
In the fashionable, fatcat gaijin/Japanese besso areas of Izu and Karuizawa, much
further from Tokyo than Boso, there was weekend resort land for sale.
But land prices were already in the 100,000 yen a tsubo (3.3 square meters) range,
and that did not include the cost of a house.
One could end up having to pay close to one million US dollars, all for the privilege
of having to travel several hours each weekend to get to an expensive house and block
of land facing directly onto someone else's expensive house and block of land.
I had to look somewhere else. But where?
A Chance?
Then one day it happened.
I had come across an advertisement offering small houses on small blocks of land
in the Kujukuri beach area just to the south of Narita.
Price: about two-three million yen apiece - unbelievably cheap, even by Australian
standards and certainly by Karuizawa or Izu standards.
Kujukuri we knew, and liked. Kujuku means 99, and li (ri) is the Japanese mile, and
the name is no over-statement - a wide strip of unspoiled beach facing good Pacific
surf and running close to 100 kilometers, all the way from Choshi in the east and
down to Ohara in the south-west .
We had been there before, once or twice, to swim.
That a beach of this quality could be largely deserted, even in the middle of Japan’s
hot mid-summers, even though it was only an hour or less from many of the 30 million
souls living in the Tokyo conurbation, was, and remains, a mystery.
At the equidistant but far less attractive Shonan beaches the other side of Yokohama,
the summer months would see bodies jammed together like seals on a rock.
(It reminded me of the story about how they advertised Saipan as a resort.)
( In the Western-oriented media they showed a beautiful tropical beach with just
one or two people on it. In the Japanese media they showed a hotel beach-front crowded
with other Japanese.)
Not just the beaches, but the Kujukuri hinterland was also largely undeveloped.
Wartime Japan had assumed that Kujukuri would be the natural invasion route for an
American attack on Tokyo. The complicated, roughly-built road system there was deliberately
designed to confuse and delay the Americans once they landed, it is said.
True or not, it was to confuse a lot of Japanese, and us, for many years after.
The Kujukuri area also had a cultural attraction.
Aoki Shigeru’s famous painting had preserved the sight of locals only a generation
or so ago going naked into the sea to haul their fishing boats and catches on to
Kujukuri beaches.
To the south, the ama-san women (abalone and lobster gatherers) used to dive semi-naked
below the Onjuku cliffs.
Maybe that advertisement would give us access, not just to cheap real estate but
also to some of this traditional culture, or so we thought.
We were wrong.
The houses turned out to be shacks. The land attached was little more than 60-70
square meters of flat sandy soil surrounded by other shacks.
And it was all quite a distance from the beach.
Paradise Found
What to do? As I stood there mumbling some negative words to the salesman I noticed
a low line of wooded hills in the distance.
Pioneering instincts were triggered. Maybe there would be some land up there in them
thar hills that I could get stuck into and develop.
‘You want land over there?” said the salesman in some kind of awe. “Snakes, jungle,
...
The pioneering instincts bubbled even more. Could he find something for us?
Well, just maybe. But none of his Japanese clients had ever shown any interest. He
would have to check out the situation there for us.
We decided to check out the situation, for ourselves.
Soon after the Kujukuri visit we went into the hills we had seen in the distance.
There in the Tsurumai area, wedged between two main highways, we had discovered a
small rural paradise of Shangri La charm - richly forested hills, beautifully-tended
farm land and old-world villages seemingly cut off from the rest of the Japan but
only an hour or so from Tokyo as the car runs.
Needless to say, there were no buses or trains. Yet as far as we were concerned,
this was Japanese countryside at its best. We even tried to rent an abandoned, thatched
farm house we discovered there.
(When Japanese communities are left free to organise themselves in isolation, they
can do so with a perfection rarely seen elsewhere. It is partly the result of the
enforced isolation on Japan’s once feudal societym, particularly in Boso where defeated
refugees from the Genji-Heike wars were said to have settled.)
(There is a message here for our globalizers and free traders trying to impose outside
values and influences on the rest of the world. Leave people alone and they will
progress naturally, of their own accord.)
(People are not stupid. Behind the semi-protective walls of isolation they will develop
naturally and organically the social structures and industries they need.)
(Japan did just this during its Tokugawa period, when not just the countryside but
a range of local industries were able to develop free from outside competition and
intervention, laying the skill and entrepreneurial basis for the highly competitive
Japanese industries of today.)
(Even today in the villages you can find quite sophisticated metal working factories
turning out implements needed by local communities.)
(Competition from largescale plants may have forced many of those smaller factories
to close down. Certainly many have been forced to modernise. But those largescale
plants themselves drew many of their early workers from those rural factories.)
(It is the careful balance between protectionism and competition that allows economies
to progress. Japan has been successful in keeping that balance.)
(If a lot of other developing peoples, Africans especially, had been allowed to do
the same, at their own pace and time, the world today would be a very different place).
A few weeks later the phone rang.
The salesman had found a block of land near Yoro Keikoku (Yoro Gorge) in the middle
of the peninsula and not far from our Tsurumai Shangri-lai. Could we please come
and look at it.
We were more than willing.
The Yoro Keikoku area was also enticing — undulating, steep, deeply forested hills
rising to 300 meters towards the head waters of the Yoro river as it cut its way
through the middle of the peninsula on its way to the ocean.
It reminded me a lot of the Austrian countryside I had seen as a student wandering
around Europe. .
It too had a remoteness that made Tokyo seem a thousand miles away.
Paradise Purchased
The land for sale was six thousand square meters (about two acres) of fertile land,
largely covered with bamboo on some flat land at the top and hinoki (cypress) forest
on the slopes below.
Total price - only 3 million yen, or around 1,500 yen per tsubo (3.3 square meters)
- not much more than what the land sharks were charging gullible Japanese for useless
rocky hillsides in distant Hokkaido
It was also a lot less than what hard-headed Australians were happily paying for
weekend shack land an hour or so out of Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne.
(As I have been happy to tell unbelieving Japanese audiences ever since, a major
reason I have wanted to stay in Japan so long is because the land here is so much
cheaper than in Australia.)
At first I could not believe that such attractive land so close to Tokyo could be
so cheap. The hinoki trees alone must be worth more than 3 million yen, I thought
fancifully (timber prices were soon to fall heavily as the yen soared and imports
flooded in.)
True, much of the block was steep slope running down to a tiny stream cut deep into
the soft, layered mud-rock that makes up most of Boso.
But that simply added to the glamour and mystery. We had our own private canyon.
We could spend days exploring it.
We even managed to find our own private secluded waterfall . And the small patch
of flat land at the top could be cultivated and built upon, provided we cleared the
bamboo.
(The Boso Peninsula is a geological anomaly. (Originally a deep bay filled with flood
mud, sand and detritus from surrounding volcanoes, it was uplifted in very recent
geological times as the Pacific plate continued to push up against the Japan plate.
Much of its sedimentary rock still lies in thick, horizontal, loosely compacted layers.)
(Deep canyons with the layers of mud or sand rock displayed along the sides are a
natural result.)
(Some Boso rivers are curious also. Their lower reaches were flooded as the level
of the oceans rose after the Ice Age. They then filled with silt to form wide plains
in which the original hills sit like islands surrounded by oceans of green rice fields.)
(Much of Boso is also a farming anomaly, with soft, fertile land on the tops of the
hills and hard clay or rock in the valleys. It seems that dust and ash from Mr Fuji
and other volcanoes continued to rain down on the peninsula as it was being uplifted.)
(Today that dust and ash has turned to fertile loam. But in the valleys it has been
washed and eroded away. It remains only on the non-eroded hilltops, and is similar
to the fertile volcanic loam that covers much of the Kanto Plain.)
True, our little piece of Boso paradise had no water supply, gas or electricity.
And to get there we had to walk several hundred meters along a dank forest track
leading in from a narrow, little-used road.
But that just added to the excitement of it all. As we disappeared down that forest
track after our long trek from Tokyo we really could feel that we were entering another
world, our own.
Besides, just a few hundred meters down the narrow road was the charming village
of Otadai, filled with dear hearts and gentle people. Some of them lived close to
our site. We were not totally isolated.
In the other direction the road went for miles along a high narrow ridge, with deeply
forested slopes falling away on either side, till it eventually came out at the Mamenbara
temple area with its famous ajisai (hydrangea) garden hillsides.
There had to be some catch, I reckoned. Such attractive land could not possibly be
going so cheaply.
(I had yet to realise that for most Japanese this kind of land had zero attraction.)
(And like most other foreigners I also had the usual prejudices about it being almost
impossible for foreigners to own land in Japan, rural land especially - that the
rules and regulations were designed specifically to keep us foreigners at bay.)
But sure enough, there in front of me were the documents proving that when we put
down our money we would well and truly become the owners of this small piece of Japanese
paradise.
To discover that as a foreigner with only a temporary visa I had exactly the same
rights as any Japanese to own and develop my own little piece of land, and that all
this could be done with little more than a stroke of the pen - or rather the thump
of an inkan (seal) - was a revelation.
It was also to do much to force me to examine many of the other myths about alleged
anti-foreign exclusiveness in Japan.
For months I used to gaze at the small, pencilled-in patch on the large-scale area
map that showed roughly the land I had bought. As a total foreigner I had actually
come to own a small piece of Japan, a nation which I liked and with which I was already
deeply involved.
Only after many years, and many Chiba land purchases later, could I shake off the
surprise.
Finding Funds
True, the money had not come easily. I had already had some heavy house-developing
expenses in Tokyo.
Fortunately, I had just made 3 million yen anyway, from an outfit called Academy
Shuppan, for writing a small booklet for them saying small children could easily
learn two languages simultaneously.
(The company was being bitterly criticised by conservatives for its efforts to sell
English language listening materials to the parents of small children. Its sales
pitch said that one's children would be permanently handicapped in the education
race if parents did not spend large amounts of money to have the children begin learning
English early.)
(The conservatives were saying the minds of the young children would be permanently
damaged if they began to learn English while they were still trying to master Japanese.)
(I was supposed to rebut the conservatives, and use the experience of my own children
to prove the point, something that anyone who has seen small bilingual and trilingual
children in other societies can do easily .)
(What Academi Shuppan should have been criticised for was gross-overcharging. Later
I was to give Academia Shuppan a much better idea for making money.)
(I told them their real market was adults, not small children. And they could tap
that market easily, by creating a set of tapes recording an mystery story written
in simple English, and market it together with the text - a novel idea in those days.)
(They did just that. The English-illiterate owner of the company caught a plane to
New York, got Sidney Sheldon to write the story, Orson Welles to record it, and has
been making a fortune ever since.)
(Even today, Japanese print media are plastered constantly with their half to full
page ads for that and a few other sets of the company's listening story tapes.)
( I should have received a lot more than 3 million yen from them for that lucrative
idea.)
And so it came to pass that thanks of the accident of visiting some useless Kujukuri
land, I was to make the first step to organizing for myself a very different life
in Japan.
But there were still quite a few more accidents waiting to happen.
Cultivating the Wilderness
For the next few years that little patch of Yoro Keikoku paradise came to dominate
our lives.
Fridays saw us waiting impatiently for the chance to make yet another of our regular
weekend trips out there, even though it would involve a three hour marathon journey
by train, bus and foot in one direction, and another three hour journey back.
We would take the Uchibo train from Tokyo to Goi, then transfer to the tiny Kominato-sen
train for a long ride down through the heart of the peninsula to the Yoro Keikoku
station, then by bus to the Oikawa village near the head of the gorge, and then finally
by foot up the steep hill on the other side of Oikawa, past Otadai village, before
we could reach the hidden entrance path to our land.
But all that simply added to the anticipation of seeing how our tiny vegetable crops
were growing and the seasons were changing.
(We had to go by train, bus and foot since mainly for ideological reasons. I had
refused to buy a car. I had seen how in Moscow the use of public transport had helped
give the society a sense of community. Foolish idealism made me think the same could
happen in vast, cosmopolitan, busy Tokyo.)
(Like King Canute, I would single-handedly stop the flood of automobilisation in
Japan.)
Having finally arrived, we would then set about killing bugs and planting more vegetables,
with the children left to play among the thick bamboo we were trying to clear. At
night we would all sleep together on the floor of the little six-mat prefab hut we
had had built for us on the edge of the steep slopes.
With its outdoor campfire, primitive toilet and roof-supplied rain water buckets,
it was our tiny palace looking out over endless green horizons and the changes in
the seasons.
Surprisingly, Yasuko went along with all this. Usually Japanese women flee at the
first hint of jungle, bugs and primitive living. But she came quickly to love it
as much as I did.
However the Yoro Keikoku adventure was to lead me to quite a few other land purchase
and development adventures in the Boso area. Persuading Yasuko that this was a good
idea was much harder, and she could have been right.
Boso land development was to take many hours, even years, when I could have and maybe
should have been doing other things. More on that later.
Life in the Faster Lane
Meanwhile life in Tokyo was changing greatly, and in ways that made our primitive
Boso existence seem even more unreal.
The lecture circuit was building up to a one a day affair. Requests to write for
a range of top publications began to pour in. I was having to get used to the idea
of being semi-famous.
Kodansha, a leading publisher, had arranged for me to do a taidan (dialogue) book
with an up-and-coming rightwing Japanese celebrity, Takemura Kenichi.
Takemura’s favorite message to his devoted audiences was to say that what was commonsense
(joshiki) in Japan was non-commonsense (hi-joshiki) in the outside world. My ‘tribe’
theory slotted in to all this neatly, even if our world views differed greatly.
Kodansha hired a room for us in a luxury hotel. For two days we were fed, wined and
listened to while we talked into a tape-recorder. A first-rate Kodansha editor, Suzuki
Satoru, then pulled our disconnected ramblings into a neat little 190 page paperback
in the Gendai Shinsho series.
Titled Yuniiku no Nihonjin — Unique Japanese - the book was to go through 18 printings
and sell something like 160,000 copies, far more than the original Japanese Tribe
book from Simul (though Simul, like most Japanese publishers, never gave me full
sales figures, or royalties).
(It had been partly the disagreement over royalties that had stopped me from wanting
to publish the English language version of the original book through Simul.)
Soon the requests to join Japanese policy making and advisory committees began to
flow in.
That too was to be a very time-consuming, but highly educational, affair.
The Japanese Policy Committee
The first invitation was to a committee set up by then Prime Minister, Ohira Masayoshi
(with whom I had had contacts as a journalist, and whom I respected as an intelligent
humanist and one of the more liberal-minded LDP politicians).
It was supposed to discuss Ohira’s favorite concept of the garden-town (denen toshi
kaihatsu) to replace Japan's ugly urban sprawl.
I knew little about town-planning (though I was later to be put on to several other
development-planning committees where I could develop a few ideas — Odaiba in Tokyo,
Makuhari in Chiba and Mirai 21 in Yokohama.)
(In each case I had tried fairly fruitlessly to make Japan’s one-tracked planners
realise that these developments needed a resident population to succeed and that
the valuable sea front land should be devoted to high class high-rise condominiums
rather than warehouses and parks which no one wanted to visit.)
(Town-planning is not one of Japan’s strengths, and yet another major difference
with China, or with most of the rest of the world for that matter.)
(It has something to do with weak spatial ability, yet another of the many similarities
between Japanese culture and the alleged nature of female psychology.)
(Japanese do much better when they concentrate on small details, and let their towns
and villages develop slowly and naturally.)
But in the Ohira committee my lack of expertise did not seem to matter very much.
There were quite a few others who knew even less than I did.
Next to me was the professor of monkey studies from Kyoto University. His contacts
with the simian species were supposed to have given him insights into the formulas
needed for successful human communal living.
(The Japanese are fascinated by monkey societies. The rise and fall of boss monkeys
in the main zoo colonies used to make newspaper headlines, together with detailed
analyses of the personality factors that create boss monkey success.)
(Quietly asserted leadership qualities, and support from female monkeys in the colony,
were duly noted.)
The Ohira committee invitation was to be followed by many more. Eventually there
would be requests from almost every Ministry or agency of policy-making importance
in Japan.
At last count there were 43 of them (the full list can be seen in the Biography/CV
on this website).
Virtually the only outfit to ignore me was the Foreign Ministry (MFA).
The MFA people naturally enough did not like my persistent media attacks on their
contrived Northern Territories claims against Moscow.
I was to be well and truly blacklisted by them, and also by their subsidiary, the
Japan Foundation, even though in the early days the Foundation had gone out of its
way to befriend me and publicise my Japan Tribe theory.
(In 2002 however I would be invited to join a private advisory committee for Tanaka
Makiko during her brief spell as Foreign Minister that year.)
( Makiko too was to fall foul of MFA’s incurably elitist, pro-US, hawkish bias, largely
because she tried to push foreign policy in a more pro-Asian direction and had uncovered
a swamp of petty corruption in MFA accounts.)
But no matter. My contacts elsewhere in the bureaucracy were to keep me busy enough.
Committee Games
The proliferation of committees is one of Japan’s stranger phenomena.
It owes much to Japan's much-mentioned consensus ethic - to the way bureaucrats and
politicians like to appear to appeal to public opinion before they hand down new
policies.
And to some extent, in the postwar years when Japan was a much humbler and poorer
society, and the wartime sense of national community still lingered, this search
for consensus was fairly genuine.
Public opinion polls were frequent. When the public turned critical, the bureaucrats
listened. There was a genuine effort to promote the national interest and to have
Japan regain its position in the world.
Today much of this has changed. Tribe-minded bureaucrats and politicians are in control
.
Preserving the territory and interests of one’s own ministry or faction has become
the primary aim. The national interest is often irrelevant.
(Many in the West were fooled by Chalmers Johnson book 'MITI and Japan's Economic
Miracle' written in the wake of this earlier, humbler period. It did much to create
the image of dedicated Japanese bureaucrats devoted to the national interest and
whose strong control from the top was the key to Japan’s successful economic growth.)
(Today, some have come to realise that bureaucratic and political tribalism and lack
of strong control from the top is a major factor hindering Japan's successful progress.)
But if anything, this tribal downsizing made the bureaucrats and politicians feel
even more need to create policy-advising committees, to prove they were still in
touch with the national consensus.
The routine is now well established. First you find a collection of so-called yushiki-keikensha
- ‘knowledgeable and experienced people’ - to serve as 'experts' on the committee.
These 'experts' are people who, with one or two exceptions, can be expected to agree
totally with what you want to have approved.
Then you call them together for a much-publicized opening meeting covered intensively
by the media.
As the faces of the 'experts' flash across the nation's TV screens that evening,
the public is encouraged to believe that the bureaucrats and politicians really are
trying to come up with policies that are best for Japan.
Then follows a dozen or so two hour meetings (this time largely ignored by the media)
where detailed briefing materials are supplied and read out at length, as if the
rest of us cannot read.
By the time the reading out is finished there is usually little time for more than
a few desultory remarks among the members, followed by some discussion about the
date for the next meeting.
The committee will then eventually approve a final report, prepared by bureaucrats,
and recommending precisely the policies that the bureaucrats wanted from the beginning
to have approved. Often those reports are prepared in draft even before the committees
get underway.
(One of my worst experiences was on an Education Ministry committee, set up allegedly
to discuss ways for improving the teaching of English in Japan.)
(Some of the members were people who, like me, realised the harm being done by bad
teaching in the high schools. I little difficulty persuading these more enlightened
members that Japan should cut back on high school teaching so it could concentrate
on teaching English in the universities where proper facilities could be provided,
among many other advantages.)
(The final report said exactly the opposite — that high school study of English,
which previously had in theory been sentaku 'elective' should now be made compulsory.)
(When I queried the bureaucrats about how they could produce a report that did not
even mention our discussion of the university option, they blandly said that from
the beginning the committee had been set up to endorse compulsory high school teaching
and it would be ‘inconvenient’ — their word for it - even to mention anything else.)
(At the final meeting, attended by the Education Minister, Nakasone Hirofumi, the
bureaucrats turned very chilly indeed when I got up to say that the State had no
right to force its citizens to subject themselves to three years of a mistaken education
which in most cases would guarantee they would never be able to speak English properly.)
Committees, and the Role of the Foreigner
How do I, as a foreigner, get involved in all these committees, some of which, in
theory at least, are supposed to discuss questions of important national policy?
I too still wonder. But there is what I call the lubra theory.
When they set up their committees the organisers like to recruit not just the ‘experts,’
but a few others also, to show that they really have tapped into a broad cross-section
of the society.
Often some notable from the sporting or artistic world will be included. I once sat
through ten entire sessions with a sumo wrestler who did little more than grunt.
Then when the female emancipation mood of the seventies got underway, the demand
was for at least one female to be on any committee.
I once spent the best part of a year on a MITI committee that was supposed to consider
global economic policies and which included a rather attractive lady haiku person
who did little more than look demure for the all the time we were in session.
Then with the onset of the ‘internationalisation’ (kokusaika) boom of the eighties,
there was also the demand for a foreigner or two to be appointed to committees.
(It reminded me of Canberra in the Whitlam years when the political correctness said
the voices of the infirm, the female, the aborigines and the non-heterosexual should
all be heard in the corridors of power.)
(The ideal candidate for a Whitlam committee was said to be a one-legged lesbian
lubra.)
(Note: a lubra is a female aborigine person.)
I lack lubra qualifications. But as a Japanese-speaker attached to the well-known
Sophia university, and, more importantly, generally free during day time hours, I
was an obvious choice as available foreigner at the time.
Inside the Committees
Why did I go along with all this? For one thing it gave me a good inside view of
the bureaucratic and political process in action.
It also told me a lot about the personalities of the ‘experts’ being appointed to
the committees. Most were highly conservative, and some quite influential in molding
Japanese popular opinion.
As well, the materials prepared for these committees were often useful for my own
research.
Some were even marked secret. Amazingly, the Japanese organizers seemed not to worry
about a foreigner reading their secrets.
(One reason is that until very recently, Japan had none of the secrecy mania that
infects Western societies. Another is more tribal)
(As a member of the committee I had automatically become a member of the Ministry’s
little world, separate from the rest of Japan, and entitled to know its secrets.)
But only rarely could this humble foreigner exert any influence on deliberations
and reports.
On a Finance Ministry trade policy committee during the trade frictions of the early
eighties, myself and the economist, Hosomi Takashi, tried hard to suggest that rather
than let the US impose threatened surcharges on Japanese imports, Japan should impose
export taxes - particularly since its currency at the time was heavily undervalued.
That way Japan would get the money, and not the US. It would also show some sincerity
about wanting to ease the frictions. And it would help Japan escape the damage that
would inevitably result when the pressure from continued trade surpluses eventually
forced severe yen appreciation.
That pressure was to arrive sooner than expected, with the Plaza Accords of the mid-eighties.
But for the Japanese at the time, taxing exports was like taxing motherhood. It also
involved having deliberately to create policies which were bound to be unpopular
with someone or other (a no-no in the consensus society.
Worse, they would be based on cold logic — another no-no in a society that prefers
its decisions to be on the basis of feelings, mood and shikata-ga-nai (it can’t be
helped) inevitability.
Far better to leave the responsibility to the US and appear to be a victim of arbitrary
fate, even if this caused far more loss to Japan in the long run.
My and Hosomi's intervention ended up as a small and quickly ignored para in the
final report.
Eventually Washington did decide to move. The Plaza Accords were one result. Another
was the decision to impose quantitative restrictions on the car imports that were
doing such damage to the US car industry.
Tokyo protested violently, and Japanese car makers complained bitterly over the way
they were forced to establish the car plants in the US to circumvent the restrictions.
But later, when those US car plants saved Japan’s car makers from serious losses
as the yen moved remorselessly to close to 80 to the dollar, Toyota, Nissan and company
forgot about their initial kicking and screaming.
They were congratulating themselves on their wisdom in setting up those plants in
the US.
(I had to chuckle to myself when Beijing in 2004 had no problem deciding quickly
to impose export taxes on the textiles flooding into the US market and harming US
producers, rather than wait for protective US tariffs to be imposed.)
(It was a perfect real-life example of the difference between Chinese rationalism
and Japanese emotionalism, though the totalitarian nature of the Chinese regime also
would have helped the decision.)
Other committee interventions were similarly ineffective.
On a government economic policy shingikai (top advisory committee) to which I had
been appointed by the then finance minister, Miyazawa Kiiichi, I was able to get
a para the final report recognising the harm the trade surpluses were causing to
foreign trade partners and would eventually cause to Japan.
But it was immediately contradicted in the next para (inserted by Keiichi Konaga,
a MITI man) claiming the trade surpluses were good for Japan and the world.
The one concrete result I can claim credit for was on a rather strange committee
set up to chose a new symbol mark for Tokyo. I had the casting vote, and was able
to vote in favor of the rather neat green leaf symbol we see today, rather than the
complicated mess that had emerged from a disturbed artistic mind.
True, when it came to education matters Iwas to have more success.
In one committee I not only got recommendations into final reports, but even managed
to get some of them partially implemented.
That was on a committee set up in 1999 by the then prime minister, Obuchi Keizo (The
National Consultative Commission on Education Reform).
My recommendations included the idea of provisional entry to universities for those
who were close to the passing grades in entrance exams, and the right for bright
students to enter universities at age 17 rather than wait till the compulsory 18.
(The former idea was picked up by a few universities, including the Akita International
University to which I was later attached.)
(The law of the land was even changed to accommodate the latter idea. University
entrance age, which by law had been set at 18 was formally reduced to 17, thanks
in part to the influence of a bright LDP politician called Machimura who was also
on the committee and liked my idea.)
(But the wretched Education Ministry - which had long been strongly opposed - managed
to make it a dead letter by attaching impossible conditions.)
In short, the many hours spent sitting around those long, cloth-covered committee
tables were not entirely wasted. But they were always peripheral to what had become
my main preoccupation, and source of income, namely Japan’s amazing lecture circuit.
And superimposed on all that was what supposed to be my real career in Japan — teaching
at a university.
Scholastic Pretensions
At Sophia I had been made professor at two areas— the Faculty of Economics and the
International Division ( now known as the Faculty of Comparative Culture).
This meant two lecture schedules, two different sets of faculty committees to attend,
two different sets of academic intrigues to cope with, and two very different languages
in which to operate.
Meanwhile the non-university lecture circuit was also building up.
The strain was substantial — particularly when the economics faculty asked me to
give lectures, in Japanese, to vast halls of bored students taking basic economics
courses.
After about three years of this purgatory, I was suddenly told that in future I should
confine myself to the International Division position.
Maybe they did not like my amateurish efforts to lecture on economics in Japanese.
More likely, I suspect, they did not like a foreigner being involved in the intense
faction fights racking the faculty in those days.
Either way, the relief was substantial.
At the International Division life was much easier. Teaching was in English, to mainly
foreign students. The lecture burden was light, and could be concentrated into one
or two days of the week.
Faction fights and boring faculty meetings could be ignored or bypassed.
Lecture Circuit Refinements
Meanwhile the lecture circuit was grinding on.
Looking back, it was an extraordinary affair — close to 3000 lectures, an average
of at least three a week, to audiences of every type and size, all around Japan,
continuously for well over 20 years.
And when one is giving much the same lecture to much the same audiences, day after
day, month after month, even an initially poor speaker such as myself begins to learn
something about speaking, and about Japanese audiences.
First lesson was that audiences are much more sensitive they you realise. They sense
very quickly, even if you don’t, whether you are at ease with your subject.
From the moment you walk onto the podium they are watching you closely. You have
to show full confidence. You have to create rapport. And you have to maintain it
for an hour and half — the normal time span of lectures in Japan.
You are not allowed to flag in the middle. The moment the audience senses even the
slightest hesitation or doubt, they switch off. It is hard to recapture them.
But once captured they will listen, well and continuously. And the interest is both
intelligent and engaged. Reactions to strong points and jokes are good indicators.
Western, and to some extent Chinese audiences, will listen if the subject is interesting.
But most will show some quizzical doubt at times. The Japanese audiences try hard
and continuously to show agreement, even when you are saying something that might
contradict their beliefs.
If all goes well you are rewarded with an immense psychological high. It is as if
you have managed, single-handedly, standing on an isolated podium, to elevate an
entire audience, sometimes several thousand people, and hold them there.
One begins to realise how dictators come to love oratory.
In my case it was not so much oratory. Part of my attraction was the fact that I
was a foreigner — a talking dog (to recapitulate, why did people pay money to listen
to the talking dog? Not because of anything the dog was saying, but because the dog
was able to talk.)
(A foreigner talking in Japanese was a major draw-card for many.)
But partly there was also some interest in what I was saying. For the most part I
was putting out ideas new to most of the audience.
And partly because I had mastered that art of what I call ‘the Japanese joke.’
Jokes or humorous asides in speeches are taken for granted, demanded even, in the
West. Not so in Japan.
Most Japanese speakers take themselves very seriously. Either they don’t know any
jokes, or else they feel that delivering them detracts from their status as the esteemed
sensei handing down wisdom to the masses.
Needless to say, as a stray foreigner wandering the country there was no way I could
have such pretensions. I was more than happy to use jokes, if I could find them.
Sponsors and audiences would then tell me repeatedly how much they appreciated this,
as if telling jokes was some quality quite unexpected in a university professor.
How do you find jokes? Often you are saying something you do not think is very funny
but the audience bursts out laughing.
You try the same thing on the next audience, and they too burst out laughing. Then
you know you have discovered a ‘Japanese joke.’
Usually they are very simple affairs with little of the ironic subtlety of Western
jokes.
I ended up with a few dozen of these ‘jokes.’ Scattered throughout the standard 90
minute speech, they proved to be perfect attention-getters.
Another quality for which I was sometimes praised by sponsors, but of which I was
hardly aware, was the ability to handle pauses (ma). For some reason ma are very
important for Japanese listeners.
Maybe it was a result of my being confident of my topic and audience (I should have
been after delivering much the same speech several thousand times).
Finally, and I guess this goes without saying, the easiest way to hold an audience
— any audience, but particularly a Japanese audience - is to speak from the heart.
I could do that most of the time because I was genuinely interested in my subject
— namely, the differences between the Japanese and us non-Japanese, and the reasons
for those differences.
A popular lecturer around Japan was Hayasaka Shigezo, former secretary to Tanaka
Kakuei. Tanaka retained enormous popularity despite the rather squalid but successful
efforts by Bungei Shunju and the foreign correspondents in Tokyo to have him removed
from office back in 1974 (long before the Lockheed scandal incidentally).
To show Tanaka-style sincerity at emotional moments, Hayasaka would remove his shirt,
jump up and down, and sweat profusely. The audiences loved it.
I could not compete with him. But before good audiences — school teachers were the
best — it was not hard for me to get deeply involved in what I wanted to say.
Sometimes I could even draw tears - for example, using a topic like Japan’s obstinate
reluctance to allow organ transplants and so forcing numbers of Japanese children
to go abroad for operations, with the result that foreign children would possibly
miss out on needed transplants, as an example of Japan’s closed mentality.
And thanks to the lecture circuit I got to be a lot better at saying what I wanted
to say. The pressure of standing on a podium and trying to communicate forces one
constantly to rethink and expand ideas. Discussions and questions also helped.
Thanks to all that, I was able to refine my original ‘tribe’ theory of Japan into
something a lot simpler and a lot more sophisticated than the original.
More on that in the next chapter. ...
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