giving up on Japan: the arguments and the counter-arguments

Well, well. Just as I was tacking stock and congratulating myself on having made the difficult but necessary decision to leave Japan a year ago, phew, Debito opened up this timely — and heated — discussion on his blog.

The whole thing started with a letter-comment from a reader, who in a couple of paragraphs cogently explains why in recent years Japan has become such an inhospitable place to live on way too many fronts — and perhaps not just for foreigners.

While it pains me to say this, I have to admit I fully agree with most of his arguments, and all the more so because I have a Japanese teenage daughter whom I (and her own father too) want to keep away from Japan as much as possible.

I take the liberty of reproducing the said comment, plus two lengthy adenda posted later by the same reader, as they hit the nail square on the head. I certainly also recommend the reading of the counter-arguments on Debito’s blog, but, as far as I am concerned, this post will be for me a way of bringing such a painful topic to a close, as I have nothing else of significance to add.

Shortly after I sent the link above to a dear Japanese friend, he wrote back with the following passage, which beautifully closes Kenzaburo Oe’s novel Changeling:

「もう死んでしまった者らのことは忘れよう、生きている者らのことすらも。あなた方の心を、まだ生まれて来ない者たちにだけ向けておくれ。」

(A rough translation: Let us forget those who have already died. Let us even forget those who are still living now. Turn all your attention to and think only of those who are not as yet born.)

The significance of Oe’s words goes far beyond this, of course, but in the present context I shall take another liberty and see in them the cue to move on with my life, by forgiving and forgetting those who I once naively and mistakenly took for loyal, genuine friends and colleagues in Japan, and who even made me believe, ever so briefly, it could be a place worth living in and trusting. It turned out not to be, alas.

R.I.P. — and cheers to the new and future friends elsewhere!

 

Eric C
Submitted on 2012/03/18

Debito:
Thank you on behalf of all NJ who have lived in Japan or are living in Japan. You are doing brilliant work. I agree with almost everything you say and do and I am in awe of your energy, perseverance and spirit.

However, the more I read your site and columns and learn about your story, the more I find myself wondering why you keep trying. I lived in Japan for years and I did what you did, but on a lesser scale: I fought discrimination, xenophobia and racism as hard as I could. I like to think I gave as good as I got, if not better. I caused a fair bit of hell at my local kuyakusho, at immigration, with the police and with various random racist folks. That’s not to say I went around with a chip on my shoulder: I had a lot of Japanese friends, spoke the language well and really tried to fit in. But, finally, I decided to leave Japan and I don’t regret it. Not for a second. Every day I’m out of there, I give thanks that I had the balls and foresight to leave.

My question to you is why do you keep trying? I don’t want to be negative, but I think even you have to admit that Japan and the Japanese are not really going to change. Not in any meaningful way. They are xenophobic to the core, perhaps even genetically so. The society is feudal, with only the flimsiest veneer of legality. There is no real law – power and connections are all that matter. Japan reached a highpoint of openness and internationalization in the early 90s, and it’s been rapidly closing and going backwards since then. As the country stagnates and gets poorer, it’s going to become less and less welcoming to foreigners. I mean, the mayors of the three main cities in Japan are all nationalists and, most likely, racists.

Frankly, I don’t even think it’s worth trying to change Japan. They’re not worth it. Let them go their own miserable way to stagnation and backwardness. Let the world pass them by. Japan is like a stubborn old geezer in your neighborhood who does something offensive (letting his dog bark all night, for instance). You know that arguing with him is a waste of time. The only sensible thing to do is move away. Fuck him, to be direct about it.

You’ve fought the good fight, Debito, and a lot of gaijin owe you a huge debt of gratitude. But, for your own peace of mind, why not let someone else take up the burden? Or, better yet, wouldn’t it be best for all NJ to simply pack up and leave and let the Japanese do whatever it is they want to do? Let them sing the kimigayo morning, noon and night. Let them teach English so poorly that no one can speak it. Let them lobotomize their kids in the name of educating them. Let them claim that their actions in WWII were one vast charitable mission to spread peace and love throughout the world. Let them sink slowly into the swamp of their own bloody minded ignorance.

It’s not our job to “fix” their society. It’s not our job to educate them about how the world really works. It’s not our job to try to bring them into the modern world.

Sorry, this is a bit of a downer of a post, but anyone who knows Japan as well as you know it must surely realize that the defining characteristic of modern Japan is the inability to change. They’re so stubborn that if you ask them to change, they’ll consciously avoid changing just to spite you. I mean, why do you think they keep whaling and dolphin killing when it requires vast government support to keep doing it? They do it precisely because the world tells them to stop.

I say, leave them to it and live your own life.

UPDATE:  The author has offered more lengthy and elaborate comments below here and here.  You might want to read them first before going on to everyone else’s.

[Here they go:]

Hi Debito,

Thank you very much for making my comment a blog post in its own right! I am honored and flattered. In order for you and your readers to understand the reasoning behind my original post, I’d like to post a longer post that I posted on another forum a while back. This summarizes all my reasons for leaving Japan and why I think others should consider it. Yes, this is very self-indulgent, but it might be useful for those thinking in terms of “Should I stay or should I go” (thanks to The Clash for those lyrics). Here goes:

I hate to rain on your parade, but I have to tell you all the hard truth (and believe me, it took me a long time to come to all these realizations and even longer to act on them). The fact is, Japan is never going to accept foreigners. Foreigners, particularly Western foreigners, should stop trying to be accepted or to change Japan. My advice to Western foreigners, especially those with half-Japanese children, is to leave Japan. Trust me, I am not trying trolling here. I am telling you what I think, what I chose to do, and how it has made my life much better. In order to stick to the theme of this thread, I will keep my explanation centered on what is annoying about Japan.

First, as MacArthur so famously said: Japan is a nation of children. At first, this might seem almost touching or cute. And, I suspect that the childish innocence displayed by the Japanese is one reason why people love Japan so much when they are fresh off the boat. The fact is, the Japanese, even when they are adults, may be physically mature, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually, they are children. The reasons for this would take a while to explain, but suffice it to say that they are essentially treated like children all through their lives, while at the same time, they are forbidden from the sort of free thinking that goes into creating a meaningful adult identity, and, on top of this, they generally have extremely limited worldly experience.

If you think honestly about this, you will see what I mean. Consider the infantile reaction that Japanese have to any form of criticism, however constructive. It is taken as an attack on the whole being. And, think about how it feels to interact with most Japanese: after a certain amount of time in Japan, you will know exactly what they are going to say, and even what words they will use to say it. When you talk with them, you feel like you are sort of humoring a slightly precocious child. It might be pleasant. The conversation might be long. But, you will not come away with any insights or have your mind expanded the way it might be when talking to a real adult in other parts of the world. The only exceptions are the very old, who have some real life experience, or returnees from abroad, who were snapped out of the groupthink mindset.

And, of course, more than the boredom that comes from living among people who are essentially children, it is the tyranny of the groupthink that is truly annoying. It is not that particular thoughts are forbidden in Japan: it is dissent of any kind that is forbidden. The indoctrination into the groupthink starts at a very young age and continues right through their lives. Along with this indoctrination comes the whole package of brainwashing and propaganda: the myth of Japanese uniqueness, the cult of victimization, and the directive to focus on the differences rather than the similarities with other cultures. Needless to say, this lifelong brainwashing and squashing of dissent handily serves the purposes of the powers that be: the useless geezers in Kasumigaseki, the top guys of the various keiretsu, the very wealthy and the various local bosses who divvy up the bounty that flows from the ministries.

Needless to say, a country with a population of children who have been intellectually neutered, governed by regressive and highly conservative old men is not likely to be a comfortable place for any halfway sensitive Westerner. And, please do not kid yourself that Japan will become more open in the future. The fact is, Japan reached a high point of internationalization and openness sometime in the late eighties or early nineties. Since then, it has been going backwards and morphing into a more conservative and closed place. Textbooks are being purged of even the vaguest mention of wartime atrocities, fewer young people are going abroad to study, attitudes toward immigration are becoming increasingly negative. I mean, the capital city of the country just re-elected a famously racist Ishihara Shintaro. That is the capital city, not some tiny backwater in Tottori! And it was not a tight race. If you think Japan is going to increase immigration and start truly embracing foreigners, frankly, you are out to lunch. If second- and third-generation Korean residents are still treated as outsiders and looked down upon, just why do you expect them to start treating you as an equal?

Even if one could put up with the mind-numbing boredom of living among children and the affront of being treated as a second-class citizen despite your best efforts at assimilation, there is the environment to consider. Several posters above mentioned the visual horror of endless concrete and power lines. You can spend your life looking and you will find precious few vistas in Japan that are not thoroughly marred by human activity. There are no pastoral or wild vistas like you will find in Europe, North America, New Zealand, Australia etc. Only deep in the heart of the Japan Alps and a few other mountain ranges will you find anything that is not totally disfigured by concrete, clear cutting, industrial sugi farming, power lines, dams, concrete retaining walls and hideous buildings.

Then, of course, there is the noise. From morning to night, you are assaulted by noise in Japan: politicians, bosozoku, recycling trucks, advertisements and announcements of every sort. If you live in certain parts of Kanto or Kansai, you may have some sort of amplified sound playing in your vicinity all day, every day from 8am to 9pm. And it is all legal. Do you really think the politicians will ever ban this, when it is their favorite means of campaigning? Never going to happen. There just comes a time in your life when you have to ask yourself: Do I want to spend the rest of my life with that as a constant soundtrack?

Even if you are single or married without children, you should get out. But, if you have got children who are part Japanese, I would say it is downright irresponsible and even cruel to remain in Japan. Sure, you might think to yourself: I am taking them abroad and I am making sure they learn English, they will be fine. But do not fool yourself: your input into their development is way less than you think. Even if they go to international school, they are being socialized in Japan. Just try to think into the future. Imagine them in one of those group hiring sessions for a big company. Imagine them being forced through the awful meat grinder of the Japanese corporate world. But, most importantly, imagine them submitting to the group mind and being denied the ability to think freely and truly enjoy the fruits of an open and well-developed mind. Being denied the joy of true individuality.

So many posters here have noted some truly annoying things about Japan. I am speaking to you guys now. You know in your heart of hearts that you are kidding yourself. If you find these things annoying, it is because they are. But, you keep telling yourself that this is the only place you can make money and that there is nothing for you to do if you go home now. And you hope like hell that somehow you can keep your kids from becoming like the victims you see emerging from the Japanese educational system. But, deep inside, you know you are sacrificing their future because you are afraid to step out of the easy routine of teaching English in Japan.

I say, stop trying to make the best of a bad situation. As Japan ages and stagnates, it is only going to get worse. Reactionary and fascist politicians will become more common, not less. Foreigners will get blamed for everything wrong with the country. Your own jobs will start disappearing as the country gets poorer and the student population declines. I suggest you do what I did. Leave Japan. Sure, it might take some time to get established in another country (either your home country or a more open country with a brighter future than Japan), but in the long term you will be glad you left. And, the lives of your children will be so much better. If what I have written above does not convince you, just imagine being an old person in Japan. Imagine waking up on your 70th birthday to the sound of another election truck and knowing that you are too old to go anywhere and that sound is the sound you are going to hear for the rest of your days. Get out now while you still can!

*       *       *

An addendum to the above: The following post covers the same ground, but focuses on the political reasons for why Japan will not change and why, therefore, you should get out:

What’s Japan’s biggest problem? It’s pretty simple: the country is owned and run by a small group of conservative geezers who speak no language other than Japanese and know nothing about the wider world. The majority of these men can be found in the ministries. They form the unelected government of Japan. Meaning simply this: Japan is not a democracy. The ministries make 90% of the laws in Japan. They send the budget up to the Diet, which rubber stamps it. And keep in mind that the ministers have decades to make dirty backroom deals with industry and that’s exactly what they do.

If the ministers were judged by their performance, as they would be in any rational society, they all would have been fired years ago. I mean, who are these ministers? They are the clowns who, for instance, sit on the Mombusho and preside over an English education system that produces graduates who place LAST in the world on the TOEFL IBT speaking section. That’s right: last. These are the clowns who brought you Fukushima Dai-ichi, Monju and Tokaimura. These are the clowns who have turned Japan from one of the world’s most beautiful countries into one of its ugliest, through the tools of concrete, dams, retaining walls and tetrapods.

Japan’s response to 311, in particular, the nuclear accident at Fukushima, is proof that Japan cannot and will not change itself. I used to think that a big enough external shock might force Japan to change (the way the coming of the Westerners did in the mid 19th century and the way the American occupation did starting in 1945), but the fact that Japan has not changed in any substantial way since 311 has proved that Japan simply will not change. The present regressive old men who run the show will sail the ship of state right onto the rocks, and they don’t care how many lives they waste in the process. They might imagine themselves to be patriots, but they are the worst form of traitors: they are thinking only of their wallets and their own personal comfort at the expense of the entire nation of Japan and all the young people who live there.

We forget that Fukushima was not the first nuclear accident in Japan that was the result of human error and lack of true regulation. Does anyone remember Monju and Tokaimura? It’s only a matter of time before another accident happens. This is madness. Japan has rendered a vast swath of its agricultural heartland radioactive and allowed the capital to be covered with fallout and they still can’t even make the most cosmetic changes to the nuclear industry. And don’t think for a second that the fact that most plants are now offline portends any great change. The nuke industry and their ministry bitches are just biding their time before they ram nuclear power down the throat of the nation.

The ministers’ partners in crime are the large companies that insist on hiring graduates in mass hiring ceremonies, rather than adopting flexible hiring practices like those of major companies elsewhere in the world. The result is an educational system geared entirely to getting hired straight out of a good school by a large company. For the vast majority of students who fail at this goal, they are ruined by the process. All of their spirit and creativity is beaten out of them (the same, of course, can be said of those who succeed in getting hired by the big companies, but at least they get lifetime employment). The educational system is designed to serve the needs of large companies, not the people of the country. Look at the passive, risk-averse, uncreative graduates of Japan’s educational system. What good will they do the country? What good will they do themselves?

It really doesn’t matter. Nothing can change this. In a short time, Korean, China, Singapore and Hong Kong will eat Japan for lunch and spit out the bones. Japan has created the perfect perpetual motion machine: a system which produces passive slaves who are trained not to rock the boat. It works until it is too old to work, or gets taken over or bought by a more dynamic and healthy culture. That’s all there is too it.

Why put up with this? Why allow your life to be endangered so you can milk the country for a few more years of easy paychecks? The very best Japan can hope for is a long slow decline into xenophobic stagnation. The more likely trajectory is one of economic collapse punctuated with nationalist uprisings and regular nuclear accidents. Get out while the getting’s good. Sure, most other countries have some form of corruption, but none have the insidious blend of passive population, lapdog media and the complete lack of means for change that curse Japan.

~ by Enigma on March 18, 2012.