RISHON LEZION, Israel — Roger Cohen makes some depressing observations on the land of the rising setting sun:
…I’m not aware of any other nation where fantasy, escapism and the cyber world have fused with such intensity.
Indeed, there’s a Japanese word, otaku, denoting a whole universe of monomaniacal geek-like obsession, whether with an electronic game, some odd hobby, or the cartoonlike “manga” comic books devoted to everything from kamikazes to kinky sex.
As Patrick Smith puts it in “Japan: A Reinterpretation,” to be “an otaku is merely the final word in private individuality. It is to reject anyone who would diminish the protected ego and to acknowledge an inability to achieve the intimacy of authentic human contact.”
Let’s face it, we’re all going a little otaku in a world where technology encourages a solipsistic retreat into private worlds and even flirting has been cyber-infected. But nowhere has this process gone as far as in Japan.
I agree. Japan is a country that produced a computer game in which players “rape women and girls, impregnate them, and then force them to get abortions.” Spengler notes that Japan is a also now a place “where teenage girls sell themselves to older men for pocket money, green hair is normal, and the adolescent suicide rate is the highest in history.” Cohen’s mention of “manga” cartoons on television and in comic books is quite an understatement — it is common to see nudity, rape, and pornography to an extent that includes monsters and tentacles doing the unimaginable to women. (Here are examples, but be warned: the images are graphic.)
Cohen continues:
My sense is that four factors have contributed to this: wealth, postmodernism, conformism and despair. Japan is rich enough, bored enough with national ambition, strait-jacketed enough and gloomy enough to find immense attraction in playful escapism and quirky obsession…
So the Japanese have settled into a postmodernist ennui, an Asian outpost of that European condition, but in a more dangerous part of the world…
I would have added another factor: civilizational humiliation. For centuries, the Japanese were a people that considered themselves to be superior to all other nations on earth. Now, most peoples in history have thought the same thing — but the Japanese took it to an extreme. The country isolated itself from the rest of the world until Matthew Perry, an American admiral, forced the country to trade with the United States. Until that time, any foreigners who ended up on Japan’s shores as a result of shipwrecks or other disasters were killed, according to my eighth-grade history teacher, because the government feared cultural contamination.
Now, imagine the Japanese being forced at gunpoint to interact with people deemed inferior. Then, almost a century later, imagine them enduring two atomic bombs that were dropped by a country that had threatened their oil-supply routes in the Pacific Ocean and forced them to go to war. (Again, this is the hypothetical viewpoint of the Japanese.) Then, Japan became the economic second-fiddle to the United States and fell into a decade of recession in the 1990s. Now, Japan’s historic rival, China, is poised to become the next economic superpower.
How does a civilization recover from all of these shocks? Just one — the humiliation of the atomic bombs — likely did enough damage by itself.
Cohen continues:
Finally, gloom seems rampant, a national condition. I couldn’t find anyone ready to tell me the worst is over or that Japan, or jobs, would bounce back, despite the bracing recent election of Yukio Hatoyama that ended a half-century of rule by the Liberal Democrats. Hatoyama has called for a new era of “Yuai,” or fraternity. He’s talking about Asian community as one way out of Japan’s self-marginalization. But any excitement seems muted.
A civilization’s birth-rate is an indication of its view of the future. When people have no hope, they have fewer children. Why would a mother want to bring a child into a world that she believes is going downhill? Predictably, Japan is facing a demographic crisis resembling that in Europe. The marriage rate is also declining.
It is not surprising that, as Cohen writes, “Japan leads humanity’s rush into isolating forms of electronic obsession.” I hope the rest of the world does not follow. I was in a bar here in Israel that was about to have a manga-themed night at which they were going to show the cartoons on the big-screen televisions. I left.
Earlier: On Japan.