Betting on Japan’s ability to rebound

„My bet is on a rebound, partly because I have always had trouble buying into a view popular among Japan’s critics of a society made up of a mass of regimented conformists defined by an unease with outsiders and a smoldering nationalism. This overlooks strong dissenting strains that have long animated Japanese life. They have produced cultural experimentation alongside political paralysis and a remarkable capacity for openness and adaptation in a society so often described as closed. A Foreign Policy magazine writer could speak in 2002 of Japan’s »Gross National Cool« because of the country’s gift for absorbing the influences of a globalized culture and influencing it in turn.

Without this capacity, Japan could not have reinvented itself so brilliantly after total defeat in war. It would not have been so hospitable to foreign influences, starting with baseball, jazz, rock and liberal democracy. Of course this paradoxical society has always confounded outsiders. Seen in the early 1980s as potentially dominating the world, Japan, not long after, was widely thought of as broken. With Japan, it seems, there is always a whiplash in perceptions. It poses a special problem for prognosticators, optimistic and pessimistic alike. And so far, Japan’s political and corporate leaders have not risen to this crisis — witness the impatience of its own people and the rest of the world over the flaws in the official information about conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors.

But political and social change come from below and not just from above. The spontaneous forms of solidarity and inventiveness that Japan’s triple tragedy has called forth suggest a society that has lost neither its resourcefulness nor its organizational gifts. Looking out that window more than a decade ago, I found it hard to bet against Japan. I still do.”