Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [113]
A friend of mine, William Gilkey, taught piano at Yenching University in Beijing at the time of the Communist takeover in 1949. He told me that when the propaganda and purges started, the professors and intellectuals were among the first to start mouthing slogans about «liberation of the proletariat» and about «sweeping away dissident elements.» On the other hand, the common people of Beijing had better sense: greengrocers in the market simply ignored the political jargon for as long as they could without being arrested.
Likewise, the majority of the Japanese people aren't taken in by the slogans of monumentalism. They don't travel to visit either the Orochi Loop or the Nagi Museum. As we have seen, domestic travel is dwindling and international tourism is skyrocketing for the Japanese. They are not nearly so gullible as bureaucrats and art critics make them out to be. They know what a real museum is, and they know where to find it. According to gate receipts, the museum most frequently visited by the Japanese is not in Japan; it's the Louvre.
Unaware of the mechanisms of the Construction State that drive Japan to build monuments, and ignorant of the real history behind the founding of the Nagi Museum, Muschamp tells us, «It is peculiar, a century after artists rallied around the cause of art for art's sake, to find oneself in a museum created for art's sake. Strange because for what other sake should art museums exist?» If Muschamp only knew!
«A work of art?» wrote Mark Twain in his celebrated essay about James Fenimore Cooper's Thе Deerslayer.
It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no life-likeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are-oh! indescribable; its love scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
One could say much the same of the Nagi Museum, the Shonandai Cultural Center, the Toyodama Mosque, the New Kyoto Station, and of course the Orochi Loop. They have no order, system, sequence, or result; no reason for being except government subsidies to the construction industry. A highway loop smashing through a valley, a giant corrugated metal tube plopped in the middle of a scenic village, «new nature» in the form of a bulldozed hill lined with aluminum trees. What are these things, really? A sand garden pasted on walls – the humor is pathetic. Aluminum trees touted as «new nature» – the pathos is funny. Across the length and breadth of Japan, an encrustation of unneeded and unused public monuments tricked up as 1960s sci-fi fantasy – the waste of money is indescribable, the slogans are odious, and the academic jargon used to explain and justify it all a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
11. National Wealth
Debt, Public and Private
These days people borrow without the slightest thought, and from the very start they have no notion of ever settling their debts. Since in their own extravagance they borrowed the money just to squander it in the licensed quarters, there is no way for the money to generate enough new money to settle the loan. Consequently they bring hardship to their creditors and invent every manner of falsehood... No matter what excuse some malevolent scheme of yours prompts you to invent, nothing can save you from the obligation of returning an item you have borrowed.
– Ihara Saikaku, Some Final Words of Advice (1689)
Gavan McCormack points out, «Japan is the worlds greatest savings country, but it is also the world's most profligate dissipater of its people's savings.» Despite five decades of continuous growth, making Japan the second-largest economy in the world, the nation is living beyond its means. After seeing the civil-engineering