Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [46]
A countryside of legendary beauty is ravaged, and what was once reputed to be the richest nation in the world runs out of money To understand how such things can happen, we must come to grips with an issue that disconcerts writers on Japan so badly that when faced with it they ordinarily set down their pens and look away. It is the quality of sheer fantasy.
We have entered a twilight zone where dams and roads carve their way through the landscape without reason and money comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. We cannot dismiss the air of unreality in Japan's public life lightly, as it is the very air that its officials breathe. The facts about much of Japan's social political, and financial life are hidden so well that the truth is nearly impossible to know. This is not just a matter of regret for academic researchers, for a lack of reliable data is the single most significant difference between Japan's democracy and the democracies of the West. Why have so many students of Japan and commentators by and large ignored the issue of how the nation handles information? I believe it is because our cultural biases run much more deeply than we think. While experts on Japan know all about the commonly encountered difference between tatemae (an official stated position) and honne (real intent), they tend to view the discrepancy as a negotiating ploy. It hasn't occurred to them that the fundamental Japanese attitude toward information might differ from what they take for granted in the West. But it does differ, and radically so.
Traditionally, in Japan «truth» has never been sacrosanct, nor do «facts» need to be real, and here we run up against one of the great cultural divides between East and West. We can see the two approaches clashing in the Daiwa Bank scandal of 1995, when the Federal Reserve ordered Daiwa's American branches closed after finding that Daiwa, in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance, had hidden more than a billion dollars of losses from U.S. investigators. MOF reacted angrily with the comment that the Fed had failed to appreciate «cultural differences» between American and Japanese banking. The cultural difference goes back a long way, to a belief that ideal forms are more «true» than actual objects or events that don't fit the ideal. When an Edo-period artist entitled his screen painting A True View of Mount Fuji, he did not mean that his painting closely resembled the real Mount Fuji. Rather, it was a «true view» because it captured the perfect shape that people thought Mount Fuji ought to have. This principle of valuing the ideal above the real is far-reaching, and one may see it at work in the play between tatemae and honne that dominates daily life in Japan. People will strive to uphold the tatemae in the face of blatant facts to the contrary, believing it is important to keep the honne hidden in order to maintain public harmony.
Tatemae requires an element of reserve, for it presumes that not everything need be spelled out. It relies on communication through nonverbal means, and in interpersonal relations there is much to be said for tatemae, for from it springs the flower of harmony. Tatemae helps to make Japanese society peaceful and cohesive, with a relative lack of the aggressive violence, family breakups, and lawsuits that plague the West. The statistics professor Hayashi Chimio puts the case for tatemae very elegantly:
When people say «There's no communication between parents and children,» this is an American way of thinking. In Japan we didn't need spoken communication between parents and children. A glance at the face, a glance at the back, and we understood enough. That was our way of thinking, and it was because we had true communication of the heart. It's when we took as our model a culture relying on words that things went wrong. Although we live in a society replete with problems that words cannot ever solve, we think we can solve them with words, and this is where things go wrong.
Discreet reliance on tatemae is one of Japan's truly excellent features,