Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [65]
The muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, who exposed Tammany Hall-style corruption in American cities a century ago, defined «privilege» as the essential problem of corruption. What Steffens meant by «privilege» was that those with money get access to government resources; those who don't pay up go without. This is why corruption has to be taken seriously: privilege skews the way the state assigns its resources. Herein lies the key to modern Japan's mismanagement. Official support doesn't go to those who need it but to the privileged – those who pay bureaucrats the most. Looking forward to amakudari rewards, officials lavish funds on building up massive overproduction in one old-fashioned industry after another, rather than support new business involving services and the Internet. The pachinko industry hires ex-policemen as amakudari, and pachinko parlors overrun the country. River Bureau officials profit from dams, so dams go up by the hundreds. Useless monuments sprout and the seashore disappears under cement because of the privileged position of construction companies. The shady money flowing into officials' pockets is molding the very look of the land.
6. Monuments
Airports for Radishes
Aujourd'jui rien.
– Louis XVI, writing in his diary on the day the Bastille fell (1789)
Information is unreliable, knowledge of new techniques used abroad scarce, and public funds distributed not to the sectors that need them but to those who pay bureaucrats the most – in this dim twilight world, Japanese officials are losing touch with reality. Government agencies feel they should be doing something and, unable to see what the basic problems are or how to address them, they turn to building monuments. Monument construction is profitable, too. Anyone who travels in Japan will be familiar with the multipurpose cultural halls, museums, and communications centers that are becoming the predominant features of urban life. Even tiny villages have them. Halls and centers that cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars each go up across the nation, it is said, at the rate of three a day.
In the ancient Chinese philosophical treatise Han Feizi, the emperor asked a painter, «What are the hardest and easiest things to depict?» The artist replied, «Dogs and horses are difficult, demons and goblins are easy.» By that he meant that simple, unobtrusive things in our immediate environment – like dogs and horses – are hard to get right, while anyone can draw an eye-catching monster. Japan suffers from a severe case of «dogs and demons.» In field after field, the bureaucracy dreams up lavish monuments rather than attend to long-term underlying problems. Communications centers sprout antennas from lofty towers, yet television channels and Internet usage lag. Lavish crafts halls dot the landscape while Japan's traditional crafts are in terminal decline. And local history museums stand proud in every small town and municipal district while a sea of blighted industrial development has all but eradicated real local history.
In libraries devoted to Japan, shelves sag under the weight of hundreds of volumes written about the gardens of Kyoto, Zen, Japan's youth culture, and so forth. Yet we must concede, after looking at the Construction State, that these are not the areas into which the energies of Japanese society are really flowing. The real Japan, sadly ignored by travel writers so far, lies in its many modern monuments; visiting a few of them will give us a taste of the true Japan.
Our first stop is Tokyo's Teleport Town, a waterfront construction project like the ones that almost every Japanese city with access to the sea now boasts. These Utopian visions of high-tech «cities of the future» are Japan's pride, with their expensive landfill in harbors, followed by museums, convention halls, and superexpensive «intelligent buildings.» The costs are astronomical, high enough to drag Osaka Prefecture and Tokyo, Japan's two major metropolitan regions, into