Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [111]
Japan would seem to be the Asian nation that has succeeded best in first modernizing its economy and then assuming a position of global economic leadership without succumbing to wholesale Westernization. Democracy has been inflected with a Japanese accent and even the economy has been nurtured with policies that temper crude Western market capitalism with a careful mixture of mercantilist state support and corporatist paternalism. Indeed, the more communitarian, consensual, even familial character of Japanese corporate style has been imitated in the West by bemused admirers of the Japanese economic miracle that once was. Though not quite as ethnically homogenous as some imagine, Japan has also managed to avoid even the gentler forms of Jihad we have seen in France or Italy or China. As James Fallows has persuasively shown, its powerful and insular culture has diminished the impact of economic theory and created a distance from the cultural artifacts of McWorld seen nowhere else.19
Yet Japan is not wholly exempt and the case for its supposed immunity to McWorld may reflect Western fears of Japanese superiority rather than a realistic assessment of its cultural autonomy. After all, Japan has been assimilating American culture at least since the long and influential post—World War II American occupation. Karl Taro Greenfeld offers a stunning portrait of “gangsters, rock musicians, hostesses, porn stars, junkies, computer hackers, night-clubbers, drug dealers and bikers,” which suggests that Japan’s current Generation X—Greenfeld calls them the Speed Tribes—may represent a dividing point between a traditional and insular Japanese past and a startlingly assimilationist global (McWorldian) future.20 Japanese rock bands (with names like S.O.B. and the Blue Hearts) are multiplying, but in music critic Neil Strauss’s gloss they are “cultural sponges, soaking up Brazilian bossa nova, British hard core and American rockabilly … borrowing pop idioms from everywhere except Japan.”21 It should be left to those with a keener knowledge of Japan to judge how pervasive the changes signaled by recent Japanese music, literature, and pop culture really are, and to assess whether the behavior modification resulting from the climb of McDonald’s and KFC into (respectively) first and second place in Japan’s restaurant industry will trickle down into Japan’s cultural bedrock and rot out the ancient stone.22
Like so many nations facing McWorld with a suspicion that impels them to struggle diplomatically (a kind of soft Jihad) against its cultural encroachments, Japan faces its own internal protests from minorities hoping to detach themselves from it. It appears to them as McWorld appears to it, and McWorld becomes their ally against it. Okinawa, for example, annexed by Japan in 1879 and returned to it by the United States (who had taken it in World War II) in 1972, has aroused anxieties in Japan with its attempts at reviving the Okinawan language and the practice of local customs. The Okinawan movement follows those peculiarly feudal dynamics we have seen elsewhere in cases where an ethnic fragment of a plural nation-state uses world culture and global economics to make its own claim for self-determination against a mother country that in the name of its own autonomy may be opposing world culture and global economics. In their struggle for an identity apart from Japan, Okinawans have turned to a hybrid form of rock music, drawing on Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Bob Marley to “jack up” a local folk music “into a band context.”23 In marching resolutely backward into its own