More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 26 - October 8, 2019
To put this in other words, the Bank of Japan’s monetary aggregates, personnel practices in Japanese corporations, Tokyo’s wacky street fashions, the endless musical chairs of Japanese politics, and Japan’s centuries of seclusion are connected in all kinds of ways. David
Oscar Wilde wrote: “The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country; there are no such people.”
For I now understand what I did not really grasp then—that much of modern Japanese history is a tragedy;
Generations of foreign writers have attempted to put their fingers on just what it is they find so alluring about Japan. The most successful at this exercise—I would nominate Lafcadio Hearn, Kurt Singer, Ian Buruma, and, above all, the late Donald Richie—have pointed to an acceptance of things as they are.
In the West we like to say that if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. In Japan, even if a job is not worth doing—and everyone knows it—it is worth doing well.
And one comes quickly to understand the tremendous advantage to a society where practically everyone can be relied upon to do what they say they have promised to do, and to do it well.
The great Japanese political philosopher Maruyama Masao
Each character was assigned a minimum of two readings. The first, a “meaning” reading, was the Japanese word for the character’s meaning. The other readings, the “sound” readings, were as close as the Japanese vocalization of the time could come to the original Chinese pronunciations.1 Thus, the “sound” reading of the character for person, , is pronounced jin (the northern Chinese pronunciation) or nin (the southern), while the “meaning” reading is hito—the original Japanese word for person.2 We have something like this in English: a fancy word—mansion/chair—derived from Norman French and a
...more
Japan’s Imperial Institution is the oldest hereditary monarchy in the world; among political institutions that survive to this day, only the papacy is demonstrably older.
Japan’s first permanent capital was established at Nara in 710—
Heian music which, together with that of the Coptic Church, forms the world’s oldest continuously performed music.
the breathtaking Byōdō-in, the temple depicted on the back of the 10 yen coin that first served as the pleasure pavilion of a great Fujiwara regent, is about the only fully intact building left from the period.
The Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji, both written by court ladies who were contemporaries.
According to legend, the kana were invented by Kobo Daishi (774–835), a Buddhist monk who had been the abbot of the Tōdai-ji.
The Tale of Genji, in its concerns with the inner life and development of its principal characters counts, as the world’s first genuine novel.
as Ivan Morris pointed out in The World of the Shining Prince (a
Features of social control that are familiar today—mass media, “security theater” checkpoints at transportation hubs, plainclothes police busying themselves with what people are thinking—can be identified in embryo in Tokugawa Japan earlier than perhaps anywhere else on
Oshio was a follower of the Ming philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) whose most famous statement is “To know and not to act is not to know.”
the immense popularity of the television program Mito Kōmon, a serial that ran for over a thousand episodes from 1969 to the end of 2011,
But the greatest teacher was Prussia—or, as it would become, Bismarck’s Germany.
Japan’s emerging stature—financial, military, industrial, cultural—enabled it to raise the money overseas to wage the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Organized by Jacob Schiff of the American Jewish investment bank Kuhn Loeb, the financing marked Wall Street’s debut as an international financial center.
For the first time since the fall of Constantinople, a non-Christian, non-Western power defeated the forces of a Christian nation.
Spring Snow is the first in a tetralogy of novels Mishima wrote at the end of his life about the fate of Japan in the twentieth century.
The Taisho Emperor, who reigned from 1912 to 1926, was probably feeble-minded,
(Only on three occasions is Hirohito known to have intervened decisively in policy matters—in 1936 to suppress an uprising by rightist officers, in 1941 when he instructed Tojo Hideki to form a cabinet, and in 1945 to end the war.)
an earthquake had not leveled much of Tokyo in 1923, setting the stage for a financial crisis four years later—a crisis that devastated both rural areas and the urban working classes—would fanatics have had a harder time recruiting ordinary Japanese into their grandiose projects?
ultimate cause of the war—or at least Japan’s part in it—was not a concentration of power in the hands of a usurper, but a diffusion of power that had slipped out of control.
As Churchill himself feared it would, the fall of Singapore spelled the effective end of the British Empire.
Between 1955 and 1971, Japan achieved the highest real economic growth rates of any economy to that point in history. The
As John Dower wrote in his magnificent history of the Occupation Embracing Defeat,
Reporters for Japan’s quality papers are to this day forced to act more like stenographers than journalists, but plenty of boisterous, unruly media exist beyond the established papers and television networks, and only a handful of topics are genuinely off-limits.
Japan was essentially given no choice but to turn to the US market in order to export its way out of the economic ruin of the war.
The events surrounding the treaty renewal consolidated the return of the men who had been at least partly responsible for the horrors of the 1930s, men who had clawed their way back into power by selling their country out to the United States—or at least it seemed that way to millions of Japanese.5
It was all part and parcel of an emerging nationwide routine that saw company unions in key industries negotiate annual wage increases that then served as a benchmark for the country as a whole. The increases invariably reflected general economic conditions, and the factory floor ended up with what amounted to a guaranteed cut of any general improvement in the Japanese economy.
The incoming administration of John F. Kennedy appointed Harvard professor Edwin Reischauer as ambassador to Japan.
Common discourse in Japan and reams of Japanese language management literature treat the company not as a contractual construct but as an organic institution akin to a family, tribe, or religious foundation.
But the “company as family” notion in modern Japan was much less an organic outgrowth of Edo period institutions, not to mention “Japanese culture,” than it was an ideologically driven response to the labor militancy of the immediate postwar period discussed in the previous chapter.
The employment window in Japanese organizations for young men with management-track ambitions opened only once: on graduation from college (exceptions existed for some technical specialists who were expected to obtain graduate degrees in subjects like metallurgy before seeking jobs). Miss it, and there was no second chance; there was nothing comparable in Japan to the “find yourself” years between college and serious work in which the offspring of the American elite indulged.
fiendishly difficult written Japanese language.
Most countries confronted with this problem—how to finance development without sufficient domestic savings—will opt to accept foreign investment. That is what China did in 1978 after Deng Xiaoping consolidated his control of that country. That is what the United States did in the nineteenth century when it relied on capital raised in the City of London to finance the building of its railroad network. But the Japanese were determined not to allow any significant part of their economy to fall under the control of foreigners.
Many of these policies involved a reworking of wartime financing methods: forcing household savings into deposit-taking institutions, then requiring those institutions to buy government-issued financial instruments.
Japan’s banks were divided into three groups.
One might even go so far as to say that success in Japan was determined by one’s ability not to notice contradictions—or to put this in other words, to figure out how to behave in any given situation without it being spelled out.
Japanese directors would bring to the screen some of the greatest masterpieces in the history of cinema: films such as Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story and Sōshun (Early Spring), Mizuguchi Kenji’s The Life of Oharu and Sansho the Bailiff, and Kurosawa Akira’s Seven Samurai and High and Low. Novels such as Mishima Yukio’s Confessions of a Mask (1949), Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human (1948), Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country (1948), and Tanizaki Junichiro’s The Key (1956)
Kawabata would receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, largely on the strength of Snow Country.
in 1980 (under the revised law, Japanese financial institutions no longer needed to seek prior approval before making investments overseas).
The families of Japanese salaried workers do not go through the annual American ordeal of filing tax returns; they are not required unless one has significant sources of outside income, which most salaried workers do not.
Rather than wait until such a recovery happens and institute the tax at the appropriate turn of the business cycle, however, the MOF opted first to introduce and then raise the tax rate whenever it was politically possible to do so. The
If interest rates on JGBs were to climb even into the 2 percent range, Japan’s fiscal deficit would become unsustainable in the absence of spending cuts, higher tax revenues, or both.
The most profitable company in Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century was Keyence, making sensors, barcode readers, digital microscopes, and various types of high precision measuring equipment. The second most profitable non-pharma firm was the robotics maker Fanuc specializing in automated systems. The third was Hirose Electric manufacturing a range of connectors used in everything from printers to copy machines to flat-panel displays. Numbers four and five were, respectively, Pacific Metals, Japan’s largest ferro-nickel producer, and Union Tool, which specializes in drills,
...more
