In his recently released book, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation, journalist and visiting International Studies scholar Michael Zielenziger recounts the fall of Japan from the world's second-wealthiest country into a morass of economic and social troubles. Japan, he points out, has the highest suicide rate and lowest birthrate of all industrialized countries, and a rising incidence of untreated cases of depression. Giving human faces to this national malady, Zielenziger documents the plight of more than a million young men who shut themselves in their rooms, withdrawing from their nation's rigid society and its aversion to self-expression. They are called hikikomori, these hermit-like young men. They are also the source of national shame. But Zielenziger argues that they may personify their nation's state of mind as it struggles to survive its post-meltdown economy and the long, looming shadow of its neighbor China.

In the halcyon autumn of 1991, Tokyo seemed the indisputable center of the universe, a gravitational force as mighty as ancient Rome. Wandering the streets of Ginza, Tokyo's most illustrious entertainment district, I felt as if I had been sucked into a strange new vortex, a dizzying universe quite unlike any that might have preceded it. A Japan once renowned for the Zen-like restraint of its aesthetics-its material simplicity, its tranquil bamboo gardens, its glassy ponds stocked with calming carp-now bathed itself in brassy neon lights and erupted in convulsions of exuberant decadence.

Each evening, as dusk fell and the lights took hold over this fabled neighborhood, a herd of black Rolls Royce limousines and Mercedes-Benz and Toyota Crown sedans strode like stallions into the narrow back alleys, exacting every inch of curbside as their tribute. Chauffeurs paced, smoked cigarettes, and kept fidgety vigils long into the night after disgorging their passengers, the shadowy and powerful men who would emerge again only around midnight, their ties slightly askew, their gait a bit wobbly from rounds of smoky scotch or chilled sake.

As the sun retreated, young women who carried themselves as delicately as their dresses, in fabulous silk kimono, heavy obi sashes, and white geta, the traditional wooden sandals, began drifting by twos and threes into inconspicuous bars and hostess clubs, whose entrances were signified only by tiny gold-plated Japanese nameplates. Other women, sheathed in expensive European couture and stilettos, strutted toward caverns with neon-lit names like Club Royale or The Monaco. These women would linger fastidiously over their customers, offering delicate morsels of small talk and watered-down whiskey to ease the flow of conversation among the barons of finance and industry holding court. Once again, the city's business elite was setting off on its nightly amble, a ritual of dining, drinking, and entertaining known as nomikai-literally a "drinking meeting." Behind sliding shoji screens discreetly shut, the nation's deals were sealed and relationships cemented. Here in the Ginza, discerning patrons could find restaurants that inserted real gold flakes into the desserts. Or clubs that offered rare single malt scotch served on icy round globes hand-chiseled from Alaskan glaciers. Waiters instructed patrons to listen for the crackle and hiss of 10,000-year-old oxygen being set free from the primordial glacial fields as the fist-sized orbs dissolved in their glasses. Corporations, it was estimated, were spending $35 billion per year on such exercises in male bonding, six times what their Europeans or American counterparts did.

This was the "bubble economy," and strolling through the Ginza you sensed the headiness swirling. In this last decade of the twentieth century, the Japanese had emerged triumphant. Who dared rival them? They built better cars more efficiently. They fabricated the most complex computer memory chips. These Japanese had created an advanced, prosperous, and technologically sophisticated economy without the ghettos, the criminal underclass, or social tensions that ravaged Western societies. Everything worked so smoothly in Japan, visitors marveled. No wonder these well- tailored executives seemed so invincible, if not arrogant, as they wandered from men's club to "snack bar" to consort with their favorite hostesses for hire.

What these Japanese could not comprehend-nor could most of the rest of us, back then-was that the incredibly close-knit system they had meshed together, one which allowed the nation to accumulate so much wealth so quickly, also held the seeds of its undoing; that this same incessant unity of purpose that generated such fabulous industrial efficiency might prove weakness as well as strength. The group harmony this homogeneous people struggled so obsessively to achieve had-through the pressure to conform, the resistance to criticism, the repression of dissenters and a desperate, almost pathological need to keep "outsiders" at bay-carried a dark and destructive seed. Not only did this system seriously constrain individuality to the point of "infantilizing" many of it own people, effectively robbing them of their own identities. It also stripped the nation of its ability to adjust to the unforeseen changes in the world and in business practices globalization was now stirring up. Until this moment, Japan had been able to appropriate the trappings of the modern world without creating for itself a critical consciousness, a truly democratic sensibility, or a vision of how a "unique" people might interact easily and equally with the rest of the world. "The essence of Japan is to have no essence," Masao Maruyama, one influential Japanese political scientist had concluded, arguing the Japanese had never learned to differentiate between the instrumental and the ideal. Instead, he likened his society to a pot crammed with a giant octopus, unable to see a world separate from its own outsized tentacles. By analogy, Maruyama suggested, Western societies, where Judeo-Christian values had taken hold, or the Chinese culture, where Confucianism remains central, more resembled the sort of whisk broom used in the traditional tea ceremony in which a sturdy wooden base splays itself into a finely separated tip, with space for each long and articulated tine of bamboo fiber to stand free and apart from the others.

	page 1	|	3