The Japan that can say No … maybe

For anyone familiar with the late 1980’s, one of the major trends of that era was the growing strength of the Japanese economy and concerns about its impact on the United States.

In Japan, the shifting financial balance led to calls for a reexamination of the political relationship between the two countries and confirmation in people’s minds of the uniqueness of the nation’s culture, seen as the basis for its rise. A somewhat extreme manifesto of this movement was Shintaro Ishihara’s best selling book, “The Japan that can say No” subtitled “Why Japan will be first among equals”.

Co-written by Sony’s Akio Morita, the book created controversy for some of its more outlandish ideas such as the possibility of Japan withholding electronic components for American weapons systems as political leverage. The book also repeated unreconstructed prewar propaganda, such as Japan’s beneficial rule of countries it colonized and its status as the victim rather than the aggressor in the run-up to the war. A good review of the book in on Amazon here.

The reason I bring up this ancient history is because of a situation in Baseball which has some similarities. One criticism of Major League players in Japan over the last several decades has been that they won’t conform to the standards of team conduct expected of them. One reason for this behavior (besides the players belief in the superiority of MLB) is the conviction that the training routines in Japan are not designed for improving performance as much as they are for reinforcing concepts like team harmony and admitting shame for poor play.

In an interesting twist, Boston pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka is in the news for refusing to follow the Red Sox rehabilitation program, claiming that all his success in the US so far has been due to the Japanese routines he’s followed. Though the Sox have a well regarded program for pitchers, Matsuzaka says their scientific arguments for their approach don’t take into account his being Japanese. He further states that he won’t change his behavior as he’s fighting for the good of future players from Japan who’ll come to MLB and be ruined by it’s western centric practices.

This is a disturbing interpretation of Japanese conformism as being only to Japanese norms and not that of institutions that the individual has voluntarily joined. Like Ishihara’s discredited theses two decades earlier, success for Japan in the World Baseball Classic doesn’t imply Japanese exceptionalism in a globalized world.

A very different explanation is given in an excellent book on Japanese culture today by David Matsumoto. His work makes the argument that the current generation in Japan are far more individualistic and less interested in group harmony than Americans. Matsuzaka’s behavior is then reflective of a trend in young Japanese from all walks of life and presents a challenge to global organizations looking to integrate them into a group with other cultures.

Ironically it appears that the inculcation of traditional American values like self sacrifice and team play are the necessary factors for success in this environment.

Dogs speaking with accents

Like all children I learned to express the sounds that animals make through the onomatopoeic words we use to describe them, for example sheep saying “baa” and dogs saying “woof”. Imagine my disappointment upon meeting Japanese people and finding out that this may not be the universal language of animals.

Surprisingly, I was told that animals in Japan speak in their own particular manner with dogs saying ”won won” while pigs far from saying “oink oink” make noises like “bhuu bhuu” ( sorry no Dr. Doolittle I, in transliterating animal sounds). Was this another point of Japanese exceptionalism, perhaps brought on by the aforementioned Evolutionary Biogeography or could our universal theory be wrong ?

Much like if the laws of gravity were inapplicable in some part of the earth, this type of discontinuity in scientific laws is always of interest to me. So I determined to make research in this matter one of my priorities on my trip to Japan. After multiple visits to investigate this phenomenon, I can assure the reader that no such anomaly exists and animals in Japan speak in the same global language we’ve codified so well in America.

The only rational explanation therefore is that Japanese are unable to understand the true sounds that animals make due to the limitations of their phonetic system, which has only thirteen consonants and five vowels.

Interestingly sound effects are also expressed differently in Japan as anyone who reads manga can tell. When a car takes off quickly rather than “zoom”, it sounds like “hyu-n” and punches land not with the canonical “pow” or “wham” but with noises like “baki !” or “don”. For those interested in further research on this topic, this blog has a great collection of sounds found in manga.

I’ve been looking for some academic work in this area but outside of references to a missing work by Professor Whitman of Cornell called “Chit-chat among Japanese Farm Animals", I can’t find any source material I can pass on. So in true academic fashion I’ll consider this to be an exercise left to the reader.

Japanese phones and the Galapagos Syndrome

When I visited Japan a decade ago I was amazed by the functionality and superior design of Japanese cellphones and wished I could take one home. This past year I had a very different experience in Tokyo as I found the phones to be uniformly similar and impractical for the business user.

Why have Japanese manufacturers like Panasonic and Sony failed to evolve in this field as they have so successfully in other consumer electronics ? A professor at Keio University, Takeshi Natsuno, has been pondering the same thing labeling this phenomenon “The Galapagos Syndrome”. In a NYTimes article this week, he considers the problem to be due to the companies’ focus on the unique demands of the domestic market, making them incapable of understanding the needs of the worldwide consumer.

Extending Professor Natsuno’s theme, I’d posit this as an example of Evolutionary Biogeography, a field pioneered by Darwin’s contemporary Alfred Russell Wallace. In his revolutionary work on islands, Wallace conceived the idea of independent development of ecosystems based on geographic compartmentalization. Applying this theory of natural selection to social and economic dynamics is an admittedly speculative though interesting exercise.

In Japan cellphones have followed the dominant design paradigm of the society, highlighting compactness and functionality tailored to the needs of the general consumer rather than the business user. Smartphones with large screens and physical keyboards like the Blackberry are the fastest growing segment of mature markets like the US but are nonexistent in Japan. Interestingly the iPhone, though wildly popular elsewhere, is not very successful in Japan as it fills a niche of personal Smartphone that’s uninteresting to consumers.

Functionally Japanese phones are packed with social and interactive features such as GPS and high resolution cameras but don’t seem to provide the ability to synch with MS Office or VPN into a network.

Architecturally the phones are tightly coupled with the underlying layers of the network allowing a very rich portfolio of services though conversely making them difficult to translate to other environments. NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode, partly developed by Dr. Natsuno, is proprietary to Japan and needs to upgrade to the evolving 4G standards in other countries such as LTE (to continue the analogy, LTE stands for Long Term Evolution).

The close integration of the different aspects of the environment from handsets to network to content providers is not easily replicable in other countries leading Professor Natsuno to make the quintessentially understated Japanese remark that “outside of Japan, the i-mode is different”.

In contrast, the chaos of the US market seems to indicate a primitive stage of development from his perspective though I would characterize it as biodiversity in an adaptable biogeographic ecosystem.

Truth and Reconciliation of Japan's past

I recently watched a discussion with Howard Bix, the noted Japanese scholar and author, discussing his thesis that Emperor Hirohito was actively involved in Japan’s policy of aggression against its neighbors. He further believes that the fiction of the Emperor being a figurehead used by the military, was a deliberate stratagem practiced by Hirohito to protect his position and supported by successive Japanese governments in order to maintain stability. In grasping for power behind the scenes while publicly appearing uninvolved, Hirohito followed the precedent of many Emperors in Japanese history, most famously perhaps, Go Shirakawa in the 11th Century CE.

Professor Bix’s research for this book led to his conclusion that as necessary for stability as this deception may have seemed at the time, it’s now become an impediment for Japan in its efforts to reconcile itself with the rest of Southeast Asia.

Illustrative of the existing level of fiction regarding the history of WWII is Air Force Chief of Staff Toshio Tamogami’s claim last year that Japan was forced in to the war by America and that it’s aggression helped to create the global drive for racial equality (!). That military and civilian leaders openly make such preposterous claims shows the lack of introspection prevalent in the government and makes it impossible for Japan to assume its necessary role in stabilizing Asia.

This deception also denigrates the sacrifices of dissidents in Japan during the 30’s and 40’s who protested the government’s militaristic policies and suffered at the hands of the fearsome Kempeitai, the Japanese Gestapo. One such hero was Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Schindler, who worked tirelessly to save Jews in Lithuania from being turned over to Nazi authorities. Mr. Sugihara is far better known in Israel and America than in his native land where his courage and humanitarianism should be extolled.

In addition the dire conditions of Japanese civilians caught in the maelstrom of modern war has not been sufficiently understood outside of the country and is discussed infrequently at home. The suffering of the populace from starvation and relentless bombing of the mainland after 1944 occurred at the same time that a generation of young men were being annihilated on the battlefield.

A poignant and deeply troubling dramatization of this history can be found in Isao Takahata's Hotaru no Haka ( Grave of the Fireflies ) reviewed by someone on Amazon as the best movie you'll never want to see again.

Maximizing ROI in Japanese literacy

To become literate in English requires learning only 26 letters, but Japanese involves considerably more work.

To begin with one has to learn two phonetic alphabets, Hiragana and Katakana, each with 52 characters. Then there’s Kanji, the simplified (somewhat) Chinese pictograms where each character represent a word, an idea or a sound. Educated adults should know at least 3,000 of these general characters along with those used for specific areas of life.

To make things even more complicated for foreigners all three alphabets are used together, sometimes in the same sentence even the same word.

Learned by children in a prescribed schedule over years of schooling, Kanji for non-Japanese adults involves a significant investment of time and effort. So what would be the best way of spending this time to learn kanji ?

An approach I’ve been trying is to focus on the most common words and thereby get the most return for the time invested. As an example take the character

山

pronounced Yama, meaning “mountain” and derived from an abstraction of three mountain peaks seen at a distance. Yama is a very common word and one that’s relatively easy to read and write. Another ubiquitous character is

中

pronounced Chu or Naka, meaning “middle” from a representation of an arrow piercing the middle of a rectangular target.

Combining these two characters together makes the word:

中山

pronounced Nakayama, meaning “middle of the mountain”.

Considering Japan’s mountainous topography, learning this word allows you to now write the family name of millions of Japanese in all walks of life and thousands of places across the country.

You’ll note that I’ve not only found common pictograms but also ones that are relatively easy to write. Drawing and memorizing thousands of kanji unfortunately involves some very difficult characters that, though simpler than their Chinese counterparts, are far more complex than the Latin alphabet. For those interested in software development, this complexity in representing Japanese characters on screen necessitates the use of Double Byte Character Sets, allocating twice the space needed for each letter in the Latin alphabet.

All three of these alphabets are undoubtedly artistic and practicing them can be a rewarding art form in itself. This book besides showing beautiful calligraphy done by the author also discusses the aesthetics of the characters and their connection to Chinese painting.

Modern designers like Katsuichi Ito have taken the characters and shaped them to their needs creating interesting logos and representations from the letters.

Kanji itself has many historical and cultural dimensions as well representing the ideas and world views of East Asia over the last several millennia. Interestingly the composition of some of the words have been changed in recent history due to their cultural or racist connotations.

Shakespeare in Japan

Since 1889 translations of Shakespeare’s works have appeared in Japan along with interpretations of his plays through the prism of Japanese Arts. Many of the early adaptations were based on the well known abridged versions of the stories by Charles and Mary Lamb, though complete translations were becoming available.

Whether in plays, the puppet theater called Bunraku or Kabuki, Shakespeare’s stories of human drama resonated with people not only because of their universal appeal but also due to their affinity to themes of Japan’s recent feudal past. Hamlet and Macbeth were particularly popular dealing as they did with topics such as the duty of revenge and the lust for power.

In movies many people are familiar with Kurosawa’s retelling of King Lear in Ran (“Chaos”) but I actually prefer his earlier retelling of Macbeth called Kumo no Sujo (“Throne of Blood”). The literal translation “Cobweb Castle” more accurately reflects the movie’s storytelling style, rooted in traditional themes of Japanese horror such as the use of ambiance rather than direct action.

The ever changing dynamics of human conflicts are dwarfed by the ever present malignancy of nature and the castle is simply an island of human endeavors in the ocean that is the fog enshrouded Cobweb Forest.

The evil spirit that forecasts the future of Macbeth and Banquo in the forest is another traditional element of ghost stories, the yurei, a vengeful ghost that seeks to create dissension in the living. As the Lady Macbeth character moves inexorably towards psychosis the implication seems to be that she’s possessed by this spirit and used to destroy what men have built, returning the area to its primeval state.

Noh is another prominent influence in the movie, beginning with the opening sequence where chanting reminiscent of Utai (the recitative background for Noh) is sung to establish the setting. The key role of Lady Macbeth meanwhile is established as one of the standard roles in Noh called "Shakumi” through her makeup and mannerisms.

As in the previous discussion of Cyrano de Bergerac, this refraction of Western literature through Japanese artistic paradigms invigorates the movie with a uniquely vibrancy and makes it my favorite version of Macbeth on screen.

The influence of India on Japanese culture

I was wandering around Nara years ago and unexpectedly ran in to one of the most iconic of Indian symbols, the lion pillar of Emperor Asoka. Set in the four corners of India in the 3rd Century BCE to spread Buddhist law, the lions are a continuing symbol of modern India. Their somewhat incongruous appearance in this ancient capital of Japan is due to their presentation by the Indian government to commemorate the 15ooth anniversary of the arrival of Buddhism in Japan.

Nara far more than Kyoto is affiliated with Indian Buddhism as can be seen in Todai-ji, whose interior reflects the architecture of Indian Temples I’ve seen, though conceived in wood rather than stone. Fittingly, the consecration of the DaiButsu at this temple in 752 CE was performed by a South Indian monk named Bodhisena.

According to this interesting paper by Dr. Hikotaro Furuta Indian influence extends beyond Buddhism to Shinto Gods like Daikoku and Benten Sama who have become identified with Indian deities. He also posits that Sanskrit words have migrated to Japan as in the case of the Biwa, the Japanese lute, being named for the classical Indian stringed instrument, the Veenai. For those contemplating such ethnographic connections while touring Nara, I’d suggest lunch at the previously mentioned Ragamala, an Indian music themed restaurant situated in an old Japanese house.

Of course the most ubiquitous Indian persona in Japan is Daruma, whose visage is seen everywhere due to the influence of Zen in Japanese culture. Zen more so than most other sects of Buddhism has kept an Indian flavor and Daruma as its front man, is ever present in Japan as he’s absent in his native land.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention “Karei”, the ever popular spicy sauce in common dishes such as Karei Spaghetti and Karei Rice. Brought to Japan by the British as their interpretation of Indian spices, what they called “curry” has after some localization become another staple of the Japanese diet due to its distinctive flavor.