Back to the Bakufu

This week’s announcement that China had surpassed Japan as the second largest economy in the world produced an interesting  response by Professor Norihiro Kato of Waseda University. Professor Kato posits an Eschersque tableau of the present flowing into past and the young in an aging society, leading the way to the maturity of old age.

Confusingly inscrutable in the oriental manner as this seems, his thesis comfortably rests in the post recession reality of globalization where winners are few and losers are plentiful. For the Professor, Japan’s response to it’s descendency is not simply a repudiation of the post war economic miracle but of the Meiji era’s push onto the international stage and striving for what it considered Japan’s rightful place in the world. One hundred and fifty years later he sees a Japan comfortable in its smallness and seeking its quiescence in inward reflection rather than outward competition.

The model then is the time of the Shogunate or Edo Bakufu, which isolated Japan for 250 years until Commodore Perry’s arrival sounded it’s death knell and ushered in the Meiji era’s transformations. In a self contained political and economic vacuum, Japanese culture and the arts developed in their own manner looking recursively back on themselves, a pattern I’ve mentioned in connection with the Rinpa School of artists.

The professor’s thesis brings up the question of whether its even possible in this age to separate from the global economy and if so what the political ramifications would be. After all the original reformers of the Meiji era such as Katsu Kaishu felt that integration with the world was necessary if Japan was to survive as an independent nation rather than becoming a colony of Western powers, as had befallen 19th century China and India.

Also if growth is not the goal of a society, is decline the logical outcome in people’s minds, making this a setting sun paradigm? In this vein I read a recent article about a village in rural Japan whose residents  like many others in the countryside, are all senior citizens. This community however decided to forego the usual push for repopulation by younger migrants from the city and instead hired an American manager to oversee its extinction when the last resident dies.

Elsewhere Professor Kato has discussed the work of artist Takeshi Murakami and how it fits in with Japanese pop culture. I’m curious about his opinion on Murakami’s thesis that Japanese culture lost the virility it had with its defeat in WWII, leading to a preference for imitation rather than innovation and stability to the point of stagnation as a societal goal.