The Land od the Rising Yen

word. Western
psychoanalysts have always tried to liberate the individual from his
oppressive surroundings; Japanese psychoanalysis (gaining ground slowly) aims
at enabling people to adjust themselves to the existing social order.
Western society becomes more and more oppressive and totally absorbing every
year and the idea — justifiably — has been born that you can’t be happy without
being a hippy; without revolting against conventions. The Japanese aim, on the
other hand, is to produce happy, well-balanced and well-adjusted halfslaves
(instead of our unhappy and unbalanced halfslaves). Western psychiatrists have
already taken notice.
    In the old days in Japan, one’s birth determined one’s whole life. It even decided the language one was
permitted to use. The equivalent of a Japanese cockney was not allowed to teach himself Oxford Japanese, or the Emperor’s Japanese. Violation of the
unwritten yet draconian laws of conformity meant not only ridicule but,
possibly, even exile. But as ridicule was regarded as worse than exile, the
threat of ridicule was sufficient. Peasants were not allowed to eat white rice
or wear silk. Merchants had to live in mean little houses. Members of the
lowest orders, the outcasts, were not allowed to cover the floor of their
abodes with tatami: they had to sit on bare, uncovered dirt. It was a
caste society, with everyone fitted into his proper pigeonhole. Those who
obeyed and those who gave orders belonged to two different worlds: it was one’s
birth solely and exclusively that determined to which world one belonged.
    To try to rise was as uncreditable as
to sink. The status of families hardly changed in 2,500 years. The Imperial
family — supreme and until 1945 divine — ruled for nearly all this time, the
present Emperor being the hundred and twenty-fourth ruling member of the same
dynasty.
     
    How are things today? Conditions had
to change to some extent but the heritage of the long past survives. Your birth
still determines your fate, the only difference being that in modern Japan you are born twice.
    First in the old-fashioned way; your
second chance comes when you enter — or fail to enter — a university and / or
get a job. There is cut-throat competition for university places, particularly
at the top universities. There are people who sit seven or eight times — in
seven or eight consecutive years — for their university entrance examination
and begin their studies (or give up hope) at the age of twenty-five or even
later. To get into Tokyo University or one or two of the other top institutions
means that you are comfortably settled for life. Huge corporations will vie for
your services and the door to high civil service jobs will be wide open. If in Britain the old school tie assures certain atavistic privileges, at least it covers only your chest;
in Japan it wraps you up completely for the rest of your life.
    I said that the great step was to
‘get in’ to a university, not to get out, to graduate. The phrase was carefully
chosen. He who gets in will get out and graduate all right. It is murderously
difficult to secure a place — the entrance exam being the hardest of all; the
rest is child’s play. Once in you have few problems. Your failure would be the
failure of the selectors and that would never do. It is the same with jobs.
Once a young Japanese gets a job, he is settled for life. He has to kick his
boss down the stairs to get fired. He will be promoted automatically according
to his seniority: it does not really matter how well he has worked, only how
long. Many offices and ministries are staffed with ageing, inefficient men
occupying high positions in their sixties and seventies. Retiring age is as low
as fifty-five, but many people leave and take new jobs at fifty or so
and then serve on, indefinitely.
    Discipline survives. It survives in
the family; it survives in one’s professional life. Humble and submissive
respect for the father is inculcated from the earliest possible time. The
mother does not count for much as far as respect is concerned, but she is loved
and it is she who spends most time with the children. The father, in many
families, remains a remote figure, hardly seen — not even after business hours
when his duty may take him to a geisha-house or some other place of
entertainment. He remains the aloof and silent authority, as the divine Emperor
used to be. Japan is more or less a one-parent society. Even babies’ heads