The Land od the Rising Yen

And that leaves little time for
neurosis.

SNOBBERY JAPANESE STYLE
     
    Western-style snobbery is a tender flower in Japan, a new growth. Like all things occidental it reached Japan only late. They had to
start from scratch. But here again they proved excellent pupils and are doing
remarkably well.
    The Snobbery Miracle is almost as
glorious as the Economic Miracle, but it is not too subtle as yet. It has a mid
nineteen-fiftyish aura about it and, all things considered, it resembles the
crude American form rather than the slightly more sophisticated British
variety.
    When put into its proper historical
and sociological perspective, the achievement of the Japanese snob is
remarkable. He has had an incredibly hard time. It was less than a hundred
years ago that the last samurai uprising was defeated. The samurai as a ruling class had been abolished. Half of the members of this class fled
headlong into commerce and industry, the rest lingered on, living in the past.
Their morality and their influence, however, survived their loss of power.
Theirs used to be a world in which the sword was the only noble tool under the
sun and anything to do with trade was beneath contempt. The true samurai refused to learn arithmetic because it smelled of commerce; he was proud of his
ignorance and stupidity, like so many ruling classes all over the world. Saigo,
the leader of their revolt and a splendid character, was beheaded on the
battlefield at his own request, but his (and his dog’s) statue still stands in Tokyo. The introduction of conscription was the last blow which, with its implication that
a peasant could become a soldier and could fight just like a member of the
ancient warrior class, triggered off the revolution. Perhaps the idea that the
peasant, too, could die, could be shot to smithereens was acceptable; but the
idea that he could wear a sword was intolerable.
    This was the samurai’s attitude towards the peasant. Merchants belonged to a still lower class, below
the peasant. The thought that this class, the lowest of the low, could rise one
day to a leading position higher than the peasant, higher than the samurai -seemed
ridiculous. That they should one day brandish Japan’s new sword — the economic
weapon — meant turning all values upside down.
    But the Japanese learn fast. Whenever
floods threaten their homes they do not flee: they dive headlong into the
menacing tide and learn, first of all, how to swim.
     
    There is no namedropping in Japan à l’anglaise. The Japanese does not want to be proud of his friends or
connections: he wants to be proud of himself. There is little outright
ostentation in the classic nouveau riche manner. There is no
aristocratic snobbery (titles have been abolished: a high-born fool is just an
ordinary fool). It is not even his money the Japanese wants to show off. Even
the most influential tycoon will have no great personal fortune in the American
sense of the word. He will have all the trimmings, the house, the car, the
chauffeur, trips abroad in the grand manner, high life in ruinously expensive
restaurants and night clubs, but not much money of his own. What the Japanese
wants to show off is his status, his position, his power.

    Japanese snobbery has three main
outlets.
    (1) In the prehistory of the new-style
snobbery (i.e. about ten years ago, at the start of the boom) everything moved
on a rather primitive level, just as it did in postwar lower-middle-class Britain when a television aerial was a coveted status symbol. In Japan people talked of the
three C’s: car, cooler and colour. Car meant car; cooler meant
air-conditioning; colour meant colour television. In other words they
were after what sober economists call durable goods, intoxicating possessions
of this age of technology. All these dreams were soon universally realized, and
— still during this period — the three old C’s had to be replaced by three new
C’s: cottage, central heating and concubine.
    Cottage means a hut or a palace in
the country — a snobbery (or need?) in the Anglo-Saxon world, in Scandinavia
(the stuga) and even in the Soviet Union (the dacha) as well as
in Japan. Central heating, surprisingly, came only after air-conditioning but
it arrived soon enough. A concubine is not a new idea in Japan, but is fairly new as a status symbol. The spiritual basis of Japanese snobbery — of
all snobbery — is not the claim that ‘I enjoy it’ but the battlecry: ‘I can
afford it.’ If a man can