Saturday, June 21, 2008

FEAR AND TREMBLING In your dealings with Japanese firms you may run into problems. In that case you send them emails and explain the matter. But don't expect them to reply; you will have to contact them several times before someone will consider the case. The usual excuse they give after they realize you are serious is that your mail was put in their spam box. When you don't get through after several attempts you start thinking you'd better stop emailing them before someone over there commits seppuku. Well, this is just to indicate that Japan is different, and can even be confusing. The usual explanation for this kind of behaviour is that Japanese people don't want to offend you by going against your reasoning. However, not replying is actually much more rude than challenging your objections. In fact, a lot is pushed under the carpet in Japanese society under the cloak of politeness or propriety. And sometimes obligatory, formal politeness turns into its opposite. Japanese society can be very dogmatic, restrictive, and discriminating. People have to conform to a strict etiquette and general rules of comportment. Amélie Nothomb is a Belgian writer who was born in Kobe, Japan, while her father was ambassador there. In 1988 she went back to Japan to work there and described her experiences in Stupeur et Tremblements (Fear and Trembling - both were expected from the Japanese people when encountering the emperor at the time when he was still considered a god). It is a devastating personal account of Japanese society, but it also shows her compassion for the people imprisoned in this system. The level of stress is very high in Japan. And it begins very early when the children have to learn the complex Japanese language. Learning more than 2000 kanji, 50 hiragana and 50 katakana characters is much more difficult than our alphabet of 26 characters. Then they have to learn all the politeness levels of verbs and other words. Many kids are sent to cram school in the evening. Nothomb's latest book, Ni d'Eve ni d'Adam, is about her love story in Japan. She begins with: 'Le moyen le plus efficace d'apprendre le japonais me parut d'enseigner le français.' (Translation: 'The most efficient way to learn Japanese seemed to me to teach French.') What a great, witty, writer she is. "Début janvier 1990, j'entrai dans l'une des sept immenses compagnies nippones qui, sous couleur de business, détenaient le véritable pouvoir japonais. Comme n'importe quel employé, je pensais y travailler une quarantaine d'années. Dans mon traité de stupeur et tremblements, j'ai raconté pourquoi j'eus peine à y rester jusqu'à la fin de mon contrat d'un an. Ce fut une descente aux enfers d'une banalité extrême. Mon sort ne différa pas radicalement de celui de l'immense majorité des employées nippones." (Translation: 'Early January 1990 I entered one of the seven immense Japanese companies which, under the banner of business, held the real Japanese power. In my treatise on fear and trembling I related why I had trouble staying there until the end of my one-year contract. It was a descent into the hell of the most extreme banality. My lot did not differ radically from that of the immense majority of Japanese employees.') The Japanese are a very hard-working people, they have high standards and want to do the best they can. Sometimes this is not sufficient, sometimes they still don't fit in. In that case Japanese society can be very hard. TimesOnline: "Japanese professionals in their thirties are killing themselves at unprecedented rates, as the nation struggles with a runaway suicide epidemic. Newly published figures show that 30,093 people took their own lives in 2007 - a 2.9 per cent increase in a year - leaving the country as the most suicide-prone anywhere in the developed world and rendering government efforts to combat the problem a failure. Government analysis of the figures, for the tenth year consecutive in which suicides have remained above 30,000 mark, has exposed a series of new and troubling trends: people in their thirties are the most likely to kill themselves, and work-related depression is emerging as a prime motive. Psychologists, sociologists and other close observers of Japanese society believe that the country is in the grip of a full-blown crisis among its young working population. Experts say that high suicide rates and the recent spate of random stabbings in public places are symptoms of a malaise that the country has ignored for too long. Mika Tsutsumi, an economist and social analyst, said that the recent stabbings in Akihabara were worryingly predictable: the killing spree for which Tomohiro Kato was allegedly responsible was, she says, driven by a sense of hopelessness in the workplace. Underneath Japanese society is concealed 'an invisible reserve army of Katos', she said. The crisis of despair gripping young working Japanese has triggered plenty of official and media hand-wringing, though little in the way of change in corporate Japan. Wages remain low, and hierarchies rigid. 'We live in an uncomfortable and restrictive society where trivial matters are important,' said Professor Kiyohiko Ikeda, a veteran social commentator at Waseda University. 'The young feel a sense of deadlock; society does not accept minor mistakes.'" Another writer I really love is Haruki Murakami. He is said to be very Western, but in fact he is writing about Japan and is very much embedded in Japanese culture, although he does mention Western cultural icons (jazz, literature) quite often. But he is essentially writing from a Japanese standpoint and his subject is modern Japanese society, though he is obviously trying to connect to the Western concept of individuality. One of his most haunting books is Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It reminds one of Kafka's Das Schloss (The Castle). As I see it, this book is Murakami's gloomy vision of Japan. Of course, he will deny this, he is Japanese after all. His brain is Japanese and the world he describes is Japanese, though there is a relation with Kafkaian hopelessness. But it is a coming to terms of an individual with the society he lives in, a search for identity. The narrator in the Japanese original is divided in Boku and Watashi, both mean 'I' in Japanese, the first being informal and the second the usual word for 'I', something that is unfortunately lost in translation. The Kafkaian hopelessness suffuses Hard-boiled Wonderland. In this respect it is interesting to note that for Kafka the world ended before he had finished The Castle. Japan is the hard-boiled wonderland and some people who don't fit in are choosing for the end of their world. It's sad, but that's how it is. Anyway, I see Murakami's work as an attempt to get out from under an oppressing system and finding one's own individuality. I do hope the Japanese people will manage to find their individual way to cope. 12:37:38 PM

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