Showa Japan - Interview
Author Hans Brinckmann on his new book, Showa Japan: The Post-War Golden Age and its Troubled Legacy, and the past, present and future of The Land of the Rising Sun.
Japan has not always been particularly well served by expatriate writers. With some notable exceptions, most non-fiction books on Japan by non-Japanese tend to fall into two categories: firstly, there are the hefty tomes of dense analysis that are largely designed to bolster academic careers; and then there are the “I spent a year teaching in Nagano/working in a Japanese company/skateboarding around Honshu” variety that seek to showcase the author’s deep understanding of all things Japanese/tell us how the Japanese got it all wrong/or – all the more frightening – to explain the entire national psyche through some fairly stereotypical encounters with the locals. The former are informative but often impenetrable, and the latter are all good fun but essentially missable for anyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with Japan.
Hans Brinckmann, long-time Japan resident and former chairman of the Institute of Foreign Bankers in New York, takes a new track in Showa Japan; The Post-War Golden Age and Its Troubled Legacy, offering not only a lucid explanation of Japan’s economic and political workings by someone with first-hand experience, but also an informed and enlightening picture of the changing face of Japanese society by someone immersed in the culture and who has an eye for telling detail. And don’t be put off by the banking credentials because this is also, thankfully, a damn good read.
Brinckmann first came to Japan in 1950 after reluctantly entering into a career in finance rather than pursuing his original passion for writing. He rose through the ranks in Japan before retiring to Buckinghamshire in the United Kingdom in 1974 to really put pen to paper, but this literary idyll was cut short when economic reality drove him back to work, firstly in Curacao, then Amsterdam and the United States. Throughout this time Brinckmann continued to regularly reside in and study Japan, and to write fiction and poetry, with the autobiographical – and sadly overlooked – The Magatama Doodle being published in 2005.
Brinckmann was, therefore, ideally placed to witness the remarkable era of post-war hardship and recovery, growth, boom and bust that we now know as Showa. Though it was a time of struggle and controversy, punctuated by domestic unrest and the Oil Shock, it is now largely seen in Japan as a time of the nation pulling together to rebuild, of simpler pleasures and selflessness. Films like the hugely successful Always, million-sellers like Tokyo Tawa: Okan to Boku to, Tokidoki, Oton (by the imaginatively named Lily Franky, aka Masaya Nakagawa), together with retro design and the revival of the once deeply unfashionable Shoten-gai shopping streets have all ridden the wave of rose-tinted wistfulness for Showa. Unsurprisingly in these times of economic gloom, this trend shows no signs of abating.
Nostalgia is by no means peculiar to Japan of course, but why now, twenty years after it ended and almost a century since it began, has Showa captured the popular imagination? “Around the early nineties when the Bubble Economy had burst,” says Brinckmann interviewed recently in Tokyo he still spends most of his time, “for a few years there was just shock. Post-war Showa had been a long period in which the trajectory of society had been, almost continuously, upwards and people felt that their lives were getting better. Then there came the realisation that this was lost, that that whole system was gone and would not come back, and quite naturally the nostalgia began.”
Though Brinckmann’s book is clearly focussed on the Showa era, its relevance to the current Heisei era cannot be overemphasized, for while Showa stands as a symbol of all that was “good and secure,” it has also left much unfinished business that he believes needs addressing in contemporary Japan. To understand this legacy, Brinckmann begins by examining the essential components of Showa Japan, from the arrival of the Salaryman and the place of manual workers, to the emergence of subcultures, changing sexual mores and the rise – and ultimate failure – of the challenges to authority seen in the 1960s.
Brinckmann’s discussion of the latter of these components, the demonstrations of 1960, paints a vivid picture of a Japan few today can imagine. Outraged at the government’s highhanded tactics in renewing the US-Japan Security Treaty, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in protest as a newfound – and fiery – political spirit took hold. Though Prime Minister Kishi resigned, his successor wooed the electorate with promises of material comforts and the protests fizzled. As Brinckmann notes in his book, “The challenge to authority of 1960, a daring, disturbing, but nonetheless potentially promising Showa event, ended before it had the chance to alter the terms of the democratic process. Its legacy is passive acceptance of the status quo rather than a realization of the vital importance of sustained political engagement.” Contemporary Japanese politicians have little to fear from such public outcry, regardless of their policies or mismanagement.
In addition to the political upheavals however, Showa Japan also neatly portrays the social ground shifts that took place, which are in many ways even more important. “Back in the early 1950s” notes Brinckmann, “the average height of Tokyo buildings was 1.4 stories, mostly low-quality structures put up in a hurry following the almost total destruction of the city during the war. Their replacement by apartment blocks and the loss of intimate shopping streets to department stores and supermarkets were among the factors in the breakdown of family life and neighbourhoods, as was the wholesale migration from rural areas to the cities. Add to that the confrontation of increasing westernization embraced by the young and the conservative tastes of the older generation, and you have some of the ingredients for a paradigm shift in social values. That’s what I try to illustrate in the book.”
Part of what makes Showa Japan so enjoyable is the balanced tone of the writing, which eschews the strictly polarized views of much writing on Japan. “Strangely,” says Brinckmann, “this could be a problem for the Japanese translation of my book, because the Japanese like to hear either love songs to their country or writing that dishes out the dirt. If you say some things are good and some things are not, it is harder for them to appreciate. In spite of the widely held perception of Japan as a country where nuance is predominant, in this regard they actually prefer things to be clear cut.” Non-Japanese readers will welcome this, as the Japanophile/Japan bashing dialectic that has existed for so long is not only counterproductive to any real understanding of Japan, it also often makes for very dull reading.
Refreshing too is Brinckmann’s willingness to immerse himself in Japan. While many of his contemporaries are happy to pontificate on all things Japanese while remaining firmly in the warm fuzziness of the gaijin milieu, Brinckmann dove headfirst into Japan and brings to the narrative firsthand experience of everything from canoodling with onsen geisha to ill-advised real estate investments. “I think there were two things that really motivated me”, says Brinckmann. “One was Japan – it had so many aspects to its culture that attracted me and that I wanted to explore – and the other is that I was very much a “reluctant banker” who really wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, and so that desire – or need – to explore things and record them drove me to get out and see as much as I could.” And he didn’t confine himself to writing. The photographs he took in Japan during the 1950s and ‘60s (and those taken by his friend and former banking colleague) were the subject of a large exhibition at the Fuji Film Gallery in Tokyo Midtown last September, which attracted 49,000 visitors.
Reluctant banker though he was, Brinckmann’s work provided first hand experience of perhaps the most enduring aspect of the Showa era: the bursting of the economic bubble and the so-called Lost Decade that followed. In this respect Brinckmann disagrees with many accepted explanations of this period and even with the adopted moniker, preferring to refer to it as the Magellan Decade. “When something is lost it implies a total lack of any kind of development and I don’t think that was the case,” he says. “There was initial stagnation, yes, but when it was realised that his was not a passing phenomenon and that the changes were going to be deep and possibly permanent, then people rolled up their sleeves and set about dealing with it, by arranging mergers, outsourcing, reviewing the traditional employment system and other measures. So there were developments, and I think the phrase Lost Decade is a bit of an overstatement.”
The impact of the Magellan Decade cannot be overstated however: the end of secure long-term employment, the emergence of individualism at the expense of group culture, loosening social strictures and what Brinckmann terms “a creeping identity crisis, both national and personal” were all born of that time and continue to haunt Japan.
Brinckmann ultimately believes Showa’s legacy will be threefold. “Firstly,” he notes, “on the positive side it has shown that when a people pull together and set aside personal interests for the sake of a common goal, whether in a community, or company or country as a whole, then great things can be achieved. But secondly, the negative side of the legacy is that precisely because of this common endeavour and group spirit that was deliberately fostered, no one was encouraged to develop individuality.” And to Brinckmann, therein lies a problem for Heisei: “The issues that face Japan now are not going to be energised by group effort; initiative and inspired leadership are going to be crucial if Japan is going to sustain its prosperity and secure its place in the world. We are seeing growing individualism in twenty and thirty year olds, but not to the point that they have channelled it into something really useful. If their talent starts invigorating the political scene you might see some real change.”
Which brings us to what Brinckmann sees as the third, and perhaps most troubling, theme of Showa’s legacy, what he calls an “ingrown political system,” with cliques, dynastic appointments, an absence of grand vision, and corruption. “Without a wholesale overhaul of that system,” says Brinckmann, “and the emergence of young clear-headed politicians willing to challenge the status quo, it will be hard for Japan to carve out a successful future for itself.”
Can this be done? Brinckmann isn’t putting money on it just yet, but Japan has dramatically reinvented itself in the past, both in the Meiji Restoration and in the period of post-war recovery. Perhaps with history in mind, the author sounds a note of optimism on the book’s last page. If Japan’s leaders can take the necessary measures to address the “unfinished business” he has identified, and “unleash Japan’s captive spirit”, he believes the country can look forward to a new age in which its “abundant energy, creativity, and genuine love of peace and harmony are no longer constrained by timidity and preoccupation with the hallowed myths of a vanished past—or hamstrung by a stagnant political environment.”
The book ends with these words: “There is no limit to what Japan can contribute to the world on every level…Far from betraying the achievements of the great post-war Showa era, such measures would build on those achievements and enhance them, and in so doing, honour them.”