Under the leadership of Shinzo Abe, it can feel as if Japan is enjoying a revolution of sorts. Sweeping economic reforms are finally shaking up its long-stagnant economy, while more foreign workers are entering the country than ever before. Soaring tourist numbers and major sporting events, like this year’s Rugby World Cup and the 2020 Summer Olympics, are also keeping “Cool Japan,” well, cool.[...]
But none of these advantages will help the country tackle its serious economic and demographic problems. That’s according to Brad Glosserman, a 12-year resident of Japan and author of a new book, Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions (Georgetown University Press, 2019). Glosserman, now deputy director of the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University in Tokyo, decided to write the book after the earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan in 2011. He wondered whether those calamities would be enough to shake Japan out of its comfortable, familiar stupor. His conclusion? Not so much.[...]
The nature of the challenges facing Japan, and the need to reverse those trends that everybody acknowledges are bad, requires structural shifts. And the Japanese are not prepared to do that. “We like what we have, we’re a small ‘c’ conservative country, we are not prepared to adopt a system that somebody else thinks we need when we’re not sure of it ourselves,” they say. Japan is not like a society trapped in the amber—of course it’s changing and evolving, but these are evolutionary, not revolutionary changes. What the Japanese are is very Japanese. This is a country that believes in law, resilience, stoicism, sucking it up and getting through it. That, as one politician put it to me, is an absolute brake on change in this country. [...]
For those on the right who seek reforms to realize their dream of a more powerful and influential Japan, they must balance their impact on social norms and idealized social structures. With women, the tension here is between what the government knows it has to do to unleash their economic potential in society, but there’s also the notion of a woman’s place in the household—I think Abe really does believe in that. There’s been all sorts of policy nudges that the government could have done, but they haven’t, like making childcare widely available. That tension has resulted in begrudging changes that are too late. [...]
People will look back at the emperor and think that he was an extraordinary man in so many ways. He was a voice of reason, a voice of calm and serenity. He encapsulated the very best of Japan. There’s even speculation that he actually decided to abdicate as one way of stopping the prime minister from getting his constitutional revision to Article 9.
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