Quartz: Too rich, too comfortable: Why Japan is so resistant to change even as disaster looms

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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The New York Review of Books: Shinzo Abe, Pursued by Scandal

How Abe performs matters more than usual. At home, he is under unprecedented pressure. A pair of scandals that have tarnished his administration refuse to die. Barely a day goes by without the revelation of another detail that undermines Abe’s record as, arguably, the most successful postwar prime minister of Japan. Things have become so bad that Junichiro Koizumi, a former prime minister and mentor of Abe, recently suggested that it could be time for Abe to step down, while on Saturday several thousand people took part in by far the largest protest to date, holding signs that said “Abe quit!”  

The first of these scandals arose last year when it emerged that the finance ministry had sold a plot of public land to Moritomo Gakuen, a company that runs private schools of a nationalistic bent, at a bargain-basement price. Officially, the plot was sold at a steep discount because, the finance ministry claimed, the land was contaminated and would cost a great deal to clean up. Despite denials from Abe and the finance ministry, many suspect that the deal was so advantageous to Moritomo Gakuen because Yasunori Kagoike, then head of the company, was a friend of Abe and, especially, of his wife, Akie. The affair seemed to have blown over, until last month, when a newspaper revealed that ministry officials had doctored fourteen documents presented to Japan’s national legislature during inquiries it held last year. [...]

Shinzo Abe has done much good for Japan, unexpectedly so. When, after a miserable first term as prime minister in 2006–2007 marred by scandals and illness, Abe returned to power in 2012, he appeared to have learned some lessons. By the cautious standards of Japan’s salaryman-like leaders, Abe is bold and decisive. His plan to reinvigorate Japan and foster a sense of national pride comes with some worrying baggage—notably, his revisionist view of wartime history that refuses to acknowledge some of Japan’s aggressions and questions whether those who worked as “comfort women” in Japanese military brothels were forced to do so—but the country badly needed invigoration. “Abenomics,” his plan to revitalize the economy by pumping money into the economy, fiscal stimulus, and structural reforms, has fallen short of its promises—in particular, a target of holding inflation to 2 percent and reforms of the labor market and Japan’s social security system. Even so, the country is enjoying its longest stretch of economic growth in years and wages are rising.

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The Atlantic: The Impossible Task of Remembering the Nanking Massacre

While Chang faced a barrage of attacks from other historians, as well as from the publisher contracted to translate her book into Japanese, the debate over what happened in Nanking from December 1937 to January 1938 had been raging before the publication of her book. Japan, for instance, remains divided over the number of Chinese killed in Nanking during those six weeks. The massacre camp generally supports the Tokyo War Crimes Trials figure of “upwards of 100,000” deaths; skeptics claim 15,000 to 50,000, while others venture only up to 10,000. Outside of Japan, James Yin and Shi Young, whose work Chang frequently cited, place the minimum death toll as high as 369,366. [...]

My grandfather, or Yaya, as I call him, grew up in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Life among the soldiers was “not much different,” he’d say when he visited us in Texas. Of course, he had to bow whenever he passed the Japanese on the street. Rickshaw drivers couldn’t complain when the soldiers didn’t pay them. If you failed to remove your hat in the presence of a Japanese soldier, he might beat you with the butt of his rifle and throw you in jail. Yaya himself was never beaten, but he witnessed beatings every day, he said. [...]

With Japan’s recent re-election of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who aspires to legitimize the military renounced long ago in the country’s post-war constitution, China has greater reason to revive its image as an imperial conqueror. Even as Abe and China’s President Xi Jinping talk of a “fresh start,” Xi stays mum during the recent anniversary of the start of the Nanking massacre. Territorial disputes roil the East China Sea, and China expands in the South China Sea. And there is the escalating threat of China’s strained ally North Korea, as well as America’s volatile role in all this. The answer to who will lead East Asia into its future may hinge on how each country makes sense of its muddled past. Or makes use.

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Vox: Inside North Korea's bubble in Japan

For this episode I found myself embeded with a small community in Japan. They were born there, they speak the language. But they're not Japanese citizens, or even ethnically Japanese - they're North Korean. There's about 150,000 of them living in Japan today, and they've been there for over a century.

This community has close ties with the regime in Pyongyang, which supports them financially (and vice-versa). But more importantly, Pyongyang offers them an identity, a heritage, and cultural legitimacy - things that some elements of Japanese society work to deny them. 

The Atlantic: The Mystery of Why Japanese People Are Having So Few Babies

But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to. [...]

This may seem surprising in Japan, a country where the economy is currently humming along, and the unemployment rate is below 3 percent. But the shrinking economic opportunities stem from a larger trend that is global in nature: the rise of unsteady employment. Since the postwar years, Japan had a tradition of “regular employment,” as labor experts commonly call it, in which men started their careers at jobs that gave them good benefits, dependable raises, and the understanding that if they worked hard, they could keep their jobs until retirement. Now, according to Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University’s Japan campus and the author of several books about Japan, around 40 percent of the Japanese workforce is “irregular,” meaning they don’t work for companies where they have stable jobs for their whole careers, and instead piece together temporary and part-time jobs with low salaries and no benefits. (Such temporary workers are counted as employed in government statistics.) Only about 20 percent of irregular workers are able to switch over to regular jobs at some point in their careers. According to Kingston, between 1995 and 2008, Japan’s number of regular workers decreased by 3.8 million while the number of irregular workers increased by 7.6 million. [...]

In a culture that places such an emphasis on men being breadwinners, this has serious implications for marriage and childbearing. Men who don’t have regular jobs are not considered desirable marriage partners; even if a couple wants to get married, and both have irregular jobs, their parents will likely oppose it, according to Ryosuke Nishida, a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology who has written about unemployment among young workers. About 30 percent of irregular workers in their early 30s are married, compared to 56 percent of full-time corporate employees, according to Kingston. “Japan has this idea that the man is supposed to get a regular job,” said Nishida. “If you graduate and you don't find a job as a regular employee, people look at you as a failure.” There’s even a tongue-in-cheek Japanese board game, Nishida told me, called “The Hellish Game of Life,” in which people who don’t land a regular job struggle for the rest of the game. [...]

The second is that Japan’s is a culture in which hard work and long hours are widely accepted and in which it is considered rude to leave before your boss. People who complain about working long hours may not find much sympathy from friends and family members, let alone the government. Finally, Japan is a country in which labor unions are weak, and often focus on collaborating with companies and preserving the good jobs that do exist, rather than fighting on behalf of all workers, according to Konno. “Unions here are for the companies—they’re not effective,” he said.   

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Bloomberg: China and Japan Leaders Seek Ties Reset Amid North Korea Worries

But while China, Japan, the U.S., Russia and South Korea all condemned the test, their approaches differ on how best to rein in North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. U.S. President Donald Trump has castigated China in public for not doing enough to prod its neighbor and ally.

China favors talks with Pyongyang to defuse tensions. It has been cautious about putting too tight an economic squeeze on Kim in case it sparks the collapse of his regime, with the risk of a resultant refugee crisis on China’s border and an increased U.S. military presence nearby. [...]

The Xi-Abe talks follow months of effort. Abe’s security council chief Shotaro Yachi spent five hours with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi at a hot spring resort near Tokyo in late May. Abe also sent a personal missive to Xi in May, via a ruling party executive, and has said he’s open to cooperating on China’s Belt and Road trade project under certain conditions. [...]

"There are people in the Communist Party who would not be pleased at the prospect of getting along with Japan," said Noriyuki Kawamura, a professor at the Nagoya University of Foreign Studies. "In order not to be criticized by these people, Xi and Li will have to be cautious about visiting Japan."

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Vox: Japan's rising right-wing nationalism | Border Dispatch #1

Like many nations, Japan is undergoing a surge in right-wing nationalism, the brand of nationism that is skeptical of globalization and outsiders. But while Japan's nationalism looks similar to other right-wing movements in the West, when you look under the surface, you see a totally different story. 

Jacobin Magazine: Abe’s Japan Is a Racist, Patriarchal Dream

The way Shinzō Abe sees it, Japan has learned all the lessons of war. “Now is the time to make a start on carving out a new era beyond the ‘postwar’ era,” the prime minister said in January in his first policy speech before the Diet. “[We will] take on the challenge of building up our nation anew.” As Japan celebrates the seventieth anniversary of the country’s postwar constitution, part of that “new nation-building” means rescripting it; the first order of business is shedding a shameful past. [...]

The US’s support for Japan remilitarization — longstanding, and reaffirmed by the Trump administration — has emboldened Abe’s militarism. Last December, his administration approved a record defense budget of $42.5 billion, the fifth consecutive increase during his term. The antiwar demonstrations that saw tens of thousands of people gather in front of the parliament have now largely subsided. And this February, the Abe administration moved to draft its first set of constitutional amendments. [...]

But what propelled the scandal into international headlines was not the school’s prewar curriculum or its unabashed xenophobia, but its connection to Japan’s first lady, Akie Abe. When it came out that she accepted a position as “honorary principal” at a new elementary school owned by Kagoike, the focus quickly fell on her husband. An inquiry into the private elementary school, originally named after Abe, soon revealed that the school had bought government-owned land at a discount, spurring accusations that Abe and his wife helped Kagoike with licensing and land acquisition. Last week, Kagoike testified under oath before the Diet that the first lady secretly donated $9,000 to set up the ultra-nationalist school. [...]

Backlash came with a vengeance. Beginning in the mid-1990s, conservative politicians and far-right groups began accusing feminists of being communist sympathizers using “gender” to subvert Japanese tradition. “Feminism and its gender-free movement is working to undermine Japanese culture and to lower our moral standards,” Michiyoshi Hayashi, a professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University and a member of Nippon Kaigi, wrote in 2002. “Formerly the Marxists, feminists now emerge as the power that will destroy our nation.”

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