Preteen pillows are a gateway drug

None of what Roger Cohen says in this short Times piece on Japan is novel. What I like about it is that it turns out to be a very intelligent way to summarize a lot of old but still relevant analysis.

As Patrick Smith puts it in “Japan: A Reinterpretation,” to be “an otaku is merely the final word in private individuality. It is to reject anyone who would diminish the protected ego and to acknowledge an inability to achieve the intimacy of authentic human contact.”

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My sense is that four factors have contributed to this: wealth, postmodernism, conformism and despair. Japan is rich enough, bored enough with national ambition, strait-jacketed enough and gloomy enough to find immense attraction in playful escapism and quirky obsession.

Alright, the first part of that is a quote taken from another writer, but it's smartly chosen. And, along with the four points that follow, he hits the nail right on the head. We all were born too late to think of Japan in optimistic terms. What has really characterized it in our lifetimes has been an extremely peculiar, and tenacious, malaise. Even as external debt has grown in excess of 200% of GDP, with GDP itself declining in both real and nominal terms, Japan has pushed the envelope of the fantastic and the grotesque to Herculean maxima. The worse their passivity has made things, the more passive they've sought to become.

What Cohen identifies in his piece, and what is idiosyncratic to the Japanese, is how circumscribed their escapism is. It's not that they've begun jumping ship in droves; emigration from Japan is so negligible as to be statistically insignificant. They stay safely onboard even as water steadily rises from the lower decks. I imagine them stowed away in the darkest part of the hold, laid out in neat rows, all eyes focused on a single screen. There, they watch a collection of pictures replayed in endless success, pictures of themselves crowded into lifeboats or leaping into the sea.

Remember Suicide Club? I know that the Japanese do kill themselves more than most folk, and so maybe it's a subject less taken up by analogue realities, but for how many people would a movie like that have been exactly what they'd never have the courage to reify? By comparison, could you imagine there being a large enough market in North America for a movie with little more to it than an endless number of high schools offing themselves in an exponential cascade of ghastliness? Somebody fronted the money believing there'd be mass appeal in the message.

The disastrous thing about escapism is that is, if paradoxically so, nevertheless an engine of conformity. Indulgence in fantasy protects us from making the much more difficult decision to resist or defy social conventions. The Japanese have not lost their reputation for an obsessive adherence to the rules, even as they've become notorious for the bizarre and revolting in controlled mediums such as films. The malaise has, with the aid of technology (according to Cohen), pushed everyone inward, leaving intact a regime of rigid external normality. There is then a feedback effect: as the status quo continues to go unchallenged, more people choose to retreat, until real resistance is, as it is now, unheard of.

The moral of Cohen story is that we're all headed in the same direction, thanks to our own techno-fetishism. Since we lack the same time-worn institutions of social etiquette as the Japanese, and because our national project hasn't (or hadn't, before last September) been derailed in the same loud and obvious way, a strong antithesis against which to contrast our mechanical obsessions has been less apparent. We nevertheless are prone to committing the same fallacy and ending up in much the same position. It's not necessarily a new or controversial message, I'll admit. Still, in the light of Japan's stale emiseration, the need to bear it in mind feels acute.