Slugs and Snails

Chewing the Cud, Part Three

So here’s the missing piece from parts one and two, hold on tight:

Japan is a unique country.

Weren’t expecting that now, were you?

I’m not talking about all the four seasons bollocks, but consider this: until fairly recently Japan was the only culturally non-european First World country. Even now it’s only really got South Korea for company. Maybe Taiwan too. That means there are social and economic forces at work which, for once, are actually pretty singular. There are echoes of these individual forces throughout the world, but they don’t combine exactly as they do here (of course, by that measure every country is unique).

Japan’s very much like an alternative history novel, one which turns on a single ‘what if?’ question. What if the Axis powers won WWII? What if the Jewish homeland was Alaska not Israel? What if the Ottoman Empire hadn’t collapsed?

The particular question here is ‘What if there’d been no sexual revolution in the 60’s?’

The sexual revolution saw women in The West looking at men and saying, “We’ll have some of that as well, thankyouverymuch.” Clearly it’s a little more complex than that, but that’s essentially what it boils down to. Never happened in Japan. Why that was so is definitely a question worth asking, but this little series is already far too long and rambling. I’ve got to draw a line somewhere, and here it is. Let’s just accept it and move on, shall we?

Anyway, no revolution; women and men remain pretty much confined to their traditional gender roles. Unlike the rest of the First World, but very much like the rest of the Second and Third. That’s a weight off your mind, eh?

And that’s what we’ve got here. No pressure, or at least none in the directions many of us would recognize. There’s a difference between simple and easy, and complicated and hard. Passing the tests, putting in the hours, not pissing people off; these are all hard, to be sure, but also pretty simple. The pressure is quantitative, not qualitative and showing up isn’t just half the battle, it’s all of it.

Human relationships are trickier. Sex is complicated (which is half the fun, to be honest). It’s purely qualitative, and in a society programmed to think in terms of quantity that’s hard to fathom.

Given the context, if you can't think of your own
sarcastic caption for this then I really can't help you.

Additionally, because Japan has been able to achieve the appearance of a relatively equal distribution of wealth, there is relatively little pressure, relatively little incentive to take risks for the chance of the big payout. If the USA is the archetypal High Risk, High Reward society, then Japan is the best, perhaps the only, example of a Low Risk, Moderate Reward society.

I covered the risk angle from the male point of view last time, but it extends to the female side as well, especially as regards vulnerability. Women in The West generally eschew the idea of accentuating their vulnerability because it’d fly in the face of all the progress towards equality they’ve made over the decades. Women in the Third World have far less choice in the matter, and the images of dominance or vulnerability they choose to project are governed far more by necessity. If you are genuinely vulnerable, it’s probably not a good idea to draw attention to it.

In Japan, by virtue of it being an incredibly developed, incredibly safe (relatively) country, there is that luxury of choice. There’s little incentive to be ‘strong’, because that’s still such a minority position that you’re swimming against an overwhelming tide. Equally, there’s no real drawback to seeming vulnerable due to the rule of law and safe civil society. So the majority, as ever, adopt the path of least resistance. ‘Cute’ it is, then.

But we’re meant to be discussing the men, remember? They’re trapped in the same risk/reward cycle as well. For all that Japanese society seems relatively equal (note how that always gets qualified), it’s also incredibly static. Social mobility is essentially nil.

Which is not always a bad thing.

A colleague once asked me when we introduced rules in the UK to prohibit family members ‘inheriting’ seats in Parliament. It was quite a task to explain that there weren’t any, it would just never happen. The electorate would be so suspicious of such a candidate, and the opposition parties would make such hay from it, that it just wouldn’t be feasible. You do get the occasional father/son combo, but perhaps the most famous at present are the Benns, and Benn Senior gave up a title and a seat in the House of Lords on principle, so no danger of nepotism there.

I know, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to use the word ‘principle’ in the same sentence as a politician’s name. The good old days, eh?

Well, no. This kind of knee-jerk deference is exactly what happened way back when. Inheriting ‘elected’ seats? This is what happens when a decent chunk of your electorate can actually remember a time when the Emperor was officially a living god. This is what happens when that cohort is, due to the seniority and sempai/kohai system, disproportionately influential. Japan isn’t a meritocracy (though nowhere truly is), it’s not really a democracy, or even a kelptocracy. It’s a gerontocracy, and that equals total social lockdown.

Anything which fails to evolve, unless it’s supremely well adapted, will eventually end up going extinct. Japan is not supremely well adapted. Even that Low Risk, Moderate Reward paradigm is coming unraveled. The lifetime employment system is tearing itself apart, and for a generation of young Japanese men brought up to follow that system – to believe that if they follow it they will be taken care of – that leaves them very few other places to turn.

Wuv me

Which brings me full circle. You’ll remember that cute=vulnerable. ‘Please take care of me.’ That’s the herbivores’ creed. The system is screwed, and they can see it’s screwed. They’re smart enough not to want to take on any extra responsibilities or complications (families, partners, even just sex), smart enough not to want the burden of caring for anyone else. But they’re so conditioned that they can see no other way to cope with that failing system other than a plaintive appeal to be taken care of by that self-same system, which has so conspicuously screwed it up for them thus far. It’s the low risk solution, because for all the decline things are still pretty comfortable.

In the UK when the youth get disaffected they at least have the get-up-and-go to burn the shit out of a few public buildings and nick a couple of flatscreen TVs. Here the deference is so ingrained that entire generations are suffering from a form of Learned Helplessness. The obsession with cute; the shut-ins; the herbivores; all these are expressions of a society that wants to be cared for, but is more and more obviously unable to care for itself. A country seemingly intent on crawling slowly but inexorably towards its demise.

The future of Japan? Imagine a Hello Kitty slipper stamping on a human face – forever. Or at least until everyone’s dead, whichever comes first.

Credit where it is due.