japan

had always ... individuality. Freshness.

Japan should look within itself and not elsewhere or from outside forces.

Bottom up

Indivuduals.

Yound people.

Old people have to equip them.

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i well known that Japan is an econpmic superpower.
But can it be assumed that, because Japan is economically resoundingly successful as a nation, its people are correspondingly happy, welathy and enjoying the fruits of that success? It is true that concumer income has risen, sothat it soars like a statisical Mount Fuji over the surrounding region. A kind o

Prosperity means that sixty million cars clog the highways; one-third of the world's tuna catch and two -fifths of its shrimp pass through Japanese stomachs; one-quarter of the world's tropical timber is imported; millions of ordinary people take ooverseas holidays every year. In terms of life expeectency, literacy years of schooling, and personal income, Japan ranked number one in the world from 1990 to 1993 and remained number three even after that.

These are impressive figures but they have to be put into perspective. In measuring standards of living, it would be foolish to ignore the availibility of gormet foods, the amount of overseas travel, he level of ownership of cars and elctronic gadgetry, but one would expect such things to follow general satisfaction of the more essential needs- for housing, urban infrastructure(transport, water, sewage, leisure and welfare facilities. quality of environment)

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The faith in mdoernization began to weaken even as its promised land was being occupied. the disparity between human needs and human desires was becoming patent. The salaryman who had created the miracle of postwar japan was begining to see himself as a Sisyphean jogger on the treadmill of infinitely expanding and replicating desire.

The deep-rooted dissatisfaction with the workings of the supposedly tirumphant market in Japan, and the search for an alternative view in government, business, and the society generally, gathers strength as the end of the century looms, even if the direction it will eventually take is unclear.

This generation will have to face the same dilemma as that of their predecessors in yet another sense: how to define its own isentity without negating either Asia or the West, wh

The third, and perhaps greatest chellange- are the problems raised in their own government's White Paper, of how to transform their own lifestyles in a way even more profound, and literally revolutionary, than the transformation of their parents or grandparents. theors will be the task of meeting the challenge to human survivsl posed not by obviously
and essentially it will have to be done without the help of outside intervention.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) looked forward to the achivement of what he called the "stationary state," which might today be called the zero-growth state, as something to be welcomed. Writing in 1848, he referred to "the mere increase of production and accumulation: that excites the congratulations of 'ordinary" politicians with mind that require "coarse stimuli." his words will ring true and wise, and witha particular appropriateness to contemporary Japan, long after he penned them.

I know not why it should be matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than anyone needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as representitive of wealth.... It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important subject; in those most advanced, what is economicall needed is better distribution/

I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling and crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existen



It is scarcely neccessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be so much scope as every for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much as for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood if its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting onm.

Straitjacket Society

Holding Japanese Minds

Unmasking japan today

Contemporary japan and Popular Culture

The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness