Today is Vernal Equinox Day

春分の日 Shunbun no Hi. This national holiday was established in 1948 as a day for enjoying nature and cultivating love for all living things. Prior to 1948, the vernal equinox was an imperial ancestor worship festival called Shunki kōrei-sai (春季皇霊祭) - in other words, it had lots of ultranationalistic overtones that the post-war Japanese felt uneasy about. Let's celebrate spring by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Modern Japan – Alex Kerr

The author’s Japanese is so proficient that he writes and publishes in it, a rare ability in a foreigner. His second book Dogs and Demons was released in 2001 and has been recommended as a must-read ever since. The title is from an old Chinese story. The emperor asked his court painter what's easy and what's difficult to paint. The artist answered that demons are easy but dogs are difficult. The artist meant that the quiet low-key things in the environment are hard to get right but flamboyant eye-catching things are easy. It was Kerr’s ambition to explain dogs - what's in front of everybody's nose but hard to see.

Kerr’s basic thesis is that Japan has been mired in economic woes since 1990 because politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders have been unwilling and unable to change their old ways and meet today's challenges.

For more than two decades, Japan's national debt has floated above 100% of its GDP. In fact, as of the second quarter of 2022, Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio was 226%. Debt is out of control because of government spending on public works projects that feed the largest employer in the country and raise demons, i.e., flashy projects that are easy to point to. For instance, the construction industry piles unsightly tetrapods one upon another along about half of the Japanese coastline. Studies done on US coasts have shown that instead of protecting beaches, the 50-ton concrete thingies in reality promote erosion.

To spend down budgets lest they be cut the next fiscal year, the Japanese equivalent of the Department of the Interior pays millions and millions to the construction industry to mold the tetrapods and plop them on the beaches. Kerr paints an unsettling picture of a bureaucracy turned spending machine for which nobody can find the off switch. As often happens among federal bureaucrats in the US, Japanese officials retire from government at the mandatory age of 55, and then they find jobs in the very industries they used to regulate.

Kerr builds a strong case because the book is solidly researched. Figures and examples support his assertion that bureaucrats in Japan collude with industry to construct boondoggles and white elephants (demons) instead of making the small particular changes (dogs) necessary to solve problems.

Using his ability to read Japanese, Kerr provides an insider’s view of the environmental degradation of Japan, the disappearance of the Japanese movie industry and the failure of internationalization. The one qualm I have with this treatment is that although he argues that plenty of Japanese are becoming concerned about the ecology, he doesn't say much about the complacent voters who are happy to receive government pork for schools, community centers, paved roads, train lines and communication towers.

The chapter on the Japanese attitude toward information is fascinating mainly because I have first-hand experience with the Japanese tendency to equivocate, prevaricate, cover, and generally mishandle information. One tiny story. When I taught in Okinawa I noted a couple of times on campus an English professor toting around a camera. I asked him on two different occasions what he was taking pictures of and both times he clowned to avoid telling me. I found out from a third party a simple explanation. For a committee the English prof was taking shots of illegally parked cars to collect evidence that the campus lacked adequate parking space. I heard the explanation only after I angrily stopped being curious, figuring “F**k it I'm not gonna give a s**t if he's got such a f*****g problem giving me the a f*****g answer to a non-sensitive f*****g question,” so incensed was I over nothing (my last two years of six in Japan I often needed more self-control than I could muster for a high-context culture). Kerr says the slow pace of Internet adoption and the waste of time that is the Japanese Internet is the result of this aversion to openness.

Anyway, Japanophile Kerr ends on a cautious but pessimistic note. This is a powerful book and well worth reading for those interested in what happened to Japan in the 1990s. Kerr not only quotes modern scholars and journalists but quotes great opinion leaders in the past to get the long view. This book is still worth reading.