back in the USA

I am finally back sleeping in my own bed after three weeks away: two weeks in Singapore and most of one in Tokyo. I'm on a tight, somewhat difficult schedule for a project at work, so I will be gophering only occasionally over the next few weeks.

This was a fascinating trip and months from now I will probably still be trying to understand what I saw. Singapore is run by a dictator, but the people seem happy. Tokyo, on the other hand, is in principle a democracy but seems moribund at best, and people spend their entire lives at work but a lot of them just seem to be going through the motions.

I didn't realize it, but Alex Kerr (of Lost Japan fame) resurfaced in 2001 with a book called Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan in which he says essentially that Japan is a mess and getting worse and for deeply-embedded reasons: because their culture is so inward-looking and so much dependent on reaching consensus it's very difficult for them to change course. This manifests in two ways: when they have a good idea they tend to run it into the ground, and when they have a bad idea there's no shifting it.

I really have no idea if he's right or wrong: I read the book somewhat skeptically, suspecting that if he were talking about a culture I am part of I would have been inclined to marginalize a lot of the particulars he cites as being symptoms of a sick society: e.g. some nuclear plant had contamination because it was poorly run, not because Japan has a cover-up culture. And as a foreigner who doesn't speak Japanese I really have no access to information.

Regardless, Dogs and Demons is a fascinating book, and one of the strangest I've ever read. I highly recommend it if you can read it at the right price. Some of what he says hasn't stood the test of time: the economy here in the States is no longer the model of health it was (relative to Japan anyway) in 2001, so some of his comparisons don't have the force they had then. Nevertheless it's still an interesting read.

I also got to change planes in Kuala Lumpur on this trip. I had been somewhat concerned flying a Malaysian airline, and I have to admit the leg from Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo was long and not especially pleasant, but on balance it was probably better than flying Delta.

I think Kuala Lumpur is the furthest I've been going west; I'm looking forward to finding an excuse to get back there again, and this time to visit the city itself. Patience patience.

in Tokyo this week

Image via WikipediaI'm in Tokyo this week on business, visiting a customer for a project where I have been the slow, under-delivering sandbagger due mostly to commitments to other projects. I hate letting people down, especially when their expectations are reasonable.

I love visiting Japan. I forget between visits how much I love being here.

As a Christian I find that this orderly, clean, relatively crime-free, almost entirely Christian-free nation gives me pause. Especially given the population density, and the tiny spaces individual Japanese people live in. And the expectations society has of the average individual: achievement, conformity, and self-sacrifice.

Frankly any Christian religious professional who goes on about "individualism" and "consumerism" would do well to visit Japan; Japanese people tend to believe in a corporate or communal identity constituted in a federal head that would put a "man of God" and his "sheep" to shame, and apart from their wedding days and Christmas average Japanese people betray no evidence of cultural Christian influences at all.

I'm not saying. I'm just saying.

McMafia: whence the yakuza?

I needed three weeks or so to finish Misha Glenny's book McMafia, partly because I got really busy and partly because it didn't make the trip to Seoul. I'm an Accidental Tourist kind of traveler; I prefer to take just a carry-on (a cheap shapeless twenty-four-inch duffle bag from Target) and a laptop bag, so very little goes with me, and I tend to abandon anything I finish reading while on the road. I paid for McMafia in GBP, so it was really expensive, and I wasn't about to dump it.

Anyway, McMafia is just packed; it goes places I've never been, and it's not just a chronicle of mindless violence: Glenny occasionally tries to identify proximate causes for particular crime waves; because he's mostly a tourist himself, these analyses typically come from other published sources.

His explanation of the origins of the yakuza is fascinating: in the postwar period the Japanese government restricted the number of lawyers; I don't recall how they did this, but the result was that the concentration of lawyers in the general population was roughly one-third that of the United States or the European Union. Nearly all of them went to work in Tokyo for large corporations (according to this New York Times article, half the lawyers are in Tokyo, leaving one per thirty thousand in the rest of Japan), leaving a shortage of qualified workers to handle legal tasks across Japan. Some of these tasks fell to notary publics and accountants, but others, such as debt collection, fell to other people.

And that's where the yakuza came in; they served as collection agencies in a culture where saving face (one's own and one's debtors') necessarily required an intermediary.

In a part of the book where Glenny deals with Russia and Eastern Europe he suggests that organized crime often fills a gap in an economy during large-scale changes; in Russia's case, between the planned economy of the Soviet Union and the market economy of the future. I'd be willing to bet that the average perpetrator doesn't see himself that way.

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