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‘Japan in crisis’ screams the newspaper headline, alongside cartoons
of a bullet train rushing headlong over a precipice and a hysterical ‘salariman’
committing hara-kiri. After decades of portraying Japan as an unstoppable
economic machine, this is the year that newspaper editors have decided that
the country is grinding to a halt: political scandals have been followed
by recession and the first change in government for over forty years. Now,
the newspapers are crowing: Japan is to fall into the same miserable hole
as the rest of us.

The reality cannot be anything like so simple. A look at the trade figures
suggests that Japan is not going to collapse tomorrow – even though the
recession continues, the yen is soaring. But Japan is certainly ready for
a radical change: just as the old men who led the nation for decades have
found themselves kicked out of power, so many of the electronics companies
which drove Japan’s economic miracle find their spreadsheets covered in
red ink with no new products in hand.

Japan has plenty of experience at reinventing itself. After the war,
it managed a transition from a belligerent imperial power to a peace-loving
nation with a constitution prohibiting military action. And after the two
oil crises of the 1970s, it switched industrial production from steel and
ship building to sophisticated consumer electronics. Which course will
it take now? What ideas are fuelling the imagination of its politicians,
scientists and technologists? And what are the social forces at work that
will shape Japan’s dreams of the future? To try to answer these questions
and to see what was new on the streets of Tokyo, five of New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s
staff went to Japan for several weeks this summer. This special issue on
Japan is the result.

Arriving from the airport along Tokyo’s waterfront highway, no one can
fail to spot one dream in the making. The bay on which Tokyo stands has
been turned into a gigantic construction site. Massive T-shaped concrete
piles tower above the water, waiting for the expressways which will link
them with distant parts of Tokyo. In the distance, a huge new suspension
bridge is lit up in constantly changing colours, and farther out to sea,
cranes labour away on artificial islands.

One of the world’s largest civil engineering projects lies before your
eyes – the Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway. Here, too, may be a new role for Japan.
As Japanese companies remodel the largest city in the world, they are learning
skills which will be in great demand in the next century as vast new cities
spring up throughout Asia. Will Japan be providing their blueprints?

Sitting in Tokyo are the architects, engineers and visionaries who may
hold the shape of the urban future in their hands. On their drawing boards
are plans for buildings that are twice the height of anything ever built
before. Already they have more than their share of international contracts.
Some of the world’s largest bridges have been constructed by Japanese engineers
too. Visit them and their impressive test facilities and they make no secret
of plans to take what records still elude them by early next century.

And what will be running across these impressive new bridges by the
21st century? The public claims to know already: according to a recent
survey, over three-quarters of Japanese wage earners believe that by 2020,
they will drive around town in electric cars and travel intercity on magnetically-levitated
trains running at 500 kilometres an hour.

This dream is definitely within reach. The world’s only train levitated
by superconducting magnets is now running on its test track. Notching
up 517 kilometres per hour, it has already captured the world train speed
record, and one of its designers expects a Tokyo-Osaka link to be ready
early next century. And Japan’s latest electric car has already taken both
world speed and endurance records.

In Kasumigaseki, the area of central Tokyo where all the ministries
have their headquarters, a very different dream is being constructed. Japan’s
top government officials have felt frustrated for years because Japan has
never been able to match its economic might with political power. Japan
has no seat on the UN Security Council and was scarcely consulted before
the Gulf War began.

What the Japanese government wants is to offer the world moral leadership
in a nice, peaceful area. At the Environment Agency, senior civil servants
think they have found the right candidate – the global fight against pollution.
Japan already has pollution prevention and energy conservation technologies
that set an example to the rest of the world. And at the Japan Development
Bank, they will tell you that if only the rest of the industrialised world
followed Japan’s example, the amount of carbon dioxide emitted would be
halved at once.

Could ‘Japan’ and ‘green’ become as synonymous as ‘Sony’ and ‘Walkman’?
Japanese politicians like to think so and the powerful Ministry of International
Trade and Industry is getting ready to back large-scale national and international
environmental projects.

Strangely, such dreams now seem more certain than some of those emerging
from Japan’s electronics industry, until recently the ruthless scourge of
the West. All the major electronics companies admit that they have run out
of new ideas for the early 21st century. Further into the future they point
to the exciting new world of nanotechnology where supercomputers shrink
to the size of a book. Brilliant minds are at work but what about the next
decade? Japan is pinning its hopes for consumer electronics on ‘multimedia’
and the belief that by tying up with the US entertainment and software industries,
it can ride the next electronic wave. If the dreams come true it could be
in the black again – but the nature of Japanese industry will have changed
for ever. The new products will be Japanese-American hybrids.

For all these dreams, however, there is one joker in the pack: to what
extent has Japan’s success been dependent on its traditional society and
a hard-working, self-sacrificing workforce, always prepared to pull together
for the common good and to place the harmony of the group before the needs
of the individual?

The reason the question must be asked is that Japanese society is clearly
undergoing the most radical changes since the nation was opened to the West
in the last century.

Social change is obvious if you head for parts of town such as Aoyama
or Hiroo. Sitting in expensive bars are the new rich, flaunting Armani
suits and Porsches parked on the pavement outside. Ask any average downtrodden
company employee and you’ll be told angrily that they made their money from
speculating on the stock market before the bubble burst in 1992, or through
land deals during the property boom of the 1980s.

It used to be that no one was very rich or very poor in Japan. Over
90 per cent of Japanese thought themselves middle class, and Japanese company
presidents prided themselves on a take home pay that was only eight times
larger than that of someone joining the company. Now get-rich-quick individualism
has arrived and the old-style Japanese work ethic is under threat. It would
be bad enough if the emerging inequalities in wealth determined what suit
you wear or what car you drive; but there is more to it. Inequalities also
hit at the education system and at the public belief that everyone has an
equal opportunity to succeed.

Until now, the education system has been built around the assumption
that it should offer equal opportunites to all and nurture group-oriented
values. Every Japanese child studied the same curriculum and took the same
examinations in classes that were never streamed. But many state schools
find they cannot match the resources of a booming private sector. The result
is that growing inequalities in parents’ wealth are affecting their children’s
chances of success. A class system is in the making.

Social change is also obvious if you look at the the new Cabinet – 3
out of 21 ministers are women. Equal opportunity in the workplace has been
guaranteed by law for over forty years, but traditional values have not
changed rapidly: a government survey published earlier this year showed
that three-quarters of both women and men consider that a woman finds true
happiness in marriage. And more than two-thirds of both women and men agree
that once a woman marries she should live for her husband and family rather
than for herself.

But even though Japanese women are not openly endorsing feminism, they
are certainly voting with their feet. Many older women are contemptuous
of their ‘worker bee’ husbands – calling them ‘wet leaves’ which cannot
be swept away. And some 70 per cent of divorces are initiated by women even
though the system ensures that they are likely to end up penniless.

Will the sudden appearance of women in government now force these issues
to the surface? Will women start to want real careers? And if they do, will
the Japanese male’s obsession with the company, with its gruelling hours
and late-night drinking, survive? It’s hard to believe that the old ways
can continue, but there may be one other force that could push women back
into the home and the economy into the doldrums.

Japan is facing a vast demographic change: the percentage of old people
in the population is growing faster than in any other country on Earth.
Traditionally, wives have looked after parents and grandparents. Women could
find themselves under pressure to continue that role because the government
is not prepared for demographic change on this scale. In the past 25 years,
the number of people over the age of 65 in Japan has doubled; by 2025 the
number of bedridden elderly people will reach 1.2 million.

Some social scientists think that even if the traditional family structure
is maintained – and in 40 per cent of households three generations still
live under one roof – Japan will not be able to cope. A falling birth rate
means that there will simply not be enough young people to do the work.
Instead, they say that the Japanese economy will be crippled as enormous
funds are diverted to nursing homes.

But others are looking for solutions where Japan has always looked before
– in technology. They are working on robots with human-like emotions which
could act as helpers to the aged.

If they are succesful, Japan may turn the problem of the ageing society
into a technological advantage and at the same time give young women opportunities
away from home. In the 21st century, could Japan end up with a trade surplus
in the warm and friendly robots needed as Western nations also grow ever
more elderly?