Online Learn to speak Japanese - Visit Japan

Online Learn to Speak Japanese - Visit Japan

 

 

About Japan

In the winter of 1974, a young Japanese adventurer called Norio Suzuki set off for the island of Lubang in the north­west Philippines, fascinated by tales of an elusive, death-dealing hermit who stalked the jungle trails in a World War II Japanese Army uniform. During a series of sniper attacks, 30 Filipinos had been killed and 100 wounded. The uniform indicated that the sharp­shooter was the last holdout of the once-victorious Japanese forces that had conquered the Philippines in 1942. Arriving on Lubang, Suzuki camped in the jungle and eventually managed to contact this lethal recluse. He turned out indeed to be a Japanese soldier, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of Army Intelligence. He had known the war was over, he told Suzuki, but neverthe­less had considered it his duty to honour his army orders never to give himself up. "Only if my commanding officer rescinds my order in person will I surrender," he declared.
One of Onoda's military superiors, former Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, was located and he willingly travelled to Lubang. There Taniguchi read aloud a 28-year-old order that relieved Onoda, formally and honourably, of his duty. With a bow to the major, Lieutenant Onoda put down his gun and agreed to turn over his rusted officer's sword to Philippine President Ferdinand Mar­cos. At a ceremony in Manila, Marcos handed the sword back to Onoda, pro­claimed him "a great soldier" and issued a pardon for the crimes he had committed. Onoda was then escorted to an aeroplane that took him back to his beloved Japan, where more than 4,000 people crowded the arrival gates of the Tokyo International Airport to cheer the ultimate warrior. Proudly erect in a new blue suit, he emerged from the plane into modern Japan. He was the incarnation of a past made all the more remote by the great changes that had overtaken his homeland dur­ing his three decades in the Philippines.

What greeted the eyes of the man from the past was a vibrant new Japan, abounding with industry and material wealth. Since the war, Tokyo had been transformed from a largely wooden city of 5 million to an awesome steel-and­concrete metropolis of more than 15 million. Streets that in the 1940s had carried bicycles and rattling lorries by 1974 rumbled underneath the weight of several million Japanese-built motor vehicles—the majority private cars. Most women moved briskly through the streets in high heels and Western dresses or trouser suits. Metal foun­dries and chemical complexes lined suburban dual carriageways in areas once covered by peaceful quiltworks of rice paddies. And upon a meticulously constructed and computer-controlled track, a gleaming blue-and-white bullet train whipped along at speeds of 200 kilometres per hour and more.
The rest ofJapan moved at the same pace. During Onoda's long, self‑ imposed exile, the old island kingdom had emerged as an economic super­power. By the mid-1970s, its resurgent industries were producing more than those of France, West Germany and Great Britain. Not only automobiles, but also TV sets, tape recorders and stereo equipment streamed off produc­tion lines—for export and home con­sumption, as the Japanese had become adept and eternally eager consumers. In short, the country Lieutenant Onoda had left in the mid-1940s had undergone a metamorphosis unprece­dented for speed and thoroughness. Japan had not been a backward nation when it launched itself into World War II; it had outstripped its Asian neigh­bours in industry and trade—and ar­maments. But it had been a country of frugal people, dominated by the figures of the hard-working farmer, fisherman and small merchant. The Japan Onoda returned to had all the glitter of one of the world's wealthiest nations. "In our history of 2,000 years," said a member ofJapan's Diet (or parliament), "this is the first time that the Japanese have not had to worry about poverty. We are nouveau riche, a nation of farmers only a short time ago." All these changes were too much for Onoda, who came from a traditional small-town family. Distressed by the growing materialism, he became an exile again. Moving to an outlying district of a distinctly less bustling and less industrialized nation, Brazil, he settled down on a small cattle ranch. "Every­one in Japan is concerned with money," he said; "I cannot live like that."
Most other members of Lieutenant Onoda's generation and their children have found being nouveau riche gratify­ing. As the 1980s dawned, most of Ja­pan's people enjoyed to the full the fact that they possessed amenities and ad­vantages befitting a society as ad­vanced as any on earth. This blaring complex of shops and dis­count caves engulfing 20 blocks in the north-central section of the city specia­lizes in the products of hundreds of murderously competitive electronics companies. Here, shouting salesmen, rotating come-on lights and mammoth montages of price cards, have created one of the most uninhibited commer­cial extravaganzas on earth. Some Japanese have echoed Onoda in deploring such blatant materialist excess, feeling that Japan's ancient spiritual and moral values are in dan­ger of being buried under an avalanche of machines and gadgets. But in a recent poll, an astounding 89 per cent of the people pronounced themselves basically contented with their lives. Whether for good or ill, the economic strides made by Japan since World War II constitute nothing less than a miracle. Japan has risen literally from its own ashes. When the war ended in 1945 and Lieutenant Onoda's com­rades came home, they found that vir­tually all of the major cities had been burnt out by 90,000 tonnes of bombs, mostly incendiaries, dropped from U.S. Air Force B-29s. Two cities had been almost completely obliterated by atom bombs. Industry had been ham­mered flat and 10 million people were unemployed. Farm output had fallen by almost one half and many of the de­feated country's people faced the real threat of starvation. Across the na­tion's ruins raged a typhoon ofinflation that would cause prices to rise 600-fold between 1945 and 1950. The average annual income of a Japanese family had climbed to ,000. The unem­ployment rate stood at a minuscule 2.5 per cent. More than 99 per cent of all households contained refrigerators and colour television sets. Two out of three families owned a passenger car and at least one tape recorder; more than eight out of every 10 had electric sewing machines. And about 40 per cent of all Japanese homes were equipped with air conditioners or microwave ovens. To observe this new Japanese consumerism—and in particular their in­satiable appetite for electronic wares—at its gaudiest, the shopper needed only to visit Tokyo's Akihabara bazaar.

The road back from such desperate circumstances was paved from the very first with good intentions on the part of the victor and vanquished alike. Even more astonishing, the intentions were matched by deeds and by a growing sense of comradeship that, if occasion­ally frayed, has remained strong. The Japanese had expected the worst from the Allied Occupation forces, but they were pleasantly surprised when the Supreme Commander, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, indicated in 1945 that Japan would govern itself, with no more than benign controls and encour­agement from him. He initiated an ag­ricultural reform bill that transferred ownership of a large portion of the country's arable land from the long-entrenched landlords to the farmers. He also weakened the power of the zai­batsu, the great industrial barons. Even more radically, MacArthur's young staffbestowed upon Japan a new demo­cratic constitution.
Among other key provisions, the Japanese constitution set forth a bill of rights along American lines, gave wo­men as well as men the right to vote, refashioned the Diet into a popularly elected Western-style parliament and turned Emperor Hirohito from a celes­tial ruler/into a benign "symbol of the state", who at last was free to pursue his heart's passion of research in mar­ine biology. Shortly thereafter, the United States made clear its intention to see Japan rebuilt into an Asian "bul­wark of democracy" and the "work­shop of the Far East". MacArthur then removed the last bars to economic growth by cancelling all but token payments of war reparations. From this point on, superb manage­ment and unceasing hard work (Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka started the electronics giant Sony by scrounging radio equipment parts from the rubble ofbombed buildings) began to generate the brilliant success that is present-day Japan. The Korean War was to provide a critical push. That conflict brought a bonanza of hundreds of millions of dol­lars in foreign exchange, to pay for Japanese-made lorries and other heavy equipment, as well as housing and ser­vices for the United Nations troops who operated supply bases in Japan, and for units passing through on their way to the Korean fighting. As a result, by 1952 Japanese industry had all but recovered from its defeat in 1945. The Japanese govern­ment proceeded to step in with an effec­tive five-year plan for national growth that included tariffprotection and sub­sidies for key industries. With the gov­ernment's help and blessing, huge new steel, shipbuilding and manufacturing complexes were formed by a fresh gen­eration of industrial leaders. In a way, these burgeoning indus­tries benefited from the destruction wreaked during World War II. New and highly efficient factories rose from the rubble of the old. Within 20 years, the Japanese were forging steel in their up-to-date furnaces at a lower cost per tonne than most world producers, and Japanese shipyards had become mar­vels of cost-efficient production.

Criticizing the company or the union can be costly. One worker who had the temerity to question a union wage pos­ition found himself shunned by his friends, who had been warned that as­sociation with him could poison their own futures. The man himself now makes some ,000 per year less than his quieter fellows. Such disharmony among the work force is rare, however; most Japanese manage to put on a good face for the factory, without compulsion or undue inner effort. The general attitude seems to be summed up in the words of a Nissan employee: "I'll keep quiet and try to get promoted." Japan's extraordinary economic gains have been achieved at a price—and not just of devoted and relentless work. There have been social costs as well. Growing industrialization has meant that the cities have burgeoned and have grown stupefyingly crowded. Japan is a larger country than many non-Japanese imagine, stretching more than 3,200 kilometres from its northernmost island to its most south­erly one; but the total geographical area is only about as large as Finland, and it is inhabited by about 120 million people (versus Finland's 4.8 million). Further, only 29 per cent of Japan's land is usable for living space, agricul­ture and industry combined. Crowd­ing is so chronic that, in the phrase of former U.S. Ambassador Edwin 0. Reischauer, Japan's "standard of well­being" is far lower than the country's standard of living would indicate. "You work in a modern building," said one government employee. "You eat in a good restaurant. You travel in a fast train. You come home at night and you have to be careful not to step on your sleeping child." The one natural resource Japan needs most, but cannot import, is land. Because of this lack of liveable space, most Japanese homes are small—by Western standards, they are cramped. The typical family of four living in the stockbroker belt outside Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka or Nagoya has a three-room bungalow slightly larger than a two-car garage, its interior as tightly packed with gear as the inside of a weekend sailor's cabin cruiser. The family members sleep on bedding that can be stuffed away to turn the bed­room into a daytime living room-dining room—which may open on to a tiny back garden of raked pebbles, a few meticulously arranged rocks, some moss and a bonsai (dwarf) tree or two. Japanese living in such modest re­treats must spend up to four hours a day commuting to and from their place of work. And the commuter trains, es­pecially those serving Tokyo, are with­out doubt the most abominably crowded in all the world. Tokyo's un­derground trains, for that matter, are even worse; during rush hours the last bodies must be jammed on board by a special breed of white-gloved platform attendants. Both train and under­ground travellers accept this crowding with equanimity, simply relaxing and swaying with the crowd. "Millions of commuters travel on trains as crowded as 19th-century slave ships," a Japa­nese once observed, "but show no signs of mutiny. Even with someone's news­paper shoved in their face and some­one's elbow jammed in their side, they remain indifferent." Crowding in the urban centres is even more relentless; one survey re­vealed that on working days some parts of downtown Tokyo are packed with 14,700 people per square kilometre. The average city-dwelling couple must somehow make do in a tiny two-room flat totalling 38 square metres.
With crowding have come environ­mental problems, including dirty air and water. Japan's rivers and harbours have been polluted, not only by com­mercial wastes but by the horrendous quantities of rubbish generated by this nation of freshly fledged but enthusias­tic consumers. In recent years, the government has made a concerted at­tack on the pollution of the nation's waterways—and has made consider­able progress in cleaning up the air as well. As for the rubbish, the Japanese make do with ingenuity. One urban unit in Aichi prefecture, a heavily populated area between Tokyo and Kyoto, has attacked the problem by spraying its fleet of dustcarts with per­fumed deodorants. They now smell like peppermint and broadcast sprightly music as they drive through the streets.

 

By the late 1970s, Japan boasted a gross na­tional product equal to France's and England's combined. Shrewdly, the Japanese reinvested huge proportions of their GDP—as much as 32 per cent a year between 1956 and 1960—in order to modernize the old industries and provide funds for new ones. Helped by such massive financial boosts, the nation's car and lorry production soared from 100,000 units in 1960 to 2 million in 1970. Dur­ing the early 1970s, Japan rivalled West Germany as the world's second-largest manufacturer of automobiles. Again, efficient plants and eager workers added up to remarkable pro­ductivity. By 1977, the average Japa­nese carworker made 33 cars per year, against 26 per year for an American worker; and the Toyotas and Datsuns sold at retail prices averaging ,500 less per car. Almost one fourth of the U.S. automobile market had by 1980 been taken over by Japanese-made cars. At the same time, Japan's light in­dustry surpassed the Swiss in the prod­uction of watches and the Germans in cameras, lenses and other optical equipment. The Japanese also carved out a large share of the world market for such disparate items as bicycles, skiing gear and consumer electronic goods. In 1983, total output surpassed a trillion dollars per year, as Japan had become not only America's principal commer­cial rival, but also the biggest or second-biggest trading partner of every nation in South-East Asia. A main motive force behind this as­tonishing climb to commercial dom­inance has come from the Japanese workers themselves. Probably no other people on earth throw themselves into their jobs with comparable devotion and energy. Japanese companies foster their employees' morale and produc­tivity with devices that range from pep rallies to "voluntary speed-ups". At Matsushita, a giant of the elec­tronic industry, workers in the main plants for years assembled in groups each morning to sing the company song through to its rousing end: "Send­ing our goods to the people of the world, endlessly and continuously like water gushing from a fountain. Grow, industry, grow, grow, grow!" They still recite the company's creed, which in­cludes the following lines: "Alone we are weak, together we are strong. We shall work together as a family in mutual trust and responsibility." Toyota employs similar spurs. The company's weekly newsletter exhorts the workers to "challenge the highest peaks with our all-out efforts", and a mouth-filling corporate slogan contin­ually reminds them that "With ingenuity and good ideas, we can find a solu­tion to increased orders even beyond our present full capacity." And they do; in 1980, Toyota reduced its main plant's transmission-assembly time to a whirlwind 45 seconds, and in the course of three years had lowered the time it took to pack certain parts for shipment from an hour to 12 minutes. Meanwhile, arch-rival Nissan, the maker of Datsun lorries and cars, or­ganized worker volunteers into some 4,000 quality-control teams. One team offered to eliminate the time when ma­chines were inactive by staying after hours for the service and clean-up that normally had been taken out of the final period of the day's run. Other teams have engaged in production experi­ments: "First we work one machine with the left hand, then another with the right," a quality-control volunteer explained. "Then we put one machine in front and another behind and work them simultaneously." During 1980 alone, the volunteers chopped 13.6 bil­lion yen, then worth million, from Nissan's assembly costs, assisting the company towards profits the next year of 158.7 billion yen, or 0 million.
The devotion ofJapanese workers to their company's success extends to the nation's trade unions. The unions stage periodic rallies at which a great deal of noisy rhetoric is aired, and they do succeed in bargaining for higher wages. But in most corporations, the union's main function is to keep things calm, in case the ever-rising heat of production generates a labour explo­sion. As a former union leader phrased it, "The blue-bird of happiness does not dwell in the swamps of spite where the storms of struggle rage."

The Japanese, indeed, meet all their urban problems—the crowding, the pollution, the relentless bustle of the big cities—with a cheerfulness and an elaborate politeness that help to reduce the inevitable tensions of modern ur­ban life. They also survive these prob­lems and pressures through a special form of self-abnegation. The Japanese tend to view them­selves as members of a group, working towards group goals, rather than as individuals striving for personal ad­vancement. Indeed, the whole West­ern concept of struggling for individual freedom or recognition is anathema to the Japanese. The American hero is the cowboy, who stands alone against the sky, no man's servant. The Japanese revere their warriors of old, the samur­ai, who vowed lifelong allegiance to a noble master. The Western concept is summed up in an old saying, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." The comparable Japanese saying is, "The nail that sticks up gets pounded down." Japanese society's governing ethic is embodied in an all-but-untranslatable concept called on. It derives from Con­fucian social philosophy borrowed long ago from China, whose fundamen­tal precepts are mutual obligation and a respect for the natural hierarchy within relationships. The typical Japa­nese is most comfortable knowing where he or she stands in relation to
people above, below and on either side. When Japanese business people meet, they usually exchange business cards in a mutual status signal that governs the tenor of all their subsequent deal­ings. The white-collar worker derives pride and identity from carrying a com­pany briefcase or wearing a company badge. Japanese men and women, like all other human beings, harbour pri­vate ambitions, resentments and im­pulses to rebel, but they keep such feelings deep inside, in deference to the overriding primacy of the group. In a country so small and so densely packed, this sense of shared obligation and social duty is a national blessing and a life necessity. Otherwise, like creatures in an overpacked maze of a psychological experiment, the Japan­ese might erupt in violence. Instead, they take meticulous care to avoid any confrontation. When faced with an un­congenial suggestion, a Japanese will respond, "I fully understand your cor­dial proposition," or simply, "Let me think it over," rather than making ob­jections or saying, "No." The closest he will come to a negative may be a scratching of the head, accompanied by the extended syllable "Saaaah"— indicating that it will be hard to agree.

The Japanese white-collar worker—today universally called a sarariman, or "salaryman", in one of the many words that the Japanese have adopted from English since the war—often seeks re­lief from the tensions of the workplace, as do many of his counterparts in the West, by visiting a bar before going home. Tokyo has 10,000 modest water­ing holes that cater for after-work groups of salarymen intent on relaxa­tion and comradeship.
In lieu of alcohol, the work-frazzled young Japanese man may throw him­self into marathon rounds ofpachinko, a vertical pinball game. Or he may head off for a bout of hitting bucket after bucket of golf balls at a mechanized, multi-storey driving range, a pastime that can be as frantic as the work from which he is trying to unwind. In private, the Japanese forgo such frenetic pursuits, gaining satisfaction from common things and from humble, very personal pursuits such as garden­ing. This is a felicity derived from their ancient religion, Shinto, which holds that all natural things are holy. The sound of wind in a pine or the reflection of a flower petal in a pond's surface are real treasures to a Japanese. The people also enjoy intellectual pursuits. Thanks to the nation's excel­lent, awesomely demanding and univ­ersally attended school system—with 90 per cent of all boys and 91 per cent of girls graduating from high school—virtually all citizens, from the northern tip of Hokkaido to the last little islands south of Kyushu, can read. And they do, assiduously. Some 93 per cent of all Japanese take one of the nation's 125 daily news­papers. Tokyo's enormously influen­tial Asahi Shimbun and the rival Yomiuri Shimbun each claim daily circulations of more than 12 million, making them the world's two largest newspapers.