Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival by David Pilling Page B

tradition was quintessentially modern ideology.’ 17
    After the war, when the Japanese traded in emperor worship for the ‘cult of gross domestic product’, new notions of what it was to be Japanese arose. Noriko Hama, a professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto, a delightfully brusque iconoclast, disputes the common notion that there was anything fundamentally ‘Japanese’ about Japan’s post-war economic model. At the turn of the twentieth century, she says, Japan practised an energetic, cut-throat form of capitalism that had little to do with the communitarian values later put forward as the secret of its economic miracle. According to Hama, some post-war arrangements, such as lifetime employment and seniority pay, which promotes people according to age not ability, were practical responses to demographics and the need to keep a manufacturing industry supplied with labour. They did not reflect any underlying Japanese proclivity for a gentler form of capitalism. As growth has slowed and society aged, many of the post-war arrangements once hailed as essentially Japanese are fast evaporating. By some measures – for example in the high percentage of casual labour – Japan now has a more flexiblelabour force than many western countries. For some, the lifetime employment system and seniority pay had been a modern version of Fujiwara’s
bushido
sensibilities. If that really is the essence of Japan, then such essence is fast vanishing, like drops of ink in water.
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    Contrary to the views of essentialists, cultures are not immutable. Like language they evolve and adapt, though they may take generations to do so. To seek to explain the history of a country – let alone its future – on the basis of supposedly fixed national characteristics is to succumb to a determinist view of the world. We should challenge some of the assumptions that give rise to such opinions.
    The starting point is the belief that island Japan is a racially homogenous society. But where do Japanese people actually come from? There were two distinct phases. The first people who came to the islands probably walked there over land bridges that connected the Japanese islands to the continent during the low sea levels of the Ice Age. The existence of stone tools suggests humans may have arrived, probably from both the northeast and southwest, some half a million years ago. By about 12,000 years ago, shortly after the glaciers had melted all over the world, these hunter-gatherers were thriving. 18 These so-called Jomon people were making the oldest examples of pottery yet discovered. They lived not unlike the Native Americans of the northwest and had a varied diet. They ate nuts, berries and seeds. They harpooned tuna, killed porpoises and seals on the beaches and fished with nets and hooks carved from deer antlers. There was little sign of hierarchy.
    But the Jomon lifestyle, which remained largely unchanged for some 10,000 years, underwent a radical transformation around 400 BC . At that time, the inhabitants of Japan began to use iron tools and to produce rice in paddies with sophisticated irrigation systems. These people, since named Yayoi, adopted customs previously unknown to Japan. They wove, used bronze objects, glass beads and rice storage pits. They buried the remains of their dead in jars. Who were they? The evidence of geneticists and archaeologists points to an influx of Koreans, a theory resisted by some Japanese scholars. They could have come from the peninsula through mass migration, overwhelming the Jomon population. Alternatively, they may have arrived in far fewernumbers, but their superior agricultural techniques would have meant that, over time, their population grew much faster than the Jomon people. Either way, the new Yayoi lifestyle spread rapidly from the southern island of Kyushu, where it first took hold, to Shikoku and then up the spine of Honshu. It did not reach the much colder island of Hokkaido. The