From the (e)Bookshelf: Bending Adversity
Sep. 23rd, 2014 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThat I doubt I was even aware of them at the time may just add that much odd interest to finding relics of the 1980s warning how Japan had figured out an altogether different approach to the great game of international relations and would buy up the world in the end. Things changed there, but after a while I suppose the new seeming assumption the country was now just this strange place off to the side, irrelevant to everything else, began to seem sort of overdone in its own way. When I saw a review in my newspaper's Sunday supplement of a book arguing that perhaps Japan wasn't quite so sunk in "decline" as everyone thinks, that got my attention enough for me to buy "Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival" as an e-book.
The book opens with the earthquake, tsunami, and followup meltdown that struck the north of Japan in March of 2011. (There, I have to keep reminding myself to fight back the thought "people were killed, ruined, evacuated, but I was inconvenienced," given the cruise I'd booked months before that had been intended to make several stops in the north of the country was rescheduled to go to South Korea and eastern Russia instead. I managed to talk myself down from cancelling the whole thing with the thought that even if the time I would spend in Japan was to be reduced from several days to one afternoon and evening, I could still at least say "I was there" and change idle, disinterested contemplation of "if someone stays an anime fan long enough, they wind up taking a trip to Japan" to trying that myself. In any case, in just happening to find a store in Kobe with a floor of licensed models in the few jetlagged hours between getting to the ship and it sailing, I don't think the experience quite managed to accomplish the stern possibility I'd considered beforehand of demonstrating the whole "drawings" angle was in fact a very minor part of the country, something only a handful of weirdos were interested in anyway.) There's both a sort of "if anything might shake Japan onto a new course, this might" suggestion and a connection or two to the idea its citizens might have already been taking greater initiative to do something about all of it themselves.
From there, the "on the spot" reporting changes to more of a history of Japan more or less from the time it re-engaged with the larger world in the nineteenth century. There's a lot of history to cover here and a firm reminder of just why the rest of Asia continues to have certain issues with the country, but also a suggestion that looked at in the context of Asia Japan doesn't seem quite as "different from everyone else." (That was a thought I did seem to have in the one day my trip spent in South Korea.) While there can be elements of "yes, but" in looking at the familiar modern narrative of "the bubble burst and that was that," there are interesting things there too. There's one suggestion made by someone interviewed in the book that Japan might yet show the rest of the world how to be comfortable without relentless economic growth, which might be both putting a brave face on things and at least worth thinking about.
The book closes as its author David Pilling returns to some of the ruined areas in the north to see first efforts at rebuilding and an afterword discussing some recent changes in the country's politics, some possibly bracing and some possibly troubling. While the true conclusion may yet have to be written, this take on what's happened is interesting.
The book opens with the earthquake, tsunami, and followup meltdown that struck the north of Japan in March of 2011. (There, I have to keep reminding myself to fight back the thought "people were killed, ruined, evacuated, but I was inconvenienced," given the cruise I'd booked months before that had been intended to make several stops in the north of the country was rescheduled to go to South Korea and eastern Russia instead. I managed to talk myself down from cancelling the whole thing with the thought that even if the time I would spend in Japan was to be reduced from several days to one afternoon and evening, I could still at least say "I was there" and change idle, disinterested contemplation of "if someone stays an anime fan long enough, they wind up taking a trip to Japan" to trying that myself. In any case, in just happening to find a store in Kobe with a floor of licensed models in the few jetlagged hours between getting to the ship and it sailing, I don't think the experience quite managed to accomplish the stern possibility I'd considered beforehand of demonstrating the whole "drawings" angle was in fact a very minor part of the country, something only a handful of weirdos were interested in anyway.) There's both a sort of "if anything might shake Japan onto a new course, this might" suggestion and a connection or two to the idea its citizens might have already been taking greater initiative to do something about all of it themselves.
From there, the "on the spot" reporting changes to more of a history of Japan more or less from the time it re-engaged with the larger world in the nineteenth century. There's a lot of history to cover here and a firm reminder of just why the rest of Asia continues to have certain issues with the country, but also a suggestion that looked at in the context of Asia Japan doesn't seem quite as "different from everyone else." (That was a thought I did seem to have in the one day my trip spent in South Korea.) While there can be elements of "yes, but" in looking at the familiar modern narrative of "the bubble burst and that was that," there are interesting things there too. There's one suggestion made by someone interviewed in the book that Japan might yet show the rest of the world how to be comfortable without relentless economic growth, which might be both putting a brave face on things and at least worth thinking about.
The book closes as its author David Pilling returns to some of the ruined areas in the north to see first efforts at rebuilding and an afterword discussing some recent changes in the country's politics, some possibly bracing and some possibly troubling. While the true conclusion may yet have to be written, this take on what's happened is interesting.