Japan leads world in a number of ways ... but not all good

Japan Today

23-06-2025

By Michael Hoffman
'Japan as number one' – you'd think we were back in the 1980s. Japan entered that decade the world's third largest economy; by 1988 it was second largest; would it supplant the U.S. and be first? A matter of time, thought many Japanese and more than a few Americans – Japanese with pride, Americans with varying degrees and combinations of fear, mistrust, envy, admiration and occasional spasms of outright loathing.
A generation earlier Japan had been rubble; now the nation that had defeated it was itself facing defeat. It was a challenging and tense moment.
It passed. Japan's bubble burst, America's fortunes revived, and 40 years later Japan finds itself an aging, sagging, it's not too much to say doddering, has-been. Number one? Number four, economically speaking, and if a second economic miracle is on the horizon, it needs a visionary to see it.
But there's more to a nation's life than its economy, and Shukan Gendai (June 23) boldly declares, 'The Japanese are number one in the world' – in a number of ways, not all of them good but that's not the point; distinctiveness is, and give Japan its due: after a century and a half of 'modernization,' 'Westernization' and various other forms of trashing its own past and large swaths of its native culture, Japan remains Japan – which is to say distinctive, which is to say unique – number one, if you choose to put it that way.
To start, as Shukan Gendai does, with the obvious: it's the world's longest-living nation, one of the safest, arguably one of the cleanest, and possibly the trimmest, only 25 percent of its population being overweight as against 70 percent of Americans and just over half of Europeans.
Thank rice for that, says the magazine – a point to which we'll return in a moment. Another 'number one' leaps off the page at us: Japan is the nation most protective of nature. Really? That too invites a pause for reflection. Let's consider sex in the meantime. Japanese couples are 'the world's most sexless.' Marital sex, broadly viewed, is tepid, occurring on average 45 times a year, according to a global survey by the condom-maker Durex. What would Greeks think of that? They're the world leaders at 164 times a year, roughly as far above the world average (103 times) as the Japanese are below it. Not surprisingly, Japanese seem to be the world's least satisfied with their marriages and their romantic lives in general, 24 percent declaring themselves satisfied versus the world average of 44 percent.
But then there's this, proof if any were needed of the old silver-lining-behind-every-cloud adage. Unerotic and unsatisfactory Japanese marriages may be once the novelty wears off, but there are grounds – at least Shukan Gendai finds some – for declaring them possibly the world's most harmonious. The evidence? Marriage counselors claim more than half their clients – 53 percent – consult them as couples rather than as individuals. Husband and wife visit the marriage counselor together, and togetherness… well, is its own reward.
Japan is said to be the least religious of nations. Not so, says Shukan Gendai. On the contrary, it leads the world in belief in 'spiritual entities' – not God in the monotheistic sense, or gods in the classical Greek or Roman mode, but real nonetheless, to believers, (or better to say, if 'belief' is too forceful a word for what is going on here, to those breathing the air that nurtures those spirits who are no less real and possibly more so for being, most of them, nameless, formless, undefinable; impossible, in short, to pin down in the way the West likes to pin down its existent beings and things.)
Japan is different, roots of the difference going back to ancient Shinto and its 'myriad gods' – kami in Japanese, a word which 'God' or 'gods' translates most inadequately; 'spirit' or 'spirits' conveys their amorphousness better.
Ambiguity, a Western vice, is a Japanese virtue; Japan may be the world's most ambiguous nation. So much the better if it is, and better off it may well be for rejecting 'the West's tendency to call everything either black or white.' In philosophy it's known as the Law of the Excluded Middle: either a proposition is true, or its negation is true. A statement is either true or false, a being either existent or non.
Why impoverish life by rejecting contradiction? Japan embraces it and is the richer thereby.
Kami were (still are, if Shukan Gendai sees true) everywhere; they did everything; not by accident was this 'the land of the gods.' Kami were 'birds, beasts, trees, plants, seas, mountains and so forth,' wrote the early-modern Shintoist Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801); human too, sometimes. They came and they went; here today, they might be gone tomorrow; amorphous yes, but 'all things in this world, such as the changing of the seasons, the falling of the rain and the gusting of the wind, as well as the various good and bad things that happen to countries and people, all are entirely the august works of the gods,' wrote Norinaga; there were some 'that shone with the luster of fireflies and evil kami that buzzed like flies,' says the 8th-century chronicle 'Nihon Shoki.'
That's part of the heritage Japan rejected as it modernized – maybe not completely. Shukan Gendai at any rate finds traces of it in the Japanese character even today. And on that note we can return to rice and nature.
Rice traditionally was sacred; so was nature. The one was more than food, the other more than natural. It was (they were) supernatural, alive in ways lost to us. What we gained in mastery and abundance we lost in sacredness. The gods fled – or perhaps didn't, not all of them, not entirely; they drop by from time to time to see how we're doing, sometimes declaring themselves, more often not. Individuals never fully escape their childhood, nor nations their past. The facts remain: rice consumption has declined steadily since the 1960s, lagging now behind bread as a breakfast choice, and as for nature, the Japanese can respond as they like to surveys measuring their reverence for it, the visual evidence is plain: they reverence concrete more.
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