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Many Japanese fear that in part the educational system itself is to blame. It has produced marvels of mass literacy (nearly 100%), but also of mass conformity. It rewards dogged rote learning, but not the kind of daring involved in making creative and unorthodox intellectual connections. "Every Japanese child," says one writer, "has a kind of invisible wire rack inserted into its body and mind," like flowers in an arrangement, like a bonsai tree. The Japanese examination system subjects the young to purgatories of cramming. It is one more symptom of a densely determined and obligated life, and some of the young these days are escaping into a sort of minor league anarchy.
At Tokyo's Yoyogi Park every Sunday, groups of momentarily rebellious adolescents come to perform a strange exhibition. They grease their hair into ducktails and put on black pegged pants and leather jackets, or else polka-dot crinoline skirts, and they group around tape-deck machines and dance to rock 'n' roll: boys with boys, girls with girls. In Japan it is always the group, even in rebellion. The spectacle is strangely sweet and sad.
The fascination of the young for things American is wistful and sometimes weirdly askew. But it reflects a larger cross-cultural longing. In some ways, America and Japan are interesting commentaries on each other. The Japanese affinity for Americans represents in part the simple attraction of opposites. The Japanese live an intricate and compact life—119 million of them crowded onto islands the size of Montana. No new blood, or little, has entered the Japanese gene pool for 1,200 years. Americans are a sprawlingly expansive people whose years. Americans are a sprawlingly expansive people whose chromosomes are a genetic brawl, an ingathering from all the tribes of the world. America is an intellectual dream, a reverie of the Enlightenment. The American civic principle is freedom and equality. The Japanese civic logic is mutual obligation, hierarchy, and the overriding primacy of the group. Japan is governed by on, by an almost infinitely complicated network of responsibility and debt and reciprocity: what each Japanese owes every other, and what each owes the entire group. America built a society around the idea that all fates are almost indefinitely reversible, around the idea of moving on, of clearing new land, changing jobs, changing roles, changing identities. The Japanese did not have new frontiers to run to; fates and roles have always seemed more settled there.
The Japanese think of Americans as far-ranging hunters, individualists, carnivores. They think of themselves as wet-rice farmers, rooted for many centuries in the same corner of the same prefecture. Perhaps each culture is wistful for the virtues and attractions of the other. Japan has, in any case, none of that American sense of immense, liberating, heartbreaking distances; Japan is put together like a watchwork, with cunning economy. The small, busy factories hum along flush against the rice fields, with apartment buildings jammed up against the other side. Japan is a very intimate country, with all of the rules and dangers of intimacy. It has been said that the Japanese have cultivated their silences and intuitive communication because they are a people with small rooms and paper walls.