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A certain quality of the American '50s clings to Japan now, the '50s refracted through the Japanese glass. Terms like conformity recur. The problems of youth violence recall the American Blackboard Jungle. But some of the behavior seems essentially innocent. If Japan is afflicted by its new worries, it remains an extraordinarily successful society by almost every measure. The social muscle tone is firm, the civic climate earnest and naive. If it is true that the Japanese are somehow spiritually located now in the American '50s, are they doomed to endure the sequel, the cultural turmoil that arrived in the American '60s? The Japanese are conscious of the possibility. When they look at what America and Western Europe have done with their economic maturity, they see as much to avoid as to emulate. They see considerable failure: economic, social and moral.
What both maddens and fascinates Americans about the Japanese success is the mystique of it. A shelf of dopesters' literature has been published to explain the Japanese phenomenon. Some is quite discerning, more of it is nonsense. The latter treats the Japanese success as a sort of mystical trick, a performance of managerial jujitsu. A concealed racist premise of these analyses is that—what's this?—a colony of ants has taught itself to waltz. The wonder is not that they do it well, but that they do it at all.
Yet the Japanese are not entirely unhappy about this myth-mongering. It keeps the world at a necessary psychological distance. It also permits a subtle form of cultural intimidation. Mystique has the effect of allowing Japanese business negotiators, for example, to play by Japanese rules, on the turf of Japanese psychology. The Japanese do not like to be understood too easily. It is possible that they do not like to be understood at all. Perhaps they have been studying Stonewall Jackson, who once instructed: "Always mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy, if possible."
Foreigners contemplating the Japanese tend to fall into two schools of perception: there are the elaborationists and the simplists. The elaborationists see an infinitely subtle and refined and complex people whose minds and customs are deeply rooted, reaching back centuries through a thousand lamina tions in time. Most Japanese are elaborationists about Japan. It is part of their cultural self-defense.
The simplists see Japan as a society that is vivid, vibrant and depthless. The Japanese, say the simplists, are a skitteringly nervous, suggestible and insecure people, quick (too quick) to change, given to adopting fads from abroad and Japanizing them. A facile people, living in the present and the immediate future, a sharp trading race. The truth, almost surely, is an amalgamation of the two perceptions. That is only fitting. Japan is a masterpiece of contradictions, of East and West, of exquisite politesse and oafish rudeness, of a certain lacquered arrogance combined with a strange insecurity in the presence of things foreign.