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Pride and Chuffedness in Japan

[POSTSCRIPT, 6th March 2009. The subject of this post - the painful sensitivity of Japan to its treatment by Barack Obama - has been cast in ironic relief by Gordon Brown's visit to Washington which has revealed (well, well, well) - the agonised sensitivity of Britain to its treatment by Barack Obama. For a fine summnary, of British humiliation over the decades, see my colleague Alice Miles's piece here.]

One of the touching, and sometimes disturbing, things about living in Japan is the extent to which people here experience a sense of personal responsibility for things - which, by my dry, individualistic, Western standards - they deserve no credit or blame either way.

I'm thinking of those scenes after the arrest of a murderer/fraud/arsonist where the malefactor's parents, siblings and even employer bow deeply before the cameras and apologise for his deeds - as if it was all their fault. I have the same kind of reaction when people of any race express "pride" in being an American or Yorkshireman, for example, or in China's Olympic medal success, or in the number of Oscars won by British films. In what sense (I always want to ask) do you deserve credit for states of affairs in which you played no personal part whatsoever? I might feel lucky to be a true-born half-Welshman, but as for being proud - well, one might as well take pride in being being right-handed, or bipedal, or in giving birth to live young, rather than incubating them from eggs.

In Japan, this is all tied up with an unusually pronounced concern about how the rest of the world views the mother country, and a baffled suspicion that We Japanese don't quite get the way They all regard Us. Hence the equal delight and surprise when a Japanese wins a Nobel Prize (extra editions of the newspapers, awards from the Emperor) - or, as this week, an Oscar. If a British cabinet minister drunkenly disgraced himself in public, there would be as much hilarity as disgust - and very few people would experience a sense of personal shame. But when Shoichi Nakagawa got publicly blotto the other week, there was a feeling that, rather than just the government or the political class, all Japanese were somehow diminished by it (headline in the Asahi: 'Japan is more embarrassed than Nakagawa').

Which brings me to the question: why is Japan so flipping chuffed about its recent diplomatic interactions with the United States?

The Cost of Everything

Wednesday's paper contained my piece about an experience, familar in Japan, which seems to be about to impose itself upon Britain: living with deflation.

One reader complains that I must have got it all wrong - on a visit to Japan in December, Peter of Phuket reports, everything was "horrendously expense". This is a natural misunderstanding. For, while the cost of living for Japanese has unquestionably remained very stable, for short term visitors, and those of us long-termers who are paid in sterling, it depends not on inflation or deflation, but on the foreign exchange rate.

If you spend yen purchased with pounds then you are the slave of an exchange rate which changes day by day. When the British currency is strong, you get lots of yen for each of your pounds, and Japan is cheap. When the pound is weak, the opposite is the case.

Since the financial crisis last autumn, the pound has been weak. Not just a little tired, or even rather exhausted, but completely shagged out and barely able to open its lips and croak for help. Against the yen it is lower than it has been for thirty years. For those of us spending sterling, the effect is dramatic.

In 2007 one pound bought ¥235 (on average - some of the time it was higher still). As of this writing, according to XE.com, it is worth ¥133 yen (and the rate actually offered by a credit card company or high street bank is worse still). In other words the pound is worth 57 per cent of what it used to be. Which is to say that anyone paid in pounds has experienced a 43 per cent pay cut.

I don't like to whinge, but this kind of thing really concentrates the mind. A few examples:

Under the influence

Shoichi Nakagawa's display of public drunkenness (sorry, I mean public intoxication with "cough medicine") is one of the most extraordinary self-humiliations by an international statesman I can recall. You have to go back to the last days of Boris Yeltsin to find a similar spectacle (even the former leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy, didn't make such a fool of himself). It is tempting to chuckle off the whole thing as just one of those sillinesses that foreign politicians get up to every now and then. But the more I think about it, the more serious and appalling it comes to seem, and in so many different ways, far beyond the usual run of "gaffes" perpetrated from time to time by Japanese leaders.

Watch the video of Mr Nakagawa's appearance, and read Leo's account of it here.

At the most obvious level, it is evidence of unforgivably poor judgement on the part of everyone concerned. Mr Nakagawa's own irresponsibility hardly needs to be spelled out. He is in charge of the world's second biggest economy at a time of utmost crisis. His decisions affect the livelihoods of hundreds of millions, not only in Japan, but in all the other countries with which its economy is interlocked. As a member of the cabinet his responsibilities don't end with financial matters. If Japan has to respond to a major earthquake, a terrorist attack, or go to war, Mr Nakagawa will be in the room when the plans are made. On Saturday night (and I am unconvinced that it was the only occasion), he was unfit to drive, let alone lead.

Even more alarming than his obvious intoxication (and MPs from the opposition Democratic Party have publicly rejected the suggestion that he was rendered thus by just a "taste" of wine) was his apparent conviction that he could get away with it. He really must have thought that no one would notice. Being drunk off duty in one's own time is one thing, being drunk on duty is another, but Mr Nakagawa on Sunday appeared to be in an even more extreme category: so drunk that he don't know he was drunk.

Is this arrogance? Or naivety? Or alcoholism? Whatever the answer, it should not be allowed to mix with that degree of power.

The love that dares to squeak its name

Happy Valentine's Day from Tokyo.

My own small attempt to stand against the tsunami of overpriced chocolate, unnecessary wrapping paper and merciless commercialism is below, a piece which also appears in this morning's paper here.

I had always assumed that Japan had the most nauseating Valentine's Day in the world. In researching this story, I learned that in South Korea it is far, far worse. They have taken Valentine's Day and White Day and added half a dozen more spurious Days of their own.

There was interesting sight on Omotesando Avenue this morning, just in front of Gap at the crossing with Meiji Dori, which I cack handedly photographed with my phone.

Apologies for the quality of this image. It shows a young man holding up a sign which reads in Japanese Give me chocolate. On his T-shirt, almost invisible in this picture, ate the English words No Wari.

Valentine's Day in Japan being the day when fanciable young chaps receive choco from their sweet hearts, I take him to be one of the Himote, the anti-Valentine's movement whom I describe below, engaged in a sarcastic act of satrical performance art.

Or perhaps he just had no girlfriend. And no chocolate. I hope he found some. None of the many, many passers-by paid him the least attention. But, true to his T-shirt slogan, it didn't seem to wari him at all.

Can an Angel save a Zombie?

Taro Aso has been in bother almost since he became Japan's prime minister but in 2009, by general agreement, he has passed the point of no return. In an opinion poll in yesterday's Yomiuri, he registered an approval rating of below 20 per cent (other polls had him sink below that threshold last month.) This, according to the punditerati, is unrecoverable. In Japanese political terms Mr Aso is Captain Scott, sitting in his snowbound tent, waiting for the blizzard to overwhelm him. He is not even a Lame Duck; he is an Undead Duck. The mirrors in the Prime Minister's Residence don't reflect him anymore; at official banquets, the whiff of garlic sends him gibbering from the room.

This is the Tokyo consensus and, as recently as a few days ago, I was espousing it myself. But since then I've started to wonder. The fact remains that Mr Aso doesn't have to call an election, which at present would be completely unwinnable, until September this year. September is seven months away - and a lot can hapen in seven months. Isn't that, after all, the the whole point about the Undead? They are not dead yet.