CONTENTS
Preface
1. From Japan as “Number One” to the Lost Decades
2. Growth Reconsidered
3. The Regime as a Concept
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4. Ordinary Virtues
5. The Book of Sushi
6. The Artisanal Ethos in Japan: The Larger Context
7. The Book of Bathing
8. Ikigai : Reasons for Living
Postface
John Lie. 8. Ikigai.
Reasons for Living.
The polymath Hashimoto Osamu, born in 1947 and therefore a member of the postwar dankai generation, recalls his upbringing in Suginami Ward in west central Tokyo. His grandparents, from a modest background, lived in a house on a lot larger than 3,500 square feet. Today that would be a gargantuan estate. Half the lot was a vegetable garden, with potato flowers, strawberries, and corn. But this paradise vanished after Hashimoto and his parents moved in with his grandparents. First an expansion of the house eliminated the garden. Then Hashimoto’s father cut down the chestnut and fig trees to build a garage. The neighborhood finally disappeared altogether in the 1960s, when construction companies bulldozed small shops and independent houses and replaced them with paved roads and high-rise apartment buildings. In retrospect, Hashimoto realizes, he was happy at his grandparents’ house in the time before their neighborhood vanished, and he believes that the era of rapid economic growth actually lowered the quality of life.¹
It would be easy to make light of Hashimoto’s idyllic pastoral. After all, many people look back fondly on childhood. And aren’t Hashimoto’s fellow baby boomers swimming in collective nostalgia for the period of rapid economic growth? But this is precisely where Hashimoto differs—he is not celebrating economic growth but lamenting the destruction it wrought. The per capita GDP of Japan is clearly higher now than it was fifty years ago, but how can we be sure that the quality of life has also gone up? Are high-rise apartment buildings, with their overlapping and redundant security systems in what is perhaps one of the safest cities in the world, really an improvement over one- or two-story houses with yards and gardens? Air conditioning has brought relief from heat and humidity, and housing built from concrete and glass keeps pesky mosquitos and moths out (though pesticides and the built environment have reduced their numbers). But what about the environmental and energy burdens? Have paved roads made up in convenience for what they replaced—entire neighborhoods that were dismissed as vacant lots? Is it better to shop in a clean, well-lighted supermarket or in a neighborhood grocery store? Is it better to grow one’s own vegetables and fruits, with all the dirt and worms that come with them? The logic of growth says, “One more, then another,” and in contemporary Tokyo there’s no end in sight to the graying of the built environment. The achievement of affluence—defined by GDP figures or by the proliferation of glass-and-concrete skyscrapers—may or may not mean a good or better life.
But all is not lost. The artisanal ethos survives, as do ordinary virtues. Many Japanese people enjoy rest and relaxation, even idleness, and not just by way of onsen travel. Meaning and purpose can be found and cultivated in leisure activity. The sustainable society is ludic. And what underlies it is the search for ikigai—for meaning, for reasons to live—reasons that in turn sustain the artisanal ethos and ordinary virtues.
RELIGION AND ITS DEMISE.
For many human beings, the whole issue of reasons for living is moot. The self-evident character of the survival instinct—the will to live—requires no extended commentary, especially when food and security are of utmost concern. Yet the arrival of affluence, or at least of the potential for rest and reflection, and the lengthening of the life-span provoke incessant and irrepressible questions about the meaning of life, if not life in general, then surely life in this or that particular. Is my life worth living? Or, as the more usual formulation has it, is my life meaningful and significant? Basic curiosity about life’s meaning (not as a semantic question) is grist for the philosophical mill everywhere, and it evokes a number of generic responses. The most common of these is religion.
The Meiji regime propounded State Shintō, with the emperor at the apex, as the wellspring of spiritual and secular authority and answers.² The emperor system was the state-sanctioned ideology that turned Japan—and, over time, the Japanese empire—into the family-state, with the emperor as the ultimate patriarch and his subjects as his children.³
The emperor ruled from his appointed place in a singular lineage that had begun with the birth of Japan, as described in the oldest extant Japanese text, Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), compiled from oral tradition in 712. Thus the purpose of State Shintō and the emperor system was to eliminate, or control and contain, competing religious or spiritual authorities (including, among others, animism, Buddhism, and Christianity) as well as folk rituals and practices.⁴ In other words, the Meiji regime established a national belief system that sacralized political rule and instituted ideological control (and during the prewar regime, the fanatical articulation of this system became a proto-totalitarian war effort). Now every Japanese person had, in theory, all the answers to life’s basic questions about meaning and identity.
Needless to say, reality is much more complex and confusing. Not everyone had unquestioning faith in the emperor system or State Shintō. The deviants included Marxists and adherents of other faiths, and if many of them followed the dictates from above, especially during the final years of the Pacific War, they did so without much enthusiasm or apodictic certainty.⁵ Be that as it may, there was one focal point in modern Japanese life before 1945: the sacrosanct character of the emperor and the divine mission of the modern Japanese nation. This is to say that the Meiji regime provided a belief system, however creaky, and a source of both social solidarity and personal identity.
After the end of World War II, the extensive apparatus of the emperor system, including State Shintō, was either disestablished or disrupted. Almost overnight, the imperial project lay in ruins, and the central religious institution was shattered (though, again, I would not deny that there were some true believers and stragglers). Postwar Japan was now a nation without a national religion, a country bereft of a dominant belief system or a centralized religious institution. By the 1960s, to the extent that State Shintō survived at all, it was primarily as an object of opprobrium, criticized with equal intensity by pro-American politicians and anti-American student radicals.⁶ Except on New Year’s Day and some other special occasions, most people seemed to ignore Shintōism, though some right-wingers did rally around it in an effort to generate a new nationalist movement.⁷
After the war, a certain nullity threatened to rule the spiritual life of Japan. The Communist Party proffered a secular religion, but the party never came close to seizing power and, in any event, it maintained a secular face. Democratic and leftist intellectuals appeared to have become the unacknowledged legislators of postwar Japan, but they too never came close to assuming the mantle of prophets and pastors on behalf of the Western ideology of progress, democracy, and science. Moreover, their enthusiasm was decidedly tepid by comparison with the power and glory of the prewar emperor system, which they scorned after the fact. If some had been willing to give their lives for their country before 1945, almost no one now seemed ready to die for the sake of democracy or science.
Thus postwar Japan, with nothing like a national religion, remained staunchly secular. The end of the Meiji regime seems to have pulverized not just the emperor system but all adherence to any kind of transcendental belief system. As Joseph Kitagawa, a leading student of Japanese religious history, observed in the 1960s, “One of the basic problems of Japan is the rootlessness of the Japanese people. . . . The tragedy of postwar Japan is that the people have lost [any] fundamental religious orientation.”⁸
Surveys conducted since the 1950s have revealed that perhaps only 33 percent of the population claims any type of religious affiliation, and much Japanese religiosity is tepid in any case, which means that Japan is one of the most secular societies in the world.⁹ As Yamaori Tetsuo characterizes the postwar Japanese, they maintain a “nebulous atheism” as their central belief system.¹⁰ Adding to the sense of Japan’s being a predominantly atheist country is the fact that religion is a private matter for the Japanese.¹¹ Nevertheless, it would be problematic to call Japan a strictly secular, much less atheist, society. For one thing, there are visible populations of Shintōists, Buddhists, and Christians, along with various new religious groups.¹² For another, some argue that the real religion of Japan is the so-called Japanese Religion, that is, belief in Japaneseness.¹³ Even so, it remains true that, apart from a small minority, Japanese people do not look to organized religion or formal belief systems to find meaning in life.¹⁴
ROMANTIC PASSION, TAMED AND TEPID.
Especially in the modern West, the individual, emancipated from such ascriptive ties as the family, the community, and the faith into which he was born, seeks life’s fulfillment in romantic love. Indeed, there are few private passions as turbulent or as celebrated.¹⁵ In contemporary Japan, however, the abatement of ambition (see chapter 4) has its correlate in the sphere of intimate interpersonal relationships. That is, the tepid nihilism of everyday life seems to have dethroned romantic love in favor of ordinary feelings, however important interpersonal relationships continue to be. This disenchantment with grand passions has also diminished expectations with respect to intimate life. It was not always this way. The people of Tokugawa Japan were no strangers to sexual and romantic longing. But, given the predominance of arranged marriages among the samurai and the landlords, and the proscription on interstatus unions, depictions of romantic love in popular culture tended to focus on the forbidden and the transgressive (for example, an extramarital liaison between a patron and a courtesan that ends in double suicide). Such depictions contained little psychology. Death was the almost inevitable outcome of passionate hearts beating against an inflexible social structure.¹⁶
After the Meiji Restoration, despite the era’s puritanical mind-set, modern Japanese people avidly consumed Western cultural imports that idealized romantic love, from Romantic poetry to love songs.¹⁷ By the postwar period, in the wake of the prewar regulation of private emotions, many young urbanites were inclined to express their feelings by way of that most common phrase heard in popular music, “I love you,” using a Japanese rendition of the English-language utterance if not the Japanese equivalent (aishiteru) or its permutations. The phenomenal popularity of the radio drama Kimi no na wa (Your name), later made into a three-part film series, featured two lovers who, over and over, barely missed meeting each other.¹⁸ Somewhere, somehow, there surely would be someone—a true love. Sports manga dominated in the 1960s and 1970s, but manga for girls and boys alike featured tales of great passion, often between star-crossed lovers. The characters in these stories knew whom they loved and hated, and, as un-Japanese as this may have seemed, they expressed their loves and hatreds, if only via confessional missives. Ai to Makoto (Ai and Makoto) recounts the romantic passion of Ai, a bourgeois lady in the making, and Makoto, a poor delinquent. Everything is straightforward—her name means “love,” his means “sincerity.” Makoto tells Ai, “I would die for you!” The sheer number of obstacles thrown in the lovers’ path recalls the impediments of Wuthering Heights.¹⁹ In a more philosophical and literary vein, Fukunaga Takehiko’s 1956 novel, Ai no kokoromi (An attempt at love), captures the postwar idealization of romantic love: from existential loneliness, we strive to pass through and realize the divine mystery of romantic love, of love as burning passion and ultimate spiritual encounter.²⁰ Eurocentric though Fukunaga may have been, his exaltation of romantic love was not uncommon for a modern Japanese writer. Indeed, in the immediate postwar decades, Fukunaga’s existentialist ruminations on romantic love were anything but unique. In 1963, Ai to shi wo mitsumete (Facing love and death) became a phenomenal best seller, and in 1964 it was made into an equally popular television program.²¹ Based on some four hundred letters between its two authors, which were written and exchanged when they were both university students and while the female protagonist was hospitalized with a terminal illness, Ai to shi wo mitsumete ends with her death, but not before she loses half her face to a botched operation. Watching the television adaptation is one of my earliest memories; grisly though the experience was, Ai to shi wo mitsumete is a testament to the ideal of jun’ai (pure love), beyond disfigurement and the grave. Clearly, love is not for the faint of heart.²²
By the 1980s, the dominant tenor of romantic relationships had become one of yūjū fudan (indecision). Popular manga like Tonda kappuru (The jumping couple) and Mezon Ikkoku (Maison Ikkoku) depicted male protagonists who were decidedly indecisive.²³ In both works, a young man cannot choose between two young women, and the arc of the narrative swings back and forth as he is unable to decide or commit himself. There is passionate intensity but also Hamlet-like deliberation: Whom should I be with? Whom do I love? These protagonists are a universe away from the violence-loving delinquent Makoto, capable of declaring his willingness to die for his love. In the most popular romance of 1990, Tokyo rabusutōrī (Tokyo love story), there is a girl who can express her love openly, but once again there is a boy who cannot make up his mind, much less express his feelings.²⁴
The life of indecision took a gentler turn in the post-Bubble decades. No longer were there loud proclamations of love. Now there was only a whispered “Sukidesu” (“I like you”). Needless to say, this semantic drift may warrant translating the language of like (suki) as a declaration of love (ai). Regardless, the tepid expression of romantic passion came to mark the outer limit of what was permissible, or imaginable.
A casual foreign observer might take the Japanese for a people so taciturn that a narrow range of romantic expression should be expected. Yet Japanese culture is drenched with tears and emotion about falling in, falling out, and even staying in passionate, erotic love. You’ve got to hide your love away, but it’s all over the place. Sōseki Natsume, that colossus of modern Japanese literature, frequently holds forth on love. For example, the elder brother in Kōjin (The Wayfarer), has this to say: “What’s truly sacred is not the relationship between husband and wife, created by human beings, but romantic love, concocted by nature. . . . And so it’s not wrong to say that someone who subscribes to morality is a temporary winner, but a permanent loser. And someone who follows nature is a temporary loser, but a permanent winner.”²⁵ To take another example, in Natsume’s Sorekara (And Then), a male character, Daisuke, declares his love to a married woman, Michiyo. At first Michiyo calls Daisuke’s declaration “cruel,” but in time she decides to pursue an extramarital relationship with him, even unto death: “If you say die, I’ll die. . . . I don’t care when I get killed.”²⁶ The theme of Liebestod is not just for a Romeo and a Juliet who accidentally die in the throes of young love, or even for a Werther who shoots himself because of unrequited
love—though I hasten to add that both Shakespeare’s famous drama and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) were staples for the modern Japanese reading public. Rather, the course of modern Japanese love has often run to murder-suicide or to shinjū (double suicide). Thwarted love ending in double suicide is of course far from unique to Japan—consider only the 1889 Mayerling incident or its near contemporary, Tchaikovsky’s 1876 ballet Swan Lake. But shinjū, both in abstract rhetoric and in concrete action, has long been a major trope in the humid, sticky world of Japanese passion, with all its erotic vexations and outbursts. Western-style romantic love was yet another import, but it would be egregiously condescending to claim that premodern and modern Japanese people had not already been suffering almost all the sorrows and pangs, the exaltations and ecstasies, of romantic love.²⁷ If they were not entirely clear on the concept, they were not necessarily innocent of its substance.
By contrast, Japanese lovers in the twenty-first century seem sober and lacking in ardor. After 1997, the year that marked the publication of Watanabe Jun’ichi’s best-selling novel Shitsurakuen (A lost paradise) and the release of the film based on the novel, it has been difficult to find any major manifestations of Liebestod in Japanese culture.²⁸ Even in 1997, Watanabe, then in his sixties, seemed to appeal almost exclusively to his contemporaries and elders. Younger audiences were perplexed by the success of the novel and the film and regarded both as entertainments for ojisan (middle-aged men). For most Japanese people of the post-Bubble era, the coupling of love and death is unimaginable. For them, passion has largely been tamed, and love has become like. As Louise Bogan puts it, “What the wise doubt, the fool believes— / Who is it, then, that love deceives?”²⁹ Perhaps the best-known work of romantic love in contemporary Japanese literature—Haruki Murakami’s Norway no mori (Norwegian Wood), published in the same year as Watanabe’s Shitsurakuen—announces itself as a “100 percent romantic-love novel.”³⁰ The male protagonist, Watanabe (a common Japanese surname), is kind and gentle, ever solicitous. He seeks a relationship based on gender equality and is all but devoid of old-fashioned patriarchal attitudes and macho behavior. The novel is not without its carnal moments, but the climactic sex scene leaves Watanabe’s love, Naoko, unmoved. In the ups and downs of his romance, Watanabe is taciturn, with almost no wild swings of emotion. To be willing to die for one’s love is one thing, but the kinder, gentler version of love seems to smother, even come close to extinguishing, romance and passion. The popularity of Norway no mori is emblematic of contemporary Japanese norms regarding romantic love. Or take Okazaki Kyōko’s Ribāsuejji (River’s Edge), in which every romantic longing is thwarted and the only sustained relationship is between the young female protagonist and her gay male friend, a relationship transacted primarily through their looking at an abandoned human body on the banks of a river.³¹ There is death, but there’s no love. The post-Bubble Japanese, disenchanted with fairy tales, are reluctant to follow the palpitations of the heart or to set out over the terra incognita of an emotional whirlwind. Sobriety rules. It’s as if everyone can see the final stages of love—disenchantment and disbelief—and know that there is no transcendence.
Perhaps the most popular love story in the late 2010s was Nigeru wa haji daga yaku ni tatsu (We Got Married as a Job). Like so many other popular movies and television shows, it was originally a manga.³² Thirty-six-year-old Tsuzaki Hiramasa, an engineer and a self-identified professional single man, is still a virgin. He’s a softer version of an otaku (a geek or nerd). He needs someone to cook and clean for him, and Moriyama Mikuri applies for the job. Over time, their employer-employee relationship becomes a contractual marriage, an extension of their cash-basis connection into a long-term employment agreement. Because the story follows the conventions of romantic comedy, the two eventually develop a romantic attachment to each other, and the story concludes with substantive fulfillment of what had been their formal, empty contractual matrimony. There were feelings and passion somewhere, but they blossomed from the cold logic of the pair’s contract, as if the two had been parties to an arranged marriage.
At the same time, women writers were abandoning the heteronormative world of patriarchal romantic love. Matsuura Rieko explores lesbian relationships and experimental sexual acts in Nachuraru ūman (Natural woman), which seems downright conventional next to her subsequent Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (The training period of the big-toe P), in which the female protagonist’s big toe opens up new possibilities by metamorphosing into a penis.³³ And in Matsuura’s Kenshin (Dog body), a woman becomes a dog. A dog was the love object in Tawada Yōko’s earlier Inumukoiri (Dog marriage).³⁴ Mizumura Minae’s Honkaku shōsetsu (True novel), loosely based on Wuthering Heights, upsets the conventions of modern romantic love stories by starting off with a physically unattractive heroine, and the course of true love runs nowhere.³⁵ Needless to say, not all Japanese women writers have given up on traditional boy-meets-girl love stories, but one explanation for why South Korean television dramas are so popular among Japanese women may be that Japanese writers increasingly find it a challenge to narrate the received arc of romantic love, which may entail a rough journey, though all’s well that ends well.
As for realism, it reflected what people were actually doing. And in the postwar period, that meant getting married (“till death do us part”) and having children (at least two). In Haruki Murakami’s novel Kokkyō no minami, taiyō no nishi (South of the Border, West of the Sun), the protagonist-narrator recalls his unusual upbringing: “In the world I grew up in, a typical family had two or three children. . . . I was an only child. . . . What other people all had and took for granted I lacked.”³⁶ The narrator then goes on about how he hated his deviant existence, and about all the pejorative connotations of being an only child (most obviously, he was assumed to be spoiled). Normality, especially in one’s family situation, was a requirement of the postwar decades, when the family was a haven and a bulwark against the unpredictable, potentially cruel and heartless world. Yet even then the rampart was cracking, if it had not always already been cracked. Recall Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 film Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story), discussed in chapters 4 and 7. In the film, an elderly man and his wife visit their adult children and receive only a lukewarm welcome. Especially for viewers of a certain age, the film often evokes the asymmetrical character of love between parents and children, or it exemplifies the delusions of gerontocracy—elderly parents, far from reigning as paterfamilias and materfamilias, fade and then pass away. The ambitious dankai generation, which sought to replace patriarchy with modern family life, found that it was not only the extended family but also the nuclear family that was breaking down.³⁷ Although contemporary Japanese people may yearn for love and marriage, for cohabitation and children, there is no question that the institution of the family is under assault. And marriage? It is now subsumed under konkatsu (spouse hunting), just another of the many activities that Japanese people engage in.
The family remains the typical form of cohabitation, but it has fractured into distinct models of living together. Even in the postwar decades there was still a widespread sense of the premodern, extended family or household as the bedrock of Japanese life. But the truths of past generations are no more. And the modern nuclear family of the postwar decades is also in crisis. In this regard, Japan is no different from many other wealthy countries. There are now more single people and unmarried couples in Japan, and more homosexual and transgender couples live together. The postwar myth of the normative heterosexual nuclear family is all but dead, and the prevailing norm is social tolerance, at least in urban areas. Thus twenty-first-century Japan, in its acceptance of different sexual orientations and lifestyles, has returned to its Tokugawa roots. BL (boys’ love) manga has served as something of an avant-garde for alternative love relationships and lifestyles. What is curious about the genre is that it is written almost exclusively by and for women (the exceptions to the female readership are such occasional deviants as a curious researcher). It would be easy to see a projection of desire in BL manga’s plethora of dashing, emotionally sensitive characters, who seem never to populate the living or working environments of the readers. The manga Kinō nani tabeta? (What did you eat yesterday?) is exemplary. In this illustrated recipe book, two likable gay men—one a lawyer, the other a hairdresser—have ordinary, contented lives, with occasional problems and crises around which the issue of what to cook and eat is a central motif as well as a master solution.³⁸ It is not that there aren’t BL stories with suggestions of wild sex or turbulent relationships. After all, BL’s readers grew up with the likes of Ikeda Riyoko’s epic-heroic Berusaiyu no bara (Berubara, or The Rose of Versailles).³⁹ It is nevertheless striking, even in stories that depict the LGBTQ community, how passion has been tamed and how life has been routinized. This is not the world of Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester or Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff.
Many Japanese people have told me that they live in order to work—not just the sushi master discussed in chapter 5 but even some businessmen—yet no one has mentioned the notion of living in order to love. To be sure, a few people have identified a connection with a pet as their most important relationship and reason for living. And mothers do say that they find solace and significance in childrearing. It is common enough for mothers, and some fathers, to say that the births of their children have been the best moments of their lives. But that form of love, agapē, is distinct from romantic love between two adults. In other words, love is important to Japanese people, and worth living for, but romantic passion appears not to be. It may be that inequality and asymmetry between women and men—including the vast infrastructure of the sex industry, which doubles as an emotion industry—have cut off the possibility of passionate relationships based on equality.
It would be easy to deplore the diminished Japanese passion for romantic love, but it is also possible that the Romantic legacy of valorizing passionate love has already visited havoc on many relationships. This is a world from which transcendent sources of meaning and value have disappeared or are disappearing, whether we mean old-time religion or tightly knit communities. In the circumstances, expecting romantic love to stand as a pillar of ordinary, intimate life is tantamount to inviting a dragon to live in the bedroom. Reality is rife with small indignities as well as massive deviations from the impossible ideal of romantic love, and companionable, compatible intimate relationships involve many compromises. Some people forgo sexual relations altogether, whereas others find the absence of sex unbearable. Consider the popularity of the novel and manga Otto no chinpo ga hairanai (My Husband Won’t Fit).⁴⁰ The protagonist suffers from what is regarded as a devastating flaw in her marriage, not to mention from the couple’s inevitable failure to conceive a child, but eventually she comes to accept her imperfect, unrealized marriage as right for the two of them. The perfect romantic relationship is an abstraction, and beguiling though the ideal of romantic love has been for many people, romantic love is surely not a panacea for people who seek meaningful relationships or love in their lives. Again, it would be inaccurate to say that most Japanese people don’t seek romance, passion, and relationships, but romantic love is not seen as the solution to existential anguish or existential questions.
OTAKU.
If most contemporary Japanese people are ambivalent or wary about religion or romantic love—or, for that matter, in the nation or the family—what is left for building a meaningful life? Surely one answer is work. On that score, artisans provide a model for the well-lived life. But many people don’t find a personally satisfactory occupation, to say nothing of all the jobs from which almost no one could derive any meaning. And other people don’t like any kind of work at all. What hope is there for these people? A clue lies in a much-derided Japanese character type—the otaku, the nerd or geek encountered in earlier chapters.
The otaku belongs to the generations after the dankai generation. The term otaku, coined in 1983, is usually credited to Nakamori Akio, a manga critic. It denotes a young man or young men (the original otaku were almost always male) of a certain appearance—an unkempt mop of hair, casual clothing—considered to be not quite delinquent but somewhat strange. Otaku have poor social skills and an obsession with one or another aspect of pop culture, particularly manga and anime (though the actual range of human interests that an individual otaku pursues may be wider).⁴¹ Otaku, whose efflorescence is coeval with post-Bubble Japan, are closely associated with the rise of consumer society and the proliferation of youth subcultures. The received stereotype of the otaku is the relentlessly negative image of young adults (again, usually male) who are incapable of dealing with the world. “They’re no good,” a woman in her forties told me. “They’re socially unacceptable.”⁴² And the father of two otaku sons thundered, “They have no spirit, no will. They’re parasites!” What prompts much of the discussion about the otaku, apart from their obsession with manga and anime, is their antisocial character. They are said to avoid the complexities and complications of real-life relationships, including sexual or romantic relationships, and to seek regulated and controlled encounters, whether online or in person with professionals. The otaku are also easy targets for people seeking to discover the causes of Japanese ills, including the struggling economy (indolent youth are said to be taking the place of the nation’s corporate workers) and Japan’s declining fertility rates.⁴³ In any case, few have much that is positive to say about this character type. As one man in his thirties told me, “I’m an otaku myself, and even I don’t like the otaku.”
Akihabara.
The area in central Tokyo known as Akihabara, once a mecca of electronics shops, has been transformed into the capital and spiritual home of otaku culture. (It should be noted, however, that Akihabara increasingly attracts men older than the typical otaku, as well as some girls and women, not to mention foreign tourists.) Two notable cultural offerings are available there. The first (and dominant) of the two is what the otaku call “two-dimensional” products—primarily manga, anime, and video games. In this domain, the most prized type of female is a young and beautiful girl-woman described as dōgan kyonyū (having a baby face and big breasts). By contrast with three-dimensional (that is, real) girls and women, these two-dimensional representations preoccupy the imaginative and affective lives of many otaku boys and men, who are marked by Rorikon (a Lolita complex). The second offering is the meido kissa (maid cafés), featuring young women clad in French maid’s uniforms who greet and serve their customers (again, almost all men) as lords and masters and may also play card games, board games, and video games with them. The hapless otaku shells out the equivalent of about five US dollars to enter the café, another five
three-dimensional (that is, real) girls and women, these two-dimensional representations preoccupy the imaginative and affective lives of many otaku boys and men, who are marked by Rorikon (a Lolita complex). The second offering is the meido kissa (maid cafés), featuring young women clad in French maid’s uniforms who greet and serve their customers (again, almost all men) as lords and masters and may also play card games, board games, and video games with them. The hapless otaku shells out the equivalent of about five US dollars to enter the café, another five for each game he plays, and five more to take a photo with a maid. (The café’s food and drinks, usually of substandard quality, are priced at approximately the going rate.) There is almost never any physical contact between the maids and their otaku customers. It is as if the otaku are at play in a Barbie DreamHouse version of the hostess bars that their fathers and grandfathers frequented.⁴⁴
The all-female Japanese idol group known as AKB48 (AKB is the acronym for Akihabara) and its satellite groups, girl bands that represent the apotheosis of fan participation, provide insights into otaku culture. The annual AKB48 election, a nationally televised affair, was routinely one of the most watched programs of the year during the 2010s; it captured more attention and generated more excitement than the national legislative elections. AKB48’s membership is determined by music fans, who vote with their wallets by purchasing the CDs in order to vote—one CD, one vote. The performer with the most votes becomes AKB48’s lead singer, and the top twenty or so singers get to perform regularly in public. An uninformed foreigner might believe that this election rewards beauty or talent, but it almost always comes down to which performer best approximates the ideal of the girl next door. It is widely agreed by fans and nonfans alike that a beautiful (or tall or bright) young woman intimidates the otaku, who form the core of CD buyers (voters), which is why beautiful, tall, or bright contestants often fail to make it in the world of AKB48. Indeed, the mean height of AKB48’s members is lower than the national mean. Recall the language of suki (like) as opposed to the language of love. In this context, the chief aesthetic virtue is not to be beautiful but to be kawaii (cute). The exemplary kawaii figure, Hello Kitty, does not have a mouth or teeth, and the AKB48 stars are similarly nonthreatening. Here, communication and expression can flourish—kawaii culture, for the otaku, means never having to risk revealing anything personal, and never being menaced by the real world.⁴⁵ The otaku knows he is in control because he is the one who has chosen and created the stars.
It is true, of course, that in the postwar period there were many movie stars and singers who also became idols. Fans saw their films, bought their albums, and may have bought their posters, too. But these stars and singers were idols, sacred objects of passionate veneration. Consider only the fact that in English the title of Hiraoka Masaaki’s book about the 1970s teen singing sensation Yamaguchi Momoe would be Momoe Is Bodhisattva.⁴⁶ What Hiraoka sees in Yamaguchi’s hollow eyes is the look of the proletariat. In this respect, Yamaguchi embodied the spirit of supokon manga (sports manga; see chapter 4), that is, the struggle for upward mobility in postwar Japan. And the postwar idols’ fans did worship them, believing them incapable of entertaining a polluted thought or committing an irreverent act—an image clearly at odds with that of idols like the members of AKB48, who represent the utter secularization of pop culture idols. How could it be otherwise, when the top vote-getter in the 2016 AKB48 election had been a contestant in a televised farting contest held in a school library? Many of AKB48’s older fans do retain a spiritual orientation toward the group, but for the otaku these stars are not sacred figures.⁴⁷ Indeed, the otaku shows little overt passion. The figures who were icons for his parents are for the otaku mere dolls, material and disposable. The otaku, as a denizen of the world of the lukewarm bath (see “Ambition and Its Diminution,” in chapter 4), makes the necessary (and considerable) effort to indulge his private interests, but he is not about to sacrifice himself like a kamikaze pilot, nor is he disposed to enact a lover’s suicide
Beyond the Stereotype.
The stereotype of the otaku obfuscates more than it illuminates. Some self-described otaku—not unlike Tsuzaki Hiramasa, the fictional engineer in his thirties who is the protagonist of Nigeru wa haji daga yaku ni tatsu—hold prestigious jobs by day, and by night they gallivant about town, dine at expensive restaurants, visit kyabakura (cabaret clubs, that is, nightclubs), and generally behave more or less the way successful businessmen of their fathers’ generation behaved with Ginza hostesses. As another challenge to the stereotype, the best-selling 2004 novel Densha otoko (Train man) features an otaku protagonist who is courageous enough to stop a sexual harasser and thus becomes a romantic hero of sorts.⁴⁸ Furthermore, the idea of Cool Japan and the vitality of Japanese subcultural products abroad (manga, anime, and video games, most obviously) suggest that otaku-based industries are thriving export economies that also partake of the artisanal ethos.⁴⁹ In addition, more than a generation after the birth or invention of the otaku, it remains far from clear just who the otaku is. At times it is difficult to differentiate an otaku from a Yankī—this label has supplanted the archaic furyō (delinquent)—or, for that matter, to differentiate an otaku from any other young man (or woman). Therefore, some critics suggest that the otaku doesn’t exist except as a by-product of discrimination.⁵⁰ As in Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of anti-Semitism, it is anti-otaku discrimination that produces the otaku.
The contemporary Japanese, however covert their public displays of affection may be, are not quite at the point of saying, “Not to be born comes first by every reckoning.”⁵¹ Nor are they still at the point of never having fallen in love, and this is no less true of the otaku. It would be easy to mistake ostensible quietude for a soulless existence, but the beating human heart maintains its interest in and devotion to one aspect of the world or another, perhaps in the arts, perhaps in the natural environment. An amateur psychoanalyst, tempted to see the otaku’s behavior as a projection of thwarted human relationships onto transitional or permanent objects, would be mistaken to overlook the vibrant inner world of interests beneath the contemporary Japanese otaku’s apparent indifference. The otaku seek, in their idiosyncratic ways, to make life worth living, to find ikigai beyond the received verities of family, community, company, or nation. No bitter taste of the real has killed their appetite for a slice of life, however mediated, among other reportedly problematic and antisocial youth. The individual otaku, then, no exemplar of post-Bubble burnout, almost always has an enthusiasm or two. He (sometimes she) readily joins fan clubs and collects everything related to a favorite genre or object.
Contrary to the stereotype, the otaku may actually be less interested in consumption and collection than in experience and matters of the spirit. Indeed, the otaku is defined by that very pursuit.⁵² A moment’s conversation with an otaku almost always reveals an engagement and an erudition akin to those of a research academic. I know a historian who began subscribing in high school to the prestigious Journal of Modern History, and after four decades he has been unable to let go of his all-consuming interest in early modern European history. Generally rumpled, and indifferent to most luxuries, he is the very picture of the absent-minded professor; the otaku in contemporary Japan is precisely this type of character. The received stereotype of the otaku—that he is unkempt, dresses indifferently, has trouble communicating, and displays little affect—also holds for a sizable swath of research academics. The only difference is that a university-based historian is an eccentric but laudable professional, whereas a lifelong passionate enthusiast of anime about Gundam (sci-fi robots) doesn’t project the same status to most businessmen and bureaucrats.⁵³
Needless to say, the research academic’s mode of expression and dissemination is different from that of the otaku, but not qualitatively so. The research academic writes up and publishes his findings and his theses. The otaku writes his blog and perhaps even publishes a book. Both attend conventions to discuss matters of mutual interest with their colleagues. Here, though, one difference is that most academics at conventions and symposia eventually fall into discussing extra-academic matters (gossip about others, about who got what job, and so on), but otaku tend to talk shop most of the time, with the occasional digression into other common interests, such as B-kyū gurume (class B gourmet) restaurants.
Otaku also make their marks in different ways. For example, a manga otaku I met at Japan’s supreme research library, the National Diet Library, had been conducting a bibliographic analysis of a manga series. His project would have put the great philologists of the past to shame. He had examined variations across distinct issues, or compared the serial version to its book variants, and his work had been so painstaking that he was in a position to publish an editio cum notis variorum. It might be argued that Dryden, say, is more important than Kyojin no hoshi, but the latter surely has more active readers. As another example, my seatmate on a flight in 2015 was an airline otaku who talked for hours about every aspect of contemporary commercial flying. In the previous decade, he had flown more than three million miles. He knew all the ins and outs of several airlines’ frequent-flyer clubs, the details of airlines’ seating arrangements, the levels of service that applied to different classes of air travel on distinct routes, and so on. As yet another example, a railroad otaku, my fellow passenger on a train trip, exhibited encyclopedic knowledge about types of trains and compartments as well as about various routes and their historical variations. There are history otaku and other types of academic otaku. I even encountered an otaku of social theory (one of my own specialties) whose knowledge of Max Weber was astounding. I could easily have dismissed this autodidact—he had not earned a graduate degree. But he did earn my respect with his seriousness and his dedication to the study of Weber (how many Weber scholars own the Gesamtausgabe?). And, as suggested earlier, there are Gundam otaku, such as Suzuki Toshimi, a barber who constructed ten large-scale models of Gundam robots outside his shop. “Sure,” he says, “it’s a hobby. But instead of just living my life, I wanted to give people something to be excited about.”⁵⁴ Another Gundam otaku—this one in his forties, with hundreds of plastic models in his apartment—has amassed his own encyclopedia of model types and variations. “This is my life’s work,” he told me, in English.
THE LEISURE SOCIETY.
The genius of the contemporary economy lies in its transformation of leisure and idleness into consumption and activity.⁵⁵ After work, we keep on working, this time in our role as consumers. We even provide free advertising by way of the corporate logos on our clothing and in the presumably personal views we transmit over social media.
People in Japan, too, like people elsewhere, are enjoined to go out and spend money, or to spend money at home by clicking links on the smartphones that have entered the inner sanctum of personal privacy, the last redoubt of idleness. Indeed, picking up a smartphone is often the first action upon waking and the last before going to sleep. Instead of cultivating their gardens or soaking in a warm bath, Japanese people are glued to the small screen where the central drama is fame and fortune, getting and spending. And if the temptation to soak in a warm bath should break through the continuous injunction to busyness, the smartphone is equipped with a waterproof cover.
If it were possible to summarize, in a simple way, the life of a contemporary Japanese corporate employee, the summary would come down to a series of katsu (activities): studying to get into a college or a university, shūkatsu (looking for employment), konkatsu (looking for a spouse), and, finally, shūkatsu (dying). To the extent that leisure enters the picture at all, it is usually devoted to conspicuous consumption, which itself is a struggle to achieve social recognition, often by establishing invidious comparisons between oneself and others. Thus, as we saw in chapter 5, some people spend more time and energy taking photos of sushi than enjoying the sushi chef’s delectable concoctions. Leisure in Japan is certainly not devoted to sleep. On average, Japanese people don’t sleep much at all.⁵⁶ Moreover, Japanese workers of all kinds—almost all Japanese adults, for that matter—are expected to be other-directed, and the demands on their time can become onerous.
In the past, people managed to find moments of fun. As noted in chapter 5, executives and other businessmen often frequented nightclubs and kyabakura, as well as the less expensive sunakku (literally, “snacks”; the term derives from these establishments’ specialty of serving light meals and drinks).⁵⁷ There, they kept up a stream of banter and flirted, all the while drinking to excess. Not surprisingly, some people describe these establishments as having been fueling stations for businessmen. And there were games, played in the batting cages or on the driving ranges that cropped up in most postwar Japanese neighborhoods. There was also pachinko (Japanese pinball), with all its permutations, a game that probably consumed more of the average office worker’s leisure time than any other activity. What all these pursuits had in common was that they satisfied the desire for either physical pleasure or mindless amusement. Needless to say, people’s free time was not devoted entirely to pursuits like these. People also read books, went to movies, and played music. Still, as a self-described anime otaku in her thirties told me, “I have no idea what my father did in his free time. Sleep? My mother was always doing stuff around the house—cleaning, cooking—though I’m not really sure, since she never talked about it. Anyway, older Japanese people didn’t know how to have fun. They just worked all the time.”
That may or may not have been true. Perhaps office workers in the past were actually less busy than they wanted to appear. Today, though, thanks to the dissemination of otaku culture, it’s not just the young and the restless who are engrossed in a life-consuming hobby. More and more office workers now lead double lives as nocturnal, ostensibly antisocial otaku. The habits of the otaku have spread widely, and Japanese people are increasingly embracing their inner geek.⁵⁸ In fact, the extent of fascinatio nugacitatis—enchantment with triviality—is nothing short of impressive in Japan. In the face of the daily grind of meaningless work, people are finding meaning and purpose in leisure activity. Hobbies and similar obsessions are ubiquitous.
This plethora of hobbies pursued with diligence—a consequence of affluence and the advent of the leisure society—had already become a notable feature of Japanese life by the 1970s, but the explosion of leisure activity coincided with the emergence of the otaku.⁵⁹ The passionate engagement of the otaku represents the modest happiness discussed in chapter 4, a happiness that relies more on fulfillment and experience than on material possessions. Paradoxically, then, the allegedly antisocial, parasitical otaku have shown their elders possibilities for a life beyond the workplace.⁶⁰
The post-Bubble years were particularly important in the dissemination of serious leisure activities, and in some office workers’ transformation into otaku. One middle-aged corporate employee began taking piano lessons after reading a manga about a young woman’s struggle to become a great pianist. “I must have listened to classical music when I was in school,” he said, “but after reading a scene where the protagonist plays a Beethoven sonata, I went out and bought a CD. It was mesmerizing. I discovered a new world.” Another relates a similar story: “I happened to see an illustration by Itō Jakuchū. It was nothing like what I’d thought Edo-era art was like. I read some books, went to galleries and museums, and became an Edo art otaku.” Others simply took what they were already doing to a new level, one that looked fanatical to outsiders but meant, in practice, the sublime level of the otaku. For example, a retired executive said, “I always enjoyed drinking, and I began to enjoy drinking alone. At an izakaya [a tavern or pub-like restaurant], you don’t really drink alone anyway [but I began solo drinking]. I read books about drinking alone and searched for interesting izakaya all around Japan.”
Leisure activity, like life itself, is all about flow. The feeling of aimlessness—the sense of being buffeted by random, incomprehensible forces—can be overcome in part through the pursuit of something in which it is possible to become passionately engaged. As long as that engagement lasts, it can offer meaning and a sense of purpose. Yet there is a long-standing, often troubling (and troublesome) practice of condemning leisure activity. For example, a volatile mixture of resentment and envy was once brought to bear on housewives because they pursued hobbies while apparently enjoying the economic support of their hardworking husbands (some women were even said to devote their free time to extramarital affairs). That misogynistic discourse has faded with women’s reentry into the labor market, but it contained a grain of truth in the sense that Japanese women in general, and housewives in particular, have been less careerist than men, and therefore more inclined to pursue one hobby or another. Some of women’s hobbies have been traditionally female pursuits with a touch of cachet and sophistication, such as tea ceremony or flower arrangement. Others have been faddish, such as hula dancing in the postwar decades or, at the turn of the twenty-first century, listening to K-pop music and binge-watching South Korean television dramas. As an example of the latter obsession, I was seated next to a middle-aged Japanese woman on a flight from Tokyo to Seoul. Immediately after takeoff, she opened a portable DVD player and proceeded to watch a popular South Korean drama. When she noticed that I had a Korean-language newspaper, she began to speak to me in excellent Korean. I asked her how she had learned the language, and she said she had been immersing herself in popular South Korean TV dramas and wanted to understand what the characters were saying. She added that she had traveled to South Korea more than twenty times in the previous five years or so, and that she enjoyed nothing more than being able to talk with an ordinary South Korean about a drama they had both watched (her knowledge of those dramas was breathtaking, by the way). I met another middle-aged Japanese woman who was extremely enthusiastic and well informed about K-pop. Her deep knowledge and dazzling analyses of the genre were the equal of what might be expected from an academic expert. Both women were effectively otaku, and women like the two of them are everywhere now in Japan.
Aristotle, in contrast to almost all other philosophers, takes leisure activity seriously, not only as a means of recovering from fatigue and of preparing for another round of work, but also as something to be pursued for the sake of fulfilling one’s personal potential. Indeed, for Aristotle, leisure activity is “the fundamental principle”; thus leisure activity is not mere play or relaxation but has a purposive element in that it must incorporate such skills and learning as can be used to turn free time in the direction of “pleasure, happiness, and the good life.”⁶¹ (It is not for nothing that Greek skole and Latin scola, the etymological roots of English “school,” denote “leisure.”) Frivolous though an activity may be, there are meanings and purposes to be gained from its pursuit. And, if not everyone can find fulfillment in work by becoming a consummate artisan, there is also no reason to believe that a good society will be one in which everyone endeavors to find and pursue a professional career. This would be a society of diligence, probably an ascetic society. But another avenue is open to almost everyone in an affluent society, an avenue made all the richer because it is enjoyable, fulfilling, and uplifting, with no hangover and no emptiness at the end. As William Morris, echoing Aristotle, puts it, “What other blessings are there in life save . . . fearless rest and hopeful work? [T]o have space and freedom to gain such rest and such work is the end of politics; to learn how best to gain it is the end of education; to learn its inmost meaning is the end of religion.”⁶² I am not sure that we should expect everyone to hew to the two goals of work and leisure. There should be a place for believers as well as for lovers and others who take meaning and sustenance from different sources. In a postaffluent society, a society in which most people have abandoned the comforts of the traditional faiths and social collectivities, or have been through the whirlwind of egoistic hedonism or romantic passion, leisure activity seems the likeliest and most reliable goal.
Leisure activity is a necessary component of the good life, and of a good society. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, or so we believe (though we’re skeptical of those who play all the time). Yet there is a sense in which leisure activity has features in common with artisanal work. Both provide meaning and purpose in life, and both involve projects that enhance personal potential and self-worth.
IKIGAI.
What is thought to be the meaning or worth of an individual life has varied enormously across cultures and throughout history. To take one example, the reigning Western historiography stresses the salience of the Christian God, often omniscient and omnipotent, in order to endow an ephemeral, seemingly pointless life with significance and immortality. To take another, Japan’s wartime imperial-military ideology affirmed that the ultimate fulfillment of life’s purpose was self-sacrifice for the sake of the emperor.⁶³ In the immediate postwar decades, recovery and growth were posited as ultimate values, given the debacle of the war. The contraction of ambition and the curtailment of passion spelled the end of transcendence, including the ideology of rapid economic growth and materialism. Nevertheless, as Epicurus (who was far from the embodiment of what we call Epicurean) might have said, life must offer modest pleasures. But if infinite desire is a self-defeating proposition, aphanisis—the extinction of desire—offers no nirvana, for we would be anxious precisely because we had no desire. This would be the life of acedia about which the medieval scholastics were so exercised. More important, it would be hard to extinguish the quest for meaning and purpose—the will to be, the desire to carry on. Ordinary virtues are not without their rewards, of course, but people still seek deeper reasons for living. For anyone who has even a moment for repose and reflection, the hermeneutical urge is almost irrepressible. Abulia and sloth, emptiness and nothingness—these are dark holes from within which we struggle to instantiate the will to live.
Existential and spiritual questions become all the more urgent once people have escaped the world of dire necessity (that is, when they have acquired adequate means of satisfying basic needs for food and shelter) and moved beyond the universe of received answers (that is, when there are no longer any hegemonic belief systems, such as religion and its secular permutations). In the twenty-first century, grand narratives about God or emperor, nation or revolution, sound hollow to most Japanese people. Despite deep-seated suspicions that contemporary Japanese people remain collectivist and holistic in their orientation, they are usually acutely aware of their individuality as well as of their potential, or actual, loneliness.
We are thrust into the world, where our time is necessarily limited. Alcohol and drugs offer one practical, moderately effective answer to existential anxiety, as does immersion in one total institution or another, whether a “black” corporation (one of the superexploitative companies in contemporary Japan) or a cult, of which there is a wide selection. For most Japanese people, however, there is no immediately available transcendental recourse, no possibility of escape into a received traditional mind-set, and no relief (barring serious cognitive deficits) from existential questions about their personal place and significance in the world. The overwhelmingly worldly orientation of contemporary Japanese life makes the consolations of Christianity or Buddhism incredible and implausible. Without the promise of an afterlife, how do Japanese people find consolation for nothingness, for the apparently meaningless universe and the inevitability of death and extinction? The received answers are unsatisfactory, and the crumbling of the postwar regime can be seen in the inefficacy of the standard postwar bromides about what makes life worthwhile.⁶⁴ The unexamined life, pace philosophers, is worth living, but the ubiquity of the idea of ikigai makes reflection on one’s life (How should I live? What should I live for?) a common theme of thought and conversation in everyday Japanese life.⁶⁵
Kamiya Mieko, a psychiatrist, has written searchingly about ikigai. “For people to continue to live vivaciously,” she says, “there’s nothing more important than ikigai. Therefore, there’s nothing more cruel than to take away people’s ikigai, and there’s no greater love than to give people ikigai.” For Kamiya, ikigai is intimately intertwined with hariai (something worthwhile). “People find it intolerable to live alone, in a vacuum,” she says. In order to live well, people need validation—the sense that they exist and matter, that they have efficacy in and responses from the world. Kamiya goes on to say that the sense of having a life worth living entails an orientation toward the future and a sense of purpose—devotion to a cause, a pursuit. Ikigai, she writes, is not a matter of the usefulness one has developed and accumulated over time, nor of the sheer length of time one has lived. Rather, ikigai is all about mattering, about meaningful living, and it leads to a series of questions: What is the purpose of my life? What is my purpose in life? Is my life worth living? Is life worth living?⁶⁶ The answers are necessarily very idiosyncratic, and they differ from one individual to another. Ikigai is a general concept, but its individual articulation is particular—it is mine.
Ikigai overlaps with happiness, but there are important differences. Happiness, as studied by positive psychology and preached by the popular Japanese religious group Happy Science, tends to be conflated with pleasure, with what makes one feel good. The notion of happiness is subjective: to say that one is happy is to offer a descriptive statement, but the description includes no temporal dimension or values-oriented content. The idea of ikigai, by contrast, does include a temporal dimension, which links the past (through the faculty of memory) and the future (through the faculty of imagination and the shaping provided by a sense of purpose). In addition, ikigai’s purposive teleology closely conforms to the sense of self and entails a values orientation.⁶⁷ Happiness, in short, is desire fulfilled. Ikigai spiritualizes desire and locates it within one’s life span and life project.
For Kamiya, ikigai exists beyond biological needs and is not synonymous with sociological security. It cannot be cultivated in desperate times—during famine or war, for example—because the life force itself and the need to survive will preclude opportunities for sustained reflection on life’s purposes. Nor can ikigai be planned and implemented, because determinism, or outside forces, will squelch the sense of possibility required for ikigai. Without individual freedom, striving is meaningless; that is, without a sense of efficacy, of the power to produce effects in the world, there can be no sense of life that has been lived. The undermining and weakening of ikigai stem from the darkness of death, biological or sociological. Kamiya does not claim that people are completely free. The individual’s agency is limited. But the individual must believe in his personal agency before he can have reasons for living. As in Stoicism, there are areas of life that one can change and areas that one cannot change. The challenge, once basic needs have been met, is to strive to accomplish what one can but accept that there are things one cannot do, such as avoid mortality.
A classic reference point for thinking about ikigai is Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru (To Live). The movie opens with a voice-over narration describing an office worker: “Busy, always so very busy. But in fact this man does absolutely nothing at all. Other than protecting his own spot.” But this consummate bureaucrat has received a death sentence—a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Moved as he is to drain what is left of his life down to the dregs, he looks for consolation in alcohol and sex. But a young hostess asks him if there is anything he would like to make or to do, and his moment of epiphany comes concretely, in the form of his desire to build a park. In so doing, he finds his life’s purpose—his meaning. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 movie, Wandafuru raifu (After Life), offers a slightly different perspective. In the film’s version of purgatory, each person must come up with a memory of a defining moment, of something the person is most proud of or finds most striking, and around this memory a film will be made about his or her life. When I asked people in Japan to perform this exercise, it was interesting that nobody mentioned a memory of work. Central though work is, most corporate employees cited memories from childhood. One proudly recalled running a race at school and finishing first. Another remembered his first, unrequited romance. Several women talked with wonder about giving birth for the first time. In general, it seems, life’s significance lies in what one pursues with purpose, whether that means winning a playground race or becoming a mother. The discourse of ikigai occasions reflection and, necessarily, regret. One thinks of redoing or resetting one’s life (the childhood wasted on frivolity, the occupation not pursued, the love that was not to be).⁶⁸ Reflecting backward, living forward—ikigai makes a richer inner life possible, though perhaps it will be accompanied at times by pain and regret.
Among artisans and others for whom work is fulfilling in and of itself, the problem of ikigai is not a clear and present danger. Yet ikigai is a serious challenge for office workers who face mandatory retirement at the age of sixty or sixty-five.⁶⁹ As a septuagenarian retiree remarked, “If you have nothing going on in your life when you retire, it’s too late for you. Some of my colleagues died. Others became incapacitated. We need ikigai.” Many office workers—forced to overachieve or overwork, or having chosen to do so—have led lives devoted to their organizational roles and have built many major relationships around their work lives. For them, retirement comes as a rude shock. In other words, in an extended act of what Jean-Paul Sartre called mauvaise foi (bad faith), they have spent years turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the existential question of ikigai.
There are retirees who crash and implode. No one keeps statistics on those who die from a sense of obsolescence—from lack of ikigai—but it is not hard to get older people to name people they knew who died when they lost their place at work, and therefore in life. Some retirees suffer from loss of meaning, a loss intensified by having nowhere to go and nothing to do. Boredom and apathy are common outcomes for these retirees—idleness begets incapacity. Others, having lost their daily commute, decide to colonize the family home; they hijack the family’s life and place undue stress on their wives to serve them during the day, or they make demands for more efficient household management.⁷⁰ In Yōji Yamada’s 2016 film, Kazoku wa tsuraiyo (What a Wonderful Family!), one of many twenty-first-century representations of the postretirement blues, the protagonist, an office worker who has been put out to pasture, finds all his hopes for his golden years dashed when his wife of fifty years demands a divorce. The film ends well for this protagonist, but the same cannot be said for many white-collar retirees, whose wives and grown children call them (and treat them like) sodai gomi (bulky trash), unattractive and with no apparent purpose in life. Some of these men even go on to live in a place overwhelmed by trash, as in Junrei (Pilgrimage), a novel by Hashimoto Osamu, in which an elderly man turns his house into a virtual garbage dump reminiscent of the house and grounds in the film Grey Gardens (1975).⁷¹
The logic of the bureaucratic organization, however small that organization may be, is that the individual plays a role and is therefore replaceable. No one, no matter how charismatic or brilliant, is indispensable to any bureaucratic organization of any size. As a result, no matter how easily one has been able to find meaning and purpose in life while employed by the organization, it becomes very difficult to do so when one’s employment comes to an end. One may have enjoyed high status in the organization, but retirement imposes a rough equality. One’s organizational title and rank are stripped away, and one must now move through the social world as an old person. Especially when one has enjoyed organizational success, coming to terms with the reality of its loss is like experiencing all the bitterness of the samurai’s life, but without the customary sartorial markers and social sustenance.
Hagakure is regarded as the bible of samuraihood. The prewar military generals were said to read it every day. Like most other classics, it has been reduced to a few selective quotations, which are tantamount to misquotations, such as that “the foundation of bushido,” or the way of the samurai, “is death.”⁷² The author of Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, propounds absolute loyalty for the samurai—obedience unto death—but his life philosophy is larger than this occupational injunction. In his autobiographical reflections, he does not regret that he left his job after his lord’s death, and he suggests guidelines for living.⁷³ “A human being’s life is very short,” he says, having himself retired early. “Therefore, one should spend time doing things one likes. . . . It is stupid to spend life in pain, not doing things one likes.”⁷⁴
Not everyone wants to be like Yamamoto and write a treatise on ikigai. But when it comes to finding reasons for living after retirement, a leaf can be borrowed from the book of the otaku, and a surprising number of retirees are seriously interested in studying.⁷⁵ There are retirees who are involved in numerous other pursuits as well. For instance, a woman in her seventies found her life’s work after retirement when she volunteered to help impoverished refugees and immigrants learn the Japanese language and explore Japanese culture. “I’ve found nothing more rewarding than trying to teach them,” she told me. “I feel really useful, and I think I’m really helping them.” Others look to more self-centered pursuits, such as mastering a sport (golf, for example) or a board game like Go. These retirees have no interest in acquiring professional-level skills in these sports or games, but there are many tournaments and other venues where the competition is challenging yet friendly.
What has been striking about the post-Bubble decades in Japan is the strong tendency of Japanese people in general to embrace the ordinary and to find ikigai in everyday life. As for retirees, one plausible way for them to live is to embrace their decline and resist the dictate of busyness that dominates so many lives. Thus Higuchi Yūichi encourages those who are sixty-five and older—those who have retired—to have “the courage to do nothing.”⁷⁶ What Higuchi is proposing is not the achievement of a Zen state of nothingness but rather self-emancipation from the externally imposed imperative to do something. Time is precious, but it is one’s own to burn or waste freely—and honorably.
SHINIGAI.
Then there is death. If philosophy is preparation for death, then either contemporary philosophy has lost its way, or many have been wrong about the task of philosophy. The striking achievement of the twentieth century, at least in the affluent parts of the world, is that death is no longer an everyday affair. One can go a long time without seeing anyone dying or dead. Life expectancy has nosed up into the ninth decade, and there’s a common saying in Japan that people should expect to live for one hundred years. No wonder the Grim Reaper and the Japanese equivalent, Shinigami, have such a low profile. At the same time, the news about Japan’s aging society is not all good. Many people in their last years are burdened with pain and other kinds of suffering, and their desire for a peaceful death, perhaps at home, surrounded by loved ones—their shinigai (reasons for dying), we might say—often remains unfulfilled.⁷⁷ It is a strange form of biopolitics that seeks quantitative lengthening of life—vita without vitality—but does not ponder the quality of life. As in economic growth, so too in life—more is not necessarily better. A person benefits at least as much from reflection on ars moriendi as on ars vivendi.
Kobori Kōichirō, a retired surgeon, observes that in modern Western medicine as he practiced it, death was seen as defeat, pure and simple, and aging was to be resisted.⁷⁸ According to this line of thinking, the longer the life, the better; patients are enjoined to fight aging and struggle against death. After Kobori’s formal retirement from surgery, he became involved with a regional hospital and made home visits to dying people. He witnessed hundreds of cases in which the patient, the patient’s family members and friends, and the medical staff, all in denial about the finality of death, made unfortunate choices that exacerbated pain and suffering.⁷⁹ Kobori now argues for a paradigm shift in palliative care, with more investment in end-of-life care infrastructure, a shifting of the site of death from the clinic back to the patient’s home, and greater involvement of the patient’s family members. Kobori’s fervent hope is that more doctors will spend time individually with dying people in their last days.⁸⁰ And perhaps family members and friends, too, will find that their involvement in hospice work serves as a reminder of their own mortality, illuminating the lives of the dying but also shedding light on the preciousness that life still has for the living. The pursuit of shinigai is another sort of ikigai.
Just as different regimes have honored different ways of death—consider, for instance, the celebration of the kamikaze pilots under the prewar regime—Japanese people over time have held various views about life, death, and the afterlife.⁸¹ And despite the dissemination of progressive ideology, there is still widespread awareness of life’s simultaneous preciousness and finitude, a concept that is often expressed as mono no aware (the pathos of things), one that incorporates both the assumption of impermanence and an appreciation of the haecceity—the “thisness” or “thusness”—of things, the ephemeral beauty of existence.⁸² Premodern samurai and, later, the modern Japanese military appropriated this concept for purposes of their own, but it serves as a contemporary reminder of mortality, an ordinary realization of ontological finitude. It serves, in other words, as a final chapter in the consideration of ikigai, or shinigai.
Ikigai and shinigai, like love and life, can be discussed only in the abstract but in fact are experienced and expressed only in the concrete. The inevitable chasm makes it difficult to say anything meaningful about ikigai or shinigai. Let me conclude, then, by noting the sheer distance between, on one hand, the people of the Edo era, who, though plagued by disease and surrounded by death, seem to have been insouciant about mortality and, on the other hand, their contemporary descendants who live with exaggerated fear for their safety and their lives even as they enjoy unprecedented security and longevity.⁸³ Kōda Rohan’s Edo-era novella Gojūnotō (The five-storied pagoda) offers a vivid sketch of the inaccessible Edo shokunin spirit. The protagonist—Jūbei, a carpenter—is nicknamed Nossori (meaning, roughly, “slow and quiet”). He has achieved nothing of significance but wants to build a pagoda, or tower. He says repeatedly that it would be fine for him to die if only he were first able to undertake his life’s work.⁸⁴ It is not that Jūbei hungers for fame or fortune, or that he seeks to realize his desire out of vanity. Rather, the tower will be a proof of life, and its realization will be a moment of both transcendence and immanence, a synthesis that sublimates his being. Kōda makes it clear that the novella is not about dense networks of human relations and expectations—it is not, in other words, about giri ninjō (ethical obligations and humane feelings)—nor does it represent the modern quest for the true self. In fact, Jūbei’s struggle to build the tower, a job entrusted to him by a Buddhist priest, has almost nothing to do with self-satisfaction or self-development. It is simply embedded in his life as a carpenter, a shokunin. In the teeth of a ferociously destructive storm, Jūbei becomes despondent, but only because he believes that the priest has lost confidence in his artisanship. This artisan is willing to go down with his tower—the artisanal ethos is free of egocentric desire, untouched by the hubris of human autonomy. The tower and the story are all that remain.⁸⁵ Very few people today could resuscitate Jūbei’s shokunin spirit within themselves (and it is unclear how desirable that would be). That spirit is alien to modern temperaments. But it points to a way of living life: if one should lose what makes life worthwhile, it would not matter if one died; knowledge of what makes life worthwhile is what is worth recognizing and preserving.
In the novel Junrei, mentioned earlier, Hashimoto traces the life of his protagonist, a straight arrow who has lived through the period of Japan’s rapid economic growth but now, in retirement, lives in a house overflowing with discarded objects not unlike his own life, objects whose value he tries to redeem. Only when his younger brother comes to help him does the protagonist allow all the accumulated detritus to be hauled away. His brother urges him to go on a pilgrimage to Shikoku so as to discover the meaning of living, and is relieved to see his older brother smiling with delight while eating tempura. “My brother has finally chosen to live,” the younger brother says to himself, but he is surprised when his older brother dies in his sleep that very night.⁸⁶ In the end he decides that his brother, upon realizing that he had undertaken a pilgrimage with no purpose, finally accepted his life and his death and let himself be pulled into the void. A life without a reason for living is hollow, like the mindless accumulation of things and pleasures. And so it goes in the quest for ikigai.
4. Ordinary Virtues
5. The Book of Sushi
6. The Artisanal Ethos in Japan: The Larger Context
7. The Book of Bathing
8. Ikigai : Reasons for Living
Postface
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JAPAN, THE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY: The Artisanal Ethos, Ordinary Virtues, and Everyday Life in the Age of Limits | By John Lie
Oakland: University of California Press, 2021
John Lie, one of the most versatile and provocative writers we have on society in contemporary East Asia, offers in Japan, The Sustainable Society a proudly polemical argument about lessons that a troubled world might draw from Japan, rumours of Japan’s global irrelevance notwithstanding. Lie positions the book as a challenge to an overarching emphasis on growth, a broad political and intellectual preoccupation that has leapt beyond its key constituencies of economists and macroeconomic policy makers and become an all-encompassing, disciplining drive for many around the globe. With a surviving if perhaps fragile “artisanal ethos,” its practice of “ordinary virtues,” and the seeming acceptance by many that the country and its residents might still thrive even without a return to its heady promise of global economic leadership in the 1980s, Japan offers hints about how we might survive “the age of limits.”
After a brief preface, Lie opens with an account of Japan’s oft-overstated “decline” from its economic peak during the bubble years of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, then moving in chapter 2 to an extended critique of an ideology of growth that, while perhaps especially pronounced in postwar Japan, is global and tied to powerful academic, policy, and political institutions in the advanced industrial world. In doing so, he simultaneously undermines any rationale for depicting Japan as irrelevant to global debate because it is no longer the expansive economic dynamo of East Asia while also suggesting that the complex and sometimes heartening reactions of its people to supposed “decline” provide a powerful counter to the soul-crushing obsession with growth for growth’s sake.
Lie turns next to the idea of a “regime,” which feels similar to Bourdieu’s conceptions of habitus and field, though perhaps longer in duration. This is important because Lie depicts postwar Japan as a kind of crystallization of elements of the Meiji regime: growth-as-modernization, other values be damned. He compares this, mostly unfavourably, to the varied ethical positions and ways of life that emerged during the Edo era, a period frequently depicted, he says, as merely backward rather than rich in social and cultural flexibility that might be useful guides for life today. Although Lie offers frequent caveats about the difficulty of drawing a straight line between the Tokugawa period and today, comments like “twenty-first-century Japan, in its acceptance of different sexual orientations and lifestyles, has returned to its Tokugawa roots” (201) seem to posit continuities that other researchers might question.
In chapter 5, “The Book of Sushi,” Lie takes readers through a concise history of sushi as a food, focusing on the “artisanal ethos” that drives many chefs to aim for the sublime even as low-cost options abound and many customers seem oblivious to the craft and care behind the food. Lie articulates the artisanal ethos his informants—from sushi chefs to hand-crafted goods makers—espouse, with transformative quality produced through creative and imperfect repetition as opposed to the more lucrative but unsatisfying routines of a salaryman’s life. They also drink a lot, several hasten to add.
And in chapter 7, “The Book of Bathing,” Lie uses the comforting routines of Japanese bathing (from onsen hot springs through the sentо̄ public baths to personal ofuro bathtubs at home) to reflect on how people can find satisfaction from the repetition of ordinary virtues, like relaxation and personal cleanliness.
His final chapter, “Ikigai,” examines how people can find meaning in their lives from these ethical commitments and practices that seem “unproductive” by the merciless standards of contemporary capitalism. A brief postscript explains the book’s unusual approach in part by noting that “sushi was great to think with, that onsen were great to think in, and that eating sushi or enjoying onsen is not a bad first step in the search for a sustainable future” (219).
Amen, of course, and it’s refreshing to see a social scientist extol the pleasures associated with these miracles of everyday life. Indeed, among the book’s many strengths is Lie’s willingness to move seamlessly between erudite command of French and German social theory and the precise details of a sushi chef’s work and even the physical sensations of stepping out of a hot bath. It offers no shortage of insights about alternative ways in which to draw meaning about our lives, with the possibility that these will offer more sustainable paths than does the road to economic growth for its own sake. He might have gone further, as he reflects only briefly on the relationship between sushi and declining maritime resources, and even less on the environmental footprint of Japan’s onsen industry. Neither would require a fundamental rethinking of the book, but everyday virtues and an artisanal ethos may in their own ways contribute to tightening limits on global capacity.
My own sensation in reading the book was similar to the one I’ve experienced in my rare foray into a high-end sushi bar: pleasure at the virtuosic craft on display, combined with deep and uncomfortable anxiety that the chef might consider me unworthy of the meal. Part of this sprouts from Lie’s faint praise for the institutional environment in which I myself work: “A Japanese university may not be the best in the world, but it is pleasant, convenient, and satisfactory” (92)—words I’ve learned to avoid in describing my own research in grant applications. But it also speaks as well to Lie’s approach, making few concessions to readers in his rapid-fire references to figures as diverse as Condorcet and Vespasian before one even gets to the Japanese material.
Lie need not be concerned about my own imposter syndrome, but this does raise questions about the book’s target audience. After all, his references to writers like Shiba Ryōtarō or Nakajima Atsushi come and go so quickly as to be likely bewildering to anyone educated outside of Japan. Scholars in Japanese studies, however, might be equally confused and even dismayed by Lie’s apparent decision to avoid much of the recent social-scientific work published about Japan in English. Quite aside from my sense that critiques of growth and of “Japan is in decline” discourses are more widespread than he indicates, Lie occasionally implies problems in the literature that seem misplaced. He writes, for example, “perhaps my having dwelled among academics—fond as they are of generalizations, such as that the Japanese are hierarchical or holistic, collectivistic or compulsive—made me resist the proverbial unum noris omnes (know one, know all), blanket generalizations that occlude more than they illuminate” (219). Here I wondered to whom he might be referring. Although these generalizations animated debates in the field decades ago, they are far to the periphery of leading work today in anthropology, political science, or sociology, let alone the humanities or cultural studies.
None of this undermines the book’s many insights, but it raises questions about how best to specify the book’s contributions to a field that has long debated growth, decline, and their cultural consequences. Few studies do so with the kind of learning and panache Lie brings to bear in Japan, The Sustainable Society, but they usually are careful to note how they build upon or challenge existing research on contemporary Japan. And for these reasons, I myself am struggling with how to use the book in my classes; I admire its ethical vision and its dazzling erudition, even as I worry it presents a misleading picture of the current state of scholarly debate. But I hope to find a pleasant, convenient, and satisfactory solution.
David Leheny
Waseda University, Shinjuku
Last Revised: August 31, 2022
Pacific Affairs
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John Lie. 8. Ikigai.
Reasons for Living.
The polymath Hashimoto Osamu, born in 1947 and therefore a member of the postwar dankai generation, recalls his upbringing in Suginami Ward in west central Tokyo. His grandparents, from a modest background, lived in a house on a lot larger than 3,500 square feet. Today that would be a gargantuan estate. Half the lot was a vegetable garden, with potato flowers, strawberries, and corn. But this paradise vanished after Hashimoto and his parents moved in with his grandparents. First an expansion of the house eliminated the garden. Then Hashimoto’s father cut down the chestnut and fig trees to build a garage. The neighborhood finally disappeared altogether in the 1960s, when construction companies bulldozed small shops and independent houses and replaced them with paved roads and high-rise apartment buildings. In retrospect, Hashimoto realizes, he was happy at his grandparents’ house in the time before their neighborhood vanished, and he believes that the era of rapid economic growth actually lowered the quality of life.¹
It would be easy to make light of Hashimoto’s idyllic pastoral. After all, many people look back fondly on childhood. And aren’t Hashimoto’s fellow baby boomers swimming in collective nostalgia for the period of rapid economic growth? But this is precisely where Hashimoto differs—he is not celebrating economic growth but lamenting the destruction it wrought. The per capita GDP of Japan is clearly higher now than it was fifty years ago, but how can we be sure that the quality of life has also gone up? Are high-rise apartment buildings, with their overlapping and redundant security systems in what is perhaps one of the safest cities in the world, really an improvement over one- or two-story houses with yards and gardens? Air conditioning has brought relief from heat and humidity, and housing built from concrete and glass keeps pesky mosquitos and moths out (though pesticides and the built environment have reduced their numbers). But what about the environmental and energy burdens? Have paved roads made up in convenience for what they replaced—entire neighborhoods that were dismissed as vacant lots? Is it better to shop in a clean, well-lighted supermarket or in a neighborhood grocery store? Is it better to grow one’s own vegetables and fruits, with all the dirt and worms that come with them? The logic of growth says, “One more, then another,” and in contemporary Tokyo there’s no end in sight to the graying of the built environment. The achievement of affluence—defined by GDP figures or by the proliferation of glass-and-concrete skyscrapers—may or may not mean a good or better life.
But all is not lost. The artisanal ethos survives, as do ordinary virtues. Many Japanese people enjoy rest and relaxation, even idleness, and not just by way of onsen travel. Meaning and purpose can be found and cultivated in leisure activity. The sustainable society is ludic. And what underlies it is the search for ikigai—for meaning, for reasons to live—reasons that in turn sustain the artisanal ethos and ordinary virtues.
RELIGION AND ITS DEMISE.
For many human beings, the whole issue of reasons for living is moot. The self-evident character of the survival instinct—the will to live—requires no extended commentary, especially when food and security are of utmost concern. Yet the arrival of affluence, or at least of the potential for rest and reflection, and the lengthening of the life-span provoke incessant and irrepressible questions about the meaning of life, if not life in general, then surely life in this or that particular. Is my life worth living? Or, as the more usual formulation has it, is my life meaningful and significant? Basic curiosity about life’s meaning (not as a semantic question) is grist for the philosophical mill everywhere, and it evokes a number of generic responses. The most common of these is religion.
The Meiji regime propounded State Shintō, with the emperor at the apex, as the wellspring of spiritual and secular authority and answers.² The emperor system was the state-sanctioned ideology that turned Japan—and, over time, the Japanese empire—into the family-state, with the emperor as the ultimate patriarch and his subjects as his children.³
The emperor ruled from his appointed place in a singular lineage that had begun with the birth of Japan, as described in the oldest extant Japanese text, Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), compiled from oral tradition in 712. Thus the purpose of State Shintō and the emperor system was to eliminate, or control and contain, competing religious or spiritual authorities (including, among others, animism, Buddhism, and Christianity) as well as folk rituals and practices.⁴ In other words, the Meiji regime established a national belief system that sacralized political rule and instituted ideological control (and during the prewar regime, the fanatical articulation of this system became a proto-totalitarian war effort). Now every Japanese person had, in theory, all the answers to life’s basic questions about meaning and identity.
Needless to say, reality is much more complex and confusing. Not everyone had unquestioning faith in the emperor system or State Shintō. The deviants included Marxists and adherents of other faiths, and if many of them followed the dictates from above, especially during the final years of the Pacific War, they did so without much enthusiasm or apodictic certainty.⁵ Be that as it may, there was one focal point in modern Japanese life before 1945: the sacrosanct character of the emperor and the divine mission of the modern Japanese nation. This is to say that the Meiji regime provided a belief system, however creaky, and a source of both social solidarity and personal identity.
After the end of World War II, the extensive apparatus of the emperor system, including State Shintō, was either disestablished or disrupted. Almost overnight, the imperial project lay in ruins, and the central religious institution was shattered (though, again, I would not deny that there were some true believers and stragglers). Postwar Japan was now a nation without a national religion, a country bereft of a dominant belief system or a centralized religious institution. By the 1960s, to the extent that State Shintō survived at all, it was primarily as an object of opprobrium, criticized with equal intensity by pro-American politicians and anti-American student radicals.⁶ Except on New Year’s Day and some other special occasions, most people seemed to ignore Shintōism, though some right-wingers did rally around it in an effort to generate a new nationalist movement.⁷
After the war, a certain nullity threatened to rule the spiritual life of Japan. The Communist Party proffered a secular religion, but the party never came close to seizing power and, in any event, it maintained a secular face. Democratic and leftist intellectuals appeared to have become the unacknowledged legislators of postwar Japan, but they too never came close to assuming the mantle of prophets and pastors on behalf of the Western ideology of progress, democracy, and science. Moreover, their enthusiasm was decidedly tepid by comparison with the power and glory of the prewar emperor system, which they scorned after the fact. If some had been willing to give their lives for their country before 1945, almost no one now seemed ready to die for the sake of democracy or science.
Thus postwar Japan, with nothing like a national religion, remained staunchly secular. The end of the Meiji regime seems to have pulverized not just the emperor system but all adherence to any kind of transcendental belief system. As Joseph Kitagawa, a leading student of Japanese religious history, observed in the 1960s, “One of the basic problems of Japan is the rootlessness of the Japanese people. . . . The tragedy of postwar Japan is that the people have lost [any] fundamental religious orientation.”⁸
Surveys conducted since the 1950s have revealed that perhaps only 33 percent of the population claims any type of religious affiliation, and much Japanese religiosity is tepid in any case, which means that Japan is one of the most secular societies in the world.⁹ As Yamaori Tetsuo characterizes the postwar Japanese, they maintain a “nebulous atheism” as their central belief system.¹⁰ Adding to the sense of Japan’s being a predominantly atheist country is the fact that religion is a private matter for the Japanese.¹¹ Nevertheless, it would be problematic to call Japan a strictly secular, much less atheist, society. For one thing, there are visible populations of Shintōists, Buddhists, and Christians, along with various new religious groups.¹² For another, some argue that the real religion of Japan is the so-called Japanese Religion, that is, belief in Japaneseness.¹³ Even so, it remains true that, apart from a small minority, Japanese people do not look to organized religion or formal belief systems to find meaning in life.¹⁴
ROMANTIC PASSION, TAMED AND TEPID.
Especially in the modern West, the individual, emancipated from such ascriptive ties as the family, the community, and the faith into which he was born, seeks life’s fulfillment in romantic love. Indeed, there are few private passions as turbulent or as celebrated.¹⁵ In contemporary Japan, however, the abatement of ambition (see chapter 4) has its correlate in the sphere of intimate interpersonal relationships. That is, the tepid nihilism of everyday life seems to have dethroned romantic love in favor of ordinary feelings, however important interpersonal relationships continue to be. This disenchantment with grand passions has also diminished expectations with respect to intimate life. It was not always this way. The people of Tokugawa Japan were no strangers to sexual and romantic longing. But, given the predominance of arranged marriages among the samurai and the landlords, and the proscription on interstatus unions, depictions of romantic love in popular culture tended to focus on the forbidden and the transgressive (for example, an extramarital liaison between a patron and a courtesan that ends in double suicide). Such depictions contained little psychology. Death was the almost inevitable outcome of passionate hearts beating against an inflexible social structure.¹⁶
After the Meiji Restoration, despite the era’s puritanical mind-set, modern Japanese people avidly consumed Western cultural imports that idealized romantic love, from Romantic poetry to love songs.¹⁷ By the postwar period, in the wake of the prewar regulation of private emotions, many young urbanites were inclined to express their feelings by way of that most common phrase heard in popular music, “I love you,” using a Japanese rendition of the English-language utterance if not the Japanese equivalent (aishiteru) or its permutations. The phenomenal popularity of the radio drama Kimi no na wa (Your name), later made into a three-part film series, featured two lovers who, over and over, barely missed meeting each other.¹⁸ Somewhere, somehow, there surely would be someone—a true love. Sports manga dominated in the 1960s and 1970s, but manga for girls and boys alike featured tales of great passion, often between star-crossed lovers. The characters in these stories knew whom they loved and hated, and, as un-Japanese as this may have seemed, they expressed their loves and hatreds, if only via confessional missives. Ai to Makoto (Ai and Makoto) recounts the romantic passion of Ai, a bourgeois lady in the making, and Makoto, a poor delinquent. Everything is straightforward—her name means “love,” his means “sincerity.” Makoto tells Ai, “I would die for you!” The sheer number of obstacles thrown in the lovers’ path recalls the impediments of Wuthering Heights.¹⁹ In a more philosophical and literary vein, Fukunaga Takehiko’s 1956 novel, Ai no kokoromi (An attempt at love), captures the postwar idealization of romantic love: from existential loneliness, we strive to pass through and realize the divine mystery of romantic love, of love as burning passion and ultimate spiritual encounter.²⁰ Eurocentric though Fukunaga may have been, his exaltation of romantic love was not uncommon for a modern Japanese writer. Indeed, in the immediate postwar decades, Fukunaga’s existentialist ruminations on romantic love were anything but unique. In 1963, Ai to shi wo mitsumete (Facing love and death) became a phenomenal best seller, and in 1964 it was made into an equally popular television program.²¹ Based on some four hundred letters between its two authors, which were written and exchanged when they were both university students and while the female protagonist was hospitalized with a terminal illness, Ai to shi wo mitsumete ends with her death, but not before she loses half her face to a botched operation. Watching the television adaptation is one of my earliest memories; grisly though the experience was, Ai to shi wo mitsumete is a testament to the ideal of jun’ai (pure love), beyond disfigurement and the grave. Clearly, love is not for the faint of heart.²²
By the 1980s, the dominant tenor of romantic relationships had become one of yūjū fudan (indecision). Popular manga like Tonda kappuru (The jumping couple) and Mezon Ikkoku (Maison Ikkoku) depicted male protagonists who were decidedly indecisive.²³ In both works, a young man cannot choose between two young women, and the arc of the narrative swings back and forth as he is unable to decide or commit himself. There is passionate intensity but also Hamlet-like deliberation: Whom should I be with? Whom do I love? These protagonists are a universe away from the violence-loving delinquent Makoto, capable of declaring his willingness to die for his love. In the most popular romance of 1990, Tokyo rabusutōrī (Tokyo love story), there is a girl who can express her love openly, but once again there is a boy who cannot make up his mind, much less express his feelings.²⁴
The life of indecision took a gentler turn in the post-Bubble decades. No longer were there loud proclamations of love. Now there was only a whispered “Sukidesu” (“I like you”). Needless to say, this semantic drift may warrant translating the language of like (suki) as a declaration of love (ai). Regardless, the tepid expression of romantic passion came to mark the outer limit of what was permissible, or imaginable.
A casual foreign observer might take the Japanese for a people so taciturn that a narrow range of romantic expression should be expected. Yet Japanese culture is drenched with tears and emotion about falling in, falling out, and even staying in passionate, erotic love. You’ve got to hide your love away, but it’s all over the place. Sōseki Natsume, that colossus of modern Japanese literature, frequently holds forth on love. For example, the elder brother in Kōjin (The Wayfarer), has this to say: “What’s truly sacred is not the relationship between husband and wife, created by human beings, but romantic love, concocted by nature. . . . And so it’s not wrong to say that someone who subscribes to morality is a temporary winner, but a permanent loser. And someone who follows nature is a temporary loser, but a permanent winner.”²⁵ To take another example, in Natsume’s Sorekara (And Then), a male character, Daisuke, declares his love to a married woman, Michiyo. At first Michiyo calls Daisuke’s declaration “cruel,” but in time she decides to pursue an extramarital relationship with him, even unto death: “If you say die, I’ll die. . . . I don’t care when I get killed.”²⁶ The theme of Liebestod is not just for a Romeo and a Juliet who accidentally die in the throes of young love, or even for a Werther who shoots himself because of unrequited
love—though I hasten to add that both Shakespeare’s famous drama and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) were staples for the modern Japanese reading public. Rather, the course of modern Japanese love has often run to murder-suicide or to shinjū (double suicide). Thwarted love ending in double suicide is of course far from unique to Japan—consider only the 1889 Mayerling incident or its near contemporary, Tchaikovsky’s 1876 ballet Swan Lake. But shinjū, both in abstract rhetoric and in concrete action, has long been a major trope in the humid, sticky world of Japanese passion, with all its erotic vexations and outbursts. Western-style romantic love was yet another import, but it would be egregiously condescending to claim that premodern and modern Japanese people had not already been suffering almost all the sorrows and pangs, the exaltations and ecstasies, of romantic love.²⁷ If they were not entirely clear on the concept, they were not necessarily innocent of its substance.
By contrast, Japanese lovers in the twenty-first century seem sober and lacking in ardor. After 1997, the year that marked the publication of Watanabe Jun’ichi’s best-selling novel Shitsurakuen (A lost paradise) and the release of the film based on the novel, it has been difficult to find any major manifestations of Liebestod in Japanese culture.²⁸ Even in 1997, Watanabe, then in his sixties, seemed to appeal almost exclusively to his contemporaries and elders. Younger audiences were perplexed by the success of the novel and the film and regarded both as entertainments for ojisan (middle-aged men). For most Japanese people of the post-Bubble era, the coupling of love and death is unimaginable. For them, passion has largely been tamed, and love has become like. As Louise Bogan puts it, “What the wise doubt, the fool believes— / Who is it, then, that love deceives?”²⁹ Perhaps the best-known work of romantic love in contemporary Japanese literature—Haruki Murakami’s Norway no mori (Norwegian Wood), published in the same year as Watanabe’s Shitsurakuen—announces itself as a “100 percent romantic-love novel.”³⁰ The male protagonist, Watanabe (a common Japanese surname), is kind and gentle, ever solicitous. He seeks a relationship based on gender equality and is all but devoid of old-fashioned patriarchal attitudes and macho behavior. The novel is not without its carnal moments, but the climactic sex scene leaves Watanabe’s love, Naoko, unmoved. In the ups and downs of his romance, Watanabe is taciturn, with almost no wild swings of emotion. To be willing to die for one’s love is one thing, but the kinder, gentler version of love seems to smother, even come close to extinguishing, romance and passion. The popularity of Norway no mori is emblematic of contemporary Japanese norms regarding romantic love. Or take Okazaki Kyōko’s Ribāsuejji (River’s Edge), in which every romantic longing is thwarted and the only sustained relationship is between the young female protagonist and her gay male friend, a relationship transacted primarily through their looking at an abandoned human body on the banks of a river.³¹ There is death, but there’s no love. The post-Bubble Japanese, disenchanted with fairy tales, are reluctant to follow the palpitations of the heart or to set out over the terra incognita of an emotional whirlwind. Sobriety rules. It’s as if everyone can see the final stages of love—disenchantment and disbelief—and know that there is no transcendence.
Perhaps the most popular love story in the late 2010s was Nigeru wa haji daga yaku ni tatsu (We Got Married as a Job). Like so many other popular movies and television shows, it was originally a manga.³² Thirty-six-year-old Tsuzaki Hiramasa, an engineer and a self-identified professional single man, is still a virgin. He’s a softer version of an otaku (a geek or nerd). He needs someone to cook and clean for him, and Moriyama Mikuri applies for the job. Over time, their employer-employee relationship becomes a contractual marriage, an extension of their cash-basis connection into a long-term employment agreement. Because the story follows the conventions of romantic comedy, the two eventually develop a romantic attachment to each other, and the story concludes with substantive fulfillment of what had been their formal, empty contractual matrimony. There were feelings and passion somewhere, but they blossomed from the cold logic of the pair’s contract, as if the two had been parties to an arranged marriage.
At the same time, women writers were abandoning the heteronormative world of patriarchal romantic love. Matsuura Rieko explores lesbian relationships and experimental sexual acts in Nachuraru ūman (Natural woman), which seems downright conventional next to her subsequent Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (The training period of the big-toe P), in which the female protagonist’s big toe opens up new possibilities by metamorphosing into a penis.³³ And in Matsuura’s Kenshin (Dog body), a woman becomes a dog. A dog was the love object in Tawada Yōko’s earlier Inumukoiri (Dog marriage).³⁴ Mizumura Minae’s Honkaku shōsetsu (True novel), loosely based on Wuthering Heights, upsets the conventions of modern romantic love stories by starting off with a physically unattractive heroine, and the course of true love runs nowhere.³⁵ Needless to say, not all Japanese women writers have given up on traditional boy-meets-girl love stories, but one explanation for why South Korean television dramas are so popular among Japanese women may be that Japanese writers increasingly find it a challenge to narrate the received arc of romantic love, which may entail a rough journey, though all’s well that ends well.
As for realism, it reflected what people were actually doing. And in the postwar period, that meant getting married (“till death do us part”) and having children (at least two). In Haruki Murakami’s novel Kokkyō no minami, taiyō no nishi (South of the Border, West of the Sun), the protagonist-narrator recalls his unusual upbringing: “In the world I grew up in, a typical family had two or three children. . . . I was an only child. . . . What other people all had and took for granted I lacked.”³⁶ The narrator then goes on about how he hated his deviant existence, and about all the pejorative connotations of being an only child (most obviously, he was assumed to be spoiled). Normality, especially in one’s family situation, was a requirement of the postwar decades, when the family was a haven and a bulwark against the unpredictable, potentially cruel and heartless world. Yet even then the rampart was cracking, if it had not always already been cracked. Recall Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 film Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story), discussed in chapters 4 and 7. In the film, an elderly man and his wife visit their adult children and receive only a lukewarm welcome. Especially for viewers of a certain age, the film often evokes the asymmetrical character of love between parents and children, or it exemplifies the delusions of gerontocracy—elderly parents, far from reigning as paterfamilias and materfamilias, fade and then pass away. The ambitious dankai generation, which sought to replace patriarchy with modern family life, found that it was not only the extended family but also the nuclear family that was breaking down.³⁷ Although contemporary Japanese people may yearn for love and marriage, for cohabitation and children, there is no question that the institution of the family is under assault. And marriage? It is now subsumed under konkatsu (spouse hunting), just another of the many activities that Japanese people engage in.
The family remains the typical form of cohabitation, but it has fractured into distinct models of living together. Even in the postwar decades there was still a widespread sense of the premodern, extended family or household as the bedrock of Japanese life. But the truths of past generations are no more. And the modern nuclear family of the postwar decades is also in crisis. In this regard, Japan is no different from many other wealthy countries. There are now more single people and unmarried couples in Japan, and more homosexual and transgender couples live together. The postwar myth of the normative heterosexual nuclear family is all but dead, and the prevailing norm is social tolerance, at least in urban areas. Thus twenty-first-century Japan, in its acceptance of different sexual orientations and lifestyles, has returned to its Tokugawa roots. BL (boys’ love) manga has served as something of an avant-garde for alternative love relationships and lifestyles. What is curious about the genre is that it is written almost exclusively by and for women (the exceptions to the female readership are such occasional deviants as a curious researcher). It would be easy to see a projection of desire in BL manga’s plethora of dashing, emotionally sensitive characters, who seem never to populate the living or working environments of the readers. The manga Kinō nani tabeta? (What did you eat yesterday?) is exemplary. In this illustrated recipe book, two likable gay men—one a lawyer, the other a hairdresser—have ordinary, contented lives, with occasional problems and crises around which the issue of what to cook and eat is a central motif as well as a master solution.³⁸ It is not that there aren’t BL stories with suggestions of wild sex or turbulent relationships. After all, BL’s readers grew up with the likes of Ikeda Riyoko’s epic-heroic Berusaiyu no bara (Berubara, or The Rose of Versailles).³⁹ It is nevertheless striking, even in stories that depict the LGBTQ community, how passion has been tamed and how life has been routinized. This is not the world of Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester or Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff.
Many Japanese people have told me that they live in order to work—not just the sushi master discussed in chapter 5 but even some businessmen—yet no one has mentioned the notion of living in order to love. To be sure, a few people have identified a connection with a pet as their most important relationship and reason for living. And mothers do say that they find solace and significance in childrearing. It is common enough for mothers, and some fathers, to say that the births of their children have been the best moments of their lives. But that form of love, agapē, is distinct from romantic love between two adults. In other words, love is important to Japanese people, and worth living for, but romantic passion appears not to be. It may be that inequality and asymmetry between women and men—including the vast infrastructure of the sex industry, which doubles as an emotion industry—have cut off the possibility of passionate relationships based on equality.
It would be easy to deplore the diminished Japanese passion for romantic love, but it is also possible that the Romantic legacy of valorizing passionate love has already visited havoc on many relationships. This is a world from which transcendent sources of meaning and value have disappeared or are disappearing, whether we mean old-time religion or tightly knit communities. In the circumstances, expecting romantic love to stand as a pillar of ordinary, intimate life is tantamount to inviting a dragon to live in the bedroom. Reality is rife with small indignities as well as massive deviations from the impossible ideal of romantic love, and companionable, compatible intimate relationships involve many compromises. Some people forgo sexual relations altogether, whereas others find the absence of sex unbearable. Consider the popularity of the novel and manga Otto no chinpo ga hairanai (My Husband Won’t Fit).⁴⁰ The protagonist suffers from what is regarded as a devastating flaw in her marriage, not to mention from the couple’s inevitable failure to conceive a child, but eventually she comes to accept her imperfect, unrealized marriage as right for the two of them. The perfect romantic relationship is an abstraction, and beguiling though the ideal of romantic love has been for many people, romantic love is surely not a panacea for people who seek meaningful relationships or love in their lives. Again, it would be inaccurate to say that most Japanese people don’t seek romance, passion, and relationships, but romantic love is not seen as the solution to existential anguish or existential questions.
OTAKU.
If most contemporary Japanese people are ambivalent or wary about religion or romantic love—or, for that matter, in the nation or the family—what is left for building a meaningful life? Surely one answer is work. On that score, artisans provide a model for the well-lived life. But many people don’t find a personally satisfactory occupation, to say nothing of all the jobs from which almost no one could derive any meaning. And other people don’t like any kind of work at all. What hope is there for these people? A clue lies in a much-derided Japanese character type—the otaku, the nerd or geek encountered in earlier chapters.
The otaku belongs to the generations after the dankai generation. The term otaku, coined in 1983, is usually credited to Nakamori Akio, a manga critic. It denotes a young man or young men (the original otaku were almost always male) of a certain appearance—an unkempt mop of hair, casual clothing—considered to be not quite delinquent but somewhat strange. Otaku have poor social skills and an obsession with one or another aspect of pop culture, particularly manga and anime (though the actual range of human interests that an individual otaku pursues may be wider).⁴¹ Otaku, whose efflorescence is coeval with post-Bubble Japan, are closely associated with the rise of consumer society and the proliferation of youth subcultures. The received stereotype of the otaku is the relentlessly negative image of young adults (again, usually male) who are incapable of dealing with the world. “They’re no good,” a woman in her forties told me. “They’re socially unacceptable.”⁴² And the father of two otaku sons thundered, “They have no spirit, no will. They’re parasites!” What prompts much of the discussion about the otaku, apart from their obsession with manga and anime, is their antisocial character. They are said to avoid the complexities and complications of real-life relationships, including sexual or romantic relationships, and to seek regulated and controlled encounters, whether online or in person with professionals. The otaku are also easy targets for people seeking to discover the causes of Japanese ills, including the struggling economy (indolent youth are said to be taking the place of the nation’s corporate workers) and Japan’s declining fertility rates.⁴³ In any case, few have much that is positive to say about this character type. As one man in his thirties told me, “I’m an otaku myself, and even I don’t like the otaku.”
Akihabara.
The area in central Tokyo known as Akihabara, once a mecca of electronics shops, has been transformed into the capital and spiritual home of otaku culture. (It should be noted, however, that Akihabara increasingly attracts men older than the typical otaku, as well as some girls and women, not to mention foreign tourists.) Two notable cultural offerings are available there. The first (and dominant) of the two is what the otaku call “two-dimensional” products—primarily manga, anime, and video games. In this domain, the most prized type of female is a young and beautiful girl-woman described as dōgan kyonyū (having a baby face and big breasts). By contrast with three-dimensional (that is, real) girls and women, these two-dimensional representations preoccupy the imaginative and affective lives of many otaku boys and men, who are marked by Rorikon (a Lolita complex). The second offering is the meido kissa (maid cafés), featuring young women clad in French maid’s uniforms who greet and serve their customers (again, almost all men) as lords and masters and may also play card games, board games, and video games with them. The hapless otaku shells out the equivalent of about five US dollars to enter the café, another five
three-dimensional (that is, real) girls and women, these two-dimensional representations preoccupy the imaginative and affective lives of many otaku boys and men, who are marked by Rorikon (a Lolita complex). The second offering is the meido kissa (maid cafés), featuring young women clad in French maid’s uniforms who greet and serve their customers (again, almost all men) as lords and masters and may also play card games, board games, and video games with them. The hapless otaku shells out the equivalent of about five US dollars to enter the café, another five for each game he plays, and five more to take a photo with a maid. (The café’s food and drinks, usually of substandard quality, are priced at approximately the going rate.) There is almost never any physical contact between the maids and their otaku customers. It is as if the otaku are at play in a Barbie DreamHouse version of the hostess bars that their fathers and grandfathers frequented.⁴⁴
The all-female Japanese idol group known as AKB48 (AKB is the acronym for Akihabara) and its satellite groups, girl bands that represent the apotheosis of fan participation, provide insights into otaku culture. The annual AKB48 election, a nationally televised affair, was routinely one of the most watched programs of the year during the 2010s; it captured more attention and generated more excitement than the national legislative elections. AKB48’s membership is determined by music fans, who vote with their wallets by purchasing the CDs in order to vote—one CD, one vote. The performer with the most votes becomes AKB48’s lead singer, and the top twenty or so singers get to perform regularly in public. An uninformed foreigner might believe that this election rewards beauty or talent, but it almost always comes down to which performer best approximates the ideal of the girl next door. It is widely agreed by fans and nonfans alike that a beautiful (or tall or bright) young woman intimidates the otaku, who form the core of CD buyers (voters), which is why beautiful, tall, or bright contestants often fail to make it in the world of AKB48. Indeed, the mean height of AKB48’s members is lower than the national mean. Recall the language of suki (like) as opposed to the language of love. In this context, the chief aesthetic virtue is not to be beautiful but to be kawaii (cute). The exemplary kawaii figure, Hello Kitty, does not have a mouth or teeth, and the AKB48 stars are similarly nonthreatening. Here, communication and expression can flourish—kawaii culture, for the otaku, means never having to risk revealing anything personal, and never being menaced by the real world.⁴⁵ The otaku knows he is in control because he is the one who has chosen and created the stars.
It is true, of course, that in the postwar period there were many movie stars and singers who also became idols. Fans saw their films, bought their albums, and may have bought their posters, too. But these stars and singers were idols, sacred objects of passionate veneration. Consider only the fact that in English the title of Hiraoka Masaaki’s book about the 1970s teen singing sensation Yamaguchi Momoe would be Momoe Is Bodhisattva.⁴⁶ What Hiraoka sees in Yamaguchi’s hollow eyes is the look of the proletariat. In this respect, Yamaguchi embodied the spirit of supokon manga (sports manga; see chapter 4), that is, the struggle for upward mobility in postwar Japan. And the postwar idols’ fans did worship them, believing them incapable of entertaining a polluted thought or committing an irreverent act—an image clearly at odds with that of idols like the members of AKB48, who represent the utter secularization of pop culture idols. How could it be otherwise, when the top vote-getter in the 2016 AKB48 election had been a contestant in a televised farting contest held in a school library? Many of AKB48’s older fans do retain a spiritual orientation toward the group, but for the otaku these stars are not sacred figures.⁴⁷ Indeed, the otaku shows little overt passion. The figures who were icons for his parents are for the otaku mere dolls, material and disposable. The otaku, as a denizen of the world of the lukewarm bath (see “Ambition and Its Diminution,” in chapter 4), makes the necessary (and considerable) effort to indulge his private interests, but he is not about to sacrifice himself like a kamikaze pilot, nor is he disposed to enact a lover’s suicide
Beyond the Stereotype.
The stereotype of the otaku obfuscates more than it illuminates. Some self-described otaku—not unlike Tsuzaki Hiramasa, the fictional engineer in his thirties who is the protagonist of Nigeru wa haji daga yaku ni tatsu—hold prestigious jobs by day, and by night they gallivant about town, dine at expensive restaurants, visit kyabakura (cabaret clubs, that is, nightclubs), and generally behave more or less the way successful businessmen of their fathers’ generation behaved with Ginza hostesses. As another challenge to the stereotype, the best-selling 2004 novel Densha otoko (Train man) features an otaku protagonist who is courageous enough to stop a sexual harasser and thus becomes a romantic hero of sorts.⁴⁸ Furthermore, the idea of Cool Japan and the vitality of Japanese subcultural products abroad (manga, anime, and video games, most obviously) suggest that otaku-based industries are thriving export economies that also partake of the artisanal ethos.⁴⁹ In addition, more than a generation after the birth or invention of the otaku, it remains far from clear just who the otaku is. At times it is difficult to differentiate an otaku from a Yankī—this label has supplanted the archaic furyō (delinquent)—or, for that matter, to differentiate an otaku from any other young man (or woman). Therefore, some critics suggest that the otaku doesn’t exist except as a by-product of discrimination.⁵⁰ As in Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of anti-Semitism, it is anti-otaku discrimination that produces the otaku.
The contemporary Japanese, however covert their public displays of affection may be, are not quite at the point of saying, “Not to be born comes first by every reckoning.”⁵¹ Nor are they still at the point of never having fallen in love, and this is no less true of the otaku. It would be easy to mistake ostensible quietude for a soulless existence, but the beating human heart maintains its interest in and devotion to one aspect of the world or another, perhaps in the arts, perhaps in the natural environment. An amateur psychoanalyst, tempted to see the otaku’s behavior as a projection of thwarted human relationships onto transitional or permanent objects, would be mistaken to overlook the vibrant inner world of interests beneath the contemporary Japanese otaku’s apparent indifference. The otaku seek, in their idiosyncratic ways, to make life worth living, to find ikigai beyond the received verities of family, community, company, or nation. No bitter taste of the real has killed their appetite for a slice of life, however mediated, among other reportedly problematic and antisocial youth. The individual otaku, then, no exemplar of post-Bubble burnout, almost always has an enthusiasm or two. He (sometimes she) readily joins fan clubs and collects everything related to a favorite genre or object.
Contrary to the stereotype, the otaku may actually be less interested in consumption and collection than in experience and matters of the spirit. Indeed, the otaku is defined by that very pursuit.⁵² A moment’s conversation with an otaku almost always reveals an engagement and an erudition akin to those of a research academic. I know a historian who began subscribing in high school to the prestigious Journal of Modern History, and after four decades he has been unable to let go of his all-consuming interest in early modern European history. Generally rumpled, and indifferent to most luxuries, he is the very picture of the absent-minded professor; the otaku in contemporary Japan is precisely this type of character. The received stereotype of the otaku—that he is unkempt, dresses indifferently, has trouble communicating, and displays little affect—also holds for a sizable swath of research academics. The only difference is that a university-based historian is an eccentric but laudable professional, whereas a lifelong passionate enthusiast of anime about Gundam (sci-fi robots) doesn’t project the same status to most businessmen and bureaucrats.⁵³
Needless to say, the research academic’s mode of expression and dissemination is different from that of the otaku, but not qualitatively so. The research academic writes up and publishes his findings and his theses. The otaku writes his blog and perhaps even publishes a book. Both attend conventions to discuss matters of mutual interest with their colleagues. Here, though, one difference is that most academics at conventions and symposia eventually fall into discussing extra-academic matters (gossip about others, about who got what job, and so on), but otaku tend to talk shop most of the time, with the occasional digression into other common interests, such as B-kyū gurume (class B gourmet) restaurants.
Otaku also make their marks in different ways. For example, a manga otaku I met at Japan’s supreme research library, the National Diet Library, had been conducting a bibliographic analysis of a manga series. His project would have put the great philologists of the past to shame. He had examined variations across distinct issues, or compared the serial version to its book variants, and his work had been so painstaking that he was in a position to publish an editio cum notis variorum. It might be argued that Dryden, say, is more important than Kyojin no hoshi, but the latter surely has more active readers. As another example, my seatmate on a flight in 2015 was an airline otaku who talked for hours about every aspect of contemporary commercial flying. In the previous decade, he had flown more than three million miles. He knew all the ins and outs of several airlines’ frequent-flyer clubs, the details of airlines’ seating arrangements, the levels of service that applied to different classes of air travel on distinct routes, and so on. As yet another example, a railroad otaku, my fellow passenger on a train trip, exhibited encyclopedic knowledge about types of trains and compartments as well as about various routes and their historical variations. There are history otaku and other types of academic otaku. I even encountered an otaku of social theory (one of my own specialties) whose knowledge of Max Weber was astounding. I could easily have dismissed this autodidact—he had not earned a graduate degree. But he did earn my respect with his seriousness and his dedication to the study of Weber (how many Weber scholars own the Gesamtausgabe?). And, as suggested earlier, there are Gundam otaku, such as Suzuki Toshimi, a barber who constructed ten large-scale models of Gundam robots outside his shop. “Sure,” he says, “it’s a hobby. But instead of just living my life, I wanted to give people something to be excited about.”⁵⁴ Another Gundam otaku—this one in his forties, with hundreds of plastic models in his apartment—has amassed his own encyclopedia of model types and variations. “This is my life’s work,” he told me, in English.
THE LEISURE SOCIETY.
The genius of the contemporary economy lies in its transformation of leisure and idleness into consumption and activity.⁵⁵ After work, we keep on working, this time in our role as consumers. We even provide free advertising by way of the corporate logos on our clothing and in the presumably personal views we transmit over social media.
People in Japan, too, like people elsewhere, are enjoined to go out and spend money, or to spend money at home by clicking links on the smartphones that have entered the inner sanctum of personal privacy, the last redoubt of idleness. Indeed, picking up a smartphone is often the first action upon waking and the last before going to sleep. Instead of cultivating their gardens or soaking in a warm bath, Japanese people are glued to the small screen where the central drama is fame and fortune, getting and spending. And if the temptation to soak in a warm bath should break through the continuous injunction to busyness, the smartphone is equipped with a waterproof cover.
If it were possible to summarize, in a simple way, the life of a contemporary Japanese corporate employee, the summary would come down to a series of katsu (activities): studying to get into a college or a university, shūkatsu (looking for employment), konkatsu (looking for a spouse), and, finally, shūkatsu (dying). To the extent that leisure enters the picture at all, it is usually devoted to conspicuous consumption, which itself is a struggle to achieve social recognition, often by establishing invidious comparisons between oneself and others. Thus, as we saw in chapter 5, some people spend more time and energy taking photos of sushi than enjoying the sushi chef’s delectable concoctions. Leisure in Japan is certainly not devoted to sleep. On average, Japanese people don’t sleep much at all.⁵⁶ Moreover, Japanese workers of all kinds—almost all Japanese adults, for that matter—are expected to be other-directed, and the demands on their time can become onerous.
In the past, people managed to find moments of fun. As noted in chapter 5, executives and other businessmen often frequented nightclubs and kyabakura, as well as the less expensive sunakku (literally, “snacks”; the term derives from these establishments’ specialty of serving light meals and drinks).⁵⁷ There, they kept up a stream of banter and flirted, all the while drinking to excess. Not surprisingly, some people describe these establishments as having been fueling stations for businessmen. And there were games, played in the batting cages or on the driving ranges that cropped up in most postwar Japanese neighborhoods. There was also pachinko (Japanese pinball), with all its permutations, a game that probably consumed more of the average office worker’s leisure time than any other activity. What all these pursuits had in common was that they satisfied the desire for either physical pleasure or mindless amusement. Needless to say, people’s free time was not devoted entirely to pursuits like these. People also read books, went to movies, and played music. Still, as a self-described anime otaku in her thirties told me, “I have no idea what my father did in his free time. Sleep? My mother was always doing stuff around the house—cleaning, cooking—though I’m not really sure, since she never talked about it. Anyway, older Japanese people didn’t know how to have fun. They just worked all the time.”
That may or may not have been true. Perhaps office workers in the past were actually less busy than they wanted to appear. Today, though, thanks to the dissemination of otaku culture, it’s not just the young and the restless who are engrossed in a life-consuming hobby. More and more office workers now lead double lives as nocturnal, ostensibly antisocial otaku. The habits of the otaku have spread widely, and Japanese people are increasingly embracing their inner geek.⁵⁸ In fact, the extent of fascinatio nugacitatis—enchantment with triviality—is nothing short of impressive in Japan. In the face of the daily grind of meaningless work, people are finding meaning and purpose in leisure activity. Hobbies and similar obsessions are ubiquitous.
This plethora of hobbies pursued with diligence—a consequence of affluence and the advent of the leisure society—had already become a notable feature of Japanese life by the 1970s, but the explosion of leisure activity coincided with the emergence of the otaku.⁵⁹ The passionate engagement of the otaku represents the modest happiness discussed in chapter 4, a happiness that relies more on fulfillment and experience than on material possessions. Paradoxically, then, the allegedly antisocial, parasitical otaku have shown their elders possibilities for a life beyond the workplace.⁶⁰
The post-Bubble years were particularly important in the dissemination of serious leisure activities, and in some office workers’ transformation into otaku. One middle-aged corporate employee began taking piano lessons after reading a manga about a young woman’s struggle to become a great pianist. “I must have listened to classical music when I was in school,” he said, “but after reading a scene where the protagonist plays a Beethoven sonata, I went out and bought a CD. It was mesmerizing. I discovered a new world.” Another relates a similar story: “I happened to see an illustration by Itō Jakuchū. It was nothing like what I’d thought Edo-era art was like. I read some books, went to galleries and museums, and became an Edo art otaku.” Others simply took what they were already doing to a new level, one that looked fanatical to outsiders but meant, in practice, the sublime level of the otaku. For example, a retired executive said, “I always enjoyed drinking, and I began to enjoy drinking alone. At an izakaya [a tavern or pub-like restaurant], you don’t really drink alone anyway [but I began solo drinking]. I read books about drinking alone and searched for interesting izakaya all around Japan.”
Leisure activity, like life itself, is all about flow. The feeling of aimlessness—the sense of being buffeted by random, incomprehensible forces—can be overcome in part through the pursuit of something in which it is possible to become passionately engaged. As long as that engagement lasts, it can offer meaning and a sense of purpose. Yet there is a long-standing, often troubling (and troublesome) practice of condemning leisure activity. For example, a volatile mixture of resentment and envy was once brought to bear on housewives because they pursued hobbies while apparently enjoying the economic support of their hardworking husbands (some women were even said to devote their free time to extramarital affairs). That misogynistic discourse has faded with women’s reentry into the labor market, but it contained a grain of truth in the sense that Japanese women in general, and housewives in particular, have been less careerist than men, and therefore more inclined to pursue one hobby or another. Some of women’s hobbies have been traditionally female pursuits with a touch of cachet and sophistication, such as tea ceremony or flower arrangement. Others have been faddish, such as hula dancing in the postwar decades or, at the turn of the twenty-first century, listening to K-pop music and binge-watching South Korean television dramas. As an example of the latter obsession, I was seated next to a middle-aged Japanese woman on a flight from Tokyo to Seoul. Immediately after takeoff, she opened a portable DVD player and proceeded to watch a popular South Korean drama. When she noticed that I had a Korean-language newspaper, she began to speak to me in excellent Korean. I asked her how she had learned the language, and she said she had been immersing herself in popular South Korean TV dramas and wanted to understand what the characters were saying. She added that she had traveled to South Korea more than twenty times in the previous five years or so, and that she enjoyed nothing more than being able to talk with an ordinary South Korean about a drama they had both watched (her knowledge of those dramas was breathtaking, by the way). I met another middle-aged Japanese woman who was extremely enthusiastic and well informed about K-pop. Her deep knowledge and dazzling analyses of the genre were the equal of what might be expected from an academic expert. Both women were effectively otaku, and women like the two of them are everywhere now in Japan.
Aristotle, in contrast to almost all other philosophers, takes leisure activity seriously, not only as a means of recovering from fatigue and of preparing for another round of work, but also as something to be pursued for the sake of fulfilling one’s personal potential. Indeed, for Aristotle, leisure activity is “the fundamental principle”; thus leisure activity is not mere play or relaxation but has a purposive element in that it must incorporate such skills and learning as can be used to turn free time in the direction of “pleasure, happiness, and the good life.”⁶¹ (It is not for nothing that Greek skole and Latin scola, the etymological roots of English “school,” denote “leisure.”) Frivolous though an activity may be, there are meanings and purposes to be gained from its pursuit. And, if not everyone can find fulfillment in work by becoming a consummate artisan, there is also no reason to believe that a good society will be one in which everyone endeavors to find and pursue a professional career. This would be a society of diligence, probably an ascetic society. But another avenue is open to almost everyone in an affluent society, an avenue made all the richer because it is enjoyable, fulfilling, and uplifting, with no hangover and no emptiness at the end. As William Morris, echoing Aristotle, puts it, “What other blessings are there in life save . . . fearless rest and hopeful work? [T]o have space and freedom to gain such rest and such work is the end of politics; to learn how best to gain it is the end of education; to learn its inmost meaning is the end of religion.”⁶² I am not sure that we should expect everyone to hew to the two goals of work and leisure. There should be a place for believers as well as for lovers and others who take meaning and sustenance from different sources. In a postaffluent society, a society in which most people have abandoned the comforts of the traditional faiths and social collectivities, or have been through the whirlwind of egoistic hedonism or romantic passion, leisure activity seems the likeliest and most reliable goal.
Leisure activity is a necessary component of the good life, and of a good society. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, or so we believe (though we’re skeptical of those who play all the time). Yet there is a sense in which leisure activity has features in common with artisanal work. Both provide meaning and purpose in life, and both involve projects that enhance personal potential and self-worth.
IKIGAI.
What is thought to be the meaning or worth of an individual life has varied enormously across cultures and throughout history. To take one example, the reigning Western historiography stresses the salience of the Christian God, often omniscient and omnipotent, in order to endow an ephemeral, seemingly pointless life with significance and immortality. To take another, Japan’s wartime imperial-military ideology affirmed that the ultimate fulfillment of life’s purpose was self-sacrifice for the sake of the emperor.⁶³ In the immediate postwar decades, recovery and growth were posited as ultimate values, given the debacle of the war. The contraction of ambition and the curtailment of passion spelled the end of transcendence, including the ideology of rapid economic growth and materialism. Nevertheless, as Epicurus (who was far from the embodiment of what we call Epicurean) might have said, life must offer modest pleasures. But if infinite desire is a self-defeating proposition, aphanisis—the extinction of desire—offers no nirvana, for we would be anxious precisely because we had no desire. This would be the life of acedia about which the medieval scholastics were so exercised. More important, it would be hard to extinguish the quest for meaning and purpose—the will to be, the desire to carry on. Ordinary virtues are not without their rewards, of course, but people still seek deeper reasons for living. For anyone who has even a moment for repose and reflection, the hermeneutical urge is almost irrepressible. Abulia and sloth, emptiness and nothingness—these are dark holes from within which we struggle to instantiate the will to live.
Existential and spiritual questions become all the more urgent once people have escaped the world of dire necessity (that is, when they have acquired adequate means of satisfying basic needs for food and shelter) and moved beyond the universe of received answers (that is, when there are no longer any hegemonic belief systems, such as religion and its secular permutations). In the twenty-first century, grand narratives about God or emperor, nation or revolution, sound hollow to most Japanese people. Despite deep-seated suspicions that contemporary Japanese people remain collectivist and holistic in their orientation, they are usually acutely aware of their individuality as well as of their potential, or actual, loneliness.
We are thrust into the world, where our time is necessarily limited. Alcohol and drugs offer one practical, moderately effective answer to existential anxiety, as does immersion in one total institution or another, whether a “black” corporation (one of the superexploitative companies in contemporary Japan) or a cult, of which there is a wide selection. For most Japanese people, however, there is no immediately available transcendental recourse, no possibility of escape into a received traditional mind-set, and no relief (barring serious cognitive deficits) from existential questions about their personal place and significance in the world. The overwhelmingly worldly orientation of contemporary Japanese life makes the consolations of Christianity or Buddhism incredible and implausible. Without the promise of an afterlife, how do Japanese people find consolation for nothingness, for the apparently meaningless universe and the inevitability of death and extinction? The received answers are unsatisfactory, and the crumbling of the postwar regime can be seen in the inefficacy of the standard postwar bromides about what makes life worthwhile.⁶⁴ The unexamined life, pace philosophers, is worth living, but the ubiquity of the idea of ikigai makes reflection on one’s life (How should I live? What should I live for?) a common theme of thought and conversation in everyday Japanese life.⁶⁵
Kamiya Mieko, a psychiatrist, has written searchingly about ikigai. “For people to continue to live vivaciously,” she says, “there’s nothing more important than ikigai. Therefore, there’s nothing more cruel than to take away people’s ikigai, and there’s no greater love than to give people ikigai.” For Kamiya, ikigai is intimately intertwined with hariai (something worthwhile). “People find it intolerable to live alone, in a vacuum,” she says. In order to live well, people need validation—the sense that they exist and matter, that they have efficacy in and responses from the world. Kamiya goes on to say that the sense of having a life worth living entails an orientation toward the future and a sense of purpose—devotion to a cause, a pursuit. Ikigai, she writes, is not a matter of the usefulness one has developed and accumulated over time, nor of the sheer length of time one has lived. Rather, ikigai is all about mattering, about meaningful living, and it leads to a series of questions: What is the purpose of my life? What is my purpose in life? Is my life worth living? Is life worth living?⁶⁶ The answers are necessarily very idiosyncratic, and they differ from one individual to another. Ikigai is a general concept, but its individual articulation is particular—it is mine.
Ikigai overlaps with happiness, but there are important differences. Happiness, as studied by positive psychology and preached by the popular Japanese religious group Happy Science, tends to be conflated with pleasure, with what makes one feel good. The notion of happiness is subjective: to say that one is happy is to offer a descriptive statement, but the description includes no temporal dimension or values-oriented content. The idea of ikigai, by contrast, does include a temporal dimension, which links the past (through the faculty of memory) and the future (through the faculty of imagination and the shaping provided by a sense of purpose). In addition, ikigai’s purposive teleology closely conforms to the sense of self and entails a values orientation.⁶⁷ Happiness, in short, is desire fulfilled. Ikigai spiritualizes desire and locates it within one’s life span and life project.
For Kamiya, ikigai exists beyond biological needs and is not synonymous with sociological security. It cannot be cultivated in desperate times—during famine or war, for example—because the life force itself and the need to survive will preclude opportunities for sustained reflection on life’s purposes. Nor can ikigai be planned and implemented, because determinism, or outside forces, will squelch the sense of possibility required for ikigai. Without individual freedom, striving is meaningless; that is, without a sense of efficacy, of the power to produce effects in the world, there can be no sense of life that has been lived. The undermining and weakening of ikigai stem from the darkness of death, biological or sociological. Kamiya does not claim that people are completely free. The individual’s agency is limited. But the individual must believe in his personal agency before he can have reasons for living. As in Stoicism, there are areas of life that one can change and areas that one cannot change. The challenge, once basic needs have been met, is to strive to accomplish what one can but accept that there are things one cannot do, such as avoid mortality.
A classic reference point for thinking about ikigai is Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru (To Live). The movie opens with a voice-over narration describing an office worker: “Busy, always so very busy. But in fact this man does absolutely nothing at all. Other than protecting his own spot.” But this consummate bureaucrat has received a death sentence—a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Moved as he is to drain what is left of his life down to the dregs, he looks for consolation in alcohol and sex. But a young hostess asks him if there is anything he would like to make or to do, and his moment of epiphany comes concretely, in the form of his desire to build a park. In so doing, he finds his life’s purpose—his meaning. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 movie, Wandafuru raifu (After Life), offers a slightly different perspective. In the film’s version of purgatory, each person must come up with a memory of a defining moment, of something the person is most proud of or finds most striking, and around this memory a film will be made about his or her life. When I asked people in Japan to perform this exercise, it was interesting that nobody mentioned a memory of work. Central though work is, most corporate employees cited memories from childhood. One proudly recalled running a race at school and finishing first. Another remembered his first, unrequited romance. Several women talked with wonder about giving birth for the first time. In general, it seems, life’s significance lies in what one pursues with purpose, whether that means winning a playground race or becoming a mother. The discourse of ikigai occasions reflection and, necessarily, regret. One thinks of redoing or resetting one’s life (the childhood wasted on frivolity, the occupation not pursued, the love that was not to be).⁶⁸ Reflecting backward, living forward—ikigai makes a richer inner life possible, though perhaps it will be accompanied at times by pain and regret.
Among artisans and others for whom work is fulfilling in and of itself, the problem of ikigai is not a clear and present danger. Yet ikigai is a serious challenge for office workers who face mandatory retirement at the age of sixty or sixty-five.⁶⁹ As a septuagenarian retiree remarked, “If you have nothing going on in your life when you retire, it’s too late for you. Some of my colleagues died. Others became incapacitated. We need ikigai.” Many office workers—forced to overachieve or overwork, or having chosen to do so—have led lives devoted to their organizational roles and have built many major relationships around their work lives. For them, retirement comes as a rude shock. In other words, in an extended act of what Jean-Paul Sartre called mauvaise foi (bad faith), they have spent years turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the existential question of ikigai.
There are retirees who crash and implode. No one keeps statistics on those who die from a sense of obsolescence—from lack of ikigai—but it is not hard to get older people to name people they knew who died when they lost their place at work, and therefore in life. Some retirees suffer from loss of meaning, a loss intensified by having nowhere to go and nothing to do. Boredom and apathy are common outcomes for these retirees—idleness begets incapacity. Others, having lost their daily commute, decide to colonize the family home; they hijack the family’s life and place undue stress on their wives to serve them during the day, or they make demands for more efficient household management.⁷⁰ In Yōji Yamada’s 2016 film, Kazoku wa tsuraiyo (What a Wonderful Family!), one of many twenty-first-century representations of the postretirement blues, the protagonist, an office worker who has been put out to pasture, finds all his hopes for his golden years dashed when his wife of fifty years demands a divorce. The film ends well for this protagonist, but the same cannot be said for many white-collar retirees, whose wives and grown children call them (and treat them like) sodai gomi (bulky trash), unattractive and with no apparent purpose in life. Some of these men even go on to live in a place overwhelmed by trash, as in Junrei (Pilgrimage), a novel by Hashimoto Osamu, in which an elderly man turns his house into a virtual garbage dump reminiscent of the house and grounds in the film Grey Gardens (1975).⁷¹
The logic of the bureaucratic organization, however small that organization may be, is that the individual plays a role and is therefore replaceable. No one, no matter how charismatic or brilliant, is indispensable to any bureaucratic organization of any size. As a result, no matter how easily one has been able to find meaning and purpose in life while employed by the organization, it becomes very difficult to do so when one’s employment comes to an end. One may have enjoyed high status in the organization, but retirement imposes a rough equality. One’s organizational title and rank are stripped away, and one must now move through the social world as an old person. Especially when one has enjoyed organizational success, coming to terms with the reality of its loss is like experiencing all the bitterness of the samurai’s life, but without the customary sartorial markers and social sustenance.
Hagakure is regarded as the bible of samuraihood. The prewar military generals were said to read it every day. Like most other classics, it has been reduced to a few selective quotations, which are tantamount to misquotations, such as that “the foundation of bushido,” or the way of the samurai, “is death.”⁷² The author of Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, propounds absolute loyalty for the samurai—obedience unto death—but his life philosophy is larger than this occupational injunction. In his autobiographical reflections, he does not regret that he left his job after his lord’s death, and he suggests guidelines for living.⁷³ “A human being’s life is very short,” he says, having himself retired early. “Therefore, one should spend time doing things one likes. . . . It is stupid to spend life in pain, not doing things one likes.”⁷⁴
Not everyone wants to be like Yamamoto and write a treatise on ikigai. But when it comes to finding reasons for living after retirement, a leaf can be borrowed from the book of the otaku, and a surprising number of retirees are seriously interested in studying.⁷⁵ There are retirees who are involved in numerous other pursuits as well. For instance, a woman in her seventies found her life’s work after retirement when she volunteered to help impoverished refugees and immigrants learn the Japanese language and explore Japanese culture. “I’ve found nothing more rewarding than trying to teach them,” she told me. “I feel really useful, and I think I’m really helping them.” Others look to more self-centered pursuits, such as mastering a sport (golf, for example) or a board game like Go. These retirees have no interest in acquiring professional-level skills in these sports or games, but there are many tournaments and other venues where the competition is challenging yet friendly.
What has been striking about the post-Bubble decades in Japan is the strong tendency of Japanese people in general to embrace the ordinary and to find ikigai in everyday life. As for retirees, one plausible way for them to live is to embrace their decline and resist the dictate of busyness that dominates so many lives. Thus Higuchi Yūichi encourages those who are sixty-five and older—those who have retired—to have “the courage to do nothing.”⁷⁶ What Higuchi is proposing is not the achievement of a Zen state of nothingness but rather self-emancipation from the externally imposed imperative to do something. Time is precious, but it is one’s own to burn or waste freely—and honorably.
SHINIGAI.
Then there is death. If philosophy is preparation for death, then either contemporary philosophy has lost its way, or many have been wrong about the task of philosophy. The striking achievement of the twentieth century, at least in the affluent parts of the world, is that death is no longer an everyday affair. One can go a long time without seeing anyone dying or dead. Life expectancy has nosed up into the ninth decade, and there’s a common saying in Japan that people should expect to live for one hundred years. No wonder the Grim Reaper and the Japanese equivalent, Shinigami, have such a low profile. At the same time, the news about Japan’s aging society is not all good. Many people in their last years are burdened with pain and other kinds of suffering, and their desire for a peaceful death, perhaps at home, surrounded by loved ones—their shinigai (reasons for dying), we might say—often remains unfulfilled.⁷⁷ It is a strange form of biopolitics that seeks quantitative lengthening of life—vita without vitality—but does not ponder the quality of life. As in economic growth, so too in life—more is not necessarily better. A person benefits at least as much from reflection on ars moriendi as on ars vivendi.
Kobori Kōichirō, a retired surgeon, observes that in modern Western medicine as he practiced it, death was seen as defeat, pure and simple, and aging was to be resisted.⁷⁸ According to this line of thinking, the longer the life, the better; patients are enjoined to fight aging and struggle against death. After Kobori’s formal retirement from surgery, he became involved with a regional hospital and made home visits to dying people. He witnessed hundreds of cases in which the patient, the patient’s family members and friends, and the medical staff, all in denial about the finality of death, made unfortunate choices that exacerbated pain and suffering.⁷⁹ Kobori now argues for a paradigm shift in palliative care, with more investment in end-of-life care infrastructure, a shifting of the site of death from the clinic back to the patient’s home, and greater involvement of the patient’s family members. Kobori’s fervent hope is that more doctors will spend time individually with dying people in their last days.⁸⁰ And perhaps family members and friends, too, will find that their involvement in hospice work serves as a reminder of their own mortality, illuminating the lives of the dying but also shedding light on the preciousness that life still has for the living. The pursuit of shinigai is another sort of ikigai.
Just as different regimes have honored different ways of death—consider, for instance, the celebration of the kamikaze pilots under the prewar regime—Japanese people over time have held various views about life, death, and the afterlife.⁸¹ And despite the dissemination of progressive ideology, there is still widespread awareness of life’s simultaneous preciousness and finitude, a concept that is often expressed as mono no aware (the pathos of things), one that incorporates both the assumption of impermanence and an appreciation of the haecceity—the “thisness” or “thusness”—of things, the ephemeral beauty of existence.⁸² Premodern samurai and, later, the modern Japanese military appropriated this concept for purposes of their own, but it serves as a contemporary reminder of mortality, an ordinary realization of ontological finitude. It serves, in other words, as a final chapter in the consideration of ikigai, or shinigai.
Ikigai and shinigai, like love and life, can be discussed only in the abstract but in fact are experienced and expressed only in the concrete. The inevitable chasm makes it difficult to say anything meaningful about ikigai or shinigai. Let me conclude, then, by noting the sheer distance between, on one hand, the people of the Edo era, who, though plagued by disease and surrounded by death, seem to have been insouciant about mortality and, on the other hand, their contemporary descendants who live with exaggerated fear for their safety and their lives even as they enjoy unprecedented security and longevity.⁸³ Kōda Rohan’s Edo-era novella Gojūnotō (The five-storied pagoda) offers a vivid sketch of the inaccessible Edo shokunin spirit. The protagonist—Jūbei, a carpenter—is nicknamed Nossori (meaning, roughly, “slow and quiet”). He has achieved nothing of significance but wants to build a pagoda, or tower. He says repeatedly that it would be fine for him to die if only he were first able to undertake his life’s work.⁸⁴ It is not that Jūbei hungers for fame or fortune, or that he seeks to realize his desire out of vanity. Rather, the tower will be a proof of life, and its realization will be a moment of both transcendence and immanence, a synthesis that sublimates his being. Kōda makes it clear that the novella is not about dense networks of human relations and expectations—it is not, in other words, about giri ninjō (ethical obligations and humane feelings)—nor does it represent the modern quest for the true self. In fact, Jūbei’s struggle to build the tower, a job entrusted to him by a Buddhist priest, has almost nothing to do with self-satisfaction or self-development. It is simply embedded in his life as a carpenter, a shokunin. In the teeth of a ferociously destructive storm, Jūbei becomes despondent, but only because he believes that the priest has lost confidence in his artisanship. This artisan is willing to go down with his tower—the artisanal ethos is free of egocentric desire, untouched by the hubris of human autonomy. The tower and the story are all that remain.⁸⁵ Very few people today could resuscitate Jūbei’s shokunin spirit within themselves (and it is unclear how desirable that would be). That spirit is alien to modern temperaments. But it points to a way of living life: if one should lose what makes life worthwhile, it would not matter if one died; knowledge of what makes life worthwhile is what is worth recognizing and preserving.
In the novel Junrei, mentioned earlier, Hashimoto traces the life of his protagonist, a straight arrow who has lived through the period of Japan’s rapid economic growth but now, in retirement, lives in a house overflowing with discarded objects not unlike his own life, objects whose value he tries to redeem. Only when his younger brother comes to help him does the protagonist allow all the accumulated detritus to be hauled away. His brother urges him to go on a pilgrimage to Shikoku so as to discover the meaning of living, and is relieved to see his older brother smiling with delight while eating tempura. “My brother has finally chosen to live,” the younger brother says to himself, but he is surprised when his older brother dies in his sleep that very night.⁸⁶ In the end he decides that his brother, upon realizing that he had undertaken a pilgrimage with no purpose, finally accepted his life and his death and let himself be pulled into the void. A life without a reason for living is hollow, like the mindless accumulation of things and pleasures. And so it goes in the quest for ikigai.
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CHAPTER 8. IKIGAI
1. Hashimoto Osamu, Tatoe sekai ga owattemo (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2017), 235,
243.
2. Helen Hardacre, Shintō (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center,
2016).
3. The classic argument remains Ishida Takeshi, Meiji seiji shisōshi kenkyū
(Tokyo: Miraisha, 1954).
4. Murakami Shigeyoshi, Gendai shūkyō to seiji (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku
Shuppankai, 1978).
5. There are reasons to be skeptical about how many true believers there were
in Japan even at the height of the prewar regime. As a proxy measure of true
believers, the highest figure presented for the number of Japanese people who
committed suicide at the end of the war is just over five hundred (they were
primarily high military officials), and there are almost no reports of mass civilian
suicide; see Oka Kiyoshi, “Jobun,” in Nukata Hiroshi, ed., Seiki no jiketsu (Tokyo:
Fuyō Shobō, 1968), 8. This is in striking contrast to Nazi Germany, where at least
seven thousand people under the Third Reich committed suicide in Berlin alone,
and there were also numerous reports of mass suicide; see Christian Goeschel,
Suicide in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 159–66. Even
more striking is the fact that so many German civilians committed suicide,
presumably from despair as they saw the Nazi dream crumbling and going down
to defeat. Some even enjoined their children to kill themselves; see Florian
Huber, Kind, versprich mir, dass du dich erschieβt (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2015).
Whatever else one may say about Nazi Germany, it had its share of true believers.
6. Murakami Shigeyoshi, Kokka Shintō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), i–ii.
As for the previously divine Emperor Hirohito, in the 1960s he ranked only
fourteenth among people whom the Japanese most respected, far behind
Abraham Lincoln (in first place) and Florence Nightingale; see Mita Munesuke,
Gendai Nihon no seishin kōzō (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1965), 69.
7. See John Lie, Multiethnic Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001), 130–36. According to a survey published by Japan’s NHK Broadcasting
Culture Research Institute, the imperial household remains popular, but it is safe
to say that the dominant attitude toward State Shintō is benign indifference, to
judge by data from the majority (60 to 70 percent) of the respondents; see NHK
Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūjo, Gendai Nihonjin no ishiki kōzō, 7th ed. (Tokyo: NHK Hōsō
Bunka Kenkyūjo, 2010), 119–23.
8. Joseph M. Kitagawa, Religion in Japanese History (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1966), 331–32.
9. See Nishihara Shigeki, “Shūkyō,” in Tōkei Sūri Kenkyūjo and Kokuminsei
Chōsa Iinkai, eds., Dai4 Nihonjin no kokuminsei (Tokyo: Idemitsu Shoten, 1982);
and Tōkei Sūri Kenkyūjo, Dentōteki kachikan to mijikana seikatsu ishiki ni kansuru
ishikichōsa hōkokusho (Tokyo: Tōkei Sūri Kenkyūjo, 2011), 33–35. Only 16 percent
of Japanese respondents to a survey conducted in the 1980s reported that they
were willing to sacrifice their personal interests for the sake of a collective
national goal, whereas more than 70 percent of respondents in the United States
and South Korea expressed willingness to make that sacrifice; see Nishihara
Shigeki, Yoron chōsa ni okeru dōjidaishi (Tokyo: Burēn Shuppan, 1987), 98. More
than 78 percent of respondents to a 2003 survey claimed not to participate in
civic life of any kind, and fewer than 9 percent acknowledged being members of
an organized religious group; see Ishii Kenji, Dētabukku gendai Nihonjin no
shūkyō, rev. ed. (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2007), 57–61. In the same year, 77 percent of respondents to another poll claimed to have no interest in religion; see Ichiro
Tanioka, Noriko Iwai, Michio Nitta, and Hiroki Sato, Japanese General Social
Survey (JGSS) 2003 (Ann Arbor: Inter-university Consortium for Political and
Social Research, University of Michigan, 2003),
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR04242.v1 (tellingly, later surveys in this series did
not include questions on religion and religiosity). And, according to a 2017 Gallup
poll, 29 percent of Japanese people are confirmed atheists, another 31 percent say
they are not religious, and only 13 percent claim to be religious; see Worldwide
Independent Network of Market Research and Gallup International, “Religion
Prevails in the World,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine,
https://web.archive.org/web/20171114113506/http://www.wingia.com/web/files/news/370/file/370.pdf.
10. Yamaori Tetsuo, Kindai Nihonjin no shūkyō ishiki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
1996), 2.
11. The nineteenth-century Edoites, though worldly and relatively irreligious,
were deeply superstitious. Their descendants have dropped such superstitions as
not living on the fourth floor of a building (the Japanese word for “four” is a
homonym of the word for “death”) and seeking expert opinions on fêng shui
(geomancy), though this is not to deny the curious persistence of interest in ways
to divine personality traits and future romantic possibilities by way of astrology or
blood types. But if the old superstitions have gone by the board, there is
nevertheless widespread fear in Japan—of the unknown, of terrorists, and of
religion in general with its connections to brainwashing and acts of terror.
12. Kōfuku no Kagaku (Happy Science) is as representative of these new
religious groups as any. Initiated in 1986, it claims to be a religion of love, peace,
and happiness that synthesizes the teachings of Jesus and Muhammad, Buddha
and Confucius. Its founder, Ōkawa Ryūhō, has established a political party, in
seeming rivalry with the Buddhist sect Sōka Gakkai (itself founded by Ikeda
Daisaku) and its powerful political party, Kōmeitō. In his latest tract, the founder
of Kōfuku no Kagaku has moved on to identifying the laws of bronze and
discussing Socrates and Sakamoto Ryōma; see Ōkawa Ryūhō, Seidō no hō (Tokyo:
Kōfuku no Kagaku Shuppan, 2018).
13. Yamamoto Shichihei and Komuro Naoki, Nihonkyō no shakaigaku (Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1981). But if contemporary Japanese people’s belief in Japaneseness
entails respect for the notion of the community and for the salience of the larger
society, the Japanese nevertheless remain stubborn individualists. In 1971, for
example, 32 percent were reported to privilege the individual over the country, and
by 2011 that proportion had risen to 56 percent; see Naikakufu Daijin Kanbō Seifu
Kōhōshitsu, Shakai ishiki ni kansuru yoron chōsa (Tokyo: Naikakufu Daijin Kanbō
Seifu Kōhōshitsu, 2017), 21, 29. By contrast with the prewar generations, the
overwhelming majority of Japanese people born after 1945 place greater value on
the individual pursuit of personal likes and preferences than on the family, the
community, or the nation; see NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūjo, Gendai Nihonjin no
ishikikōzō, 8th ed. (Tokyo: NHK Shuppan, 2015), 162–68; and Tōkei Sūri Kenkyūjo
and Kokuminsei Chōsa Iinkai, Dai5 Nihonjin no kokuminsei (Tokyo: Idemitsu
Shoten, 2003), 66–84. It is very difficult to shake most Japanese people’s
fundamental faith in the ontological uniqueness and distinctiveness of the
individual.
14. What is more significant is the continuing legacy of folk spirituality, not
only with respect to seasonal rituals but also regarding concern for hotoke (the
dead, or a menagerie of living and deceased spirits). The Edo-era practice of
splashing water or placing mounds of salt in front of a house remains remarkably
persistent (though not in urban areas, given the dominance of high-rise
apartment buildings). The archaeological accretion of Japanese religious history
survives as an eclectic and syncretic modality of spirituality, which includes
something like a religion of nothingness that still resonates deeply, as in the
frequently invoked idea of ichigo ichie, or the ephemerality of life. Indeed, it has
been suggested that the relative absence of religious affiliation in contemporary
Japan is in fact an identification with the religion of nothingness; see Yamaori
Tetsuo, Shinzuru shūkyō, kanzuru shūkyō (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronshinsha, 2008),
27–28.
15. In more mundane terms, and in the words of a quotation misattributed to
Sigmund Freud, “Love and work are the cornerstone of our humanness”; see
BrainyQuote, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/sigmund_freud_165464. On
the misattribution as such, see Alan C. Elms, “Apocryphal Freud,” Annual of
Psychoanalysis 29 (2001), 83–104. Cf. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (New York:
Schocken, 1995).
16. See, for example, the plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, in which what we
would call romantic passion comes up against the intransigent realities of rigid
social norms; a representative work would be Sonezaki shinjū (1703).
17. Yanabu Akira, Hon’yakugo seiritsu jijō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982),
89–97. See also the suggestive essay by Itō Sei, “Kindai Nihon ni okeru ‘ai’ no
kyogi” (1962), in Kindai Nihonjin no hassō no shokeishiki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
1981): “We imported ‘love.’ But we didn’t import prayer or repentance, the dowry
or a sufficient income on the husband’s part” (153). According to Itō, love became
fallacious in Japan without a Western background of Christianity and economics;
in the West, he argues, there is a tendency to achieve inner peace through stable
social relations, whereas in the East, by contrast, there is a tendency to hesitate to
form egalitarian relationships (140).
18. The 1953–54 film version, which aired on NHK from 1952 to 1954, was
directed by Ōba Hideo and is loosely related to the 2016 anime directed by
Shinkai Makoto.
19. Kajiwara Ikki and Nagayasu Takumi, Ai to Makoto, 16 vols. (Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1973–76).
20. Fukunaga Takehiko, Ai no kokoromi (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1956).
21. Ōshima Michiko and Kōno Makoto, Ai to shi wo mitsumete (Tokyo: Daiwa
Shobō, 1963). See also Sonia Ryang, Love in Modern Japan (Abingdon, UK:
Routledge, 2006), 75–90.
22. It is possible to argue that for the wartime generation, before the end of
World War II, the significance of death far outweighed the significance of love,
and that after the war, economic recovery and material pursuits also outweighed
love. In this respect, the sociologist Mita Munesuke’s study of popular song
lyrics considers more than twenty themes, including anger and joy, but not love
(though Mita does consider bojō, which denotes affection or longing and possibly
love, but only in the sense of agape); see Mita Munesuke, Kindai Nihon no shinjō
no rekishi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1967).
23. Yanagisawa Kimio, Tonda kappuru, 15 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1978–81);
Takahashi Rumiko, Mezon Ikkoku, 15 vols. (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1980–87).
24. Saimon Fumi, Tokyo rabusutōrī, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1990). To be
sure, one of the two love interests in Yanagisawa Kimio’s Tonda kappuru is also
decisive and expressive.
25. Natsume Sōseki, Kōjin (1913).
aozora.gr.jp/cards/000148/files/775_14942.html.
26. Sōseki Natsume, And Then (1909), trans. Norma Moore Field (Tokyo:
Tuttle, 2011), 202.
27. These amorous symptoms are brilliantly anatomized by Roland Barthes,
Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977).
28. Watanabe, Shitsurakuen.
29. Louise Bogan, “Juan’s Song,” in The Blue Estuaries (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1968), 10.
30. The phrase is in the banner added to the cover of the book’s Japanese
edition. See Murakami Haruki, Noruwei no mori, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997).
See also Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood, trans. Jay Rubin (New York: Vintage
International, 2010). In Murakami Haruki Shinbun, Murakami suggests that his
preferred phrase would have been “This is 100 percent Murakami Haruki’s realist
novel”; see “It’s a 100% Love Story,” Haruki Murakami Newspaper,
http://murakami-haruki-times.com/100percentlovestory/. Be that as it may, most
readers regarded the novel as a love story, as is blatantly clear from the 2010 film
version directed by Tran Anh Hung.
31. Okazaki Kyōko, Ribāsuejji (1994; reprinted, Tokyo: Takarajimasha, 2015).
32. Umino Tsunami, Nigeru wa haji da ga yaku ni tatsu, 9 vols. (Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 2013–17). The original manga had a Hungarian subtitle, Szégyen a
futás, de hasznos.
33. Matsuura Rieko, Nachuraru ūman (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1991);
Matsuura Rieko, Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha 1993).
34. Matsuura Rieko, Kenshin (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2007); Tawada Yōko,
Inumukoiri (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993). The word mukoiri (rather cumbersome to
translate into English) denotes adoption by one’s wife’s family upon marriage.
35. Mizumura Minae, Honkaku shōsetsu, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2002).
36. Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun, trans. Philip
Gabriel (New York: Vintage, 2000), 4.
37. Divorce, once an affront to the sacrosanct family, became common, and if
it still carried a whiff of embarrassment, it was seen as a garden-variety error, a
venial sin. At the same time, there has been a precipitous decline in the total
Japanese fertility rate (that is, the mean number of births per woman over her
lifetime). Until 1974 the total fertility rate was higher than 2.0, but in the
twenty-first century it has fluctuated between 1.26 and 1.45; see World Bank,
“Fertility Rate, Total (Births per Woman)—Japan,” 1960–2019,
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=JP. Whatever
the causes of Japan’s declining fertility—the usual suspects include the difficulty
of childrearing in a two-career household and the considerable expense of having
children, especially when it comes to their education—there is no doubt that the
typical twenty-first-century Japanese family is not the same as in the immediate
postwar decades. And not only are there fewer children, but there are fewer
marriages, and the unions are of shorter duration. In fact, nearly 66 percent of
respondents to a 2013 survey said that there is no need for marriage; see NHK
Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūjo, Gendai Nihonjin no ishikikōzō (2015), 2.
====
38. Yoshinaga Fumi, Kinō nani tabeta?, 17 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2007–20).
39. See Ikeda Riyoko, Berusaiyu no bara, 13 vols. (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1972–73).
The series depicts a turbulent love affair during the French Revolution (the very
definition of turbulence and tumult). This work is significant in that it established
gender-based manga written by and for women, though some trace the genre to
Tezuka Osamu’s Ribon no kishi (available in English as Princess Knight). From at
least the era of Yamagishi Ryōko’s Hiidurutokoro no tenshi (1980–84), the primary
romantic relationship had been between two men. By the twenty-first century, this
genre, often called yayoi, had come to be known as BL (boys’ love) manga.
40. The novel is Kodama, Otto no chinpo ga hairanai (Tokyo: Fusōsha, 2017),
and the manga version is Kodama and Gotō Yukiko, Otto no chinpo ga hairanai, 5
vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2018–20).
41. Ōtsuka Eiji, Otaku no seishinshi, rev. ed. (Tokyo: Seikaisha, 2016; 1st ed.,
2004), 44; Azuma, Dōbutsukasuru posutomodan.
42. In 1988 and 1989, a number of girls were kidnapped and murdered by a
young man whose room was overflowing with manga and anime, and this
sensational crime helped cement the perfidious image of the otaku; see Ōtsuka,
Otaku no seishinshi, chap. 6 (see also chap. 24 for the impact of the Aum
Shinrikyō cult).
43. The otaku do not quite belong to the ranks of furītā and nīto, the under-
and unemployed young people who are demonized as only slightly more
functional than the hikikomori (Japan’s urban agoraphobics, young adults
suffering from acute social withdrawal and fear of leaving the house); see Honda
Yuki, Naitō Asao, and Gotō Kazutomo, Nītotte iuna! (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2006),
38–41, 220–22 (the discourse of nīto stresses not only deviance from the previous
generation’s norms of work and ambition but also criminality). Willingly or not,
however, the otaku do not lead the regimented life of the office worker, and so
they deviate socially and psychologically from the dominant lifestyle of the
postwar regime. In the mid-2010s there was considerable discussion about young
men who, unlike their aggressive, “carnivorous” elders, had become meek
“vegetarians” (more symbolic than actual culinary orientations); this discourse
formed part of a story about declining masculinity, a putative cause of Japan’s
declining marriage and fertility rates.
44. The scale of sex work is staggering: an estimated 350,000 women work in
the sex industry (fūzoku), with an array of services ranging from deriheru (health
delivery, entailing the delivery of sex-related services) to the long-standing
sōpurando (soaplands, that is, bathhouses with sexual services); see Nakamura
Atsuhiko, Nihon no fūzokujō (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2014), 38–69. In addition,
perhaps 10,000 women every year enter the vast industry of pornographic video,
usually called AV (for “adult video”); see Mori Yoshiyuki, Adaruto bideo ura no
sekai (Tokyo: Takarajimasha, 2012), 5.
45. See Miyadai Shinji, Ishihara Hideki, and Ōtsuka Akiko, Sabukaruchā
shinwa kaitai (Tokyo: PARCO, 1993), 40–49.
46. Hiraoka Masaaki, Momoe wa Bosatsu de aru, complete ed., ed. Yomota
Inuhiko (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2015; 1st ed., 1979).
47. Hamano Satoshi, Maeda Atsuko wa Kirisuto wo koeta (Tokyo: Chikuma
Shobō, 2012).
48. Nakano Hitori, Densha otoko (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2004).
49. On the political economy of Japanese subculture, see Nissim Kadosh
Otmazgin, Regionalizing Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013).
50. Ōizumi Mitsunari, Otaku to wa nanika? (Tokyo: Sōshisha, 2017), 240–47.
51. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus (c. 401 BCE), in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed. and
trans., Loeb Classical Library, vol. 21: Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes,
Oedipus at Colonus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 547.
52. Puzzled outsiders’ reactions to the ubiquitous otaku slang term moe,
which expresses strong attraction and enthusiasm, are symptomatic of the
general misrecognition regarding the otaku’s passionate inner life. For example,
the father of a single otaku woman in her thirties asked, “Why can’t she say, ‘I
love you’ or ‘I like that’? Instead, it’s ‘moe.’ What is that? Is it moyamoya [uneasy]
or moeru [burning]? I don’t understand.” There is in fact a curious convergence
between the meaning of moe and Motoori’s classic definition of mono no aware
(usually rendered in English as “the pathos of things”) as “to feel deeply in the
soul” about something. Thus the consummate eighteenth-century thinker
anticipates the soul of otaku folk; see Motoori Nobunaga,
“Isonokamisasamegoto” (1763), Ashiwake obune, isonokamisasamegoto (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 2003), 177.
53. The object of study should not determine that study’s worth (though I
hasten to add that this illusory correlation does fuel much research in the social
sciences). The pursuit of a dream, of purposefulness, is not something to be
judged by its content. Just as one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,
something that is of consuming interest to one person may leave many others
cold. A passionate interest may fade over time and even disappear, but a new
interest may appear. The point is not the transcendental importance or long
duration of the interest. Rather, it is having something to be interested in.
54. Tokyo Shinbun, 11 May 2019.
55. The locus classicus of this argument remains Theodor W. Adorno and
Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944; reprinted, Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1988).
56. The average amount of sleep in Japan in 2015 was seven hours and
forty-three minutes—a full hour less than the 1960 average. The 2015 US average was eight hours and thirty-six minutes. See Japan Institute of Sleep Science,
“Sleep Situation of Modern People,”
https://www.nishikawasangyo.co.jp/company/laboratory/topics/01/.
57. There are more than one hundred thousand sunakku in Japan, which
means that sunakku are more common than the ubiquitous izakaya (taverns or
pub-like restaurants) and only slightly less common than real-estate offices. A
sunakku is primarily for eating, drinking, and conversation. The sunakku exists
outside the so-called water trade of sexually tinged clubs and bars, and so its
servers, almost all women, must sit across from rather than next to their
customers, who are almost all men. The figures regarding sunakku are from
Taniguchi Kōichi, “Sunakku kenkyū kotohajime,” in Taniguchi Kōichi, ed., Nihon
no yoru no kōkyoken (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 2017), 16.
58. Katō Hitoshi, Teinengo (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2007), 26–28.
59. On this point, the pioneering analysis is Miyadai, Ishihara, and Ōtsuka,
Sabukaruchā shinwa no kaitai. The Tokyo neighborhood described in chapter 6 of
this book has two shops dedicated to old jazz LPs, and the bookstore in that
neighborhood has a full shelf of new books on jazz. Moreover, an almost
maniacal devotion to waning musical genres (waning in the United States,
anyway) can be observed in everything from the demotic (such as blues) to the
Olympian (such as Western classical music). The passionate pursuit of jazz or
classical is surely otaku by another name.
===
60. Compare Furuichi Noritoshi, Zetsubō no kuni no kōfuku na wakamonotachi
(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2011), chap. 6; and Futagaki Nōki, Nīto ga hiraku kōfuku shakai
Nippon (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2012), chap. 2.
61. Aristotle, Politics (c. 350 BCE), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol.2,
ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 1337b. See
also Josef Pieper, Musse und Kult (Munich: Kösel, 1947), chap. 2.
62. William Morris, “The Lesser Arts of Life” (1882), in The Collected Works of
William Morris, vol. 22, 269.
63. The members of the tokkōtai (kamikaze pilots, as they’re known to
outsiders) and their ilk were not poorly educated. On the contrary, many of them
were overeducated and excessively idealistic. It is bracing to read their diaries and
letters, which convey the pilots’ moral sincerity through references to a veritable
Who’s Who of modern Western philosophy, from Marx to Heidegger. To be sure,
we should not overlook the curated and justificatory character of these accounts,
often composed after the war by the pilots’ survivors; see Hidaka Kōtarō,
Fujichaku (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsuōraisha, 2006).
64. Gordon Mathews, What Makes Life Worth Living? (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), 232–38.
65. Mathews, What Makes Life Worth Living? 12–16.
66. Kamiya Mieko, Ikigai ni tsuite (1966; reprinted, Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō,
2004), 7, 11, 31.
67. Kamiya, Ikigai ni tsuite, 28–29.
68. When respondents to one survey were asked what they would do if they
could live their lives over again, they most commonly replied that they would
study more, or better; see Asahi Shinbun, 18 May 2019.
69. As late as 1981, Japan had more companies with a mandated retirement
age of fifty-five or younger than companies with a retirement age of sixty or older.
By the turn of the millennium, however, less than 1 percent of Japanese
companies had a formal retirement age of fifty-five or younger. See Kōsei
Rōdōshō (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare), Koyō kanri chōsa (Tokyo:
Kōsei Rōdōshō, 2014).
70. Katō Jin, Teinengo (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998). According to one
writer, many diseases exist—fugenbyō (literally, “father-created illnesses”)—that
are caused by retired husbands who put stress on their wives; see Ishikura
Fuminobu, Fugenbyō (Osaka: Osaka Daigaku Shuppankai, 2011).
71. See Hashimoto Osamu, Junrei (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2009). (The 1975 film
Grey Gardens was directed by Albert and David Maysles.)
72. Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure (1716), ed. Kanno Kakumyō, Kurihara
Gō, Kizawa Kei, and Sugahara Reiko, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2017), 35.
73. Yamamoto, Hagakure, 466–68.
74. Yamamoto, Hagakure, 392.
75. For example, Tokyo’s Asahi Culture Center, where many retirees enroll
alongside younger people, offers more than a thousand courses and is much
more comprehensive than many colleges and universities. The curriculum
features classes geared to absolute beginners in various subjects, but past
offerings have also included advanced physics, recherché topics in classical
Japanese literature, and a course in which students read Proust in the original
French. One retiree, a Buddhist art and architecture otaku, has dedicated
considerable time and energy to visiting Buddhist temples and looking at pieces
of art that are usually not shown to the public. Having amassed a body of
knowledge equal to that of a professional expert in the field, this man points to
other otaku whose expertise far exceeds even his own.
76. Higuchi Yūichi, 65sai nanimo shinai yūki (Tokyo: Gentōsha, 2018).
77. Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die (New York: Knopf, 1994), chap. 1. As
recently as 1951, almost 90 percent of Japanese people died at home, but today
that proportion is only about 10 percent; see Kobori Ōichirō, Shi wo ikita hitobito
(Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 2018), 1.
78. Kobori, Shi wo ikita hitobito, 5, 89–91.
79. My mother, for example, after her diagnosis of stage 4 cancer, wanted to
spend her remaining time with family members and friends, and to visit hot
springs. But my father and my siblings believed both in the miracle of modern
medicine and in the notion that a dying loved one should be encouraged to
scratch out every possible extra moment of life, and so they insisted on
experimental interventions that caused my mother excruciating pain, great
personal indignity, and, soon enough, loss of cognitive function.
80. Kobori, Shi wo ikita hitobito, 198.
81. See Shimazono Susumu, Nihonjin no shiseikan wo yomu (Tokyo: Asahi
Shinbun Shuppan, 2012).
82. The consensus is to credit Motoori Norinaga’s reading of Genji
monogatari (The Tale of Genji); see Watsuji Tetsurō, Nihon no seishinshi (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1926).
83. On ordinary Edo-era people’s attitudes toward death, see Watanabe, Edo
to iu genkei, 81–87.
84. Kōda Rohan, Gojūnotō (1887; reprinted, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1927),
24–26, 36–37.
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