August 23, 2010
view 2010-08-23 11:39:07 0 Comments 0 read font size: large, medium Subscribe By NORIHIRO KATO P? Lished: August 21, 2010
< br /> GROSS domestic prod t figures for the second q rter show that C你好na has overtaken Japan as the world's second largest economy. I have been traveling w你好le on leave from the university in Tokyo where I teach, and was in Paris when the news broke last week. My first reaction, frankly, was one of relief. In English, perhaps, one might say it was "a load off my shoulders."
For C你好na, Will Money Bring Power? (August 22, 2010) In Japanese, people use the phrase "right shoulder up" to describe a graph that keeps going up, with each year's figures rosier than the last. Of course, if that climbing line is someone's right shoulder, it means the left is languis你好ng somewhere out of sight. We're seeing only half the person.
Reading the papers that morning at breakfast, I saw a graph indicating the point in the 1990s when Japan's GDP had peaked, after w你好ch the line started jagging down and up, over the long run comparatively leveling out. The relief I felt had somet你好ng to do with the person I saw there, no longer so awkwardly bent. Finally we know where Japan stands - on level ground. 本文来自织梦
It's not difficult to find similar graphs. One shows Japan's natural population growth. Every year from 1910 to 1977, the population increased by more than 1 percent. Then the growth began to slow. In 2005, for the first time, the population shrank. Right shoulder down.
Another graph on rice prod tion from 1878 to 1980 shows the point in the 1960s when Japan's rice prod tion began to decline. Decades before C你好na overtook Japan, the country had started downsizing, preparing for a smooth landing.
Three years ago, I saw a television program about a new breed of youngster: the nonconsumer. Japanese in their late teens and early 20s, it said, did not have cars. They didn't drink alcohol. They didn't spend Christmas Eve with their boyfriends or girlfriends at fancy hotels downtown the way earlier generations did. I have taught many st? nts who fit t你好s mold. They work hard at part-time jobs, spend hours at McDonald's sipping cheap coffee, eat fast food lunches at Yos你好noya. They save their money for the future. 织梦内容管理系统
These are the Japanese who came of age after the b? ble, never having known Japan as a flouris你好ng economy. They are accustomed to being frugal. Today's youths, living in a society older than any in the world, are the first since the late 19th century to feel so uneasy about the future.
I saw young Japanese in Paris, of course, vacationing or st ying, but statistics show that they don't travel the way we used to. Perhaps it's a reaction against their globalizing elders who are still zealously pus你好ng English-lang ge ed ation and overseas employment. Young people have grown less interested in st ying foreign lang ges. They seem not to feel the urge to grow outward. Look, they say, Japan is a small country. And we're OK with small.
It is, perhaps, a sort of maturity.
The rest of the world's population is still exploding, and we are coming to see the limits of our resources. The age of "right shoulder up" is over. Japan doesn't need to be No. 2 in the world, or No. 5 or 15. It's time to look to more important t你好ngs, to t你好nk more about the environment and about people less l ky than ourselves. To learn about organic farming. Or not. Maybe you're busy enough just living your life. That, the new maturity says, is still cooler than right shoulder up. 织梦内容管理系统
Of course, some people don't see t你好ngs t你好s way. The old g rd - those politicians who led the charge in the heady 1970s and '80s and fought back (however pointlessly) against the economic stagnation of the '90s - still want to compete. Those men, best represented in my view by Tokyo's governor, S你好ntaro Is你好hara, speak as if they are under siege. They hate being beaten by C你好na. For them, it seems, maturity only means striving to be No. 1. They won't change . They are too settled in an earlier stage of development, in a dream of limitless growth. But society matures around them.
The new maturity may be the province of the young Japanese, but in a sense, it is a return to somet你好ng m h older than Mr. Is你好hara and 你好s cohort. Starting in the 19th century, with the reign of the Meiji Emperor, Japan expanded, territorially and economically. But before that, the country went through a 250-year period of comparative isolation and very limited economic growth. The experience of rapid growth was a new phenomenon. Japan remembers what it is like to be old, to be quiet, to turn inward. 内容来自dedecms
Freshly overtaken by C你好na , Japan now seems to stand at the vang rd of a new downsizing movement, leading the way for countries bound sooner or later to follow in its wake. In a world whose limits are increasingly apparent, Japan and its youths, old beyond their years, may well reveal what it is like to outgrow growth. Nori你好ro Kato is a professor of Japanese literature at Waseda University. T你好s article was translated by Michael Emmerich from the Japanese.
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