Book review: Japan: The Paradox of Harmony, by Keiko Hirata and Mark Warschauer

by Keiko Hirata and Mark Warschauer
Yale University Press
3.5 stars
Julian Ryall

A book, as we all know, should never be judged by its cover, but the image on the cover of Japan: The Paradox of Harmony is appropriate. And frightening.

It is of up and down escalators full of young graduates - all straight ties and sober business suits - attending a recruitment fair. Not one appears excited or even mildly enthusiastic. They seem more like people simply resigned to their fates.

Which is, of course, a criticism that has been levelled at Japanese education and corporate culture for the past quarter-century. But seldom has the crisis Japan faces been more stark. And seldom has it been put into such worrying perspective as in this book.

As someone who lives in Japan and has the deepest respect for many of its traditional attributes - loyalty, an ethos of hard work, respect for others, a low crime rate - I find this book depressing.

The titles of the six chapters are a sobering indication of what is to come: Grass-Eating Girly Men, for example, focuses on the preference among a large proportion of 20- and 30-something men to watch animated movies or make plastic models instead of seeking a bride and a family, or Graying and Shrinking, which details the dramatic ageing of the population and the desperate lack of young people being born combined with a society that is, at best, deeply wary of permitting large-scale immigration.