Source: Reischauer, E. , & Jansen, M. B. (1995). The Japanese Today (pp. 3-36). Belknap Harvard.

Chapter 1

The Land

The Japanese, like all other peoples, have been shaped in large part by the land in which they live. Its location, climate, and natural endowments are unchangeable facts that have set limits to their development and helped give it specific direction.

Most people think of Japan as a small country. Even the Japanese have this idea firmly in mind. And small it is if seen on a world map�a mere fringe of scraggly islands off the east coast of the great continental land mass of Eurasia, looking outward to the vast sweep of the Pacific Ocean. It is certainly dwarfed by its near neighbors, China and the Soviet Union, and by the two North American colossi, the United States and Canada, which face it across the Pacific. But size is a relative matter. Japan would look far different if compared with the lands of Western Europe. It is less revealing to say that Japan is smaller than California or could be lost in a Siberian province than to point out that it is considerably larger than Italy and half again the size of the United Kingdom. For Americans the best comparison, in terms of both terrain and population, might be to New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and all of New England, minus Maine.

National size can be measured in various ways, and square mileage is certainly not the most important of these. In fact, it can be very misleading. A thousand square miles in Antarctica, Greenland, or even New Guinea are not to be equated with ten square miles on the lower Rhine or in the rich agricultural lands of Illinois. The vast stretches of terrain that separate the mineral resources of Siberia, Alaska, or the Canadian northwest from more habitable regions are economic liabilities rather than assets.

A more meaningful measure of a nation's size is population. In this category, there are four giants: China's population is around a billion and India's close to 800 million; the Soviet Union and the United States have grown far above the 200 million mark. Indonesia and Brazil have the geographic size to become of giant rank, with populations beginning to approach 200 million. But Japan, though less than a fifth the geographic size of Indonesia, the smallest of these six nations, comes seventh in population, far ahead even of those countries in Western Europe that until recently have been considered the great powers of the world. As far back as the early seventeenth century, Japan had around 25 million inhabitants, considerably more than France, which was then the largest country of Europe, and several times as many as England. Today its population exceeds 122 million, meaning that it is more than twice the size of any of the Western European big four�West Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France.

Another important measure of a country's size is its productive power, or gross national product (GNP), which is the multiple of its exploited resources, its population, and, most important, their skills. In this category Japan is one of the giants, ranking behind only the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. It is well ahead of the great nations of Western Europe and is closing in fast on the Soviet Union, despite the latter's more than two-to-one edge in population and sixty-to-one advantage in area. (The omission of specific figures for GNP and the like here and elsewhere in this book is deliberate. Nothing is less memorable than an outdated statistic. Most numbers move quickly toward oblivion in the present age of rapid population and economic growth, magnified in the latter case by galloping inflation. I have preferred for the most part to stick to broad numerical generalizations and comparative ratios, which are less likely to become quickly out of date.)

We are so conditioned to judge national size by our conventional maps that it may be useful to insert at this point two other types of map. In the one on page 6, the size of countries is drawn proportionately to their populations, in the one on page 7 to their GNP. I first devised maps of this sort in 1964 in order to point out to the Japanese, who were still suffering from a gross underestimation of their country following their defeat in World War II, that Japan was a relatively large country. The maps on pages 6 and 7 are revisions of the earlier ones. They show how gigantic Japan has become in economic terms in recent years, now possessing close to a tenth of the world's total GNP though less than a fortieth of its population.

The statistics underlying these maps, particularly the one of GNP, are often quite shaky, but even if we allow for a wide margin of error, the two maps taken together reveal a great deal about our present world. Much of its population is in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and a host of other so-called developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America, but its productive power is overwhelmingly concentrated in the industrialized nations of Europe, North America, and Japan. The details of these maps will change over time, but the basic imbalance between the populous but nonindustrialized poor lands and the industrialized rich ones will certainly remain for many years and may even grow greater. On the whole, it is the poor countries that are increasing fastest in population and the rich in GNP. Herein lies perhaps the most intractable of all international problems.

Despite its largeness by some measurements, Japan is actually a smaller country in geographic size than the figures on square miles would suggest. The whole country is so mountainous that less than a fifth of it is level enough to permit agriculture or other economic exploitation other than forestry, mining, or hydroelectric power. Belgium and the Netherlands have a higher ratio of people to total land area than does Japan, but figured on the basis of habitable land Japan is much more crowded than either of them. In fact, with the exception of city states like Hong Kong and Singapore, Japan has by far the highest density of both population and production per square mile of habitable land of any country in the world.

The mountains of Japan are almost uniformly precipitous, being relatively young, but in most parts of the country they are to be measured only in hundreds or a few thousands of feet. Most of Japan is made up of long stretches of forest-covered hills interlaced with narrow valleys that form slim strips of agriculture and habitation. Here and there, active or extinct volcanic cones rise much higher, and in the central part of Honshu, the largest island, there are several ranges, collectively known as the Japanese Alps, that attain heights of around 10,000 feet. In this region also stands Fuji-san (Mount Fuji), a perfect volcanic cone, last active in 1707, which soars 12,385 feet, on one side directly out of the sea. Because of its majesty, it has always been much in the Japanese artistic and literary consciousness.

There is only one relatively extensive plain in Japan--the Kanto Plain around Tokyo--which stretches a mere 120 miles at its longest point. Otherwise the habitable portions of Japan consist of small seacoast floodplains, relatively narrow river valleys, and a few basins in the mountains, each separated from the others by rugged hills or impassable mountains.

The division of the country into many small units of terrain has been conducive to local separatism and may have contributed to the development of a decentralized, feudal pattern of government in medieval times. These topographical divisions certainly underlay the division of the land in antiquity into a number of autonomous petty "countries," which became institutionalized by the eighth century as the traditional sixty-eight provinces of Japan. It is significant that more than ninetenths of the borders of the forty-seven prefectures into which the country is now divided still follow precisely the mountain ridge delimitations of these early provinces.

Despite the natural division of the country, however, unity and homogeneity characterize the Japanese. As early as the seventh century, probably influenced by the example of a unified Chinese empire, already close to a thousand years old, the Japanese saw themselves as a single people, living in a unified nation. This has always remained their ideal, despite long centuries of feudal divisions. Today few if any large masses of people are as homogeneous as the Japanese. There is little of the ethnic divisiveness that persists in the British Isles, even though geographic barriers there are much less formidable than in Japan.

Until the building of railroads and paved highways in modern times, communication by land within the country was difficult. Only short stretches of any of the rivers are navigable. But sea transport has always been relatively easy around all the coasts and particularly on the beautiful, island-studded Inland Sea, which has always been the great central artery of the western half of Japan. Leading from the chief point of contact with the continent in north Kyushu to the ancient capital district at the eastern end of the Inland Sea, it was the main axis for much of Japan's early history.

Agricultural people everywhere have developed a close attachment to the soil that has nourished them, but among the Japanese there is in addition to this universal feeling a particularly strong awareness of the beauties of nature. No part of Japan is more than seventy miles from the sea, and mountains are within view almost everywhere. With ample rainfall, the whole country is luxuriantly green and wooded, and the play of the seasons brings wondrous variety. The earliest Japanese literature shows a keen appreciation of the beauties of seascapes, mountains, and wooded dells, and today Japanese are avid visitors to renowned beauty spots, sometimes all but destroying them in their enthusiasm. In addition to peerless Fuji, there are the famous "three landscapes of Japan" (Nihon sankei)�Miyajima, a temple island in the Inland Sea near Hiroshima; Ama-no-hashidate, or "Bridge of Heaven," a pine-covered sandspit on the Japan Sea coast north of Kyoto; and Matsushima, a cluster of picturesque pine-clad islands in a bay near the city of Sendai, in northern Japan. Most localities in Japan are likely to have their own three or eight landscapes, and there are thousands of other beauty spots and hot spring resorts, as well as innumerable less-known places of beauty.

Unlike the vastness of the untamed American West, the scale of Japan's natural beauty is for the most part small and intimate. The smallness of scale has perhaps lent itself to the Japanese effort to capture and preserve nature in small bits, as in their miniaturized gardens, in which within the narrow confines of their crowded cities a small area of carefully selected rocks and stones, some skillfully pruned trees and bushes, and a few pools of water suggest the grandeurs of nature. The chief exceptions to the smallness of scale in Japan's landscape are the high mountains of central Japan and the long vistas of the northern island of Hokkaido. Notifully absorbed into Japan until the latter part of the nineteenth century, Hokkaido has stretches of landscape and a thinness of population that are more reminiscent of North America than of the rest of Japan.

Ironically, the Japanese, for all their love of nature, have done as much as any people to defile it. This may have been inevitable in a country with the highest levels of population and production per habitable square mile. Beautiful green hills have been hacked down for factory or living sites and to provide fill for land recovered from the sea. More distant mountains for a while disappeared behind industrial smog. Urban blight sprawls across much of the agricultural countryside. Mountains have been defaced by so-called "skyline drives" to accommodate the city tourist. Renowned beauty spots are half buried in hotels, restaurants, and trinket shops. But the greater part of Japan today is thinly populated, and anywhere off the beaten track it remains a land of great natural charm and beauty.

Japan's dense population and phenomenal agricultural production can in part be explained by the climate, which contrasts quite sharply with that of Europe. Whereas European agriculture is limited by summers that are overly dry in the south and too cool in the north, Japan has both hot summer weather and ample rainfall, which comes for the most part during the growing season from early spring to early autumn. This has permitted a much more intensive form of agriculture than in Europe, with consequently heavier agricultural populations.

The climate of Japan resembles that of the east coast of North America more than that of Europe, largely as a result of the similar relationship among land masses, oceans, and prevailing winds. One way to gain a general idea of Japanese temperatures and climate would be to superimpose the Japanese islands on a map of the east coast of North America at the same latitudes. The four main islands of Japan--Hokkaido Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu--would stretch from northern Maine, or Montreal in Canada, almost to the Gulf of Mexico. Okinawa (the Ryu kyu Islands) is in the latitude of Florida, and the Kuril Islands, which Japan lost to the Soviet Union after World War 11, parallel Newfoundland. Tokyo and the bulk of metropolitan Japan, however, lie at the latitude of North Carolina.

Since Japan is not part of the continental land mass but lies several hundred miles offshore, it has a somewhat more oceanic climate, with less severe heat in summer and cold in winter than do parallel latitudes along our east coast. There is also more precipitation, ranging from around 40 to 120 inches per year. Late autumn and winter are relatively dry, with long stretches of delightful sunny weather in most parts of Japan. This is because during the colder months high pressures build up over frigid Siberia and Mongolia, causing cold, dry winds to flow ourward from the continent.

There is one major exception to this rule, however. The winter winds from Siberia pick up considerable moisture from the Japan Sea and dump it as snow as they cross the central mountainous backbone of Honshu. It is the same phenomenon as the "snow shadow" on the eastern shores of the Great Lakes in North America, only on a much larger scale. As a result, the northwestern coastal regions of Honshu, which are known as the "snow country," have prodigious winter snows, giving a steady ground cover of five or six feet in many areas�the heaviest snowfall in the world for any region with a dense population.

The contrast can be striking between deep snow and gloom on one side of the mountainous backbone of northern Japan and sunshine and bare ground on the other, sometimes only a few miles apart by railway tunnel. These conditions, together with the concentration of all the great cities on the Pacific side of the islands, have given a certain sense of inferiority and resentment to the residents of what they themselves call the "backside of Japan" (Ura Nihon). In contrast, the peninsulas that jut into the Pacific on Japan's south coast have a particularly benign, almost subtropical, climate, thanks to the Japan Current (or Black Current, Kuroshio, as the Japanese call it), which bathes that coast in much the same way that the Gulf Stream does the southeast coast of the United States.

Except for Hokkaido, the growing season in most of Japan averages between 200 and 260 days, but the period of oppressive summer heat is relatively short, usually lasting only from early July to early September. However, during this period it is indeed oppressive, not so much because of high temperatures as because of excessive humidity.

Winters are not very severe, but they can be quite uncomfortable if one does not have adequate heating, which was the prevailing situation in Japan until well after World War II. Except in the north and the higher mountains, temperatures rarely fall more than a few degrees below freezing, but in most parts of Japan they do dip during the night below freezing for a month or two in the winter, and snow does fall at least occasionally in all parts of Japan except Okinawa. Since winter temperatures are not severe enough to kill sheltered humans, the premodern Japanese, like other peoples living in comparable climatic zones, developed heating systems that lessened the rigors of winter only a little. Traditionally the construction of their houses was light and drafty, more fitted to admit cooling breezes in summer than to keep out the frost of winter. The chief heating device was a charcoal brazier, or hibachi, where one could warm one's wrists for supposed circulation of the heated blood throughout the body, though in some farmhouses one could warm one's feet in a sunken heating pit, or kotatsu. A nightly scalding bath would bring real warmth fr-om then until bedtime, and in the middle of the day glorious winter sunshine might heat the house to tolerable levels for a short while. A good southern exposure was therefore important. Today, central heating is still not the general rule in private homes, but electric, gas, or oil heaters have replaced the old charcoal brazier and together with more solid house construction make winter living more tolerable. For most Japanese, however, winter still means heavy long underwear.

Thus, summer and winter can be unpleasant in Japan, but they are not extreme and are relatively brief. The remaining eight months of the year are very pleasant. The four seasons are clearly differentiated, and the progression of temperature changes is slow and quite regular, unlike that in most of the United States.

Japan's climate is typically temperate, contrasting with the tropics, where the growing season is year round and temperatures make a relatively slow pace of life advisable. To survive the colder months, food surpluses have always had to be built up by hard, concentrated work during the more productive parts of the year, and daytime rest periods or a leisurely work pace have not seemed necessary to escape the midday heat. The same is true for Japan's East Asian neighbors, Korea and China. Such climatic conditions may help explain why the people of all three of these countries are noted for their hard work and unflagging energy. Simple necessity at first, reinforced over the centuries by wellestablished custom and insistent moral precept, seems to have produced among the Japanese and their neighbors in East Asia what may be the most deeply ingrained work ethic in the whole world.

One outstanding feature of Japanese weather is the series of great cyclonic storms, called typhoons, that devastate parts of the country in late summer and early autumn. These are identical in nature with the hurricanes that occasionally ravage the east coast of the United States, both being products of the same general relationship between land and water at comparable latitudes. Typhoons, however, strike Japan with somewhat greater frequency and usually with more destructiveness to life and property, since the greater part of the Japanese population is concentrated on the southeastern seacoast, where the typhoons first come ashore.

Typhoons have accustomed the Japanese to expect natural catastrophes and to accept them with stoic resilience. This sort of fatalism might even be called the "typhoon mentality," but it has been fostered by other natural disasters as well. Volcanic eruptions sometimes occur, since Japan has many active volcanoes that are part of the great volcanic chain that encircles the Pacific Ocean. The largest active volcano, Asamayama, devastated hundreds of square miles of central Honshu in 1783. There are also numerous fault lines throughout the islands, and destructive earthquakes are frequent. Tokyo and its port of Yokohama were in large part leveled by fires resulting from a great earthquake that struck at noon on September 1, 1923, taking 130,000 lives. Since Edo, as Tokyo was earlier called, has been periodically hit by severe earthquakes about ever'y sixty years, there is a popular belief that another is about to strike now that more than sixty years have passed since 1923, and people wonder how well the city will survive with its modern subways, towering buildings, and traffic-jammed streets. In any case, the Japanese have a fatalistic acceptance of nature's awesome might and a great capacity to dig therr selves out after such catastrophes to start afresh.

Chapter 2

Agriculture and Natural Resources

Between the ever present mountains and the sprawling cities, less than 12 percent of Japan's land area is under cultivation. The soils of Japan, moreover, are on the whole not very fertile. Nonetheless, a relatively long growing season, plentiful rainfall, unlimited hard work, and high agricultural skills have made it a very productive country despite its narrow geographic base.

Agriculture reached Japan quite late�only two or three centuries before the time of Christ. Whereas millet grown in unirrigated fields characterized farming in North China, the homeland of most East Asian civilization, the type of agriculture that came to Japan was wet-field rice cultivation, which seems to have originated somewhere to the south of ancient China. By the second century A.D. it was practiced in Japan in its essentially modern form in small dike-surrounded, water-filled plots of land, fed by an intricate man-made system of small waterways. Seedlings normally are grown in dense profusion in special seedbeds and later transplanted to the main fields; in earlier times transplanting was performed by hand, but today it is normally done by machine. Transplanting assures more uniform growth and also frees the main fields longer for the maturation of winter crops in the warmer parts of Japan, where double cropping is possible.

In the small floodplains and narrow valleys of Japan, this sort of agriculture did not require the massive water control efforts needed to harness the destructive forces and agricultural potential of great river systems. Large-scale water-control projects in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and North China are thought by some to have contributed to the development of mass authoritarian societies in these regions. In Japan, however, what was needed was close cooperation in the sharing of water among s aller groups. Probably such cooperative efforts over the centuries contributed to the notable Japanese penchant for group identification and group action.

Irrigated rice cultivation as practiced in Japan in the past demanded enormous amounts of labor, but it produced much higher yields per acre than the dry-field wheat farming of the West. As much of the land as possible was converted into irrigated paddies. Marshes, swamps, and coastal flats were carefully drained, diked, and turned into productive areas. Elsewhere rice fields followed each stream or rivulet almost to its source and, where water was available, ascended the hillsides in manmade terraces. Unirrigated dry fields for other crops stretched still higher up the slopes or wherever water could not be made to flow. Today rice is grown as far north as the western half of Hokkaido, and roughly 40 percent of farmland is devoted to paddy.

The productivity of the land has been further increased by double cropping wherever possible, usually between summer rice and various winter grains or vegetables. This sort of double cropping can be practiced in the half of Japan southwest of a line running from a little north of Tokyo to the west coast of Honshu north of Kyoto.

As a result of intensive wet-field rice cultivation and double cropping, Japan, like the rest of East Asia, has supported since antiquity much heavier concentrations of population than the drier or colder lands of West Asia and Europe. At least since Roman times China alone has equaled or outdistanced the population of all of Europe, and the Japanese population as long as three centuries ago had grown well beyond that of European states of comparable size. Thus the Japanese have been living together for many centuries in much larger and more concentrated masses than have Westerners. These conditions may have helped develop their propensities for group action and their skills in group organization.

Japanese agricultural methods, involving as they once did an immense amount of labor, were relatively primitive when compared with the large-scale, highly mechanized agriculture of the United States. Even with the aid of modern machines, it is still not very productive per manhour, but it is extremely productive per acre�perhaps the most productive in the world. For example, until recently Japanese rice yields per acre were two to four times those of Southeast and South Asia. This emphasis on productivity per acre rather than per man is understandable because Japan has long been richer in people than in land. As a result, well over a hundred times as many people work a square mile of farmland as in the United States and almost ten times as many as in West Germany.

Japanese agriculture, however, is very efficient and even scientific in its own way. Almost every square foot of tillable land is exploited as fully as possible. The rice seedlings or other crops are planted in careful straight rows that fill every square inch of space. The soil is carefully tilled to a depth of one or two feet, in earlier times by the long-bladed hoe of East Asia. The fields are meticulously weeded, and fertilizers are used in abundance. Originally these were organic materials, including until shortly after World War II night soil from the urban areas, which was as malodorous as it was economically beneficial. More recently night soil has virtually dropped out of use, and the Japanese farmer has come to depend largely on chemical fertilizers, which he applies lavishly. He also makes extensive use of vinyl coverings to form a type of simple greenhouse for vegetables.

Even before modern times Japanese agriculture had become self consciously "scientific," and many treatises on improved seeds and su perior agricultural methods were written by eighteenth-century farmers. Virtually all the suitable agricultural land had been put under cultivation (except in Hokkaido, which then was still a largely undeveloped border land), and both the government and farmers sought by every means to increase production. Thus, the population of around 30 million with which Japan entered the nineteenth century was perhaps almost the maximum that could be supported by the country in its preindustrial isolation.

The opening of Japan to world trade in the middle of the nineteenth century and the centralization and modernization of its government dra matically changed the situation, permitting a surge forward in agricul tural production. Advanced agricultural techniques now could spread more rapidly from more progressive areas to backward regions; cheap transportation by steamships and then railroads made possible a greater regional specialization of crops; Hokkaido came under the plow; even tually government agricultural institutes made available more modern scientific agricultural knowledge; and in the twentieth century Manchu rian soybean cakes and other sources of foreign fertilizers became avail able. Most of Japan's political modernization and industrial growth in the late nineteenth century was financed by surpluses achieved in agri culture. Population growth, however, in time outdistanced agricultural production, and by the beginning of the twentieth century Japan had developed a deficit of almost 20 percent in its food supply.

In the early years after World War II food was in extremely short suppl!. and hungry people tried to grow crops among the ruins of the cities and on any other scraps of unutilized land, but as the country slowly restored itself such desperate efforts were abandoned and some particularly uneconomic pieces of agricultural land were allowed to fall out of use. Meanwhile a rush of new technologv brought another leap in agricultural productivity. Chemical fertilizers, which were already widely used, became available in even greater quantity and mechanization at last came to agriculture, permitting a sharp decline in thc farming population. In the depressed conditions of the early postwar years, close to half the Japanese remained engaged in agriculture, but thereafter the percentage declined drastically. At present only about 8 percent of Japanesc live in farming households, and a mere quarter of these devote themselves exclusively to agriculture. The great majority combine seasonal work on the ancestral farm with other employment or, more frequently, perform their farming chores on weekends and in the early mornings and late evenings while holding down nonagricultural jobs within commuting distance in factories, offfices, or stores. For a while the farm work was done primarily by wives and retired parents, but the parents have mostly died, and the wives have joined their husbands in taking other positions, leaving very few full-time farmers.

The pattern of mechanization in Japanese agriculture is far different from that of the United States. In Hokkaido the size of farms is relatively large, though still very small by American standards, but elsewhere in Japan farms average only about two and a half acres, or about one hectare, the unit the Japanese themselves now use. A further drop in farm population may eventually produce a consolidation of farm holdings, but this has not yet started on a significant scale. In any case, regardless of the amount of land the individual farmer cultivates, the terrain dictates that most of the rice paddies and dry fields must be extremely small, better measured in square yards than in acres or hectares. Their size does not permit the use of great combines or large tractors. Instead the Japanese have developed an extremely different set of tractors, threshers, rice transplanters, and other machines, better suited to their type of agriculture and the smallness of their fields, and incidentally more suitable for the small fields and agricultural methods of most other parts of East, Southeast, and South Asia. The desire of each farm family to own its own machinery despite lack of adequate land to make much use of it has made Japanese agriculture perhaps the most overmechanized in the world.

Despite the drastic decline of agricultural labor, Japan witnessed a postwar surge in agriculture resulting in annual new records of rice production. Since per capita consumption of rice declined at the same time, because higher living standards permitted a more varied diet, the Japanese, to their amazement, suddenly found themselves with a surplus of rice. But with a population four times the Malthusian limit that was reached in the eighteenth century, the Japanese now face an even greater overall deficit in food of about 30 percent, or more than half if one counts imported feed grains used in domestic meat production.

Such shortages in food make the Japanese nervous. This anxiety, together with political sensitivity to the farm vote and a desire to avoid upsetting social changes in rural areas, has induced the government to continue to put emphasis on agriculture, even though it is much less productive per capita than most other forms of economic activity, contributing only about 3 percent to GNP. Generous farm subsidies keep food prices much higher in Japan than on the world market. For example, American rice identical to that produced in Japan could be unloaded in Japanese ports at only a fifth of the cost of domestic rice. To keep Japanese agriculture from being swamped by cheaper foreign produce, agricultural imports are strictly controlled, and the government has raised the price of rice to artificially high levels in order to maintain production and help farm families keep up with the rapid general rise in living standards. On the other hand, most farmers cling to their land, not just out of traditional devotion to it but also because, in the land-short, industrialized country that Japan has become, land prices have shot up astronomically, far beyond their agricultural value.

The Japanese farm population, as we have seen, has dropped precipitately, and the sprawling cities continue to gobble up surrounding tracts of the most productive agricultural acreage. But the Japanese will probably attempt to maintain their present degree of self-suffficiency in food. The resulting economic drag of inefficiently small-scale agriculture will probably be offset in their minds by the insurance value and psychological satisfaction of not being almost totally dependent on foreign sources for food, especially rice.

The diet and cuisine of the Japanese have been strongly influenced by the nature of their agriculture. Rice has always been the staple food and until recent times was eaten in large quantities at all three meals each day. In fact, the word for cooked rice (gohar~) is also the word for meal. Sake, the chief traditional alcoholic beverage, is made from rice by a brewing process that gives it an alcoholic content of 15 to 20 percent� a trifle stronger than most wine. All land that can be brought under irrigation, almost regardless of the effort required to do so, has been devoted to rice cultivation. Nonirrigable fields are used for dry-field crops of other grains, vegetables, and justly renowned fruit, including most of the temperate zone varieties as well as a great abundance of Mandarin oranges.

Of the total land area of Japan, less than 2 percent, largely in the colder north, is pastureland used for the less efficient production of food through animal husbandry. In the past, cattle were used to haul carts or plow fields but not for food. Their relative scarcity, together with the Buddhist prejudice against the taking of animal life, made the Japanese for most of their history nonmeat eaters. They obtained their protein instead from the fish that abound in the waters which bathe the country and now largely from worldwide fisheries and imports. Much of the fish is aten raw either in small slices called sashimi or as sushi, which combines it with seaweed and vinegared rice in a tidbit that has won wide popularity in the United States in recent years. Another important source of protein has always been the versatile soybean, which is now largely imported from abroad and is used to make tofu (bean curd), miso (fermented bean paste), and shoyu (soy sauce).

The traditional Japanese cuisine is simple and fairly bland, especially when compared with the world-famous cooking of the Chinese. Polished white rice, uncontaminated by sauces or condiments, is not just the belly filler in a traditional Japanese meal but also the most highly prized component. Large mouthfuls of rice are alternated with small bites of fish, vegetables, or pickles. Whereas a Chinese banquet consists of a series of rich dishes with a variety of sauces, a Japanese banquet is made up of a great number of small servings of individual things�a piece of cooked fish, a few slices of sashimi, some vegetables, pickles, and the like�all artistically served, often with more obvious attraction to the eye than to the palate. Chinese cooking is an overwhelming gustatory experience; traditional Japanese cooking appeals more to delicate tastes and to esthetic charm.

Of course, like everything else in Japan, eating habits have been changing rapidly in recent decades. Per capita consumption of rice has declined as the Japanese have developed more catholic tastes. Cheap imported wheat is baked into excellent European-style bread, which is commonly substituted for rice at breakfast. Meat, either imported or produced from imported feed grains, has become a significant part of the modern diet, though per capita consumption remains less than a fifth that of Americans. The Japanese have even taken to dairy products, which until recently were anathema to all East Asians. Even sake is gradually yielding place to excellent German-type beer, Scotch-type whiskey, and other Western beverages.

The Japanese enjoy a great variety of noodle dishes; Chinese cooking is widely prevalent; and Western dishes from French haute cuisine to American fast foods, such as McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, are very popular. The Japanese have also developed a number of specialty dishes that are quite unlike their traditional cuisine and perhaps for that very reason have achieved a degree of international fame. Among these are sukiyaki, a beef dish said to have been invented by iconoclastic medical students in the mid-nineteenth century, and tempura, or deep-fried prawns, thought by some to have been borrowed in the sixteenth century from the Portuguese. Japanese beef is known for its excellence, attributed by popular myth to beer mash and massage, though a more plausible explanation may be the fact that the animals are often stall raised and lack a range or even pasturelands in which to toughen their muscles.

The traditional Japanese diet of rice, vegetables, and fish, which con trasts with the heavy consumption of meat and fat in the West, would be almost a perfect health diet if it were less salty and the Japanese did not insist on polishing the nutritious bran off their rice. This diet may account in part for the low Japanese incidence of heart disease as com pared with Americans. On the other hand, something about it, possibly the polished rice, may produce the high rate of stomach cancer in Japan. In earlier days the diet was perhaps too austere for optimum childhood growth. Since World War II, Japanese children have increased several inches in height and many pounds in weight. Part of the increased height may be attributed to the straightening out of legs as Japanese sit less on the floor and more on chairs, but, like the weight, it may be chiefly due to a richer diet, which now includes dairy products and more meat and bread. Young Japanese today are quite visibly a bigger breed than their ancestors, and fat children, which formerly were never encountered, have become a commonplace sight.

Japan's meger supply of arable land is not offset by any oher great natural riches. Water is the only resource with that it is well endowed. Plentiful rainfall makes possible its intensive agriculture and produces a dense forest cover on two thirds of the area. Much of this forest land is now scientifically planted for maximum growth. As a result, Japan, despite its small size, ranks relatively high among the wood-producing nations of the world, thought the yield meets less than half its own voracious appetite for pulp for industry and lumber for its private housing Traditionally almost all Japanese buildings were constructed of wood, since stone or brick structures were extremely vulnerable to earth quakes, and even now most private homes and small shops are made of wood. The small but precipitous rivers of Japan are also a significant source of hydroelectric power. Despite almost full exploitation, however, water power supplies less than 5 percent of Japan's present gargantuan consumption of electricity.

The surrounding seas are a major economic asset. They are the source in of Japan's chief protein supply�fish�and also vitamin-rich seaweeds, or which the Japanese use extensively in their cooking. Coastal waters have alway provided vital food resources, and today there is considerable cultivation of fish, shellfish, and seaweed. Japanese fishing fleets also harvest the seven seas. In fact, Japan is the leading fishing nation in the world, which is appropriate for a large country with the highest per capita consumption of fish.

The oceans also provide the Japanese with easy communication within their country and constitute their highways to the resources and markets of the world. With the exception of the old capital of Kyoto, all of Japan's six biggest cities and a majority of its middle-sized cities are located directly on the sea. In most cases, they have themselves been extended seaward by the construction of new docking facilities and factory sites through the filling in of large stretches of shallow water. The bulk of Japanese heavy industry thus can be located efficiently for transportation purposes, not on inland waterways and railroads, but directly on the sea.

In mineral resources Japan is poorly endowed to meet its modern needs. The volcanic origin of the islands has provided an abundance of sulphur, and there are plenty of limestone, clays, sands, and the like, but otherwise Japan is short of almost every important mineral resource. A wide variety of minerals is to be found in the islands and these were adequate for Japanese needs in preindustrial times, but today they provide for the most part only marginal support to Japanese industry. There is, for example, sufficient coal to have been of critical importance in Japan's early industrialization, but the seams, being thin and broken, are not easily exploited, and today Japan imports more than five times as much coal as it produces. Once Japan was a copper exporter, but even in this commodity it is now almost entirely dependent upon the outside world, and more than two thirds of its zinc and six sevenths of its lead, two other minerals with which the islands are reasonably well supplied, must come from abroad. In most other important minerals, including iron ore, Japan is entirely or almost entirely dependent on imports. Worst of all, it is virtually lacking in the key energy resource of petroleum, which accounts for roughly three fifths of total Japanese energy consumption. Moreover, it has only very meager prospects for offshore oil and no appreciable fuels for nuclear power.

Despite its paucity of natural resources and extremely limited agricultural base, Japan's population has more than doubled since the beginning of the twentieth century and its standard of living has increased many times over. Obviously, this sort of growth has been possible only because rapid industrialization. But because of Japan's narrow and poorly endowed geographic base, this industrialization has brought with it a heavy dependence on foreign sources of energy and raw materials and therefore an equal dependence on foreign markets for industrial exports to pay for necessary imports. Japan is the world's largest importer of oil, coal, iron ore, a large number of other ores and metals, cotton, wool, lumber, and a great variety of other commodities. Although Japan once grew its own cotton, it has long since converted the land used for cotton to food crops and buys its cotton abroad. It has even become a net importer of silk, a labor-intensive semiagricultural product because of the mulberry leaves on which silk worms are fed), which was its greatest export item from the 1860s until the 1920s. Japan's dependence on global trade for its verv survival is the single most important fact about its economic geography and the chief determinant of its relationship with the rest of the world.

Industrialization naturallv means cities, and Japan is indeed a heavily urbamzed land today. But in fact, ever1 the preindustrial, isolated Japan c~t the eighteerlth centurv vvas economically and politically centralized enough to have had surprisingly large cities. Edo, as Tokyo was then called, had a population of about a million and may have been the largest city in the world around 1700. Osaka, the great trade center, and Kyoto, the ancient capital, both had several hundred thousands. The rest of Japan was dotted with castle towns which ranged up to 100,000 in population and were the seats of the roughly two hundred and sixty-five semiautonomous feudal lords.

In the middle of the nineteenth century there was already a sizable urban population, and the growth since then has been prodigious. Tokyo alone now has more than 8 million people in its main urban areas (the portion divided into wards) and over 11 million counting the suburban cities of Tokyo Prefecture. Packed alongside it are Yokohama, with about 3 million; Kawasaki, with over a million, squeezed between Yokohama and Tokyo; and heavy industrial and suburban populations in the adjacent portions of surrounding prefectures. The whole population node rivals metropolitan New York and is one of the four or five largest in the world.

The Kansai region, around Osaka, is another great metropolitan area of more than 12 million people. Meaning "west of the pass," the Kansai is the one great regional rival to the Kanto area ("east of the pass"), around Tokyo. In addition to Osaka, which has more than 2.5 million people, the Kansai includes the great port city of Kobe and the old capital of Kyoto a little way inland, each with close to 1.5 million, and a host of smaller cities.

Nagoya, midway between the Kanto and the Kansai, is the center of another major node of well over 2 million people. Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, has 1.5 million; Fukuoka, the old capital of northern Kyushu, and Kitakyushu, a large industrial center made up of a number of once separate municipalities and located as its name, "North Kyushu," indicates, both exceed a million; and Hiroshima, on the Inland Sea, has close to a million. Besides the cities named above, there are 194 other municipalities ranging from 100,000 to over 800,000, and an industrial sprawl permeates most of the countryside wherever there are a relatively heavy rural population and adequate transportation facilities.

Japanese industry is located in the nonmountainous fifth of the country, but it is particularly thick along the old main line of Japanese history, which extends westward from the Tokyo area along the Pacific coast through Nagoya to the Kansai region and then along the northern side of the Inland Sea to northern Kyushu. Here lies an almost continuous band of factories and houses, interspersed at places with agriculture and broken only occasionally by mountain ridges. This coastal band is com parable to the strip city of the American east coast and contains close to half Japan's total population.

As a result of political centralization and then industrialization during the past 120 years, Japan now has excellent internal communications. The metropolitan areas are serviced by superb networks of commuting railway lines and the cities of Tokyo and Osaka by fine subway systems as well. Where commuting lines converge, large secondary "downtown" areas have developed, as at Shinjuku, five miles west of downtown Tokyo. Despite these scattered downtowns and the fine commuting systems, the size of the Tokyo and Osaka metropolitan areas forces millions of people to commute to work or school between one and two hours each way.

The whole of Japan is now tied together by a complex and efficient railway network, and modern high-speed highways are beginning to spread to most areas. The water breaks between the main islands are being overcome by giant bridges and tunnels. These already connect Kyushu with Honshu; a tunnel to Hokkaido, longer than the English Channel tunnel, is in use, and bridges connect Shikoku with the main island. Airlines cover the islands, but a series of "New Main Lines" Shinkansen reailways running from Tokyo through the Kansai to Fuknoka and also to the west coast and northern Japan carry the bulk of the traffic at speeds averaging well over a hundred miles an hour. They run with incredible punctuality and frequency, about every 15 minutes between Tokyo and Osaka, covering the 343 miles on this run in a mere three hours. Planes are much less reliable and, count ing the time needed to travel between city centers and airports, not much faster.

Japan's cities and general industrial sprawl are scarcely its most at tractive features. Industrialization came rapidly to Japan, and under ad verse conditions. During World War II most of the cities were in large part destroyed, and they had to be rebuilt in a period of great economic i stress. Many of their structures, as a consequence, were flimsy and taw dry. Little effort was put into city planning; economic necessity seemed to override all other considerations.

Today the rate of growth is more leisurely, and attention can be given to matters other than economic production, but Japan still faces great problems. As the world's most crowded land in terms of habitable area, it suffers acutely from a general lack of space, and this situation is, of course, worst in the cities. Land prices are extremely high, and crowding is inevitably severe in personal living accommodations and public facilities. Almost all Japanese would prefer small individual houses, but many city dwellers have been forced to find accommodations in the groups of 4-10 story concrete apartment buildings (called danchi) that ring most of the large cities. In these an apartment is usually no larger than a good-sized room in an American home, though it may be divided into two small sleeping and living rooms and an even tinier kitchen and bathroom. A third of housing facilities in Tokyo average only eleven by eleven feet in size, and most Japanese still lack flush toilets. The Japanese were deeply wounded when an outspoken British journalist a few years ago compared their apartments to "rabbit hutches," and irritation still rankles over the comment.

The roads of Tokyo and Osaka occupy only 12 and 9 percent of the land space, compared with 35 percent in New York. Residents are allowed to have a car in Tokyo only if they can prove they have offstreet parking, with the result that the entrances to many homes look like small garages. Tokyo residents have less than a tenth as much park space per person as residents of New York and hardly more than a twentieth that of Londoners. In comparison with Japanese urban conditions, even the most crowded cities of the United States seem almost like the proverbial wide open spaces.

The net result is that Japanese cities and their surrounding areas of urban sprawl are not only terribly crowded but also form a vast esthetic wasteland. Although private homes often wall off quiet islands of beauty, and many small side streets are quite charming, the outer face of most cities is almost unrelievedly ugly, contrasting sharply with the beauties of sea, mountain, and the rural countryside, where these remain undisturbed by industrialization. The great moats and castle walls of the imperial palace grounds have always given charm and dignity to the center of Tokyo, but otherwise Japanese cities are only just beginning to take on some shape and grandeur, as broad thoroughfares are cut through the jumble of houses and handsome new buildings rise, sometimes to a height of forty or fifty stories.

The scarcity of space in Japan, combined with a much smaller invesrment in the past in permanent, paved roadways and in longer-lasting structures of brick and stone, means that actual "living standards" in Japan may be quite a bit lower than per capita GNP figures would suggest. Space up to a certain point is a vital element in well-being. Though it cannot be factored into our statistics, its scarcity justifies the Japanese in their argument that they are quite a bit poorer in "gross national living standards" than the GNP figures would indicate. In any case, in Japan's cities, with their vast industrial production, vibrant life, bur deplorable overcrowding, one encounters as clearly as anywhere in the world the mixture of triumphs and mounting problems that characterize industrialized society today.

Chapter 3

Isolation

One final, vital fact about the geographic setting of the Japanese is their relative isolation. Japan lies off the eastern end of the Old World in much the same way the British Isles lie off its western end, though at considerably greater distance. The more than 100 miles that separate the main Japanese islands from Korea is roughly five times the width of the Straits of Dover. In the time of primitive navigation it constituted a considerable barrier, and the roughly 450 miles of open sea between Japan and China were even more formidable.

Throughout most of its history Japan has been perhaps the most isolated of all the major countries of the world. Until the dawn of oceanic commerce in the sixteenth century it was fitfully in contact with its two closest neighbors, Korea and China, and influences from further afield came to Japan only as filtered through these two lands. In more modern times, Japan's rulers took advantage of their natural geographic isolation to fix on the country a firm policy of seclusion from the outside world. For more than two centuries, from 1638 to 1853, the Japanese were almost completely sequestered from foreign contacts. It was a unique experience at a time of quickening international and mter regional relations elsewhere in the world.

Thus natural geographic isolation, magnified later by human design, forced the Japanese to live more separately from the rest of the world than any other comparably large and advanced group of people. Or perhaps one should say that this combination of natural and artificial isolation enabled them more than most other peoples to develop on their own and in their own way. Certainly the Japanese throughout history have been culturally a very distinctive people, diverging sharply even from the patterns of nearby China and Korea, from which much of their higher civilization originally came. Even today, Japan occupies a unique place in the world as the one major industrialized and fully modernized nation that has a non-Western cultural background.

Isolation has had a number of important by-products. It has made other people, even the nearby Koreans and Chinese, look on the Japa nese as being somehow different and has produced in the Japanese a strong sense of self-identity and also an almost painful self-con sciousness in the presence of others. Such things are hard to measure, but the Japanese do seem to view the rest of the world, including even their close cultural and racial relatives in Korea and China, with an es pecially strong "we" and "they" dichotomy. Throughout history they have displayed almost a mania for distinguishing between "foreign" borrowings and elements regarded as "native" Japanese.

Isolation thus has ironically caused the Japanese to be acutely aware of anything that comes from outside and to draw special attention to its foreign provenance. The civilization of any country is much more the product of external influences than of native invention. If one subtracted everything from English culture that had foreign roots or antecedents, there would be little left. But borrowing from abroad has usually been a slow and unconscious process or at least has gone unrecorded. The Jap anese, on the other hand, have always been sharply conscious of the distinction between "foreign" and "native" and made the fact of cul tural borrowing a major theme of their history. Thus they have given themselves and others the impression that they are somehow uniquely cultural borrowers. A myth has grown up that, unlike other peoples, the Japanese are mere mimics, incapable of invention themselves and unable to understand the inner essence of what they have borrowed. In actuality, their isolation has probably forced them to invent a greater part of their culture and develop a more distinctive set of characteristics than almost any comparable unit of people in the world. What distinguishes them is not their imitativeness but rather their distinctiveness and their skill at learning and adapting while not losing their own cultural iden tity. Others have tried to do the same but with less success.

Another by-product of isolation may be Japan's unusual degree of cultural homogeneity, which has already been remarked upon. Of course, isolation and homogeneity do not necessarily go together, as can be seen in the case of the British Isles. But prolonged separation from the outside world perhaps aided in the spread of uniform cultural pat terns throughout the Japanese islands, despite their internal barriers of terrain.

The theme of homogeneity will reappear frequently in our story, but one striking illustration of it is the racial composition of the Japanese people, which might be regarded as part of the natural setting for Japanese civilization. The Japanese, like all other peoples, are the product of long and largely unrecorded mixtures. In fact, the diversity of facial types in Japan suggests considerable mixing in the past. But the important point is that, whatever their origins, the Japanese today are the most thoroughly unified and culturally homogeneous large bloc of people in the world, with the possible exception of the North Chinese. There are few important physical variations throughout the islands, and, while there are differences in folkways and accents, not unlike those among the English, French,
Germans, and Italian, there e nef the sharp divisions as between Gaelic and English speakers and Protestants and Catholics in the British Isles, between speakers of French, Breton, German, and Basque in France, or the profound differences of all sorts between north and south Italians.

Actually the Japanese islands form a sort of cul-de-sac into which various peoples drifted over time and, finding no exit, were forced to mix with later comers. Among these peoples were the Ainu, who may represent an early type of man dating from a period before the modern races became clearly differentiated. In any case, they combine some characteristics of the white race, notably hairiness of face and body, with characteristics associated with other races. Thus the Ainu may account for the somewhat greater hairiness of some Japanese as compared to most other members of the Mongoloid race. At one time the Ainu, or people who at least were in part their ancestors, occupied either all or most of the Japanese islands, and until the eighth century they still controlled the northern third of the island of Honshu. But bit by bit they were conquered and absorbed by the main body of Japanese, until today fewer than 20,000 Ainu survive as a culturally identifiable group in the northern island of Hokkaido, and even these are on the brink of com plete absorption.

Basically the Japanese are a Mongoloid people, much like their neighbors on the nearby Asian continent. Both archaeology and historical records attest to a broad flow of peoples from northeastern Asia through the Korean Peninsula into Japan, especially during the first seven centuries o the Christian era. There may also have been an earlier flow of people or at least cultural traits from more southerly regions, which gave rise to certain "southern" characteristics that Japanese culture shares with the peoples of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. An early diffusion of peoples and cultures may have occurred from South China southward but also eastward to Japan by way of Korea. These "southern" strains may account for some of the mythology of Japan, the flimsy, tropical nature of its early architecture, and the fact that Japanese in physical build are more like the South Chinese than their somewhat taller and sturdier neighbors in Korea and North China.

Hints in the historical records suggest that there was some ethnic diversity in Western Japan up until the eighth century, and there is solid evidence of a heavy flow of people from Korea up until that time, but there has been no major infusion of new blood since that time. ln fact, for over a thousand years immigration of any sort into Japan has been only infinitesimal. There has thus been a long time for racial mingling and the development of a high degree of cultural homogeneity. This process was no doubt aided by the artificial seclusion of Japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and has been further fostered by strong centralized rule since then. But long before this the Japanese had developed a picture of themselves as a racially distinct and "pure" group, often portrayed in terms of a single great family. It is a concept more frequently encountered among primitive tribal peoples than among the citizens of a large modern nation.

Japan's imperial conquests in modern times and its present global trade have attracted some foreigners into the islands in recent decades. The only sizable group, however, is a Korean community of about 700,0001eft over for the most part from the much larger numbers imported during World War II to replace Japanese workers gone off to war. There are also a few tens of thousands of Chinese, mostly merchants, from Japan's former colony in Taiwan or from the mainland, and a few thousand other outlanders from more distant parts of Asia and the West.

Altogether, these outsiders number much less than 1 percent of the population, and only the Koreans constitute any sort of a real ethnic problem. Since they are physically all but identical with the Japanese and are closely allied to them in language, they could be readily absorbed both culturally and physically, and Koreans born in Japan usually do lose the language of their parents in much the same way that people of non-English-speaking origin become linguistically absorbed in the United States. The Japanese, in their extreme ethnocentrism, however, tend to reject Koreans as full members of their society, while the Koreans, resentful of this attitude and of Japan's colonial domination of their homeland in the past, often cling to their ethnic identity. In fact, the Korean community injects a disruptive element into Japanese society and politics by its passionate adherence to one or the other of the two rival Korean regimes and the respective supporters of these regimes in Japanese politics. The Korean problem, however, is a tiny one compared to that of ethnic diversity in North America or even the problems caused by floods of postwar immigrants and temporary workers into the countries of northern Europe.

One extraordinary exception to Japanese homogeneity, however, deserves mention. This is the survival from feudal times of a sort of outcast group, known in the past by various names, including the term eta, but now usually called burakumin, or "hamlet people," a contraction from "people of special hamlets." This group, which accounts for less than 2 percent of the population, probably originated from various sources, such as the vanquished in wars or those whose work was considered particularly demeaning. Clearly they included people engaged in leather work or butchery, since the Buddhist prejudice against the taking of all animal life made others look down on such persons, though, it should be noted, not on the butchers of human life in a feudal society dominated by a military elite.

The burakumin have enjoyed full legal equality since 1871, but social prejudice against them is still extreme. While they are in no way distinguishable physically from the rest of the Japanese and are not culturally distinct except for their generally underprivileged status, most Japanese are reluctant to have contact with them and are careful to check family records to ensure that they avoid intermarriage. In the highly urbanized Japan of today, the burakumin are becoming progressively less recognizable, but their survival as an identifiable group is a surprising contrast to the otherwise almost complete homogeneity of the Japanese people.

Japan's isolation is now only a psychological remnant. Japan, in fact, is in a sense the least remote of all nations. None is more clearly dependent on a massive worldwide flow of trade simply to exist. As a result, it has developed strong trade relations with almost all parts of the world. The seas that once cut it off now bind it effectively to all regions. The great distances that once lay between it and all other countries have now shrunk to insignificance. Military destruction can be projected across the oceans in a matter of minutes. Floods of words and visual images are transmitted instantaneously throughout the world. A person can be in both Tokyo and New York on the same calendar day. With the coming of giant tankers and container vessels, the costs of oceanic transportation have plummeted compared with those of land transport. Mountain ranges, deserts, tropical jungles, and arctic tundra can still be serious barriers to commerce, and man-made barriers can be even greater, but oceans are now the cement that binds the world together economically. It is for these reasons that, in drawing my population and GNP maps, I largely eliminated the oceans and seas, leaving only enough of them to help demarcate the various countries and continental land masses, and I placed Japan, not on the periphery as it seemed to be in the past, but in the center, a spot to which it is as much entitled as any nation because of its massive involvement in worldwide trade.

The shift from almost complete isolation little more than a century ago to complete involvement today has, in historical terms, been sudden. The impact of outside economic and military power as well as of culture and ideas was once cushioned by what were then great intervening distances and also by firm man-made barriers. The psychological effects of isolation still linger on among the Japanese and in the attitudes of other peoples toward them. Linguistically the Japanese remain quite separate, having a most unusual and difficult writing system and a very distinctive language. But the original geographic isolation and the self-imposed isolation of more recent times exist no more.

This has been a huge and upsetting change for the Japanese. Attitudes and skills once suitable to their position in the world do not serve them as well today. The adjustment to the new conditions is not an easy one to make. The Japanese feel grave uncertainty about their position in the world and even about their identity. What does it mean to be Japanese today, and what should Japan's role be in the contemporary world? These are questions the Japanese frequently ask themselves, and I shall return to them in the final section of this book.

= end of Chapter 3, Isolation =

Source: Reischauer, E. , & Jansen, M. B. (1995). The Japanese Today (pp. 3-36). Belknap Harvard.