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S4 Episode 21: In conversation with Christopher Harding on Japan.
40 Plays1 month ago
Today, John and Dejan are joined by Christopher Harding, a Japanese Historian at Edinburgh University. Tune in to hear them discuss Japanese history, politics, and the future of this fascinating nation.
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Transcript
Introduction of Christopher Harding
00:00:00
Dejan
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Debatable Discussions podcast.
00:00:02
John Gartside
you
00:00:04
Dejan
Today we are incredibly lucky to be joined by Christopher Harding, one of most prominent historians and broadcasters in the world today. Thank Christopher, for coming.
00:00:15
Chris
David Sloanenberg.blogspot.com. Thank you that's a
00:00:17
John Gartside
So for our guests who don't know, but I imagine you do, Christopher Harding is a historian of Japan and South Asia and broadcaster. He has published several books on Japan and South Asia region.
00:00:29
John Gartside
He's also been a presenter on Radio 4 and currently lectures at Edinburgh University.
00:00:36
Chris
nice That's nice to meet you both.
00:00:38
John Gartside
Nice to meet you too, mate.
Influence of Religion on Japan
00:00:39
Dejan
So a lot your work has been on Japan. And the first question we have is that very interesting element of Japanese history and its heritage today is its connection to religion.
00:00:52
Dejan
How would you say that religion has shaped Japan into what it is today?
00:00:58
Chris
I think there are probably three really important religious traditions that shape Japan in quite different ways. And I'll give you just a quick flavor of each and we can talk more if you'd like to.
00:01:11
Chris
Probably the oldest one that is shaping Japan still now is Shinto, which literally means the way of the gods. And so if you go to Japan or even if you see pictures of Japan, you'll see these Tori shrine gates.
00:01:25
Chris
which are these two pillars with a horizontal bar across the top. So those are normally at the entranceway to a Shinto shrine. They tell you you're about to enter sacred space. And I suppose what Shinto has brought to Japan is a sense that everything, any kind of remarkable feature of nature, like a waterfall or mountain is alive, that energy pulses through everything.
00:01:48
Chris
If some of your listeners or viewers are fans of Hayao Miyazaki films, you know, the famous Studio Ghibli animated film
00:01:55
Chris
I think they're quite influenced by Shinto, that sense of nature having not just life, but maybe personality. That'd be the first one.
00:02:03
Chris
So the second one Confucianism, which came in from China to Japan. I think that's been quite important for shaping how people relate to one another, how fathers and sons relate, how wives and husbands relate, how friends relate, a certain sense of hierarchy and respect.
00:02:19
Chris
That's been very profound for Japan. And then the last one, of course, is Buddhism. which has been in Japan since we think probably the sixth century AD. And if Shinto is all about life, for Japanese people, Buddhism is all about death and the afterlife.
00:02:35
Chris
So most funerals in Japan would be conducted via Buddhist rituals because Buddhism has got the most to say about death, the afterlife, and this sense that everything in life is always passing away.
00:02:48
Chris
So that very profound insight, I think, comes from Buddhism and really shapes a lot of the Japanese arts?
00:02:55
John Gartside
What are the sort of remnants of these perhaps more spiritual religions in the world today?
Religious Coexistence in Japan
00:03:01
John Gartside
Has there been a sort of a sort of sense of more disbelief towards or has less people who are part of the Shintel Buddhist religion or are they still quite prominent in Japan in the modern day?
00:03:14
Chris
It's a good question and it's one that scholars of religion have trouble trying to answer. Maybe couple of things I might say about that. One is Japan is quite different from culturally Christian countries like the UK in the sense that there is no expectation that any one religious tradition will offer you the exclusive and final truth about the way the world works.
00:03:39
Chris
So Japan operates with what someone once called spiritual double glazing. You know, you've got your Shintoism, you've got your Buddhism. They both got things to say about the world. They can both give you a certain kind of protection.
00:03:50
Chris
So for many, many centuries, a lot of people in Japan wouldn't have been entirely clear where Shinto ends and Buddhism begins. Often, if you go to Japan, you'll see shrines and temples sharing the same sites.
00:04:01
Chris
Sometimes even their gods mix and mingle. So it's an interesting situation, but one that can be hard for Westerners to get our heads around. That's maybe the first thing. Second thing is, I think there has been a change across the 20th century and maybe especially after the second world war a general slight decline what you might call literal belief in the gods in the kind of afterlife that buddhism talks about but people still you'll see them on new year's day going to shrines they'll take their babies or children's along children along for particular festivals at shinto shrines they'll take their funerals very seriously there's a phrase in japan hanshin hangi which
00:04:41
Chris
kind of means we believe and we don't believe, or we sort of suspend the question of whether we believe or we don't believe. There's kind of a modesty, I think,
Buddhist Funeral Practices in Japan
00:04:50
Chris
about what human beings can really say about the biggest possible picture, which sometimes I think is quite attractive and maybe quite realistic.
00:05:00
Dejan
I think another question that I think is on the sort tip of our listeners' mouths at this moment is what is actually a Buddhist burial look like? How, what happens?
00:05:11
Dejan
What are the sort of processes that happened there? And is there anything special in Japan that we maybe not find in other Buddhist countries?
00:05:20
Chris
So it's a solemn affair, as you might expect. You are often cremating your relative, whoever it is that's died.
00:05:30
Chris
There is a, in some cases, there is a ceremony as part of it whereby you move the remains, the cremated remains of whoever's funeral it is, around with particularly long chopsticks, what look like chopsticks, you know, as part of as part of the ceremony, and suppose one of the reasons that's quite significant is in Japan, if you go to Japan, there are certain things that you don't do with chopsticks because they remind people of what happens at a funeral.
00:06:00
Chris
are a couple of things you wouldn't do. You wouldn't pass food from one set of chopsticks to another because that puts people in mind of a Buddhist funeral. The other thing you wouldn't do is if got a bowl of rice and you're not eating it, you wouldn't,
00:06:13
Chris
put your chopsticks in the top. You know, you lay them down on the side, but you wouldn't poke them into the rice because, again, at a Buddhist funeral or a Buddhist temple in general, actually, there are incense sticks poking out of pots of earth often.
00:06:28
Chris
So again, that'll put people in mind of it. So I suppose those are some of the visual aspects of what goes on. And maybe one quick thing to throw in, you might very likely have a Buddhist monk or priest intoning Buddhist sutras in this kind of low and rhythmic voice which which is done for the benefit of the dead but also builds an incredible atmosphere.
00:06:50
John Gartside
Carrying on with this cultural sort of theme, especially in the West, we associate Japan with a lot of culture, whether it's the haiku poems or woodblock painting.
00:07:01
John Gartside
But
Cultural Development in Tokugawa Era
00:07:01
John Gartside
am I right in saying that this sort of emerged amidst Japan's period of isolation under the Tokugan shogunate? So why is this? And what are the sort of cultural and artistic aspects of Japan?
00:07:14
Chris
Yes, a lovely question. You could probably think about some of the really big achievements very briefly three parts. So about a thousand years ago, what some people call the first ever Japanese novel or the first ever world novel, some people would go as far as that, was published called The Tale of Genji about this fantastically brilliant and handsome and accomplished prince.
00:07:36
Chris
And it's a very psychologically deep and sophisticated piece of writing, which is extraordinary for something written around the year 1000. Japan at that point was run by an emperor, run by aristocrats. It was a highly sophisticated place based in the city of Kyoto.
00:07:50
Chris
So some aspects of Japanese culture like literature, poetry, fine kimono, et cetera, we date it back about a thousand years. There's a middle period where there's lots of fighting sort of going on, sort of 14th, 15th, 16th centuries.
00:08:03
John Gartside
Thank
00:08:07
Chris
It's very, very bloody. Samurai are sort of killing each other, chopping each other's heads off, et cetera. But even then, some developments in Japan, which you and I might know, still managed to surface. So, for example, Zen Buddhism, some of the art and calligraphy that goes with Zen Buddhism, incredible interiors of castles with beautiful gold leaf.
00:08:26
Chris
Again, those things come about in a country that's otherwise very often at war. So it's quite an achievement. But I think I'd agree with you, John. The Edo period, as you say, ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate, 1600 to middle the 1800s, Japan is at peace while some of your listeners, I'm sure, will know parts of the world like Europe are often at each other's throats.
00:08:47
Chris
So Japan gets this period of two and half centuries, more or less cuts itself off from the rest of the world, not entirely, but more or less. And so, yeah, haiku, kabuki theater, woodblock printing, the first celebrities who are often actors or sumo wrestlers,
00:09:02
Chris
All these things come about in this wonderful early modern period. And I think if you ask a lot of Japanese people now, what's your favorite period of Japanese history? Some might say that courtly aristocratic period from a thousand years ago, but a lot would say the Edo period.
00:09:14
John Gartside
Okay.
00:09:17
Chris
Because it seems like a kind of, you live in Edo, which is now Tokyo or Osaka or a big city, and you had a bit of money, you could have so much fun with all these different forms of arts and entertainment.
00:09:29
Dejan
And another question is on sort of arts and the entertainment, we've spoken lot about Japan in isolation, but how much impact have its neighboring countries have had on Japan?
00:09:40
Dejan
Thinking Korea, China, maybe other countries in the region.
Influences from China and Korea
00:09:46
Chris
China and Korea both an absolutely huge influence, I would say particularly from second century onwards. So China and then sometimes direct from China, sometimes through Korea.
00:09:59
Chris
So some of the really building blocks of Japanese culture and society. So rice agriculture comes to Japan from China. Some of the iron tools required to do that agriculture.
00:10:10
Chris
come from China through Korea. Later Buddhism, as we were talking about, Confucianism. If you go to a Japanese Buddhist temple now and you see these heavy, these grand heavy wooden buildings with these amazing Buddhist statues inside, a lot of that artwork and also that style of temple building is originally Chinese.
00:10:33
Chris
And some of the very first ones in Japan were actually built by Chinese and particularly Korean master crafts people. Even Japan's first constitution was inspired by China for many centuries, including the Heian period, this period of this aristocratic period we were just talking about.
00:10:48
Chris
The language of educated people was Chinese rather than Japanese. So that regional influence, I think, for centuries has been huge. The one thing I might say on the opposite side of it, or at least to sort of round out the point a little bit, is for people in Japan, what they'll often say is that yes, some of these ideas came into Japan from outside, but in Japan, they've been perfected.
00:11:12
Chris
So yes, we'll take Buddhism, but then we'll think a bit more about it. We'll try this or that practice and we'll take it to a brand new level. And almost with any aspect of culture, art or poetry, whatever it might be, people in Japan, I think, would argue that that's the trajectory.
00:11:28
Chris
They do hoover up these ideas from elsewhere, but they take them to a brand new level in Japan.
00:11:34
John Gartside
And
Impact of Meiji Restoration
00:11:34
John Gartside
yes, that's sort of very interesting to think about how there are these cultural influences which have almost culminated in Japan. Another notable part of Japanese history is the Meiji Restoration in 1868. It's perhaps the most famous part.
00:11:50
John Gartside
Can you explain the significance of this for us?
00:11:53
Chris
Yeah, absolutely. Let's link it back to the Edo period we were just talking about, this period of semi-national isolation, which is brought to a really abrupt and potentially quite violent end in the 1850s, when, for those of your viewers and listeners who like their American history, by the 1850s, the United States has grown and grown and grown until it's on the Western seaboard,
00:12:20
Chris
of North America, so California, et cetera.
00:12:21
John Gartside
Okay.
00:12:23
Chris
And you can now get, or this period, 1850s, you could get from the United States to Japan in a steamship in about, I think it was either 10 or 18 days off the top of my head, but quite rapidly.
00:12:36
Chris
Japan is more and more becoming America's backyard. So the US sends some ships, some steamships under the control of someone called Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan, although they actually go the long way around the world,
00:12:50
Chris
to Japan to say, basically, we want a friendship with you. We want, ideally, a trading relationship eventually, certainly a diplomatic relationship. And seeing those steamships just off the coast of Edo, which is now Tokyo, as we've been saying, I think is a real shock to Japan.
00:13:07
Chris
They don't have steam technology at this point.
00:13:08
Dejan
Thank you.
00:13:09
Chris
They don't have ships that big. We think about four ships initially that go. Those ships combined, their firepower could have destroyed the whole of Edo.
00:13:20
John Gartside
Wow.
00:13:20
Chris
So it's an extraordinary advances in technology that have been happening elsewhere in the world, because obviously a country that's at peace doesn't really advance much in its weapons technology. You think about how rapidly drone technology has been evolving in Russia and Ukraine, because it has to.
00:13:38
Chris
That kind of process just hasn't happened in Japan. So they've got the samurai, I've got the kind of guns that you might have if you're in the States in the 1850s, you might have it in your attic. because they're so old and a little bit obsolete.
00:13:49
Chris
But that's what the samurai are carrying. So it's a real crisis for Japan. And suppose a long story short, 1850s and 1860s, there's this huge debate in Japan, well, what do we do about the outside world?
00:14:01
Chris
Clearly, they're dangerous, which means maybe to let them in is a mistake. But if we try and keep them out, the Americans are clearly threatening us with violence. We need weapons that are like theirs. And then it's really interesting process. The people who start to win the argument for,
00:14:16
Chris
opening Japan's doors, which is what eventually leads to this major restoration, they have to go through interesting thought process. So they'll say, yes, we want the weapons.
00:14:27
Chris
If we want the weapons, we need the factories to make the weapons. If we want the factories, we need the raw materials, we need the money, we need the talent. And before you know it, there's more and more that you're having to accept from the West simply so you can defend yourselves.
00:14:42
Chris
So that debate keeps going on and off, And then there's a mini civil war from 1868 to nine. And the winners of that, essentially these kind of young samurai, just a few years older than the two of you, who no one's ever heard of, managed to take control of Japan.
00:14:58
Chris
And they go through this rapid process of modernizing it along Western lines, but trying to maintain a kind of Japanese identity at the same time. But, you know, within a few decades, Japan is one of the most powerful and modern nations in the world. So it's an extraordinary period, I think.
00:15:16
John Gartside
Thank
00:15:17
Dejan
How do you think Japan sort of managed to get from that point of development of the second world war to being quite destroyed and how, how did, how they managed to bounce back? What
Post-WWII Reconstruction and Innovation
00:15:28
Dejan
was their sort of philosophy or strategy and, rejuvenating their country into now sort number one country for innovation and, uh, new technology?
00:15:42
Chris
Probably two things in particular. After Second World War, there is an occupation of Japan. So it started 80 years ago, roughly around now.
00:15:52
Chris
Allied occupation, but really led by the Americans. And halfway through that occupation, sort of around 1947, 1948, they start to get really worried about China, about communism.
00:16:03
Chris
And so they say, right, we want Japan to be stable, conservative, capitalist ally with whom we can trade and on whom we can rely in East Asia as a force against the Soviets and as a force against the Chinese if they fall to communism, which does happen, of course, in 1949.
00:16:21
Chris
So because of that, the US is prepared for a few years to really support Japan's big comeback. So they let them license really important technologies like the transistor, which helps out this brand new firm who go on to become Sony, one of the greatest technological firms in the world.
00:16:38
Chris
They help them out with loans. They help them out with advice on the economy. They let them have exchange rates between the yen and the dollar, which help out the Japanese. So in all sorts of ways, the Japanese get a big boost from the United States because it's in US interests.
00:16:54
Chris
I think the other thing they do quite cleverly, and whether we like it or not, this is what China has done in the last 10, 15, 20 years, which is have the state and industry and big businesses and banks as far as possible cooperate and work together with similar policy goals.
00:17:15
Chris
So they decide, for example, that cars are gonna be a really big thing, which is a smart move, right? In the late 1940s, everyone's gonna want their own car. So let's be really good at making cars. So they make decisions like that at a national level and they get everyone to coordinate.
00:17:28
Chris
And so you have this extraordinary process of economic growth where Japan is growing an insane percentage every year from the late 1950s all the way through the 60s and into the early 1970s.
00:17:40
Chris
And I think it's mainly because of those two things. Plus, I think some Japanese people would want to say, and it's fair to say, extraordinarily hard graft on the part of ordinary people.
00:17:51
Chris
And so if the two of you and your friends ever hear from parents or adults in your life that, oh, in our generation, we did da-da-da, you've got it easy, or you're lazy, or you're feckless. I mean, hopefully they're not that harsh on you.
00:18:01
John Gartside
Yeah.
00:18:02
Chris
But lot of Japanese adults, you know, would say to their children after this period, you know, after the war, I worked X many hours a week.
00:18:09
Chris
Your mother was doing the same with her at home in her job. A real sense that everyone was coming together and sacrificing quite a lot. And I think to an extent that's probably true. That post-war generation put in an enormous amount of labor her bring Japan back from the brink, really.
00:18:25
John Gartside
And I think that sort of economic post-war transformation is really symbolic in a way of how unique and fascinating Japan's history is. And as I said, again, unique because there's no other country that has sort of gone on to the transformations which it has.
00:18:41
Chris
Mm.
00:18:42
John Gartside
Transitioning
Contemporary Economic and Social Issues
00:18:42
John Gartside
into sort of the modern day, there's currently been on the news a lot of articles about discontent in Japan, whether this is over tourism or politics.
00:18:44
Chris
Mm.
00:18:50
Chris
Mm.
00:18:53
John Gartside
Can you perhaps give us bit more sort of insight into why there is so much discontent at the moment in Japan?
00:18:59
Chris
Yeah, absolutely. So the economic miracle that we've just talked about that lasted really from the late to the late 1980s was overseen by a single political party called the Liberal Democratic Party.
00:19:13
Chris
It's often said that our own Conservative Party is the most successful party in world history. The Liberal Democratic Party, since its formation 1955, has almost never been out of power in Japan, which is extraordinary. You know, in a real democracy, it's sort of sometimes almost like a one-party state.
00:19:30
Chris
So if, you know, you were thinking about being a politician in the future, you might not think, which party do I join? You might think, which faction do I join of this one party which is doing so well?
00:19:40
Chris
So that party did really well for a very, very long time. But then since the 1990s, Japan's economy has done less well. There was a bursting of its bubble and then a few decades, we're into two and a half decades now, of pretty slow growth and occasional recession.
00:19:58
Chris
If you go to Japan, it still looks modern, beautiful, clean, wonderful, everyone loves it. But it's had these economic problems for quite a long time and successive governments have failed to really do much about it.
00:20:12
Chris
Now, in the last few years, what's really looming and causing some of the discontent that you're mentioning, I think, is that those economic problems are being compounded by population decline.
00:20:23
Chris
So not enough people having babies. Japan's population is shrinking by more than 2,000 people every single day. So every 24 hours, more than 2,000 people overall are disappearing from Japan's population.
00:20:37
Chris
Nearly a third of Japanese are over the age of 65. Most of those are not working. They're expensive to care for. They deserve it because they've worked their whole lives. I wouldn't question the you know, the pensions and the health care, obviously.
00:20:48
Chris
But nevertheless, that's a really big problem. And so what some Japanese politicians tried to do to bring extra money into the country and to sort of boost things a little bit was they looked outside Japan's borders.
00:20:59
Chris
And they've tried two things. And now both of these things are causing big trouble in Japan. The first thing was bring in more foreign labor because Japan is short of people. For every four nursing jobs in Japan at the moment, they get one applicant.
00:21:14
Chris
So it's a disaster and that's a really important sector.
00:21:14
John Gartside
Thank you.
00:21:16
Chris
So bring in more people from elsewhere, from China, Korea, Vietnam, elsewhere.
00:21:20
Dejan
Thank you.
00:21:21
Chris
And then also let's encourage lots of tourism because tourists are big spenders. The British actually spend more than anyone else when they go to Japan. not sure why, but we do. And so they thought that'd good solution as well.
00:21:32
Chris
What's happened last year and this year, they had elections last year to their lower house. So the equivalent of our house of commons, an election to their upper house last summer, just gone this year. to the equivalent of our House of Lords, although ours isn't elected and theirs is, so-called House of Peers.
00:21:48
Chris
In both of those, the main party is taking a kicking because you have these populist right-wing parties, and one in particular called San Seto, who campaigned on a slogan which was Japanese first.
00:21:55
John Gartside
Yes.
00:22:01
Chris
Basically, the government has let too many foreign workers in. There are parts of Japan that don't feel like Japan anymore because we don't see enough Japanese faces. Neighbourhoods in Kyoto, some of them, they would say, are being taken over.
00:22:15
Chris
Tourists behave badly. Do you know we were talking a moment ago about those Shinto shrines, right? The two pillars with the horizontal bar.
00:22:21
Chris
So very famously, an influencer, I think she was from Chile, did pull-ups on it, which is obviously a massive no-no. Someone else just a few weeks back or a couple of months back at a grave in Japan, sometimes you leave food and drink for the spirits of the deceased.
00:22:39
Chris
including canned drink. He's YouTube influencer. And he went and opened the can and drank it, having tossed the Harry Potter coin to see whether he would do it or not.
00:22:42
Dejan
I had to wait for him.
00:22:50
Chris
These sorts of things go viral in Japan on social media. And it helps this backlash that's starting to happen against tourists. And it's a mix of, I think it's a mix of two things.
00:23:01
Chris
And we can talk a bit more about it if you'd like to, but briefly a mix of two things, I think. One is quite a longstanding idea in Japan that it's a racially homogenous society, that everyone is of Japanese by blood, going back ages and ages and ages, and that anyone who's not Japanese by blood can't really become Japanese.
00:23:19
Chris
It's a little bit like what some people think about being English, or they're used to. They thought, oh, English is an ethnic identity, whereas anyone can become British. So Japan doesn't really yet have an identity that anyone can join.
00:23:31
Chris
So it's partly that sense, and the sense that foreigners in Japan cannot become Japanese, they will always be foreigners, and they won't know how to behave, et cetera, cetera. So there's a kind of a racial argument going on. The other argument that people make, and it's intertwined with the racial one, is Japan has really high standards behavior.
00:23:50
Chris
And it's a really easy place to live because everyone knows how to treat each other. There used to be this urban myth that went around I was first in Japan that if you bought a ticket on Japan's national air carrier, Japan Airlines, as it was, you could pay extra so you didn't sit next to a foreigner.
00:24:05
Chris
because you want to be sitting next to someone who takes their shoes off and eats badly, et cetera, et cetera, for 12 hours, you know, if it's a long flight. I think that was a myth, but it shows you that there was that sense that foreigners might not know how to behave.
00:24:18
Chris
And so there's this cultural anxiety that if you let too many people into the country too rapidly, you end up undermining society and undermining what makes Japan an easy place to live for people.
00:24:29
Chris
So those things combined with economic problems It looks like it's pushing Japanese politics more and more rightwards, which we haven't really seen before or not for a very long time.
00:24:42
Dejan
Why do you think that is? Why do you think there's this sort of almost fear of, don't want to say necessarily a fear of foreigners, but this sort of fear of Japan being taken over by people who are not Japanese. Do you think there's maybe a sort of historical link to that or it a completely new phenomenon?
00:25:03
Chris
So
Migration and Cultural Identity
00:25:03
Chris
I think it's partly because Japan is a place where there's been very little migration for quite a few centuries. So I think that's the background. People there aren't used to the idea.
00:25:15
Chris
And the very idea of becoming Japanese, if you're not ethnically Japanese, is something that people, I think, struggle with, even though they sort of know, because it's very obvious in the numbers, that really, and it sounds crude, but Japan has one of two ways it can go if it wants to survive it can either have more people come in from elsewhere to boost the population particularly the younger population or it can lean more heavily on robots and automation and ai and we can maybe get into that if you want to but there are a lot of people who would slightly prefer the latter option because they feel so uneasy so i think it's i think it's partly that the other thing that i see and i hear when i speak to people in japan
00:26:01
Chris
And I don't really agree with this take, but it certainly gets a lot of traction in Japan, which is countries like the UK and France and the United States who have had histories of migration.
00:26:14
Chris
They would say the reason why these countries have so many political arguments and so much division is because they don't have a sense of being a single community. and a single population.
00:26:25
Chris
So if Japan goes the way of the UK or the US and allows lots of migration, we're not going to be stronger and more diverse and more interesting and more multicultural. We're going to steadily fragment and fall apart.
00:26:38
Chris
And so there's a lot of hysteria, I think, in right wing social media in Japan, where they look at countries like the UK and say, we don't want that. The same way, you know, those of your viewers listeners who are interested in the United States now and again,
00:26:53
Chris
people on the right of American politics will look at a place like Birmingham and they'll say, oh my goodness, it's run by Muslims and it's awful, et cetera. You know, it's ridiculous. But it can be quite powerful to say to people if their awareness of the rest of the world isn't very great and isn't very sophisticated, that's what happened to that country.
00:27:12
Chris
If we do this with migration, the same thing is going to happen to us. So it's a very simplistic argument. but it does have a lot of traction and in particular on social media.
00:27:23
John Gartside
And it is fascinating in a way just to think of how sort of global almost this populist right wing rhetoric that we are seeing is. Perhaps
AI and Robotics in Japan's Future
00:27:31
John Gartside
as our final question, Chris, could we sort of look towards the future?
00:27:36
John Gartside
And you mentioned there Do you think Japan will adopt AI? It's been that sort of forefront of many other technologies. How do you imagine that will be integrated into Japanese society?
00:27:48
Chris
I think they're really hoping to. So I think until the Japan really was at the cutting edge of technology. If it was about electronics and precision manufacturing, Japanese were doing it better than anybody else.
00:28:00
Chris
To the point where Americans got really upset about automobile industry competition, for example. There's a video on YouTube I found the other day from Detroit, you know, big center of automobile manufacturing in the US, where they were allowing, had a Japanese car and they were allowing people for a dollar to smash it up with a baseball bat.
00:28:18
Chris
You know, you get one hit for a dollar because people were incensed about the amount of Japanese cars coming in and that they were undermining the US automotive industry. So that changes in the 1990s. Suddenly the US is doing better.
00:28:31
Chris
Companies we all know like Microsoft, Apple, and then Google, et cetera. For all sorts of reasons, Silicon Valley starts to take off and Japan, by comparison, starts to fall back.
00:28:42
Chris
a little bit. Some people say it's business practices were bit conservative, that it didn't have the venture capitalist funding, venture capital funding that some of these American firms had.
00:28:52
Chris
They didn't have the idea, you know, the move fast and break things or the set up a startup, let it fail and then do it again. Sort of philosophy in the US. Japan didn't really do much of that. So I think in Japan, there's sense of having fallen behind in the last 20 years or so.
00:29:07
Chris
And they are hoping that both AI, but particularly AI married to semi-autonomous or autonomous robots is the way to go. So the big thing now in Japan, as you say, for our last question, thinking about the future.
00:29:20
Chris
The thing I would expect to happen in the next few years is Japanese AI, which interestingly is harder to develop than English language AI. That might be more technical than we want to go, but it's an interesting area.
00:29:30
Chris
Anyway, AI married to first what we call cobots. Robots that aren't designed to replace us, but they're designed to help us out. So if you're a nurse in a caring home, in a care home, you haven't got enough colleagues, your back hurts.
00:29:44
Chris
You get a care bot to come and lift a patient for you. And yet you're there to actually be with the patient, have the human contact, et cetera. Or if you're in a convenience store in Japan, you can't lift all the heavy boxes by yourself.
00:29:56
Chris
You get your cobot to do that. And you, again, do the human interaction. I think there'll be more and more of that going on to try and accommodate this drastic reduction in Japan's labor force.
00:30:08
Chris
Whether or not the foreign population in Japan grows and becomes integrated, I think that's 50-50 at the moment, because I don't know what Japanese politics is going to do. That's one to watch.
00:30:20
Dejan
I think just before we end as well, we are on the brink of half term. I think this video will be released just as we enter half term and for our viewers and listeners who are a bit bored and don't really have anything to do. I've got sort of three quick fire questions.
00:30:37
Dejan
Number
Recommended Media on Japanese Culture
00:30:37
Dejan
one, best movie about Japan. Number two is most accurate movie about Japan. then we're going go into question three.
00:30:46
Chris
Wow. Okay. Best movie about Japan. I'm going give you a sad one. So if your viewers are going to watch they're going to want to have a box of tissues handy.
00:30:57
Chris
An animated film called Grave of the Fireflies, which is Studio Ghibli. It's not Hayao Miyazaki, but it is absolutely beautiful. So I would have a look at that one. And I'm going to give you another historical one for most accurate film about Japan. It's made in Japan, so it's fairly It's fairly safe with one of their great actors whose name I'm blanking on at the moment. But the film is called Warae no Daigaku. So it's University of Laughs or University of Laughter.
00:31:24
Chris
I love that film because it's set in the Second World War at home in Japan. lot of people I imagine listening to or watching this might have grown up with an idea of Japan in that period as being kind violent and crazy and brutal. And all those things are to an extent true.
00:31:39
Chris
But for a sense of what was going on in Japan on the home front. how ordinary people were were suffering and trying to get along with a very difficult authoritarian government that university of laughter is both funny and sad and uplifting so i would watch that as well one animated film and one live action film there we go
00:31:57
Dejan
And the third question, it's also book season. So obviously check out Christopher's book on Japan, but apart from your book, would you recommend a book either written by Japanese author or about Japan that you think is necessary for people to have a look at?
00:32:14
Chris
yeah. Would this be sort of a fiction book or a non-fiction book about Japan?
00:32:18
Dejan
Whatever you prefer.
00:32:18
John Gartside
Yeah.
00:32:21
Chris
Oh, OK.
00:32:24
Chris
I think if people want to put a toe in the water of Japanese fiction, they could do worse than read. What would I suggest?
00:32:36
Chris
I think I would read a book called Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari. He was the first Japanese person to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and he won it partly because of that book.
00:32:50
Chris
I'd probably recommend that, in addition to my sub stack, which is ChrisHardingJapan.com, which they'd be very welcome to have a read of as well.
00:32:59
John Gartside
Yes, I urge all our listeners and me and Deanna, I'm sure, will to read your Substack and your books and also all those great suggestions. So thank you very much for coming on the podcast today.
00:33:07
Chris
Brilliant.
00:33:10
John Gartside
think Deanna and I found your insight quite fascinating, actually. And as I said, Japan has got this sort of unique history in politics, which makes it just so fascinating to hear about.
00:33:21
Dejan
Definitely an episode where everyone learns something new.
00:33:25
Dejan
Highly unlikely not to. And even if you haven't learned anything new somehow, you still have those film and book recommendations to take over into the holidays.
00:33:29
John Gartside
Thank you.
00:33:34
Dejan
Thank you, Christopher, very much for coming and see you next week.
00:33:37
Chris
Thank you having me.