Japanese Echoes of an Old American Activism

The working-class boys dress like Elvis; doo-wop sounds waft over the burgers and fries in the luncheonettes. Baseball players are honest and clean; businessmen drink Scotch and play golf. The newspapers warn of communist plots and Mickey Mouse is everywhere. It could almost be California, 30 years ago, but the fish isn’t cooked and the finless cars are too small. “Happy Days” has crossed the Pacific; Japan, finally, is having its ‘50s.

The resemblance is more than coincidental. The Depression and its aftermath shaped ‘50s America; something similar is at work in Japan.

For Americans born in the ‘30s, life was hard. Most families knew poverty; many knew hunger. A generation of Americans grew up determined: They studied hard, worked hard and willingly sacrificed to build the future.

Japan’s worst years came after the war. Many Japanese now in their 30s grew up hungry, poor and determined. The kids who once begged for chocolates and chewing gum have grown up. Like Scarlett O’Hara they have taken the vow: “I’ll never be hungry again.”

They won’t be. They work hard; they save. They have faith in the simple values that endure in hard times: honesty, family, thrift. Like America’s Depression babies before them, they have worked an industrial miracle, but as we also learned, success brings problems of its own.

America’s ‘50s had a dark side; so do Japan’s. In both places, single-minded pursuit of economic growth produced social and environmental problems. Cars cause gridlock and smog; affluence has unexpected side effects.

America’s ‘60s were complicated. Minorities, women, consumerists and environmentalists argued for looking beyond gross national product. It was not enough to boast that, in Richard M. Nixon’s words, America had built “the largest shopping center in the world.” Quality, not just quantity counted.

Attitudes about work also changed. Children of affluence do not thank God they have work; they worry that work isn’t fulfilling. They won’t do scut work, and they want good pay for what they will do. The postwar generation consumes while its parents saved, takes vacation while parents took overtime and thinks of rights while parents thought of duty.

As an age of affluence takes hold in Japan, there are signs of a similar transformation. Japan’s future will not be just a rerun of America’s past but the new Japan is already tasting the civic activism and youthful alienation that marked the end of America’s innocent ‘50s.

Japan has no large racial minority, so the struggle for racial justice does not play a role comparable to our civil-rights movement. Still, contemporary Japanese speak about their own civil-rights movement--for community power, women’s liberation, environmental preservation and consumer protection.

The most important of the new movements may well be the women’s. Japanese women are perhaps more frustrated by social traditions than their Western sisters, and the women’s liberation movement in Japan is picking up strength. Takako Doi has made the unthinkable thinkable; Japan could enter the ‘90s with a woman at the helm. Even the conservative ruling party, horrified at Doi’s popularity, is hastily promoting women to Cabinet posts and looking for women candidates in upcoming elections. But this is only the tip of a growing iceberg. All over Japan, small groups of women are reading--and responding to--the work of Western feminists like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. A network of consumer and community activists--led mostly by women--is shaking local governments all over Japan.

Intellectually, feminism poses profound challenges to Japanese culture--to its emphasis on sex roles and to every form of social hierarchy. Since the 19th-Century Meiji restoration, Japan’s history has been profoundly affected by intellectual imports from the West and feminism is the most likely candidate for the next Western idea to catch hold.

Consumer advocates also raise their heads. Ralph Nader visited Japan this September and addressed more than 10% of the membership of an interested Japanese Bar Assn. A new word appears to be gaining ground in the language-- classu-action-- used to describe a legal remedy Japanese lawyers would like to use. In another consumer development, the cozy, high-priced distribution system has become a political whipping boy; conservative and socialist parliamentarians compete to see who can denounce it in strongest terms.

Japan’s greening is also under way. Support for whaling steadily shrinks; news of asbestos in the new Municipal Building caused a furor in Tokyo. Japan’s postwar ravaging of nature was anomalous in historical terms. For generations the Japanese have carefully conserved their forests; both Buddhism and Shinto teach reverence for nature.

Despite its present problems, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party--in fact, conservative--may not be unseated by the burgeoning civil-rights movement. In the United States, the Republican Party--roughly as conservative as Japan’s LDP--has held on to the White House even as feminists and other social movements transformed American life.

Japan’s corporate Establishment may have a harder time than the politicians. More pressure from environmentalists, class-action suits by angry consumers and the gradual disappearance of postwar workaholics in the labor force will dull their formidable competitive edge.

The consumer movement has already begun to improve the shaky prospects of the current U.S.-Japan trade talks. Reform of the distribution system is on the way, as much because of domestic pressures as because of international complaints. Similar progress, for similar reasons, may come in talks over land use: Current Japanese policy helps keep home prices high and subsidizes the inefficient micropaddies that dot its urban landscapes. Best of all, a nation of affluent consumers will be a good customer for other countries. The quicker, the better.

The greening of Japan will reduce its trade surplus and improve its world relations. Perhaps U.S. car- and steelmakers should stop lobbying for quotas against Japan’s products and start distributing the work of American feminist and consumer activists in Japan.