The scene is downtown Tokyo; the date is 1 December; the weather – warm sunshine and cloudless blue sky – mirrors that of the south of France in mid-September. And Japan has begun to celebrate Christmas.
Japan switched on the Christmas lights at the beginning of the month, only a few days later than London’s West End and, it has to be said, with altogether more panache. There are Christmas trees tinged with artificial snow or, in some cases, simply covered in machine-created snowflakes; robot Santa Clauses that wink at the world against a skyline of Japanese calligraphy; jingle bells that sound awkward when set to the high-pitch notes of traditional Japanese music; and there are cribs in all the best hotels, in the top superstores and, for all I know, in some of the darker alleyways of Tokyo’s back streets.
Japan is not a Christian country. Yet this must be the most consciously commercialised Christmas anywhere in the world. This supreme salute to the birth of Christ is not confined to pleasing the tourists and foreigners who live in Tokyo. In all the major cities, the festive bells of Christmas ring out. Take the bullet train to Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima and Fukuoka, and you will find the Christmas trees bristling with goodwill. Tokyo’s very own Disneyland is putting on a special show, which the enterprising local authority has labelled “Christmas Fantasy”. In the Tokyo suburb of Ikebukuro, real snow made by, and showered from, special snow machines will fall inside the town from 22 December through to Christmas Day.
Nothing is being spared to encourage this Christmas consumer boom. After a decade of economic stagnation, Japan needs it. Big Christmas bonuses are traditional, and they can amount to an extra three or four months’ pay. Every national newspaper is packed with display advertisements that beckon the masses to spend. Japan’s big problem is that it has record levels of saving, but people won’t spend their money.
Japan has always been a nation of paradoxes. The early religion of the Japanese, Shintoism, was largely nature worship tinged with ancestor deification. Shinto means the “way of the gods” and remains the traditional religion of the older gen-eration, many of whom still regard the emperor as the manifestation of Shinto power and belief. Tens of thousands of Shinto shrines splash the country. Buddhism came later, with its promise of nirvana, a state of mind in which a person can become indifferent to the routine trials and tribulations of life.
The Christian missionaries reached Japan later still – in the mid-16th century – and were then banned. They began to return after Commodore Matthew Perry and his American fleet sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 but, even now, fewer than 1 per cent of Japanese are practising Christians. Tokyo and other cities have a sprinkling of churches but, unlike the Shinto shrines, they are difficult to find without a guide.
There is no impulse toward religious belief among the younger generation, who are absorbed in the material world. The contemporary Japanese have little time for spiritual reflection. But they have lots of time for spending money.
If there is a new god in Japan, it is the god of information technology. I have been visiting Japan for more than 30 years, but never before have I felt the thrust of a cultural revolution so powerfully as on this occasion. To be sure, the Japanese, postwar, have been the electronic wunderkind nation, only to find themselves left behind in the past decade by Microsoft, Bill Gates and the remarkable developments in computer technology in the United States. Now they are fighting to catch up and, as they quietly predict, perhaps even overtake the US.
That is what the deep-rooted shake-up in Japanese political and economic life is all about. The old Establishment – the “iron triangle” of power held by the state bureaucracy, the banks and the major industrial groups, Japan Inc – is beginning to break up after ten years of pretending that change could come without pain. The breaking mechanism of traditional culture, the philosophical Buddhist shrug, no longer conceals the underlying anxiety. The cliche about Japan being the “second most powerful economy on earth” is a sticking plaster worn thin. An impatient younger generation demands a market economy freed from the bureaucracy and corruption of the old order. In the words of Hisamitsu Arai, the highly sophisticated deputy minister at the ministry of international trade and industry: “We are in the process of a revolution. It will take time, but there is no turning back. Japan is changing.”
As the Christmas tree lights were switched on, the Japanese parliament passed a new act designed to create what they describe as “electronic government”, meaning full ministerial support to wire up every home in Japan. The privatised NTT – Japan’s equivalent of BT – has an entire floor of its 44-storey building in Tokyo devoted to demonstrating what IT will be like in ten years’ time. They call it the Magic World of 2010, a world of mobile information with a handset that will bring person-to-person image contact about everything and connected, at least in theory, to everybody. Listening to this saga on Japan’s new god, I said to the Mr Big of Japan’s IT business that I did not find all this futurism nearly as attractive as the world of simple Christmas trees without artificial snow and mobile phones. He gave me a Shinto-like smile and moved on.
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