In Japan; Part 1

Think of the world as it really is. The Pacific Ocean touches the shores of places so far distant in miles that when it is night in one, it is day and another. That distance has created a world history in which nations have grown up dissimilar to each other. But in the world as it really is, distance no longer exists. As wide as the Pacific is, we can cross it in ten hours. We can communicate with each other in an instance once we find a common language. Japan and the west coast of America are 6,000 miles apart, but it is evening in America. It is 13 hours later, the morning of the next day in Japan, 40 years ago the two countries were enemies in war, but it may be that as the 20th century ends, they'll find themselves involved in the world's strongest alliance and on the cutting edge of change in a rapidly changing world. What follows is an attempt to understand Japan. It is a story of small automobiles, hard work, and hidden melancholy, and of a broadened concept

of the way the world works. It begins in the midst of an urban kind of dream world in Tokyo, on a Saturday night. By Saturday afternoon, the six-day work in school week has come to an end in Japan. The trains come sailing into Tokyo across the streets of avenues. On the subway is the press of people heads mostly in the direction of Gensha station. They flow out into the central intersection of a country that thrives on the tension between a quiet and its inner soul and the world is economic activity. This is a place of light, who's a strong green-arm climate building front along the city, stores are Kingston's throne, and in large bright windows, lines of people travel escalators, and storing the stories of the streets. On Saturday, shore during south of Gensha corner is sealed off from traffic. At night beneath the sky but in colors, the people move slowly along the department stores and restaurants as a Gensha, and almost silent world, stay home on corn's music.

It is the materialist Japan dressed in its best clothes I've had its leisure, and with heart and stories uniformed, sales girl standing before counters and having racks of clothing that are voluptuous with color and sparkle. On this Saturday night on the Gensha, as if out of the silence and contemplating Japan, a Buddhist monk will slowly drown the sidewalk pretty looking all over each step, as head is bowed into the levee. He's one of the sect of lungs who operate distances in Japan in silence, sitting through the fabrication. Slowly, his veil is lost and the traffic begins a corner. This one place in the center of Tokyo may be the center of long Japan, but it has the

cob where it is going, and as the travel goes further into Japan, he wonders if in fact it might not be caught in the center of the world. You can imagine the terrible sights as almost the entire city was swept by the blast and flames, and suddenly changed into an atomic desert. Ahead in Hiroshima, a constant flow of visitors from all over the world passed through the Peace Memorial Museum with rented cassette players that tell them how to understand the dropping of the atomic bomb over that city. On August the 6th, 1945, three U.S. military planes arrived in formation over Hiroshima and the city at 8.15 a.m. Flying at an altitude of about 8,500 meters or 24,500 feet. One of the three planes took sight on the heart of the city, released the atomic bomb, and immediately banked sharply and flew away to the northwest and top speed.

The bomb dropped from the plane, emitted mysterious flashes applied to the air. That was nearly 40 years ago, now we're on a Boeing 767 from Tokyo approaching Hiroshima. This is a business-made flight, a modern airplane with all seats occupied by those who drive this factories and offices in Japan. The plane has a TV camera at its nose, and as we descend over Hiroshima we can see the land beneath on a large television screen at the head of the cabin, much as a bombardier must have looked out of his target on that day in 1945. Hiroshima is the starting point of the post-war history of Japan, the legend of the phoenix rising from its ashes retold. To understand Japan, one needs to understand what happened here. A democratic and reclusive nation had turned imperialist and fascist and had gone to war. The war was ended by the most devastating weapon known to man, when it exploded over Hiroshima, 120,000 Japanese were killed instantaneously or died within the week. As shadows of people and objects were burned into stone and metal surfaces, and I can

be seen to this day. Now please proceed to the corner entitled The Fury of High Temperature Conflagration. No sooner did the atomic bomb explode, than fires broke out in the areas beneath the explosion. Even after the flames had burnt up almost everything by dusk, the red-hot embers of the city were still reflected brightly in the night skies, presenting a hot-rending sight of the last night of Hiroshima. It was indeed a burning hill that no one could enter. Tens of thousands of persons who were unable to move because of injuries must have been melted in the intense heat. Yoshitaka Kawamoto is the director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. He was the only child in his school to survive the bomb that day. He says that he must explain why he is living. He was in the center of his room. Everyone around him was killed, but he was just buried in the debris. He crawled out.

The soon he lost all of his body here, eventually he lost most of his vision. It was a year before the survivors of Hiroshima really understood what had happened to them. It were told that the grass would not grow in their city for 70 years. 40 years later, Mr. Kawamoto's hair and vision are restored. Children play statues in the forms of pigeons in the park outside his office window, flowers grow in profusion in fountains and monuments at the center-taffed visitors through coins into a slotted box and paused about their heads. In the near Hiroshima, Willow trees line the boulevards, families in robo's cold and cells leisurely along the rivers underneath the bridges, a collection of brightly-peded old trolley cars rumbles through the streets. On a bus full of American visitors, a young tour guide takes a gracious Japanese bow and sings this song. We suffer from two bombings, black rains dropped on these lands.

We are all determined to prevent a third bomb, we are united to prepare to do to clear war. What happened to Hiroshima and in Nagasaki was that Japan became liberated from a burden that other nations bear to this day. It had known the bomb firsthand and chose not to become involved with it again, and Japan was told by its former enemies to forsake the development of its strong military in favor of the building of a strong economy, its people closed ranks and worked hard to overcome a war which had shown them a dark compartment of the Japanese soul which had devastated their cities in ways no one had thought possible. The GMP plummeted. As the American B-29, from Bharat Tokyo and other cities and sunken more 99% of them, ocean-going ships, the Japanese economy GMP plummeted. So, we were the state of the non-liberal of the GMP economy in another 100 years, 100 years. The sign of the ocean of the Japanese Federation of Economic Organizations recalls the

destruction of his country's economy brought about by a self-inflicted war. You can still buy Japanese one-to-toys like this bear playing a drum in the socks of the district of Tokyo. They Japan began to put itself back together in the pro-store years, and the wind of joy seemed to become a staple export, and a symbol made in Japan, but with the help of its former enemy America and the collective will of the Japanese to work hard for their country's recovery made in Japan eventually changed from a pejorative to a term that the world's other industrial nations had to take seriously. We finished with construction in terms of GMP and tenure time. The Japanese moved out into the world and quietly began to understand how to master it as an economic power. Now, on the outskirts of what's devastated Hiroshima, the factories of the most emotic corporation produced 1.3 million cars in trucks a year.

They are the nucleus of the company, the factories in 18 countries, and really from Burma to Zimbabwe. Here a translator, Akira Mehta, managing director of the Hiroshima plant, talks about time spent in America in the mid-1950s. At that time, the US was the strongest and most wealthiest country in the world. It was a very amazing for me to see your country. I thought that my country must work hard to catch up with the US, therefore I went to many places to see many things around your country, and it was a great motivation for me to learn more and to do more. But Akira Mehta did, along with many other Japanese industrialists, was to make use of a highly motivated workforce and pursue an industrial philosophy of constant improvement, efficiency, and planned international marketing. As the cars and trucks traveled the gauntlet of the clean well-lit assembly line, the worker

puts things together quickly, and, with a bit of finish, he rejects the defective heart, he puts forth his best effort. Many and his fellow workers are a tight ensemble. In the morning, they exercise together with equipment that mines with factory walls. They talk regularly about how to produce better quality at lower cost. After that switch to plant outside Kyoto, the visitor is shown a film that opens with glass replicas of food, feeding weight, and brilliant colors. The effect is stunning, and the message is eloquent. In 1980, in Kamasuki, Matsushita started his company with 100 yet, and the equivalent of $50. Now, among other products, it produces consumer electronics under the brand names of Panasonic, Quasar, and Technics. The company has 125,000 employees in 82 factories worldwide. The introduction of new technologies overseas also plays an important role in racing

the company's industrial potential. The products made here are benefiting the countries that receive them as well as the country where they're made. It's a two-way mode for society. The company philosophy holds that one only gets from the world what one gives to the world. In the factory, the television sets, turntables, video cassette players, radios, and tape players were allowed into an eager world. And, Mr. Matsushita's $50 investment, 64 years ago, netted $17 billion in sales during the last fiscal year. This area is either... 45 stories above Tokyo, an official-related Toshiba corporation looked down from his company and skyscraper at a city on the moon.

The warehouses that once served international trade are disappearing to be replaced by the electronic information systems and buildings like Toshiba's trade is more and more the flow of data around the world. When night falls on one side of the planet, day breaks on the other side, the flow of commerce is constantly circular. The products of Toshiba range from consumer to industrial electronics, but the business of Toshiba seems to be business and how it is conducted in an increasingly international world. In the decision room of its world headquarters, the visitors showed a film about O.A. or Office Automation, information and transmission systems that are described in terms of the nervous systems of living creatures of fiber optics that set the flow of data speeding

along at 100 megabits per second. With three-dimensional computer graphics, the visitor is shown how the data flow of the Toshiba building in Tokyo is plugged into an interactive information system that reaches across the Americas and Europe. The business of the company follows the sun around the planet. In London, it is already the afternoon, and in the Middle East, the data is just under. Across the globe, the rhythms of human activity have been flowed. For its U.E., a large general trading company, engaged in a multitude of trading activities across the world, the action never stops. The business of Maxuya and company is the international trade. Its method is the connection of buyer and seller in a global marketplace. The product areas in which it invests its money and effort range from machinery to textiles. It grows and thrives on the development of commercial and industrial activities around the world.

Until the recent past, the active ingredients of world trade have included money, goods and human resources. Now, there is a fourth, an intangible called information. As a trading good, information includes the understanding of new technologies and quick access to collection analysis and transmission of knowledge on market trends and conditions. The flow of information is unimpeded by time and distance, and its Sui communications network is the skeleton of the Mitsui rule in world trade from Sydney, Australia through Tokyo, Bahrain, London, New York, and South America. The network moves 80,000 messages a day. The Japanese have to import the raw materials to export to survive, almost literally. In the American Embassy in Tokyo, Ambassador Mike Mansfield explains an incontrovertible fact about Japan. It is an island nation with few natural resources. No resource to speak of, except its people. And they know, I think every Japanese knows deep down just how vulnerable his country is,

and when the going gets tough, they get that much more productive. To import the food, fuel, and raw material it needs, Japan must use the labor of its people to turn some of those imports into exports. It's a matter of survival, and in the 40-year recovery from World War II, Japan has become a master at World Trade. In 1983, it exported $147 billion worth of goods based on imports of just $126 billion. And why does Japan have a $21 billion trade surplus with the world? The nations with which it trades accuse it of unfair trading practices. The Japanese, like Makio Mizakuchi, of the foreign ministry, attribute those disagreements to the fact of trade itself. You don't want friction and trade problems one way is not to trade at all. You didn't have, if you had zero trade, there would be no problems, but that is not the way to castority in trade for 100 years, you had a trade surplus with Japan.

Did we complain? We complained, but you said, oh, you know, think about it in global terms. The Japanese see the basis of their strength in world trade in the nature and quality of the products they produce, and those products that they export around the world are manufactured almost primarily with the Japanese consumer in mind. And the machinery that is exported is also the machinery of a productive Japanese industrial plant, automobiles and consumer goods that are flooding the homes and driveways of the world have been designed primarily for the Japanese consumer. The Japanese market, we think, is the most competitive consumer market in the world. If the Japanese manufacturers can win in this market, they are pretty good chance in any other market. It's not only prices, in Japan now prices don't matter much, it's the quality. People are now just getting sold luxury-minded, they want to buy cheap things, except for underwear or things that maybe don't show, you know, that underwear, everybody uses Taiwan

or Korea, but you know, what is wearing Italian or not. But the course of world trade is changing according to Mr. Misaguchi, at the other end of the spectrum from underwear, are the products of technology. And like the Japanese automobile, they are moving industrial production into goods that grow increasingly smaller in bulk, while more valuable in dollars and yen. In the meantime, Mr. Misaguchi feels that some of the rest of the world is leaving itself behind. Like Europe, or in Europe, the basic idea that you stand still and try to protect what you have. Not won't work. And still, it is a capitalist society, if you stand still, you cannot win, you have to run. Everybody is running. Korea is running. Taiwan is running. Hong Kong is running in. I was in India last week, they are starting to run, you know. Why are they starting to run? Because China is running. Indeed, in the streets and offices of Tokyo, you can almost feel the rest of Asia and parts of the third world, rumbling awake.

China is reorganizing its economy, and has ensured its control of the capitalist island of Hong Kong as a door to the rest of the world. Singapore continues to thrive on the work of its harbors. The two Koreas seem to be reconciling and seeking economic growth. And Japan is turning the corner from heavy industry into the realms of new technologies that are ripe for exploration. In Japan, the largest sounds are those that ride close to the edge of silence. The cities, their people in traffic, may create the highest levels of noise, but the visitors soon begins to understand that the most compelling sounds to the Japanese are those that can be heard in silence. Here in the golden pavilion of Kyoto, a waterfall speaks to its own Buddhist origins, the sublime path of life is that which is quiet, persistent, at one with nature.

In Kyoto, the Kameh River flows down from the hills and beneath the bridges in the midst of willow trees, crickets sing through the rise and fall of traffic. Kyoto became the capital of Japan in the year 794. For more than a thousand years, it sat at the center of Japanese culture and history. It was the urban place in which grew a Japanese soul that built nature and understood silence. In 1868, the capital of Japan was moved to Edo, now known as Tokyo. Tokyo was 300 miles to the east and just three hours ride by bullet train, the Hikari, which pulls out of Kyoto station that accelerates into the countryside to a speed of 120 miles an hour. It is Sunday afternoon, outside the window, the passing land is bathed in a life-persistent rain.

The precious farmland of Japan is cultured into terraces, the climb the slopes of hillsides, mountains gather together in the distance and disappear in the clouds and mist. The Hikari passes from tunnel to tunnel and speeds through miniature valleys that can only be seen in the blink of an eye. It coast through cities and towns that spread out beneath the elevated railroad track saw mass cars that horizon. It pulls into Tokyo, where it will cause for only a moment, four heading on to the northern tree pasture. When the capital was moved to Edo, in 1868, Edo Castle became the center of power and a new palace was built for their emperor at that time, they divine ruler of Japan. In 1945, the palace and the unquestioned rule of the emperor were destroyed by air raids and defeat at war.

Today, the emperor of Japan, Harohito, a symbolic leader, lives in the quiet grounds of the imperial palace in the center of Tokyo. Harohito is no longer as a god to his people, he is, however, one of the world's distinguished botanists, his power it would seem has been given over to nature. After World War II, Japan was faced with the challenge of rebuilding its economy and its cities and defining a new non-military role in the world community. A cultural trait of the Japanese is their ability to compromise individuality for the common good of the group, the family, and the nation to work hard to do whatever must be done. Over the years since World War II, Japanese productivity shifted from the country to the cities. As it has been in almost all societies, the growth of crowded busy cities did not come about without a cost in the quality of life. Hiroshi Yoshida is a lecturer on Japanese life, many people live far out in the suburbs

from where they have to communicate to work by trains. Sometimes they spend one hour or one and a half hours long way to get to work. So when they read the office box, they find themselves exhausted. When the Japan external trading organization wants to convince those from other nations to work and trade with Japan, it shows them this curious film. It is the story of a day in the life of Hideo Taki, a kacho, with management executive at a Tokyo department store. As the film goes on through Mr. Taki's day, we are told that the stores employ societies, have few friends outside of the family in which they work and rely on their

cohort this whole companionship. Indeed, one of the inclined duties of Mr. Taki's job is to help in the arrangement of the marriages of those he wore with. He must subordinate himself to the Japanese workers and guide their actions when necessary and a potterly will. Mr. Taki's immediate superior is shown sitting at his desk as little to do but read his newspaper and remain aloof so that he does not appear to be too managerial, which would not lie a little trust in the ability of his staff. The object of his long day would seem is not to work, except in ceremonial ways, but managers are shown dealing with sale or shall media people from outside the organization. It is assumed that those contacts will be followed up by evening meetings and the bars and restaurants of the city. Finally, the end of this working day finds the same workers having a party in one of those bars and Mr. Taki's presence seems even more important off the job than all. Mr. Taki is used to handling this kind of algorithm with good humor, it is all upon his job.

Eventually, Mr. Taki heads into the long trade ride home. The film's narrator points out that although Mr. Taki earns $27,000 plus expenses each year, the cost his job exacts on his private life is high. It is very late, but a small bar offers a few minutes of freedom. And yet another bar, Mr. Taki takes a few drinks, eventually he is shown with his head bowed, singing quietly to himself. We are teaching generations, I have lived through it, it is a difficult life, this is a poor day, we see war, and after war, in this crowded city you cannot avoid it because

tension is well life, I mean tension unit is a certain amount of tension to keep yourself healthy. If you feel too comfortable, then you will have salt, and I have carried a phenomenon, very big target of 10,000 steps, and the 1600, so 4,400 steps to go. So probably some of you may notice me just walking very fast, tension. Aside from Yoshi, as an officer of Kedan Wren, the Japanese Federation of Economic Organizations. It is 4.30 in the afternoon, and Mr. Miyoshi has walked just more than halfway through his day. The tension he speaks of is the dynamo that has driven Japan's post-war reconstruction. In the offices of Kedan Wrap, and in offices across Tokyo and the other large cities of Japan, the workday will continue into the evening.

At night, in the center of Japan, the Gensa section of Tokyo is a wonderland of crowded streets, paved in sparkling light, and tasteful land, men are in dark business suits, women in the canonos. Tokyo has already passed through two rush hours this evening, a standard rush hour at 6, and a secondary rush hour of office rise between 8 and 9. It's now 11 p.m. on the Gensa, and the third rush hour has just begun. The fourth is yet to come, the business of Japan barely pauses. The business day ends, and the rituals of fellowship among business men, and an environment of civility, food, and Drake, and the graceful extensions of women. In the business of Japan, written contracts are far less desirable than the human mon that is sealed on our dinner in Saki. The third and fourth rush hours of the Gensa are the culmination of the day, and a time when Tokyo reaches perhaps its finest hour in doing what a city is supposed to do, to allow people to work and live together as meaningfully, and with as much convenience

and ease as possible. There is a light drizzle in the air this evening, as the restaurants and clubs begin to close groups of men gather in doorways to say good night, the women, many in bright kimonos, stand with them, try to join in the end that evening pleasantly spent, the women placed their palms into the air, and feeling the moisture admonish some of the men to open their umbrellas before heading on their way. From the doorways, the women call out the Japanese words for Saki on a good night, don't know, but it got took a sinus. On the sidelines, and the street corners, the men bow to each other before parting the angle of the individual bow to determine the relative status between bower and bowie, those umbrellas that are in use move with the bow, and often crash into each other. Yet a noodle soup stand on large wooden wheels, men stand inside short black curtain, and discuss the events of the day over a final meal.

Chestnuts are roasted on the nearby grill.