Japan's Flaming Conservatives

...The old talk a great deal about change, and statistics suggesting change are very easy to come by...

...Still, they do their fathers the honor of wanting desperately to follow them, from Hibiya High School to Tokyo University and on into Mitsui and the Finance Ministry, the latter being an elite within the bureaucratic elite...

...On holidays and on the nights before holidays the pursuit of pleasure becomes frantic...

...Yet in the effort not to take the complaints of old Japanese and of casual observers too seriously, it is possible to give too sanguine a description of young Japan...

...Ideas receive very noisy expression among Japanese youth, to be sure, but they do not live and grow...

...More immediately, it provides rich opportunities for those nationalists of Leftist persuasion—and the Socialist party is in many ways the heir to prewar nationalism—who argue that Japan could be more than it is if it were not under the Western thumb...

...For another thing, the crowds on the Ginza and in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo always seem to be the same age, despite the passage of years...

...How can this be unless every 20-year-old has his fling and, having had it, turns the streets over to other 20-yearolds...

...There is something carnal in the very air of Tokyo...

...No doubt they all want peace, and probably some of them continue to be genuinely miffed about Hiroshima and the Japanese-American Security Treaty...

...Even when young Japanese are most maddening— when, for instance, their snake-dancing paralyzes Tokyo during the rush hour—they are not merely pestiferous, as are certain of their intellectual mentors...

...The young do undoubtedly have liberties that were denied their fathers...

...Edward Seidensticker, a regular correspondent who has lived in Japan for more than a decade, spent the last year at Stanford University...

...The parks may be crowded, but their occupants have more engrossing concerns than peeping...

...Then there is the fact that the young are in so many ways like their parents, and that their grandparents made the same complaints about their parents that their parents now make about them...

...Yet here too the difference can be exaggerated...

...The Japanese are very conscious of the fact that they are not what they once were, and a favorite appeal of the Left has to do with the image of Japan as "the orphan of Asia...

...But the day may come when apathy will set in, the product of a feeling that the struggle to the top of the heap is not worth all that much trouble when the heap is a small one...

...Nor are there many cases on record of refusals to accept paternalistic pats on the head from the culture-minded nation...

...It was three or four decades ago that the novelist Nagai Kafu, asked some favor or other by Keio University, replied that he would give his attention to the matter when Keio University did him the favor of keeping its students from brawling on the Ginza...

...Japanese men have always been allowed great liberty, though traditionally their pre-marital or extra-marital partners have been professionals...

...but when the search for status now is as intense and trying as it is in Japan, it leaves little energy for revolution...

...The only explanation for the statistics and for the aspects of nocturnal Tokyo, however, is that great numbers of young people have been poured in on the city and liberated from parental surveillance...

...True, the anti-nuclear demonstrator is a Utopian while the yachtsman would appear to take the passing moment for what it is worth...

...How new are the new Japanese...

...A great many others may still live with their parents, of course, but do not pay very much attention to them...

...The successful are among the elite, and the desire to be among the elite is enough to keep high-school graduates occupied for four and five years at college entrance examinations, and nothing else...

...Significantly, although Tokyo contains most pleasures it does not contain a real Bohemia, a Greenwich Village or a North Beach...

...All of the old, dead heresies are there to delight the historian of Marxist thought, and the temptation is to believe that they are not dead at all...

...the divorce rate is rising...

...In less highly charged language this means that a Japan allied to the West has forfeited its claim to leadership of the "non-aligned" African and Asian nations...

...That there is change is undeniable...

...World Youth Today - IV This is the fourth in a series of articles which began with "Britain's Cautious Generation" by Ruth Langdon Inglis (April 15), followed by "Germany: The Decline of Tradition" by John Mander (May 27) and "New Heroes in France" by Herbert Lottman (June 24...

...Like most pictures, then, the current picture of Japanese youth is confused...

...Wounded nationalism is as important to the young as to the old, and helps explain the intense seriousness with which they take international athletic meets...

...Complete beatnik rejection by a son of the ambitions his father has for him is much rarer than in the United States...

...The flaming radical outside the house can be a leaden conservative at home, once again evidence that, with the older generation as with the younger, intellectual cordage rests lightly upon its Japanese bearers...

...The railway stations are a desperate crush, and the mountains swarm so with young hikers and skiers that they remind one of a Chinese dam site...

...Since family discipline was the basis of the pre-modern Confucian state, these changes, carried to their reasonable conclusion, could mean the end of all the old sanctions...

...So what is the difference between young and old...

...The problems that really drive them to distraction, however, have to do not with revolution and Utopia but with their own advancement in society as it is...

...The juvenile delinquency rate u shooting up...

...The effect of this sometimes drives the less resilient and more inept to suicide...

...The rise in juvenile delinquency also is evidence that they take for themselves other liberties, as if the ones allowed them were not already generous enough...

...They continue to be boys and girls longer than do the young of America, for whom the cultivation of a blasé appearance seems to be a part of the required high-school curriculum...

...The apparent intellectualism of student leaders, aggressively anti-worldly from unpolished black shoes to uncombed black hair, is really not all that intellectual...

...It tells not of people who are surfeited with pleasures but of people who still have something to do...

...A revolutionary may, it is true, be a seeker for status...

...It is a shattering experience for the son of a Tokyo University professor to find himself off in some upstart provincial university...

...In addition, a sense of decline has been very much in the air in postwar Japan...

...the Kinseys of Japan tell us that, for women at least, sexual relations are freer than they used to be...

...The competition to get into the revered public universities, and from there into what one professor described as "the companies that sound good at the wedding banquet" is intense and heartless...

...The bright centers of the cities agree with the statistics, and suggest the nearest thing to licentiousness...

...If this much is true, one may go on to wonder how much different the young Japanese really are from their elders, whose record for dispassionate thinking, for not allowing their ardor to get the better of them, is not a very good one...

...There is, for one thing, that youthful eagerness...

...Insofar as they have ideas at all, those ideas ultimately put the blame for world tensions on decadent monopoly capitalism, and principally on the United States...

...The ardor with which they act makes one think of boy scouts who got handed the wrong manual and, instead of building campfires with no matches and untying knots with no hands, are out destroying decadent capitalists and imperialists...

...Japan's Flaming Conservatives By Edward Seidensticker IF, away from Japan, a person who has known Japanese youth is asked about them, the first thing that comes to mind is likely to be the most obvious thing: They are very young...

...The Japanese are not, perhaps, the best authorities on what they themselves are like, but it is significant that when they cast around for their better traits a reliance on intuition at the expense of cold reason always crops up...

...Man for man, the Japanese have more of a flair for painting pretty pictures than have Americans...

...Young people clad in the world's tightest trousers and skirts pursue one another through the world's most elaborate pleasure facilities, and can if they choose— no policeman will interfere—withdraw to cheap inns and well-wooded parks...

...And yet there are reasons for believing that the sanctions continue to be strong...

...No doubt there is something to the comparison...

...The intuitional, artistic East is always contrasted with the cold, rational West...

...For a half century rebellion against the family has been one of the major themes of the Japanese novel, but for the most part the rebels have not declined to become stern fathers in their turn...

...Certainly, a tendency toward muko-mizu was characteristic of the prewar generation that now provides the elders of the land—though a nation that prides itself on its "heart" or "spirit" and scoffs at any claims that might be made for the head is likely to lose its head rather easily...

...But soon the excitement of an encounter with their youthful advocates wanes, or, if it survives, the survival is due more to the obvious "sincerity" (most favored Japanese word) of the young people who so noisily toss ideas about than to any interest the ideas themselves might have...

...Corrosion of an order which depended on parental authority is unquestionably in process, and only a very rash prophet would predict where it might end...

...Like so much well-dried wood, the ideas rest lightly upon their bearers, and with yachtsman and anti-nuclear demonstrator alike it is the unfeigned ardor, the sincerity, that counts...

...Nevertheless, it can be said that while there may be great changes in the future, the young of Japan are today not as different from their elders as the latter would have us think—or as an evening on the Ginza would suggest...

...Perhaps the most important consideration of all is the nature of the problems that tend to upset young people...

...When one young Japanese gets into a 19-foot boat and sails by himself from Osaka to San Francisco, and two or three others go off to conduct an anti-nuclear demonstration in Red Square, they may seem to be at opposite extremes of political awareness and commitment...

...Everything, in short, points to t'.ie relaxing of family discipline, particularly in the great cities...

...In the altogether more puritanical cities of America the air of world-weariness is heavier, even among the very young...

...The appeal seems to be particularly effective with the young, who overwhelmingly vote Socialist...

...It makes a person wish to flee when he is there and wish to be back when he is away...

...All are well endowed with the boyish venturesomeness which the Japanese call muko-mizu, or "no eye for what lies beyond...

...But they are not really so different...

...It may one day result in quieting that scramble for status—since it is, after all, more fun to throw one's weight around in a major society than in a minor one...

...The ambitious, no doubt, will always be with us, though the realization that one's country is not what it was a generation ago can in many subtle ways lead to debilitation and lethargy...