Crash of Culture

What Is the True Crisis Looming Over Japan?

The precipitous crash in the Japanese government bond market and the exchange rates that have spiraled beyond Japanese control mark a decisive moment. It is the collapse of “Japanese trust,” a credibility maintained for so long since the era of high economic growth, and the signal for the beginning of the end. I say it has finally begun because Japan can only find the will to regenerate in the true sense by ending once. However, despite exposing to the world that the nation is technically in a state of fiscal insolvency, Japan has strangely not yet fallen into complete bankruptcy. Even when observing daily life, while the livelihoods of the people have clearly collapsed, we have not yet reached a situation where the bottom has entirely fallen out. In other words, something is allowing it to endure.

If this were any other country, facing a shock of this magnitude would likely have resulted in immediate sovereign default. In Japan’s case, however, the dramatic development achieved during the post-war high economic growth period has become a shackle for the modern generation, for better or worse. Because the nation still holds funds such as foreign currency reserves accumulated during that era, it is unable to go bankrupt. Current Japan is a nation suffering because it cannot collapse, despite existing in a state where it ought to.

While these phenomena are being heatedly debated as serious problems internationally, the domestic mass media in Japan maintains its usual silence, showing no trace of decent reporting. Since the Japanese mass media does not pursue truth or facts but occupies the airwaves with the singular professional philosophy of “not reporting,” the citizenry does not understand what is happening even in the face of such a crisis. This is because in Japan’s super-aging society, the overwhelming majority of the elderly cannot use the internet or handle smartphones, placing immense trust in newspapers and television as their sources of information. Politicians understand this situation, so rather than addressing the problems, they are currently unfolding a situation where vast sums of money are disseminated for elections. We are in a state where the nation is facing bankruptcy with unpayable debts, yet elections are held solely for certain statesmen to privatize the system, and the scattering of large funds there is calmly tolerated in this super-aging society due to the information camouflage by the mass media. Japan is arguably no longer constituted as a state, yet there is a heterogeneity to the Japanese nation that allows it to survive nonetheless. In this article, however, I will focus on the domains that will likely be affected in the near future by the collapse of the fiction known as “Japanese trust,” which has persisted for about fifty years.

First, much like the mass media, the government is rushing into a dissolution and general election amidst this vortex, thinking only of the privatization of the system. They have declared a thorough dissemination of funds by ignoring all facts of this fiscal crisis and reducing the consumption tax rate on food to zero. The typical pathology that occurs in such a terminal state is rushing toward a near future that completely destroys the livelihoods of the people, yet because so many are focusing too excessively on monetary issues, there is a serious problem that is not being considered at all. That problem is culture.