![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiThe New York Times is beginning a series of articles on contemporary Japanese society entitled The Great Deflation; the first article, "Japan Goes from Dynamic to Disheartened," was published in today's paper.
I'm frequently iffy on The Times' Japan coverage. On the one hand, they do make a reasonable effort to go "beyond the headlines," as it were; on the other, their coverage of the same is frequently…skewed. This series will probably be more of the same in that its very premise is rather pessimistic, and today's article paints a fairly bleak picture that is not completely sustained, I think, when one doesn't go expressly looking for it. Times are unequivocally tough in Japan, and they have been for a while, but just like in America, there are certain segments of and places in the economy where you'd never know a recession was going on. And there are certainly still plenty of people with lots of money.
On the other hand, the article's brief comments on the contraction of Japan studies in academia in the States are spot-on. My own sense is that there are enough anime fans to sustain Japanese language classes at the undergraduate level at most institutions, but the discipline is definitely on an ebb tide at the graduate level--by way of example, I'm the only person in my cohort of 24 whose primary field is Japan, compared with three people whose primary field is China, and I'm not sure that any East Asia-Japan people entered the program last year. And the same factors are partly responsible for my own efforts to do regional history.
With all that being said, however, I would never bet against Japan's eventual recovery--it's probably not physically possible for the country to overtake China economically, of course, but the economic miracle and for that matter the Meiji modernization in the first place were universally unpredicted. And you know what else was historically unprecedented? The rise to economic and political dominance of northwest Europe in the late 18th and 19thC. It ain't over til it's over--and it's not.
I'm frequently iffy on The Times' Japan coverage. On the one hand, they do make a reasonable effort to go "beyond the headlines," as it were; on the other, their coverage of the same is frequently…skewed. This series will probably be more of the same in that its very premise is rather pessimistic, and today's article paints a fairly bleak picture that is not completely sustained, I think, when one doesn't go expressly looking for it. Times are unequivocally tough in Japan, and they have been for a while, but just like in America, there are certain segments of and places in the economy where you'd never know a recession was going on. And there are certainly still plenty of people with lots of money.
On the other hand, the article's brief comments on the contraction of Japan studies in academia in the States are spot-on. My own sense is that there are enough anime fans to sustain Japanese language classes at the undergraduate level at most institutions, but the discipline is definitely on an ebb tide at the graduate level--by way of example, I'm the only person in my cohort of 24 whose primary field is Japan, compared with three people whose primary field is China, and I'm not sure that any East Asia-Japan people entered the program last year. And the same factors are partly responsible for my own efforts to do regional history.
With all that being said, however, I would never bet against Japan's eventual recovery--it's probably not physically possible for the country to overtake China economically, of course, but the economic miracle and for that matter the Meiji modernization in the first place were universally unpredicted. And you know what else was historically unprecedented? The rise to economic and political dominance of northwest Europe in the late 18th and 19thC. It ain't over til it's over--and it's not.