Historically, it makes sense to consider Japan as a contemporary modern state, and the west's nations as contemporary postmodern states. The people who rebuilt Japan after World War 2 were somewhat conservative -- businessmen and military men -- and so rebuilt the world to the ethos they understood, which was modernism. You can see this in their media which may question narratives but does not wholesale reject them. Japan is a fundamentally conservative country who modernized because they realized if they did not the colonial powers would eat them whole just as they did to much of the modern world in the era before World War 1.
Both the west and Japan use the trope of the bad guy who turns out not to have been a bad guy after all. There's a big difference in how the two accomplish this trope, however. The west believes in destroying existing standards and narratives, so it asks the question "Maybe what Dr. Evil is trying to do isn't so bad after all? From another perspective maybe trying to stop him from using his moon laser to blow up the earth is wrong?". Japan derives this trope from the Chinese stories "Journey to the west" in which the evil can be chastened to understand they have been wrong and convinced (through either force or reason) to change their evil ways and become good, suggesting that there is a good and that people ought to strive towards that good.
Modernism isn't perfect, mind you. There's a reason why it ultimately failed in the west despite its overwhelming successes. It helps align entire peoples towards a set goal, it has a focus on rationality and moral certitude which helps ensure modernist people are good people. It has a drive towards progress with a positive end goal in mind but that drive can push a people to feel morally justified to go well beyond what would normally be considered just. The world wars shattered the modernist mindset in part because they showed that the European man was not as morally perfect as his modernist ideals suggest he was.
On the other hand, modernism is incredibly powerful as an ideology. It allowed tiny Great Britain, an island nation so tiny you could barely find it on a map if you weren't looking carefully, to take over an empire so massive the sun never set on it. It produced almost every technology we consider important today. It massively increased the human population and increased the quality of life of people. Look at Japan, and consider that a tiny island nation is a cultural and manufacturing powerhouse, renowned around the world despite the country being an insular backwater just 200 years ago before the arrival of Commodore Perry's ironclad steamships.
I sometimes think of Japan as similar to the Muslim world during its golden age during the time after the fall of the Roman empire. The west lost a lot during the fall of that empire, but the Muslim world was still carrying on philosophical traditions of antiquity -- both maintaining transcripts and building on them. When that work finally made it back to the west, it sparked the renaissance as the wisdom of antiquity combined with the internal advancements of Europe at that time to produce something new and powerful. I tend to think that Japan is successful in part because there's a thirst for the positive traits of modernism in the west. Entire generations of kids are growing up not watching the dreck being produced by Hollywood for the most part, and instead is gravitating towards the modern storytelling of Japan. It's only a matter of time until that fact ends up leeching into the culture and media of the west, perhaps seeing a postmodern resurgence of modernism.
Both the west and Japan use the trope of the bad guy who turns out not to have been a bad guy after all. There's a big difference in how the two accomplish this trope, however. The west believes in destroying existing standards and narratives, so it asks the question "Maybe what Dr. Evil is trying to do isn't so bad after all? From another perspective maybe trying to stop him from using his moon laser to blow up the earth is wrong?". Japan derives this trope from the Chinese stories "Journey to the west" in which the evil can be chastened to understand they have been wrong and convinced (through either force or reason) to change their evil ways and become good, suggesting that there is a good and that people ought to strive towards that good.
Modernism isn't perfect, mind you. There's a reason why it ultimately failed in the west despite its overwhelming successes. It helps align entire peoples towards a set goal, it has a focus on rationality and moral certitude which helps ensure modernist people are good people. It has a drive towards progress with a positive end goal in mind but that drive can push a people to feel morally justified to go well beyond what would normally be considered just. The world wars shattered the modernist mindset in part because they showed that the European man was not as morally perfect as his modernist ideals suggest he was.
On the other hand, modernism is incredibly powerful as an ideology. It allowed tiny Great Britain, an island nation so tiny you could barely find it on a map if you weren't looking carefully, to take over an empire so massive the sun never set on it. It produced almost every technology we consider important today. It massively increased the human population and increased the quality of life of people. Look at Japan, and consider that a tiny island nation is a cultural and manufacturing powerhouse, renowned around the world despite the country being an insular backwater just 200 years ago before the arrival of Commodore Perry's ironclad steamships.
I sometimes think of Japan as similar to the Muslim world during its golden age during the time after the fall of the Roman empire. The west lost a lot during the fall of that empire, but the Muslim world was still carrying on philosophical traditions of antiquity -- both maintaining transcripts and building on them. When that work finally made it back to the west, it sparked the renaissance as the wisdom of antiquity combined with the internal advancements of Europe at that time to produce something new and powerful. I tend to think that Japan is successful in part because there's a thirst for the positive traits of modernism in the west. Entire generations of kids are growing up not watching the dreck being produced by Hollywood for the most part, and instead is gravitating towards the modern storytelling of Japan. It's only a matter of time until that fact ends up leeching into the culture and media of the west, perhaps seeing a postmodern resurgence of modernism.
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Well I think that there's two points to be made here.
The first is that a lot of the issues in Japan today are a direct effect of modernist ideology. The fact that you can use modern ideology to get everyone together to push for a certain goal is one of the reasons for the acceptance of an extremely poor work-life balance, everyone ends up focusing on ganbatte as a cultural touchstone, and the reality is that modernisms focus on productivity and a shared cultural goal and certain elements of Life has those same negative connotations. The fact that kids work so hard in school and then leave school and go to work so hard at work is exactly because modernism tends to drive everything towards the one goal of modernism.
Japanese democracy and rule of law are arguably just as corrupted as for example Victorian England's corruption of democracy and rule of law. Both are parliamentary democracies with a relatively weak emperor or King at the top of the hierarchy. Modern society during the Western modern age was also dramatically imperfect, which is one of the reasons that the World wars ended up happening.
The other point I think is that it doesn't really matter whether Japan is truly successful or is just maintaining face, in terms of acting as a repository of modernist ideology for a fallen postmodern West. We can see absolutely the problems with postmodernism in the west, whereas Japan is a very orderly society perhaps too much so, the West is accepting of a lot of horrific crimes without really judging those crimes to the extent that they should because postmodernism rejects Grand narratives and most values. If you'd rather walk outside at night in a postmodern society or a modern society the question is absolutely indisputable.
But a return to mere modernism definitely isn't going to save the West. We can see from both modern and postmodern societies that both ideologies have massive blind spots that end up with the extinction of its people. However, what is undoubtedly necessary in the west is for a return to an ideology that at least recognizes that virtue exists and is something worth striving towards and that some ideas are good and some are bad and goodness and badness of ideas does exist.
A lot of your criticisms could be levied against the Arab world, they are absolutely tribal, in a lot of ways they are backwards, they ended up facing a period of massive humiliation because in spite of a fairly warlike ethos they we're just rolled over by the West in the world wars, and that's one of the reasons why they've returned to the highly conservative religious doctrines that they're in right now. None of the criticisms of the Arabs change the fact that their work ended up helping to fuel the Western Renaissance.
Also note that the advancements of the Renaissance were not towards a return to classical culture. What resulted was a synthesis of Christian culture and classical culture which actually ultimately resulted in modernism. This suggests that the west, even if strongly affected by Japanese modernism, isn't going to just move into that but into something different based on the cultural zeitgeist at the time, for better or for worse.
The first is that a lot of the issues in Japan today are a direct effect of modernist ideology. The fact that you can use modern ideology to get everyone together to push for a certain goal is one of the reasons for the acceptance of an extremely poor work-life balance, everyone ends up focusing on ganbatte as a cultural touchstone, and the reality is that modernisms focus on productivity and a shared cultural goal and certain elements of Life has those same negative connotations. The fact that kids work so hard in school and then leave school and go to work so hard at work is exactly because modernism tends to drive everything towards the one goal of modernism.
Japanese democracy and rule of law are arguably just as corrupted as for example Victorian England's corruption of democracy and rule of law. Both are parliamentary democracies with a relatively weak emperor or King at the top of the hierarchy. Modern society during the Western modern age was also dramatically imperfect, which is one of the reasons that the World wars ended up happening.
The other point I think is that it doesn't really matter whether Japan is truly successful or is just maintaining face, in terms of acting as a repository of modernist ideology for a fallen postmodern West. We can see absolutely the problems with postmodernism in the west, whereas Japan is a very orderly society perhaps too much so, the West is accepting of a lot of horrific crimes without really judging those crimes to the extent that they should because postmodernism rejects Grand narratives and most values. If you'd rather walk outside at night in a postmodern society or a modern society the question is absolutely indisputable.
But a return to mere modernism definitely isn't going to save the West. We can see from both modern and postmodern societies that both ideologies have massive blind spots that end up with the extinction of its people. However, what is undoubtedly necessary in the west is for a return to an ideology that at least recognizes that virtue exists and is something worth striving towards and that some ideas are good and some are bad and goodness and badness of ideas does exist.
A lot of your criticisms could be levied against the Arab world, they are absolutely tribal, in a lot of ways they are backwards, they ended up facing a period of massive humiliation because in spite of a fairly warlike ethos they we're just rolled over by the West in the world wars, and that's one of the reasons why they've returned to the highly conservative religious doctrines that they're in right now. None of the criticisms of the Arabs change the fact that their work ended up helping to fuel the Western Renaissance.
Also note that the advancements of the Renaissance were not towards a return to classical culture. What resulted was a synthesis of Christian culture and classical culture which actually ultimately resulted in modernism. This suggests that the west, even if strongly affected by Japanese modernism, isn't going to just move into that but into something different based on the cultural zeitgeist at the time, for better or for worse.