Sapporo Diary

Peter Rutland
(Wesleyan University, USA, COE-Foreign Visiting Fellow, SRC, 1998)



I was not quite sure what to expect as I stepped off the plane in Sapporo at the end of May. Like most Westerners, my impressions of Japan were based on a hazy set of stereotypical images, derived from watching Kurosawa movies as a teenager and seeing Sumo wrestling on TV. Like everyone on the planet my house is filled with Japanese consumer electronics, and I even drove a Toyota for a few years. In the academic world there is an ongoing and lively debate about the Japanese economic model, and about the causes and character of World War Two. My university, Wesleyan, has a regular supply of Japanese exchange students (including two each year on leave from the Foreign Ministry), and they had often signed up for my classes.
However, I realized that I had no clear mental images of what a Japanese city would look like, or how Japanese people go about their daily lives. I naively imagined, I suppose, that something like the "convergence thesis" holds true: that economic globalization is eradicating cultural differences, and that urban life is becoming more and more similar on all five continents. The only Japanese novelist I had read was Haruki Murakami (THE WILD SHEEP CHASE; DANCE), whose works coincidentally are set in Hokkaido. But Murakami is an Americanized, young-generation writer, currently residing in Cambridge Mass., who does not give insights into the "real" Japan.
I was partly prepared for my exposure to Japan by the month-long trip I took to Korea and China last year С my first visit to Asia. I was amazed by the dynamism of those societies, and the level of wealth and sophistication on display in Seoul and Hong Kong. Long-standing notions of "Developed" versus "Developing" societies fell away very quickly. There is really no substitute for traveling to a place and seeing it with one's own eyes.
My initial impressions of Japan were similarly powerful. One is immediately struck by the ethnic homogeneity of the society: I was aware of being the only gaijin on the plane up from Osaka. I was also surprised by the newness and modernity of the urban landscape in Sapporo. Of course, Sapporo is an atypical Japanese city, its spacious streets and grid system are remarkably American in feel and look. My son referred to downtown Sapporo as "New York": Odori has more than a passing similarity to Park Avenue, on a smaller scale. When I visited Kyoto and Tokyo in July I realized how much more crowded life is on Honshu. But despite the ancient temples of Kyoto, even that city has a contemporary feel, and Tokyo itself of course is totally modern.
Reading Japanese society is much more difficult than reading its built environment. I regret to admit that before I left the U.S. I could not even find time for the "two hour Japanese lesson" in my guidebook. My excuse is that I was teaching until one week before I left for Sapporo, and was literally grading student papers on the morning of my departure. Not knowing any of the language was a huge obstacle in penetrating Japanese life, the triple alphabets are highly intimidating. Daily life itself was fairly straightforward. I was able to navigate my way around without any major problems, thanks to help from the center staff and friends, English-language signs in streets and stations, and some inspired guesswork in the supermarkets.
However it was frustrating to me as a sociologist to live in a society which I found full of intriguing contradictions, but not be able to do more serious fieldwork because of the language barrier. I was reduced to "sidewalk sociology," working with my eyes and not my ears. One is struck by the rituals of daily life, such as the taking off of shoes (even separate slippers for the bathroom) and the rote greetings chanted by store attendants, and the precision of Japanese body language. The festivals were an unexpected pleasure. Watching the Soran street dancing, I thought I had landed in Sao Paulo and not Sapporo. The repeated festivals testified to the determination of Japanese people to preserve (and reinvent) their culture, and their willingness to put time and effort into collective displays of this commitment.
I tried to take every opportunity to talk to colleagues, Japanese and foreign, and pump them for their ideas on how Japan works. I also read some of the Western literature, but found it to be heavily polarized between the "Chrysanthemum school" (Ruth Benedict) and the "Revisionists" (Chalmers Johnson, Patrick Smith). The former see Japanese culture as highly stable, while the latter see it as highly fragile, but both agree that it is internally contradictory, and has distinctive features. The Japanese politics specialist at Wesleyan teaches a course comparing and contrasting politics in Japan and Britain. They are both insular monarchies with strong social traditions, conventions and notions of hierarchy. After visiting Japan I can agree that it is indeed an island: about the other similarities I am not so sure. British society is more flexible and fluid, also more conflictual and highly individualistic, and in the past 30 years it has also become very multicultural.
The Center organized things for me very smoothly: a fully-equipped apartment, a spacious office, and even a bicycle to get me from one end to the other. Thanks to the World Wide Web, I was up and running, answering e-mail and reading Russian papers, as soon as I "landed" in Sapporo. I think the first Japanese word I learned was "Netuscaipu." It really is amazing how the Web has shrunk the globe. The first task I had to do here was wrap up the editing of the annual survey of political events in 1997 in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which is being published by M.E. Sharpe. This meant I was e-mailing back and forth to people in Warsaw, Baku and Tirana. It was a strange feeling to be sitting in Japan discussing political crises in those regions as they erupted, in real time, with people living there.
Stranger still was my experience with a Harvard colleague, Mark Kramer. Over the course of July we e-mailed back and forth about some new information that I came across, and only after four weeks did Mark realize that I was sitting in Japan and not in Middletown, Connecticut! I had forgotten to tell him I was going away for the summer, and he was still using my Middletown e-mail address (from which messages were automatically forwarded to Sapporo).
I realized from talking with colleagues and from the summer symposium that Slavic studies is done differently in Japan than in the U.S. Here there is less concern with the fashionable theoretical debates and more emphasis on gathering information about what is happening in those societies. This seems to apply across the disciplines of history, economics and political science. As an empirically-minded person, I am very comfortable with this approach, although it is still important to put one's research into a broader context in order to communicate its findings to the larger community. I fear that the obsession with theory on American campuses is squeezing out Area Studies and turning America into an increasingly insular country С at precisely the same time that it is expected to show leadership in a complex and far from trouble-free world. I think that collaboration between scholars from different countries is very important in helping to correct such disciplinary imbalances.

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