Category Archives: Japan

Why Didn’t We See That Train Coming ?

Current Affairs, Japan, Politics

Donald Trump is a stupid man’s idea of a smart person, a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a weak man’s idea of a strong man. Fran Lebowitz.

I thought Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz were going to win the last election. I even wrote several posts about it, such as Why Harris & Walz Will Win. Unfortunately, the proverb Seeing is believing is backward. Actually, believing is seeing. I live in a bubble of beliefs that define how I see reality. In my reality, my bubble, not being an asshole is essential, and knowing what the job is and how to do it is important.

However, most people who voted in the last election are not in my bubble, and I didn’t see their discontent that trumped Trump’s assholery and incompetence. I’m still trying to figure out why I didn’t see that anger, but I think I’m starting to understand part of it.

I want to start with a story that is not about politics (well, sort of not about politics, anyway). Years ago, in, I am going to guess, 1967, Sam Berland, my boss – I say “boss” because, even though we were partners, he had been my boss at our previous company, and I still thought of him as my boss – and I agreed to take on a third partner. Sam had met a man, who I’ll call Jim, about the same age as me, who worked for a lumber company that had gotten into the recreational land-for-sale business and was now trying to get out by liquidating their holdings. Sam thought Jim would be perfect as a partner and land expert.

Jim’s boss, who Sam knew, gave Jim an outstanding recommendation, as did a co-worker Sam also knew. We hired Jim with the plan of making him our third partner. We didn’t make him a partner, but, in this case, even an almost partner was a disaster, alienating everybody he interacted with, and it cost us a lot of money to get rid of him.

A couple of years later, I ran into the co-worker who had given Sam the excellent recommendation and asked him why he had done that. His answer surprised me. Jim had blown the whistle on a couple of employees who had been skimming money off of the escrows on the land sales, and consequently, Jim was revered by the company’s top brass. But he was a jerk, and none of his coworkers liked him. Jim disrupted the office, but they couldn’t fire him. All they could do was hope somebody else would hire him, so when we came along, they were thrilled and gave us a very positive recommendation.

Because Jim was a jerk and ostracized by his co-workers, he was, in effect, a permanent outsider. He was in the right place to see the employees skimming, but most of his co-workers and his boss were also in the same place. But unlike his co-workers and boss, his vision wasn’t clouded by friendships or the pressure of conformity, and he could more clearly see what was going on.

Trump is like that. Like most of us, he is in a position to see the growing disparity between the college-educated elite rich* and the rest of the country. But he also saw the monetary and psychic damage done by sending good jobs out of the country and letting in poor, desperate people who would work for less money, thereby taking away more good jobs. I keep thinking, Why did he see that pain and anger, and none of us did? He’s a rich narcissist. How did he see what most of us didn’t and many still don’t?

First, like Jim, Trump was an outsider for most of his life. An ill-mannered guy from Queens, trying to make it in Manhattan society but never fitting in. Like Jim, Donald Trump was not hindered by friendships or the pressure of conformity. He was an outsider and felt mistreated; more importantly, he felt disrespected.

It’s easy to say that Trump projected that feeling of being disrespected onto the people he wanted to attract, and this may be true. But it is also true, and may be hard to admit for most of us, that we college-educated elite rich* don’t respect or value people who aren’t as educated, nor do we consider them worth listening to. I know that all of us do respect some people who aren’t college-educated, but that is only after we get to know them as individuals; as a group, we don’t listen to them or interact with them. Trump did and does.

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

*Even though it is buried in a footnote, I want to be clear: we are the elite rich, and while we might not think of ourselves as rich or elite, we are definitely rich compared to people living paycheck to paycheck or afraid of losing their homes if they get sick.

Japan Is Dense…

Japan, Japan, Travel

I think that the Japanese culture is one of the very few cultures left that is its own entity. They’re just so traditional and so specific in their ways. It’s kind of untouched, it’s not Americanized. Toni Collette

In Japanese culture, there is a belief that God is everywhere – in mountains, trees, rocks, even in our sympathy for robots or Hello Kitty toys. Ryuichi Sakamoto

For me, Japan is appealing because, unlike most non-European countries, Japan was never a European colony. The result is a first-world country that is completely unEuropean-based (or unAmerican-based, if you prefer). It is Asian all the way down and, at the same time, first world all the way down. More importantly, Japan works in a non-European way; sort of. Steve Jobs said that Japan is very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. Out of that understanding, they will reinvent it in a more refined second-generation version. By the time we left Japan, I was thinking about that Steve Jobs quote probably three or four times a day.

In Japanese cities, there are lots of overlaps with American and European cities – mostly European cities- but everything seems slightly different. It is the most user-friendly place I have ever been to. Japan is also the densest place I have ever been to. It is about 145,950 square miles, but about 73% is considered mountainous, so Japan really has only about 40,000 square miles where people live and farm. That is about the same as California, which is about 39,000 square miles, when you take away about 50% for mountains and 25% for desert. However, Japan has a population of about 124 million people compared to California, which has a population of only 39 million people (for reference, greater Tokyo alone has a population of around 39M).

Japan isn’t just dense because there are a lot of people jammed in, which there are, but because they have been swimming in the same culture for about twenty centuries. It is as if people were still living in all nine layers of Troy. Japan seems dense because that small area is jammed with the artifacts of its collective history.

One night, Michele and I took a taxi to Shibuya Scramble Square, a shopping center and station complex in an already dense area of Tokyo. We got out at what seemed like a normal street corner in Tokyo and went around the corner to the actual scramble. In Japan, a street crossing where pedestrians can walk across the intersection in any direction is called a scramble. As far as I can tell, this scramble is famous because there are a lot of people here, and the people are here because it is famous.

The scramble, however, was not what most intrigued me. The area around the scramble, the actual Square, the stations, and the structures around the Square are what intrigued me. This is an area where the maps are both horizontal and vertical. The area around the Square is packed because it has six subways and a railroad that come into and through a series of interconnected stations. It is one of the busiest places on earth. More than 1,000,000 people pass through these stations every day.

There are large buildings on both sides of a major street with two pedestrian bridges connecting them, and down below, way below, at ground level, is a creek in a concrete channel.

What fascinated me the most, however, is the short freeway, National Route 246, that arches over the whole thing in an almost impossible leap.

We’re Home, Thinking About The Election When It Would Be More Fun Thinking About Japan

Japan

There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism, and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again. David Brooks in an NYT editorial.

Voted Trump, but I like you and Bernie. I don’t trust either party’s establishment politicians. An anonymous voter answering AOC’s question “People who supported [President-elect] Trump & me OR voted Trump/Dem, tell us why.” 

We are home; we had a great trip, and I want to write about it. But now that we are home, Trump and the election seem to be everywhere, crowding out everything else. Writing about our enjoyable trip to Japan without acknowledging the trauma caused by Trump winning the election seems insensitive. Still, that’s where Michele and I have been during the last month rather than experiencing the collective trauma.

I don’t say collective disparagingly, but only that it exists. Being in the US after the election is like seeing a horror show in a crowded theater, and being in Japan, wandering around Joetsu checking for results on an iPhone, is like watching the same horror show at home. Yeah, the plot is the same, but the emotional impact is very different. I feel guilty about that, guilty that I should be more upset than I am.

I don’t like Donald Trump; I think he is a lout, a narcissist, and a con man. He has failed at almost everything he’s tried; he’s incompetent. He failed at making money with a casino, he even failed at selling steaks, and he certainly failed at running the government the first time around. However, he succeeded at the hard job of winning the presidency (although with a lot of help from the Democrats). In the end, I’m more worried about the chaos President Trump will create than his successfully becoming a fascist.

I do like Kamala Harris; I was happy to vote for her and think she would have done a good job. Harris was the first candidate I voted for – rather than against the opponent – since Obama. I thought she was going to win. But she didn’t. She lost to a guy almost half the nation thinks is a fascist in waiting. It was shocking and very discouraging.

It is easy just to write the whole thing off as “Trump voters are just stupid.” But Trump voters aren’t stupid. They are pissed – I haven’t met a Trump voter who wasn’t pissed – not only do they think they have been screwed out of a lot of money, but – and this is probably more important – they feel they have been disrespected. And they have, and we’ve been complacent accomplices.

David Brooks theorizes that that disrespect started back in the sixties when the draft was changed to exclude men who were in college. I tend to agree. That sent a strong signal that the people running the country think college-educated men are worth more than working men. We elite even said as much when we justified taking fellow elites out of having to do a stint in the military. That preference for the college-educated by the college-educated snow-balled into the people’s President touting the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to any place with cheaper labor and opening the borders to allow large numbers of very poor people willing to work for lower wages into the country.

We all saw the growing disparity in income and respect between the college-educated elites and the rest of the nation, sort of subliminally, but Donald Trump really saw it, and he also saw the discontent that disparity was sowing and the disrespect the college-educated elites had for anyone who wasn’t one of them. Still, very few lawmakers saw it on the left and right. And don’t forget that Trump ran against both the Republican and Democratic establishment. To be fair, it’s hard to see and relate to people who are outside of our socioeconomic class, and the average member of Congress is worth $7,888,502 (according to Ballotpedia).

When I read the postmortems, although there are still many people who blame the loss on racism, misogyny, and voter stupidity, it seems the Democratic Party is starting to ask what it did so wrong that Trump actually won. In my opinion, that is the only good news that has come out of this tragedy. Maybe this election will be a long overdue eye opener.

Tokyo

Japan

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. Steve Jobs