Why "the coming war with Japan" isn't coming
Saturday, September 4, 2010 at 12:03AM 
Referencing George Friedman's 1991 book, and the notion he still peddles in The Next 100 Years about the U.S. and Japan squaring off in a "war of the worlds" space battle that involves secret moon bases right out of James Bond.
This is James Fallows in front-of-mag bit in The Atlantic.
He returns to an old neighborhood of his and "finds an inward-looking country that has lost its ambition."
I have heard this refrain from a number of Japanologists. The kids there are zoning out the world.
Is it a wealthy place? Definitely. But a self-satisfied one too, facing an extreme demographic decline (getting smaller and older at a stunning pace).
An interesting example of the turn inward:
The Japanese youths, scientists, and businesspeople of the 1980s, like their Chinese and Korean counterparts today, were bursting to use their country's success as a platform to engage the rest of the world, by traveling, investing, studying. As The Washington Post recently pointed out, only half as many Japanese students are now enrolled at U.S. colleges as 10 years ago--the opposite of the trend in almost every other nation. The tight job market has discouraged students from doing anything as "risky" as spending time outside the Japanese school system. The elbows-out cockiness of the Japan I remember caused its frictions. But I miss its eagerness for a new version of itself.
What happens when your population shrinks by half over a half century?
You don't become more ambitious, or war-like.
Reader Comments (2)
Judging from what I know about Japanese real estate and population density, I wouldn't be surprised if that pic above was the Prime Minister's house. Either way, isn't this expected, and where many people wanted Japan to be? Problems from success are a blessing!
Nations all too often are virtually dragged into wars by forces outside their conscious control.
My own distinctive ancestors, the Scots, according to their Declaration of Arbroath, left "Greater Scythia" (the region of the Aral and Caspian Seas) around 300BC and migrated westward, fighting their way through the peoples who occupied those lands. Eventually, after many generations, a portion of them conquered and assimilated with the Picts of present-day Scotland.
The Declaration does not tell why they left Scythia, but a perusal of world history shows that they were pushed out by the westward-expanding waves of Mongols.