Japan and Hong Kong: A First Reckoning

This is not an accident of national character, if such a thing exists, which I am increasingly doubtful about. It is the accumulated product of specific historical decisions: the Meiji-era modernisation that deliberately imported Western industrial and administrative methods while consciously preserving what the reformers regarded as distinctively Japanese; the postwar reconstruction that rebuilt an economy from almost nothing in less than a generation by channelling collective effort into industrial production with an intensity that still looks remarkable from the outside; the social contract, maintained partly through expectation and partly through the kind of mutual accountability that comes from living in very high density with very little private space and needing to make that work. Japan’s social cohesion is not free. It is produced by specific pressures that have specific costs, including conformity costs that the people inside the system pay in ways that are not always visible to visitors who experience only the orderliness.

The nuclear attack sites at Nagasaki and Hiroshima are the places where Japan’s modernity and its recent history most visibly collide. Both cities were destroyed within three days of each other in August 1945 and both rebuilt themselves within two decades into functional, prosperous urban centres, a speed of reconstruction that the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum presents as a form of resilience and which is also, simply, an extraordinary organisational achievement. The old man at the peace park in Nagasaki, standing beside the melted bells and telling his story about being sent to fetch something from another part of the factory two minutes before the bomb fell, has been doing this for decades. He is there because the city decided that the story needed to be kept alive by the people who lived it, not just by the exhibits in the museum.

Hong Kong is a different kind of case study. Where Japan has spent seventy years working through its postwar identity with the specific seriousness of a country that experienced something irreversible and has never been allowed to forget it, Hong Kong has been working through something more present-tense and unresolved: the question of what it is now that the British are gone and China is sovereign and the promise of fifty years of autonomy is ticking down. The answer, in 2011, is that it is proceeding. The financial sector is proceeding. The construction is proceeding. The coffee shops are excellent and the MTR runs with a frequency that makes the London Underground look like it is taking its time. Underneath all of this the political question sits, not urgent yet, not requiring an answer yet, but there.

The photographs from both countries are online now for anyone who wants to look through them. There are a lot of photographs. Some of them are good and some of them are evidence of what happens when you hand a compact camera to someone running on four hours of sleep and excitement. The one of me on the street sign in Hong Kong falls into the second category. I remain uncertain how it came about.

The Philippines is louder than either of them, hotter, more immediate, less legible. More on that shortly.