Likewise, the majority of the Japanese people aren't taken in by the slogans of monumentalism. They don't travel to visit either the Orochi Loop or the Nagi Museum. As we have seen, domestic travel is dwindling and international tourism is skyrocketing for the Japanese. They are not nearly so gullible as bureaucrats and art critics make them out to be. They know what a real museum is, and they know where to find it. According to gate receipts, the museum most frequently visited by the Japanese is not in Japan; it's the Louvre.
Unaware of the mechanisms of the Construction State that drive Japan to build monuments, and ignorant of the real history behind the founding of the Nagi Museum, Muschamp tells us, «It is peculiar, a century after artists rallied around the cause of art for art's sake, to find oneself in a museum created for art's sake. Strange because for what other sake should art museums exist?» If Muschamp only knew!
«A work of art?» wrote Mark Twain in his celebrated essay about James Fenimore Cooper's Thе Deerslayer.
It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no life-likeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are-oh! indescribable; its love scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
One could say much the same of the Nagi Museum, the Shonandai Cultural Center, the Toyodama Mosque, the New Kyoto Station, and of course the Orochi Loop. They have no order, system, sequence, or result; no reason for being except government subsidies to the construction industry. A highway loop smashing through a valley, a giant corrugated metal tube plopped in the middle of a scenic village, «new nature» in the form of a bulldozed hill lined with aluminum trees. What are these things, really? A sand garden pasted on walls – the humor is pathetic. Aluminum trees touted as «new nature» – the pathos is funny. Across the length and breadth of Japan, an encrustation of unneeded and unused public monuments tricked up as 1960s sci-fi fantasy – the waste of money is indescribable, the slogans are odious, and the academic jargon used to explain and justify it all a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
11. National Wealth
These days people borrow without the slightest thought, and from the very start they have no notion of ever settling their debts. Since in their own extravagance they borrowed the money just to squander it in the licensed quarters, there is no way for the money to generate enough new money to settle the loan. Consequently they bring hardship to their creditors and invent every manner of falsehood... No matter what excuse some malevolent scheme of yours prompts you to invent, nothing can save you from the obligation of returning an item you have borrowed.
– Ihara Saikaku, Some Final Words of Advice (1689)
Gavan McCormack points out, «Japan is the worlds greatest savings country, but it is also the world's most profligate dissipater of its people's savings.» Despite five decades of continuous growth, making Japan the second-largest economy in the world, the nation is living beyond its means. After seeing the civil-engineering and monument frenzy sweeping Japan, we have a pretty good idea where the money is going. What remains to be seen is the results as they manifest themselves on the bottom line.
In 1990, a cartoon in a Japanese newspaper featured two couples, American and Japanese. The American man and wife, dressed in designer swimwear, were guzzling champagne as they sat in the whirlpool bath of their large, luxurious apartment. In the companion cartoon, a Japanese wife was hanging laundry out on a tiny veranda while her shirtsleeved husband read the newspaper in a cramped kitchen. Under the American couple the caption read «World's Largest Debtor Nation,» and under the Japanese «World's Largest Creditor Nation.»
Since then, the Americans have gone on living well, and the Japanese have gone on sacrificing, but by 1996 their country had become the world's largest debtor nation. Adding in so-called hidden debts buried in Ministry of Finance special accounts, Japan, with a national debt approaching 150 percent of GNP, has no relief in sight, as budgets, set by government ministries on automatic pilot, continue to climb. The Ministry of Finance's support for banks and industry through the manipulation of financial markets has had high costs. Interest rates of 1 percent or lower have dried up the pools of capital that make up the wealth of ordinary citizens: insurance companies, pension funds, the national health system, savings accounts, universities, and endowed foundations. The prognosis is for skyrocketing taxes and declining social services.
Besides the central government, local units across the nation, from heavily populated prefectures to tiny villages, are drowning in red ink. By 1998, thirty-one of Japan's forty-six prefectures were running deficits averaging 15 percent of their total budgets; six prefectures had reached the crisis level of 20 percent, at which point the central government had to step in and rescue them. Of these, Osaka Prefecture, reeling from a string of failed waterfront projects, is basically bankrupt, surviving on emergency cash infusions from the central government; its cumulative debt already topping ¥3.3 trillion, Osaka has been running annual losses of ¥200 billion per year since 1997. However, Osaka could still lose in the race to become the biggest prefectural bankruptcy, for the municipality of Tokyo also met disaster at the waterfront, and its shortfall for fiscal 2000 is three times larger than Osaka's, and growing.
Quantifying Japan's debt crisis is not easy, because its debts are so well disguised that nobody knows the exact figure. In a special pamphlet on the national debt, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported: «In addition to the general budget, there are 38 special accounts and the Zaito program, known as the 'second budget,' as well as debts of local governments. All of these are intertwined with one another, and have become a bloated monster.» Here is one estimate: In 1999, revenue shortfalls for the official «first budget» came to ¥31 trillion, an astonishing 37.9 percent of expenditures. Measured as a percentage of national product, Japan's deficit came to 10 percent of GDP, jumping right off the scale when compared with the OECD average of 1.2 percent; the nearest competitor for big-deficit spending among advanced industrial nations was France, at 2.4 percent of GDP Adding long-term bonds, by 1999 Japan's cumulative debt had risen to ¥395 trillion, amounting to 72 percent of GDP (the United States' gross federal debt, in contrast, comes to 64 percent of GDP). But this is not all. We need to take into account the shortfalls of municipal and prefectural governments, which come to ¥160 trillion. Add this to the national debt and the total jumps to ¥555 trillion, approximately 97 percent of GDP.
There is more. «Hidden debt» from the JNR Resolution Trust and Ministry of Finance budget manipulations; Zaito loans to bankrupt agencies such as the Forestry Agency, the Highway Public Corporation, and the Housing Public Agency; and additional trillions of yen in off-budget short-term «financing bills» brought the grand total to 118 percent of GDP, surpassing even the notoriously spendthrift Italy, and making Japan the most heavily indebted of the twenty OECD nations. And that was 1999. By 2002, cumulative debt will have reached possibly 150 percent of GDP. David L. Asher, of Oxford University, claims that Japan's real debt could be as high as $11 trillion, or 250 percent of GDP, after Zaito loans and unfunded pension liabilities are added.