another excerpt from an email:

This is part of what I wrote just now, and concerns some of that same stuff I've been blabbing about for the last couple of days:

About Debito, I’ve read several pages worth of his site, and the more I read, the less I like him. He spends most of his time defending himself, a little less on defending his friends and his own race, and occasionally some time on the other much larger minorities in Japan. His points of contention are also suspect. How hung up is he on the mizushoubai? There are a lot more foreigners (russian, philippino, chinese etc) suffering a lot worse on the other side of that door, but he’s more concerned about his friends with crew cuts who can’t get into hostess clubs and handjob shacks, when they don’t speak much Japanese anyway.

Even if it is important for the individual to change the world in this way, setting up a website that subverts any public dialogue, and divides the gaijin community from the Japanese one (like his, or big daikon) is counter productive, and accomplishes nothing but stoking the fires of the “west knows best” westerners who exercise inordinate influence in the gaijin community.

When I call him a “white man”, I’m using (perhaps unfortunate) shorthand for a long history of Western Europe and America’s insistence on the governmental and individual level that Japan is backward, undeveloped, or wasting its potential on account of its national peculiarities.

In my worldview, if there are places where Japan does fall behind the western countries they relate to efficiency at the managerial and governing level. The most elite among the elite of western countries also seem to outclass their japanese counterparts. But the lumpen mass of regular folks that comprises 95% of the population tell another story entirely. It’s the sense of self-sacrifice that exists less and less in Japan today, and existed in FDR America as well, the sense that the nation has a purpose greater than the value of an individuals short-lived happiness that sets great countries apart.

What follows is a short account of my view of how things got so different: FDR’s greatest adversary (thanks to his populist, pro-gov’t, anti-business agenda) was big business. Business fought back hard, and with the help of Freudian techniques, worked to re-atomize the individual, and turn him into an individual consumer whose needs could no longer be met by the government.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_Of_The_Self

The trust in authority that brought about unprecedented prosperity in America was slowly dismantled, as a belief in mechanical administration rose to power, and decayed into a governmental policy of distributing “rights” that have no basis in or connection to the functioning of the world, and work quite clearly against prosperity, justice and in the end, the freedom of the individual. A la Philip K Howard... http://cgood.org/

By no means do I think Japan is perfect, but almost all of the changes at the level of the individual being and many of the reforms in law and governance that foreigners recommend for the country seek to rush Japan down the same road that’s filled american convenience stores with 15 flavors of gatorade and american streets with drugs and violence.
There are things I’d like to see changed, and indeed, more humane working conditions for the middle class is on the list. What I really object to is the insistence that Japan is somehow uniquely burdened by especially urgent problems and that her people are profoundly unhappy with the status of their country. It’s just not true.