They threw the fairy-tale wedding that everyone in Japan wanted last week or at least, the fairy-tale wedding that Japan’s media said everyone wanted. It’s easy to confuse the two. For one thing, what millions watching on TV saw was a computer-generated simulation of the private Shinto ceremonies. Afterward, the rain clouds parted as if on cue, and nearly 200,000 people cheered Crown Prince Naruhito and Masako Owada. The new princess wore a diamond tiara and waved tirelessly to the crowds, looking as if she’d trained for this day all her life.
She hadn’t, of course, but by last week it had become, according to one leading Japanese magazine, “rude and disrespectful” to point that out. Owada was educated in Western schools, had a promising career as a diplomat and had-twice in the past six years said a flat “No, thank you” to the prince. His long search and her reluctance were duly reported in the Japanese press at the time. But last week that had all been erased. Foreign publications (like NEWSWEEK) that noted Owada’s ambivalence drew the wrath of the Imperial Household Agency (which runs the affairs of the royal family), the establishment press and the country’s fringe right-wing groups, stalwart defenders of the throne.
The reality of the wedding, in other not unusual in cherishing its symbols and myths. But the sanitized public discussion of the royal wedding illustrated one way in which Japan does differ from its Western allies: whether it’s to ensure national “harmony” (an exalted condition in a crowded nation) or to celebrate “unity,” the Japanese state has an extraordinary ability to alter reality when it sees the need.
It sees that need often. Japan’s history is a violent and contentious one, and the miracle of its postwar history is not so much economic as social: the men who run Japan successfully created the strict social controls needed to build a modern economy. Today, for example, Japanese workers are considered dutiful, loyal employees who cooperate with management for the greater good. It’s easy to think that’s always been the case. But that’s virtual reality. Real reality is the brutal 1950s suppression of a growing labor movement.
No trust: If Japan’s ability to adopt new myths helps keep 120 million people in sync, who’s to quibble? But virtual reality doesn’t play as well when it crosses the nation’s borders. The most obvious example is the country’s whitewash of its wartime history. After World War II, it may have made sense both to Japan’s leaders and to the occupying U.S. forces to spare a defeated country a wrenching self-examination. But the result is a nation that sees itself as one of the war’s victims-and a lack of trust that haunts Japan’s relations with much of Asia, which saw it as an aggressor.
The impulse to create virtual reality dies hard. These days, Masako Owada’s former colleagues in Japan’s bureaucracies argue that Tokyo is the good guy in the international-trade debate; they say the United States, once the guarantor of the free-trade system, is the villain, undermining trade through increasing protectionism. It’s true that Japan’s formal barriers to trade are now no higher than those of most other countries. But innumerable informal barriers make Japan the most difficult of all First World markets to penetrate.
The new crown princess doesn’t have to deal with any of that unpleasantness anymore. Her job is to bear an heir to the throne and to live happily ever after, the way princesses in fairy tales do. You can bet it’ll come out that way in Japan’s press, no matter what happens. Here’s hoping that its reality and hers converge.
