Sunday, October 20, 2013

A Comeback Required




Sitting listening to some exquisite, spacious Ike Quebec from the album “Heavy Soul.”  I wasn’t aware of his story.   I just read up on this gentleman from Newark New Jersey.  This 1961 release, so broad and measured at a time of hard bop angularity.  It was a bit of a comeback for this full-throated tenor.  A short-lived resurgence, he’d be dead from lung cancer two years later.




Yesterday I talked about “early markers” in China.  This term comes out of the scenario planning technique, developed originally and evangelized by the founders of Global Business Network, (GBN) (the firm was later bought out by Monitor Consulting.)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Business_Network
It’s a rich, multidisciplinary technique used to consider multiple divergent futures.  I was trained by GBN years ago and have run a number of scenario planning exercises. 

I would love to host a session here in Beijing at some point on the central question of the topic of “The Seven Deadly Starbucks” (7DS); namely, the future of North East Asian relations.  There are a fine collection of sharp Chinese minds, sharp international minds here in my social circle.  The challenge would be, without funding, to get everyone to commit a few days, as the technique generally takes that long to do a convincing exercise that is robust and really challenges people’s ideas of the future. 

The “early markers” came up yesterday and perhaps for a few days now on this recurring theme of Red Guard who appear compelled to publically seek absolution for the violence and abuse they were involved in during their youth.  This hadn’t been part of the public dialogue and appears to increasingly be so.  This, I argued was an “early marker” for China’s ability to make a deeper reconciliation with Japan.  Professor Zhu Dake rather eloquently stated:  “In a nation without a tradition of confession, this apology can be viewed as rare evidence of the awakening of humanity.”   (See “No Time Like the Present”)

This, I suggested, this awakening of humanity, in his words, is an early marker for a China that can also accept the apology of another group of people, namely the Japanese.  And for that discussion not to sound like one hand clapping, the Japanese need to show up for the exchange. 

I suggested that it was noble for the Red Guard generation, who are now in their sixties, and seventies, to drive this discussion of atonement domestically.  Chaff, they missed out on all formal education, they missed out on being able to xia hai and jump into the private sector, they were the first to be made redundant during the SOE reform.  And they are wondering now if their, go-go children who inhabit this brave, new, world will ever have time to visit them or bother to fund the retirement they could never have properly prepared for.  This generation can certainly do something remarkable by forcing a discussion on their “lost” years.   Years that were seen as irrelevant and wasted but are perhaps critical to the awakening that professor Zhu mentions, in these frenetic, amoral times.

How different the same generation in Japan!  That generation came of age in a Japan that finally was regaining its confidence.  The same time China was gearing up to destroy itself, Japan hosted the world for the Olympics, it’s coming out party.  That generation grew up in confidence and drove the nation to become the second largest economy in the world, a power that rode astride the planet and lived to shed so much inferiority and shame they were born into.   And as this generation began to prepare for retirement and enjoy the fruits of their salaryman labor, the subsequent generation screwed it all up.

I discuss in 7DS this phenomenon in Japan, where in the conservative, majority gerontocracy stands in the way of reform.  Old people, the baby boomers who vote, and do not want to experiment with a Japan, reimagined.  “No” to immigration, “no” to policies that encourage women in the work place, “no” to children making noise in public parks.  “No” to change, and “yes” to the status quo, to a future where Japan is weaker, poorer, and isolated.  Japanese boomers: that is a shameful legacy. 

And yet this may be the generation that we need to look to, to find our early markers.  Just like in China perhaps it will be this consequential group who begin to adjust their posture domestically.  “I can not go to the grave easy, remaining silent.”  I will be looking for practical voices of reform amidst that group that are brave in the face of knee-jerk conservatism.  Can we imagine a Japan where the conservative gerontocracy considers legislation that is for the good of future generations in Japan, and not just for themselves?  

I have wondered aloud and spoken ad naseum with Japanese contemporaries about the woeful stasis of their generation.  They too, of course, could take action, could organize.  Perhaps, not unlike in China, incipient seeds as Mencius would say, sprout first with the generation who are preparing to exit the scene.  Certainly the Japanese born during the War and immediately thereafter have a tremendous amount to be proud of.  But they will leave a terrible legacy if, in the face of a pressing case for change, they instead used their power to prohibit it. 



Two civilizations that venerate the old.  Peer groups from across the East Asia Sea with polar opposite formative year experiences.  Divergent years of maturation that naturally hardened a mutual suspicion, a mutual hatred.  And age is the great equalizer.  Perhaps you both now have more in common than you would have ever suspected.  The next generation of Chinese, the next generation of Japanese are both a bit lost.  Reckoning with your legacy, freeing the subsequent generation to evolve out from under your shadow, what a triumphant comeback that would be, as you prepare for the long meander. 

Seize the moment you Chinese and Japanese children born in the forties, born in the fifties.  机不可失.[1] Be swift, less your comeback is cut short like old Ike Quebec.  He was certainly on to something.




[1] Jībùkěshī:  No time to lose! (idiom)

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