25 YEARS IN JAPAN

1985 TO 2010: ALL SEEMS JUST THE SAME

The whence and whither of Japan — How not to get caught in a never-ending time loop

Noriko Hama

The Japan Times, September 16, 2010

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

This passage from "Nineteen Eighty-Four," George Orwell's pseudo-futuristic satire on the totalitarian state, is a sinister comment on power-hungry men's attempt to rewrite history. However, at least the first part of the quote can be paraphrased into something less chilling by substituting knowledge for controls. "Who knows the past knows the future" is a reasonable enough proposition. Winston Churchill evidently thought so. For it was he who said: "The further backward you look, the further forward you can see."

It is not 1984 but actually 1982 to which this commemorative edition of The Japan Times looks backward. It is a backward look that is well worth attempting. For it was in the 1980s that the seeds of much that the Japanese economy struggles with today were sown. All in all, the 1980s was a strange decade. It was a strange decade in what one might call "the dog that didn't bark in the night" way: Things that should have happened at the time didn't happen.

(...) [artículo aquí]