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Images of Japan
Pas d’images justes, juste des images
Godard

Over the course of the last decade, the image of Japan has changed rapidly: once a model of economic success, both feared and admired, the very paradigm of a (post)modern economy, where new futures were being prepared that go far beyond the urban, political, and aesthetic conceptions we have in the West – “A Japan That Can Say No,” as the title of an infamous book went, a book that sent shock waves around the globe a decade ago – it has now come to symbolize the crisis of authoritarian economies, and very little remains of those “Asian values” that held Western economists, political scientists and politicians captive ten years ago. What we are seeing today is more like the break-up of a mutual agreement between the political and the financial sectors (not entirely unlike the state of affairs in Sweden, one might add), the dissolution of a “corporative” social structure that for a long time had been able to guarantee prosperity and modernity based on strong disciplinary mechanisms.

Excerpt from Images of Japan by Sven-Olov Wallenstein.

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