by JULIET WATERS

There’s an old Japanese proverb, Catherine Bergman tells us: “The nail that stands out will get hammered down.” According to her readable, fascinating book of essays, it is a proverb heard everywhere and a belief that perfectly illustrates Japan’s relentlessly conformist culture. Yet during the five years she spent there in the ’90s, as the wife of the Canadian ambassador to Japan, she met many nails that seemed to be sticking out pretty far.

Kiyomi Kikuchi, for one. In 1992, she became the first woman in Japan’s history to publicly sue for sexual harassment, or sekku hara as it’s called in Japan, anglicized to retain its foreignness. Her family was devastated with shame when she first announced she was going to sue. They fully, and not unreasonably, believed it would destroy not only her career and prospects, but also those of her siblings. However, even though the case is still being fought, she has become a national hero.

There is Philippe Troussier, the French coach of the national soccer team. The Japanese sports establishment was furious when he basically dumped an entire generation of Japanese soccer players in favour of younger, more trainable players. It went against the respect for seniority that is the foundation of Japanese society. Still, despite tremendous resistance from his employers, this soccer sorcerer, as he is thought of, managed in a few years to give the country a world-class team.

There is Takeshi Tachibana who is to the history of Japanese journalism what Woodward and Bernstein are to American journalism, though few seem to want to emulate him. Japanese media is apparently pack journalism at its worst and so sensitive to national shame that scoops are regularly leaked to the foreign press so that the domestic press won’t have to take responsibility for generating negative news. Tachibana single-handedly brought down a Japanese prime minister by exposing business corruption that was a matter of public record. He is Japan’s most famous journalist and its most sought-after talking head, yet socially he lives the life of a hermit.

There is Shidzue Kato, a 100-year-old retired female parliamentarian. Kato is so outspoken and so revered that during the launch of a new political party, she was allowed to publicly lambaste three former prime ministers and the new party’s founder, reducing them to bumbling schoolboys. This despite a country that seems to be taking only baby steps towards feminism.

There are the transvestites of Kabucki-Cho who stage elaborate dance numbers that are a form of political satire so perverse it would put Brecht to shame. There are the destitute Korean War refugees who are only starting to demand justice. There is Japan’s aboriginal population who are just starting to preserve a culture and language that is near extinction. There are those scholars who are trying to reverse the cultural amnesia regarding Japan’s war crimes. And many, many more.

Japan has enough of these errant nails, many of them so successful at their nonconformity that Bergman asks: “Could it be that the fear of the hammer leaves only the most determined to speak up?” Though Bergman’s prose is lucid, and the journalism skills she learned as a veteran of Radio-Canada’s Téléjournal obvious, it’s hard to take her perspective at face value. As an ambassador’s wife, she’s inevitably going to brush up more often than not with the most conservative forces at work in Japanese culture. One is left with the sense that there is much, much more in this country than meets even her skilled eye.

The people she presents us with seem more and more like part of a society in the beginning stages of a quiet revolution. Maybe it’s time for Japan to rework its proverbs. Perhaps something along the lines of this old Salvadoran proverb “It takes a nail to drive out a nail.” :

From the Japanese by Catherine Bergman, McClelland and Stewart, pb, 280pp, $24.99