Japan is in love — with Bhutan, a supposed Shangri-La of a country nestled in the Himalayas, famous for deemphasizing gross domestic product (GDP, the standard measure of well-being) in favor of a more abstract, possibly more human metric known as gross national happiness (GNH).
Everybody loves happiness. Japan, profoundly unhappy, has quite lost its heart to the little kingdom, 97 percent of whose 700,000 people claim, despite an unimpressive GDP, to be happy. The Bhutanese king and queen, visiting Japan last month on their honeymoon, glowed like happiness personified. If the Japanese were infatuated, who can blame them?
The difficult phase Japan is going through is well captured by the young men's magazine Spa! in a series of articles addressed to "good-for-nothings." For decades postwar Japan had waged war on the economic front, imposing an almost martial discipline on itself, sacrificing personal happiness to the god of national and corporate prosperity, offering unstinting, unquestioning, wholehearted, unending effort to job, department, company — and for what? Twenty years of economic stagnation were raising that question even before the earthquake-tsunami-meltdown of March 11. What was the point? Where does it get you? Maybe, Spa! suggests, the good-for-nothings had it right all along.