Among the intellectuals it is not hard to detect the New Pessimism; among the citizenry, the Same Old Apathy. Today I wish to focus on the former.
The old left is all but defunct and sadly ineffectual. In past times intellectuals were taken most seriously in Japan, their ideas and suggestions regarding social organization spreading from small studies across the country on the pages of the national dailies and the much-read thick magazines. Now the perceptible dumbing down of the dailies' content to fit a national mood of soft-core information deemed accessible to the One Big Happy Family of Japan has rendered their causes, once rigorously pursued, unpursued.
As for the thick magazines that carried essays, full of real and imagined profundities, on art and society, some have folded, such as "Kaien," "Yasei Jidai" and "Umi," while others suffer from paltry circulation syndrome, cherished mainly by the writers who contribute, issue by issue, and their followers. Television programs about books have been banished to the Siberia of the cold, unwatched hours; the genre of the radio play is a static memory; and smoky coffee shops under railway bridges where once academics sat, discoursing on existentialism and the latest derivative Japanese novel, have been replaced by high-stool chains. Coffee shops are no longer the chat rooms of ideas that they once were, though the amount of smoke has hardly diminished.