Judged solely by the bestseller stands of the biggest bookshop in Tokyo’s financial district, the streets of late 2022 Japan should now be licked by revolutionary flames.On one set of shelves are the titles that worship business, deify its pantheon of global leaders and promise readers supremacy with seven keys to success. Where these volumes identify crises — underfunded pensions, demographic collapse, climate implosion — they do so with the fearless faith that capitalism will present a solution.
But from across the aisle comes the newly remastered snarl of Karl Marx — insistent from beyond the grave that the brakes must be slammed on the world’s economic propulsion units, this update is attractively packaged for the mass consumption of despondent modern Japan and presented as the original visionary of the philosophy of “degrowth”.
The new wave of Japanese books eyeing global malaise through a Marxist prism includes a manga (comic) explainer of Das Kapital which depicts worker exploitation in a charming mountain campsite and is aimed at broadening the potential salaryman audience of degrowth converts.