Having the courage not to 'ganbaru'

“The Courage Not to Ganbaru” – there’s a beguiling title. If frequent use polishes, few Japanese verbs shine brighter. What does it mean? Nothing mysterious, yet it escapes easy translation. Work hard! Do your best! Go for it! Go all out! Don’t give up! And so on. That’s the essence, but none rings with quite the all-purpose exhortation-encouragement of “Ganbatte!”

“Ganbaranai” is the negative form. It’s rarely heard. It takes some courage just to use it. To urge it as a way of life, as Dr Minoru Kamata does in a little booklet published by President Books (2024), is a striking departure from conventional wisdom. For that alone he merits the acknowledgment we here accord him.

Maybe it’s a legacy from samurai times. The evolution from battlefield warrior to corporate warrior has many twists and turns, but so do all evolutions. Just as samurai courage in the face of death often reached the pitch of a courtship of death, so the modern employee’s resistance to exhaustion seems a courting of exhaustion – proof of dedication, badge of honor. That’s ganbaru.

It’s not what it was. Corporate warriors are in retreat. Their heyday was the postwar reconstruction. They had a mission. Mission accomplished, warriors withdraw – or are dismissed. 2002 was a turning point. The education ministry that year introduced “yutori kyoiku,” “relaxed education,” meaning thinner textbooks, fewer classroom hours, less rote learning, and generally speaking less stress. Stress was killing students – sometimes literally, as in cases of suicide and/ or bullying; more often not, in the form of a psychological and emotional toll two of whose more pronounced symptoms were hikikomori (reclusion from all non-virtual social intercourse) and clinical depression.

Not everyone applauded the easing, and many say even now that the 15 years during which yutori kyoiku prevailed dulled Japan’s competitive edge.

If it did, that’s fine with Kamata.

Relax, he says in effect – not into sloth, far from it, as his own very active career shows, but rather into satisfying oneself first and foremost, as distinct from satisfying parents, teachers, employers and society. Let them seek their own satisfaction.

Does that mean living selfishly? Kamata is living proof that it does not. Graduating from medical school in 1974, he joined the staff of Suwa Hospital in Nagano and was instrumental, as its director years later, in reviving its sagging fortunes. A “healthy living” campaign he initiated is considered part of the reason why Nagano is Japan’s longest-living prefecture.

Following the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in 1986 he organized treatment for radiation victims. He’s been to some of the world’s poorest and most troubled places – Iraq, Palestine, African slums – treating, organizing, donating, encouraging. If this is ganbaranai, what’s ganbaru? 

The distinction, he explains, is between work as play and work as work; working free and working driven; pursuing your own goals in your own way at your own pace and performing assigned tasks to meet imposed quotas within set deadlines.

We do best what we enjoy doing – everybody knows that. Society – education, employment – should be structured in such a way as to tap that basic truth. How productivity would rise! The trouble, of course, is that most of the work that needs doing is boring, distasteful and unfulfilling. So we must be forced, or bribed to do it – forced or bribed, that is to say, to ganbaru. Kamata doesn’t address that point. He escapes it. He’s one of the lucky few – or plucky few – who can.

Most can’t. Thus the ganbaru ethic, making a virtue of necessity. Parents in infancy, teachers as childhood advances, employers and society as a whole later on, urge us on: “Ganbatte!” It becomes second nature. We’re not at peace with ourselves out of ganbaru mode – not at peace with ourselves, in other words, let alone with those around us, unless we’re destroying our own peace. Granted the difference in degree between ganbaru today and ganbaru as our pre-yutori postwar ancestors knew it, the basic facts remain, and probably will as long as society does: we’re solitary beings who can’t live alone and social beings who can’t live together, torn between what we owe ourselves and what we owe society.

Don’t give up! Don’t give in! Don’t lose! Nonsense, says Kamata. Give up by all means, when giving up is the thing to do. It’s the secular equivalent, he says, of Buddhism’s emptying of the mind, preparatory to filling it differently, though only to empty it again. Persistence is excellent; so is knowing when not to persist. Losing, too, is okay; it’s the best education there is and besides, what’s to lose and who’s to lose to if we see, as Kamata does, the wisdom of not competing? True, competition is the fuel that powers most of us most of the time in most endeavors. It runs us ragged and leaves us no time to question the value of those endeavors. One has only to consider modern stress levels.

There are more stressed-out countries than Japan – among them Greece, Iran, the U.S. and Uganda, says U.S. poll and research firm Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report. Fifty-nine percent of employed Greeks, 55 percent of Americans, 55 percent of Iranians and 53 percent of Ugandans “reported experiencing stress during much of the previous day.” The figure for Japan s 41 percent. Which proves what – that things could be worse, or should be better?

Kamata’s focus is on individual attitude, not government policy. To sum up: Live slow when others live fast; be quiet when others are loud; withdraw when others congregate; value small things when others aim big; contract when others expand; whisper when others shout – better still, be silent.

Michael Hoffman is the author of “Arimasen.”

© Japan Today