Demokorasu

Demokorasu is a sardonic term for the democratic and Westernizing culture associated with postwar Japan. The novel uses it not as a settled description but as a point of friction: Richard Lovelace Henderson treats it as a surface overlay on deeper national continuities, while Tiger Tanaka condemns its conspicuous American forms as temporary consequences of defeat. Their arguments make the word a shorthand for competing accounts of what Japan has become, what it has been made to accept, and what may endure beneath the appearance of change.

Meaning and Political Use

In Henderson’s account, demokorasu describes an outward political and cultural accommodation that should not be mistaken for a permanent realignment. He tells James Bond that Tiger appears wholly committed to it but is more complex than that appearance suggests. American occupation and influence might seem to provide a secure basis for an American-Japanese alliance; Henderson nevertheless argues that national identity persists beneath public gestures. For him, the important question is not merely what is immediately desirable, but what Japan’s leaders might regard as a long-term investment. He urges Bond to appeal to that longer horizon when approaching Tiger, whose calculations, Henderson says, extend beyond the short-term interests of an alliance.

The label therefore belongs to an argument about appearances and political time as much as to one about democracy. Henderson presents public accommodation as compatible with a deeper strategic outlook, and cautions Bond not to assume that visible Westernization determines the country’s future. His account is an interpretation offered to prepare Bond for a meeting, not a neutral definition of Japanese political life; its sweeping claims about national character reveal Henderson’s own framework as well as his assessment of Tiger.

Henderson’s Rejection of the Ideal

Bond challenges Henderson’s picture of Tiger by observing that it does not sound very demokorasu. Henderson responds by rejecting the democratic label for himself: he favors government by an elite and imagines political participation graded according to an individual’s standing within that elite. His joking suggestion that Bond’s government should receive only a fraction of a vote turns the debate into a personal provocation, but it also makes his position plain. For Henderson, demokorasu is not a principle he embraces; it is a political style whose claims he distrusts.

His critique broadens into a polemic against equating visible Western habits with civilization. Baseball and bowler hats, he argues, do not prove that a society has become civilized in the Western sense. He describes Japanese social and political life as carrying older traditions beneath imported forms, and treats the samurai as a cultural inheritance, even while acknowledging that the popular image of the samurai is partly mythic. This distinction allows him to regard Westernized manners as superficial without claiming that every historical ideal behind them is intact. His language is deliberately provocative and essentializing, presenting national cultures as possessing durable inner characteristics that outlast political fashion.

Tanaka’s Critique of Postwar Westernization

Tiger gives the term a sharper historical charge. When Bond asks whether the culture Henderson has described is officially encouraged in Japan, Tiger’s expression darkens. He characterizes the country’s present condition as a kind of Coca-Cola school: baseball, amusement arcades, hot dogs, neon lighting, and other consumer attractions stand for an Americanized way of life. He calls this culture a payment for defeat in battle, linking its everyday amusements to the continuing consequences of Japan’s loss.

For Tiger, demokorasu is not simply a form of government. It also names a package of cultural habits that, in his view, denies the spirit of the samurai, the kamikaze, the ancestors, and the gods. His denunciation places the postwar attractions of commercial entertainment against a remembered or inherited order of obligation and reverence. Yet he does not present the imported culture as permanent: he calls it expendable and temporary, assigning it little importance in the long history of Japan. The comparison to a dragonfly’s life makes the contrast in scale explicit. The fashionable present is brief; the history Tiger invokes is measured in generations and centuries.

Bond’s question complicates Tiger’s account. If the Westernized life is officially encouraged, it cannot be dismissed as merely an intrusion imposed from outside; it is also entangled with choices made within Japan. The exchange leaves that tension open. Tiger condemns the visible culture, but his own description acknowledges that it has become part of the country’s present, while his forecast depends on the possibility that this present will pass.

The Term in Conflict over Honour

Later, Tiger invokes demokorasu ironically while discussing a young man who has killed himself after failing an examination. Bond argues that the student could have attempted a lower-level examination and describes suicide after failure as, in British terms, a refusal to face reverses. Tiger answers that those who remain old-fashioned regard dishonour as something to be expunged, and that giving one’s life can be the most sincere apology available. He says the youth’s parents and neighbors will rejoice, because honour matters more to them than life.

In this exchange, demokorasu marks a contrast between Bond’s response and the traditionalist code Tiger defends. The word carries the argument’s earlier political and cultural meanings into a concrete dispute over personal conduct: whether a setback calls for readjustment or can be answered through self-sacrifice. Tiger’s irony does not make the term a precise synonym for any single moral position; rather, it signals his view that democratic Western norms do not govern every Japanese understanding of honour. Across the novel’s discussions, demokorasu remains contested—at once a label for postwar change, a target of cultural criticism, and a foil against which older obligations are asserted.