Shoshaman: A Tale of Corporate Japan

This study will provide a political analysis of Arai Shinya's novel Shoshaman: A Tale of Corporate Japan. The study will argue that author Shinya is critical of the corporate political system, but he finally seems perhaps too much a part of the corporate world himself to fully and honestly portray the harsh and ruthless reality of that world and its destructive consequences for both the workers in the corporation and the corporation itself.

Shinya is the Executive Vice-President of Summit, Inc., and a Director of Sumitomo Corporation. With a book critical of the short-sighted political system of the corporation, he is clearly biting the hand that feeds him, but at the same time he is not biting it too hard. The central problem of his novel is the protagonist's search for a way to change the corporate political system so to create an atmosphere in which the corporation encourages managers to develop into entrepreneurs. Accordingly, the only politics in the novel are the politics of the corporate world.

Shinya does not have a pro-corporation philosophy, but he does have a pro-business philosophy. He never even considers that there might be a world outside of the world of corporations and entrepreneurs. This philosophy limits what he has to say about corporate politics, because, being far from a revolutionary and little to say of a concrete nature even in terms of reform, he has little to offer as an alternative. It is not surprising to find little hope in his Afterword fo

(and his protagonist) seem to want to have it both ways. They both clearly have benefitted from climbing the corporate ladder, but they seem at other times to suggest that corporate politics creates such misery that it should be completely changed: "Each and every . . . colleague was to be pitied. Every man who is under the delusion that he made the greatest accomplishment in the world by simply being ahead of his peers in the promotion race" (166). Of course, the individual workers, managers and entrepreneurs suffering alienation and frustration are not the only ones who pay a high price because of the restrictive political system of the corporation. In addition, the corporation itself suffers because it loses the potential of much of its human resources. Hoshino at one point says to Nakasato: "The third problem with American Gourmet is . . . they've got no distinct corporate identity" (42). The problem with the book is that the people have little or no human identity. They merely embody ideas, which does not make them compelling characters. Again, it is crucial to keep in mind that people (the "polis") form the heart and soul of politics. If the reader does not connect in some powerful way with the people in the novel, then

Category: Literature - S