Japan: An Analysis

Japan: An Analysis

Itabashi Rail

  Introduction

•  A can of hot coffee comes from a vending machine that bows graciously as it delivers it.

• Japan tried to maintain its tribal uniqueness and asserting group- enforced social harmony, Japan also hoped to avert the invidious consequences of industrialization- especially the gap between rich and poor of which Karl Marx had waned.
• If this is an economic race, whatever the contest might be, Japan seemed to be winning. It wowed us with its work ethic and impressed us with its relentless obsession for getting details right.
• The trains ran on time, the platforms were antiseptically clean. Japan has entered the club of the world’s wealthiest without the social baggage- the urban ghettos, the disaffected underclass, the plague of violence- the tormented Western society. 

Waiting for Tran in Osaka

Waiting for Train in Kyoto

•  Innovation tends to flourish in a complex habitat like the variegated ecosystem of a rainforest, where a diverse selection of birds, grasses, insects, and animals randomly rub up against one another and cross pollinate, adapting to one another’s spontaneous behaviours. 

 

Line of commuters in Hiroshima

• Many nations experience periods of economic turmoil and painful adjustment- America’s “Internet Bubble” crashed, too- but no nation has lagged so persistently as Japan since the collapse of its speculative “bubble economy” in 1989. Exhausted, traipsing through a wilderness without a compass, the nation suffers rising joblessness, especially among young adults, crushing national debt, and an unprecedented deflation that hammers price, wages and self-confidence. It also lack the innovation and leadership to guide its revival.
• Although some Westerns remain interested in Japanese anime and aesthetics, its architecture and artifacts, or are charmed by cultural icons like shish and ikebana, they no longer believe that they need to emulate or cultivate the peculiar customs and codes that govern Japanese business and social practices.
• Japan has the world’s highest rate among wealthy industrial nations- as well as in the growing number of group suicides committed by compete strangers who met on the Internet in order to die together.
• America’s domestic economy will also be weakened if Japan cannot remerge as dependable engine of growth in an integrated, interdependent world.
• When the pursuit of material extravagance delivers emptiness rather than inner contentment, a people are forced to confront deeper, more existential questions about meaning, value, self – affirmation, and moral purpose hat classroom training alone cannot teach. Exploring this inner dimensions demands different vocabulary. To pose such courageous and fundamental questions is, after all, to subvert the underlying mission by challenging its objective.
• There are more than one million young adults, fearful, isolated, intelligent, and alone, who barricade themselves in their rooms for protection rather than attempt to engage with a society they feel denies them any expression of self.
• Being in the unknown and being in denial is a common pattern. 

Pokemon GO at Ueno

 An arrow pointed deep inside me

• Manic, angry, indomitable, Jun pumped fast, faster, through these ancient neighbourhoods heavy with his history, his legs almost flailing, his knees driving hard. Sweat beading his forehead in the humid night, he sliced through the low-slung neighbourhoods of Tokyo's old downtown, the working-class flatlands along the banks of the Sumida River, far removed from the aristocratic, hillier districts to the West, deathly still in the hours after midnight, the road illuminated only by the arc of a few scattered streetlights and the eerie blue fluorescence of the ubiquitous Family Mart and 7-Eleven convenience stores. Later he might stop at one to browse through its huge array of comic books and purchase a polyethylene bottle of orange drink to slake his thirst.

Building in Nagasaki

•  These tranquil few hours before dawn are strangely precious to many people. Only in this empty calm can this wiry twenty-eight-year-old work off his restless anxiety. Only on these rare dark nights when they can gather the courage to venture out of his tiny room, can they be in the world yet themselves, and escape for just a few hours the confinement of a bedroom that has become their citadel. Being alone seems to them the only mode of self-preservation.

• 80% of hikikomori are male, loosely translates to the one who shuts himself away and becomes socially withdrawn. 

Aokigahara Forest

Shukkei-en Garden view

 

Broken apart from others

•  Of course, the Japanese are not biologically different from anyone else any more than the snow that falls on Mount Fuji differs from that atop of Mount Everest.
• Teenagers can be cruel, the word mushi- the Japanese word for the conscious decision to ignore another and pretend he does not exist- is just one of the nefarious tactic hey might employ to snub a classmate.
• “They were living together and eating together, but they barely talked”
• Sekentei- how one appears in the eye of society, or the need to keep up appearance – can powerfully constrain individual action just as bullying does in the collectivist pressure cooker of contemporary Japan. Japanese people always sees to maintain a high state of alert, always aware of their neighbours’ every move. As a foreigner walking down the streets, I often felt that cold Japanese stare. A warm smile did not disarm. If I turned to meet the gaze, the head would quickly turn away.

Tsujki Fish Market

A Long Tunnel

• Attacking a parent has become one of the most common forms of domestic violence in Japan. At least half of hikikomori treat their parents with some sort of violence. The nation’s first child abuse status was adopted only in May 2000, and “domestic violence” was not formally recognised as a crime until the following summer. The health ministry which had long sought to deny even the existence of hikikomori. 

Skyscrapers at Shibuya

• Until recently, the “best and the brightest” of Japan’s elite college graduates sough jobs not in commerce or in universities , but among the ranks of the all-powerful civil service, whose senior officials, rather than those elected by the voters, actually run the company.
• Bullying remains a distinctive and brutally effective means of “behaviour modifications”. 58.4 percent of all junior high schools reported serious bullying incidents. “It’s not a mental disease,” like schizophrenia or paranoia; it’s “a social disease”.
• “To survive in Japan, you have to kill off your own original voice.”
• Some anthropologist attribute Japan’s collective coercion to a primordial dependence on a spiritual connection to rice. In the pre-modern era, rice was the source of all wealth, a rice cultivation demanded both intense, orchestrated labour and the pooling of a critical resource, water, to irrigate the crops and guarantee a bountiful return. Rice cultivation demanded centralised control and broad cooperation. Achieving consensus and ensuring that agreement were implemented had for centuries been matter of life and death. 

 Personalities “Front” And “Back”

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Man walking down the streets in Ikkebukoro

• One epreeses tru feelings, hone, only amonst the closest friends, late at night over a glass of sake or whisky. Japanese may say hai –or yes- during a negiations, for instance, but the word does not signify agreement with what the other party is saying it means only that they understood what is being said. The split between true feeling and public “face” is so deeply ingrained in the Japanese, they suffer far fewer cases of multiple personality disorder than Westerns do.
• The mother’s expectation for the child is very high, and if the child violates that expectation, he feel guilt and shame.

Three Japanese “Lunatics”

• Child rearing in Japan has been warped by the pressure to create harmony.
• Japan provides few outlets for youngsters who have absorbed and been changed by these new media. 

Youth at Shinuya

Tourist at Nara

•  Japanese schools still emphasise rote instructions. Some teachers now even carry stopwatches, to ensure pupils spit out their answers quick enough.
• Less classroom time, mothers feared, would make it more difficult for their sons and daughters to pass college entrance exam. Many mothers also didn’t want to commit more time to watching over their children. In swift reaction, enrolment surged in Juku, or private “cram schools”, where students often study until ten or eleven every night, being drilled on subject likely to appear in the exam. 

Worker at Ginza

 Careening Off Course

• Japan’s goals had been unquestioned and its society precision- engineered to conquer the industrial age.
• So obsessively had Japan focused on one single dimension of success that it lost sight of the most important elements societies need in order to adapt and prosper. 

Ueno

• The traditional “jewels” of the Japanese workplace – lifetime employment, company unions, and seniority-based wages- help reinforce such conformity. Called the golden triangle, the arrangement of Japan’s corporations, politicians, and government bureaucrats- often orchestrated by the nation’s main banks- which dispense the funds essential to keep the system running.
• The western businessman who come to Japan in search of profit often finds himself trapped in a strange mirror wold where left is right and up is down.
• Even today, after more than a decade of recession in which any Japanese have been forced to draw own their “rainy day” funds, Japanese on average, save twice as much as Americans and nearly a third more than Europeans.

The Cult of the Brand

• The New Year or O-shogatsu, when more than three million people burst from commuter trains and subways to stream up Omotesando and enter the park like Meiji Shrine. Hanging in the rafters are clanging bells whose long ropes teenagers and ageing grandparents, one by one, grab and tug to gain the god’s full attention. Then, bowing their heads, squeezing their eyes shut, they whisper silent prayers- for wealth and happiness, for a new bank loan perhaps or for a passing for a grade on a fiendishly competitive college entrance exam- before solemnly clapping their hands three times. Before departing, they may buy a colourful good luck amulet, or omamori, to protect them against evil.

Fushimi- Inari- Taisha, Kyoto

•  There are thousands of people, who in their belief believe that the power of Vuitton to magically transform their own life and make them feel special. Research suggests that one in six Japanese owns some item bearing a Louis Vuitton logo.

• There are some things that only occur in Japan; that is, in their daily lives Japanese do many things that Westerners and even other Asians- find slightly unusual. Take the many Japanese men who, to while away their long commutes to work, paw through thick manga, or comic books, full of sadomasochistic violence without a hint of self- consciousness. The way businessmen bow respectfully when they speak to some invisible other on their mobile phone.

• There is this obsession with appearance, with finding the right costume to wear out in the world seemed a direct expression of the modern Japanese perilous quest to find identity.

• There seems to be another phenomenon in Japan, the rise of otaku and the power of the zoku. Though otaku is, literally, and honorific form of “your household”, it is generally used to derive a “geek” or a “nerd” fan who’s obsessed, sometimes dangerously so, with the minutiae of a particular bit of pop culture. It is claimed that 2.85 million Japanese live as otaku. An estimate is that otaku pump $26 billion each year into the domestic economy. 

Dontobori, Osaka

Ikebukoro

Notes extracted with the help from:
Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger

Ikebukoro

 But I was like this throughout Japan:

Sumo at Ryogoku

 Sayonara!