Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (26 page)

Furuichi’s breezy attitude about the present masked his deeper concerns about the future. I asked whether the current situation was sustainable. ‘Among developed nations, our national debt is astronomical,’ he said. ‘Then we have an ageing population. So this is a transitory moment. Thirty years from now all these people living with their parents will need to care for them. I don’t know whether they are prepared for that, either financially or emotionally.’ Even Japanese housing was shoddy, he said, meaning little of what was built during the boom years would last very long. You couldn’t rely on the wealth
that had been built up in the past for ever. ‘But in the meantime, young people are living quite happily with their parents, coexisting quite comfortably,’ he added, downplaying the notion of inter-generational strife. Since stable jobs were harder to come by, younger people were absolved of the responsibility of trying to secure them. They could live with their parents, or share a house with friends, a growing trend. ‘So long as their parents are healthy, there is no need for them to join the whole process,’ he said. ‘It’s an open question whether this is a form of “twisted happiness” or not. But all I’m saying is that, if today’s youth is in dire straits, they’re not aware of it.’

Most Japanese still believed they had it relatively good, he said. When they looked at Europe and the United States, they tended to think things could be a lot worse. The world outside Japan could seem violent and frightening, filled with riots, drug addiction, homelessness and a yawning divide between rich and poor. Those impressions might be exaggerated, filtered as they were through Japan’s blinkered view of itself as a uniquely comfortable and harmonious society. Still, the self-image had made people wary of change. The old set-up might be creaking and groaning. But it still functioned. ‘The previous system that developed in the high-growth era worked so well that everything has become fixed around it,’ he said. ‘Because the old system has not obviously come off the rails, conservatism rules. If it had fallen apart, we could have had a more radical renovation. But there has been no fundamental rethinking of whether that was the right way to organize a society. So instead we get entropy. That’s precisely our crisis.’

•   •   •

‘I don’t feel as though I live in a desperate country, and I don’t like it when people say Japan is in a desperate situation,’ Yoshi Ishikawa, a 28-year-old who worked in the growing non-profit sector, said. I had asked him about Furuichi’s idea that younger people were living in the moment, blind to the nation’s larger problems. That made them sound rather like passengers on the Ship of Fools than confident navigators of their own destiny. Ishikawa thought they were more aware than that implied. Many young people, he said, had consciously rejected the values of their parents and were searching for fresh ways of living. ‘There are so many young people trying to make something new.’

I first contacted Ishikawa through the organization he worked for, ETIC, or Entrepreneurial Training for Innovative Communities. ETIC had been active in the Tohoku region of Japan whose coastline had been so devastated by the tsunami. A government-supported body, it had been helping fishermen whose boats – even whole families – had been swept away. In Kesennuma, where large ships were washed up and the high street and much of the town destroyed, ETIC sent entrepreneurs to teach fishermen how to maximize profits by ‘branding’ their catch and selling direct to consumers. ‘It was pretty impossible to do something like that before the earthquake,’ Ishikawa said, referring to the difficulty of cutting out the middlemen with whom some fishermen had done business for generations. ‘But now they feel more empowered and less afraid of the pressures from older generations.’ Of his own motivation, he said, ‘For us, the new frontier is to do something good for society or for our community. Even if we earn less money, so long as we can work with satisfaction, that is OK. I think that’s how young people think these days.’

I had come to see Ishikawa at his office in Shibuya, a district of Tokyo where Japanese teenagers like to parade their fashions. On the way to his office, I’d seen two girls in matching yellow tartan with leggings pulled down around their knees to expose their thighs, and ruffles around their necks like clowns. Others clopped by in red cowboy boots, platform shoes or black patent leather boots with improbably narrow heels. Some of the boys wore beltless baggy pants riding low on their hips, knitted caps or pork-pie hats. There were skinny young men all in black, with drainpipe trousers and ghostly white faces. The fashions, so carefully individualized, still somehow contrived to look like a uniform. Ishikawa was casually, if much more conservatively, dressed, in a French-onion-seller-style stripy shirt and a dapper waistcoat. His hair was short with a studiously jagged fringe. The office was open plan. People, mostly in their twenties, sat at long benches made of rough-hewn wood, manufactured by one of the small businesses ETIC supported. There was a gentle clicking of laptops and the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

Ishikawa was brought up in Kira, a town of rice paddies and auto-parts factories about an hour from the industrial city of Nagoya where Toyota is based. His father worked at a small trading company,
his mother was a housewife. His family was of fairly modest means. Neither of his younger brothers made it to university, though they both studied at technical school and landed good jobs in the motor industry. Ishikawa, an engineering graduate, could have worked in manufacturing too. But he chose a different path. His turning point, if it can be called that, came as a seventeen-year-old when he won a scholarship to spend a year as an exchange student in Alaska. He was in America when al-Qaeda terrorists flew planes into New York’s Twin Towers. People from his home town had always thought of the US as a dangerous place. Several years before, a boy from Nagoya had been sent to Baton Rouge on the same scholarship as Ishikawa. One night he had been on his way to a Halloween party and had knocked on the door of the wrong house by mistake. The man, who thought he was a trespasser, shot him dead. ‘We all knew this and felt scared of American culture,’ Ishikawa said. But his time in Alaska turned out to be something of a revelation. He marvelled at how easily Americans socialized with each other and liked how openly affectionate his host parents were with their children. He even got a kick out of their tolerance for what, to his eyes, was the shoddy service and poor-quality merchandise Americans were used to. Perhaps the Japanese, who expected their petrol attendants to bow and their food to be always beautifully presented, were just too uptight, he thought.

Back in Japan, after postgraduate studies at Nagoya University, he landed a job as a management consultant. He worked in Texas, Barcelona and Tokyo, but felt unfulfilled. What was the point, he thought, of advising one Japanese beer company how to grab market share from another? That was the sort of thing that might have motivated his parents’ generation, but surely there was more to life than that? The more he came into contact with corporate Japan, the more he became convinced it revolved around drudgery and pointless late-night drinking sessions. As a consultant, he had worked with one company whose employees spent millions of yen of the firm’s money a month at a certain hostess club – a typical way for stressed-out salarymen to unwind with clients. His advice to the company, he said with a pained expression, was that it would make more sense to buy the club and run the hostess business itself.

Younger people thought differently, he said. The pre-bubble
generation had contributed to society by making the appliances – the fridges, air conditioners and cars – that people wanted. They felt strong loyalty to their companies, more than to the families they rarely saw. ‘Our fathers didn’t look so happy to us. They worked such long hours. They earned money, but families in those days led separate lives. Maybe we are asking ourselves, “What are we working for?” That’s something we are trying to figure out.’ He was into his theme by now. ‘We call people in their late forties “the bubble generation”. They think only about themselves and their family, but they don’t think about social issues. They call us the “
yutori
generation, the anything-goes generation”,’ he said, using a word to suggest a less-conformist modern era in which youth had more leeway to express themselves.
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‘They think we’re into iPhones and video games and that’s all. There is an inter-generational – I am not going to say conflict – but there’s definitely a difference; an inter-generational gap.’

Of his new career, he said, ‘I’m pretty sure we need entrepreneurs who can innovate. We should support small companies and entrepreneurs.’ From his experience, many young people wanted to strike out on their own, or persuade corporate Japan to adopt new values. ‘University students these days are asking the corporations they are hoping to join about their social values and CSR activities,’ he said, casually throwing off the English abbreviation for corporate social responsibility. ‘Even for me, it’s incredible how they think about these issues. Social values is the big thing, even more than the environment. That means things like education, the family, equal rights for women, caring for the elderly.’

Ishikawa was not claiming that all young people had suddenly become idealistic, entrepreneurial and bent on refashioning Japan. ‘Young people are divided into two. One group is more conscious and more passionate about going outside and doing something new. The other is getting poorer, and doing video games and internet all day.’ He had two friends who he felt could be classified as
hikikomori
, people who shut themselves away. One, the daughter of a college professor, lived with him in a shared house. She had also spent a year abroad, but now she hardly ever ventured outside the house. She browsed the internet all day and took part in online forums such as 2channel, which attracted several million, sometimes incendiary or
ultra-nationalistic, postings a day. Back in his home town of Kira too, one of his friends had never landed a proper job. Though he was in his late twenties, his room was decorated like a teenager’s, with posters of pouting ‘idols’, heart-throb female singers or models. A nomad of cyberspace, he too rarely left the house. ‘It’s not a psychological problem,’ Ishikawa said, after a long pause. ‘He’s just a bit scared.’ He thought some more. ‘He doesn’t feel the need to work because he can live with his parents.’ The
hikikomori
phenomenon was as much a product of affluence as poverty, he said. ‘
Hikikomori
people do come from both rich and poor families. But if you’re really poor, you cannot lie around in bed all day.’

Affluence wasn’t the same as economic momentum. Ishikawa recognized that the era of fast growth, with its sense of national rejuvenation, was over. ‘I was born in 1983. I didn’t get any benefit from the rapid growth of Japan. By the time I entered elementary school, the economy was going down. We don’t believe the economy will grow so much in the next decades. It’s not going to give us so many good things. I think that’s something we all are feeling.’

•   •   •

Masahiro Yamada, a slightly dishevelled sociologist in his mid-fifties, had a different take still on the post-bubble generation. His was almost comically dark. I’d met the professor, a delightful man with a nervous giggle, several times over the course of a decade during which he had succeeded in becoming progressively gloomier. Known for coining the phrase ‘parasite single’ to describe twenty- and thirty-year-olds mooching off their parents, he recently wrote an essay with the fairly self-explanatory title ‘The Young and the Hopeless’.
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I visited Yamada a few years ago in his cubbyhole of an office at Tokyo Gakugei University where he then lectured. Most Japanese academics are crammed into tiny spaces, smaller than some walk-in cupboards. Yamada’s looked more cramped than most. Every available bit of shelf space and much of the floor were piled high with books and heaps of papers. On the way in I nearly tripped over a foot-massage machine buried somewhere in the debris. Yamada was a somewhat flustered host. Every now and again he would leap up to retrieve a document from the surrounding flotsam.

He sat opposite me on a moth-eaten couch and handed me a sheet
of paper on which he had typed several phrases in Japanese. It was titled ‘Winners and Losers in the New Economy’. Mostly he seemed interested in the losers. Top of the list was ‘Sudden Increase of Suicides’, a reference to a 35 per cent jump to nearly 33,000 in 1998, a year of big lay-offs. Suicides had remained above 30,000 ever since, about ninety a day, one of the highest rates in the world, although the rate did begin to fall again from 2010 and dropped below 30,000 in 2012. (One ‘anti-suicide’ measure the government had taken was to install large mirrors on some railway platforms. Apparently, the sight of oneself about to jump had a sobering effect.) Suicide was by no means the end of Yamada’s list. It continued, ‘Rapid Increase of Child Abuse . . . Temporary Jobs . . . Jobless Young People . . . Wasted Labourers who Dream of Unrealistic Futures . . . Twilight of Post-war Family’. In vain, I scanned the page for something more uplifting.

Yamada’s view of contemporary Japan chimed quite closely with the version Shimotsubo had explained. The labour market had broken down, excluding more and more people from decent jobs by forcing them to take temporary work paying as little as $10 an hour. Yamada called those people ‘liquid’ labourers, sluiced from one part of the job pool to the next. Their existence in such large numbers was proof, he said, that the old system had stopped functioning. In its place had been created a sort of economic apartheid in which the winners were protected by the rules of the old system and the losers pushed out into an ultra-precarious new world. In his view, Murakami’s part-timers and drifters were victims, not pioneers. The villain of the piece was the mass hiring of graduates, the
shushoku katsudo
, a fixture of the labour market for decades. It ought to be scrapped immediately, he said, though there were too many vested interests for that to happen. ‘The time has come to do away with a system that apportions total stability to a shrinking elite of full-time employees while granting none to anyone else.’
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