Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (27 page)

The old system worked in a fast-growth era when labour was scarce and companies put a premium on loyal employees, he said. But no one believed those days would ever return. He sprang up to fetch a survey. Taken among 25- to 35-year-olds, it showed that only 4 per cent expected the economy to improve over their lifetime. An overwhelming 61 per cent thought it would only get worse. Furuichi
regarded low expectations as a sort of release from the treadmill of endless self-improvement, but Yamada had come to the opposite conclusion. Far from becoming independent risk-takers seeking their own path, he said, young people were ‘conservatives’ and ‘fantasists’. The conservatives craved yesterday’s certainties precisely because they were ever-harder to attain. Fantasists sought solace in make-believe, endlessly postponing decisions – on marriage, childbirth, career – in the Micawberesque belief that something splendid would turn up. It wasn’t clear whether the conservatives or the fantasists upset Yamada more. He salvaged another survey from the surrounding piles, this one of newly hired workers. The question was whether they wanted to ‘keep working for this company until retirement’.
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In 2010, the percentage agreeing with that statement had risen to 57 per cent from just 20 per cent in 2000. ‘Because opportunities for stability have been reduced, that’s what they long for,’ he said glumly.

The same attitude was reflected in surveys of young women. Far from seeking independence and career fulfilment, more than ever they wanted to become housewives, he said. (I once saw a flier for a hostess club called ‘Badd Girls’ in which one of the young women listed her favourite hobby as ‘doing the washing up’.) More women in their twenties and thirties agreed with the statement ‘the man works, the woman takes care of the house’ than in any other age group, Yamada added. That was because most full-time jobs in Japan were not designed for women in the first place, especially if they wanted children, he said. Japanese employers demanded long hours of drudgery and too much overtime. Shimotsubo had said of her husband’s job, ‘I can’t work like him. I am a mother, so I can’t follow the company rules. That’s the experience of women in Japan.’ Unable to find security by following a male-oriented career path, Yamada said, women sought the next best thing – they married stability. But because the pool of eligible men with secure jobs was shrinking, more and more women were postponing marriage.

That was where conservatism blended into fantasy, he argued. The majority of unmarried Japanese between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five lived with their parents. Many had unrealistic dreams of becoming rock stars or fashion photographers or, if they were women, of marrying a wealthy man. The ‘parasite singles’ saved on rent and
spent all their wages on maintaining a luxurious, but ultimately unsustainable, lifestyle. Much of their life was make-believe. Young men shied away from the attention of real women. Instead, they watched movies produced by Japan’s vast pornography industry or went to ‘maid cafés’ where they were treated with old-fashioned deference by the sort of demure, pretty woman they could never hope to meet in real life. Women waited around for Mr Right, putting off marriage and childbirth. ‘Not only are they living in a dreamland but they’re not waking up.’ Yamada despaired. ‘They’ve given up. There’s no idea about changing society, or changing their own life.’ Perhaps, I ventured, they didn’t want to change society because actually their lives weren’t all that bad. Maybe they were contented as Furuichi said. ‘Those who live outside the established system have no way of getting in,’ Yamada said a little contemptuously. ‘That’s why they remain’ – here he curled his lip mockingly – ‘so-called happy and free.’

•   •   •

The words sliding along the bottom of the television screen left little room for ambiguity. Unless something was done, the ‘children of Japan’ would be burned alive. There were three of them. Nahoko Takato, a 34-year-old female aid worker, who had gone to Baghdad to distribute bread and jam and other staples to Iraqi street children. Then there was Soichiro Koriyama, thirty-two, a freelance photojournalist who had ventured to Iraq to cover a war in which Japan’s Self Defence Forces, its version of an army, had been cast as a bit-player. But the person whose grainy image stood out for me was Noriaki Imai, a wan, handsome youth of eighteen years, cowering on the ground. All three were blindfolded. Behind them stood jumpy Iraqi militiamen, brandishing knives and Kalashnikovs.

It was 2004, the year Tokyo had sent its Self Defence Forces on a reconstruction mission to Iraq in Japan’s biggest deployment of ground troops since the Second World War. The dispatch was considered unconstitutional by many. Public opinion was divided and volatile. The three ‘children of Japan’ had wound up in Iraq for humanitarian reasons, there to document, or to help alleviate, the suffering in a war that troubled them. Imai, a recent high-school graduate, had sneaked across the border from Jordan in a rented taxi. His objective was to study the effects of depleted uranium on civilians. It
wasn’t a well-thought-out plan. Within hours of his arrival, when his car stopped for petrol just outside the city of Fallujah, he was bundled into another vehicle by a group of militants shouting ‘Kill the Japanese’. One held a hand-grenade to his head.

The events of 9/11 and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq had transformed Imai from an out-of-touch video gamer living on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido into a young man vexed by some of the world’s most pressing issues. ‘When the bombing of Afghanistan started I felt very empty and useless,’ he said of the US-led invasion of that country in 2001.
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Imai had wandered the internet in search of answers to half-formed questions. He browsed topics such as the Rwandan genocide, and the possible connection between conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the scramble for coltan metal, a blackish ore used in Japan’s then world-beating mobile phones. He felt that his generation was not interested in these moral and political questions, much less so when they involved people in far-away places. Somehow, it seemed like his duty to learn more. He knew it sounded pretentious, but he wanted to catalyse and energize his generation. That is how his cyber-odyssey led him to a real-world petrol station outside Fallujah.

For several days, Japan had been transfixed by the fate of the hostages. Parents of the three had been on television, both in Japan and in the Arab-speaking world, to plead for their children’s lives. The young people had gone to Iraq to help the country, they said. None had supported the deployment of Japanese troops. To the fury of the Japanese government, the parents even reiterated the militants’ call for Tokyo to withdraw its ground forces. For several excruciating days, the fate of the hostages hung in the balance. Only a few weeks later, Kim Sun-il, a 33-year-old South Korean missionary, was beheaded by his Iraqi capturers. The Japanese were more fortunate. After eight days, Imai and his two fellow hostages were passed into the hands of a cleric amid rumours that Tokyo had paid a ransom to secure their release. After debriefing and a medical check-up, they were flown back to Japan. It was then that the trouble really started.

Public opinion, or at least that reflected by the media, had turned quickly. After at first rallying in sympathy, Japan’s powerful newspapers and television channels – which tended to ply the same party
line – rounded on the three hostages, blaming them for ignoring foreign office warnings to avoid Iraq and for dragging Japan into a humiliating episode. The phrase
jiko sekinin
, meaning ‘self-responsibility’, became the stuff of the vacuous breakfast television shows, slapstick ‘current affairs programmes’ where men dressed in pork-pie hats and young starlets called
tarentos
(‘talents’) pondered the issues of the day with scant concession to substance or knowledge. From the media ether, the term bubbled into common parlance, muttered over sushi counters and through the smoke and background jazz of bars. The media started demanding that the three repay the government the cost of their flight home and post-kidnap medical check-up. Did the taxpayer really have to foot the bill for these hapless do-gooders? By the time Imai and his two fellow countrymen stepped onto Japanese soil, the mood was downright hostile. The former hostages emerged from the plane, heads bowed in shame. They shuffled past placards printed with angry slogans, one of which read simply, ‘You got what you deserved.’

The reaction was difficult to fathom. Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, gave what seemed like the more rational response. ‘I’m pleased that these Japanese citizens were willing to put themselves at risk for a greater good, for a better purpose,’ he said. ‘And the Japanese people should be very proud that they have citizens willing to do that.’
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That was not how many Japanese saw it. When I caught up with him a few weeks later, Imai was still in shock at the reaction. ‘It was a huge surprise. People were saying I needed to take responsibility for my own actions. But it sounded to me as if they were saying they wished I’d died. To my mind the meaning was, “You should have died in Iraq and come back a corpse.”’ He was inundated with hate mail. ‘When I was just walking in the street in Sapporo, sometimes people would say, “Why did you waste so much taxpayers’ money?” Twice someone punched me. That’s why I became psychologically sick. I didn’t talk so much. I wasn’t friendly. It became a serious problem, like a phobia.’

Yoichi Funabashi, my friend at the left-leaning
Asahi
newspaper, said the government had manipulated the discussion through a pliant media. The three young Japanese, by offering humanitarian assistance outside the framework of Japan’s official, military-led effort, had intruded onto the government’s moral high ground, he said. In their
small and shambling way, they had offered an alternative to the officially sanctioned policy of helping Iraq through the work of the Self Defence Forces. The Japanese mission was presented as a reconstruction effort, bringing water and electricity to ordinary Iraqi people. If there was good to be done, the government could handle it. A close adviser to Junichiro Koizumi, the prime minister who had promised George W. Bush he would get Japanese boots on Iraqi ground, confirmed Funabashi’s suspicions. ‘The families of the hostages self-destructed by appealing for the withdrawal of the Self Defence Forces,’ he told me, adding that he suspected they were Communists. He applauded the public reaction. ‘Such stern criticism reflects the growing maturity of Japanese public opinion.’

In their naivety, the three had stumbled into the hottest foreign policy issue of the day. But there was a broader symbolism to these youngsters’ search for meaning in life and the sharp reproach they received at the hands of their elders. Years of less-than-stirring growth over the past two decades had put paid to the certainties of pre-bubble Japan. According to the academic Yoshio Sugimoto, as many as two in five young workers were now in non-regular employment, with many part of what had come to be known as the ‘working poor’.
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Non-regular workers were less likely to receive training, making it all the harder for them to break back into steady employment.

The upending of the old model forced a whole generation – or at least those shut outside what remained of the old employment system – to seek an alternative. Many, like Ishikawa, looked for something more fulfilling than the ‘empty affluence’ of their parents’ middle-class dream. Fetching up in Iraq, as Imai had done, was a pretty drastic alternative, to be sure. Most youngsters stopped well short of that. But, in their own way, many were testing the boundaries of how to live. Some simply worked part-time, bouncing from job to job, or worked for employment agencies that dispatched them – like so many returnable packages – to the big companies that had refused to take them on as full-timers. That gave them a certain independence and time to pursue a better work–life balance. It freed them from the onerous demands of the typical large Japanese corporation. But in the bargain, they lost both long-term career prospects and a decent salary. Some even lost their identity since that had become so tightly bound
up with being a member of a corporate family. Yet, outside the system, there was a life for some. Some set up businesses, though that was perhaps less common than in the west. Some worked for non-profit organizations, the numbers of which had mushroomed since the Kobe earthquake of 1995 where so many volunteers made their mark. Still others embraced ‘slow living’. They established cooperatives or organic farms or just took it easy, dropping out like modern-day hippies. In 2003 one cigarette company caught onto this new lifestyle with the slogan ‘Slow Down, Relax Up’.
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Some local authorities tapped into the trend, declaring themselves oases of
gambaranai
, adherents of the almost un-Japanese philosophy of ‘don’t try too hard’, or ‘don’t stress yourself’. Many youngsters certainly weren’t trying quite as hard as their parents. They saved on rent by living at home, spending all their money on fashion, dining, foreign travel or the pursuit of hobbies. They were enjoying Japan’s affluence – while it still lasted.

Then there were people like Noriaki Imai. I hadn’t seen him for eight years. I wondered what had happened to him since his ordeal in Iraq and his painful homecoming. Quite coincidentally, I discovered that, now twenty-six, he had become one of the social entrepreneurs backed by ETIC, Ishikawa’s organization. He was running a non-profit group to help disadvantaged children in Japan’s second city of Osaka. I arranged to meet him in the spring of 2012, a few days after the first anniversary of the tsunami. I took an early-morning bullet train from Tokyo. Salarymen were drinking beer with their breakfast, going over papers or just sleeping as we sped past the industrial corridor that links Japan’s two biggest conurbations.

Osaka had a completely different feel from Tokyo. It was grittier, more industrial, more casual. Young people dressed a little punkier than in the capital. People even stood on the opposite side of the escalator. Maybe it was the Manchester of Japan. Osaka had become the focus of some attention of late because it had elected a young mayor, Toru Hashimoto, who was making waves nationally. A brash politician and son of a yakuza gangster, Hashimoto – in the style of Junichiro Koizumi – had ridden the anti-political wave to become one of the country’s most talked-about politicians. Recently, he had opposed the restarting of a nuclear plant in a nearby town, claiming that the government was ignoring safety. He had won notoriety for
many other things: enforcing the early closing of nightclubs, insisting the national anthem was sung in schools and cutting budgets by firing bureaucrats. In one speech, later to haunt him, he had said Japan needed leadership ‘strong enough to be called a dictatorship’ to get out of its current funk.
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His popularity even survived revelations in a weekly magazine that he had had an affair with a woman whom he got to dress up as a flight attendant during sex.
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Some people thought he was dangerous, others were energized by what they saw as his vigour. Hashimoto was a one-man Tea Party. His arrival on the scene was another sign of youthful impatience with the status quo.