The young are for the most part brash, confident and relaxed. The difference between them and their parents is starker than in any previous generation gap in Japan, and is increasing all the time. Their manner, dress, tastes and easygoing exterior parallel those of young people around the world. Indeed, far from merely aping foreign fashions, Japanese youth is now busily creating them. The guinea pigs for this new export industry are the legions of teenagers prowling about areas like Shibuya in western Tokyo, with their brightly dyed hair curled or plaited or twisted into punky spikes, and their iPods blaring out the latest J-pop hits. Girls are as different from tripping geishas as you can get, although they frequently trip up on their eight-inch-high platform shoes – a fad marked, not surprisingly, by a spate of broken ankles and dainty limping. Far from the whitened powder face and figure-concealing kimomo of the geisha, they are decked out in garish make-up, huge fake nails, stick-on eyelashes, crimson, yellow or green hair extensions, and tiny miniskirts wrapped around their slender hips like loincloths. Perhaps underneath it all they remain as Japanese as their parents, but they certainly seem utterly different, and bemusing, to their elders.
One thing is clear: they love sex. High-school students claim to be too busy or segregated for it, but the evidence on trains and public thoroughfares suggests otherwise. The old taboo of kissing in public has been brazenly cast aside. On off-peak commuter trains, I often saw schoolchildren absorbed in advanced petting, having consumed their fast food and cast the empty cartons onto an adjacent seat. Predictably, the liberties taken by Japanese youth gravely worry their elders, from parents who fear for their children’s careers, to government bureaucrats who (somewhat hypocritically) complain of an “ethical vacuum”, to captains of industry who wonder how purple-plumed punks will ever be turned into good corporate warriors. Almost everybody seems baffled by what is really going on in these libertine heads. Explanations for the phenomenon of jiko-chu, or self-centredness, abound: poor parental guidance, dietary changes, mental dysfunction. I stumbled across one of the more original theories while leafing through The Daily Yomiuri, a major national newspaper. Under the headline ‘Young People Suffer From Immature Frontal Lobe’, a professor of brain science from the distinguished University of Hokkaido was claiming that public displays of jiko-chu, such as kissing, changing clothes in public and applying make-up in trains, could be put down to inadequacies in the frontal lobe, the brain’s most developed region. In his article, which covered much of the front page of the newspaper’s special New Year supplement on the future of Japan, Professor Toshiyuki Sawaguchi insisted that young people behave exactly like patients suffering from disorders of this part of the brain:
These people ignore the situations or people around them. For instance, they suddenly become upset in quiet gatherings, making obscene remarks about women walking along the street, or acting disgracefully in a crowd.
The really bad news, according to the professor, was that most human abilities – language learning, self-control, sympathy with others, determining one’s goal in life or indeed any activity at all for whatever end – turn out to depend on the frontal lobe, so “there will be no hope for Japan in the 21st century” unless “immediate measures” are taken “to remedy the situation”. These measures included attending to the Mongoloid brain’s scientific requirements “to be raised slowly and carefully in large families and be exposed to complex social relationships”. Since “racially, the Japanese are Mongoloid”, such an environment was essential to ensuring that Japanese children’s frontal lobe develops properly. Sadly, “Westernization” and a declining birth rate were threatening any return to traditional child-rearing practices, so the Professor advocated grabbing the bull by the horns and establishing special schools to help children develop their frontal lobes – for which a nationwide initiative embracing government, local communities and parents was required. And he concluded, in ringing tones:
Let’s establish “schools to nurture the frontal lobe” – I offer this proposal to make the 21st century bright for Japan.
Judging by their brassiness and, in the case of many of the undergraduates, their indolence, my students at Tokyo University had specific frontal-lobe problems of their own. Their deference was restricted to my first meeting with them – when I was duly bowed to and addressed as sensei (teacher). Thereafter they were bold, informal and to the point. They came and went from my lectures when they felt like it, nodded off when they were tired or bored, asked direct and usually excellent questions, left their mobile phones on, and giggled, whispered and flirted during classes as students do everywhere. The tone was set at the beginning of the academic year, when they all introduced themselves. Without a hint of shyness, they each stood up to speak. Their interests seemed to coalesce around the grimmer German philosophers. A dapper young man, dressed in an immaculate suit, said he wasn’t sure if he liked philosophy at all, but was giving it a try, beginning with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (rather like choosing Joyce’s Ulysses as one’s first reading material, instead The Hungry Hamster). Another, very self-possessed, said he had started with Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death at sixteen and had just finished Heidegger’s Being and Time – which he read in the original German, a task from which many, if not most, Germans would shrink. A rather attractive and taciturn girl, who compulsively scratched her arms with her fingernails and then picked at the scabs, and who I was sure would be overcome by shyness when her turn came, stood up and declared her special interests to be euthanasia, Heidegger, and Novalis’s Hymn to the Night – a pretty unnerving combination even for the strictest devotee of the Teutonic mind.
At dinner afterwards, discussion was more light-hearted. This time, the students were all asked to introduce their hobbies. Again, no one was reserved; many were gregarious to the point of exhibitionism. One young man – the thinnest youth I have ever seen – said his hobby was Sumo wrestling. I was attempting to conjure up this unlikely spectacle when his neighbour said that he enjoyed watching his puppies bite each other. The taciturn girl said that she played Satie and Chopin for a few hours a day, some of the time as entertainment at weddings. And funerals. Another, the son of a farmer, who modestly claimed that he had been “born a philosopher”, enjoyed visiting fish markets with his parents, but had given this up in order to learn German, French and English, so as to read “all philosophy texts in the original”. Someone else, wearing a T-shirt which mysteriously declared “HELL AWAITS”, said that he really wanted to fall in love with some subject now – if not philosophy then another – because “after twenty-five falling in love becomes much harder”.
I sat there wondering why Japan is normally considered to be so inscrutable. Was I missing something? How was it that my discussions with people had been so fluid, whether with young or old, conformists or mavericks? Perhaps my own frontal lobe was being rigorously challenged? Or was my apparently easy integration part of the trick that Japan plays on novices – gently drawing them in before, as it were, spitting them out, brutally and unexpectedly?…