The Promised Road
Kumiko Shimotsubo dated the start of what she called ‘the ice age’ to the winter of 1995. Like Haruki Murakami, she regarded that tumultuous year as the time when everything changed. For her, it was less about earthquakes and sarin gas attacks. Rather, it was when, she felt, many young people were ‘frozen out’ of the system their parents had taken for granted. In her final year of college, which she spent at the University of Tsukuba, a once futuristic science city built outside Tokyo in the 1960s, she sent off more than 100 applications to companies, each neatly handwritten on a postcard. She got perhaps fifty replies, a lower ratio than her male counterparts, she recalled with some bitterness, but enough to give her hope she could get a slice of the Japanese Dream. Now a slightly disenchanted 37-year-old, whose business card identified her as a Bilingual Writer/HR Consultant/Intercultural Facilitator, Shimotsubo had found what she called ‘the promised road’ barred to entry.
We met in the elegant tea room in the Imperial Hotel, a mosaic by Frank Lloyd Wright covering one wall, the only remnant of the building he designed in 1915. Even such a prestigious hotel, still patronized by the imperial household, became swept up in the 1960s construction frenzy as Japan tore down the old in pursuit of the modern. In 1968, the hotel was redeveloped above the strenuous objections of Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow, then in her seventies, who pleaded for it to be preserved even as the bulldozers moved in.
Shimotsubo was slim and fashionably dressed with a double string of pearls draped over her sweater. She started by telling me about her career expectations when, like all the other graduate hopefuls, she set out on the rite of passage known as the shushoku katsudo. Literally the ‘find work activity’, it was the mass screening of graduates by corporate Japan. Wearing a black suit, white blouse and sensible black shoes, her hair neatly trimmed (and on no account to be dyed), the then twenty-year-old followed the advice dispensed by make-up companies about how a young female graduate setting out in life ought to look. ‘Fresh but not too sexy,’ she recalled. The shushoku katsudo, or shukatsu in the inevitable contraction, was an urban phenomenon that might be compared to the migration of wildebeest. The passage traversed, however, was not to the pastures of East Africa, but to life in a big corporation, and hence a place in the Japanese Dream.
She applied to a who’s who of elite companies, including the big trading houses such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Marubeni. But by the mid-1990s, fewer graduates were making the migration successfully. Companies had finally realized that the economic shock of the early 1990s, when asset prices started collapsing, was not an aberration. They would need to make adjustments. Because of their compact with existing employees – one that Shimotsubo likened to that of a daimyo lord with his loyal samurai retainers – there was almost no question of sacking existing workers who had implicitly been offered a job-for-life. The only option was to hire fewer fresh graduates or, in extremis, to suspend graduate recruitment altogether. Shimotsubo and millions of graduates like her bore the brunt of that decision. Shut out in the cold, they became the ‘lost generation’.
Like many during that era, Shimotsubo had been caught unawares by Japan’s changed economic circumstances. She had set her sights on being recruited as a so-called sogoshoku, the top intake of graduates whose careers were expected to progress smoothly into the higher ranks of a corporation. The second-tier intake, known as the ippanshoku, the clerical workers on the ‘non-career’ track, was almost exclusively female and generally not expected to advance. Most likely such women would marry and leave to start a family. Shimotsubo aspired to a fast-track position. Attitudes were slowly changing, though some employers still thought these top-tier jobs should be reserved for men, the economic breadwinners. That and the deteriorating economic situation meant the sort of positions she was pursuing were few and far between.
Her dream of walking the promised road proved fleeting. She received not a single offer. Only at the last minute did she get a solitary positive reply from a private publishing company, not the sort of elite firm to which she had aspired. ‘I lost my motivation totally,’ she recalled fifteen years after that bitter disappointment. Now married with a young daughter, she said of the years before she graduated, ‘There used to be a promised career path. People were expected to join a company and then spend all their life in that company with the same colleagues. My father was a typical Japanese salaryman. He spent more than thirty years with one traditional Japanese company, the famous NEC. He followed the promised road.’
Shimotsubo did not. In Japan, where all serious hiring was – and still largely is – done en masse after graduation, there was no second chance. Most companies were inflexible about taking on people in mid-career. They wanted to get their hands on fresh graduates so they could train them from scratch and exercise what Shimotsubo called ‘mind control’ – to turn them into obedient employees. ‘Once you dropped off the promised road, you’d be evaluated as “not a good person”, just because you didn’t belong to anything,’ she said. ‘To have a permanent job means to have a good social status. Not to have one means to lack social status. I am now thirty-seven and many people of my age are still desperately working in temporary jobs. They get a very low wage, the same as a new graduate, even though their careers have been going nearly twenty years. It’s a kind of social discrimination.’
Shimotsubo had been luckier than most in her position. Because she spoke English, learned at her internationally minded high school in Yokohama, she had been able to build an alternative career working for foreign companies operating in Japan. They cared little, if at all, that she hadn’t joined straight from university. At one, she even became head of the human resources department, something that would have been impossible at her age in a Japanese company. The irony of that job was that, after overseeing an aggressive western-style restructuring, she too was dispensed with. Now she worked as an ‘intercultural consultant’, operating in the penumbra between national employment practices. She remained bitter that the opportunities afforded her parents’ generation had been snatched away. ‘When I was a senior college student, I was so jealous of the bubble generation. They could eat and drink from the company’s pocket,’ she said of the famously lavish expense accounts. ‘They got big bonuses even if their productivity was low. It was so easy to earn money in those days.’ Looking back, she added, ‘I was just a senior high school student when Japan was really booming. That generation had their very happy hour. But the people of the ice age, people like me, don’t know what the bubble was. Today’s younger generation don’t know what growth is. Their experience is just downsizing and recession. That’s all they know of the Japanese economy. That’s why dreams are shrinking in Japan.’
Her work in human resources had led her to believe that the Japanese employment system needed to change. It was, she said, an all-or-nothing lottery that favoured those who gained an early foothold after graduation, but excluded the rest. ‘I personally wish there were alternative paths to follow. But the current system is the only established one,’ she said. The waitress came to pour more tea. Around us, an almost exclusively older clientele was chatting amid the reassuring clink of bone china. Looking around the tea room nervously, as though she were plotting a coup, Shimotsubo turned to me conspiratorially. ‘For the younger generation to have any hope,’ she whispered, ‘I really hope the old system collapses totally.’
• • •
For Haruki Murakami, the fact that the promised road had forked off into a hundred unexplored directions was as it should be. Sure, because of a flagging economy, young people were having to make it on their own, he said. That was not always easy. But Shimotsubo’s promised road had led to a false dream. When he was researching Underground, his book about the sarin gas attack, Murakami had become better acquainted with the foot-soldiers of the Japanese miracle. He had interviewed the stoic, uncomplaining office workers and bureaucrats who were gassed on their way to the offices from which they would seek to keep the Japanese Dream alive. ‘It was love and hate of course,’ he said, weighing up his words carefully. ‘I admired them and, at the same time, they depressed me. I think their lives are absurd. They are consuming, consuming themselves, you know. They commute two hours between their house and the office and they work so hard. It’s inhuman. And when they come back to their house, their children are sleeping. It’s a waste of humanity.’1
Murakami felt more affinity with the post-bubble generation. He talked warmly of the freeters, the Japanese word for the casual, part-time employees who worked, mostly for minimum wage, in dead-end jobs. For most social observers, the idea of a freeter – moving from one precarious job to another – was the epitome of all that had gone wrong in the long years of slow-burn crisis. But where many Japanese saw low wages, lack of security and the extinguishing of opportunity, Murakami saw young people trying to build something new. It was, perhaps, easier to be optimistic from his position as a rich and successful novelist. He forked off the promised road of his own volition – and ended up with fame and money. Not everyone could be so lucky. Back then, the outlines of the promised road were still clearly discernible. Now, trying to make it as a young person in Japan was like charting an uncertain path through the desert. But Murakami admired a generation that had, albeit mostly by necessity, set out to find its own way. ‘Our society has been changing,’ he said. ‘There are so many freeters. They chose to be free. They have their own opinions and their own lifestyles. I think the more alternatives we have the more open society will be.’ The rigidities of the old system may have helped Japan in its catch-up phase, he was saying, but they were outdated and harmful to individual development and personal choice. ‘Most Japanese don’t have any sense of direction,’ he continued. ‘We are lost and we don’t know which way we should go. But this is a very natural thing, a very healthy thing. It is time for us to think. We can take our time.’
• • •
Noritoshi Furuichi, a 27-year-old Ph.D. student and author, was – at least on the face of it – more in Murakami’s camp than in Shimotsubo’s. Ten years younger than Shimotsubo, and three decades younger than Murakami, he was more optimistic about contemporary society, based both on his own, privileged, experience and on the research he had done as a budding social scientist. Furuichi, who doubled as the executive of a start-up IT firm established with college friends, dressed fairly typically for a twenty-something Japanese man. That is to say he looked nothing like the drab-suited salaryman of western imagination. If anything, he was more like the androgynous creation of a manga comic, a dashing, slightly effete young wizard from Howl’s Moving Castle. His well-groomed hair had a delicate henna tinge and he wore casual clothes with no trace of a crease. He carried an iPhone 4S, then the latest model, and, over his shoulder, a capacious purple shoulder bag. When he waved goodbye, it was the cute salutation beloved of Japanese girls, elbow pressed against his hip, hand oscillating to and fro.
In his book called Happy Youth in a Desperate Country, Furuichi’s main conclusion – quite counter to the prevailing narrative – was that Japan’s youth has never been so content. ‘The media have been unrelenting in their depiction of youth as poor, hapless, desperate and in dire straits,’ he told me when we met on the top floor of a glinting new office tower near Shinagawa station, one of numerous showcase buildings that had shot up in Tokyo during the years of supposed stagnation. ‘In fact, the government’s own data shows that 73 per cent of youth are perfectly satisfied with their life,’ he said, referring to an annual ‘satisfaction survey’ that had been going for decades. In the 1960s, when Japan was entering its high-growth sweet-spot, about half of respondents aged twenty to twenty-nine said they were happy. The ‘happiness quotient’, he said, had risen steadily ever since.
Those numbers looked wrong given what was generally said about the optimistic years of economic take-off and the directionless post-bubble decades. Furuichi’s book had drawn criticism for downplaying real economic and social hardships. It was not unusual, though, he told me, for satisfaction levels to rise as an economy matured and slowed, partly because young people no longer had to delay their gratification like their parents and grandparents. Japan’s miracle years, he said, were an era of happiness deferred. ‘Half of Japan was still rural until the mid-1960s. So many people working in the cities were living for others. They were in the city on behalf of their home town and they needed to send part of their pay cheque back to the countryside. They functioned on behalf of another person. They were serving the future, serving the nation, serving the provinces. They were serving something other than themselves.’ In sociological terms, Japan had transitioned from being what he called an ‘instrumental’ society, where actions served a larger purpose, to becoming a ‘consummatory’ society in which people lived for the moment. ‘Now they’re working for themselves, making their own decisions, taking their own responsibilities and reaping their own rewards.’
Despite all the economic insecurity of contemporary Japan, Furuichi said, few people of his age hankered after the old days. ‘We knew our fathers were being called economic animals, that they were made fun of for being hapless cogs in the machine. Our mothers did what they could to be “happy housewives”, but they were essentially maids and servants.’ The job-for-life system was almost exclusively male and, even then, not all-encompassing, he went on. Many men worked for small companies without the benefits of absolute job security, ascending pay and generous pensions. ‘Even in the best of times, the so-called lifetime employment system covered only 30–40 per cent of the population.’ That number may have shrunk still further, but there were compensations. ‘Fewer young people are buying cars. Instead, they’re spending money on food, clothes, phones and spending time with their friends. “What should Japanese youth do?”’ he asked rhetorically. ‘I’m doing it. I’m not running for office, so I don’t have a prescription for what everybody else should do. But for myself, and the people around me, I am being proactive. I’m establishing ways to use my knowledge and use the knowledge of people around me. I think people should look at the society that’s near them and find ways to utilize each other’s resources. They shouldn’t worry about a united Japan, or the “Japanese people”. Just find a group of people you can do something productive with and be productive. Everywhere you look you see the problems of the state . . . I’m not saying we need to abandon the public sphere. But I am saying that small groups of smart people, ten or twenty people, getting together and seeing what they can do, that is definitely what interests me.’
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.2 ‘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’.3
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.’4
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’.5 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 2001.6 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.’7 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’.8 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’.9 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.10 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.11 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.
I met Imai at an izakaya, a Japanese pub where often high-quality food is served with sake, shochu spirit, beer and wine. The lighting was moody with artful use of spotlights. Jazz was playing over the speakers and, through the wooden partitions that separated the private rooms, there flowed the sound of youthful chatter lubricated by alcohol. We pressed the buzzer on our table and ordered crab, some sashimi, grilled mushrooms, a little abalone hot pot and a couple of ice-cold draught beers. As we waited for the food, Imai told me that he had been depressed for years after his return from Iraq. He felt as though his mission to speak up for Iraqi children had ended in fiasco. The hostile reaction in Japan was worse than the kidnapping ordeal itself, he said. ‘I was only kidnapped for nine days. But during those years in Japan, sometimes I felt like I wanted to die.’ He left his home town of Sapporo to study at the other end of the country, at an international university in the southern city of Oita. He kept mainly to himself. ‘Even four or five years after [Iraq] some people recognized my face,’ he said. ‘Not so much now. I’m nearly free.’ He fell silent for a bit. ‘Actually I don’t care,’ he went on. ‘This is a stressed-out society. Many people simply wanted to let off steam.’
Looking back he had no regrets. ‘I became psychologically very strong and because of that I do my non-profit work.’ By his fourth year of university he felt better. He travelled to Zambia with a friend who was helping to build a school. He was struck by the optimism. ‘Compared to Japan I felt they had so much hope for their country. A fifth of the population is infected with HIV and the average life expectancy is just forty-six. But I sensed hope in their eyes. I came back to Japan and got on the train and everyone looked so gloomy. Here, younger people are under a lot of pressure. I felt I should do something for young kids.’
Like Ishikawa, he had arrived via a detour, in his case selling pork and beef for a small trading company. ‘Buy cheap, sell expensive,’ he smirked. He quit in 2012 to devote himself full-time to mentoring troubled children. At one underprivileged high school he met a boy who had lived with three different fathers and whose mother had a multiple-personality disorder. The family was on income support and the boy sometimes worked at night to earn extra money. Imai was shocked things could be so bad for people in a country he still thought of as affluent. ‘These kids don’t have any self-confidence. They don’t feel as though they have a future.’ Secretly he wondered if they might not be right. ‘The population is shrinking. Poverty among young people is rising. For people with a good education, it’s invisible. But it’s a big problem. Living has become too hard.’
I explained Furuichi’s theory that what youngsters had lost in security they had gained in freedom. At least one survey seemed to show they had never been happier, I said. ‘The future will get worse, so now is the happiest moment,’ Imai replied after giving it some thought, pleased at his own logic. ‘Some young people do feel like that. But it’s kind of fake. Feeling happy is just for now. The future is dark.’ He too worried that Japan might be living on borrowed time, slumbering on the financial cushion built up during the economic boom. How could an economy survive with so much debt, he asked? One day it had to explode, surely. ‘I don’t know when this bankruptcy will happen. Maybe we’ll be OK for three years or five years. But ten years? I don’t know.’
Imai doubted the younger generation’s ability to bring about positive change. He had a sneaking regard for Hashimoto’s strong convictions, though he didn’t find the actual content of his ideas appealing. (Hashimoto’s popularity later imploded after he made light of the use of sex slaves by Japan’s army during the war.) Apathy was the default position, Imai said. ‘So many of them are on Facebook or Twitter. They seem to care about the Japanese future, but do they really act for Japanese policy, to change the national situation? I cannot really see it.’
About the time we met, the anti-nuclear movement had gathered some momentum. Big crowds, including some young people, had taken to congregating outside the prime minister’s office to demand an end to nuclear power. Imai doubted it would go far. ‘Just a few people are moving, acting. But I don’t think it’s having much impact,’ he said. ‘I want to become effective at changing Japanese policies. That’s why I am doing my non-profit work. In a few years, I would like to make suggestions to the national government.’ He paused, as if digesting the implications of all he had said, looking for a way to sum it up. ‘I don’t know what they should call my generation,’ he said finally. ‘Maybe the tough generation. Certainly not the happy generation.’