Coming Anarchy in Japan?

This is some creepy, creepy stuff. From Australia’s The Age.

When a 27-year-old woman and her three-year-old son died of starvation in their Tokyo home at the end of winter, it was a sign that something was going wrong in the second richest country in the world. Police said the mother and son had been dead for about a month, there was no food in the house and only eight yen (about 10 cents) in her purse.

It was February, still cold, when a rent collector saw the bodies through a window. A neighbour said that it had been three months since the pair had been outside. At the other end of town, on waterfront land an hour from Tokyo, a resort was marketing itself as “an oasis of repose and elegance far removed from the clamour of the big city”. It will not be built until 2008, but memberships costing more than 4 billion yen (A$47 million) have been presold in just two months.

Japan is having a midlife crisis. Sixty years since the end of World War II, it wants to change and modernise, but the makeover is painful. The hardest thing of all is looking in the mirror. Wrinkles and all, it’s not pretty.

The article requires a subscription, so I’ve included the entire thing below.

Japan’s midlife nightmare
By Deborah Cameron
July 23, 2005

As the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima nears, the nation that rose from the devastation is changing in painful ways.

When a 27-year-old woman and her three-year-old son died of starvation in their Tokyo home at the end of winter, it was a sign that something was going wrong in the second richest country in the world. Police said the mother and son had been dead for about a month, there was no food in the house and only eight yen (about 10 cents) in her purse.

It was February, still cold, when a rent collector saw the bodies through a window. A neighbour said that it had been three months since the pair had been outside. At the other end of town, on waterfront land an hour from Tokyo, a resort was marketing itself as “an oasis of repose and elegance far removed from the clamour of the big city”. It will not be built until 2008, but memberships costing more than 4 billion yen (A$47 million) have been presold in just two months.

The signs of Japan’s disintegrating social model of connectedness, restraint and shared aspirations are common. A few weeks ago, a 22-year-old scolded for doing her make-up in full view of everyone on a subway platform shoved her critic, an elderly woman, into the path of a train. Last week, a boy killed his parents and displayed no feelings about it at all, according to investigators.
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Japan is having a midlife crisis. Sixty years since the end of World War II, it wants to change and modernise, but the makeover is painful. The hardest thing of all is looking in the mirror. Wrinkles and all, it’s not pretty.

In April, national broadcaster NHK ran a three-hour documentary about gaps emerging in society – between rich and poor, men and women, educated and illiterate, those with families or alone, in a decent job or not, with assets or broke. Such issues are familiar in Australia but a shock for Japan.

“In short, the new economic realities are shaking the foundation of Japan’s 100 million-strong “middle class society”, said Professor Kondo Motohiro of Nihon University in an article headlined “Japan’s New Misfits”.

Keio University’s Masaru Kaneko said: “I do not think we can maintain our society in this way.” He also warned of an unfair education system that required parents to spend large amounts on extra tutoring and fees for university entrance exams – both out of the reach of low-income families. Rather than striving for the top, more people are being sucked into the vortex of ordinariness. Aspiration is withering. The number of people who define themselves as battlers – in the “lower middle” or “lower” classes – has risen from 23 per cent in 1994 to 34 per cent today. In a survey by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper last year, more than half of respondents said the gap between rich and poor was widening.

There is a crisis of confidence in the education system, with the Government about to announce a return to a six-day school week and scrapping a policy called “education that gives children room to grow”, introduced in 1977 with the aim of spawning more analytically-minded and creative graduates.

Sensing that children are ill-equipped for a rapidly internationalising and competitive global economy, parents are enrolling offspring as young as two in extra classes, particularly in English. One of the largest language schools, Nova Corporation, employed 3,300 English instructors last year, recruiting 35 per cent of its staff in Australia.

In international comparisons, the performance of Japanese children in science and mathematics, once the envy of the world, has declined. The Education Ministry estimates that 126,000 primary and high school students are regular truants. While some are running wild on the streets, many more are living as hermits inside their parents’ homes.

The ministry has started a national program to credit hermit students for study done at home, tacitly acknowledging that for some, a life of isolation is preferable to the pressure of the Japanese classroom.

Many other Japanese have also cut themselves off from society. Their lives are spent locked in their rooms for years, sometimes with curtains drawn or paper over the windows, watching television or doing nothing.

“They are terrified of having people say things like, ‘I hear that boy who lives there is a recluse,’ or ‘You never see him. Maybe he’s studying abroad,’ says Saito Tamaki, a psychiatrist and expert on the subject. “That is why they decide that the best thing to do is to completely hide themselves from view.”

Because they are hidden, it is hard to guess at the number, but volunteer groups set up to help hermits and their families say there are hundreds of thousands. A 2002 Health Ministry survey that investigated about 3300 hermit cases brought to its attention, said about one-third of the hermits were in their 30s.

Their families keep up the supply of food, feel ashamed about the social failure and sometimes confront them about getting a job or going back to school, but usually to no effect. Among rising instances of domestic violence in Japan are reports of deranged hermits who emerge from their room to slaughter their whole family.

Of course some are not insane at all, but simply bone idle. Inconceivably for Japan, the country’s work ethic is changing among some young people. About 850,000 people aged between 15 and 34 are described as “not in employment, education or training” (called NEETS). In this year’s budget, the Government set aside 67.9 billion yen for programs to motivate both that group and four million freelancers, known as “freeters”, who do not seek full-time employment and are criticised for their lack of ambition.

“If we look at Japanese society today, the problem with freeters is considered a big issue, but the problems with education are also a big issue,” said Yasayuki Nambu, chief executive of labour-outsourcing company Pasona Inc and one of the nation’s richest and best-connected men. “I think we need to talk about dreams or visions,” Mr Nambu said. “A dream might be to have a job . . . your company listed on the stock exchange, a big house, things like that. Vision goes beyond that; it goes beyond the individual.

“Unfortunately, education in Japan right now is very much black and white kind of education – you are basically told that one way is right and one way is wrong. It does not allow you to develop a bigger vision.” Mr Nambu believes that the most disillusioned group are the children of salary men and blue-collar manufacturing sector employees, the loyal soldiers of Japan’s postwar economy.

“These blue-collar workers have been in a situation for many years where they are worrying about being restructured and not having a job; they are worried about pensions; they are worried about longer-term welfare. And these conversations that their parents have had reach the ears of children who realise that they are living in a society that seems prosperous to some extent but that also doesn’t seem to have any great fulfilling moments.”

It is summer sale time in Tokyo and there are “40 per cent off” signs in department stores and boutiques everywhere. Consumer spending, about 50 per cent of Japan’s gross domestic product, appears to be on the way back up, lifting the spirits of business. The main index of business confidence last week reported its first positive result in three quarters. After more than a decade of recession or stuttering recovery, the result sent the Nikkei sharemarket index rising to its highest level for months.

Even accounting for the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, China’s gross domestic product is only about one-third of Japan’s, and GDP per capita in China is about a 40th of Japan’s. When it comes to consumerism, China is a squalling infant compared with the maturity of Japan.

On population though, Japan is facing a kind of doomsday. From next year, the country’s population will go into decline, with deaths outnumbering births. Because there is no immigration program and none is being seriously proposed, a tomb is waiting. Demographers estimate that the population will peak next year at 127.5 million and then fall to between 92 and 100 million by 2050, affecting the economy, the workforce, tax collection and the structure of government spending, not to mention more ephemeral considerations including Japan’s youthful image and cool popular culture.

Given the retirement of baby-boomers, fewer young workers, the low birthrate and children who are not as diligent as their parents, the labour force is predicted to shrink and economic growth could be crimped.

To try to fend off the labour shortage, the Government has revised the retirement age to 65, starting next year, and is torn between urging women to work or have children. By 2050 almost 40 million people will be over 65, researchers say.

Time is running out. The internal conflicts of Japan’s midlife crisis might make it wise-up. But in a country with a special tolerance for hermits, it could just as easily try to ignore the problems. Perhaps a benign acceptance will set in. Another possibility, the most worrying for the region, is that it will end up like an angry and wizened pensioner: rigid, dyspeptic and looking for someone to blame.