Drawing conclusions from Japanese demographics

THE REALITIES OF DEMOGRAPHICS and the aging of Japanese society are causing some people, primarily in private-sector businesses, to draw their own conclusions and act accordingly. Meanwhile, others are oblivious to the new realities because they can’t see–or don’t want to see–beyond their own front yard. The latter group might wind up regretting their failure to pay attention.

Here are some examples:

Item 1

The Nishinippon Shimbun published a survey earlier this week that revealed 58 hospitals and clinics in all seven Kyushu prefectures eliminated their pediatric wards during the period from April 2007 to April 2008. The primary reasons cited for the step included the declining number of children and a shortage of pediatricians. In contrast, 35 facilities added an internal medicine ward.

Some hospital officials pointed out the difficulties of pediatric practice. Because both parents are working in many more families than before, they take their children for medical examinations during their off hours, when most examinations are being conducted on emergency patients. It is also difficult to determine the severity of a child’s illness, and illnesses in children tend to become more severe more quickly than in adults. That means pediatricians must work longer hours without a commensurate increase in pay.

The 2004 reform of the system for medical education resulted in greater freedom for students to select their course of study. Since then, the number of medical students choosing pediatrics has sharply declined.

One hospital director also cited business factors as a reason. The remuneration for treating children is low, their diagnosis and treatment involve a lot of time and trouble, and fewer tests and drugs are ordered. Pediatrics always has been a money-loser for hospitals, but the falling population of children has spurred the elimination of the wards that treat them.

Here’s what is being left unsaid, but is perfectly obvious: Bright young medical students have drawn the conclusion that pediatrics is not a growth sector in Japan, and some hospitals think the sector is more trouble than it’s worth.

Why are pediatrics wards becoming unnecessary in some hospitals?

Item 2

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications released a report for 5 May–Children’s Day–estimating the national population of children on 1 April this year. The estimate counted a record low of 17,250,000 children aged 14 or younger, down 30,000 from the previous year. The number of children in this category have declined every year since 1982, or 27 straight years. According to the ministry, this age group accounts for 13.5% of the population, one of the lowest levels in the world. This percentage has been dropping for 34 consecutive years.

On the same day, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (link also on right sidebar) reported there will be fewer than 15 million children by 2015, and they will account for less than 12% of the population. The institute said that urgent measures were needed to deal with this situation.

The institute broke down the percentages by prefecture. Tokyo had the lowest percentage with 11.7%, followed by Akita with 11.8%. This is significant because these two locations represent different population extremes. It isn’t surprising that there would be fewer children in Tokyo, a megalopolis with a high percentage of singles. But Akita is a more rural prefecture with a much smaller urban population.

The prefecture with the highest percentage of children was sunny Okinawa at 18.1%. The only one in which the percentage of children rose over the past year was Tokyo–by 0.1%.

The private sector has drawn its own conclusions from this information and is taking steps to seize their financial opportunities.

Item 3

On the same day that its report on local pediatrics wards appeared, the Nishinippon Shimbun ran a feature explaining that Kyushu Electric Power, Saibu Gas, Nishitetsu Railroad, and other big businesses in the Kyushu region are ramping up their business investments in homes for the aged by building facilities on their unused land holdings. These companies are parlaying their name recognition to create facilities that provide services similar to those of hotels. Some are assisted care facilities that require initial payments ranging from several hundred thousand yen to several million yen, and a few upscale institutions require initial entry payments of more than 100 million yen (about US$ 952,000).

A facility built in Fukuoka City by Saibu Gas has 122 units on 24 floors with Italian furniture in every unit and a natural hot spring on the premises. The minimum entry fee is 30 million yen. It opened in 2006 and is now 40% occupied. Two of those units carried the 100-million-yen price tag.

The extreme aging of society

Recall that the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecast that children aged 14 and younger would account for less than 12% of the population in seven years. Statistics from the institute’s website also show that the percentage of Japan’s population aged 75 and older rose from 1.4% in 1930 to 4.7% in 1995 and to 8.8% in 2004.

Everyone knows the reasons for this: the Japanese are a healthier people to begin with, and they are living longer as a result of the advances in medical science.

That means the day there are more people aged 75 in Japan than those younger than 15 is just over the horizon. How far away is it? We might be able to count the years on our fingers, with a few toes thrown in.

To its credit, the Japanese government drew its own conclusions about this situation a long time ago. Japan’s semi-socialized medical system provides exceptional care with few of the drawbacks of the systems in Canada or Great Britain, for example. Until recently, the elderly were required to pay just 10% of their costs, and those who were registered as dependents of employed children (not unusual in this East Asian country) were exempt from payments altogether.

Considering the general abundance of modern life and the success of the Japanese pension system, the elderly—who are naturally the primary consumers of health care—had quite a deal for themselves.

But the country is in a difficult fiscal situation: gross public debt is more than 170% of GDP and is expected to continue to rise. More old people are using more health care resources paid for by public funds. And the tax-paying population is going to decline in the future, not grow.

The government began planning changes in the system a few years ago, and they inaugurated the new system on 1 April this year. Those people aged 75 and older will be required to be responsible for their own health care costs (though this has been purposely delayed to limit the political backlash), and there was a marginal increase in the monthly payments.

It’s difficult to blame anyone for the inevitable uproar that resulted.

Gray anger

The government is trying to keep outlays from getting out of hand. It’s not unreasonable to expect people to assume more responsibility for their health care, particularly when the system is so generous and affordable to begin with.

People who have ceded their responsibility for the basic functions of life to the government are not going to act their age when that government tells them fairness requires they start assuming more personal responsibility.

As the novelist Upton Sinclair once observed, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Replace salary here with benefits, and the statement describes the reaction of many Japanese elderly to the new system.

One old man on the street interviewed for national television blustered for the camera that it was as if the government was telling him it hoped he died early. In fact, some people have started calling this the “hurry up and die” insurance system.

The reaction was so intense it was cited as one of the reasons for the defeat of the ruling party’s candidate in a by-election for a lower house seat in Yamaguchi.

Yes, that is blubbering selfish stupidity, but no one seems anxious to set them straight. Indeed, no one explained the new system to them to begin with. Discussions about the reforms became public around the time the war in Iraq started, and the mass media, being an entertainment enterprise, knows it’s more entertaining when people die, preferably in explosions. Instead of covering a development that involved all Japanese, they devoted their time and resources to covering a story that involved almost no Japanese.

And when it became a public issue, the media chose to fan the political flames and turn it a potential election issue between the ruling party and the opposition rather than discuss it in a reasonable way.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government is not known for the ability to communicate with its citizens.

Failing to connect the dots

The only ones who seem to be unable to draw any conclusions are those people over the age of 75, though they are probably hiding their eyes deliberately. The government is fiscally strapped. Personal liability for health care costs is low. The population is rapidly aging, and more elderly are using health care services more often. The number of children is rapidly declining, which means the pool of potential taxpayers to pay the bills is shrinking.

And yen trees don’t grow in the gardens of Nagata-cho.

Responding to the criticism, Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo said the government would study ways to alleviate the burden on the lower-income elderly using funds from the national budget, but the new system would remain in place.

The contours of future developments are not difficult to make out, however. As health care costs continue to rise in tandem with the number of late-stage elderly, the older citizens will exercise their right to vote until they find a party that will shelter them from financial reality.

There will be no shortage of politicians volunteering for the task.

But that will inevitably place a larger financial burden on an increasingly smaller group of younger people who are employed. As with other social welfare programs, the Japanese health care system shares the same characteristics as a pyramid scheme—it requires a growing population to sustain, and that’s no longer possible in Japan. The taxpaying population won’t put up with it forever, and one day they will demand tax relief, perhaps with an American-style taxpayer revolt.

In that scenario, the logical first step would be to ration health care. Arguments in favor of that step already are being made elsewhere. As this article points out:

(In the book Setting Limits, author Daniel) Callahan proposed that the government refuse to pay for life-extending medical care for individuals beyond the age of 70 or 80, and only pay for routine care aimed at relieving their pain.

As we’ve seen, some people have been calling the new Japanese health care plan for the late-stage elderly the “hurry up and die” system. Of course that’s just silly, but it’s time those people started drawing conclusions of their own.

Otherwise, before too long, they might find that the rest of society really has begun to wish they would hurry up and die.

Cars losing cachet in Japan?

A NEW SOCIAL TREND in Japan? The Japanese Automobile Manufacturers’ Association revealed the results of its FY 2007 market trend survey showing that younger Japanese are less interested in car ownership than ever before.

The key figure in the survey is the percentage of primary drivers younger than age 30 in all households that own cars. (The primary driver is defined as that person with the greatest frequency of automobile operation in the household.) This percentage slid four points from the survey conducted five years ago to 7%. That’s the first time this percentage has ever been in single digits.

An association source says this percentage stood at 19% in 1995. Those in the 20-29 age group also accounted for 19% of the population that year. They now account for 14%. Therefore, the decline in primary drivers in that age group has been steeper than the drop in the ratio of that group to the overall population during the same period.

A similar survey conducted by the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living of men in their 20s uncovered a parallel trend. When asked what they would spend their money on, 31% of the guys in 1996 answered cars. That figure fell to 16% in 2006.

These surveys do not show a corresponding decline for people in their late 30s and older.

An analyst from Demeken (an abbreviation of the Japanese for Digital Media Research Institute) says this represents a shift in the attitude of the generation who grew up in the Internet era amidst the detritus of the collapse of the bubble economy in the 1990s. The people in this age group, he suggests, place more importance on use rather than ownership.

He notes that many in the youngest adult generation view cars merely as a means for transportation and not as a status symbol, as they were for previous generations of postwar Japanese.

Buttressing this analysis is the 35% increase in the number of rental cars in Japan during the 10-year period ended in 2006. Meanwhile, automobile sales fell during that period. (The largest decline occurred from 1995 to 2001).

The Nishinippon Shimbun, the newspaper in which this article appeared, views this as a matter of concern. They’re based in Fukuoka, and local governments and business organizations in northern Kyushu have been lobbying hard—with great success—to attract companies in the auto industry.

The article failed to provide a breakdown by region for these figures, however. It’s a lot easier to get around without a car in Tokyo or Osaka than it is in an area with a lower population density. With the exception of those who live in Fukuoka City, most people in Kyushu would find a car-less life quite inconvenient.

Nevertheless, there has been a noticeable shift in the attitude toward automobiles compared to the early 80s, when I first came to Japan. In those days, it was still the rule for people to work on Saturdays (at least half a day). I was surprised then at the number of people in their 20s whose idea of a good time on Sunday was to go on an all-day automobile jaunt. They went just for the drive and had no specific objective for the trip, such as to attend a concert or sporting event. After driving a few hours in one direction, they’d have something to eat, fool around a little bit, and then turn around and drive back home.

That doesn’t seem to be the case now.

Kicking the smoking habit in 19th century Japan

ONE OF THE FIRST no-smoking signs in Japan has been discovered in a Shinto shrine in Hokuto, Hokkaido.

Well, it’s not really a sign—it’s actually called an ema in Japanese, or votive tablet, and it hung in a local farmhouse about 120 years ago. Two young men wrote a prayer on it asking for the strength to swear off smoking. The tablet is 60 centimeters high and 30 centimeters wide, and contains a 50-centimeter-long kiseru, an old-fashioned pipe that was used to toke single hits of tobacco. The pipe is made from the wood of the Japanese angelica tree, otherwise known as aralia elata.

The tablet was found hanging on the wall of the main hall of the Fumitsuki Inari Shinto shrine, which was built in the early 19th century. If anyone knows how it got from the wall of a farmhouse to the wall of a Shinto shrine, they’re not talking. Also written on the ema is the date and the names of the two men who offered the dedication. It often happens in Japan that examining one aspect of a historical matter brings several others to light, and this is no exception–a little digging discovered that one of the men was the descendant of the first farmer to successfully cultivate rice in Hokkaido in 1692.

The local historian who found it (the 83-year-old gentleman on the right in the photo) observed that it was an interesting example of folk history that conveys the struggles people went through to give up the habit, and that it might be the first item of its kind found in Hokkaido. The historian, incidentally, has been visiting Hokkaido’s Shinto shrines since 1989 to examine about 500 of these tablets. According to the Japanese Tobacco and Salt Museum, several old votive tablets using kiseru have been discovered throughout the country, which leads them to believe it was once a custom to offer a prayer for some help in kicking the devil weed.

The Museum should know: take a look at this older post on the institution, or visit their website here or on the right sidebar.

Did the ema work? Who knows, but they were probably as effective as nicotine replacement therapy, nicotine chewing gum, nicotine patches, inhalers, nasal sprays, the prescription drug bupropion hydrochloride, videos, support groups, toothpicks, or beating the dog. Statistics show that 90% of the long-term smokers who quit did so by going cold turkey!

Koga Takeo (1950-2008)

SORRY FOR THE LIGHT POSTING lately, but the end of the fiscal year in Japan is a busy one for translators, and other things have been occupying my time this week as well. On Monday afternoon, Koga Takeo, the man who got me to Japan 24 years ago this month (and the nakodo at my wedding three years later) died. His wake was held tonight, and the funeral will be held tomorrow.

Ordinarily Japan is the subject here rather than anything to do with me, but in many ways, to talk about Mr. Koga is to talk about grass-roots Japanese internationalism over the last quarter of the 20th century. To the extent that Japanese society, a former feudal domain that emerged from its self-isolation in a particularly unpleasant way, is now enthusiastically and pleasantly engaged on a variety of levels with the rest of the world, is due to people like Mr. Koga and thousands of people like him in cities and towns throughout the country.

The obituary in the newspaper noted that he was a pioneer (kusawake, literally grass-parter) of international exchange activities in the prefecture, and that doesn’t begin to describe it. The man was a veritable fountain of ideas, and he had the energy to pull most of them off and the persuasiveness to get people to go along with him. He was the founder of three different enterprises (all of which continue to operate today), as well as an instructor in Wado-ryu karate with his own dojo. (He was seventh dan.) It was not unusual for him to spend summer vacations leading a group of students to stay in a remote Thai village that lacked electricity or running water.

On one occasion some years ago, I was part of a group of people bouncing around ideas for solving his latest problem. He was trying to figure out how to find the money to ship two buses to Thailand that he had convinced the local bus company to donate to an orphanage in that country. It took him a while to get them there, but it was just the sort of thing he enjoyed doing.

He had created a scholarship fund for that orphanage, and there were two reasons for his involvement with it. First, he wanted Japanese to become more aware of Asia, and second, he wanted poverty-stricken orphans in rural Thailand to go as far in school as they could. In a country where uneducated country girls often wind up in the sex industry, that is a very big deal.

He convinced his hometown to form sister-city ties with a small town in the United States, and then served as the interpreter during the formal signing ceremony. He also could have interpreted had the ceremony been conducted in French. Ten years ago in Busan, I had a couple of late-night drinks with him in a pojang macha (I think they’re called), a sort of yatai, or street stall, but with the selection of a yakitori restaurant, and his conversational Korean was good enough for all the other customers.

He thought that too often for Japanese, foreigners = Caucasians, so he embarked on a one-man affirmative action program of hiring as English teachers people from such countries as Sri Lanka, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Zaire whenever he could.

Here is the website of the Terra People Organization, the NPO/NGO he founded. (Only in Japanese, unfortunately) His greeting (which is a bit cosmic) and photo are on this page.

As if that weren’t enough, he was always coming up with ideas for projects on the side. For example, he conceived the idea of filming The Wings of A Man, the story of the only Japanese professional baseball player to die as a kamikaze pilot, and wound up borrowing money from the bank himself to finance the bulk of it.

He also had his eccentric aspects. I have seen him show up for events dressed in an informal men’s kimono, a black cape lined in pink, and a bowler hat. Apparently, he was like that as a young man, too. His first job was as a high school English teacher, and his classroom attire was a t-shirt, shorts, and sandals.

Oh, and did I mention he shaved his head like a monk? He said a priest gave him permission to do so.

The subheading to this site is “Japan from the Inside Out”, and the reason I was allowed that vantage point is because he was the one who opened the door and invited me in. To be sure, participation in Japanese society as an equal (with no special favors) is exactly what I wanted, and that is exactly what he insisted upon from his foreign employees. Still, it is surprising even today that many foreigners who talk about internationalism and their interest in Japan and the Japanese are really just blowing smoke. It is also surprising how many Japanese still give them a pass.

But I continue to learn things from him, even indirectly. At the wake, his son delivered a short eulogy in which he said, “My father was like a storm who always thought what he wanted, said what he wanted, and did what he wanted. Many of you might have been engulfed by that storm and suffered some damage from it, but we ask you to forgive him.”

That’s when I learned that the Japanese can laugh at a funeral, as well as cry.

The final scene in the movie Leo the Last, made in 1970 during a period of global social upheaval, shows the star Marcello Mastroianni lying in a heap in the street with the neighbors after an explosion on his block. One of his neighbors tells him, “You can’t change the world.” Mastroianni replies, no you can’t, but you can change your street.

Koga Takeo didn’t change the world, but he certainly changed a lot more than his street. Over the years, he inspired more young people than I can count to expand their horizons, travel the world, and accomplish things they couldn’t have imagined trying before they met him.

Before going to his wake tonight, my wife and I calculated how much time it would take to drive to the funeral parlor and set out accordingly. So many people came that it caused a traffic jam, and we arrived 25 minutes later than we planned. Goodness knows what it will be like at the funeral tomorrow.

He died 10 days short of his 58th birthday. May he rest in peace.

Update: I don’t know how long the link will last, but here’s a Japanese-language story about his funeral with a photo that appeared in the regional newspaper. Attendance was estimated at about 1,000, and that is no exaggeration. The prefectural governor delivered one of the eulogies, in which he said, “That a person such as him even existed is a marvel.” That about sums it up.

Logos, pathos, and Japanese politics

IT’S STILL TOO EARLY for a major retrospective of the Koizumi Jun’ichiro administration, which ended only 17 months ago, so I almost turned the newspaper page without reading the review of the book, Koizumi Seiken—Patosu no Shusho wa Nani wo Kaeta no ka?, or The Koizumi Administration: What Did the Prime Minister of Pathos Change? by University of Tokyo professor Uchiyama Yu.

But I’m glad I didn’t turn the page, because one passage in particular was key to understanding an important aspect of Japanese politics. The newspaper reviewer recapped the events of the Koizumi Administration—the third longest in the postwar period, the privatization of the postal system and the public road corporation, the dispatch of Self-Defense forces to Iraq, the visits to North Korea and Yasukuni Shrine, and his efforts to effectively dismantle his own party.

Then this section followed (my translation):

(Professor Uchiyama) discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a strong prime minister who frequently resorted to pathos (passions, sentiment) and top-down methods of governing. Even today, (Koizumi) still tops the list in some public opinion surveys when people are asked, “Who would you like to see as the next prime minister?” Many young LDP Diet members beseeched him to run in the most recent election for party president. But the author points out the dangers of Koizumi’s incorporation of pathos into politics, which was symbolic of his approach of stripping logos (reason and language) from politics, thereby weakening the logic of responsibility.

Not only does that quote describe one of the characteristics that set Mr. Koizumi apart from the other politicians in this country, it also goes a long way toward elucidating what many Japanese believe is the political ideal. There is a palpable sense of distrust of those politicians who appeal to the emotions of the people to enlist popular support.

This might explain why many foreign observers find Japanese politicians to be bland and colorless. Those same observers sometimes make the mistake of thinking those politicians are just as bland at home as at work–or perhaps they just choose to present them that way. But anyone who lives in Japanese society for any length of time realizes that most politicians across the political spectrum do have personalities; it’s just that people here are expected to behave in a certain way when they have serious jobs.

Obviously this aversion to pathos has not always predominated in Japan. It would be impossible to conduct a war and build an empire over several decades without resorting to pathos to arouse and involve the people.

But that has not been the case in the postwar period. After their defeat in the war, perhaps the Japanese developed an antipathy to the use of emotional political appeals as they applied themselves to studying and incorporating the principles of liberal democracy.

That would be in very sharp contrast to the people who tutored them in democracy during the Allied occupation. Americans are almost shameless in their preference for pathos over logos in their own political system, despite the lip service they give the latter. That’s why it’s instructive to read this paper, The Sentimentalization of American Political Rhetoric, written by Bruce E. Gronbeck in 2005.

The Director of the University of Iowa’s Center for Media Studies and Political Culture, Prof. Gronbeck argues that pathos is just as important to political discourse as logos, though he does briefly review the arguments against pathos in the West starting with the ancient Greeks. The professor states his objective as follows:

The goal is to suggest how imaged sentimentalization can contribute to citizen engagement.

He asserts that:

(S)entimentalization can be essential for creating and maintaining political identity and can provide motivational grounds for political action.

And:

To try to excise the emotional in the name of political sanity and moral sanitation is to attempt the impossible while turning away from the humanizing capacities of sentiment, sympathy, empathy, or sheer feeling.

He concludes:

We can profit more politically from vision-sensitive knowing and feeling-driven action than we must lose to them.

As the last quote indicates, Prof. Gronbeck focuses on the use of pathos as projected through the medium of television. Here are some examples he cites from American political conventions:

1. “Aretha Franklin’s performance of the national anthem for the Democratic National Convention in 1992. She opened up the text by turning The Star Spangled Banner into soul music.”
2. “In 1992, the Republicans used Louis Armstrong’s It’s a Wonderful World with a film of sentimental images. It is heavy on happy children of varied ethnic backgrounds; it includes the young and middle-aged along with elderly adults living the good life. It shows diverse families hugging, praying and worshipping, playing sports and family games, and greeting each other warmly.”
3. “Four years earlier, the Republicans had aired an ad late in the campaign that began and ended with candidate Bush holding a granddaughter. It intercut shots of mass adoration for Bush…with the Bush family barbequing together and Bush pledges to foster a kinder, gentler nation by listening to the voices of the quiet people who loved him.”
4. “In 1996, the Democratic National Convention rolled out Christopher Reeve on American Hero Night. This was his first major public appearance following his paralysis. He spoke of family values and the political family that would join him to fight not only for research on spinal-chord (sic) injuries but also for helping all citizens without support. His appeal for party dedication to all in need was empowered emotionally by sights of his sheer, if awkward, physical presence: laid back in a head-locking, body-cradling power chair.”
5. “Perhaps even more dramatic and equally sentimental was AIDS activist Mary Fisher’s appearance on the GOP stage that year with a twelve-year-old African American girl. Heideia had been an AIDS baby, and she read a poem about her ambition to be anything she wanted. Fisher added that, when AIDS has its way with me, her children will belong to the community.”
6. “(T)he highlight of appeals to personalized sympathy at the 1996 conventions was the seven-minute, breath-by-breath description from Vice President Al Gore of his sister Nancy’s death from lung cancer. On the big screen, the Democratic Party and nationwide television audiences saw Gore narrate a story of regret, sorrow, then anger at the tobacco companies. The party audience was stunned into silence as Gore gulped for air, fought off emotional breakups, and allowed Nancy’s death to turn him into an instrument of political wrath. The cutaway shots of delegates paralleled the shots of Gore, as television viewers saw concern evolve into tears then an outpouring of support for the David ready to take on the Goliaths of corporate tobaccodom.”

Compared to these examples, what the Japanese press criticized as Koizumi Theater seems very tame indeed.

It’s clear that Prof. Gronbeck found Al Gore’s use of pathos to be the most impressive. As it turned out, however, Mr. Gore’s performance, rather than exemplifying the positive uses of pathos in politics, underscored the negative aspects of its use. Mark Steyn explains why in this 11 January 1997 article in The Spectator:

Many a tear has been jerked, but it’s all in the grand game of ensuring that, in three years, Albert Gore Jnr meets his rendezvous with destiny. To that end, everything must be pressed into service, including his routinely touted stricken relatives: in his speech to the 1992 Democratic convention, it was his son, who was nearly killed in a car crash; at the 1996 convention, it was his sister, who died of lung cancer. Gore `loved her more than life itself’, he told America in a hushed voice, and paused. `Tomorrow morning, a 13-year- old girl will start smoking. I love her, too.’ By this time, the gaps between his words were big enough to smoke half a pack of Marlboros in, `And that is why until I draw my last breath I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking.’

No network news anchor saw fit to mention a speech Gore made in 1988, four years after his sister’s death: `Throughout most of my life, I’ve raised tobacco,’ he told a North Carolina audience. `I’ve hoed it, I’ve chopped it, I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn, stripped it and sold it.’ No television correspondent pointed out that in 1990, six years after the `nearly unbearable pain’ of his sister’s death, Gore was still taking campaign contributions from the tobacco industry.

Eventually, the Washington Post caught up with him and asked him why, if he was that devastated, he’d carried on hoeing, chopping, shredding, spiking, stripping and selling the stuff. His answer was ingenious: ‘I felt the numbness that prevented me from integrating into all aspects of my life the implications of what that tragedy really meant,’ he said. `We are in the midst of a profound shift in the way we approach issues. I really do believe that in our politics and in our personal lives, we are seeing an effort to integrate our emotional lives in a more balanced fashion.’

Now you see why the mere mention of Al Gore’s name induces eye-rolling in vast swaths of continental America.

It is apparent from the behavior of both parties in the current presidential campaign that pathos-based appeals still predominate in the American political process, and even their ostensibly logos-based appeals come wrapped in pathos. Indeed, it would be interesting to calculate how often today’s American Democratic candidates use the word “change” and compare that with the frequency of Mr. Koizumi’s use of the word “reform”.

But to return to the original point, it is difficult to imagine the Japanese indulging in spectacles such as those cited by Prof. Gronbeck to create political excitement and encourage popular participation. That is not to say that Japanese are not susceptible to pathos; the public were enthusiastic patrons of the Koizumi Theater. It’s just that pathos does not always mix well with politics here.

It should be noted that the American political examples cited as pathos are really examples of the degeneration of that concept into bathos, or trivial sentimentality—a fate that has befallen the texture of American culture as a whole. This might have escaped Prof. Gronbeck’s notice because he lives in that culture, and he is unaware of it in the same way a fish is unaware of the water. But Japan has not yet reached that point.

Also, the Japanese do not hold political conventions, and the sort of hoopla that both American parties still revel in every four years is unlikely to go over well here (if it would go over anywhere else, for that matter).

All of this might serve to put the administration of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in a different perspective. In retrospect, Mr. Abe’s idea of Japan as a beautiful country was an attempt to incorporate pathos in his own political approach, albeit nothing as heavy-handed as that used routinely by both parties in the U.S. The Japanese, he asserted, no longer have to be ashamed of themselves and apologize for being Japanese, because the bad old days are gone. We’ve paid our penance, so it is time to leave the post-war order behind. There’s nothing wrong with honoring our national anthem and flag, even though they were temporarily used as symbols for unsavory ends.

The amount of opposition he stirred up in some quarters is worthy of note. His opponents in Japan and overseas rolled out the heavy artillery to brand him as a nationalist, but a careful examination of his words and deeds would reveal that in other countries—such as the United States—his political stands would be considered an unremarkable display of patriotism, with a lower-case p.

To be sure, many of the people who labeled him a nationalist were those for whom patriotism is either an unfamiliar concept or a dirty word. Those in the press who applied the glue to the back of the label either shared the world view of the labelers or parroted them because their knowledge of him came second hand.

While people everywhere are susceptible to the use of pathos and respond positively to it, it might be the case that the Japanese remain more cautious about how and when it is used. Mr. Koizumi used emotional appeals to sway the electorate, but he was an adroit, skillful politician with an engaging personality. In contrast, Mr. Abe lacked political skills, and his personality, while not unpleasant, tended toward the bland businesslike demeanor Japanese expect from men at work.

It is interesting to speculate what might have happened had Mr. Koizumi applied his skills and personality to propagating Mr. Abe’s themes as well as his own. His popularity in Japan certainly didn’t suffer because of his Yasukuni visits. I suspect Mr. Koizumi would have been more successful in promoting Mr. Abe’s agenda than some critics might want us to believe, but that is of course unknowable.

Another unknowable element is what will happen to the political process in Japan in the future. As memories of the past fade and a competitive two-party system becomes firmly established, a greater incorporation of pathos in politics is likely.

Both the expression of the Japanese political ideal and the reality of political discourse today might be gleaned from comments in Sangi-in Nanka Iranai (which I’m tempted to translate as We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Upper House), a book-length roundtable discussion featuring the participation of former upper house members Murakami Masakuni of the Liberal Democratic Party, Hirano Sadao of the Democratic Party of Japan, and Fudesaka Hideyo of the Communist Party.

Mr. Murakami expresses the ideal for politicians in Japan with logos-based principles that aren’t often heard in the United States these days:

Politics must be more sober and serious. Politicians need to be popular, but the pursuit of popularity must not be the objective of politics. To do so is to mistake the means for the end. There also must be a standard of morality, in which the minimum condition is that the politician must not lie.

It is important to remember that Mr. Murakami means what he says.

Ideals as these, however, must confront the reality that people consume politics through television, and that the demands of television are intrinsically pathos-based and seek the dramatic rather than the sober and the serious. Politicians become the servants of television, rather than the other way around. Mr. Hirano told a story about a television appearance he made last year:

When I recently appeared on a television program, the subjects of conversation were all about political crises involving the upper house election. I blurted out that we should discuss the reform of the upper house and its role in politics. All the other people on the program agreed with me. But that part was cut out of the broadcast.

I don’t expect to see a Japanese politician follow the lead of Al Gore and use the techniques of daytime soap opera in an election campaign, but it’s also likely that Prof. Uchiyama is fighting a losing battle if he wants to keep pathos out of Japanese politics.

Let’s hope that Japan is more successful than the Americans at resisting the temptation to indulge in bathos.

Endnotes:

1. Both Mr. Murakami and Mr. Fudesaka resigned from the upper house under a cloud—Mr. Murakami because of a financial scandal (he protests his innocence) and Mr. Fudesaka because of sexual harassment charges (which he admitted were true).

2. People may find Prof. Gronbeck’s paper difficult to read, particularly non-native speakers of English. He is an academic in the social sciences writing for other academics in the same discipline, which means clarity is not essential, and he is not a particularly good writer to begin with. He also tends to use words that few people will understand, such as “psycho-epistemological” (assuming that word means something in the real world). It took me three tries before I could get through the essay from start to finish without stopping and without my eyes glazing over.

The WaPo’s cure for Japan’s demographic ills

BLAINE HARDEN OF THE WASHINGTON POST offers another textbook example of two-dimensional journalism about Japan in an article titled Demographic Crisis, Robotic Cure?

Ostensibly, the article has two major points:

1. The Japanese face the most serious demographic crisis of any nation in the world today. The country’s population could shrink to 42 million by this time next century.
2. Japan chooses to deal with the looming labor shortage through the development of robots, not through immigration.

But even a casual reading of the article makes it apparent that the two points Mr. Harden really wishes to present are these:

1. The Japanese face the most serious demographic crisis of any nation in the world today. The country’s population could shrink to 42 million by this time next century.
2. Japan is still too racist, xenophobic, and ethnocentric to allow the problem to be solved by immigrants, and working women don’t want to have children because the country’s men are still too sexist to help with child-rearing and the housework. The Japanese are such dweebs they’d rather develop robots instead.

Pay attention and you’ll have no trouble spotting the standard techniques: Mr. Harden finds some people who support the idea he wishes to present and inserts their quotes at points chosen for maximum effect. Knowing that newspaper readers often will not finish an entire article, he places the mitigating information toward the rear. He then rebuts the mitigating information himself with more tailor-made quotes, and gives the rebuttal substantially more space than the counterargument.

And most typical of all, Mr. Harden unobtrusively inserts the real point of the article at other carefully chosen points. He finds a Japanese to propose immigration as the only “rational” solution to the problem—without a rational examination of its ramifications—and then slips the knife into the Japanese in the last clause by claiming they won’t consider it (emphasis mine):

What ails this prosperous nation could be treated with babies and immigrants. Yet many young women here do not want children, and the Japanese will not tolerate a lot of immigrants.

He does it again here:

Highly restrictive and aggressively enforced immigration laws have broad support from the Japanese public, which blames immigrants for crime, impolite behavior and untidiness.

He gets this quote out of a foreign observer:

“(Robots) are a nice excuse not to address the issue of immigration. They do not cause crime. They are not foreign people.”

Does he make a solid case that immigration would work? If he does, it certainly eludes me. Japan has a serious demographic problem, but the author has not made the effort to consider the real-world implications of the solution he clearly supports. Perhaps he is too enamored of the multicultural fantasy to recognize its inherent flaws. Or perhaps, as we’ve seen before, a negative view of Japan is the default position of the Washington Post.

Foreign residents in Japan

But consider this: Japan has no problem admitting educated foreigners with job skills and permitting the long-term residence of those foreigners who have demonstrated a willingness to acclimate themselves to life here. In fact, I am a de facto “immigrant”—I’ve lived in the country nearly 24 years, I own a home, my business is in Japan, and I have a permanent resident visa. No one in Japan placed any obstacles in my way for any of this, and most of it was achieved with Japanese encouragement and support. All it took was a willingness to stay employed, obey the law, and learn the Japanese language.

And I’m not alone–there are plenty of non-Japanese of all nationalities here doing exactly what I’m doing.

But Mr. Harden is using a proxy to make the case for the admission of “at least” 10 million immigrant workers. (Elsewhere, that proxy has suggested 20 million immigrants.) It is unlikely that he, or anyone else who advocates that solution, has given serious thought to what that would entail.

An ill-considered solution

The work for which robots are being considered is the simplest of manual labor. If three- or four-generation households were still common in Japan, the task of feeding an enfeebled older person, for example, might be handled by any child older than 10. A sophisticated set of job skills is not a requirement.

Therefore, the people the proponents of massive immigration insist Japan should admit would largely be unskilled and uneducated labor.

Where would they come from? Well, some would come from China—ambitious Chinese have emigrated all over the globe for years. The next most likely source in East Asia would be The Philippines. But ten million people is roughly 8% of Japan’s current population. Where would Japan find the rest of the hired help?

I’ve worked in three municipal jurisdictions as an interpreter for prosecutors interviewing overseas manual laborers caught while being smuggled into the country by Korean fishermen, so I know from experience where many of them would come from: countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

In essence, what the immigration proponents and their cheering section in the Western media are proposing is that Japan should embark on the biggest planned immigration program in history by importing and assimilating 10 million unskilled, and by definition uneducated, workers ill-equipped to handle the tsunami of culture shock awaiting them. Here’s what Mr. Harden’s Japanese proxy suggested:

“Robots can be useful, but they cannot come close to overcoming the problem of population decline,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, former head of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau and now director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, a research group in Tokyo.
“The government would do much better spending its money to recruit, educate and nurture immigrants,” he said.

Ten million of them? To plan and build the infrastructure for recruiting that many unskilled laborers to perform menial tasks, educating them to become self-sufficient in one of the most difficult foreign languages to learn—an effort that would require the better part of a decade, assuming they studied in earnest—and “nurturing” them to enable them to survive comfortably in a country with a distinctive culture vastly different from their countries of origin, demands a massive, prioritized effort by the national government that would render it incapable of devoting its attention to the real matters of state.

And there is no guarantee that such an effort would even succeed. The only countries that have successfully accepted and integrated large numbers of immigrants are those countries founded by immigrants to begin with.

Post-immigration Japan

But as we’ve seen in Europe, the progressive multiculturalists would respond to these difficulties by demanding that Japan itself change to accommodate the immigrants and allow them to retain their own languages and culture. Indeed, a hallmark of European multiculturalists is that they do not want the immigrants to assimilate. That would be much too judgmental and nationalist. (For additional reading on this subject try the articles under the category of Islam and the West on the website of Bruce Bawer, author of the book While Europe Slept.)

I have some experience with this too: I give informal cultural advice and English information to a local primary school teacher charged with handling a child who can speak only English. The boy’s Japanese mother gave birth to him overseas in an English-speaking country, got divorced, and returned to Japan. She refuses to speak Japanese to the child and insists that he be taught in English. For some reason, the local school system has acceded to the mother’s demands.

Multiply that by ten million. Then, in addition to English, which many educated Japanese can handle to an extent, factor in the complications of teaching children in Tagalog and Urdu.

Sayonara, Nihon

There is, of course, one other aspect to this issue. Many of the immigrants would come from Muslim countries in central and southern Asia, and they would demand the provision of Islamic education and religious institutions. Japan today has very few mosques. But the Saudis would surely be happy to lend their financial support, infecting Japan with the same Wahhabist bacillus that has gained a foothold in Europe.

Shall we ask the Europeans how well their plan to allow Muslim immigration to augment the labor pool is working out for them?

What the immigration proponents are suggesting is nothing short of Japanese national suicide. Yes, Hidenori Sakenaka and some other Japanese favor the immigration scheme, but every country has its harebrained schemers. For an idea of what the likely result of massive immigration would be, try this description by Mark Steyn in the New Criterion:

Much of what we loosely call the western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate.

Substitute Japan for Italy and the Netherlands, and the Ise Shrine for St. Sophia’s Cathedral, and you get the idea.

To be sure, the Japanese may yet commit national suicide without anyone’s help if current demographic trends continue.

But here’s the choice: invest a substantial portion of the national assets and energy into an unrealistic proposal to “recruit, educate, and nurture” 10 million immigrants, or to put the money, technical skills, and intelligence to work to develop robots. The Japanese already utilize 40% of the world’s industrial robots, so their success is not out of the question.

If I’m in a position of authority in Japan, I know which scheme I pick.

This should be obvious for anyone who bothers to think it through, instead of indulging in self-congratulation by demonstrating one’s moral superiority at the expense of a falsely assumed Japanese backwardness.

Endnote: The Mark Steyn article requires registration. I urge Japanese visitors in particular to register and read the entire article. This is a critical international issue, but I have seen very little discussion of it yet in Japan.

Political correctness: Gaining traction in Japan?

JAPAN HAS ALWAYS BEEN OPEN to new ideas from outside its shores, and as this article in the Mainichi demonstrates, it makes no difference whether those ideas have merit or are emotional froth.

The city government of Oshu, Iwate, asked the JR East railway company to display posters in train stations advertising the Kokuseki Temple’s Somin Festival. This 1000-year-old event is what is known in Japan as a “naked festival”, though no one is in fact naked. The male participants wear loincloths.

JR East refused:

“It wasn’t just that it was out of line because there was nakedness; the pictures showed things that were particularly unpleasant for women, such as chest hair, and it was decided that showing them things they didn’t want to see was sexual harassment.”

This in a country where people still visit mixed-gender public baths, and where NHK television offers live coverage of sumo–six tournaments a year, 15 days for each tournament, three hours a day. The sumo rikishi wear loincloths not that much different from those shown in the poster (which you can see accompanying the article).

Vapidity is apparently contagious. Let’s hope Japanese society has enough natural resistance to these bacteria.

Endnote: Intrepid cultural explorers who would like to see photos of what goes on at the festival and who are hardy enough to withstand the potential sexual harassment can click on this site. It’s in Japanese, but there are plenty of pictures.

Nippon Noel: Japanese Christmas tree finale!

MOST OF THE JAPANESE CHRISTMAS TREE designs we’ve seen over the past few days have been recognizabe as Christmas trees, albeit from a unique perspective. This Christmas night post, however, features three trees that really stretch the envelope for Yuletide design.

The arrangement of lights shown in the first photo isn’t even called a tree, though it is conical in shape and definitely suggests a Christmas tree. The creators refer to it as an objet, however, and it has been on display in a park in Sumoto, Hyogo Prefecture all month.

As with two of the PET bottle trees shown in the previous post, this is also a project of the local JCs. The group has been involved with public lighting displays in the city during the Christmas and New Year’s season since 1999, but they substantially changed the exhibit’s design this year.

The tree–sorry, objet—is 15 meters high and five meters in diameter. An estimated 10,000 red, orange, and yellow LEDs were used in its creation. There is also a tunnel created by lights nearby, and both are surrounded by a 1.5-meter wide path, along which are hung 6,500 PET bottle lamps carved by local kindergarten students.

The object at the top of the objet is what appears to be an upside-down human figure, but none of the reports I saw included an explanation of what it was supposed to be doing. If we let our imaginations roam freely and look at the exhibit upside down, we could say it resembles the Spirit of Christmas from Outer Space beaming his Noel Ray down on the people of Sumoto.

Whatever it is, it will be lit every night from 5:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. until 6 January.

The next tree doesn’t need electricity to create a glow—a subtle illumination emanates from it naturally. That’s because it’s made out of an estimated 10,000 cultured pearls.

On display at the Japan Pearl Center in Kobe, the two-meter long tree is worth about 30 million yen (about US$ 263,000).

Assembly of the tree required about three months. The pearls, which range from eight millimeters to one centimeter in diameter, are hung like chandeliers on 400 threads from the ceiling and illuminated vertically. The creation–pearl objet?–is said to shine with a mysterious milky white color when viewed in a dimly lit room.

The pearl tree (on which no partridge could roost) was made by the Pearl City Kobe Association, a group that consists of 70 companies in the industry. Their objective was not only to celebrate Christmas, but also to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the development of the Akoya Cultured Pearl technique, which was the key to making pearls more inexpensive and therefore accessible to the public at large.

The Akoya Cultured Pearl technique for coaxing oysters to create pearls on demand was invented by two Japanese, Tokichi Nishikawa and Tatsuhei Mise, and successfully commercialized by Kokichi Mikimoto. The story is fascinating, and you can read more about it at the bottom of this page. Mikimoto had a long history of creating elaborate structures with pearls, so it is likely the association did not come up with the idea of making a large pearl Christmas tree on the spur of the moment.

The next tree is my personal favorite for the sheer brilliance of the idea alone. This Christmas tree is located in the Omotesando Station in Minato Ward, Tokyo. In Japanese, a subway is literally an underground railroad (chikatetsu[do]). Since the station is underground, it only makes sense that the portion of the tree visible there would be the roots. Therefore, this decorated Christmas tree is not the part above the ground, but the part below the ground—the Christmas roots.

The tree—sorry, roots–are in the Echika Omotesando section of the station, which is a commercial area with restaurants and shops. Instead of giving the tree’s height, the reports say it is “two meters deep”.

The pink ornaments hanging from the tree are actually Christmas cards on which messages can be written. Every Friday for the past month, the nearby shops have distributed the cards to customers, who jotted down their Christmas wishes. The cards are then placed on the tree.
　
Japanese readers and those familiar with Japan will recognize this as a custom borrowed from Tanabata on 7 July, during which people write their wishes on colored pieces of paper and hang them from a bamboo tree. For as often as it is claimed that the Japanese are an insular people with a tendency toward xenophobia, there are in fact more spontaneous expressions of multiculturalism here than people think–and this represents another one.

Finally, lest you think the country has floated over the edge into the Christmas twilight zone, here’s a more conventional decoration on a more conventional Japanese piece of architecture.

That’s the Megane Bridge in the Isahaya Park in Isahaya, just outside of Nagasaki City, shown in the fourth photo. The word megane in Japanese means eyeglasses, and the reason the bridge was given that name is obvious once you look at the photograph. Built in 1839 in imitation of the older and smaller Megane Bridge in Nagasaki City, which is reportedly the oldest stone arch bridge in the country, it has been designated an important cultural treasure by the national government.

This year the city decided to festoon the bridge with lights, and they used an estimated 5,000 of them for the project. They’ve been on from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. every night since the 15th. The bridge has been decorated in conjunction with a larger event that also involves a 10-meter-high light tower and roadside bushes and trees hung with another 25,000 lights. (This is what the bridge looks like when it’s not decorated for Christmas.)

The show will last until 14 January, after which the lights will be removed, the objets will be dismantled, the PET bottles recycled, the roots restored to the dirt, and the country again returns to normal!

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Nippon Noel: PET bottle Christmas trees!

POLYETHYLENE TEREPHTHALATE—or PET for short—is a type of polyester used to make fibers, bottles and jars, and injection molding parts. Synthetic fibers account for more than 60% of the world’s PET production, and in that application the material is called polyester.

Because it is clear, safe, light, and recyclable, as well as excellent for maintaining product integrity and creating containers of various designs, 30% of the PET produced worldwide is used for bottles or other containers.

And the Japanese have employed their ever-fertile imaginations to find a new application for used PET bottles: Decorations for Christmas trees and the Christmas trees themselves, particularly for public display. The results, as you are about to see, can be visually stunning.

The first place we’ll visit is the last place you’d expect to see a tree made of recycled trash—Fukuoka City’s Tenjin district, Kyushu’s largest shopping and commercial area. Every year, the Daimaru department store erects a large Christmas tree for exterior display, and last year they came up with the idea of using PET bottles to make the tree. They did it again this year, too, incorporating 6,000 bottles in the 14-meter high tree shown in the first photo.

Store workers cut open the bottles to create an estimated 1,000 flower ornaments in 290 different designs. To make the tree more attractive at night, they also trimmed the tree with 30,000 LEDs in three different colors. The tree will be up through Christmas day.

The Tenjin tree is a part of a commercial enterprise, but just as often, the creation of PET bottle trees is the work of a civic group. One example is the trees shown in the second photo, which were put together by the Hamasaka JCs of Shin’onsen-cho, Hyogo Prefecture, and placed in front of the JR Hamasaka Station. The trees are illuminated from the interior, which creates a floating effect that viewers are said to find attractive.
　
The JCs hoped their project would attract people to the shopping district near the station and raise local awareness of recycling. They put together a total of 14 trees ranging in height from one to three meters by using 340 two-liter bottles and 830 500-milliliter bottles

Not content to do things by halves, the JCs also held a lighting ceremony to present their handiwork. During the ceremony, parents of students attending the Hamasaka Kindergarten sang Christmas songs and performed music with hand bells. The tree will be lit from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. every day until the 26th.

The creation of five-meter PET bottle trees made with 600 bottles each in Toyosato-cho, Shiga Prefecture, is another JC effort. They were erected in the parking lot front of the town’s municipal offices and are lit every evening at 5:00 p.m.

For the past four years, the JCs have been holding classes for kids to provide instruction in building PET bottle rockets. (I’d like to take that class myself!) This year, however, they decided to do something different and created the trees instead. Each of the trees has conical bases and eight large light bulbs inside.

The groups started collecting used bottles during summer vacation, and the whole project took about six months to finish. The trees will be lit until 11:00 p.m. on the 25th.

The last PET bottle tree is the result of a much larger project in which the whole town participated. The bottles were collected in special boxes placed in front of the local primary school, post offices, and other locations throughout Geino-cho, Tsu, Mie Prefecture.

The tree is 25 meters high and required an estimated 10,000 PET bottles to make. It too was first presented with a lighting ceremony, dubbed Geino Christmas 2007. Performing Christmas songs during the ceremony was Geino Brass, the brass band from the local junior high school. The event also featured a parade with seven cars, which carried smaller trees, reindeer and a sleigh, and model houses with chimneys.

The tree will be lit every day from 5:00 to 10:00 p.m. until the 25th.