It is often said that Japan takes its lead from the U.S.
It’s too bad that the umpires who are officiating in the Japan Series between the Yomiuri Giants and the Seibu Lions this year have taken to mimicking the poor performance of their Yankee brethren during this year’s World Series.
As everyone probably knows by now, American-born Japanese heartthrob Leah Dizon recently announced that she is both married and pregnant.
Instructive in this announcement is the childishness with which dating, male-female relationships, marriage, and pregnancy is treated in Japan.
Here is a video of Leah’s announcement at a recent concert. Note the screams of shock and disbelief that a young 22-year-old woman would do such things. At the end of her announcement, Dizon says she will take some time off to have the baby, after which she plans to start performing again. She ends with a plea to her fans not to “toss her aside.”
With attitudes like this, it is no surprise that young people in Japan are shying away from marriage and that the population of the country is declining.
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On October 1, 2008, Japanese manufacturing giant Matsushita Electric officially retired both its corporate name and the National brand and brought all of its product lines under the Panasonic label. The Matsushita and National brands had previously been used–mostly in Japan–for industrial parts and equipment in the former case and kitchen appliances in the latter (called shiromono in Japanese, or “white goods”).
The National/Panasonic distinction remains pretty fixed in my mind. My little National rice cooker (white enamel finish, natch) is a quarter century old and still works fine. I have a Panasonic VCR and DVD player. At least for the time being, it’s weird to see “Panasonic” on a toaster or refrigerator. I expect there to be a radio in it or something. Then again, computerized toilets are big in Japan, so maybe it’s not that big a reach.
www.eugenewoodbury.com
One of the more unexpected aspects of living in Japan as an American is the presence of political posters for candidates in the Japan Communist Party.
I’m pretty sure most people don’t think of the words “Japanese” and “Communist” together very often, but the surprising fact is that the JCP is Japan’s second largest minority party, with 400,000 members. Because the Parliamentary system in Japan makes it possible for small political parties to win some representation, there are currently 16 national Diet members who are affiliated with the JCP, something that wouldn’t be possible in the U.S. with our two-party system.
The Japan Communist Party isn’t pushing for the kind of Soviet-era ideas Americans usually associate with Communism — the Japanese are far too conservative politically for that — but they do oppose the special military relationship Japan has with the U.S., as well as any cooperation by Japan’s military with foreign wars, even in a support capacity, as going against Japan’s Constitution.
Supposedly a 1929 novel called Kanikousen (Crab-Canning Ship), which portrays the hard life of workers on a ship at sea, is experiencing a boom among younger readers, which is causing conjecture that larger numbers of young people will consider joining the JCP. On the other hand, this could just be the summer’s short-lived “My Boom,” as something that’s popular with an individual for a short time is called.
You can pick almost any area to compare Japan with the U.S.: history, culture, sports — or if you like, convenience stores. The modern combini came to Japan in 1974 with the opening of the first Seven-Eleven here, a project which got its start when Japanese businessman Hideo Shimizu took a bus trip across the U.S. looking for the “next big thing” and fell in love with the idea of stores that offered items customers might need to buy on short notice, sold in a uniform way. Now there are dozens of convenience store chains here, including Lawson (”your town’s hot station”), Sunkus (the name is a bizarre merging of “sun” and “thanks”), FamilyMart, MiniStop, Heart-In, and Yamazaki Daily Store.
While most of the foods sold at U.S. convenience stores are pre-packaged and highly processed, many of the offerings in their Japanese counterparts are downright wholesome, with traditional Japanese-style food (bento and onigiri), Western favorites like cucumber and strawberry sandwiches, bread products including sliced bread as well as specialty items like Curry Pan, a good selection of salads, dozens of types of bottled Asian and Western teas, aloe-flavored yogurt, and so on.
Convenience stores are the salvation of the single male since there are enough healthy choices that you can usually eat pretty well there without resorting to that most famous of bachelor foods, instant ramen, although they sell that, too.
You won’t find the iconic Slurpee or Big Gulp at Seven-Elevens in Japan, but I’d give them up any day in exchange for niku-man, a steamed Chinese bun filled with meat that’s great in the winter.
Combini offer other forms of convenience, too, like a full color copier and digital photograph printer, the ability to pay your electric and phone bills at the cash register, shipping services for sending packages, and increasingly, real banking services, including making cash withdrawals and deposits using the smart ATM.
That first pilot store back in 1974 has really paid off: Seven-Eleven’s parent company Seven&i Holdings purchased its parent company in 2005 and now owns the brand worldwide.
Taro Aso, a direct descendant of the great 19th century political revolutionary Toshimichi Okubo, is the brashest and most charismatic prime minister since Jun’ichiro Koizumi (left). But if Koizumi is Elvis (indeed, the only foreign head of state to visit Graceland), then Aso (right) is Edward G. Robinson (middle).
Aso’s got a voice like a tough guy in a Bogart film, too. And he’s already proven himself more than willing to play the heavy with his opponents in the Japanese Diet.
One of the benefits of being a continuously broke writer is that I can watch banks collapsing around me without feeling the impact too much–at least not yet. Unlike others in New York City, I don’t have a massive portfolio to mourn, and I’m pretty good at doing my own cooking and enjoying small ethnic eateries and not lamenting my inability to eat at Raoul’s every week. It also, unfortunately, means that I don’t necessarily understand what is going on around me as I feel I should.
I do know enough to know that Japan experienced a banking collapse a decade ago, which prompts my 20-something Japanese friends to recall the “bubble” and how it dashed their dreams of partaking in massive Japanese wealth. So I wonder; is there something to learn from Japan’s own bank woes and its bailout?
One article I’ve read seems to think so. Examining the Swedish banking collapse and the Japanese banking collapse, the author draws the following conclusions.
RESOLUTION: The Japanese government recouped a sizable amount of its bailout funds by reselling collateral, most often land, and other assets. The abysmal times in Japan during the 1990s are now known as the “lost decade.” Even though the economy is better now, the Japan’s stock market still hasn’t returned to its peak before the bubble burst. And Japan still has about $9 billion worth of property held as collateral that needs to be sold.
LESSON FOR U.S.: Japan waited too long before resorting to a bailout using taxpayers’ money to write off the mountain of bad loans on banks’ balance sheets, experts say.
The Swedish government, claims the article, intervened quickly and as a result, the banking system recovered more quickly.
Regardless, I’m assuming (ahem, Mr. Pink, ahem) that we will begin to see a number of Japan-related articles in which the dangers of too much debt are examined and rexamined. Are any lessons applicable? Will anyone be smart enough to heed the lessons? I’m hoping the varied and intelligent readers of Japundit will weigh in with opinions.
On the bright side, massive economic downturns often go hand in hand with great creative output, so I’m hoping that artists will at least be inspired by this mess!
One interesting concept I learned about soon after coming to Japan was jiko shokai, which just means “self introduction” but which seems to have a special cultural significance here.
In almost any situation where people will be interacting, be it a classroom, a part-time job or the local PTA board, a new member will always stand and make a formal self introduction, telling the others their name (including how to write it in kanji), where they’re from, what their hobbies are, and so on.
Giving this information to the other members of the group allows everyone to categorize the newcomer properly, and afterwards the others will do their own jiko shokai in turn.
These self introductions are also heavily used in ESL teaching, too, since formal self introductions are seen as the “most basic” form of human communication in Japan. Back when I was an ESL teacher, I taught children a lot, and I made sure to spend a lot of time teaching self-introductions, since I knew that the parents of my students expected that their kids have this ability before anything else and would complain if their kids couldn’t recite basic information about themselves to others.
Most Western nations are facing the problem of aging populations, but Japan is really leading the pack, with its combination of a very low birth rate, healthier diet and a good medical system.
Japanese older people are just like elderly from any other part of the world, sometimes friendly and interesting to talk to, and other times unwilling to take crap from anyone as they dive for the last pair of shoes at a department store bargain sale. As an American living in Japan, it’s can be interesting to strike up conversations with older Japanese, who will often talk about what the war years were like for them, or the time they saw General MacArthur, and there’s an unspoken acknowledgment of all that’s changed in the past 60 years.
Since it’s generally expected that the oldest son or daughter will take over the family house and care for the parents in their silver years, elderly folks generally have the benefit of lots of family around them, at least in the semi-rural prefecture where I live. Partially because of this system, and also (I’ve been told) because Japanese rarely leave the area where their family grave is located, you don’t see people migrating to a different part of the country when they retire as is the case with Florida.
The main social activity of Japanese retired people seems to be going to the doctor’s office every day to sit and chat with friends while they wait to be seen by the doctor for some (usually imagined) pain, and if you ever get sick in Japan you’d better have a strategy for getting to the doctor’s office early.
While most of the older people living in my neighborhood are very genki (healthy, full of energy), there’s one poor woman whose back is stuck at a 90 degree angle, making her unable to stand up at all. I’d always assumed this problem came a lifetime of planting rice by hand, but supposedly it’s caused by a chronic vitamin B1 deficiency that was a problem in the first few decades of the 20th century.
