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.

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.

There’s a sad statistic that’s on the rise in Japan these days: divorce.

The combination of the country’s rapidly aging society, high stress levels and a new law that enables a woman to claim up to half of her husband’s company pension is causing the number of older couples getting a “vintage year divorce” to rise.

When I was an English teacher, I taught a wide range of students, including a fair number of housewives, and I remember being surprised by the venom some of the women were capable of spitting when discussing their husbands. I didn’t understand at the time that at least some of this husband-bashing was part of a Japanese social custom you might call “out-humbling each other,” as women try to show that they have the most worthless, lazy husband in the room. (Japanese mothers and grandmothers will do the same thing when discussing their own children with others, having competitions to see whose kids were the most baka, and I’ve had to expressly forbid this kind of talk in my own home.)

The divorce rate in Japan is still comparatively low — currently around 2.2 per 1000 people per year, compared with 4 in the U.S. and 2.6 in the U.K. — but finding someone who is batsu-ichi (lit. “one strike out”) is a lot more common than it has been in the past. Coupled with the trend of women either marrying much later or not at all, it Japan has some tough issues to face as the 21st century progresses.

Blaine Harden of the Washington Post penned a thought-provoking article about modern Japanese women that touches on many topics which have been raised here on Japundit. It asks why women are postponing or even eschewing marriage and children; a trend which I, too, have seen. Off the top of my head, I can name about 10 single Japanese women friends in their mid-to-late thirties; far fewer than the number who are married.

Takako Katayama has not closed the door on marriage and children. When she meets girlfriends for dinner, they ask each other, “Where are the good guys?” But she refuses to settle for a man who works long hours, declines to share in child-rearing and sees marriage mainly as a way to acquire lifetime live-in help.

“I want a mature, equal-partner kind of marriage,” she said. “Anyway, there are complete lives without a baby.”

Therein lies a dismal prognosis for Japan and for many of the other prosperous nations of East Asia. In numbers that alarm their governments, Asian women are delaying marriage and postponing childbirth. In Japan, the percentage of women who remain single into their 30s has more than doubled since 1980.

“We need to organize our society so that women and families will be able to raise children while working,” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in an interview in May. “I think we still lack adequate efforts on that front.”

This year, Fukuda’s government is pushing a “work-life balance” program that addresses the country’s famously punishing work ethic. It pressures companies to shoo workers (primarily men) out of the office at night. The intent is to improve the quality of family life and, in the process, make more babies.

The stakes are high here in the world’s second-largest economy, which now has the world’s highest proportion of people over 65 and lowest proportion of children under 15. According to a recent forecast, population loss will strip Japan of 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.

Yesterday I lost my wallet (which contained cash, two credit cards, two bank ATM cards, an electronic highway toll card, my gaijin card, my driver’s license, my health insurance card, and more) while on the way to Tokyo by train. Except for a prepaid train pass, all I had to my name when I got to Shinjuku was about 700 yen.

After doing my in-town business, I filed reports with the Shinjuku Station lost-and-found office and the police at the Shinjuku Station West Exit Koban (who were professional, kind, and courteous). Then I met Mr. Pink, who kindly took me to dinner and lent me a bit of cash to get me home.

As I rode home on the train, I was thinking of all the trouble it was going to be to replace the documents that I had lost. When I got home, however, Mrs. JP was waiting for me at the door with the news that my wallet had been found on the train and turned in at Yokohama Station with all of cash and documents intact. The Shinjuku Station lost-and-found office took the trouble to give us a call at 10:00 p.m. to inform us of the good news.

Yes, Japan is changing. Yes, there are some bad people here just as there are anywhere. But I really felt that yesterday was one of those days that I experienced some of the very best of Japan and its people.

There are three kinds of employees in Japan: full time, part time, and arubaito.

The last type, the name for which comes from the german word for “work” (arbeit), refers to contract-less employees who are paid by the hour and work irregular or semi-temporary schedules, as differentiated from full company employees, who have benefits like twice-annual bonuses and vacation time, and semi-official part-timers, who also have some formal benefits.

One of the biggest trends in post-bubble Japanese society is the tendency of younger workers to shun traditional full-time employment, instead being content to work informal jobs staffing video rental stores and gas stations, tutoring at evening cram schools, and so on. According to a new government report, an amazing 35% of the workforce now occupies these “non-regular” employment positions, exchanging freedom to change jobs at will and less on-the-job stress for lower job security.

Why so many would choose to work as freeters (as these part-time and temporary workers are called) puzzles older Japanese, who of course benefited greatly from the stable economic growth of the postwar period. The reasons ‘baito is so popular are many, but one big one is that many Japanese have come to value their own leisure time over work.

This is a good thing of course, although I personally consider the industriousness of the Japanese people as a whole to be no less than a National Treasure for the country, and something that I hope will continue into the future.

Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times is back with another interesting article, this time on foreign workers in Japan. One thing I have noticed in my time in Japan is the consternation many Japanese feel towards foreigners. My wife trains foreign workers (largely in Japanese language and culture) who are employed by Japanese companies both here and abroad and it opens a window for me into these attitudes. Soon her organization will be training a large group (50 +/-) of Indonesian nurses and the hand wringing continues…

With one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations and lowest birthrates, Japan is facing acute labor shortages not only in farming towns but also in fishing villages, factories, restaurants and nursing homes, and on construction sites. Closed to immigration, Japan has admitted foreign workers through various loopholes, including employing growing numbers of foreign students as part-timers and temporary workers, like the Chinese here, as so-called foreign trainees.

The labor shortage has grown serious enough that a group of influential politicians in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party recently released a report calling for the admission of 10 million immigrants in the next 50 years.

The foreign work force in Japan rose to more than one million in 2006 from fewer than 700,000 in 1996. But experts say that it will have to increase by significantly more to make up for the expected decline in the Japanese population. The government projects that Japan’s population, 127 million, will fall to between 82 million and 99 million by 2055. Moreover, because the population is graying, the share that is of working age is expected to shrink even faster.

The large presence of the Chinese workers has unsettled some Japanese here even as they have become increasingly dependent on them. Some vaguely mentioned the fear of crime, though they acknowledged that crime rates had not risen. No Japanese interviewed welcomed the idea of immigrants here or elsewhere in Japan.

“I feel a strange sense of oppression,” Toshimitsu Ide, 28, a lettuce farmer who had not hired any Chinese workers, said of seeing large groups of Chinese hanging around town. “They seem hard to approach.”

Perhaps because of the Japanese unease, the Chinese workers were given directives apparently aimed at curbing their movements, even before they arrived. They said they were told to go home by 8 p.m. and not to ride bicycles except for work. Some even said they had been instructed not to talk to young Japanese women.

“Though I’m in Japan,” said Toshimitsu Yui, 57, who works in construction, “I feel this is not Japan anymore.”

Don’t get me wrong, the English like to apologise more often than necessary too. If you step on someone’s foot in a crowd, chances are that they‘ll apologise to you. If you get in someone’s way, and do the side-stepping dance, you’ll probably end up both apologising to each other. The English do say sorry rather a lot.

But endless Japanese apologies, like the one still going on at the Mainichi, get on my nerves.

Apologies are invariably very formal. Always with bowing. Perhaps even, in extreme cases, with face to the ground. For company executives to appear in a row in front of TV cameras and apologise for some heinous wrongdoing committed by someone even tenuously connected to their company, and bow deeply as the flashbulbs go off, they are debasing themselves and this is seen as enough.

Bit of a clash of cultures then, because I don’t and can’t judge a person on how he apologises, but on how he goes about trying to make amends. Essentially, I don’t care what you say or how you say it, I care what you do next. Not for me, then, the tatemae of the ritual apology, and then all forgiven. Nope.

Which is why the endless kerfuffle over the Mainichi’s WaiWai meltdown is starting to get a little tiresome.

For readers who aren’t aware, the Mainichi newspaper used to run a section called the WaiWai in which it ran, in English translation, saucy stories from the more sordid end of the weekly magazines. Most purported to be titillating in some way, and you can bet on the majority being entirely made up. But the point is that the Mainichi didn’t even write them. They just ran translations of them.

Well it all blew up on them, and mounting complaints (about how they were portraying Japan to the English-speaking world) forced the Mainichi into a humiliating apology, and they pulled the WaiWai. They then went into full grovelling apology mode.

And some weeks later, the front page of the Mainichi still diverts to a page-long apology, and a list of promises about how the Mainichi will do better, and then some bowing, a bit more scraping. Get over it already!

Seeing the whole scenario as formulaic, I wonder how anyone can see any genuine value in it whatsoever. And it’s not because I’m a foreigner. At least some of the natives are aware of the silliness of it all too.

Japan through the eyes of a drifter camped in a shantytown near one of Tokyo’s trendiest areas.

Thanks to Xeni Jardin.

Japan is a great country, with a lot to offer both short-term visitors and tourists as well as people like me, who like the place so much we put down permanent roots. But still, Japan is far from perfect, and there are various sources of stress for gaijin living here, for example (if your language skills are still improving) not being able to talk freely to people or even to read what’s written on some signs, not being able to understand local customs that might be taken for granted by everyone but you, or (if you live in a rural city like I do) having kids occasionally stare at you because you’re different. (I just say hello to them in English.)

I’ve lived in Japan for 17 years and have traveled quite extensively throughout most of the country, meeting a lot of people along the way. It has happened, so infrequently it’s almost statistically insignificant, that not every experience I had here was a good one, and not every person I met was 100% happy to be dealing with an overly-exuberant American like myself.

Like an old farmer who, when in his cups, asked me why “big America” had to beat up on “little Japan” during the war, or the scary yakuza gangsters I found myself surrounded by when I stupidly stayed at a 24-hour sauna in Kyoto, or the one time I tried to enter a bar in Roppongi and was told politely that they didn’t accept foreign customers. (I should have worn our “No Gaijin” T-shirt.)

Whenever I encounter some minor inconvenience I shrug and move on, reciting that useful Japanese mantra shikata ga nai (or more colloquially, sho ga nai), which means “it can’t be helped,” the main way the Japanese maintain their happy, largely confrontation-free society.

I know that everyone is human, and for every minor negative experience I may encounter here in Japan, there are a few hundred positive ones.