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nchristi
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Re: Japan—Domestic Issues/Events in the News
NY TIMES
Op-Ed Contributor
Japan and the Ancient Art of Shrugging
By NORIHIRO KATO
Published: August 21, 2010
GROSS domestic product figures for the second quarter show that China has overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest economy. I have been traveling while on leave from the university in Tokyo where I teach, and was in Paris when the news broke last week. My first reaction, frankly, was one of relief. In English, perhaps, one might say it was “a load off my shoulders.”
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Brad Holland
In Japanese, people use the phrase “right shoulder up” to describe a graph that keeps going up, with each year’s figures rosier than the last. Of course, if that climbing line is someone’s right shoulder, it means the left is languishing somewhere out of sight. We’re seeing only half the person.
Reading the papers that morning at breakfast, I saw a graph indicating the point in the 1990s when Japan’s G.D.P. had peaked, after which the line started jagging down and up, over the long run comparatively leveling out. The relief I felt had something to do with the person I saw there, no longer so awkwardly bent. Finally we know where Japan stands — on level ground.
It’s not difficult to find similar graphs. One shows Japan’s natural population growth. Every year from 1910 to 1977, the population increased by more than 1 percent. Then the growth began to slow. In 2005, for the first time, the population shrank. Right shoulder down.
Another graph on rice production from 1878 to 1980 shows the point in the 1960s when Japan’s rice production began to decline. Decades before China overtook Japan, the country had started downsizing, preparing for a smooth landing.
Three years ago, I saw a television program about a new breed of youngster: the nonconsumer. Japanese in their late teens and early 20s, it said, did not have cars. They didn’t drink alcohol. They didn’t spend Christmas Eve with their boyfriends or girlfriends at fancy hotels downtown the way earlier generations did. I have taught many students who fit this mold. They work hard at part-time jobs, spend hours at McDonald’s sipping cheap coffee, eat fast food lunches at Yoshinoya. They save their money for the future.
These are the Japanese who came of age after the bubble, never having known Japan as a flourishing economy. They are accustomed to being frugal. Today’s youths, living in a society older than any in the world, are the first since the late 19th century to feel so uneasy about the future.
I saw young Japanese in Paris, of course, vacationing or studying, but statistics show that they don’t travel the way we used to. Perhaps it’s a reaction against their globalizing elders who are still zealously pushing English-language education and overseas employment. Young people have grown less interested in studying foreign languages. They seem not to feel the urge to grow outward. Look, they say, Japan is a small country. And we’re O.K. with small.
It is, perhaps, a sort of maturity.
The rest of the world’s population is still exploding, and we are coming to see the limits of our resources. The age of “right shoulder up” is over. Japan doesn’t need to be No. 2 in the world, or No. 5 or 15. It’s time to look to more important things, to think more about the environment and about people less lucky than ourselves. To learn about organic farming. Or not. Maybe you’re busy enough just living your life. That, the new maturity says, is still cooler than right shoulder up.
Of course, some people don’t see things this way. The old guard — those politicians who led the charge in the heady 1970s and ’80s and fought back (however pointlessly) against the economic stagnation of the ’90s — still want to compete. Those men, best represented in my view by Tokyo’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara, speak as if they are under siege. They hate being beaten by China. For them, it seems, maturity only means striving to be No. 1. They won’t change. They are too settled in an earlier stage of development, in a dream of limitless growth. But society matures around them.
The new maturity may be the province of the young Japanese, but in a sense, it is a return to something much older than Mr. Ishihara and his cohort. Starting in the 19th century, with the reign of the Meiji Emperor, Japan expanded, territorially and economically. But before that, the country went through a 250-year period of comparative isolation and very limited economic growth. The experience of rapid growth was a new phenomenon. Japan remembers what it is like to be old, to be quiet, to turn inward.
Freshly overtaken by China, Japan now seems to stand at the vanguard of a new downsizing movement, leading the way for countries bound sooner or later to follow in its wake. In a world whose limits are increasingly apparent, Japan and its youths, old beyond their years, may well reveal what it is like to outgrow growth.
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Norihiro Kato is a professor of Japanese literature at Waseda University. This article was translated by Michael Emmerich from the Japanese.
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8/23/2010, 7:01 pm
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Hiroshi66
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Re: Japan—Domestic Issues/Events in the News
Nchristi, thanks so much for posting this very interesting article. It's really fascinating to read about the many changes that have been taking place in Japan over the past decade or so. Not only has the country's political and economic climate constantly been changing, but Japanese society has been undergoing some tremendous changes, as well. It was interesting to read about these changes from the author's point of view.
Perhaps these changing times in Japan is the reason heind some of the J-dramas that have been produced lately. Dramas like Jiro Shirasu, Ryomaden, and Summer of the Bureaucrats all chronicle the lives of various historical figures living in different times, but it seems like they all look at times in Japan's history where the future was uncertain, which the article mentions is a feeling shared by many Japanese today. It's also interesting because of the major political changes that have taken place in Japan over the last year or so.
With the recent news of China overtaking Japan as the world's second largest economy, it can only remind us of all the changes that Japanese society continues to go through. It's also interesting to think about and compare these times of tumult to the previous times of uncertainty in Japan's history, such as the time period we are currently seeing portrayed in Ryomaden.
Thanks again for posting this article, Nchristi. It was a fascinating read!
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8/23/2010, 8:47 pm
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nchristi
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Re: Japan—Domestic Issues/Events in the News
I found it interesting, too. Especially in light of what you mentioned about the recent J-dramas we've been seeing. This morning on the NHK Newsline, I caught only the last bit of an update on the Yen, one of the reporters giving the latest on the problem with it. Because it is valued so high (and apparently climbing), this is putting Japan in a very dangerous situation. Their economy largely depends on exports, but with the yen so high, Japan is being bypassed by countries that produce much cheaper products.
At the end of the report on Newsline, they interviewed one of the senior analysts with Standard & Poor's. He very frankly (though non-condemnatory, I must say) commented that the Bank of Japan needs to take immediate action, but it doesn't. He does not understand why it is taking so long (too long) to make a move on the yen issue. He said it is like racing towards a wall in your car. If you do nothing, you know a crash is inevitable but you don't apply the brakes because you're not sure whether or not they will work. At least see if they do.
I keep reading that Japan has been in a recession for the last 20 years. Is that correct? Yikes. The other night I watched a different report on the loss of electronics and other businesses there. The summary was that the biggest problem for Japanese businesses to compete globally is their devotion to making the best product. Excellence is a basic pillar of Japanese society, but the commentator said that Japan cannot compete in this global economy unless it produces low-priced products. And we all know what that means—to cut the price, other corners must be cut. They highlighted a business that made polished metal for various things (i-phones, etc.) They lost all their contracts to China and SE Asia, with their low-cost labor. How to survive? This company searches for ways and products to keep themselves afloat, but the company continues to shrink and workers laid off. The owner didn't know how much longer he could remain in business.
I somewhat follow the goings-on of ASEAN (The Association of Southeast Asian Nations). It is a geo-political and economic organization of 10 countries located in Southeast Asia. But it seems to be where the action is, so other financial heavy hitters like ROK (So. Korea), China, and Japan are heavily involved and positioning themselves, though not official members. So. Korea, for example, has built the ASEAN-Korea Centre in Seoul. It reminds me of the United Nations, with a Secretary-General, and all. At any rate, my point is that many old-school nations like USA, Japan, etc., find themselves having to reinvent themselves to survive in the rapidly changing global economy in which we live.
ASEAN/Wikipedia
ASEAN logo
Check out the ASEAN logo and its symbolisms at the bottom of the page.
Last edited by nchristi, 8/25/2010, 10:55 am
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8/25/2010, 10:53 am
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Hiroshi66
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Re: Japan—Domestic Issues/Events in the News
Nchristi, thanks for the information about ASEAN. I've read a little about the organization, but I've always wondered what kind of a role China, Japan, and South Korea have played in it, even though they are not located in Southeast Asia and are not official members of ASEAN. It looks like all three East Asian nations are playing a very important role within the organization. I found the ASEAN-Korea Centre website to be very interesting, as well.
Come to think of it, I remember reading an article a while ago about how South Korea has been offering a lot of economic assistance to Cambodia over the past decade or so. I think it mentioned that in addition to financial and technological assistance, South Korean companies are also looking for investment opportunities in Cambodia, and some Cambodians are learning Korean, as well. Though that particular article was about South Korea and Cambodia, it seems like this must also be the case with other ASEAN nations, too.
Yep, I, too, have read that Japan has been experiencing a recession for the past twenty years. With so many political and economic changes taking place in East and Southeast Asia, it looks like Japan has to re-evaluate the role they are playing in that region of the world, especially since all these rapid and frequent changes are still continuing to take place
Very interesting that Summer of the Bureaucrats almost seems to mirror what is taking place now. With each episode that airs, it really makes the two different time periods seem more and more similar. It's quite a fascinating (and pressing) issue, indeed.
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8/25/2010, 7:58 pm
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nchristi
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Re: Japan—Domestic Issues/Events in the News
After reading this NY Times article, I couldn't help but think of the drama, Summer of Bureaucrats. Societies seem to continuously move in a loop from conservatism to liberalism and back again, ad infinitum. class blockquote
The New York Times
New Dissent in Japan Is Loudly Anti-Foreign
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: August 28, 2010
KYOTO, Japan — The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students ****roaches and Korean spies.
Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.
The December episode was the first in a series of demonstrations at the Kyoto No. 1 Korean Elementary School that shocked conflict-averse Japan, where even political protesters on the radical fringes are expected to avoid embroiling regular citizens, much less children. Responding to public outrage, the police arrested four of the protesters this month on charges of damaging the school’s reputation.
More significantly, the protests also signaled the emergence here of a new type of ultranationalist group. The groups are openly anti-foreign in their message, and unafraid to win attention by holding unruly street demonstrations.
Since first appearing last year, their protests have been directed at not only Japan’s half million ethnic Koreans, but also Chinese and other Asian workers, Christian churchgoers and even Westerners in Halloween costumes. In the latter case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that said, “This is not a white country.”
Local news media have dubbed these groups the Net far right, because they are loosely organized via the Internet, and gather together only for demonstrations. At other times, they are a virtual community that maintains its own Web sites to announce the times and places of protests, swap information and post video recordings of their demonstrations.
While these groups remain a small if noisy fringe element here, they have won growing attention as an alarming side effect of Japan’s long economic and political decline. Most of their members appear to be young men, many of whom hold the low-paying part-time or contract jobs that have proliferated in Japan in recent years.
Though some here compare these groups to neo-Nazis, sociologists say that they are different because they lack an aggressive ideology of racial supremacy, and have so far been careful to draw the line at violence. There have been no reports of injuries, or violence beyond pushing and shouting. Rather, the Net right’s main purpose seems to be venting frustration, both about Japan’s diminished stature and in their own personal economic difficulties.
“These are men who feel disenfranchised in their own society,” said Kensuke Suzuki, a sociology professor at Kwansei Gakuin University. “They are looking for someone to blame, and foreigners are the most obvious target.”
They are also different from Japan’s existing ultranationalist groups, which are a common sight even today in Tokyo, wearing paramilitary uniforms and riding around in ominous black trucks with loudspeakers that blare martial music.
This traditional far right, which has roots going back to at least the 1930s rise of militarism in Japan, is now a tacitly accepted part of the conservative political establishment here. Sociologists describe them as serving as a sort of unofficial mechanism for enforcing conformity in postwar Japan, singling out Japanese who were seen as straying too far to the left, or other groups that anger them, such as embassies of countries with whom Japan has territorial disputes.
Members of these old-line rightist groups have been quick to distance themselves from the Net right, which they dismiss as amateurish rabble-rousers.
“These new groups are not patriots but attention-seekers,” said Kunio Suzuki, a senior adviser of the Issuikai, a well-known far-right group with 100 members and a fleet of sound trucks.
But in a sign of changing times here, Mr. Suzuki also admitted that the Net right has grown at a time when traditional ultranationalist groups like his own have been shrinking. Mr. Suzuki said the number of old-style rightists has fallen to about 12,000, one-tenth the size of their 1960s’ peak.
No such estimates exist for the size of the new Net right. However, the largest group appears to be the cumbersomely named Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan, known here by its Japanese abbreviation, the Zaitokukai, which has some 9,000 members.
The Zaitokukai gained notoriety last year when it staged noisy protests at the home and junior high school of a 14-year-old Philippine girl, demanding her deportation after her parents were sent home for overstaying their visas. More recently, the Zaitokukai picketed theaters showing “The Cove,” an American documentary about dolphin hunting here that rightists branded as anti-Japanese.
In interviews, members of the Zaitokukai and other groups blamed foreigners, particularly Koreans and Chinese, for Japan’s growing crime and unemployment, and also for what they called their nation’s lack of respect on the world stage. Many seemed to embrace conspiracy theories taken from the Internet that China or the United States were plotting to undermine Japan.
“Japan has a shrinking pie,” said Masaru Ota, 37, a medical equipment salesman who headed the local chapter of the Zaitokukai in Omiya, a Tokyo suburb. “Should we be sharing it with foreigners at a time when Japanese are suffering?”
While the Zaitokukai has grown rapidly since it was started three and a half years ago with just 25 members, it is still largely run by its founder and president, a 38-year-old tax accountant who goes by the assumed name of Makoto Sakurai. Mr. Sakurai leads the group from his tiny office in Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district, where he taps out announcements and other postings on his personal computer.
Mr. Sakurai says the group is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners.
“They have made Japan powerless to stand up to China and Korea,” said Mr. Sakurai, who refused to give his real name.
Mr. Sakurai admitted that the group’s tactics had shocked many Japanese, but said they needed to win attention. He also defended the protests at the Korean school in Kyoto as justified to oppose the school’s use of a nearby public park, which he said rightfully belonged to Japanese children.
Teachers and parents at the school called that a flimsy excuse to vent what amounted to racist rage. They said the protests had left them and their children fearful.
“If Japan doesn’t do something to stop this hate language,” said Park Chung-ha, 43, who heads the school’s mothers association, “where will it lead to next?”
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9/2/2010, 12:40 am
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Hiroshi66
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Re: Japan—Domestic Issues/Events in the News
Thanks for posting that very interesting article, Nchristi. Yes, I, too, thought of dramas like Summer of the Bureaucrats and Ryomaden after reading this article. Some of the comments made by members of the “Net right” sounded very reminiscent of a few of the beliefs the anti-alienists held in Japan during the 1860s, during the time of Sakamoto Ryoma. I agree, societies always seem to move in a continuous cycle throughout history, don’t they?
What was especially alarming and sad about this particular incident was reading about how the elementary school children were exposed to all this, having to sing songs loudly to drown out the sounds of the protestors. Very sad…
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9/2/2010, 8:13 pm
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nchristi
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Re: Japan—Domestic Issues/Events in the News
Some interesting comments by Emperor Akihito on his 77th birthday—especially about the elderly in Japan (and how many are "unaccounted for"). I always enjoy seeing the Empress. She is like a doll or mannequin from a thousand years ago. Her facial expressions, gestures, and manners seem lifted from centuries' old art.
The Japan Times Online
Dec. 24, 2010
Birthday greetings: Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko wave to visitors at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo as the Emperor celebrated his 77th birthday Thursday. KYODO PHOTO
Emperor turns 77; feeling his age
Kyodo News class ul Emperor Akihito, on the occasion of his 77th birthday on Thursday, reflected on the past year and said that as he grows more aware of the symptoms of aging, he hopes that society will become more attuned to the needs of the elderly.
"It is my sincere hope that there will be further understanding of the needs of the elderly and that more and more attention will be paid to make buildings and towns better equipped to serve the needs of the elderly," the Emperor said at the customary prebirthday news conference held Monday.
He admitted he has developed hearing difficulties and said, "I can understand what the announcers are saying, but when it comes to listening to other people's conversations on TV, I find myself often relying on subtitles."
The Emperor, who climbed Mount Sekison in Nagano Prefecture with Prince Akishino's family in the summer, said he was sometimes helped by Prince Akishino and Princess Mako on his way down the mountain, which had never happened before.
The Emperor has experienced some health problems this year, including a case of norovirus-induced acute enteritis in February and a cold in June, leading to the cancellation or postponement of his official duties.
However, he stressed that he is "not planning on making any more major reductions" to his workload, which had been cut back in consideration of his health.
The Emperor also said he and Empress Michiko are "worried" about Princess Aiko, the only child of Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess Masako, who has been attending a limited number of classes since missing several days of school due to the "rough behavior" in March of boys in her grade.
While their opportunities to see Princess Aiko have been limited, the Emperor said whenever the princess visits them she "expresses her love for the Empress" by presenting flowers picked from her garden and by showing a video of her cat on her camera.
Concerning Crown Princess Masako, who continues to receive treatment for a stress-induced illness, the Emperor said, "It is my hope that she will strive first and foremost to regain her health."
On the recent revelation that over 230,000 centenarians are unaccounted for despite having been registered in local government offices, the Emperor said that the matter is "most regrettable."
He also sympathized with the suffering of those affected by the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Miyazaki Prefecture in April and the torrential rains that hit Amami-Oshima Island in Kagoshima Prefecture in October.
On a brighter note, the Emperor said it was "a truly delightful feat of the year" that Japan's Hayabusa unmanned space probe landed on the asteroid Itokawa and returned to Earth in June after a roughly 6 billion-km journey.
He also expressed deep respect for professor Tetsuji Nakabo of Kyoto University, who made a major contribution in the rediscovery of "kunimasu," an indigenous freshwater salmon species, which was thought to have become extinct over 70 years ago.
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12/24/2010, 1:42 pm
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Hiroshi66
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Re: Japan—Domestic Issues/Events in the News
Nchristi, thanks for posting this interesting article about Emperor Akihito's comments during the news conference! Since the Emperor doesn't make many public appearances or speeches, when he does speak at this customary pre-birthday news conference at the end of the year, I always find it interesting to read his comments and what he has to say as he reflects on the past year.
Wow, so the young Princess Aiko is still not going to all her regular classes. I read earlier in the year that she had been bullied in school and was bothered by the behavior of some of her classmates, but I guess she's still only attending a few of her classes. It must be very difficult for Princess Aiko and the family.
I wonder if the Emperor's comments will cause for Japanese cities to make more of an effort in making buildings more accessible to serve the needs of the elderly? Hmm. I don't remember when or where I heard this, but I seem to recall reading once that many buildings and structures in smaller Japanese cities and towns still don't have wheelchair ramps. Perhaps this has changed in recent years, though.
Yes, it's always wonderful seeing Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko at the end of the year appearance they make for the Emperor's birthday.
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12/24/2010, 2:12 pm
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