Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

by Pilling, David

  One can take such arguments too far. One objection is that, even if growth isn’t desirable in itself, it may be necessary. Without growth, institutions such as pension systems are in danger of collapse. Without growth, it is hard to see how Japan can get out of its current debt trap. For Japan, the alternative to growth could be some sort of financial crisis that would deal living standards a further blow. Perhaps national economies, like sharks, really do have to keep moving forward. The search for measures of economic success beyond GDP is also open to abuse. Governments may be tempted to employ such definitions to justify their own lousy performance. Gross National Happiness was a term coined in the Bhutan of the 1970s. It was supposedly a measure of broader spiritual, as well as material, happiness. When it comes to things we can actually measure, however, Bhutan doesn’t do so well. Today, it remains a poor country with a per capita income of $6,000, a life expectancy of sixty-six – a hardly creditable 134th in the world – and a literacy rate below that of Togo or Bangladesh.53 Gross domestic product may be imperfect. But at least it means something.

  In the case of Japan, one could argue that talk of ‘life after growth’ is defeatist nonsense, the result of failed public policies and national drift. Only a fool would embrace decline as a desired outcome. That is certainly the opinion of many. Takeda, the man who had taught me about the manufacturing prowess behind the capacitor, regarded such talk as revealing a national character flaw. ‘To become Number One you have to have the will,’ he said. ‘But Japan never had that. Right now people say, “Why do you need to be Number One?” Unfortunately a lot of people have that attitude.’ I understood Takeda’s impatience. But I also thought that some Japanese were casting around for something important. The post-war period had been characterized by a national effort to increase GDP as much in the name of national pride as of the wellbeing of its people. Kato and others wanted Japan to find a more humanistic goal.

  In recent years, it has become clearer that Japan’s economic crisis, though prolonged, has not been unique. Nor has Japan, for all the mistakes, been uniquely incompetent in dealing with the litany of problems that followed the bursting of its bubble. ‘Its historic experience – high economic growth, bubble economy, and subsequent economic stagnation, deflation and falling birth rates – will inevitably be replicated by countries around the world,’ says the author Natsumi Iwasaki.54 Japan may not look pretty. But it could be a taste of things to come.

  James Abegglen, who was among the first to recognize Japan’s industrial strengths in the 1950s, also warned against writing the country off too quickly. The 1990s, the so-called ‘lost decade’, he told me, had in fact been ‘a decade of redesign’, when many companies began to grapple with changed circumstances by paring their costs, paying down their debts and increasing their productivity. They had merged and moved some manufacturing abroad. They had ditched some lines of business and switched to others. That restructuring had carried on into the twenty-first century, he said. To call those years lost was ‘simple nonsense’. Even so, Japan’s most exhilarating days were behind it. ‘In my era, Japan was a very exciting place. In the next era, it’s going to be a very dull place. Very wealthy and very dull. It’s going to be like a very large Switzerland – and that’s not such a bad thing.’55

  10

  The Promised Road

  Kumiko Shimotsubo dated the start of what she called ‘the ice age’ to the winter of 1995. Like Haruki Murakami, she regarded that tumultuous year as the time when everything changed. For her, it was less about earthquakes and sarin gas attacks. Rather, it was when, she felt, many young people were ‘frozen out’ of the system their parents had taken for granted. In her final year of college, which she spent at the University of Tsukuba, a once futuristic science city built outside Tokyo in the 1960s, she sent off more than 100 applications to companies, each neatly handwritten on a postcard. She got perhaps fifty replies, a lower ratio than her male counterparts, she recalled with some bitterness, but enough to give her hope she could get a slice of the Japanese Dream. Now a slightly disenchanted 37-year-old, whose business card identified her as a Bilingual Writer/HR Consultant/Intercultural Facilitator, Shimotsubo had found what she called ‘the promised road’ barred to entry.

  We met in the elegant tea room in the Imperial Hotel, a mosaic by Frank Lloyd Wright covering one wall, the only remnant of the building he designed in 1915. Even such a prestigious hotel, still patronized by the imperial household, became swept up in the 1960s construction frenzy as Japan tore down the old in pursuit of the modern. In 1968, the hotel was redeveloped above the strenuous objections of Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow, then in her seventies, who pleaded for it to be preserved even as the bulldozers moved in.

  Shimotsubo was slim and fashionably dressed with a double string of pearls draped over her sweater. She started by telling me about her career expectations when, like all the other graduate hopefuls, she set out on the rite of passage known as the shushoku katsudo. Literally the ‘find work activity’, it was the mass screening of graduates by corporate Japan. Wearing a black suit, white blouse and sensible black shoes, her hair neatly trimmed (and on no account to be dyed), the then twenty-year-old followed the advice dispensed by make-up companies about how a young female graduate setting out in life ought to look. ‘Fresh but not too sexy,’ she recalled. The shushoku katsudo, or shukatsu in the inevitable contraction, was an urban phenomenon that might be compared to the migration of wildebeest. The passage traversed, however, was not to the pastures of East Africa, but to life in a big corporation, and hence a place in the Japanese Dream.

  She applied to a who’s who of elite companies, including the big trading houses such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Marubeni. But by the mid-1990s, fewer graduates were making the migration successfully. Companies had finally realized that the economic shock of the early 1990s, when asset prices started collapsing, was not an aberration. They would need to make adjustments. Because of their compact with existing employees – one that Shimotsubo likened to that of a daimyo lord with his loyal samurai retainers – there was almost no question of sacking existing workers who had implicitly been offered a job-for-life. The only option was to hire fewer fresh graduates or, in extremis, to suspend graduate recruitment altogether. Shimotsubo and millions of graduates like her bore the brunt of that decision. Shut out in the cold, they became the ‘lost generation’.

  Like many during that era, Shimotsubo had been caught unawares by Japan’s changed economic circumstances. She had set her sights on being recruited as a so-called sogoshoku, the top intake of graduates whose careers were expected to progress smoothly into the higher ranks of a corporation. The second-tier intake, known as the ippanshoku, the clerical workers on the ‘non-career’ track, was almost exclusively female and generally not expected to advance. Most likely such women would marry and leave to start a family. Shimotsubo aspired to a fast-track position. Attitudes were slowly changing, though some employers still thought these top-tier jobs should be reserved for men, the economic breadwinners. That and the deteriorating economic situation meant the sort of positions she was pursuing were few and far between.

  Her dream of walking the promised road proved fleeting. She received not a single offer. Only at the last minute did she get a solitary positive reply from a private publishing company, not the sort of elite firm to which she had aspired. ‘I lost my motivation totally,’ she recalled fifteen years after that bitter disappointment. Now married with a young daughter, she said of the years before she graduated, ‘There used to be a promised career path. People were expected to join a company and then spend all their life in that company with the same colleagues. My father was a typical Japanese salaryman. He spent more than thirty years with one traditional Japanese company, the famous NEC. He followed the promised road.’

  Shimotsubo did not. In Japan, where all serious hiring was – and still largely is – done en masse after graduation, there was no second chance. M
ost companies were inflexible about taking on people in mid-career. They wanted to get their hands on fresh graduates so they could train them from scratch and exercise what Shimotsubo called ‘mind control’ – to turn them into obedient employees. ‘Once you dropped off the promised road, you’d be evaluated as “not a good person”, just because you didn’t belong to anything,’ she said. ‘To have a permanent job means to have a good social status. Not to have one means to lack social status. I am now thirty-seven and many people of my age are still desperately working in temporary jobs. They get a very low wage, the same as a new graduate, even though their careers have been going nearly twenty years. It’s a kind of social discrimination.’

  Shimotsubo had been luckier than most in her position. Because she spoke English, learned at her internationally minded high school in Yokohama, she had been able to build an alternative career working for foreign companies operating in Japan. They cared little, if at all, that she hadn’t joined straight from university. At one, she even became head of the human resources department, something that would have been impossible at her age in a Japanese company. The irony of that job was that, after overseeing an aggressive western-style restructuring, she too was dispensed with. Now she worked as an ‘intercultural consultant’, operating in the penumbra between national employment practices. She remained bitter that the opportunities afforded her parents’ generation had been snatched away. ‘When I was a senior college student, I was so jealous of the bubble generation. They could eat and drink from the company’s pocket,’ she said of the famously lavish expense accounts. ‘They got big bonuses even if their productivity was low. It was so easy to earn money in those days.’ Looking back, she added, ‘I was just a senior high school student when Japan was really booming. That generation had their very happy hour. But the people of the ice age, people like me, don’t know what the bubble was. Today’s younger generation don’t know what growth is. Their experience is just downsizing and recession. That’s all they know of the Japanese economy. That’s why dreams are shrinking in Japan.’

  Her work in human resources had led her to believe that the Japanese employment system needed to change. It was, she said, an all-or-nothing lottery that favoured those who gained an early foothold after graduation, but excluded the rest. ‘I personally wish there were alternative paths to follow. But the current system is the only established one,’ she said. The waitress came to pour more tea. Around us, an almost exclusively older clientele was chatting amid the reassuring clink of bone china. Looking around the tea room nervously, as though she were plotting a coup, Shimotsubo turned to me conspiratorially. ‘For the younger generation to have any hope,’ she whispered, ‘I really hope the old system collapses totally.’

  • • •

  For Haruki Murakami, the fact that the promised road had forked off into a hundred unexplored directions was as it should be. Sure, because of a flagging economy, young people were having to make it on their own, he said. That was not always easy. But Shimotsubo’s promised road had led to a false dream. When he was researching Underground, his book about the sarin gas attack, Murakami had become better acquainted with the foot-soldiers of the Japanese miracle. He had interviewed the stoic, uncomplaining office workers and bureaucrats who were gassed on their way to the offices from which they would seek to keep the Japanese Dream alive. ‘It was love and hate of course,’ he said, weighing up his words carefully. ‘I admired them and, at the same time, they depressed me. I think their lives are absurd. They are consuming, consuming themselves, you know. They commute two hours between their house and the office and they work so hard. It’s inhuman. And when they come back to their house, their children are sleeping. It’s a waste of humanity.’1

  Murakami felt more affinity with the post-bubble generation. He talked warmly of the freeters, the Japanese word for the casual, part-time employees who worked, mostly for minimum wage, in dead-end jobs. For most social observers, the idea of a freeter – moving from one precarious job to another – was the epitome of all that had gone wrong in the long years of slow-burn crisis. But where many Japanese saw low wages, lack of security and the extinguishing of opportunity, Murakami saw young people trying to build something new. It was, perhaps, easier to be optimistic from his position as a rich and successful novelist. He forked off the promised road of his own volition – and ended up with fame and money. Not everyone could be so lucky. Back then, the outlines of the promised road were still clearly discernible. Now, trying to make it as a young person in Japan was like charting an uncertain path through the desert. But Murakami admired a generation that had, albeit mostly by necessity, set out to find its own way. ‘Our society has been changing,’ he said. ‘There are so many freeters. They chose to be free. They have their own opinions and their own lifestyles. I think the more alternatives we have the more open society will be.’ The rigidities of the old system may have helped Japan in its catch-up phase, he was saying, but they were outdated and harmful to individual development and personal choice. ‘Most Japanese don’t have any sense of direction,’ he continued. ‘We are lost and we don’t know which way we should go. But this is a very natural thing, a very healthy thing. It is time for us to think. We can take our time.’

  • • •

  Noritoshi Furuichi, a 27-year-old Ph.D. student and author, was – at least on the face of it – more in Murakami’s camp than in Shimotsubo’s. Ten years younger than Shimotsubo, and three decades younger than Murakami, he was more optimistic about contemporary society, based both on his own, privileged, experience and on the research he had done as a budding social scientist. Furuichi, who doubled as the executive of a start-up IT firm established with college friends, dressed fairly typically for a twenty-something Japanese man. That is to say he looked nothing like the drab-suited salaryman of western imagination. If anything, he was more like the androgynous creation of a manga comic, a dashing, slightly effete young wizard from Howl’s Moving Castle. His well-groomed hair had a delicate henna tinge and he wore casual clothes with no trace of a crease. He carried an iPhone 4S, then the latest model, and, over his shoulder, a capacious purple shoulder bag. When he waved goodbye, it was the cute salutation beloved of Japanese girls, elbow pressed against his hip, hand oscillating to and fro.

  In his book called Happy Youth in a Desperate Country, Furuichi’s main conclusion – quite counter to the prevailing narrative – was that Japan’s youth has never been so content. ‘The media have been unrelenting in their depiction of youth as poor, hapless, desperate and in dire straits,’ he told me when we met on the top floor of a glinting new office tower near Shinagawa station, one of numerous showcase buildings that had shot up in Tokyo during the years of supposed stagnation. ‘In fact, the government’s own data shows that 73 per cent of youth are perfectly satisfied with their life,’ he said, referring to an annual ‘satisfaction survey’ that had been going for decades. In the 1960s, when Japan was entering its high-growth sweet-spot, about half of respondents aged twenty to twenty-nine said they were happy. The ‘happiness quotient’, he said, had risen steadily ever since.

  Those numbers looked wrong given what was generally said about the optimistic years of economic take-off and the directionless post-bubble decades. Furuichi’s book had drawn criticism for downplaying real economic and social hardships. It was not unusual, though, he told me, for satisfaction levels to rise as an economy matured and slowed, partly because young people no longer had to delay their gratification like their parents and grandparents. Japan’s miracle years, he said, were an era of happiness deferred. ‘Half of Japan was still rural until the mid-1960s. So many people working in the cities were living for others. They were in the city on behalf of their home town and they needed to send part of their pay cheque back to the countryside. They functioned on behalf of another person. They were serving the future, serving the nation, serving the provinces. They were serving something other than themselves.’ In sociological terms, Japa
n had transitioned from being what he called an ‘instrumental’ society, where actions served a larger purpose, to becoming a ‘consummatory’ society in which people lived for the moment. ‘Now they’re working for themselves, making their own decisions, taking their own responsibilities and reaping their own rewards.’

  Despite all the economic insecurity of contemporary Japan, Furuichi said, few people of his age hankered after the old days. ‘We knew our fathers were being called economic animals, that they were made fun of for being hapless cogs in the machine. Our mothers did what they could to be “happy housewives”, but they were essentially maids and servants.’ The job-for-life system was almost exclusively male and, even then, not all-encompassing, he went on. Many men worked for small companies without the benefits of absolute job security, ascending pay and generous pensions. ‘Even in the best of times, the so-called lifetime employment system covered only 30–40 per cent of the population.’ That number may have shrunk still further, but there were compensations. ‘Fewer young people are buying cars. Instead, they’re spending money on food, clothes, phones and spending time with their friends. “What should Japanese youth do?”’ he asked rhetorically. ‘I’m doing it. I’m not running for office, so I don’t have a prescription for what everybody else should do. But for myself, and the people around me, I am being proactive. I’m establishing ways to use my knowledge and use the knowledge of people around me. I think people should look at the society that’s near them and find ways to utilize each other’s resources. They shouldn’t worry about a united Japan, or the “Japanese people”. Just find a group of people you can do something productive with and be productive. Everywhere you look you see the problems of the state . . . I’m not saying we need to abandon the public sphere. But I am saying that small groups of smart people, ten or twenty people, getting together and seeing what they can do, that is definitely what interests me.’