By Kikuyo Yamada
There’s a peculiar phenomenon going on in Japan today. The department store across the street from my Taiwanese friend’s house in Tokyo closed abruptly last month, and the construction workers dismantling it seemed relieved not to be in the position of the salarymen they hear about who get up every morning and go to the park in coat and tie, returning home at 7 p.m. to a family that doesn’t know daddy has already been laid off. Unemployment recently hit a postwar high of approximately 5%. A pretty bleak situation. And yet, what may be the most striking thing about Japan’s current economic depression is not how visible it is, but just the opposite. The stores appear as jammed with shoppers as ever, with customers dropping unfathomable sums on big-name handbags; and flights to Hawaii and California are still booked up 3 months in advance. Japan is not a country with broken windows, shuttered stores, and slums. In recessionary Japan, on the contrary, most people seem to be well-dressed, on their way somewhere expensive and exulting in Ichiro’s success in American Big Leagues. “Seem” is the important word here, of course, and many visitors will tell you Japanese people have mastered the art of not appearing to be worried by burying their heads in the sand. In 2000, the Nikkei index lost a quarter of its value, and now it’s getting even worse. In the late 1980’s, when my Taiwanese friend went to live in Japan, an English teacher told her that when he asked his students to choose an adjective to describe themselves, he had to forbid them to use the word “cheerful,” or else everyone in the class would have selected it. Accentuating the positive is an article of faith in Japan. But its regulated optimism may not be so pragmatic. Some Japanese people I know see happiness not as something to be pursued, but rather as something to be found wherever they happen to find themselves. The first rule of Buddhism, which lies at the heart of Japan’s ancient rites and culture, is the reality of suffering, which implies that anything other than suffering is supposed to be an unexpected luxury. The second is impermanence, which, to Japanese people, means taking a longer view of things. The economic forecast calls for overcast skies, my Taiwanese friend heard her neighbor say, but that can only change at some point; in the meantime Japan has the second largest economy in the world and unparalleled private savings. Besides, a rainy day allows you to do things you would never think of when the sun is out. To live in a culture not your own is to learn a different language–not so much in the sense of mastering foreign words but of rethinking the language you thought you knew. In Japan, denial seems to mean denying despair, while depression means repressing the impulse to put your own circumstances before everyone else’s. Fatalism is just a less happy word for faith. When a country is drawn together by adversity, learning to putting a brave face on things might be the best way of passing hopefulness around, and the first step toward making the hopefulness come true. The department store across the street from my Taiwanese friend’s house closed last month, and the people around her said, “Who knows what will come into its place? Perhaps it will be something better!” That might be called wishful thinking. But living in Japan, perhaps it’s just realism. a
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May 2024
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