Minispike: The end of the line?

The Iwaizumi line, a spur which runs for 38km and nine stations up the rugged middle of Iwate prefecture in Northeastern Japan, from the hinterland of the fish city of Miyako, mauled by the tsunami, to the cow town of Iwaizumi, whose 10,400 residents are spread out across a territory of 992km², half as large again as Tokyo’s 23 wards, with their nine million residents, is notorious—at least among observers of these phenomena—for being the least trafficked line in the whole nation, with average daily ridership per kilometer of 46 people in fiscal 2009, one 23,000^th the ridership density of the Yamanote loop line in central Tokyo. Half of it was built during World War II, prompted by military demand for clay for flame-resistant brick for industrial purposes, but it was not completed until February 6, 1972, an astoundingly late date and one by when the demographic future of Iwaizumi, then home to some 21,000 people, was already on the wall, as scrutiny of the photo below of Iwaizumi station on opening day (and also in 2003) might suggest.

The line, up and down which three trains a day trundle, led for many years a charmed life: it was targeted for the axe at the privatization of Japanese National Railways in 1987, just 15 years after completion, but escaped because the road that runs more or less parallel with it and is the only route into Iwaizumi from the south is not wide enough in many places for two cars to pass and is treacherous in winter. East Japan Railways (JR East), which inherited the line post-privatization, tried again to get rid of it in 1996, but was rebuffed. Then, on Saturday July 31, 2010, at 07:33, disaster struck. Loosened by hours of torrential rain, rocks had fallen at the end of a tunnel 24km up the line, and into them the single-carriage northbound morning train ploughed and derailed.

Most accounts say there were seven passengers and two crew—astoundingly the line was never converted to driver-only operation—on board at the time, although my fourth-hand sources tell me that at a recent presentation, JR East asserted that there were only three passengers, and all of them were train-spotters. The Japan Times reported the incident the next day thus:

A 63-year-old man suffered a graze, while a 48-year-old man badly hit his shoulder and leg, the officials said. Another passenger who felt ill and the 28-year-old driver, whose back was slightly injured, were sent to a hospital.

Naturally, the derailment featured prominently on the national evening news broadcasts and in the pages of the national press the next day. “Naturally,” I hear you scoff, “a derailment in which four people were slightly injured on a railway line of no consequence in Iwate, so far from the centers of power, why the media hype?” Well, Saturday is a slow news day and Japan is a slow news society, it is true, but let’s take a little detour to explain the prominence afforded the derailment.

You could do worse, in attempting to explain much of what happens in modern Japan—and nearly everything that doesn’t—and by extension Korea and China, than by holding the event up to the light shone by five interlocking words, all of which share a common character: anzen(sei), (安全[性], safety), anshin (安心, peace of mind), antei (安定, stability), fuantei (不安定, instability), and fuan (不安, unease). Safety is an integral component of stability, which leads to peace of mind. Its absence leads to instability and hence to unease. These words exist like the parallel strings of a guitar: a single string can be plucked or several can be strummed at once. The Iwaizumi derailment was a clear violation of the prescription of anzensei, safety, and an infringement of anshin, peace of mind, not only of the injured but of the townsfolk of Iwaizumi, engendering in them fuan, unease, that the derailment would be consequential enough to knock the line out of commission, with the antei, stability, of the “natural” order of things, replaced by the fuantei, instability, of change–even though a replacement bus service running the length of the line was inaugurated just two days after the derailment.

On March 30 this year, JR East held a press conference at which it formally announced plans to axe the Iwaizumi line. The accompanying briefing materials, available in Japanese here and in sadly truncated English here, make for astonishing reading. Passenger numbers, never elevated to begin with, have fallen to a quarter of the level they were at in 1987 at privatization. In fiscal 2009, the line generated Y8mn (about $100,000) in revenue, not appreciably more than the annual income of a family of four (about Y6mn), yet cost Y265mn (about $3mn) to run in operating expenses, resulting in an operating loss of Y257mn, so the line loses Y32 for every Y1 it takes in. The report identifies 23 places along the line where rockfalls are possible, a further 88 where rockslides are possible, and puts the cost of ensuring the safety of the line and the safe running of trains—those words again—at Y13bn (about $150mn), mostly through the time-honored method of spraying concrete on rockfaces. To put that cost into perspective, assume that every last yen the line generates could be hypothecated to payment of the construction bill—which it cannot—and that revenues will remain static—which they will not—then it would take 1,625 years, or until around the year 3637, for the bill to be paid, or roughly a thousand years after the last inhabitant of Iwaizumi, at the current population rate to halve, pops his or her geta.

It is in many ways a marvel that something as gloriously, anarchically, emphatically antithetical to the rules of economics and the regimen of the bean-counters as the Iwaizumi line should have staggered on for as long as it has. If it is indeed axed, it will be an epochal event, marking the first closure of any JR East line since privatization and potentially opening the floodgates to other closures—of JR East’s 67 conventional, non-shinkansen lines, just 16 were profitable in fiscal 2007. The language of the briefing materials, though, is apologetic, not defiant, for the company must know that it has a fight on its hands. The Mainichi Shimbun, a national newspaper, reported on the closure the day following the press conference, in an article wholly sympathetic to the defenders of the line, under the headline, JR Iwaizumi line to be axed, users despair. After briefly recounting the history of the saga, it turned to the locals:

Users and related parties have been voicing their discontent and despair about the plans to axe the line. Shunya Kawamura (17), who took the line to get to Iwaizumi High School, said, “I’m using the bus replacement service, but there are lots of corners on the highway and I get carsick.” Most of the users of the line are Iwaizumi High School students or the elderly visiting hospitals in Miyako. It was reported that, at a residents’ rally in Iwaizumi in January, some older people said that being shaken around in a bus without toilets made them feel awful. The Hotel Ryusendo Aisan, which takes in about 3,000 railway fans and other tourists a year, has been hit hard by the disappearance of tours since the accident. Hotel boss Sadaji Nakamura warned that, “If the railway is wiped from the map, the town will gradually lose its appeal as a tourist attraction.”

As an unsentimental friend who shares my fascination with the tale snorted on reading this, “JR East could lay on a fleet of luxury coaches, hand out free motion-sickness pills, hire a troupe of can-can dancers to entertain the passengers, and still come out ahead!”

Still, a cleanly professional website to defend the line has been set up and inundated with messages of support, petitions have been organized, rallies have been held—the one mentioned above and pictured below attracted some 900 folk—and cakes no doubt have been baked.

On May 10, the Iwate Nippo reports, the deputy governor of Iwate and the mayors of Miyako and Iwaizumi lobbied the deputy president of JR East for the swift and complete restoration of the line and then met with the vice minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport to request that the ministry “guide” and “advise” (read: browbeat and coerce) JR East into seeing the error of its senseless thrift, to which the vice minister’s guardedly noncommittal response was to acknowledge the importance of the line while stating the need for the local authorities and JR East to talk fully to each other and search for a resolution. Conjecture it can only be at this stage, but there may be as good as an even chance that JR East can be cajoled into spending the $150mn and saving the line.

All of this fascinates but does not surprise: the love for local, loss-making lines, a fiercely nostalgic love for a past that never existed but which is no less a valid love for all that, flames in inverse correlation with the economic utility of the line. I have never had, and may never have, the pleasure of the Iwaizumi line’s acquaintance, but during the spring Golden Week vacation last year, I rode—both ways—the Tadami line, which runs 135km from Aizu Wakamatsu in western Fukushima through snow country to Koide in Niigata, which itself was only completed in 1971, and which, if the Iwaizumi line is axed, will be crowned with the twin titles of the least trafficked and most money-losing line in the empire of JR East—and just in time I was too, for torrential rain three months later swept away bridges and services have still not been fully restored. Although no commemorative run, just a regular scheduled train, it was packed with rail buffs achatter with excitement, and along the rail-side banks were dotted throngs of hobbyist photographers who vied for the best shots. Truly, madly, deeply, Japan is geek heaven.

(With thanks to A.P. for the additional reporting)

Spike: The weekend wrap

[Welcome to a new, occasional Spike feature, inspired by links kindly sent by readers that weren’t getting a sufficient airing, as well as by the miscellany of articles, graphs, book excerpts, and academic papers that I run across that don’t fit neatly into the mosaic of a regular Spike piece. I’ll try and keep the writing breezy and newsy, so as to be able to complete it over a glass of wine—or just conceivably two—on a weekend evening.]

Everyone, including me, seems to be an amateur demographer these days. It behooves us amateurs to occasionally listen to the professionals, and one such is Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at the formidably right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI). There are two sides to Dr. Eberstadt: the first is the uncontentious descriptive demographer with a powerful turn of phrase. He casts an unsparing eye over Japanese demography in his most recent piece, Japan Shrinks, in the spring 2012 edition of The Wilson Quarterly (link here, reading time approximately 15 minutes). Much of what he says is familiar enough territory to regular readers of Spike, but it’s always refreshing to have the demographic picture painted so forcefully and accurately. It’s also good to be reminded that Japan, of course, is not alone in being at the apex of a momentous demographic transition and that Germany, indeed, arrived there earlier: interestingly, the German expression for the phenomenon, schrumpfende Gesellschaft, or shrinking society, has a close parallel in Japanese, chijimu Nihon, or shrinking Japan, the title of a recent series of NHK programs on the implications of population aging and decline, although the phase is not yet in very common currency, perhaps because of widespread denial and perhaps because, unless you live on the furthest flung fringes, the shrinkage is not yet obvious. Dr. Eberstadt also throws out the odd intriguing comment that calls for further research, such as the observation that there is a “near perfect correlation between the demise of arranged marriage in Japan and the decline in postwar Japanese fertility”.

Japan’s demographic issues pale in comparison with those of Russia, and for a better understanding of those, I highly recommend Dr. Eberstadt’s 2011 article in Foreign Affairs, The Dying Bear: Russia’s Demographic Disaster (link here, approximately 30 minutes). Here’s a taster:

By various measures, Russia’s demographic indicators resemble those in many of the world’s poorest and least developed societies. In 2009, overall life expectancy at age 15 was estimated to be lower in Russia than in Bangladesh, East Timor, Eritrea, Madagascar, Niger, and Yemen; even worse, Russia’s adult male life expectancy was estimated to be lower than Sudan’s, Rwanda’s, and even AIDS-ravaged Botswana’s. … The country’s fateful leap backward in health and survival prospects is due to an explosion in deaths from cardiovascular disease and what epidemiologists call “external causes,” such as poisoning, injury, suicide, homicide, traffic fatalities, and other violent accidents. Deaths from cardiovascular disease and injuries account for the overwhelming majority of Russia’s spike in mortality levels and for nearly the entire gap separating Russia’s mortality levels from those of Western countries. At the moment, death rates from cardiovascular disease are more than three times as high in Russia as in Western Europe, and Russian death rates from injury and violence have been stratospheric, on par with those in African post-conflict societies such as Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Is there an elite on earth more cravenly corrupt and more openly contemptuous of its subjects than the Russian oligarchy?

The other side of Dr. Eberstadt is the prescriptive, rather than the descriptive, demographer, the opponent of Al Gore and other neo-Malthusian proponents of population stabilization—whom he damns as the “old anti-natalist crowd”—the self-appointed flayer of supposed shibboleths about the determinants of fertility rates and other population nostrums such as “overcrowding”, on display best in his 2002 AEI essay Population Sense and Nonsense (link here, approximately 20 minutes). I happen not to share his sunny demographic optimism, but it’s always constructive to read the well-rehearsed views of an adversary, even when you can drive a coach-and-horses through their lacunae, and also to be reminded of the root cause of the 20th century global population explosion: it was “not because people suddenly started breeding like rabbits—rather, it was because they finally stopped dying like flies.”

Remaining on demographic turf, my chart of the week is below (click on it for a clearer resolution). It shows nothing more—or less—than the Japanese total fertility rate by prefecture at selected intervals from 1925 to 2010. For what is merely a collection of 765 numbers ranging from 6.47 (Aomori, 1925) to exactly 1.00 (Tokyo, 2005) in a grid, this chart provides the flab-bellied armchair demographer with a feast of fascination and speculation.

Start at the very bottom row, which is the nationwide figure, and note that the fertility rate has been rising off the 2005 low. Memo to self: remember to haul out the BS detector every time I hear someone talking about Japan’s “falling birthrate and aging society”—they are either ignorant, lazy, or deliberately trying to mislead.

Moving up a row: Okinawa. Why is it such a perennial fertility outsider, going from having the second lowest fertility rate in 1925 to the highest fertility rate for every single survey year from 1970 to 2010? Is this somehow a legacy of the 1945-1972 US occupation?

Moving up to the top seven rows, which show Hokkaido and the six prefectures of Tohoku, why is the 2010 fertility rate so generally low, with Hokkaido, Miyagi, and Akita being three of only four rural prefectures with rates below 1.30 (the other is Nara), why has their bounce off the 2005 low been so weak (indeed, it hasn’t occurred at all in Akita and Yamagata, where the fertility rates have continued to decline, the only prefectures aside from Yamanashi for which this is true), and what are the implications for post-earthquake recovery?

And finally, note that the prefectures with the highest fertility rates (over 1.6) are all in Kyushu (Miyazaki, Kumamoto, and Kagoshima), and that of the 13 prefectures with fertility rates over 1.5, all but two (Fukui and Fukushima—all those once stable nuclear power industry jobs?)—are in the west of Japan, which all things being equal, would suggest a barely perceptible but relentless shift in the population center south and west, as is occurring in the US.

Finally on the demographic theme, another chart, this one home-made. It occurred to me, rootling through the data last week, that the population tipping-point was creeping ever closer to the capital, so I ran for myself the numbers on the greater Tokyo metropolitan area, the shutoken, for which I used the 2005 and 2010 census data and the April 2012 population estimates (suikei jinko) that are compiled, I believe, by each and every municipality, based on the census and simply adding or subtracting births, deaths, in-migrants, and out-migrants (demography, although important, is not by any means rocket science…) As for accuracy, we can be sure that next to all births are registered and that all deaths—apart from the odd mummified centenarian whose avaricious relatives want to continue claiming the welfare benefits of the deceased—are registered. Some inaccuracy may result from underreporting of changes of domicile, however, so a measure of caution is warranted. Nevertheless, the results speak of a momentous change afoot.

	October   2005	October   2010	April   2012	%   chg
Yamanashi	884,515	862,772	852,855	-1.15%
Gunma	2,024,135	2,008,170	1,994,309	-0.70%
Tochigi	2,016,631	2,007,014	1,993,283	-0.69%
Ibaraki	2,975,167	2,968,865	2,945,505	-0.79%
Saitama	7,054,243	7,194,957	7,204,353	+0.01%
Chiba	6,056,462	6,217,119	6,195,643	-0.34%
Kanagawa	8,791,597	9,049,500	9,052,730	+0.00%
Tokyo	12,576,601	13,161,751	13,182,509	+0.01%
TOTAL	42,379,351	43,470,148	43,421,187	-0.01%

The real surprises here are Kanagawa (Yokohama and its hinterland) and Tokyo itself, whose populations were not projected to peak until 2015 and 2020, respectively, and it may be that we are still a few years away from the Great Stall. It may equally well be, though, that the last six months or so has seen a definitive end to the thousand years of expansion in which an anonymous fishing village was plucked from obscurity to become the largest city in the world by the early 18th century and again, after World War II, the largest megalopolis and the most intense concentration of wealth the world has ever seen, with an economy twice the size that of the nearest challenger, New York, an economy that would, were it independent, give it a GDP about the size of Russia.

I learned a neat little demographic trick this week: how to use the Rule of Seventy (the natural log of two is 0.693) to calculate a population’s halving (or doubling) time. For Yamanashi, the most rural and most demographically challenged prefecture in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area, for instance, the maths looks like this: 69.3 ÷ ([-1.15% ÷ 18] x 12) = 90.4 years. For Akita, the prefecture where population decline set in first (1980), has been greatest (-15.1% from peak to date), and is steepest, the time to halve is currently 58.6 years. (Note that in the case of a population with rising net mortality, time to halve in years is not static, but contracts as the decline accelerates).

Well, that was rather dry, wasn’t it? Time for lashings of humor and violence. Here’s an assortment of titles of self-help books inspired by the Japanese mob: Yakuza Techniques for Overcoming Business Hurdles through Successful Speaking and Listening (2006), Modern Yakuza Tips for Making Cash (2008), Choosing your Man: Yakuza Tips for Telling a Winner from a Loser (2008), Management Skills of the Yamaguchi-gumi (2005), and my personal favorite, Yakuza Techniques for Dealing with Complaints (2010). Initially, I had a hard time believing these books really exist, but a moment at amazon.co.jp was enough to convince—and there are dozens of other self-help books out there with similar titles. Which goes to underscore what has been long known—that there are too many books being published, and too many self-help books in particular.

These come from a nothing short of brilliant survey of the current state of the Japanese mob by Andrew Rankin, a PhD student (but with a 20-year stint in Japan behind him) at my alma mater, Cambridge University, whom I recently contacted having been misled by the Internet rumor-mill into believing he was writing a new biography of Yukio Mishima. He’s not, but the translation of a Mishima biography penned by Tokyo Deputy Governor Naoki Inose is due out in November.

The two-part yakuza survey is here and here but needs a solid hour of concentrated attention. If you don’t have the time to spare, here’s the summary: less money, less power, less violence, more ingenuity, staying parochial, getting older, going deeper underground, fewer tattoos, and lots fewer missing pinkies. Like Mr. Rankin, I can’t help but feel the yakuza crackdown of the last decade or so is potentially counterproductive: would you rather have organized crime—and the Japanese mob has historically been supremely organized—or disorganized crime? I’d go one wholly speculative step further, too, and say that the crackdown is but one more manifestation of an incipiently totalitarian state that brooks no serious opposition to its crushingly rigid and drearily passé petit-bourgeois ideology.

Causing a bit of a media brouhaha in recent days has been a report, Global Japan: 2050 Simulations and Strategies, by the 21st Century Public Policy Institute, a public policy think-tank (dread words!) affiliated with Keidanren, which for those not in the know is a pro-business lobbying organization akin to the Confederation of British Industry in the UK or the Chamber of Commerce in the US. The link is here (approximately 10 minutes). The eccentric English (“if perchance financial collapse does occur”) suggests that, for all of the hot air about internationalization and globalization, no native speaker had a hand in its production. The two key takeaways are that the debt-to-nominal GDP ratio sails blithely past 300% in the early 2030s and on up to around 600% by 2050, even if the consumption tax is doubled to 10% by fiscal 2015, and that under all four scenarios, even the rosiest, GDP turns negative by the decade from 2031 to 2040. That rosiest scenario sees women’s labor force participation rate rise to rank on par with that of Sweden, and indeed, the very first (nebulous) policy recommendation is: “Promote labor participation of women and the elderly, and strengthen the workforce from young to senior workers.”

Keidanren may be practicing what it preaches about labor force participation by the elderly—shaggily-eyebrowed Chairman Hiromasa Yonekura is a sprightly 74—but as for labor force participation by women—at least in roles less menial than pourers of tea and makers of photocopies—not so much. Of the 18 chairs and vice-chairs, how many are women? Ah yes, none. Of the 17 chairs and vice-chairs of the Board of Councillors? None again. Among the 108—108!—chairs of policy committees, we might hope to find at least a token woman, right? Wrong. As a wag once quipped of Japanese corporate boards, the higher echelons of Keidanren make a Brigham Young University graduation photo look like a Benetton ad…

That alone is enough, I think, to cast doubt on the rosiest scenario and reason to expect a post-growth society to set in, to the delight of the degrowther advocates of décroissance, sooner rather than later, perhaps as soon as the coming decade. As is the overall quality of the report, with the strident alarmism—Japan is going to lose developed country status, Japan is going back to the Third World!—of the first slide undermined by the last slide, which has Japan sandwiched between the UK and Germany in 2050 per capita GDP. Presumably the alarmism is designed to foster public backing for the Keidanren agenda, but it’s hard to see what it contributes to the public debate, save to expose the think-tank’s vacuity. Still, as a friend forever likes to remind me when I point out the pointlessness of much developed-nation economic activity, we all have to put food on the wolf and keep the table from the door.

To return to demography (not that we ever really left it), here’s a demographic quiz. There’s a free lifetime subscription to Spike for the closest answer! (Oh, wait…) At the 2010 census, there were 253 cities across the nation with populations under 50,000. They form the backbone of rural Japan, ranging in size from Masuda in Shimane, at 49,925, to poor old Utashinai on the Sorachi coalfields, at 4,390, less than half the size of the next smallest city, and from Wakkanai, at the northernmost tip of Hokkaido, where the population has fallen by about a third from its 1975 peak, to Ishigaki, south of Taipei, where the population rose by about a third from 1970 to 2010 (trite moral of the story—people prefer living in subtropical paradises to wind-blasted and snow-swept fishing towns). Here’s the question: since the 2010 census, how many of the 253 have experienced population growth? (And no, the answer’s not none).

Finally, the photos of the week. One of the consequences of stopping shopping, as I did many moons ago, is that you eventually run out of clothes, which is inconvenient, as nudism as a hobby can only be practiced in the summer months, and also of footwear, so lately I have been down to three pairs: work shoes purchased around 2004, hiking boots purchased around 2002, and these Indonesian-made Nike trainers, purchased around 2000.

Tiring of gluing and regluing the soles to the uppers, I surrendered last weekend and splashed out on some new ones. Allow me to do something endearingly characteristic to animist societies such as this one, and address these inanimate objects directly with a funeral oration before consigning them to the incinerator of history.

So, dear shoes, I bid you a big old otsukaresama—you must be tired—and thank you so very much for carrying me to every single place that Spike has visited, to the northernmost, easternmost, southernmost, and westernmost tips of mainland Japan, to Brunei and to Bali and—many times—to Britain, for the untold millions of footsteps we have trodden together, for protecting my feet from snow and slush, from torrents and rivers of rain, and from mud and rubble, to name just a few of the host of threats to which an unshod foot is prey. You’ve had a hard life in my hands, I know, but I’d like to think it was a long and fruitful one. Goodbye, my faithful friends, goodbye.

Next time, there’ll be no demography, I promise. Until then…

Tokyo through the letterbox

Reams have been written about the suicide-as-spectacle of novelist Yukio Mishima’s death; less, perhaps, about the cartographies and circumstances of his birth. He was born Kimitake Hiraoka, on January 14, 1925, the first child of a civil servant, of a family of what would once—then, indeed—have been called “very good stock”, and his wife, of a family of Confucian and Chinese scholars, in Yotsuya, once on the fringe but now already in the heart of a Tokyo that was rapidly expanding and shifting its center of gravity westward, in a district known then as Nagasumi-cho (永住町, “long dwell town”, although he would be gone from the neighborhood by the age of eight) but which was reorganized and renamed Yotsuya 4-chome in a municipal redistricting on April 1, 1943 (one would have thought they would have had better things to do), before being pulverized to smithereens by American air-raids less than two years later.

Before the Meiji Restoration, Nagasumi-cho had formed part of the Tokyo estates of one of the three noble branches of the house of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Tayasu Tokugawas, but by the early 20th century, it had fallen on its uppers, and was home to a couple of dozen cheap lodging houses, of which this drably fading hostel, the Nagaragawa, where rooms can be had for Y4,000 ($50) a night, is the spiritual successor.

Mishima describes the family and house into which he was born in his almost wholly autobiographical but unreliably narrated novel, Confessions of a Mask (1949), the book which made his name, thus:

…My family began sliding down an incline with a speed so happy-go-lucky that I could almost say they hummed merrily as they went—huge debts, foreclosure, sale of the family estate, and then, as financial difficulties multiplied, a morbid vanity blazing higher and higher like some evil impulse.

As a result, I was born in not too good a section of Tokyo, in an old rented house. It was a pretentious house on a corner, with a rather jumbled appearance and a dingy, charred feeling. It had an imposing iron gate, an entry garden and a Western-style reception room as large as the interior of a suburban church. There were two stories on the upper slope and three on the lower, numerous gloomy rooms, and six housemaids. In this house, which creaked like an old chest of drawers, ten persons were getting up and lying down morning and evening—my grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, and the servants.

私の家は殆ど鼻歌まじりと言いたいほどの気楽な速度で、傾斜の上を辷りだした。莫大な借財、差押、家屋敷の売却、それから窮迫が加わるにつれ暗い衝動のようにますますもえさかる病的な虚栄。
―こうして私が生れたのは、土地柄のあまりよくない町の一角にある古い借家だった。こけおどかしの鉄の門や前庭や場末の礼拝堂ほどにひろい洋間などのある・坂の上から見ると二階建であり坂の下から見ると三階建の・燻んだ暗い感じのする・何か錯雑した容子の居丈高な家だった。暗い部屋がたくさんあり、女中が六人いた。祖父、祖母、父、母、と都合十人がこの古い箪笥のようにきしむ家に起き伏ししていた。

(On inspection, it occurs to me that the original translator, Meredith Weatherby, one of a coterie of gay Americans who were to generously dominate the narrow neck of the funnel through which Japanese arts reached the wider world in the years after the war, has some of this wrong, not least the implicit reference to a five-storied house, when the original says, ambiguously, that the house had, or appeared to have, two stories when viewed from the upper reaches of the slope, and three stories when viewed from the lower reaches, but we know that as early as 1952, six long years before publication in English, Weatherby and Mishima discussed the translation in New York, so I defer—and anyway, I digress.)

Declivities are important here: there is the metaphoric incline down which the family fortunes begin to slide, mirrored by the slope on which the old rented house precariously rests, and there’s one more slope that matters, the one on which Mishima, as a boy of four, has—by his account—his erotic awakening:

It was a young man who was coming down toward us, with handsome ruddy cheeks and shining eyes, wearing a dirty roll of cloth around his head for a sweatband. He came down the slope carrying a yoke of night-soil buckets over one shoulder, balancing their heaviness expertly with his footsteps. He was a night-soil man, a ladler of excrement. He was dressed as a laborer, wearing split-toed shoes with rubber soles and black canvas tops, and dark blue cotton trousers of the close-fitting kind called “thigh-pullers”.

The scrutiny I gave the youth was unusually close for a child of four. Although I did not realize it at the time, for me he represented my first revelation of a certain power, my first summons by a certain strange and secret voice. It is significant that it was first manifested to me in the form of a night-soil man: excrement is a symbol for the earth, and it was doubtlessly the malevolent love of the Earth Mother that was calling to me.

坂を下りて来たのは一人の若者だった。肥桶を前後に荷い、汚れた手拭で鉢巻をし、血色のよい美しい頬と輝く目をもち、足で重みを踏みわけながら坂を下りて来た。それは汚穢屋ー糞尿汲取人ーであった。彼は地下足袋を穿き、紺の股引を穿いていた。五歳の私は異常な注視でこの姿を見た。まだその意味とては定かではないが、或る力の最初の啓示、或る暗いふしぎな呼び声が私に呼びかけたのであった。それが汚穢屋の姿に最初に顕現したことは寓喩的である。何故なら糞尿は大地の象徴であるから。私に呼びかけたものは根の母の悪意ある愛であったに相違ないから。

(Weatherby reorders the Japanese, as is his prerogative. Let’s re-unpack a little of it using the tried-and-true four-step formula of the late, lamented Mangajin magazine.
坂を下りて来たのは一人の若者だった。
Saka wo orite kita no wa hitori no wakamono datta.
Slope (object marker) descend-came (of + topic marker) one-person (of) young-person was.
A youth came down the slope toward us.
肥桶を前後に荷い、汚れた手拭で鉢巻をし、血色のよい美しい頬と輝く目をもち、足で重みを踏みわけながら坂を下りて来た。
Koeoke wo zengo ni ninai, yogoreta tenugui de hachimaki wo shi, kesshoku no yoi utsukushii ho to kagayaku me wo mochi, ashi de omomi wo fumiwakenagara saka wo orite kita.
Night-soil buckets (object marker) front-and-back (place marker) bear-on-shoulder, was-dirty hand-towel (as) headband (object marker) did, blood-color (of) good beautiful cheeks and shines eye (object marker) had, feet (by) heaviness (object marker) distribute-by-step-while slope (object marker) descend-came.
Bearing a yoke of night-soil buckets fore-and-aft on his shoulder, wearing a dirty hand-towel as a headband, with handsome ruddy cheeks and shining eyes, the youth balanced the heaviness of the yoke with his footsteps as he came down the slope.
それは汚穢屋ー糞尿汲取人ーであった。
Sore wa owaiya—fun’nyo kumitorinin—de atta.
That (topic marker) night-soil-man—feces-and-urine ladle-person—was. 
He was a night-soil man, a ladler of excrement.

One thing the English loses, in the transitions from “blood-color” to “ruddy” and from “feces-and-urine” to “excrement” is the bond being tentatively forged by Mishima between blood and feces, a theme to which we’ll return, and it helps to know that Mishima was nicknamed “Aojiro” [“Blue-white”] at school for the pallor of his complexion—but I digress.)

The locus of Mishima’s desire, he goes on to say, is on the dark-blue “thigh-pullers”, part of the uniform of laborers still worn occasionally today, and the night-soil man’s occupation itself, although he then claims that he had “a misconception of the work of a night-soil man” and soon transfers his ardor to “the operators of hana-densha—those streetcars decorated so gaily with flowers for festival days—or again to subway ticket-punchers”—particularly the latter and “the rows of gold buttons on the tunics of their blue uniforms”.

What was once Nagasumi-cho is bounded to the east by another residential district, to the north and south by two major arteries, Yasukuni-dori and Shinjuku-dori, which were there in the days of Mishima’s youth, and bisected to the west by another major artery, Gaien Nishi-dori, which was not. The quarter into which Mishima was born, to the east of Gaien Nishi-dori, is tiny, at most 500 meters north-to-south and 250 meters east-to-west. Flat to the south, to the north and west it declines perhaps 20 meters in altitude to meet the major arteries—this is where Mishima’s formative slopes lie. Although I’ve lived for a nigh on a dozen years a two-minute cycle ride from it, and passed the mask it presents to the world on the major arteries measureless hundreds of times, I realize I’ve never once penetrated beyond the mask, down its somnolent streets and tangle of lanes where, in the deepest recesses of the warren the alley is so narrow, so private that to set foot in it feels like intrusion.
Although I have the prewar address for Mishima—Nagasumi-cho 2-banchi—and three maps to guide me, one from 1936,

one showing the redistricting of neighborhoods in 1943,

and a contemporary book of Tokyo street maps,

the address is too amorphous and the layout of the streets has changed too much to do more than stab a guess at its precise location, so I resolve to wander down every street and stairway, every passage and slope, and see what turns up.

It takes a moment to register from the exterior what the Horaiyu, a sento, a neighborhood public bathhouse, is—the giveaways are the chimney and the sign for hot water (ゆ) on the curtain behind the entranceway.
“Not many of these left,” says the passing Frenchman.
“No,” I concur, “I don’t think I’ve seen one in years.”
The sento is flanked, not only by a brace of vending machines, but by a pair of laundromats.

“Interesting architecture. From the sixties, I guess. People bring their washing here, have a bath, go home, everything’s pikapika,” he exclaims, using the onomatopoeia for a state of resplendent cleanliness.

The Horaiyu survives because, as it was in Mishima’s day, the neighborhood is pockmarked by poverty. To be sure, in this central and hence desirable neck of the woods some gentrification has occurred—a huge shiny new condo edifice has sprouted at one corner, a crop of smart townhouses has taken root at another—but there are plenty of shabby old blocks of one-room apartments lacking bathrooms, or even space for a washing machine, dotting the district.

The Meiwaso, the Mitsuiso, the Kawakamiso, how cruelly they taunt their occupants with the suffix for “villa” or “manor” (荘) that they all share in their names, how little, it is patently clear, their slumlords spend on their upkeep, how much it costs—about $500 a month—just to rent one of these tiny, tiny toeholds in the center of the capital. No Poggenpohl, no Aga, no Miele here, no kitchens at all: if you’re lucky, a one-ring gas stove on a bench to reflect your no-ring loneliness. I’ve been close to down-and-out in urban Japan, I’ve seen these places from the inside, and I well know they’re slit-your-wrist suicide traps, one misstep from death—or life on the street.

Some of the tenants are just transients through poverty, penurious students from the provinces scrimping by on what their parents can send them and their arbeit part-time jobs can pay them, but others—that never-married middle-aged woman who cleans your office toilets, that widower with his baton for directing traffic at construction sites, that barely employed aspiring singer growing too old for the game—they are stuck here for good.

“You’re still in Edo,” continued the Frenchman, using the old name for Tokyo. “Up there, at the big intersection, there are some old stones that show the boundary between the city and the country, you know, when Shinjuku was fields. Okido, it was called.”

He was right. The stone lantern marks the location of the Yotsuya Okido, one of the three “big wooden doors” that served as customs barriers on the three main thoroughfares west out of the capital, in this case the Koshu Kaido out to Nagano Prefecture. How many countless times have I passed it without pausing to contemplate its significance, I wonder.

A man passed by us on his way home from the sento.

“And over there,” the Frenchman went on, gesturing in the opposite direction, “in Tomihisa-cho, there’s a memorial to [Greek-Irish author] Lafcadio Hearn. Quite elaborate it is. He used to live there when he was in Tokyo. Ask at the police box, they’ll tell you how to find it.”

Who is commemorated and who is not: no plaque, no plinth with somber statue, no pedestal with bronze bust honors Mishima’s birthplace. He has never been forgiven for his criticism of the emperor, for the many other feathers he ruffled, for that last torrid day of his life.

In many ways, that day—November 25, 1970—was a homecoming (not that Mishima ever lived for any length far from the neighborhood of his birth). Nagasumi-cho is just 500 meters or so from the western edge of what was then the Eastern Army headquarters, where, after Mishima and four members of his Shield Society private army kidnap the army commander and Mishima harangues a throng of bemused and listless soldiers, hungry for lunch, in a speech that begins by acknowledging its own futility and is drowned out by boos and jeers and heckles and the police and media helicopters circling like vultures overhead, Mishima retreats to the commander’s office, smokes a final cigarette, strips to his loincloth, gives his wristwatch to a henchman, plunges a dirk into his belly, and is decapitated, to be followed headlong into death in like fashion by his acolyte Masakatsu Morita.

Indeed, from one spot—just one spot—in Nagasumi-cho, as the vista, usually so constricted, opens up, you can see the green-swaddled roofs and the communications tower of the Ministry of Defense, which moved to the site once occupied by the Eastern Army 12 years to the day before this photo was taken, in a relocation that took seven years and cost $3bn or so, the site having also once been the headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army and the venue of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, where the Tokyo War Crimes Trials were held.

That day was a homecoming in less literal ways, too. Enthralled, I watch anew the 1985 BBC TV documentary, The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima, as bewitched by the imperfect perfection of his Grand Guignol exit—a monstrous coelacanth of an act hauled up from the depths of the extreme—as I was when I first saw the program, a naïve teen, when it first aired. There’s so much to savor but inevitably Mishima is the star: his urbanity, the suaveness with which he speaks in archive footage in excellent English about the “huge spiritual vacuum” and “unbearable boredom” engulfing post-war Japan, the relish he reserves for the word “death”, the voiceless dental fricative of the terminal “th” pronounced perfectly, his eyebrows, two hairy black caterpillars writhing with malevolent intent, and his sign-off declaration, “Hara-kiri sometimes makes you win.”

I grow fascinated by the khaki winter uniform of the private army, in which Mishima appears in the last shots taken of him alive, mere moments before his death, a uniform that some have ridiculed as Ruritanian or Graustarkian and others have derided as the livery of a hotel doorman, but which seems to me the epitome of a sparsely modern sensibility and was designed by a man, Tsukumo Igarashi, with a truly otherworldly name (九十九五十嵐, “ninety-nine fifty-storms”) who had worked with Pierre Cardin in Paris and sewn trousers for General de Gaulle and who is still alive, designed thanks to the offices of one of the patriarchs of the latterly deeply scandal-tainted Seibu railway-to-department store-to-real estate empire, Seiji Tsutsumi, who is also still alive. And the uniform itself, isn’t its progenitor to be found in the “thigh-pullers” of the night-soil man? And those rows of buttons that ascend in flying goose formation up the flanks of Mishima’s abdomen, aren’t they the descendents of the buttons on the subway ticket-punchers’ tunics? And that hachimaki headband, with its Shinto-nationalist inscription (七生報国—“Even if reborn seven times, I will serve my country”), isn’t it the just the night-soil man’s dirty hand-towel, rarefied, cleansed and politicized?

The double disembowelment and beheading produces barrels of blood, as is only to be expected, great ghastly torrents of blood that spatter everyone and everything; it also releases, as the dirk goes in, the stench of feces, even though Mishima had evacuated his bowels that morning, and it’s plausible that if he had had any space left in his sensory system free of paralyzing pain, the very last odor he would have tasted would have been his own ordure—and there we are, transported back to the slope of 1929, with the night-soil man, his beautiful blood-red cheeks and his buckets of excrement. So in death, Mishima achieves his earliest yearning: writing of the night-soil man, he says, “Looking up at that dirty youth, I was choked by desire, thinking ‘I want to change into him,’ thinking, ‘I want to be him.’”

In the BBC documentary, Nobuko Lady Albery (now there’s a name to conjure with) says in her exquisitely cut-glass but expressive English of the suicide of Mishima something worth citing in full:

It was a political embarrassment, as well, because just when Japan was on the point of becoming a member of the advanced industrialized nations, whom we have copied so doggedly all those years, and then here comes this writer, and killing himself as if the clock were put back two centuries. Certain people say, the way he died, the way he worshipped the sword, the Japanese Hagakure cause of ethics of the samurais and everything, he’s the most archaic, the most reactionary Japanese. Now, in whatever little compartment as an individual, as a clown—which he liked to be—as an actor, as an impostor, as a gangster, as an aristocrat, in every little thing he tried to be, he over-existed, and I think that quality, the Japanese simply not only scorn, but find intolerable, because we have all been brought up on this Confucian teaching, “When there is a stink, put a lid on it.”

When there is a stink, put a lid on it—this is what Mishima refused to do. When he appropriates—if that’s not too strong a word—the buckets of the night-soil man, he lifts their lids and carries them with him, through life to death.

Nagasumi-cho is trisected south-to-north by two roads just wide enough for cars to pass each other; one manages to make it out of the neighborhood, the other dissolves into an intricate nest of tiny lanes barely wide enough for a bicycle, then into a lattice of stairways and slopes. There are no gods here, save for a tiny curbside Shinto shrine to Oinari, flanked by red-bibbed stone foxes in cages, no shops here, save for a greengrocers with sagging sun-sapped awnings,

no reason for outsiders, save deliverers of parcels and post, to broach the bulwarks of the district. I wander the lanes of the flatlands first, where manhole covers seem to rear up off the asphalt like the shining breastplates of warriors.

It’s a fine day for washing, for airing, for drying, and the laundry is out—as it is all over the city—on ramshackle verandahs perched above sheds and on poles blocking rickety staircases.

Umbrellas hang off a staircase handrail like acrobats and futons lap out of windows above banks of air-conditioners, their parasitic tendrils seeming to suck the life out of the old grey concrete.

Almost nothing is left of the neighborhood as it would have appeared in 1970, when Mishima died, but here and there are vestigial traces of the first wave of post-war reconstruction, and down the merest capillary of an alleyway, accessible only on foot, I stumble across the purest expression of that reconstruction, a house, its front staved in as if punched in anger, that dates to around 1950—confirmed by an old man weeding nearby.

To the north and east, as the claustrophobia intensifies, the abandonment multiplies. Of a jumble of refuse outside a postage-stamp park, to which an enraged resident has affixed a sign that’s almost a haiku:

Fly-tippers
Go to hell
I’ll be waiting!
Enma Daio (the wrathful Hindu-Buddhist god of purgatory)

Of bicycles, naturally, but also of scooters, moldering away under and beside stairways, wherever surplus space—there’s precious little—can be found.

The doorways close in as the passageways narrow—and what doorways they are, rust-blotched and rust-rashed doorways, doorways in ocher with ancient light fixtures, crazy-paved doorways with piles of tires, doorways to secret strips of land down which one could go looking for a lost cat and end up in a parallel world, doorways with the light on at midday and a sticker refusing flyers for sex services, doorways to a landing on stilts with no manifest purpose, doorways that give on to yet other doorways, where someone always seems to watching.

And the stairways! What a profusion of stairways crowd in now, aerial stairways, stairways that clamber up the sides of the tenements, public and private stairways that feel forsaken by feet, stairways piled on stairways—impossible Escher stairways the denizens of this netherworld of stairs are condemned to ascend and descend for eternity.

“Is it so unusual?” asked the man in yellow and black, dismounting with bagfuls of laundry.
“No, not really. I just like the shape of the stairs.”
“Bloody stairs. Hard work when you’re my age.”

Quixotic though the quest for the slope of the night-soil man certainly was—there is no telling whether it has been effaced by war or prosperity, or even how close to Mishima’s home it lay—being freed from the burden of certainty allowed the liberty to choose whichever felt right. I have never had a literary hard-on for Mishima, but I could feel one coming on, dick as dowsing-rod, walking the backstreets of Nagasumi-cho. We can infer from the scene in Confessions that the slope was narrow, as the buckets are being carried, fore-and-aft, over one shoulder, whereas the yoke would usually be worn across the back of the neck with the arms wrapped around the beam—the night-soil man as eternal Christ-like penitent in the blood cult of Christianity. The night-soil man’s journey must have been short, too, because by the twenties there were surely night-soil carts, hand-drawn or horse-drawn, plying their abject trade across the metropolis.

In this—no doubt morbid—curiosity about the night-soil man, I’m joined by throngs of priests and priestesses of the religion of psychoanalysis, be they Freudians, post-Freudians, Lacanians, post-Lacanians, post-post-Freudian-Lacanians, or whatever irascible sect into which they have splintered, who furiously pen articles in their journals and festschrifts with titles like Phallic Narcissism, Anal Sadism, and Oral Discord: The Case of Yukio Mishima. (Oddly, they are steadfastly uninterested in the operators of hana-densha or the subway ticket punchers.) The coarser sorts of Freudians simply insult:

One may also discern a more specific psychological meaning [than that attributed by Mishima himself to the night-soil man]: the attraction to excrement common among homosexuals fixated in what Freud called the anal-sadistic phase.

Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima, Roy Starrs, Associate Professor, University of Otago (1994)

The more sophisticated post-structuralists, influenced by feminism and queer theory, simply obfuscate:

The ability to spill (blood, shit, urine) is a sign of the body’s flaunting of the norms of containment, its relish in excess, but also of its moribundity. Accordingly, Kochan’s [i.e., Mishima’s] first physical attraction is to a ladler of excrement (funnyuo: manure/urine), an episode that comes close on the heels of his initial bout of autointoxication and reinforces his tendency to apotheosize health-as-reformulation/emission. … But the connection of excrement to the social role of the shit-ladler and the mapping of that role on a sociohierarchic grid—a role that Kochan valorizes and eroticizes—indicate the attraction is identificatory as well. One effect of Kochan’s pairing of recirculation/emission fantasies with the ladler of excrement manifests itself in a homoeroticized coprophilia, in which health and beauty are linked with the collection/dispersal of soil/feces.

Body/Talk: Mishima, Masturbation, and Self-Performativity, Donald H. Mengay, Associate Professor, Baruch College, CUNY (1995)

I used to be old enough to understand what this meant, but thankfully I’m so much younger now. And besides, just to take the first sentence alone, the ability to micturate and defecate is not a sign of either the “body’s relish in excess”, as bodies alone cannot relish anything, nor of its moribundity, but of healthy excretory processes, and blood is not to be idly conflated with feces or urine.

The post-Lacanians simply provoke giggles:

It is around the age of four that the boy must lose his penis to bear the phallus, the signifier of desire and of castration. This is how masculine identification takes place. The privilege of the phallus, says Lacan, is to give order to the real of the body and to its mental scheme, to integrate it, so that even if it remains parceled out, it functions as the elements of the body’s crest, or coat of arms.

Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to the Sword, Danielle Bergeron, Training Analyst, GIFRIC, Quebec (2002)

It amuses—though it should appall—that the good taxpayers of New Zealand, the United States, and Canada should be funding, directly or indirectly, this infantile psychobabble. In a September 11, 1964, Life magazine special ahead of the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, Mishima has the following to say, in a short yet meandering and in places flippantly offhand essay, A Famous Japanese Judges the US Giant (adore that “giant”):

In America … the fear of self-confrontation appears to have impinged on the outlook of some intellectuals. I was amazed to learn how many intellectuals and artists frequent the psychoanalysts. Would it not be more proper for the psychoanalysts to consult the artists? In Japan, the laundries send a man every morning to the back door to pick up the family wash, but in America it is the customer who must make his way to the laundry with his bundle of soiled clothes, the accumulation of days if not weeks.

By poring over the entrails of Mishima’s life and works in search of validation, the psychoanalysts are, I suppose, answering his wish that they consult the artist, although they appear convinced they have the upper hand in the dialogue; personally, I would advise anyone with disequilibria of the mind, psychoanalysts—surely they have enough problems of their own—and indeed anyone of less than robust mental constitution to steer well clear of Mishima and artists of his ilk. As for the soiled laundry analogy—as if schizoaffective disorder, psychotic depression, or delusional parasitosis could be washed out like a dirty shirt—well, just see above…  

The next day, a little providence and a little diligence conspired to hand me a modern address—Yotsuya 4-chome 22 banchi—for Mishima’s birthplace. While still amorphous, this address covers less territory than its prewar counterpart, and there was only one corner.

So this was it, the modern incarnation of that “pretentious house on a corner, with a rather jumbled appearance and a dingy, charred feeling”; still a tad pretentious and jumbled, perhaps, though not dingy and charred. It is both the office premises of Aroma Watch Japan (that’s “watch” as in “wristwatch”), about which I can dig up nothing, and the home of either a Japanese with the forbiddingly rare family name Kiku (聞) or—heaven and Mishima forfend!—a Chinese.

But what of the slope? There was one leading away to the right from the corner house itself, narrow enough in places, but scarcely an incline and lacking in drama, and another, half-slope, half-steps, but too broad and too bright, somehow, for the night-soil man. The steps, though—what if the slope had been laid to steps since? Again, there were two candidates.

The first stairway I dismissed as too wide, too straight, but the second, ah the second—there was an ineffable magic about the way the stairs climbed, then twisted, then narrowed, then turned, one wall rusticated with mossy stone. This, then, was the slope of my night-soil man, my Mishima.

If much of what was Nagasumi-cho looks dowdy and superannuated, well it is. In 1979, critic Donald Ritchie could write in an essay, Tokyo, the impermanent capital, that “the city as a whole does not appear as though it were built to last”, that new buildings are so flamboyantly modern “one cannot but expect them to be shortly superseded”, and of how the grand shrine at Ise, the Mecca of Shintoism, is torn down and rebuilt every 20 years:

In its way the Japanese city follows this same pattern. The idea of continually pilling down and putting up is very strong. Tokyo for this reason always seems under construction and indeed, will never really be finished.

Tokyo strikes me as a vast swathe of veldt that has to be swept by fire—in its case, earthquakes and conflagrations historically, latterly carpet-bombing and prosperity—to have its ecosystem renewed. But in the last two decades of stagnation, and especially in the last five years, those fires have grown fewer, briefer, and more concentrated around stations overground and underground, and in places like Nagasumi-cho—of which there are thousands across the capital—the clock of renewal has slowed to a crawl. Tokyo, like its inhabitants, is aging, and because, beyond the arteries, its proportions are so resolutely human, and because it is primarily built of concrete, that most unforgiving of materials, whose aging cannot be disguised by Botox or surgery, the physical fabric of the city is aging as a favorite aunt or uncle ages, visibly, almost painfully, as the metabolism of the city slackens. As far back as 1932, Belgian poet Henri Michaux could exclaim, “Tokyo is a hundred times more modern than Paris!” The same comparison would not hold today.

This, though, is my Tokyo, if not the Tokyo of Mishima: unshaven, unshowered Tokyo, Tokyo with its make-up off last thing at night, a place of battered plastic bottles strapped with green duct tape and nylon string around a lamppost to ward off cats and—maybe—demons, of rolls of toilet paper and cleaning fluids seen through frosted mosaic windows, of traces of tires worn in the dusty beige and ecru tile floor of an empty garage, of a white business shirt slumped on a pillar like a crumpled ghost, of bicycles parked where no bicycles should be, of brooms and plant pots and bright blue upturned buckets and bins, of resident association noticeboards, green felt encased in bronzed steel, with no notices of note, of electricity meters slapped on chipboard and strung up with wire knots, of silvery shrouds for motorcycles and motorboats, of lanes and balconies and doorways and narrow strips of sunlight that fall on passageways between buildings down which noone ever strays—a disciplined Tokyo gothic if you like, where a fluorescent strip-light always flickers down some dank corridor, even on the sunniest day, where clouds sneak up and rain sets in for hours and hours, where a mother sits on a bench in a park reading a paperback, alone, while her toddler son plays in the dirt, alone, where ivy breeds and strangles desire, and where, on a stairway forever in shade, a camellia weeps its petals for the youth of an old woman who hangs her undergarments with bath-fresh flesh-pink pegs on a washing line in a gloomy nook, hard by the spot where—just possibly—eighty years before, a boy had his first, aureate, erotic encounter, one that was to define the contours of his life and death, a Tokyo where some young Mishima still lies in bed and dreams of blood and glory, a Tokyo where something—or someone—can always be revealed if one peers intently enough past the spray-on drywall coating and through the letterbox, the letterbox of everybody’s river.

Minispike: The Hashist

One of the most curious things about the boyishly telegenic and viscerally ambitious Toru Hashimoto (pictured left), mayor of Japan’s second city, Osaka, is his name. Not how it sounds—Hashimoto is a common enough surname and Toru a familiar enough given name—but how it is written. Here it is in Japanese order, two-character surname first:

橋下徹

The problematic character is the middle one. Hashimoto is almost always rendered as 橋本 (usually) or 橋元 (more rarely), but to write it 橋下 makes me (and I suspect the average Japanese person) want to read it as “Hashishita” rather than “Hashimoto”. And thereby hangs a tale.

Although seen from Tokyo as the personification of Osaka boosterism, Hashimoto was actually born and brought up, until his fifth year of elementary school, a few stops out of Shinjuku station in the heart of Tokyo, which is why a Japanese acquaintance described his ability to speak persuasively in the Osakan dialect as “bimyo”, ambiguous.

His father’s roots, however, are in the Kansai region of western Japan where Osaka lies, specifically in an impoverished mountain-flank hamlet of some 60 dwellings whose name the media are collectively too terrified to reveal, because this is no humdrum hamlet but what is known in euphemism-drenched contemporary parlance as an “area subject to discrimination” (被差別地域), which, decoded, means a home to Japan’s once mightily despised and now largely ignored undercaste of tanners, gravediggers, and butchers, among other occupations deemed tainted, who down the centuries have gone by a myriad of names, among them eta (穢多, “mass of filth”, a word now so intensely incendiary that my PC PC simply refuses to summon it up), shin heimin (新平民, “new citizens”), burakumin (部落民, “village people”), and dowa (同和, “same as the Japanese”), the currently acceptable term.

When all citizens were required to take surnames sometime after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, it appears that all the residents of the unnamable hamlet into which Hashimoto’s father was born chose, or were assigned, Hashishita (橋下) and that was the reading by which his father was known when, sometime after World War II, he left the hamlet for the city of Yao in Osaka Prefecture, where he took up residence in a dowa district (同和地区) and fell into yakuza circles, ending up as one of the three main movers and shakers (三羽烏) in a gangster gang. The father married outside of the dowa community and Hashimoto’s parents moved to Tokyo in the late 1960s, where Toru was born in 1969. In the early 1970s, the father grew estranged from his new family and drifted back to Osaka alone, where he gassed himself to death over debts incurred to other gangsters when young Toru was in the second year of elementary school. Soon after, Hashimoto’s mother changed the reading of her surname to Hashimoto from Hashishita, seemingly in part to sever ties with the rest of the Hashishitas but also because of the negative connotations of the name, for Hashishita (“under the bridge”) carries implications of vagrancy and homelessness whereas Hashimoto (“foot of the bridge”) does not.

Three years after Hashimoto’s father killed himself, Toru, now in the fifth grade of elementary school, and his mother moved to Osaka, where they ended up—coincidentally or not, it is hard to be sure—in a dowa district of Osaka City. His mother, although apparently eligible, refused the rent reduction the city offers to dowa (同和減免措置) and Toru, although his junior high school offered a special education program for dowa (同和教育), was adamantly opposed and took the regular classes. While it is clear that Toru was aware of his dowa heritage from an early age—his father is buried in a cemetery reserved for dowa in Yao—it seems that he only learned of his father’s gangster background from the media after he rose to fame. In public, at least before the investigative journalists from the weeklies broke the story of his father’s background, Hashimoto would deny his dowa roots, saying, “Although we lived in a dowa neighborhood, we weren’t dowa ourselves, so we couldn’t get subsidies, which really hacked me off. I don’t do the dowa problem”.

Although by his own admission not particularly academic, Hashimoto made it into Tokyo’s prestigious Waseda University at the second attempt and, after passing the bar exams, registered as a lawyer with the Osaka Bar Association in 1997 at the relatively young age of 28, striking out on his own the following year as a specialist in corporate compliance and M&A, among other fields. He subsequently gained notoriety on Kansai-area talk shows as a celebrity lawyer for the extreme forthrightness with which he expressed his opinions, of which he has many, and was catapulted to his first taste of political power on a nebulous platform of change (slogan: “an Osaka where children laugh”) in the January 2008 Osaka gubernatorial election, backed by the Liberal Democratic Party, in which he won an absolute majority of the votes cast. He resigned as governor before the end of his first term and in November last year succeeded in both winning the Osaka City mayoral election and maneuvering an ally, Ichiro Matsui, into the governorship.

So who is Toru Hashimoto, what does he believe in, and what does he want? There’s something of the shtark, the spiv, the shyster about him—you feel that he’s always about to peel back the jacket of his suit to reveal row after row of Rolex knock-offs on silken racks in the lining. He was cautioned for stealing a bicycle in junior high and, while still a university student, could be found running a tidy little wholesale sideline in leather jackets until someone ripped him off. As a lawyer, he acted as an advisor between 1999 and 2004 for a small-business loan firm (less politely, a usurer) called Cities, regarded by lawyers for the heavily indebted as one of the most intransigent and recalcitrant of any company of its type—and that is saying something. In July 2010, when the brouhaha about the possible extinction of the consumer finance (read: loanshark) industry because of new regulations was at its zenith, he proposed a special-zone concept for the money-lending industry (貸金業特区構想) that would relax the incoming restrictions on the maximum that can legally be borrowed and restore the pre-reform maximum interest rate of 29.2% on loans of less than Y200,000 (just over $2,500) with durations of a year or less. As a friend who is intimately familiar with the underbelly of Japanese loansharking world—and who shares with many Tokyoites a certain metropolitan disdain for Osaka and all its works—said with deep glee, “It is just such an Osaka-rashii idea, just so typically Osaka!”

Hashimoto is also an ardent supporter of the legalization of casinos and, even more controversially, wants to restore some of Osaka’s red-light districts that were cleaned up ahead of The International Garden and Greenery Exposition in 1990. He is on record as an admirer of cockroaches, as they flee quickly and have an acute sense of danger, and had some eyebrow-raising things to say on the subject of rules in general in his 2006 book, Mattou Shoubu:

Unless we build a Japan in which people who sneak through the cracks in the rules are applauded, this country will not survive in the international society of the future.
「ルールの隙を突いた者が賞賛されるような日本にならないと、これからの国際社会は乗り切れない。」
Wringing out ideas that get around the rules, isn’t that what’s most needed in today’s Japan?!?
「ルールをかいくぐるアイディアを絞り出すことこそ、いまの日本にとって一番必要なんじゃないか！」
It’s only clear rules that are the basis of actions, and where there are no regulations defined by clear rules, then I don’t care what anyone does.
「明確なルールのみが行動の基準であって、明確なルールによる規制がない限りは何をやっても構わない。」

Hashimoto’s political and social philosophy, such as it is, strikes me as being grounded in the Victorian self-help mentality of a Samuel Smiles. Like many a successful man of humble origins, he simply cannot fathom why everyone should not be able to prosper, as he has, by dint of industry and application. In a prefectural assembly debate in 2008 he defended the cuts his administration was making in support for poor students attending private high schools: “In today’s world, the first and foremost principle is self-responsibility. No one is going to save you.” (今の世の中は、自己責任がまず原則ですよ。誰も救ってくれない。) This is tempered, to be fair, with a belief that those unable to clamber into the sumo ring of competition, such as the disabled, should be offered all due assistance. Though partly of dowa stock himself, he won support from the (very) far right in the Osaka gubernatorial election for his pledge to cut the dowa measures budget to zero and in another 2008 prefectural assembly debate, had the following to say on the dowa:

I was brought up in a so-called dowa district. The dowa problem hasn’t been solved at all. But just because there’s still prejudice, the question of whether they should be given special preferential treatment—well, that’s a different matter.
「私はいわゆる同和地区で育ったが、同和問題は全く解決されていない。ただ、差別意識があるからといって、特別な優遇措置を与えていいのかは別問題。」

Despite having been bullied himself at school because of his inarticulacy in the Osaka dialect when he arrived from Tokyo, Hashimoto has no shred of sympathy for the victims of bullying:

There’s bullying wherever you go. If you can’t get over something like that, what are you going to do in the rest of your life?
「いじめなんてどこの世界にもある。それ位乗り越えられなくてどうするのか。」

In some ways, Hashimoto reminds me of nothing so much as a crusty old hang ’em and flog ’em Tory from the shires, a breed now nearly vanished from the shores of Britain. Although in an interview he has claimed his sole memory of his father was of having had the living daylights thrashed out of him, aged three, by the old man for throwing chopsticks across the dinner table, he has boasted elsewhere, immune to the layers of irony, that he beat one of his own kids for 50 minutes straight for having been caught bullying—beaten for bullying, I should add, not for having been caught. He called for the swift hanging of the perpetrator of an indiscriminate knife attack in 2001 at an Osaka elementary school that left 8 students dead—and was duly rewarded. Of the near gang-rape of a fourth year elementary-school girl (who was thus about 10 years old) in the Kansai city of Amagasaki in 2006, Hashimoto hinted that she might have been asking for it, although how a prepubescent girl asks for something about which she knows nothing beggars my feeble imagination:

It all hinges on whether they took off the girl’s clothes, or whether she took them off herself.
「女の子が服を脱がされたのか、自分から脱いだのかによって話が変わってくる。」

Hashimoto has a rusty axe to grind about education, about which his beliefs are a perplexing brew of the sensibly iconoclastic—he is a vociferous critic of Japan’s cram-and-rote-learning system and a supporter of a more diverse entry system for state high schools, with non-academic criteria such as sporting ability to be taken into account—the mainstream global right—classes streamed by academic ability and school vouchers—and the dismal pedagogy of the Gradgrind: he wants useful education, whatever that might be, not education imposed from above, and believes the core curriculum should be stripped down to reading and writing, the abacus, and the inculcation of respect for one’s superiors. He is a remorseless foe of Nikkyoso, the Japan Teachers Union, which although a shadow of its onetime self I think Karel van Wolferen was right all those years ago in identifying in The Enigma of Japanese Power as the only liberal-leftist opposition to the paternalist monolith, and a backer of former Transport Minister Nariaki Nakayama (now, aged 68, settling comfortably in to that political retirement home for old fogeys, The Sunset Party of Japan), who, possessed by a form of hysteria, once dubbed Nikkyoso “the cancer of Japan”.

As any ill thought through and hastily articulated political worldview is bound to be, Hashimoto-ism is a bundle of contradictions: he wants to arm Japan with nuclear weapons and bring back conscription, yet—at least since the Fukushima disaster—has come out against nuclear power. While in favor of Japan’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement, he hopes the gods forefend that foreigners, no matter how many generations their families might have been in the country, be allowed to vote in even local elections. Hokkaido University professor Jiro Yamaguchi coined the brutal portmanteau “Hashism” to condemn our Hash’s authoritarian tendencies, amply documented in a comment made in June last year:

In Japanese politics these days, the most important thing is dictatorship. Having so much power you’re called a dictator.
「今の日本の政治で一番重要なのは独裁。独裁と言われるぐらいの力だ。」

and in a 2009 slanging e-mail match with his own staff:

You’re frighteningly unconcerned that the prefecture has lost Y38bn [about $500mn] by failing to forecast water demand. No one seems worried. If this was a private-sector company, the whole lot of you would be quivering in shock! … Organizations in which people’s pay is guaranteed no matter what happens are terrifying.
（抜粋）「水需要予測の失敗によって380億円の損失が生まれたことに関しても、恐ろしいくらい、（職員の）皆さんは冷静です。何とも感じていないような。民間の会社なら、組織あげて真っ青ですよ！！（略）何があっても給料が保障される組織は恐ろしいです……」

A female prefectural bureaucrat had the temerity to send him a rebuke, to which he responded:

First, don’t give your boss any sass. I’m your boss. I’m the head of this organization. Time to acquire some common sense. As the head, I’m giving you a serious warning. If you’ve got a bone to pick, come to my office and I’ll hear you out. 
「まず、上司に対する物言いを考えること。私は、あなたの上司です。組織のトップです。その非常識さを改めること。これはトップとして厳重に注意します。あなたの言い分があるのであれば、知事室に来るように。聞きましょう。」

Ultimately, the poor woman was given a—probably career-destroying—official reprimand. Around here, we’ve come to call this kind of toy-throwing tantrum “pawa hara”, power harassment.

But like many a politician on the make, what Hashimoto believes in most ardently is himself. Unlike the others, though, he’s not in the least ashamed to admit it:

What’s wrong with a lust for power and glory as a motivation for becoming a politician? Why do politicians blather on about serving the people, serving the country—such bullshit! (Literally, “it makes my arsehole itch”.) Setting one’s sights on being a politician, that’s the pinnacle of a lust for power, a lust for glory. After that comes doing it for the people, doing it for the country. Us politicians have to grudgingly serve the people so as to satisfy our lust for power, our lust for glory. 
「別に政治家を志す動機付けが、権力欲や名誉う欲でもいいじゃないか」「なんで『国民のために、お国のために』なんてケツの穴が痒くなるようなことばかりいうんだ？政治家を志すっちゅうのは、権力欲、名誉欲の最高峰だよ。その後に、国民のため、お国のためがついてくる。自分の権力欲、名誉欲を達成する手段として、嫌々国民のために奉仕しなければいけないわけよ。」

As a shoot-from-the-hip, take-no-prisoners politician possessed of many an unsound view, Hashimoto has amassed down the years a glorious rogues’ gallery of gaffes that deserve to be framed and exhibited, as Doonesbury does with the wisdom and wit of a Bush or a Gingrich. Here’s a random assortment:

People who like [the traditional performing arts of] noh and kyogen are weirdoes!
「能や狂言が好きな人は変質者。」

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down too well with the practitioners of noh and kyogen and their trade associations.

Whoring by the Japanese in China is a kind of ODA.
「日本人による買春は中国へのODAみたいなもの。」

Astonishing how much offensive condescension can be packed into so few words. This talk-show spasm did at least provoke an impromptu and tear-stained on-air apology the following week.

Shitty boards of education
(クソ教育委員会)

This was said in reference to municipal boards of education that refuse to disclose percentages of correct answers scored in scholastic tests at the local authority level. In a language almost bereft of swear words and yet with vast scrolls of verboten taboo-to-broadcast expressions, this is more shocking than it might seem to outsiders. Hashimoto was rapped over the knuckles by his own mother for this; he apologized but did not withdraw the comment.

On a Fuji TV program in 2006, Hashimoto infringed one of the many taboos by using the banned word “cripple” (びっこ引いている), which elicited an immediate apology from both him and the compere, Sawako Agawa, to whom he said on-air a couple of months later, “If it was up to me, I’d knock you up straight away” (いまの僕なら阿川さんを即妊娠させられますよ), which earned him a complaint from the Osaka Bar Association that he had brought the dignity of the profession into doubt.

In 2008, Hashimoto had a contretemps with the ever-so-slightly left-of-center Asahi Shimbun, which had published an editorial critical of his posturing:

The world would be better off if the Asahi disappeared. It’s a totally foolish institution. I hope it goes out of business soon. The paper seems to think it’s fine to badmouth the powers that be.
「朝日新聞がなくなった方が世のためになる。全く愚かな言論機関。すぐさま廃業した方がいい。権力の悪口を言っていればいいと思っているのではないか。」

If the number of adults that just badmouth people like the Asahi does increases, then this country’s done for!
「人の悪口ばっかり言っているような朝日新聞のような大人が増えると日本はダメになります。」

Hashimoto is by no means a fan of NEETs, young people not in education, employment, or training, an acronym that originated in the UK and spread swiftly to the Far East:

Lock them up and set them to forced labor!
「拘留の上、労役を課す。」
Folk who don’t pay taxes aren’t entitled to live. 
「税金を払わない奴は生きる資格がない。」

With NEETs not having anyone in particular to stand up for them, these comments went uncensured.

One of the most contentious left-right tug-of-war freedom-of-conscience issues is that of forcing teachers to stand, face the Rising Sun, and sing Kimigayo at school ceremonies. Here’s what the Hash thinks:

Civil servants who repudiate the flag and the national anthem should quit. Antics that make light of their unsackability are absolutely intolerable.
「国旗国歌を否定するなら公務員を辞めればいい。身分保障に甘えるなんてふざけたことは絶対許さない。」

And finally, a dig at the sleepy Sea of Japan backwater (he’s got me at it now) of Tottori, a long put-upon butt of jokes:

Tottori’s got about 600,000 people, but 40-odd members of the prefectural assembly. Six would be enough!
「鳥取県は60万人くらいの人口で、議員が40数人いるんですかね。鳥取県議なんて6人でいいんですよ。」

Osaka has 109 prefectural assembly members for 8.9mn people, one for every 80,000 citizens, while Tottori has 35 for 585,000 people, one for every 17,000 citizens, so Hashimoto might be said to have a point, but this is not the sort of comment with which a politician can get off scot-free, and Hashimoto, having trampled on delicate provincial sensibilities, was forced to murmur an apology.

Although not gaffes, two quotations about his children—he now has seven—reveal him to be a stay-away, hands-off dad of orthodox ilk, as uninterested in their welfare as his father was in his:

I’ve got seven kids but I haven’t had anything to do with their upbringing, so the wife asks me how I can spout off about childrearing.
「私も、子どもは7人いますが、全く子育てをしなかったので、妻から『子育てについて何を語るのですか。』と言われました。」

I’ve got six kids but if the wife wasn’t around, spending 30 minutes with them would be about my limit.
「僕は子供が6人いるけど、妻がいなければ子供と一緒にいるのは30分が限界かな。」

At least some of these gaffes would in the West be darts toxic enough to stun the advance of even the most bull elephant of politicos but here, while we assiduously sort them into categories—was it a “slip of the tongue” (失言), a “problematic utterance” (問題になった発言), or the amorphous catch-all, “words or deeds that became a talking point” (話題になった言動)— the culprits soldier on. After all, Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, a wholly unreconstructed racist and misogynist whose gaffistry makes Hashimoto look like a rank wet-behind-the-ears amateur, is on his fourth successive term, and nothing, but nothing, he says, even his declaration that the Great East Japan Earthquake last year was divine punishment (天罰) for the greed of modern Japan, can stop him in his tracks. Why this occurs, I can only speculate: that these populist demagogues are in many cases channeling the opinions, sometimes repressed by decorum, of an on-balance archly conservative electorate more than willing to indulge the odd gadfly here, the grumpy maverick there, if only for entertainment value, as long as they do not get too close to the levers of power. 

But there are always specifics at play, too, and the popularity of Hashimoto in his Osaka bastion can be explained by his eagerness to shake a devolutionary fist at Tokyo, the center of power in a highly centralized state, and the woes of Osaka itself, expressed as well as anywhere on the website of his new party, Osaka Ishin no Kai (大阪維新の会), glossed variously as One Osaka and the Osaka Restoration Party.   

Per capita prefectural income in Osaka Prefecture fell to Y3.08mn (c$39,000 but around $31,000 at PPP, very roughly the same level as Spain or South Korea) in 2006 from Y3.57mn in 1996, down by close to Y500,000 (14%) over the decade. In Osaka City, the decline was even more dramatic: the city’s per capita income was Y4.12mn in 1996, close to Tokyo’s Y4.27mn, but while Tokyo’s rose to Y4.82mn in 2006, Osaka City’s fell to Y3.44mn (down 16.5% on the decade), creating a gap of around Y1.4mn. The prefecture has the highest welfare rates in the country and unemployment blackspots as bad as anywhere, and with many of its leading corporate lights such as Sharp and Panasonic now adrift in seven seas of misery, the troubled present augurs more pain to come.

On arrival as governor in February 2008, Hashimoto inherited a monstrous prefectural debt of around Y6trn (approximately $10,000 a head), the legacy of a decade of fiscal mismanagement and deficits, and his first act was to declare a financial crisis and vow to cut the budget by Y100bn (about $1.3bn) a year. He managed to prune Y244bn over three years in what I’ll concede was a gutsy performance that started with his own salary, which he slashed by 30%, and that naturally earned him a host of enemies. As Osaka mayor, he will doubtless be anxious to take the same scalpel to the bloated municipal body, and in a city where the average bus driver earns somewhere between Y7.5mn ($95,000) and Y9mn ($115,000) a year, depending on which source you consult, and a third of sewage maintenance workers reputedly were until recently pulling down more than Y10mn ($130,000) annually, few could dispute that there is flab for the trimming.

As governor, Hashimoto can also be credited—to a degree—with cleaning up crime: Osaka has long been notorious as the crime capital of the country (these things are of course relative—Osaka is no Detroit). Some pragmatic initiatives—thousands of CCTVs and bright LED streetlights, ring-fencing the police budget from the worst of the cuts—helped reduce the number of reported crimes by 24% from 2007 to 2010, ahead of the 17% reduction recorded nationwide. Finally, after 35 inglorious years, Osaka ceded the title of national pick-pocketing champion to Tokyo in 2010. And for such an avowed autocrat, Hashimoto governed with a surprisingly liberal streak in some respects, pushing Osaka up the national information disclosure rankings, as compiled by the National Ombudsman Conference, from 28th out of 47 in 2007 to first in 2010.

The policy for which Hashimoto is now best known, however, is an arcane one: he wants to make Osaka Prefecture the administrative mirror-image of Tokyo. As he perceives it, the problem is that, although the population of Osaka is similar to that of a New York or London, administratively it is a patchwork quilt of 43 separate local authorities—33 cities, 22 of them with more than 100,000 people, nine towns, and a solitary village—which breeds overlapping provision of services and general inefficiency. The plan is to merge Osaka City with 10 of its surrounding cities, turn them into 20 wards, aping the 23 wards of Tokyo, and then turn Osaka Prefecture into a city. Without delving deeply into the minutiae of the pros and cons of the plan, its single biggest drawback, to this observer leastways, is that it rests on a specious piece of a priori reasoning: that to make Osaka look, administratively, like Tokyo will make it behave, economically, like Tokyo. It won’t, because the causes of the gaps that have opened up over the last dozen or so years between the capital and the second city—globalization, technological advance and commoditization, and the steady whittling away of the industrial base, to name but three interlocking phenomena—are not going to be ameliorated, let alone sent into reverse, by a dose of administrative tinkering.

No matter: Hashimoto is a—very resolute—man with a plan. To push it through, though, he will need not only the unwavering commitment of the wavering people of Osaka and the unqualified support of the heads of all affected municipalities, which has not been uniformly forthcoming, but also approval of revisions to the relevant laws by both houses of the Diet, which will require cross-party consensus, all of which will be a very tall order indeed. My suspicion, though, is that he is using the plan as a means to an end, that end being to orchestrate a revolt of the regions and vault himself onto the national political stage as a Napoleonic colossus astride the horse of a new, third-party force. He wouldn’t be the first dowa boy made good in national politics by any means—former minister for post-earthquake reconstruction Ryu Matsumoto, whose career imploded so spectacularly and entertainingly in a blizzard of boorishness one Sunday last summer, is the grandson of the founder of the Buraku Liberation League—but he would be the first with a gaze fixed so snake-like on the ultimate political prize, the keys to the Kantei. It was, I believe, former PM Taro Aso—no friend to the dowa—who said that it would be impossible for someone of dowa lineage to become prime minister. In Hashimoto, we might just see that assertion put to the test.  

Whoever said that Japanese politics was dull?

 [An apology, a justification, and a recommendation: As this is a mere Minispike post, it relies on intelligence gleaned from a handful of websites, a couple of articles from the business weeklies, and a smattering of general knowledge. Amazing what you can unearth through just a little fossicking in the leaf-litter, though. The original Japanese quotations I inserted as something is always lost in translation: to take one tiny example, “zettai yurusanai”, rendered here as “absolutely intolerable”, loses the insistent aggression of the double-t plosive in “zettai”. Finally, for those seriously interested in the ins-and-outs of politics, Japanese style, I can do no better than recommend Michael Cucek’s splendid blog, Shisaku. How he stays so immaculately well informed is a constant wonder and mystery.]

 

 

Spiked: Eamonn Fingleton

The inability to change one’s mind in light of new evidence is perhaps the greatest obstacle—bar stupidity—to attaining the wisdom with which our evolved psychologies burden us.

Alphatuosity blog

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

J. M. Keynes (attributed)

The Myth of Japan’s Failure
The New York Times, January 6, 2012

DESPITE some small signs of optimism about the United States economy, unemployment is still high, and the country seems stalled.

Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed, although there is intense disagreement about what that path might be. Here, for instance, is how the CNN analyst David Gergen has described Japan: “It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back.”

But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which started with a stock market crash in January 1990. By some of the most important measures, it has done a lot better than the United States.

Japan has succeeded in delivering an increasingly affluent lifestyle to its people despite the financial crash. In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story.

How can the reality and the image be so different? And can the United States learn from Japan’s experience?

It is true that Japanese housing prices have never returned to the ludicrous highs they briefly touched in the wild final stage of the boom. Neither has the Tokyo stock market.

But the strength of Japan’s economy and its people is evident in many ways. There are a number of facts and figures that don’t quite square with Japan’s image as the laughingstock of the business pages:

• Japan’s average life expectancy at birth grew by 4.2 years — to 83 years from 78.8 years — between 1989 and 2009. This means the Japanese now typically live 4.8 years longer than Americans. The progress, moreover, was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, diet. The Japanese people are eating more Western food than ever. The key driver has been better health care.

I only really have one word to say to this: Cuba, which according to the WHO had an average life expectancy at birth of 74 in 1990 and 78 in 2009, despite being an “economic basket-case”. Manifestly, the strength or otherwise of a developed country economy only has the scantiest of bearings on longevity or life expectancy gains. Indeed, hampered by a high initial starting point for life expectancy, Japan’s gain over the last two decades looks distinctly mediocre on an international comparison.

                            1990    2009      Gain

Japan                  79          83            4

Australia             77          82          5

Brazil                   67          73           6

Canada                77          81           4

China                  68          74          6

France                 77          81          4

Germany             75          80          5

Italy                      77         82          5

Korea                   72          80         8

New Zealand      75         81         6

Spain                   77         82          5

UK                       76          80          4

US                       75          79          4

I particularly relish Fingleton’s breezy explanation, unsubstantiated by any evidence (of course), for the cause of the gain in life expectancy over the last two decades, even though isolating the factors at work in changes in life expectancy is widely regarded to be notoriously difficult. The Japanese may well be “eating more Western food than ever”, but they are doing so in moderation; given the startlingly low levels of obesity, which have next to nothing to do with “better health care”, it is surprising that Japan has just a one-year lead in life expectancy over, say, Italy or Spain.

For a bias-free and more disturbing interpretation of the recent Japanese longevity picture, I recommend turning to an expert. Here’s Christopher J. L. Murray, Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington, writing in The Lancet in an article titled Why is Japanese life expectancy so high? 

The third and more troubling phase for Japan begins in the mid to late 1990s. Since that time, the pace of decline in mortality for adult men and, to a lesser extent, adult women (aged 15—59 years) has been slower than other nations. Japan has fallen behind Sweden, Italy, and Australia for men and behind Sweden for women. If recent trends continue, other nations are likely to achieve lower rates of adult mortality than Japan. Given the previous two decades during which Japan remained in the top rank, this recent change is dramatic. Many explanations for this worsening relative performance are offered by Ikeda and colleagues, including high tobacco consumption compared with other high-income countries, a modest rise in body-mass index, and high and rising rates of suicide. Unstated is the hypothesis that although Japan has a universal health-care system, the quality of the care delivered might be low. Treatment coverage for high cholesterol, for example, is much lower than in other high-income countries. Given poor measures on quality of care, further reduction in mortality may require that Japan revamp its health-care system. Economic stagnation and rising income inequality could also be part of the explanation of recent trends. 

• Japan has made remarkable strides in Internet infrastructure. Although as late as the mid-1990s it was ridiculed as lagging, it has now turned the tables. In a recent survey by Akamai Technologies, of the 50 cities in the world with the fastest Internet service, 38 were in Japan, compared to only 3 in the United States. 

You can access Akamai Technologies’ State of the Internet Report by registering here. The most recent one that seems to be freely available is for 2011 Q2. Our first lesson is on the use and abuse of statistics. That the Japanese city with the fastest average Mbps, Shimotsuma, ranked 3^rd in the world, is a small Tokyo dormitory community to which very few Japanese could point on a map, and that one of the Japanese “cities” in the top 50, Marunouchi, is not a city, nor even a ward of Tokyo, but a few blocks of office buildings clustered around Tokyo station, make it readily apparent that if you are a largish country for which Akamai has a lot of data collection points and you have a highish average connection speed, then of course you are going to dominate the city rankings. For a more truthful picture of Internet infrastructure, we need to turn to a country-level analysis.

In 2011 Q2, Japan ranked third for average connection speeds, at 8.9Mbps, behind South Korea at 13.8Mbps and Hong Kong at 10.3Mbps. Impressive, to be sure, but not quite the picture of global leadership that Fingleton insinuates it has. Indeed, the broader the metric becomes, the worse the picture looks for Japan: for high broadband connectivity (above 5Mbps), the Netherlands ranks first at 68% of all connections, Japan ranks 6^th, at 55%, and the US 13^th at 42%, while for good old-fashioned broadband connectivity (above 2Mbps), 10 mostly European countries have penetration rates over 90%, the US ranks 35^th at 80%, and Japan is actually behind the US, coming in 39^th place at 76%. What’s more, Japan’s high broadband connectivity actually fell 8.9% YoY and its broadband connectivity fell 12% YoY, while the rates of almost all other countries surged. Not all that stellar a performance at the broadest end of the spectrum, especially given how suited relatively small, very densely populated Japan is to the build-out of broadband.

This Akamai saga, I should add, is a textbook example of Fingletonian deceitfulness, whereby he cherry-picks a data set that severely distorts the truth and ignores the evidence that is inconvenient to his case. 

• Measured from the end of 1989, the yen has risen 87 percent against the U.S. dollar and 94 percent against the British pound. It has even risen against that traditional icon of monetary rectitude, the Swiss franc. 

The strength of the yen has absolutely no relationship with “the strength of Japan’s economy and its people”. All that yen strength is doing, on the liability side of the ledger, is to hollow out those domestic “hard industry” jobs beloved of Fingleton—an astounding 550,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in just the three months to end-November 2011, according to the latest Labor Force Survey (Japanese only)—while on the positive side of the ledger, yen strength makes agricultural and energy imports cheaper and Mr. and Mrs. Watanabe can take that retirement cruise for which they have been saving for so long a year or two earlier. I challenge Fingleton to explain the mechanisms whereby yen strength works to the sustained net benefit of the Japanese economy.

• The unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, about half of that in the United States.

Japan’s Hidden Jobless Hits 4.69mn, Worse Than After Lehman Shock
Nikkei, November 16, 2011
TOKYO (Nikkei)—The number of Japanese that want to work but are not actively seeking employment has surpassed levels from after the global financial crisis erupted, according to government data released on Tuesday. …
The hidden jobless in Japan jumped by 190,000 from a year earlier to 4.69mn in the July-September quarter, excluding the three prefectures hit hardest by the March 11 disaster, the Internal Affairs Ministry said.
The figure is nearly 70% larger than the number of officially unemployed people. It is also higher than the 4.61mn in the July-September quarter of 2009, when the employment market deteriorated sharply after the financial crisis. 

Adding the 2.80mn officially unemployed and the 4.69mn hidden unemployed together and dividing by the number of employed (62.60mn) yields a “real” unemployment rate of very close to 12%. Of course, all countries have their hidden unemployed, to a greater or lesser extent; my intention here is merely to highlight how the Japanese employment paradise that Fingleton would have his poor readers conjure up from a single statistic is not by any means as rosy as he claims. Japan’s artificially low jobless rate, kept down by a tacit agreement among players in “Japan, Inc.” (for which there is ample indirect evidence), may look attractive from the US, the UK, or any other unemployment blackspot, but paradoxically it gravely weakens the competitiveness of exporters, impedes productivity growth in the service sector in particular and economy as a whole, and serves as a massive barrier to wealth creation.

Even the headline unemployment number, while low, has more than doubled, to 4.5% in the latest Labor Force Survey, from 2.1% in 1990. And Fingleton would rather not let you in on some of the other features of the Japanese labor market in the “outstanding success story” of the last two decades: the rapid growth in the number of poorly paid non-regular workers (now approximately a third of the workforce), the evisceration of the middle class, stagnant or falling real wages, and rising inequality, all extensively, indeed exhaustively, documented in the vernacular press and readily apparent in the data. 

• According to skyscraperpage.com, a Web site that tracks major buildings around the world, 81 high-rise buildings taller than 500 feet have been constructed in Tokyo since the “lost decades” began. That compares with 64 in New York, 48 in Chicago, and 7 in Los Angeles.

Now we enter the realm of the surreal. No one of sound mind would take skyscraper construction as anything other than the loosest conceivable proxy for economic vitality. Take Rome: no skyscrapers at all by the 40-storey/150m/500ft definition, with the tallest building being the 22-storey Palazzo Eni, constructed way back in 1962. Yet who would dispute “il miracolo economico”, Italy’s equivalent of France’s long Les Trente Glorieuses post-war boom. The pace of skyscraper construction is dictated by a myriad of factors, among them cultural predilections, population densities, technical considerations, the already installed skyscraper base, and the availability of land, to name a few, with the state of the economy—as long as it is not in a state of utter collapse—at best a bit part player in the drama.

And of course Japan was busily building skyscrapers in the 1990s and beyond: the Earthquake Nation was very much a latecomer to the skyscraper party. There was no skyscraper by the above definition in Japan until arrival of the Tokyo World Trade Center Building (1970), and it was not until the 1980s that quake-resistance technologies advanced to the extent that Tokyo skyscraper designers pushed past the 150m mark with confidence. Even by 1990, neither Osaka nor Nagoya had a single skyscraper, and Tokyo a mere handful.

Fortunately I have some numbers to hand that gives a more nuanced view of the Tokyo office market than Fingleton cares to concern himself with. They slice the data a different way: here we are dealing with office buildings with gross floor areas of over 10,000 meters squared. As the Bubble inflated, the number of these buildings going up rocketed, and remained in the 40-50 annual new build range between 1989 and 1994, before collapsing to around 15 annually in 1999-2001. There was a spike up to 42 in 2003, which was the consequence of large tracts of former Japan Railways marshalling yards becoming available at Shiodome and Shinagawa in the late 1990s, coupled with the colossal Roppongi Hills complex, but the 1994 Bubble high of 47 buildings (I count 1994 as part of the Bubble era for these purposes because of the three to five years it takes to build a large Tokyo office block) was never regained. Mori Building, a major property developer, expects the supply of office buildings of this size to collapse over the next few years, falling to just five in 2015.

There’s another way of slicing the data, too: total office space in Tokyo’s 23 wards. Let’s compare 1980-1994 (the end of the Bubble for real estate) and 1994-2009. For the former period, office space rose from 33.2mn meters squared to 65.7mn, effectively doubling. For the latter period, it rose from 65.7mn meters squared to 89.6mn, up by just over a third, a marked slowdown in growth indeed, with the annual percentage gain between 1999 and 2009 exceeding 2.0% in only one year, very much what you would expect in an economy with nominal GDP growth closing in on zero.

Skyscraper demand has been driven by the shift to service industries (another belated phenomenon in Japan that helps to explain why the skyscraper boom came late), more office space per worker (a trend that has gone into sharp reversal if my experience is anything to go by), and of course population growth (up by a quarter in Tokyo and its three key surrounding prefectures between 1980 and 2010). But the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, in its Tokyo Worker Projections, expects the number of office workers in Tokyo’s five central wards, which had been rising last decade, to flat-line between 2010 (1.88mn) and 2020 (1.86mn), which does not bode well for asking rents, which are now at a post-1990 low, vacancy rates, which are now at a post-1990 high, nor the future of skyscraper construction, apart from the odd replacement one, in Tokyo. 

• Japan’s current account surplus — the widest measure of its trade — totaled $196 billion in 2010, up more than threefold since 1989. By comparison, America’s current account deficit ballooned to $471 billion from $99 billion in that time. Although in the 1990s the conventional wisdom was that as a result of China’s rise Japan would be a major loser and the United States a major winner, it has not turned out that way. Japan has increased its exports to China more than 14-fold since 1989 and Chinese-Japanese bilateral trade remains in broad balance.

Though some may say current account surpluses and deficits don’t matter, I’m tempted to give Fingleton the benefit of the doubt on this one—the only quarter he will get from me—as the surplus plays a critical role in funding chronic government indebtedness. But those current account surpluses will not be with us forever. 

Current Account Surplus Down 85.5% in Nov
Nikkei, January 12, 2012
TOKYO (Dow Jones)—Japan’s current account surplus contracted for the ninth straight month in November, falling 85.5% from a year earlier, the Ministry of Finance said Thursday.
The surplus in the current account, the broadest measure of Japan’s trade with the rest of the world, stood at Y138.5bn in November before seasonal adjustment, the data showed. 

As longtime Japan watchers like Ivan P. Hall and Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr. point out, the fallacy of the “lost decades” story is apparent to American visitors the moment they set foot in the country. Typically starting their journeys at such potent symbols of American infrastructural decay as Kennedy or Dulles airports, they land at Japanese airports that have been extensively expanded and modernized in recent years.

As these opinions are wholly subjective and not open to analysis, I will only add a couple of subjective comments of my own. A US informant tells me that both Kennedy and Dulles are still perfectly serviceable airports. Not having had the pleasure of their acquaintance—I don’t get out much—I couldn’t say. But I do know that compared to the sterile, deserted concentration camp that is Narita (Tokyo’s principal international airport), with its scant retail pleasures, I much prefer the teeming souk of my own London Heathrow, for all its shabbiness, as a future vision of the world.

William J. Holstein, a prominent Japan watcher since the early 1980s, recently visited the country for the first time in some years. “There’s a dramatic gap between what one reads in the United States and what one sees on the ground in Japan,” he said. “The Japanese are dressed better than Americans. They have the latest cars, including Porsches, Audis, Mercedes-Benzes and all the finest models. I have never seen so many spoiled pets. And the physical infrastructure of the country keeps improving and evolving.”

We should be grateful to Fingleton, really, for so many belly-laughs in a single piece, but in particular perhaps for this gem of a paragraph, which had me RoFL, as I believe young people say these days. William J. Holstein is not, by any measure, “a prominent Japan watcher”—he is a minor-league journalist and business consultant who doesn’t have his own Wikipage, has never written a book about Japan, almost certainly doesn’t speak more than a word or two of the language, and as far as his career profile reveals, has never spent more than a couple of months in the country at most.

But Fingleton needs Holstein, because there are precious few people left on the planet who will subscribe to his bizarre worldview. Fingleton’s sheer desperation for comrades-in-arms is nowhere better revealed than in his willingness to quote this sentence: “They [the Japanese] have the latest cars, including Porsches, Audis, Mercedes-Benzes and all the finest models.” This is a pitch-perfect instance of what I have come to call the Grand Hyatt School of Journalism, or what we might label “Roppongi Class Syndrome”, a severe deep-vein thrombosis of the mind that results from never leaving a cosseted, gilded circle of central Tokyo, where yes—surprise, surprise—there are lots of expensive German cars on the road, as there are indeed in every single world capital of a country with a per capita GDP of over $25,000 (and in many poorer ones, too). Here’s a modest little challenge to Fingleton and Holstein, though: go and stand in summer clothing on a mid-February afternoon on a street-corner in Wakkanai, Hokkaido, about 200km from any German car dealer, even a VW one, and count me out half a dozen Porsches, Audis, or Mercedes-Benzes before you cry uncle for fear of hypothermia. German cars account for a paltry 3%-5% of the total Japanese passenger vehicle market. 

Why, then, is Japan seen as a loser? On the official gross domestic product numbers, the United States has ostensibly outperformed Japan for many years. But even taking America’s official numbers at face value, the difference has been far narrower than people realize. Adjusted to a per-capita basis (which is the proper way to do this) and measured since 1989, America’s G.D.P. grew by an average of just 1.4 percent a year. Japan’s figure meanwhile was even more anemic—just 1 percent—implying that it underperformed the United States by 0.4 percent a year.

A look at the underlying accounting, however, suggests that, far from underperforming, Japan may have outperformed. For a start, in a little noticed change, United States statisticians in the 1980s embarked on an increasingly aggressive use of the so-called hedonic method of adjusting for inflation, an approach that in the view of many experts artificially boosts a nation’s apparent growth rate.

On the calculations of John Williams of Shadowstats.com, a Web site that tracks flaws in United States economic data, America’s growth in recent decades has been overstated by as much as 2 percentage points a year. If he is even close to the truth, this factor alone may put the United States behind Japan in per-capita performance.

 If “he is even close to the truth”, then the US has been in what must have been an almost relentless recession for the last couple of decades (simply deduct 2ppt from 1.4ppt). It must have been a very strange recession, though, for most of that time, what with employers vigorously hiring rather than firing, inflation-adjusted wages rising (slowly, admittedly) rather than falling, and corporate profits and the stock market soaring (the S&P 500 rose from 360 on January 1, 1990, to 1,277 on January 1, 2012).

Perhaps, then—I just suggest this as an alternative interpretation—he is nowhere close to the truth, and neither is Fingleton. I would also suggest that Fingleton knows nothing at all about hedonic regression, hedonic price indices, hedonic quality indices, and the like, and that his “many experts” are nowhere to be found. Attentive readers and those familiar with Fingleton’s oeuvre will by now be beginning to glimpse the two vast and mirror-image conspiracy theories that motivate the Fingletonian world-view: that there has been a long-enduring conspiracy, at the highest levels of the US government, to manipulate the data to present a falsely positive picture of the economy, so as to blind the US people to their growing immiseration, while in Japan, nebulous elites have been furiously massaging the data to present a falsely negative picture of the economy, so as to “blindside” those dull-witted Americans and secretly overtake the US as the world’s preeminent economy. Those nefarious Orientals!

It only takes a moment’s investigation, though, to unearth a 1999 Federal Reserve Board of Chicago working paper, Measurement Errors in Japanese Consumer Price Index, by economist Shigenori Shiratsuka, who is currently Associate Director-General at the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies of the Bank of Japan and who is an expert on hedonic regression, in which the author tentatively concludes that the Japan CPI has an upward bias of around 0.9%, a very similar level to the 1.1% upward bias to the US CPI found in the Boskin Commission report of 1996, from which Fingleton would presumably be forced to conclude that Japan’s growth has been overstated by a very similar degree to that which US growth has. I challenge Fingleton to explain why the Japanese CPI data must be accurate and the US data not. 

If the Japanese have really been hurting, the most obvious place this would show would be in slow adoption of expensive new high-tech items. Yet the Japanese are consistently among the world’s earliest adopters. If anything, it is Americans who have been lagging. In cellphones, for instance, Japan leapfrogged the United States in the space of a few years in the late 1990s and it has stayed ahead ever since, with consumers moving exceptionally rapidly to ever more advanced devices.

No, no, Fingleton, stop it, please, I implore you! My sides are splitting, the laughter is too painful now! While it is true that for a brief spell in the early years of the last decade, Japan’s mobile internet and its advanced feature phones were at the cutting edge, the world has long moved on and left Japan trailing in its wake. Here’s wired.com in December 2011, courtesy TomiAhonen Consulting, ranking 42 countries by smartphone penetration rates. Japan, whose consumers are “consistently among the world’s earliest adopters”, Fingleton would have you believe, could well be number one, no? No. Top ten, though, surely? No. In fact, Japan is tied for 33^rd place with Romania and Brazil, at 14%, just behind Thailand in 32^nd place. The survey sensibly notes a proviso that both Japan and South Korea have advanced feature phones—but then South Korea’s smartphone penetration rate is already 34%, fully 20ppt ahead of Japan. No doubt Japan will play catch-up rapidly over the next couple of years, but catch-up is not exactly what “leapfrogging” Fingleton has in mind.

There are hosts of other fascinating metrics that show how tentative the Japanese embrace of the Internet has really been: online sales as a percentage of retail sales are far lower in Japan than the developed country average, due to credit-card security concerns (which interestingly are not shared by the South Koreans), online media time consumption is lower than it is in South Korea, China, the US, or the UK, online advertising spending as a percentage of total advertising spending is likewise lower, the money that is spent on advertising is more focused on display than on (more sophisticated) search than elsewhere, usage rates of social networking services such as Facebook are far below those of peer countries, and the Internet is used overwhelmingly for its old-school features—news, search, and e-mail—rather than more up-to-the-minute features such as online music, online gaming, and online banking.

Much of the story is qualitative rather than quantitative. An example is Japan’s eating-out culture. Tokyo, according to the Michelin Guide, boasts 16 of the world’s top-ranked restaurants, versus a mere 10 for the runner-up, Paris. Similarly Japan as a whole beats France in the Michelin ratings. But how do you express this in G.D.P. terms?

I think I will retch if I hear once more the “argument from Michelin” from Japan’s professional boosters—and there are dozens of them, in a Baskin-Robbins array of flavors, out there, however much Fingleton would like the world to think he is a lonely, embattled crusader. We could choose, should we wish, to demolish this comparison on demographic grounds—the Tokyo Michelin guide also includes Yokohama and Kamakura, giving us very roughly one three-starred restaurant per million people, while the city of Paris has only a couple of million folk, and likewise Japan has more twice the population of France—or on pedantic grounds—France has 558 starred restaurants, Japan only 509, but I’d prefer to hone in on the complete and utter irrelevance to the culinary habits of 99% of the population of three-starred Michelin restaurants. All that Tokyo’s 16 three-starred restaurants show is that—surprise, surprise—there is a well-heeled elite in a huge and quite prosperous city that takes its food very seriously indeed. For those of us not privileged to be one of the 1%, our dining-out options are necessarily more limited. For every Michelin-starred restaurant, there are countless thousands of hole-in-the-wall purveyors of affordable eats. The real Japanese food experience, for many a harassed salariman or office lady, is to be found in the cheap solace of a convenience-store bento lunchbox. 

Similar problems arise in measuring improvements in the Japanese health care system. And how does one accurately convey the vast improvement in the general environment in Japan in the last two decades?

How does one begin to know what “the vast improvement in the general environment in Japan in the last two decades” could possibly mean?

 Luckily there is a yardstick that finesses many of these problems: electricity output, which is mainly a measure of consumer affluence and industrial activity. In the 1990s, while Japan was being widely portrayed as an outright “basket case,” its rate of increase in per-capita electricity output was twice that of America, and it continued to outperform into the new century.

Forgive my unparalled ignorance, but I have never encountered anyone other than Fingleton attempting to use electricity output and its rate of change as a(nother) proxy for economic vitality. But let’s have a look at the data, anyway, from the US Energy Information Administration. What follows is electricity consumption in billion kilowatt/hours per million people and the rate of change over the decade, 1990-1999. 

                              1990                    1999                   Pct. chg.

Australia              7.82                     9.08                    16.1%

Canada                15.49                   15.79                   1.9%

France                  5.70                     6.83                    19.8%

Germany             6.14                     6.05                     -1.5%

Japan                  6.25                     7.48                     19.7%

UK                       4.97                     5.57                     12.1%

US                       11.41                   12.38                     8.5%

The first thing to note, obviously, is that the rates of change are all over the place: if we were to apply Fingletonian logic, then France must have been truly flourishing in the 1990s, while consumers and industry in Germany and Canada must have really been suffering. No more than a moment’s reflection is needed to show this up for the arrant nonsense it is. What the high-growth countries—Australia, France, and Japan—have in common is that they are all (mostly) hot in their summers, and I will wager (although for now I lack any hard evidence) that much of the growth in electricity consumption was driven by the—late, compared to the US—spread of air-conditioning. And Japan’s power consumption between 2000 and 2008, years which even Fingleton, I think, could be persuaded to admit were much better for the Japanese economy than the original “lost decade” was, completely stagnated, further undermining his case. 

Part of what is going on here is Western psychology. Anyone who has followed the story long-term cannot help but notice that many Westerners actively seek to belittle Japan. Thus every policy success is automatically discounted. It is a mind-set that is much in evidence even among Tokyo-based Western diplomats and scholars.

Take, for instance, how Western observers have viewed Japan’s demographics. The population is getting older because of a low birthrate, a characteristic Japan shares with many of the world’s richest nations. Yet this is presented not only as a critical problem but as a policy failure. It never seems to occur to Western commentators that the Japanese both individually and collectively have chosen their demographic fate—and have good reasons for doing so.

The story begins in the terrible winter of 1945-6, when, newly bereft of their empire, the Japanese nearly starved to death. With overseas expansion no longer an option, Japanese leaders determined as a top priority to cut the birthrate. Thereafter a culture of small families set in that has continued to the present day.

Japan’s motivation is clear: food security. With only about one-third as much arable land per capita as China, Japan has long been the world’s largest net food importer. While the birth control policy is the primary cause of Japan’s aging demographics, the phenomenon also reflects improved health care and an increase of more than 20 years in life expectancy since 1950.

Fingleton here is referring to the Eugenics Protection Act of 1948, which essentially legalized abortion on demand and felled the post-war baby boom just as it was getting into its stride. But to infer from a single piece of legislation passed at a single point in historical time, now 64 years ago, that—perhaps by some heroic act of the Jungian unconscious unavailable to other, lesser nations—“the Japanese both individually and collectively have chosen their demographic fate” is preposterous. The drafters of that act—politicians and bureaucrats, two species not widely known for their deep foresight—could not possibly have known with any precision what the consequences of their legislation would be five years into the future, let alone a century. They were not by any means burning their midnight candles calculating the ratio of workers to retirees in Japan in 2050.

Two other points, both of them vital: yes, a low birthrate is “a characteristic Japan shares with many of the world’s richest nations”, but this emphatically does not mean it shares a demographic profile with them. Largely as a consequence of the Eugenics Protection Act, Japan is aging far faster than any other developed country and its population will decline far faster. Second, Fingleton insinuates that it is only ignoramus Western commentators who regard Japan’s demographic profile as a “critical problem” (which it is) and a “policy failure” (which it is, and a far too late to rectify one). This does a gross, gross travesty to the depth and breadth of the debate in Japan: presumably Fingleton must believe that the 1.3mn search-engine hits that “shoshika mondai” (roughly, “low-birthrate problem”) generates must be misguided foreigners writing in Japanese in a forlorn attempt to persuade a people that have “chosen their demographic fate” to repent and see the error of their ways. For a real understanding of the Japanese demographic situation, I recommend—as I have done before on these pages—Shrinking-population Economics: Lessons from Japan, by National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies professor Akihiko Matsutani, from which for now I offer the following passage (de-italics mine):

The wrenching demographic change in store for Japan will do worse than slow the pace of economic growth; it will shrink the nation’s economy. Negative economic growth will become the norm in the nation that until recently set the pace for the industrialized world. This is because of the all-too-rapid pace of Japan’s aging and of its population decline. The aging of society at a more moderate pace, as in France, would not push the economy into negative growth. Even Germany, whose demographic profile is more similar to Japan’s, appears likely to enjoy positive economic growth for another 20 years or so.

Technological progress raises labor productivity. Japan’s continuing advances in technology would offset the economic effects of a moderate decline in the workforce and support continuing GDP growth. The problem is that Japan’s working-age population will shrink far too fast for the decline to be offset through technological advances and resultant gains in labor productivity.

The all-too-rapid pace of Japan’s aging is also the villain in the nation’s pension system drama. Everything would be a lot more manageable if the aging of Japanese society was proceeding a little more slowly. As things stand, the number of people who pay into the system will decline rapidly even as the number of people who receive benefits increases rapidly. Something has got to give soon and in a big way. Japan will need to increase premiums, reduce benefits, or devise some combination of the two. The outlook for pension systems is also a concern in the European nations, but the problem there is nowhere near as severe as in Japan. That is because the pace of change in the populations of payers and beneficiaries is far more moderate. 

Back to Fingleton. 

Psychology aside, a major factor in the West’s comprehension problem is that virtually everyone in Tokyo benefits from the doom and gloom story. For foreign sales representatives, for instance, it has been the perfect get-out-of-jail card when they don’t reach their quotas. For Japanese foundations it is the perfect excuse in politely waving away solicitations from American universities and other needy nonprofits. Ditto for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in tempering expectations of foreign aid recipients. Even American investment bankers have reasons to emphasize bad news. Most notably they profit from the so-called yen-carry trade, an arcane but powerful investment strategy in which the well informed benefit from periodic bouts of weakness in the Japanese yen.

To which I only ask: if the beneficiaries of “the doom and gloom story” are so numerous and the losers so thin on the ground, why does the predominant economic narrative in all countries and at all times not accentuate the negative? (We’ll leave the ludicrous misdescription of the yen carry-trade for another time…)

Economic ideology has also played an unfortunate role. Many economists, particularly right-wing think-tank types, are such staunch advocates of laissez-faire that they reflexively scorn Japan’s very different economic system, with its socialist medicine and ubiquitous government regulation. During the stock market bubble of the late 1980s, this mind-set abated but it came back after the crash.

Japanese trade negotiators noticed an almost magical sweetening in the mood in foreign capitals after the stock market crashed in 1990. Although previously there had been much envy of Japan abroad (and serious talk of protectionist measures), in the new circumstances American and European trade negotiators switched to feeling sorry for the “fallen giant.” Nothing if not fast learners, Japanese trade negotiators have been appealing for sympathy ever since.

The strategy seems to have been particularly effective in Washington. Believing that you shouldn’t kick a man when he is down, chivalrous American officials have largely given up pressing for the opening of Japan’s markets. Yet the great United States trade complaints of the late 1980s—concerning rice, financial services, cars and car components—were never remedied.

The “fallen giant” story has also even been useful to other East Asian nations, particularly in their trade diplomacy with the United States.

A striking instance of how the story has influenced American perceptions appears in “The Next 100 Years,” by the consultant George Friedman. In a chapter headed “China 2020: Paper Tiger,” Mr. Friedman argues that, just as Japan “failed” in the 1990s, China will soon have its comeuppance. Talk of this sort powerfully fosters complacency and confusion in Washington in the face of a United States-China trade relationship that is already arguably the most destructive in world history and certainly the most unbalanced.

I trust that those who came to this unfamiliar with the paranoid machinations of the Fingletonian mind are beginning to see the light. 

Clearly the question of what has really happened to Japan is of first-order geopolitical importance. In a stunning refutation of American conventional wisdom, Japan has not missed a beat in building an ever more sophisticated industrial base. That this is not more obvious is a tribute in part to the fact that Japanese manufacturers have graduated to making so-called producers’ goods. These typically consist of advanced components or materials, or precision production equipment. They may be invisible to the consumer, yet without them the modern world literally would not exist. This sort of manufacturing, which is both highly capital-intensive and highly know-how-intensive, was virtually monopolized by the United States in the 1950s and 1960s and constituted the essence of American economic leadership.

Those sly Orientals! They have only gone and hidden “their ever more sophisticated industrial base” from prying Western eyes! I challenge Fingleton to explain in what way it is a graduation to shift from manufacturing, say, a car to manufacturing components for it. Let’s wholly invert what Fingleton says to give an alternative and more accurate reading of developments over the last few years in particular: having been beaten back by the competition in a slew of end-products from mobile phones to TVs, Japan’s manufacturers find their last redoubts are in capital goods and precision equipment. Good places to be, admittedly, for a nation on the technology frontier—no one is disputing for a nanosecond that there are deep reservoirs of strength in the industrial base—but beats have most assuredly been missed.

Japan’s achievement is all the more impressive for the fact that its major competitors— Germany, South Korea, Taiwan and, of course, China—have hardly been standing still. The world has gone through a rapid industrial revolution in the last two decades thanks to the “targeting” of manufacturing by many East Asian nations. Yet Japan’s trade surpluses have risen.

Unease As Japan Nears 1st Trade Deficit In 31 Years
Nikkei, January 9, 2012
TOKYO (Nikkei)—Japan almost certainly saw its first trade deficit in 31 years in 2011, and experts warn that unless the gap is plugged with interest and dividend income from abroad, Japan will continue to see an outflow of money and have to rely on overseas funds for its fiscal management, such as by issuing government bonds.
Japan booked a deficit of Y2.3trn in its balance of trade—exports minus imports—in the January-November period of 2011, according to government data. The red ink is attributed to a slowdown in exports due to the yen’s record-breaking appreciation and an increase in imports of liquefied natural gas for thermal power generation to make up for the suspended operation of nuclear plants in the wake of the catastrophe last March.
The last time Japan incurred an annual trade deficit was 1980, at Y2.6trn. …
“Japan’s trade deficit will expand unless the world economy achieves a high growth rate, as it did in 2002 to 2007, and the yen continuously weakens,” said Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at JPMorgan Securities Japan Co. …

Japan should be held up as a model, not an admonition. If a nation can summon the will to pull together, it can turn even the most unpromising circumstances to advantage. Here Japan’s constant upgrading of its infrastructure is surely an inspiration. It is a strategy that often requires cooperation across a wide political front, but such cooperation has not been beyond the American political system in the past. The Hoover Dam, that iconic project of the Depression, required negotiations among seven states but somehow it was built—and it provided jobs for 16,000 people in the process. Nothing is stopping similar progress now—nothing, except political bickering.

“Japan’s constant upgrading of its infrastructure”—for which read its insistence on wasting money building roads and bridges and trains to nowhere and airports that no one wants to fly to or from—is no inspiration, merely testament to the last gasps of the Construction State in its death throes.

There are many, many more splendid pearls of ignorance on Fingleton’s website, Sandcastle Empire, one of the top drop-down bars of which proclaims, hilariously, “forty years of foresight” and suggests that Fingleton, to paraphrase Churchill on Clement Attlee, is “an immodest man who has little to be immodest about”. So many pearls of ignorance indeed that I may have to pen a follow-up, but for now I’ll lay my blood-soaked quill aside.

It is a disgrace to the Gray Lady that it should have stooped to printing this gibberish. What’s sad is that Fingleton has half a case—there have been a few rays of sunlight amid the pervasive gloom of the last two decades—a case which he proceeds to ruin through truculence and a remorselessly misdirected focus.

Fingleton was a fool when I first encountered him on the Dead Fukuzawa Society message board in the late 1990s and remains an undiluted fool to this day. I can come up with three explanations, plausible and not so plausible, for his behavior: that he is genuinely, unfortunately stupid; that his mentality is such that once cornered, he can cede no nuance of grey in a debate; or that, to cast a Fingletonian conspiracy theory to work on the man himself, he is in the pay of sinister Fulfordian forces, perhaps the “fascist cabal known as the Bilderbergers”. Readers, what do you think?

Minispike: Season’s greetings

Well, the carol muzak fills the air of the arcades and promenades (with a muzakal rendition of O Tannenbaum, better known to these Brit ears as The Red Flag—“The people’s flag is deepest red / It shrouded oft our martyr’d dead”–on heavy rotation), the rightist soundtrucks blare out martial songs in the background as I write this as they rehearse for the Emperor’s birthday on December 23, and snatches of the fourth movement (“Alle Menschen werden Brüder”) of Beethoven’s Ninth, a hardy perennial Yuletide favorite in Japan, emanate from television and radio.

All of this can only mean one thing: it’s time to inaugurate a new tradition, at grave risk of coming across somewhere between an Oscar acceptance speech and a sherried-up great-aunt’s photocopied Christmas circular, and send out season’s greetings to all. Writing in the contemporary world is, for me at least, a daunting affair—with 100,000 books published annually in the US, another 100,000 published in the UK, some 200 million and mounting blogs in the blogosphere, and half of all US teens describing themselves as “content creators”, why would anyone waste their precious time on my witterings, I often wonder to myself, so I’m simply and straightforwardly grateful to everyone who stops by, in particular to Spike’s 300-odd e-mail subscribers, who hail from places as diverse as Hanoi and Prague (with a big shout-out to the sizeable Alberta/British Columbia contingent), its 100-odd Twitter followers, and especially to everyone who takes the trouble to leave a comment.

Us bloggers are narcissistic, solipsistic, frequently deluded folk, filled with self-doubt—in short, we’re human—so we care deeply about our stats—our clicks, our hits, our comment counts—and at the business end of a fine WordPress blog, at least, we can obsess unhealthily over them in quite some detail. It was with a rush of delight, for instance, that I discovered last month that Spike had notched up its quarter millionth hit. Not much compared to the Benjy the skateboarding dog video at YouTube, I bemoaned to a friend, who caustically and rightly replied that Benjy brings far more joy to the world than I do.

Spike began the year with the quotation “By God,” says he, “I think the Devil shits Dutchmen” and ended with the phrase “harsher winds blowing in the heartland”. In between, I somehow managed to scrawl out 24 posts—another novella length’s worth of ramblings—about everything under the Japanese sun from alienation to orb-weaver spiders. As Spike, my alter-ego, the year brought one particular personal highlight, at a farewell party—no shortage of them this year, as foreigners fled—at the rooftop poolside of the swanky Tokyo American Club, where the host introduced me as “Spike Japan” to coos of recognition and approval, as well as friendly admonitions not to slacken the pace and disappoint my “fans”. So once again, thank you all—I simply wouldn’t have kept on writing without you.

Ah, I almost forgot—the photos. They’re fresh off the roll, taken yesterday on a wild-goose, needle-in-a-haystack mission to the summer resort of Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture with my old friend Dr. W—, associate professor of Japanese history at W— University. The mission was to find this mountain lodge, in amongst fifteen hundred others like it, in a half-shambolic, half-spruce besso holiday home resort called Lake New Town, where entry by outsiders is an act of trespass and the now icy roads make driving treacherous.

No one wants this lodge to be found—no signs guide the way, no memorial plinth stands nearby, no “X” marks the spot. This is no ordinary lodge though, but the Asama Sanso, where on February 19, 1972, nigh on forty years ago, five members of the United Red Army forced their way in, took the caretaker’s wife hostage, and held off the police in a bloody siege that lasted ten days and left two cops and a bystander dead. The United Red Army had started the winter of 1971/2 a platoon 29 strong, but at its Haruna Base, just over the prefectural border in Gunma, had succumbed to an orgy of internecine strife and lynch-mob justice that left 12 of its acolytes dead through starvation, exposure, and asphyxiation for imaginary thought-crimes that span the gamut from “defeatism”, the offence of the first to die, Michio Ozaki (22), to “bureaucratism” and “theoreticism”, the offences of the last, Takashi Yamada (27). As the dragnet closed in, the ringleaders and other members were nabbed; five escaped on foot across the border to Nagano, and so began the siege of the Asama Sanso.  

It was a strange stand-off: the besieged paid no heed to the police and made no demands of their own. The lodge was stocked with provisions aplenty, and once the only entrance, on the top floor, had been barricaded, it was turned into a nigh on impregnable fortress. Nothing on the police side worked, not even the 150 tonnes of water rained down, the 1,500 rounds of tear gas fired, the all-night barrages of noise, and the megaphoned pleas of anguished relatives. The siege was marked by moments of macabre comedy: the besiegers’ bento meals froze in the frigid cold before they could be doled out and the police were forced to rely on then just-invented Cup Noodles for sustenance. A scheme to destroy the top floor with a wrecking ball had to be aborted after the operator of the improvised armored crane kicked the battery terminal from its moorings in the cramped cabin.

On the 10th day, the police stormed the lodge; it took over eight hours to find and subdue the five fugitives. If the incident spelt the end of ultra-radical left as a force with which to be reckoned , it marked the dawn of the age of live outside broadcasts and saturation coverage of breaking news—the peak audience rating of 90% on the last day of the seige has never been matched before or since in Japanese television history.  

At the time of the siege the lodge belonged to a maker of musical instruments. Astonishingly, it was not demolished but renovated and extended, passing through several owners before ending up a few years back in the possession of a motorcycle design firm, which goes some of the way to explaining the sign in peeling green and fractured French by the front door: “C’est l’espace pour les menbres et amis de moto”. In February this year, it was bought by a Japan-registered company with a Chinese name and probable Hong Kong connections, to predictable howls of outrage from the right, enraged that the Maoist-tinged United Red Army should have the last—for now—laugh as ownership passes into the hands of the sons and daughters of Mao. What the Chinese plan to with it is anyone’s guess—it’s hard to imagine anyone who knows their history spending a restful night in a place so abustle with ghosts.

Of the five fugitives, one, Kunio Bando, was released in 1975 after the Japanese Red Army stormed the US and Swedish embassies in Kuala Lumpur and took 52 hostages; he remains at large. One, Motohisa Kato, was just 16 years old at the time of the incident, and went largely scot-free. His older brother, Michinori, was sentenced to 13 years; he is now a farmer and active in the Wild Bird Society of Japan. Masakuni Yoshino was sentenced to life for the murder of 17 people and remains behind bars. Hiroshi Sakaguchi, “number three” in the United Red Army, was sentenced to hang and remains on death row, four decades on—a cruel and unusual punishment if ever there was one.

Well, you wouldn’t have wanted a beaming Santa and his grinning little elvish helpers on a Christmas card from me now, would you? All the best for the year ahead, thanks again, and please drop by, if you have the time to spare, in 2012.

Iida: A twitch at the curtains

That summer feeling
Is gonna fly
Always try and keep the feeling inside
Need a crystal ball to see her in the morning
And magic eyes to read between the lines

Teenage Fanclub, Sparky’s Dream, 1995

Geologically, Iida is a place where the bedrock of life’s banalities lies much closer to the earthen surface of works and days than it does in the painted face of the big smoke, which makes her a more honest, death-embracing locus, but she was not somewhere I could hold on to for very long. I treat Iida nonetheless as my furusato hometown, though no parents, siblings, or relatives wait for me there, and truth be told I’m a neglectful lover, rarely returning now. It was with a touch of trepidation, therefore, that I accepted an invitation from Old Bill, fellow Withnail & I obsessive, connoisseur like me of quality knobs (this one a Bakelite beauty from Sato Parts),

electronics tinkerer extraordinaire,

self-styled “Dipso Dad”, now husband to long-suffering Shinako and father to the adorable Lynne (aka 凛, Rin, “dignified”) and Hannah (aka 花, Hana, “flower”) to visit for a sultry September weekend.

We set off on a road tripette in Bill’s lesbian-beloved Subaru Forester, with Lynne, buried in a book, on the back seat. This being rural Japan—and Nagano Prefecture in particular, I can’t help but feel—we were soon in the realm of aerial roadways to heaven

and tunnels

and bridges

to absolutely nowhere at all.

There’s something of a cheap optical illusion and something crassly Freudian about the tunnel and the bridge. Unoriginally, I want to scrawl under the photos in a “steady, painstaking, artificial script”, “Ceci n’est pas une rue”, and be rewarded for my efforts years later with an explicatory and adulatory essay by some soixante-huitard philosopher replete with talk of unraveled calligrams and negations multiplying themselves. To me, at least, the bridge is violent, the hillside vulnerable; the tunnel, its mirror image, is patient, the river ready to be bridged. As they are near neighbors, separated by only a few dales and folds, the bridge and the tunnel could perhaps get it together on an Internet dating site for large ferroconcrete structures.

To return to the mundane: all three form part of what one day, my son, my daughter, will be the San’en Nanshin Expressway, a 100km link between Iida in the interior and Hamamatsu on the coast. The project was given the green light back in 1983; the aerial interchange and the bridge have been in a state of Viagric erection since 1994; only a dozen or so kilometers have so far been completed; much of the rest is scheduled for completion in 2016 or after; and a few crucial sections have no schedule for construction at all, which means they are unlikely to be completed until the mid-2020s, fully four decades after the project left the drawing board of some faceless committee. As a friend loves to say, in Japan we take the long view. The expressway traverses terrain that is about as hostile to the dreams of road-builders as any on the planet, as hereabouts the Japan Median Tectonic Line meets the Fossa Magna, with the trickiest sections costing around $30mn a kilometer and the bill for the whole expressway set to come in somewhere north of $2bn. The leisurely construction schedule testifies both to the unimportance of the road—denizens of Iida can already access Nagoya in two hours and Tokyo in four—and pinched budgets for megaprojects such as this.

The road’s boosters, which encompass the whole of “official Japan” from the Ministry of Concrete—sorry, I’ll read that again, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport—on down, make claims for it alternately nebulous and suffused with the finicky precision of the bureaucrat: of the Iida portion, completion will mean that 88% of outlying towns and villages will be able to reach the city center by car in the event of rainfall of 100mm or more (which must occur, ooh, half a dozen times a year), up from 71% currently! And for this you want me to pay $2bn? Opposition to the road is inchoate, disorganized, confined to the odd squawk of a taxpayer on obscure bulletin boards. Make no mistake, my son, my daughter: the men from the ministry (no women there) will have their way, the bulldozers and pile-drivers and excavators will prevail, bridge will meet tunnel (and maybe fall in love), the San’en Nanshin Expressway will be built.

Our destination was the hundred-soul hamlet of Shimoguri, fancifully known as “the Tyrol of Japan”, the last stutter of civilization in the Southern Alps before boars and eagles and bears take the place of humans at the apex of the food chain, seen fragmentarily here looking north toward the 3,000m peaks of the Akaishi Mountains. 

One blogger, something of an authority on out-of-the-way crannies, calls Shimoguri “the backwoods at the back of beyond” (僻地の中の僻地), and once, before the arrival of the roads—the good roads—in the late 1960s, it might have been. Now it is scarcely an hour from the center of Iida and indeed, courtesy of a 2005 municipal amalgamation, lies within its precincts. So the city stretches its claws out into the country. Nor is it, as he claims, “Japan’s last hidden spot” (日本の最後の秘境), if such a chimera exists: tourists far outnumbered locals when we were there. Still, it’s an otherworldly place, accessible only up and down and around a vertiginous single-track lane 10km long, with fields of cabbage and potato and buckwheat so steep—up to 38 degrees steep—that they have to be tilled from above to stop the soil slipping irrecoverably down the slopes.

We traipsed out through a sad stand of plantation pines, shot through with the slenderest bolts of amber and rapacity, dead to birdsong and itself, for the money shot—our rapacity—of Shimoguri in the glaresquint sunlight.

Architecturally no gem, largely rebuilt after the tarmac was laid, Shimoguri looks best from afar, though it does have some top sheds, the plank-knots a Braille from tree to forester.

Humanity has been fossicking around these valleys for millennia, the archaeological record shows, the earliest modern trace an inscription on a temple bell from 1460. But Shimoguri, school-less since 1980, is locked in a bloody bout with custom and its trainer, time, a bout it is all but bound to lose this coming century.

On the way back, we detoured to the feted baby village of Shimojo. I’d told Shinako we would.
“I hear the birthrate’s really high there.”
“Yeah, but there aren’t any jobs, so everyone has to commute into Iida.”
Guess I wasn’t the only hard-boiled straight-talker in town.

Overheated hacks prone to hyperbole have showered garlands on Shimojo, calling it “the miracle village” (奇跡の村), “a model municipality” (モデル自治体), and “the village where Japan’s future can be seen” (日本の未来が見える村). It’s attracted praise from across the ideological spectrum, from the Japan Communist Party to the right-leaning Nikkei BP, and even won a hat-tip from The Economist in its latest special feature on Japan in November 2010. What’s all the fuss about? Simply this: as the nation’s birthrate cratered to an all-time low of 1.26 in 2005, Shimojo’s was rising, to 2.04 on average between 2003 and 2006, tantalizingly close to the replacement rate and as high as anywhere on mainland Japan. (And yes, the corollary is that not a single municipality on the mainland then had a birthrate above the replacement rate).

Shimojo’s path to celebrity status begins back in 1992, with the election as mayor of one Kihei Ito, a gas station owner, who professed himself appalled by the sloth and inefficiency he uncovered in the village administration. To instill in the flaccid pen-pushers the rigors of the private-sector ethos, so the party line goes, he packed them off to wait on customers at a home improvement center in Iida, humiliating them with their dismal sales performance in comparison with regular employees. To cut spending, the bureaucracy was allowed to wither on the vine through natural attrition, ultimately reducing the number of officials per 1,000 head of population to half the national average and the bill for their salaries by a third from the peak. To free the village from the vicious debt cycle of subsidies (補助) paid for through the issuance of muni bonds (地方債) paid for in turn by tax grants from the state (交付税), Shimojo forewent 1990s luxuries such as the installation of a full underground sewage system, opting instead for much cheaper septic tanks. In a bid to further prune expenditures, one that carries the firm smack of Soviet collectivism, Mayor Ito had his villagers do their own road repairs and build their own roads, especially the farmer’s tracks that lattice the paddies, with the council providing only the cost of materials.

All this thrift was to transform the village’s finances. Bear with me on a brief geeky foray into the intricacies: in 2009, there were 1,749 municipalities across the nation, and lacking a lucrative tax base of the sort provided by, say, the headquarters of a major corporation, Shimojo remains dependent on tax grants from the state, ranking a lowly 1,489 nationally in its fiscal strength index (財政力指数), a measure of a local authority’s own revenue raising ability. But by recurring expense ratio (経常収支比率, very roughly fiscal resources allocated to recurring expenses divided by recurring fiscal resources), a metric of a local authority’s fiscal flexibility, Shimojo ranked seventh nationwide, and by bond expense ratio (実質公債費比率, very roughly muni bond servicing costs divided by general fiscal resources), Shimojo ranked an astounding fourth, behind only three central Tokyo wards.

With the money saved, Mayor Ito set about on phase two of his grand scheme, the audacious “village population doubling plan” (村民倍増計画), which to any Japanese of a certain age would carry overtones of the 1960 “income doubling plan” (所得倍増計画) of Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, achieved in a mere seven years. Step one was to build cumbersomely named “housing to promote the permanent residence of young people” (若者定住促進住宅). The first three-storey, twelve-unit block went up in 1997, but by Mayor Ito’s account, he slipped up in accepting a state subsidy of half the cost of construction, a subsidy that came with all sorts of inconvenient notions of justice and fairness attached: the right to live in the apartments was decided by lottery and a number of them had to be set aside for low-income families. Well, that was sure to bring in all sorts of undesirables! The good mayor was careful to build the next nine blocks with the village’s money alone, so he could attract only “quality young people” (質のいい若者), ones willing to participate in extra-curricular activities such as the volunteer fire-brigade and village events in that deliciously voluntary-compulsory way I long ago pinpointed as a defining national characteristic.

Notwithstanding the onerous free-time obligations, the mayor’s offer was for many too good to refuse—spanking new 63 square meter (680 square feet) two-bedroom apartments with two parking spaces for Y35,000 ($450) a month, half what one would cost in neighboring Iida, and the applications flooded in. There was more pro-natalist largesse on the way, too: a 20% cut in kindergarten fees, a children’s library with some 7,000 volumes, and free healthcare at any hospital in Japan up to the last year of junior high school. “It’s great,” one young mother of two told the reporter from Akahata (“Red Flag”), the Japan Communist Party rag, in 2005, “We can take the kids to hospital even if they’ve just got the sniffles”, a comment sure to strike unintended fear into the hearts of the opponents of unmetered medicine everywhere. The population of the village, which had peaked in 1950 at around 6,500 and fallen to a low of 3,859 in 1990, began to inch higher, reaching 4,241 in 2006. Mayor Ito had done it! Earnest delegations poured in from every corner of the land—250 alone in the three years to 2009—to study the “miracle village”. It’s impossible to know precisely what lessons they took away, but the national birthrate began to crawl like a toddler higher off the 2005 low, and Shimojo in its own infant way may be fractionally responsible.

We parked up outside one of the breeder blocks, a nondescript dun-colored slab with no trace of the rustic that could have fallen off the drawing-board of any architectural practice in Japan after an hour of slipshod draughtsmanship. While there were no real live children around—perhaps they were at hospital with the sniffles—there were at least traces of them, in the shape of plastic toys in bright made-in-China primary colors stacked under stairwells. A lightly modded Chevy Astro van spoke of the presence of members of the Yankee subcult, renowned for their proclivity to procreate early and frequently (and often in the van), in contradistinction to most of the rest of the nation, which procreates, if at all, little and late. In retrospect, knowing what I do now of the Shimojo story, the block had the stench of the factory farm about it, the odor of the illiberal conceits that lie behind all such crudely gerrymandered attempts to manipulate populations up or down, and, in Mayor Ito’s welcome mat laid out only at the squeaky clean feet of “quality young people”, just the faintest trace of eugenics.

Of late though, some of the sheen seems to have come off the mayor’s great experiment. The population is on the slide again, down to 4,105 as of November 1, and the village website lets on that a few of its apartments are vacant and available to “married men” (妻帯者, itself a superbly gendered expression, combining characters for “wife”, “bind”, and “person”). Sexual minorities, of course, need not apply, though they would no doubt return the insult, had they the grotesque misfortune to be born in Shimojo, by fleeing at the earliest opportunity. It’s not hard to discern what lies behind the flagging of the baby revolution: the village has in essence been filching the youth of Iida, which itself finds it has fewer and fewer of them, due to a demographic profile that’s been described as “waistless” (寸胴型)—missing the middle—and only so many of them will accept the trade-off between cheap accommodation and soporific, stultifying, and claustrophobic village life under Mayor Ito’s paternalist eye.

What worlds can we see in Shimojo’s grain of sand? Three, I think. The first is that the village was lucky to have the autonomy to do what it did. The great Heisei merger boom slashed the number of villages nationwide from 568 in 1999 to 184 today, of which a staggering fifth (35) are in Nagano, even though it accounts for less than 2% of the population, testimony maybe to a stubbornly independent local streak. The second is that there exists across swathes of primarily rural but also urban Japan both a dyed-in-the-bone conservatism, here to be seen in the disrespect paid to the bureaucratic clerisy, and—ignoring the contradictions for a moment—an almost Tea Partyesque resistance to state (federal, in a US context) “interference”. The third is that however valiantly Mayor Ito and his village have fought against population decline, its forces are destined to overwhelm them, not merely because they are 4,000 pitted against 128 million, but because all the fevered construction of an environment purportedly friendly to childrearing misses the larger point, which is that until hiring is more equal in every regard, workplace regimens are redesigned from the ground up around the needs of working mothers, and women’s careers are not deep-sixed by childbirth, there will be no baby-strike solution in sight. Not something an old duffer oyaji like Mayor Ito could be expected to comprehend.

En route home, we passed Iida City Hospital.
“That’s where I’m going to die.” From others’ mouths this would have come with the tonally different melancholies of the honorable exile, the ambiguous émigré, the despicable expatriate.
“No, no,” I strove to reassure him. “I’m sure a clean swift stroke will get you in your bed.”
A little later, I gestured sweepingly at a clatter of drive-ins, superstores, and car dealers on the main suburban drag.
“You know, I don’t remember this in the slightest.”
“Perhaps there really is a God after all.”

We headed back to Bill’s own Iida satellite village, Toyo’oka (population 6,797), whose much-mocked (by me) motto is “early to bed, early to rise, breakfast”. Perhaps it sounds better in Japanese: hayane, hayaoki, asagohan. Ah, no. There are few distractions to ruffle the determinedly diurnal lifestyle to which the motto exhorts the populace: a beer or two and banter to warm up the evening at a snakku bar, some late-night slapstick on TV, or perhaps a midnight loiter on the aluminum bench by the ashtray at one of the two 24/7 convenience stores.

I delved into the statistics of disruption: there were 16 traffic accidents reported in Toyo’oka in 2009, one roughly every three weeks, most of which will have been no more than fender-benders. There were 23 crimes reported in Toyo’oka in 2009, some of which at least will have been of the order of radishes pilfered from a field, 33.73 incidents per 10,000 people, ranking the village 1,534th out of 1,749 municipalities (lower is safer) in a fierce contest for uncriminality in which several municipalities went entirely crime-free.

Nevertheless, Toyo’oka has a permanently staffed police substation (豊丘村警察官駐在所), to which I believe three constables are assigned, giving each one roughly one crime every six weeks to investigate. The average annual pay of a Japanese police officer was Y7.7mn (almost exactly US$100,000 at the current rate) in 2007, so with overheads it is fair to assume that it costs very roughly $500,000 a year to investigate the two crimes a month that plague Toyo’oka.

There are a quarter of a million stalwart women and (mostly) men in the thin blue line keeping us from anarchy across the nation, one for every 500 people, so the vipers’ nest of vice and sin that is Iida (population 104,668) has perhaps 200 officers (and an annual wage bill of around US$20mn). As far as I can tell, ten crimes were logged in the Iida police blotter in November this year: five thefts of bags, purses, or cash from cars, two burglaries in which cash was stolen, a theft of a moped, a theft of a pair of gloves from an office, and a theft of a grating from a “facility”. Small wonder, then, that out in the provinces more than 10 hopefuls vie for every police officer post.

The terrible tranquility engendered by the lust for order makes the Ina valley a wonderfully untroubling and untroubled place to raise The Mikan Sisters.  

But as with everything, there is a quid pro quo. A wag once described the then faded-to-scruffy English seaside resort of Brighton as a place that “always looks as if it is about to help police with their enquiries”. Well, behind the privet hedge, Iida is the hand twitching the net curtains at the window with the neighborhood watch sticker, ready to turn in the hoodlum likes of Brighton to the authorities at the first hint of trouble.

Bill does his best to puncture the boredom of smugness with tacks of wit. He took a dubious phrase from a previous post of mine, “chapatsu slappers” (women of easy virtue with dyed brown hair), shortened and Japanesed it to “chappa surappa”, and taught it to his daughters, who now with glee will point to some hapless stiletto-heeled, bustiered, and chestnut-locked lass and shout in unison in their perfectly modulated Japanese, “Are wa chappa surappa?” Is that a tart? No one understands, though, and the tranquility seeps back to stifle once more.

You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

With its mizuhiki cord craftwork and its puppet festival, Iida is not short of cuckoo clocks of its own. While the relationship between crime (presence or absence thereof) and culture (presence or absence thereof) is no doubt not as easily mappable as the words Orson Welles put into the mouth of Harry Lime in The Third Man imply, it’s fair to say that the cafés of Iida do not hum to the sound of aspiring scriptwriters crafting screenplays on their laptops, that the bars of Iida do not throng with bien-pensant wannabes deep in debate over polymorphous perversity (“No, no! Gender is a performative construct!”), the role of crocodiles in the Mesozoic ecosystem, or the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, fair to say that the air of Iida is not febrile with intellectual ferment.

We girded ourselves with barrel-bottom sake for “a brief nocturnal sample of the delights of Iida’s nearly extinct nightlife.” I was keen to renew my acquaintance with Cock,

a subterranean izakaya pub offering “multinational home cooking”, whose matchbox I treasure, much frequented by the in-crowd long ago, but we found its space had been usurped in 2006 by a hip-hop emporium, Club Rulez, so there was to be no Cock for us in Iida that night.

We dined on butter and batter with an old mutual friend in an almost chic restaurant whose other patrons, without exception, were Japanese men with Filipina consorts. The talk was of shrinking pay packets and shrinking enrolments, old bangers bought on the never-never, and diminished expectations—harsher winds blowing in the heartland.
(to be continued)