Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (28 page)

I met Imai at an
izakaya
, a Japanese pub where often high-quality food is served with sake,
shochu
spirit, beer and wine. The lighting was moody with artful use of spotlights. Jazz was playing over the speakers and, through the wooden partitions that separated the private rooms, there flowed the sound of youthful chatter lubricated by alcohol. We pressed the buzzer on our table and ordered crab, some sashimi, grilled mushrooms, a little abalone hot pot and a couple of ice-cold draught beers. As we waited for the food, Imai told me that he had been depressed for years after his return from Iraq. He felt as though his mission to speak up for Iraqi children had ended in fiasco. The hostile reaction in Japan was worse than the kidnapping ordeal itself, he said. ‘I was only kidnapped for nine days. But during those years in Japan, sometimes I felt like I wanted to die.’ He left his home town of Sapporo to study at the other end of the country, at an international university in the southern city of Oita. He kept mainly to himself. ‘Even four or five years after [Iraq] some people recognized my face,’ he said. ‘Not so much now. I’m nearly free.’ He fell silent for a bit. ‘Actually I don’t care,’ he went on. ‘This is a stressed-out society. Many people simply wanted to let off steam.’

Looking back he had no regrets. ‘I became psychologically very strong and because of that I do my non-profit work.’ By his fourth year of university he felt better. He travelled to Zambia with a friend who was helping to build a school. He was struck by the optimism. ‘Compared to Japan I felt they had so much hope for their country. A fifth of the population is infected with HIV and the average life expectancy is just forty-six. But I sensed hope in their eyes. I came back to Japan and got on the train and everyone looked so gloomy.
Here, younger people are under a lot of pressure. I felt I should do something for young kids.’

Like Ishikawa, he had arrived via a detour, in his case selling pork and beef for a small trading company. ‘Buy cheap, sell expensive,’ he smirked. He quit in 2012 to devote himself full-time to mentoring troubled children. At one underprivileged high school he met a boy who had lived with three different fathers and whose mother had a multiple-personality disorder. The family was on income support and the boy sometimes worked at night to earn extra money. Imai was shocked things could be so bad for people in a country he still thought of as affluent. ‘These kids don’t have any self-confidence. They don’t feel as though they have a future.’ Secretly he wondered if they might not be right. ‘The population is shrinking. Poverty among young people is rising. For people with a good education, it’s invisible. But it’s a big problem. Living has become too hard.’

I explained Furuichi’s theory that what youngsters had lost in security they had gained in freedom. At least one survey seemed to show they had never been happier, I said. ‘The future will get worse, so now is the happiest moment,’ Imai replied after giving it some thought, pleased at his own logic. ‘Some young people do feel like that. But it’s kind of fake. Feeling happy is just for now. The future is dark.’ He too worried that Japan might be living on borrowed time, slumbering on the financial cushion built up during the economic boom. How could an economy survive with so much debt, he asked? One day it had to explode, surely. ‘I don’t know when this bankruptcy will happen. Maybe we’ll be OK for three years or five years. But ten years? I don’t know.’

Imai doubted the younger generation’s ability to bring about positive change. He had a sneaking regard for Hashimoto’s strong convictions, though he didn’t find the actual content of his ideas appealing. (Hashimoto’s popularity later imploded after he made light of the use of sex slaves by Japan’s army during the war.) Apathy was the default position, Imai said. ‘So many of them are on Facebook or Twitter. They seem to care about the Japanese future, but do they really act for Japanese policy, to change the national situation? I cannot really see it.’

About the time we met, the anti-nuclear movement had gathered
some momentum. Big crowds, including some young people, had taken to congregating outside the prime minister’s office to demand an end to nuclear power. Imai doubted it would go far. ‘Just a few people are moving, acting. But I don’t think it’s having much impact,’ he said. ‘I want to become effective at changing Japanese policies. That’s why I am doing my non-profit work. In a few years, I would like to make suggestions to the national government.’ He paused, as if digesting the implications of all he had said, looking for a way to sum it up. ‘I don’t know what they should call my generation,’ he said finally. ‘Maybe the tough generation. Certainly not the happy generation.’

From Behind the Screen

Natsuo Kirino does not like to be called a crime writer. There is plenty of crime in her novels, but few sleuths and almost no trail of whodunit. Instead, there is sociological and psychological mining as she drills into Japan’s more rancid layers in the years after the collapse of the economic bubble. There she discovers seams of poverty, violence, rage and depravity in a society that mostly sees itself as refined and orderly. Above all, she writes about how women get by in a country where they are too often treated as second-class citizens both in the home and at work. Sometimes the survival mechanisms her fictional heroines adopt are extreme.

In
Out
, a book about working-class women toiling the nightshift in a grimy boxed-lunch factory, Yayoi strangles her useless and violent husband to death. Driven to desperation she enlists three female co-workers to help her cut up, and then dispose of, the corpse. In a macabre plot development, the women soon branch out into business, helping local
yakuza
gangsters to spirit away evidence of their gangland slayings. The scene in which the women chop up Yayoi’s husband reads as much like a how-to manual as a dispassionate description. Kirino spares little detail:

Next she used her knife to cut around the hip joints. Watching the blade slip through the layers of yellow fat, she heard Yoshie mutter that it looked ‘exactly like a broiler’. When she reached bone, she braced her foot on top of Kenji’s leg and began sawing the femur in just the same way as one would cut through a log.

In a later novel,
Tokyo Island
, Kiyoko, a 43-year-old housewife, is washed up on an island with her husband when their cruise ship sinks.
Kiyoko adapts to hardship more easily than her hapless husband, who soon perishes. Her resourcefulness becomes more necessary when she discovers that she is the lone female on the island along with more than two dozen Japanese and Chinese men around half her age. She skilfully plays one man against another to ensure her survival and even attempts to start a religion with herself at its centre. The book was inspired by the true story of Kazuko Higa, who found herself stranded on Anatahan island in the Marianas group with nearly thirty men at the end of the Second World War. The men refused to believe the war was over and continued to live a primitive existence. Higa escaped from the island in 1950. Kirino’s novel, which was later turned into a film, won critical acclaim for its exploration of group dynamics and a plot in which an ordinary woman was transformed into a sort of island goddess. ‘She controls the group through sex,’ Kirino told me matter-of-factly. ‘So much happens, but although the leaders constantly change, in the end she survives.’

Kirino was born in 1951 in Kanazawa, the castle town where I had lived briefly in my first month in Japan. Her father was an architect and her family moved around before settling down in Tokyo when she was fourteen. She studied law and later started to write pulp romantic fiction for a mainly adolescent audience. It was not until she was forty that she won critical acclaim for one of her novels,
Rain Falling on My Face
, and started writing more serious fiction about things she considered important. Her biggest breakthrough came with
Out
, the first of her novels to be translated into English.

I met Kirino one May afternoon in 2008 in the plush surroundings of the Fiorentina, an Italian café in the lobby of Tokyo’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, where large-scale works of modern art vied for attention with the beautiful people milling about. Burned once before by a foreign journalist, Kirino had brought along a female chaperone for protection, though the author of more than fifteen novels looked more than capable of looking after herself. Her face had a toughness about it. At fifty-six, she was an attractive, even beautiful, woman, though hers was not the pristine mask worn by some age-defying Japanese women. She was dressed casually in a flowery top, slacks and cork-soled shoes. Her nails were thickly painted with sparkly polish. Her voice was powerful and husky, yet of strangely low decibel.

She talked about a ‘sense of pent-up retribution’ driving her protagonists. ‘Men and women are not on good terms in Japanese society. They don’t get along,’ she said, toying with her coffee cup. ‘There is too much gender-specific role division. Men are almost like slaves in the corporate world and Japanese women are contained within the household. Their lives are disconnected. That is one of the sources of this boiling rage.’ Writing fiction, she explained, allowed her to explore this deep well of anger, often unexpressed in a society that prized smooth surface relations. ‘Writers try to cluster into words the things that lie buried in society, unconscious things. That is our duty.’

She was mindful that fiction could affect the world outside its pages. ‘Writers have to be powerful. But I also live in the real world, and sometimes I find the power of fiction frightening. After my book
Out
appeared – and this is scary to talk about – but I think there have been more cases of wives killing their husbands. And there may be people who found new ways of doing things because of what’s written in my book.’ Not long before we met, a case had come to court in which Kaori Mihashi, a fashionable 32-year-old, had killed her abusive husband, a Morgan Stanley employee, with a wine bottle. Like Yayoi in Kirino’s novel, she had cut him into pieces and distributed the sections among different locations. The luxury apartment where the murder took place was two minutes from my house.

If Kirino worried that she might have unwittingly inspired violence, as well as depicting it, she also thought she had performed a service by giving voice to women’s rage. ‘After
Out
, male readers can expect anything from me. I think I have educated them,’ she said, looking coyly at the table. ‘I was on a radio programme with a male personality once, and during the show he wouldn’t utter a single word to me. Towards the end, he asked: “What do you think of murdering somebody?” So I said: “It’s not a good thing to kill a person.” And he said: “Oh, that’s good. I’m really relieved to hear that.”’

•   •   •

Japan is often portrayed in the west as a society of powerful men and timid, subservient women. It generally scores poorly in international comparisons that seek to quantify equality of opportunity. According to a 2010 global study on women’s economic opportunity by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Japan came 32nd in the world with a
score of 68.2 out of a possible 100. It was above all other Asian nations, apart from Hong Kong, but below Scandinavian countries, which scored in the high 80s, as well as the United States, at 76.7. Japan scored reasonably well in the legal and social status categories. Women’s rights are, after all, protected in the post-war constitution. Article 14 outlaws discrimination based on sex and Article 24 states:

Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis. With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.
¹

In other categories, Japan did less well. On labour policy practice, which measured pay equality, workplace discrimination and childcare provision, it came below several developing countries, including the Philippines, Brazil and Tanzania. Even South Korea, another advanced Asian economy said to discriminate against women, did better on that measure. By contrast, Japan scored well in the ‘access to finance’ category, reflecting the fact that women still tend to control household income.
²
Different surveys throw up different results. In the United Nations Gender Inequality Index,
³
Japan does well, coming fourteenth in the world, below Scandinavian countries but above Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. On the other hand, in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, Japan performs abysmally, ranking 98th. There it comes below such well-known bastions of feminism as Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Brunei.

Clearly there is a good deal of subjectivity to such surveys.
⁴
But there are obvious ways in which Japanese women face discrimination. In business, female managers are rarer than in other rich countries, making up a lowly 1.2 per cent of senior executives in listed companies. Women don’t get such good jobs as men, and earn, on average, about 60 per cent as much as they do. By law, married women are not allowed to keep their maiden name – unless, curiously, they are married to foreigners, who presumably rank even lower in the pecking order. Only about 10 per cent of Japanese legislators are women,
putting Japan in 121st place out of 186 nations, and prompting a government committee to recommend mandatory quotas for female MPs.
⁵
Unlike Britain, Germany or India – and now South Korea, following the election of Park Geun-hye in 2012 – Japan has never had a female leader. Nor, of course, has the US. But in Japan, there are fewer role models to emulate.

Obstacles to women having what many of their western counterparts might consider a rounded life – juggling motherhood with a career – are very real. Though the traditional employment system is eroding, women hired by big companies still tend to be placed on career tracks that go precisely nowhere. It is not unusual to see women with college degrees reduced to fragrant presences in the office, bearers of green tea and objects of gossip about which colleague they will end up marrying. If women marry and have children, few take up their old job at the same company. Many firms are reluctant to let women return, particularly after a lengthy maternity break. Sometimes women themselves elect not to go back to work, although such choices are reinforced by strong social expectations about what it means to be a good wife and mother, even what it means to be happy. (In Japanese ‘to become happy’,
shiawase ni naru
, can be used as a synonym for ‘to get married’.) The job of bringing up children is, perhaps, more respected in Japan than in some other countries, where women who don’t manage to have a job as well as bring up a family are sometimes looked down upon. When my wife took our young son to Japanese kindergarten, she was touched by the fact that children were taught to thank their mothers for making their bento-box lunches, something she thought might not happen in the west. (The expectation was firmly that the mother, not the father, would have made the lunch.) Still, there are undoubtedly women in Japan who would like to work but who cannot because of a chronic lack of affordable childcare, especially for very young children.

Discrimination, like pornography, can be hard to define. But you know it when you see it. Take the example of the Japanese women’s soccer team, which made history by defeating the US to win the FIFA Women’s World Cup in the summer of 2011. Coming so soon after the devastating tsunami, the victory prompted national euphoria. Members of the team, nicknamed the Nadeshiko – after a pink flower,
and the idealized beauty and strength of Japanese womanhood – became national celebrities. But when the victorious Nadeshiko team members set off for the 2012 London Olympics, they flew economy class. The less successful men’s team was seated in business.

Japan’s most neglected resource is its women. In a country with no oil, gas or precious minerals, national prosperity is almost entirely predicated on the diligence and ingenuity of its people. But social conventions have suppressed the potential of half Japan’s population. Japanese women, less restrained by social convention than corporate-bound men, often strike foreigners as the more dynamic, inventive and sometimes plainly more competent half of the population. That their talents are so often sidelined strikes many as a terrible waste of national, not to mention individual, potential.

We should be wary, though, of looking only at the surface. Relations between the sexes in Japan are more nuanced than the caricature might suggest. And, as with many other areas of contemporary society, the position of women is in flux. The end of fast growth and the consequent strains at work and at home have had a profound impact on male–female relations. Richard Koo, the economist, said one of the attractions of the fast-growth period was that people didn’t have to think too much. It made for smooth, if not exactly modern, relations between the sexes. ‘Men concentrated on getting the job done. Someone would arrange a nice girl for them to get married to. The girl knows the guy will have job security, a steady wage increase, a nice house. So why not?’ The loss of that certainty had spawned angst. ‘Those guys have no idea how to date a girl or find a wife. These days the matchmakers are scared because you never know what is going to happen to this guy next, what with corporate restructuring, downsizing, outsourcing. There are a lot of men out there who never trained themselves to attract members of the opposite sex.’ Women, he said, were generally not interested in men who could not provide – one reason they were marrying later. The relative shift in power had even spawned a new take on manliness and femininity. The Japanese, forever inventing new categories to describe shifting social patterns, now talked about ‘grass-eating’ men who were not interested in sex, and ‘meat-eating’ women who knew what they wanted and how to get it.
Tokyo Island
, it seemed, was not entirely fiction.

•   •   •

Noriko Hama, professor of economics at Kyoto’s Doshisha University, did not fit the stereotype of a demure Japanese woman. She had forthright opinions about almost everything, often delivered with withering sarcasm in the upper-class English accent she had acquired when she lived in Britain as a child. She had a penchant for shockingly loud hair dye, often purple, and dressed in what I took to be designer clothes, thrown together in a manner that suggested they had been picked randomly from her wardrobe. We had known each other for years. Hama had never bought the argument that Japanese women played second fiddle to men. In important respects, she argued, they had been running Japan for centuries. It was a woman, the lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote Japan’s – and indeed the world’s – first novel,
The Tale of Genji
, in the early years of the eleventh century. Women had long been the powers behind its public figures and the bosses of its households, she said. ‘Women have always had control of the purse strings and had responsibility for running everything smoothly. Japanese men have been incredibly reliant on the female of the species, not knowing where anything is, not knowing how to dress. Without women they would have to go around naked,’ she told me, shooting me a look of contempt mixed with sorrow. ‘There has always been a depth to Japanese women behind the silk screen. There was never that much of an idea of being the protected, pampered species put on a pedestal in the sort of “ladies are gods” culture that predominated in medieval Europe or in Victorian times. Women were deemed to be the tougher sex, tirelessly working, physically as well as mentally, taking on anything that was remotely awkward or a strain on the male intelligence.’ Another look of contempt followed. I was reminded of something a well-known former geisha once told me when she described what she called the ‘lady-first’ culture of the west as sexist.
⁶