]]> http://www.easterwood.org/hmmn/2005/10/for-charlotte/feed/ 2 http://www.easterwood.org/hmmn/2005/04/aberration-or-yet-another-symbol-of-what-is-wrong-with-japan/ http://www.easterwood.org/hmmn/2005/04/aberration-or-yet-another-symbol-of-what-is-wrong-with-japan/#comments Thu, 28 Apr 2005 06:35:47 +0000 Kurt http://72.18.130.52/~zxmarkxs/hmmn/?p=457 Gen Kanai points to this article by Norimitsu Onishi for the International Herald Tribune about Monday’s train derailment in Osaka which has left 96 people dead (as of this writing) and hundreds injured. Onishi wonders if the ultimate blame for the accident might not lie with Japan’s attention to punctuality, which he claims borders on the obsessive.

Gen thinks Onishi “hits the core issue” and on the surface of it it does seem a compelling way to explain the accident, but count me as someone who finds the article’s conclusions just a bit too pat, especially this soon after the accident. The driver’s body appears to have been found as of this writing (according to this New York Times article) so we will probably never know what his motivations were, why was he speeding (if in fact he was), etc. It may well be that we was trying to make up lost time, but to state that “This disaster was produced by Japanese civilization and Japanese people” (a direct quote by a railway worker interviewed by Onishi, to be fair, but it is this quote that he hooks his argument on) sounds like someone looking for easy answers and convenient scapegoats while bodies are still being pulled from the rubble.

If in fact the driver was worried about being reprimanded a second time for overshooting a station, to the point that he was dangerously speeding, that to me seems the product of an inexperienced (only 11 months on the job), young (23) driver, not of an obsession with punctuality. I don’t think we can automatically assume that an older, more experience driver would have acted the same, as if each driver was cut via the cookie cutter.

Despite Onishi being the New York Times’ Tokyo bureau chief and therefore someone who should know better, I can’t help feeling he’s playing to the Western audience of the IHT/NYT here, one all too ready to lap up preconceived notions about a neurotic Japanese culture, hell-bent on perfection, inflexible to the point of being robots, incapable to seeing the bigger human picture, and so obsessed with punctuality that it’s willing to risk the lives of 600 people to make up a mere 60 seconds, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. At this rate, it shouldn’t be too long before the theory is advanced that the accident was caused by the driver’s wish to commit seppuku to atone for the guilt he felt at causing his passengers to be a minute late for work.

The reality on the ground is of course much different, not something easily compartmentalized and explained. I’ve used the commuter train system every day of the three years I’ve been here, and while not a common occurence, delays do happen, announcements are sometimes vague, and questions to station staff are occasionally met with shrugged shoulders. But the fact of the matter is that in those three years, I’ve been late to work on account of a train delay all of TWO times (and mind you, both times station staff handed me an “excuse slip” to give to my employer). This is not something to be defensive about, however, but something to be celebrated. The system, as extensive and complicated as it is, shuttling millions of people to and from work and school every day, by and large on time, works — let’s not look this gift horse in the mouth. One accident of this scale in 40 years, as tragic and destructive as it was, needs to be looked at for what it is, an aberration in what is generally regarded as the world’s most efficient train transportation system.

But aberrations don’t sell newspapers, or provide closure to the victims’ families, and so the hand-wringing and second-guessing pundits come forth to peddle their theories before a receptive audience. For Onishi’s readers in America and elsewhere, they’re not seeking closure of course but rather a justification of their own inefficiencies and in the process a sense of cultural superiority which says that somehow a system that works so well, that is so attuned to the needs of its customers, can’t possibly be the product of normal, psychologically sound individuals, but instead must be the inhuman machinations of some monolithic, dystopian Other out here in the Far East. This artificial polarization allows Monday’s train tragedy to be co-opted as some sort of divine comeuppance.

Adam Greenfield, who has just shuffled off these islands of Japan, sums up his two-year stint here, using the new Roppongi Hills project as metaphor:

Here is where I see the greatest, saddest parallel between this building project and my daily experience of contemporary Japan: in the clamor of these voices, and all the superlatives they evoke, Roppongi Hills is absolutely desperate to fill every space, to shut out doubt with affirmations not even of its specialness, but of its simple existence. Like an idiot beacon shrieking “I’m here! I’m here!” into the humid night, Roppongi Hills inserts itself into every possible vista, spoors the entire neighborhood with its sonic effluvium.

Read the whole thing. Sobering. (Above image of Roppongi Hills shot on July 5, 2003, on Fuji Neopan 1600 film).

The above is a full page ad that was published in yesterday’s Yomiuri Shinbun, sponsored by the hugely popular Japanese boy-band, and television mainstay, SMAP. “MIJ” stands for “Made in Japan,” and the ad is a admonishment to Japanese to feel proud of themselves, and of the recent achievements of some Japanese in the fields of sports, film, music, fashion, and science. As the crux of the copy says (click on the above image for a larger, and more readable, photo of the ad),

Has there been any other period when so many Japanese have played such active roles in the world at one time? Nowadays, Japan is experiencing tough times. People seem to have lost their energy. However, this is a truly amazing time for Japanese culture. Don’t you feel good to be living as a Japanese in such a wonderful age? We should be encouraged by their achievements and feel a little proud of ourselves. We hope that someday, with you, we will be able to walk tall and play a positive role too. So come along with us. The slogan is – MADE IN JAPAN = [MIJ]

The ad’s appearance coincided with a new SMAP television program broadcast last night called, unsurprisingly, MADE IN JAPAN, although to be fair, nowhere in this ad is the television show mentioned or promoted. I didn’t see the program, but according to the tv schedule and the little bit of it that Naoko saw, it featured the band members each participating in a different aspect of traditional culture, such as working at a small Japanese chopsticks factory. According to Naoko, the band members have come to realize that they, like many of the young adults and teenagers they count as their fans, know precious little about their own culture, and that rather than look towards the West for inspiration, Japanese should start appreciating their own cultural output and achievement.

Given this however, I do find it curious that they chose to publicize their message in English, in a Japanese newspaper (the Japanese version of the ad’s copy is printed at the bottom of the page, in small type). Further, I also wonder about the idea of using those Japanese who “have played such active roles in the world” as the underpinning of the ad’s message. (Interestingly, none of these achievers is referred to by name, although it’s easy to work out who each one is.)

Certainly Japanese should feel pride that the likes of Ichiro and Miyazaki and Seiji Ozawa and Tanaka Koichi (Nobel prize winner) are succeeding on the world stage. But perhaps, by focusing on those who have had success outside of Japan, the ad is ultimately sending a mixed message. In a way, the ad seems to imply that, unless or until one’s achievements are recognized by the rest of the world, they’re really not achievements, or only half-achievements not worthy of pride, at any rate. Exhorting Japanese to feel pride in themselves, to look inward rather than outward, is all well and good, but as long as the West is posited as the arbiter of success and achievement, the standard by which all else is measured, I’m skeptical of how much good messages such as these will do, no matter what language they’re written in?

Naoko says that according to early reports being flashed on the TV, in our area of Saitama, the earthquake was only a 3 on the “Shindo scale” that Japan uses to measure quakes, but a 4 in Tokyo. Initial reports indicate the earthquake measured 5.1 magnitude on the Richter scale, and was centered in Chiba prefecture (in the same spot as yesterday’s quake).

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, the quake was jolting enough to compel more than a few of us to post about it: Ore no Buloggu, Tokyo Tidbits, Wirefarm, Cerebral Soup, sajjadzaidi.com, The Blog From Another Dimension, and turquoise all blogged about the temblors.

Now my father is in the biz, so I know mistakes can obviously happen in any newsroom, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how some editor (or intern?) substituted Japan for Hong Kong in the headline for a story of yet more SARS-related deaths in Hong Kong, as pictured above (the story is here at New York Times online, though I suspect the headline will be corrected fairly shortly). In the Times’ defense, I’m sure this error was committed over at Associated Press, as it’s just a wire story being picked up and published as is. But at a time when there is a lot of panic about SARS, especially here in other as-yet-unaffected parts of Asia like Japan, it seems mighty careless and irresponsible of them, no matter who originally made the mistake. These kind of glaring errors rarely happen in print editions, with gauntlets of editors and proofreaders to go through, but they seem all too common online. When will we get to the point where online editions must pass through the same scrutiny?

The resemblance isn’t particularly striking, so I’ll alert you to the fact that this is supposed to be Ronald Reagan, circa the days he was public enemy number one in my book. I mentioned yesterday that on the way to Kazo, we got sidetracked by the sight of a huge 100-yen shop, and ended up spending close to an hour (and 3,000 yen) inside. Well, this was one of the things I came away with. I wasn’t really in need of a Ronald Reagan mask, of course. (Nor was I in need of most of what I bought yesterday, but it’s hard to exert self-control when everything is only 100 yen each.) However, it occurred to me that it would allow me to show you, dear reader, the type of thing one can buy in these stores for just a single 100-yen coin (about $.83 US cents), and you know I spare no expense for you. Actually, there were four masks altogether for me to choose from. In addition to the Reagan mask, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Nixon visages were also available. It looked like a modern day Mt. Rushmore. (Sadly, the one which presumably would be in greatest demand right about now, that of current public enemy number one Bush Jr., was not in stock or has yet to be manufactured).

Interestingly, the label for these all feature the image of Reagan (looking decidedly more like Reagan than the mask does). It did strike me as a bit weird that in a distant suburban bottom-yen discount store in Japan, they would be selling party masks for 4 former U.S. presidents. (In fact, with the exception of a plastic Edo-era chonmage wig similar to this one, these were the only masks or costume accessories available.) Why not a Junichiro Koizumi mask? Or perhaps even more appropriate for this part of the world, a Kim Jong Il mask?

This is a couple of weeks old now, but I only just got around to scanning this from the August 27th
print edition of The Yomiuri Shimbun. What this graph is a detail of (click on the image for a larger view) is, in its entirety (it took up 80% of a single newspaper page), a summary of the summer weather for all of Japan from July 20th to August 25th.

Now I happened to scan the top part of the page, which is for Hokkaido, so there is an abnormally small amount of bright red squares, which denote hot, sunny days. Down in the Kansai (Osaka/Kyoto) and Kanto (Tokyo) areas of the page, it’s almost completely full with red squares. But you probably knew this already. Japan is unmercifully hot and humid in the summers. It’s a subject as old as the day is hot, and I’ve been ready to move on to other concerns for weeks now (like a lot of things, Japanese like to think their summers are the worse, but in reality this summer was more bearable that the summers I spent in Texas many moons ago).

But this post really isn’t about the weather, and neither was the full-page spread in The Yomiuri Shimbun. As considerate as it was for the paper to give its readership this visually appealing summary of Japanese summer weather, the real pupose of this page was to help Japanese students cheat on their homework. HUH? Come again? Yes, that’s right, this page is aiding and abetting, indeed sanctioning, cheating. Let’s call it institutionalized cheating. Alright, I’m laying on the hyperbole fairly thick, but let me explain.

You see, Japanese students get approximately 5 or 6 weeks off in the summer as their vacation (the school year begins in April). And during this time they get assigned homework, apparently lots of it, book reports, papers, etc. And many teachers assign summer vacation journals or diaries. Like students anywhere I suppose, there are probably those students who do this homework and some who don’t, and again like most students, there’s a lot of procrastinating involved and much midnight oil burned on the night before vacation officially ends and students return to school.

So what’s the weather report got to do with this? Well, as it was explained to me, the main purpose of publishing the summer weather for all of Japan is so that students will have an easily identifiable starting point with which to hurriedly craft their summer journals. Anyone who’s ever tried to keep a travel journal knows what a bitch it is to fall behind and have to go back and try to write about what happened two or three weeks prior (it’s usually the reason I never have been able to sucessfully keep a journal of any kind). So try writing about 6 weeks in the space of a night or two? The weather makes a nice lynchpin on which to build a journal around. But can you imagine these things? This is what I imagine:

July 25th, Thursday
– Hot today. 33.1 celsius. Went shopping with Aiko-chan. Got a haircut. Saw a cute boy on train. IM’ed with Michiko-chan. Met Kazumi-chan in Shibuya and saw a movie.

July 26th, Friday
– Hot today. 34.5 celsius. Went shopping with Mariko-chan. Bought a new blouse. Later went to karaoke with Tomoko-chan. Made stickers after.

You get the idea. Now, diaries have a long and rich tradition in Japanese life (see this article for a good overview of their place in Japanese literary tradition). But, as needs to be done with many aspects of the Japanese education system, someone needs to look at the real worth of this kind of homework, or more accurately, busy work. I’m not sure what troubled me more about this: that students are assigned these types of meaningless homework assignments, or that The Yomiuri Shimbun, a 125-year old paper with the largest daily circulation of any newspaper in the world, openly encourages its readership (or the sons and daughters of its readership) to flout the education system and to basically encourage students to crib and cheat. It further enlarges what many including yours truly see as the bane of Japanese education, and that is rote learning.

With the recent attention that blogging has gotten, and the increasing prevalence of a computer in the household (we now have three ourselves!), I wonder how long it’ll be before an enterprising and forward-thinking teacher (from the sound of it, a fairly rare commodity in Japan) assigns to his or her students the maintainance of a summer vacation blog. Would the results be any different I wonder? While the idea excites me, somehow I imagine that what would happen would be that the URL for Yomiuri’s online “summer vacation weather” page would be emailed around (or better yet, IM’ed via cellphone), and on the night of August 25th or whenever vacation ended that year, millions of students would be ALT-tabbing between the weather page and their blog software, copying and pasting, back-dating entries and basically doing what they always have done, cramming. To prevent this, the teacher would have to monitor the blogs as the vacation progressed, but would they? How many of these teachers are cramming themselves, busily preparing lessons and what not on the evening before the Fall term begins?