Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Read online

  Changed economic and social circumstances mean many more women don’t have to ‘sit in the shadows and bear it’ any more. As a result of becoming more selective, the percentage who remain single into their thirties has almost doubled since the 1980s. Many of the ‘parasite singles’ identified by Masahiro Yamada are women in their twenties, thirties or forties, living with their parents and spending their salaries on luxury goods, eating out or travelling abroad. Yamada dismissed them as ‘fantasists’, holding out for an elusive Prince Charming. In fact, only 4 per cent of women over forty-five remain unmarried, about half the rate of the US. One could just as easily interpret women’s behaviour as a refusal to bend to social pressure by settling for marriage at any cost.

  Another way in which women are asserting their independence is by divorcing. Divorces have nearly doubled since the 1990s, with about one in four marriages now ending in separation.12 That is getting on for the same as Europe, though it is still about half the rate of the United States.13 Research shows that Japanese women tend to initiate divorce and, unlike men, do not rush to remarry. In 2003, legislation was passed enabling women to collect back instalments of unpaid alimony. Since 2007, women who filed for divorce have been eligible for up to half of their husband’s pension.14 In 2001, the Domestic Violence Prevention Law was passed, signalling that violence within the home would no longer be treated as a family affair. A law on the prevention of spousal violence allowed district courts to issue six-month restraining orders against the perpetrators and to evict them from the home for short periods.

  The divorce rate of 45–64-year-olds rose fifteen-fold between 1960 and 2005. Since 1985, divorce among couples married more than thirty years has quadrupled. That suggests women, trapped in bad marriages by legal and social norms, are finding ways to escape. Many of the divorces take place after the husband retires and the wife discovers she can no longer stand living under the same roof with her previously absent husband. In a phrase suggesting that women are not the quietly suffering shrinking violets sometimes depicted, retired husbands are sometimes referred to as sodai gomi, ‘big garbage’, after the clapped-out appliances thrown out for collection, though the phrase can be used affectionately.

  Young people, of course, get divorced too. The ‘Narita divorce’, named after the international airport, describes the phenomenon of post-honeymoon separations. These are said to occur when internationally minded, confident women discover that their monolingual, narrow-minded husbands can’t function outside Japan. More and more women are marrying foreign men. Pico Iyer, a British-born essayist who married a Japanese woman, once told me, ‘Women have everything to be gained by escaping Japan. Men are wedded in all senses to the status quo.’15

  The fraying of the family structure might reflect growing female assertiveness, but it comes with problems. Contrary to common perceptions of a nanny state that looks after its coddled citizens from cradle to grave, Japan actually has a relatively underdeveloped social welfare system. Traditionally, care has been outsourced to families. Because of social and economic changes, those families are no longer always in a position to provide. Divorce has pushed more women into low-paid work, adding to the numbers of working poor and struggling one-parent families. According to Unesco, Japan’s child poverty rate climbed to 14.9 per cent in 2012, lower than the US, but the ninth worst among thirty-five advanced OECD countries. Divorced women make up a disproportionate slice of the 20 million-strong ‘precariat’ – the ‘precarious proletariat’ without full-time employment.16 Half of working women are stuck in part-time, low-paid jobs.17 The proportion of Japanese single mothers who are working is the highest in the industrial world, suggesting a lower level of state support – and conceivably a stronger work ethic – than in other advanced nations.18 The erosion of the old model, with its certainties of lifelong employment for the man and lifelong housekeeping for the woman, has brought a fluidity to male–female relations. But Kirino was less optimistic than some about the benefits of what she called ‘this big societal shuffle’. Changes in the workforce might, she said, provide greater opportunity for a narrow spectrum of educated women. But for the majority, the new ‘flexible’ employment market would mean dead-end jobs for deadbeat pay, like the women working in her fictional lunch-box factory.

  I put it to Kirino that Japanese women, certainly the more privileged ones, tended to be less constrained by social norms, more worldly, interesting and daring. They were more likely than men to speak English or to have travelled abroad. As Hama had said it was still fairly common for a man to hand over his pay cheque to his wife, who might dish him out a little ‘spending money’ if he was lucky. Women also appeared to be having more fun. I remembered once having lunch in Tokyo with a Chanel executive at Chateau Joel Robuchon, an expensive French restaurant. Apart from the two of us, the diners were exclusively female, all impeccably dressed and leisurely advancing from amuse bouche to petits fours. Many were sipping wine or champagne. I couldn’t help picturing their overworked husbands shovelling down warmed-up pork cutlet at a desk piled with papers. ‘I can’t say unequivocally that Japanese women are oppressed or not oppressed,’ Kirino replied after thinking about what I had said. ‘In hidden places, Japanese women always had power, it’s true. All Japanese men also have a tendency to suffer from mazacon,’ she added, using the contraction of ‘mother complex’ to refer to the obsessive devotion men are said to harbour for their mothers. ‘That is why Japanese women are seemingly rather strong . . . You talked about running the household accounts. But this means that men don’t have to worry about how much to save. They are relieved of such worries. Once you get married, it is not a case of man and wife, but man and mother. Once they are married, mothers can have fun. That is what you saw in the French restaurant.’

  • • •

  Kaori Nakahara,19 a working woman in her mid-twenties, was more privileged than most. A graduate of Hitotsubashi, one of Japan’s most prestigious universities, she joined a large bank as a career-track employee. But rather than being a draw, she saw her high status as a barrier to marriage. ‘Many Japanese guys hate it when the woman does better or has a better label,’ she said. ‘The younger career women at work are finding it very difficult to find boyfriends and future marriage prospects.’ (Japanese men had told me something similar. One said, ‘There’s a preference for the traditional type of female. Men are not so confident in themselves these days, so they pursue women who are shorter than they are, who earn less than they do and who are less accomplished than them. There’s not much of a market for over-achievers.’)

  Nakahara said she didn’t feel discriminated against at work. In some situations, the rarity factor – in her year there were four fast-track men for every woman – could work to her advantage. She was sometimes invited to meetings she might not normally have attended simply because it was considered better to have some women present. Still, sexism persisted. One friend was admonished for asking a pertinent question in a meeting. ‘You talk a lot for a woman,’ her boss told her later, implying that it had been inappropriate to challenge an elder male employee in public. The primary role of many women at the office was still to look good and be subservient, she said. The reception desks at many offices and department stores are staffed with doll-like women, trained to speak in an odd falsetto and to spring to attention every time a visitor approaches. Doll-like coquettishness is generally considered an attractive feature in Japanese women. ‘What they do is just take people upstairs to the meeting room and look nice and bow when someone comes in,’ is how Nakahara described it. ‘They have the perfect bow. That’s probably what they were taught when they were recruited.’

  Then there was the matter of socializing. Women were generally welcome to go out eating with their colleagues after work. But office nights out often ended with niji kai, after-party drinks, or sanji kai, after-after-party drinks. As the evening wore on, the entertainment tended to get more lewd and female colleagues dropped away,
leaving the men to get on with their male bonding in hostess bars or ‘soapland’ massage parlours. Some women felt this tradition was detrimental to their chances of success since they missed out on the best company gossip, which flowed more easily after a night of drinking. Kumiko Shimotsubo, the human resources consultant who missed out on the promised road, called such sessions ‘nomunication’, an amalgam of ‘communication’ and nomu, which means to drink in Japanese.

  Nakahara told the story of a young male employee at the bank. ‘One day his boss took him out. The only thing he was told in advance was that they were going to one of those places with girls. Anyway, they go in and, after they were welcomed, the first thing they were told to do was to pull their pants down, underwear and everything.’ The two men, both wearing business attire from the waist up, were then ushered into the exact replica of a subway carriage. There were even straps of the sort that hang from train compartments to add authenticity. The young graduate and his older boss sat opposite each other. ‘Then these girls come out with school uniforms on and basically kept on touching them for an hour,’ Nakahara said. The most awkward thing, her colleague later told her, was that throughout the entire experience, he was sitting within feet of his boss who was naked from the waist down. And all the time, Nakahara said, bursting out laughing, ‘the boss was smiling at him’.

  Many Japanese women make relatively light of such entertainment. It is not uncommon to see families go out for a stroll with their young children in the huge neon-lit red-light districts that exist in every town and city. Many of the young women who work in such places are not desperately poor, but university students seeking extra spending money. Kirino said there were fewer taboos about such things in Japan than in the US. But unlike some, who regarded the Americans as too puritanical, she was not happy about the Japanese situation at all. ‘The way the sex industry exists in Japan is something that really upsets me, especially when teenage girls are exploited. Some people say: “Oh no. They love to go and work in that industry.” But when I hear that, my heart is crushed. The existence of hostess bars is one of the reasons that Japanese men and women don’t get along,’ she said. ‘You see, there are women who will perform services for men, pour their drinks, light their cigarettes. And at home, wives will cater to their husbands’ needs. There is a separation of roles, of being kind to men in two different settings. So men feel that, as long as they pay, they will receive service in such places. And when they go home, they will receive service from their wives. Japan is truly a kind of men’s paradise.’

  PART FIVE

  Adrift

  12

  Asia Ex-Japan

  More than six decades after the end of the Second World War and some 120 years since Japan set out on its ruinous attempt to conquer Asia, history continues to stalk Japan’s relations with its neighbours and former enemies. Unlike Germany, which has dealt with its Nazi history and reconciled with the rest of Europe, Japan has never been able to put the past behind it. That is partly because it suits its neighbours to play the ‘history card’ by keeping the past alive. Governments in China and South Korea have become adept at switching on old hatreds when it suits them. But Japan’s patchy record on facing up to its past has given them plenty of ammunition.

  Many younger Japanese, with scant knowledge of what went on in the war, are bemused at the hatred still harboured by some Chinese and South Koreans towards them. Some attribute it to brainwashing by the Communist Party, but this is a less useful explanation when it comes to democratic South Korea, where it is still common to refer to the Japanese by pejorative terms such as ‘dwarves’. Nor, though less spoken about, has Japan’s wartime conduct been forgotten in places such as the Philippines, whose people also suffered massacres and rapes on a horrifying scale. The writer F. Sionil José once told me he had shocked his Japanese hosts – at a convention to discuss Hiroshima – by proclaiming that the Americans should have nuclear-bombed every Japanese city they could find. He was not invited again.1

  It is true that in China, since the military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, education has placed more emphasis on Japan’s wartime atrocities, stoking a sometimes frighteningly virulent nationalism among Chinese youth. It is true too that anti-Japanese demonstrations in China can sometimes be cover for broader dissatisfaction with an authoritarian system that usually does not permit protests. Still, the common view in China is that the Japanese have never honestly repented for their wartime aggression and that Japan remains an unpredictable country in which militarism lies dangerously close to the surface.

  This idea of Japan as dangerous aggressor – so far removed from the pacifist image the Japanese harbour of themselves – was not such a problem twenty or thirty years ago. Then, Japan was at the height of its economic resurgence and China was an impoverished nation only beginning to emerge from the ruinous decades of Mao Zedong’s rule. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who uncorked reform in the late 1970s, took a pragmatic view towards Japan, preferring to downplay history in the interests of a more practically useful relationship. Then, the chance of conflict between a weak China and a demilitarized Japan was almost non-existent. Not so today. Now, to borrow Mao’s phrase, China has ‘stood up’. In 2010, as we have seen, its economy surpassed that of Japan, making China once again the strongest power in Asia. Although China continues to benefit from Japanese technology and investment, with each passing year the balance tips further in China’s favour: Japan, in short, is more economically dependent on China than the other way around. With each year, too, China becomes stronger militarily. In 2012, Hu Jintao, the outgoing president, declared that China intended to become a ‘maritime power’, serving notice that it wanted a blue-water navy capable of projecting power in the Pacific. By most reckoning, China has already become the world’s second-highest spender on its military. China’s economic and military ascendancy has sparked fears in Japan, helping those on the right who have long argued the country should become more ‘normal’ through the restoration of its ‘sovereign right’ to wage war. History, in short, has become ever more pressing as the balance of economic and military power shifts within the region. For Japan, which would prefer to forget, history is an unattended corpse at the bottom of its diplomatic garden.

  • • •

  In 1970, Willy Brandt, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, fell to his knees before a monument to victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The gesture, apparently spontaneous, was such a convincing demonstration of German contrition that the word ‘Kniefall’ entered the lexicon and Brandt went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Japan has never had a Willy Brandt moment. A constant refrain in Asia is that, unlike Germany, it has never properly owned up to its history – to itself or to others. Over the years, Tokyo has paid billions of dollars in lieu of war reparations and its leaders have issued innumerable formal apologies. Rightly or wrongly, these have never been taken as sincere. In 2001, for example, Junichiro Koizumi, then prime minister, said in a typical and oft-repeated statement of regret at Japan’s wartime actions, ‘We conducted colonization and aggressive acts based on a mistaken national policy and caused immeasurable pain and suffering. I wish, in the light of our country’s regrettable history, to take this to heart, to express my deepest regret and remorse.’ Such statements belie the claim, so often heard, that Japan has never apologized, though readers will judge whether it is a ‘proper apology’ or not.

  Koizumi followed his statement of contrition, however, with a visit to Yasukuni shrine, a religious monument to Japan’s war dead that is reviled in Asia as a symbol of its hated militarism. Among more than 2 million ordinary foot soldiers, Yasukuni contains the ‘souls’ of fourteen convicted Class-A war criminals. The Japanese like to see the shrine as their equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery, a place to show respect for those fallen in war. Many in Asia, however, regard prime ministerial visits to the shrine as the equivalent of a German chancel
lor laying a wreath at the tomb of Adolf Hitler. Koizumi’s pilgrimage in 2001 provoked a macabre demonstration in Seoul, where twenty male protesters each chopped off a little finger. Beijing said the visit suggested Japan had not properly ‘reflected’ – a favoured word in this debate – on its wartime conduct. Seoul lamented that a Japanese leader would show his respect to ‘war criminals who destroyed world peace and inflicted indescribable damage on neighbouring countries’.2

  That, in a nutshell, captures the problem with Japanese apologies as seen from Beijing or Seoul. No sooner do the Japanese say sorry, goes the complaint, than someone on the right undermines it by denying, or even glorifying, Japan’s wartime behaviour. Part of the problem is that Japan is a democracy where people, in and out of government, are free to say what they like. Japan will never stop its wartime apologists, just as Germany cannot hope to silence its neo-Nazis. But conservatives and nationalists have tended to dominate the discourse in Japan, overshadowing the statements and actions of many Japanese who have sought to look at history more squarely. As a result, the revisionist view of history is often seen by Japan’s critics as the true sentiments of its people, normally hidden but revealed after a few glasses of sake or in the company of fellow Japanese.

  The rightwing has certainly kept alive the idea that Japan’s was an honourable war of national defence and Asian liberation fought against western colonial aggression. Sure, the Imperial Army did terrible things, some will admit. But wasn’t that the nature of war? Hadn’t the Americans incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japan and didn’t they go on to commit atrocities in Vietnam? Weren’t the Chinese armies locked in their own civil war in the 1930s and 40s, every bit as murderous as the Japanese? And wasn’t it true that, after the war, as a result of Japan’s intervention, countries from Indonesia to Burma had been able to shuffle off the indignity of European colonization? Why was Japan’s attempt to build an empire any more heinous than Britain’s, a country that was not constantly hounded to apologize for its past excesses? In 2013, David Cameron, the UK’s prime minister, expressed regret for the 1919 Amritsar massacre in which British troops opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing up to 1,000 people. But he refused to apologize, saying it would be inappropriate to say sorry for events that had taken place before he was born. The Japanese, it seemed, were being held accountable to a higher standard. Still, there were those in Japan that went further, putting a positively glorifying spin on the country’s wartime record. Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist former governor of Tokyo, once succinctly put the rightwing case to me. ‘We were proud during the war and we were proud after the war. We felt the war was not just for Japanese people but was to help the countries that had been colonized by the US and Europe,’ he said.3 Forgiveness of Germany contrasted with a continued belief that Japan was congenitally evil, he added. That was both hypocritical and racist, he said.