Posted 6:23 AM by Blah blah

Three Articles on Japan

Last week, my local paper published a series of three explosive articles about Japanese society today. Please comment! I'd like to hear your views on this.

All three by Michael Zielenziger, San Jose Mercury News Tokyo Bureau:

1. Japan's Shut-in Society: Reclusive Young Adults Reflect An Anxious Nation:

TOKYO - Kenji has seldom left his bedroom in five years. On a good day, when he forces himself, he can almost get to the front door of his mother's small Tokyo apartment before fear overtakes him.

"It requires a lot of courage just to go downstairs and get the mail," said the 34-year-old shut-in, who is thin as a twig and nearly as fragile. "I have two personalities: one who doesn't want to go out and one who does. They are fighting with each other constantly."

At least 1 million Japanese adults, mostly men, share Kenji's reclusive behavior, just one symptom of the nation's decline after a decade of recession and economic stagnation. Sleeping by day and pacing their rooms at night, these men epitomize a country that has become isolated, apprehensive and increasingly unable to interact with the outside world, according to a growing number of professional counselors and other experts.

These men imprison themselves in their rooms for months or even years at a time, according to Tamaki Saito, the first therapist to write a book on the subject. They hardly ever leave except for a quick run to the 7-Eleven, if they can manage that.

Counselors and psychiatrists say Kenji's reclusion, known here as hikikomori, is an illness that exists only in Japan and was unknown even there until a decade ago. Hikikomori sufferers shut themselves off from siblings and friends, even parents, whom they sometimes attack in violent outbursts.

"I fear that Japan, as a nation itself, is becoming hikikomori," said psychiatrist Satoru Saito, who treats shut-ins and counsels families in his Tokyo clinic. "It is a nation that does not like to communicate. It is a nation that does not like to take risks. So what these young adults are doing is a mirror of what they see around them in adult society."

The United States and other wealthy industrial nations are also being buffeted by rapid economic, technological and social change. But few nations are as wedded to conformity and resistant to change as contemporary Japan.

2. Shifting family values: Fewer Births, Marriages Threaten Japan's Future:

Worried about their futures and unwilling to commit to others, a generation of Japanese is shunning marriage and childbirth, giving their nation one of the world's lowest birthrates, with profound consequences. A steadily shrinking labor force promises to starve the world's second-largest economy just as baby-boomers swell the ranks of retirees. And as Japan's population declines, so will its influence.

Japan's birthrate is 1.3 per woman per lifetime, compared with 2.1 in the United States. The nation's population will begin shrinking in 2005, and in 25 years, more than a third of Japanese will be 65 or older. And unlike other nations confronted with shrinking birthrates, such as Italy and Germany, homogeneous Japan gives no sign that it will welcome foreign immigrants to supplement its depleted workforce.

Like the hundreds of thousands of men who lock themselves in their rooms to escape the pressures of a rigid social system, Japanese women fear being trapped in marriage and are disengaging from traditional family roles. Smarter and better educated than any previous generation, they're unable to find companies that accept working mothers or husbands who embrace working wives.

Until the late 1960s, the average Japanese woman first married when she was 24 1/2 years old. A woman who didn't marry by 25 was considered ``Christmas cake,'' a sweet that no one would bother with the day after Christmas.

Now the average age for a woman's first marriage is 27.2 and rising. In 1980, when Japan's economy was growing vigorously, 80 percent of women age 28 were married. In 1995, 55 percent were. Today, 45 percent are.

Katsura Komami ought to be a catch. The 27-year-old executive at a giant automotive manufacturer is well-educated and attentive. She frequently travels abroad and enjoys musical theater and fashion. She wants a baby someday.

But like thousands of other ambitious women in Japan, Komami isn't thinking about marriage. She prefers to remain in the bedroom in her parents' modest apartment where she grew up.

Komami shyly acknowledges that she's a ``parasite single,'' a popular Japanese term for the more than 7 million unmarried Japanese women who live with mom and dad....

Professional women such as Komami who continue to live in their parents' homes -- where they usually make only token rent payments -- can take shopping trips to Paris or New York, go to fashionable restaurants and fill their closets with Louis Vuitton purses and Gucci accessories. They're Japan's biggest consumers.

A woman once ``had to get married in order to survive,'' said Suzuki, the researcher. ``But now, in order to live a better life, women choose not to marry.''...

Japanese companies rarely offer a ``mommy track,'' a flexible work schedule to accommodate child care needs. Career women face the same demands as men to work long hours; during peak work periods, many don't get home before midnight. If they get pregnant, they often are forced to quit.

Husbands, however, still expect their wives to rush home and prepare dinner each night.

``We've discussed it, and my husband says he simply would not take paternity leave if we had a baby,'' said Mika Kuroiwa, who works in the programming department of a Tokyo television production company. ``So that settled it for me. It means we're not going to have children.''

``If we get pregnant, we're moving to Australia,'' said Yuki Takahashi, 29, whose Japanese husband studied for his law degree in Melbourne. ``I could never raise my child in a society as rigid as Japan.''

Just meeting a prospective partner can be an ordeal. Marriages traditionally were arranged between families, and while arranged marriages have gone out of style, many Japanese still aren't comfortable with U.S.-style dating.

Dr. Shigesato Takahashi, the chief researcher at the National Institute of Population and Social Science Research, said government data revealed that 49.8 percent of unmarried Japanese men ages 18 to 34 said they had no social relations -- no casual friendships, no dating relationships, no love affairs -- with anyone of the opposite sex. The comparable level for women is 41.9 percent.

``People who are trying so hard to pass university entrance exams, they actively suppress their desire to go out,'' Takahashi said.

Men spend long hours in the office and pass most evenings entertaining male clients or socializing with male colleagues or bosses. While Tokyo boasts more than 80,000 restaurants, men and women rarely dine together, except in the most romantic venues.

``I really don't have much opportunity to meet people,'' said Yuriko Hirose, 35, who studies tea ceremony and flower arranging and helps in her mother's floral business.

When Japanese men and women do meet, they have trouble talking to each other. ``The single men seem so helpless; they are really the parasites who depend on their mothers,'' Hirose said.

Sex counselors and therapists say men and women seldom discuss sex or feelings.

And marriage isn't the ticket to a good sex life. In Japan's only comprehensive study of sex lives, completed three years ago, one in five married couples in their 30s and 40s said they were ``sexless,'' meaning they have sex less than once a month.

``It's hard for Americans to believe,'' said Takao Sano of Mitsui Homes, one of the nation's largest home builders. ``But 40 percent of our customers ask us to separate the bedrooms'' between husband and wife. Often the couples are in their late 40s. Usually, Sano says, it's the wife who wants a separate room.

3. As Japan's economy falls, suicides rise: Increase Among Salaried Workers:

TOKYO - Japanese are committing suicide in record numbers.

Nearly 600 die by their own hands each week, and every year, three times as many Japanese hang themselves, hurl themselves in front of speeding commuter trains or kill themselves in other ways as die in automobile accidents.

``Suicide is the single biggest health care issue in Japan today,'' said Yukio Saito, a Lutheran minister who runs Japan's largest suicide-prevention hotline. Japan's suicide rate, he said, is three times higher than America's; the World Health Organization ranks it the highest among industrialized countries.

The rise in suicides has closely tracked the decline of Japan's economy, Saito said. In a decade, they have increased 67 percent among men. In a nation of corporate warriors who have made their companies their true families -- with ritual obligations and enveloping social ties -- the nation's rising suicide level ``is like a barometer reflecting the epidemic problems of the economy,'' he said.

Japan used to be a society in which competition was limited, economic outcomes were guaranteed and a ``convoy system'' kept all ships afloat, the weak and the strong. Lifetime employment and a seniority system guaranteed annual raises that provided security.

``Now we are becoming more of an individualistic society'' in which competition is less polite and outcomes are uncertain, said Tomotake Yamazaki, who runs a mental health-consulting practice and is a member of the Health Ministry's task force on workplace stress. ``Japan today is at a turning point. If you don't have your own individual strength, you cannot survive.''...

Of the 31,042 suicides last year, 71 percent were male. Experts say most of the recent increase is among salaried workers who are anxious about their economic prospects. Another large segment of suicide victims is elderly rural residents, especially women, who fear that they have become a burden on their families....

Widespread pessimism and even depression have replaced the giddy optimism of the 1980s. A survey published earlier this month by the Pew Research Center found that Japanese are far more downbeat than others with comparable levels of prosperity. Nearly twice as many feel their lives have gotten worse in the past five years as think things have improved. By a 4-1 ratio, Japanese think that when today's kids come of age, life will be worse than it is today. Only Guatemalans were gloomier.

In a Health Ministry poll of nearly 12,000 workers, 16 percent of the women and 11 percent of the men said they suffered from moderate or severe depression.

``I would have to say we have a mental health crisis in this country,'' said Yamazaki, who estimates that 70 percent of his patients suffer from depression caused by fatigue. ``Either they work too long or they have too many burdens from work.''

Many employees worry that if they take time off, their companies will discover that they can get along fine without them. Government data shows that last year, the average Japanese worker took only 8.8 of the allotted 18 days of paid vacation, a figure that has been dropping steadily.

The epidemic of anxiety has collided with taboos against talking about it. Large Japanese companies are establishing ``nursing rooms,'' where workers can go for counseling -- but counselors say workers fear getting black marks on their personnel record if they are seen entering or leaving such a center. Many will visit a counselor only at off-site locations.

Yuuki Saito, 22, said it took him six years to talk to his mother about his father's suicide.

``In Japan, to openly discuss something like suicide is never appreciated,'' he said. ``We have been raised not to whimper.''