Quotes of the Day
If you were Manabu Sakai and it was March 1989, then you were a very
lucky man indeed. Imagine... You are 23 years old. It is spring. The
cherry blossoms are out, drizzling with pink the Elysian campus of Tokyo
University, better known as Todai. You have just graduated in law, which
means that after three years of drinking, partying, tennis and more
drinking—the study workload at Todai is famously untaxing—you
now possess the most bankable degree from the most prestigious
university in the second wealthiest nation on the planet. With corporate
headhunters trampling one another to hire you, and with the stock market
soaring to stratospheric highs, unemployment is not an option. It's not
even a concept. Beyond the 200-year-old Red Gate, Todai's hallowed
entrance, awaits the rest of the earth—and you, as one of your
nation's best and brightest, are about to inherit it. "The country was
wealthy. Next year it would be wealthier," recalls Sakai, now 37. "We
took it all for granted."
Sakai and fellow members of the class of '89 had no inkling of what
would happen next. On Dec. 29 that year, the Nikkei peaked at 38,916
points, having doubled in only three years. Then it began to fall, and
then to plummet. The bubble had burst, just as the tumultuous '90s were
beginning—the decade when the economy stalled, Kobe crumbled, the
subways were gassed, and Japanese were finally forced to reckon the high
social cost of their economic miracle. And Sakai? He would not become a
rich corporate lawyer, a career his blue-chip degree essentially
guaranteed in good times or bad. He first joined the Matsushita
Institute of Government and Management—an élite political
training ground—then dropped out to spend four years at a remote
temple in Kumamoto, meditating upon his life, what had gone wrong with
his country and how he could help put it right. Older and wiser, he now
works as a political aide in Tokyo, and soon plans to run for public
office, perhaps for a seat in parliament. "Our fathers' generation was
always taught that poverty was bad and only wealth would make us happy,"
he says. "That's why they worked so hard. But now we're learning that
chasing money doesn't make us happy. Something is missing. The last
decade has encouraged us to search for it."
"This is a generation that is motivated by the carrot rather than the stick," says Takayo Yamamoto, research director of the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living. "Because they are knowledgeable about the good times and bad, because they know a pay cut isn't a life-and-death issue. They possess more breadth. They are very adaptive." They are, in short, Japan's great hope.
If the Eighty-Niners are optimistic, it is partly because they were raised in optimistic times. They were born in the '60s, a decade in which the Tokyo Olympics signaled Japan's postwar resurgence, and grew up in a nation burgeoning in pride, prosperity and global prominence. By the time they entered university, few corners of the planet remained untouched by their nation's products or unmoved by its example.
On graduating, they seemed poised to lead Japan into a new and dazzling imperial era, which dawned with the death in 1989 of Emperor Hirohito, the last potent symbol of old Japan.
Cocooned within the lower echelons of gargantuan banks and infallible omni-corps, Eighty-Niners from top schools like Todai would be largely shielded from the effects of the gathering recession. But outside the cocoon, Japan was unraveling. Companies were going bankrupt, banks were reeling under multibillion-dollar debts, and joblessness—a risible 2% when the class of '89 joined the work force—was inexorably rising and would double by the century's end. The notion of lifetime employment was under assault. For Eighty-Niners, the message from all that they observed was clear. "It didn't matter how hard you worked or how prestigious your company was," says Masahiko Nakamura, a Honda executive and Todai graduate. "Since the bubble burst, you're not guaranteed job security anymore."
For an older generation, this all spelled gloom and uncertainty. Indeed, as the '90s progressed, senior company workers were committing suicide in record numbers or falling victim to karoshi (death by overwork). But where some saw doom, Eighty-Niners—adaptive, self-reliant and freethinking—sensed opportunity. O.K., so lifetime employment was dead. But a work force that switches jobs more often is going to shake up traditional corporate hierarchies, which tend to reward seniority rather than talent. Keisaku Sato, an independent filmmaker and graduate of Waseda University's class of '89, says Japanese his age are unusually egalitarian in the workplace: "We think and associate with people horizontally, as opposed to the vertical, hierarchical way" that typifies older Japanese workers.
This distaste for hierarchy and convention also makes Eighty-Niners statistically more likely to switch jobs—and that's fine by them. Naoki Adachi, 37, a 1989 biology graduate from Todai, gave up a government-funded research project on Malaysia's disappearing rain forests to address an issue he felt was both "more connected with reality" and closer to home. He is now a consultant to major Japanese corporations seeking advice on how to improve their environmental records. Is he happy with his career change? "Very," says Adachi. "People who follow unusual paths are usually happier, because they're doing what they really want to do." Likewise, women from the class of '89 have gained much greater freedom to explore areas that once seemed out of bounds to them. With the passing of the historic (though still inadequate) Equal Employment Opportunity Law in 1986, female Eighty-Niners were among the first women to compete in the male-dominated workplace with legislation on their side, at least in theory. "We didn't set out to change the world," says banker Yuko Kasahara, 36, a member of the class of '89. "We just wanted to make careers for ourselves. But as a result, younger women now have greater opportunities." Says Eighty-Niner Yukari Yui: "It's easier for working women these days, although if a woman wants to have a child she still usually has to quit her job." This makes the example of Yui, a 40-year-old astronomer at Japan's space agency, even more striking: she is married with three children. "It was hard when we started out," she admits. "The economy has got worse since then, but because we had such a tough start, we didn't notice so much."
Architectural engineer Yuji Yamazaki, 37, has also watched his industry suffer unprecedented wage freezes and cutbacks, but he remains philosophical. "I don't earn as much money as I might have," he reflects, "but then I don't work such long hours either." Less money, more leisure: the formula suits Yamazaki just fine. His wife recently gave birth to their second child, who can expect to grow up with ample attention from both parents.
Many Eighty-Niners share Yamazaki's relatively carefree attitude toward money—surprising for a generation that came of age in the greed-is-good '80s. They understand, perhaps better than their parents, that cash and contentment are not necessarily synonymous. It was this that encouraged Todai law graduate and Eighty-Niner Kikuo Sakaguchi to eschew the lucrative but stifling corporate law career his degree promised. Instead, he handles lesser-paid, low-profile personal bankruptcy cases at a small firm, trying to help regular people in financial distress. It's not glamorous work, but it leaves him plenty of time to travel. Sakaguchi has visited more than 50 countries, most recently Bangladesh. "Bangladeshis earn a fraction of what Japanese earn," he says, "but are they only a fraction as happy? They're probably happier."
While they reject the all-consuming work ethic of their parents, Eighty-Niners are not scared of hard work—or of public service. They share a keen desire to improve their country, an urge stemming from a diminished faith in their government's ability to tackle society's problems. Public disgust with Japan's corrupt and inefficient leaders has reached record levels since 1989. "Japan has no strong leadership—not in politics, economics or education," says Reiko Ikeda, 37, a manager at automaker Subaru and '89 Todai graduate. For many Japanese, this disgust has decayed into apathy. For class of '89 members, it seems to have stirred their sense of self-reliance.
Take astronomer Yui. She recalls 1993, the year the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had governed Japan for 38 years, lost power (albeit briefly) and a socialist government was sworn in. For many Japanese, who had grown up knowing nothing but one-party rule, it was a disorienting event. But Yui was hopeful—at any rate, initially. "I disliked the LDP, and hoped the socialists would change Japan," says Yui. "They failed. Gradually I began to realize that only the people themselves could change Japan—starting with our own communities." She and her neighbors in Kawasaki City have badgered the local authorities to spend taxpayers' money on schemes that make their lives more livable, such as day-care centers for kids, swimming pools and old people's homes. "Sometimes we've been successful, sometimes not," explains Yui. "But at least people in our town now recognize they can achieve such things. The same is happening all over Japan."
If Eighty-Niners are less selfish and more civic, it's partly because they had to be. Even by the early '90s, with the political élite unable to stop the economy's tailspin, the beneficent nanny state upon which Japanese had depended for so long—and had taken for granted—was already looking decidedly shaky. The horrific events of 1995 dealt it a deathblow. With the Kobe earthquake and Aum Shinrikyo's sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, 1995 was Japan's year of living disastrously—and, for Eighty-Niners, the 9/11 of their generation. In Kobe, while an ill-prepared government dithered, thousands of people died beneath the rubble of their own homes. Two months later in Tokyo the authorities failed to prevent Aum's act of terror despite countless warning signs.
It is hard to exaggerate the impact these events had on Japan. A generation that grew up in the safest nation on earth now worries about rising crime, a modern ill that (once upon a time) Japan seemed to have sidestepped miraculously. "In another 10 years' time," shudders Yoichiro Kurata, CEO of an art auction house in Ginza, Tokyo, "Japan could be like ... Botswana." (Poor Botswana: since last year, when Moody's judged it more creditworthy than mighty Japan, it has apparently become the country against which Japanese measure their own nation's decline.)
For a less resilient generation, such developments might spell only disaster. But even as Eighty-Niners lost faith in their government, they seemed to rediscover it in themselves. Architectural engineer Yamazaki, from the class of '89 at Tokyo Metropolitan University, was a trainee living in a company dorm near Kobe when the quake struck. He awoke to the sound of people crying for help, trapped inside their wrecked homes. Hundreds died in his neighborhood alone, yet Yamazaki recalls those times with something approaching nostalgia. "People helped each other," he says. "People spoke to each other. It reminded me of an older Japan." Quake survivors like Yamazaki were not the only ones to be moved by this spirit. Banker Kasahara notes how volunteer work became popular in Japan after Kobe. "It was kind of a turning point," she says, recalling how people nationwide skipped work to help the relief effort. "It was the first time so many Japanese chose other people instead of their companies."
Atsushi Kanamaru, a 1989 graduate in education from Waseda University, not only lost faith in his government but in his company, too. In 1995 the air-cargo firm he worked at saw its profits almost halve and his colleagues lose their jobs because of a strong yen, which that year surged to an all-time high against the dollar. "The earthquake, the sarin attack, the strong yen—I could do nothing about these things," says Kanamaru, 37. "It made me think I should change my ways, be less dependent on companies." He then studied English and co-founded an independent English-language publishing house called Kotan, the Ainu word for village. He would no longer be a cog in somebody else's corporate machine.
Are Eighty-Niners so different from their juniors—from, say, the class of '99? Yes, they chorus. "They're more diligent than we were—they have to be—but not so independent-minded," says Reiko Ikeda about his younger employees. "I tell them, 'You can't wait for someone else to tell you what to do. You have to think for yourself.'" Many of the Eighty-Niners name one other quality that differentiates them from their parents, who had worked too hard to ever enjoy their wealth and then bore the brunt of the bubble bursting: hope. "We now know that even the biggest companies can go bankrupt," Ikeda continues. "But we're not pessimistic. That's what makes us different from the older generation. For us, economic growth isn't everything." Even as the Nikkei teeters near 20-year lows, banker Kasahara says, "Now is a hard time for Japan, but we're convinced good days will return."
For some Eighty-Niners, Japan's performance at the 2002 World Cup put
their country back on the map, much as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics had for
their parents. It also signaled a long-awaited return of optimism. Of
course, much of the joy of watching the nation's footballers was that
they played like no Japanese team before them. With their dyed hair,
their brazen individuality and their almost swaggering confidence on the
ball, they seemed thrillingly free from the constraints of the past. The
Eighty-Niners hold a similar promise. They distrust élites, even
though their universities were training grounds for them; and they
refuse to be tethered by respect for authority, wealth and conformity.
And so they, too, are free to run with the ball. "We're now old enough
to hold some authority and influence in our jobs," says astronomer Yui.
Now it's up to them to change Japan.
- Andrew Marshall / Tokyo
- The nation's class of '89 is set to change the country with a jolt of creative idealism