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The Salary Man
Certainly change has characterized the life-styles of virtually every age group and class, except for those at the very bottom and the very top. The eta, descended from the practitioners of such despised occupations as leatherworking and butchering, are Japan's closest equivalent to India's untouchables; there are 1,000,000 of them, living in slums, working as ragpickers or worse, and rarely able to marry outside their class. At the top is Emperor Hirohito, who lives serenely in Tokyo's Imperial Palace with Empress Nagako and devotes most of his time, as ever, to his studies in marine biology.
Perhaps most affected are the people in the middle—the country's 17.6 million "salary men." They are the silent, white-collar backbone of the Land of the Rising G.N.P. Take, for instance, Tokyo Salary Man Iwao Nakatani, 27. He is typically middle-sized (5 ft. 4 in.), middle-income ($222 a month), middle-management. In his three-room, $6,900 flat ($833 down, $41 a month), Nakatani, his wife and two children all sleep in the same room.
Nakatani, who studied business administration at Berkeley, spends 21 hours each day commuting to his company, Taiyo Kogyo Co., a tent firm that made the translucent roof of the
U.S. exhibit at Osaka. Paternalism and lifetime employment are still features of Japanese corporations, and Taiyo Kogyo keeps Nakatani happy with a six-month salary bonus every year and a new-car loan every two years. Corporate entertainment allowances total $2 billion a year in Japan, and Nakatani spends a good chunk of his $1,600 share taking foreign customers to geisha parties. But he is not a kimono chaser. That tradition is beginning to fade, albeit slowly, as Japan's women become more assertive.
Nakatani runs counter to tradition in a number of other ways. He occasionally considers quitting for a better post, though job-hopping is still largely unheard of in a land where people usually stay with the same firm for life. He drives home in his Toyota Corolla every day at 5 p.m., whether his boss has left the office or not. And he thought nothing of voting for the Communists in the last election, though he describes himself as "a conservative's conservative," because he was certain they were going to lose and he wanted to help keep the long-entrenched Liberal Democrats on their toes.
The greatest change in the Nakatanis' life has been in the increased conveniences, but the Japanese salary man is fast learning a lesson absorbed by his Western counterpart long ago. "Now that all of us have a car, color TV and a stereo," says Nakatani, "we Japanese have begun to hanker for a mink coat for the wife and a foreign-made car." Already, Japanese housewives are complaining about "the servant problem."
Then there are Japan's two ages of discontinuity — elder and younger. Older Japanese, used to the rigors of life before the boom, find the relative abundance of contemporary Japan confusing and empty. Eight years ago, as Tokyo's sprawl