(4 of 10)
But if the Japanese are happy, why does Japan hurt so much in so many different ways? It is as if the Japanese have been singlemindedly intent, since the catastrophic end of the war, upon survival and then success. Now, in the fulfillment of so many of their ambitions, they have raised their eyes and looked about them, and seen that success has a price.
Everywhere in Japan, one senses an intricate serenity that comes to a people who know precisely what to expect from each other. But one also senses—occasionally, distantly—a disconcerted, vaguely frantic emotional vibration, a feeling of dislocation and alienation and incipient loss. The Japanese are almost obsessively aware of their problems; it is possible that they exaggerate them in order to execute a subtle kind of psychological evasion—the domestic concerns relieving them, implicitly, of larger international responsibilities.
Yet the difficulties are real enough. It is a myth much advertised in the West, for example, that the vast majority of Japanese workers enjoy lifetime employment, a fondly cooperative relationship with management and a mutual delight in the company song. True, there is less than 3% unemployment. But, in fact, Japan has a schizophrenic business system, a dual economy. The myth applies to 30% of it, in the high-tech and highly productive companies. But the other 70% of Japanese workers labor in smaller, considerably less efficient industries. There, they receive low wages and few financial benefits, if any. Such workers bounce from job to job within that traditional economy; last year there were 17,000 bankruptcies in Japan.
The Japanese, in their pursuit of commercial success, have neglected a thousand social and civic details. They need the neglected a thousand social and civic details. They need the parks and playgrounds and sidewalks that they never got around to building. Their lives are often almost unbearably constricted. They commute two, three or four hours a day to work from claustrophobia-inducing apartments out in suburban regions that look like an interminable Bridgeport smudging into the outskirts of Albuquerque. Some 75% of the population lives in the narrow Pacific corridor from Tokyo to Hiroshima. Land prices are impossibly high (more than $100 per sq. ft. in suburban Tokyo). Newly married couples despair of ever owning a house (a typical two-room Tokyo apartment measuring 400 sq. ft. costs more than $83,000). The clutter of Japanese life is not only difficult, it is sometimes noxious. Lakes and swamps are polluted. For a people with an exquisite and even rhapsodic appreciation of nature, the Japanese are capable of casually littering and ravaging it.