----- Original Message ----- From: Mark Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: crl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2000 8:39 AM Subject: [CrashList] Japan's secret shame The world sees Japan as a rich, successful country. But the economy is stagnating, big companies are going bust, and workers are facing the unthinkable - the end of jobs for life. Jon Snow on an unreported disaster. Thursday December 28, 2000 The blade caught the morning sun. Despite the gloom beneath the bridge, I'd seen enough to know that it was at least the size of a carving knife. This man meant business. Even though we were on the other side of the river talking with other homeless men, he had clearly decided he was going to see to us. With a roar he grabbed his old bicycle, charged up the embankment and headed straight for us. There was a block of flats a few hundred yards away. Our film crew of four split up, and headed for different stairwells. Four floors up Mayu, a Japanese journalist working with us, was hammering on doors begging to be let in. The crazed knife wielder was closing in. As suddenly as he had come after us, he disappeared. We sneaked down the hallways and out on to the street again. In seconds he was back - but this time he had the police with him. An amazing sight, here was a dishevelled vagrant, ordering first two, then three, then five, and finally eight policemen to arrest us. And arrest us they did. Two squad cars, and even the superintendent's limo attended the scene. Our first night in Kyoto was spent in the cells. In the chaos of our arrest, Mayu had become separated, so that only the three white men of our team found themselves behind bars. The complainant arrived, still on his bicycle, but with no knife, about 10 minutes after our arrest. Our lingually-challenged confinement and eventual release lasted three and a half hours, and occupied the attention of all eight of the arresting officers. There is little crime in Kyoto, but there is much homelessness. Yet even the homeless have powers when foreigners come to call. They may have no social security, but they can still make a citizen's arrest. Somehow, you don't expect this rich, successful, country to sport rows of cardboard box homes with desolate hungry men and women beneath every span in town. Ten bridges in Kyoto, 10-20 beneath each - I suppose we met at least 200 homeless people, and there were clearly many more that that. It is a new phenomenon that has hit a society that has almost no provision for coping. For pride is the Japanese watchword and nothing assaults pride so much as the loss of everything else, hence the ire and fury that accompanied the threatening blade beneath the city's most westerly road bridge over the Kamog river. Japan is in unreported trouble. Sure, the statistics reveal little more than 0% growth for the past 10 years, a massaged 1.5% this past six months that has already dribbled to nothing. But they tell you nothing of the precipice this country is hurtling toward. Back under the next bridge, Hajime Tanaka, slurped tea. He had run a small business, lost it, lost his wife and his three children, and now he had lost his home. His pride, like his dirty white gloves, was still just about intact as he scoured the river banks for cans. He can make #7 a day selling them in a country where the average wage is #500 a week. Takashi Matsuta is only a fraction luckier. A kimono weaver, his breathtakingly fine woven wasteband lies on the table in front of his loom in the upstairs room of a sweatshop. He earns no money, but is kept by the factory owner, a distant cousin. The bottom has fallen out of the Kimono industry. We were travelling the Tokaido Way - the old 400-mile imperial route that led from the former capital to Tokyo. Travelling in a G7 economic powerhouse, an industrial miracle maker - the birthplace of my hi-fi, my microwave, my television, even the Walkman on my belt - yet now an undiscussed disaster on its knees. Even so, we don't know it, and many of them don't either. We had been sent here to find out if the recession was over, if Japan was coming back. The dense elongated concrete coastal sprawl that spawned Japan's success still feels prosperous, the trains run, the neon flashes and the cranes sprout above the skyline. But, like the white gloves of the homeless scavenger, appearances in Japan are deceptive. Beyond the convenience stores, the gambling halls and the noodle bars, there is an event taking place that dwarfs any postwar recession Britain has experienced. You can hear the factory in Hamatsu where Yamaha makes grand pianos long before you enter it. Infernal robotic fingers drum the keyboards for hours on end to see if they fall apart. It is strange to see so singular a thing as a concert grand in unfurnished rows of twenty. Four hundred people work here, four hundred jobs for life. Like all old Japanese businesses, Yamaha looks after its workforce from the cradle to the grave. Except that suddenly it can't. It has already laid off more than 1,000. The world's appetite for grand pianos is sated. Mayu sat at a #7,700 grand and played sumptuous Schubert. Tears welled in the manager's eye. He knows there's a problem; I don't think the workforce does. Further along the Tokaido, as we arrived in Toyota, they announced the closure of its biggest superstore, Sogo, and another 20 elsewhere in Japan. Sogo is the heart of Toyota. The next day the country's second biggest life assurance company went belly up with debts of #25bn. Have we hit a particularly unfortunate week in Japanese history, or is this business as usual? The Japanese bubble, when times were good, saw the Toyota car company so pressed for labour that Japanese migrants who had gone a century earlier to Brazil were encouraged to come home. Past the doomed Sogo store and up the hill we could hear the Saturday night partying as soon as we opened the car door. Inside there were entirely Japanese-looking people cavorting around doing the samba and the bossanova. Many of these "returnees" speak not a word of Japanese. The quiet, introverted, indigenous Japanese resent the bizarre bangs, crashes and whoops that accompany a good time for these people. The conflict has turned so tense that a police unit has been formed to bring the two communities together. Japan is ageing so fast that the UN estimates that 600,000 immigrant workers will be needed over the next couple of years to keep the place going even in a recession. Yet as the tension in Toyota shows, even their own forebears have a rough time. Traditional Japanese xenophobia is unlikely to take any more kindly to the Indians, Chinese and Vietnamese knocking at the country's door. The piledrivers, barge cranes and construction boats dominate the Takonome skyline. Out at sea they are building yet another multi million pound airport. Nobody needs it - the new, offshore Kyoto airport is just down the road. But the mayor, Seikoh Ishibiashi, has secured the deal as a means of boosting the local economy. The construction companies have already been prosecuted for paying wads of yens to local officials, who have got away with suspended sentences. The whole project is adding to the 700 trillion yen (#4.3 trillion) national debt which leaves Japan the most indebted industrialised country in the world. So who's worried? Certainly not the upper political echelons; for them it's business as usual. Certainly not the managing dirctor of the telecom offshoot NTT DoCoMo. Keiji Tachikawa told me: "Leave us alone for another 10 years and we'll fix it." Other, younger Japanese men and women are not so sanguine. Junichi Izumi is a young internet entrepreneur. Japanese does not fit well with the internet revolution and he is toiling against the stream. But he is convinced the old guard who run Japan don't even understand what it is. "In the summer," he told me "prime minister Mori kept calling the IT revolution the it revolution." The day we left Tokyo the minister of economic planning, Taichi Sakaiya, announced a #64bn economic renewal programme. "It's focused on IT," he told me. Closer inspection revealed still more construction projects. Sure, the new Tokyo sewerage system does have an IT element, sophiticated computer sensors for checking sewage levels. Japanese politicians, alas, appear to be subject to no such monitoring system. So why don't people talk about Japan's perilous economic state? Is it just too big to worry about, too far away, too impenetrable, too threatening to the global financial structures? As I was leaving the minister's office, another vast life assurance company, Kyoei, had just announced that it too was going bust with debts of #30bn. Guardian 29.12.00 _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
