On the edge of an upheaval

Changing social moves in Japan are causing rumblings, but it is a country trying to preserve its honesty and courtesy, writes GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN.

JAPAN is at once fascinating and frightening, and first impressions are bewildering and bewitching. Japan is the Land of the Rising Sun, where the ferocious but now dormant Mount Fuji showered its snow flakes on springtime cherry blossoms, but these images are, at best, meant for pretty picture postcards. Even the raw sushi or Sony is a mark not quite in focus.

What is, is the average man or woman's grit to promote and preserve a society of scrupulous honesty and disarming courtesy. Tales of how wads of notes in dropped wallets turned up intact at the "Lost and Found" offices may sound somewhat far-fetched in this day and age, but despite a worsening unemployment scenario - at nearly five per cent today, it is the highest since World War II - petty crime is rare on the streets of this nation of 126 million people, 45 per cent of whom live in the three major urban conglomerations of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. Even this sheer mindboggling density has not provoked crimes like picking pockets, snatching and burglaries, at least not on a noticeable scale .

I felt quite at ease leaving my bags outside the bus, which was to take me from the airport to the Tokyo city, 66 km away, while I walked a few hundred metres away to get my ticket. When I returned, my luggage remained untouched.

I was to see this virtue ever so often in the days to come. Newspapers are placed in street-corners, and nobody picks up one without throwing the change into the little box placed alongside. A professor of the renowned Waseda University in Tokyo, Iwamoto Kenji, says that a person may drop a few extra Yen, but never the other way round.

An Indian living here for a couple of years feels absolutely safe walking around even in the middle of the night with a bulging wallet, a common feature in a society that still prefers paper to plastic. In fact, there is a strong disdain for credit cards, one of the few areas where Japan has not aped the West.

Be it clothes or food, the young and the not-so-young have adapted largely American styles. If burgers and sandwiches are what many feast on these days, eyebrows are raised when a woman dressed in a kimono enters the compartment of a subway train. But nobody looks at one in dare-and-bare stuff. So complete is Westernisation here.

Or, is this because of the ordinary citizen's enormous level of consideration: his exemplary courtesy and touching politeness leave no room for nosy interference. I am yet to see a race that is so kind and friendly, even helpful. An aging teacher not only walked me to a video parlour, but even put his signature of introduction without which I could not have borrowed movie cassettes. And the man had known me only for a few hours.

Yet, a United Nations Human Rights report voices concern over the continuing discrimination against the sons and daughters of Japan's pre-war social outcastes. Much like the caste system in India, where occupation determined social hierarchy, this little island nation still finds it hard to ignore those whose parents or grandparents were butchers or leather artisans, trades that violated Buddhist strictures against killing.

Called Burakus, Japan's modern-day untouchables do not find jobs and mates easily, and there are 1.2 million of them, although unofficial figures place the number still high.

And for a Buraku man, life could not be harder in a country where women are running away from saying "I will". The development psychologist, Keiko Kashiwagi, writes in her latest book The Value of Children that with families now preferring a girl child to a boy (daughters are considered easier to raise and more likely to look after their aged parents), the status of a woman has risen dramatically. She now finds it simpler to get into a profession and become financially independent. Marriage is hardly her priority, and there is a disturbingly high percentage of singles in Japan.

Even within a traditional home, the wife expects her retired husband to help her with household chores. There are, in fact, cooking classes for such men.

Separation - partners may not divorce one another but live away from each other - is another phenomenon that is pushing Japan to a state where the emphasis is on the individual. Gone are the days, when he or she was strongly linked to the pre-war State (and the family) and the post-war company.

These changes cause rumblings all right, and a sense of loneliness - which many youngsters in particular try driving away by staring into their mobile telephones reading and re-reading messages or playing games - appears all pervading, raising strong suspicions that recent crimes like gassing the subway or murdering schoolchildren can be attributed to a state of extreme depression.

A trace of imperfection in an otherwise seemingly flawless existence could well be the cause of further discomfort in a community that takes pride in getting just about everything 100 per cent right. Blemishes like school killings and underground mayhem may push Japan to the precipice of a social upheaval.

Films like "Battle Royale", where director Fukasaku Kinji paints a horrible picture of a group of children goaded by their teacher into becoming monsters, are, of course, exaggerated nonsense, but for one pressured to perform continuously, the celluloid work may be too tempting to overlook. And, at this juncture, Japan does not need this.

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