8/13/2005

To all of you in the Real World dreaming about Japan, think again.
There’s a reason for Japan’s increasing suicide rate and it’s not caused mind-numbing anime or TV CMs.

Generation J in a land of confusion
Japan surrendered 60 years ago this Monday, but the defeat that once bonded the nation has no meaning to the youth of 2005…
A stretchy hat, edgy glasses and low-hitched trousers mark Junichi Nakano…is wondering where he and Japan are headed. “My vision of my country is my family, my friends, the places where I go to mess around, my neighbourhood,” Nakano says. “I don’t have a bigger vision than that. I don’t believe in God or the Emperor or something like that…. today is a list of problems that is as life-changing as 60 years ago, though much more subtle. Among them are a fertility crisis, a changing work ethic, population decline, a smaller economy, the shape of the future relationship with the US and the discord with China and Korea. As wealth and knowledge gaps emerge as never before, cohesion is crumbling.
At times, Japan feels as if a monumental fatigue has settled over it. One Tokyo academic has spoken of “an age of lassitude”….boys no longer dream of becoming salarymen like their fathers, and that there is no “guaranteed path to contentment”….the postwar job model, is out of favour. Family life is also under strain. Agony aunt columns get letters from wives who never even speak to their husbands, let alone have sex. Men are also unhappy and are disproportionately represented in the country’s suicide rate, the highest in the developed world….