Playing Pachinko as Japan Churns
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
Perspectives PLAYING PACHINKOAS JAPAN CHURNS BY STEVEN Y ROBERTS Tokyo We have gotten used to thinking of the Japanese as a race of overachieving superpeople, unafflicted by doubt...
...Only one problem: They have trouble finding their way around...
...The Japanese, he explained, have a different "social contract" with established authority than the Americans...
...Most forms of gambling for gain are illegalhere, so winning players receive small tokens that are redeemable for common commodities, like toothpaste or candy...
...The inflated real estate market has another, and perhaps more corrosive, effect: Many families cannot afford decent housing anywhere near their work, and thus have to accept cramped conditions, horrendous commutes, or both...
...Nearly two-thirds of all Japanese workers said they take less than two weeks of vacation a year...
...I have no claims to expertise, however, merely a notebook full of impressions and observations...
...Now it is both fearful and resentful that the West is expecting Tokyo to assume a larger role on the world stage...
...In an accidental parody of Japanese industrial efficiency and discipline, pachinko players sit doggedly in front of their machines, endlessly pursuing victory against the odds...
...Indeed, the Japanese are consumed at the moment with a series of debates about their national image and identity...
...It's Hiroshima and Nagasaki," says the Diet member...
...In fact, if you have a meeting across town, your host often faxes you a sketch of your destination to hand the cabdriver...
...Nobody knows when the shock will hit, but they fear it will have to come sometime...
...You might say that under the circumstances these are healthy responses, but the myth holds that Japanese workers are immune to common frailties...
...Reid of the Washington Post: "When the government puts out its ideas for raising the birth rate, I justlaugh...
...For a long time Japan has thought of itself as a "small island nation," defeated in war, deprived of natural resources, desperate for protection by Big Brother in Washington...
...This is an irreversible trend" insists Doi, who believes the growing power of the women's vote will have a longterm impact on a Japanese system suffocated by a professional bureaucracy that "respects the precedents that are the result of a male chauvinist society...
...Reminiscent of a child going off to college, Japan is eager for independence, yet ambivalent about leaving the soothing comforts of home...
...The answer to what is missing has not yet come through on their fax machines...
...The lack of adequate housing is a major reason for the drop in fertility, too...
...But because people are squeezed for cash, pachinko has spawned a whole subindustry: brokers who buy winning tokens for cash—at a discount, of course —redeem them for merchandise, and then sell the goods at a profit...
...A friend said his tiny apartment rents for $4,500 a month, and an American businessman based here pays—or rather, his company pays—$12,000amonth for an apartment that would cost about one-tenth as much in Washington...
...here, people are willing to trade the risks of individualism for the security of a corporate welfare state...
...We don't trust ourselves," a magazine editor confided...
...Some of the disquiet stems from genuine uncertainty about Japan's rusty diplomatic skills...
...Thoreau's line, that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," applies quite aptly to the Japan I've been able to glimpse during a relatively short journey...
...Younger Japanese clearly are thinking more for themselves, and a manifestation of this is the "birth dearth...
...Self-doubt is starting to grow on the domestic front as well...
...In Japan, people are waiting for the real estate bust the way Californians are waiting for The Big One, the great earthquake that could make Nevada oceanfront property...
...One hears the same figure repeated endlessly, like a prayer for the dead—20 million Asians killed by Japanese imperialism...
...The U.S...
...Takaka Doi, the feminist who leads the Socialist Party, Japan's main opposition group, sees a political implication in the rising level of dissatisfaction...
...The brute truth is that the majority of Japanese have not benefited from the unparalleled prosperity produced by thencountry's economic power...
...The present state of the nation is embodied for me by its cabdrivers...
...Steven V. Roberts, a frequent contributor to The New Leader, is a senior writer at U.S...
...Many people died here...
...Ambassador says the embassy and its grounds are currently worth $5 billion...
...The haunting concern is that once Japan's military instincts are aroused it will be impossible to control them...
...It all sounds a little like the scams perpetrated by those unscrupulous savings and loan executives in the States who traded properties back and forth, boosting their paper profits with each transaction but producing no real increase in value...
...An official of International House, the guest quarters and conference center where my wife and I were staying, told me the complex had increased in value 5,000 times since it was purchased by the Rockefeller family after the War...
...One of the most dreaded phrases in Tokyo at present is "the bubble, "a reference to the incredibly inflated real estate market that has sent land prices soaring and fueled much of Japan's industrial development...
...Accordingly, only 21 per cent of Japan's married couples told a recent survey that having children would be fun...
...The bargain is simple: In exchange for a certain job and a minimum level of comfort, you trade your impulses—even your rights—to protest...
...in providing what working mothers need, from flexible schedules to affordable daycare...
...I wonder, though, whether that social compact is weakening...
...A female executive at Sony, responding to official efforts to improve the birth rate, recently toldT.R...
...And some flows from a deep-seated feeling of national shame...
...the comparable response for the U.S...
...One of my lasting impressions of Japan is its pachinko parlors, the large, brightly-lit storefront rooms where people play a form of pinball seated at long lines of machines...
...The whole country seems like those drivers: efficient and disciplined to be sure, but a little uncertainof where it is going...
...To cynical Americans such words simply emphasize Japan's irritating habit of portraying itself as the eternal victim, but I sense a core of real horror when the Japanese talk about their past...
...schools, adds: "We never expected to be this successful, and we don't know how to handle it...
...We're economically mature but politically immature," a member of the Diet, or Parliament, told me one morning over breakfast...
...This is a different Japannow, and for the first time women feel free to tell people in authority, 'My life is none of your business.'" There are other signs of trouble in Japan's industrial paradise: Four out of five white-collar workers in a recent survey said they were overworked, and two in five said they were worried about dying from karoshi, or the effects of job-related stress...
...Sketches of the future have not yet arrived by fax, everybody's favorite electronic toy...
...was 49 per cent, and in Britain and France it was 70 per cent...
...Tokyo is huge and the addresses are meaningless—one explanation has it that buildings were numbered to indicate when they went up, not where they appear on the street...
...They navigate carefully, many of them wearing white cotton gloves...
...I asked a fellow journalist whether this was causing any complaints, and his answer was: fewer than an American might expect...
...One of those focuses on foreign policy...
...Perspectives PLAYING PACHINKOAS JAPAN CHURNS BY STEVEN Y ROBERTS Tokyo We have gotten used to thinking of the Japanese as a race of overachieving superpeople, unafflicted by doubt or division, climbing inexorably toward a pinnacle of economic domination...
...In addition, incomes remain limited, while the competition for educational opportunities has intensified enormously...
...The opposition leader concludes firmly, "Women represent change...
...Idon't know whether Doi is accurately predicting Japan's political future, but women have certainly changed the face of American politics...
...In Texas, many of those paper houses eventually collapsed, bankrupting the thrifts...
...Peering through the window of & pachinko parlor, watching the maniacal devotion of the players, one senses that there is something profoundly dispiriting about the Japanese today...
...Just as the United States is still suffering from a post-Vietnam syndrome, Japan remains traumatized by the legacy of World War II...
...The birth rate has sunk to 1.57 children per family, the lowest in Japan's history and far below the rate of 2.1 needed to replace the existing population...
...Some arises from blatant self-interest, since it is clearly cheaper and easier for the Japanese to have the Americans police the world while they concentrate on economic advancement...
...A sophisticated woman, with two graduate degrees from U.S...
...So for a first-time visitor here it is surprising and a bit refreshing to discover that the Japanese are not perfect after all...
...This was a battlefield...
...No wonder 44 per cent report feeling "constant fatigue" and 23 per cent admit to "a frequent desire to call in sick...
...The recent failure of the government to win popular support for legislation authorizing the restricted use of Japanese troops in the Persian Gulf highlighted this senseof national confusion...
...In November's balloting, Democrat Ann Richards lost the male vote in Texas but was elected Governor by getting 61 per cent of the female vote...
...In a very homogeneous country, where immigration is hardly encouraged, such a shortfall is particularly alarming...
...And Japan lags behind even the U.S...
...She noted in an interview that during a recent election for Governor of Okinawa, 5 per cent more women voted than men and helped elect a challenger to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party candidate...
...News and World Report...
...We always hid behind the Americans and let them protect us, but we' ve become too big to hide behind them...
...the car doors open automatically and the seats are covered with white doilies...
Vol. 73 • November 1990 • No. 15
