The elderly, hipsters and agriculture

When I was a boy, Rete 4 used to broadcast a Japanese animated series called Star Blazers. It featured the sunken WWII battleship Yamato – ‘Yamato’, Japan’s traditional name, resounds with patriotic fervour in Japanese hearts – which is brought up from th

The metaphor of postwar Japan rising from the ashes was so striking – the original Japanese dialogue was even replete with sexual innuendo signifying the nation’s potent regeneration (the Italians duly sanitised it) – that some have even considered the cartoon series nothing but Fascist in tone and outlook.

It represented the rebirth of a nation, the post-war quest for economic growth at all costs.

Like other vanquished peoples before them, the Japanese started to imitate their conqueror. In the post-war years, Japan imported the American nuclear family model to replace the extended family of Japanese tradition.

The economic experiment succeeded, and Japan flourished.

Not only did the economy bloom, but the country experienced a second baby boom accompanied by another, enormous boom in housing, a necessity dictated by the new wave of young ‘soldiers’ (and their families) who manned industry in the economic war that a demilitarised Japan declared against the world.

The enormous housing estates, called danchi and constructed on pristine farmland on the outskirts of big cities, attracted people who could satisfy strict requirements. For instance, only those who earned 5.5 times the rent could apply for an apartment.

These once-desirable flats today look like chicken coops, one on top of the other, in rows of soulless blocks extending as far as the eye can see. One danchi outside Tokyo is so large that two train stations had to be built to cater for the droves of workers who would commute six times a week to the burgeoning city. Now its population has dwindled, and it’s mostly old people who live there.

Economic growth at all costs cost a lot in social, environmental and human terms.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times carried an article on what the Japanese call “lonely deaths”. Old people die all by themselves, forgotten and lonely, having spent the last years of their lives enduring daily depersonalising loneliness.

Almost eerily, this scenario had been foreseen by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) in his Gulliver’s Travels. In one of his travels, Gulliver visits a country where people called ‘struldbrugs’ attain immortality at the age of 80. Then they find that their friends and immediate family have all passed away and they envy them, and they have no contacts among the younger generations whom they envy for their youth. They become detached from society, and society strips them of virtually all their rights.

In his book L’origine des systèms familiaux (2011), the French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd argues that the English nuclear family system could explain the rise of capitalism, “because it permits the social