Blossoms, hope return to Japan
TOKYO – Thirty-five years after my first visit, the uniqueness, orderliness, egalitarianism and the theatre of everyday life in Japan still fascinates me. I am always happy to return here, as I did this Thursday.
Even the simplest of gestures, such as the proffering of business cards with two hands and a humble bow, is done elegantly and to a unique script in Japan that would be mocked anywhere else.
It is the same with baseball. Although the rules, mechanics and skills of the American pastime are the same in Japan, it is a very different game here.
Every trip to a grocery store is a unworldly experience. The quality, size and variety of the fruits and vegetables being sold is extraordinary. So are the prices!
iphone Internet access is $25 a day. A pleasant dinner for two can easily cost up to $500. It is outrageous. But you do routinely get personalized service of a quality that most Canadians have not enjoyed for half a century or more.
What everyone usually likes best about Japan is that it works. You can set your watch by the trains and subways. Taxis are so scrupulously clean you could eat food off the floor of the trunk.
Even when stuck in one of Tokyo’s notorious traffic jams, there is plenty to marvel at. Elevated expressways snake through the city, providing a bird’s-eye view of tiny apartments, crowded offices and multi-storey golf driving ranges as well as glimpses of exceptionally well organized lives.
The way “salarymen” devour “pork cutlet curry” or slurp bowls of noodles every noon hour during a threeminute standing lunch is an impressive, high-speed ritual.
During my first trips to Japan I was mesmerized by how monorails and high- speed trains glided so effortlessly.
Although hardly an electronics geek, I was always drawn to the cutting-edge technologies that were to be seen for the first time at the Sony Building in Ginza, at the teeming markets of Akihabara and in some of the tsutayas, the video-game parlours usually packed with young Japanese males.
My favourite spot in Tokyo is a sushi bar with no name. It is a modest hole in the wall wedged into a narrow passageway beside a police station near Shinjuku. Only six customers can be squeezed in at a time.
If you are there late at night, and there is a seat free, chances are you will find yourself between a beefy, heavily tattooed mobster and a cop. While civil with each other, these two worlds do not collide because there is almost no kibitzing. The bad guys and the good guys are there for the sublime food and to watch baseball.
One never gets a sense of Japan’s economic prob- lems in the sushi bar with no name. But Japan has had a rough time of it for a while now. First there was a serious real estate bubble about 10 years ago. More recently, there was anxiety because of the economic challenge posed by South Korea, Taiwan and now China.
Iconic names such as japan Airlines, Olympus, Sony and Toyota have all been in the red. Sumo, which is a cross between a national sport and religion, has been plagued by a series of betting and behaviour scandals. Skewed by unbalanced demographics, pension funds are unravelling. There are far more retired people needing them than there are young people to pay for them.
That was the dire backdrop when the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown struck last March. Nearly 20,000 people died. The disasters displaced 340,000 people, hobbled thousands of businesses and is still causing serious power shortages.
After a particularly cold winter, Japan’s famous cherry blossoms have finally begun to bloom in the south of the country. Tokyo’s stock market was up again a bit this week. The books of some factories are a little healthier. Order of all kinds is slowly being restored in a country that craves it.