NYTs update on conditions at Fukushima plant

Reading Martin Fackler's story in the New York Times about his visit Saturday to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, eight months after the March 11 catastrophe. Fun facts:  There's a field full of 4 story-high tanks holding some 90,000 tons of contaminated water that had been dumped onto the reactors in an attempt to cool them. And so far Tepco has stored 480,000 sets of used protective clothing, discarded after each use by workers.

Fackler writes: "...[M]any nuclear experts say serious challenges remain. The biggest is the fact that the company does not know the exact condition of the fuel within the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors, whose cores appear to have melted through the inner containment vessels. 'Cold shutdown is an indication that the accident phase is over,' said Akira Tokuhiro, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Idaho in Idaho Falls, 'but the next phase of cleaning up will take more than 20 years.'

"During the plant tour, the bus kept moving at the most contaminated areas near the base of the reactors to limit the time there and, thus, the radiation exposure. As it did, a radiation detector on the bus jumped to 300 microsieverts per hour — high enough to reach the annual recommended maximum dosage in just over three hours."

One worker tells Fackler that the mood at the plant is "totally different now." Radiation levels aren't so high outside the buildings, but still high within the reactor buildings but not so high outside, though there are hotspots. In the only building within the plant where protective clothing is not needed, "visiting journalists passed through a series of rooms where teams of workers systematically cut off the layers of protective clothing with scissors. The discarding is done in stages to limit contamination; booties come off in one room, the full body suit in another," Fackler writes.

Click to read the full article, Devastation at Japan Site, Seen Up Close

The Village

Japan's original nuclear trouble:
Culture of collusion

Long before the tsunami, protection of interests undermined plant safety

BY NORIMITSU ONISHI AND KEN BELSON
The International Herald Tribune
April 27, 2011

Given the fierce insularity of the Japanese nuclear industry, it was perhaps fitting that an outsider exposed the most serious safety cover-up in the history of Japanese nuclear power. It took place at Fukushima Daiichi, the plant that Japan has been struggling to get under control since the tsunami last month.

In 2000, Kei Sugaoka, a Japanese-American nuclear inspector who had done work for General Electric at Daiichi, told the main Japanese nuclear regulator about a cracked steam dryer that he believed was being covered up. If exposed, the revelations could have forced the operator, Tokyo Electric Power, to do what utilities least want to do: undertake costly repairs.

What happened next was an example, critics have since said, of the collusive ties that bind the nation's nuclear power companies, regulators and politicians.

Despite a new law shielding whistle-blowers, the regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, divulged Mr. Sugaoka's identity to Tokyo Electric, effectively blackballing him from the industry. Instead of immediately deploying its own investigators to Daiichi, the agency instructed the company to inspect its own reactors. Regulators allowed the company to keep operating its reactors for the next two years even though, as an investigation ultimately revealed, its executives had actually covered up other, far more serious problems, including cracks in the shrouds that cover reactor cores.

Investigators may take months or years to decide to what extent safety problems or weak regulation contributed to the disaster at Daiichi, the worst of its kind since Chernobyl. But as troubles at the plant and fears over radiation continue to rattle the nation, the Japanese are increasingly raising the possibility that a culture of complicity made the plant especially vulnerable to the natural disaster that struck the country on March 11.

Already, many Japanese and Western experts argue that inconsistent, nonexistent or unenforced regulations played a role in the accident - especially the low sea walls that failed to protect the plant against the tsunami and the decision to place backup diesel generators for powering the reactors' cooling system at ground level, which made them highly vulnerable to flooding.

A 10-year extension for the oldest of Daiichi's reactors suggests that the regulatory system was allowed to remain lax by politicians, bureaucrats and industry executives single-mindedly focused on expanding nuclear power. Regulators approved the extension beyond the reactor's 40-year statutory limit just weeks before the tsunami despite warnings about its safety and subsequent admissions by Tokyo Electric that it had failed to carry out proper inspections of critical equipment.

The mild punishment meted out for past safety infractions has reinforced the belief that nuclear power's main players are more interested in protecting their interests than improving safety. ...

...In Japan, the opaque network of connections between the nuclear industry and government officials is now popularly referred to as ''the nuclear power village'' - an expression connoting the collusive interests that underlie the nuclear establishment's push to expand the industry, despite the discovery of active fault lines under plants, new projections about the size of tsunamis and a long history of cover-ups of safety problems.

As in any Japanese village, the likeminded - nuclear industry officials, bureaucrats, politicians and scientists - have prospered by rewarding one another with construction projects, lucrative positions and political, financial and regulatory support. The few who are openly skeptical of nuclear power's safety become village outcasts, losing out on promotions and backing.

Until recently, it had been considered political suicide to even discuss the need to reform an industry that appeared less concerned with safety than maximizing profits, said Kusuo Oshima, one of the few lawmakers in the governing Democratic Party who have long been critical of the nuclear industry.

''Everyone considered that a taboo, so nobody wanted to touch it,'' said Mr. Oshima, adding that he could speak freely because he received financial backing from Rissho Kosei-Kai, one of Japan's largest lay Buddhist movements, not from a nuclear-affiliated group.

''It's all about money,'' he added.

Click here to read the rest of this article on nytimes.com (you have to be a subscriber to read the archives) or here to read it on the Herald-Tribune site.

Pushing the Mob Out

Nov. 18, 2010 article in The New York Times
By Hiroko Tabuchi

TOKYO —When the toasts are raised here next year at the opening of the world’s tallest communications tower, yakuza gangsters will not be celebrating.

The yakuza, as members of Japan’s criminal underworld are known, are banned from the construction of the 2,080-foot tower, developers say.

“The mob cannot come here,” said Toru Hironaka, a lawyer who leads a legal team retained by the tower’s developers to bar crime syndicates from the construction project.

The ban is part of a nationwide effort by the Japanese government and the business community to sever the deep-rooted ties between organized crime and corporate Japan, especially in the construction industry.

As part of the national crackdown, on Thursday a top crime boss of Japan’s largest crime syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi, was arrested on charges of extorting 40 million yen ($480,000) from a construction company in the western city of Kyoto, police officials said.

The man arrested, Kiyoshi Takayama, 63, had been seen as the syndicate’s de facto leader after its official boss was imprisoned in 2005 for possessing firearms, which are illegal in Japan.

“Organized crime is threatening Japan’s entire economy,” Kohei Kishi, director of the organized crime division of Japan’s National Police Agency, said in recent interview. “And they have deep roots in construction.”

The National Police Agency and other government departments are pressuring businesses of various sorts to stamp out mafia links, which police officials describe as more entrenched in corporate Japan than in the United States.

The country’s finance ministry, for example, has directed banks to step up safeguards to prevent money laundering, cut off loans to mob-related companies and deny bank accounts to individuals with known gangster ties.

The big target, though, is Japan’s 30 trillion yen ($362 billion) construction industry, where the yakuza have long run rampant. In the 1990s, at the peak of yakuza involvement with construction, police estimate that gangs pocketed at least 2 to 3 percent of all construction spending in Japan.

Many experts say Japan’s crackdown efforts are long overdue. The crime syndicates now operate with such sophistication that Jake Adelstein, who has written extensively about Japanese organized crime, calls the yakuza “Goldman Sachs with guns.”

Across Japan, almost 83,000 gangsters operate in 22 crime syndicates, according to police data, that contribute to a mob-controlled economy worth an estimated 20 trillion yen ($242 billion) a year.

In the construction industry, the yakuza’s influence dates back to at least Japan’s extensive rebuilding after the devastation of World War II, when the mob helped supply cheap labor to contractors, aiding in the breakup of worker strikes and the enforcement of labor compliance.

A modern-day yakuza boss pressures developers to pay “protection money” to cover construction projects — as in the case in Kyoto — or use front companies to win lucrative construction or procurement contracts, police say.

In a 2007 police survey of 3,000 construction companies in Japan, 34 percent of respondents said they had been approached by the yakuza with requests for payments or business in the last year.

Sometimes it is the developers that reach out to the yakuza — to muscle reluctant owners into selling their land, for example. In 2008, the president of a big real estate company, Suruga, resigned after police arrested members of a front company that Suruga had hired to evict occupants from a Tokyo building. Banks quickly recalled their loans from Suruga, and the company went bankrupt.

“The construction industry was once tolerant of yakuza involvement,” said Hiroshi Inuzuka, a lawyer and adviser to the nationwide Federation of Construction Contractors, a trade group. “A good project manager was expected to smooth over ‘local relations,’ which involved working with the yakuza so there would be no trouble,” he said.

The industry’s anti-yakuza effort, which began in 2008, has shifted away from the past focus on going after the crime gangs themselves. Now the emphasis is on monitoring companies and imposing tougher penalties on ones that do business with the mob.

In April, the federation advised its members to adapt a clause in all contracts that would void obligations if a contractor was found to have links with the yakuza.

The new Tokyo tower — which is called the Tokyo Sky Tree — has become a prominent symbol of the crackdown. Companies involved include the railroad operator Tobu Railway and the Obayashi Corporation, one of Japan’s biggest contractors.

In late 2008, the companies working on the Sky Tree teamed up with local businesses to form an anti-yakuza committee. It is one of more than 100 similar committees that have been formed here in the past few years.

Mr. Hironaka, the tower’s anti-mob lawyer, says movement to and from the construction site is closely monitored by guards and with closed-circuit video. Contracts are scrutinized to make sure that no construction equipment or materials — not even boxed lunches or gloves for workers — come from companies with mob affiliations.

“The site is water-tight,” Mr. Hironaka said. “It will take a lot to get past all that.”

Local governments, whose public works projects account for the bulk of construction spending in Japan, have also joined the campaign to extract the yakuza from the building business. Next month, Tokyo is set to ban any company or individual affiliated with the yakuza from city contracts — from office supplies to public works — along with threats of penalties and public disclosure for companies found to have mafia ties.

Morio Umeda, who runs a public anti-yakuza advice center in Tokyo and runs seminars for companies on dealing with the yakuza, says inquiries are rising as more companies try to sever ties with the mob. In 2009, similar advice centers across the country received more than 4,200 consultations about organized crime from companies in construction or real estate, about 12 percent of total consultations.

“I tell them that they should not be afraid, that they should go to the police even if they are warned not to,” said Mr. Umeda, a former anti-yakuza officer with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. “But especially at busy construction sites, it can sometimes be difficult to be aware of who’s coming and going.”

And the mob is threatening to fight back. Last month, police say, a gunshot was fired into the wall of a construction site linked to Takenaka Corporation, one of Japan’s biggest general contractors, the fourth shooting at construction sites in Tokyo this year. Although no one has been hurt, the shootings have resonated in a country where guns are almost unobtainable for everyone except gangsters.

Those close to the yakuza call the attacks a sign of desperation.

“It’s the ice age” for organized crime, said Yukio Yamanouchi, a former legal adviser to the Yamaguchi-gumi, who still defends members of organized crime.

“They looked for new earnings in the mainstream economy, but that’s triggered a backlash,” Mr. Yamanouchi said. “Now, some yakuza are worrying where their next meal will come from.”

'Japan's Overblown Anxiety'

Fascinating article by Ian Bremmer in the The New York Times:

Pessimism abounds, but there are solid reasons why Japan's future may not be as bleak as it seems.

Nov. 16, 2010

In Japan, anxiety over a lost decade has given way to fear that economic growth is never coming back. Japanese pundits warn that the country has “lost its animal spirits.”

A business leader I spoke with during a recent visit talked of relocating his company’s operations to Singapore. Another asked if I thought Japan “would still be around” in 20 years. I’m not sure what he meant, but I know it isn’t good.

Two decades ago, Japan’s gross government debt stood at 63 percent of the country’s G.D.P. Today, it’s at nearly 200 percent. Consumer prices have fallen in 9 of the past 20 years, depressing production. A third of Japanese between the ages of 20 and 30 don’t have jobs. [Blogger's note: This explains the regular weekday crowds of young adults strolling and shopping in Dogenzaka and Udagawacho and Harajuku, as if they had all day to do so!] Falling birthrates suggest there may soon be just two workers to support each retiree, yet there is little prospect of immigration reform to give the work force new dynamism.

Add projections for several more years of flat growth, frustration with the country’s deeply dysfunctional political system, and worries that Japan has no place in the emerging world order and you begin to see the depth of the country’s malaise. Japan’s alliance with the United States has been stuck in the mud for some time, and the country is ever more reliant for growth on an increasingly unfriendly China.

Japan’s business community seems the most disillusioned segment of society. Senior executives I spoke with acknowledge that Prime Minister Naoto Kan is more competent than his hopeless predecessor, Yukio Hatoyama, but they have little else positive to say about his government. In part, that’s because the Democratic Party of Japan arrived in power just 15 months ago after a half century of nearly uninterrupted Liberal Democratic Party rule. Only since August 2009 have the DPJ and the country’s business community begun to build working relationships.

But there is also a philosophical divide between the two sides. The DPJ’s traditional ties with trade unions, and the anti-corporate rhetoric of many of its leaders, make mutual suspicion difficult to overcome. Recent party efforts to build bridges with the Keidanren, Japan’s lead industrial organization, have produced little. In addition, many of Japan’s business leaders have been in place for a long time, and some are resistant to change.

Yet, there are three reasons to believe that all this pessimism is overdone.

First, the DPJ and the business elite now appear to see that they are stuck with one another. The DPJ will remain in power for awhile, and the industrial elite knows it can’t simply wait for the moribund LDP to stage a comeback.

In fact, finance and economic officials say work is moving forward on a proposal for a substantial reduction in the corporate tax rate, one they said enjoyed support at the highest levels of government. It’s a modest accomplishment, and the devil may yet be in the details, but it’s clearly a positive signal that Japan’s political and business elites can work together more effectively.

In addition, Japan was a one-party system for several decades, and there was little incentive for the bureaucracy to share vital information on the operation of government with leaders of the seemingly eternal opposition. Yet, DPJ officials and the army of bureaucrats tasked with day-to-day operation of government finally appear to be communicating with one another more effectively.

Second, anxiety over China’s recently more aggressive foreign policy has helped put troubled U.S.-Japanese relations back on track. Much work remains to be done to restore damaged trust. These days, U.S. and Chinese officials negotiate questions of trade, currency policy and security while American and Japanese officials bicker over the length of runways at U.S. military bases.

But real progress has been made on an extraordinarily important project: The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral free trade pact that might one day integrate the Pacific Rim’s largest economies. Singapore, Chile, New Zealand and Brunei are already members. The United States, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Peru are negotiating to join. Tokyo has finally begun to show interest.

Under the LDP, Japan would not consider membership, since the country’s farmers, a key segment of the LDP’s base, stand to lose the protections of tariffs on imported staples. Prime Minister Kan has expressed interest in joining the pact, and his support will come at a much lower political cost. That’s good news for those in Washington and Tokyo who see advantage in hedging their bets on China via closer ties with one another.

The third reason for a more optimistic view of Japan’s future is that the country’s elected leaders do not face the outraged opposition of citizens and interest groups eager to make trouble in the streets. Following two decades of economic stagnation, there are no Tea Partiers, fuming French transport workers or rock-throwing South Korean students.

In China, despite three decades of go-go growth, officials warn that continued growth of 7 to 8 percent is necessary to create enough new jobs to safeguard “social stability.” Japan, by contrast, will continue to enjoy relative domestic tranquility despite yet another year of growth at less than 2 percent.

In that sense, at least, Japan’s leaders are the envy of the world.

Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and author of “The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?”

Hello Mr. President.

I see that you and I share a love for the Daibutsu...

(Reuters Pictures) Obama stands between Takao Sato (L), chief monk of the Kotoku-in Temple, and Michiko Sato, the director of the temple, during a visit to the Great Buddha statue in Kamakura on Nov. 14, 2010.

Obama, here as part of a 10-day trip through Asia, spent his last day in Yokohama chatting with the Russian President Medvedev about an Asia-Pacific free trade zone, then taking a helicopter to Kamakura to visit a "colossal copper Buddha that he had seen as a 6-year-old," the IHT reported. "The giant statue, which experts believe dates to 1252, has 656 coils of hair and weighs 121 tons. While there, Obama ate a green tea ice cream bar -- the same kind he had here as a child -- and left with a bag of gifts including bracelets for his daughters Malia and Sasha. 'It is wonderful to return to this great treasure of Japanese culture,' Obama wrote in the guest book. 'Its beauty has stayed with me for many years.'"

(Reuters Pictures)

interesting article

from the weekend edition of the IHT (playing a little catchup this morning)

DESPERATE TO AVOID JAPAN-STYLE SLUMP

U.S. officials look anew at Tokyo to glean insight on reviving the economy

By Martin Fackler and Steve Lohr

TOKYO — In the annals of economic policy blunders, the one in which Hiroshi Kato played a hand in early 1997 ranks among the biggest in recent Japanese history.

Mr. Kato led a government advisory committee that concluded that the economy, which was then finally starting to rebound from the collapse of its 1980s land and stock bubbles, was healthy enough to raise the national consumption tax to 5 percent from 3 percent.

Aimed at reducing deficits, the tax increase instead quickly snuffed out the fragile recovery, pushing Japan to the brink of a financial meltdown and thrusting the nation deeper into the economic morass from which it has yet to emerge even today.

“Our sins are large,” Mr. Kato, now president of Kaetsu University in Tokyo, said ruefully. “I hope the rest of the world can learn from this mistake.”

And indeed, the lessons of Japan’s long stagnation are well known to American policy makers like the treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, who have studied Japan’s policy missteps.

In 1999, Mr. Bernanke, then an academic, tartly criticized Japanese officials for mishandling their 1990s financial crisis, saying Japan’s plight was “self induced.” Partly because of that expertise, American policy makers have long been confident, even during the darkest days of the current financial crisis, that the United States could avoid the fate of Japan and its two lost decades.

But now, with growing signs that the United States might be a lot closer to a Japan-style slump than previously thought, that confidence is waning.

In the United States, a robust recovery remains stubbornly elusive, and Mr. Bernanke is said to be ready to take new, unconventional steps to increase the money supply in order to maintain the uncertain growth of the past year. He is also said by close associates to favor further fiscal measures to stimulate the economy. But in the current political climate, with Republicans poised to make strong gains in the midterm elections while preaching fiscal austerity, the prospect of more federal stimulus spending seems remote, and it is unclear if monetary policy alone will be enough to restore healthy growth.

Partly as a result, some economists now predict that it could take years or even a decade for the American economy to regain the levels of employment and vigor achieved before the 2008 crisis. The growing political pressure for cuts in federal spending — along with plunging consumer confidence and companies that seem more intent on cutting costs and hoarding cash than investing in new growth — have led economists to talk of the United States’ entering a grim new era of austerity.

That is very close to what befell Japan two decades ago, when the seemingly invincible Asian economic juggernaut fell into a deep rut of chronically anemic demand and corrosive price declines, known as deflation, from which it has never fully recovered. The parallels are so striking, and unsettling, that economists are now taking a renewed look at Japan for insights on how the United States can avoid the deflation trap.

“There has been a political and intellectual arrogance in the United States that it won’t happen to us,” said Adam S. Posen, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “We shouldn’t be so smug. You can get there without being Japan.”

Indeed, the financial crisis that crippled Japan’s once high-flying economy appears an eerie precursor of the one that struck much of the global economy in 2008. In Japan, a huge expansion in credit created twin price bubbles in the land and stock markets that, when they burst in the late 1980s and early 1990s, left banks and other companies drowning in failed real estate investments.

But perhaps the most alarming part is what came next: a collapse in demand that pushed prices and ultimately wages into a self-reinforcing deflationary spiral, which made already stingy individuals and businesses even less willing to use money, because falling prices meant that cash itself gained in value.

Japan has remained trapped in this spiral despite the equivalent of trillions of dollars in stimulus spending, more than a decade of near-zero interest rates and even unconventional steps by the central bank similar to those now contemplated by Mr. Bernanke, like purchasing corporate and government bonds to increase the money supply.

Despite the strong parallels, there are still reasons to think the United States can escape what has been called Japanification.

The United States and Japan are very different, culturally and politically, and Japan faces a host of unique problems that have sapped its vitality, like a rapidly aging populace that has created generational tensions, and the closing of its doors to immigration and the youthful labor and fresh ideas that can bring. Economists say the dynamic United States economy has shaken off seemingly intractable slumps before, as in the frightening recession of 1980-82, when conditions and the prospects for recovery seemed, for a while, every bit as bleak as they do now.

However, some warn that the United States could still get it wrong, especially if the midterm elections produced a sharply divided political landscape.

“The danger is if the U.S. plunges into policy paralysis just like Japan in the 1990s,” said Shumpei Takemori, an economist at Keio University in Tokyo. “Ideological divides and political divides can make bold policy action impossible.”

In fact, some economists warn that the United States may be deeper into Japan-style stagnation than is widely realized. Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, estimates that the total output of the American economy this year will be no higher by his estimate than it was in 2006.

“We’ve already lost half a decade,” said Mr. Johnson, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In addition, economists say, Japan had one advantage the United States does not. With its high savings rate, the government could borrow from its own domestic sources at minuscule rates to finance trillions of dollars in stimulus projects. By contrast, the United States has to sell its government bonds to foreign investors, who are likely to demand higher interest rates as its national debt grows.

Leading Japanese economists also said their nation’s many failures — like the 1997 tax increase — yielded one crucial lesson on combating the aftereffects of a financial panic: the need to avoid policy flip-flops.

“The lesson is that there is a proper sequence for pulling a nation out of a financial crisis,” said Heizo Takenaka, an economist who was the architect of the successful cleanup of Japan’s banking system in the early 2000s. “First, you restore growth before worrying about deficits.”

However, Mr. Takenaka acknowledged that while the banking problems have been largely fixed, Japan has yet to come up with a strategy for restoring growth, which he says is the only way to end deflation.

This month, Japan’s central bank pushed its benchmark rate back down to zero. However, central bankers here argue that it is not enough just to loosen monetary policy when a lack of borrowers and new investment means there is no demand for money to start with. And this points to another feature of Japan’s experience that may already be visible in the United States: the paradox of a stagnant economy that is awash in cash.

This occurs when companies and individuals stop spending and banks stop lending for fear that anemic growth and rising bankruptcies will result in defaults. This is particularly apparent in regional economies outside Tokyo, which remains relatively vibrant.

In a healthy economy, banks typically lend out more money than they have on deposit. But in Osaka, Japan’s third largest city and commercial hub, nearly two decades of hoarding of cash created the unusual situation in 2002 of deposits at all the city’s banks surpassing their outstanding volume of loans. Since 1997, the total amount of loans by the city’s banks has fallen by a third, to $530 billion, while deposits have risen by 20 percent, to $767 billion.

“Deflation has made everyone very conservative and eager to hold cash,” said Hiroshi Tanaka, a senior director at Osaka Shinkin Bank. “We have too much cash and nowhere to invest it all.”

This has created distortions in Japan’s economy. One is a sharp drop in the number of times cash changes hands in normal business and spending transactions. This so-called velocity of money has dropped to about a third the level of the United States, according to figures from the Mizuho Research Institute in Tokyo.

Another distortion is Japan’s so-called dresser savings — the piles of cash that individuals keep at home for fear that their banks may also go bankrupt. These stashes are estimated to total about $370 billion, according to Akira Otani, a researcher at the Bank of Japan.

Economists see early signs that the United States is heading down the same path. Recent data shows a surge in savings rates to 6.4 percent in June from less than 1 percent in 2005, reflecting consumers’ reluctance to spend, and continued disinflation.

The picture is not entirely bleak for the United States, where the constant drive to innovate can produce bursts of growth that few economists or anyone else can see coming. While Japan was seen once as an unstoppable powerhouse, the picture was altered by wave after wave of technological innovation in the United States — the personal computer industry, then the Internet and Web businesses, smart phones, and mobile software. That dynamism, economists note, is often wrenching. But it also means that investment dollars and people shift more rapidly to new opportunities. In Japan, though, such painful payroll cuts and corporate deaths were postponed for years.

The American approach to economic adjustment is “shock treatment,” said Edward J. Lincoln, director of the Center for Japan-U.S. Business and Economic Studies at New York University, while “Japan favors stability and the corporate socialization of the pain.”

“Deep down inside, as an American,” Mr. Lincoln said, “I tend to think that the United States’ approach makes for a healthier economy in the long run.”

Martin Fackler reported from Tokyo, and Steve Lohr from New York.

Japan's young men seek a new path

Whenever I see groups of young Japanese guys, locals, walking around, on the train, on the street, shopping or hanging out, I wonder what their lives are like, what they're goals are, where they think they are going... They're not all that much older than my own sons.

Thanks Kathryn and Brendan for telling me about this article (to read the story on the Wash Post website click here)

By Chico Harlan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 24, 2010; 10:35 PM

TOKYO - Something is happening to Japan's young men. Compared with the generation that came before, they are less optimistic, less ambitious and less willing to take risks. They are less likely to own a car, want a car, or drive fast if they get a car. They are less likely to pursue sex on the first date - or the third. They are, in general, less likely to spend money. They are more likely to spend money on cosmetics.

Japan's young men mystify their girlfriends and their bosses. They confound the advertisers who aim products at them. They've been scrutinized and categorized by social commentators, marketing consultants and the government. And they unnerve just about everybody who makes long-term projections about Japan's flagging birthrate and fading economy. Japan will grow or falter, economists and sociologists say, upon the shoulders of these mild, frugal, sweet-mannered men.

To hear the analysts who study them tell it, Japanese men ages 20 to 34 are staging the most curious of rebellions, rejecting the 70-hour workweeks and purchase-for-status ethos that typified the 1980s economic boom. As the latest class of college graduates struggles to find jobs, a growing number of experts are detecting a problem even broader than unemployment: They see a generation of men who don't know what they want.

Japan earned its fortune a generation ago through the power of office warriors, the so-called salarymen who devoted their careers to one company. They wore dark suits; they joined for rowdy after-hours booze fests with co-workers; they often saw little of their families. These are the fathers of Japan's young men.

But among business leaders and officials, there is a growing understanding that the earlier work-for-fulfillment pattern has broken down. The economy's roar turned into a yawn. Concern about Japan's future replaced giddy national pride. As a result, this generation has lost "the willingness to sacrifice for the company," said Jeff Kingston, author of the recently published book "Contemporary Japan."

Kingston added: "And now as Japan begins to unravel in a sense, young people realize that the previous paradigm doesn't work. But they aren't sure what comes next. They've seen what amounts to a betrayal in Japan."

Striving for balance

And so, instead of fantasizing about riches, Japan's young men now fantasize about balanced lives and time for their families and quaint hobbies. As they do, Japanese women are catching up. This month, the government said single women younger than 30 were, for the first time, earning more on average than their male counterparts.

Yuizo Matsumoto, 24, learned about the differences between old and young values when he worked for a small food development company. Matsumoto studied the way trace ingredients and artificial flavorings change a product's taste. He developed salad dressings and fruit juices. He liked his job, with one major complaint: He worked 14 hours a day, often on Saturdays as well. He worked so hard, he didn't have time to job-hunt for alternatives. So in July, with the support of his parents, he told his boss he was quitting.

"My boss said to me, 'If you quit this wonderful company you'll never succeed in life,' " Matsumoto said. "I think the concept itself of quitting is alien to them. I think it's very normal for somebody from the older generation to stick with something whether he's happy or not."

Many in Japan's older generation deride the young for listlessness, even a lack of what is thought of as traditionally male behavior. Playing to that characterization, some media accounts of the transformation note the extremes of behavior: how one in four engaged men now opts for a pre-wedding spa treatment; how young men host dessert-tasting clubs; how, given a hypothetical $1,000 to spend and a list of possible purchases, a lot of young men would choose a high-end rice cooker.

Similar to metrosexuals

But Japan's modern man, separated from the statistics, cuts an endearing profile. Pop culture writer Maki Fukasawa first wrote about the changing male gender identity in 2006, coining a shorthand term for the new man ("a herbivore" - gentle and cautious). Now Fukasawa, who has surveyed young Japanese men about their purchasing preferences, defends the herbivores' nobility. "The people of the older generation would buy things, consume things, even fall in love for status," Fukasawa said. "However, these young people have no desire for status. . . . Maybe we're searching for new values. This is a more sustainable model."

This isn't about sexual orientation. According to a 2009 survey from market research firm M1 F1 Soken, almost half of Japanese men ages 20 to 34 identify themselves as herbivores. No matter their sexual preferences, herbivores tend to be less overtly sexual. Many say they do not prioritize physical relationships. They're more likely to buy gifts for their mothers than for their significant others.

Japan's herbivores bear some resemblance to the metrosexuals familiar in America. Like metrosexuals, they pay a lot of attention to how they look and how they dress - with a preference for flannel-patterned shirts, bought first-hand but made to look second-hand, and tight-fitting pants. But herbivores reflect a wider societal movement.

And, as it turns out, even those who identify themselves as more traditional men, rather than herbivores, are a lot different from their fathers.

Like Shinsuke Kanemura, 25, a jockish graduate from the elite Kyoto University, who met his friend for a 4 p.m. ice cream before beginning his night shift. And Akira Tanaka, 26, a "carnivore" who ridicules the herbivorous desire to "blend into the atmosphere."

"I was brought up in a family where, if you're a man, you ought to act like a man," Tanaka said. He works as a hairstylist.

Those who have rejected the old model, though, haven't yet discovered a new model - a way to earn a comfortable living without losing a quality life. Much as they loathe the office place's stifling social obligations, Japan's young men - according to the latest government statistics - prefer lifelong employment to any alternative, mostly because they value a safe option over a risky one. Japan's dim economic climate, experts say, has spawned a generation of unsentimental job-seekers who see only a spectrum of flawed options.

Little income

This demographic has remained elusive for automakers, brewers and other manufacturers. According to Tokyo's Metropolitan Police, between 1998 and 2007, the number of driver's licenses in Japan increased by 1 million. But the number dropped by 30,000 for people age 20 and by 40,000 for people age 25. People in their 20s, according to government statistics, consume less than half the alcohol of twenty-somethings in 1980.

Yoshio Kanda, 28, a wedding photographer from Osaka, says he feels "awkward" when talking to people from the bubble generation. He describes a sense of opposite values. He notices this most, he says, "when we go out drinking."

"People of an older generation, whatever they say or do, it's to the max," Kanda said. "Our generation, we don't spend money to the max and we don't drink to the max. We feel the need to save. At the same time, it's not cool to be throwing up on the street after you've been drinking."

More than the earlier generation, Japan's young men, according to marketing consultants, value close friendships and memorable experiences. One recent beer commercial depicts a hiking trip. Another shows a bunch of pals, hanging out at somebody's home.

But there's another factor, too: Japan's young men have little money to spend. Only 3.5 percent of men ages 25 to 34 make more than the average workers' household income of about 6 million yen (or $73,600) per year, according to National Tax Agency.

Matsumoto, the former food developer, has only his unemployment stipend, which expires in three months. He hopes to find a new job before then. So far, he's interviewed for one position and applied for five more.

He admits there's a chance his next job could also require 14-hour workdays. He wouldn't want to ask direct questions about time off during an interview.

Matsumoto shrugged.

"I never thought my job was the priority - that it was everything in my life," he said. "I want my private life to feel enriched as well. . . . I feel that the system itself is built for the older generation, but the young people just go into it because they have no other choice."

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

I've always wanted a Prius

I find the whole Toyota recall mess fascinating.

The article I read today (by Martin Fackler, on the front page of today's International Herald Tribune) notes that Toyoto "looms so large that Japan can seem like a one-company town" and that the company has "long enjoyed near hallowed status here as the greatest practitioner of monozukuri, a centuries-old ideal of perfection in craftsmanship, seen in pottery and ancient sword-making."

And now?

"Once a leading symbol of Japan’s rise to global economic might, Toyota has become one of the most visible signs of its decline."

The piece quotes Masatomo Tanaka, a professor at the Institute of Technologists, a university in Saitama that specializes in training engineers: "At this rate, Japan will sink into the sea. If Toyota is not healthy, then Japan is not healthy."

Fackler writes: "Many economists and business executives say they hope that Toyota’s trauma will be the unsettling blow that Japan needs to understand that its reliance on manufacturing and industrial exports, which served the country so well after World War II, is no longer wise."

One expert says that "Japan must finally evolve into a postindustrial, service-based economy — a painful transition that the United States and Great Britain underwent in the 1980s" while others say it "should focus exclusively on high-end, high-profit products, like robots and fuel cells."

To read the whole article click here. (It ran first in the New York Times.)

smart slime

From IHT, Jan. 28, 2010...

A blob manages to recreate a very complex rail system

Researchers in Japan have shown that a slime mold can design a network that is as efficient as one developed by humans over many years: the Tokyo rail system. Furthermore, the slime mold can build its network in a day.

A slime mold is what scientists refer to as a single-celled amoeboid organism. When foraging for food, it spreads out as an amorphous mass and then builds tubular connections between the food sources.

Scientists in Japan set up an experiment where they laid out 36 bits of food in a pattern corresponding to cities in the Tokyo area and put a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, at the spot corresponding to Tokyo.

As they reported in Science, after 26 hours the slime mold had created a series of tubular connections that matched, to a great extent, the rail links among these cities.

2 experts on how to rebuild Haiti

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January 17, 2010

Op-Ed Contributors

Learn From Postwar Tokyo

By MATIAS ECHANOVE and RAHUL SRIVASTAVA

The standard approach to residential redevelopment projects is to take ground zero as a starting point — even if it means creating it. This often translates into shifting people from substandard but incrementally developing environments into apartment blocks that cut them off from their social networks and livelihoods. These projects often become housing-centric and blind to the relationship between neighborhoods and economic development. They end up benefiting the construction industry much more than the population they are supposed to serve.

Haiti’s shattered urban landscapes were about communities, street life, resourcefulness, aspirations and dynamic local exchanges. As we have seen in the Dharavi area of Mumbai (the setting of “Slumdog Millionaire”), poverty often generates creative responses and initiatives. Local actors tend to produce piecemeal development that directly supports neighborhood-level activity.

As we consider how to rebuild Port-au-Prince, we can find an alternative to the usual top-down redevelopment model in postwar Tokyo. The Japanese government didn’t have the money to rebuild housing and so focused instead on roads, sewage and rail transportation. It also encouraged lenders to give families money to build homes. A decentralized and highly participatory urban redevelopment process produced areas of low-rise, high-density structures built with local skills and material. This not only strengthened communities but also stimulated the local economies. Tokyo today has a landscape that is futuristic and yet retains many traditional Asian urban features including street markets, small-scale businesses and family enterprises. The incremental redevelopment of Tokyo was thus intricately connected to the rise of its middle class.

If aid in Haiti aims specifically at regenerating local economies, if it promotes existing skills and collective initiatives, if it consults with grassroots groups and residents directly, it may well bring about a real transformation.

Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava are founders of URBZ — User-Generated Cities.