Recently we took our daughter to a resort hotel in Kusatsu, a hot springs town in the mountains with more than 1000 years of history. When we checked in, the hotel employee handed us a standard old-fashioned metal key for our room, which made me realize another difference between my home country and Japan. Most hotels in the States employ a computer-control card-key system, which allows the hotel to assign a unique code for each card then change it the next day. While these convenient hi-tech devices give the hotel a more modern appeal with guests, the main driving force behind their adoption has been litigation, with hotels often liable for theft or other crimes that occurred inside their rooms. With the ability to prove exactly when an individual (including hotel staff) entered a given room, hotels in the U.S. can better control their liability for such things. Since Japan is for all intents and purposes a country in which no one sues anyone else — remember, I’ve never met a single lawyer in my 16 years living in Japan, they’re so rare — it’s not a problem for hotels to keep using the old metal key systems.
I’ll teach you a word of Japanese that can be quite useful. The word is -kei, part of the word kankei, meaning “relationship.” Basically, you take a word and put -kei on the end and you’ve essentially widened its scope, for example cha-kei would mean any kind of tea-like beverage, from Western iced tea to green tea and so on. The suffix is often used to create slang words related to fashion and popular culture, and new words are created almost daily to describe the ever-changing world we live in. One buzzword you hear a lot these days is Akiba-kei (“related to Akihabara”), describing anything that can be found in this popular area of Tokyo, from anime to manga to electronics and maid cafes. More specific otaku-related slang words might include moé-kei, i.e. related to moé (mo-EH) or “the warm, happy feeling you get when you look at your favorite anime character,” or otome-kei (oh-toh-meh-kei), used to refer to anything related to yaoi or BL. The -kei suffix is used in music as well, for example the visual-kei rock bands pioneered by X Japan and now represented by the likes of Gackt or Malice Mizer, or the currently popular genre of club music known as Shibuya-kei. One slang word for the hip-hop culture that Japanese young people often like to imitate is B-kei, for black, while the type of man most Japanese females would like to date would probably be Johnny’s-kei, men who are attractive in the way that Japanese male idols like SMAP or KAT-TUN are. Japanese magazine publisher Recruit publishes Gaten, a job magazine for workers in physically-demanding fields like road construction or moving, and a popular slang term for strong men who can work in these jobs is Gaten-kei, similar in meaning to the word “blue collar.”
One aspect about living in Japan I like very much is the custom of a family’s finances being handled by the woman of the household, a good thing since Japanese females generally tend to be very organized and level-headed, a lot more than me anyway. In past decades, Japanese households have been famous for their high savings rate, with the average family keeping around US$120,000 in standard cash savings accounts. Now that Japan finally seems to be permanently past the terrible period of recession that followed the bursting of the Tokyo land bubble in 1991, known officially as the Great Heisei Recession and unofficially as the “Lost Ten Years,” some are seeing signs that this era of high savings may be coming to an end. In 1973 the average Japanese household managed to put away a whopping 23% of their annual salary, but this number has fallen to around 2.7% today. A lot of changes are afoot in Japan these days, with many households remodeling their homes to make them “barrier free” so that elderly parents can live at home safely, and of course those aging Japanese workers are retiring, reducing the income available to save. Lifestyles are changing too, with people getting married later and later, living at home into their thirties and forties. Some Japanese households are no doubt fed up with the miniscule interest paid on savings here in Japan — the rate paid by a major bank in our area is just 0.2%, if you can believe that — and are looking for other vehicles than straight savings. Unlike the old days when Japan had many barriers to entry for foreign firms, many investment companies are active in Japan, offering a range of more interesting alternatives for families wanting to save for the future.
