New election and the hullabuloo over the Japanese post office, and the “joy of satori”

It’s once again that time most feared by foreigners living in Japan: election season, when white-gloved Japanese politicians drive around in trucks with loudspeakers mounted on top, shouting their name and saying things like “I will work hard for you!” and “Thank you for your support on election day!” When Prime Minister Koizumi lost an important vote on his administration’s goal of privatizing Japan’s sprawling postal system on Monday, he disbanded the Diet and called for new elections, which will be held on September 11. Until then, we’ll have to put up with lots of noisy politicians shouting at us through our windows, speaking through bullhorns in front of train stations in Tokyo, and so on.

The issue at hand is the privatization of Japan’s postal apparatus, which would basically create four mostly-private corporations to manage the various postal activities more efficiently than they are at present. Japan’s post office does much more than just deliver the mail in rain or sleet or snow: it’s also the world’s largest savings bank, holding a vast amount of money in deposits by Japanese households, and it also operates a life insurance business, too. These two businesses hold a mind-boggling $3 trillion in cash reserves, which is far too much money for politicians to resist touching, so they use it for various “economic revitalization” projects, such as a government-subsidized hot springs hotel near Nikko, with a massive indoor pool complex next to it that no one uses. The post office is Japan’s largest employer, with 24,000 post offices, frankly far more than it needs for a country that’s about the same size as Italy or California. Opponents of the privatization plan warn that if Japan Post starts actually seeking profits, it will close down thousands of these smaller post offices, leaving rural areas with less convenience, and this is a sensitive issue here in Japan, not unlike base closings in the U.S. Another issue is, will a privatized Japan Post be on the same playing field (or as they say in Japanese, in the same sumo ring) as Japan’s private delivery companies like Yamato and Sawaga, or will receive a lot of winks and special treatment like NTT (which started out as a government-run utility before being privatized in 1985). Considering that it costs 75 cents to send a first-class letter inside Japan, about twice the rate of the U.S., I’d say there’s room for more efficiency in Japan’s postal system.

One of the things I’ve liked about my years of learning Japanese is what I’ve come to call the “joy of satori,” a sort of thrill that jumps through your brain when you make a difficult connection, solve a puzzling kanji problem, or intuit a correct answer without really knowing why. Satori means understanding or comprehension, or written with another kanji, enlightenment in the Buddhist sense, and I believe our brains are hard-wired to feel joy when a difficult solution is finally comprehended. You can’t learn a foreign language without getting lots of input in that language, and I went out of my way to read plenty of manga to learn kanji and vocabulary words, one of them being the Rumiko Takahashi classic Maison Ikkoku, the story of a man living in an apartment who’s in love with his apartment manager, the widowed Kyoko. There’s a secret code embedded in the series, a number system based on the names of the characters and the ten apartments in the apartment building: for example, the main character is Godai and he lives in room number 5 since go is 5 in Japanese; his neighbor Yotsuya lives in room 4 since yotsu represents that number; and so on, with Kyoko being zero, since her last name contains the character nashi (meaning “nil”). I’ll never forget how I felt when I puzzled this system out for the first time — it was a small piece of enlightenment, but it was my own.