Imagine what would happen if a quarter of all Americans lived in the Washington D.C. area instead of spread out around the country from sea to shining sea. That’s essentially the case in Japan, where 27% of the nation’s population lives in the Greater Tokyo Area, including Tokyo, Kawasaki, Yokohama and neighboring cities. When a long holiday like the current Obon break rolls around, everyone naturally tries to get out of Dodge at the same time, which can cause frightful congestion. This morning the snaking traffic jam out of the Tokyo area was 55 km (34 miles) long, as people tried to get back to their inaka (ee-NAH-KAH, home town), or anywhere out of the concrete jungle. One of the most popular destinations for Tokyo-ites is Karuizawa (ka-roo-ee-za-wa), the charming little town in the mountains that was discovered by a Canadian Priest in 1886 as a getaway spot for foreigners and which has enjoyed a special appeal ever since. Unless you like sitting in your car for 12 hours, however, I don’t advise going there right now. The rush back into Tokyo Wednesday will be even worse, as hundreds of thousands hurry home so they can get back to work on Thursday.
One smart rule of thumb is that whenever a new product is pushed as “revolutionary,” it probably won’t be — true revolutions, like TCP/IP, open email standards and Salad-in-a-Bag sort of sneak in through the back door when no one is looking. On my last flight back from the U.S. I happened to be seated next to a medium-level Sony executive, who seemed to be on a mission to show everyone on the plane his cool Sony e-book reader, which let him flip through pages of “virtual” books. If its e-books you’re looking for, they may be here in Japan right now, available on the phones that people are already using. Just point your keitai (cell phone) browser to websites like EZ Book Land or Gokko and you can buy thousands of books from “light novels” aimed at the anime-and-manga crowd to steamy Harlequin Romances (yes, they have those here). There’s even a whole category of novels actually written by authors using cell phones, due to a quirk of the syllabically-structured Japanese language that makes it as fast or faster to input text using a 10-key pad than on a computer keyboard. (Using a phone keypad, “arigatou” (ありがとう) would be 1992*44444111, which looks confusing but it’s quite easy once you know how hiragana works.) Even major companies like Yahoo Japan are getting into the electronic novel business, adding services top help readers find this week’s top-selling titles.
If there was an award for poorest administration of a government program ever, I’d like to nominate the Japanese National Pension System. The equivalent of Social Security in the U.S., the program is designed to guarantee Japanese a minimum income after requirement, but it’s got a lot wrong with it. First of all, workers are “required” to make their premium payments, but since there’s no mechanism to force employees of smaller companies and the self-employed to do this, millions never bother — including some well-known politicians, a scandal which brought down a few careers when it came to light in 2004. Then there were the many wasteful projects built with pension money to “foster economic activity,” like a government-built resort that no one ever uses called Green Pier. Finally, there are the estimated 50 million payments that were mishandled by the National Pension System during the computerization of the records in the 1980s, which has resulted in a huge number of people losing credit for real money they parted with years ago. The government is trying to fix the problem, but with the old records thrown away, many citizens are reciting that famous Japanese phrase, shikata ga nai (it can’t be helped). This is one of those rare times when having more lawyers would really help, since Japan lacks the basic legal framework to force the government to take action and fix things before, say, pensioners start dying of old age. Taxpay- ers have found one effective way to vent their anger at the situation, at the voting box, and the election last month saw the ruling Liberal (not) Democratic (not) Party go from 64 to 37 seats. I still have to check and make sure the 4+ years I paid into the system as a salaryman teacher were counted or not.
