Japan- Welcome to the future (or not)
Yesterday’s Asahi Shimbun took the occasion of Angela Merkel’s visit to tell the Japanese government they could learn a lot from Germany. They are talking about green issues, which is one area we could all learn from Germany in, but really despite the impeccable trains and outrageous modern architecture (the Yurikamomo line just coming out of Shimbashi station through Shiodome has to be the closest thing to being in sci-fi I have ever experienced) Japan is far behind Europe and America is so many ways:
- Working mothers
- Rights for gays
- Rights for minorities
- Education (in terms of creativity, top universities, English language skills per classroom hour, equivalence of a Japanese degree and a foreign one, attracting foreign students, bullying, kids dropping out and staying home, vocational training- you name it. In fact, virtually everything except maths and literacy- and the second one is taught in such as way that kids can read but desperately don’t want to and end up as salarymen reading manga or watching TV on the mobile phones)
- Use of the internet and the standard of most websites (almost all searches in Japanese come up with a blog as the first result- because no one ever listens to them and they can never say their true feelings if they don’t blog perhaps??)
- Software companies
- Connecting homes to the central sewage system
- Burying cables
- Preserving old buildings
- Dealing with immigration
- Pension reform
- Teaching children about green issues
- Parks
- Using the waterfront
- etc etc.
Some of these are explainable by local conditions (e.g. there are less internet sites because most people search for info through their mobile phones), but others are things that the Japanese are going to have to sort out sooner or later.
Even the apparent advantages like lack of youth crime, immigrant riots, abandoned factories and urban squalor are just because the Japanese haven’t got to the stage of even starting to deal with them yet. As much as the post-colonial apathy of the UK hardly makes for the happiest of lifestyles now, the fact that solutions are being attempted for those problems gives some hope that things will be sorted out and the country will move onto the next stage.
For better or worse, Japan is still living as if they are in a 1950’s USA fantasyland of Dad works hard, Mum makes lunch for him, kids study for a better future. When things do indeed work out like that it is better than Dad takes drugs, Mum walks the streets, kids joyride, but the average Neo-Tokyo sci fi anime shows that I am not the only one who thinks Japan is going to have to deal with those problems sooner or later, and it is not going to be any easier for them than for anywhere else.
In the meantime though, when I don’t make the mistake of thinking about it too much, this semi-futuristic Japan is much more liveable than that Neo-London distopia back home…