I always thought that visiting Japan would be like taking a trip to the future.
I imagined gleaming buildings, shops filled with every imaginable electronic device, walls of neon flickering with exotic adverts, and a nation so advanced it would make most European countries seem like they were still using horse-drawn buggies.
Apart from the towering walls of neon, I was wrong. Travelling through Tokyo, Yokohama and one distant rural town, I came away with an impression of a country that had all the zest, zip or zeal of a middle-aged man contemplating his afternoon nap.
It’s true that Tokyo’s harbour, with its hundreds of container ships lined up and laden with some of the world’s best cars, computers, cameras and game consoles is still a breathtaking sight. Cross the Rainbow Bridge and you get some sense of the still extant power of Japan’s manufacturing base and that it remains the world’s second largest economy. After all, the label “Made in Japan” on a product means that it has been better designed and is more reliable than goods produced elsewhere.
But drive through Tokyo’s seemingly endless suburbs and you begin to see the cracks. There are weeds growing out of the noise barriers that shield the city’s residents from the perpetual traffic jams, bridges that are rusting and with fading paint work. The place looks neglected even as this is a country that has spent, according to a Japanese cabinet office, some $6.3 trillion on infrastructure between 1991 and September 2008.
Japan looks like a country that is growing old. After talking to some young Japanese you discover that this is exactly what they are most worried about. The reason is everywhere you look. I have never been in a country with such a preponderance of old people. They’re everywhere, and they’re far from frail. Walk around London’s suburbs and you find elderly people, most of whom appear to be in a serious state of disrepair. Life looks like it has not been good to them: they’re bent, broken and seem to be heading, rapidly, towards the grave. In Japan the aged bounce about in parks doing their morning exercises and power-walk the streets. They live well and vigorously and are a long way from meeting their ancestors in the afterlife. One in four Japanese women and one in five Japanese men are now older than 65. And that’s what’s worrying the young. There aren’t enough of them to support the aged in their retirement. The workforce has been in decline since 2005. Each year, fewer people are born. The population is shrinking: estimates have it dropping from today’s 127 million to 89 million by 2055. The young are aware that when they retire the situation will be worse.
The problem is that far too few of the younger Japanese want children. The new government has promised to make it worth their while but that costs money, and money, despite the size of Japan’s economy, is in short supply. To meet its pension requirements and the costs of health care for its elderly population Japan has had to resort to massive borrowing. The IMF believes next year its debt will be some 227 per cent of GDP – the largest percentage in the industrialised world.
The general mood among young people seems to be a wary yet resigned pessimism. They really don’t think things are going to improve. And they’re not alone – economists such Carl Weinberg, quoted in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, has this apocalyptic view: “The debt situation is irrecoverable … They will not be able to fund their deficit. There will be a fiscal shutdown, a pension haircut, and bank failures.” You also get the feeling that there is a lack of will to tackle this looming nightmare. Not only is it taboo to criticise the elderly, what criticism could you possibly give: that they’re taking too long to die?
The Japanese way of solving problems, through consensus, is a graceful and often effective way of doing business, but it can mean an easy excuse for prevarication or avoiding hard choices. And you have to question whether there’s the will to create new solutions if it means changing the established way of doing things.
After all, this is a country where, when you decide not to have the set breakfast and ask instead just for a coffee, it involves negotiation with the waiter, then the maître d’, and finally with the head chef who emerges, in raised white hat from inside the kitchen to grant you permission, but just this one time, to allow a transgression of the social order.
If it takes this much effort to get a coffee you have to wonder about what it’s going to take to confront the reality of the serious demographic issues Japan faces. Perhaps it’s time the country considered renaming itself the land of the setting sun.
Simon Mars is a TV producer based in Cairo and Dubai
