Japan's "Evaporating People"
It's a testament to the power of shame -- and it's especially powerful in Japan.
This is a fascinating story by Maureen Callahan in The New York Post about how people who fail in some major way just disappear -- or even kill themselves. The stories Callahan relates in the piece are out of a book "The Vanished: The Evaporated People of Japan in Stories and Photographs," by French journalist Léna Mauger and her collaborator Stéphane Remael:
As a newlywed in the 1980s, a Japanese martial arts master named Ichiro expected only good things. He and his wife, Tomoko, lived among the cherry blossoms in Saitama, a prosperous city just outside of Tokyo. The couple had their first child, a boy named Tim. They owned their house, and took out a loan to open a dumpling restaurant.Then the market crashed. Suddenly, Ichiro and Tomoko were deeply in debt. So they did what hundreds of thousands of Japanese have done in similar circumstances: They sold their house, packed up their family, and disappeared. For good.
"People are cowards," Ichiro says today. "They all want to throw in the towel one day, to disappear and reappear somewhere nobody knows them. I never envisioned running away to be an end in itself . . . You know, a disappearance is something you can never shake. Fleeing is a fast track toward death."
Of the many oddities that are culturally specific to Japan -- from cat cafés to graveyard eviction notices to the infamous Suicide Forest, where an estimated 100 people per year take their own lives -- perhaps none is as little known, and curious, as "the evaporated people."
Since the mid-1990s, it's estimated that at least 100,000 Japanese men and women vanish annually. They are the architects of their own disappearances, banishing themselves over indignities large and small: divorce, debt, job loss, failing an exam.
...Whatever shame motivates a Japanese citizen to vanish, it's no less painful than the boomerang effect on their families -- who, in turn, are so shamed by having a missing relative that they usually won't report it to the police.
...In many ways, Japan is a culture of loss. According to a 2014 report by the World Health Organization, Japan's suicide rate is 60 percent higher than the global average. There are between 60 and 90 suicides per day. It's a centuries-old concept dating back to the Samurai, who committed seppuku -- suicide by ritual disembowelment -- and one as recent as the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II.
Japanese culture also emphasizes uniformity, the importance of the group over the individual. "You must hit the nail that stands out" is a Japanese maxim, and for those who can't, or won't, fit into society, adhere to its strict cultural norms and near-religious devotion to work, to vanish is to find freedom of a sort.
For younger Japanese, those who want to live differently but don't want to completely cut ties with family and friends, there's a compromise: the life of the otakus, who live parallel lives as their favorite anime characters, disappearing from time to time into alternate realities where, in costume, they find themselves.
"Running away is not always about leaving," a young man named Matt told Mauger. "We dream of love and freedom, and sometimes we make do with a little -- a costume, a song, a dance with our hands. In Japan, that is already a lot."
Sad.
See also Japan, Japan.
Crid at January 18, 2017 7:14 PM
>Sad.
Don't do that. It's a Trumperian cluck. It won't be ironic until 2035. "Ask not" was no fun until about 1978.
Crid at January 18, 2017 7:19 PM
Crid your link reminds me that in every Asian country I've been to has small hidden pockets of young men that publicly harass multiple young women for dates. Each time I see it, which is rare, I ask one of my friends to explain and they always retort "Oh those guys? They are quite successful in dating". They are an anomaly in their respective cultures so it's fun to see.
That's why when women complain about street harassment (which I don't like myself) I often think well damn women do respond...and those guys are way more successful than most.
Ppen at January 18, 2017 7:33 PM
Meh. Dating is a numbers game. You ask enough people out, you'll eventually find someone who will say yes. These roving packs of horny young street harassers appear to be applying that principle.
Not that I approve of people walking down the street and making lewd comments at total strangers, but evidently, it works.
Patrick at January 18, 2017 10:41 PM
Speaking of the power of shame, I'm reminded of the Honda Element.
The Element was a brilliant concept, but plagued with major, obvious design flaws (like problematic doors).
It would have been easy to fix these deficiencies - adding sliding rear doors, for example - but Honda did nothing. Absolutely nothing. The Element languished, unchanged, for years on the market until it finally died.
IMO, the problem was that making changes would first have required decision-makers at Honda to admit error. Gross, obvious error. This they could not do.
Some day, when the Element returns, it will be because a new generation of managers has moved in, so no one authorizing the new design has to say, implicitly or explicitly, "I was wrong".
Lastango at January 19, 2017 12:25 AM
LT-- That's what we used to hear about the entirety of Japan's banking system... They had 20 years of paralysis because no one could admit they'd made an underperforming loan, and organized-crime-types weren't eager to have things moved along.
Someone (here?) said last year that there are now more women in managerial positions in Japan than in the States. (I don't know any of their names.)
Crid at January 19, 2017 1:48 AM
Ah, I remember the 1980s. Everyone feared that Japan was becoming the economic powerhouse of the Western hemisphere (ironic, that), and that all others would be swept away. Usually reasonable people feared that Japan would soon own most of the United States, and high-profile purchases of Vegas casinos and PGA-level golf courses seemed to prove that out.
But it was all built on a foundation of crony government, very high tariffs, and restrictions on foreign investment. (And having the U.S pay for their national defense.) The trouble with that sort of thing is that it can be made to work, or at least appear to work, for a short while. A lot of tech people in the U.S. fell to their knees at the mention of the holy acronym MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry). And the sort of people who love the idea of "managed competition" declared U.S capitalism obsolete and pointed at Japan as being the example that we would have to follow in order to remain relevant on the world stage. Fortunately, not enough Americans listened to them.
It's not that people in Japan weren't working hard. They were working ridiculously hard. But it was all built on a system that was faulty to begin with. The facade was already showing cracks by 1988. Everyone at the time feared that Japan was going to utterly dominate the forthcoming market for high-definition television. But the development path MITI dictated was to try to amp up conventional analog broadcast methods, which they thought they could do better than anyone else. And they were probably right about that, as far as it went.
But in the U.S. and Europe, there came to be a thing called the Moving Picture Experts Group, which we now know as MPEG. They came up with a completely different idea: figure out to digitize and compress video, so that it could be transmitted efficiently and then reconstructed in the receiver. Today, HDTV has arrived. And today the television is not a television in the traditional sense; it's a computer with a cable modem built in. Japan drove their train skillfully, but they did so on a completely wrong track. Because MITI.
Japan has never recovered from that. I don't know what the answer is. What they are doing is obviously not working, but they don't seem to be able to think of any other course. Quite a contrast from the go-get-'em Japan that I remember from the early '80s.
Cousin Dave at January 19, 2017 9:09 AM
Popular story about rejection in dating, from Norah Vincent's book "Self-Made Man" (for those who don't know, she - an attractive lesbian - disguised herself as a man for a year):
https://books.google.com/books?id=3flVbiAZmwMC&pg=PT111&lpg=PT111&dq=%22handle+all+this+fucking+rejection%22&source=bl&ots=IeO15XyR54&sig=fQU_r4AP8Vws4TLfL7g_n3T83oM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQ4Ket8M7RAhVE1oMKHTaQCWcQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=%22handle%20all%20this%20fucking%20rejection%22&f=false
lenona at January 19, 2017 10:56 AM
Cousin Dave, that's an interesting story. I had no idea about hi-def vs. MPEG.
Kevin at January 19, 2017 12:46 PM
Ooooo.... nobody has called me "LT" on the web in years! XoXoXo
Lastango at January 19, 2017 1:47 PM
That is very true CD. The Japanese work incredibly hard. But working hard doesn't mean much when it isn't in an effective direction. Though even if MITI hadn't picked the wrong technology to back it wouldn't have made a difference. The reality is that (as you point out) the Japanese economy is dependent on exports to the US. Without those exports they have too few customers. When the yen raises against the dollar due to people buying Japanese goods in America the price of those Japanese goods raises when marked in dollars. Eventually they get too expensive and Americans stop buying. This puts a cap on Japan's economic growth. This also applies to China.
So far the US's benign neglect appears to be the best system. Though it is one of the most terror inducing too.
Ben at January 19, 2017 3:35 PM
I wonder if the Japanese will ever develop the "whining" class... do their colleges have "safe" spaces yet?
Radwaste at January 19, 2017 7:04 PM
> Everyone feared that Japan
> was becoming the economic
> powerhouse
I will never, ever forget a 1985 article in RS by Greider about MITI and Japan's onrushing dominance, and his pants-pissing certitude that there was no way mere capitalism could withstand the combined power of government and industry in alliance.
But it was all over, even then. The Walkman was cute, but it was already being devalued by plastic-chassis knockoffs from across Asia. A few years later, the Sony DigiBeta would do a LOT for my career... But microcomputers, American microcomputers, were the flourishing technology of our generation, and everyone knew it. Jobs had already introduced the Mac. Whatever his own career oscillations, the power of unfettered innovation was to rule, essentially, the rest of my lifetime.
At a job in 1988, I actually saw a Sony PC in use as an edit controller. It was sitting there, in a control room that we walked by ever day. I never saw anyone use it. I wonder what OS it used?
Crid at January 19, 2017 7:48 PM
Holy Moly! Found it. (CP/M)
They must have sold dozens.
Crid at January 19, 2017 7:57 PM
Wow, flashbacks. CP/M was a popular OS among computer hobbyists and small-business users in the early '80s. It was good for that era because it worked well on the very small micros, but it was pretty much obsolete by 1988. The story about how IBM came to Gary Kildall, the guy who wrote CP/M, and then went to Bill Gates instead when they weren't satistified with Kildall's negotiating, gets told in wildly differing versions. To this day I can't decide what the truth there really is.
I worked for a minicomputer manufacturer in the mid-'80s. The minicomputers had been in the '70s what the personal computers became in the '90s, a less expensive and more technology-forward alternative for entities that wanted computing, but didn't want or couldn't afford a mainframe. By 1985 it was becoming apparent to us engineers and technicians who followed the market that micros with graphical interfaces were the future. The company I worked for had an alliance with Sun, one of the pioneering workstation manufacturers. They had a chance to develop server-client systems and evolve into a server supplier. And they blew it. (One story I heard said that there was some personal animosity between our head of marketing and Sun's Bill Joy, but I never really found out.) And the amazing thing is, all of the minicomputer makers had the same opportunity and they all blew it, even DEC.
But of course that's how the American innovation marketplace works. There's always someone with a better idea. When confronted it, you have three choices: (1) adopt it, (2) come up with a better idea of you own, or (3) get run over. We don't have any MITI shielding well-connected companies from competition, and that's a very good thing.
Cousin Dave at January 20, 2017 6:24 AM
I used to see CP/M machines everywhere but never actually had to use one. For 30 seconds last night I thought of buying one of the Sonys from Ebay or wherever, but then thought... What the Hell for? To take up excess electricity? Because there's nothing so attractive as the dust that collects on the wiring of an old computer sitting in the corner?
Last month I was Googling pictures of Crays, and thinking that if the living room were a little larger, it would be a great conversation piece... But apparently even museums are unable to locate a copy of the OS to boot. So even if you had the wiring in order, and you never would, or the budget for the electricity, and you never would, it would be a totally preposterous thing to own... With less processing power than a used Iphone.
But damn, it would look so cool. Especially the coolant waterfall.
Crid at January 20, 2017 5:28 PM
I can imagine getting a Compaq sewing machine from Ebay someday... It can run useful word processing, and the portability would keep the sprawl under control. When I was first out of college, that machine was the coolest thing in the world. It was integral instance of BIOS cloning and MS licensing and all the developments in the industry for the next twenty years, including the Web. For a lot reasons, nothing is ever going to look so cool to my eye as those green phosphor screens. They'd been on the campus when I was growing up, and to imagine having one in your home was just bliss.
Crid at January 20, 2017 5:56 PM
I will miss Function Keys on the Left every day until the day I die.
...And will never understand why they went away. Everyone adored them; when they went missing, nobody said anything.
Crid at January 20, 2017 6:07 PM
Look at this, from Ebay... The little girl doesn't even know what day it is!
Takes you back, right?
Thank God you don't have to stay.
Crid at January 20, 2017 11:21 PM
Moar Cray
Crid at January 21, 2017 1:05 AM
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