Into the Rising Sun 7

So how golden must be the life of the new successful salaryman candidate? Not so much. During the boom years of the late 1980's, Japanese corporations hired with abandon, often locking students into future jobs while they were still college juniors. The practice was called aotagai, harvesting the rice while it is still green. But now, companies are heavily over-staffed with general white-collar workers. Worse, many firms no longer hire Shinsotsu system ‘regular’ employees. Corporations are now more often willing to fire employees to lower costs, and salarymen are increasingly pressured to abandon their benefits, to demonstrate their dedication to the company. They are perpetually processed through Hansei self-reflection, a bizarre Japanese hybrid of Western Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and Maoist Chinese struggle sessions. If a manager or engineer claims that there were not any problems with a project, they are reminded that ‘no problem is a problem,’ and castigated for inadequately evaluating, in the necessary effort to find improvement. Salarymen have become grass-eaters, avoiding stress, controlling risk and grazing contentedly in their home pasture. Diligent but unoriginal, lacking initiative and competitiveness, they are increasingly disparaged as shachiku corporate livestock, or kaisha no inu corporate dogs. Their own terminology defines them- Naitei, hitting the glass ceiling, Sasen, moving down a step, Fundoshi wo Shimeru, tightening your loincloth, Wakai, making honorable concessions, Heso wo Mageru, bending the bellybutton, Itami Wake, sharing the pain, Otsukare Sama, above and beyond the call, Renchishin, avoiding shame, Ryuko, fashions and fads, Sabetsu Go, taboo language, Sabisu, more than service, Mon, wearing company colors, Happo Bijin, keeping your slate clean, Seiza, sitting correctly, Sunao-Sa, the meek survive, Hiru Andon, no light in the eyes...
The samurai aristocratic diversions of poetry and Zen gardens and tea ceremony and flower viewing and ink painting have little cultural equivalents in the lives of modern salarymen. Recreation does not flourish in an atmosphere of too little time, and no creation.
When critical thinking begins to seed in the mind of an individual part of the corporate entity, it is converted by a chemical process into alcohol, and mahjong and karaoke and pornography, and golf. But in a working world of clinically depressed breadwinners even more competitive than the educational one it parasitizes, in a nation of burst economic bubbles, in a universe of hypergravitational social pressures acting in a vacuum of individual expression, golf is simply the last fairway before suicide. And In the Land of the Rising Sun, the handicap is up to seventy people a day.


               ‘It's as if Japanese men, all to aware that deep inside 
                they'd like to stomp Tokyo flat, breathe fire, 
                and do truly terrible and disgusting things to women,   
                have built themselves the most beautiful of prisons 
                for their rampaging ids. 
                Instead of indulging their fantasies, they focus 
                on food, or landscaping, or the perfect cup of tea- 
                or a single slab of o-toro tuna- 
                letting  themselves go only at baseball games 
                and office parties.’
                                                                Anthony Bourdain