Please do not discard
Your empty cans or fag ends
Or morality
Japan’s remorseless finger-wagging now comes in haiku form. This one appeared yesterday on a municipal billboard on a Tokyo street boasting two brothels, an illegal mah-jong parlour and a yakuza money laundry. But these are not the target of the poetic puritans — instead, as ever, it is young people and their ne’er-do-well ways.
Japan’s under-18s have a dismal lot. They are well behaved and hard working despite monstrous betrayal by their elders. Soon after they are out of nappies, the young are “offered” a deal: work hard, make yourself sick chasing a job you will hate and spend your life paying off the world’s biggest public debt as the most selfish generation in human history enjoys its dotage.
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And the framers of this one-sided contract reserve the right to blame the young for every social ill out there. This invariably takes the form of a national moraru (moral) or mannaa (manners) drive.
The organisation behind much of the moralising is the Koukyoukoukokukikou, a well-funded group of do-gooders backed by 1,200 corporations and hundreds of private members. The organisation, which boosted its word-of-mouth prospects last summer by adopting the name AC Japan, exists principally to moan about decaying civic standards. Without a yen of public money, it does this on a lavish scale — mounting television, billboard and print campaigns aimed at making Japan a better mannered place and one in which the young are regularly cast as villains.
One such campaign links a five-year-old child’s failure to give up his seat on a train to an inevitable spiral into criminality. The boy’s lack of manners is juxtaposed with footage of his future self shambling down a street, glancing around suspiciously and then heaving a violin case over a hedge. Where will this savagery end?
Business ties
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One of the few reforms to survive the reformist premiership of Junichiro Koizumi was Cool Biz, a simple enough idea, based on the notion that climate change can be defeated by catchphrases and a canvas shopping bag. The policy demanded that thermostats be set no lower than 28C in government buildings in summer. To compensate, bureaucrats were allowed to strut about their domains without ties. Modestly effective and uncontroversial, you might have thought.
But this week Takeshi Kobori, the head of the tie-makers’ guild of Japan, launched one of the great Luddite battles of the early 21st century. Since Cool Biz began in 2005, he informed Sakihito Ozawa, the Environment Minister, tie sales have slumped by 35 per cent. This environmentally conscious scourge must end now, Mr Kobori added. It is hard to guess the response to this protectionist onslaught, but Mr Ozawa should be careful: the tie-makers have powerful alliances with the bowler hat, spats and knickerbocker industries.
Korea opportunities
Who knows where the Luddite impulse will strike next? I’m all for scientists touting their wares on the global stage, but their timing can be rotten. South Korea, despite its proximity to China and the global success of its gadgetry, is having a tough time at the moment. Yesterday it emerged that the number of people on unemployment benefits in 2009 passed one million for the first time — a 28 per cent increase from 2008. Worse still, the official numbers may hide a four-million-strong army of “virtually jobless”. At the root of all this is a recently published truth about South Korea. It took 10.9 workers to create $1 million worth of production a decade ago but only 8.2 today.
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The perfect moment, therefore, for lab coats at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology to wheel out Mahru-Z — the world’s most advanced household-helper robot. This mechanical Jezebel, with her six-fingered hands, 3-D vision and ability to put bread into a toaster has been designed to steal human jobs. Deaf to the nation’s suffering, the boffins just would not shut up about their brilliant machine. It could even replace astronauts on the Moon, they said, shattering the dreams of space cadets across the land.
Same old same old . . .
I return from Seoul to find the Koukyoukoukokukikou up to its usual tricks. A new TV campaign demands the “right to dodder” for old people. The young are implicitly condemned for walking, talking and thinking too fast. “Watch me being slow with warmth in your eyes,” simpers the steel-haired crone fronting it. We are surely only days away from a barrage of haiku:
Oh, youth of Japan!
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Creaking with age we loathe you P S. Pay our debts . . .