RE: The Dark Side of Japanese Work Culture
(Edited)
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Thank you for writing this. I wanted to get a feeling from your personal perspective.
I have watched volumes of YouTube videos on the subject but still wasn’t sure if all of that is true or am I missing something. Looks like I am not.
The trouble doesn’t seem fixable at this point because it hasn’t been fixed in the last 80 years while rest of the world has moved on. The fact that the magic of Japan is still alive is a true testament to its disciplined and dedicated population. But it is crumbling from within and I don’t see a solution. The modern Japanese kids can’t remain a dedicated salaryman which watching the rest of the world pass by.
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The common refrain among the young here is, “Change will happen when all the Shōwa generation retires or dies.” Technically, that means anyone born during Emperor Hirohito’s reign, but in practice it mostly refers to the Baby Boomers. In that way, the attitudes of young Japanese aren’t terribly different from those of young Westerners.
Change is happening, but like I said, it’s slow. Will it come before it’s too late? I do think we’re facing an economic reckoning here that will force change one way or another. After the bubble burst in 1989, we had the “lost decade”... then another... and now, nearly forty years later, things still haven’t really improved.
The Shōwa generation quietly endured. Here’s a word you should know: 我慢 (gaman). It means patience, endurance, stoic perseverance. It was their attitude. But their children are far less accepting, and there’s a lot of anger simmering under the surface.
Again: parallels to the U.S. In America, Trump tapped into that anger and redirected it into the MAGA movement. In Japan, we’re seeing something similar: a growing right-wing that’s becoming louder and bolder, pushing to remove Article 9 (the clause in the constitution that forbids Japan from maintaining an army or going to war) and blaming foreigners for domestic problems.
I don’t know if the problems are unfixable. We can’t go back. We’ll never return to the postwar economic miracle or the tech powerhouse of the 1980s. But there will be change ahead, for better or worse.
Yes, I am reading about the current right wing government too. It is currently a populist movement in many count of the world. Like everything else this will pass too. The problem is we don’t know what we will be left with afterwards, not just Japan but elsewhere as well.
I choose to be optimistic and think that we will come out of this tailspin (both in Japan and in the US) before disaster, but who knows. I hope anyway!