‘Never forget your original intention.” The four-character saying was inked with elegant brushstrokes, marked with the seal of a calligraphy master and set in a black lacquer frame. I picked it up on a rubbish dump during my first week in Japan.
The calligraphy was the first of many treasures I found in the gomi (rubbish) in September 1990, at the height of the country’s economic power. Such was the quality of the garbage in those days that I rarely needed to buy a thing — which was fortunate because prices were astronomically high.
The dump was on Port Island — a mountain-relocated piece via a conveyer belt into the middle of the bay so well designed that it was known as ”paradise island” by residents.
Kobe’s well-heeled citizens would ride the monorail across the bridge to amuse themselves in the giant amusement park, marvel at the sleek architecture or shop around the spacious Vandaru department stores.
Little did I know that my arrival coincided with one of the most remarkable turning-points in economic history — the bursting of the biggest asset bubble the world has seen in more than a century and the subsequent financial instability and collapsing confidence widely referred to in Japan as ”the lost decade”.
After growing at a spectacular rate for almost the entire post-war period to reach the point where it almost overtook the United States, the Japa-nese economy hit a wall in 1990 and has since been shrinking even faster than it expanded.
Share prices have fallen by 75%, land values by 80% and prices have declined for four years in a row. The government has the biggest public debt in the industrialised world, worth 140% of gross domestic product.
Japan’s credit rating has slipped below Botswana’s. With interest rates at zero and the first peacetime deflation since the 1930s, the country appears to have contracted some strange new economic disease with baffling symptoms.
Despite the grim statistics, overseas visitors are frequently amazed at the prosperity they see in today’s Japan. As one incredulous British minister put it: ”If this is a recession, I’d like to have one in my constituency.”
But if I had any doubts about the impact of the past 13 years, they faded during a recent return to Kobe, where the huge, painful and important transformations in Japan are written large.
As soon as I got off the monorail, it was clear why no one would dream of calling Port Island ”paradise” any more. Rust, weeds, even a tiny smattering of graffiti — all unthinkable in 1990 — hinted not just at age, but retrenchment. Locked railings on the bike sheds revealed an insecurity missing before. Most telling of all, the rubbish is not what it was. Instead of lovingly wrapped treasures, the tips are full of dirty, broken junk.
Yet there is more competition for what little can be salvaged. In 1990 I rarely saw anyone but cheapskate foreign teachers scouring the dumpsites. This time I bumped into a couple of Japanese professionals who bemoaned the fact that the only half-decent item they found that day was a framed picture of a sailboat.
Despite the growth of the junk market, Kobe port is no longer bustling. Many more of the Port Island docks are empty. The same is true of the amusement park, where the ferris wheel hasn’t spun in years. The main sound on the island is that of the construction work for the new Kobe airport — a pork-barrel project few residents outside the building industry and the yakuza support.
Wandering along the row of shops, once neat and prosperous, the scars of the long economic downturn were apparent. My old bank has disappeared, merged and downsized three times in an attempt to survive the never-ending bad loan crisis that has been at the heart of Japan’s problems.
Barely hanging on is the Daiei supermarket — kept afloat by politicians last year despite a sea of red ink. The small Port Island branch has changed its name, trimmed its staff by 30% and slashed prices. The hottest item on the shelves is one that didn’t exist 13 years ago: happoshu beer — the cut-price, low-alcohol tipple of a country tightening its belt.
I stopped for lunch at the shopping mall. The okonomiyaki, tasted as good as ever but Akiko Murata, the woman behind the counter, grumbled about what has become of her home: ”Thirteen years ago this was one of the most sought-after places to live in Kobe. Now it’s a disgrace. Drunk welfare spongers come here in the afternoons, shouting and falling asleep at the tables. The newcomers lack class.”
The ”newcomers” are the refugees from the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 6 000 people and left tens of thousands homeless. The disaster was so badly handled by the authorities that it shook Japan’s confidence in itself. That confidence has yet to recover.
There are still numerous grassy spots where buildings once stood. In the nearby town of Rokko I was shocked to discover that one of my old apartments — located above a public bathhouse — had been shaken to the ground. All that was left were the main tubs, steamroom and the electric-current bath, which have since been rehoused. While I took a nostalgic dip, the owner told me my old neighbours were lucky to have escaped alive.
Surviving the man-made disaster of the Japanese economy has been just as tough. Unemployment in the Kinki region, which includes Kobe, has shot up from 2,5% in 1990 to 7% today.
Even the official who gave me this figure, Yuji Mizuno, said he could not take in the scale of the bankruptcies and restructuring of recent years: ”For the first 20 years of my life, I was taught that Japan was a country that always had a 2% or 3% jobless rate. Nobody could have believed then that it would reach the current terrible level,” he said.
Some of the reasons for the collapse were apparent on Flower Road, Kobe’s main thoroughfare. My old English language school has long since vanished — having become one of the first and most prominent bankruptcies of the early 1990s.
Like many companies since, its failure exposed an over-expansion on the basis of shady loans and suspected links with yakuza gangsters. An addition to the street was a brokerage promoting shares in Chinese comp-anies — something that would have been unimaginable in 1990 after the Tiananmen Square massacre the previous year. Since then, however, the Chinese economy has surged forward at the rate of 7% to 14% a year while Japan has eked out an average annual rise of just 1%.
Money and industry are following the growth. Panasonic goods in Kobe’s electrical shops used to be made in nearby factories; now most are shipped in from the other side of the East China sea.
Visit almost any rice-farming village or industrial urban centre and it is impossible to escape the impression that Japan has lost its dynamism as its economy shrinks, its people grow older and its main regional rival hurtles forward in alarmingly large leaps and bounds.
If this country is still seen as an indicator of the world’s future then the future is a comfortable retirement home rather than the frenetic, high-tech shopping mall Japan seemed back then. That may not be a bad thing.
Despite the wrenching changes, there have been improvements. Japan is a calmer, more diverse and more comfortable place to live. Thanks to the falling birthrate, exam pressure is receding and children are getting more individual attention. At Imamiya High School, where I once taught 46 students at a time, class sizes have shrunk by more than 10%.
Yes, the crisis of confidence has led to a political shift towards the nationalist right, most worryingly in the form of the overtly racist Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara. But it is a backlash against further US influence, closer trade relations with China and increased cultural globalisation.
Shorn of some national pride, Japanese people have never been so willing to explore South Korean music and film. Likewise, foreign businesses have far greater opportunities in the Japanese market than was the case in 1990. Women remain second-class citizens but their opportunities have been increasing, while middle-aged men have been the main victims of suicide and unemployment associated with long recession. And, as the rubbish shows, there is a little less waste, less needless consumption.
”I suppose you could say that our lives now are gloomier than they were in 1990, but I like it better now,” said my former Japanese teacher, Sumiko Okita.
”During the bubble, all people cared about was material wealth and brand-name goods, but now we are more relaxed, more focused on enjoying life. For me that is an improvement even if I have less cash. Japan may be worn out, but it is still very peaceful.”
Certainly, few other countries could go through such a collapse of assetvalues without social unrest or war. But the jury is still out on whether Japan’s economic decline has been as brilliantly managed as its former growth. With huge debts still hanging over the government’s head, the day of reckoning may only have been postponed.
Meanwhile, under pressure from the US — which still has a huge military presence in Okinawa and calls many of the political shots in Tokyo — Japan is putting more effort into being a strong military ally of the US than into supporting the United Nations.
After the disastrous failure of its military adventures in World War II, Japan placed a priority on peace. It is a ”first intention” the country would do well not to discard or forget. — Â