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Commentary By Hank F. Miller Jr.
Thumbing through some of my faded old photographs of my early days abroad here in Japan, I find a mustachioed face with hair almost down to my shoulders and water-clear eyes, eyes perhaps indicative of a vast space behind My face. Thirty years almost thirty years later the mustache is still here but the hair is just a memory it\’s still here but shorter and thinner.
Only the wide eyes-and perhaps that empty space-remain today.
But those eyes have seen a lot in the past three decades. The Japanese of now is not the Japan of then. Here are just a few of the ways it has changed.
Inhale and you can almost smell it -the heady fragrance of money.
Japan was not quite a poor sister in the mid 1970s, but since that time she\’s been tossing yen around like confetti. Forget those damp years after the burst of the bubble-years of overall gloom, business foreclosures and micro fractions holloweening as interest rates. Yet years when Japanese cash registers still ring with respectable vibrato.
Now you see it everywhere-in architecture, fashion, and on the streets of pearly neon. Japan was once working class, but not anymore. Shaky economy and sky-high prices be damned, the Japan of today is flat-out rich, rich, rich to say the least!
\”But no place beats the old\’ USA!\”Says an American buddy, basking with pride up on his quiet prairie town of pot-holed roads shopping opportunities starting and stopping with Wal-Mart. Yes, the folks back home are as fine as people anywhere, but in 30 years time Japan has upped the ante affluence-wise. Increasingly wealthy and increasingly cosmopolitan-I also find that the Japanese of today are simply increasing. Not in numbers, but in size. At 5\’8,\”(173 cm) it used to be that I could hang on to a subway strap and gaze above every head the entire length of the car. Now I\’m lucky if I can see as far as five feet. But it\’s not just height that\’s evolved here.
\”Hey, look! A fat guy!\”
A foreign friend once elbowed me this while nodding to a man on the street. In the 1970s, obesity here was rare enough to raise eyebrows.
Maybe it still is, as most Western counterparts. Yet, sumo-size is not exception it once was. With plump bellies and chubby cheeks both up and down-today\’s Japanese carry much more meat than their earlier models.
For proof, check out seating arrangements still around from yesteryear, like in the peanut gallery of Japanese Diet, a spot where visitor used to
\”slide\” right in. Now the only workable verbs are \”squeeze\” and \”cram.\”
Junk food, fast food, snacks food-through the years the Japanese have adopted the worst eating habits of the West. But as the West wises up to those wicked dietary ways, so do the Japanese, after all we now have Billy\’s Boot Camp CDs, plastered all over in TV commercials, and they are selling like hot cakes, what a clever guy Billy is!
A 1998 cover article of The East magazine predicted the end of \”smokers\’ paradise\” in Japan. And paradise it was. The offices of the engineering company where I worked in 1977 and the faculty room of the high school where I started teaching in 1983 boasted only one nonsmoker-me. Yet, to me perhaps the largest change is on people\’s faces.
I think the Japanese of today show much more emotion than those of 30 years ago.
Here\’s a sample\”victory\”interview from TV shows of the \’70s:
Emcee: Well, Taro that was quite a game you played. Your winnings include 300 tons of gold, plus eternal life. Tell us how do you feel? Taro 🙁 Head down, feet shuffling, and voice barely audible) Oh, I suppose I\’m pleased. Sports heroes, game show champs, contest winners-it was all the same. People were humble. Too humble. Unnaturally humble. As if to be happy was a crime. Contrast that with the first-pumping \”guts poses \”of modern athletes or Olympic swimmer Kosuke Kitajima\’s gold medal whoop at the games in Athens.
Thirty years ago such reactions would have been picked apart by the Japanese press as sheer embarrassments. But today it\’s really OK, with the resulting release of feelings being somehow much healthier. Now it\’s not so unusual to see Japanese hug each other in public too. Sometimes even when they\’re sober. A wealthier, heavier and happier Japan. That\’s 30 years of observations in a nutshell. Of course, some things haven\’t changed at all-a topic for some another time maybe, OK?
Warm Regards From Kitakyushu City ,Japan
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