Japan - Myths vs Math Part 1

I'm making my way through Introduction to Japanese Society by Yushio Sugimoto, which is kind of a broad overview of the sociological literature on Japan. I'll have more on the book later once I've finished, but one point driven home by the book is that a great many of the stereotypes and assumptions about Japan don't survive even a cursory look at the underlying statistics. 

I had this in mind when I read two recent articles on Japan in the Economist. The first concerned discrimination and underutilization of women in the work force. The second concerned the persistant narrative that Japan has been mired in a lost decade for the past two decades. The general gist of this article is that demographic changes are prime reason for the perception of weakness, and that once you control for differentials in population growth Japan's recent economic performance is quite good. This is a theme I explored a bit before here. 

But first let's look at why smart reasonable people think Japan has been stuck in a lost decade. Here's real GDP for Japan, US, Germany, and China since 1980. (click to enlarge)

You see how the yellow line has pretty much been flat since the early 90s? That's the stagnation people are talking about. But as the Economist points out the US added a whole lot more people over that time period then Japan, once you account for GDP on a per capita basis a Japan's economic performance looks a lot better.

I actually think the Economist didn't go far enough here. Not only has Japan experienced lower population growth, but an increasing share of it's population is passed working age. Curtesy of the great statistics database at the World Bank website, I further adjusted the GDP data to look at it per working age person, those aged 15-65. On this basis the difference in performance between the US and Japan pretty much disappears. 

Over the past decade Japanese worker's productivity has actually increased faster than both their US and German counterparts. Now that isn't to say that total GDP, or per capita numbers don't matter. They do depending on the question you're concerned with, for example can Japan support it's level of outstanding debt? Can it maintain it's standard of living for it's retired population? Or that raw economic numbers capture everything society should be concerned with. For the moment let's table issues about inequality, environment, culture, leisure time etc. 

What this does show is that contrary to the popular narrative of stagnation Japan continues to be as economically vibrant and innovative place as pretty much any other developed country. Once you take into account the fact that a lot of American economic activity involved building useless houses in the desert and financial wizardry to hide the fact that they were useless, Japan's performance looks even better. 

While the US and Japan end up with similar GDP PWP numbers if you drill down there are quite a few differences in how they get there. As the first Economist article points out Japan doesn't utilize the female half of it's potential labor force nearly as efficiently as other developed countries.

Also from the world bank here is the female labor force participation rate for the US, Japan, and Germany. 

Note that this data just looks at raw employment, and makes no adjustment for the type of employment. A waitress is just as employed as an engineer.

I'm not attempting a comprehensive treatment of these issues by any means. Japanese also work longer hours then Americans, who in turn work more then the Germans. Things can get complicated real fast when you consider that those longer hours are likely a contributing factor to both higher per worker output as well as lower birthrates and female participation in the work force. 

The broader point here is that once a given narrative catches on in society it can be very persistant. People become pre-disposed to see evidence of that narrative in their daily lives, while viewing any contrary events as an anomaly (confirmation bias). That's not to say statistics are everything, often anecdotes captures some essential point missed in the statistics, or help illustrate some trend in an understandable way. However, looking at data is one way of testing our assumptions about how the world works. 

Anyway that's enough for now. 

Class dismissed. 

高尾山 Takaosan

On a bit of a whim I decided to head out to Mt Takao or Takaosan today. Takaosan is a smallish mountain only 2,000ft or so, but it's location only an hour from central tokyo makes it a popular destination for people looking to escape the concrete jungle and tourists. The mountain features a few temples and food stands at the summit, even a beer garden.

Takaosan has been on my to-do list for awhile and I didn't want to miss the opportunity to see some good foliage so I broke up my usual hung-over stay in bed Sunday routine.

For those intimidated by the all of 2.5 mile hike, you could take either a chairlift or a rail car up to the summit although I'm pretty sure you can hike up quicker then the wait in the line for either of those two options. 

In addition to the lines at the entrence to the mountain there was also this guy doing some routine on the stage.

The benefit of having the chairlift option was that while the base and summit were very crowded the actual trails up were quite peaceful.

 

All over the mountain there are shrines, and statues.

At the top there is a major complex with a bunch of larger temples. I have to say, that as a tourist spot it didn't disappoint. The term tourist has developed a kind of negative connotation, usually associated with the commercialization, commodification, a sterilization of culture. (How bout that trio of adjectives, you just know I'ma gonna break this down for ya intellectually- next two paragraphs IYI only) Tourism is juxtaposed against a more authentic and genuine understanding of the society in which you are a visitor. And of course no one enjoys the experience of feeling like cattle in a crowd. 

But I think these criticisms while valid (particularly the bit about the crowds) I think they miss the point of what makes a tourist site a good one. The experience of visiting a landmark is most importantly a visceral visual experience. Good tourist attractions provide those experiences in ways that can't fully be communicated by a photograph. Things can wow us with this scale, or draw us in to observe their details. In my opinion the essential ingredient to a good tourist site is how they provide us this visual stimulation and make us more conscious of our surroundings. I think part of the reason people feel compelled to take photographs, when clearly superior ones exist done by people with far more skill, is that they are trying to make that experience less fleeting. 

So on that criteria I think Takaosan succeeds, albit with a big assist from mother nature on the color palet. 

Angels?

  All of the temples featured this incredibly intricate wood work.   

 You also had this incense and slow deep drums going to round out the sensory experience.

 I should probably do this get out of bed on a Sunday thing more often.

The View from Inside the Dumpling - why Tokyo looks the way it does IYI

One of the first things one realizes upon arriving in Tokyo is that the layout doesn't make any sense. There is no real center of the city, and block by block things seem to alternate from looking like this.

 To this

In no apparent order.

A couple of weeks ago I went to an exhibit at the Opera City Art Museum that tackled the question of why Tokyo looks the way it does. The exhibit was called Tokyo Metabolizing.

The exhibit opens with two arial cityscape shots. One of Paris, labeled the monarchist city, showed wide avenues converging to major buildings, parks, and squares. The other was New York, the capitalist city, with it's clear efficient grid and large tall buildings. The juxtaposition begs the question, so what kind of city is Tokyo?

The answer, the dumpling city.

But lets back up.

Metabolism was an architectural movement back in the 50s and 60s based on the idea that buildings should be constructed modularly so that their components could be replaced when newer and better versions came along. Now despite a few notable buildings this notion didn't catch on.

But while metabolism as an architectural movement wasn't the wave of the future it aspired to be, Tokyo in many ways resembles the metabolism ideal. What's distinct about Tokyo as aposed to other major cities is the speed at which it is constantly regenerating and how much the landscape is dominated by small structures. In a city of 36 million people there are 1.8 million property owners. Statistically speaking, unlike what most tourists see when they come to Tokyo, the second scene above is much more representative of what Tokyo looks like.

The average lifetime of a housing unit in Tokyo is 25 years, which means on average the city has completely rebuilt it's entire housing stock twice since the end of World War II. By comparison in New York the figure it's more like 100 years, and in many European cities it's older then that.

Tokyo's history as a fairly calamity prone city has shaped it's development. Earthquakes, fires, and American bombers in world war II have resulted in periodic destruction and necessitated regeneration.  It's not entirely surprising in a city where the ground moves for people to have a slightly different view about the permanence of buildings that developed in the west.

In order to guard the city against future disasters, when the city was rebuilt in the fifties the mass web of small structures was carved up by large multi-lane roads. For example, like the one pictured above. Along those main thoroughfares would be high rise and fire proof buildings. The result is really effective fire walls that separate these individual little urban villages. The metaphor here is the dumpling. The fire resistant tall buildings are the shell. The maze of small dense structures are the filling.

Inside that dumpling you run across some pretty wild buildings.

 Tiny old shrines

And some things that make you glad that the average lifespan of a housing unit is only 25 years...

Each dumpling is in many ways it's own mini city or village. Each one features, restaurants, stores, pretty much everything you need on a daily basis located around a central train station. This gives the whole city a kind of fractal geometry and symmetry where patterns are repeated at ever larger scales. Where major subway lines intersect you have massive train stations that are the basis of the major shopping centers, and skyscraper districts. 

Tokyo is really a quite unique city. 

Below is the only really decent youtube video I could find of the exhibit, taken from it's showing in venice.

Swallows Narrowly Lose Climax Series

Last week the Chunichi Dragons beat the Tokyo Yakult Swallows in the Central league Climax Series, denying us of the best headline in sports...

That's One Way to Eat Sanma

This weekend we hosted a couple of American couch-surfers, John and Jim from Colorado. I took the pair to a small traditional Japanese style restaurant for dinner right by my apt. The place is one of my favorites and I always get a kick out of then scene I make when I come there, as their only foreigner regular customer. Three Americans really made people crane their necks, especially Jim who at 6'8'' blows peoples minds here.

Initially it looked like the place was at capacity and we wouldn't be able to get a seat. But one local salaryman who I had met here once recognized me and said that he and his friend were leaving and we should take their spot at the table. The three of joined a couple that stayed behind, and the five of us crowded around a table that could probably comfortably seat three. The guy didn't speak much English, the girl new a little, proudly saying that her name meant Venus.

The exact relationship between the two seemed a little ambiguous and Venus definitely seemed to take a liking to Jim. His unique -though not totally ineffective- chopstick method was a particular source of amusement.

"You're a southpaw!"

It took the three of us a minute to process that. Japanese English -more then any other ESL group - seems to be littered with these slightly old fashioned Americanisms. It's as if someone went to America to learn English in the 60 & 70s wrote down all these colloquialisms and they made it into the standard textbook that's been in use for decades. Japanese English speakers tend to be very surprised that we're surprised that they know the particular turn of phrase. For non-American English these sayings can sometimes lead to great confusion. An Australian friend of mind was extremely confused when at dinner a Japanese guy asked him if he wanted to "go dutch" by which he meant split the bill.

Venus was putting back sake like it was her job.

Unfamiliar with the term "booze" she misheard it as "boobs"

Venus tells Jim she loves him

Venus asks Jim to marry her

We ordered Sanma, a small grilled fish. I hadn't really thought a fish could be considered "seasonal" but it's a traditional Japanese fall dish. The cold weather supposedly leads the fish to put on more delicious fat. It's quite good and usually the fish is served whole, here's a sample picture below.

You generally pick out the meat around the torso.

Jim in an inspired move harnesses all his chopstick ability to pick out the eyeball and eats it.

Venus, get's all serious.

Picks up the sanma, now a skeleton except for the head and fin.Carefully coils the tail in a small bowl in front of her.

We are all wondering where she's going with this.

Venus looks Jim in the eye all sensual like.

Puts the head of the phallic sized fish into her mouth and bits the whole thing of, the skull and everything, and swallows it down.

The three of us are stunned, Jim especially, who doesn't strike me as a personal familiar with being totally sonned, is really amazed.

Venus carefully coils the now decapitated fish remains in a bowl, considerately covers it and removes it from the table.

Not too long after that our new friends decide to leave. Venus takes a total dive leaving the restaurant, falling into a parked scooter. She's alright though and once helped to her feet by her friend proceeds to waive vigorously.

Fall in Yoyogi Park

On Saturday I ran into a few people I had met the night before having a picnic in Yoyogi park, and they invited me to join them.

Speaking of Murakami

My Japanese tutor -have I mentioned here before my company is paying for a Japanese tutor?-totally killed it the other day when she brought in an article from a Japanese newspaper on Haruki Murakami and why he is popular outside of Japan. I had mentioned to my tutor that I enjoyed Murakami's work so she brought in the article and helped me go through it.

The title translates to "Facing World Chaos and Enjoying it," actually the word chaos is pulled straight from english and is written in Katakana カオス "kaosu". This was my first experience trying to work through some text in Japanese written above like a second grade level. It was quite challenging and took me about 2 hours to go through just that bit above. Trying to read a news article in Japanese was kind of disorienting. I'm so critical of everything I read in English I felt totally disarmed working my way through this. Just to work out the gist of the article took so much effort that I couldn't even begin to work on some kind of second order analysis, like should I take this seriously.

The article is broken up into two sections first it addresses Murakami's popularity in China, and in the second part the English speaking world. With respect to China, Norwegian Wood is far and away his most popular novel. The article quotes a literature professor who says that work resonated with young people who moved to large cities during the period after the Tiananmen square protests who felt isolated and disoriented in their new environment.

However, in the English speaking world all of this novels have gained a large degree of popularity. The article talks about peoples attraction to the surreal, dreamlike qualities of his stories. The article closes with a quote from Murakami himself about why he thinks his works are popular. He says something along the lines of, since the end of the cold war, there hasn't been a system that allows people to make sense of the world, events from the Kobe Earthquake and subway gas attack in Japan to 9/11 in the US make people come face to face with world chaos and that leads people to relate to his stories.