Japanese culture – there are two cultures in Japan. The traditional culture that most people seem fascinated by and attracted to. Then there is the modern culture which is equally fascinating, but quite dark and depressing.
Traditional culture includes Japanese Tea Ceremony, flower arrangement, Haiku (Japanese poetry), calligraphy, martial arts such as Karate and sumo, Hanami (cherry blossom viewing) and origami to name a few. However, this culture is being replaced by a new emerging culture and it isn’t pretty . School bulling, suicide, group suicides, school girl prostitution, shopping addiction, loveless marriages and broken families , television and computer game addiction….the list could go on and on.
When first coming to Japan I was overwhelmed by the culture and the friendliness of the people. I am still amazed by the culture, the food, the history and people. However, after living in Japan for 10 years I can no longer turn a blind eye to certain aspects of the lifestyle and the new emerging culture. Usually I am fairly protective of Japan and try to defend Japanese opinion, but opinions and facts are indeed very different things.
The Dark Side of Japanese Culture
School bulling in Japan is reaching epidemic proportions..well not really…but it certainly seems that way with the number of news stories on the subject. It is growing problem with which Japanese society lacks the compassion and responsibility to do anything about. I think it also underscores the problems with lack of love and relationship in families. School bullying has led to an increase in childhood and teenage suicide.
More than 100 people take their live everyday in Japan. In the news group suicides are now monthly news stories. Internet suicide web sites have become one of Japan’s most morbid trends — total strangers making arrangements online to kill themselves together. Rather than searching for support services to to get help, Japanese are now looking at these suicide web sites as the answer to their unhappy lives. Suicide web sites are easy to find. Japanese people post their feelings and details of their troubled lives in the hope to find someone to suicide with. Some post include exchanges on methods of suicide and lists of materials necessary for self-asphyxiation. The group suicides usually take place inside sealed cars, where people burn charcoal so that they will die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Japan has had a homeless problem since the economic bubble burst in the early 1990s and unemployment began to rise. I remember once offering a homeless man a pizza in Shinjuku because I was so shocked to see him eating rice out a garbage can. Unfortunately, it became all-to-familiar site and I made efforts to avoid homeless people when they approached me as I walked to my teaching job in the morning.
In most major cities you will see homeless people.
Currently in Osaka there are more than 10,000 homeless people living in the city. The majority of the homeless are single men aged in the late fifties. Most of them victims of of the construction industry, day laborers who toiled without fringe benefits to help Japan flourish in the postwar era. The recession hit contractors hard and they have been out of work for years.
Many of the homeless are desperate for a job. But there are no jobs and no hope for their future. There is also little in the way of support from the government, and no compassion from people, even family members. In fact most of the homeless are systematically eliminated from society. The average homeless man is e middle or older-aged and single. They have difficult finding jobs because companies believe married men will work more strenuously, since husbands in Japan are usually the sole breadwinners.
Japan’s homeless problem is attributed to the deeply rooted discrimination of old age- a unique aspect of the problem of homelessness in Japan. While homeless people suffer from low self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy, age discrimination reinforces their sense of alienation. This is coming from a culture that many westers percieve respects the older generation. Homless people are considered to be stubborn, inflexible, weak, and forgetful because of their age. Because they are alienated from society for a long time, they don’t expect to be spoken to.
