Reiwa in Omori
Japan has this thing when a new Emperor rises to the Chrysanthemum Throne, we begin a new era.
It’s like a grandiose New Years that comes once or twice a lifetime minus the ball drop.
People can talk pessimistically about the age to come, but a new era gives a nation hope. You get this feeling that you can define an entire era, that you get to shape something that still does not exist.
What about me? You know, Omori is almost like a forever Edo period here so I’m not feeling much of that Reiwa fever at the moment.
Times like this though make you look back on what you have done to arrive at the place that you are right now, for me the biggest question would be:
“How the hell did I end up in Shimane?”
As some may already know, I was a complete Japanese studies geek during my college years. I essentially studied how the Japanese population lived during the post war period until now. Lifestyles say a lot about hopes and aspirations, social norms, and even larger thematic topics such as neoliberalism and its development and effects in Japan. I followed lifestyle trends and how they were unknowingly being shaped by government policies and social norms. I looked into why people went to such lengths to achieve lifestyles that may have strained their physical, mental and financial capacities. I even studied what sort of social institutions that were built into Japanese society that made these lifestyles possible.
For myself and I think for many in social science, one of the most satisfying things to study and to research are paradigm shifts. So essentially when certain “ways of thinking” and “ways of living” shift in reaction to something. I found this so interesting because so much of what I thought was just “the ways things are" I found was actually socially constructed. A lot of the ways you think or understand things are largely shaped by our social environment, or in other words we are products of society.
One of those “ways of thinking” that is socially constructed is hope.
Now, I think this consciousness that lets us understand something that does not yet exist is something we humans have within us, you know without going into like psychology and Freud’s worm hole of the human psyche.
It’s such a powerful tool being able to control and create the hope of society, because you are essentially controlling the goal to human life, whatever that may be. Not only can hope can be created, but entire systems of social institutions can be artificially be created to help people get to and achieve that “hope”. Let’s take the bubble economy Japan for example, the hope that was being pushed down people’s throats went something like, come from a family that had a bread winning father and a professional housewife, take school exams to get into good schools, go to tutoring and study your butt off to get into a top-tier school, play around for 4 years, have one of your senpai’s get you a recommendation into a large company, get married to one of your co-workers, the husband stayed in the company and earned enough money to support the family while the wife stayed at home and took care of everything inside the household, get a loan to a house and a car, have some kids, work for 30 years at a same company, retire at 65 and play golf with your friends because you realized you have neglected your wife and kids all these years because you were so focused on rising up the corporate ladder.
Okay that was a bit of an over exaggeration, but let me tell you this wasn’t all that uncommon and people thought this was how life should be. This was the lifestyle that was supposed to make your next day better. Except the social institutions that held up this lifestyle and made this “hope” achievable or even allowed it to exist was because of the continuous growth of the Japanese economy. Only because there was this financial backing to Japanese society all of this was possible, maintaining these certain forms fo social institutions cost money! So when the bubble economy crashed, so did “hope”. Hope was lost because there was no longer economic backings to support all of these social institutions and norms that guided the Japanese people through their various stages in life. People lost the feeling that there will be a better tomorrow because there was nothing there to financially support that hope after the economy crashed.
So after the economy crashed began the lost decade and now the lost two decades of Japan, then there was the 1995 Sarin Gas attacks, Lehman Shock, 3/11, etc. So not only were there economic downturns, but also natural disasters and acts of violence which lead to the various studies of Japanese society where most of the themes were about comparing the golden years of 1980’s Japan to the state of hopelessness in the 2000’s.
I was really interested in learning if this was still the case back in around 2016 when I was a sophomore in college. Was Japan really still in that state of hopelessness? I would go to Japan every summer during college and find that people weren’t crying in the streets from hopelessness everyday, but it wasn’t as if anything really hopeful was driving the country. I felt like the only thing that was slightly at the back of everybody’s minds was the Olympics, maybe. That made me realize there probably isn’t much that was giving the entire Japanese population some hope for the future. What that meant for me was that there must be some small alternative hopes that were budding out of the ground in places that we didn’t even realize.
I think this thought process is a generational thing, we can talk about the lost decade and all the hopelessness that may have been in the public and academic discourse of Japanese society, but things in the present were relatively better than in the past. Convenience stores with 100 yen rice balls, the trains run on time, the internet gave us all access to endless forms of entertainment and information, cheap and good quality clothing from UNIQLO. Japanese society was relatively affluent in a very general sense. I grew up in that environment. So for me and those of my generation, we probably see Japan in a very different perspective, because we were essentially living in a time when things just plateaued. Things weren’t especially bad but it wasn’t especially good also. I think in that way, my generation grew up in an interesting time of the typical fluctuations in a capitalistic economy. Not when things were booming, but also not when things were really bad.
my generation is the post growth generation
My generation grew up during a time when Japan had achieved a relative amount of economic development which is why I keep using the phrase plateauing. Japan hit a relative plateau in economic development, but a high plateau being one of the largest economies in the world. The question then becomes what do we try to achieve next? We can either try to get more economic development and continue that growth, or perhaps we can try to achieve growth in a different way. What this plateau allows us is with a choice, a choice to choose our next step, do we continue what we have been doing for the last 50 years after WWII or do we go for something maybe alternative. Do we continue to live towards the same hope that we had, or do we create a new hope for ourselves?
Yet we kept hearing in the news about the aging population, diminishing fertility rate, young workers committing suicide from overwork, social shut-ins, the rising marital age, etc. So in a long historical point of view things weren’t too bad in Japan, and yet there were still these social problems that were slowly eating away at the Japanese population. That is the context to my generation.
Kamiyama-Cho was another one of these little pockets of hope and alternative choices
So it became my theme, to find little pockets of hope and alternative choices somewhere in this plateauing Japanese society. I was also interested in finding hope that was something a little more grassroots rather than ones that were being driven by the government. My other condition was that I wanted to focus on something that was different from building hope from absolute hopelessness. I say this because even in 2016 the memory and disaster relief from 3/11 was continuing and a large theme of hope during that period was about building something after everything was taken away. During that time after reading some books and articles about hope, I found that there were some patterns to recreating hope. One would be the example with Fukushima, where hope is built from absolute hopelessness. The other pattern that I found was when hope is built not from after a period of absolute hopelessness, but from an inkling that things needed to change. This was apparently the case in prefectures like Fukui Prefecture where they are not in a desperate situation to rebuild and revitalize, but things have plateaued with not much of a prospect that things were going to get better.
I felt that the second case of hope was more representative of Japan’s social-economic condition that I was observing. People were not desperate to create a new hope, but there was a general feeling that if we continued the way we have until now, things won’t get a lot better. Also in academia, I felt that these cases were not being taken up as much and I saw that there may be an opportunity to get myself involved in a topic that still only had a limited amount of research put into. I was in a way looking for a space of hope, where work, lifestyle, production, consumption and other basic components of life were being organically reimagined. I knew from my studies that previous hope in Japan was supported by continuous economic growth and could no longer be achieved under the current socio-economic conditions of Japan. In this way, I had a feeling that the next hope for Japan had to be something about the creation of a new value system which took advantage of the current point in history where Japan’s society was plateauing.
These sort of thoughts were swirling around in my head on that day I saw a tv show while on winter break in NJ about the company I now work at called Gungendo.
While I watched the show, I was struck by the words that the chairwoman Tomi-san said:
“We may be in the red economically, but we are in the blacks emotionally."
I was not sure what this really meant or if a company could go around existing with a business style like that, but from the television show it looked like there were young employees there working quite happily. I was also drawn to their philosophy of not simply creating new things or just protecting the past, but taking something from the past and reimagining it to fit into people’s current lifestyles.
I was intrigued by this because I just wrote a paper on the Japanese household registry and I was arguing that Japan always had this weird complex about modernization. Because Japan’s current modernization began with Perry '“opening Japan” up, modernization tended to have this connotation with westernization. I mean we can take other examples in Asia and it’s usually the case, especially with the particular history of colonization. So with the family registry the two sides of the topic would be either maintain the family and household because that is what being “Japanese” is, or it is get rid of the household system and take in a more western orientated identification system that was based more on the individual.
So I digress a little, but that I’m just trying to make the point that a town or a country can modernize without throwing away its traditions, but all the while not also getting stuck in the past and to resent change. That is exactly what I saw with the problem with Japan and its problem with hope. The hopeful lifestyles that were being constructed by society seemed to be this bizarre combination of the more negative parts of Japanese tradition and Japanese modernization which was based mostly on very neoliberal values.
I was curious to find if Gungendo had found some sort of balance of maintaining tradition, all the while modernizing in the small town of Omori, so I decided to head there myself like a good Anthropology student and to do some field work.
By the time I was finished doing my fieldwork in Omori, I had visited the town for two months in total, once from July to August and another month from December to January. The results of my findings can be found in my graduating thesis, but what I concluded was:
Gungendo and the town Ōmori is an experimental ground where the new generation of the Japanese population can re-imagine what prosperity means in post-growth Japan. A small but increasing number of youth are looking for alternatives as their lifestyles and work-life are becoming increasingly precarious because of the widely accepted logic that continuous economic growth would lead to prosperity. As I found, this is not simply a “back to our roots” movement to the countryside but is a questioning of the neoliberal system of life, and constructing a viable and sustainable lifestyle which runs on different values.
