It’s October and Tokyo is already getting ready for Christmas! Along with Halloween decorations, shopping mall Christmas decorations and retail sale of holiday items are very much in evidence. I had to remind myself I was actually in Japan!
I have tried to make my blog an invitation for family and friends to partake in the sights and experiences of life in Japan. Although the pandemic has restricted wider travels, my daily walks and bike rides through Tokyo neighborhoods are filled with interesting, curious, and a times somewhat humorous or mysterious, observations of everyday life.
Recycling in Japan is an art-form. With very few public waste containers and lots of sorting rules, Japan can be a hard (and expensive) place to get rid of trash.
Garbage in Japan must be very carefully separated into precise categories. In our building, a visit to the common recycling room takes time and effort. I have developed a system to meet expectations for packaging and placement of various categories of “trash.”
When out and about, it is almost impossible to find a trash can anywhere other than inside convenience stores. With few exceptions, everyone carries their trash with them. The practice makes the site of trash left lying in a public park exceptional.
While difficult to understand and master, the somewhat troublesome rules and accepted practice for trash recycling and disposal do make Tokyo one of the cleanest cities in the world.
It is fascinating living in Japan at this time in history as the country faces a complex matrix of domestic and global issues. The following article speaks to one critical facet of the serious dilemma that Japan’s new Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga desperately needs to address: how to develop and deploy Japan’s human capital, women in particular, as a central feature of the bold reforms required to supercharge the country’s stagnant economy and transform the way it does business.
Despite the unfortunate Trump-like headline, the article is worthy of attention by Japan’s aged, male-dominated political leadership, ministerial bureaucracy and business elite. It will be interesting to see how the government responds.
Back in 2014, the former Prime Minister pledged to make Japan “a place where women shine.” Sadly, the lack of any significant government action to encourage private sector structural change, it remains an unfilled promise. The article concludes:
As a result, the benefits from the educational gains that women have made since the 1980s have fallen short of potential. To be sure, a new generation of university-educated women who graduated in the 1990s and 2000s is coming of age, and some will soon take up more prominent positions. But labor-market conditions for the bulk of Japanese women remain highly constrained.
While this problem partly reflects persistent misogyny and rigid corporate attitudes, the main culprit is the cheap-labor strategy. Too many men and women suffer from job insecurity and low wages, which almost certainly has contributed to Japan’s low marriage and birth rates. And this, in turn, has kept the overall population in decline, putting a cap on economic growth.
When he entered office last month, Suga promised to “create a cabinet that works for people.” To make that mean something, he needs to put the Japanese people at the very center of his national economic strategy. Japan desperately needs to develop and deploy the human capital embedded in its population, so that it can replace the 30-year-old emphasis on cheap labor with a restored vision of a high-wage, high-productivity society. Japan should be the Switzerland of Asia, not its U.S.
You can read the article by Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist, and the author of Japan’s Far More Female Future here:http://www.paulmyer.com/wp-content/uploads/How-To-Make-Japan-Great-Again.pdf
I have been hungry for a proper burger since leaving America. For my 77th birthday dinner Keiko and I set out for one of the top Tokyo burger joints, the McLean Old Fashioned Diner located in the Kuramae neighborhood of eastern Tokyo where Keiko grew up.
The burger, fries and onion rings with a beer chaser didn’t disappoint! An unpretentious “greasy spoon” environment with a 1950’s atmosphere added to the enjoyable experience! I felt like a kid again singing along with a great soundtrack; a wonderful trip down memory lane. Proving again that you can take the kid out of New Jersey, but you can’t take New Jersey out of the kid!!
I wonder if Costco-Japan will eventually offer White Castle hamburgers for sale?
On May 22, 2020 we received a letter from President Trump saying we had received our Covid economic impact payment he sent us! Almost 6 months later the IRS check finally reached us in Tokyo arriving in this morning’s mail. A very pleasant unexpected 77th birthday surprise.