Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival by Pilling David

Author:Pilling, David [Pilling, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

10

The Promised Road

Kumiko Shimotsubo dated the start of what she called ‘the ice age’ to the winter of 1995. Like Haruki Murakami, she regarded that tumultuous year as the time when everything changed. For her, it was less about earthquakes and sarin gas attacks. Rather, it was when, she felt, many young people were ‘frozen out’ of the system their parents had taken for granted. In her final year of college, which she spent at the University of Tsukuba, a once futuristic science city built outside Tokyo in the 1960s, she sent off more than 100 applications to companies, each neatly handwritten on a postcard. She got perhaps fifty replies, a lower ratio than her male counterparts, she recalled with some bitterness, but enough to give her hope she could get a slice of the Japanese Dream. Now a slightly disenchanted 37-year-old, whose business card identified her as a Bilingual Writer/HR Consultant/Intercultural Facilitator, Shimotsubo had found what she called ‘the promised road’ barred to entry.

We met in the elegant tea room in the Imperial Hotel, a mosaic by Frank Lloyd Wright covering one wall, the only remnant of the building he designed in 1915. Even such a prestigious hotel, still patronized by the imperial household, became swept up in the 1960s construction frenzy as Japan tore down the old in pursuit of the modern. In 1968, the hotel was redeveloped above the strenuous objections of Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow, then in her seventies, who pleaded for it to be preserved even as the bulldozers moved in.

Shimotsubo was slim and fashionably dressed with a double string of pearls draped over her sweater. She started by telling me about her career expectations when, like all the other graduate hopefuls, she set out on the rite of passage known as the shushoku katsudo. Literally the ‘find work activity’, it was the mass screening of graduates by corporate Japan. Wearing a black suit, white blouse and sensible black shoes, her hair neatly trimmed (and on no account to be dyed), the then twenty-year-old followed the advice dispensed by make-up companies about how a young female graduate setting out in life ought to look. ‘Fresh but not too sexy,’ she recalled. The shushoku katsudo, or shukatsu in the inevitable contraction, was an urban phenomenon that might be compared to the migration of wildebeest. The passage traversed, however, was not to the pastures of East Africa, but to life in a big corporation, and hence a place in the Japanese Dream.

She applied to a who’s who of elite companies, including the big trading houses such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Marubeni. But by the mid-1990s, fewer graduates were making the migration successfully. Companies had finally realized that the economic shock of the early 1990s, when asset prices started collapsing, was not an aberration. They would need to make adjustments. Because of their compact with existing employees – one that Shimotsubo likened to that of a daimyo lord with his loyal samurai retainers – there was almost no question of sacking existing workers who had implicitly been offered a job-for-life.

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