Category: Culture

Dueling PR: Are consumers spending more or less on weddings during the recession?

Are Japanese couples spending more or less on their weddings during the current recession? For the answer the J-media have unsurprisingly turned to their corporate overlords, but this time it looks like they have been given mixed signals:

  • Back in April, some of you might have seen news suggesting Japanese couples are going for more “bare bones” wedding arrangements. Specifically, the story profiles Nagano-based The Y’s (it’s a pun) is offering “photo-only” and other no-frills wedding packages for bargain prices starting at 50,000 yen. The story notes that the first such service originated in Kyoto in 1997 and now about a dozen companies nationwide administer more than 4,500 weddings (0.62% of the 723,113 weddings that took place in 2008).
  • More recently, Recruit-affiliated wedding information site Zexy has released its Marriage Trend Survey 2008 (PDF). The headline figure? While the total amount spent on weddings dropped slightly from 2007, the cost of each individual wedding has gone up. The biggest reason survey participants noted as to why they held a ceremony and afterparty was to express thanks to the people in their lives.

So does that mean the recession pushes people to spend more or less (or the same) on their weddings? J-Cast seems to think data like this reflect Japan’s growing economic disparity. The key to explaining this disparity, they argue, lies in whether a couple’s parents helped pay for the wedding. Recruit’s data shows that 78% of couples did have parental support, so perhaps the other 22% had no choice but to settle for less.

I have no data to back me up (not the first time), but I suspect that weddings can be somewhat recession-resilient. Though weddings can be expensive, if you invite enough people they will bring more than enough ご祝儀 (cash gifts) to make up for the cost. Some couples even profit from the exchange (though that means they will have to attend many of the guests’ own weddings later on).

Obviously, that could still mean the poorer sections of society have to settle for less, for a lot of reasons. Without parental support, a young couple is unlikely to have the cash that’s needed up front to make deposits or pay bills ahead of time. Also, poorer couples have poorer friends, limiting the amount of financial support they can ask for. And at any rate there is a recent trend of a rising number of shotgun marriages (estimates range from 26.8%-40% of new marriages), which can make it socially difficult to hold a big celebration due to the shame involved.

Deconstructing the Japanese housing statistics

The 2008 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications housing statistics are out. Read them here, or just read my highlight reel below.

57.6 million homes in Japan and 13.1% are vacant

Anyone who has traveled through the countryside of Japan is probably not surprised at this. Several prefectures are now in the 15 to 20% vacancy range, including Yamanashi (the worst at 20.2% vacancy), Nagano, Wakayama, and all of Shikoku.

Stand-alone houses are in the majority, but high-rise apartments are slowly taking over

Of the total home count, 55.4% are stand-alone houses (一戸建). A dwindling 2.7% are row houses (長屋建), i.e. stand-alone houses clustered together sharing walls. The remaining 41.7% are group residences (共同住宅), like apartments and condos. These form the majority of homes in the Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya metropolitan areas (52.1% of the three regions combined), and 56.4% of the housing stock around Tokyo. Looking to sell land in Texas for cash? We provide quick, no-obligation offers that make the selling process smooth and hassle-free.

Although the landscape of the group residences has evolved since the eighties, with a shift towards taller buildings dominating the skyline, one aspect remains constant: the need for reliable gutter services such as the Denver Colorado gutter services.

More owners than renters

61.2% of Japan’s homes are owned, while 35.8% are rented (the remainder is “unverified”). About 6% of the total stock is owned by the government (public housing and Urban Renaissance Agency “UR” housing, about which I plan to write more in the future). For real estate professionals navigating this market, leveraging Digital Business Cards For Realtors can enhance networking and showcase properties more effectively.

Owners have a heck of a lot more space

The average owned home has a floor area of 120.89 m2. The average rented home, on the other hand, has a floor area of 45.93 m2 (494 square feet for our American readers), which I find to be ridiculously tiny for anything resembling a “household.” (It would be interesting to see some more stats, like quintiles or something, or at least median numbers.)

Old people are taking over

8.3% of Japan’s houses are now occupied by single people over 65, and that number is rising (up 22.4% in the last five years). This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, since this is one of the most rapidly aging societies on Earth, but one must wonder who will take care of all these people in the event of a really major disaster. Like an extended LDP administration.

Time Suck is funny

Let’s close out this intense week on a lighter note:

1. The Time Suck section of Houston-based culture website 29-95.com is hilarious. It’s written by a team of people including Joe Mathlete of “Marmaduke Explained” fame (he now posts his explanations on this site). Here is one video of a “translated” rap battle they recently recommended:

 

2. Mad Men is back for its third season starting August 16 and  I for one can’t wait. It’s turned into a total soap opera but I love it because in a lot of ways the office atmosphere is remarkably similar to the corporate culture at Japanese firms. Here is a photo gallery they posted to help promote the new season (thanks to Time Suck for the link).

mad men

Priests can become jurors, but not lay judges

Asahi Shimbun, 28 July:

According to Peter Takeo Okada, who is president of the [Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan], the lay judge system “does not fit in with the mission of the clergy from the start.”

Okada gives two reasons for the conflict. The first is that the basic thinking behind Christianity is the notion of forgiveness. The clergy must preach that whatever the sin, God has mercy for sinners who repent, and therefore, that mission does not go hand in hand with handing down a conviction in a crime.

The other point is the unique position that bishops and other clergy members hold. Their beliefs are formed around the notion that God alone knows whether a person is guilty of sin. Therefore, the clergy do not judge whether a person is good or evil based on information that person has gleaned.

Officials say it would be difficult for the clergy to shift away from such thinking only while they serve as lay judges.

Further down in the article:

In the United States, which employs a jury system, few states make an exception for clergy and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued no instructions to dioceses.

Some suggest that in the United States the clergy have a stronger sense of sharing responsibility as individual members of society.

There’s another major systematic consideration, which Asahi hasn’t picked up on, and which most people overlook when comparing the Japanese lay-judge system to the American jury system.

In the US, a juror’s duty is essentially to look at evidence, to compare that evidence to a list of criteria for legal guilt or liability, and to either decide whether there is reasonable doubt that those criteria exist (in a criminal case) or to decide whether there is a preponderance of evidence that those criteria exist (in a civil case). The judgment of guilt or lack thereof is simply a function of the rules imposed by the system and is not technically up to the juror to decide: the juror is there to decide whether the evidence is credible enough. This is why the judge is generally careful in issuing jury instructions to guide their decision. (Note that, depending on jurisdiction, American jurors can often legally find a “not guilty” verdict if they object to a guilty verdict for any reason, but this ability is disdained by the trial courts and usually isn’t pointed out to the jurors.)

On the other hand, as described in a recent American law journal article (which is horribly edited, confirming all my prior suspicions about Penn kids), Japan has taken a more collegial approach where the roles of judge and jury get blissfully muddled.

At the close of the trial, the panel of judges and lay jurors will retire to deliberate. The Lay Assessor Act provides little guidance for how deliberation should proceed. This question was left to researchers at the Supreme Court. Though every detail is not finalized, summaries of their meetings indicate that some important decisions have already been made. Researchers determined that jury deliberations should open with undirected, free conversation about the trial and evidence, after which judges can clarify disputed points, review the evidence, and explain the law. Great emphasis was placed on guarding against the possibility of judges leading lay jurors to the judges’ interpretation of events. For example, judges will be asked to state their opinion only after the lay jurors have stated theirs. In the case of a disagreement between a judge and the lay jurors, if the judge can recognize the lay interpretation as valid, she should defer to the jurors. Judges should state only their opinion and avoid actively persuading jurors, especially at the beginning stages of the deliberation. However, if a judge cannot compromise on a disputed point, she is permitted to vigorously argue her view.

In short, the professional judges and lay judges (or jurors or assessors or whatever you want to call them) are supposed to be on an even footing in the whole procedure, and they are supposed to reach the decision through a holistic assessment of the situation as a group. In this regard, the lay judges are actually taking a much more active role in administering justice, so it’s little surprise that the Catholic bishops are nervous about subjecting clergy to those duties.

Nemutan’s revenge – some fact-checking and reaction to the NYT story on anime fetishists

The New York Times has an article in its Sunday magazine section by Tokyo Mango author Lisa Katayama about a “thriving subculture” of men who prefer “2D women” to real women, sometimes engaging in serious relationships with anime characters. On the website, the story is billed under the tagline “Phenomenon” which would give readers the impression that this sort of thing is common in Japan.

Seeing as it comes from America’s most prestigious and influential news outlet, the article has already been widely read (see here for a Japanese translation of a Korean-language summary), and reactions have ranged from uncritical acceptance of the reporting (wtf is wrong with Japan?!) to absolute incredulity (she just ripped off an Internet meme and borrowed from WaiWai so this “phenomenon” is completely overblown and is an example of the NYT exploiting Japan for cheap thrills).

Responding to the reaction, Katayama said on Twitter, “imho, responses to my 2D article reflect readers’ biases + issues more than the offbeat situation of story subjects.” So at the risk of revealing my biases plus issues, I am going to respond to this article.

But before I get to my overall thoughts, I want to point out what appear to be two small but important factual errors. While the article focuses on profiling individuals who are either examples of the “2D love” phenomenon or who promote the concept, at one point she cites some government statistics to bolster her claim that there is indeed a thriving subculture of men who literally think a pillow is their girlfriend:

According to many who study the phenomenon, the rise of 2-D love can be attributed in part to the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life. According to a government survey, more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan do not have friends of the opposite sex.

 After I asked the author via Twitter where she got the numbers, she helpfully directed readers to “the gov’t agency that monitors population and social security” which in proper noun terms means the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

So I looked around to find where she might have gotten the information. The results? I could find nothing to credibly back up either of those statements, but there are survey results that show similar but critically different results. Let’s take them one by one.

Friends of the opposite sex

First, the good news – there is rough statistical backing for the claim “50 percent of men and women in Japan do not have friends of the opposite sex.” A 2004 study “The Japanese Youth” conducted by the Cabinet Office shows that only 43.7% of Japanese youth aged 18-24 reported having friends of the opposite sex.

The only relevant figures from the population institute I could find were from its most recent survey from 2005, which state that around half of unmarried men and women are not currently dating anyone of the opposite sex as friends, as a serious boyfriend/girlfriend, or as a fiance.

Still, both figures are much different from saying that half of all Japanese people have no friends of the opposite sex. As kids grow up they are much more likely to have platonic friends, though it’s true that this is less common than in the US. But that in no way backs up the argument that men and women are isolated in Japan. And as for the stat on single people dating, it really is a coin flip whether a person surveyed will be dating someone or not at the time. And it’s completely irrelevant to the “2D Love” story.

Are a quarter of Japanese 30-34 year-olds virgins? No way.

Now let me repeat the other claim: “According to a government survey, more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins.”

Think about those numbers for a minute – if true they would be staggering news and quite possibly a major cause of Japan’s demographic problem. Yet in all I have read about the topic this article marked the first time I have ever seen that claim made. (Mostly it’s attributed to long life expectancies and low birth rates caused by late marriage, quality of life factors, etc.). 

It turns out that the real statistic from population institute states that around 25% of unmarried 30-34 year olds are virgins. It doesn’t say anything about the population as a whole. Note that a separate survey finds that around two thirds of men and women have lost their virginity by the time they are in university, so I find it very hard to believe that another 15% or so won’t have met someone special in the intervening 10 years.

I’ll admit that I have not scoured the entire Internet, so there may be a survey that I just didn’t come across. So to give her the benefit of the doubt, let’s see if this claim is even close to realistic. According to the institute’s 2005 survey (PDF in English, page 15), single people with no kids aged 30-34 (defined as one-person private households) make up 34% of all households in the age group.  On the other end, 54% of private households whose head of household is in that age bracket are married. That means in order for more than one quarter of all Japanese adults aged 30-34 to be virgins, one of the following must be true:  either a) almost all unmarried people at that age are virgins (and we already know that’s wrong); or b) even a good portion of married people fail to consummate their marriages several years into their lives together. And that I am afraid is next to unfathomable.

The WaiWai Connection?

So what happened? Some have accused the author of using the notorious WaiWai as a source. WaiWai is a discontinued feature of Japanese national daily Mainichi Shimbun’s website that specialized in creative translations of Japanese tabloid articles. It was taken down in 2008 after angry Japanese internet users discovered it and found scores of misleading, exaggerated, and false stories depicting Japan as a perverted and even deranged society.  

Katayama has claimed that the government reports were her sources and specifically denied using WaiWai. But thanks to James at JapanProbe, I have found the following June 2007 article that contains a passage very similar to one claim made in the NYT story: 

 The Japan Cherry Boy Association is facing a crisis after the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research revealed that almost one in four Japanese men aged 30 to 34 remains a virgin, according to Weekly Playboy (7/2).

Obviously I wasn’t there when she wrote the story, so I can’t tell where that number came from. But it could easily have come from this source as it makes the same mistake of omitting the key fact that the survey in question only covered unmarried men and women.

Getting facts like this wrong can lead to some unfortunate consequences. Already, the Korean daily Joong Ang Ilbo has posted a summary translation of the article in Japanese (and presumably Korean), complete with a verbatim repetition of the claim “more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins.” Without a correction, this idea is likely to spread and might end up becoming a commonly cited myth about Japan, much like the similarly unrealistic but widespread claim that over 90% of Japanese women in their 20s own a Louis Vuitton handbag.

Without these numbers, the background for this story becomes somewhat undermined. While the isolation between men and women in this country is commonly cited by both foreign and Japanese observers, this gap tends to be reflected in the different ways adult men and women spend their time, particularly married couples. For some fascinating anecdotes on the gulf that opens up between housewives who never leave their neighborhoods and their husbands who never leave the office, read this fascinating interview with author Sumie Kawakami.

 

Overall thoughts

Aside from the statistics issues, I think Katayama and NYT did readers a disservice by making Nisan the focus of the story, because that turns the real story on its head.

Yes, there is a subsection of otaku who are unapologetic about their dedication to anime porn and proudly wear their virginity on their sleeves. But it’s a stretch to characterize all moe anime fans as walking a blurred line between normalcy and 2-D Love, and it’s even more of a stretch to equate all 2-D Lovers with Nisan, who is clearly in a class by himself. It would have been much fairer to start with the Okayama character. He is a collector of body pillows but isn’t public about it, which is far closer to the typical consumption pattern for these products, though even he is on the extreme side. Most American men have seen porn, but you know you’ve lost your way if you buy one of those fake rubber vaginas. In Japan, most men are probably more like economic commentator Takuro Morinaga who grew up on a diet of anime and maybe even dabbled in some “2D Love” content but never made the plunge into Nisan territory (btw, Morinaga is not one of “Japan’s leading behavioral economists.” He teaches at Dokkyo University but only has his bachelor’s and is best known as a populist TV pundit who commonly makes no sense).

It’s also important to note that since at least Evangelion in the late 1990s there’s been an element of eroticism present in most popular animated series aimed at teenagers and adults, and in general sexual content in manga and anime is much more common and accepted in Japan than it would be in the US. So most otaku may in fact own things Americans might consider erotica such as sexually explicit manga or suggestive figurines (not exactly 2D), but that does not make them Nisan- or Okayama-style 2D Lovers nor even place them outside the mainstream. The US and Japan also have the first and second largest live-action pornography industries in the world, so I think that makes both populations rabid 2D Lovers in their own ways. The key difference is the preference in Japan for underage girls (both real-life and 2-D) as objects of desire, a topic that’s not discussed in the article but deserves its own investigation.

To the extent that 2D love is a real phenomenon, it is driven by pop culture and consumption preferences led by people like Toru Honda and Momo who have books and pillowcases to sell. The market for this stuff is a relatively small niche of the overall otaku market, and I don’t see much of a serious ethos that goes far beyond a kind of brand loyalty (but please by all means prove me wrong; you could say the same thing about NASCAR fans but no one doubts NASCAR’s importance and influence on the identity of certain subsections of the US). And yes, the erotic body pillows are a popular accessory among that demographic. But Nisan and the few people who have an abnormal attachment to their pillows are merely the extreme example of what is largely a story of private porn consumption. And while I have never met or spoken with Nisan, how much do you want to bet he carries his pillow around either as an elaborate joke or to prove his otaku street cred? The whole idea of a proud life-long virgin has the air of a joke about it, and you can read any 2-channel thread on the topic to get an idea of how common it is for people to riff on this meme.

I want to be clear that I am not necessarily against this type of reporting. Far from it, I would say that all weird stuff everywhere should be documented and presented to the world. It’s an amazing world out there with countless stories waiting to be told. Lisa Katayama wrote an interesting story in her field of specialty, so I don’t hold it against her for publishing this article or trying to entertain by finding interesting aspects of Japan to present to the world. And as someone who loves to dig through government reports, I hereby offer that the next time she wants to write a story she is more than welcome to enlist my help if she wants to know what government studies are actually saying about Japan. It’s just in this case she got a couple of facts wrong and mischaracterized what I see as the real situation.

To be honest, if I didn’t notice the potentially groundbreaking statistics, I don’t think I would have bothered to write about this story. The “weird Japan” theme in the English-language media is what it is – viewed from the outside a lot of what happens in Japan does seem odd. And the New York Times is in the business of presenting the world to Americans in an entertaining and digestible manner. Producing stories that cast Japan as a backward country that got modernization wrong lets the readers feel better about their own country and confirm the basic rightness of the American dedication to social progress. But Japan is interesting enough without having to resort to exaggeration.

(Thanks to James at Japan Probe for help with some of the research in this post)

Renting in Japan vs America – Part 1

Inspired by the news the other day that a Kyoto district court has rules that housing rental contract renewal fees are a violation of consumer rights, I thought I would write a brief introduction to how renting works, based primarily on my own experiences.

I have rented twice in America, three times in Japan, and one time in Taiwan, with an asterisk. As this post was getting quite long, I’ve decided to split it up into three pieces. Since I want to go in chronological order, I’ll first discuss America with a brief mention of Taiwan, then part 2 will discuss how it works in Japan, and finally in the third part I will break down my actual housing contract as specific examples.

I went to college at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in the small city of New Brunswick. After two years in various dorms I decided to move out, and went looking for a house or apartment to share with a friend or three. The Rutgers campus is surrounded by a zone of houses (with a very few apartment buildings) which are occupied almost entirely by students renting from year to year, formed as if the city were insulating itself from the campus in much the manner of an oyster generating a pearl to protect its soft, fragile body from a piece of grit. Since houses in the area are almost entirely for students, landlords can advertise directly to them quite easily through the housing office bulletin board etc, so there is no need for anyone to involve real estate agents. In most cases, the owner of the house rents directly to students, and are usually very amateurish about arranging repairs etc. The security deposit is equal to 1.5 months rent, as specified by city ordnance, and must be kept in a special bank account which may be used only to store the security deposit. When first moving in, the only thing you pay are first month rent, last month rent, and the security deposit. There is no “renewal fee” or anything similar, and in ordinary circumstances, most of the security deposit is returned.

This is pretty much the procedure throughout the US. While houses may be rented directly by the owner or through a real estate agent (who I presume earns some sort of fee), one often has contact with the landlord (i.e. the actual owner) after moving in, but owners of multiple properties may hire a company to deal with residents for them. Large apartment buildings generally have a superintendent who manages building, particularly construction, although I am somewhat vague about how small apartment buildings generally work. Security deposit is usually legally restricted to an amount of 1.5 or 2 months rent, and contract renewal fees are illegal. There is one big exception in the case of ‘key money’, which I will discuss later.

I should also add that exclusion by race or nationality is highly illegal, to the point where realtors are legally prohibited from even discussing the racial makeup of the neighborhood, should the renter be trying to, for example, avoid living near black people. This is very strictly enforced (at least in some states.) My mother had a good friend who worked as a realtor, who told me that the New Jersey state board of real estate (or whatever the official name is) actually sends undercover inspectors to do random checks of real estate agents and make sure they are following the discrimination guidelines. Realtors who break the rules lose their license.

I lived in one such house for a year (actually the first story of a two family house, as many houses are in the area), went to Japan for two years, where I lived in school dorms, and then returned for my final year at Rutgers, where I shared a second-story apartment of a different two-family house, which had been arranged while I was away by the girlfriend of a good friend (the girl being Jess Rees and the friend being Brian Cervino, both members of the band Huma whose music I recommend), and another guy that she knew. I’m afraid I forget now exactly what the rent was, but it came out to somewhere between $300 and $400 per person, plus some more for utilities. The security deposit in New Brunswick is set by law at 1.5 months, and in both cases most of it was returned, although well after the 30 day window required by law. As a student with no independent source of income, the landlords also required parents to co-sign as a guarantee. This is common in the US in such situations, but is not usual for renters who actually have a stable job. In both cases, everyone living in the apartment signed the lease, but the room and rent allocation was not explicitly spelled out, which in retrospect might have been a good idea, as there were some minor arguments in that area in the first house (although none at all in the second.)

I next went to study in Taiwan for a few months, where had arranged no housing in advance aside from a one-week reservation in a youth hostel, but almost immediately found a promising room advertised on a bulletin board at school. This experience gets an asterisk because as a subleter I never signed, or even examined, a contract and know relatively little about the local procedures and laws. My general impression, however, is that it works more or less the same as in most of the US, with no ‘key money’ or renewal fees, and only moderate security deposits. It seemed to me that rentals often go through agents (at least in apartment building-dominated Taipei) but perhaps in smaller cities/towns there are more landlords renting directly.

Stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow.

Mizuhiki twine art

Mizuhiki is a Japanese craft that uses twine made from washi (Japanese-style paper) to create fancy bows and other designs. You could call it a rough analogue of American pipe-cleaner art. Anyone familiar with Japanese culture has probably seen it decorating gift packages or envelopes used for cash gifts given at weddings:

  img39048212

Foreigners who rave about Japanese gift-wrapping techniques often have this stuff in mind.

More than 70% of Japan’s mizuhiki output comes from Iida, a city in Nagano prefecture. The city is home to a mizuhiki museum, where you can find some more creative renditions of the art form:

tk

A turtle and a crane, made as a gift to Crown Princess Masako Owada.

dress

A twine wedding dress.

dragon

A dragon (If I am not mistaken, even the smoke is made of twine).

An ex-diplomat’s three-step English boot camp for university students

judge_yanai

Shunji Yanai, former Japanese ambassador to the United States and current judge at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, offers some radical measures to help university students bring their English communication skills up to speed.

Writing in the July 21 evening edition of the Nikkei Shimbun, he explains that when he first started teaching at a university after retiring as a diplomat, he was asked to help lead extracurricular study sessions for students.

Though his students could read English fairly well, he soon became painfully aware of their poor conversational English. Typically, he blamed Japan’s education system for emphasizing test preparation over actual communication skills.

Out of a concern for their futures as global citizens, Yanai came up with the following crash course to whip the students into shape:

  1. Memorize and recite US presidents’ political speeches: He made all his students memorize a speech word for word and recite it in front of the group. The variety of sentence structures in each speech helped with conversational skills and composition, while speaking at length trained their mouth muscles to speak in English.
  2. Memorize jazz standards and listen and sing along to the songs at live performances: He took some of his students to jazz bars and pays for their drinks… on the condition that they memorize the lyrics ahead of time. Singing along to the songs with some drinks in them, he claims, helped students start speaking more fluently.
  3. Place a digestive pill in your mouth to help learn how to pronounce R’s differently from L’s: Japanese people grow up without using the English L and R sounds in their everyday lives – the sounds in standard Japanese that are written with a letter “R” in English are actually pronounced with a sound that’s somewhere between the L in “la” and the “D” in “dog.” To fix that problem, Yanai had students practice saying R words with a pill of biofermin digestive medicine in their mouths. The weight of the pill kept their tongues from hitting the roofs of their mouths, which would result in a mistaken L sound.

Now, I seriously doubt Yanai ever used these methods on himself. As a former diplomat he has presumably gone through the foreign ministry’s rigorous language training. As far as I can tell from the diplomats I have met over the years, this training is highly effective – every Japanese diplomat I’ve met has spoken very good, fluent English. If this is because of days spent with pills in their mouths, I would be very surprised.

I am far from an expert in English teaching methods, but I can’t help but question this plan’s effectiveness. Can a strict regimen of memorizing speeches and jazz songs, recitation, and jury-rigged palate correction do what commitment, good guidance, and more traditional practice cannot?