International Herald Tribune editorial mentions Gaijin Ura Hanzai File and Japan’s “innovation problem”

I found the editorial pretty lame, arrogant and your usual superficial analysis you could read 10 or much more years ago. “Tokyo is still awash with women wearing work uniforms that make them look like 1970s flight attendants.” Yes, and awash with men in … business attire, like in Manhattan. Big deal. Yanagisawa is 71. His mind was raised and stultified in a cultural context based on the values of his father. It stinks Meiji. It does not excuse the gaffe, and as a mean of preempting criticism, my point is not to support an old fart, but to understand why an old fart thinks like an old fart. Unless one observer/journalist doesn’t start doing that exact thing rather than reacting as a pavlovian dog to any new blunder from the geriatric men and their sons or grand-sons in power, nothing will be gained in terms of contemporary social analysis of today’s Japan (or elsewhere as well).
There are lots of Yanagisawa’s with power in this country whose mind linger 50 years ago in terms of generally admitted values. The same apply to other countries with a difference in terms of how fast a society tends to “track the currents of history.” Japan is known to tend and lay behind, and at the same time ahead when it comes to (the perception of) trendiness, cool design and all the visuals that come with it. So much that culturally clueless young Westerners, from Europe especially, are dreaming these days of Japan as the holy land. The Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu is a second rate phenomenom that was – seemingly – brillantly dealt with by this blog and others, resulting in that trash being pushed back in the seedy gutters of distribution where it belongs. But despite that piece of crap showing the known undercurrent of “traditional” xenophobia in this country, it does not totally stop foreigners to thrive to various levels here, not always in blessed conditions, but at times in better condition than a Mexican in the US or an Algerian in France. There’s a colored guy selling roast chickens in Ameyoko – Ueno, and when I spotted his tiny shop, I really felt that times they are changing, too slowly for the newspaper journalist’s taste, but changing all the same.

“What Japan’s economy lacks most is the kind of rampant entrepreneurship you would expect from such a highly educated labor force.”

A keen observer of Japan already in the knows about what education is all about here and what they learn at school is – sociability that fit the Japanese model mainly – what with already well-informed and referred to low level of generalized trust should on the opposite “not” expect any such thing from “a highly educated labor force.” It is pathetic and farcical to read such piece of journalism in 2007.
The rest is standard issue and comes down to the fact that the government should put money in the incentives to have children perceived as less of an economic drain and more of a hopeful future. And Dentsu could put less money in recruiting Sakuras, and more in displaying the invisible pregnant mothers and “happy families” that are so lacking in “cool Japan” vision where married bachelors are kings, and queens too.