Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future

TOKYO — As recession-wary Americans adapt to a new frugality, Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect.

The economic malaise that plagued Japan from the 1990s until the early 2000s brought stunted wages and depressed stock prices, turning free-spending consumers into misers and making them dead weight on Japan’s economy.

Today, years after the recovery, even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills. Sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming ’80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak. And the nation is losing interest in cars; sales have fallen by half since 1990.

The Takigasaki family in the Tokyo suburb of Nakano goes further to save a yen or two. Although the family has a comfortable nest egg, Hiroko Takigasaki carefully rations her vegetables. When she goes through too many in a given week, she reverts to her cost-saving standby: cabbage stew.

“You can make almost anything with some cabbage, and perhaps some potato,” says Mrs. Takigasaki, 49, who works part time at a home for people with disabilities.

Her husband has a well-paying job with the electronics giant Fujitsu, but “I don’t know when the ax will drop,” she says. “Really, we need to save much, much more.”

Japan eventually pulled itself out of the Lost Decade of the 1990s, thanks in part to a boom in exports to the United States and China. But even as the economy expanded, shell-shocked consumers refused to spend. Between 2001 and 2007, per-capita consumer spending rose only 0.2 percent.

Now, as exports dry up amid a worldwide collapse in demand, Japan’s economy is in free-fall because it cannot rely on domestic consumption to pick up the slack.

In the last three months of 2008, Japan’s economy shrank at an annualized rate of 12.7 percent, the sharpest decline since the oil shocks of the 1970s.

“Japan is so dependent on exports that when overseas markets slow down, Japan’s economy teeters on collapse,” said Hideo Kumano, an economist at the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute. “On the surface, Japan looked like it had recovered from its Lost Decade of the 1990s. But Japan in fact entered a second Lost Decade — that of lost consumption.”

The Japanese have had some good reasons to scale back spending.

Perhaps most important, the average worker’s paycheck has shrunk in recent years, even after companies rebounded and bolstered their profits.

That discrepancy is the result of aggressive cost-cutting on the part of Japanese exporters like Toyota and Sony. They, like American companies now, have sought to fend off cutthroat competition from companies in emerging economies like South Korea and Taiwan, where labor costs are low.

To better compete, companies slashed jobs and wages, replacing much of their work force with temporary workers who had no job security and fewer benefits. Nontraditional workers now make up more than a third of Japan’s labor force.

Younger people are feeling the brunt of that shift. Some 48 percent of workers age 24 or younger are temps. These workers, who came of age during a tough job market, tend to shun conspicuous consumption.

They tend to be uninterested in cars; a survey last year by the business daily Nikkei found that only 25 percent of Japanese men in their 20s wanted a car, down from 48 percent in 2000, contributing to the slump in sales.

Young Japanese women even seem to be losing their once- insatiable thirst for foreign fashion. Louis Vuitton, for example, reported a 10 percent drop in its sales in Japan in 2008.

“I’m not interested in big spending,” says Risa Masaki, 20, a college student in Tokyo and a neighbor of the Takigasakis. “I just want a humble life.”

Japan’s aging population is not helping consumption. Businesses had hoped that baby boomers — the generation that reaped the benefits of Japan’s postwar breakneck economic growth — would splurge their lifetime savings upon retirement, which began en masse in 2007. But that has not happened at the scale that companies had hoped.

Economists blame this slow spending on widespread distrust of Japan’s pension system, which is buckling under the weight of one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies. That could serve as a warning for the United States, where workers’ 401(k)’s have been ravaged by declining stocks, pensions are disappearing, and the long-term solvency of the Social Security system is in question.

“My husband is retiring in five years, and I’m very concerned,” says Ms. Masaki’s mother, Naoko, 52. She says it is no relief that her husband, a public servant, can expect a hefty retirement package; pension payments could fall, and she has two unmarried children to worry about.

“I want him to find another job, and work as long as he’s able,” Mrs. Masaki says. “We must be ready to fend for ourselves.”

Economic stimulus programs like the one President Obama signed into law last week have been hampered in Japan by deflation, the downward spiral of prices and wages that occurs when consumers hold down spending — in part because they expect goods to be cheaper in the future.

Economists say deflation could interfere with the two trillion yen ($21 billion) in cash handouts that the Japanese government is planning, because consumers might save the extra money on the hunch that it will be more valuable in the future than it is now.

The same fear grips many economists and policymakers in the United States. “Deflation is a real risk facing the economy,” President Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, told reporters this month.

Hiromi Kobayashi, 38, a Tokyo homemaker, has taken to sewing children’s ballet clothes at home to supplement income from her husband’s job at a movie distribution company. The family has not gone on vacation in two years and still watches a cathode-ray tube TV. Mrs. Kobayashi has her eye on a flat-panel TV but is holding off.

“I’m going to find a bargain, then wait until it gets even cheaper,” she says.

The Panda That Roared

YOU wouldn’t think, with all the things on the collective Chinese mind these days — Tibet, the Sichuan earthquake and especially the looming Olympics — that an American animated film about a panda would generate any pained discussion.

But you would be mistaken, as amply demonstrated by the commentary about “Kung Fu Panda,” Dreamworks’ blockbuster cartoon featuring an overweight bear named Po who saves the world.

A few weeks ago, when the movie opened in China, there was already a call for a boycott — on the grounds that foreigners had lifted one of China’s most precious symbols, the panda, and were using it for their own profit.

The boycott never got off the ground, and “Kung Fu Panda” was an immediate box office hit. In the last few weeks the movie has provoked a deeper discussion, even a degree of soul-searching and critical self-examination of the sort that China, which has an amazing mix of ambition, self-confidence and insecurity, goes through from time to time.

The main question being asked is: How could Western filmmakers have used Chinese themes to create such a brilliant animated movie with such widespread appeal to the Chinese themselves?

Why, in other words, doesn’t China itself seem to be able to use its rich traditions to such brilliant cinematic and commercial effect?

“Besides borrowing a number of sequences from classic kung fu movies in China, the animated comedy grasped the essence of our culture,” Lu Chuan, a young Chinese movie director, wrote in a much noted commentary in China Daily.

“As a movie director, I cannot help wondering when China will be able to produce a movie of this caliber,” Mr. Lu said.

Or, as Wu Jiang, president of the China National Peking Opera Company, said, according to Reuters: “The film’s protagonist is China’s national treasure and all the elements are Chinese, but why didn’t we make such a film?”

Certainly the movie’s themes do evoke some important Chinese elements, not all of them as obvious as the panda. Overriding the whole story of Po and his triumph over his own bungling nature is a recognizably Buddhist sensibility; it is embodied by the Shaolin Monastery-like setting, where spiritual enlightenment is fused with the mental discipline and mastery over the self that are prerequisites to enlightenment.

Perhaps in bemoaning their failure to be the ones to exploit these themes, the Chinese are being a bit hard on themselves. The truth is that the success of “Kung Fu Panda” is taking place within a context of a considerable cultural flourishing that seems to have used China’s traditions and history to tremendous effect, in movies by directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, and in the terrific explosion of contemporary Chinese painting.

In a way, “Kung Fu Panda” is only the latest illustration of a centuries-old tradition whereby Western artists have used China and other Asian countries to produce enduring works of art. You only have to think about Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado” or Puccini’s “Turandot” or, for that matter, the animated feature “Mulan” of a few years ago, to recall the strength and age of this tradition.

Indeed, all of these works illustrate a continuing historical imbalance in cultural cross-fertilization. The West’s use of China as an artistic setting is unmatched by any Chinese use of Europe or America as backdrops for its own cultural productions.

That imbalance is connected to another element in the picture: the animation itself. From Walt Disney on, Americans have long been developing animation as a cinematic form, while China, in this particular area of the arts, has not developed much.

American animation is not the only sort that concerns the Chinese. Some of the people who commented on “Kung Fu Panda” also evoked the popularity in China of other foreign productions, especially Japanese ones, that have exploited Chinese themes. In the 1980s, a Japanese animated movie, "Dragon Bell," used the monkey king, a Chinese classic if ever there was one, as its main character. The film played in reruns on Chinese television for two decades and probably played a role in China’s 2005 decision to ban foreign animations in prime time. Still, it’s certainly rare for an animated feature to win the kind of box office success in China that “Kung Fu Panda” has achieved, which no doubt explains the intensity of interest in Dreamworks’ production

“When we look back at it, we see that most of the animation we’ve made has been junk,” said Jiang Bo, dean of the school of art at the Shanghai Film College. This is the case despite the fact that a large number of Chinese film students actually do study animation.

But what might be most interesting are some yearnings provoked by “Kung Fu Panda” that surfaced in response to the call to boycott it. That call was largely the initiative of just one person, an artist, Zhao Bandi, and it seems to have drawn at least as much derogatory comment as support.

As Hong Tao of Beijing People’s University put it, “To criticize Hollywood for stealing Chinese cultural resources is a shallow nationalism.”

There are even a few signs that a different lesson is being drawn from the film’s success, a lesson that goes to the heart of China’s cultural situation, namely that a movie like “Kung Fu Panda” could have been produced only in an atmosphere of cultural and artistic freedom that China doesn’t enjoy. At the least, a few comments along those lines have leaked through the country’s carefully monitored and censored Internet sites.

“China has first-class directors, first-class playwrights, first-class actors, but it’s a shame that we have censorship by government officials,” one anonymous blogger wrote. “If they don’t like your work, then there’s no way.”

Mr. Lu, the commentator in China Daily, had a telling story in this regard, about a project he undertook to produce an animation for the Olympic Games. “I kept on receiving directions and orders from related parties on what the movie should be like,” he recalled. “We were given very specific rules on how to promote it.

“Under such pressure, my co-workers and I really felt stifled,” he continued. In the end, “the planned animation was never produced.”

Asian Relief: The Sharon Stone Effect

By HANNAH BEECH

The two natural disasters struck just days apart, yet their aftermaths were strikingly different. When cyclone Nargis swept through Burma on May 2-3, leaving roughly 134,000 people dead or missing, the world reacted with deep sympathy and immediate promises of aid. International generosity, so far reaching nearly $230 million in relief aid, stood in sharp contrast to the callousness of the ruling junta, which unilaterally slowed the flow of aid to a trickle and essentially ignored the plight of millions of suffering Burmese.

Then on May 12, an earthquake in the central Chinese province of Sichuan razed hundreds of villages, killing at least 65,000 people. While battalions of Chinese People's Liberation Army soldiers clawed through rubble to rescue people buried alive and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao rushed to the disaster scene to comfort victims, the Western reaction was far more muted.

Yes, nearly $160 million in cash was pledged by foreign nations, and the quake helped shift media attention from Beijing's harsh crackdown on Tibetan riots earlier this year. But, all in all, the Chinese earthquake didn't elicit the same groundswell of popular international compassion as the Burmese cyclone — much less the activist urgency of the genocide in Darfur. Indeed, significant amounts of aid to China seemed to be from multinational corporations with an eye to economic relations with the People's Republic rather than from an outpouring of populist sympathy. In an extreme indication of prevailing Western attitudes, Hollywood actress Sharon Stone suggested that the Sichuan temblor could have been the result of bad "karma" for China's recent campaign in Tibet.

Certainly, there are few victims as beleaguered as the Burmese. Oppressed by a military junta for more than four decades, the people of Burma seemed to expect little from their government when Cyclone Nargis tore through the Irrawaddy Delta. The government duly met those low expectations, for weeks keeping nearly all foreign aid workers out of the devastated delta and even confiscating private donations from Burmese horrified by their rulers' inaction. Nearly a month after the storm, the United Nations estimated that 1 million victims still had not received any help at all. Then, just two days after U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon left Burma following a donors' conference in the commercial capital, Rangoon, the generals yet again proved their disregard for international sentiment by extending by another year the house arrest of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. The figurehead of Burma's strangled political opposition, she has been under detention for much of the past two decades. With the exception of the North Koreans, few nationalities feel as downtrodden as the Burmese do.

Survivors of China's earthquake have faced a different kind of international scrutiny. While there's no questioning the overwhelming tragedy faced by the people of Sichuan, the narrative of sympathy is more complicated. In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, many foreigners were alarmed by what has been perceived as a burgeoning Chinese nationalism, which manifested itself most fervently after the Olympic torch relay was disrupted by foreign activists calling attention to Chinese human-rights abuses. The same national pride was what prompted thousands of ordinary Chinese citizens—not normally known for their sense of volunteerism—to rush to the aid of the Sichuan earthquake victims, loading up their own cars with food and water to distribute to the needy.

But the flip side to this Chinese patriotism—jingoistic rants on the Internet against any foreigner daring to question, say, Tibet's status as an inalienable part of China—has raised concerns in the West. Add to that the slew of bad press linked to Chinese workshops, which have churned out cheap but potentially dangerous products. Sichuan is one of the leading sources of the migrant labor that is powering China's factories. Perhaps it's harder to feel concern for the very workers who may have been toiling at factories producing toxic baby toys or dog food.

But people in need are people in need. True, it may be easier to cheer for an underdog like Burma than a behemoth like China. But when U.S. President George W. Bush condemned Suu Kyi's continuing detention, he also stressed that the junta's political intransigence would not affect American aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis. The same calculus should be used for Sichuan. Yes, China is richer than Burma, and it may not need as much international aid as a country widely regarded as an economic basket case. But Beijing has urgently appealed for more tents and supplies from foreign donors. And the lessons of past natural disasters are instructive: After the 2004 tsunami, the international community poured money into the Indonesian province of Aceh, where civil strife had been simmering for years. The reconstruction effort, in part, helped galvanize a peace that holds to this day.

China as a potential superpower is not going to disappear anytime soon. Already, China's state-controlled press, which just weeks ago was castigating the outside world for harping on human-rights abuses instead of cheering the upcoming Olympics, has acknowledged with gratitude the aid provided by foreign countries. A few more donations could generate a lot more goodwill. That, with apologies to Sharon Stone, is the true meaning of karma.

Japan’s work force of 66.5 million people is set to shrink by more than one-third, to 42 million, by 2050 if the country fails to reverse a declining birthrate, the government said in a report. The white paper outlined potential measures to address the labor problem, including earmarking $15 billion to $23 billion to encourage women to resume working after having children by improving child-care centers and making maternity leave more flexible.
-------
I think this is a good news for some positive social changes.

Whisk Those Blues Away

--------

Many people will get married on August 8th, 2008 in Beijing. Do you know why? That's right, it's the opening day of Olympic game in Beijing. I remember a few months ago I was told that there are going to be tens of thousands of couples (or maybe even more!) getting married on that particular day. I thought it was very interesting because obviously I underestimated the significance of Olympic game in China. Not only economically and politically it is a huge event, but also socially and culturally, it has such a tremendous impact on people's life. Among these couples, perhaps there are couples who I even know, haha. But I personally think marrying on that day lacks the kind of luster that a loved one need. I mean, since there are so many couples going to marry, some of them have to probably just pursue for the sake of the popularity. How do you relate Olympic to love and marriage? Perhaps marriage itself is a kind of sport, where two persons have to play their roles complementary to each other's side.

Maybe I should just go back to China and get married on 8/8. And it's such a lucky number in Chinese, too, which is related to money fortune. Who wants to be the other candidate?

BEIJING — China is studying how to move away from the country’s one-child-per-couple restriction, but any changes would come gradually and would not mean an elimination of family planning policies, a senior official said Thursday.

The official, Zhao Baige, vice minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, told reporters at a news conference that government officials recognize that China must alter its current population-control policies.

“We want incrementally to have this change,” Ms. Zhao said, according to Reuters. “I cannot answer at what time or how, but this has become a big issue among decision makers.”

With more than 1.3 billion people, China is the most populous nation and is home to one of the most stringent family planning regimens. Most urban couples are limited to a single child unless they pay hefty fines. Farmers are generally permitted to have a second child if the first is a girl. Minorities are often allowed to have two or more children.

For more than three decades, the restriction on births has been a centerpiece of government economic and social policy. Local officials receive performance ratings based partly on how well residents adhere to the restrictions. In the 1980s, officials routinely forced women to abort fetuses that would have resulted in above-quota births, and both men and women were often forced to undergo sterilization operations.

Enforcement of the policy has softened markedly in recent years, with most areas relying on fines to ensure compliance. But scandals over forced abortions continue to arise periodically. The restrictions also have deepened a severe imbalance in the ratio of boys to girls in the population because many families have used selective abortions to ensure the birth of a son, the traditional preference.

Chinese officials have sought to curb the excesses and abuses and have argued that the one-child restriction has prevented roughly 400 million births and allowed the country to prosper and better live within its resources.

But China’s fertility rate is now extremely low, and the population is rapidly aging, especially in urban areas. Experts have warned that China is steadily moving toward a demographic crisis with too many old people in need of expensive services and too few young workers paying taxes to meet those bills. China is often regarded as having a limitless pool of young, cheap labor, but the country’s biggest manufacturing centers are already facing labor shortages.

Some of the biggest cities, like Shanghai, have tried to make small tweaks in the policy to spur more births. Nationally, the policy now allows urban couples to have two children if both spouses are from one-child families. But officials have resisted any major policy changes out of fears that a major population boom might follow. In recent months, Chinese officials have pledged to crack down on rich couples that are using their money or influence to disobey the policy.

Ms. Zhao said surveys indicated that a large majority of younger Chinese would like two children. But she warned that current plans call only for studying potential changes and that any adjustments must not lead to a rapid jump in the birthrate.

Ms. Zhao’s comments come less than a week before the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, the Communist Party-controlled legislative body. They also come as China is trying to soften its human rights image as Beijing prepares to play host to the Olympics in August.

I’m Not Running for President, but ...

WATCHING the 2008 presidential campaign, you sometimes get the feeling that the candidates — smart, all of them — must know better. They must know we can’t fix our economy and create jobs by isolating America from global trade. They must know that we can’t fix our immigration problems with border security alone. They must know that we can’t fix our schools without holding teachers, principals and parents accountable for results. They must know that fighting global warming is not a costless challenge. And they must know that we can’t keep illegal guns out of the hands of criminals unless we crack down on the black market for them.

The vast majority of Americans know that all of this is true, but — politics being what it is — the candidates seem afraid to level with them.

Over the past year, I have been working to raise issues that are important to New Yorkers and all Americans — and to speak plainly about common sense solutions. Some of these solutions have traditionally been seen as Republican, while others have been seen as Democratic. As a businessman, I never believed that either party had all the answers and, as mayor, I have seen just how true that is.

In every city I have visited — from Baltimore to New Orleans to Seattle — the message of an independent approach has resonated strongly, and so has the need for a new urban agenda. More than 65 percent of Americans now live in urban areas — our nation’s economic engines. But you would never know that listening to the presidential candidates. At a time when our national economy is sputtering, to say the least, what are we doing to fuel job growth in our cities, and to revive cities that have never fully recovered from the manufacturing losses of recent decades?

More of the same won’t do, on the economy or any other issue. We need innovative ideas, bold action and courageous leadership. That’s not just empty rhetoric, and the idea that we have the ability to solve our toughest problems isn’t some pie-in-the-sky dream. In New York, working with leaders from both parties and mayors and governors from across the country, we’ve demonstrated that an independent approach really can produce progress on the most critical issues, including the economy, education, the environment, energy, infrastructure and crime.

I believe that an independent approach to these issues is essential to governing our nation — and that an independent can win the presidency. I listened carefully to those who encouraged me to run, but I am not — and will not be — a candidate for president. I have watched this campaign unfold, and I am hopeful that the current campaigns can rise to the challenge by offering truly independent leadership. The most productive role that I can serve is to push them forward, by using the means at my disposal to promote a real and honest debate.

In the weeks and months ahead, I will continue to work to steer the national conversation away from partisanship and toward unity; away from ideology and toward common sense; away from sound bites and toward substance. And while I have always said I am not running for president, the race is too important to sit on the sidelines, and so I have changed my mind in one area. If a candidate takes an independent, nonpartisan approach — and embraces practical solutions that challenge party orthodoxy — I’ll join others in helping that candidate win the White House.

The changes needed in this country are straightforward enough, but there are always partisan reasons to take an easy way out. There are always special interests that will fight against any challenge to the status quo. And there are always those who will worry more about their next election than the health of our country.

These forces that prevent meaningful progress are powerful, and they exist in both parties. I believe that the candidate who recognizes that the party is over — and begins enlisting all of us to clean up the mess — will be the winner this November, and will lead our country to a great and boundless future.