G.K. Chesterton opens his breezy 1910 jeremiad What's Wrong With the World with a humorous warning regarding "the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about 'young nations' and 'dying nations,' as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life.
"Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth," he wrote. Nations consist of people; the first generation may be decrepit, or the 10,000th may be vigorous."
Despite Chesterton's sensible warning, people continue to map nations metaphorically to the lifespan of individuals; Mark Steyn, in a somewhat hysterical essay about Muslim population growth in Europe published in January's New Criterion, says, "As fertility shrivels, societies get older -- and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age."
Well, we know what comes after old age in individuals, yes. Death. But, while it may be useful to talk about a society "aging" when its average citizen gets older and older, let's not take this metaphor into the realm of Spain losing her teeth...
Societies don't die when they increase their longevity and decrease their birthrate. They don't die when their populations decline rather than increase. They change. And from some perspectives (although not necessarily the economic one) this change is desirable, the result of increasing health and wealth. In fact, this sort of change (controlled decline rather than mindless growth) might be the very condition of a society's sustainability -- and the world's.
2006 is a significant year for Japan. Demographers agree that sometime this year the Japanese population will stop increasing and start decreasing -- from today's 127 million to about half that figure by 2100, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. But when it comes to the interpretation of this scenario, there's less consensus.
The Japan Times recently reported the projections of Iwao Fujimasa, a demographer with the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. According to the Times, Fujimasa "believes that while depopulation could depress the real estate market and affect the financial standing of banks dependent on real estate prices, as well as rattle the pension system, it will probably have a big plus side. He pointed to possible trends such as boosting gender equality, breaking down generation gaps and ultimately allowing for a more relaxed way of living. Land prices will fall, people will be able to afford bigger homes, and the daily crush on trains will be lessened."
There are two reactions to population decline: a hard-nosed economic one and a softer, more philosophical attitude focused on quality of life. If we must use the national-individual metaphor, let's say that Japan may just be hitting a sort of collective midlife crisis. And the best kind of midlife crisis makes you ask questions like: "Is that all there is?" and "What really matters to me?"
In response to the increasing average national age, money-minded people push for privatization, pension reform, greater per-worker efficiency, less protection, greater ambition. (Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is of this school. Whether he'll call for immigration reform is another matter; some say Japan's amazing new caring, sharing domestic robots have a less-publicized function: to forestall the need to bring foreign maids and nurses into Japan.) In this view, changing demographics mean that life must get harder, more ruthless, more efficient.
Not everyone agrees. The soft approach is summed up by Japan's burgeoning Slow Life trend. Ironically for a movement that seeks to shift the social focus from money to quality of life, Slow Life has its roots in marketing. In 2001 prefectural governments, chasing the "green yen" of eco-tourism, began advertising campaigns using the slogan "Ganabaranai! -- Don't go for it!" Attempting to lure stressed city dwellers to their rural regions (no doubt on high-speed trains sporting the Koizumite slogan "Ambitious Japan!"), the prefectures devised an eight-point Slow Life Manifesto that stressed nonacademic, noncompetitive lifestyles -- walking, wearing traditional clothes and eating food made from local ingredients; durable and sustainable building construction; forestry; respect for the old; self-reliance and living in accord with the rhythms of nature.
Some saw the Slow Life movement as a passing fad, but five years on magazine racks tell a different story. On a recent visit to an Osaka bookstore, I saw a plethora of new magazines using phrases like "slow living," "self-sufficiency" and "natural life" in their titles, all stressing "lifestyles of health and sustainability." As I flipped through them, recurrent themes appeared in the photographs: huts in the forest, wooden furniture (with discreet Apple computers), sleep, wabi sabi patina, simplicity, bare light bulbs, baking bread, little-house-on-the-prairie Puritan style, rustic Okinawa, bathing, artisanship, older Asian lifestyles, slow food, organic vegetables and a pervading urban longing for the rural.
Musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of the most eloquent early promoters of the Slow Life ideal, puts it like this: "The current economic system has required people to be busy trying to achieve growth -- it's as though they're continually riding a bicycle. People have to do things fast to meet the demand for excessive efficiency.... I think it would be better if Japan became a beautiful third-rate country. It would be nice if Japan was a place of delicious food, beautiful scenery and abundant nature. If that were the case, I think it wouldn't matter if one had little money."
It's not just aging boomers who think this way (Sakamoto is 54). Young Japanese have been pulling out of the rat race in such numbers that new acronyms have had to be devised for their lazy lifestyles: furitas (from the English phrase "free time") live at home with their parents well into their 30s and take temporary jobs to earn just enough money to pay off their cell-phone bills. NEETs are "not in education, employment or training." One BBC report calls these dropouts and refuseniks "Japan's free spirits."
Perhaps Japan's young "free spirits," together with the older, more affluent Slow Lifers, have something in common with the "tree-huggers, organic fructarians, solar-powered scooter riders, water-birth enthusiasts, Tantric-sex practitioners, world-music listeners, teepee dwellers, hemp-trouser wearers and Ayurvedic massage addicts" described in "A Brief History of Cranks," an excellent essay by Paul Laity in the current issue of Cabinet magazine. But, as Laity says, "Environmentalism is increasingly the cause rather than an eccentric distraction from it ... we are all sandal wearers now."
G.K. Chesterton would poo-poo the metaphor, but Japan seems to be growing a lovely long white beard.
