The American journalist Mignon McLaughlin wrote, "Spring, summer and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition". Wise words, though with a name like 'Mignon' you would expect her to have such thoughts.

(As an aside, what right thinking parent names their daughter 'Mignon', and reckon it works quite well with 'McLaughlin'? Presumably steak was quite popular at the dinner table).

Winter descended on Muroran last night, in all it cold, imperial, Siberian haute glory. Cold morning, cold day, colder night as I write this. We are due to have snow on and off for the rest of this week and early into the next.

And it's only November 16th. Going to make for a long winter this year...

Japanese Demographics Part II

As a sort of postscript to my previous entry, I will point you in the direction of this article in a recent edition of the Economist (Cian kindly lent me his copy). It is a fairly damning indictment of the inherent, one might say entrenched sexism in Japan's labour market. The article in full is at the following link:

http://www.economist.com/node/21536543

Nor is it just confined to white-collar, corporate Japan. In the university I work in there are approximately 260 teaching faculty. Three, yes, three of them are women. And they all work in the languages department. We are a science and engineering university, 10% of our undergraduates are female, yet there are no female faculty to be found teaching them (or male graduates either). It is not exactly sending out a very positive message about either their choice of study or their potential job opportunities.

Demographics

Japan held its quinquennial census last year (that's every five years, Ciara. No need to look it up), and the initial results were released last month.

(One of the incidental pleasures of same was when I got to tick both the 'head of household' and 'home-owner' boxes. Ahh, the sense of proprietary).

According to the survey there are now 128, 057, 352 people living in Japan. Surprising as this may seem, this actually a (very) slight increase of nearly 30,000 people from the previous census in 2005. However, this increase is attributed directly to a rise in the foreign population resident in Japan. Yes, us gaijin are all that is stopping Japan from slipping down the demographic sinkhole. Since the previous survey, the number of big hairy foreigners has increased by 5.8% to 1,648,037 people, which is less than 2% of the total population, but still dizzyingly cosmopolitan for Japan.
The actual number of rice-munching Japanese declined by 0.3%, the first time this has happened since the census began. Although is only a slight decline, it masks marked differences in regional demographics. Whereas Tokyo has seen an increase of over 580,000 people, Hokkaido by contrast has seen the greatest decline in population among Japan's 47 prefectures, with the disappearance of nearly 122,000 people.
Although some of this is due to a natural decline, a significant proportion can be attributed to people leaving Hokkaido to live elsewhere in Japan. The vast majority of the students here in the university, for instance, come from Hokkaido, but upon graduation more than 90% of them will leave the island to look for work elsewhere in Japan. Not many of them, I suspect, will return in the future.
Indeed, one of the most distinctive features about Japan's declining demographics is the ongoing internal migration that is taking place, which is resulting in the accelerated depopulation of many rural areas, and indeed, urban areas too. Again, to take some examples from Hokkaido: the village of Shimukappu, in the mountainous centre of the island, saw its population plummet by 23.4% in five years. Should that level of decline continue, the place will be empty by 2025.
For the urban example I will use Muroran. Back in 1969 during the steel town's heyday, the population peaked at 183,000. Then one of the large steel mills closed down in '73 and after that we became a Bruce Springsteen song. According to the 2010 census, the town's population has almost halved to 94,000 and continues to decline on by more than a thousand people a year. And of those 94,000, nearly a third of them are over the age of 65 which means that an increasing amount of the city's budget goes on pension and social welfare and health support for this group while other areas are severely reduced or cut outright. To give a personal example, the hoikusho (nursery) Cian attends, is due to close next year and be merged with another one some 3km's away as the town can't afford to keep both open.
Feckers.
Nor is there any end in sight; in fact it may well just be 'the end' for many towns and villages across Japan. Short of the government erecting a Statue of Liberty in Tokyo Bay and asking the world to send us 'your poor, huddled masses', then those quinquennial censuses are going to be filled in by less and less people.

"Who are you nature..."

"What's keeping us from reaching out and touching the glory?"

Ahh, yes. In anticipation of the imminent arrival of the dvd of 'Tree of Life', I have been rewatching, nay experiencing the films, nay the slow unspooling philosophy of Terence Malick in all its wind-washed, wheat waving glory.

And then going for long walks, both physically and mentally, in this vast, unreeling cosmos we try to render home.

Hushed voiceovers, that's what this blog really needs.

Halloween

On Sunday last we danced with madness, entertained chaos, flirted with disaster; we held a Halloween party for Cian and some of his friends in our house.

Yes, that same feeling.

I'm not too sure what we were thinking. Actually there was no 'we' as such. Matters were taken out of my hands, decisions taken behind my back, invites issued and accepted without my knowledge. Basically I was Greece and Sanae and Cian were a well sugared mix of the EU-IMF-and the munchkins.

In total we had 14 people here - four mothers, 9 kids ranging from 5 to 12, and one bewildered Irishman whose hitherto belief in the peacefulness and decorum of Japanese kids was rudely and loudly shattered.

There were games - hide-n-seek, screaming hide-n-seek, just, basic screaming, etc. - and an unfortunate amount of sweets and chocolate which send the kids off rocketing around the house like they were in an M&M fueled version of a particle collider.

I left. Or rather, I fled for my life, and hid in my office at the university until Sanae rang to say that both the children and the riot police had left.