Japan has a worrying number of virgins, government finds

By Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, September 16, 2016

Japan’s demographic challenges are well-known: It’s home to the world’s oldest population and has a shrinking birthrate and an astonishing number of single people. And it seems that, despite government efforts to incentivize marriage and child-rearing, things aren’t quite trending in the right direction.

According to the Japan Times, a new survey of Japanese people ages 18 to 34 found that 70 percent of unmarried men and 60 percent of unmarried women are not in a relationship. It gets worse: Around 42 percent of men and 44.2 percent of women admitted that they were virgins.

The study is carried out by Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research every five years. The organization has noted a marked trend since its first foray on questions of relationships and sex in 1987, when it found that 48.6 percent of men and 39.5 percent of women surveyed were unmarried. In 2010, 36.2 percent of men and 38.7 percent of women in the 18-34 age bracket said they were virgins. The number of children among couples who have been married for between 15 and 19 years averaged a record low this year.

The Japanese government under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said it wants to raise the nation’s fertility rate from 1.4 to 1.8 by 2025. It’s offering better child-care services and tax incentives for married couples, though such programs have yet to bear statistical fruit.

Most people surveyed said they want to get married at some point. It’s just not clear when.

“They want to tie the knot eventually. But they tend to put it off as they have gaps between their ideals and the reality,” Futoshi Ishii, head researcher for the study, told Japan Times. “That’s why people marry later or stay single for life, contributing to the nation’s low birthrate.”

This is not unique to Japan–in various parts of the developed world, economic uncertainty is reshaping the way millennials and other young people conceive of their sex lives and marital choices. But it’s particularly pronounced in the Asian nation, where experts and government officials have spent the better part of a decade fretting over the country’s population decline and, as WorldViews once put it, “sexual apathy.”

A booming industry surrounds Japan’s growing condition of loneliness, a phenomenon at once quite particular to the Japanese, yet also a glimpse into a future where many people live atomized lives mediated exclusively through personal technology.

There was one clearly positive indicator in the survey: For the first time, the proportion of women returning to work after having their first child in Japan’s once notoriously patriarchal society exceeded 50 percent.

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Japan Emperor Intends to Abdicate ‘in a Few Years’—NHK

Reuters, July 13, 2016

TOKYO–Japanese Emperor Akihito, who has spent much of his time on the throne trying to heal the wounds of World War Two, intends to abdicate in a few years, public broadcaster NHK said on Wednesday, a step that would be unprecedented in modern Japan.

The 82-year-old monarch, who has had heart surgery and been treated for prostate cancer in recent years, expressed his intention to the Imperial Household Agency, NHK said.

It did not cite a reason and officials at the agency could not immediately be reached for comment. Akihito has been cutting back on his official duties, handing over some of the burden to his heir, Crown Prince Naruhito, 56.

Born in 1933, Akihito was heir to Emperor Hirohito, in whose name Japan fought World War Two.

The soft-spoken Akihito marked the 70th anniversary of World War Two’s end last year with an expression of “deep remorse”, a departure from his previous remarks seen by some as an effort to cement a legacy of pacifism under threat from conservative Japanese nationalists.

“Looking back at the past, together with deep remorse over the war, I pray that this tragedy of war will not be repeated and together with the people express my deep condolences for those who fell in battle and in the ravages of war,” he said.

While Akihito’s father was a controversial figure, Akihito “was the first post-war emperor to embrace the (pacifist) constitution and his role as a symbol of national unity”, said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.

“He cares a great deal about war issues and reconciliation (with Asian countries). Naruhito has made clear that he will carry on with that,” Nakano added.

Akihito has sought to deepen Japan’s ties with the world through visits abroad. In 1992 he became the first Japanese monarch in living memory to visit China, where bitter memories of Japan’s past military aggression run deep.

Emperor Kokaku, who gave up the throne in 1817, was the last Japanese emperor to abdicate, NHK said.

Miiko Kodama, a professor emeritus at Musashi University, said the Imperial Household Law would need to be amended to allow Akihito to step down, a process that could take time and debate in parliament.

A scientist by avocation, Akihito is the first royal heir to have married a commoner, Michiko Shoda, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist.

Under the U.S.-drafted, postwar constitution, Japan’s emperor is “the symbol of the State and of the unity of the People”, with no political power.

Akihito’s efforts to draw the imperial family closer to the people in image, if not in fact, have played into a carefully crafted picture of a “middle-class monarchy” that has helped shield it from the harsh criticism suffered by flashier royals abroad.

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Japan Election, a Landslide for Abe, Could Allow a Bolder Military

By Motoko Rich, NY Times, July 11, 2016

TOKYO–The Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has governed Japan in one way or another for all but four of the past 61 years, a winning record that reflects the political inertia of a society that values stability and tradition.

But even by the standards of Japanese politics, Mr. Abe’s landslide victory in national elections on Sunday was stunning. For the first time, voters gave the Liberal Democrats and their allies more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament–a supermajority that could allow Mr. Abe to realize his long-held ambition of revising the clause in the Constitution that renounces war and make Japan a military power capable of global leadership.

Opinion polls show only lackluster support for Mr. Abe’s security agenda or even his program to revitalize the Japanese economy, but the public appeared unwilling to take another chance on the opposition Democratic Party, which stumbled badly in its last, rare stint in power, most notably in its response to the 2011 earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The vote for stability at home, though, is likely to provoke unease across Asia, where memories of Japanese militarism in World War II endure and the prospect of a more assertive Japan will add to worries over China’s territorial ambitions and North Korea’s nuclear program.

In China, Xinhua, the state news agency, warned in a commentary on Monday that the election results “could pose a danger to Japan and regional stability.”

Experts say that Mr. Abe’s governing coalition will not be able to push through constitutional revisions immediately, given that some of the partners have differing opinions on what needs to be amended and how. For example, the Liberal Democrats’ main ally, a small Buddhist party, has said that it opposes changes to the clause that renounces war. At a news conference on Monday, Mr. Abe said that he intended to press for debate on constitutional revision, though he acknowledged that “it’s not so easy” and added, “I expect the discussion will be deepened.”

Mr. Abe’s party, in a draft proposal of a revised Constitution, has also recommended amendments to the clause on freedom of speech and the press that could limit these rights in cases deemed dangerous to the public interest. Another proposal would expand emergency powers for the prime minister. Any revision would need to be approved by a majority in a public referendum.

But the party’s victory on Sunday appears to have less to do with its proposals and more to do with the disarray in the opposition Democratic Party.

“The people’s distrust towards the Democratic Party is very high,” said Lully Miura, a lecturer on international politics at Tokyo University. “In 2009, the Democratic Party won the government, but they failed and failed and failed, and even once-supporters of the Democratic Party now distrust them.”

Outside Japan, Mr. Abe’s new supermajority is likely to further unsettle an increasingly tense region. South Korea defied China last week by announcing that it would deploy an advanced American missile defense system to protect itself against North Korea. And many in Asia are waiting to see how China and the United States respond to a ruling expected on Tuesday in a complaint brought by the Philippines challenging Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.

“The Chinese will fear that Abe will find a way to work the system to his advantage,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia and a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. At a regular news briefing on Monday, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Lu Kang, said that China and other Asian countries were “concerned about political moves in Japan” because of its past military action in the region.

In South Korea, an editorial in Munhwa Ilbo, a right-leaning newspaper, said the election results “opened the door for a Japan that can go to war,” though it added that a rearmed country “will also help deter North Korea’s nuclear threat and check the rising military power of China.”

The White House had no immediate comment on the election, but Jonas Stewart, a spokesman for the United States Embassy in Tokyo, said the Japanese government remained “a steadfast ally across our broad agenda of regional and global issues.” The United States supported Mr. Abe last year in the passing of the security bills that enable the military to participate more fully in foreign actions.

While constitutional change may be a long way off, some analysts said they worried the consequences of Sunday’s election were more fundamental.

“Democracy needs a system of checks and balances,” Gerald L. Curtis, a professor of political science at Columbia University, wrote in an email. “But if the opposition parties are impotent and the L.D.P. is firmly under Abe’s control, that system will be weakened to an unprecedented degree.”

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Retired Japanese Fighter Pilot Sees an Old Danger on the Horizon

By Martin Fackler, NY Times, April 3, 2015

NAGANO, Japan—Kaname Harada was once a feared samurai of the sky, shooting down 19 Allied aircraft as a pilot of Japan’s legendary Zero fighter plane during World War II. Now 98 years old and in failing health, the former ace is on what he calls his final mission: using his wartime experiences to warn Japan against ever going to war again.

This has become a timely issue in Japan, as the conservative prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has called for revising Japan’s pacifist Constitution. On a recent afternoon in this alpine city near his home, Mr. Harada was invited to address a ballroom filled with some 200 tax accountants and their business clients.

After slowly ascending the stage with the help of his daughter, he stopped to hang up hand-drawn war maps and a sepia-toned photo of himself as a young pilot in a leather flight suit glaring fearlessly into the camera.

It was the same face that now turned to look at the audience, creased by age, and somehow softer and wiser. His body was so frail that his suit hung loose like a sail, but he spoke with a loud voice of surprising vigor.

“Nothing is as terrifying as war,” he began, before spending the next 90 minutes recounting his role in battles, from Japan’s early triumph at Pearl Harbor to its disastrous reversals at Midway and Guadalcanal. “I want to tell you my experiences in war so that younger generations don’t have to go through the same horrors that I did.”

It is a warning that Mr. Harada fears his countrymen may soon no longer be able to hear. There are only a dwindling number of Japanese left who fought in the war, which in Asia began when Imperial Japan invaded northeastern China in 1931, and claimed tens of millions of lives over the following 14 years.

In an interview after his speech, Mr. Harada described himself as “the last Zero fighter,” or at least the last pilot still alive who flew during that aircraft’s glory days early in the war with the United States. He recounted how in dogfights, he flew close enough to his opponents to see the terror on their faces as he sent them crashing to their deaths.

“I fought the war from the cockpit of a Zero, and can still remember the faces of those I killed,” said Mr. Harada, who said he was able to meet and befriend some of his foes who survived the war. “They were fathers and sons, too. I didn’t hate them or even know them.”

“That is how war robs you of your humanity,” he added, “by putting you in a situation where you must either kill perfect strangers or be killed by them.”

Mr. Harada said that as he and other aging veterans pass from the scene, Japan will lose more than just their war stories. He said it was his generation’s bitter experiences, and resulting aversion to war, that have kept Japan firmly on a pacifist path since 1945.

While he tries to avoid wading into politics, he let slip a jab at Japan’s current leaders, who he said seem a bit too eager to discard Japan’s renunciation of war, and too forgetful of what an accomplishment its long postwar period of peace really has been.

“These politicians were born after the war, and so they don’t understand it must be avoided at all costs,” he said. He sat on a tatami mat in his living room, which is decorated with pictures of aircraft and an aluminum fragment from the Zero in which he was shot down in 1942. “In this respect, they are like our prewar leaders.”

Similar concerns are shared by many Japanese, as the nation approaches the 70th anniversary of the war’s end. Warnings about the passing of the war generation have been voiced all the way up to Crown Prince Naruhito, 55, who in February urged his nation to “correctly pass down tragic experiences and history to the generations who have no direct knowledge of the war, at a time memories of the war are about to fade.”

Such worries have made Mr. Harada a highly sought-after public speaker. He said he has spoken dozens of times in recent years, though he has had to cut back since collapsing from exhaustion in a bathroom after a talk last year. Despite a recent diagnosis of throat cancer, he speaks with a passionate conviction that left some in the Nagano audience brushing away tears.

“I am 54, and I have never heard what happened in the war,” said Takashi Katsuyama, a hair salon owner, who like many in the audience said he was not taught about the war in school. “Japan needs to hear these real-life experiences now more than ever.”

Mr. Harada’s talk was filled with vivid descriptions of an era when Imperial Japan briefly ruled the skies over the Pacific. During the Battle of Midway in 1942, he said, he shot down five United States torpedo planes in a single morning while defending the Japanese fleet. He described how he was able to throw off the aim of the American tail gunners by tilting his aircraft to make it drift almost imperceptibly to one side as he closed in for the kill.

He also described his defeats. He said he had to ditch his plane in the sea after Japan lost all four aircraft carriers it sent to Midway, the battle that turned the tide of the war in favor of the United States. Four months later, he was shot down over the island of Guadalcanal. He survived when his plane crashed upside down in the jungle, but his arm was so badly mangled that he never fought again. He spent the rest of the war training pilots back in Japan.

After Japan surrendered, he said, he hid from what he feared would be vengeful American occupiers. He worked for a time on a dairy farm, but found himself plagued by nightmares that made it tough to sleep. In his dreams, he said, he kept seeing the faces of the terrified American pilots he had shot down.

“I realized the war had turned me into a killer of men,” he said, “and that was not the kind of person I wanted to be.”

He said the nightmares finally ended when he found a new calling by opening a kindergarten in Nagano in 1965. He said he was able to alleviate the pangs of guilt by dedicating himself to teaching young children the value of peace. While he has now retired, he said he still visits the school every day he can to see the children’s smiling faces.

He said it took many more years before he could finally talk about the war itself. The turning point came during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, when he was appalled to overhear young Japanese describe the bombing as if it were a harmless video game. He said he resolved to speak out.

He has been talking about his war experiences ever since.

“Until I die, I will tell about what I saw,” Mr. Harada concluded his speech to the accountants’ group. “Never forgetting is the best way to protect our children and our children’s children from the horrors of war.”

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