Japan Socially Breaking Down After Two Lost Decades.

[Patrick Degan]

Gee, you steadily impoverish the middle and working classes, shut millions of youths out of upward mobility, and the fabric of society begins to disintegrate. Whoduthunkit, eh? Think our own business conservatives might see that this really wouldn't be a good idea to bring about in our own country? No, of course not —they're too stupid greedy focussed on business priorities to consider it.

Because Japan is totally run by Randian libertopians, enacting policies that would make an American business conservative jizz his pants, right?

The phrase "man of straw" springs to mind for some reason.

[Guardsman Bass]

Gee, you steadily impoverish the middle and working classes, shut millions of youths out of upward mobility, and the fabric of society begins to disintegrate. Whoduthunkit, eh? Think our own business conservatives might see that this really wouldn't be a good idea to bring about in our own country? No, of course not —they're too stupid greedy focussed on business priorities to consider it.

Because Japan is totally run by Randian libertopians, enacting policies that would make an American business conservative jizz his pants, right?

The phrase "man of straw" springs to mind for some reason.

The point is that many of Japan's less pleasant economic problems are reactions to restrictions and interventions in the Japanese domestic market. Like the heavy use of contract workers to get around the "lifetime employment" system, the propping up of "zombie" companies with credit, the inefficient and protected service sector, and so forth.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Gee, you steadily impoverish the middle and working classes, shut millions of youths out of upward mobility, and the fabric of society begins to disintegrate. Whoduthunkit, eh? Think our own business conservatives might see that this really wouldn't be a good idea to bring about in our own country? No, of course not —they're too stupid greedy focussed on business priorities to consider it.

Because Japan is totally run by Randian libertopians, enacting policies that would make an American business conservative jizz his pants, right?

In some ways yes, although the root cause of this is that Japan has found no way to replace the model deriving from the post-war period. Like the articles said, the model was that the employees gave a large part of their life to the companies and in return the companies guaranteed a job until retirement age, and in many cases other company benefits as well. It was a bizarre mix of classical liberalism and traditional Confucian values. The system broke down when Japanese economy after the 1980s could no longer grow, but at the same time efficiency had improved so much that existing employees could do all the work the companies needed and even more; many positions became superfluous, but for a long time there was no way to lay off those workers. However, when they were finally laid off it did improve profit margins of the companies, but not the Japanese economy, because by that time most investments were going to the "Tiger economies" and China.

The only way to improve the situation somewhat would be to force the old employees to work less or at least force the companies to pay them for overtime, which would stimulate domestic consumption and perhaps generate some jobs in the process. That, however, would reduce the profit margins and make Japan look less efficient, which is why it's unlikely to happen. Nobody really knows how to get out of the pit, although the neoliberals of course suggest all-round paycuts to make the economy more competitive with China, which would encourage the companies to hire more employees etc. Now, that might work, but it would also mean seriously lowering the standards of living, so it's politically very difficult. All possible solutions to try and solve the situation are going to be very unpopular in some ways: the companies of course would fight tooth and nail any attempts to decrease the working hours of employees, but any government suggesting major cuts to the wages would probably not stay in power for very long, either.

[Surlethe]

Gee, you steadily impoverish the middle and working classes, shut millions of youths out of upward mobility, and the fabric of society begins to disintegrate. Whoduthunkit, eh? Think our own business conservatives might see that this really wouldn't be a good idea to bring about in our own country? No, of course not —they're too stupid greedy focussed on business priorities to consider it.

Because Japan is totally run by Randian libertopians, enacting policies that would make an American business conservative jizz his pants, right?

The phrase "man of straw" springs to mind for some reason.

Oh, please do add some detail.

[Surlethe]

The only way to improve the situation somewhat would be to force the old employees to work less or at least force the companies to pay them for overtime, which would stimulate domestic consumption and perhaps generate some jobs in the process. That, however, would reduce the profit margins and make Japan look less efficient, which is why it's unlikely to happen. Nobody really knows how to get out of the pit, although the neoliberals of course suggest all-round paycuts to make the economy more competitive with China, which would encourage the companies to hire more employees etc. Now, that might work, but it would also mean seriously lowering the standards of living, so it's politically very difficult. All possible solutions to try and solve the situation are going to be very unpopular in some ways: the companies of course would fight tooth and nail any attempts to decrease the working hours of employees, but any government suggesting major cuts to the wages would probably not stay in power for very long, either.

I am not sure that all-around pay cuts would seriously lower the standards of living; they would quickly be accompanied by deflation and the standard of living would stay essentially the same. In any case, the article made it sound like the problem is as much cultural as economic (much like, as you said in the paragraph I didn't quote, the economy at its height was a mix of neoliberalism and Confucianism): people who had expected to be guaranteed lifelong jobs were laid off, causing mass disillusionment and betrayal, while the lack of high-paying tenured jobs (economic) and correspondingly huge pressure of family expectations and rigorous testing (cultural) combined to produce a couple of generations of people who either shut themselves off in response to stress or shed the expectations and were consequently despised (again, cultural).

The problem won't be fixed politically, then, because the government reflects the culture: as you point out, any economic remedy is simply culturally unacceptable.

[Surlethe]

The phrase "man of straw" springs to mind for some reason.

Oh, please do add some detail.

Ghetto edit: Never mind, you're right. Let me try this instead: why is this decay of social fabric necessary to increased income inequality, rather than a uniquely Japanese culture response?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Well, as it is, Japan is on a downward spiral. High costs of living is leading to a reduced birth rate. The country side is depopulating. People are moving to the cities for work. Companies are moving their operations off shore because of high costs, and there are fewer jobs available for young Japanese. This in turns leads to less marriages, less kids etc. etc.

The LDP is known to be very very cozy with businesses, and the stimulus in the 80s propped many construction companies etc., I think even some villages survived on stimulus. I'm not sure how cozy is the current DPJ is, but regardless, no one seems to have a spine to do any substantial reform, beyond the so-called "tried and tested" methods. It's all quite sad actually.

[Patrick Degan]

The phrase "man of straw" springs to mind for some reason.

Oh, please do add some detail.

Ghetto edit: Never mind, you're right. Let me try this instead: why is this decay of social fabric necessary to increased income inequality, rather than a uniquely Japanese culture response?

You take away any chance of upward mobility for the next generation combined with eroding the position and indeed the percentage of the middle classes and you wind up with millions of people who have, or feel they have, no stake whatsoever in the society they find themselves in. They do not share in its benefits, are denied any chance of sharing in its benefits, and have no reason to hope for a future either for themselves or any family they might attempt to start —assuming that they even consider it worthwhile to try. Those mechanics transcend the parametres of culture in any country. Indeed, culture becomes irrelevant to people who find everything is being taken away from them bit by bit, or in some cases in one stroke. It is not yet so bad in this country, but some of the same mechanics are starting to operate here: shrinking the middle class while at the same time negating the value of a college degree by a) increased corporate downsizing and outsourcing and b) raising the price of a college education so that a graduate is facing five- and six-figure debt at the end of that pursuit, which tends to severely hamper upward mobility.

(ADDENDUM) At the same time, shredding the social safety net helps create a situation where workers dare not agitate for their economic rights for fear of being cast into poverty, which neutralises them economically and politically and makes them quite exploitable. The tie to income inequality is the ongoing pursuit of maximising corporate profit by slashing expenses to the barest minimum: which often translates into slashing salary and benefits as well as layoffs. Those at the top benefit the most at the expense of the workforce, who are getting less for the work they do but face increasing costs for living.

[Vehrec]

The only way to improve the situation somewhat would be to force the old employees to work less or at least force the companies to pay them for overtime, which would stimulate domestic consumption and perhaps generate some jobs in the process. That, however, would reduce the profit margins and make Japan look less efficient, which is why it's unlikely to happen. Nobody really knows how to get out of the pit, although the neoliberals of course suggest all-round paycuts to make the economy more competitive with China, which would encourage the companies to hire more employees etc. Now, that might work, but it would also mean seriously lowering the standards of living, so it's politically very difficult. All possible solutions to try and solve the situation are going to be very unpopular in some ways: the companies of course would fight tooth and nail any attempts to decrease the working hours of employees, but any government suggesting major cuts to the wages would probably not stay in power for very long, either.

I am not sure that all-around pay cuts would seriously lower the standards of living; they would quickly be accompanied by deflation and the standard of living would stay essentially the same. In any case, the article made it sound like the problem is as much cultural as economic (much like, as you said in the paragraph I didn't quote, the economy at its height was a mix of neoliberalism and Confucianism): people who had expected to be guaranteed lifelong jobs were laid off, causing mass disillusionment and betrayal, while the lack of high-paying tenured jobs (economic) and correspondingly huge pressure of family expectations and rigorous testing (cultural) combined to produce a couple of generations of people who either shut themselves off in response to stress or shed the expectations and were consequently despised (again, cultural).

The problem won't be fixed politically, then, because the government reflects the culture: as you point out, any economic remedy is simply culturally unacceptable.

I'm not so certain that cutting wages would be accompanied by deflation-Japan is by it's very nature an expensive country to live in. Their culture does not help with austerity very well either-their nationalism has become expressed in some very odd ways such as a refusal to import rice. Apparently, Japanese rice, farmed inefficiently at several times world prices, is sacred, and superior to foreign rice. So superior, it has a 490% tariff protecting it. Glass eels, raised in ponds in China, are apparently only good if they are caught in Japan. This goes on and on and on. Japan's population is aging, and because the younger generation can't get jobs, kids aren't being born, and menial jobs are going unfilled. Instead of importing Filipino or other southeast asian labor, Japan is making robots to do the sweeping and to pull grandma out of the bathtub so they won't have foreigners dirtying up the place.

Even without these cultural problems, would deflation really bring jobs to Japan? The jobs that the Japanese public wants? These shut ins are not looking to become factory workers-most of them probably believed that if they slept 5 hours a night and studied like dogs every day for their school years, they could become executives and live the dream. Now, from their perspective, the dream is dead. Why even bother to try again after all that effort?

[Surlethe]

Ghetto edit: Never mind, you're right. Let me try this instead: why is this decay of social fabric necessary to increased income inequality, rather than a uniquely Japanese culture response?

You take away any chance of upward mobility for the next generation combined with eroding the position and indeed the percentage of the middle classes and you wind up with millions of people who have, or feel they have, no stake whatsoever in the society they find themselves in. They do not share in its benefits, are denied any chance of sharing in its benefits, and have no reason to hope for a future either for themselves or any family they might attempt to start —assuming that they even consider it worthwhile to try. Those mechanics transcend the parametres of culture in any country.

I don't believe your (implied) claim that greater inequality and decreased upward mobility inevitably leads to "social decay". You're merely restating it. Do you have any evidence?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I don't believe your (implied) claim that greater inequality and decreased upward mobility inevitably leads to "social decay". You're merely restating it. Do you have any evidence?

You could pick a number of third world countries where that the gap is pretty wide and the crime rate is high etc. etc. where those social conditions are pretty prevalent.

Heck, there's Thailand for an example. The recent riots are a product of such conditions.

[Archaic`]

Their culture does not help with austerity very well either-their nationalism has become expressed in some very odd ways such as a refusal to import rice. Apparently, Japanese rice, farmed inefficiently at several times world prices, is sacred, and superior to foreign rice. So superior, it has a 490% tariff protecting it.

There's three factors behind this.
1) A very very strong farming lobby, which has a lot of connections to the traditionalists in the major political parties
2) The American food aid after WW2. Long story short....the rice which came into Japan after WW2 was shipped using re-purposed oil tankers which had been poorly cleaned. Foreign rice became seen as bad tasting and unhealthy.
3) Outside of Japan, short-grain rice as eaten in Japan is relatively rare. Most of the world production is medium grain or long grain rice, which apparently doesn't work as well for most Japanese dishes, and certainly doesn't work as well for Sushi.

[Surlethe]

I don't believe your (implied) claim that greater inequality and decreased upward mobility inevitably leads to "social decay". You're merely restating it. Do you have any evidence?

You could pick a number of third world countries where that the gap is pretty wide and the crime rate is high etc. etc. where those social conditions are pretty prevalent.

Heck, there's Thailand for an example. The recent riots are a product of such conditions.

And these are the same symptoms Japan is experiencing? Extremely high crime, rioting? That's not what the OP made it sound like.

[Vendetta]

The phrase "man of straw" springs to mind for some reason.

Oh, please do add some detail.

Ghetto edit: Never mind, you're right. Let me try this instead: why is this decay of social fabric necessary to increased income inequality, rather than a uniquely Japanese culture response?

The video I linked in this thread some time ago shows a great deal of research showing an incredibly strong correlation between income inequality and social instability. The book of the same title shows it in even more depth.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

And these are the same symptoms Japan is experiencing? Extremely high crime, rioting? That's not what the OP made it sound like.

Such things take time. Probably a decade or so. Japan still has rather successful companies, but don't expect them to prop up most of the economy forever.

[Surlethe]

And these are the same symptoms Japan is experiencing? Extremely high crime, rioting? That's not what the OP made it sound like.

Such things take time. Probably a decade or so. Japan still has rather successful companies, but don't expect them to prop up most of the economy forever.

It seems to me that the situation is more complicated than "greater inequality --> high crime and rioting and so forth". For instance, in the 1960s the US was very unstable in the manner you describe (and we do need to bear in mind that this is not the disintegration the OP describes). However, since the 1960s and '70s inequality has been rising, yet crime rates have been steadily falling. What makes this different (and what does the US of the 1960s have in common with third world countries and not with Japan)? A very young population. This suggests that "social disintegration" is affected by many different factors, prominently demographics and cultural pluralism, and it is a gross oversimplification to pin it on income inequality in particular.

[Surlethe]

The video I linked in this thread some time ago shows a great deal of research showing an incredibly strong correlation between income inequality and social instability. The book of the same title shows it in even more depth.

The question I asked in that thread remained unanswered, so I may as well ask it again: why doesn't causation go the other direction? That is, countries with greater social cohesion work together to reduce income inequality?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

It seems to me that the situation is more complicated than "greater inequality --> high crime and rioting and so forth". For instance, in the 1960s the US was very unstable in the manner you describe (and we do need to bear in mind that this is not the disintegration the OP describes). However, since the 1960s and '70s inequality has been rising, yet crime rates have been steadily falling. What makes this different (and what does the US of the 1960s have in common with third world countries and not with Japan)? A very young population. This suggests that "social disintegration" is affected by many different factors, prominently demographics and cultural pluralism, and it is a gross oversimplification to pin it on income inequality in particular.

The United States is unique in that it attracts a good number of immigrants from across the world. A good part of America's success lies in immigrants who arrive and add new blood to the country, and often the new immigrants bring additional value-addedness by bringing skills which are valuable. Your young population is also a distortion: You get lots of immigration from S. America for example. Constrast this with Europe. Populations across there are shrinking.

Japan's population is greying. And that adds an added dimension: eventually the tax system will crumble if it cannot support the old, and yet rely on young people to bring in the cash.

[Redleader34]

Well I was doing my usual Sunday NY Times reading, and I found a funny article which is highly related to our conversation about Japan and its reaction... Turns out America does have exports, as we will see here.

[/url]
New Dissent in Japan Is Loudly Anti-Foreign
By MARTIN FACKLER

KYOTO, Japan — The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.

Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.

The December episode was the first in a series of demonstrations at the Kyoto No. 1 Korean Elementary School that shocked conflict-averse Japan, where even political protesters on the radical fringes are expected to avoid embroiling regular citizens, much less children. Responding to public outrage, the police arrested four of the protesters this month on charges of damaging the school’s reputation.

More significantly, the protests also signaled the emergence here of a new type of ultranationalist group. The groups are openly anti-foreign in their message, and unafraid to win attention by holding unruly street demonstrations.

Since first appearing last year, their protests have been directed at not only Japan’s half million ethnic Koreans, but also Chinese and other Asian workers, Christian churchgoers and even Westerners in Halloween costumes. In the latter case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that said, “This is not a white country.”

Local news media have dubbed these groups the Net far right, because they are loosely organized via the Internet, and gather together only for demonstrations. At other times, they are a virtual community that maintains its own Web sites to announce the times and places of protests, swap information and post video recordings of their demonstrations.

While these groups remain a small if noisy fringe element here, they have won growing attention as an alarming side effect of Japan’s long economic and political decline. Most of their members appear to be young men, many of whom hold the low-paying part-time or contract jobs that have proliferated in Japan in recent years.

Though some here compare these groups to neo-Nazis, sociologists say that they are different because they lack an aggressive ideology of racial supremacy, and have so far been careful to draw the line at violence. There have been no reports of injuries, or violence beyond pushing and shouting. Rather, the Net right’s main purpose seems to be venting frustration, both about Japan’s diminished stature and in their own personal economic difficulties.

“These are men who feel disenfranchised in their own society,” said Kensuke Suzuki, a sociology professor at Kwansei Gakuin University. “They are looking for someone to blame, and foreigners are the most obvious target.”

They are also different from Japan’s existing ultranationalist groups, which are a common sight even today in Tokyo, wearing paramilitary uniforms and riding around in ominous black trucks with loudspeakers that blare martial music.

This traditional far right, which has roots going back to at least the 1930s rise of militarism in Japan, is now a tacitly accepted part of the conservative political establishment here. Sociologists describe them as serving as a sort of unofficial mechanism for enforcing conformity in postwar Japan, singling out Japanese who were seen as straying too far to the left, or other groups that anger them, such as embassies of countries with whom Japan has territorial disputes.

Members of these old-line rightist groups have been quick to distance themselves from the Net right, which they dismiss as amateurish rabble-rousers.

“These new groups are not patriots but attention-seekers,” said Kunio Suzuki, a senior adviser of the Issuikai, a well-known far-right group with 100 members and a fleet of sound trucks.

But in a sign of changing times here, Mr. Suzuki also admitted that the Net right has grown at a time when traditional ultranationalist groups like his own have been shrinking. Mr. Suzuki said the number of old-style rightists has fallen to about 12,000, one-tenth the size of their 1960s’ peak.

No such estimates exist for the size of the new Net right. However, the largest group appears to be the cumbersomely named Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan, known here by its Japanese abbreviation, the Zaitokukai, which has some 9,000 members.

The Zaitokukai gained notoriety last year when it staged noisy protests at the home and junior high school of a 14-year-old Philippine girl, demanding her deportation after her parents were sent home for overstaying their visas. More recently, the Zaitokukai picketed theaters showing “The Cove,” an American documentary about dolphin hunting here that rightists branded as anti-Japanese.

In interviews, members of the Zaitokukai and other groups blamed foreigners, particularly Koreans and Chinese, for Japan’s growing crime and unemployment, and also for what they called their nation’s lack of respect on the world stage. Many seemed to embrace conspiracy theories taken from the Internet that China or the United States were plotting to undermine Japan.

“Japan has a shrinking pie,” said Masaru Ota, 37, a medical equipment salesman who headed the local chapter of the Zaitokukai in Omiya, a Tokyo suburb. “Should we be sharing it with foreigners at a time when Japanese are suffering?”

While the Zaitokukai has grown rapidly since it was started three and a half years ago with just 25 members, it is still largely run by its founder and president, a 38-year-old tax accountant who goes by the assumed name of Makoto Sakurai. Mr. Sakurai leads the group from his tiny office in Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district, where he taps out announcements and other postings on his personal computer.

Mr. Sakurai says the group is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners.

“They have made Japan powerless to stand up to China and Korea,” said Mr. Sakurai, who refused to give his real name.

Mr. Sakurai admitted that the group’s tactics had shocked many Japanese, but said they needed to win attention. He also defended the protests at the Korean school in Kyoto as justified to oppose the school’s use of a nearby public park, which he said rightfully belonged to Japanese children.

Teachers and parents at the school called that a flimsy excuse to vent what amounted to racist rage. They said the protests had left them and their children fearful.

“If Japan doesn’t do something to stop this hate language,” said Park Chung-ha, 43, who heads the school’s mothers association, “where will it lead to next?”

So, the Tea Party mentality is spreading to Japan, and this isn't the old guard racist element that makes up Japan, but this is a new generation, the one everyone spoke of, who realizes there may not be the ideal lifestyle for them. This century will be a very interesting place to live in, after all.

[Surlethe]

It seems to me that the situation is more complicated than "greater inequality --> high crime and rioting and so forth". For instance, in the 1960s the US was very unstable in the manner you describe (and we do need to bear in mind that this is not the disintegration the OP describes). However, since the 1960s and '70s inequality has been rising, yet crime rates have been steadily falling. What makes this different (and what does the US of the 1960s have in common with third world countries and not with Japan)? A very young population. This suggests that "social disintegration" is affected by many different factors, prominently demographics and cultural pluralism, and it is a gross oversimplification to pin it on income inequality in particular.

The United States is unique in that it attracts a good number of immigrants from across the world. A good part of America's success lies in immigrants who arrive and add new blood to the country, and often the new immigrants bring additional value-addedness by bringing skills which are valuable. Your young population is also a distortion: You get lots of immigration from S. America for example. Constrast this with Europe. Populations across there are shrinking.

Japan's population is greying. And that adds an added dimension: eventually the tax system will crumble if it cannot support the old, and yet rely on young people to bring in the cash.

This is all true, but doesn't really address my point.

[cosmicalstorm]

I spent the summer going through an old box of Reader's Digest from 1946-1990 and it's weird to read those stories about a Japan ready to conquer the world via capitalism in the light of this stuff.

[Archaic`]

It's actually a question how much the Japanese population is really aging. A few things have come out in the past few months which suggests that the figures are being inflated by pension fraud on a massive scale. There's a lot of people alive on paper who have been missing or dead (with that being completely unreported to the authorities) for 30 years or more.

Japan, Checking on Its Oldest, Finds Many Gone
By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO — Japan has long boasted of having many of the world’s oldest people — testament, many here say, to a society with a superior diet and a commitment to its elderly that is unrivaled in the West.

That was before the police found the body of a man thought to be one of Japan’s oldest, at 111 years, mummified in his bed, dead for more than three decades. His daughter, now 81, hid his death to continue collecting his monthly pension payments, the police said.

Alarmed, local governments began sending teams to check on other elderly residents. What they found so far has been anything but encouraging.

A woman thought to be Tokyo’s oldest, who would be 113, was last seen in the 1980s. Another woman, who would be the oldest in the world at 125, is also missing, and probably has been for a long time. When city officials tried to visit her at her registered address, they discovered that the site had been turned into a city park, in 1981.

To date, the authorities have been unable to find more than 281 Japanese who had been listed in records as 100 years old or older. Facing a growing public outcry, the country’s health minister, Akira Nagatsuma, said officials would meet with every person listed as 110 or older to verify that they are alive; Tokyo officials made the same promise for the 3,000 or so residents listed as 100 and up.

The national hand-wringing over the revelations has reached such proportions that the rising toll of people missing has merited daily, and mournful, media coverage. “Is this the reality of a longevity nation?” lamented an editorial last week in The Mainichi newspaper, one of Japan’s biggest dailies.

Among those who officials have confirmed is alive: a 113-year-old woman in the southern prefecture of Saga believed to be the country’s oldest person, at least for now.

The soul-searching over the missing old people has hit this rapidly graying country — and tested its sense of self — when it is already grappling with overburdened care facilities for the elderly, criminal schemes that prey on them and the nearly daily discovery of old people who have died alone in their homes.

For the moment, there are no clear answers about what happened to most of the missing centenarians. Is the country witnessing the results of pension fraud on a large scale, or, as most officials maintain, was most of the problem a result of sloppy record keeping? Or was the whole sordid affair, as the gloomiest commentators here are saying, a reflection of disintegrating family ties, as an indifferent younger generation lets its elders drift away into obscurity?

“This is a type of abandonment, through disinterest,” said Hiroshi Takahashi, a professor at the International University of Health and Welfare in Tokyo. “Now we see the reality of aging in a more urbanized society where communal bonds are deteriorating.”

Officials here tend to play down the psychosocial explanations. While some older people may have simply moved into care facilities, they say, there is a growing suspicion that, as in the case of the mummified corpse, many may already have died.

Officials in the Adachi ward of Tokyo, where the body was found, said they grew suspicious after trying to pay a visit to the man, Sogen Kato. (They were visiting him because the man previously thought to be Tokyo’s oldest had died and they wished to congratulate Mr. Kato on his new status.)

They said his daughter gave conflicting excuses, saying at first that he did not want to meet them, and then that he was elsewhere in Japan giving Buddhist sermons. The police moved in after a granddaughter, who also shared the house, admitted that Mr. Kato had not emerged from his bedroom since about 1978.

In a more typical case that took place just blocks from the Mr. Kato’s house, relatives of a man listed as 103 years old said he had left home 38 years ago and never returned. The man’s son, now 73, told officials that he continued to collect his father’s pension “in case he returned one day.”

“No one really suspects foul play in these cases,” said Manabu Hajikano, director of Adachi’s resident registration section. “But it is still a crime if you fail to report a disappearance or death in order to collect pension money.”

Some health experts say these cases reflect strains in a society that expects children to care for their parents, instead of placing them in care facilities. They point out that longer life spans mean that children are called upon to take care of their elderly parents at a time when the children are reaching their 70s and are possibly in need of care themselves.

In at least some of the cases, local officials have said, an aged parent disappeared after leaving home under murky circumstances. Experts say that the parents appeared to have suffered from dementia or some other condition that made their care too demanding, and the overburdened family members simply gave up, failing to chase after the elderly people or report their disappearance to the police.

While the authorities have turned up a large number of missing centenarians, demographic experts say they doubt that discoveries of the living or the dead would have much impact on Japan’s vaunted life expectancy figures; the country has the world’s highest life expectancy — nearly 83 years — according to the World Bank. But officials admit that Japan may have far fewer centenarians than it thought.

“Living until 150 years old is impossible in the natural world,” said Akira Nemoto, director of the elderly services section of the Adachi ward office. “But it is not impossible in the world of Japanese public administration.”

[Marcus Aurelius]

I spent the summer going through an old box of Reader's Digest from 1946-1990 and it's weird to read those stories about a Japan ready to conquer the world via capitalism in the light of this stuff.

Yeah, Hollywood even made movies about it in the late 1980s and early 1990s (it took Hollywood a few years to realize that the Japanese economic wonder was over).

I visited Japan in 1993 and at that time there was already a lot of talk about the employees that basically had work for perhaps two hours per day on average, but because of the prevalent culture made 9-12 hour work days just like everybody else. The social norm in Japanese companies was and probably still is that you can't leave before your boss, even if you don't have anything to do.

It was not a new thing even back then. It appears that this phenomenon started already during the last years of the rapid economic growth, but it was masked by the growth. Many of these employees had been hired in the 1970s or early 1980s, but increasing efficiency had made them mostly redundant only after a decade.

[Edi]

And these are the same symptoms Japan is experiencing? Extremely high crime, rioting? That's not what the OP made it sound like.

Such things take time. Probably a decade or so. Japan still has rather successful companies, but don't expect them to prop up most of the economy forever.

It seems to me that the situation is more complicated than "greater inequality --> high crime and rioting and so forth". For instance, in the 1960s the US was very unstable in the manner you describe (and we do need to bear in mind that this is not the disintegration the OP describes). However, since the 1960s and '70s inequality has been rising, yet crime rates have been steadily falling. What makes this different (and what does the US of the 1960s have in common with third world countries and not with Japan)? A very young population. This suggests that "social disintegration" is affected by many different factors, prominently demographics and cultural pluralism, and it is a gross oversimplification to pin it on income inequality in particular.

Surlethe, the mechanics Degan describes seem to be applicable to nearly any situation in the past hundred plus years where there has been great income inequality. That often comes with all kinds of other inequality as well. Certainly there are other factors involved and it's not solely due to income inequality, but it is one of the main factors nearly every time.

In some places it has sparked revolutions even. The same mechanics can be seen in the Russian revolution when you pare down the communist rhetoric of Lenin. The same factors were a pretty big part of the reason why Finland had a civil war back in 1918-1919 and more examples would be easy to dig up.

His addendum also explains how those conditions are becoming more of a reality also in the US and why upward mobility is hampered.

It doesn't need to manifest itself as riots and high crime everywhere, because cultural factors often come into play in how people deal with that. Japan is a highly conformist society and relatively quiet, peaceful and stable all told for several different reasons. In Russia where social decays is evident, there is high crime, there are sometimes riots (brutally crushed by the authorities) and some parts of that country are essentially having their own regional civil wars. In Thailand there are riots in the capital, civil war in the south and all well in some other areas.

As far as the 1960s US and the turmoil there, it is again a highly special case where you have other things factoring into the unrest experienced at that time. It was in the 1960s that the racial segregation was struck down, you had the Vietnam War going and there was social upheaval that had nothing to do with social decay. It was era of social progress and much of the unrest was due to opposition to that progress.

That situation is in no way relevant to the current one where everyone aside from the really rich are either running faster to stay in place or on a downward spiral.

[Marcus Aurelius]

The same factors were a pretty big part of the reason why Finland had a civil war back in 1918-1919 and more examples would be easy to dig up.

Ahem, Edi, the Finnish civil war was actually entirely in 1918 with the last Red Guards surrendering already in May 1918. Political escalation started in November 1917 in earnest, but actual fighting broke out in January 1918.