Hard Won Battles and Babes on Buses: Dealing with Life (and Death) in Japan

By Jenny Evans

Being in Japan is surreal. Honestly, I have been really homesick. This month my twenty two year old cousin, lifelong friend and briefly roommate, died of cancer. Our grandmother has ten kids and most of the family lives in the same town near Chicago, which I had never wandered far from till I came to Japan.

Five days before our cousin died, my sister called me and told me I had to come home right away. It was Saturday morning so I couldn’t make a bank transfer, and the travel agent didn’t take credit cards. I could not wait till Monday if I wanted to say goodbye to my cousin, so with a suitcase, a backpack, and my one year old, I got on the Thunderbird to Osaka to buy a ticket home for Sunday.

When I arrived in Osaka I had fifteen minutes to find the travel agent before they closed. With directions from the agent, I climbed into a taxi, but the driver could not find the shop. I walked around Izumi no Hiroban for three hours and could not find the travel agent. Some people in a Chinese restaurant tried to help me and bought me dinner, but it was too late. I had to go back to Terai and try again on Monday.

I bought a bus ticket to Komatsu. The lady behind the counter was crabby and may have mumbled “Komatsushima?” which I must have heard as “Komatsu, ima?” Before stepping onto the last bus out of town for the night, I asked “Komatsu?” “Hai, Komatsu,” said the bus driver. I chatted with two ladies drinking beers on the bus, who wanted to practice their English and play with the baby.

Hours later, the bus stopped along the dark highway and let me off. I did not recognize this part of town. I walked to a restaurant in the distance. I called my husband and left him a message to pick me up. He never came. I called for a taxi. When the driver arrived, I asked him to take me to Terai. He had never heard of Terai. I was so surprised. I said, ”You know, Komatsu, Neagari, Terai…..Ishikawa?” “Ha, ha, ha! Ishikawa!” he laughed. He left. The waiters drew me a map and showed me I was in Shikoku. I was shocked. The police picked us up after midnight. They played with the baby and took me to a hotel in Tokushima.

The next morning I decided to enjoy Tokushima; what else could I do? It was Sunday and the travel agent was closed. I took a bus to see Jurobei puppetry and stumbled upon a gaijin sandwich shop where I was thrilled to talk with Westerners for hours and again had my dinner bought for me, delicious American food.

The next morning I took the first bus to Osaka. Upon arrival, I got terribly lost. If I did not get the ticket that morning, I would not be able to go home. I needed the rest of my money for the plane and could not afford another hotel or bus back to Terai. People kept giving me the wrong directions. I had the baby on my right hip, and dragged my suitcase in the left hand up and down the stairs. One man told me this way, so up the stairs I went. The next man said that way, so I’d go back down the stairs, under the street, and back up again, with the baby and the luggage. It was raining. A salaryman slammed into my baby’s head as he hurried by. He did not apologize and the baby wouldn’t stop screaming. Dejected, I stepped into an internet café and discovered I was one block away from the shop. It was 9:55 A.M.

I tried to buy the ticket for the 1:15 pm flight that day. Apparently, I had misunderstood the price on the phone Saturday and did not have enough money. I was in disbelief. I ran to the ATM, knowing my account had already been emptied for this ticket, but somehow, the money was there. I ran back. The baby bounced on my hip and laughed. I paid 10 MAN for the flight, which left in just over two hours. The travel agent ran the five blocks with me to the bus. The bus to Kansai took 65 minutes instead of 55 because of traffic. I seriously contemplated abandoning my luggage to save time. If I missed the flight, I would lose the money.

I ran through the airport. Of course they searched my suitcase. Not the people in front of or behind me. Just me. At check-in, about 1:00 pm, I found out the flight was not at 1:15 pm, but at 1:50 pm. Aaaah. I relax a little.

I do not have a re-entry permit.

The check in lady runs with me to the other end of the airport, through a maze of hallways and elevators, to the immigration office, where they process my permit like a couple of tortoises, while our hearts are pounding and our eyeballs are about to pop out. The baby is crying. We race back to the check in counter, I get through customs, and catch the last shuttle to the plane. I made it. I was going home.

Too Many Babies? Thoughts on Population

By Andrew Cerini

Recently, I’ve been obsessed with population. It comes from an interest in environmental issues. Since coming to Japan my interest has been heightened by feelings such as lack of space and observing the traditions—new and old—that Japan has developed to deal with large masses of people in small spaces.

To put it simply, I yearn for less people. I don’t consider myself an introvert. I love people. Humans are a truly amazing species who develop great ideas in art, technology and politics based on imagination, ingenuity and social interactions. It would be hard to measure, but I would say that humans are among the top five most amazing species on Earth. Right up there with the giraffes, redwood trees, funghi and kangaroos.

But the problem with humans is, they don’t seem to know when things become too much. Ange and Al put forth “The Future Eaters” series in August. The name “Future Eaters” is taken from the title of a book by Australian researcher, Tim Flannery, who exposes the patterns of human civilization on islands.

People basically follow this pattern:

1. They arrive on an island.

2. They eat what they can, doing the least work, until scarcity makes them resort to more prudent methods such as farming, abstinence, moving to another island or having fewer babies.

3. Depending on what happens in 2, they seem to either die-out, reduce population to a sustainable level or keep expanding their reach in the world.

This happens in nearly all inhabitable areas of the world. Currently, most humans are in the 2nd phase. People are looking for more careful methods or expanding their reach. Activities include recycling, mining in Antarctica, as well as the creation of gas fields in Alaska, war in Iraq, rainforest destruction and countless other manifestations

So back to my wish of having less people. If we had less people, I think we would be much happier people. Not only us, but the giraffes, funghi, redwoods and kangaroos would also have a bit more room to shine on the species stage. With less people in Japan, we might be able to take more holidays and eat fresh veggies that haven’t been shipped from California and sprayed 22 times. Society as a whole would experience a reduction in the superfluous: roads, cars, concrete etc; as well as the obviously damaging: garbage, pollution, energy use and all-round resource burden.

Suspend your rational thought for a second and imagine this: what if there were less people? In Japan, people might relax more. They might worry less about punctuality or social constraints such as wearing a tie or being painstakingly careful to avoid stepping on others’ feet. Not that these are necessarily bad in a superficial sense, but if we could do without, why not?

Thinking of Australia, the problem, put forward by Flannery, of not having enough water to comfortably sustain more than 10 million people - though the current population is 20 million and is rising by 100-200,000 people a year – might be solved. The insidious “Los Angelisation” of large cities such as Melbourne and Sydney may be halted and we could repair the damage done thus far.

In the “minority world”, i.e. rich developed minority countries like Japan, Australia, and the USA, species practice self-congratulation and a belief that having kids is natural and not to be restrained (by conscience or by other people). Still, people in Japan and Australia are not suffering mostly because of their penchant for procreation. Overpopulation could be the result of many factors. In the majority world, i.e. the larger proportion of countries where people scrape-by, debt-ridden, where land and labourers are abused by the West, having large families may be needed to pick cash crops or because good old rule number 2 (above) is at work, and resources still allow rape of the land and there’s little education to help relieve the burden. So who should we blame? Who has more of a right to children than anyone else?

But more to the point, how can we reduce the population? People around me joke, “We just need a good war/disease/famine/meteorite shower/(insert favourite major disaster) to fix the balance.” We may chuckle and say, “Yeah”, but who wants that? Some people wear the human population problem and its disastrous effects like a badge to excuse any kind of behaviour because it will “all end in catastrophe anyway.” It probably will, whether it is human-caused or not. But there is not much point in putting on your doomsday cap and staying in every night, or going on a rampage because, “nothing matters anyway”.

For myself, if I cannot incorporate some change into my life that will make a difference, how can I expect anyone else to? My dad wanted four kids and my mum wanted two, so they ended up with 3. It wasn’t so simple, but people in the market for them (couples thinking of kids), must ask themselves (and hopefully each other) these questions at some stage. “How many will we have dear? One or two? Half a dozen? One for each day of the week? Just one more? Just one to keep me company? Lots of brothers and sisters like I had?”

A bit of math:

If every couple decided to have one child, the population would decline. Not bad for the short term, say 25 years. If every couple had two children, we would probably establish a good balance, though population would still decline due to fatalities, age at the time of pregnancy and other factors. But this option would probably allow a smooth transition to a more sustainable population and a society with time to prepare and adjust to having less “blokes looking over ‘ya back fence”.

So far I have been tackling the numbers but not the causes. Quantity not quality. I can rant forever about how many people we have, but in the end I don’t believe people will stop having kids until…what? I honestly don’t know.

In the minority world, people are having less kids. We don’t know exactly why. This seems to go against the idea of rule number two. Are the rich and the fat (in the resource sense) giving up on sex? I don’t think so. Are they socially inept? Nope. So what is it, and how can we get more of it? Would it be good for this trend to spread to the majority world? I don’t know.

I just wish I could walk down the street in my home town and not feel as crowded as I normally do. Call me nostalgic, call me unrealistic and selfish. I probably am all of these, but I think something really needs to be done and I don’t mind being on the committee/protest rally/billion person march (he he!) to make it happen. Anyone else thought about this? Thinking of having kids?

Check this site for a population clock ticking over, while below it an ‘arable land area’ clock clicks down as we expand our reach and slowly destroy our sustainability: