ABOUT JAPAN
I have suddenly discovered I know very little about Japan and I wonder if such a lack of common, every day facts is a common shortcoming with others.
About Japanese housing, for instance.
I am told that a typical home in Tokyo offers the resident about 630 square feet of living space. Is that enough space for the average family? I rather doubt it, since I find that American "trailer" homes - an item no longer being produced, but still used as a yardstick - offers more space than in a 32ft.x 10ft. model. That' s "togetherness" in a family sense, I'd say. Here, it would be considered to be inadequate for a family of modest circustances and I'm told that, in Japan, two familes might well occupy such an area.
Of course, we realize that the population of Japan is said the be "dense". It has been that way for centuries and, oddly enough, seems to show little tendency to change.
One reason set forth to explain this static growth stand is that Japan is subject to earthquakes, and high rise constuction has, therefore, been avoided for decades. The cities have growth has not been "up" and "out" is limited. Growth has been "inward" to make strill more intense use of the space the do have. It simply does not make good economic sense to build structures which a quake can eliminate. Another fact has been stated which is distrubing one to me, as well. That argument cites the relative poverty of the people. Tokyo is known as one of the most expensive cities in all the world in which to live and when it comes to many standards of present living elsewhere plainly indicates that the people of Japan - a least of Tokyo - enjoy the best life they have had for generations. In a relative sense, they can't be all that "poor".
Tokyo and Osaka are not "all" of Japan, of course. I think we realize that well enough, but we tend to equte the rest of Japan with our own vast westward lands of expansion. Much of Japan, I find, is virtually uninhabited. The truth, I'm told, is that "most" of Japan is, indeed, "uninhabited". I find that difficult to believe. It just doesn't fit in with my concept of Gilbert and Sullivan's pictures of it all. I would have thought we had learned about what modern Japan is because of World War II associations and the occupation years. I ,obviously, did not do so and I find the same level of ignorance to be common among many I know.
Just about half of the 130 million or so citizens of Japan live in several large, urban swatchs around major cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. The same clamoous jumble of always moving people, steadfast concrete on every side, and glistening asphalt surfaces can been seen ahead and otherwise noted for seemingly endless miles. Take the three hundred and forty mile trip from Toyko to Osaka on one of the celebrated but highly subsidizd "bullet" trains and you will see nothing but wilderness beyond the track area. There are, it seems, no "small towns" dotting the landscape here and there.There are no end-to end flowery bowers of the music hall versions of rural Japan. There are no bucolic byways, either.
I must learn more about Japan. Have they every had a full-fledged agricultural plan, I wonder, wherein unused lands might be adaped to growing the foods they must now import in large amounts. This sort of action, it would seem to me, is Japan's key to future security and prosperity. Yet we, as a nation, are certainly in no position to point the finger of criticism at Japan. Witness, if you will, the vast stretches of woodland and pasture which is unwisely used, misued or not used at all along our own Interstate highways and other roads in every secionoif our own country.
I would imagine old concepts of land ownership might have something to do with land use in Japan, and, perhaps,too, their changing ideas of what constitutes a family.
We need to learn more about people with whom we share this Earth, if only to come to realize how we have been blest and continue to be cared for by what President George W. Bush made reference to in a speech this week as "the wonder working power."
A.L.M. Feburary 7, 2003 [c780wds]
