CONSUMERS ON THE WARPATH

A special feature in the December 2007 issue of Ronza reports on a crisis brewing in Japan’s hospitals and clinics. The bonds of trust that once existed between doctors and patients and their families are crumbling, we are told, and formal complaints from patients have increased dramatically. These observations are echoed by Kusakabe Yô, who describes the barrage of complaints inundating doctors and hospitals in an article titled "Bôsô suru ‘kanja-sama’" (Patients Out of Control) in a special feature about the emerging "claimant society" carried in December’s Chûô Kôron. Moreover, the trend is by no means unique to the health care industry. It has also infected schools, where parents increasingly regard teachers and administrators with distrust and are themselves viewed with irritation, according to an article by Onoda Masatoshi in the same issue titled "Oitsumeru oya, oitsumerareru gakkô" (Parents on the Warpath, Schools Under Siege). Corporations, meanwhile, have come under vicious and concerted attacks for what are often trivial failures of legal compliance, so much so that the situation has taken on the character of a feeding frenzy. As summed up by the editors of Chûô Kôron, "Japan is being swept up in a rising tide of complaints flooding manufacturers and retailers, schools and hospitals."

Gôhara Nobuo criticizes this trend in his article featured in this section. The deluge of complaints, claims, citations, and lawsuits, he argues, represents a new climate in which any violation of a legal statute—regardless of the character or severity of the infraction—subjects the perpetrator to a storm of criticism. "This phenomenon," he writes, "has its roots in the increased emphasis on ‘legal compliance’ that has accompanied the shift toward free competition within the broader Americanization of the economy through structural reform," leading to "dramatically increased pressure to obey the letter of the law." In his eyes, the epidemic of formal complaints and whistle blowing is a symptom of an ailing society.

In the interview carried in this section, Uchida Tatsuru suggests that this phenomenon has emerged because communities have ceased to function and their members have lost their sense of ownership. When this happens, he maintains, community members turn into "claimants," people who are quick to demand redress through public or official channels.

Like others before him, Uchida points to the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 as a turning point in the development of postwar Japan, and he mourns the loss of the close-knit communities that characterized pre-1964 Japan, even in a big city like Tokyo. The image of such a community, as depicted in Yamazaki Takashi’s 2005 hit movie Always: Sanchôme no yûhi (Always: Sunset on Third Street), had a profound impact on Japanese viewers. Winner of 12 out of 14 Japan Academy awards, including Best Picture, the film is set in an old shitamachi ("low city") neighborhood in downtown Tokyo in 1958, the year Tokyo Tower was finished. Television began to spread more rapidly after the completion of the huge communications tower, but at this point, relatively few shitamachi households could afford a TV set. Consequently, a home equipped with a TV would take on the character of a tiny neighborhood theater as neighbors crowded in to watch programs together. In those days everyone on the block belonged to a tonarigumi, or neighborhood association—a community in which residents lived in constant and close interaction, "rubbing shoulders," as it were. This is the world that Yamazaki brings to life in Sunset on Third Street.

Surpassing the Eiffel Tower in height at 333 meters, Tokyo Tower was an object of great pride to the Japanese of the time as a symbol of the country’s postwar recovery. Although the people were still impoverished, it was a period of "republican poverty," to use Sekikawa Natsuo’s term. "It’s not about money," says the hero at the climax of Sunset on Third Street II, the sequel released in November 2007. "There are more important things."

But the world changed rapidly after that. It was the beginning of a period of extraordinary economic growth during which the economy expanded at an annual rate of 10% for almost 15 consecutive years. In 1964, "bullet train" service began on the new Shinkansen line, and that summer the Olympic games opened in Tokyo. Economic growth skyrocketed, accentuating social and economic differences. The gap between rich and poor grew, and communities became stratified. Uchida laments the ensuing disintegration of the neighborhood as a close-knit community.

As Uchida tells it, the impact of this disintegration has been particularly devastating in the schools. In the days when people felt that they belonged to the community and were responsible for its well-being, families frequently donated their own time and labor to improve or enhance the facilities at their children’s schools. Today parents are more likely to be seen charging in after their offspring get into trouble, claiming that the school or the classroom teacher is entirely to blame. Self-centered "monster parents" who plague teachers and administrators with demand after unreasonable demand have become a fixture in many schools.

Uchida believes that the period some 50 years ago portrayed in Sunset on Third Street marked the heyday of Japan’s postwar democratic society, and he judges it to have been the happiest time ever in Japanese history. His prescription for reinvigorating Japan is to turn the clock back to 1958 and return to the pre–Tokyo Olympics model of Japanese society. (Kondô Motohiro, Professor, Nihon University)

© 2008 Japan Echo Inc.