Libertarian musings from just inside the M25.

The architecture tour today was briefer than I imagined, and focused mainly on Harajuku and Omote-sando. I met up with the others at 14:00 at Meiji-jingumae station – despite a brief communication breakdown at the beginning where I waited for them at the metro exit, while they had all congregated at the JR station exit – and proceeded down the main Omote-sando street, occasionally dipping into side-streets and narrow alleys to look at some interesting buildings. One particularly wild creation was a house covered in lurid graffiti and murals, as well as a vaguely spider’s-web-shaped metal structure, which housed an art gallery and café – not sure most of the art on display particularly agreed with me, but there was a stairway imaginatively covered in henna-tattoo-like patterns and a quirky cartoon-artist which certainly caught my eye. We headed on past the Louis Vuitton and Tod’s buildings, took a quick look into Omotesando Hills, and ended up looking round Spiral and various other buildings around Omote-sando station. We wandered down vaguely towards Roppongi and observed the Prada building, which is essentially made of slightly bulbous glass rhombuses piled on top of each other, and then parted ways to our respective dinners.

The reason we had a day off work today was because of what Wikipedia calls “Respect for the Aged Day”, which in Japanese is 敬老の日, keiro no hi. From what I’ve gleaned from Japanese co-workers and the indomitable power of Google, the day is intended to shift the limelight to what in many developed societies has become a disadvantaged social group, which goes hand-in-hand with the considerably greater value placed on the family unit and respect for ‘elders and betters’ in Japan relative to Western countries. Without wishing to comment on the moral stature of these last two values, it certainly makes a change to see the elderly taken seriously by anyone other than ‘grey’ parties and pensioner protest groups – and though the celebration of centenarian citizens has taken something of a bashing recently, with apparent models of longevity being discovered to be long-dead and merely not registered as such, it’s only common sense for the Japanese to indicate some level of awareness of one of the most significantly growing voter groups. Japan doesn’t really have a uniform retirement age, but the most recent legislation on the subject (in the 1980s) changed the industry consensus on 55 as the age at which employers could essentially boot out workers to 60, with scope and incentives for firms to hang on to good employees beyond that point, usually at reduced wages. The usual cut-off point beyond that is 65, but with 21% of the notoriously long-lived Japanese population lying above that age-mark, reform of the pension system is an even bigger problem here than in comparably economically developed countries.

Quite how far Respect for the Aged Day translates into social awareness where this (fiscally long-overdue) reform is concerned I can’t tell – but I expect that Japanese citizens might be even more resistant than the French and Greeks to the sort of austerity measures that would be needed to bring down Japan’s monstrous sovereign debt. 189.3% of GDP, second only to Zimbabwe in the entire world (282.6%), and miles above even the profligates in Italy (115.2%) and Greece (113.4%). The public sector is only part of the problem – Japanese citizens are just used to high levels of government spending in all areas, and the two recessions since the start of the 1990s have seen the government here under whatever stripe borrow insane amounts of money to try and kick-start the economy with a multitude of dubiously-effective initiatives over the last 20 years. Vouchers, subsidies, handouts, central bank interest rates of 0%… all pretty much useless – the economy has yet to really pick up again, with stasis and deflation much more pressing worries than in the West. The only definite result has been spiralling debt and massive loss of confidence in the Japanese economy – not helped by the fact that Japanese firms have been remarkably slow to adopt their own countries’ major technological innovations, with a lot of administration being done in parallel by multiple employees, one for paperwork, the other to input the paperwork into the computers from which everything is ultimately run. Unfortunately for the elderly, ramming up pension ages is just so much easier than more involved root-and-branch public-sector reform – even though both will inevitably meet with protests from unions, the latter concerns more vocal current workers, while the former concerns a smaller group of de facto less energetic citizens, and the unions can generally be bought off with some good old pork-barrel politics so that the administratively simpler reforms at least can be pushed through. But at least in Japan such attempts would be far less likely to be snuck through unnoticed…