Changing Japanese behavior
Things have changed. Before my eyes, a list of things that have changed in Japan in recent decades.
1) There are much fewer traditional kimonos being worn, for one thing. This is something I’ve commented on before. There are a few traditional celebrations that habitually used to see many women wearing kimonos: New Year’s and Coming of Age Day, both in January. But although kimonos are beautiful, they are expensive and inconvenient, so their use is noticeably in decline.
2) “Tachishoben,” or men urinating in the street in broad daylight is something I haven’t seen in a long, long time. I wonder why? Maybe it’s just a matter of the older generation dying out and being replaced by a younger set with different values.
3) There is a lot less vomit in the street than I remember seeing when I first arrived. It used to be that drunken salarymen staggering home late at night would throw up on the pavement on the way home, and that’s what I found on my way to work in the morning. I still see it sometimes - rarely now - and I even have a Facebook album of vomit pictures. But sightings are in decline and my album grows sloooooowwwly. I spoke with two foreign acquaintances about it. One agrees with me that it seems to be coming less common. The other disagreed, and suggested my conclusion was just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
4) Old men hawking gobs of spit on the sidewalk. I haven’t seen this in a long time, thank God. Spitting is known as an old male Asian custom. It’s worse in China. The idea seems to be better out than in. More than once I have slipped and fallen on unnoticed gobs of spittle on train platforms and on staircases. Those incidents led me to greater caution. One public health problem aggravated by spitting is that it contributes to the spread of pulmonary diseases like tuberculosis. Asia has a higher rate of tuberculosis than elsewhere. The decline in public spitting is a good thing.
5) Soap lands and bath houses. A soap land is a bath house where men can go to receive manual stimulation from a young woman - a hand job. That’s it. There’s no sex, just masturbation. They’re fairly recognisable when you see one, but I haven’t seen a soap land in years. I mentioned it to some people who assured me that they do still exist. But their numbers have certainly declined, as have he numbers of sento public bath houses. The public bath used to be a common neighborhood sight, but no longer. Until the 1970s it was much less common than it is now for apartments to have baths or showers. You could rent an apartment with a kitchen, a community toilet in the hallway, but no bath. It was cheaper. People went to bathe at the local sento instead. As such, these bath houses were an important focus of community and social life. But no longer. Onsen, or hot spring hotel resorts in the mountains are still common and popular as holiday spots, so the Japanese affection for the shared bath is not extinct.
6) High school uniforms. Public elementary schools do not use school uniforms. But most public junior and senior high schools do. All private schools use uniforms for all their grades. The traditional public school uniforms are modeled on 19th century naval uniforms - a “sailor suit” for girls featuring a wide collar, skirt and vest, and a high, stiff collared, straight-legged suit for boys called the “gakuran,” habitually black or navy blue. These uniforms replaced traditional kimonos as Japan raced to modernize. The gakuran takes after an old Prussian military design. Today, more and more schools are opting for looser-fitting blazer jackets and neckties for both girls and boys, with plaid skirts and trousers instead of the traditional plain. Also, in recent years, more schools are allowing girls to wear trousers. There are three main reasons for this. First, when cameras were introduced to cell phones in the mid-1990s they quickly led to a problem of sexual predators on trains and in commuter stations taking photos of the girls. Trousers give them more security in that regard. Second, allowing girls to don trousers is supposed to be some acknowledgment of diverse sexual identities. Third, the blazers are just more comfortable. Many students say so. But I prefer the old-style uniforms. The sailor suits look good, and the gakuran are cool. That’s what I think. If you know how to read the signs, insignia on school uniforms (collar tabs, jacket buttons, and livery on school bags) tell you not just the name of the school they attend, but also their grade. What this all amounts to is that today there is much greater diversity in student clothing than ever before. Long ago, students were all uniformly dressed, all in unison, all of a type. But those days are gone.
7) Direction finding has experienced a near total revolution. Today, most people navigate with GPS systems in their cars, or Google Maps, or some map applications on their smartphones that allow them to wander the streets looking for a destination with great accuracy. A Japanese address is not a building number on a street. Most streets in Japan have no name. Instead, an address here is a description of a neighborhood. The more numbers in the address does not indicate the length of a street. It indicates the level of development of a neighborhood. Before the invention of modern digital navigation systems, it used to be difficult for newcomers to find their way. Postal workers and emergency responders would memorize their areas in order to achieve a functional familiarity with it. Taxi drivers (before GPS) relied on their passengers to describe their destinations (a skill I relied upon to get home from the airport after a trip). So, neighborhoods here used to feature numbers on utility poles and garden walls as location indicators. These still exist, but as digital navigation has grown the neighborhood numbering signs have diminished, been removed. I found this out recently when I went looking for an old address I used to inhabit, and relied on neighborhood numbering signs to guide me. I eventually found the location, but it was a real chore.