Word: salarymen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Normally, such behavior would not get you far in the land of white-shirted "salarymen." But Shigeru Miyamoto, 43, has reached the top in the rarefied world of video-game designers by consistently creating games that kids can't resist. As a result, he's as revered as a rock star--and not just in Japan. Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and movie directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have all traveled to Nintendo's famed E.A.D. (Entertainment Analysis and Development) lab in Kyoto to meet the man known as the Spielberg of video games...
WHEN SPRING COMES TO THE CITIES OF JAPAN, salarymen dutifully assemble under cherry blossoms, and drunkenly bawl songs in what is really only a quainter version of St. Patrick's Day. In the fall, supermarkets hang paper leaves from their cash registers, and cigarette makers issue packages featuring autumn colors. To a jaded foreigner such an observation can seem as formulaic and debased as the Muzaked versions of Jingle Bells that torment every department store from Bangor to Bangkok...
Sometimes the system works and turns out efficient next-generation salarymen. But as some of these children reach adulthood, they begin to ask questions for which this narrowest of training provides no answers. The word for them then is majime, whose direct translation is earnest. They are in search of meaning but unequipped with the tools normally used to discern it. They grasp at any world vision they are offered. ufos perhaps; perhaps fortune telling, channeling, yoga or mind control. Once lured, they pursue their new faith with the stupendous energy of the lost...
...articles revealed a country far different from that portrayed in most other American coverage. He had the ability to take perfect slices of Japanese life -- how the Japanese handle household garbage, for example -- and offer the reader something far more authentic than cliches about geishas and salarymen. Since leaving Asia in 1989, Fallows has often returned to survey the world's most dynamic economic region, and in his new book, Looking at the Sun (Pantheon Books; 517 pages; $25), he demonstrates that his reportorial skills are as sharp as ever...
...salarymen, bereft of overtime and entertainment allowances, are having to spend time with wives and children they have barely spoken to for years -- sometimes to their mutual shock. Japanese businessmen are traditionally so lost outside their offices and clubs that many a wife refers to a retired husband as a "damp leaf" -- a sticky annoyance to a woman tidying up a walk...