Word: salarymen
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...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...
Overtime and expense accounts have severely been trimmed, radically changing the lives of many salarymen. The Ginza in Tokyo once sported 4,000 clubs where businessmen passed the late hours drinking, eating and chatting with young hostesses. Several hundred clubs have been forced to close, and many more are up for sale. Yuri Hirota, mama-san at the Club 48, used to keep an employee at the phone all night doing nothing but summoning hard-to-get taxis. Now cabs can be hailed by stepping out the door, but penny-pinching customers prefer to take trains -- and since the last...
...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...
...begin with, Japan's special sort of samurai work ethic will be under assault. Coming generations of young "salarymen" will be less willing to work such grueling hours. They will want more leisure time, larger apartments, shorter commutes. Japanese men and women alike, no longer content to be poor people in a rich country, as they describe themselves, will demand a larger share of the national wealth they create. The resulting higher consumption at home will inevitably mean more imports and a reduction in Japan's trade surpluses...