Word: salarymen
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...hows or ifs of economic recovery anymore: the unspoken question these days is whether some seismic collapse is on the near horizon. Lifetime employment, a pillar of the Japanese miracle, has been supplanted by the specter of lifetime underemployment for today's twentysomethings and brutally early retirement for the salarymen who rose out of that rubble. A lot of Japanese are shaking their heads and muttering, "Times are bad, but ..." and the sentence goes unfinished. No one can find a consoling conclusion...
...like skateboarding in snow. Both profess, in the mantra of their sport, that having fun is more important than winning. Insists Miyake: "I don't know why the medal question keeps coming up all the time." If she wins, it will be one for the slackers, zero for the salarymen...
...department store down the street from me in Nara abruptly closed last week - and the construction workers dismantling it seemed happy not to be in the position of the salarymen they hear about who get up every morning, go to the park in coat-and-tie and return home at 7 p.m. to a family that doesn't know daddy has been laid off. Unemployment recently hit a postwar high of 5%, and my Japanese friends regularly point out "For Sale" signs proliferating outside luxury houses, or talk of college-age kids who actually want to work for the government...
...York is still a post-apocalyptic crime scene, still a place where rescue workers dig for miracles with masks over their noses and mouths. Not yet a place to go to work; not yet a place to begin trading on a tragedy that robbed New York?s financial-services salarymen of thousands of their closest friends...
...Roppongi, where she eventually found work at a hostess bar called Casablanca, is the neon-lit playground of this civilization in decline, where Japanese Neros go to fiddle while their economy burns, where saked-up salarymen nuzzle Russian strippers and tea-haired twenty-somethings look to score designer drugs. The district is home to scores of dives, cafés, strip clubs, casinos and after-hours clubs catering to foreigners and to Japanese who like to hang out with them. The crowd - American bond-traders in Brooks Brothers suits, visiting models, second-rate rock stars, African bouncers, Israeli street vendors...