Nothing But Words

Today I have some various Japan-related observations:

• I half-jokingly commented recently that Japan would deal with its declining birthrate by replacing its workers with robots, rather than allowing in large numbers of immigrants. Well, it’s not a joke. Recently Maria went to a work-related dinner where she was chatting with an American government official who lives and works in Tokyo (and who I shouldn’t name since he didn’t know he’d end up in my blog). He expressed the opinion that the Japanese are intensively developing robotic technology with their demographic issues in mind, and that in 10 years or so a significant portion of low-wage jobs in Japan – from factory work to care for the elderly – will be automated.
• With heavy drinking on the rise, Japan is now on the warpath against drunk driving:
  

  In the vanguard is Toyota, which plans to launch a car in 2009 that will shut down the engine if its driver is drunk, using sensors on the steering wheel to measure the alcohol level in the driver’s sweat. If the driver is wearing gloves, a camera on the dashboard will check for dilated pupils and the car’s computer will detect erratic steering. Nissan, meanwhile, is testing a breathalyser-like device into which the driver must blow before starting the car.

  In grad school I had a class taught by Jeane Kirkpatrick. One time she went off on a tangent about “coercive seat belts” – her term for automatic seat belts. It’s not hard to imagine how she’d react to this.

• Maria caught a bit of a program on Japanese TV last night on how to deal with your child when he or she cries at night. Babies typically sleep with their parents in Japan, so they don’t even get into the crib vs. co-sleeping debate here. They suggested: have daddy carry the baby around, go out on the veranda for some air, cluck like a chicken, and cry with the baby (to shock the baby out of crying). Clearly they haven’t heard of the Ferber method . Actually, I think it’s partly a cultural matter and partly a practical one: Letting your baby cry may be an option in a big house in an American suburb, but it won’t make you too popular in a 1 bedroom Tokyo apartment, when you have another kid trying to sleep and neighbors sharing walls on each side. It took us about 6 weeks after we got here to finally get Eidan sleeping well again (and thankfully, sleeping on his own).
• Check out the trailer for the new Japanese Movie, Go to the Bubble (click Enter, then click Trailer, then click the one labeled 01 – be warned it plays music after you click Enter). It’s about a woman who is sent back in time by her company to the height of Japan’s bubble economy, to stop the bubble from collapsing. It’s actually billed as a romantic comedy. I like that the prop used for the time machine is nothing more than a front-loading washing machine (“timu washa,” as the man says in the trailer). Also, listen for the Japanese phrase for time travel – “timu slippu” (time slip).

• View at Picasa Sumida Tower: to be completed in 2011 in Tokyo, will be the world’s tallest structure

  Japan is making a late entry in the “world’s tallest man-made structure” game. The Sumida Tower (aka New Tokyo Tower) will be 2001 feet tall. It’s expected to be completed in 2011. Tokyo actually doesn’t have any remarkably tall buildings, so this will really dwarf everything else in the city. I think the structure itself has a nice design, but I think it will look ridiculously out of proportion to everything around it. The official site is Japanese only, but the trailer is cool, even if you can’t understand the narration (click the “movie” link on the top left). According to a woman in my Japanese class the old Tokyo Tower will be torn down, but I haven’t been able to confirm that anywhere.