ABSTRACT
I wanted to get the feel of Japan after being in southern Asia, and the following is what I wrote in my journal upon my return to Tokyo.
People seem more tense and tired than those I saw in Bangkok, Hong Kong, or Taipei. This is partly the effect of a huge city. You ride on the bus, or train, or subway, and the people around you have the generally sober, unrelaxed look of folk going drudgingly to work. But it isn’t just that; it’s something deeper. Try to get a smile from kids. Smile at them and they stare back owl-eyed. It isn’t that way with kids in China, Thailand, or India. It isn’t because people don’t know how to laugh or be gay. Here, adults take life very seriously, it seems, and maybe the kids get trained to also.
There is election campaigning afoot. People go about in trucks with loudspeakers addressing the streets day and night. But in this neighborhood crowds don’t gather. The loudspeakers bellow, but people go on about their business as though electioneering had no relation to them. Maybe it doesn’t. I’ve been told that it’s the most “famous” people who get elected, not those with policies that win them votes.
Japan impresses me by its industry. The hurry and bustle, the long hours of work, the great amount of goods in the shops are all in contrast to India, where the pace is much slower. Perhaps they hide unemployment here. But those who work, work very hard, actively and long. It’s true in rural areas, too. In the Izu Peninsula you see agriculture pushed much farther than anything I saw in India. It’s in the terraced rice fields, and the little corners of land used for growing vegetables; it’s the people working hard in the fields. In southern India they work hard too; and doubtless in northern India after the rains there is great activity. But land there just is not so intensively used. Burma and Thailand don’t know the meaning of work in comparison with China and Japan.
