Can the Class of '89 Fix Japan? — page 3

Take astronomer Yui. She recalls 1993, the year the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had governed Japan for 38 years, lost power (albeit briefly) and a socialist government was sworn in. For many Japanese, who had grown up knowing nothing but one-party rule, it was a disorienting event. But Yui was hopeful—at any rate, initially. "I disliked the LDP, and hoped the socialists would change Japan," says Yui. "They failed. Gradually I began to realize that only the people themselves could change Japan—starting with our own communities." She and her neighbors in Kawasaki City have badgered the local authorities to spend taxpayers' money on schemes that make their lives more livable, such as day-care centers for kids, swimming pools and old people's homes. "Sometimes we've been successful, sometimes not," explains Yui. "But at least people in our town now recognize they can achieve such things. The same is happening all over Japan."

If Eighty-Niners are less selfish and more civic, it's partly because they had to be. Even by the early '90s, with the political élite unable to stop the economy's tailspin, the beneficent nanny state upon which Japanese had depended for so long—and had taken for granted—was already looking decidedly shaky. The horrific events of 1995 dealt it a deathblow. With the Kobe earthquake and Aum Shinrikyo's sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, 1995 was Japan's year of living disastrously—and, for Eighty-Niners, the 9/11 of their generation. In Kobe, while an ill-prepared government dithered, thousands of people died beneath the rubble of their own homes. Two months later in Tokyo the authorities failed to prevent Aum's act of terror despite countless warning signs.

It is hard to exaggerate the impact these events had on Japan. A generation that grew up in the safest nation on earth now worries about rising crime, a modern ill that (once upon a time) Japan seemed to have sidestepped miraculously. "In another 10 years' time," shudders Yoichiro Kurata, CEO of an art auction house in Ginza, Tokyo, "Japan could be like ... Botswana." (Poor Botswana: since last year, when Moody's judged it more creditworthy than mighty Japan, it has apparently become the country against which Japanese measure their own nation's decline.)

For a less resilient generation, such developments might spell only disaster. But even as Eighty-Niners lost faith in their government, they seemed to rediscover it in themselves. Architectural engineer Yamazaki, from the class of '89 at Tokyo Metropolitan University, was a trainee living in a company dorm near Kobe when the quake struck. He awoke to the sound of people crying for help, trapped inside their wrecked homes. Hundreds died in his neighborhood alone, yet Yamazaki recalls those times with something approaching nostalgia. "People helped each other," he says. "People spoke to each other. It reminded me of an older Japan." Quake survivors like Yamazaki were not the only ones to be moved by this spirit. Banker Kasahara notes how volunteer work became popular in Japan after Kobe. "It was kind of a turning point," she says, recalling how people nationwide skipped work to help the relief effort. "It was the first time so many Japanese chose other people instead of their companies."

Atsushi Kanamaru, a 1989 graduate in education from Waseda University, not only lost faith in his government but in his company, too. In 1995 the air-cargo firm he worked at saw its profits almost halve and his colleagues lose their jobs because of a strong yen, which that year surged to an all-time high against the dollar. "The earthquake, the sarin attack, the strong yen—I could do nothing about these things," says Kanamaru, 37. "It made me think I should change my ways, be less dependent on companies." He then studied English and co-founded an independent English-language publishing house called Kotan, the Ainu word for village. He would no longer be a cog in somebody else's corporate machine.

Are Eighty-Niners so different from their juniors—from, say, the class of '99? Yes, they chorus. "They're more diligent than we were—they have to be—but not so independent-minded," says Reiko Ikeda about his younger employees. "I tell them, 'You can't wait for someone else to tell you what to do. You have to think for yourself.'" Many of the Eighty-Niners name one other quality that differentiates them from their parents, who had worked too hard to ever enjoy their wealth and then bore the brunt of the bubble bursting: hope. "We now know that even the biggest companies can go bankrupt," Ikeda continues. "But we're not pessimistic. That's what makes us different from the older generation. For us, economic growth isn't everything." Even as the Nikkei teeters near 20-year lows, banker Kasahara says, "Now is a hard time for Japan, but we're convinced good days will return."

For some Eighty-Niners, Japan's performance at the 2002 World Cup put their country back on the map, much as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics had for their parents. It also signaled a long-awaited return of optimism. Of course, much of the joy of watching the nation's footballers was that they played like no Japanese team before them. With their dyed hair, their brazen individuality and their almost swaggering confidence on the ball, they seemed thrillingly free from the constraints of the past. The Eighty-Niners hold a similar promise. They distrust élites, even though their universities were training grounds for them; and they refuse to be tethered by respect for authority, wealth and conformity. And so they, too, are free to run with the ball. "We're now old enough to hold some authority and influence in our jobs," says astronomer Yui. Now it's up to them to change Japan.

—With reporting by Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo

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