Japan's Elegant Suicide
A journey through the heartland reveals a deep sense of gloom. Recovery may depend on how quickly the crippled nation can reinvent itself
By TERRY McCARTHY Tokyo

Michiharu Shimada is 64 and homeless. He scrabbles for construction jobs at $60 a day (half of which goes to his gangster recruiters) and at night sleeps in a cardboard box on the steps of Osaka station, along with a growing number of other casualties of the recession. He wears a jacket and tie at all times: "I was born in Osaka, and I might meet someone who knows me." But Shimada takes off his shoes before getting into his cardboard shelter. In Japan you always remove your shoes before entering your home. Even if you are homeless.

Japan is suffering. The economy is shrinking: GDP will fall an estimated 2.4% in fiscal year 1998, miring the nation in its worst recession since World War II, pulling down the rest of Asia. Japanese banks' cumulative bad debt equals the size of the entire British economy. As the downward spiral worsens, the message from Washington, Beijing and just about everywhere else is deafening: "Pull up, pull up." But still Japan vacillates. Conventional wisdom holds that the Japanese are too comfortable, scarcely aware that they're living in a recession. But a two-week trip through the day-to-day world of coffee shops, pachinko parlors, schools, bars, train stations and living rooms reveals something very different: a population slowly being consumed by fear, hopelessly devoid of ideas about how to turn things around. The warning lights are all flashing red, but there appears to be no one prepared to take the controls and pull the country out of its dive.

Japan, the country that raised suicide to an art form, appears to be locked in a kind of national death spiral. Bizarre things are happening throughout Japanese society--omens, perhaps, of a malaise that goes far deeper than the Nikkei's woes. Consider the mysterious wave of poisonings sweeping the country. Since last July, when four people died and 63 were hospitalized after eating curry laced with arsenic at a festival in Wakayama prefecture, police have reported 34 similar attacks across the nation. To outsiders, the country may seem comfortable and unperturbed. But it doesn't take long to find a hollow dread beneath the surface.

Shimada, for one, is afraid. He sleeps in the same spot every night at the station's south exit and, for mutual protection, has befriended the men who sleep in the boxes on either side of him. He keeps a plastic bottle of shochu, rice spirit, for comfort. Though the cold nights of winter have descended, Shimada's box has become his prison. He has no idea how to get out of it.

Only a 10-minute taxi ride from Osaka station is Grand Cafe, a basement club in the city's Minami entertainment district. It is a large oval room with orange lighting and ambient techno-music pulsing at a soft, conversation-enabling level. The fashion models come here; it's one of Osaka's hot spots.

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