All over the country, the refrain is the same: Japan has lost its bearing. As individuals, the Japanese have never really known how to reinvent themselves--how to go west like the Americans or head to the coast like the Chinese. As a nation Japan moved in lockstep until it reached its goal of economic parity with the West. But the next move is into thin air. In a system designed in the ethos of the industrial assembly line where people are discouraged from thinking on their own, there are few agents of change, fewer free-floating radicals who can think outside the box. Consensus rules, not prime ministers, who come and go like interns. Society has decayed into something playwright Samuel Beckett might have constructed--everyone is waiting for a leader to emerge, but everyone knows no leader will emerge. As the millennium approaches, Japan is aimless. One of the world's richest nations is exhausted, bereft of imagination and incapable of seeing an alternative to a slow, elegantly coiffed collapse.

And that might even hold reason for hope. The only route to a new Japan may be: crash, burn, resurrection. Listen to Kozumi Kobayashi, a 27-year-old Hiroshima housewife, pregnant with her first child. It is Sunday afternoon, and her husband is out refereeing a neighborhood soccer game. Last summer he took her to France for a week to watch the World Cup. He is happy enough with his slice of the Japanese dream. He works for the computer division of NEC and has never considered he might lose his job. She has: "In my parents' generation, always the husband worked. Now we have to prepare for the possibility of the husband being fired." She smiles disarmingly, but her logic is unforgiving. The local Kirin Beer factory closed not long ago, leaving its workers jobless. Things will only get tougher, Kobayashi fears: "Only those who have had a very severe experience will gain a better idea of how to live. Those who don't learn to be independent will be swept away."

She is due in March. Her main concern is saving money for the child's schooling. "I know my parents spent a lot of money on my education, so I cannot lower the level for my own children." So she no longer buys $800 designer dresses and rarely eats out with her husband. The trip to France was the couple's last overseas excursion for a long time (so much for Tokyo's efforts to stimulate a consumer spending boom to end the recession). Kobayashi has no answers but sees a grim silver lining: "The economy won't be so good in the future, so we will not be able to spoil our child. My baby will be a good person who can think for himself."

In the city of Nemuro on Japan's northeastern tip, Hiroichi Iwamoto is riding the pachinko machine, trying to chase away the blues. He knew things weren't right when the Hanasaki crabs ran out in mid-August, several weeks before season's end. For Iwamoto, 28, this was the worst of the 16 years he has spent fishing off Nemuro's coast. Salmon, saury, cuttlefish--all are scarcer than ever. Cod was fished out five years ago. "We didn't pay too much attention to conservation," he says sadly.

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