The local fishing cooperative, set up to support people like Iwamoto, is part of the problem. It's overstaffed--no fewer than 100 officials supervise 231 fishermen from spacious offices overlooking the port. Fishermen who are friends of the co-op directors tend to get the best permits, says Iwamoto. Nobody thought about protecting fish stocks until it was too late. When fishermen are struggling they borrow from the co-op against future catches--as these diminish, their debts mount. The co-op will not allow a fisherman to leave and find another job until he has paid off his borrowings. And nobody got rich from pachinko. Iwamoto is single: "What I earn now would not be enough for two." Girls don't date fishermen in Nemuro any more--Iwamoto's longest relationship lasted six months.

Five hundred kilometers to the south, Iwate prefecture's farmers are bringing in bundles of rice straw from the miniature fields nestling in valleys. Bamboo groves sway in the breeze, and persimmons hang bright orange on the trees. This is the Japanese idyll. Or so Makiko Yakushige thought when she first saw it seven years ago. A graduate of the prestigious law department at the University of Tokyo, she landed a high-flying job with the Ministry of Agriculture but gave it up to settle down in Iwate. She married a local and decided to raise a family in a valley straight out of a woodblock print.

Agriculture looks different outside of the ministry, which pours billions of urban taxpayers' dollars into supporting the production of rice and keeping out imports. Indeed, the exercise appears hopeless. "The rice price is going down and there are no young people to take over the farms," says Yakushige. "Now we know we cannot compete with U.S. agriculture. We should aim at something else." The average age of farmers in her valley, she says, is about 60. Her husband's family owns one hectare of paddy field, which is not nearly enough to support them, so he works in the town hall. She worries about what is waiting for her two-year-old son. "Maybe we are at a turning point," she says, "with the recession, environmental problems, rising child crime rate, the poisonings. If we cannot change society now, we will never change it." She has no answers though, beyond a vague sense that Japanese should return to simpler lives, cut back on the consumerist life-style that exploded during the bubble years of the 1980s.

If adults have no idea where they are going, schoolchildren are truly in a vacuum. Most spend long hours cramming facts into their brains, without much idea of what they are being trained for. Aggression builds up as in a pressure-cooker, and the group selects its victims without mercy. Utako Akasaki is a victim, picked on by her classmates in Tokorosawa, Saitama prefecture because she was quiet, withdrawing, out of step. At age 13 someone skillfully imbedded three razor blades inside the drawer of her desk. "Whichever way I opened the drawer," she recalls, "they would slash my hand." A tendon on her ring finger was severed, and even today she cannot straighten it. Pins were taped inside her shoes; her schoolbooks were torn up. She responded by communicating even less, retreating inside a mental box.

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