Sashimi Report: Japan News, Raw!

Monday, August 27, 2001

Reform is in the air in Japan these days. You name it, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi wants to change it. Banks. Road-building. Elections. Haircuts. But we at the Sashimi Report have a few things we'd like to reform -- with one firm calligraphy stroke -- and they won't cause any loss of jobs or affect the country's GDP. They include:

Garbage collection
For a culture as sensitized to cleanliness and order as this one, there's a curious cognitive dissonance about picking up the trash. Briefly, this is how it works. Householders put their trash out on the street on certain days of the week. One day is for "burnables" -- paper and biodegradable food and such. Another day is for plastics and other "non-burnables." Another day is for recyclables. All that sounds nice and eco-friendly. But where it all falls apart -- literally -- is that the garbage is set out in plastic bags. So the streets are turned into stinky, messy mazes of garbage, ripe for the pickings of Tokyo's nuclear-mutated crows that are bigger than many toddlers.

Solution: Garbage bins with lids.

Crows
See No. 1.

Solution: Shoot them!

Schoolchildren's bags
At many schools, children wear leather upholstered backpacks that appear heavier than the frames of the small children forced to wear them. Plus, they are expensive. And they use animal products, needlessly.

Solution: Nylon.

Morning coats.
Are we the only people who think the long, tailed morning coats and pin-striped pants worn by members of the Diet (Japan's parliament) for official functions, look a bit ridiculous? Lose the top hat and tails, unless you plan to dance like Fred Astaire.

Solution: Yukata, the lightweight cotton kimonos. They're Japanese through and through, they're comfortable and they don't make the wearer look like a stuffed shirt.

The amplified sound trucks used by right-wing nationalists.
We're all for free speech, but does it have to be so loud? We asked an organizer of one of these groups (he was wearing a military suit, jackboots and a scowl) why the volume has to be cranked up so high. His answer: "To intimidate people." O.K., we're scared. Now, turn it down!

Solution: Force the right-wing nationalist groups who operate these trucks to listen to the heartthrob boy band SMAP 24 hours a day for a week.

SMAP.

Solution: Draft the boys into the Self-Defense Forces.

Vacations, part I.
The problem: People don't take them. Koizumi is on the right track here, taking a week plus off to relax in the hot-spring baths at Hakone. One executive we know loves to brag that she hasn't taken a vacation in six years. That "boast" should be cause for demotion.

Solution: Start with the bosses. Force them to take at least three weeks off every year. If they refuse and come to work, change the locks.

Vacations, part II.
The problem: The people who do take vacations take them at the same time. Namely, all of Japan disappears during Golden Week in late April/early May and during Obon Week, in August. And everybody goes to the same places. So it's not like vacation at all, it's just the usual, humdrum life with all the usual humdrum people exported to some other place.

Solution: Sell people discount tickets with destination "to-be-announced."

Train etiquette.
The problem: Commuters refuse to yield or give seats to old people, pregnant women, children or anyone with a physical handicap.

Solution: Anyone caught being rude is sentenced to a day-long train ride with a hungry crow, 5 Diet members wearing nothing but yukata and a right-wing nationalist screaming the lyrics to SMAP songs over the public address system.

O.K, now we feel better.

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