Cruising for A Bruising

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It was a muggy afternoon in Suginami, an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Tokyo, and Keiichi Onizawa was strolling home from the train station. The 68-year-old journalist was alone on a quiet street sheltered by cherry trees along the Kanda River. Suddenly, he heard footsteps, then a loud voice: "You bastard!" Onizawa turned around to see two muscular young men rushing him. The shorter, stockier one swung an iron pipe at his head; Onizawa blocked it but the metal tore into his arm. A second blow ripped through his shirt and the flesh on his shoulder. For good measure, the taller guy kicked him so hard that Onizawa fell to the ground. The guy with the pipe then went for his stomach and his knee. "I thought they were going to kill me," Onizawa recalls. But a bicyclist came into view and the assailants fled. "I felt so helpless," Onizawa says. "I couldn't fight back."

Japan's salarymen were once revered as modern-day economic samurai. Today they're like washed-up gunslingers mocked by everyone in the saloon. The jokes at their expense are bad enough: they wear bad suits and smelly socks, their hair is gunky with oil, they behave like drunken buffoons. But cruel jokes are just the start of their torment. The lifetime employment system is over, with unemployment now hitting a 50-year high of 5.3%. And so many middle-aged men have been attacked by teenage boys that police have created a new crime classification: oyaji gari, or geezer hunting. Police don't keep stats on such crimes, but say they are increasingly routine. Earlier this year, two boys were convicted of beating to death a banker on a Tokyo train platform—a nihilistic attack whose impulse was disdain. Survivors rarely talk about what happened to them because they're ashamed they couldn't defend themselves. "Men my age are afraid to walk home alone at night," confesses Jinsuke Kageyama, 54, a criminologist in Tokyo. "We call our wives to pick us up at the train station."

Onizawa, who is a celebrity-gossip expert on television, was brave enough to share his story. He says he recognized his assailants from the train: he had asked them to give up their seats for a pregnant woman. They glared at him, then furtively tailed him. "Young men like them have no respect for the older generation," Onizawa laments. "After the economic bubble burst, middle-aged men all lost their confidence. So what the kids today saw growing up were these sad, pathetic father figures."

The Japanese have their own word for these losers, oyaji, which literally means father. Long ago, it connoted respect, endearment, even awe. "They used to have all the power. They were supposed to protect the family," says sociologist Yoko Shoji. "Now people just pity them." So what does oyaji mean now? Kazuhito Suzuki, a 20-year-old construction worker who admits to beating up an oyaji, snorts and rolls his eyes. Sitting on the front stoop of a pachinko parlor, he takes a drag on his cigarette and watches a parade of older men passing by. None of them looks him in the eye, none dares ask him to stop blocking the doorway. "They smell," he says. "The minute I get on a train in Tokyo, I can smell them. They're scared of us. They don't have any power in Japan. Not anymore."

The typical salaryman now endures a daily allotment of petty humiliation. On his way to his dead-end job, he glances up to see a jumbo TV screen showing middle-aged men in boxer shorts dancing the parapara, a kind of disco line dance. After work, he steps around homeless men at the train station who once had stable jobs like his. If he seeks solace at his favorite izakaya, or pub, he may find ridicule in the form of oyaji gals, young women who get their kicks by dressing in wrinkled men's suits and doing salaryman impressions: swilling beer, belching, picking their teeth. At home, when he kicks back in front of the TV, he's confronted with a Sapporo beer commercial featuring a superhero parody: a balding, potbellied man who dashes into perilous situations. Explains a Sapporo spokeswoman: "It's like cheering for the middle-aged man who has been depressed lately."

It's more like mockery. "When I was young, Japan was the country that was humiliated after losing the war," says Onizawa. "So we all knew we had to somehow get the spirit back. Everybody was fighting to save Japan. Nobody thinks that way anymore. Our dreams have all disappeared."