The White Peril 白禍

According to the Mitsubishi Fuso website, the company name has charming origins:

When the B46 autobus was created, the company held an internal search for a nickname, and the name that was selected was Fuso. Fuso (扶桑: "caretaking" + "mulberry") is a Chinese word of ancient origin that refers to "sacred trees that grow in the Land of the Rising Sun on the East Sea" and was used as a variant name for Japan. The actual fuso trees are called "bussoge" and are more generally known as "[Chinese] hibiscus."

The site doesn't mention that, while mitsubishi (三菱) is commonly understood to mean "three diamonds," the hishi literally means "water chestnut," so there's kind of a mixed plant metaphor thing going on there. I suppose that might be considered an additional part of the charm.

Not so charming, unfortunately, is the company's endless string of problems with defective trucks. The latest problem is with wheel hubs that were introduced in response to previous defects:

Mitsubishi Fuso Truck & Bus Corp. has announced it will recall tens of thousands of its large trucks because of concerns over a potential defect in the wheel hub, company sources said Tuesday.

The wheel hub in question is a new type introduced following a large-scale recall in 2004. However, fractures and cracks in the hubs have been discovered in a number of cases since October.

Until now, the company has maintained to the Construction and Transport Ministry that the problem would not occur under normal conditions and that it was the result of a maintenance error. However, the sources said the company now believes the new hub is simply too weak.

Five years ago, a woman driving with her two children in Yokohama was killed when a wheel detached from a passing truck. The accident was highly publicized because it's the kind of thing that's not supposed to happen in Japan, with its vaunted transportation systems and technology. Note that Mitsubishi Motors, M. Fuso's parent corporation, has had completely unrelated problems of its own with, among other things, the clutches in its cars.

The new movie about Japanese abductee Megumi Yokota looks to be an interesting treatment of her case. Next to Hitomi Soga, who gained fame as the wife of US Army deserter Charles Jenkins, Yokota is the abductee who's received the most publicity. Her family has been very vocal in its demands that the Japanese government use all diplomatic means possible to find out what happened to her and the other abductees who are still unaccounted for. There's been little development on the issue lately, but those who are interested in the push and pull over the last few years can click the category button below to see some of the news items that have appeared.

The "suffering passive" is a construction in Japanese that we foreign language students tend to have trouble wrapping our heads around at first. Today's news brought a ghoulishly apt example of how it's used:

At around 7:55 on the evening of 3 January, a man's voice reported to 110, "I killed my mother," from the residence of [Ms.] Yaeko Tsukumo of 2 Mizue, Edogawa Ward, Tokyo.

...

[Her 53-year-old third son] Minoru was suspected of having strangled her using his hands and socks at about 7 p.m. "She was getting on my case about my not having a job, and I went ballistic" he stated. Yaeko and Minoru lived together.

The suffering passive is not used to make the direct object the subject and the subject the agent; instead, it's used to emphasize the way the speaker (usually) was made to suffer by the action. You learn sentences such as 妹にケーキを食べきられてしまった, which doesn't just mean "the cake was completely eaten by my younger sister" but rather "little bitch hoovered all the cake on me!" The cake is still the direct object; the verb is passive because the speaker feels powerless to do anything about his or her suffering (not an uncharacteristic Japanese attitude by any stretch).

Mr. Tsukumo did, of course, take matters into...uh...his own hands; but he still used the suffering passive to describe his mother's scolding. The "getting on my case" part is in the passive voice: 仕事をしていないことをなじられ --> "I was made to suffer by her taking exception to my not having any work."

It's impossible to determine from that preliminary report whether the Tsukumos mère et fils had a history of arguing; however, elder abuse has become a recognized social problem in Japan, despite its image of uncommon respect for the aged. Many elderly people still live with their children--traditionally, it's the oldest son and his wife--but households are now rarely structured around the clan, with the patriarch and matriarch presiding over several generations under one roof, or at least in one compound. Nowadays, elder care is frequently seen as a burden added onto that of stretching tight post-Bubble incomes. It also involves carving up close quarters in tiny urban apartments. The freestanding houses in major metro areas aren't much roomier.

The rules against venting about family problems to friends who aren't relatives appear to have relaxed a bit, but the sense that seeking professional counseling or assistance is shameful remains strong, perhaps especially among those who would most benefit from it. There's a major tendency to keep gritting your teeth through your frustrations until you crack. And Japanese society does revere the elderly as repositories of experience and wisdom; but as a shame and not guilt culture, it also makes it relatively easy to do nasty things if no one's looking and you think you can get away with them.

I've just finished former Knight Ridder Tokyo bureau chief Michael Zielenziger's book Shutting out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation. So many books have now been written about what's wrong with post-Bubble Japan that I wish I could say that Zielenziger's is redundant, that the big problems have already been sufficiently teased out and there isn't much more to add to the discussion. Unfortunately, that's not the case, and one of the virtues of Zielenziger's book is that he focuses on the patterns that emerge from talking with individual Japanese people about their lives.

His focus, as his subtitle implies, is on Japanese adults born in the '60s and '70s. He's spoken mostly to men who've dropped out of society and rarely leave home and to women who are approaching middle age but unmarried. At this stage in their lives, they would be expected to have their families and careers and, for lack of a better term, life goals established pretty well. Why is it that so many do not, despite living in an affluent, well-educated, democratic society?

One obvious but clever way he considers the question is by way of comparison: Why is it that Korea, so similar to Japan in so many ways, was specifically able to rebound from the Asian financial crisis a decade ago and is generally more receptive to social and economic reforms? One of Zielenziger's key answers is something that, while extensively discussed in academic circles, doesn't get much play in the mass-audience books about East Asia I know of:

In my somewhat conventional coverage of the political and economic character of these two competing societies while working as a journalist, it had never dawned on me that the role religion played could prove so decisive in altering a people's attitudes toward self-esteem, individuation, or communal responsibility. Nothing in my background or disposition as an American Jew prepared me to accept that the rise of Western religion--and especially the Protestant Church--had served as a vital force crucial in transforming South Korean society. It may be too simple to argue that exposure to Christianity alone has changed Korean consciousness. Yet the churches have coached the Korean people in forming social networks, building trust among strangers, and accepting universal ethics and individualism in ways that served as powerful antidotes to the autocratic worldview their grandparents--and, indeed, the Japanese--had been taught.

I happen to think that the Japanese view of nature--as crowded with turbulent, competing and complementary forces that are, on balance, indifferent to human joy and pain--is a much more accurate reflection of reality than Christian theology. But the same imagination that allowed our Western ancestors to conceive of God as an immanent, transcendent, more super-cool version of us (complete with a highly-evolved personality) is what allowed them to conceive of principles above and beyond group-rule and of the possibility of asserting will over nature.

There's a danger in extending that explanation too far, of course. Korea, despite having been the Hermit Kingdom, is a peninsula attached to Asia; the neighbors with which it shares borders are huge and frequently pushy. Korea has a long history of dealing with and adapting to external forces, and since the 1950s, the South has had the proximity of the DPRK to maintain a sense of urgent mindfulness of hard reality. So Christian missionaries have not been the only source of difference in outlook between Korea and Japan; nevertheless, Zielenziger is right to pay attention to them.

On a more amusing note of possible ill portent, the Mainichi reports the following:

Four people suffered an ominous start to the Year of the Boar when they were attacked in the street--by wild boars.

...

Local police suspect that several different wild boars attacked the four, noting that their descriptions of the animals were different.

It may be that nature is rebelling; it's more likely that boars are just more newsworthy right about now than they have been since twelve years ago. The New Year danger of choking on sticky rice cakes, by contrast, is an annual thing; in the Tokyo area, eleven elderly people were taken to the hospital, with five still in critical condition. In Japan, even the rice cakes have hidden dangers.

Happy New Year, everyone.