Too Hot for Civil Society

Just when I thought Autumn had finally joined us at the table and Summer was excusing itself to take a leave of absence, yesterday was barbs of yellow sun carving marks in your face in a murky swamp of maximum humidity. So what better occasion to get up at 8 a.m. and go to your Neighborhood Disaster Training.

In some fit of faulty reasoning, I had decided that (a) attendance at this event was mandatory (b) everyone in the 'hood would be there and (c) the whole thing would involve us arriving at the refuge site and then dispersing fifteen minutes later.

All of these assumptions turned out to be a product of my imagination, as we greeted the only people who bothered to show up: twelve elderly residents of our chou-me area. We also hunkered down for what would be a three-hour training session, starting with fire extinguishers, going to basic first aid, and then drifting off into defibrillating machines. By ten forty-five, I started to question whether this was the best way to spend a Sunday morning, seeing that the rest of the neighborhood certainly did not think so.

Civil society has always been relatively weak in Japan, and I would blame "the kids" for a lack of perspective on social responsibility but their parents were not there either. This is not really a unique "Japanese" problem, as illustrated by Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone - nobody anywhere anymore really feels like community, society, other people particularly deserve much of their time, especially in big cities.

In Tokyo, I find it hard to imagine anyone feels as if they have time to spare. I had to go out to Chiba on Friday, and I was reminded how long and dreary the daily commute is for a large chunk of metropolitan workers. They recently removed one train from the morning schedule of my "lightly packed" Inogashira Line and now it's wall-to-wall upon leaving Kichijoji. Even my relatively short ride wears me out before I even get to work.

Admittedly, my values and standards are a bit warped the lazy pace of the American South, where my dad would be home from work at 5:30 every night to eat dinner, but still, I get the feeling that getting up at 6 every morning and getting back to the house around 10 or 11 to take a bath and eat the cold remains of dinner on every week night would lead most everybody to treating the weekend as sacrosanct. Who in their right mind would give three hours to their local committee when they can barely give the same attention to their offspring? Local community (and kids, for that matter) will always lose out to the corporation: "No man can serve two masters."

Who shows up to these things? The retired. These kinds of events are like Field Day for the elderly. It's easy to say they "possess a heightened sensitivity towards civic duty that has been lost in recent generations" but really, their Sunday is like their Tuesday - they've got three hours any day of the week. This is why the elderly also set our political agenda.

We youngsters snuck off at eleven. Once I learned the proper location for fleeing my earthquake-savaged neighborhood, I needed to go home and get back to my dwindling moments of free time. I look forward to attending the next training session in forty or so years.

Posted by marxy at September 11, 2006 11:07 AM