Welcome to rock bottom, Hitchens-San... A penetrating look at a Japan still reeling from TWO economic earthquakes

I dived beneath the kitchen table as the floor trembled and heaved beneath me. A pan clattered from the stove, the furniture tottered. An unsettling roaring noise seemed to surround me. It was an earthquake.

But I had, literally, asked for it. Japan must be the only place in the world where you can learn how to behave in an earthquake, by undergoing a remarkably realistic simulation.

Showing off, as usual, I had requested the most violent version possible, equivalent to the 1995 Kobe upheaval which flattened hundreds of buildings, snapped a motorway in two and killed more than 4,000 people.

Wrong track: Peter Hitchens finds that even a brief pause for a photo isn't allowed to disturb the perfection of Japan's rail system

It turned out to be a much nastier and more disturbing experience than I had bargained for, the ground pushing painfully and queasily against my knees as I cowered, wishing it would stop.

Anyone in Tokyo can undergo this rather odd experience, provided by the capital's fire brigade at several special 'safety learning centres', along with an unsettling instructional film on how to survive when the Big One strikes, as it is bound to do sooner or later.

This is a country where everyone is accustomed to the idea of sudden, irresistible disaster.

Small and medium-sized earthquakes are normal and frequent. Huge, devastating ones are all too common.

Nor are earthquakes the only sudden horrors in the national memory. Japan has the only two cities in the world which have been destroyed by nuclear weapons, when an ordinary morning turned into Hell in half a second.

Many still living recall the great incendiary bombing raid of March 1945 that destroyed half of Tokyo in a night and wiped out more people than either atomic bomb.

But the earthquake that is troubling everyone now is an economic one. Japan went bust in the early Nineties in an eerie foretaste of the collapse which has now overtaken the rest of the world.



A bubble of growth based on inflated property prices and a frenzied building boom burst, leaving what had once been the world's most impressive economy limp and wheezing, deflated and unable to recover.

Nothing, it seemed, would bring Japan back to life. The banks wouldn't lend. Deflation set in. House prices sank. Grandiose spending projects - of the kind now being planned in the United States and Europe - were tried to the limit.

All over Japan you can see the monstrous concrete stilts of uncompleted motorways or bridges stretching into the distance. The country has more football stadiums than it knows what to do with - especially given that baseball is really the national sport. Even now, there are giant new towers uncompleted in central Tokyo.

Smooth (and often superfluous) roads and railways, smart new bullet trains and majestic office blocks crowd the already cramped landscape. A new airport, costing £1 billion, has just opened at Shizuoka in an area well-served by the fastest and most reliable trains in the world, and so near Tokyo's Narita and Haneda airports that nobody can really work out what it is supposed to be for, except to stimulate the economy.

With their usual virtue, discipline and dedication, the Japanese did eventually manage to clamber out of the hole they had fallen into.

Appliance of science: Dr Maria Niino with a selection of the fake fingers that she sells to maimed gangsters

They did what Britain and America ought to do, and redoubled their efforts to make things the world wants, at prices it can afford. Well-run car and electronics companies turned out excellent products.

And, just as prosperity was returning, New York succumbed to the sub-prime catastrophe, the customers vanished and recession reappeared, this time thanks to someone else's bursting bubble. However good Japan's products were, the major Western countries no longer had the cash to buy them. Virtue went unrewarded - punished, in fact.

Down they went again, Gross Domestic Product shrank by more than 15 per cent in a single quarter and thousands were abruptly thrown out of work in car plants and TV factories.

In any society, this would bring problems. But Japan is not like anywhere else.

Among Tokyo's sparkling towers and madly busy streets, you get a strong feeling of being in a different universe from ours, a feeling strengthened by the way British mobile phones are not advanced enough to work here, and your cashpoint card is rejected with an almost audible sneer by most Japanese bank machines.

As a Japanese friend said: 'We are on another planet here, the only place that has not globalised.'

In many ways this is a conservative paradise. Though Tokyo is not as severely conformist as when I first saw it almost 30 years ago, some things have not changed.

Men still see too little of their children because of ferocious work pressure. Karoshi, or death from overwork, is still common - often happening on crammed commuter trains after an over-long day of stress and smoking.

The regiments of salary-men with identical suits and hairstyles, all spookily opening their identical umbrellas in unison at the first sign of rain, have been replaced by a much more varied people, as adventurous with their hair and clothes as most Westerners (though in a fundamentally tasteful and orderly way). Even the umbrellas are multi-coloured these days, and the feeling of being in a beehive state where all think alike has faded, if not completely gone.

But beneath a thin layer of fashion, the ancient and harmonious Japan still lives and breathes. The old are respected. Immigration (we shall come to that) is more severely restricted than in any other major industrial nation. Education is tough and mercilessly selective.

Street crime and disorder are virtually unknown. You and your property are safer here than anywhere else on Earth. The rare perpetrators of heinous murders are hanged, and the public approve.

Most women still give up paid work at marriage, whereupon they run the home with an iron hand and their husbands hand over their wage packets, and control of the family budget, to them.

Face off: Peter Hitchens meets a robot 'secretary' - a symbol of Japan's high-tech wizardry

Each small neighbourhood is under the care of its own jichi kaicho, an elected community leader who keeps an eye on the old and ill and discourages anti-social behaviour with a quiet word here and there.

Everyone has beautiful manners. You bow - and get bowed to - when you buy a pizza or ask directions. I am greeted as Hitchens-San, the equivalent of Mr Hitchens, wherever I go. Self-restraint is almost universal. Outbreaks of temper are hugely frowned on and quelled with a cold stare or a single word of rebuke.

Schoolchildren in their early teens sit quietly as they wait for trains, quite unlike the noisy and menacing gaggles you so often see in Britain. The same children can freely walk or bike to school through neighbourhoods safer and more settled than we can nowadays imagine.

As your impossibly shiny and tidy train glides into Tokyo central station right on time, platoons of cleaning women, smartly dressed in pink uniforms like a sort of SWAT team of Fifties housewives, stand ready with brushes and cloths to get it even cleaner before it leaves on its next journey. Department stores employ smiley squads of lift girls with gloves and hats, as if it is still 1936.

Even gangsters want to be respectable. Dr Maria Niino runs a successful business providing replacement fingers for members of the Yakuza - Japan's mafia - who have had the originals chopped off in gory punishment rituals, but don't want their associations to be obvious to friends and neighbours, or possible employers.

Her convincingly gnarled and ugly fake digits, she says, come in handy at awkward social moments: 'They're especially useful at a wedding or a funeral where you need to clap your hands, necessary in Shinto rituals. And you can't travel to Hawaii these days without a full complement of fingers, so I supply them with fingerprints as well, to cope with US immigration.'

The price is nearly £3,000 a finger, plus £900 for a spare: expensive for those who have suffered double or triple amputations.

So what happens when people fall off the edge of this perfect-seeming planet? For the double shock, of the bursting bubble and the Wall Street collapse, has undoubtedly caused grave hurt.

The first to suffer are the immigrants. And here Japan has unintentionally conducted an astonishing experiment which establishes once and for all that it is culture and upbringing, not blood and genes, which determine where and how you fit in and who and what you are.

Back in 1990, Japan's rulers began to wonder how to cope with an ageing population and a falling birthrate, without destroying the country's unique culture. They needed workers to do the jobs known as the Three Ks - kitsui, kitanai, kiken, or hard, dirty and dangerous.

World apart: The uniformed lift attendants in a luxurious Tokyo department store seem a million miles from the parks where the homeless congregate

The authorities decided to encourage immigration from Brazil, where many Japanese families had emigrated about a century before and where there are now more than a million ethnic Japanese. The idea was that, being basically Japanese, the Brazilians would fit in.

It was not to be. More than 300,000 came from Brazil and Peru. Many of them ended up in Hamamatsu, a neat if dreary industrial city, making TV sets and cars, two hours south of Tokyo by Shinkansen bullet train. There, all too many of them did not, would not, or perhaps could not, fit in.

Coming from a chaotic, loud land of carnivals and exuberance, they found it difficult to belong in a place where failing to sort your rubbish into burnable and non-burnable items is a major affront to public morals, and modesty is very highly valued.

Having been raised in Brazil's outgoing sunshine culture, with perhaps a few words of old-fashioned Japanese learned from grandparents with vague memories of the homeland long ago, they swiftly encountered problems over their graffiti, loud music, unruly children and generally non-Japanese behaviour.

Shops, claiming that the migrants stole from them, began to sprout signs saying 'No Brazilians', which were eventually taken down after protests. But the sentiment lingers on and the experiment is coming to a sad end.

To me, these rather tragic people look completely Japanese. But my Japanese guide could immediately tell that they were different. Even the set of their faces, formed by speaking Portuguese rather than Japanese, marked them out. So did their very different diet. And - even where they spoke good Japanese - their accents instantly gave them away.

Now many are on the dole, which in Japan means relatively generous unemployment benefit for a few months, followed by severely means-tested and regulated minimal benefits reserved for those who really cannot work - in practice, for many people, nothing at all.

Late in the evening in a bare and harshly-lit cafe, in the corner of a Brazilian supermarket selling specialities from Rio and Sao Paolo, I met Shuichi Shimomoto, who has lost his job in a TV plant and hopes to find new work before his benefits run out.

But what if he doesn't get another job? He wants to stay, but knows it will be difficult. 'A lot of my friends have already gone back to Brazil.' he admits.

The authorities are offering £2,000 to anyone who goes back to South America, provided they stay away for three years (to begin with the money came on condition that you never came back at all, but the conditions have now been softened).

Like all the Brazilian-Japanese I meet, he is confused by the local equivalent of Norman Tebbit's famous 'cricket test', and doesn't want to say if he supports Brazil or Japan at football.

Down and out: Homeless men collecting and crushing cans to sell as scrap in a Tokyo park

Many also have Portuguese names as well as their Japanese ones, and are delighted when I thank them by using the Portuguese 'obrigado' instead of the Japanese 'arigato'.

Early the following morning I see an even more stark illustration of Japan's unembarrassed belief that to be Japanese is to have won first prize in the lottery of life, while others just have to cope as best they can.

The Hamamatsu labour exchange, like all such offices in Japan, bears the jaunty name of Hello Work. But it might equally well be called Goodbye Foreigners. It has two separate queues where the jobless can sign on: one for Japanese citizens and one for the rest.

Both are alarmingly long, but the non-Japanese line looks somehow more dispirited. It contains a few Koreans (another awkward minority here) but is mostly made up of Brazilians, who say softly that their circumstances are much worse than those of Japanese citizens. After a few minutes, an official emerges from Hello Work and instructs me to stop asking questions.

Even the children of the Brazilians, many of them raised and educated in Japan, will find it very hard to be naturalised. They gain no rights from having been born here. Koreans who have lived here for five generations were only recently spared from forcible fingerprinting.

An earlier experiment in allowing mainland Chinese to work in Japan on 'apprentice visas' resulted in unpleasant friction, with Chinese workers complaining of being singled out by the police as crime suspects. Many of the leaders of a recent anti-Japanese campaign in China were former residents in Japan.

With the Japanese birth rate well behind the death rate, and a recent TV projection suggesting that in a few hundred years there will be only two people left in the country, the pressure is on to go multicultural.

Or it would be if the economy had not shrivelled. As it is, there are more Japanese than there are jobs, and it grows worse every day.

This is true even for the best-placed. Michimasa Ogata, 23, a Tokyo University graduate, says that even for alumni of his highly-regarded college it can now take as many as 30 interviews to get a job, when once it would have taken only 20.

'It is quite possible that you won't have a job even after 30 interviews. If they can't find a job by the time they graduate, they do an extra year at university.'

He explains that it is fatal to leave university. It is far better to stay on well into your 20s than to finish. Once you leave, you are off the conveyor belt and probably have no hope of getting one of the coveted jobs with big corporations or government departments.

What his contemporaries fear is that they might follow the so-called 'lost generation' of the mid-Nineties. 'They are now 35 and cannot get secure jobs. Once you are out, it is very difficult to get back in. All you can hope for is a string of temporary jobs. You are not secure and you cannot get married.' The Japanese dream: a long-term, safe job with a giant company or the state, will elude them all their lives.

City of dreams: Peter Hitchens in the wealthy heart of Tokyo, where Karoshi, or death from overwork, is still common

Even worse is the plight of many thousands of so-called 'freeters', young men and women left adrift by the last recession, when the big corporations were not recruiting, and so forced to take temporary jobs or seek work experience as unpaid interns.

These live on the edge of society, many as 'internet-café refugees', without proper homes to go to. Cheaper than the cheapest capsule hotel, many such cafés rent cubicles for the night.

I visited one near Yoyogi Park where for about £3 you can rent a tiny space with a cushioned floor and a computer screen, where you can play games, watch DVDs or sleep for a few hours.

The proprietors knew perfectly well that the place was a sort of home to young people on the margin of life. Showers and free soft drinks were also provided. Although I doubt if anyone but the scrupulously clean and considerate Japanese could make such a system work. In London it would be full of rubbish, booze and drug paraphernalia.

But there is a stage even lower than this, and not far away.

In the park across the road, one of Japan's new industries is flourishing. Homeless men, some young and unlined, some old and bowed, are collecting and then stomping on empty beer cans collected from the prosperous Shibuya suburb, with its fashionable shops and cafes.

A young woman, who says she is 29 but looks older, hurries forward with a cart loaded with hundreds of fresh cans for crushing. As soon as they are unloaded, she is off again for more.

She is willing to talk, but not to stop. The price of metal has fallen, and she must work harder than before to make ends meet. If she does not reach her quota, she will not be paid and will not eat. Somewhere in the background there are bosses and gangmasters controlling what is, in fact, a bustling scrap metal trade.

Look carefully in any Tokyo park and you will see signs of this almost Victorian fringe economy, and its proud, genteel misery.

In Ueno Park, next to several grand art galleries and a concert hall, there are little tent villages of tiny homes, screened from sight by twee fences rather nauseatingly adorned with pretty pictures of cottages, clouds and trees.

These are not the squalid hovels you might see in London, but tragically respectable homes, clean and intensely tidy, sometimes with carpets, where visitors must remove their shoes before entering. Their inhabitants are embarrassed at their plight, reluctant to talk, jealous of their privacy.

A dismal queue forms in the rain as a Korean church sets up a soup kitchen, handing out sandwiches and providing free haircuts to the hundreds of poor men who appear suddenly from among the dripping trees as the food distribution begins.

None of these people is a beggar. No Japanese will beg. The shame would be too great. And many are clearly uncomfortable about accepting the aggressively charitable help offered by the Koreans. The atmosphere is somehow angry and upset, but they are hungry.

A few days later, in Shinjuku Park, visible from the upper floors of the super-grand hotel where they filmed Lost In Translation, I watch as more than 500 destitute men (and a few women) line up solemnly in the early evening for a bowl of rice, this time handed out by a Japanese charity organised by a gentle philanthropist, Mr Kazuaki Kasai.

It is an astonishing sight. The queue stretches into the darkness. Marshalled into groups of three, the hungry and roofless advance silently and patiently towards their benefactors, who are each holding a bowl of rice. Both groups bow solemnly and equally to each other before the food is handed over with a polite smile.

It is both moving and disquieting: a symbol of a society that has deliberately chosen not to provide a heavy-duty state-funded welfare safety net for those who fail or fall. In Japan, if you slip or miss your chance, you might tumble all the way to the bottom - and here it is.

Not far away are the teeming stations with their ever-punctual trains, the electronic marvels in the shops, an unending array of excellent restaurants, cosy bars and shops crammed with tasteful luxuries. Beyond lie the peaceful, crime-free suburbs stretching for dozens of well-mannered and harmonious miles.

Yet amid the most efficient, well-ordered, peaceful and technically advanced civilisation on the planet, you might witness scenes which Charles Dickens would find entirely familiar.

Is it possible that the one might be the price for the other, and that in our long struggle to make life safe, we have also made it worse?

Will we, when all the accounts are completed, have coped better or worse with recession and crisis than our distant twin, another group of small, cramped offshore islands which have somehow managed to shake the whole world with their inventiveness and energy?