Japan

Article in NY Times Travel section

In the words of Alan Watts:

"...to watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds... When the vision is the sudden perception of something mysterious and strange, hinting at an unknown never to be discovered..."

Yes, Japan has broken banks and crummy companies. But the real problem is unproductive workers

If you want a look at what's really ailing the Japanese economy, just drive over on any given weekend to the Ito-Yokado shopping center parking lot in Shinyurigaoka, a large suburb half an hour west of Tokyo. Actually, it doesn't matter where you go, since the same scene is played out at parking garages, train stations and construction sites all over the country. But on a typical weekend here in Shinyurigaoka, there are four guards at the intersection directing traffic. Another man is on hand to make sure you don't miss the turn that leads to the garage. Five meters down the path, an attendant removes the ticket that the machine just generated and hands it to you. Head up the slope to the first floor and a woman will wave you on, just in case you missed the brightly lit No Vacancy sign over her head. (Every floor, whether full or not, gets its own guard.) When you exit, you get the same treatment in reverse: more floor guards waving you through, a white-gloved attendant to feed the ticket back into the machine, and a new crew of traffic smoothers to make sure you are safely on your way. By the end of your visit, at least 20 employees have provided you with a service of nearly zero value that could easily have been--and was clearly designed to be--completely automated.

Forget (for now) the banking system crippled by mountains of bad loans, a government debt equal to 130% of the nation's GDP, deflation that sucks the life from corporate profits and a stock market hovering near its lowest point since 1983. There is a more fundamental ailment undermining the world's second-largest economy: Japan's labor force is one of the most unproductive in the industrialized world. And not by a little. According to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development, a government-affiliated research center, Japanese laborers are 40% less efficient than Americans, 20% less efficient than the French and 11% less efficient than the Germans. The Japanese lag behind not just Britons and Swedes as well but--where will the humiliations end?--the Italians and Spanish, too.

It is the cracks in the bark of trees that lets us know it is a mature and healthy tree, harboring an ecosystem while protecting itself from many of the denizens of the ecosystem.

It is the lines in a persons face that lets us know how much they have laughed, considered carefully, grimaced in their lifetime.

Krishnamurti speaks of our souls each being of the same paper but that which makes us unique is the creases left in the paper from all the folding and unfolding of experience.

Despite protests by academicians and citizen activists, Japan has launched a compulsory identification system that will assign each of its Japanese citizens an 11-digit identification number.