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It's once again that time most feared by
foreigners living in Japan: election season, when Japanese
politicians drive around in trucks with loudspeakers mounted on
top, shouting their name and saying things like "I will
work hard for you!" and "Thank you for your support on
election day!" When Prime Minister Koizumi lost an
important vote on his administration's goal of privatizing
Japan's sprawling postal system on Monday, he disbanded the Diet
and called for new elections, which will be held on September
11. Until then, we'll have to put up with lots of noisy
politicians shouting at us through our windows, speaking through
bullhorns in front of train stations in Tokyo, and so on.
The issue at hand is the privatization of
Japan's postal apparatus, which would basically create four
mostly-private corporations to manage the various postal
activities more efficiently than they are at present. Japan's
post office does much more than just deliver the mail in rain or
sleet or snow: it's also the world's largest savings bank,
holding a vast amount of money in deposits by Japanese
households, and it also operates a life insurance business, too.
These two businesses hold a mind-boggling $3 trillion in cash
reserves, which is far too much money for politicians to resist
touching, so they use it for various "economic
revitalization" projects, such as a government-subsidized
hot springs hotel near Nikko, with a massive indoor pool complex
next to it that no one uses. The post office is Japan's largest
employer, with 24,000 post offices, frankly far more than it
needs for a country that's about the same size as Italy or
California. Opponents of the privatization plan warn that if
Japan Post starts actually seeking profits, it will close down
thousands of these smaller post offices, leaving rural areas
with less convenience, and this is a sensitive issue here in
Japan, not unlike base closings in the U.S. Another issue is,
will a privatized Japan Post be on the same playing field (or as
they say in Japanese, in the same sumo ring) as Japan's private
delivery companies like Yamato and Sawaga, or will receive a lot
of winks and special treatment like NTT (which started out as a
government-run utility before being privatized in 1985).
Considering that it costs 75 cents to send a first-class letter
inside Japan, about twice the rate of the U.S., I'd say there's
room for more efficiency in Japan's postal system.
One of the things I've liked about my years of
learning Japanese is what I've come to call the "joy of
satori," a sort of thrill that jumps through your brain
when you make a difficult connection, solve a puzzling kanji
problem, or intuit a correct answer without really knowing why.
"Satori" means understanding or comprehension, or
written with another kanji, enlightenment in the Buddhist sense,
and I believe our brains are hard-wired to feel joy when a
difficult solution is finally comprehended. You can't learn a
foreign language without getting lots of input in that language,
and I went out of my way to read plenty of manga to learn kanji
and vocabulary words, one of them being the Rumiko Takahashi
classic Maison Ikkoku, the story of a man living in an apartment
who's in love with his apartment manager, the widowed Kyoko.
There's a secret code embedded in the series, a number system
based on the names of the characters and the ten apartments in
the apartment building: for example, the main character is Godai
and he lives in room number 5 since 'go' is 5 in Japanese; his
neighbor Yotsuya lives in room 4 since 'yotsu' represents that
number; and so on, with Kyoko being zero, since her last name
contains the character 'nashi' (meaning "nil"). I'll
never forget how I felt when I puzzled this system out for the
first time -- it was a small piece of enlightenment, but it was
my own.
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