Category: Society

I think I’m starting to be too used to Japan and I’m loosing my capacity to be surprised by “things that make Japan different”. I uploaded his picture to Flickr and many users told me that all umbrellas in the picture except mine are transparent!

View picture on Flickr

Yes, the transparent umbrella is the most common one in Japan. They’re cheap and they break easily, but people does not care because it’s seen as a temporary or emergency umbrella. Many transparent forgotten umbrellas can be found on the streets after some rain,. Also, I call the transparent umbrella the “community umbrella” because when you put your transparent umbrella together with other transparent umbrellas when you enter a shop or restaurant… then when you leave the place you don’t really know which one was your umbrella so you just get one 🙂 It would be interesting to track a transparent umbrella around Tokyo during rainy week, I bet it would have many “owners” until it breaks.

Another advantage is that you can more or less see what it’s in front of you. In fact when riding a bicycle under the rain it is really useful, although I think it is illegal to ride a bike with an umbrella in Japan. I do it all the time and the police never said anything to me.

Japan is the country in the world where more umbrellas are produced during a year, and transparent umbrellas are the most common here. It must have some kind of record, It could the most successful umbrella of all times, maybe the news super-umbrellas will be the transparent ones 😉 ? Do you know which company makes these transparent umbrellas?

Real state and land prices have been falling in Japan during the last 15-16 years. In this chart, there is data until 2005.

I think this chart is made with average data from urban land prices.

After 2005 it continued falling but at the end of 2006 and during 2007 prices started rise (A little bit, around 0.something%). Prices rose really fast since the end of the 70s until the bubble exploded at the beginning of the 90s, it has been continuous fall until recently. What do you thing will happen with the sub prime crisis in the US and other countries, will it be like in Japan, or do you think it will be fixed in one or two years?

There are 127 inhabitants in Japan, and 35 million of them are retired. In 30 years it is expected that 50% of the Japanese will be retired. Immigration and natality rate are really low in Japan. Everyone between 20 and 59 years old has to pay to the pension system by law. But the big problem is that most of the young people don’t trust the system anymore and they just decided not to pay and just “save” money by their own.

I found this ad in Okinawa, it states that the pension system is the basis to “connection generations”.

The pension system and social security in general in Japan is REALLY rotten, politicians, newspapers, professors are thinking and thinking on how to solve it. Some of the most common proposals are:

• Reduce the number of years from where you would receive the minimum pension from 25 years to 15 years. In countries like Germany with 10 years is enough.
• Increase consumption taxes, here in Japan are ridiculously low (5%).
• Increase immigration and natality. To solve this there are many proposals and stuff already going on but I can’t see any REAL change.

Which solutions would you propose for a country where the population doesn’t increase? This is something that in Japan is ALREADY happening and is going to start happening in other rich countries in the next decades.

Details about the Japanese pension system.