Saturday, August 18, 2018
Japanese Millennials hr609
A big open-air rock festival is held annually every summer in the small
town where I live that is enclosed by mountains. More than ten times as
many people as the town’s population visit during the few days of the
festival. People all over the country and even from overseas fill up the
train station that is usually inactive and quiet. In front of it, an
endlessly long line is formed in the heat for the shuttle bus to the
concert venue. The attendance trend has changed in recent years. While a
young attendance has been down, more and more men in their fifties and
sixties come by their own. The reason mirrors characteristics of today’s
Japanese youth. They have been getting poorer than the generation
before and the tickets and the transportation for the festival cost too
much for them. Also, they don’t like being dirty. It’s not appealing to
them to watch concerts in the rain soaking wet and getting muddy in the
open air. That attributes a less crowd on Japanese beaches, too. They
opt for a pool where they don’t get covered with sand. I’ve seen young
people’s behavior change everywhere. In restaurants, chairs and booths
are disappearing and replaced by a Japanese-style space with tatami
mats. They prefer sit directly on a tatami floor at a low table by
taking off their shoes and folding their legs. In a restaurant that has a
Western style without any tatami space, I sometimes see shameful people
who take off their shoes and sit folding their legs on a chair as if a
chair was a floor. Knives and forks are less available because they like
to use chopsticks and suck pasta by making slithering noises. In a
movie complex, less and less American movies are showing and Japanese
movies are abundant instead. To make things worse,the majority of that
small number of American movies is dubbed into Japanese, which spoils
original actors’ performances completely. Up until a decade or so ago,
almost all the foreign movies were subtitled. Since I exclusively see
American movies with subtitles, which by the way I prefer without them
but have no choice at a theater in Japan, the selection for the movie is
excruciatingly limited nowadays. I sometimes see trailers of Japanese
movies before the one I came to see and even a glimpse of it disgusts
me. A main character is always a female high-school student or a child
or an animal. Most are animated and a story is lukewarm and saccharine
without any contention. I don’t understand what is the point to spend
time and money to watch those. It seems that American movies, in which
things are destroyed, people are killing each other, lives are at stake,
emotions are exploding, are too intensive and strong for Japanese
gentle millennials. Their taste for fashion is gentle, too. They choose
somber, obscure colors with no patterns or accessories so that they look
lowly. They seem peculiar to me especially because my taste is fancy
and colorful. I like wearing clothes with bright colors and patterns and
confusingly complex accessories. Although I’m not rich, I tend to have a
glass of sparkling wine at a Western-style restaurant in a hotel. As my
favorite restaurants and shops aren’t popular anymore and have been
closed or remodeled into a cheap Japanese-style one by one, Japan has
been getting an uncomfortable country to live in for me. Well, come to
think of it, it has never been comfortable to me since my childhood. I
had thought it would have been better by the time I became a grown-up,
but it just didn’t happen. It was an illusion of a child and Japan has
treated me the same way with different people...
Labels:
beach,
character,
Japan,
Japanese-style,
millennials,
movie,
rock festival,
tatami