Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [139]
People have become so addicted to recorded aisatsu and commands that they feel lonely without them. Nowhere in modern Japan can one get away from a recorded voice thanking you for coming, giving you information, apologizing for an inconvenience, commanding or warning you – all this accompanied by a chorus of beeps, buzzes, chirps, and gongs.
The most common words you will hear are kiken (danger) and abunai (hazardous). Daily life in Japan is filled with peril – unless people follow the rules. A ride on any public conveyance – bus, train, or subway – is an endless round of kiken, followed by orders: Don't leave anything behind; stand back while the train pulls in; don't rush to get in; don't get your fingers caught in the door; stay in line. National parks, rock gardens in Kyoto, ski resorts, university campuses, temples, and shrines reverberate with recorded messages and sound effects. There is no escape. With the clamor at home on television, the ear-shattering fanfare of sounds at the pachinko parlor, and recorded voices, beeps, and gongs in all public spaces, the Japanese spend a major part of their waking lives in a sea of noise.
Useless announcements are not, of course, unique to Japan. In New York City, public-address systems in the subway urge commuters not to make trains late by holding the doors open; taxis broadcast recorded warnings, spoken by celebrities, to fasten your seat belt and not to forget your belongings when getting in or out-something that even Tokyo's cabs haven't got around to doing. Nevertheless, the noise pollution in the West and in Southeast Asian countries (so far) is mostly limited to public transit – one would rarely expect to hear loud announcements on every escalator, in gardens, parks, and churches. And repeated not once but endlessly. In Japan, it's a case of excess, of announcements carried far beyond a reasonable limit. And uncontrollable excess is the defining quality of Japan's modern cultural crisis.
In a famous haiku, Basho wrote, «Silence / Into the rocks seep the voices of cicada.» Today, there would be no place for Basho to be alone with his thoughts, for seeping into the rocks would be an announcement from a chartered police-department Cessna overhead: «Let's remember to fasten our seat belts. When crossing the road, let's look left and right. This is Such-and-Such Police Department.» The writer Fukuda Kiichiro points out that public agencies spend tax money to broadcast this sort of message because they have misunderstood the concept of «public service.» Staffed with amakudari officials who have no idea how to benefit the public in any real way, agencies dream up these announcements so that «in the end it's a burlesque comedy put on by agencies such as the Transportation Safety Association as an alibi so they can say, 'Look! We're doing something!' » Another unstoppable tank of officialdom goes rumbling over the landscape. The same spirit of total dedication that has buried Japan's rivers takes over.
This, however, explains only the announcers, not the audience. The key question is why the Japanese public accepts and even craves all these commands and warnings. Fukuda writes:
One could say that social control in Japan has come to invade the private realm to an extreme degree. Of course «control» does not take place if we have only people who want to control. It's a necessary condition to also have a majority of people who wish to be controlled. It's the same mechanism that sociologists call «voluntary subjugation.» That is, people who wish to be controlled struggle to bring about control over themselves. It's related to the fact that chddren in high schools and students in universities never tire of having their teachers advise them what to do. Japanese college students are not adults who bear rights and responsibilities