Smiling your way to depression
"For hundreds of thousands of women across Japan a well-honed smile is a critical part of their job description. Almost every service business insists that its women staff learn to smile broadly at all times. For youngsters taking up jobs in the huge convenience store industry, the first day of training is spent developing the perfect, customer-luring smile.
The problem, a leading psychiatrist at Osaka University alleges, is that after a while many women simply cannot turn the perma-smiles off.
Real emotions, Makoto Natsume says, are being dangerously suppressed by the “smile masks” that women wear all day at work and the psychological effects he sees among patients are devastating. Depression, mental illness and other disorders are spreading fast, he cautions, and smile-mask syndrome could soon become a serious national health issue."
Here's the article at Times Online.
4 Comments:
Hi Hokai
Have you ever read Alex Kerr? Very controversial, but well worth reading . He describes how in his opinion Japan is losing its beauty. The story about the permanent smile just one example of a much more fundamental ill.
http://www.alex-kerr.com/index.html
In "Lost Japan" he askes himself why, then after six years of research later he produces his answer in "Dogs and Demons".
Most of his tenacious critics though turn out to have mostly failed to learn the Japanese language properly...
Enjoy :-)
Hi Adrian,
yes I have read "Lost Japan" as soon as it was published by Lonely Planet, and though I haven't seen Dogs and Demons I do agree that Japan is in deep trouble, one that I don't see them coming out of in near future. Medieval harmony fares badly in 21st century, while the medieval shadow lurks ready to jump into new technologies, but that's only one of Japans' problems. The pervasive institutionalism and collectivism, blind adoption of decontextualized Western semes by the young etc. only compound the cultural crisis. Further on, the huge economic success only serves to hide the crumbling logos and ethos. On the other hand, Japanese seems to be at their best when confronted with huge challenges. Though, me not being an expert on Japan, all this is an uneducated guess, at best.
Hi Hokai
the author, points out that it was not until the 1980s that Japanese people smiled in the workplace at all.
And now they cannot stop smiling anymore. Alex Kerr was talking about a phenomenon he observed in many places in Japan that works like a "crescendo", of getting gradually louder. But most often it would end up with a big bang or crash. New things are tried out to see if they work, and once they do they become so "successful" that it hits its extreme.
In "Dogs and Demons" he talks about Japanese society lacking "brakes", not being able to slow down when things have progressed far enough.
Of course you are not an expert. Even Alex Kerr himself relies heavily on japanese expertise. Which takes us to the problem of translation. I wonder how an interview with Tomomi Fujiwara would sound like in Japanese... I am sure there are differences.
I believe your observation is quite right, I do not recall though any of it being part of the analysis available in "Dogs and Demons". For lack of a better interpretation of what I have seen in Japan, I still tend to stick to the one made in "Dogs and Demons", it is a close fit.
The title goes back to a story between a chinese emperor and his adviser. The emperor wanted to know what is easy to draw and what is difficult to draw. His adviser told him that common things like a dog are difficult to get right, much easier are demons, not so common. The title really sums up a lot of the books content but not all of it.
An alternative title might be called: "The power of nightmares", but may be with a smile ;-)
Hi Adrian,
it seems "Dogs and Demons" is interesting indeed. And quite right in pointing that over-smiling is a recent introduction, and I believe it has something to do with Americanization, but then Japanese do it their own way, often overdoing what initially is not necessarily a bad idea. The main problem seems to lie in the fact they haven't really done anything to transform/update the deep socio-cultural features to go along with huge technological and socio-economic change. This dissociation of - in Wilber's AQAL terms - lower-left and lower-right quadrants will prove extremely problematic.
Translation is not so much of a problem with deep cultural and social features, as they seem to be universal. Mythic/traditional identity is what it is, irrespective of country, and so are modern and postmodern. Deep shifts in structural evolution need to be negotiated by every nation and culture in their own terms, surely, and that is where experts enter, to fill in the details. Most Japanese think of their cultural identity, past and present, as very much unique in many ways, and that is not a very useful way of moving into the 21st century. One does much better by realizing there are quite a few unique cultures out there, but also that there's a common world we share in which not only technology is being exchanged, and that a shift in economic basis necessarily provokes a shift in individual identity and values and needs etc.
Nightmares with a smile? Yes, what King Crimson would term "21st century schizoid man" (see cover by a Japanese band).:-))
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