One year after a 25-year-old factory worker killed seven people in a stabbing spree in a crowded Tokyo shopping district,  Japan is struggling again with the sinister puzzle of random killings following the arrest of a man on suspicion of  causing the deaths of four people by setting fire to a “pachinko” pinball parlour.

“I was out of work, had no money and hated my life, and then I got the idea of killing anyone, like a random killer, and started a fire at a place where there were a lot of people,” the 41-year-old man was quoted by media as telling police after turning himself in on Monday evening.

Acquaintances and neighbours told Japanese media the man was a loner who lost his job last year. Reports said he had around $20,000 worth of debts. Among those killed in the fire was a 20-year-old female staffer who was going to night-school and had hoped to become a wedding planner.

Three days later, the story is still getting wide media play, jostling for attention with reports of ethnic violence in China and Prime Minister Taro Aso’s attendance at a G8 summit in Italy.

Japan’s crime rate is lower than that of many advanced countries, and strict gun laws mean shooting sprees are unheard of. But violent crimes grab media attention, especially as the economy struggles with recession and rising ranks of  jobless.

Concerns about a breakdown in traditional community values and widening social and economic gaps also simmer, reflected in politicians’ calls to restore “fraternity” and repair frayed social bonds.

“Even at the risk of the death penalty, such people seem to be trying to leave evidence of their existence by killing those who, from the perspective of one who has lost hope, appear to be happy,” author Masahiro Yamada told the Yomiuri newspaper.

“We have become a society where there is no second chance if you fail and the spirit of ‘challenge’ is disappearing, even from youth,” Yamada added. “If we don’t change this kind of society, such incidents may reoccur again and again.”

Photo credit: REUTERS/Toru Hanai

The global financial crisis has been a catalyst for many to look back at history and see what, if anything, was learned from Japan’s so-called “Lost decade” in the 1990s, as well as the Great Depression, to which the turmoil is most often compared.

But few have gone as far back as Tadashi Kikugawa, a former hot-shot trader of Japanese government bonds, who was a key market source of mine over the years.
 
After working at brokerages including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, he left the high-octane financial world in May last year to run a small, private museum for ancient Egyptian art in Tokyo’s Shibuya district.

He began his own collection 10 years ago, when the JGB business was still very good, as prices were on the rise thanks to the Bank of Japan’s ultra-easy monetary policy after the burst of the bubble.

“The job stress was so overwhelming, so I found an escape in Egypt,” he told me.
 
The collection, which cost him part of his fortune, now amounts to about 1,000 pieces, with statues and other items.
 

Is there any lesson to be learned from ancient Egypt?

“All that prospers must decline,” he said.  “The history of ancient Egypt is one of war over furtile land along the Nile River.

It’s a bit similar to the financial world I used to be in.”

Bookworms right across Japan are flipping the pages of “1Q84″, the latest novel by Haruki Murakami. The print run of the hardback version has already topped the 740,000 copies of his earlier work “Kafka on the Shore”, and more than 1 million copies are likely to have hit the store shelves by the end of this month.

“If a literary work sells 50,000 copies, we call that a bestseller. With 100,000 copies, that’s a huge success,” Fumiaki Mori, a spokesman for publisher Shinchosha Publishing Co Ltd, told me. “By that standard, reaching this number in about 10 days since sales began is a very fast pace.”

The two-volume novel, Murakami’s first since 2004’s “After Dark”, explores thought control, cults, abuse and other issues and takes place in Tokyo in the year 1Q84.

The title borrows heavily from George Orwell’s “1984″, as the Japanese for 9 is pronounced the same as the English letter Q. Some readers have said that “1Q84” seems to sum up all of Murakami’s works.

I grew up reading Murakami, who made his literary debut in 1979, and was often shocked or confused by his books. But as I grew older and re-read them, I felt some parts were written just for me, especially where the narrator describes a sense of isolation.

I picked up a copy of his new book two days after its release but now it has sold out at many shops, and its success is spilling over to sales of music mentioned in the story as well as to Orwell’s classic.

In the book, the lead characters listen to “Sinfonietta” by Czech composer Leos Janacek, and that CD has sold some 6,000 copies in a week, Tetsushi Koyama of Sony Music Japan International told me.

Orwell’s “1984″ has also sold thousands of copies recently, the publishers of the Japanese translation said.

Murakami has been seen as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature for years — a topic widely covered by the Japanese media, as was his emotional acceptance speech last year for Israel’s Jerusalem Prize following the fighting in Gaza. These reports may have attracted a wider readership, Shinchosha’s Mori said.

Some say that the writers who debuted in the late 1970s to early 1980s, including Murakami, ushered in a new era in Japanese literature. Their work is urbane and written in a way not seen before in Japan, but perhaps more significantly, their sense of identity and consciousness is no longer bound by the family system that was so strong in Japan, or by the experience of losing World War II.

I’ve read Murakami in both Japanese and English, and though I’m Japanese, I feel that sometimes it is easier to read him in English. His style, which sometimes incorporates direct translations of English phrases into Japanese, suits English very well.

Before “1Q84” went on sale, readers and media alike were thirsty for information on the book as the author and publisher revealed nothing.

Now, the book is all over the internet and in the media, with magazine headlines like “Haruki Murakami’s ‘1Q84′ — read it ahead, read it deep, or skim-read” and “Find out without reading! Haruki Murakami’s ‘1Q84′”.

I liked it too, but English-speaking readers will have to be patient – the translation may not come out for a year or two.

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Baz Ratner

I wrote about Japan’s traditional doll industry for the Reuters Luxury Summit this week, and I was surprised to find it’s not feeling much impact from the country’s deepest recession in decades - not bad, considering an average doll set can set you back 200,000 yen ($2,000).

One shop owner I spoke to even said sales had edged up in the all-important shopping season before the Doll Festival on March 3. Sales of some dolls have certainly dropped as consumers have gradually tightened their grip on their purses , but shop owners told me they’d seen solid sales this year of their “hina” dolls - the mainstay of their business.

These ornamental dolls in ancient court attire represent the imperial couple and their entourage, dressed to the nines on a staircase-like stage complete with mini-furniture, a carriage and other items. Families with daughters put the whole cast on display around the time of the festival.

Traditionally, the mother’s parents buy dolls for the first girl in the family, and while popular ones cost about 200,000 yen per set, some go for as much as 5 million yen. 

But it’s not just doting affection that leads families to splash out this much - shop owners said vanity is a key factor as many grandparents don’t want to be seen skimping on the doll duties by their families, in-laws and neighbours.

The pressure to show off is strong in rural areas, where tradition is more strictly followed, and in tight-knit communities everyone knows which family has the most sumptuous dolls in the house.

Nevertheless, the shop owners worry that this pressure is fading as more people live away from their parents and in-laws, and thus feel less need to keep up such traditional appearances.

“Nowadays, many people don’t have fussy families and in-laws around. That’s one of reason our industry’s in gradual decline,” one shop owner said.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Michael Caronna

I am ordering vodka and Red Bull at $10 a pop at the bar of a posh Ginza club and a woman dressed as a nurse carrying a silver tray full of syringes taps me on the shoulder.

“Open your mouth!” she says with a wink.

“OK then.” And she squirts some strawberry-flavoured cocktail down my throat.

Moments later another pretty girl dressed in a skin-tight pink rubber “Cat Woman” suit introduces herself as Azusa. “I work at the Torture Dungeon.”

“Of course you do, sweetheart,” I reply, becoming increasingly confused at how this exclusive “Night of the Body” theme party was being passed off as a “fashion event” with so many people having squeezed themselves into rubber, leather and barbed wire. Whatever cracks your whip, I guess.

“It’s nothing kinky,” said Maika, one of party organiser Libido’s top dancers. “Our customers, I guess people with a bit of money maybe, like to dress up.”

If Tokyo is feeling the bite of recession, it certainly wasn’t in evidence this night as pole-dancers whirled dangerously in razor sharp stilettos, guests volunteered to be “soft”-whipped and a bleached blonde beauty had various sweets and desserts artistically laid out on her naked body in the Japanese “nyotaimori” style.

One funky Japanese guy in dreadlocks and platform shoes boasted that he had designed his own rubber suit. It had taken him two weeks at a cost of $2,000.

“My jeans are Issey Miyake,” I responded a bit lamely.

Clearly this underworld of fetish parties was big in Japan. In one night I was invited to no less than three similar events over the following two weeks.

Not with my wardrobe. Not on my wages.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Issei Kato

Wedding venue hired? Check. Wedding dress hired? Check. Guests hired? Check.

June’s the big wedding month here in Japan, but even in these tough economic times, instead of opting for a small event, some couples are renting fake family, friends and colleagues to plump up the guest list.

Many in Japan see weddings as a formal event that must be attended by lots of family members, friends and co-workers. At the party, bosses often give speeches, colleagues or friends stage performances, and families formally greet other guests.

But what if you’ve got no one to do that for you?

“We’ll attend the wedding as your friend instead of your friend,” Hiroshi Mizutani, who heads Office Agents, a company in Tokyo that rents out guests, told me.

“Suddenly, a guest might not be able to make it. Or maybe you are concerned about the gap in the number of guests you have compared to your partner. Or, there are many temp workers these days and you may be uncomfortable inviting your boss.”

For  around $200 you can have a hired guest attend your nuptials. Add another $50 and they’ll sing or dance. Tip in another $100 and they’ll even make a suitable speech, perhaps pretending to be your boss.

At one memorable wedding, all 30 of the family, friends and coworkers of the groom were fakes from Mizutani’s company. It was the second marriage for the groom, who wanted to avoid inviting the same guests from the first time around.

The firm gets about 100 wedding requests per year and has some 1,000 fakes available for various occasions, including funerals and training seminars. You can hire a stand-in lover to introduce to your family and false secretaries for those that want to look important.

The key qualification for the fakes is that they do not stand out.

“What’s important is that these are normal people… normal as in they are cheery and clean and look like they have regular jobs,” Mizutani said.

Sometimes not even the marriage partner is aware.

“People are proud and they don’t want to tell their partner that they do not have many friends,” Mizutani said. “The environment is so that people don’t have anyone to invite. It may be that they are lonely and it may also be that the way people work are changing.”

I’m not sure what happens, though, if you meet the same fake at multiple events.

In these hard times, you know a car is important when the maker hires Robert de Niro to promote it.

That honour goes to Subaru’s new flagship Legacy touring wagon, which went on sale in Japan today. Fuji Heavy Industries (which owns the Subaru brand) even put out a press release last week just to say the two-time Oscar winner would appear in its TV commercials in Japan.

“It’s the first time he’s appearing in a commercial for a Japanese company – ever,” a Fuji Heavy spokesman told me proudly the other day. He guessed that Hollywood actors are “twice, three times, or four times more expensive” to hire than a local celebrity.

It is well-known that international movie and rock stars get lucrative work moonlighting in Japanese TV commercials - witness the famous gadzillion-dollar Mitsubishi Electric VCR commercials in the late 80s starring Madonna. This tradition was even parodied in the film “Lost in Translation”, in which Bill Murray plays a Hollywood has-been actor filming a whiskey commercial in Tokyo.

A sampling from my late-night YouTube-ing yesterday offered the following roster, for cars alone:

- Paul Newman: Nissan Skyline, for its 25th anniversary (1982)
- Harrison Ford: Honda Legend (1993)
- Dennis Hopper: Toyota Celica (1994)
- Anthony Hopkins: Honda Avancier (“Let’s have a thrilling time,” a la Hannibal Lecter)
- Ewan McGregor: Toyota Alphard (recently)
- Jean Reno: also, Toyota Alphard, and separately, Honda Orthia
- Rowan Atkinson: Oddly, as Mr Bean (who drives a Mini) promoting a Nissan Tino
- George Clooney: Honda Odyssey, Toyota Mark II

Subaru had a bunch: Kyle McLaughlin in an Impreza commercial in 1992 and Antonio Banderas for the Forester. Ads for the past four versions of the Legacy have been graced by Bruce Willis (1st), Rod Stewart and Mel Gibson (2nd), Kevin Costner and J-Lo (3rd) and Bruce Willis again (4th).

Leonardo DiCaprio, known for his private endorsement of the second-generation Toyota Prius, was all over the place, selling Honda’s Civic in 1995, Suzuki’s WagonR in 1999 and Toyota’s “Hybrid Synergy Drive” system more recently.

A memorable one for me when I was growing up was Michael J. Fox in a series of ads for Honda’s Integra sports car as the Marty McFly character in the 80s classic “Back to the Future”, complete with Huey Lewis & the News’ “Power of Love” playing in the back.

And while we’re in the 80s, then-teenage heart-throb Rob Lowe had the unfortunate one-liner, “Hip-conscious!” in a 15-second clip for Suzuki’s Cultus hatchback.

The 80s were obviously a good decade for Japanese carmakers, as the economy worked its way into a bubble. Maybe it’s just me, but the car commercials these days seem fairly low-budget. Toyota, for its most important car launch this year – the all-new Prius — has TV actor Matthew Bomer playing Clark Kent/Superman in a commercial. And Honda’s rival Insight car? The Peanuts. No offense, Charlie Brown.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Ran Kim, Subaru

The blue sky and white clouds bounce off the surface of the water in the paddy as I trundle up and down on the rice-planting tractor, sending frogs leaping and splashing away in all directions.

I’ve been coming to my wife’s family farm north of Tokyo to help with the rice planting and harvesting for seven or eight years now.

The family grows about 15 tonnes a year, enough to feed 250 people going by the modern Japanese average of 60 kilos per person per year.

“It used to be double that, but people eat different stuff now,” my father-in-law says, as we squat by the side of the paddy for a break, sipping canned coffee, another example of the changing national diet.

Rice is the only food Japan grows more of than it eats, but it does so with high tariff protection from foreign produce, giving the ruling Liberal Democratic Party a bit of a headache in trade talks.

Farmers provide a solid support base for the LDP, which naturally does what it can to protect their interests.

But when you’re running the world’s second-biggest economy, it’s no surprise that everyone wants to sell you things produced cheaply elsewhere, including your own national staple food.

One step the government took years ago to encourage a bit of crop diversity this was to limit farmers’ rice planting to 72 percent of their land.

My in-laws also took their own step in the 1960s when they bought their first cow, and now most of the family income comes from milk.

But like many other dairy farmers, they’re not ready to give up on rice, which comes with plenty of cultural baggage - and perhaps the odd hint of local snobbery. My brother-in-law takes me to the station at the end of my stay, and we drive past some huge paddies that I haven’t seen before.

“Our paddies are old, so the rice is delicious, but these ones are new, so they’ve had to replace all the earth. The rice is just no good.”

Photo credit: REUTERS/Hugh Lawson

Attending a media conference given by a Hollywood star in Tokyo is often more of an exercise for the shoulder muscles than journalistic instincts. If you are obviously not Japanese, you can sit right up front and raise your hand as far and fast as you like, but chances are the MC will not pick on you to ask a question.

I got back from a news conference where Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard were promoting their new film “Angels and Demons” nursing a familiar sore shoulder, but not the pithy quotes I had hoped for about the Vatican’s reaction to a movie some Catholics see as offensive.

Movie distributors deny there is any policy of discouraging questions by the foreign media here.

“I wasn’t there, but probably there were just too many people with their hands up,” an employee in the marketing division at Sony Pictures told me.

Anxiousness to protect foreign visitors from any potential embarassment is perhaps among the reasons why Japanese reporters — whose questions often revolve around the stars’ sushi preferences — are favoured over those who want to dig deeper.

Just as in the movie “Lost in Translation”, visiting stars are shielded from criticism and often seem to feel free to do things they might not risk at home.

Appearances by foreign stars in TV commercials have tailed off somewhat along with the decline in Japan’s economic might. But Brad Pitt has recently starred in a series of slapstick commercials for mobile phone company Softbank. Tommy Lee Jones has a long-running gig as an alien who drinks Japanese canned coffee whenever things go wrong, while George Clooney is more often seen on Japanese TV screens driving a Toyota than in any of his movie or television incarnations.

Performers’ appearances go beyond commercials. Beyonce not only dances to promote mineral water, but last year appeared on a TV variety show alongside a bizarre Japanese impersonator.  Catherine Zeta Jones has been seen disagreeing vehemently with Japan’s most famous TV fortune-teller, and Cameron Diaz and Jude Law are among a long line of celebrities who have acted as judges on a TV cookery show.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Michael Caronna

Spare a thought for Japan’s foreign clay throwers.

The plunging economic tide has exposed some interesting characters here, like Graham McAlister, who came from Australia in 1983 to study pottery and never moved back. I met him at the Himatsuri Festival, a huge pottery bazarre-cum-folk festival held over the Golden Week holidays in the town of Kasama, where craftsmen and women have been throwing the soft local clay since the 18th century.

“It’s been a bit rough this year,” said Graham. “There’s still loads of people turning up, but not many are buying.”

The festival itself started about 30 years ago.

“It was just a great big potters’ party at first,” said Roland Sachse from Germany, a veteran clay-meister who has lived and worked here since 1972.

“You should stay for the music tonight,” he smiled, sipping a bottle of beer and watching over his stall.

Himatsuri is now the largest event in the Ibaragi prefecture calendar. About 200,000 people come to the Art Forest Park each year to stroll around the 200-odd stalls offering food, drink, face-painting for the kids, and mountains of pottery, all around an open stage where musicians play through the day, with full concerts laid on at least twice during the week.

After chatting to Graham at his stall for five minutes or so, I started to feel awkward. It was all very well sounding sympathetic about his sales, but I hadn’t actually bought anything myself.

I picked out a little soy sauce pot for 2,800 yen ($28) and held it up to admire the flecks of red and gold glaze. Graham explained how it took three turns in the kiln to fix the clay, then the first layer of glaze, and finally the extra dashes of coloured glaze at a lower temperature.

“It should really be four, though: one each for the red and the gold. But then I’d have to charge more for it.”

Hard times don’t change good nature, though. When I took out my wallet, Graham said: “Let’s call it 2,500 yen. You had to pay 300 for the car park, eh?”

Photo credits: REUTERS/Hugh Lawson