A Million Millionaires
A chapter where the hunger for learning is almost literal
A couple of weeks ago I saw a quote on Instagram, something about choosing the events in your life based on whether they’d be interesting to write about. (If you know who said it, tell me — I forgot to take a screenshot.)
Well, if that’s the metric, I’m living a future bestseller. I just got rejected a visa to Japan — the trip I’ve been building toward for months, leaving in three weeks.
If you’re wondering how I feel: still raw, I’m somewhere between bargaining (I will try to get another appointment) and sadness. Not overly dramatic, just enough to make my coffee taste metallic. I’m sure there’s a perfect Japanese word for it…
On the bright side, our gallery just opened a beautiful pop-up show in London. And while I process my bureaucratic heartbreak, at least I get to stand in front of the most peaceful, meditative landscapes imaginable. The timing for this unplanned emotional therapy couldn’t be better.
So if anyone from my precious subscribers happens to work at the Japanese embassy lives in London — come see the show and bring a hug.
P.S. I still can’t spare you from a cultural recommendation. Go to the cinema and see Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Nothing to do with Japan, but an absolutely great film. Consider it my diplomatic response.
—A.
A Million Millionaires1
Translated from Vsevolod Ovchinnikov
If I had to name one trait above all, I would say this: the Japanese read widely and are curious about many things. In a packed subway car, behind the sliding walls of a country house — everywhere you look, someone is reading. By print run, Japan trails only the Soviet Union and the United States. A nation of a hundred million buys about half a billion books a year and more than one and a half billion magazines — nearly 1,500 monthlies alone.
The total one-day circulation of Japanese newspapers has passed fifty million — close to a world record. Here, though, there’s a curious twist. In capitalist countries, newspapers are usually divided into “quality” and “mass-market.” The first — the most solid, authoritative, influential — like The Times in Britain, Le Monde in France, The New York Times in the United States — have far smaller readerships than the popular press with its multi-million print runs. In Japan, the “quality” papers — Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri — are also mass-market: the most widely read. The reason lies not with the publishers but with the readers — with the level of expectation they bring.
You could say the Japanese are cultivated as a people. And not only because literacy is universal. A Japanese person’s outlook is shaped not just by what they’ve read, but by the way people of any age keep a truly childlike curiosity. Courses, exhibitions, lectures — young and old flock to them. The “Workers’ Society of Music Lovers” is a mass organisation with a membership some political parties might envy.
What’s striking is that the breadth of interests that cuts through daily routine — the passion to understand what is still unknown — is as unselfish as the Japanese love of beauty. People have not forgotten how to place spiritual values above material comforts.
It would be easy, with a dozen examples, to paint a vivid picture of the Americanisation of Japan’s inner life. The Japanese are receptive to novelty, and that receptiveness shows in how readily they follow foreign fashions. But spread wide over the surface, Hollywood standards of taste remain a childhood ailment. They do not reach the core of the national character.
The young Tokyoite who is mad for the latest craze — say, electric guitars — will not read a fifty-page abridgement of War and Peace. He accepts the standardisation of fashion, but instinctively resists any attempt to standardise thought and feeling. There is plenty of pulp in Japanese print, but digests are not held in high regard.
Hearing that Japanese students sometimes have to sell their own blood to pay for textbooks, a visiting American is surprised: “How can you make such sacrifices for a diploma?” The vans of blood buyers waiting at university gates are a double symbol: of how strong the hunger for learning is — and how dear the price.
“You know what we call a university diploma now?” a student says. “A millionaire’s certificate. To get it, you have to lay out a million yen.” Japan has something to be proud of, you see: its student body — a million millionaires.
The joke, heard at a university evening, points to a bitter paradox in a highly developed capitalist state. Japan’s private universities — three quarters of all students in higher education — survive almost entirely on what they take from their students, receiving from the state budget twenty times less than they take from the young. In the last fifteen years, fees at private universities have risen sixfold.
A newly admitted first-year student pays an entrance fee of 200–300,000 yen (almost a year and a half’s wages for a secondary-school leaver). The more practical the specialty, the higher the cost. Technical faculties are dearer than the humanities; medical schools reach 600,000 yen (hence the student quip: if you fail your exams, you can always buy a car to console yourself).
And the entrance fee is only the beginning. In the years that follow you must keep paying — tuition, library access, laboratory use. In short, a five-year course of study costs more than a million. Even with the prized diploma in hand, a young specialist often earns less in a year than their student years cost.
Those who make it into state universities pay several times less in tuition. But even they are forced, in their way, to become “millionaires.” Being admitted means the right to attend lectures and sit exams. Where to live and how to eat — that is the student’s own concern.
The so-called Scholarship Association (a fund built from public and private donations) is, in practice, a loan office. Even the paltry stipend — barely enough for a season ticket — that a quarter of students receive must be repaid in full after graduation. And so a young specialist, leaving university with a “millionaire’s diploma,” often carries with them a debt of four to six future salaries.
One of the most common words on campus is arubaito — borrowed from German before the war — which means not work in general, but a side job without which student life is hard to imagine.
For the overwhelming majority of Japanese youth, studying means earning one’s keep at the same time. The only difference is that for some, arubaito supplements help from their parents, while for others it is their only source of income.
The oldest — you might say classical — form of arubaito is tutoring. There is always demand. To move from the nine-year school to the upper secondary, you need to pass a competitive entrance exam, and parents hire students well in advance to prepare their children.
But tutoring alone, even daily, won’t keep you afloat now. Alongside the main arubaito you have to find others. The stronger lads hire on to shove passengers onto metro and suburban train carriages. The work is heavy, but student humour likens it to morning calisthenics: the peak comes in the early hours and doesn’t last long.
When exam season starts, Tokyo offers strange sights. Dock workers on a quay argue about the theory of relativity. A scullery maid, snatching a free minute, flips through an anatomy textbook. A long-limbed fellow in a top hat, lugging a night-time advert for some dubious establishment, reads International Law by the light of neon signs. Future lawyers, engineers, doctors do whatever comes: they wash cars at filling stations, wrap goods in shops, go door to door chasing down non-payers of water or gas bills.
It’s hard in exam time, when there are no hours left for arubaito. It’s hard in April and October, when on top of daily costs you have to pay the half-year’s tuition. And there is nothing worse for a self-supporting student than falling ill. Quite apart from the cost of treatment, it simply means going hungry — unless friends step in.
Not everyone can withstand the overstrain of mind and body that the university years demand of a Japanese student. The sad part is that many learn this too late.
A million student faces — how much self-denial, even heroism, their unquenchable thirst for knowledge requires! Japan has a right to be proud of that. But are such sacrifices necessary? Is it truly impossible to find the means to help the young and support their striving?
You who love Japan so much. This is unfair!
Oh that is such a blow Alexandra. Fingers crossed for a second chance.