Japan's herbivores

I'm interested in Japanese youth - particularly how they consume (see my Atlantic piece on that subject), but also how they think. The social changes in Japan are fascinating right now - young Japanese I talk to have a completely different approach to life than their parents. What kind of country does that create? Is it one where people are more free to pursue whatever lifestyle they want, where they feel less judged not following the traditional path of cram school-university-job-marriage-children-30 years of long hours-retirement? I'm also interested in how this generation is pursuing more inwardly-focused hobbies - a lot of online games, of course, but also Japanese traditional crafts, and domestic travel rather than the status-trip to Honolulu. One Japanese man told me that he and his friends have no interest in holding down regular jobs - their parents will support them, and any extra money they need they can earn easily, by working at convenience stores or in Japanese pubs. Another swathe of young Japanese earn their keep by selling manga to each other in Akihabara and elsewhere. Anyway, I've written a piece about part of this phenomenon for Slate here. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. (Image by Robert Neubecker courtesy of Slate.)

K Lunch

And now for some lite fare: it turns out that Hong Kong people have been disappearing into karaoke rooms on their lunch hours - singing and eating their hearts out for less than five US dollars. K Lunch, as it's known, is not news to most Hong Kongers, but was completely new to me when I heard about it a while back. Check out my piece on the subject in Time here.

How green is your bamboo keyboard?

One of the issues that has captivated me (and let's be honest, lots of other people) for a while is how green products that say they're green really are. A lot of products marketed as green don't actually provide us the information to prove it, and green products are so in fashion these days that suppliers in China, Taiwan and elsewhere go to very un-green lengths to create "green" products. And just because a product carries a green label doesn't mean it's actually good for you. Over on the excellent New Energy and Environment Digest, my friend Elizabeth Balkan wrote about bamboo keyboards earlier this month. Her post reminded me of the debate on bamboo flooring, and my overall interest in building materials (stifle that yawn!). Bamboo materials, it has been pointed out, do not yet carry any certification like the Forest Stewardship Council. That's before we discuss quality and safety problems such as those raised in the recent lawsuits about Chinese drywall and Paul Midler's excellent book Poorly Made in China. I'm not suggesting that children are going to spent their days licking the keys, but given the above, I do wonder what else is in that bamboo keyboard.

Mr Tiffany and me

Anyone who follows my posts on Facebook will know that I'm the proud parent to a rescue rat, Mr Tiffany (aka Mr T). My husband Colin and I found him drowning in a puddle almost a year ago near our apartment in Hong Kong. Since then, we've both learned a lot about rats, ourselves and our friends. Before you dismiss me as a nutcase, have a look at this Wall Street Journal story about a young PhD student who is trying to change public perceptions of rats. Mr T has taught us that even wild rats are incredibly intelligent, tender, determined characters, and that even tiny rodents can have a passion for interior design. We've learned about rats who help remove land mines, Debbie the Rat Lady, and Oxford University Professor Manuel Berdoy's landmark documentary on the private lives of rats. We never planned to keep Mr T - he was just a creature on the verge of death who needed a hand. But he charmed us completely, and now he's part of the family - the only one who gets daily massages and hot meals at home.

Go Patagonia!

A while back, a woman I met who works in corporate social responsibility at Patagonia told me that their customers were asking so many questions about working conditions in its supply chain that they had to educate their customer relations representatives about what they were doing to address these issues. If only more companies had that kind of problem! Patagonia has always been associated with environmental causes, but they are also quietly honest about the challenges they face on the labor side. Their multimedia presentations about the origin of products raise the bar for transparency. Sure, we could quibble about how honest they really are with themselves and with us, but it's a huge step in the right direction, one I wish more companies would take. Now, Patagonia has put together an excellent video in which their executives and outside observers discuss some of the challenges and complexity in ethical sourcing. It includes interviews with Michael Posner of Human Rights First, Auret van Heerden of the Fair Labor Association, Richard Applebaum of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and moi. Click on "Digging Deeper" here.

China-Japan relations

Last night in Hong Kong, I went to a dinner sponsored by the Asia Society where Cui Tiankai, China's ambassador to Japan, spoke about China-Japan relations - a topic that interests me personally and professionally. Seats were assigned beforehand; I was seated between a US diplomat and an older Japanese businessman, a man whose informality betrayed his long experience overseas (or his lack of interest in me). Ambassador Cui was seated next to Sato Shigekazu, Japan's consul general in Hong Kong. Around the table were several other consul generals from the US, South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore. Despite the close economic ties, and Consul General Sato's insistence that the foreign ministries of both countries were on good terms, what was remarkable to me was how often Ambassador Cui raised the issue of history, specifically "the war started by Japan." In the Q&A, one Canadian guest, who told me later his wife is Japanese, insisted that there was no need to teach the minutae of war in Japanese schools and that the free press in Japan would allow people to educate themselves about history when they were adults. That didn't sit well with Ambassador Cui, and it doesn't sit well with me either. After the ambassador's prepared remarks, I asked the American diplomat to my right what he thought, and he said, basically, nothing new, that's what I would have expected him to say. But when I asked the Japanese businessman to my right, he had heard it in a completely different way: he said the speech had been "tough". He wished the ambassador had started his speech with the fact that Japanese rescue teams were the first foreign groups to reach victims of the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake. And while he admitted Japan had made plenty of mistakes in the past and its discussion of the war, he wished that the speech hadn't focused so much on politics. Better to discuss ways to expand economic cooperation, he said.

On migrants returning home

I've been arguing for a while now that in this economic downturn, China's migrants will not be a source for instability - despite warnings from authorities in Beijing and fear-mongering from China-watcher friends of mine. Pieces like this one in last week's Financial Times echo my views. But I have also argued that many migrants will not be excited about returning home during this crisis because the Chinese countryside is a step back developmentally to people accustomed to life in the big cities. The second generation of Chinese migrants - the generation born in the 80s - is not in it so much for the money as for the experience. This is why a blog written by one of these young migrants and translated into English by China Labor Bulletin is so fascinating. It's important to remember that the writer, Xiao Sanlang, is the only person from his village to go to graduate school - so he's not typical. But his comments are sympathetic and fascinating. They raise an interesting question about the transformation of the China price from a coastal China price to an inland China price: Will workers who have been working in Shenzhen and Shanghai really want to live in the same basic conditions they fled to work at an export factory near their home, particularly if the conditions are no better and wages are lower than on the coasts?