One magazine's sunny view for Japan in 2025, with a few dark clouds

What’s ahead?

Many of us (most?) have yet to catch up with what’s behind. But a new year dawning says, “Look ahead!” – and so we do, so Josei Seven (Jan 2-9) does, gloomily or cheerfully as our natures incline us, for though the clouds are thick and thickening, patches of blue here and there sparkle with sunlight, and on these the magazine focuses. You may find its optimism catching. Then again, you may not.

“Her Majesty Empress Aiko-sama” – it has a nice ring to it, and 2025 may smooth the 23-year-old princess’s path to the throne when her father’s reign ends. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has acknowledged the time ripe for a female reign.

It would chart a new course. Japan, almost morbidly conservative regarding women’s rights, is as sensitive as vulnerable to foreign criticism, and in October the United Nations delivered a dose. Japan is consistently and systematically unjust to women, declared CEDAW, the international body’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Too few women sit in the Diet, too few rise to corporate heights, separate surnames for married couples are not recognized as they are elsewhere, and the Imperial Throne, of little political but vast symbolic importance, has been occupied by an empress only 10 times in all Japanese history, not for the thousand years from the 8th century to the 17th and never since the last empress regnant abdicated in 1771.

Would an empress free Japanese women? No, but something else might help – to wit, a series of innovations in food processing, conservation and packaging that add up to what might be called an “instant revolution.” “Instant” used to mean quality sacrificed to convenience but no longer does, affirms “frozen food journalist” Junko Yamamoto. You can have it all these days – quality, quantity, variety, nutrition, economy, speed, and no dishes to wash either, just trash the containers. (The seemingly inevitable consequent plastic and other waste accumulation is not mentioned.) A significant and catchy neologism emerging from all this is renchin – ren for range or microwave, chin the bell-like sound the microwave makes, having done its minute or two or three of work, bidding you welcome to the feast.

Technology proceeds apace, cleansing the human spectrum of drudgery, good riddance to it. For too long it dragged us down and held us back. Machinery in its early phase liberated a vast servant class, and now digitalization is extending the good work to the masters. The smartphone evolves and evolves, perhaps evolving itself into extinction. Imagine a little device, weighing all of 100 grams, clipped to your shoulder, brimming with artificial intelligence and obviating the need to carry anything; you’ll walk down the street talking to it as you’d talk to a friend walking by your side except it’s smarter, more knowledgeable, more eager to do anything it can for you, and what can’t it do? If anything, it’ll learn, and the possibilities just grow and grow. “Friend” is one metaphor, maybe not the best. More like an internal organ.

Back to earth for a moment: it’s going to be an awful spring for the pollen-vulnerable. Blame the hot summer just past, stimulating cedar and cypress proliferation beyond anything known before (840 percent more than last year in Shikoku, 380 percent in Kinki; Kanto gets off relatively lightly: 160 percent). The annual inflow of “yellow dust” from China’s windswept deserts won’t help.

The beauty industry is on a roll – but then it always is. That’s not quite true. The COVID-19 crisis meant a three-year lull. People were stuck at home and, with other concerns pressing, ceased to care much what they looked like. The predictable rebound expresses itself in new foams, salves, lotions and of course technology, prominent among the latter a beauty-foam-emitting showerhead and a do-it-yourself acupuncture kit that replaces needles with a pair of digital earrings, generating digitally-regulated warmth that spreads from the earlobes throughout the body, promoting relaxation, improving circulation and generally mimicking the effects of the ancient art with ease and comfort.

Fashion, post-COVID, is back in fashion, with a new twist: the old are putting their stamp on it as never before. The power of numbers tells: it’s as cool now to be old as it once was (now it seems almost childish) to be young. The stress is on outdoor wear as the old take to the road, the travel industry responding with “health tourism” featuring hot springs, trekking, fresh air, gourmet dining and its opposite, “fasting tours,” so widely do tastes and perceived needs vary from person to person, season to season and mood to mood.

Work is no less in flux than leisure, maybe more so. 2025 will be the year of “spot work” – not innovating it, its been around for a while, but steering it into the mainstream. You work not by the year, month or week but by the day or the hour, not (usually) for bare survival as in the day labor of days gone by, but as an income supplement or even for amusement, as, for example: strutting around Shibuya in a manga or anime character outfit for 3000 yen an hour, roughly triple the minimum wage that most part-time jobs pay.

To sum up: life is getting better and better and in 2025, the Year of the Snake, it’ll get better still, in Josei Seven’s sunny view of things. There are shadows, but it’s a festive season and they are best passed over. On the other hand, a glancing reminder won’t spoil the festivities too much. One shadow has already been mentioned, the waste the “instant revolution” is bound to spawn. Another looms over spot work: the yamibaito (dark part-time job) scams in which unsuspecting applicants are forced on pain of violence to commit crimes ranging from defrauding the elderly to armed robbery.

Out there in the real world there’s war, there’s environmental destruction, and there’s the looming U.S. presidency of the erratic and unpredictable Donald Trump – which could mean anything to anything, but Josei Seven’s only mention of it is its likely impact on Japan’s economy – it will be good for high-yield stocks, it says.

© Japan Today