When we Westerners observe the Japanese people, their habits and cultural solutions that clash with our way of life, we usually come up with an explanation: shame. If Christianity has been based on the management of guilt, the East draws on shame and honor as a motor of action. The literature has made us believe that the code bushido or “path of the hero” that marked the life of the samurai in the 11th to 14th centuries is found buried in many of the behaviors which, seen from thousands of kilometers and 700 years later, seem amazing to us.
We have previously talked about karoshithat involuntary suicide of many of its workers due to work pressure out of a feeling of duty towards the company and society. We also know their tendency towards seclusion and detachment, as practiced by otaku or the hikikomoris. Today it is the turn of the johatsu (蒸発), or “evaporated people”, as the Government describes them.
It is a solution that many of us have thought about applying at some point, and have even dared to explore certain works popular. Become a johatsu is to lose your identity. Your family, your job, your name. All. You become a ghost for the State, all your trace is erased and you renounce your previous life to embrace a new and marginal one as you can no longer endure the pressure that presses you.
According to estimates, 100,000 Japanese a year have become johatsu in the last 40 years. How to collect a report from the Japanese policethe “faded” became a social problem starting in the 70s that had to be regulated. Some cases had already been known since after the Second World War, and following a famous event in the 60s that found a film adaptation in 1967 and a ballad performed by Ken Yabukithe term, the idea, became popular.
And what pressure leads these people to leave everything?
According to the statistics and testimonies collected, a good part of them succumb to work overwhelm or the shame of having been fired, something that they are unable to communicate to their loved ones. Also in many cases they are members of families who have contracted big debtseither due to gambling addiction or ruinous businesses. There are people who mysteriously, and without any justification, decide to sacrifice themselves socially.
An important part of the disappearances, approximately one in five cases, has to do with gender violence: since the State was not committed (nor does he commit) to fight against these abuses (until 2001 the law dictated that the most that could be done was ask husbands to be more respectful with their wives) many women began to leave their families to live in poverty.
Because that is the new life that many of its protagonists must face. The neighborhood of Kamagasaki Osaka and San’ya of the outskirts of Japan no longer appear on maps. In fact, their nomenclaturesand, if you ask for their address, many Japanese pretend to be Swedes. It’s not that they don’t know what you’re talking about, but it is an unpleasant reality that is better not to face.
Men and women who disappear because of the shame they carry on their shoulders. Families who, in turn, and when they suspect that the member who has disappeared has done so of his own free will, do not report it to the authorities because they feel the same fear of being criticized by society. This is confirmed when it is verified that according to official Government statistics, only 2,000 people disappear a year without leaving a trace or without returning after a few months of his journey.
According to the Japan Missing Persons Search Support Association, these figures are strongly under-representative of reality, closer to those 100,000 disappearances annuals that we pointed out at the beginning. Those close to a johatsu They do not usually warn the authorities. But, if they have sufficient funds and a genuine interest in regaining contact with the person, they do request the services of companies or private detectives.
Since Japanese laws strongly guarantee the privacy of citizens (they require keeping someone’s whereabouts secret even in front of their families unless criminal complaint), it is easier to go to these agents. In practice, many spouses, children, siblings or parents let it be. They do not want to hear from the person who has left their life again.
So, to the particularity of that administrative silence that characterizes Japan, is added that structure that protects the “ghosts“. The existence of these neighborhoods allows them to find a way to survive. “There, the Johatsu They live in tiny hotel rooms, often without Internet or private bathrooms,” as Léna Mauger, journalist and writer for a book focused on the lives of these people.
Back in the years of the Japanese miracle, between the 60s and 80s, San’ya was the home of thousands of day laborers in industrial and mechanical jobs. The blue-collar workers who were eclipsed in terms of State recognition by their white-collar compatriots. They were informal, masculinized jobs, without great pay but that in most cases allowed these citizens to survive and sometimes, if the person affected was skilled, save a little money with which to return to society.
As masculinized communities that they were, alcoholism, gambling and homelessness began to proliferate. Many never managed to overcome their addictions and harmful behaviors. The mafias began to take sides, owing their people. Today some NGOs enter the district daily to distribute food. Many residents live so precariously that they were considered dead in life.
The “ghost” life that is about to fade away
As technology advances, the jobs that support its population become scarcer. Added to this are two other problems: for tax purposes, and so that the debts incurred do not become a burden, since 2015 the country has been starting to track more harshly to its members. As real estate pressure increases, less well-regarded neighborhoods begin to gentrify. It is possible that the way of life of the johatsus is touched to death.
Despite everything seen, this is still a positive solution to a very difficult problem to face. Many of the individuals who take this path are precisely seen by others as weak. Suicide, unlike in our culture, is seen there as a honorable gesture when the affected person has to face personal failure. This is exemplified by the seppuku that the samurai practiced, but also the hangings or jumping into the void that many of the salaymen every year.
Japan is the second country with the index of suicides highest of all OECD members. Although the latest statistics dictate that they have managed to go down to 25,000 suicides annually (the lowest figure in its last two decades), taking one’s own life remains the leading cause of death among men and women ages 22 to 44. Better gone than dead, we can conclude.
That is the path chosen by Yuichi, a construction worker who “faded” in the mid-90s and with which journalists from the New York Post were able to speak. In addition to his job, Yuichi had to take care of his sick mother and the associated medical expenses, a series of financial pressures that led to his bankruptcy.
“I couldn’t take care of my mother,” he says. “She had given me everything, but I was incapable of taking care of her back.” His next gesture could be seen as reprehensible based on national values, but it allowed him to get out of a suffocating situation. He took his mother to a cheap hotel, rented a room for her, and abandoned her there, never to see her again. He then moved to San’ya. “Here you see people on the streets, but they themselves know that they have ceased to exist. Our escape from society was our first disappearance. Now we face the second: here we let ourselves die little by little.”
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