Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Poverty

Kate: When Risai and others enter Tai, they encounter a ravaged and danger-filled country, rife with poverty. 

A great deal is discussed about poverty in the books, especially in Hills of Silver Ruins. I know from previous conversations with you and from your post on “parasite singles” that in Japan, individuals are expected, even required, to go to their families first before they go to the state. In the manga series, What Did You Eat Yesterday? Kenji’s deadbeat father hasn’t lived with the family for years, yet the local welfare agency sends a letter to the mother anyway, basically asking, “Is there anything you can do?” The family meet and confer before sending back a polite negative. (Americans would call up the local Social Security office and rant for twenty minutes.)

The discussions in Hills of Silver Ruins seem to focus on people helping themselves but only if the structures are in place that make that possible—Sure, we will work hard but we have to be allowed to get jobs and take home the cash. Hence, Gyousou’s efforts, described in more than one book, to end as peacefully as possible the siege on the town that wouldn’t pay taxes—because the town had a point.

Does Ono’s attitude here towards poverty reflect a general attitude in Japan? Or a specific political/economic attitude held by a specific group?

Eugene: Kipling could have written "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" as a treatise about contemporary Confucian attitudes toward life and work in Northeast Asia.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Thus, as in The Devil is a Part Timer, the first thing a stranded alien does when he shows up in Japan is go to school or get a job (or both).

 In Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, Kaguya's father, a soulless business machine (with intimations of connections to organized crime), is not treated with as much contempt as Miyuki's layabout father. In contrast, the most valiant stock character in all of Japanese fiction is the single mother who keeps hearth and home together despite the most bizarre of circumstances. Seiko in The Demon Girl Next Door is an excellent example.

In Asian society, "make work" is not an anathema. In practice, lifetime employment necessarily results in low productivity and overall lower wages, as does overhiring. But it is a price Japanese society has long been prepared to pay, and with little debate. Hence the ubiquitous sight of "elderly guys, wearing bright orange jackets, waving what looks like a cheap lightsaber toy around" in the vicinity of any construction zone.

That's pretty much the situation we see developing at the end of book 3 of Hills of Silver Ruins.

Soup kitchens and boarding houses were built in cities where large numbers of refugees had congregated. Agents set up shop among them, recruiting workers to rebuild the towns and cities damaged by war and natural disasters. Despite the meager wages, news of paying jobs drew in more refugees from outside Zui Province.

The job recruiter is depicted as a heroic role throughout the novel, and the "tax holiday" in order to encourage commerce (even on the black market) is seen as good policy.

Hajime Aoyama in Coffee Ikaga Deshou ("How About a Coffee") turned his life around (he was a mob enforcer for a loan shark) when he met a homeless man (Tako) who turned out to be a coffee connoisseur. In his makeshift shack beneath an underpass, he teaches Hajime the art of roasting, grinding, and brewing coffee. This category of homeless person is more an urban camper with extremely low overhead.

A romanticized view, to be sure, the self-organized homeless do come across as so well organized that it is not hard to see it as the lingering remnants of the black market economy from the post-war Occupation period. As Japan's society ages, social welfare policy is slowly stepping in to pick up the slack.

Getting back to Kipling, though, in Coffee Ikaga Deshou, this idea of coming to terms with your sins is a central theme, and Hajime must at some point confront his past, which also brings him into contact with Tako's estranged family.