There’s been a lot of talk about “jishuku” in Japan, especially for the first month after the earthquake. Although the word simply means “self-restraint”, as usual in Japan the term is intimately linked to “what other people (might) think”. So jishuku, like so many things in Japan, has a tendency to turn out to be a principle that is actually a form of peer-pressure in disguise.
There may be people of principle who perform jishuku naturally, as a form of self-discipline, as part of their integrity, but I suspect they are few and far between.
As I’m a rugged Western individual who will never, ever, ever succumb to peer-pressure (what’s that dear? Yes. Yes, I’ll be finished with the computer soon. Yes, you’re right, an hour is quite long enough, yes dear), I never really liked the jishuku, such as dimming lights or wearing dull clothes. What is this? A wake? Indeed, there’s a case to be made for the recent post-earthquake jishuku as an expression of mourning.
On a recent trip, I noticed something missing in the landscape – these:
Where the heck where they all? At this time of year, end-April/early May, they are usually all over the place. It must be jishuku.
Then, way out in the sticks, I saw some. Not just 1 or 2 or 3 on a single pole, but what looked like hundreds strung across a river. Ha-ha! Yaa-boo-sucks to tsunami-gloom and earthquake panic and nuclear-crisis-neurosis, they seemed to say. I looked at them and cheered, not just the carp-streamers themselves but the folks who had abandoned that silly old jishuku and boldly celebrated life and colour, and tradition. Don’t they look great?
Then on May 5th, I saw a news item about a high-schooler in the tsunami-hit area who had lost his family in the disaster, and who put together a long line of koi-nobori streamers and hoisted them above the town. Yay! (I can’t find the news item online, maybe someone can? I did find these though):