Are You Happy? – Japanese People and the Sense of Happiness

It is super cool (temperature-wise) today here in Tokyo. No need of A/C, and is probably not a very smart idea to go out to the beach, but it is a perfect day to go sightseeing and also to play sports.
It seems like the high pressure – which usually is supposed to move up north together with the end of rainy season – has gone down south temporarily. But it’s not going to stay there long. It’ll come up again and we’ll have a nice sweaty summer as usual. Even today, the regions south of Kanto (that’s where Tokyo is) is right underneath the high pressure leaving them to nothing but heat. So we have cool weather in the northern half and hot one in the southern half. Interesting situation, the weatherman commented. Hmm.

Well today’s topic is not on weather but on Japanese people and the sense of happiness.
The other day on the news, I heard a report about this research and its results on the world’s population’s sense of happiness. To flatten it, the research was about whether you consider yourself a happy person, or an unhappy person. Adrian White, professor and analytic social psychologist of Leicester University analyzed the results of 80,000 individual reports in more than one hundred kinds provided by UNESCO, CIA, WHO, etc. who have conducted researches based on data of a British thinktank.
Based on his own method, he calculated each countries’ “happiness level of its people” and created a rank list. For details click here http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-07/uol-uol072706.php .

1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Bhutan
9. Brunei
10. Canada
11. Ireland
12. Luxembourg
13. Costa Rica
14. Malta
15. The Netherlands
16. Antigua and Barbuda
17. Malaysia
18. New Zealand
19. Norway
20. The Seychelles

Seeing the ranking so far, you can easily tell that the top listed countries are those that have well-established social health and welfare plus education systems. When you think about yourself aging or coming down with some kind of illness, having and not having support from your country makes a huge difference, I think.
Anyway, so where’s my country? ... I scroll down and down, but can’t find it till... ah, there we are...

23. USA
35. Germany
41. UK
62. France
82. China
90. Japan
125. India
167. Russia

SWEET, 90th place out of what? Nearly a couple hundred countries. Super low. It’s even a bit surprising, at least for me. Even though the detailed calculation method is not disclosed, do we think of ourselves that unhappy?

BTW if I’m being asked the same question, “are you happy now?” I’d say YES. Don’t have mean diseases, not being chased after by collectors and I love my country. It’s not that I’m one hundred per cent satisfied with the present status, but satisfaction and happiness are different, in my opinion.

In the end, I think of happiness as something we speak of in relative terms. Some like me are happy with theirselves, but at the same time there are people who just don’t look at the bright side and keeps on complaining about what they don’t have and want. Man, if you start doing that, I’m sure that every single person in this world would fall into the unhappy category.

As I started to think that way, I realized that in that sense, countries with more people that have upward mobility in good terms and greed in bad terms rank lower in the chart. Of course, by absolutely no means I mean to say that the top ranking countries are lazier.

What I’m more interested in is how Japan and Japanese people are portrayed in the eyes of non-Japanese people. In some parts of the world, there are war and people dying from hunger.
There’s this saying in Japanese (altho prolly originally Chinese), “ishoku tatte reisetsu wo shiru”. It’s difficult to give the literal translation, but what it means is that “only after having enough to eat and wear you learn to have manners and courtesy”. To flip it around, it means that poverty invites chaos.

The point I want to get to is this: from the eyes of some other countries, Japan must be a country that has enough food and material for almost everybody. But the question is, do we have good enough manners?

It is not wrong to stride forward to gain something that you don’t have and want to have.
But, people who can use that energy for people around them, or people who can stride for other people’s happiness – I hope we have a lot of people like that in our country. And of course, I hope to become someone like that. That’s what’s on my mind on the first day of August.