The Vanished

 

Shoji Ueda, 1950

I recently became aware of a very particular phenomenon that occurs in Japanese society. I have known better.

We know how competitive the Japanese – and the Chinese – society is. The suicide rate, since university, is very high in this country, the highest in the world, with 30-53,000 cases every year.

Failure in studies, as in emotional life or in work, is like a stigma, a burden and an unacceptable shame.

But there is not only suicide as a solution.

Also famous are the “hikikomori” (being on the sidelines), young people who decide to self-lock themselves in their own rooms: nowadays there are 500 thousand (out of 127 million inhabitants), young victims of bullying, who have failed at school level or fired by companies, who decide to live their entire existence without ever leaving the rooms, immobile for hours and hours in front of computers, living unreal lives.

 

In Japan, study and work reach unbearable levels of stress: at school every day of the week, 12 hours a day at work with very few days off, it is forbidden to talk on cell phones in subway wagons, where people often sleep – even standing up.

 

Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression #39, 2010

Moreover, an even more decisive and deep element, Japanese culture prefers silence and emotions are never communicated. In marriages themselves, couples don't show their emotions. Everything is wrapped in silence and a cosmetic kindness, which conceals lacerating inner dramas.

And when these dramas ink some of their beautiful white clothes with black, like ideograms of pain on rice paper, they decide to disappear.

Or rather, to “evaporate”.

 

Not suicide, then.

 

Rather, thousands of citizens, men and women of all ages and social classes, every year leave everything behind to disappear from the society that has hurt them.

As emerged from a recently published investigative book: “The Vanished: The 'Evaporated People' of Japan in Stories and Photographs” by the French couple, she author and he photographer, Léna Mauger and Stéphane Remael.

“Johatsu”, as they are called in Japanese.

Their long reportage has documented how there are now agencies dedicated to these people, capable of canceling their lives on an administrative level, and in a few hours’ “transport” them to remote locations, without their families, friends or spouses knowing anything.

The book also tells the stories of these “night movers”, a new profession in Japan, whose task is precisely to make those who request it lose track.

A millionaire turnover, also protected by a national law on the protection of personal data, which allows an adult to go anywhere without having to provide explanations, even to their wives or husbands, and the right to anonymity, and therefore without being able be traced by the authorities, if the criminal record is clean.

By contrast there are private investigators who instead try to find these evaporated people.

 

However it's not a recent phenomenon, now we talk about it more. But since the 1970s, young workers who grew up in the countryside were fleeing from hard work to the cities.

It's not a coincidence that the name Johatsu is taken from the title of a 1967 documentary directed by Shōhei Imamura, “A Man Vanishes”, which tells the story of a man who leaves his entire life, including his girlfriend, behind him.

Then in the nineties there was a boom in these cases, and now it is a reality told in investigations, books and reports on the BBC news.

 

It's a disturbing and sobering phenomenon.

 

Especially in these times where, on the contrary, what causes anxiety and loneliness is not being visible to everyone. In our societies we get sick and die, in absurd ways, to have a unique selfie to post on social networks that can attract as much interest as possible on us (which translates into numbers of “likes”).

 

It's certain that between the two polarities virtue is in the middle.

It's absurd to think of disappearing one morning without saying anything to one's parents, friends, or spouses, to live in a place where nothing remains of our past, like a new identity.

But it's also equally disturbing that it's no longer possible to disappear – which translates into being offline in social networks – for an hour without arousing alarm in our friends.

It is as if we have a GPS in our heart and we must always be “present” and traceable; as if the green or blue lights that indicate our online presence are equivalent to those of the machinery that keeps people alive in hospitals.

 

Two mirror societies, two mental disorders.

Two different types of social stigmas: failure and incommunicability that leads to the loss of all traces of one's existence, deliberately untraceable; and, on the other hand, the stigma of not being sufficiently and “properly” visible to the eyes of the world, too little exposed and dangerously offline, as if disappearing for a few hours coincides with confessing sins and secrets to be kept hidden.

 

Knowing other societies and cultures, in their drama and problems, teaches us to understand our own much better too.

 

Shoji Ueda, 1984

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Léna Mauger ad Stéphane Remael: “The Vanished: The 'Evaporated People' of Japan in Stories and Photographs” (Skyhorse Pub Co. Inc, 2016)
Michael Wolf - Tokyo Compression, Peperoni Books (October 10, 2010)

Italian version