Last March I went to Shanghai with my wife. Since she is a great lover of walking, I was obliged to walk into the life of ordinary people, and found out that Shanghai in fact is full of narrow alleys and crude housing. However, it is not that they are poor. I and my wife were impressed by their positive attitude to the life. Below is the recounting of our odyssey in Shanghai.

Yuyuan and a Time-Trip to the Medieval Din and Bustle
I used to think that Shanghai was nothing more than a new, “artificial” town, but after visiting the old district of Yuyuan during my recent trip to the city, my thinking changed 180 degrees. Shanghai still has a lot of the “hutong” (districts consisting of rows of narrow alleys and crude housing) type areas that have largely vanished from Beijing. Walking through the areas and seeing the bustle and lavishly consumeristic way of life, you feel as if you have traveled back to China’s Middle Ages (although the young people on the streets can be seen wearing jeans, showing that we are living in the 21st century).

Houses line the streets, which smell of Chinese pickles, and curve so you cannot see where they lead. There are small tables here and there along the streets, and it seems like at any given time there is someone having a meal. Several rows of laundry poles protrude into the air from each of the windows of the multistory apartment buildings of the communist era. The laundry put out to dry is mostly black and red in color. (Underwear is not hung outside.)

The sight makes me think of Naples where laundry poles also stick out to the street. At the same time, walking here I start to recall the feeling of walking through Bukhara and other ancient towns of Central Asia. The roofs are curved and differ from those in Central Asia, but the reason that the area looks more like Central Asia than the old downtown areas of Tokyo may be that even though the housing is wooden and quite crude, it is white-washed in plaster.

Cultural influence by Central Asia may be another reason. Recently many people in academia have started to point out that China has been culturally influenced by Central Asia (Sogdiana) since ancient times. And Yuyuan as well: entering the house of a wealthy person in the district, you see that the layout centering on a courtyard closely resembles that found in large private residences in Uzbekistan. Even in modern times, young people with Central Asian-looking faces—perhaps they are from Xinjiang—transport large, beautiful cakes on the backs of their bicycles and sell them on the streets.

Shanghai also has a surprising number of bicycles and two-wheeled carts. Now on top of this there are motorbikes which are powered by electric motors that run very quietly. There are also regular motorbikes, but significantly fewer than in the cities of Southeast Asia. I do not know why this is.

In any case, even in Shanghai it still appears that the majority of the people have low income levels. Here and there on the streets, people beg for money. They are mostly elderly or disabled persons. When I gave the cold shoulder to one man on crutches, he cursed, “Stingy Japanese!” I liked it that he did not say “Xiao Riben!” (little Jap; a derogatory term in China for Japanese people).

The Yuyuan area is enjoyable place to see and walk around, and going there is like traveling back in time. Apparently authorities are paying subsidies in an effort to preserve the area. People say the summer here gets unbearably humid (I noticed air conditioners outside even some of the crude houses), and an increasing proportion of the residents are elderly people, who have lived here since long before.

Onslaught of McDonald's
The city itself is a bustling muddle of cultures. The stores sell bags printed with Mickey Mouse and Doraemon and everything you can think of. Boom boxes fill the streets with the sound of loud vulgar pop, the like of which you would hear in Moscow streets. There is no trace of the customary “charamela”-style Chinese melodies.

China is similar to the United States in that it takes in everything and makes everything commonplace. (The same is true of Japan, but on a different scale.) There are also flies—big ones, but not as many as in India where they can be overwhelming.

The public toilets are a lot cleaner than they were 30 years ago when I first visited China, but the stalls still do not have doors. The waste matter travels down a long canal.

The Japanese mass media tends to focus too much on China’s upper middle class and above, failing to portray the way of life and sentiments of ordinary Chinese people. To encounter it, you have to go there, walk around and see it for yourself.

Once China becomes affluent, it will probably end up beautifully preserving this kind of Middle Ages-type muddle. For example, the construction work at the famous Nanjing Xilu street that started several years ago has been completed, transforming the street into a stone-paved, clean promenade that is closed to traffic. The interest of the area has been lost.

Just outside Yuyuan is a Starbucks. The prices were about the same as they are in Japan, but the sizes of cups were on par with those in the United States, so in effect the prices were probably about half those in Japan. As you can tell from the greeting from the well-trained store personnel, who looked as if they were students, “Hello, Ni Hao,” the store was aimed at foreigners. Meanwhile, the staff at a nearby McDonald’s had not been trained and the service there was socialist.

“Water village” District---Tourists' Wonderland
In an area less than one hour southwest of Shanghai by car, there are a number of old towns that line the banks of a network of large and small creeks. My Japanese guidebook called this the “water village” district. This time I visited the town of Zhuiiajiao as part of my JTB tour(3-day tour to Shanghai costs 700 dollars for everything and in fact is cheaper than any other tours. It is one of the reasons why 10,000 Japanese fly to China daily)).

The town is indescribably beautiful. Perhaps it could be described as a mix of Venice, Niigata and Kurashiki of Japan in the old days, and Bangkok. I think it is a miracle that places like this still exist in the world.

The banks of the creeks, which have been reinforced with stones, are lined with rows of old houses. The water of the creeks is stagnant and very brown, but the people still wash their clothes in it. Not only that, in the morning the housewives come out of their houses with some sort of big brown jar, empty its contents into the creek and scrub the inside with a brush.

I was told that this is the household toilet. I once read in some serial story in a newspaper that in around the 16th century, some Japanese chief councilor of state went to Manila and liked these jars. He bought several dozen for dirt-cheap prices and sold them back in Japan at high prices as pieces of art. They are very nice-looking jars.

I looked at the scenery of the town as I strolled around and rode in boats. These boats have oars that are the exact same shape as those found on Japanese boats and are used in the same way. (I thought these were unique to Japan.)

Thoughts on China’s Development and its Fragility
I have been to China several times over the past 10 years, but taking a close look at daily life in Shanghai during my most recent trip, I got the feeling that China’s current development, like its Westernization movement 150 years ago and industrialization in the 1910s, is government-led (with the exception of foreign investment).

Moreover, many people there still have a socialist mentality. The quality of service differs from that in Japan, and there is still a roughness to it. (However, service in Japan is always by the book, and in spite of its lack of emotion, it is overly detailed and intrusive. “At the store registers, always be sure to give the customer the receipt with both hands…”) It appears that people working at companies are not driven like South Korean people, with the mentality that “profits for the company are profits for me.” This means that there is a possibility that the desire of Chinese companies to branch out into the world may be supported only by their presidents.

The look of the cities has gotten a lot nicer, but the mentality and approach regarding making full use of high-rise buildings and other infrastructure—the “software” aspect— remains unchanged from the China of old. I also get the feeling that China is still clinging to the Soviet Union way of doing things.

For example, even in terms of the glittering Pudong airport terminal, I took a peak at the offices, and they were cluttered and dirty. I can see a socialist mentality of “Do not value things that do not belong to you and things that belong to the public.”

Even visiting the mushrooming skyscraper district of Pudong, for some reason you can hardly see any of the businessmen dressed in dark suits and holding leather briefcases as you see in Tokyo. All you see are, in Chinese, “Gongren” (Laborer) type people dressed in security guard and engineer-like uniforms. I am aware that the high-rise buildings were built as a venture, but I wonder what is really going on.

People who see the high-rise buildings of Pudong for the first time are overwhelmed. But considering what I saw, I got the feeling that Japan’s economy actually has more substance to it. In Japan, just as much money may have been spent on the development of Shiodome(A new business district in Tokyo) as was spent on Pudong, and the added value that has been created as a result of the buildings is perhaps greater than in Pudong.

Youth
The young people of Shanghai were wearing jeans and some of them had dyed their hair brown, so they were similar to the young people in Japan(The fashion to dye the hair in brown, pink or whatever has abated in Japan, though.).

One morning I was taking the elevator of the hotel, and a middle-aged man got on with a somewhat flashy-looking young woman. The man got off at the second floor restaurant, but the woman got off at the first floor and went outside. Perhaps it was a “one night stand.” The woman looked like she was a student, so maybe it was “Enjo Kosai” (compensated dating) as it is called in Japan.

In my view the youth of Shanghai are more spoiled than young people of Japan today, who have been hardened by the difficulty of finding employment during fifteen years of economic stagnation. They remind me of the young people of Japan just prior to the bursting of the economic bubble, when the country was completely at ease.

On the other hand, there are young people who are living a steadfast way of life. The Japanese-speaking guide who took us to and from the airport came to Shanghai from Harbin. He said that he lives in an apartment where the rent is 80 dollars per month and he does not have air conditioning. He said there is no bath and the toilet is communal. We also had a guide who had come to Shanghai from Guangxi Province. He said that he studied Japanese at a vocational school in Guilin. He had lived in a town near the border with Vietnam, but his clothing and way of thinking were completely modern.

None of the guides had been to Japan. They are too busy on the weekends to make friends. One of the guides said, “I do not speak the Shanghai language, so I get by with Mandarin. Even so, it is like living in a foreign country.”

Technically it is easy to get a tourist visa to Japan, but actually you cannot get one unless you submit a document proving that you have a bank account with a deposit of around ten thousand dollars.

If you do not return from Japan, your deposit is seized, and the travel agency is subject to punishment. “If entering Japan truly became free, everyone would go to Japan,” one guide said. He is probably right.

Not Freedom but the Right for Existence is the Issue with China
I thought that the relationship between Japan and China is like that between Germany and the Soviet Union, where two countries can build a cooperative relationship despite the background of the war. This is because it is not the case that both Japanese and Chinese are only thinking about the other country, but their top interest is improving their way of life.

I also recognized that the argument that “Japan is a free democracy and China is not, so Japan must protect itself,” is too abstract. Chinese people, without even arguing freedom or democracy, act freely enough (in fact they are in many ways much more self assertive than Japanese people. This could possibly be because they are a multiethnic society).

If that is the case, the relationship between Japan and China does not have to do with some beautiful ideal such as freedom, but is simply rooted in the bare fight for the right to existence. In the bathroom back at Narita airport, one Chinese traveler coolly ignored the line and went straight to the front.

That said, I do not think there is any need to take measures to look upon China as an adversary. All I think is that I want us to look at the reality and find a way to coexist.

The image that I had until my last visit to Shanghai as a “glittering modern city” had vastly been changed. The stage of development of the city overall is very similar to that of Moscow. One system--that is communism-- has broken down, and meanwhile the squalidness and cultural muddle of people starting to make money as they please is appearing in places such as the flashy advertisements and tasteless new architecture.

China’s initial period of accumulating capital through direct foreign investment has ended, and the country has invested this capital mainly into real estate, developing it rapidly. (This form of development is unique to socialist countries, where all of the land is owned by the state. There is a possibility that Russia, too, will shift the capital that it has built up with oil to real estate.) Unless the young people quickly learn how to use the country’s infrastructure effectively, it will be a nation with nothing more than rows of high-rise buildings.

This is off the subject, but I had thought that the areas around Shanghai would still have the outstanding culture of the medieval Southern Song dynasty. Nevertheless, most of the temples, gardens and other old structures that remain are newer than those in Japan, and I was unable to explore the origins of Japanese culture. The style of the gardens was similar to that of Japanese gardens, but the gardens in Yuyuan showed too much of the individual tastes and self-assertiveness of the person commissioning the garden. The gardens thus differed from Japanese gardens, which aim for unity with nature. Perhaps this means that Japanese culture is after all something unique which Japan can boast to the rest of the world.