TOKYO LETTER:Donations of gifts to orphanage children, donated by people using comic-book names, is spreading through Japan
IT STARTED quietly on Christmas Day, when an anonymous donation of school satchels arrived at an orphanage in Japan’s rural Gunma prefecture.
The sender identified himself as Naoto Date, the alter ego of masked comic-book wrestler Tiger Mask who donated his winnings to the fictional childhood orphanage where he grew up.
That apparently spontaneous act of modest generosity has since set off a sort of benevolent contagion, with donors sending cash, school bags and food to child welfare facilities across the country. Japan’s state broadcaster NHK estimates the tally of donations at more than 700, worth more than $400,000.
The gifts have come in all shapes and sizes. Care workers at an orphanage in Yamagata woke up to find leeks, cabbage, sacks of rice and ¥10,000 (€90) with a note under the Tiger Mask name, asking the children to be strong and share the food.
Nappies and stuffed toys are popular. A cram school operator weighed in last week with a single donation of €44,500.
Perhaps not surprisingly in a manga-loving culture that traditionally shuns ostentation, the comic-book guises of the donors have mushroomed like the crowded cast of an afternoon soap opera. The name of beloved children’s character Anpanman, who has a head made of bread, has been on several gifts, along with Mario, the stocky plumber of Nintendo’s Super Mario games, and Doraemon, Japan’s famous 22nd robotic cat.
The hundreds of donors have mostly stayed faithful to the anonymity of the Tiger Mask character, but some have been spotted dropping off their gifts.
In one case, an apparently elderly man wearing the character’s tiger mask ran off after leaving more schoolbags at a welfare facility in Oita prefecture.
Japan’s media, drowning in bad news, has grabbed on to the story like a lifebuoy. All the major newspapers have run stories speculating on the identity of the donors.
Many appear to be middle- aged or older, making them the prime audience for the hugely popular Tiger Mask comic series, which ran for three years from 1968.
For millions of Japanese, those were better times. Their country had, to the astonishment of many, overtaken West Germany to become the planet’s number two economy, a little over two decades since being crushed in the second World War.
The government had successfully united a humiliated, potentially unmanageable population around the common goal of overtaking the West.
Ahead was the go-go 1980s, when Japan peaked and some predicted it would overtake the United States as the world’s top economic powerhouse.
Today, after two decades of political and economic drift, Japanese seem united only in their belief that the best is over.
That feeling had been compounded by the success of neighbour China, which last year overtook Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy.
Malaise has set in like gangrene, draining the under-30s of the energy and commitment of their parents. The malaise has inevitably been accompanied by social problems that shock older people in a country supposedly built on rock-solid family ties.
Child abuse, although still low by international standards, has rocketed in the last decade, reaching a record high last year when 18 children died, mostly at the hands of parents.
In one particularly disturbing case, a woman left her two children to starve to death in a small apartment. Neighbours heard the children crying but did nothing to help.
Commentators say the Tiger Mask phenomenon has been fuelled by a sense of sharp generational concern, even guilt, among the people who grew up during better times.
"Many of these donors are probably people of my generation who feel an emotional bond with Tiger Mask," novelist Arisu Arisugawa (51) told the Yomiurinewspaper. "I think people want to contribute to society."
Not everyone is a fan.
Photographer Shinya Fujiwara told Kyodo News that the masked donors made him “uncomfortable” because they were evidence that Japan’s economic and social funk was deepening.
“Those donors probably include people whose ties with their families and friends have been severed, and who have no place to express affection for others,” said Fujiwara, who called the gift-giving a form of “distorted heroism”.
That’s not the dominant view. On TV, ordinary people interviewed about the phenomenon have invariably welcomed it, while lamenting that it may have already peaked.
“I hope people don’t treat this as a temporary thing and keep giving,” one woman told NHK. “We need more thought for others in our society.”
