When you’re living on a college campus, you’re surrounded by people your own age. It’s something you get used to really quickly without noticing – what you do notice is when that 18-22 year old bubble is punctured by someone who isn’t employed by the university. “Why is this child in the dining hall? Who is this old guy walking around the track (at American University, it might be Dr. Fauci)?” Because of this age bubble phenomenon, the differences between grades become exaggerated. As soon as you become a sophomore, freshmen and their novice ways become an easy subject of derision. You scoff at how they travel around campus in packs of a dozen or more, like gazelles on the savannah fearing an attack from an apex predator – even though that was you only a few months ago.
Once I returned from Singapore as a senior, this bubble was burst for me. I was reminded that most people are not young adults when I walked around my neighborhood, went to the grocery store, and so on. One time, I was assaulted by an elderly woman at the Cathedral Heights Giant. I felt bad whenever seniors were forced to briefly step off the sidewalk for a zoomer whizzing by on an electric scooter with their AirPods in.
A quick word about electric scooter etiquette. Depending on where you live, your city might be awash in these contraptions. You may see them rarely. DC is drowning in these personal mobility devices, in pastel shades of orange, yellow, and green, based on which tech company maintains them (or, more accurately, the scooters are drowning in the river – funny except for the ecological damage). The scooters are undeniably fun and convenient – as an underclassman, I often cruised around with my friends after midnight when the price would drop to $6.99 for an hour (I think), and most cars had vacated the roads. One of my friends could not figure out how to ride the damn thing, and tore up their legs falling off, which was very funny. But the rest of us were like the Hell’s Angels, if Hell’s Angels were a few stoned teenagers topping out at 15 mph. In my opinion, this is what scooters are for. Either late-night leisure cruising, or cheaper and fun transportation to/from the bar/friend’s house. You should be embarrassed to ride one when the sun is out.
If you’re using a scooter as day-to-day transport to the point where you fork over several hundred dollars to purchase your own, I have a problem. I understand that this is a symptom of both our urban planning and affordability crises – people live far away from things, but also can’t afford a car. But that’s what a bike should be for! Or, if you’re into scooters, consider a Razor, which can also function as a weapon for devastating ankles.
Opting for an electric scooter seems lazy, like the people in Wall-E who fatly float around in hovering chairs. During my sophomore year, there was a ring of scooter thieves – I think they were revealed to be local teenagers. I had little sympathy for the scooter owners. Early in my senior year, I was briefly involved with a young lady who owned one of these personal scooters, and I did not hide my feelings about scooters from her. She broke things off after a week or two (via text), and later that semester, her scooter was stolen. I call that karma.
Let me get back on track. I was talking about age demographics. Beyond my college campus, which is not unique, DC is a deeply millennial-coded city. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the numbers.
In the pilot episode of The Sopranos, Tony is speaking about how the glory days of the Mafia were long over before he even got started. He says,
That’s how it feels to live in DC as someone born in 2003. You can see that the 90s-born millennials dominate DC. They most likely moved to DC (as most people did, less than 34% of DC’s population was born there) either for college or a post-grad job during the Obama administration, a time when hope and optimism abounded (or so I’m told, I was much more focused on my Nintendo Wii from 2008-2016 and my knowledge of politics was largely confined to the Mitt Romney parody of “Gangnam Style”).
Washington, DC, is a tale of two cities. Or really, we can treat Washington and DC as two overlapping cities. Washington is the millennial kingdom, populated with vest-wearing transplants (I will occasionally don a vest, not in a finance bro way) who work at Deloitte or Raytheon. They’re who the hyperspecific Metro ads are targeted at. They live in Dupont Circle, if they can afford it on their meager six-figure salary, but more likely they live in the gentrified NoMa (a neighborhood that literally didn’t exist before recently) or Navy Yard. They live, shop, and work in areas indistinguishable from any other big city with a similar population. They loooove brunch. As they age, they will probably flee across the Potomac for Alexandria.
DC is a different place. In many ways, its existence is threatened. Once known as Chocolate City, it has seen a decline in the Black population. This is probably due to a variety of factors, but most notably just how expensive much of the city is (although the suburbs hold the highest concentration of Black wealth in the country). With this, it feels like DC has suffered staggering cultural losses. The Kilimanjaro Club, into which my dad snuck in using a fake ID back in the late 1980s to see the likes of Chuck Brown and Yellowman, is now a place for those aforementioned yuppies to do Pilates. That’s grim, but deeply indicative of how the city has changed. Not that DC is dead – it’s just harder to find.
I straddle both groups – as a young transplant but with ties to the area, I came in search of DC, a more cosmopolitan and diverse alternative to my hometown. Though there were moments, I didn’t quite find it. That’s part of what is pulling me back. I need to frequent dive bars, cafeterias in Baptist churches, and wherever they’re still playing go-go music these days.
So yeah. If you skimmed that, your takeaway should be that DC is by and large a city of youngish adults, roughly ages 18-35.
Where I am now couldn’t be more different. In case you didn’t know, Japan is currently in the throes of a demographic collapse, spurred by a fertility rate that is amongst the lowest in the world. Basically, the economy has been in various stages of decline since 1990, and no one is having kids because no one can afford it. This is coming soon to a theater near you, by the way, despite Trump’s best efforts. This is especially felt in my island of Shikoku. The population of my prefecture, Ehime, is projected to halve by 2060.
But I didn’t need the numbers to tell me what my eyes are seeing. When I stand in line at the grocery store, I see mostly old people. I see some families as well, with middle-aged parents and young children. But rarely other young adults. Especially because I live in such close proximity to Shikoku’s biggest city, Matsuyama. In case you weren’t aware, young people like to live in cities.
You might think of Japan as a gleaming, futuristic metropolis. And much of it is. But Shikoku is the land that Japan forgot. That technological progress is slow to come here. Japan Rail, known as JR (which I thought was publicly-owned but was privatized back in 1987), is broke in Shikoku. The Iyo JR station has an abandoned vibe, the trains come about once an hour, and they’re usually either a single or merely two cars long. By contrast, Iyotestsu, the local rail company, has gleaming trains that run frequently, and also operate buses, the Matsuyama tram, and other brick-and-mortar businesses that have nothing to do with transit.
There was no bridge connecting Shikoku to Honshu before the opening of the Great Seto Bridge in 1988. The people of Shikoku hoped that the bridge would spur the modernization of Shikoku. Instead, it has been an albatross around its neck. Young people go one way on the bridge – to Osaka, and mainland Japan. What gets sent from Honshu to Shikoku? Cheaper goods from bigger corporations, putting local companies out of business.
Walking around Iyo City, you can see urban decay that most visitors to Japan would never see. Abandoned houses and buildings on the verge of collapse. Sidewalks with potholes. Piles of not garbage per se, but junk like furniture and scrap metal.
My main grocery store, Fuji, closed abruptly at the end of February. I don’t understand why – it always seemed to be full of people, and was located on one of the main streets in Iyo, right next to the city hall. While I have another grocery store closer to my apartment, Fuji was convenient for me to hit after school on my way to the train station to go home.
Back in the day, Ehime was Iyo Province, so many things are named after Iyo, from a plethora of train stations to malls and restaurants. But now, in many ways, Iyo feels like a dying place. There aren’t many shops or restaurants. Where I live in particular is not very walkable. As I prepare to leave in a month, I am overall thankful and appreciative for where I’ve been placed. The scenery and proximity to Matsuyama is great, but otherwise I’m not the biggest fan of my apartment or my town.
I realized that I hadn’t written about Japan in a while, and this post has been sitting in my drafts for months. Expect a few more shorter posts reflecting on my year here before I leave for good on August 10th.
– Zev
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