Mindless Consumerism, Human Limitations; Frailty, Ignorance

I took a trip to the city this weekend.

I walked down the covered "arcades": the kamitori and shimatori of Kumamoto City. Filled with neon lights and chaotic pricetags, people standing outside the stores yelling about their special offers or asking for donations. Then in the night the side streets, the red-light district of the city spilling out of its seams with "snack girls." You can walk up to them and they will do their best to corral you into their "snack bar," a place where you will then pay outstanding amounts of money to drink in the company of other snack women. Mainly rich business men flock in like wolves hungry for a midnight snack but unable to feed (usually). I really have no idea what happens in these snack bars because I have never been in one. I've heard that the industry goes well beyond what it appears to be. But I can guess what there generally is based on my other observations of the consumerism here.

As a consumer here, more than anywhere else I have been (although America is not far off the mark either) you may go around and spend all of your money on things that do nothing. Not that things are that expensive but that it seems that most of what is sold has little or no use. Or it appears to have more use than it really does. Cars, for example, are certainly tools of transportation. But why must they be replaced so often? Why is style and newness so controlling of the consumer? I am confident that 90% of the people here have little or no idea of what's really under the hood of their car. That is a forbidden place reserved for the specialists. Just as if you are sick you must immediately visit your local doctor, the same might go for your can and the mechanic. Many perfectly good cars are scrapped and replaced; their engines completely capable.

There is a scene in THX 1138 where the man of the title's name, played by Robert Duvall, goes to buy a red plastic thing at a shopping area. He then brings it home and puts it in the recycling bin. The idea was that he bought something just for the pleasure of buying but it had no real purpose beyond that initial pleasure. I see a lot of the same things happening here. Electronics are a good example. At the electronics store in the city I spent 20 minutes looking at the dozens of varieties of electric shavers they had on display. A perfect gadget, completely and utterly unnecessary. Still I wanted one. I even liked the boxed they came in. It would mean that shaving would be just a little easier. I could also use an electric toothbrush.

My salary seems like it's about $50,000 if you consider the fact I pay way too little for housing and I have few other expenses. In real terms though it is a much lower figure. But this is my first time having a lot more money than I need. In the past I just had very little. Don't get jealous though because it won't last long and I have plenty of loans to pay off.

The fleetingness of the objects of our desire cast a gloom to my mind every now and then. I feel that it is true that holding on only causes suffering. It is when we apply the workings of consumerism to the human being, however, that things get truly gloomy. It is then that we must remember that people, although fragile, have worth well beyond anything that can be bought and sold. Snack bars disgust me. It is the extremely short-sighted ignorance, the myopia of believing that visuality is reality that propagates such narrow-mindedness. The dearth of critical thinking blares brilliantly in these kinds of situations (and they are, to be fair, all over the world). To understand me as well as you can you could open up one of the various sex-centered magazines in the local 7-11 and simply look at the 13 and 15 year old girls posing in their swimsuits. In a place where the male and female genitalia are always blurred out with what is referred to as the "mosaic," even in the most mature pornography, the sex-culture finds its ways in the most mysterious, awful, absent-minded ways. School girls are preyed on, cartoons are masterminded to fill in that which the mosaic hides and much more. Sex is driven to the unfortunate extremes and those extremes are not pretty. They represent the worst of what I deem the mindless consumerism, human limitations; frailty, ignorance. Short-sightedness, depression.