David Plotz, from Japan. (5) - By David Plotz

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Entry 5

Posted Friday, April 12, 2002, at 10:32 AM ET

David Plotz, Slate's Washington bureau chief, is currently on a Japan Society media fellowship in Tokyo.

OK, I realize that I've become a food bore. All I've written about for two days is what I am eating and what I want to eat. I am slightly ashamed of this, but in my defense, I am only barely exceeding the amount of time and energy the Japanese devote to food. (And why not, given how sublime it is?) So, no food today, except this detail. In the cheese boutique of yet another ritzy department store, displayed alongside all the zillion-yen French imports, I spy a box of Velveeta.

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I'm heading out the door for my appointment at the Nippon Foundation when I realize I've lost my map. This is disaster. There are no addresses in Japan (or rather, there are addresses, but they're basically gobbledygook). Maps are the only way anyone ever finds anything. Before you go anywhere, the person you are going to meet faxes you a map. (Life was apparently incredibly difficult pre-fax. You had to mail a map, which meant that everything was planned weeks in advance. This may be why "dropping by" is a foreign concept here.) A friend who used to live in Japan advised me that if someone invited me over but didn't fax a map, I wasn't really invited. They know I would never find them without the map.

Map of Tokyo subwayAs a result of all this confusion, Japan must be the world's greatest cartographic nation. I am collecting maps of the Tokyo subway system: There must be 100 different versions, each more confusing than the last. Almost everyone (including taxi drivers) carries an atlas, which they are constantly rotating this way and that in vain efforts to orient themselves. People without atlases feverishly consult crumpled sheets of thermal fax paper. (Oh, another problem: There are neighborhood maps on practically every corner and in every subway station, but these maps are not necessarily oriented north to south. Tonight I got very confused by a map that was south to north. Some are east-west, some are northwest-southeast.) Subway stations are so labyrinthine that they have their own maps, posted along platforms. These are gorgeous. Some are Escher-like prints of the endless stairways and escalators. A few new depots have marvelous bas-relief bronze casts of the station, each escalator outlined in three dimensions.

I eventually find my map and make it on time to my appointment with the foundation's executive director. The Nippon Foundation is one of the many extraordinary institutions associated with Japanese gambling. Besides pachinko, Japan has the world's biggest government-sponsored gambling operations, including two national lotteries, the world's largest horse-racing operation, the world's largest bicycle-race gambling business, a lucrative motorcycle-race gambling business, and the world's only speedboat-race gambling—six different national gambling franchises, collectively a $50-billion-a-year industry.

What does this have to do with the Nippon Foundation? The racing operations earmark a small fraction of the percentage of money wagered for public-private ventures to help Japanese businesses and do good works. The Nippon Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the motorboat-racing business. It gets 3.3 percent of wagers made—its share will total about $350 million this year. It uses the cash to help Japan's shipbuilding industry, to aid Japanese nonprofits, and to fund international aid projects.

(Motorboat racing, incidentally, is a very peculiar sport to my American eyes. Six racers in boats not much bigger than jet skis race around short courses on lakes and rivers. At every race I've seen, the winner was the person who was leading after the first turn, which meant the race was interesting for about five seconds.)

Over the years, the Nippon Foundation has given away more than $1 billion in overseas aid alone (and perhaps 10 times as much at home), including more than $100 million to the U.N. and other international agencies, millions to help eradicate leprosy, and vast sums for famine relief. (The Nippon Foundation subsidizes one of the foundations that has sent me to Japan, in fact.) The foundation is the largest philanthropic organization in Japan, but it is still somewhat controversial because it was run from its inception in the 1960s till the mid-'90s by Ryiochi Sasakawa, one of Japan's richest and most powerful men, a right-wing Japanese nationalist who spent three years in prison during the American occupation, suspected (though not convicted) of war crimes. Sasakawa's control of the motorboat charity allowed him to become extremely influential worldwide. (The foundation endowed dozens of universities in 20 nations, as well as the libraries of both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter.)

I come away from my meeting with very complicated feelings. On the one hand, the Nippon Foundation makes significant contributions to Japanese and international social welfare. It has an impressive, independent board of directors that thinks hard about how to spread the wealth most wisely. The foundation certainly spends the motorboat money better than a government ministry would. On the other hand, there is something a little jarring in the idea that Japan's most generous philanthropy depends on losing motorboat gamblers. I am confused about how to think about this, which is why I'm glad to have another month in Japan to keep studying it. And to keep eating.

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