people as commodities are only valuable when they're young.

[intertribal]

Japan takes fear, consumerism, and the human body to a whole new level.  As usual, Nippon is at the cutting edge of the tragi-comic postwar devolution.  It's when I look at Japan that I think, "we may think we're progressing, but we have actually hit the apex, and we are on the way down."  I'm not sure what the apex was.  World War II?  The Berlin Wall?  9/11?  It's sad to think any of those would be the pinnacle of human civilization.  Then you start wondering if we ever reached the apex at all, or if we just fell off the plateau.