The Japanese call the species "salariman": indistinguishable from one another, suited, obedient, punctual, identical in demeanour, habit and thought. They have always seemed a quintessentially Japanese creation, though an observant watcher of Dublin life-forms would have noticed increasing numbers of salariman about the streets of Dublin in recent times. Since we tend to imitate London sooner or later, the mass arrival of the salariman here seems inevitable.
For London is already full of them. You can see them at close of day, pouring out of their offices into the Tube stations, an army of cloned young men in suits of navy blue or subdued pinstripe, with the one cut - a cross between single- and double-breasted, four buttoned, with a high collar. They share almost identical haircuts, the same invariable rimless or thin-rimmed spectacles. The one concession made to individual taste are their ties, but even these seem designed to harmonise, to conceal visibility, to camouflage identity and even nationality completely.
Identical as starlings
For though this is London, these young men were of every nationality. Deregulated London, like tax-incentive Dublin, is booming. Young bankers, accountants, traders, brokers are flocking here, as identical as starlings no matter where they come from - Germany, Italy, France, Japan, the US, Ireland. In a docklands cafe, they sat and chatted desultorily, uninterestedly, 25 years of age and set fast in the rut which will guide salariman to the pension and the grave.
Everything they do, they do identically. They all chew gum with deliberate languor. They all drink beers directly out of the bottle, though the beer drinkers of the world know that beer only has a taste when it is sipped from a glass. They relax in their chairs in precisely the same fashion, collapsed in a feigned pose of suited cool, a knee purposefully flexed, James Dean comes to Canary Wharf. But of course James Dean would never have been seen dead or alive in such heavy dark threads on an Indian summer's evening, or never stood as they soon will do, with dead eyes on the platform of the Docklands Light Rail system, waiting to be shuttled to the outside world.
Catch the Docklands Light Rail system when the salariman is embarking on his evening migration, like bats departing their roost. It is so hot and sweaty and airless in the train it is like travelling in a bear's rectum. Look in every direction and you will see the suited salariman staring expressionlessly, saying nothing, chewing his gum, thinking salariman's thoughts, whatever the hell they might be, waiting to get home, to shower, re-gell the hair, dress up in designer leisure-wear and go clubbing, drinking expensive American beer by the neck, then returning to the tiny flat where he will rise at six to resuit and restart the day.
No salaribabes
But there seem to be no Salaribabes. The day of the power-suited female exec seems to have passed. Whatever businesswomen were travelling through London, they were not wearing uniforms: maybe that's because they have the courage of individuality, which is something that salariman, with his lowered, unseeing eyes, his safety in packdom, his flock-anonymity, seems to have surrendered entirely. Power is shifting, just as it has in Washington, where men behave like low-status monkeys, avoiding eye-contact not to cause offence, speaking the body-language of subjugation and defeat at the hands of the dominant caste of New Woman.
Is this it? Is this the future guaranteed by economic prosperity, a future not of widened choice and greater personal self-expression, but of a characterless, uniformed servitude? Where did this suit culture come from? Why do businesses think it necessary? Does a man think better because he is dressed just like a colleague? Or is individuality as threatening in commerce as it is in armies? Is that why cultures of sartorial identicality are so dominant in the two? And is that the future of the Western male: salarimandom?
The other evening I sat in a cafe in London's docklands. In the great blue skies above me were spreading contrails of aeroplanes. All around me, suits of all nationalities relaxed in the sun.
Fifty-nine years ago exactly, the contrails were caused by Heinkel bombers whose cargoes were laying waste to the docklands in the great East End blitz in which 40,000 people died. Nobody could have predicted then that in the lifetimes of the young people living through that murderous inferno, before the end of the century, German and Japanese would be relaxing there, in a cafe surrounded by surreally modern buildings, with unmanned electric trains whirring between vast skyscrapers.
No accurate forecasts
So that is it. The one thing we know for sure is that we cannot know our future. No forecasts about our tomorrows are accurate. It is therefore impossible to prognosticate on the future of suits and of salariman. But is it too much for Irish businesses to resist the insidious invasion of salariman culture, with its facelessness, its fear, its eradication of the individual? Might not the companies working in the Financial Services Centre - which, after all, is Son of Canary Wharf - declare: Suits Are A Dismissal Offence? Or are we doomed to produce identically dressed, identically thinking and identically forlorn clones of the salariman of London?
And if we are, what in the name of God is the point of prosperity?