Dropping off the escalator

AFTER he graduated, young Yasuyuki Ozeki landed the kind of good job in a good company that all Japanese graduates dream of.

But it didn't last. He'd been tainted.

Around him, other young sales executives slogged far into the night, sacrificing health and family lives for careers, some of them heading for karoshi, the death by overwork syndrome that is a fact of life in Japan. But not Yasuyuki.

Yasuyuki had been to Ireland, where people couldn't get out of work fast enough to their pubs and their families. He loved it it ruined him for life as a "salary man", for the pollution and pressure of life in Japanese cities.

So, prompt at the official quitting time every day, he would leave his desk, his colleagues fuming silently at his departure he would hop on his bike, and cycle for miles in the countryside around his home in Osaka, dreaming of changing the system, of the future, of Ireland and its smiling natives.

Indeed, it is hard not to return Yasuyuki's simile the 25 year old cyclist's wide grin and enthusiastic espousal of the pub culture and fresh air of Ireland clearly won him friends wherever he went, three years ago, on a month's holiday between university and his first job, visiting a land he had found through a travel tale by his favourite author.

But Yasuyuki is far from alone in bucking the Japanese system. Of the graduates who joined his firm when he did, he reckons about IS per cent have given up the long nights of heavy industrial machinery sales. Many have gone abroad perhaps the most acceptable way to drop out of Japanese society.

Dropping of the escalator, he calls it, explaining that "the escalator" is the term used to describe the steady progress an executive expects to make within a Japanese company.

Yasuyuki, meanwhile, found a unique not to say a great response to his discontent. He threw up the machinery sales six months age to work on a building site, to save money and firm his muscles. In March of next year, he will set off to cycle from Japan via China, Mongolia and Russia, across Europe, to Dublin. He will arrive, weather and whim permitting, in October 1998.

Quitting, that good job scandalised his parents, and in a land where respect for your elders is highly prized this caused Yasuyuki great fain.

"It was a terrible time," he says. My mother and father are typical Japanese. My father cried, my, mother cried ... It was a family tragedy.

"But they are changing. They feel Japan is changing." As time goes on, he, says, his parents can see a little, if not through his eyes, at least "through my sunglasses".

TO Yasuyuki, this journey is as much in his head as on the road, as much a chance for months of introspection as an exploration of the Eurasian continent. Both journeys are symbolised on his cycle helmet, which will hear the Irish flag on the front, the Japanese flag on the back, between them a map of the continent and his route. And there will be, spaces on the helmet for new friends to write names or greetings and as the spaces fill, so will the chasm between his Japan and his Ireland or at least, so Yasuyuki hopes.

And I wish to end my project on O'Connell Street, surrounded by millions of Irish people waiting for me with millions of pints of Guinness, just like on St Patrick's Day, he jokes. And if he makes it I, for one, intend to be there.