Funny, i had a meeting last night about this problem... the thing that was on tv all over the country is the seijin ceremony that happened in Takamatsu, the city where i live. Takamatsu in the biggest city (300,000 h) in a quite conservative prefecture (Kagawa, 1,000,000 h) were other cities (Zentsuji and Kannonji) have seen similar problems this year.
The politician is Takamatsu mayor, not pelted with eggs but under cracker fire by a group of 5 kids, the car outside the ceremony hall is said to be an unregistered extreme right car and the violence was in the hall mostly directed at journalists.
I don't think the whole thing had anything to do with any sort of anti-traditional behavior of japanese youth. in fact even young people who study in other prefectures come back home to take part in the ceremony, girls spend huge amounts of money on funky kimonos and boys get their nicest suit to parade in the room and then go get drunk. the very anti-traditional feeling comes more from the celebration itself where you have rows of elders giving boring speeches while the only thing that matters is the matsuri (party) spirit. whatever. this time is another oportunity for politicians in lack of anything serious to say to talk about morals in schools etc.
the issue this year is the following: the 5 kids who threw crackers at the mayor were held in custody for 10 (ten) days and the other kids who took part in the violence where never cought by the police. the media took the 5 as scape goats and published their names pictures and addresses all over the country. the journalist who got the most severly beaten is now in nervous depression, not so much he got beaten (he said he was more scared there than when he was in angola and east timor...) but because the journal he works for forced him to write a paper 3 days after the events. when he refused and asked for a one month leave he was threatened by the management and his leave has yet to be accepted. (according to journalists who were present yesterday, it is current practice for management or senior journalists to beat juniors when they refuse a job, cf koreans hitting mexicans on the head in a different message fwd by Doug.)
In fact the mayor, after saying nothing had happened, started to over react when hundreds of email were sent to him to complain about the lack of morals etc (besides the fact that it is a traditional extreme right tactic in the area: overload politicians with outraged letter/faxs/mails after any petty thing that happens). a few days ago he published a word on the city's homepage where he criticized a certain form of democracy and human right'ism' that led to this... http://www.city.takamatsu.kagawa.jp/hitorigoto/116.html
about violence in japan, there is a movie starring Kitano Takeshi called Battle Royale, where a class of junior hs students is put in a situation where the students have to kill each other to gratuate (the subtitle is 'hey, have you ever killed one of your classmate ?') the book was first a novel. of course when the movie was out, there was a lot of noise in the political world about censoring it etc. it did not happen. violence here is everywhere, in fact it is totally part of the socialization process, from the very early days of primary school. physical violence starts in club activities (junior high) but psychological violence starts earlier, with the strict hierarchy that is set between different age classes, elders have the right to say what they want to youngers (even with only a 1 year difference). the language used for sempai (anyone that is at least one year older than you) has to be polite to the extent that some of my university mates say it is difficult to make friends with sempais.
anyway, anything that is interpreted as anti-traditional here has to be seen first through an anti-establishment filter, tradition in japan is much more than rigid ceremonies.
jc helary