Slowly the nation wakes from its nightmare. Tokyo Disneyland reopens. A semblance of normality returns, at least to areas outside the stricken zone.

It's April. Catastrophe does not stop the cherry trees from blooming; nor can it dampen a certain charged atmosphere that permeates corporate life every year around this time. It's spring. People start new jobs. There are fresh faces in the office, among them those of newly-minted "OLs" (office ladies). The consternation they cause is partly erotic, partly philosophical. How to approach them? Not that they're unapproachable, but the very young are so inscrutably mysterious! What are they thinking? What do they want out of life? It's a perplexity that infects office veterans not so very much older themselves, so rapid is generational change.

Spa!, tracker for decades of the young generation, offers some incisive observations. Today's 23-year-old freshman OL would have been 3 in 1991, the year Japan's economy started to run out of gas. At 9, she would have been aware of a ghastly and senseless crime that seemed to spawn others and signify a national descent into moral chaos — the murder in Kobe of two small children by a 14-year-old boy.