Apt observation

IN THE BOOK Jiminto wa Naze Tsuburenai no ka (Why Won’t the Liberal Democratic Party Collapse?), former LDP and opposition Democratic Party of Japan member Hirano Sadao makes a perceptive observation during his roundtable discussion with Murakami Masakuni and Fudesaki Hideyo about the type of people who populate the DPJ. He adds that the same could be said for Japanese society as a whole.

Here it is for your consideration. (Note: The Jomon period, from prehistory to 200 BC, is the earliest of the Japanese historical periods. It was followed by the Yayoi period, which is defined as 200 BC to 250 AD.)

“Actually, there are three types of people in the DPJ. The first is the Jomon type. They speak belly to belly, as typified by (past party president) Ozawa Ichiro, and words are used as a complement to that.

“The second is the Yayoi type. They speak using only letters and numbers, and they’re the members of labor unions, citizen activists, and the pampered sons of the wealthy.

“The third is the Internet type. They think using only letters and numbers, and never consider the essence of the words.

“That means communication in a real sense is not possible. This phenomenon is occurring throughout Japan, and is the basic cause of the confusion in contemporary society.”

Throughout Japan? Could not the same be said of the entire developed world?

You say you want a devolution

YOU’LL SELDOM SEE it covered on the front page of newspapers or on prime time television—their game is infotainment, not issues—but the political equivalent of a civil war is raging in Japan. The insurgents in this war are the governors, mayors, and other chief municipal officers storming the barricades of the central government in Tokyo.

Though both the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan claim they support greater devolution, the rebels take neither at their word. Still, the issue in Japan is not whether there will be regional devolution and a restructuring of government, but when and to what extent. Here are some dispatches from the front lines.

A pox on you both!

Eguchi Katsuhiko

Eguchi Katsuhiko chairs a government panel for examining the state/prefecture concept, the official policy of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its New Komeito coalition partner. It would create 9-12 large sub-national entities to replace the current 47 prefectures at the level between the central government and municipalities. Supporters say this plan would revitalize the country by reducing the size and authority of the central government while curtailing the influence of the Kasumigaseki bureaucracy.

Prime Minister Aso Taro says he supports the LDP program in particular and devolution in general, but Mr. Eguchi thinks he’s full of bologna. He publicly slammed the prime minister for his failure to actively promote the state/prefecture concept, calling his approach retrogressive. He didn’t stop there; he also criticized Mr. Aso for his attitude toward devolution and civil service reform, and said those in business and financial circles were fed up with him. Neither did Mr. Eguchi spare Hatoyama Yukio, the head of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan:

Regrettably, neither Mr. Aso nor Mr. Hatoyama seem interested in reforming Japan. The bureaucracy dominates and the politicians and the people are being led by the nose. The prime minister doesn’t seem to be aware that he’s being used by the bureaucracy.

Mr. Eguchi is a supporter of small government, and he’s got a good reason:

The central government creates dependency among the people. The form of the country must be changed.

The very public criticism by Mr. Eguchi raised eyebrows because it’s unusual for the chair of a government group of this type to criticize the prime minister in public.

He’s so committed to the issue he’s written a book about it, called Chiiki Shuken-Gata Doshusei (A State/Province System Based on Regional Sovereignty). His specific proposal calls for the reorganization of sub-national governments into 12 states/provinces and 300 municipalities (or “basic governmental units”), with both levels receiving substantial authority to levy and collect many of the taxes now paid to the central government. In return, they would be given the authority to conduct those governmental functions with the greatest impact on daily life.

Mr. Eguchi is the head of the PHP Research Institute founded by Matsushita Konosuke. He’s also allied with reform firebrands Watanabe Yoshimi and Eda Kenji (click on the Tags for more), and joined them to establish a political organization this January. That organization is about to be transformed into a political party. PHP publishes a line of trade paperbacks and the monthly current affairs magazine Voice, so the group has a ready-made medium through which to make its views known.

Mr. Inside

Meanwhile, the LDP’s Koizumian standard-bearer Nakagawa Hidenao continues his daily barrage against the party’s mudboat wing. He recently threw a party at a Tokyo hotel for young Diet members (probably first-termers who owe their seats to Mr. Koizumi’s coattails in 2005) and invited that well-known loose cannon of devolution and reform, Osaka Gov. Hashimoto Toru.

During the meeting, Mr. Nakagawa told those assembled:

“The people’s expectations for changing the Kasumigaseki bureaucracy lie with the DPJ. They will not be with us unless we offer a compelling plan that goes above and beyond theirs…The only message that will counter the DPJ’s call for a change in government is to dismantle Kasumigaseki.”

Some of the party’s mudboaters have begun firing back. Machimura Nobutaka, the head of the LDP’s largest faction–of which Mr. Nakagawa may or may not still be a member–took issue with the latter’s promotion of a bill to completely outlaw the means through which retired civil servants find cushy post-retirement employment in organizations affiliated with the government. It also would allow for the demotion or salary reductions of senior civil servants. Said Mr. Machimura:

“We already can demote or cut the salaries of those bureaucrats under the present law. I have to think that those people who claim it isn’t possible, and that this is a new law, have some different end in view.”

Retorted Mr. Nakagawa:

“Flexible salary reductions are difficult under the government’s proposal.”

Translation: “Difficult” is often a euphemism in Japanese. It usually means that the subject under discussion is either (a) impossible, or (b) so unlikely as to be impossible in practice.

There is speculation in the Japanese media that Mr. Nakagawa’s redoubled efforts are a counterattack against the tribal MPs (zokugiin) with close ties to Cabinet ministries (in a sense, lobbyist-legislators working for the bureaucracy) who scuttled the recent proposal to reorganize the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare.

The human howitzer

Speaking of Mr. Hashimoto, he is slinging so much lead at both the LDP and DPJ he’s on the verge of exploding into space. Keeping track of the governor’s daily activities is akin to following a spectator sport. But his sky-high ratings among his Osaka Prefecture constituency mean that both the LDP and the DPJ are desperate for his endorsement in the upcoming lower house election.

The governor knows an opportunity when he sees one, so he’s letting them have it with both barrels.

Here’s what he said about the LDP at that Tokyo hotel party hosted by Nakagawa Hidenao:

“As long as there is no change in the Kasumigaseki system, the people will think that nothing’s going to happen. The LDP and (coalition partners) New Komeito will lose the election if they approach it this way…I’d like to see you (the Diet members) introduce a compelling plan (to deal with the bureaucracy) that will astound every citizen.”

He later told a press conference:

“The LDP is not doing enough. The ruling party in government has the authority, so I hope they submit a terrific plan.”

Mr. Nakagawa agreed that the prime minister’s efforts were insufficient:

“If he can’t (come up with a good plan), the election result will be as Gov. Hashimoto said.”

Après-party, the governor let loose a volley against the government’s Robust Policy Plan for 2009:

“There’s not enough about devolution. It’s worse than last year’s plan. Last year’s plan had a chapter heading with a promise to look into the problem of local agencies (i.e., the local agencies of the central government that prefectural governments must pay to support). This year, there’s no chapter heading and less talk about the bureaucracy…not enough effort is being put into cutting expenditures.”

Salvos at the DPJ

While the Osaka governor has praised the DPJ’s stance on reforming the bureaucracy at Kasumigaskei, he’s not entirely convinced they’re serious. For example, he’s said he thinks the party will try to end bureaucracy-led government—the way things have worked here since the Meiji Era. But he’s also said:

“With the DPJ riding on the backs of (public sector) unions, are they capable of civil service reform?”

But he hasn’t had anything good to say at all about the devolution plan the DPJ is most likely to adopt. Mr. Hashimoto supports the LDP’s state/province system with three layers of government.

It’s difficult to determine exactly what plan the DPJ favors. Party members have told the media the issue divides them more than any other. DPJ boss Hatoyama Yukio has supported the LDP state/province system plan in the past, but it’s now apparent that he can’t be taken at his word for much of anything.

The plan most people think they’ll back is one that former DPJ leader Ozawa Ichiro has touted for at least 15 years: a two-level scheme divided between the central government and 300 sub-national governmental units. It still isn’t clear who wears the pants in the DPJ family, however, and they’ve yet to nail this plank into their platform. Here’s Mr. Hashimoto on the Ozawa plan:

“This image of the state is divorced from reality…No head of local government agrees with them. The people in charge of this issue in the party should hold a public debate.”

And:

“The DPJ talks about (strengthening) regional authority, but that’s not what will happen. Central government will be stronger under a two-level structure, making top-down decision-making more likely.”

And:

“The approach of making the central government the next highest government body above the basic local government units (without anything in between) is dangerous. It could lead to egregious central governmental authority.”

Tokyo Deputy Governor Inose Naoki, a Hashimoto ally, thinks the Ozawa idea is a warmed-over version of the governmental system in Japan during the Edo period, from the early 17th century to the mid-19th century. The Shogun sat atop the food chain, and under him were 300 primary daimyos and their fiefdoms, defined as those offering at least 10,000 koku of rice (about 51,200 bushels) as tribute.

(To be precise, most historians say there were really only 260 to 280 primary fiefdoms, and that the number 300 is used as a convenient shorthand.)

The Hashimoto charge that the Ozawa system would lead to egregious central government authority is not without merit. Japanese historians say that while the local daimyo were granted some authority and privileges, including law enforcement and the right to levy taxes, the central government was extremely powerful.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the man who prefers the role of shadow Shogun would be atttracted to that concept.

Mr. Inose recently discussed the issue with Haraguchi Kazuhiro, who holds the portfolio for the Internal Affairs and Communications ministry in the DPJ Shadow Cabinet. He told Mr. Haraguchi that the DPJ plan was too abstract for serious discussion.

One potential difficulty is that Japan has just been through a series of extensive municipal mergers. The so-called Great Heisei Mergers (Heisei being the reign name of the Emperor), have reduced the number of Japanese municipalities–cities, towns, and villages–from 3,300 to 1,800. It just isn’t possible to slash that number to 300 while eliminating the prefectures at the same time, and officials in the Internal Affairs Ministry have told the party as much.

Mr. Haraguchi sheepishly admitted to the Tokyo Deputy Mayor that the first step to attaining the goal of 300 would be a reduction to 700, but said, “we really haven’t thought this out. This is as far as we’ve gotten.”

Strong opposition to the Ozawa plan has also emerged from the National Association of Towns and Villages, an association for the municipal officers of machi and mura nationwide. (Those municipalities designated as cities are excluded.) While the association is a strong supporter of devolution, they are opposed to further consolidation because they maintain the last round of mergers did more harm than good.

There were 2,652 towns and villages before the merger mania started, and the total as of 1 June was 992, according to the NATV website. (A further complication is that there are no clear-cut definitions under the law to differentiate cities, towns, and villages. Generally speaking, cities have the most people and villages have the fewest, but some municipalities classified as towns have a larger population than some smaller cities.)

The NATV recently pried another admission out of the DPJ that the Ozawa plan is unrealistic and has to be reworked. The DPJ official who let that cat out of the bag was Osaka Seiji, the managing director of the party’s devolution survey committee.

This issue is taken very seriously by business and financial leaders throughout Japan–Keidanren, the country’s most influential business organization, is a staunch supporter of the LDP plan–but the DPJ still hasn’t decided where it stands as a party.

And they think they’re ready to assume leadership of the government?

The governors’ rebellion

Perhaps the most stunning development in the battle between local and central government was the response of the prefectural governors to the national government’s explanation of the prefectures’ liabilities for the maintenance and management costs of the local agencies of central government ministries. (For a more detailed look at the issue, try this dialogue between Mr. Hashimoto and Mr. Inose.)

The Kyodo news agency conducted a survey by questionnaire of the 47 prefectural governors regarding their views of the explanation and itemization of the charges provided by Kaneko Kazuyoshi, the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport. Forty of the 47 said it wasn’t sufficient.

Of those 40, 21 gave as their reason the continued prefectural financial liability for the maintenance and management of national roads and rivers. The National Governors’ Conference is seeking its immediate abolition. The dissenters thought the information was lacking and said they were dissatisfied with the government’s partial modification of the system while maintaining its essence. (This is a hallmark of governmental operations under the LDP.)

As specific examples of the inappropriate use of the funds they’re required to provide, 33 cited construction costs for agency buildings and dormitories for the civil servants. Eighteen of the governors cited footing the bill for the personnel costs of management personnel at research institutes and agencies under the direct control of the ministry. In addition, 36 said the breakdown of liabilities in the FY 2008 budget presented by the ministry at the end of May lacked critical information.

I’m not kidding about rebellion. Of the 47 governors, only three said their prefectures would pay the money the central government is asking for. In addition, Gov. Hashimoto of Osaka said his prefecture wouldn’t pay other inappropriate expenditures in addition to retirement and pension benefits. The remaining three governors did not specifically say what they would do. The Saitama governor said they might freeze payments if they thought the information disclosed was inadequate, while the Wakayama governor said the prefecture wouldn’t hand over any money until they received a reasonable explanation.

A total of 46 of the governors said the system should be either modified or eliminated entirely (only the Mie governor dissented), and of those 46, 27 opted for complete elimination.

Now imagine what would happen if 43 of the 50 American state governors flipped the bird in unison to the federal government after being told it was time to pay up. There would be so much activity on the Internet and in the mass media it would melt optical fiber cables worldwide and smoke would be issuing from the vents of your CPU.

It sounds like a rebellion to me!

So pointless it’s comical

ONE MEANS by which the opposition Democratic Party of Japan promises to finance some of the extravagant spending promises in its platform is to eliminate government waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s plausible on the surface, because waste, fraud, and abuse is the hallmark of governments (and large organizations) everywhere. Even the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has formed a project team to ferret out and eliminate waste in government.

A Satonaka work of media art

Earlier this month, the LDP team called for the elimination of a government plan to build what was described as a national media and arts center that would collect and exhibit comics, cartoons, and video games.

The plan was contained in the FY 2009 supplementary budget passed at the end of May, which allocated JPY 11.7 billion (about $US 122,500,000) for the center. Some ruling party MPs were opposed from the start, but their opposition went for naught.

Explained a bureaucrat:

“As a content industry, (this industry) has a role in supporting the Japanese economy. There is meaning is pursuing this as a national policy.”

The Agency of Cultural Affairs calls this “world-renowned ‘media art’” and hopes it “creates a whirlwind of new art originating from Japan.”

To his credit, DPJ President Hatoyama Yukio has repeatedly criticized the project. During a debate with Aso Taro in the Diet, he said:

“I know the Prime Minister likes comics and cartoons, but is it necessary to spend 11.7 billion yen to create a giant state-run comic book coffee shop and further enrich an independent administrative agency?”

Replied the prime minister:

“I think it is important now to create an international center for the media arts, referred to as the Japanese Cool, for cartoons, comics, and games. It will be a core institution for promoting Japanese culture. The new National Media Arts Center will be established as part of the Independent Administrative Institution, National Museum of Art, but the management and operation of the center will be outsourced and the funds it requires will be self-generated.”

Is that the stench of amakudari—cushy second jobs for retired bureaucrats—wafting through your monitor? And who really believes this center will be financially self-supporting?

Some also criticize the project for lacking originality. A panel of experts produced a lackluster report that proposes the center be housed in a four-or-five story building in Tokyo with exhibition rooms and a hall for screening films. They’ve yet to offer suggestions for the content to be displayed.

The lack of clear standards for the content troubles more than a few people. Perhaps the panel of experts would exclude items that many would find objectionable. (Or perhaps they wouldn’t, if the controversy of the public funding to exhibit Piss Christ in the United States is anything to go by.) The unanswered question is who knows where they would draw the line. One can almost guarantee it: The wrong place.

The panel of experts initially consisted of seven people, to which another seven were added. They are primarily from academia and the related industries. One of them is University of Tokyo Professor Hamano Yasuki, a specialist in Media Environment in the Department of Human and Engineered Environmental Studies. He has written several books, one of which is called Media as an Ideology.

Another is cartoonist Satonaka Machiko. Golly, what do you suppose she thinks of the project? On her blog, she says it is too easily misunderstood, and adds:

“Unless Japan is recognized overseas, there will still be a tendency to look down on Japanese culture. This must not be allowed to continue forever. We need a center to promote the country and say, ‘Here’s how wonderful the Japanese media arts are!’”

What Ms. Satonaka doesn’t seem to realize is that if any people overseas do look down on Japanese culture (and I suspect there aren’t many, rather than it being a tendency), their disregard is more likely caused by those who want to pretend that comic books and cartoons have serious artistic value. Why not just admit that the project is designed to attract the cash of the people attracted to chewing gum culture and be done with it?

Project team member Kono Taro of the LDP told reporters the project should be halted immediately because insufficient consideration was given to the taxpayer’s liability and the selection of the items to be exhibited.

When Mr. Kono was asked why he voted to approve the budget, he replied:

“The ruling party must also accept the responsibility.”

After speaking to the media, Mr. Kono briefed the chair of the project team and the Diet members aligned with the Education Ministry (the so-called tribal MPs), which is also involved with cultural affairs. Are the dots starting to connect yet?

The Cultural Affairs Agency plans to acquire land for the center this year and open the doors sometime in FY 2011. They haven’t stopped work, the project team’s objections notwithstanding. The preparatory committee plans to meet on 2 July and formulate the standards for the content to be displayed later this month.

Ms. Satonaka claims the annual Japan Media Arts Festival is insufficient to promote the industry. The 13th festival begins in mid-July and continues until mid-September; here’s their website. Take a look and see if you think a permanent government-financed home for all that is worth an investment of more than 120 million dollars.

Let’s be clear about this: This project is a perfect illustration of what people mean when they say they want to smash the Kasumigaseki bureaucracy. Japan’s infamous Iron Triangle still exists. The three legs of the triangle are the bureaucracy, the legislature, and industry, and they’ve formed a unit for their mutual enrichment at the expense of the taxpayers. People usually associate the Iron Triangle with public works projects, including highways and bridges to nowhere, but this plan demonstrates there is no limit to the imagination of bureaucrats with nearly unlimited public funds at their disposal.

It’s time to cut out the nonsense, admit that former Prime Minister Koizumi, Takenaka Heizo, and their allies were right, and maintain the fight against this expensive foolishness. It’s not possible to say, “end it once and for all”, because this fight never ends, anywhere. Mr. Hatoyama may be on the side of the angels in this battle, but he’s just as anxious to stop the privatization of Japan Post as he is to stop this project. Just as there’s no reason for the government to fund a comic book museum, there’s also no reason for the government to operate a retail financial institution, life insurance company, resort chain—or even deliver the mail.

Maintaining this fight requires the vigilance of the mass media, but they’re unreliable allies because they often pay attention to the wrong things. They require ratings and consumers, and that means pandering to the popular imagination. For example, they’ve filed few stories about this issue over the past month, yet found plenty of time and space to cover a flu epidemic that will infect very few in Japan and kill even fewer.

I stumbled across this story by accident in Akahata, the house organ of the Japanese Communist Party. That the controversy was semi-buried in the mainstream media speaks volumes about their priorities. Their failure to cover the debate despite their knowledge of it makes them just as culpable for producing this barrel of pork as the bureaucrats and the self-serving “media arts” content producers.

Afterwords:

One of the winners in the Manga Division of the 2008 Media Arts Festival was a comic called Real Clothes. Here is the summary from the MAF website:

Kinue, a woman of 27, works for a major department store in Shinjuku, a very competitive environment. Unexpectedly, she is transferred from the bedding floor, where she loves to work, to the women’s clothes floor. This is the story of her search for meaning in dressing, working, and living, and also of her personal development through her work and dealings with devious new coworkers.

Here is the reason given for the award:

I was not only captivated by the artist’s outstanding drawing skill and sharp, effective lines, but also by the clever storytelling, and healthy elegance and liveliness of the heroine, who almost seemed as though she were coming out of the picture. Although the same can be said of her other works, the exhaustive research into the thematic subject matter is amazing. This story is set on a women’s clothes floor, one of the topliner sections in a department store. She lives positively and energetically. However, her romance begins to hinder her work, and she must choose between them! It is the sort of life-changing turning point that all working women have to face once in their lives. The artist faces this matter squarely, portraying the naked soul of humanity. The heroine eventually chooses her work, and breaks up with her beloved boyfriend. The expression of her intense feeling of loss is strongly conveyed and the reader cannot help but feel deep compassion. This modern heroine’s way of life is very interesting, and I hope that women currently facing similar decisions in the workplace have the opportunity to open the pages of this manga.

Another award was given to the comic Shiori to Shimiko. The creator was asked about his motivation. He said:

“With regard to Shiori to Shimiko, my main intention was to produce a horror manga for girls.”

Taxpayers might consider this: You’ve spent at least 12 years of study to graduate from high school, and many of you have devoted an additional four or more years to university study. You’ve hopped through all the hurdles to finding employment, and now spend the better part of the day five days a week to provide for yourself and your family.

But instead getting to spend the money you earn on your priorities, a band of brigands in Tokyo (it makes no difference that they wear business suits instead of masks and work in offices instead of hiding in caves) has decided to confiscate part of your income to create a comic book/cartoon/gameboy museum. One of their excuses is that some people overseas still don’t take Japanese culture seriously.

Who’s serving whom here? Is the government (including both the legislature and civil servants) serving you? Or are you shackled in servitude to them?

To conclude, Japanese readers should not misunderstand. This isn’t about Japan; it’s simply a Japanese example of what goes on every day, everywhere else. The United States, where I come from, is just as bad, if not worse. It’s just that I pay taxes to the Japanese government now instead of the American one.

Japan’s political kaleidoscope (2): Aso edition

THE YEASTY FERMENT brewing in the world of Japanese politics is a heady blend with ingredients ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Anyone who thinks politics in this country is moribund either isn’t paying attention or their beverage of choice is Kool-Aid. Today’s draft is drawn primarily from the Aso Taro keg.

Politicians say the darndest things

Logorrhea is an occupational hazard for politicians, and all sorts of things come out of their mouths when they’ve switched on cruise control. This is from a recent speech by Prime Minister Aso Taro:

“(The current Japanese national soccer team) doesn’t have a superstar like Nakata Hidetoshi. Eleven people working together—that’s Japanese soccer. If Japan had a superstar, it would be His Majesty the Emperor.”

Do you ever wonder how Mrs. Aso would answer if someone asked her whether her husband talks like this when they’re relaxing together at home?

Then again, if the idea of Jesus Christ Superstar can sell millions of albums, launch productions on Broadway and the West End of London, generate two films with a third planned, and still be performed on stage 35 years later, it should be harmless for some Japanese to consider the tenno to be the local superstar.

Why people dislike journalists #4,937

Journalists defend themselves from the charge of pointlessly repeating the same question by saying it’s their job. Well, yes, for some people, working for a living does involve creating make-work projects designed to convince the boss you’ve got the situation well in hand. All they usually accomplish, however, is to waste the time of people with more productive things to do. Try this dialogue from a recent Aso Taro press conference:

Reporter: First, about the personnel for senior party positions and the Cabinet…

(Mr. Aso leans back and smiles)

Reporter: Last Saturday you had a discussion with Mr. Kuroda (LDP secretary general), and at that time you took a negative approach to making major personnel changes. You said, “I’ve never talked about it; it’s just outsiders making things up.” Could you tell us again what your thoughts are about the personnel issue?

PM: I haven’t thought about personnel.

Reporter: Does that mean you won’t think about personnel until the Diet is dissolved and there’s a general election?

PM: It means I’m not thinking about it now.

Reporter: Now.

PM: Now look, you’re jumping on everything I say as soon as I say it, and you also did it not long ago. This sort of thing…saying these needless things will just lead to a pointless conversation, so let’s drop the subject…well, that was a close call (laughs).

Reporter: I see.

PM: (Clear voice) I haven’t thought about it.

Reporter: OK. Next…

PM: Do you understand?

Reporter: You’re not thinking about it all?

PM: (Laughs, doesn’t answer)

Update: Well, it looks like this reporter knew more than I gave him credit for. The very next day, Mr. Aso said that he had been thinking for a while about “the most suitable people at the most suitable time”. Nevertheless, it should have been obvious he didn’t want to answer the question when he was asked. That’s no reason to bug the man.

Why would Mr. Aso double back on his word so quickly? Some television journalists speculated that former PM Abe Shinzo, a long-time Aso friend, had been urging him to reshuffle his Cabinet and had nearly convinced him. But then party bigwig Mori Yoshiro told Mr. Aso not to waste his time.

How typical: Mr. Aso’s lack of decisiveness and willingness to listen to either of those men for political advice are two of the reasons his popular support is negligible to begin with.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the latest teacup tempest in an administration known for them is that one of the TV journalists casually commented that “he lied” the first time before moving on to comment about subsequent developments.

That does not speak well of contemporary Japanese politics at the highest level, does it?

Grated Aso

A lower house election must be held within the next few months, and it looks very much like the LDP is going to be trounced, allowing the opposition Democratic Party of Japan to form a government for the first time. The ruling party no longer offers a coherent political philosophy, and their post-Koizumi prime ministers have been the politically clumsy manipulated by the terminal klutzes behind the scenes.

It’s no wonder then that some senior party members want to move up the September election for LDP party president (who would become prime minister) to find an alternative to going down with Mr. Aso and the rest of the mudboat crew before the lower house election.

LDP faction leader Yamasaki Hiraku (AKA Taku) has submitted a petition to LDP MPs and other party members specifically calling for an early election. He also set up a special area on his website for citizens to provide their input.

Said Mr. Yamasaki:

“It’s not (designed) to bring down the Aso Cabinet”.

It is to laugh. No one believes that, particularly because the special area materialized on his website the day after the LDP candidate was defeated in the election for Chiba City mayor. A former Cabinet minister also admitted off the record that the idea is to create a popular consensus to replace Mr. Aso.

Indeed, Mr. Yamasaki later quit beating around the bush. A week ago, he claimed he had 108 signatures from lower house LDP members, though he wasn’t showing them to anyone. That’s about halfway to his goal of signing up an outright majority of LDP MPs in the lower house. He says that would prevent Mr. Aso from calling a snap election out of petulant frustration.

Then came the release of the following poll:

• People intending to vote for the LDP: 16.4%
• People intending to vote for the DPJ: 40.4%

A 24-point differential causes alarm bells to ring so loudly even those with earplugs can hear them. It also tends to shake up senior party leaders with heretofore safe seats because an electoral tsunami that large could just as easily wipe them out as it would the small fry in marginal districts.

The secretaries-general

Said Kato Koichi at a press conference:

In my 37 years as a diet member, I have never seen the reputation of the LDP sink as low as it has now. It’s the lowest it’s ever been. Calling an election now would be an act of suicide…Some MPs say we can take only 165 seats, but I think that outlook is too optimistic.

Said Takebe Tsutomu to reporters at party headquarters:

“We (Diet members) will work hard until the end of the term on 10 September, (but) we should have a showdown in the election with new policies promoted by a new leader.”

Ibuki Bunmei was slightly more optimistic, if optimistic is the word to describe a prediction of the loss of the party’s lower house majority:

“The cabinet support rate has fallen. We could have taken 241 seats with New Komeito, but now that will only be 220 to 230.”

All four of these gentlemen have served as LDP secretary-general, the top position in the party apparatus, so they know when electoral defeat is staring them in the face. Another former SG, Nakagawa Hidenao, has been saying the same thing every day for months now.

The names that arise most frequently as possible replacements are the Acting Secretary-General (i.e., representative) Ishihara Nobuteru, the son of Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro; Health, Labor, and Welfare Minister Masuzoe Yoichi, a former University of Tokyo professor who won public favor as a TV commentator slamming bureaucrats for their handling of public pensions; and former Defense Minister Koike Yuriko, a favorite of the Koizumian wing of the party, but disliked by some for a perceived shallowness of loyalty to the LDP. The problem with all three is that none of them are strong enough on their own to serve in that role without substantial help from the old boys in the backroom, most of whom have been out of touch for a generation.

Not everyone has jumped on the dump Aso bandwagon, however. Those who think they can swim–or cling to the flotsam and jetsam–when the ship sinks include former postal rebel Noda Yumiko and former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Mr. Abe may be a man of principle and party loyalty, but he is sorely deficient in the third P of political acumen.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Kawamura Takeo is also opposed to a change:

“Party unity is of the utmost importance before the lower house election. Turmoil in the party will cause its own downfall. Would the people really understand if we only changed the leader? How would we answer the criticism that holding a party leadership election before the general election was done only with the general election in mind?”

Yes, the people would understand if you removed a leader they don’t support who lacks a firm political touch. They’d probably sympathize with you, in fact. To answer the carpers, you could always point out that the parties sitting in the opposition rows don’t get to make policy.

New Komeito, the LDP’s coalition partners, also want to stick with the loser. Said a senior official:

“It will have a negative impact on the election for governor in Shizuoka and the Tokyo Metropolitan District council. It’s also possible the voters would not support (the coalition) in the lower house election.”

You mean the same voters who already favor the opposition over the coalition by a 24-point margin? Those voters?

The official dropped hints the party would withhold support from LDP Diet members who tried to oust Mr. Aso.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that candidates running behind a party leader promoting regional devolution, delinking from the mandarins of the civil service, putting the nation’s finances in order before raising taxes, continued privatization, and a resolute foreign policy probably wouldn’t need New Komeito support to win.

Naturalists speak of the cornered prey summoning all its energy for a desperate counterattack. Some hunters, however, know that cornered prey tracked for a long time often become too tired and dispirited to continue, and willingly surrender. What else could be the explanation for those people who are ready to fight an election campaign led by Mr. Aso—a man who has demonstrated no leadership ability, is not amenable to the reforms the public knows are needed, and who thinks that promising a large tax increase will earn the party public favor?

Mr. Aso might even be among those willing to surrender to the hunter. He’s dropping hints that he’ll hold the lower house election in August. Was this done to forestall a putsch? Was it his idea, or did someone put him up to it?

Why is it that the dimmest bulbs invariably think they’re the brightest?

Taro and the pirates

But let’s be fair: Mr. Aso does have his moments. The Diet recently passed a bill that allows Japanese self-defense forces (i.e., the military) to be sent overseas with the authority to fire on pirate vessels overseas if they do not respond to an order to cease and desist their attacks—even on non-Japanese ships—and allows Japan to participate in joint international anti-piracy operations. It also criminalizes piracy, which permits the offenders to be apprehended and punished in Japan.

Yet the DPJ chose to potentially sacrifice Japanese lives and ships by refusing to pass the bill in the upper house. They and the other opposition parties delayed the measure for two months and forced the LDP to use its supermajority in the lower house to get it through.

Said the prime minister:

“Naturally you’d protect yourself if you were attacked by thieves. I don’t understand (their opposition to the use of weapons). What are they thinking about when it comes to the safety of the Self-Defense Forces and the Coast Guard?”

There have been about 150 pirate attacks on shipping off Somalia this year, already exceeding the 111 attacks in 2008. What was the opposition “thinking”? For starters, the DPJ and the Social Democrats were concerned that the bill allows the Cabinet to send the SDF overseas without Diet approval.

Well, their two-month foot-dragging and gamesmanship while piracy continues unabated demonstrates why waiting for the approval of more than 700 people in both houses of the legislature, many of whom are all too willing to create artificial political crises to delay bills on any pretext, is unwise and possibly fatal when real world circumstances demand prompt action.

Meanwhile, the SDP and the Communists think the Coast Guard should be the only military forces involved against the pirates, and called into action only in Japanese territorial waters. They were also opposed to the relaxed rules on the use of weapons. What do they think works against Third World pirates looking for a multi-million dollar payday? Moral suasion? Do they expect the Somalians to start raiding along the Seto Inland Sea?

Let’s be clear: Many in the DPJ supported this bill as it was. That meant it could have sailed through the upper house with little or no problem, but the party leadership felt compelled to object. That’s partly because they lack the political sophistication to understand that for critical areas of national interest, it really is OK to agree with the government and not to oppose something merely because they’re the opposition. It’s also because they chose again to ignore the national interest by playing a numbers game for their own political ends and ally with the SPD solely to bring down the government.

What this demonstrates:

1. The SPD hold their countrymen in such contempt that they believe Japanese are still too irresponsible to be trusted with lethal weapons overseas in matters of self-defense. (It’s also possible that the wool in their heads has grown so thick they’re no longer capable of coherent thought.) That, combined with their other positions, past associations with North Korea, their socialist/Marxist background (which includes circumstantial evidence linking a leading party figure to the Japanese Red Army terrorist group of yesteryear) reveals serious character flaws.
2. That the DPJ would put to risk Japanese lives, commercial interests critical for an island nation with limited natural resources, and nascent efforts to show that the country is a responsible international partner willing to help enforce the basic concepts of right and wrong, solely to feed the fantasies of miniscule fringe parties for the sake of gaining power, is another sign that they are too immature to successfully lead a government.
3. Communists always behave like Communists.

Want more? DPJ President Hatoyama Yukio was asked if he would roll back the decision if they gained a lower house majority and formed a government later this year. You know, if you’re opposed, you’re opposed, right? His answer:

“We will not make a hasty decision to do an immediate about-face.”

Bless their pointed little heads, but aren’t they dependable? The DPJ can always be counted on to choose expediency over principle.

Some claim the DPJ maintains its alliance with the SPD because it “needs them” in the upper house.

“Needs them” for what? It’s not as if the SPD is going to start voting with the LDP if the DPJ tells them to bugger off.

The Democratic Party of Japan—still shameless after all these years.

Getting real

During the same discussion, Mr. Aso continued:

“It’s the same with North Korea. At a minimum, we must fight when we should fight. If we aren’t prepared to do that, we won’t be able to defend the nation’s safety.”

Added current LDP Secretary-General Hosoda Haruyuki in a Yurakucho speech:

“Who knows what North Korea, which has nonchalantly abducted hundreds of people, will do if they develop nuclear weapons? We must apply more pressure to North Korea. Our ultimate objective is to bring about a collapse of the current regime and have the country be reborn as a peaceful state. The DPJ’s response to (this issue) is extremely soft.”

And why not? Who better than the Japanese to understand that a malevolent regime can become a peaceful state?

Messrs. Aso and Hosoda aren’t the only ones tired of the international pussyfooting. The aforementioned Koike Yuriko resigned last week from the chairmanship of a special LDP committee studying the question of enemy military bases. A party council submitted a statement to Prime Minister Aso on whether Japan should maintain the capability of conducting an attack on enemy military installations. The council adopted a policy of ruling out preemptive defensive attacks, which caused Ms. Koike to walk.

Instrumental in adopting that policy was Yamasaki Hiraku (also mentioned above), who said:

“We must not cause misunderstandings overseas”.

Retorted Ms. Koike:

“A policy exclusively oriented to defense is too restrictive, and a defensive preemptive attack policy is even more restrictive. All we talk about is limiting what we can do. Is it such a good idea to continue to limit Japan’s policies for defense? People say it’s done out of consideration for neighboring countries, but they don’t show any consideration for us at all.”

Bingo. And give that last sentence bonus points.

Duh

The people overseas who might misunderstand could be divided into two groups. The first consists of those in the region who would choose to purposely misunderstand. That would allow them to use Japanese policy as both a diplomatic weapon in bilateral relations, and as a domestic weapon to stir up anti-Japanese sentiment at home. Their feigned ignorance would enable them to continue painting the country as a false enemy, thereby strengthening their base of support.

North Korea threatens Japan with military action every day and has the hardware to make those threats very real. The Chinese are not going to stop until they have made themselves the East Asian hegemon (at least). Russia seized Japan’s Northern Territories after Japan surrendered in 1945 and refuses to return them. South Korea used military force to seize Takeshima in 1954, still illegally occupies the islets, and still refuses international mediation (which Japan says it would accept).

The second group of people who would misunderstand is in the West and principally consists of politicians, academics, and journalists, most of whom can’t be bothered to do the research to get it right to begin with. Perhaps that’s because a real understanding would conflict with their preconceptions.

Japanese diplomatic and military behavior has been the gold standard in Northeast Asia since 1945. Ms. Koike, Mr. Aso, and Mr. Hosoda are right: Japan should choose to defend its legitimate interests as a sovereign nation. The decision-makers in neighboring countries will understand perfectly, regardless of what they say in public for the gullible or the Barnumesque suckers who want to be deceived. As for the people on the other side of the Pacific, there’s a Japanese expression that covers them: Baka ni tsukeru kusuri wa nai. There’s no medicine to cure a fool.

Some people in this country pretended they didn’t understand what Abe Shinzo meant when he said he wanted Japan to move beyond the postwar regime. Well, here you are.

But of course they always knew exactly what he was driving at—they just didn’t want to face the implications. It’s not always easy for adolescents to embrace responsibility and take charge of their lives.

Matsuri da! (107): The mikoshi marathon

A KEY ELEMENT of most Shinto festivals are the portable shrines known as mikoshi. Rites in other religions usually require the performance of strictly defined acts from which there is little or no deviation. One distinguishing feature of Shinto matsuri, however, is that there is very little from which to deviate to begin with. It’s hard to get stuffy about tradition when the founding principle seems to have been “Hey, that’s a great idea! Let’s try it and see what happens!”

The standard operating procedure during a festival is for the carriers to vigorously raise and lower the mikoshi while calling out shouts of self-encouragement during the procession. Meanwhile, the onlookers provide encouragement of their own from alongside the parade route, often drenching the carriers with buckets of water to cool them off—summer or winter, it makes no difference. When you’re hot and sweaty from all that work, you need to get cool!

But there are also festivals in which the mikoshi are hauled up the side of a steep mountain, run down the side of a mountain on narrow stone stairs at top speed in the middle of the night, carried under a waterfall, jumped over a blazing fire, used as a weapon in a street fight with another mikoshi-carrying group, or just smashed to pieces as a sign of devotion.

Though there are plenty of stories of how the mikoshi are used, few of those stories specifically mention how long those processions last. One exception is the story I came across for a festival last month at the Yudanosan Shinto shrine in Yamagata.

The event starts with the hakkosai ceremony, in which part of the spirit is taken from the tutelary deity at the shrine and placed in the mikoshi. Then about 150 young parishioners from a group known as the Miyuki-kai (神幸会) carry it around a six-kilometer course in Yamagata City chanting “Soiya sah!” The group does more than just go through the motions and then go home. It takes them seven hours to conduct this part of the festival. That must be one of the reasons for having 150 members in the Miyuki-kai–they have to take turns doing the heavy lifting.

That object at the top in gold leaf, by the way, is the ho’o, a type of phoenix whose myths originated in China. A mythical Chinese creature on top of a palanquin for a Shinto divinity–now how’s that for another example of Japanese syncretism? The ho’o seems to have been created from spare parts–the front was shaped like a giraffe, the rear like a deer, the head like a snake, the tail like a fish, and the back like a turtle. It’s enough to make you wonder how much hemp was cultivated in China in the old days.

The Yudonosan shrine has a history even more interesting than the festival it conducts. It’s located 1,500 meters (about 4,920 feet) above sea level, and the hike required to get there is not for the faint or weak of heart. The photo here shows the large red torii, but the shrine itself is far enough down the path and up the side of the mountain that a special bus leaving from the building at left takes visitors the rest of the way for 200 yen. It’s not possible to post a photo of the shrine itself, because photography at the site is forbidden.

Once visitors arrive, they have to remove their shoes to enter, and that, like the photo prohibition, is not a common practice at most institutions. Then again, the shrine is located in an uncommon area. The Yudonosan mountain is one of three in a group of mountains and valleys that were a site for Buddhist ascetic practices for more than a millennium. Some of the heavy hitters of Japanese Buddhism came here for meditation and enlightenment, including Kukai, the founder of the Shingon sect, and Saicho, the founder of the Tendai sect.

Their practices were uncommonly rigorous, and included vegetarian meals, daily ablutions, and Yudono no Hozen worship three times a day for 30, 50, or 1,000 consecutive days to remove their impurities. Another objective for some was to achieve Buddhahood while still in the material body, a practice called sokushinjobutsu, and at Yudonosan the preferred method was to meditate until one became “mummified”, as the explanation has it. Some of the remains of these people still exist in northern Niigata.

While in those days the site primarily attracted Buddhists, the institution itself was one of many that shared space with a Shinto shrine. When they were split up during the Meiji era reforms, the Buddhist temples relocated elsewhere. Why did they move and the shrine stay? I don’t know, but it might have been because the shrine’s shintai, the object of worship in which the divinity’s spirit dwells, was a large rock from which a natural hot spring emerges.

It has to be easier to build another temple than it is to change the course of a hot spring in the mountains!

Asuka: Gagaku for the 21st century

LONG-TIME FRIENDS know that I’m like iron filings for the magnet of modern Japanese roots music, including that goofy/funky mongrel known as chin-don, as well as Okinawan minyo. Hit the Music category on the left sidebar and you’ll find plenty of references to those styles, including one post about the Ryukyu Chimdon Band. That group combines both of them into a barrel of musical fun concealing a lot of sophistication behind the wackiness. (What better word to use to describe the use of Zairean soukous structures with chin-don instrumentation to play Okinawan melodies?)

Long-time friends also know that one of my avocations is informal research into festivals and Shinto traditions, and for proof of that all you have to do is get clicky with the Festival category on the same sidebar.

Somewhere in the Music category there are a few references to gagaku, the ancient music of the Japanese Imperial court. Both the music and the instruments of that style came primarily from China about 1,400 years ago, though some also crossed over from the Korean Peninsula. While that musical tradition has long been dead on the Asian mainland, it’s still alive here. Some musicologists say it’s the longest continuous musical tradition in existence.

Asuka me again and I'll tell you the same

So it should be no surprise that I had to grab my tongue to keep from swallowing it in excitement when I stumbled across news of a progressive gagaku band on the run that’s updated the tradition for the 21st century. How do you do, Flame, meet the Moth!

What I read was almost too good to be true. The group is named Asuka (明日香), and all the members are conservatory graduates. While at music school, they specialized in studies of Western jazz, pop, and classical music.

But that’s not the half of it–the male members of Asuka are legitimate Shinto priests and the women are miko shrine maidens. And two members are from families of musicians who perform in what is known as the “festival gagaku” tradition (祭典雅楽). Rather than playing for the Imperial court or related functions, these musicians play at Shinto shrines and village ceremonies. (This is the first I’ve heard of it, and there’s not a lot of information about it on the web in Japanese, either.) It’s considered to be more cheerful than the Court version of the music.

Asuka has presented more than 100 performances a year since they came together, but it’s only recently that they’ve begun playing in more commercial settings. Now comes word that they’ll be making their concert debut (on stage as a solo act before several thousand people) at the Japan Expo 2009 in Paris from 2-5 July. They’ll also give a short live performance during the Expo at the booth of the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry.

If that hasn’t grabbed you by the shirt collar and woken you up yet, this will: in conjunction with their Japan Expo appearance, they’ve formally created a branch of Osaka’s Horiage Atago Shinto shrine and will have a small shrine structure and torii shipped from Japan. They plan to set up what their record company is calling a “mini theme park” of a Shinto shrine and festival. It will have the amulets, fortunes, lotteries, and ema (votive pictures) that are part of established shrines for the edification and enjoyment of the Europeans.

Asuka has released a CD available at Amazon Japan called Tenchi Muso (天地夢想). Here is their page in Japanese at the record company’s site. They helpfully provide a link to a YouTube promotional video of a live performance. By the time I’d made it this far, I was nearly salivating. And here it is:

It broke my heart! Why oh why did they have to screw it up by using computers and a drum machine? What wasted potential!

This is my confession, mama: I’m a such a diehard that when I finally flip out for good, I might just turn into a musical Carrie Nation. Instead of taking an axe to saloons, I’ll track down record studios and destroy all their rhythm machines. If I had a hammer, I’d swing it in the morning, into those consoles, all over this land. Computerized drum machines are to music what inflatable rubber dolls are to sex. They miss the point entirely!

I’m OK with electric or electronic instruments, as long as they’re performed in real time using hands, feet, head, heart, and lung.

Before giving up on them, I was lucky to notice that YouTube has several videos by Asuka. The next one I tried was this:

Now that’s more like it. It combines a transverse bamboo flute, acoustic piano, and electric bass with a jazzy melody. OK, I thought, there’s hope for these guys yet. And then I discovered this:

All is bliss! Fans of Japanese music will recognize the man playing the Yamaha as Sakamoto Ryuichi, Japan’s first Academy Award winner for his work on the score of The Last Emperor. He’s been composing and performing cutting edge pop/avant garde music for decades, first as a member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra and then on his own. Those with longer memories will recognize this song as Tong Poo (東風), one of his better-known numbers from the YMO days–though this version is quite different (and much more to my tase). Mr. Sakamoto has always been ready to incorporate Japanese and Asian elements into his music, including Okinawan minyo. What a lovely performance!

That sold me. The Asuka CD is going to be my next musical purchase, and I’ve got my fingers crossed that the tracks sound more like the second and third videos here than the first.

Afterwords:
The instrument with the vertical bamboo pipes is called a sho. It’s a mouth organ with 17 pipes that can play tone clusters of five or six notes at a time. The two longest pipes are silent; the sound of the instrument is said to resemble the call of the phoenix, and those pipes are the wings. It’s tuned using wax. For those who can read music, here’s some sho notation:

I can’t read music, but I do know this: I’d jam some clothes into a rucksack tomorrow, leave home for good, and become the love slave of either of those women playing it! Dip me in chocolate and turn me into a licking stick!

Japan’s cultural kaleidoscope (2)

BAREFOOTIN’ IN TEE-SHIRTS and short pants, all the better to deal with the 30-minute turnarounds of pouring rain and blazing sun: yeah, summer has arrived at last in Japan. During the dog days, the archipelago offers all sorts of hot-weather delights, including watermelon, shaved ice, and best of all, the transformation of even the most neo-radical of young women into traditional beauties once they exchange their jeans for yukata (a summer kimono).

What else is going on up and down the islands? Well, take a look and find out!

Firefly festivals

Once upon a time, summer nights on the East Coast of the United States came alive with a light show au naturel created by fireflies. The march of progress and suburbia seems to have ended all that, but the lightning bugs, as we used to call them, are still alive and flickering in the countryside here.

This is Japan, so take it as given that people know just when to expect their appearance every year, just how long it will last, and how to organize the viewing parties and festivals held to coincide with those dates.

Lightning bugs!

The photo shows the fireflies near the Ayu River in Tanabe, in the southern part of Wakayama. It’s one of several locations in the area known as superb firefly viewing sites from the end of May to the beginning of June.

But as with the cherry blossoms and the rainy season, the firefly front keeps marching north, and right now the folks in Yonezawa, Yamagata, are enjoying a month-long firefly festival at the Onogawa spa. The festival is sponsored by the spa’s tourism association and the Yonezawa Firefly Protection Society. The opening ceremony was held at the local memorial firefly tower to pray for the safety of the participants during the event. Those Yonezawans must really like fireflies!

It’s not a festival in Japan without liquor, so right after the prayers they perform another centuries-old ritual by knocking open the head of a sake barrel with wooden hammers and passing the hooch around. They say some people see double when they drink too much, so you can imagine the sort of visions that light up the retinas of the festival-goers when a wave of fireflies floats by.

The viewing in Yonezawa begins on the riverbank right after it gets dark at 8:00 p.m. and lasts until 9:00. The area is such a firefly mecca that three different species breed here, and who but the entomologists knew there were different types of lightning bugs? For a spot of relaxation after all this excitement, the open-air baths stay open until nine, and there’s a tea house set up temporarily next to the firefly tower. The festival fun lasts until 31 July, but some people like to time their visit for the amateur entertainment contest on the 4th and 5th.

Hatsukiri

Sliding over from zoology to botany, here’s a photo of the festival held by the Miyajidake Shinto shrine in Fukutsu, Fukuoka, for the first cutting of Edo irises in a local garden. The purpose of the event, called Hatsukiri—first cutting, appropriately enough—is to present the irises as an offering to the divinities. They’ve got plenty of flowers from which to choose, because the garden has 30,000 individual plants. While the priests grunt, bend over, and swing their scythes, two miko hold irises as they perform a dance accompanied by a flute. More than 200 people came to watch. A small turnout, you say? That’s not a bad crowd for watching two girls perform a centuries-old dance in costume in a garden in a town of 56,000 while priests cut flowers. How many people would show up where you live?

The shrine held its Iris festival on the same day. They place 70,000 irises in front of the shrine and light ‘em up until 9:00 p.m. for 10 days. The shrine has its own iris garden too, started from bulbs sent by the Meiji-jingu in Tokyo in 1965. They now have 100,000 plants in 100 varieties. That’s a heck of a lot of irises, but they need that many to go around for all of Shinto’s yaoyorozu divine ones. (Yaoyorozu is the traditional number of divinities in Shinto. It literally means eight million, but figuratively represents an infinite number, signifying that each natural object has a divine spirit.)

Seaweed cutting

Irises weren’t the only flora getting cut for a Shinto ritual. Four priests from the Futamikitama Shinto shrine in Ise, Mie, boarded a boat with some miko and sailed offshore for some seaweed cutting. They present the seaweed—fortunately an uncountable noun—to the divinities, allow it to dry out for a month, and then distribute it to their parishioners to drive out bad fortune and eradicate impurities.

At 10:30 a.m., the priests set sail on their skiff festooned with red, yellow, green, purple, and white streamers, with bamboo grass placed at bow and stern, and headed for the special seaweed site 770 meters northeast of the Futami no Meoto, sometimes called the Wedded Rocks. (The word meoto designates a pair of something, one large and one small.) Since this is a special ritual, they can’t just start cutting—first they have to circle the divine Kitama rock on the seabed three times, then they haul out a three-meter long sickle and get to work.

Sea goya

Since the subject is aquatic plants, now’s as good a time as any to report that the Fukuka Aquaculture Center in Kin-machi, Okinawa, is ramping up production of a new variety of sea grapes they hope to popularize in Japan after sales start next month. The center has dubbed the new type “sea goya”, after the knobby bitter squash for which Okinawa is famous. (Here’s a previous post about sea grapes in Okinawa and goya in general.)

Tastes as good as it looks!

The center’s director said they discovered these particular sea grapes among a batch imported in March 2008. The new variety flourished in the southern climate, and that gave people the idea to turn it into a new product, particularly as they were looking for ways to juice the market after the prices of regular sea grapes and mozuku seaweed tanked.

They decided to call the new plant sea goya because it’s more elongated than regular sea grapes and has the bitter flavor of goya. The center has already applied to register the name as a trademark, and they’re confident the application will be approved. After hearing about the new product, more than 10 companies inquired about handling the distribution.

Nara ayu

After insects, irises, seaweed, and sea grapes, here come the freshwater fish: namely the ayu, or sweetfish, which we’ve encountered before in a post about their encounters with traditional traps.

Some sweetfish just for you

These sweetfish, however, were caught by means with an even longer and exalted pedigree—trained cormorants. The birds require keepers that are somewhat analogous to falconers, all of whom ply their skills for the Imperial Household Agency because the technique is a tradition of the Japanese Imperial household. (Dig their costumes in the photo at the link.)

Six keepers were employed to catch the fish at the Imperial fishing grounds on the Nagara River in Gifu City, but the keepers can handle up to a dozen birds on the end of ropes, so they must have taken quite a haul. They go out in boats too, but at night, and they take along lighted torches. The fish are attracted to the flame like maritime moths, and the birds dive in after them. The lower part of the cormorants’ necks are collared to prevent them from swallowing the fish, and after they’ve snatched one, the keepers reel them in and make them cough it up. That’s got to be more cruel than feeding a dog peanut butter.

The fish were packed into paulownia boxes and shipped to the Kashihara-jingu, a Shinto shrine in Kashihara, Nara, as well as the Imperial Palace and the Meiji-jingu, another Shinto shrine in Tokyo. Both shrines have an Imperial connection.

The Japanese have been using cormorants to catch sweetfish since at least the 8th century—don’t you wonder who came up with that idea?–and the Nagara River event is more than a millennium old, but this shrine has been receiving the sweetfish shipments only since 1940 to offer in prayer for the safety of fishing and a good catch. (The 1940 date suggests it might have begun as part of the celebrations that year marking the 2600th anniversary of the establishment of the Japanese Imperial House.)

Contributing to the delinquency of minors

Yet another sign of summer in Japan is the yaoyorozu of rice-planting festivals held throughout the country. It’s easy to figure out why—they grow the rice in wet paddies, which are made even wetter by all the rain that falls this time of year.

But the students at Miyoshi High School in Miyoshi, Tokushima, weren’t planting this rice as part of a festival; they were getting classroom credit. The lads aren’t planning to be farmers when they grow up–rather, they’re enrolled in a course covering the brewing and fermentation of food products. They’ll harvest that rice in the fall and use it to make sake.

The rice is grown on a 3,000-square-meter paddy the school rents from area residents. The teachers do most of the planting with a machine, and then some of the second year students wade right in and plant by hand those parts the machine can’t reach. They expect to harvest 1.5 tons of the rice in mid-September, which can probably be converted into enough sake to keep the town of Miyoshi more lit than a riverbank full of fireflies until New Year’s. The school started the project last year, and this year they increased the size of the cultivated area six-fold to use only the rice grown by students.

One of those students, 16-year-old Fukuda Shinya, had planted rice before, but he said the seedlings were more difficult to handle because the size was different than that of regular table rice.

Now why couldn’t I have gone to that school!

Shochu collector

While the high school students were outdoors sweating and getting dirty as they planted the rice for the sake they will later brew, Masuyama Hiroki (73) of Izumi, Kagoshima, was relaxing with an adult beverage as he contemplated the success of his 12-year effort to collect one bottle each from all the prefecture’s shochu distillers. This is Kagoshima, where everyone drinks shochu and almost no one drinks sake, so he had his work cut out for him.

He’s so proud of his accomplishment he’s got them lined up on the wall, and hasn’t twisted the cap on a single bottle. Mr. Masuyama decided to make it is hobby after he retired from a job with the prefectural government in 1996 and started working in sales. His business trips took him throughout Kagoshima, and after he got the idea—probably in a bar during one of those business trips–he made a list and started buying while he was selling. He started with 1.8 liter (1.92 US quarts) bottles, but they were too heavy and took up too much space, so he switched to bottles half that size. He had a few difficulties completing the collection, and no, one of them wasn’t a tendency to polish off a bottle before before he could display it on the rack. For one thing, the smaller bottles were sold mainly to commercial establishments, but he applied his salesmen’s skills to get what he wanted. Another was that he didn’t have much of a chance to go to the prefecture’s many outlying islands on business. After retiring from his second job, it took two more years to finish the project.

Mr. Masuyama says he enjoys looking at his collection while having a late-night drink, but his libation doesn’t come from those shelves on the wall. He hasn’t opened any of the bottles and says it would be a waste to drink them.

Now there’s a man with discipline!

Miko class

Shinto shrine maidens, known as miko, get to do all sorts of fun stuff. In this post alone, they’ve sailed out to the Wedded Rocks to help the priests cut seaweed, carried the sacred sweetfish caught by cormorants, and danced while the priests cut Edo irises in Fukutsu. Even better, they get to handle the money at the shrine during New Year’s.

Doesn’t that sound like a great part-time job? If that’s the kind of work you’re looking for, the Kanda Myojin Shinto shrine in Chiyoda, Tokyo, is offering a beginner’s level course that provides instruction in how to become a miko. Even better, the class will last only one day, on 17 August—the middle of summer vacation!

Kanda Myojin conducts the class every year with the idea of giving young Japanese women a better idea of their traditions and culture, as well as teaching them more about the shrine. Last year, the student body consisted of 24 women who got to wear the red and white outfit for a day as they studied the shrine’s history, the daily conduct of affairs at the shrine, and its religious ceremonies.

Considering they charge only JPY 5,000 yen ($US 52.40), that sounds like a good deal. They’re looking for 20 unmarried young women this year from 16 to 22, and enrollment is open until the end of the month.

The declaration of the eisa nation

Start with a party, end with a party. This particular hoedown is the eisa dance native to Okinawa. Centuries ago, it was performed as a rite for the repose of the dead, but now it’s done for entertainment and is more likely to wake the dead than ease their way into the next world.

Okinawa City issued a proclamation declaring itself Eisa Town earlier this month, and held a Declaration Day Eisa Night event outside the city offices to lay claim to the title. Six groups made their eisadelic statement as they performed in original/trad clothing they created themselves. Eisa Night means that eisa season has officially started in the city, and summer in this city means that local youth groups will give public performances every weekend until the really big show, the Okinawa Eisa Festival in September.

During her greeting at the ceremony, Mayor Tomon Mitsuko said, “We hope you come to Okinawa City on the weekends and enjoy yourselves.” Then the dancing started and everyone proceeded to do just that.

It’s not just for the Ryukyuans, either. One of the six groups performing was the Machida-ryu of Machida, Tokyo, who started their own group in 1999 after a trip to Okinawa. They were so captivated by the dance they had to do it themselves at home. Now the troupe has more than 100 members.

There’s an idea: create your own Okinawan dance and drum ensemble and visit Eisa Town next year. If you want to learn, watching the video is a great way to start!

Ain’t nobody gonna steal my miso natto roll!

SOME PEOPLE THINK Japanese schools stifle the imagination of their students, but you can’t prove that by me. I’ve associated with Japanese school-age children for the better part of a quarter of a century, and I’ve found them every bit as imaginative as the children I knew growing up in the United States, if not more so.

Scrumptious!

Now a group of students at the Yonezawa Commercial High School in Yonezawa, Yamagata, are displaying a creative imagination above and beyond that of some adults who get paid to do it for a living.

The members of the Research Club at the 107-year-old school delight in creating new food products. One of their past triumphs was cookies made with powdered locusts. They named them inagoma cookies, combining the word for locust, or inago, and sesame, or goma.

But they’ve outdone themselves this time. In March, their faculty advisor assigned this year’s research theme, which was to create something new by using the wisdom of the past. So the students, mostly 11th-graders, came up with the idea of making two different kinds of rolled cakes: one with miso and the other with natto.

Miso is a traditional seasoning made most often by fermenting rice and soybeans with salt to create a paste used in a variety of dishes. Most people outside of Japan are familiar with it as the base for the stock in miso soup, or miso shiru. Soldiers in Japan ate it as part of their rations several centuries ago, so that aspect fulfilled the requirement for the wisdom of the past.

While fewer foreigners know about natto, it’s the type of food one never forgets after a close encounter. It too is a fermented soybean, using a smaller type of bean with a special bacteria that results in a distinctive odor and a sticky consistency. Pick it up with chopsticks and you’ll see translucent gummy strings holding it together. There are several ways to eat it, but it’s usually spread over rice. Most people have trouble with the odor in the same way that some cheeses in Europe and the Middle East cause problems, though its smell is not as intense as that of limburger cheese, to cite one example.

Students at the school used to sell natto in the 1920s and 1930s to raise money for their tuition, so that also dovetailed with their research theme.

The rolled cakes are five centimeters (about two inches) in diameter and 13 centimeters long, with the miso and natto mixed into the cream. The students said they found it difficult to maintain a balance of tartness and sweetness with the miso roll. The natto is not in bean form, but a paste. The trick with that ingredient was to keep the odor in check but to retain the stickiness.

A local confectionary produces it for them, and you can imagine what the bakers must have said to each other when they found out what they would be making. The students got the last laugh, however; they took 60 rolls to a local event, offered them for JPY 500 ($US 5.19) apiece, and sold out completely. If they’re that good, it won’t be long before local beaneaters with a sweet tooth beat a path to their door. But the idea is not as unusual as it might seem; several traditional Japanese pastries are made with sweet bean paste (and are quite good).

Said 16-year-old Takahashi Shiho:

“We wanted to make products that weren’t sold anywhere else.

And they succeeded, too!

“Those are unusual combinations, but they have a rich taste.”

If the idea of miso or natto in a confection doesn’t sound appealing, think of it as a health food. Both of those ingredients are seriously nutritious, packed to the gills with protein, vitamins, and minerals. Natto is also said to be good for preventing blood clotting, and therefore heart attacks and strokes.

That’s my justification for eating natto every day, even though I didn’t care for the smell at first, either. My wife, for whom natto is a daily culinary event, found a clever way to get around my reluctance. She heard that the odor and the stickiness are minimized somewhat if the natto is mixed with grated daikon radish. After about a year of eating that combination I got accustomed to it. Then she decided it was too much trouble to keep grating the daikon every day, but by that time I was already housebroken and didn’t notice any more!

I know what you are; we’re just haggling over the price

Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
- Ronald Reagan

AND TO THINK that some people considered the late American president to be an amiable dunce! To prove his point, let’s read the lips of some of the practitioners of Japanese politics. First, however, we’ll start with a forecast from an unidentified bureaucrat.

The civil servant was speaking to freelance journalist Yokota Yumiko for an article she wrote in the June 2008 issue of Shokun! magazine. His prediction involved the relationship of the Kasumigaseki bureaucrats and the politicians in a possible government led by the current opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan. He said:

“No matter how you look at it, no policy proposals can be implemented without Kasumigaseki. Even if the Democratic Party of Japan were to form a government, it would be unlikely to have an adverse impact on our work. Indeed, it would make our work a lot easier if the DPJ did us the favor of winning the next lower house election and breaking the logjam in the Diet. It would be easier to pass bills, and we would be able to free ourselves from the chains that tie us to the engorged LDP politicians.

“If the DPJ were to form a government, they would wind up having to restrain their current irresponsibility. Having them take power once should be enough for the voters to realize they have no ability to handle the reins of government.”

Now for the political lips. Here’s Aso Taro of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party just after he was selected prime minister last year:

“I’m a politician that can skillfully utilize the bureaucratic organization…There is a distinction between what one should entrust to government officials without recklessly opposing everything they do, and what politicians should do….The bureaucracy is something to be managed.”

On 9 February this year, then secretary-general and now party president of the DPJ, Hatoyama Yukio, said during a speech:

“We will have everyone with the rank of bureau chief or higher in every ministry and agency submit their resignation, and then confirm whether or not they will implement the policies that the DPJ has in mind.”

It certainly sounds like he’s serious about reforming the bureaucracy, doesn’t it? It also sounds suspiciously like a loyalty test for government employees, but let’s read some more lips.

Here’s Acting DPJ President Kan Naoto answering a question at a press conference just this week:

Q: Will you seek the resignation of all personnel with the rank of bureau chief or higher (if you form a government)?

A: “It would be next to impossible to automatically force those resignations. Separating oneself from the bureaucracy does not at all mean being opposed to the bureaucracy or eliminating the bureaucracy. We want to utilize the bureaucracy’s experience and knowledge for crafting legislation. We want people to understand that the roles of politicians and bureaucrats are different, and to create a cooperative relationship in a new business model.”

By jingo, he sure sounds a lot like Aso Taro, doesn’t he? But Mr. Aso is the one people think Kasumigaseki has under its thumb!

It also sounds as if that unidentified bureaucrat was on to something.

And if you compare the statements of Messrs. Hatoyama and Kan, one has to wonder if all DPJ promises are delivered with a pre-existing expiration date.

At least this one expired before the election.

Up next is Nakagawa Hidenao, the de facto leader of the reform wing of the LDP. Mr. Nakagawa and a group of allies have drawn up a bill for consideration in the Diet that completely prohibits amakudari (the practice of giving senior bureaucrats important jobs in government-affiliated organizations and private companies when they retire) and watari (the name for the ministries’ arrangement of successive jobs for retired bureaucrats at government-affiliated corporations, with the former civil servants receiving a pension each time).

It also has a provision for reducing the rank and salary of senior bureaucratic executives, presumably for substandard job performance.

Mr. Nakagawa has collected 125 signatures in support of the bill from LDP MPs: 111 in the lower house, and 14 in the upper house.

Any Diet member can submit a bill for consideration; it requires 20 signatures for the lower house and 10 for the upper house, and Mr. Nakagawa obviously has them.

When bills are submitted, however, the speaker usually refers them to a committee. In this case, Mr. Nakagawa submitted his proposed legislation to the LDP’s Diet Affairs Committee and an LDP organization first. The committee chair said the legislation would be discussed in conjunction with the government’s civil service reform legislation.

Both Mr. Nakagawa and the DPJ have said the government’s legislation lacks muscle. He designed the bill specifically to gain the support of the opposition, giving it the potential to become a true bipartisan reform measure.

What has the DPJ said in public about the bill put together by Mr. Nakagawa?

…………

Their lips haven’t moved yet.

If the opposition wanted to put pressure on the government, establish their reputation as serious reformers, and actually achieve real reform much needed by the government and much desired by the people, wouldn’t they have been all over this already?

Could it be they’re waiting for Ozawa “The Puppeteer” Ichiro, the party’s Shadow Shogun, to tell them what to think first? Or could it be they weren’t all that serious to begin with?

It looks like we’re about to find out which members of the world’s second-oldest profession in the Diet are really part of the first-oldest.

The tower of logo-babel

THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN are two countries separated by a common language, observed George Bernard Shaw, but at least the written matter in one country can be read by the people in the other. Those two countries, along with the rest of the Anglosphere, use the same writing system.

Imagine how much greater the separation must be in the Sinosphere, where there’s more than one way to write Chinese. Many languages are spoken throughout the region that might be called Greater China, but different approaches to the lexicographic system for the written Chinese language are one manifestation of the perennial battle royale in Taiwan over the question of how closely they should associate with the Mainland. On one side are those who want to adopt the PRC’s standard writing system (now that they’ve already adopted the PRC’s Romanization system). Arrayed against them are those who think that’s just a ploy to promote unification on PRC terms. The latter group is using an argument based on the unusual combination of preserving tradition and maintaining ethnic diversity to support their claim.

First, here’s some historical background to get everyone on the same page. The Chinese have been using ideographic characters since at least the 11th century BC. They’ve developed several writing systems throughout their history, but the characters they use today became roughly standardized about 2,000 years ago. Other people throughout East Asia adopted (or adapted) them to write their own language. They were used in the earliest documents written on the Korean Peninsula, and the Koreans used them until they developed their own alphabet. The Korean writing system was formally adopted in 1446, but did not come into common use until the late 19th century. Thus, literacy in Korea until fairly recently required the ability to read Chinese characters.

The Japanese used Chinese characters to write their own language at first, but only as phonetic symbols to express Japanese pronunciation and not necessarily for their meaning. While those early texts appear to be superficially Chinese, no Chinese reader would understand them because it’s still the Japanese language. Japan later developed two phonetic alphabets to use in conjunction with the characters to express vernacular grammatical elements, and these alphabets came into general use from the 8th to the 12th centuries.

The Chinese characters are called kanji in Japanese (which is now also an accepted English word), hanja in Korean, and hanzi in Chinese, but they all mean the same thing: Chinese (Han) letters.

Some of the traditional Chinese characters are quite complicated and require many individual strokes to write. In 1946, the Japanese started modifying their written language by reducing the number of kanji they required students to learn and simplifying their written forms. For example, the character gaku, which appears in such words as daigaku, or college, and gakko, or school, once had 18 strokes, but now has only eight. Some of the modifications were so extensive it would be impossible for contemporary readers to identify the connection. (Here’s a chart comparing the old and the new, for Japanese readers.)

The Chinese started simplifying the same characters in the 1950s, but their modifications were different than those the Japanese adopted, making the divergence between written Chinese and Japanese that much greater. The Koreans still use the traditional form of the characters for hanja when they do use them, but that is seldom. The Taiwanese are the only people to have retained the traditional form of the characters in everyday applications.

But now some people want to change that.

The current president of the Republic of China/Taiwan is Ma Ying-jeou of the reconstituted Chinese Nationalist Party, also known as the Kuomintang (KMT). That was Chiang Kai-shek’s party of the Chinese who fled China when Mao and the Communists took over to set up a government in Taiwan.

Earlier this month, the president proposed that Taiwan adopt the Beijing government’s simplified character set for writing only and retain the traditional characters for reading. The skeleton of the story is in this AFP article.

Said Mr. Ma:

“We hope the two sides can reach a consensus on (learning to) read standard characters while writing in the simplified ones…It is also our hope that the standard characters can be listed as World Heritage by the United Nations one day,” he said in a statement.

AFP is perhaps the least-bad of the major media outlets reporting on Northeast Asia, and this article gets the basic facts right. Yet they still manage to tilt perceptions in the direction they want all right-thinking people to support.

Relations with China have improved dramatically since Ma’s Beijing-friendly government was inaugurated in May 2008, vowing to promote reconciliation and trade ties.

Note that the Taiwanese president also wants the standard characters to become a “World Heritage”. He does not explain why any Chinese should think a UN imprimatur would enhance the prestige of a written language several millennia old and still in daily use by more than a billion people.

Though it’s not mentioned here, Mr. Ma also hopes that the PRC will implement two United Nations human rights covenants (the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) in Tibet in the future.

Add his Harvard Law degree to his wishful thinking about Chinese behavior and it’s easy to see why Time Magazine chose him as one of their top 100 “Leaders and Revolutionaries” for 2008.

Meanwhile, AFP chose an over-the-top yardbird to provide the only dissenting quote in the article.

“Ma is seeing China as his master. He is even trying to change our writing habits to please China, which is absolutely unnecessary,” said Cheng Wen-tsang, spokesman for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP.)

It’s not as if they didn’t have other people from whom to choose. Take this editorial from the Taipei Times:

Since taking office, Ma has been leaning toward the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as can be seen in many things, from his statement on the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre to his plans to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement with China.

This may be the trend of the times and Ma may not have a choice, but this does not mean that Taiwanese should learn only to recognize traditional Chinese while writing with simplified characters, because there is a thin line between this and unification — or, rather, being unified.

In ancient China, the standard for unification included standardized wheel width for carts and a standardized script. Today, Ma is promoting simplified Chinese without receiving any goodwill from Beijing.

This is not far from unification as seen by ancient Chinese — how can we not be worried?

And:

Ma may see an acceptance of simplified Chinese characters as part of cross-strait economic and cultural exchanges, but it constitutes a form of political recognition.

Mr. Ma’s statement on Tiananmen, incidentally, praised the Chinese for the progress they’ve made on human rights. (One of these days, perhaps we’ll understand why the people for whom Harvard Law degrees, Time Magazine lists, and the UN are so important think it’s commendable to be friendly with the maleficent Chinese regime, yet were so outraged by the existence of the South African apartheid government, or even the comparatively benign Chile of Augustin Pinochet.)

But the KMT wanted to quickly ameliorate any concerns. They explained:

President Ma Ying-jeou yesterday proposed a concept of “reading in traditional characters, writing in simplified characters…The Office of the President today explained that the suggestion was aimed at 1.3 billion simplified character users in China, not Taiwan. (emphasis mine)

The concept aims to make Chinese people get to know the traditional character symbolizing authentic Chinese culture, said the Office. Traditional characters should be used in publications, but simplified ones are allowed in writing. It is not necessary to promote the concept in Taiwan as Taiwanese are familiar with traditional characters, the Office noted.

The Presidential Office explained that some media misunderstood that Ma intended to push forward the use of simplified characters in Taiwan, and thus clarified that the use of traditional character in Taiwan, a token of preservation of Chinese culture, will not be altered.

Most Taiwanese people are accustomed to using traditional characters in writing. But, for the sake of convenience, it is difficult to ban the use of simplified ones in writing. However, schools, government agencies, and military units should still use traditional characters at all time, according to the Office.

Do we have that right? The KMT wants people to believe the president suggested adopting the simplified PRC writing system in Taiwan so that the people on mainland China will reconstitute its entire educational system for 1.3 billion people and have them turn back the clock and recognize traditional characters?

Did they really think anyone would believe that, or, as seems to becoming common for politicians these days, did they just say it because they had to say something and didn’t care if anyone believed it or not?

But that still leaves another question: if all the books and documents in Taiwan are going to be in traditional characters; the schools, government, and military will use all trad/all the time; and since most people today usually communicate in writing by using the Internet and text messages…

What’s the point?

The Taiwan News has some other objections:

Despite hasty denials by a presidential spokesman, such an interpretation (promotion of unification) is by no means far-fetched given the apish decision by the restored KMT administration to officially adopt China’s Hanyu Pinyin romanization system and exile to the margins Taiwan’s home-developed Tongyong system on the grounds that Hanyun Pinyin was the “international standard,” presumably because of the PRC’s rising global clout. This conclusion was based less on Hanyu Pinyin’s questionable advantages than on an ideological drive to “link” the PRC’s “putonghua” with “Mandarin,” which the KMT defines as the unitary “national language” of the “Republic of China,” and ignored Taiwan’s multilingual environment, in which Tongyong could well be more suitable.

Their concerns are not unfounded. While the advocates of Tongyong pulled off some backdoor maneuvering of their own to get it adopted a few years ago, the Ma administration quickly rolled that back, ditched Tongyong, and adopted the PRC Romanization standard after taking office.

One of Tongyong’s advantages, by the way, is that it allows foreigners who don’t know Chinese to better pronounce family and place names. For example, non-Chinese speakers are at a loss how to deal with the Q in Qingdao (青島) and the X in Xian (西安). Tongyong used other spellings.

The opposition might also have a point that the PRC will see this as a concession without making any of their own:

Ma’s proposal received immediate applause Wednesday morning from PRC Taiwan Affairs Office Spokesman Fan Liqing, who gushed that “both simplified and complex characters were rooted in Chinese culture” and proposed that “experts on both sides can actively discuss how to make mutual interchanges in writing more convenient.”

Notice that Mr. Fan said nothing about restoring the use of traditional characters for reading in the PRC. He knows that isn’t going to happen.

“(A) most objectionable facet of Ma’s remarks concerned his implicit privileging of Mandarin, “the” national language in Taiwan, and his complete lack of mention of the fact that Taiwan has at least three Sinitic languages (Mandarin, Hoklo and Hakka), which do not entirely use the same Han characters, and over a dozen Austronesian languages which have no relationship whatsoever to Han characters but are equally or even more entitled to be considered as “Taiwan languages.”

The anachronistic attachment of Ma and KMT ideologues to Mandarin and Han characters as an unitary “national language” reflects their continued colonialist imposition of a racial and patriarchal conception of “Chinese” culture on Taiwan’s multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual democratic society, as reflected by the arrogant and false declaration of his inaugural address last May 20 that “all the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the Chinese race nation (zhonghua minzu).”

How refreshing to see the bogus concept of multiculturalism put to a positive use for a change. And then they drive the point home:

Instead of compromising Taiwan’s cultural sovereignty and democratic pluralism, the KMT government should demand that the PRC should fulfill its own international commitments and “converge” with the world community by implementing full freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of thought.

Writing in the August 2008 issue of Voice, Omae Ken’ichi suggested that the ties between the constituent elements of Greater China will loosen, and that the Sinosphere will eventually become a confederation rather than a single nation. The article itself was poorly written and poorly argued (and a disappointment, because that’s why I bought the issue), but this lexicographical dispute presents some of the reasons that confederation might come into being.

Kangolian?

Meanwhile, as the Chinese argue about how to best write their own language, a native of Inner Mongolia—also part of Greater China—studying in Japan is creating art by combining two different languages.

A graduate student at Shikoku University conducting research into calligraphy is presenting an exhibit of his creations in Naruto, Tokushima.

Usually I include names with these stories, but in the article this man’s name was written in katakana, the Japanese alphabet used for foreign names (other than Chinese and Korean names, for which kanji is used). It’s not possible to track back the katakana and come up with an accurate Romanization of the man’s name–and doesn’t that dovetail perfectly with the theme of this post?

His calligraphic art is the combination of the 800-year-old Mongol script with kanji. Mongolian also has a calligraphic tradition, and he is studying ways to fuse kanji with that script. Written Mongolian is one of the few vertical scripts in the world read from left to right. (You can read more about it at this website.) The student has also created some works with the two scripts side by side that show identical words and phrases.

To create a bit of Mongolian atmosphere for the exhibit, the museum is serving chai, or milk tea, and playing tapes of horsehead lute in the background.

He came to Japan five years ago and began attending a calligraphy class to improve his Japanese. He was fascinated by the strength of the brushes and the beauty of the work, so he enrolled in college to focus on those studies. He’s now in his first year of grad school.

So to sum it all up, two countries with the same basic language want to impose their own lexicographical views on each other because they can’t read what the other has written, while in Japan a man can combine two entirely different writing systems, call it art, and hang it in a museum to be viewed while drinking tea and listening to music.

And some people wonder why I don’t read fiction any more!