In Japan, it’s the economy, baka!

IT’S LONG BEEN AXIOMATIC among both politicians and pundits that pocketbook issues are the key to electoral success. As campaign advisor James Carville famously reminded Bill Clinton during the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

With the Japanese Upper House election to be held in July, we might find out whether the same rules apply to the Japanese electorate, or whether the media’s constant drumbeat of doom to drown out the Abe administration will have its intended effect. Buried at the bottom of this article from AFP about the latest economic news was this nugget:

Japan, which for years was beset by stagnant growth and on-off recessions, is now in the midst of its longest sustained expansion since World War II.

And that’s not to mention the glad tidings for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the ruling LDP in the rest of the article:

Japan got a double dose of good news on the economy Tuesday with the jobless rate hitting a nine-year low and consumer spending up for a fourth straight month, underpinning the overall recovery…The last time Japan’s unemployment rate was so low was in March 1998, officials said.

Some opinions diverged, however. Said AFP:

The unexpected fall in the April jobless rate to 3.8 percent from 4.0 percent in March reflected brisk hiring by Japanese companies at the start of the new fiscal year and a shift from part-time to full-time positions, analysts said.

Bloomberg, on the other hand, agreed with the first assessment…

Increased employment of college graduates at the start of the business year drove the drop in the jobless rate, the statistics bureau said. “Young people who in the past couldn’t find jobs out of college are now getting them,” said bureau spokesman Norio Kondou. Japan’s unemployment rate is the second lowest among Group of Seven nations, behind 2.8 percent in the U.K.

…but disagreed with the second:

Greater use of part-time workers is another reason (higher demand for labor has yet to spur wage growth). Part-timers made up more than a third of the workforce in the first quarter, rising almost one percentage point from the previous three months, the statistics bureau said.

Wherever the truth lies, conventional political wisdom holds that the bright economic picture should serve as a tailwind for the LDP in the upcoming election.

Now for the double dose of bad news: the media is convinced that the suicide earlier this week of Agriculture Minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka, who was embroiled in a political financing scandal, will dim the LDP’s prospects in the July balloting.

Additionally, the Asahi Shimbun is reporting that confusion over the rightful beneficiaries of 50 million pension accounts (!) is the reason for the Abe Cabinet’s decline in their latest polling results after a sharp rise in May.

I’m not so sure about the former; suicides in Japan have a tendency to close the book on a situation rather than exacerbate it. I also tend to think the voters will have typically short voter memories come election day.

They may not have forgotten about the pension account problem, but that will depend on the ability of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan and their leader Ichiro Ozawa–the most overrated politician in Japan™–to remind them. If I were to take a flyer, I’d wager that the DPJ will cement its well-deserved reputation for tripping over its own shoelaces.

Though most in the media would be loathe to admit it, Mr. Abe’s presence cannot be so easily discounted, either. He surprised many observers by demonstrating political coattails in a recent by-election for an Upper House seat in Okinawa. The prime minister twice made the trek to the southern islands to make personal appearances for his candidate, who wound up winning what was previously an opposition seat.

Also, consider what else the Asahi poll found:

Asked who they would vote for if the Upper House election were held now, 26 percent of the respondents picked Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party or its candidates in the proportional representation system, down from 31 percent in the previous survey.

On the other hand, 25 percent said they would choose the main opposition party, Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), or its candidates.

When respondents were asked which party’s candidates they would vote for in the prefectural districts, 29 percent said the LDP while 26 percent chose Minshuto.

When asked which parties they would like to see gain a majority in the July Upper House election, 28 percent answered the ruling coalition and 48 percent said the opposition.

In other words, the Asahi poll finds that nearly a majority of voters want to see the opposition win a majority in the election, but also reveals that more respondents intend to vote for the ruling party in both phases of the election itself.

That only provides further ammunition to those who suspect the media conduct their polls by throwing darts at a paper target.

It’s possible that the Asahi’s poll is accurate. Then again, newspaper poll results in Japan vary significantly from paper to paper. Here’s this from the Yomiuri:

In a poll taken by The Yomiuri Shimbun on May 19-20, the approval rating for the Abe Cabinet stood at 49.6 percent, up 5.8 percentage points from the previous survey conducted in March. The disapproval rating declined 7.1 points to 36.8 percent. Thus, the approval rating exceeded the disapproval rating by 12.8 points.

At this point, if you decide you want to use the newspapers for lining the cat box instead of for getting a line on Japanese electoral trends, I wouldn’t blame you.

All things considered, the poll I’ll take the most seriously is the one announcing the results after the balloting is finished on July 22.

Karaoke: Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay

DRUMMER Daisuke Inoue was named by Time Magazine in 1999 as one of the 20 most influential Asians of the century—along with Mao Tse-tung and Gandhi—and received the Ig Nobel Peace Prize from Harvard University students in 2004. Yet he failed to patent his invention, and the business he established to sell it went belly up. Today, he lives outside of Kobe and sells rat repellant devices for a living.

What is Inoue’s claim to fame?

He invented the karaoke machine! Here’s the magazine’s story as it appeared at the time, which contains the astonishing information that it took Inoue 28 years to try karaoke himself after inventing it.

One thing the author fails to mention in the article is the importance of singing in popular Japanese culture. Learning songs is a core part of early education, and most adult Japanese remember the words to songs they learned in kindergarten. Many, especially women, start singing along when they hear them. The longest-running TV show in Japan (Kohaku Uta Gassen) is the special New Year’s Eve singing contest starring a selected list of the most popular singers in the country. Another long-running show is Nodo Jiman, literally “Confidence in (Your) Throat”. It’s broadcast simultaneously on TV and radio from a different location around the country every Sunday and features local people with varying degrees of talent who get the opportunity to show off their singing skills—or lack of them—to a national audience. (And thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can see a clip here.)

Commercial karaoke in drinking establishments started out with a sound system, a set of tapes, and a book of lyrics. Improvements soon began to appear, however, and these included laser disc (now DVD) karaoke with filmed skits accompanying the music and the lyrics displayed on screen as subtitles. Shops sprouted up devoted exclusively to patrons who wanted to sing. Usually a town will have one or more shops that develop a reputation as the one where the talented amateurs hang out, and it can be fun just to go and listen. (Honest!) There are facilities called karaoke boxes where groups can rent karaoke rooms for their exclusive use. These are quite popular with high school students for after school recreation. There is on-line karaoke and a karaoke channel on cable TV. Many people have karaoke equipment at home they use for instant parties.

Most of the Westerners in Japan I know don’t enjoy karaoke very much (including me), which presents a challenge for accommodating oneself to this aspect of Japanese society. The Japanese often invite new foreigners out for a night on the town, and this inevitably means going to a karaoke establishment and being asked to sing. I soon adopted the solution of those Japanese who don’t care very much for karaoke—I settled on one song I liked and could perform reasonably well, and used this as my contribution for the night. Usually only one song is required; more than that is optional.

When I first came to Japan, I hung out with a Londoner who went back to England after two or three years. A few years later, he came back for a visit and hornswoggled two Japanese friends and me into a night of karaoke. He had been practicing in London clubs that catered to Japanese and wanted to show off.

We wound up in a bar with laser disc karaoke. It was fascinating that the pub’s clientele was rather blasé about seeing two Westerners and two Japanese out together singing, though there were few foreigners in town then. My London friend sang several Japanese songs that he memorized and had down very well. There was no reaction from the other customers. I hadn’t memorized any songs, but sang my contributions in Japanese from the subtitled lyrics shown on the video as the background music played. It is rare for Japanese anywhere to see a foreigner reading their language spontaneously, but the customers in this joint acted as if it happened all the time. In contrast, our two Japanese friends stuck to popular Western songs, and they sang entirely in English. The other customers continued to pay us no attention.

Just as we had decided to call it a night, one of the Japanese guys asked me to sing an American song before we went home so they could hear “what it really sounded like”. We discussed the possibilities and settled on Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode. Then I belted out a version at the top of my lungs. It was more shouting than singing.

It brought down the house. Cheers, applause, and rounds of drinks from total strangers! People who had ignored us for two hours all of a sudden wanted to strike up conversations and visit other shops for another round of singing. I’m still amazed whenever I recall that night.

Jong-il Be Goode

THE BLOG DPRK Studies features a weekly roundup of news articles focusing on North Korea, and their haul this week contained this item classified as “offbeat” by USA Today.

Tokyo was the host over the weekend to the semi-annual Design Festa, in which 6,000 artists from throughout Asia presented their creations. A popular motif this year was the Dear Leader himself, Kim Jong-il of North Korea, whose likeness appeared on greeting cards, t-shirts, and keychains. Don’t you think the designer of the following creation deserves an award?

One stall displayed greeting cards showing the leader, who famously sports a quiff, dressed as Elvis Presley and was titled “Jong Il B. Goode” — taken from the song “Johnny B. Goode” by another rock ‘n’ roller of the 50s, Chuck Berry.

If he put that on a t-shirt, he’d be rolling in money by the end of the year!

Is Matsuzaka a rookie? Or is Japanese baseball minor league?

WAYNE GRACZYK has been writing a column in the Japan Times on Japanese baseball and the players who play the game, both native and foreign, for more than 30 years. In his column on Sunday, Graczyk makes the point that it’s farcical to regard such people as Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, and Daisuke Matsuzaka as rookies, but that’s exactly how they are classified in the American major leagues. In fact, Ichiro, Kazuhiro Sasaki, and Hideo Nomo all won the Rookie of the Year award after their first year of baseball in the U.S.

Last week an Associated Press photo appeared in these pages with a caption that began, “Boston Red Sox rookie hurler Daisuke Matsuzaka . . . ” An AP story in the sports briefs mentioned New York Yankees “rookie pitcher Kei Igawa” and his progress in working his way back to top form. Previously, Boston reliever Hideki Okajima was named the American League “rookie” Pitcher of the Month for April. Then a Kyodo News item reported, “Red Sox rookie right-hander Daisuke Matsuzaka” was named the American League Player of the Week for the period of May 14-20.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. These guys are not rookies, and it really rubs me the wrong way whenever I see this description.

Graczyk took the issue up with Omar Minaya when the latter was an assistant GM with the Mets. (He is now the general manager.) Minaya agreed with his point, but said there’s nothing much that can be done because the rules state any first-year player in the U.S. is a rookie, regardless of his experience elsewhere.

The clinching argument:

The Red Sox did not pay more than $100 million in posting, salary and bonuses for Matsuzaka the inexperienced novice, but for Matsuzaka the proven veteran star.

Why does it matter? Graczyk notes that it’s unfair to players who are real rookies by making it less likely that they’ll win the ROY award, which could have financial benefits.

Though the columnist doesn’t say it, there might be another reason. He recalls that 10 years ago, there was a proposal to have a four-way postseason tournament between the champions of the (then) three AAA leagues in the U.S. and the winner of the Japan Series. The idea was scotched by the Japanese when they pointed out they couldn’t participate because they were not a minor league like the other three.

Japanese baseball doesn’t consider to be rookies those veterans of the American major leagues who come to play in Japan. Why shouldn’t the American major leagues implement a similar rule–and extend Japanese baseball the respect it deserves as a major league?

Especially now that the Japanese are the reigning champions of international baseball.

The disappearing Chinese junk

DAVID WARREN of the Ottawa Citizen has written a paen to the disappearing junk of China. Once Hong Kong’s Victoria harbor were filled with them; now a friend reports he counted only one on a recent trip.

Warren admires the beauty of their perfection:

…the ancient vessel was a whole creature, a perfect unity of its parts, quiet and at peace with itself like the dhows of the Arabs; and like a Micronesian proa, at one with its crew.

But that’s only the first part of his Sunday column. He extends the theme to encompass what he calls “the tyranny of progress”.

Beauty, truth, the good, do not come into the human view except on condition of simplicity of life. And this is the very condition the “universal and homogenous world state” is in the business of eradicating.

Younger readers might suspect he’s just another old-timer depressed about the world passing him by. But to paraphrase the American non-fiction writer Joseph Mitchell, it takes a lifetime to understand simplicity. And there’s a lot to be said for Warren’s sentiment, “I’m against machines with skills, and people without them.”

In Japan, love will find a way

If you’re out on the town by yourself on a Friday night in the West and encounter the girl/guy of your dreams (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), the question at the end of the night often becomes, “Your place or mine”. If one or both of you are married or otherwise engaged, it then becomes a matter of finding the closest Holiday Inn or motel (or so people tell me).

Those solutions are not an option for most Japanese, however, as many Japanese young people, particularly women, still live at home. Japan also doesn’t have the interstate highway system of the United States, and people are more likely to take a train or airplane for longer trips, so the motel industry is nonexistent.

Love will find a way, however, and in Japan that way is usually in a “love hotel”. Since the urge is eternal, the Japanese have no problem with recognizing and calling a spade a spade, so there are plenty of businesspeople looking out for the main chance. That’s why love hotels are a major industry in Japan and are found everywhere—including sedate suburban neighborhoods. I live in a quiet, older part of town, and three blocks away from my house is an establishment with a small neon sign in front announcing itself as the Hanazono (Flower Garden). Discreet as it is—the entrance and exits are hidden—everyone knows exactly what it is, and no one seems to mind. The initials NIMBY (not in my back yard), often used in the U.S. when people do not want certain facilities or enterprises in their neighborhood, don’t seem to apply here. They’re in everyone’s backyard.

They’ve been there for a long time, too. Love hotels offer rates for stays of two hours or less, or for all night, and short-stay hotels for couples have existed in Japan since the early 1600s. The forerunner of the modern love hotel was called a tsurekomi ryokan. Ryokan are Japanese style inns and tsurekomi means bring your own, and they’re not talking about bottles. These facilities were mandated by the government for the use of Occupation servicemen after WWII, when prostitution was still legal in Japan. After prostitution was outlawed in 1957, the hotels spread out, grew, and transformed into a different kind of lodging entirely.

The original tsurekomi ryokan had little or nothing in the way of amenities, including toilets or air conditioners. They were for servicemen and hookers, after all. But to stay in business after the Occupation forces left, the operators developed the modern love hotel that became a financially lucrative industry. How lucrative? Try four trillion yen a year. Statistically, there are 951 couples in a love hotel somewhere in Japan this very minute. The hotels have an occupancy rate of 260%, compared to 70% for the normal hotel. Rates are so reasonable that a room can be rented for the night at a price lower than that of a standard hotel, and there is no falloff in amenities. In fact, some tourist guides suggest that travelers to Japan looking for inexpensive accommodation consider staying in love hotels.

It goes without saying that they are discreet. The entrances and exits are hidden. Customers park in a lot that is often underground, and there are devices resembling traffic barriers or other means to hide license plate numbers from the nosy or the cameras of private detectives. There is no front desk and no cheerful staff member to greet you (or recognize you in town during the day two weeks later). Modern hotels allow customers to select a room, find it, and pay for it through a completely automated system. In the old-fashioned places, couples inform the staff by in-house telephone when they’re going to leave, and the cash is anonymously collected through a slot in the door.

Due to the number of hotels and the intense competition, hotels are often decorated using specific themes to attract visitors. Some try to capture the romance of Europe. The room in the accompanying photo tries to create the mood of Greece with its view of the Acropolis. Doing the research for this article, I saw a photograph of one hotel that offered rooms with the ambiance of a “European port”. Not the area close to the docks, I hope. Some feature amenities not usually seen in the home, such as a rotating bed or a ceiling mirror. Others duplicate the sets of movies popular in Japan, such as Roman Holiday or Gone With the Wind.

In fact, the services and benefits provided by Japanese love hotels are as diverse as the Japanese imagination. Some have karaoke rooms (why?), Jacuzzis, or swimming pools. If swapping is your adventure, some hotels have adjoining rooms so you can switch back and forth. If you like to watch, some hotels have in-house video channels, but of course you’ll be watched while you’re doing the watching. Some also offer party rooms for groups, and naturally, there are S&M facilities for folks with that preference.

Believe it or not, the primary customers for love hotels are women in their 20s, so the hotels are designed and decorated with female customers in mind. The highest outlay by owners for an individual room is the bath, which of course has a Japanese style tub. They’re stocked with brand name shampoos, hair conditioners, and other beauty products to attract repeat customers. The nearby photo on the left shows a sink that the hotel says upfront was designed to appeal to women, while the one on the right shows the expense hoteliers will go to for the bath.

And they offer more than décor. Hotels often provide free drinks in the refrigerator and free dinner or breakfast, while others have chefs on the staff to provide free food. Then there are the bonuses. One hotel offered a free trip to Tokyo Disneyland to any couple who stayed in all 24 rooms of their rooms within six months and a free trip to Hong Kong for those that did it twice

The amenities offered by hotels even differ by region. In the Kansai area (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe), the love hotels tend to use free food to attract customers, while those in the Kanto area (Tokyo, Yokohama) emphasize rooms that create a specific mood or atmosphere.

And who could fail to enjoy the names of these establishments? Some of the names I found on the web include: Hotel Rose Lips, Châteaux Belle, Paradise, Casablanca, Hotel J-Mex, Hotel Liberty, Green Green, Hotel Palau, Executive Hotel Grand Garden, Hotel I-N-G, Hotel BaRong, ReStay, Hotel Laporti, Hotel Ash, Hotel Birth (maybe they ought to reconsider this), Grand Chariot, Hotel Vie-Bonheur Kobe, Hotel Wien Bel Magic (Wien is Vienna), Wimbledon (singles or doubles?), Hotel 24°C, Hotel Prelude (isn’t that part over?), and the Hotel Stellate. The latter, astonishingly enough, sells its own line of products, such as robes with the name of the hotel monogrammed on the front. Not something you’d want your wife to find in the suitcase after an overnight business trip.

If you’re thinking that the Japanese are a nation full of rabbits, however, consider these statistics. Japan usually ranks last in sexuality surveys for frequency of sex. They average 36 times a year, compared to 97 times annually worldwide. When asked what activities they prefer to sex, 20% of Japanese said sleeping and 13% said shopping. They do have a higher ranking for number of partners per person, however. Their average is 10.2, placing them seventh and above the world average of 7.7.

If you ever find yourself in Japan and want to find a love hotel on the net, there are plenty of nationwide directories, including one here and another here. If you can’t have a good time in some of these places, check into a monastery instead!

The Korean language in Japanese–and vice versa!

THE MAP SHOWN HERE highlights an important aspect of Japanese-Korean relations that’s often overlooked by outsiders, and even some Japanese and Koreans themselves. Notice just how close the southern Japanese island of Kyushu and the southern part of the Korean Peninsula are to each other. A flight departing from Fukuoka City takes 90 minutes to arrive in Tokyo and two hours to reach Sendai in the northeastern part of the country—but only 45 minutes to land in Busan, or an hour to touch down in Seoul. The hydrofoils that ply the Korean Strait between Fukuoka City and Busan make the trip in three hours, moving along at a speed slightly less than that of an automobile on an expressway.

In today’s era of nation-states, the Kyushu native has of course much more in common with the native of the Tohoku area, now a fellow countryman, than he does with someone from Busan. But in an earlier era, geographical proximity was the predominant factor in human interaction, until that aspect was vitiated by the creation of national borders.

There was so much interaction—both ways—between Kyushu and the southern part of Korea that more than a few scholars in both countries consider the region as a whole to have been one cultural sphere. That state of affairs continued until the 7th century, at least, and until the end of the 8th century, Kyushu (and the Japanese imperial court) interacted more extensively with the Baekche (Kudara in Japanese) and Silla kingdoms than it did with the northeast.

The fruits of this interaction were much the same as those for any two nearby regions throughout the world, and they include more than just intermarriage. There are many examples—burial mounds, tools, ornaments, artwork, architecture—but none more obvious than language.

Their name is mud–and they’re proud of it!

THERE’S NO BETTER EXAMPLE anywhere of people making lemonade out of the lemon that life handed them than an annual event held on the tidal mudflats of the Ariake Sea by the small town of Kashima in Saga Prefecture. The tide level differential at the Ariake Sea is six meters, one of the three highest of any body of water in the world. (The other two are said to be in France and South Korea.) I live near the Ariake Sea and have seen the difference. When you stand at land’s end at high tide, you can watch the water lapping at your feet. When you return at low tide, you won’t see any water at all—just mudflats stretching to the horizon.

There’s a local story about these mudflats and World War II that sounds as if it might be an urban legend—or more properly, a rural legend. The old-timers like to cackle about the American planes that flew over the town during high tide to plan a bombing run. When they returned, the story goes, they dropped their bombs into the tidal flats and killed a lot of maritime wildlife, sparing the town. It’s a plausible story, until you realize there was probably nothing in Kashima worth bombing at the time. (And records indicate Saga Prefecture was not heavily bombed.)

What do you do if you’re a small rural town on the coast that no one ever visits, located next to a huge, constantly shifting expanse of mud? What you do is find a way to turn all that mud to your advantage, so the people of Kashima created the Gatalympics. That’s a bilingual portmanteau word created by combining the Japanese word gata, or tidal mudflats, with Olympics. The first Gatalympics were held on May 3, 1985, and I was there.

They’re not fooling when they say Olympics. The town invites university students studying in Japan to participate in Olympic-style events held in the mud instead of a track or swimming pool. Before the competition starts, they march onto the assembly grounds at the seashore in groups divided by nationality, accompanied by recordings of their respective national anthems.

Meanwhile, the competitions that the organizers have created for the mud in Kashima are a testament to the human imagination. The events include swimming, dancing, and cycling races. Yes, cycling races–a course of plywood is laid out on the surface of the mudflats and the participants compete to see how far they can ride a bicycle before falling over into the slop.

The photo on the left shows what they call The Women’s Battle Royale. We’d have called it King (or Queen) of the Hill where I grew up in the U.S., except there’s an anchored platform instead of a hill. The spectators love this—evidently, watching women wrestle in the mud is a popular attraction anywhere you go in the world.

They’ve also set up a crane over the mudflats and suspended a rope from it. The objective is to swing from the rope and see how far you can fly into the mud. The Tarzan yell is optional. Then there’s the four-team tug of war, with the chairman of the executive committee joining in. (Can you imagine the head of the IOC participating in the Olympics? Especially if he had to get dirty.)

Additional events include a race over an obstacle course and a parent-child triathalon. The Gatalympics conclude with the NTT Cup, which is a freestyle dash over the flats. The first event starts at 11:00 a.m. and it ends at 3:30 p.m. It pretty much has to—that’s when the tide starts coming back in.

The whole idea is to get filthy and laugh yourself silly. There’s nothing like competing in a pseudo athletic event and getting slathered from head to toe in stinking mud to create international camaraderie. The people of Kashima benefit because the national media cover the event every year, they get a piece of tourism revenue that ordinarily would go somewhere else, and everyone really does have a lot of fun. It’s hard to be shy or stand on ceremony talking to someone when both of you are covered in slime.

If you think you’re a good mudder and fancy your odds, it’s probably too late to go for the gold this year, because the Gatalympics are being held on Sunday the 27th. But you could always come and watch. There’s no telling who you’ll meet. In addition to the foreign students, English teachers, and locals, all sorts of people have stopped by. Researchers from the Fisheries and Fishing Community Research Center of the Korea Maritime Institute have visited in the past to observe. The Center was studying ways to promote local economies in South Korea by using tourism in fishing villages.

Before you know it, the South Koreans will be sending over a national team to compete every year. Perhaps Kashima can offer a prize called the Shochu Cup.

Mutsugoro

After next Sunday, however, life returns to normal in Kashima, and that means catching mutsugoro, or mudskippers. If you’ve never seen a mudskipper, take a look at those two darlings in the accompanying photo. They’d both fit in the palm of your hand. They’re called mudskippers because they skip over mudflats when they look for food, and probably when they look for mates, too. In fact, they can leave the water for longer periods of time than the average fish, as this site about the Singaporean variety explains.

All that mud is the mudskippers’ habitat. They dig holes in the mudflats and come out to frolic when the tide is out. Not only are they edible, some people think they’re a delicacy, so that means there’s money to be made by going out and catching them. I’ve watched fishermen, such as the one shown in the photo, do just that, and it’s not an easy way to make a living.

It might be more accurate to say these men are a combination of fisherman and hunter. They slide out with one knee bent on the board, skating all over the flats to catch as many as they can before the tide rolls in. They snatch the mudskippers with a tool that looks like a fishing pole and a line, but with a special hook at the end used to snare the creatures and flick them back toward the box.

That sounds like it should be a special category in the Gatalympics, but these men depend on it for their livelihoods.

Mud Festivals

The folks in Kyushu seem to have a special fondness for playing in the mud. We’ve already talked about the Mudslinging Festival held every March in Asakura, Fukuoka Prefecture, in which the townspeople throw mud at a young man selected to be a priest for a day, after bucking him up with sake to withstand the onslaught.

If you’re the type that enjoys getting down and getting muddy, then Kyushu might just be the place to spend a week or two. The following Sunday after the Gatalympics, on June 3, the city of Hioki in Kagoshima Prefecture holds another mud extravaganza, called the Seppetobe Festival. Its origins are unclear, but it dates back more than 400 years to 1595.

Here’s what happens—the local men get dressed in white robes and meet at the local Hachiman Shinto shrine. The first order of business is to pass around an 18-liter jug of shochu mixed with hot water. Can you think of a better way to prepare for a religious ceremony in the mud? Witnesses say they can get carried away with themselves and wind up sloshing a lot of the grog on the ground, leaving the shrine grounds with a strong odor of liquor.

The priests then conduct a Shinto ceremony, while the men enter a nearby mud field, form a circle, and start jumping around, perhaps practicing for the main event. At the conclusion of the ceremony, the object of worship at the shrine (in which the divinity is thought to dwell) is carried over in a procession. Everyone then moves into a rice paddy, which has been specially filled with water for the occasion. The men bring with them 10-meter-high flagpoles, which are the symbol of their respective neighborhoods. The rice paddy is filled with water, the men are filled with shochu, and the flagpoles are heavy, which makes walking a tricky business.

A small group starts off the ceremony by forming a small circle and performing a dance and splashing water. Other men gradually enter the circle until their number reaches about 100. By this time, they are covered in mud, splashing, cavorting, ripped out of their minds, and praying for a bountiful harvest.

Seppetobe is local dialect for seiippai tobe, or fly (jump) as hard as you can. They’ve come up with some good justifications for this behavior, other than just having a goofy good time. All that stomping in the paddy kills harmful inspects (so they say), and also makes paddy cultivation easier. They do it as hard as they can to impress the divinity with their seriousness of intent, hoping that will bring them blessings in the form of a good harvest.

And here you thought being a stick in the mud meant you were a grumpy old fellow who didn’t know how to enjoy himself!

Seoul’s International Lotus Lantern Festival

By all means, take a look at this post at The Marmot’s Hole of the recent International Lotus Lantern Festival in Seoul. Excellent photographs! Wish I could have seen it–and heard it, as a samulnori group also performed.

Comfort women again: One door closes, and another opens

READER INFIMUM sends along this link that machine translates a Korean news article from Naver into Japanese about the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs’ handling of the resolution censuring Japan over the comfort women issue.

From what I can decipher, the article says it will be impossible to pass the bill this month because the committee has 23 other items of business with which to deal. Instead of the comfort woman resolution, a bill thanking South Korea for its efforts in the war against terrorism will be introduced. (Does that not sound like a consolation prize?) It concludes by saying that committee chair Tom Lantos had no explanation for not introducing the bill, though 130 representatives had supported it. Does this mean the resolution is dead for this session?

Reports now indicate that the legislation has been merely delayed, and a vote may come in June, but they’ve already delayed it once to avoid conflicting with Prime Minister Abe’s visit in May. Speculation without further information is pointless, but I am reminded of the Japanese proverb 大山鳴動してねずみ一匹 (taizan meido shite, nezumi ippiki, or the mountain rumbles and produces a mouse). This certainly has given plenty of people without a stake in the issue a chance to burn off some spare time by indulging their emotions, which is the primary business of the mass media (and, unfortunately, increasing numbers of blogs).

Fortunately, those enthralled by the issue won’t have to go cold turkey—last Friday, the U.N. Committee Against Torture issued a report that “accused Japan of trying to whitewash its past practice of forcing women to become sex slaves for Japanese Imperial army soldiers, and urged Tokyo to help surviving victims.”

Hey, when you’re having so much fun validating your own goodness by castigating the evil of others, how can you stop? Especially when the committee members include such anti-torture stalwarts as China and Russia. It’s difficult not to consider this committee a self-parody; a year ago this month the same U.N. committee rebuked Senegal—a committee member—for violating the Convention on Terror. It’s like a perpetual floating game of political Old Maid.

Hans Greimel wrote the piece for the Associated Press, which contains quite a few elements of unintentional self-parody itself. How’s this for an example of modern, a-go-go cotton candy caring and concern?

“(T)he U.N. committee condemned what it called efforts to cover up history and urged Japan to address the “discriminatory roots of sexual and gender-based violations” and improve rehabilitation for survivors.

It said the victims suffered “incurable wounds” and are experiencing “continuing abuse and re-traumatization as a result of the state party’s official denial of the facts, concealment or failure to disclose other facts, failure to prosecute those criminally responsible for acts of torture, and failure to provide adequate rehabilitation to the victims and survivors.”

In March, a fund set up by Japan to help Asian women forced into military brothels expired amid widespread criticism it had fallen short of healing wounds.”

I’m beginning to think there’s a genetic component in this. Some young men walk around with shapeless shirts that look like the pajama tops worn by old men in a nursing home and consider themselves the fashion plate. Some young women in Japan today think it’s fashionable to wear gold or silver shoes with sharply pointed toes. Other people wouldn’t be caught dead in duds like that. What else can explain it besides the hardwiring of the nervous system?

In the same way, some people will consider the above language an exquisite expression of the imperative for long-overdue moral justice, while others will wonder where all the drips came from. On another level, it’s like the scene in Animal House in which John Belushi smashes the guitar of the boy playing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” on the stairs. Folkies will be aghast at the violence of the philistine; R&B fans will laugh out loud.

We’re past the point of useful debate on this issue. Japan will have to resign itself to the fact that occasional eruptions such as this have become part of the wallpaper, while the People Who Are Seriously Committed will have to resign themselves to being ignored by those outside the membership of their international club of wonderful people who congratulate themselves on being wonderful.

The article has the usual half-truths and misrepresentations. Instead of going into it all again, here, here, and here are links to my past posts on the subject.

Bon appetit, and bon soir!