Too fat to fight the Japanese

NOW IT’S OFFICIAL: The Chinese have gotten gloriously rich.

Here’s why: Government officials are complaining that Chinese kids have gotten fat, lazy, and useless.

Media reports of hand-wringing and tocsin-sounding about becoming a nation of porkers is common in the wealthy Western countries, though a fat lot of good all the complaining has done to stop it. Some of the Beige Shirts in the Obama Administration have even begun to mutter darkly about the implications for energy costs and the national infrastructure, and we all know where they’re headed with that.

But leave it to the Chinese to come up up with their own reasons why all the young hippos are a threat to the well-being of the nation:

The government must immediately invest some of its new wealth in ensuring that children take regular exercise, Beijing Sports University president Yang Hua told the sports group of the largely ceremonial advisory body to China’s annual parliament.

“It is time for the Chinese nation to improve the physical fitness of our next generation,” said Yang. “If we miss the next three to five years a whole generation will be next to useless.

“If there was another war against Japan, would the younger Chinese be able to fight the Japanese one-on-one?

Considering there are 1.3 billion people in China and 127 million people in Japan, that the Chinese have been involved in at least three foreign wars since 1945 and the Japanese none, and that Chinese military forces occasionally probe Japanese maritime defenses while the Japanese have better ways to spend their time, the more pertinent question might be:

“If the Chinese decide to start a war with Japan, how long will the Japanese be able to resist before they’re overwhelmed by sheer numbers alone?”

Besides, it’s hard to get up when you’re pinned to the ground by a fat guy.

The new Chinese budget, incidentally, calls for a 7.5% increase in defense expenditures over last year’s funding. Some people actually thought this was important because it was the first time in 22 years their military outlays won’t rise by a double-digit percentage. Nevertheless, it was a 10.7% increase over last year’s initial budget figures, and they still aren’t counting the money being spent on plans for a domestic-built aircraft carrier and ballistic missile development.

The Reuters journalist tried to put a bib on the baby to keep the spittle from giving everyone the wrong idea:

Japan invaded and occupied much of China between 1931 and 1945. Rancour over Japanese wartime atrocities has subsided as a diplomatic flashpoint, but it continues to shape Chinese public attitudes toward Japan and its people.

The reason the rancour continues to shape Chinese attitudes toward Japan and its people is that the Chinese government encourages it. Reuters and others in the Western media, however, overlook that it’s another form of rent-seeking behavior that has the added advantage of deflecting popular anger away from them. That makes for a less sensational narrative.

Even though Reuters’s failure to provide more context or information makes it difficult to understand what this man is talking about, it’s easy to hear at least one snatch of the Chinese national conversation when they think the rest of the world isn’t listening:

“A survey has shown that Chinese teenagers are behind their Japanese peers in almost every indicator it measured,” Jiang Xiaoyu, a senior member of the organizing committee for the Beijing Games, told the meeting.

And yes, the Chinese are still statolatrists:

“The government has enough money for banquets and for luxurious office buildings, do they not have money for children’s physical education?” he added.

When did physical fitness require spending money, least of all from the government? And this from the country that invented chi gung, an excellent way to improve physical fitness that requires the practitioner only to just stand there without moving.

The article provided yet another glimpse of the Chinese weltanshauung:

“The physical fitness of the young is a matter of strengthening our country and our Chinese race.”

I found this article on a site with a collection of links to what the site owner considered to be minor curiosities.

Had this been backwards, however, and some Japanese official were triple-tongueing it about “strengthening the race” and the need to get in fighting trim for one-on-one combat with the Chinese, would an article reporting on that official’s statement have passed by in such obscurity?

The question answers itself, doesn’t it?

And the Olympic gold medal for whingeing goes to…

GIVE CREDIT to Robert Koehler of The Marmot’s Hole for being one savvy blogger.

As he notes in this post, he’s written about the contentions between Japan and South Korea regarding the island of Tsushima several times before.

But the weather’s warming up and that chauvinist sap has been primed by the Winter Olympics and the ensuing cross-strait cyberwar, so naturally the fancy of the dateless and friendless saps will turn to prowling the Internet on a Friday night looking for more pointless disputes to get involved with.

All the better to drive up the page views, my dear.

Rather than write about it again, he cops a quote from the blogger Kushibo, who wonders about the whacky Japanese getting upset about Korean behavior on the island.

Well, I’ve written about that issue too. And as those who have read this post know, there are more reasons than the day is long for the Japanese to “have a stick up their arse” about the Koreans on Tsushima. One of the best is the first, which appears in the introductory quotes before I got around to writing a word of my own.

Kushibo also thinks it’s weird that the Japanese are concerned about Korean restaurants with ties to the North in this country. We can give him a pass on that one, however. He doesn’t seem to know much about the decades of North Korean intelligence operations in this country, working through places exactly such as those. It probably would seem weird without the background information.

Indeed, the Marmot’s fishing expedition caught one in the very first comment.

What I find more interesting are the Japanese not being able to accept Kim Yuna’s gold medal win. I wish they just get over it. It’s becoming really annoying.

The Japanese? All 127 million of them? He doesn’t seem to know many people in this country.

If he can read the lingo, I can slip him some links to raving right-wing nationalists who sincerely congratulated Ms. Kim on her medal. Then I could slip him plenty more from normal people. More than he’s got enough time to read.

It’s a humorous note, really. He’s annoyed because they can’t get over it? Well, he could always do what the Japanese do when the Koreans can’t get over whatever the whinge du jour happens to be on the menu.

Ignore them.

Then again, the Japanese have had a lot more practice in dealing with annoyed Koreans. Such as those Koreans who got upset with the proposed design for posters for the joint World Cup because it used the outline of a soccer pitch. It too closely resembled the first kanji used to write “Japan” (日). They insisted the Japanese change the posters, and of course they did.

No, I am not making that up.

But not to fret, they’ll get over it soon. That might be hard to believe for someone whose experiences with Olympic controversies are limited to bitching about Apolo Ohno. That one’s lasted for the better part of a decade and three Olympic games, and also spilled over to pollute a World Cup soccer match. With that sort of background, I suppose we should give him a pass too. It must be a novel experience to have the shoe on the other foot for a change.

Be that as it may, I have to admit that if I were dateless, friendless, and reading a South Korean site on a Friday night, I’d probably get irritated myself.

Here are all the Google ads attached to The Marmot’s post: Meet Japanese ladies, Earn your MBA in Japan, Want to Work in Japan, Japan News FT.com, Japan Investments, and HVAC Contractor in Japan.

That last one’s for refrigeration solutions, which is fitting. It’s long past time for some people to chill.

But I won’t hold my breath.

The regressive progressives

33. JAPAN’S LOWER HOUSE passed the budget for next fiscal year last Tuesday.

32. It will go into effect in one month regardless of what happens in the upper house.

31. The budget calls for JPY 92.3 trillion in expenditures, or roughly $US 1.0 trillion.

30. That is the largest budget in Japanese history.

29. To pay for it, the government plans to issue JPY 44.3 trillion yen in debt.

28. That means the government will have to borrow nearly half of what it will spend and break their promise not to increase the amount of deficit-financing bonds.

27. They will pile this debt on a financial plate already piled so high as to defy the laws of physics, mathematics, and common sense.

26. The OECD estimates that Japanese public debt will rise to 200% of GDP by 2011.

25. By way of contrast, the level of public debt in Greece was about 113% of GDP in 2009.

24. The possible EU bailout of that mismanaged government has created an existential crisis for the union and rioting in the streets of Athens.

23. People sure can get surly when weaned off the government tit–it’s that perverse sense of entitlement.

22. One justification for Japan’s budgetary elephantiasis is to stimulate an economic recovery.

21. One cause of Japan’s budgetary elephantiasis is that past spending to stimulate an economic recovery failed repeatedly.

20. A government stimulus will always fail, in the long run.

19. The Hatoyama government is oblivious to the failure of the stimulus in the United States to do anything other than create a trillion-dollar hole and prevent some public sector job loss.

18. The United States government’s proposed solution to the failure of the stimulus is to have a second stimulus.

17. To repeat one’s efforts in the face of failure instead of changing one’s approach is a defining characteristic of the second-rate mind.

16. Had either government a lick of common sense, they would have found ways to spend less money instead of more by downsizing the public sector.

15. But Japan has a government of social democrats in fact, if not in name, so the idea that feeding the public sector is folly will never occur to them.

14. The de facto social democrats have included in the elephantine budget a new government child-care stipend, free public high school tuition, and plans to remove the tolls from public expressways.

13. They are renationalizing JAL airlines, the public expressway corporations, and–unlike the Europeans–Japan Post.

12. This will result in more elephantine government, more elephantine budgets, and before long, more elephantine taxes.

11. It will also atrophy the private sector—the only part of the economy that is capable of providing a real stimulus to the economy.

10. They have cut a small amount of what they claim is wasteful public spending to pay for their programs.

9. Part of what they consider wasteful public spending is outlays on the promotion of science and technology.

8. They cut these expenditures by 3.3%

7. They don’t seem to be so interested in laying the groundwork for the creation of new industries, new wealth, and new employment, do they?

6. Meanwhile, they’re goofy enough to think they can spur economic activity by splitting the country into five blocs to take consecutive five-day holidays at different times of the year.

5. Does the phrase “Bread and Circuses” ring a bell?

4. In other words, they are determined to turn the world’s second largest economy, wrought not by miracle, but by intelligence, diligence, and hard work, into an imitation of low-growth, low-dynamism, and high-statolatry postwar Europe–now that they’ve got the low-birth part down pat.

3. Their objective is to replace the concept of government as servants of the people with the concept of people as clients of the government.

2. In intellectual, moral, and practical terms, this government and its policies are backward.

1. Just like the numbers on this list

Zero and beyond:

Here’s a list that goes from 1-10. It’s about Greece, but it might well be applicable here before too long. Note in particular the proposed rate for the VAT, and remember that Japan’s government wants to boost the consumption tax into the teens.

Now they make jets

EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS the Honda brand from their automobiles and motorcycles, and they also manufacture what they call “power products”, including generators and snow removal equipment.

A new addition to their product lineup is a five-passenger Very Light Jet that has the potential to transform passenger air travel sooner than you think. Glenn Harlan Reynolds in Popular Mechanics tells the story:

…the HondaJet, a fast, comparatively cheap five-passenger Very Light Jet that Honda hopes will not only appeal to the usual run of corporate-jet purchasers, but that will also promote an entirely new way of flying, one that’s capable of bridging the gap between cheap-but-unreliable commercial jet travel and swanky-but-expensive corporate jet travel. What I saw makes me think that the Honda folks just may be onto something.

The HondaJet is the brainchild of Honda Aircraft president and CEO Michimasa Fujino. Fujino told me that his first job in the United States was in Mississippi, back in the 1980s, and that he found that wherever he traveled by air—even elsewhere in Mississippi—he usually wound up having to change planes in Atlanta. This seemed wasteful of time and fuel, and made travel iffier, since it created the risk of a missed connection. To Fujino, the hub-and-spoke system makes sense for a country like Japan, where Tokyo is at the center of everything, but much less sense for a country as big as the United States, where important places are widely distributed. For this, point-to-point travel is much better.

Imagine this for the price of first-class ticket:

…(B)y the time the HondaJets are rolling off the line at full speed, there’s a good chance that the economy will have recovered. So the air-taxi model—where you go to a website, enter your destination, and have a small jet swoop down to pick you up, possibly at a small business airport rather than a big one where parking and security hassles are greater—may well have a chance.

The only drawback is that passengers won’t get a chance to ride in that sharp-looking cockpit!

Who wants yesterday’s papers?

I think the mainstream media is quite broken.
- Sarah Palin

THAT THE PRESENTATION OF NEWS by journalists in paper periodicals or by readers on television programs is the smokestack industry of the early 21st century is clear to everyone with an Internet connection.

The causes of this phenomenon are as equally clear. Some in the industry cite the failure of their business model, while no one in that industry has developed a satisfactory replacement model. Others point to the manner of presentation. Much of the newspaper content is as unreadable as the paper is inedible, while television offers the convenience of instant ramen in an overly stylized, time-limited serving with even less content. Still others share the opinion of Internet news aggregator and website entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, who recently told a roomful of journalists covering a political conference in the U.S.: “It’s not your business model that sucks. It’s you that sucks.”

The Japanese news industry is not immune to the maladies plaguing their brethren in the West, and it has a few that are uniquely its own. Here’s a look at some of the symptoms in this country.

Wave goodbye to the prime demographic

Tokyo-based M1-F1 Soken released a report on its survey of newspaper readership among M1s, or males aged 20-34, that sent ripples throughout every newspaper company in the country. The organization, described as a “think tank”, conducted an Internet survey that found only 36.7% of the M1s often read newspapers. According to 62.6% of that group, their reason for shunning the dead-tree editions is that they have to pay for them.

The other reasons cited, in order, were:
* No time to read them
* The information from other media is sufficient
* They contain too much unnecessary information

M1-F1 Soken said their results suggest this age cohort thinks newspapers are inadequate as information aggregators.

The reasons the M1 newspaper fans cited for consuming the product were:
* Efficient information aggregators (46.1%)
* Offer a wide range of information (39.3%)

A total of 86.2% of all respondents said that an efficient information aggregator was what they were looking for.

The readership rate was higher among the M2 group, or males aged 35-49, at 48.5%

Said the organization’s Matsukawa Chieko:

It was surprising that more than 60% of the respondents cited the reason of costs. Today they can get news off the Internet or Yahoo News, so it might be their view of information as something to be paid for is declining.

Said one of the university students surveyed:

I subscribed (to a newspaper) five months ago when a sales agent told me he wouldn’t come back if I did. But my impression is that the Net has the same information the newspapers offer. I get a pretty good idea of what’s going on from Yahoo News or the 2channel news service. When the subscription runs out, I don’t think I’ll renew it.

Wave goodbye to the Mainichi

The American print media has been cutting staff to stem losses for several years, and ABC news recently announced it would lay off or eliminate the jobs of 25% of its non-union personnel.

Now the red ink is washing up on Japanese shores. The Asahi Shimbun posted its first-ever consolidated net loss in the business year that ended last March, and the Nikkei financial newspaper group recorded a loss in the January-June 2009 term. That was the first loss for the group since it began compiling consolidated earnings in 2000. Disappearing ad revenue is the most frequently cited reason for the disappearing profits.

The national newspaper in the deepest water, however, is the Mainichi Shimbun. On their interim report in September for the current fiscal year (which ends this month), Mainichi posted a net loss of JPY 1.234 billion (about $US 13.9 million) on sales of JPY 1.316 billion, itself a 4.6% year-on-year decline. It was the company’s second straight interim net loss. The only good news was that it was an improvement on the JPY 1.619 billion net interim loss of the previous year.

They also recorded both a current loss and operating loss in 2008 for the full year—the first time that happened in 15 years.

The Mainichi was the newspaper singled out as the one most likely to go under by the weekly Shukan Diamond in its 5 December article last year titled, The Double Depression for Newspapers and Television.

According to the magazine, the company’s outlook is so bleak their main bank, Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, suggested they close their offices in Nagoya and Hokkaido, suspend publication of the Sunday Mainichi weekly magazine, and sell their headquarters building.

The company pleaded with the bank to let them keep their Hokkaido operations, the story goes, because the Mainichi printing plant there brings in revenue by handling the printing for a local religious newspaper. One can just visualize the mob at the press club bar hearing that news and ordering another round.

The severity of the paper’s problems became apparent when they later announced an arrangement with the Kyodo news agency to restore ties that ended 58 years ago.

Here’s the Mainich survival strategy: Last October, they informed their union they would eliminate 20 one-man regional bureaus. Instead of generating their own stories for their local editions, they will now pick up dispatches from the regional papers that are part of the Kyodo network.

They also plan to use Kyodo for stories derived from government and corporate announcements and concentrate on in-depth surveys and analysis from their own perspective, which they think is their strength.

Those stories from governments and corporations are called “announcement journalism” in Japanese, but might be called “press release journalism” in the West. The newspaper’s representatives attend the news conferences of government organizations and companies for their daily information feedbag. By some estimates, this accounts for 70% of the news media content in Japan.

Mainichi also hopes to promote sports and cultural events with Kyodo and work together on campaigns. In addition, they’re going to outsource page production systems and printing, and try to make the sales network more efficient. (These reports did not mention the Hokkaido printing plant.) The new arrangement will start on 1 April.

Some Japanese bloggers writing on mass media issues think the Mainichi is planning a shift from being a true national newspaper to an aggregation of regional newspapers to stave off liquidation.

Said Mainichi President Asahina Yutaka:

As of now, we are not thinking of restructuring in the regional areas in concert with this agreement…We will maintain an office in the kisha club, but we can use Kyodo for government and corporate announcements.

A progressive solution is now the problem

Discuss the news media in Japan, and mention of the kisha club is inevitable.

The kisha (reporters’) club system, often translated as press club in English, has been well reported overseas. That’s no surprise—in addition to being a legitimate story, it gives foreign journalists an excuse to indulge in righteous indignation and to parade their self-proclaimed independence, and thus their superiority.

The system was seen as a great advance for democracy and a free press in 1890 when the first club pressured the Japanese Diet to provide access. No one knows exactly how many exist now—estimates range from 800 to 5,000. They are the medium through which most Japanese news passes. In this system, the recipients of the information are the major newspapers, including the so-called Big Four national newspapers, as well as the wire services and TV and radio broadcasters that belong to such trade associations as the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association. The distributors of the information are government ministries and agencies at the national and local level, and corporations.

Reporters from Japanese magazines, Internet publications, and foreign reporters have been traditionally excluded from the system.

The government benefits because the arrangement offers them some control over the news. Kisha club members that displease the government will find themselves out of the loop when all their competitors run a story they don’t know about. (This exclusion is known in the trade as toku-ochi.) Meanwhile, the news business benefits because it allows them to maintain their monopoly.

The same Japanese media bloggers didn’t understand the logic behind the Mainichi move. As one put it, announcing that you’re going to transcend press release journalism while maintaining an office in the kisha club and also relying on Kyodo is like saying you’ve kicked the nicotine habit while puffing on a Mild Seven Light.

More strange Mainichi logic

Mainichi reporter Furuta Shinji, the chief secretary of the club last year, told the New York Times in November it wasn’t as closed as people think. Over the past decade, some American and British financial news agencies have been allowed to join, and some non-members are allowed to attend press conferences on a case-by-case basis as observers. On occasion, they were even allowed the privilege of asking questions.

But Mr. Furuta’s justification for a closed system demonstrated why the Mainichi might be in such trouble. Some of non-journalist rabble might cause a commotion.

What if someone tried to commit suicide or burn themselves to death at a press conference? Who would take responsibility for that?

Laugh if you must, but it isn’t any goofier than anything written by the likes of E.J. Dionne, Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman, or Joe Kline these days, and some of their publications are in just as much financial hot water.

More DPJ hot air

Some hoped the system would change with the advent of a Democratic Party of Japan administration. They had good reason to hope—the DPJ had actually walked the walk in the past, and promised to continue to do so in the future.

The first to hold open news conferences was Okada Katsuya, then secretary-general, in 2002. The practice was continuously maintained with party presidents Kan Naoto, Mr. Okada himself, Maehara Seiji, Ozawa Ichiro, and Hatoyama Yukio.

That practice was maintained up to the very day that Hatoyama Yukio was sworn in as prime minister last September.

That’s when it ended.

Freelance journalist Uesugi Takashi counts himself as one of about 30 freelance and outside journalists who regularly attended DPJ press conferences over the years. (Mr. Uesugi frequently writes for weekly and monthly publications, and does not try to conceal his bias for the DPJ.)

Writing in the 11 October Shukan Bunshun last year, he quotes a one-on-one conversation he had with Mr. Hatoyama after the latter was selected as DPJ president on 16 May.

If I form a government, I’ll also make myself available to you. I’ll say, please, come right on in. There may have been some criticisms under the kisha club system, but I think that’s one of the best things Mr. Ozawa left behind after his tenure. That’s what I think. I of course will allow any person in for an interview, and I think we must hold the banner of fairness high.

When Mr. Uesugi and the other irregulars tried to attend Mr. Hatoyama’s first press conference as prime minister, they were stopped at the security office, made to wait 30 minutes, and then turned away. That’s when the plot got a lot thicker.

Officials in the Hatoyama administration made the following comments immediately after the event:

It was a splendid press conference. I’ve never seen a press conference this open before. That’s because it was open to the magazines and overseas reporters. It was unprecedented.

And:

The last part was particularly good. (The prime minister’s) aides said that time had run out, but he allowed a question about the contributions to his campaign from dead people. Has there ever been an initial press conference that fair?

Mr. Uesugi pointed out the people making that appraisal were veterans of the Kasumigaseki bureaucracy working in the prime minister’s office as aides. Each ministry sends some of their top personnel to work in these jobs. While the job description makes them sound important, the reporter said, “they are nothing more than monitors” to keep tabs on the government. They apply their influence to rein in the prime minister and chief cabinet secretary and water down legislative initiatives.

Their strategy worked. The Kyodo headline the next day read:

DPJ Holds Open Press Conference with Prime Minister
Magazine reporters and others join for first time

And the Asahi’s:

New Prime Minister’s First Press Conference; Magazine Reporters Allowed Entry

Five reporters from magazines and 15 from the overseas media did attend. None of them were allowed to ask questions. Mr. Uesugi thought they might as well have stayed home to watch it on TV.

None of the regular media reported that members of the Internet media were denied entry.

Uesugi Takashi

His years spent covering the DPJ and writing flattering articles about them have given Mr. Uesugi excellent access—he picked up the phone and called the prime minister. Mr. Hatoyama, he said, believed his own government’s propaganda that he had held an open news conference and didn’t realize people had been turned away.

Mr. Uesugi offers several reasons for the current state of affairs. The aide of a former prime minister told him that Kasumigaseki aides control the traffic flow in the Kantei (the Japanese equivalent of the White House, 10 Downing St., or the Kremlin), and limit the access of parliamentary aides to keep the political class scattered. They also control what reports from the news media go to the prime minister and chief cabinet secretary.

Meanwhile, the bureaucrats and kisha clubs work together to protect their interests. The establishment press benefits from the leaks received from “high government officials”.

The DPJ was elected to tame the bureaucracy, but their inability to hold open news conferences demonstrates an inability to deal with the bureaucracy. If Okada Katsuya can do it today—as foreign minister—why can’t Hatoyama Yukio?

Mr. Hatoyama told him:

I will definitely keep my promise. Please be patient just a little while longer.

The problem is not whether the DPJ and Prime Minister Hatoyama can or can’t, says Mr. Uesugi, but whether they will or won’t.

And you believed a Hatoyama promise?

In a Kyodo article that appeared on New Year’s Day—more than three months later—the prime minister was still making the same promises:

Hatoyama vowed again in late December to open up the press clubs, saying at a news conference he is sorry for having been slow in dealing with the issue.

“My determination remains unchanged over the matter, although you may not believe what I say,” he said in responding to a freelance reporter who accused him of doing nothing to open up the clubs.

Kyodo claims that one problem is the TV stations. They don’t want Internet media competitors cutting into their advertising revenue by broadcasting their own versions of the press conferences.

They also quoted Katsura Keiichi, whom they indentified as a leading researcher in journalism and mass communications in Japan, as saying that the initiative lies with journalists.

Journalists should not let the authorities decide who can or can’t attend their news conferences or when they should be held, Katsura said.

“They must protect the rights of their peers on their own,” he said, while also maintaining that the existence of the press club system itself should not be challenged.

Presumably Mr. Katsura—who is now a professor but was once president of the National Press Club—is also worried about those kooky Internet reporters setting themselves on fire.

Citizen alternatives also failing

The Pierce-Arrow, the Hupmobile, and the Stanley Steamer were popular models that briefly flourished in the early days of American automobiles, but later disappeared. The same process is underway with the alternatives to mass media-produced news that some thought promising, but have failed to connect. Prominent among these failures are such citizen-journalism websites as OhMyLife, formerly OhMyNews, which shut down in April 2009, and Tsukasanet, whose demise is penciled in for this November.

Another citizen-journalism website, JanJan, announced last week they will suspend publication at the end of the month, though past articles will still be accessible online. The publication, whose slogan was, “Citizens’ media by the citizens for the citizens,” has been around for seven years. They say ad revenue has fallen so drastically the enterprise is now unsupportable.

They’re probably telling the truth about the ad revenue, but they’re not telling us why the ad revenue dried up. Here’s a possibility—the site content wasn’t worth reading. The name JanJan is short for Japan Alternative News for Justices and New Cultures, and I’ll pause a second for everyone to roll their eyes. The articles on the site are just as ploddingly earnest and poorly written as one might gather from that title.

Their one good idea was to compile a database on the nation’s politicians, but only an extreme policy wank or political otaku would have found it useful.

Now, if the citizens had managed to dig up information such as the following, it might have turned out differently for them.

Ozawa feeds pork to the media, too

Would you believe it? DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro provides financial remuneration for services rendered to commentators working in the mass media! And would you believe that most of them wind up defending Ozawa Ichiro in public? The information about the payments was found in his political fund reports, and it came to light in February through the Q&A site Yahoo Chiebukuro.

Among the prominentoes sticking out their hands for a palm greasing with Ozawa cash include such journalists and commentators as Katsuya Masahiko and Morita Minoru, who wound up with JPY 500,000 (about $US 5,600) from 2006 to 2008, and Insider editor Takano Hajime, Futatsuki Hirotaka, and Suenobu Yoshimasa, who received JPY 300,000 each.

Another Ozawa-affiliated group disbursed JPY 500,000 during that time to Messrs. Morita and Suenobu again, as well as Otani Akihiro and Shima Nobuhiko, among others.

It’s something to keep in mind when you see or read someone defending the keppaku Mr. Ozawa as the rest of the commentariat bashes him for his murky political funding practices.

The inclusion of Mr. Morita is particularly enlightening. He sometimes is asked to offer opinions in English-language newspapers as one of the on-call group of commentators and academics that journalists like to use in their pantomime of objective journalism. He was so critical of former prime ministers Koizumi and Abe, one half-expected him to start foaming at the mouth. (He claimed Mr. Abe was going to start a war.) The Caped Gaijin Crusader of the Hokkaido Bathhouses once referred to him as “respected” in a published piece, though he didn’t specify who respected him.

For an example of what Ozawa Ichiro’s money can buy with journalists, try this Morita Minoru interview in the Japan Times in 2006.

Ozawa pursues symbiosis. By symbiosis, first of all, I mean world peace, living in harmony with other countries and not antagonizing China or South Korea like Abe and Koizumi. And, of course, in harmony with America.

I also refer to the natural environment, to the natural world and humanity coexisting. Ozawa aspires to this, and so his politics will be far and away better than [the current] fighting politics.

Nor is Uesugi Takashi immune to the same blandishments. A great defender of the DPJ in print, he’s also been spotted playing golf at a party-sponsored tournament. Other journalists wondered how he could objectively cover people he associates with on Sundays.

What next for journalism?

That’s such a good question, it was the title of a debate held on the evening of 28 February in Tokyo. It was conducted in two parts—the first moderated by Tahara Soichiro, a host of current events and political programs on television, and the second by Tsuda Daisuke, a younger journalist and Twitter fan.

It ran from 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. at a Tokyo café, and was broadcast live on the net on Ustream and Nikoniko Doga. Another journalist Twitterer provided regular Tweets.

The participants included Uesugi Takashi—there he is again—LDP reformer Kono Taro, videojournalist Jimbo Tetsuo, and weekly Shukan Asahi editor (and Ozawa defender) Yamaguchi Kazuomi.

Guess what? The kisha club system drew a lot of fire! Said Mr. Uesugi:

It would be best to aggressively crush the kisha club system for the sake of Japanese journalism.

During the second half, Mr. Tsuda had this exchange with a masked news director from a TV network:

Tsuda: During the LDP administrations, all the media bashed Mr. Aso, and that was the story. Now they’re bashing Mr. Ozawa the same way. This creates skepticism about just who is writing this narrative. Why are they acting in concert?

Masked man: That’s because of the kisha club system. If one company got out of hand, they’d be cut out of the loop and wouldn’t be able to get stories any more. After that, the toku-ochi would continue, and they wouldn’t make headway.

The Nikkei experiment

The Nikkei Shimbun, Japan’s leading business and financial newspaper, plans to launch a complete electronic edition on 23 March for Internet users. It will be the first full-scale Internet paper (if it can be called that anymore) in Japan. They’ll charge JPY 4,000 (about $US 45.00) a month for a subscription, which will buy access to all the articles from the morning and evening editions and any updates along the way. A monthly subscription to the paper itself costs JPY 1,000 now.

That’s a bit pricey, but this is a business publication, after all. They hope to round up 300,000 subscribers initially. The mainstream media companies are very interested in seeing whether this new business model works, as you might imagine. Even they realize their days with the old model are numbered. The Nikkei plans to be generous and offer information on the operation of its e-edition and systems to other members of the guild.

It might work, if only because the people who subscribe to the Nikkei can afford it. (It’s one of the publications in my dentist’s waiting room.) But if the results of the M1 survey in the first piece are valid, it might be just another idea that winds up in the same scrapheap as the Hupmobile and JanJan.

Afterwords:

Here’s a rundown of translated Japanese blogger comments on a book Uesugi Takashi wrote called The Collapse of Journalism.

The intro states:

Journalists in the kisha clubs despise freelance reporters who, rather than getting their news from the top, pursue deeper truths and publish them in the magazines they write for.

Well, the deeper truths Mr. Uesugi often pursues are the ones of benefit of the DPJ. He seems to have picked up some bad habits while working overseas.

And it’s not as if open press conferences in the West have resulted in a notably freer press there. To suggest outside of a newsroom that the bravos of American mainstream journalism pursue deeper truths would be the cue for a national laugh-a-thon.

Besides, the premise is not entirely true. For years, kisha club journalists have fed stories they can’t handle to weekly magazine freelancers and the Akahata (Red Flag), the daily paper published by the Japanese Communist Party. It’s a bit like samizdat journalism, but stories do get out. Indeed, Uesugi Takashi has likely stumbled over a scoop or two of his own that way.

Also, despite his years overseas, Mr. Uesugi seems to be myopic, or naive, about some subjects in the West.

He has written amusingly in Japanese that some of the kisha club members have used his Wikipedia page to attack his reputation. He wonders why those guys have so much time on their hands to create Wikipedia fiction.

He should have stopped there, but he added that the nefarious practices on Japanese Wikipedia weren’t anything like those used for the English-language Wikipedia.

Hah!

Try this account by John Derbyshire about his adventures with his own Wikipedia page. Anyone inclined to mistrust him because he is a man of the Right should be advised that Stephen Pollard and Oliver Kamm, two men of the Left in Britain, hold Wikipedia in even greater contempt.

Derbyshire quotes Irish journalist Kevin Myers as calling Wikipedia an “uncontrolled and filthy internet gossip-shop, whose very power derives from the complete fiction that it is an ‘encyclopedia’.”

Uesugi Takashi should open those journalist eyes of his a little wider.

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That’s the best story they could come up with?

HERE’S THE FIRST SENTENCE from an article in the Saturday edition of ShanghaiDaily.com:

A man died in a central China detention house with cut-off nipples, injured penis and a hole in his head, while police claimed he died from an acute disease after drinking a cup of water.

Here’s the rest!

Wooly bully

TYPE THE WORD “bullying” into Google and the first auto-suggestion to pop up for a search is “bullying in Japan”. The Japanese are more aware than anyone else that school bullying is a social problem, and it receives serious attention both in the national school system and in the mass media. The latter’s coverage also provides an excuse for those elements of the English-language media who delight in presenting the “nobody understands weird Japan” narrative to devote plenty of space to the topic.

The doubleplusungood Maehara Seiji

Of course that involves more than a bit of holier-than-thou posturing among the Western voyeur-moralists, as anyone who grew up in those countries would admit to themselves on honest reflection. There’s a reason Lord of the Flies is still in print more than 50 years after it was published, and almost 20 since the death of its author, William Golding. For that matter, plenty of Japanese find the events at Columbine High School in Colorado in April 1999 difficult to grasp–to cite one instance–but one doesn’t see “nobody understands weird America” articles in the Japanese media.

Be that as it may, the latest mini-flap involving the Democratic Party of Japan’s mismanagement of government does contain some junior grade bullying of its own.

In brief, here’s the story: The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport (the former Construction Ministry) is responsible for national public works projects. As you can imagine, enough pigmeat has passed through those portals to keep Nippon Ham supplied in raw materials for a decade. No surprise there–that’s standard operating procedure for governments the world over.

One of the local twists is that the heavyweight politicians in the ruling party and the zokugiin, the de facto legislator-lobbyists of the Diet who tend to the interests of the government ministries, meddle in the decisions about which public works projects will be selected for funding. The process can be used for both the financial and electoral benefit of the politicians.

The DPJ ran as a reform party that vowed to clean up the politics of the past, and that meant focusing on the MLIT. When the party formed a government last September, they named Maehara Seiji to head the ministry. Mr. Maehara is the co-leader of a party group/faction, and was briefly the party president. Now that scandals, inefficiency, and broken promises have tainted the DPJ brand, Mr. Maehara leads in some public opinion surveys as the favorite from that party to serve as the next prime minister.

A problem has emerged in the MLIT under Mr. Maehara’s watch, however. The new government’s policy was to keep information regarding the budgetary decisions on the public works projects within the government and the party. What actually happened was that the information found its way from the ministry to the party and then to the local governments concerned. Ordinarily, the ministry is supposed to inform the local governments about the budgetary decisions, but this year the local governments found out through local party chapters after a DPJ official in the MLIT briefed a party executive.

This article explains why it looks bad:

The opposition has attacked the DPJ, saying it made light of the Diet because the disclosure of information occurred before parliament had even begun budget deliberations. Some argue that the DPJ was attempting to curry favor with contractors ahead of the House of Councillors election this summer.

The DPJ is already taking a beating at the polls due to the politicial fund scandals involving Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio and Secretary-General/Puppetmaster Ozawa Ichiro, so that last charge in particular is quite believable. The party’s candidates are starting to lose local elections. The latest to be defeated was a DPJ-backed incumbent mayor in Okinawa, which had turned into something of a party stronghold, last weekend.

Naturally the DPJ is anxious to apply a tourniquet and prevent the bleeding from further staining of its reputation with an upper house election coming up this summer. Said Mr. Hatoyama:

“It should never be seen as pork-barrel politics or an election strategy,” he said. “It’s quite regrettable.”

The government has concluded that the problem originated in the MLIT. Since Mr. Maehara has the ultimate authority over that ministry, he will receive a reprimand that has yet to be determined, though he is not accused of personal involvement. Some think he will be asked to forego part of his salary.

To the casual observer, this would seem to be an honorable and praiseworthy solution to the problem. Some people made mistakes, and the person in charge is being held accountable. But we can’t put two and two together just yet. For that, we need the second half of the equation.

The furnace calling the pot black

Between them, Mr. Hatoyama and Mr. Ozawa have had five close aides arrested for problems in handling political funds over the past year. The first arrest was of an Ozawa aide early last year, when he was still party president and the DPJ was in the opposition. Mr. Ozawa claimed he was innocent, but more than 70% of the electorate didn’t believe him. At that time, the public was so fed up with LDP rule it was obvious the next election was the DPJ’s to lose—and it was just as obvious that if Mr. Ozawa stayed on, the party might well lose.

He finally gave in to the inevitable and resigned. Mr. Hatoyama, who as then-party Secretary-General had pledged to step down together with Mr. Ozawa to take responsibility, also resigned.

Their definition of taking responsibility was to trade jobs. One week later, Mr. Hatoyama was the party president and Mr. Ozawa was the secretary-general. During the week-long campaign for party president, there were reports of documents circulating among party members bashing Mr. Hatoyama’s opponent, the now-Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya, as being a political wuss. They touted the potential of the “soft” Mr. Hatoyama as the public face of the party and the “hard” Mr. Ozawa laying down the law behind the scenes.

Since then, two of Mr. Hatoyama’s aides have been arrested for giving fraudulent information about the source his political funds. The prime minister had accumulated more individual donations than any other Japanese politician, and his political fund group tried to pass most of the money off as donations from anonymous sources and others who were in fact dead.

It turned out the money came from his still-living mother, the heiress to the Bridgestone fortune. The prime minister was forced to pay more than the equivalent of six million dollars in gift taxes alone on the money wags described as the biggest parental allowance in Japan. But as Japan’s wealthiest politician, he could afford it.

Two more of Mr. Ozawa’s aides were arrested earlier this year in another fund raising scandal that hinted at the old-school pol’s ties with the construction industry in his part of the country. In this case, his political fund management committee spent the equivalent of nearly four million dollars—in cash—to buy some Tokyo real estate.

Yet Messrs. Hatoyama and Ozawa say they are as pure as the driven snow. They claimed to have been ill-served by aides—most of whom had spent their entire careers working for the two politicians—and that their only fault was a lack of oversight.

In fact, they insist they’re keppaku—clean, immaculate, unblemished. No one can ever say the Japanese political class doesn’t understand Newspeak. That’s a textbook example of the Orwellian term “blackwhite”.

Who pays the price?

This is not to say Mr. Maehara shouldn’t be held accountable for the cock-up, if that’s what it was. Members of the government are recipients of the public trust, and they should be held to a high standard. Was Mr. Maehara personally involved? Did the leak occur because of his clumsy conduct of the process as he handled a ministerial portfolio for the first time? Was the information leaked deliberately by the DPJ to win votes? It’s likely we’ll never know.

What we do know, however, is that Mr. Maehara has never liked Mr. Ozawa’s presence in the party or his Chicago-style politics–and he seldom has been reticent to say so. Two years ago, he began meeting informally with former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro and a group of reform-minded LDP politicians who believed in smaller government, sound finances, and a strong national defense. He criticized Mr. Ozawa and the party publically in a solo interview in one monthly magazine, a group discussion with LDP party elder Yosano Kaoru in a second, and in an article he wrote for a third. Speculation grew that he was thinking of leaving the party and forming an alliance with the LDP reform wing. That talk ended after the DPJ victory last August.

He was one of the most prominent supporters of Mr. Okada for the party presidency that Mr. Hatoyama won last year. Even before the results came in, reports floated through the media that Ozawa Ichiro had promised to make the disloyal pay.

He was also among the first to publicly hint that Mr. Ozawa should step down during both of the latter’s scandals. Even this morning, when asked at a press conference whether he thinks Mr. Ozawa should resign his position in the party, he said:

Shouldn’t he make his own decision on what to do to enable us to win the upper house election?

That’s Japanese politician code for, “If we’re going to stand a chance in this election, he’s going to have to get his fat ass out of the way himself so the party doesn’t blow up over the issue of forcing him out.”

And then, with what was undoubtedly a choirboy look, he added:

From Secretary-General Ozawa’s perspective, I think the problem of whether he should resign is not a topic that I, with my short political career, should address so lightly.

Mr. Maehara has been in the Diet for 17 years.

So, who is the man to be dressed down, humiliated in public, and given a black mark on his record that will be brought up should he ever decide to seek the premiership again?

Meanwhile, the two top men of the DPJ swear they are keppaku, with the full knowledge that few of their listeners take what they say seriously. Well, one can hardly blame them. At their age, they would be unlikely to weather a jail term well, regardless of its length.

Some bullies never outgrew junior high school, it seems.