A textbook from the South Korean New Right

RECENT ACTIVITY in the Comments section has prompted me to present a summary of a longer article sent to me some months ago by Prof. Shimojo. It is not part of his recent series of short essays, but it is worth reading for the information it presents. Here is my very quick translation.

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A Textbook from the South Korean New Right

In March last year, the Textbook Forum of South Korea, consisting primarily of economists, published the Proposed Textbook of South Korean Recent and Modern History. This textbook has attracted attention both inside the country and overseas because its view of recent South Korean history is not based on the theory of Japan’s colonization of Korea as an illegal seizure of territory. Rather, it offers (to a certain extent) a positive evaluation of Japan’s role in the modernization of the country. For that reason, it is viewed in some quarters as a Korean version of the New History Textbook published in Japan. That is why it was subjected to a concentrated attack by the Left.

At just that time, a new conservative government took power in South Korea that emphasized a practical relationship with Japan rather than the issues of the past. The publication of this textbook portends the advent of a new period for the historical problems of Japanese-Korean relations. Therefore, let us consider how best to deal with those historical problems as we refer to this textbook of the New Right.

The creation of the Textbook Forum

The preface of the proposed textbook states that the Textbook Forum was created in 2005. On 16 March that year, Shimane Prefecture passed an ordinance establishing Takeshima Day, which inflamed nationalist passions in South Korea. It was also a period in which historical issues were brought to the forefront. Then-President Roh Moo-hyon made historical problems a matter of national policy and established the Presidential Commission on True History for Peace in Northeast Asia. That resulted in the emergence of a narrow-minded nationalism in South Korea, and the forces of the Left gained strength. This trend was accelerated by a special law passed by the Roh Administration in 2004 that enabled the investigation of collaborators with the Japanese during the colonization period. Thus began a period of research into the past.

At the same time, Shimane Prefecture passed an ordinance declaring Takeshima Day and commemorated the 100th anniversary of the incorporation of the islets into the prefecture. Opposition to these moves erupted in South Korea. The backdrop to this opposition was the South Korean historical view, formed in the 1950s, that Takeshima represented the first territory sacrificed in Japan’s invasion of the Korean Peninsula. However, then Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon (now UN Secretary-General) took the stance that the Takeshima issue was of greater importance than the bilateral Japanese-Korean relationship itself. President Roh also declared that the claim of sovereignty over Dokdo (Takeshima) constituted a “second invasion”. Thus, historical issues became a matter of South Korean foreign policy.

This further inflamed nationalist sentiment in South Korea, for which Prof. Emeritus Han Sung-joo of Korea University paid with his reputation. At that time, Prof. Han had written an article for the April 2005 issue of Seiron titled, “The Stupidity of the Condemnation of the Japan-Friendly Faction, Stemming from Communist and Left-Wing Thought”. In the article, he argued for a reexamination of the merger between Japan and Korea. The university stripped him of his title, and his vilification as a pro-Japanese professor spread to campuses throughout the nation. The previous year, in 2004, Prof. Lee Yeong-hun, a central figure in the Textbook Forum, published The Latter Joseon Period Reexamined from the Perspective of Quantitative Economic History. That prompted a reevaluation of Japan’s colonization and merger. The Textbook Forum was founded in this environment.

A different approach

In South Korea, the new proposed text was viewed as a Korean version of the New History Textbook. Since the textbook problems of 1982, however, Japan’s Neighboring Nation Clause has permitted interference from China and South Korea. In regard to the Tsukuru-kai’s New History Textbook, the self-restraint in the writing of textbooks has limited efforts to championing the cause of the liberal view of history.

The dispute over textbooks in South Korea, however, originated in the South Korean nationalist view of history that arose during the negotiations for the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries, which began in 1952. This is rooted in the intellectual conflict between Left and Right. It was in this context that the Roh Administration employed the issue of historical views as a card in diplomatic relations. In February 2008, the Roh Administration in its final days distributed educational videos both in South Korea and overseas that focused on seven separate issues: the Yasukuni shrine, comfort women, history textbooks, Takeshima, the East Sea, Chinese historical research into its northeastern region, the former Mongolia (which caused an uproar in South Korea), and the border dispute between China and North Korea involving Mt. Changbai. The objective was the Takeshima dispute, however. The aim was to isolate Japan by mobilizing all the historical issues and insisting that the colonization was a Japanese invasion. In 2007, legislatures in the United States, Canada, The Netherlands, and the EU also took up the comfort woman issue after being urged to do so by South Koreans.

Japan, however, views the comfort woman issue as a single issue, and so was unable to respond from a broader perspective. When the problem with history textbooks arose, the Neighboring Nation Clause was adopted. When the issue with comfort women arose, the simplistic response was the Kono Statement. The South Koreans thus extracted commitments from Japan. Both the Koizumi and Abe administrations encouraged the joint study of Japanese-Korean history, but the result could be seen in advance as long as there was a problem with historical views in South Korea.

In this regard, the Textbook Forum’s publication of the Proposed Textbook of South Korean Recent and Modern History represented a different approach—one that did not follow the South Korean historical perspective that viewed history as an invasion by the Japanese.

The Textbook Forum

The Textbook Forum has criticized conventional education in history for its nationalistic view based on a single perspective. The basis for its position is statistics and other data. Prof. Emeritus Park Son-su of the Academy of Korean Studies stated, “The description in the textbook showed that Japan contributed to the improvement and modernization of the Korean colony’s economy, society, and culture.” He was also critical, however, saying “The Japanese colonial government was the worst government, with none other like it in the world.” This is just historical viewpoint speaking, however, and is not historical fact.

In the 1970s, President Park Chug Hee’s Semaul Movement put South Korean agriculture on an independent footing and promoted economic development. President Park used the Japanese colonial administration as his point of reference for this movement. Past textbooks denied those successes, however, because the Park Administration was a military dictatorship, and he was considered friendly toward Japan.

That Park Geun Hye, a presidential candidate of the Grand National Party, is his oldest daughter was another factor in the political use of history. South Korea’s historical disputes are extremely political.

Park Geun Hye praised the Proposed Textbook of South Korean Recent and Modern History, saying, “It highlights the problems with current textbooks.” The South Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry has presented to the Ministry of Education a proposal to revise the current textbooks. Thus, through the recognition of diverse values, the waves of democratization are beginning to break over South Korean history textbooks.

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Afterwords: Long-time readers know I am loathe to use the expression Right Wing or any of its permutations because its meaning became degraded beyond any practical use years ago. I asked Prof. Shimojo about the use of the term New Right, and he answered that the term is used in South Korea itself. Therefore, I used it here.

Hatoyama Yukio, AKA Klaatu

I think of my husband as a man from outer space.
- Hatoyama Miyuki, the wife of Japan’s prime minister

GOING BY the shorthand version in the English-language media, Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio was given his nickname “The Man from Outer Space” because Japanese think the shape of his eyes make him look like an alien.

Those looking for a more satisfactory explanation than the ones found in the English-language media might refer to the recently published Hatoyama Yukio no Uchujin Goroku (Roughly, The Collected Sayings of Hatoyama Yukio the Spaceman) for more background.

Yukio-chan

The book explains that the moniker started to gain traction back in 2001 when Mr. Hatoyama’s party, the Democratic Party of Japan, was desperate to create an identity for itself among the electorate after Koizumi Jun’ichiro of the Liberal Democratic Party became prime minister. Mr. Koizumi’s support in the polls transcended the stratospheric and touched the lower levels of outer space itself. The LDP tried to capitalize on the phenomenon by selling key chains, cell phone straps, and other merchandise that featured likenesses of the PM, whose unique hair style made him a natural for caricature.

Meanwhile, support for the DPJ was teetering at the bottom end of the seesaw. The party wanted to raise the visibility of Mr. Hatoyama, who was then serving as party head and came off a poor second in comparison to his LDP counterpart.

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the party decided to create a cartoon character of Mr. Hatoyama that they called Yukio-chan. The caricature exaggerated the shape of his eyes and placed them somewhere below cheekbone level. It does make Mr. Hatoyama look non-human and otherworldly, and it’s easy to see how people made the spaceman connection. In fact, the shape of the eyes and the jawline somewhat resemble those of the alien drawn for the cover of the 1985 Whitley Strieber book Communion, whose subject is alien abductions. (Whoa, now…I’m not going there!)

The DPJ was so pleased with its creation that they put it up on the home page of their website, used it to sell their own character goods, and hung a life-size poster of the caricature at party headquarters in Tokyo.

One wonders what the office ladies thought the first time they saw it.

As often happens, the law of unintended consequences came into effect. Instead of raising the profile of either the party or Mr. Hatoyama—neither of which happened for several years—the caricature cemented in the public mind the image of the DPJ boss as a bug-eyed visitor from another galaxy.

To be sure, this was all done with Mr. Hatoyama’s approval. In fact, he seems to rather like the spaceman idea. He’s on record as having said:

“I want to transcend (being) an earthling.”

Isn’t that as good an explanation as any for the basis of his political philosophy and policies?

Streiber's alien

The caricature was a natural target for the LDP. One of the first to spot the potential was then-Foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko, who always led with her dokuzetsu, or poison tongue. The book quotes a political journalist who says that she and Mr. Hatoyama often became embroiled in what he referred to as “strange disputes” in those days. Whenever a reporter would bring up the subject of Hatoyama Yukio, she’d dismiss it with the reply, “Ah, that spaceman!”

(Ms. Tanaka had quite the knack for nicknames, by the way. The late Hashimoto Ryutaro, who served as prime minister in the 90s, had a full head of slicked-down hair that he combed straight back. She referred to him as Uncle Pomade, or Pomado Oji-san.)

For an interesting twist, and example 35,472 of how politics makes strange bedfellows, Ms. Tanaka and her husband are now officially Space Cadets as members of the Hatoyama-led DPJ.

So, if the Japanese public thinks Mr. Hatoyama looks like a spaceman, perhaps that’s because they were encouraged to do so by both the man and his party.

And if you think the DPJ has unusual ideas for the visual promotion of its candidates, wait’ll you see how Deputy Prime Minister Kan Naoto sold himself once upon a time.

Nihonjin no Senso

ON SUNDAY, I served as one of the judges for the Saga Prefecture English speech contest for high school students. It was held at Imari, a country town that was once famous as the port for shipping Arita ware overseas. The views of the forests and mountains are beautiful, and I thought it would be an excellent place to spend one’s high school days.

The students might have a different view, however, especially as they get closer to graduation and either university or the workaday world beckons.

The room reserved for the judges was the school library, and when I had some free time I looked at their book selection. A student could learn quite a bit by exploring the books in that room.

Prominently displayed on a table next to the librarian’s desk was a book called Nihonjin no Senso (The War of the Japanese), edited by Donald Keene. He described the book in a recent interview in the Japan Times:

You recently published a book titled “Nihonjin no Senso” (“The War of the Japanese”). What is its theme?

It’s about what the Japanese people did during the five years from 1941, when World War II broke out, to 1945, when the Allied occupation of Japan began. That was an extremely interesting subject, because during the war my principal duty was translating handwritten Japanese documents, and though other people had great trouble reading them, I taught myself to do so. I read many diaries that were written by ordinary soldiers or sailors, not literary people. But for the book I decided to examine the diaries of literary people who could express their feelings adequately and who had kept their diaries faithfully during the war years. Their attitude was totally different and proved what I’d always believed — that the Japanese were not fanatics eager to die on a battlefield. There were such people, certainly. But there were a lot of people who were terribly unhappy about the war going on and had very strong thoughts about it. The importance of the book, I hope, will be to show the diversity among Japanese people even during the war, when everyone was expected to conform to everything the government said.

I’ll emphasize again that this book was not stuck on some shelf in a back corner, but placed on a table in the open where everyone would see it.

Some people–in East Asia, the West, and even in Japan–would have you believe the Japanese consider topics such as that off limits in schools.

Now you know how much credibility they have.

Monkey see, monkey don’t

ONE RECURRING VOICE IN THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION in Japan when I first arrived here was the tendency by some people to promote a political, social, or cultural cause by claiming that it was already a common practice in the West (usually the United States), so therefore Japan should adopt it too. Those who didn’t care for the ideas countered by accusing the proponent of saru mane, or monkey imitation—in other words, monkey see, monkey do.

Japan’s postwar success means they no longer have to crane their necks to look up at other countries they think might be more advanced. That means fewer pet theories are justified by pointing to behavior in other parts of the world. But the practice hasn’t entirely disappeared, and the following describes two examples that I ran across last week.

Rather than advocating a particular position, the first example is the unnecessary use of the United States as a standard for comparison. It’s harmless in this case, but it was presented by a man who should know better. In contrast, the second example has the potential to bring about some downright ugly changes to Japanese society.

Japanese Unemployment

Appearing on a recent NHK TV program, Prof. Noguchi Yukio of the Waseda Graduate School of Finance, Accounting, and Law created a stir when he claimed that Japan’s unemployment rate, which as of May was officially 5.2%, is really about 9%.

Here’s what Prof. Noguchi said:

“If the (effectively) unemployed still working at companies due to the Employment Adjustment Subsidy were counted, the unemployment rate would be more than 9%, a level not much different from that of the United States.”

The subsidy is offered by the government to companies who are cutting back on operations due to deteriorating profits as a result of the economic downturn. The government provides part of the funds for job furloughs or the rent of employees temporarily furloughed or seconded elsewhere. The government calls it a “subsidy for corporate efforts”, but it’s in fact a measure to keep those companies from terminating the people they’d rather lay off.

Noguchi Yukio

The program has mushroomed over the past seven months. The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare reported that in October 2008, 140 companies received these subsidies for 3,632 workers. Those figures had risen to 67,192 companies and 2,338,991 workers by May 2009. Technically, those workers are not unemployed, but that’s only because the government is subsidizing their continued presence at their place of employment.

Prof. Noguchi’s point is that adding those 2.3 million people to the unemployment roll would lift the rate to 9%. In fact, the unemployment rate might be higher still. It does not count NEETs (people not currently engaged in employment, education or training), or the furiitaa, the underemployed youth (15-34) who tend to live with their parents after leaving school and shift from one low-skilled, low-paying job to another (such as convenience store clerk) rather than start a career. The latest figure for the former category is 640,000 and 1,700,000 for the latter.

Of course Prof. Noguchi is trying to drive home the point that employment conditions in Japan are much worse now than the government cares to admit, and he’s probably right. But the man received his doctorate in economics from Yale, so he is well aware that the American government is just as likely to blow smoke over employment statistics as its Japanese counterpart. The United States is not the gold standard for government honesty, assuming that any such standard exists.

American unemployment

To look behind the smokescreen covering current American unemployment figures, try this article in the Wall Street Journal by Morton Zuckerman, the editor in chief of the US News and World Report.

June’s total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse.

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don’t count on the unemployment roll.

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted…(b)ecause they hadn’t searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

- The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That’s 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago…If Americans were still clocking those extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration).

So while unemployment in Japan might be worse than people realize, conditions could be harsher still in the United States.

The 9% number should be shocking enough for the Japanese public. There’s no need to bring the United States into the picture, but old habits die hard.

But as I said, that’s a harmless example. The second is a classic case of saru mane that is troubling because, while based on what the advocate thinks is commonly accepted conditions in the United States, it combines a failure to understand the real circumstances with a transparent sense of self-importance. If adopted, her proposal would seriously degrade the Japanese political dialogue.

Election Reporting

Oguri Izumi began working for the Nihon Television Network as a newscaster in 1988, and spent three years on the Kyo no Dekigoto (Today’s Events) late-night news program. Her husband is a reporter for the Tokyo Shimbun.

Oguri Izumi

Ms. Oguri left the network in August 2007 to accept a Fulbright Scholarship to the Edwin O. Reischauer Center For East Asian Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in The Johns Hopkins University.

She released a book last month about her observations of broadcast journalism in the U.S. called Senkyo Hodo, or Election Reporting. (It’s an inexpensive Chuo Koron Shinsha paperback on display in bookstores now.)

I haven’t read the book, but I have read the promotional material, and here’s the scoop:

During her stay in the US, she was shocked to see many television journalists openly declare their support for presidential candidates.

Ms. Oguri thinks this is a capital idea. She proposes that all Japanese television journalists be allowed to become “opinion leaders” and openly advocate the candidates they favor on the air—not as a disclaimer, but as a matter of practice.

She claims that supporting a party is not necessarily a violation of fairness or neutrality, and offers her book as a plan for creating a “good country”. She added that she had a hard time maintaining her own fairness or neutrality while on the air in Japan.

Specifically, she says that newscasters should make their choices based on their reading of party platforms and then explain those choices to the viewers.

Let us count the ways in which that is a very bad idea.

Had Ms. Oguri turned off the TV set and talked to off-campus America, she might have discovered that they too were shocked—and angered—that many television journalists openly declared their support for presidential candidates. They do not watch television news to see manipulated reports or hear a talking head tell them what they should think.

The consumers of news are intelligent enough to know where to find political opinions when they want them. There are already plenty of outlets for that expression, both in the United States and in Japan. What the consumer of basic news programs seeks is a straight accounting of the facts.

The job of journalists in the print and broadcast media outside the op-ed corner is to present just the facts, and nothing but the facts. That so many of them feel compelled to twist those facts to conform to their own biases, and then aver that true neutrality is not possible, is testimony to flawed temperaments underpinned by a belief in their superior intelligence.

It should be a simple matter to stick with the facts, regardless of what the biens pensants would prefer us to believe. I have no doubt that if I were a television journalist, or responsible for the production of television news programs, that—unlike Ms. Oguri—I could handle that part of the job in my sleep. It would be easy money. Indeed, it would be a lot more difficult (not to mention creepy) to insert propaganda while trying to pretend that I wasn’t.

All Ms. Oguri is trying to do is to take the difficulty out of pushing her own views on everyone else by hijacking a medium that should remain neutral. Supporting her pet plan by saying that the Americans do it–without realizing that many Americans detest the mockery the practice has made of the political process–is nothing but saru mane.

It’s tempting to buy the book to see how she tries to make the case that open advocacy isn’t a violation of the principle of neutrality, but who has the time for what is likely little more than a string of excuses?

One reviewer stated the obvious objection that since private-sector television is supported by advertising, overt support for specific candidates could subject the network or the station to pressure from those advertisers. The pressure from ownership cannot be overlooked, either, considering that the press is really only free for those who own the enterprise. It’s one thing to claim to speak truth to power; it’s another thing entirely to speak truth to the man who signs your paycheck and tells you to parrot his line.

Broadcast journalists who openly support candidates will surely do so on the basis of pre-existing beliefs. The idea that they will read and judge a platform is a false front, and it’s hard to believe that they’re even fooling themselves. Anyone can find reasons for either supporting or opposing the planks of any specific platform, based on their own cast of mind. Lawyers do the same sort of thing every day with the law and legal precedents. It’s their job.

Taking this one step further, broadcasts journalists freed from the obligation to be objective will then be guided by their political preferences. That would prevent them from exercising the self-examination required to root out the idea that they alone have the intelligence or the right to decide which facts should be broadcast, which should be emphasized, and which should be glossed over. Does Ms. Oguri seriously believe this would not happen? Has she even thought this out?

That would leave us with an overtly biased media, which would mean that none of its news content could be trusted. If this sector of the media cannot be trusted to stick to the facts, they have eliminated the reason for their existence. They would have in effect become the PR wing for a particular politician or a cause using an enormous megaphone. Let the politicians and the activists do that on their own time.

Far from being a model for Japan, the former news gatherers of the American print and broadcast media now find themselves in exactly this predicament. That’s why so many of them are going out of business, in the case of newspapers, or ignored, in the case of network news.

The electorate does not need opinion leaders, and the idea that it does is insulting to its intelligence. All it requires is that the facts—as many as the limited programming time allows—be reported. Self-appointed elites are not required to filter those facts for anyone, especially since the people on camera don’t seem to be any more intelligent than anyone else on the street. Indeed, viewed from the perspective of day-to-day life, they’re likely to have less practical intelligence than most people on the street.

People are capable of figuring things out for themselves. If Ms. Oguri lacks the insight to understand that, she lacks the insight required to offer us her political opinions while claiming to be fair and neutral.

And if she has that much trouble squelching her bias on the air, she should find another job.

Are Japanese broadcasters unprejudiced now?

In passing, I should note that more than a few Japanese would laugh at the idea their broadcast media is neutral to begin with. The general approach of the Asahi network is from the left, and even I could see the slant in their broadcasts before I was able to make the connection between the announcers and the network.

Some Japanese have long thought that the news on the quasi-governmental network NHK is also tilted. A common observation is that they are soft on China and hard on the United States.

It should be obvious that anything other than strict neutrality for a public broadcaster is an affront to the ideals of democratic government. The network is supported by funds that all citizens are required to pay, so they have a moral obligation to present the news impartially. If people do not care for the programs offered by a private sector broadcaster, it costs them nothing to stop watching. If enough people take that step, it will lower the network’s ratings and cut into their ad revenue. Viewers can even go over the head of the network itself directly to the sponsors to complain.

From reporting to making the news

Regarding the connection between the media and politics, by the way, I recently ran across a Japanese-language article reporting that more people from both the print and broadcast media are becoming professional politicians. For the upcoming lower house elections, the opposition Democratic Party of Japan is running at least 23 people who came from that industry, either recently or longer ago, while the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is running 10.

Takeuchi Ken, former mayor of Kamakura, founder of the Internet newspaper JanJan, and a visiting professor at Waseda University, thinks he knows why there are more in the DPJ. It’s not necessarily because of political philosophy:

“The DPJ most definitely have the wind at their back, but a careful examination of local conditions shows that they lack an organizational base. That’s why, as a party, they look for people who can catch that wind. In contrast, the LDP is an organizational party from the candidates’ perspective, and younger people have a difficult time obtaining their recognition. People from the mass media have name recognition due to their exposure, and they’ve mastered communication skills, which makes it easier for them to pick up votes. As a result, more of them have gravitated toward the DPJ.”

Perhaps Ms. Oguri should take the hint. If she thinks her analyses are so penetrating, she should try her hand at retail politics instead of making Olympian pronouncements from a TV studio.

Or get a blog!

Afterwords:

Ms. Oguri also represents another aspect of saru mane, and that’s what some Japanese refer to as the madoguchi phenomenon. It dates back at least to the beginning of the Meiji period, when the country reopened to the outside world and was hungry for knowledge of other places and the technology of the modern age.

Madoguchi is the word for a clerk’s window at a bank, venue for ticket sales, or other similar facility. There has long been a tendency for some people here to go abroad to study some specialty—Chinese regional cuisine, Scotch whisky distillation, Italian sports cars, British politics, watermelon cultivation in Missouri, black gospel music recorded but unreleased by local labels in the American south in the 1960s—in short, anything and everything. Then they return to Japan and create the equivalent of a madoguchi (glorified lemonade stand?) to offer their knowledge, much as the delegations dispatched overseas by the Meiji-era governments brought back knowledge from their observation tours of Western countries. The idea is to make a career out of their specialty.

The easy accessibility of international travel has removed many of the obstacles that prevented people from pursuing their interests abroad, so the practice is less prevalent than it once was. It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a clear example, but with this book, Ms. Oguri seems to be setting up a madoguchi of her own.

Incidentally, I have no idea what Ms. Oguri’s political ideas might be. Another former newscaster on the Kyo no Dekigoto program, Sakurai Yoshiko, is quite conservative politically, and now quite active writing opinion pieces for monthly magazines.

The DPJ and the pero-guri pol

IT SOMETIMES SEEMS as if the only person with the skills required to describe Japanese politics today would have been the novelist Charles Dickens–and sometimes it seems even he wouldn’t have been up to the task.

Tanaka Yasuo

For example, spearheading the drive for the devolution of governmental authority are Osaka Gov. Hashimoto Toru and Miyazaki Gov. Higashikokubaru Hideo, two Dickensian characters who have parleyed their celebrity into a national soapbox to present the case for stronger local governments. The former is an attorney turned television performer, and the latter was a television comedian associated with Beat Takeshi, himself a famous comic and film director under his real name of Kitano Takeshi. The nation’s mass media are happy to give the TV veterans and audience favorites that soapbox, and the pair are just as happy with the chance to perch themselves on top and promote their cause while indulging their inner publicity hounds.

Working in a loose alliance, they’ve had a significant role in shaping the parameters of the national political dialogue this year with a potentially landmark lower house election due next month. But constant media attention and popular support is a dangerous combination that can drive anyone over the top. Over the past month, Mr. Hashimoto might finally have found the adult supervision he needed, while Mr. Higashikokubaru did indeed go over the top, but we’ll save that for later.

Of interest this week was the sudden reemergence of the celebrity governor who foreshadowed nearly a decade ago the appearance of the Dynamic Duo on the national political radar. That would be Tanaka Yasuo, an award-winning and best-selling novelist, governor of Nagano for six turbulent years, and now a national at-large delegate in the upper house of the Diet for his vanity party, New Party Nippon.

Mr. Tanaka has agreed to act as an electoral assassin for the opposition Democratic Party of Japan by running in Hyogo’s 8th district against incumbent Fuyushiba Tetsuzo of New Komeito, who has a Dickensian background of his own. Mr. Fuyushiba began his lower house career as a member of Komeito in 1986, switched to the New Frontier Party in 1994, served as a party official when former DPJ head Ozawa Ichiro led the group, and then switched back to New Komeito when it reorganized in 1998. He later served as New Komeito’s secretary-general, but resigned that post in 2006 to serve for two years as the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport.

With his New Frontier Party background, Mr. Fuyushiba might be considered an Ozawan-style conservative, if that concept still has any meaning. Like the DPJ, he supports voting rights in local elections for those people of Korean ancestry born in Japan who choose to retain Korean citizenship. Yet the DPJ, depending on who’s doing the interpreting, is either trying to eliminate New Komeito as a political force because Mr. Ozawa detests them, or making them an offer they can’t refuse to have them defect from the ruling coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party. But let’s get back to Mr. Tanaka.

The incumbent might seem to be in a strong position. New Komeito is backed by Soka Gakkai, the lay Buddhist group. The membership of that group is said to have a relatively high proportion of Japanese-born Korean citizens, as does the population of Hyogo.

Mr. Tanaka might be able to overcome these disadvantages because he is well-known in the area for his hands-on volunteer work during the recovery from the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people. He told the Sankei Shimbun that those volunteer activities opened his eyes to the necessity for changing politics and society. He added, “I want to create a type of politics with a close connection to the local residents, and destroy the vested interests of rule by the bureaucracy.” And this is definitely a year for the anti-incumbents.

La vie est belle

What would Dickens make of him? He wrote a best-selling novel while still a university student, as did the granddaddy of celebrity governors, Ishihara Shintaro—with whom he is engaged in a long-running feud.

After a career as a novelist and critic, and recording one LP as a singer, Mr. Tanaka became involved in community grassroots activities. He spent six months helping the earthquake victims and then campaigned against the construction of the Kobe Airport. He was asked to run as the governor of Nagano, where he lived as a child after his father began teaching at Shinshu University. He originally declined, saying that he thought he could be more effective outside politics, but changed his mind.

Sui generis is the only term to use to describe his politics. He favors stronger local government, but is opposed to municipal mergers, particularly in remote areas. He is an anti-bureaucracy reformer who was blood-in-the-eye-angry over former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro’s privatization of Japan Post, citing as his reason concerns that the measure would allow foreign interests to purchase it. Though he is known to have a personal relationship to some degree with Ozawa Ichiro, he dislikes both the LDP and the DPJ and calls himself an “ultra-independent”. He dismisses both the major parties as “department stores”, staffed by personnel seconded from business and industry groups in the case of the former, and labor unions in the case of the latter. He is critical of the influence of what he calls the Labor Aristocracy in the DPJ.

Mr. Tanaka also says he combines the best qualities of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, though it isn’t clear if he knows what they actually did, or is attracted to what he perceives as their image. He has somewhat nativist tendencies—the URL for his party’s website includes the string “love-nippon”–and he thinks that Japan should stake out a more independent international position. Yet he is also well-known for his taste in foreign automobiles, particularly Audis and BMWs. He rejects the label anti-American, preferring to refer to himself as a critic of America. (The Japanese expression he uses is the difficult-to-translate 諫米, if anyone wants to take a crack at it.) But he strongly supported Bill Clinton and redoubled that support after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. (We shall see the probable reason for that shortly.)

He ran for governor in Nagano after his predecessor became embroiled in scandals, which parallels Higashikokubaru Hideo’s entry into prefectural politics. He campaigned in opposition to unnecessary public sector projects, most notably a local dam. He was opposed by every political group except the Communist Party, as well as local legislators. But he was one of the few people in the country to understand and act on the hunger of the Japanese electorate for anti-establishment politicians. Assisted by the publicity that a friendly national media provided, he won the election and assumed office in 2000.

The media coverage lavished on his administration very much prefigured that now bestowed on Mr. Hashimoto and Mr. Higashikokubaru. At one point his approval ratings were slightly above 90%, outdoing even the other two, whose ratings still languish at the 80% level.

Mr. Tanaka recently sat for a long interview with the Sankei Shimbun, but his scattered line of thought makes it too difficult to describe concisely what he said, much less translate. Let’s look instead at this interview from four years ago in the Japan Times. It too is scattershot, combining a serious discussion of legitimate issues, grandiose unsupported statements, and more holes than a pound of sliced Swiss cheese. There are too many hard truths to keep it from being useless, but too many flaws that prevent it from being important. Complicating matters is an amateurish interviewer who seems more interested in producing hagiography than bringing to the attention of a non-Japanese audience a man who then was a nationally prominent politician. It all starts with the second sentence.

After converting his private office into a glass-walled room to make his work as transparent as possible…

Excellent PR, isn’t it? “I have nothing to hide.” It also screams, “Hey, everybody, look at me!” The glass substantiated one of the most common criticisms of Tanaka—that he’s nothing more than a publicity hound.

It’s puzzling why a journalist would be making positive references to the glass-walled room at that point in his term. Not long after he became governor, Mr. Tanaka demonstrated his transparency by entertaining a female television personality in this office. They shared a drink together while she sat on his lap. The glass walls made it easy for someone to take their photo and send it to a weekly magazine, which promptly published it. That embarrassed the people of his prefecture, who probably expected him to behave like most politicians and dally somewhere other than his office on his own time. For Mr. Tanaka, however, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Gov. Yasuo Tanaka defiantly declared “No More Dams” in a direct counter to the local economy’s heavy reliance on public works projects at the expense of ecological concerns. He also abolished the traditional, self-serving press club system in his prefecture.

Here we give the man credit where credit is due—Japan could use more governors (and prime ministers) who pursue the same policies, even when the ecology isn’t a consideration. He brings up other worthwhile points in the interview.

Besides tackling local politics, the flamboyant 49-year-old devotes his time to writing columns for magazines and criticizing and analyzing national and local politics on radio and television programs. He is also a well-known restaurant critic….When he was still a student at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo in 1980, he received the prestigeous Bungei Award for his novel “Nantonaku Kurisutaru (Somewhat Like Crystal).”

But he hasn’t written a worthwhile novel since then. He has, however, written a regular column for a magazine called The Pero-Guri Diaries. Here’s how Time Magazine explained it a few years ago:

“To understand Yasuo Tanaka, you need a piece of slang you won’t find in any Japanese-English dictionary. Pero-guri is a phrase Tanaka coined himself to describe the sexual act. More specifically, his sexual acts. It’s an onomatopoeic word, the pero coming from the slang pero-pero, which means to lick. The guri comes from guri-guri, which means to grind….Tanaka is Governor of Japan’s mountainous Nagano prefecture, west of Tokyo, but he’s also a writer, specializing in autobiographical pero-guri tales, which reveal a predilection for flight attendants, married women and fine champagne.

“‘Appointment with Mrs. U. Nap at Park Hyatt. The entire floor must have heard us. Midnight. She goes home to her husband… Dom Perignon at Roppongi’s Kingyo. Head to Chianti at Iikura for an espresso chaser but end up on the roof of the adjacent building, pero-pero guri-guri with the Tokyo Tower in the back. Her screaming fills the air. Pull out moist wipes from the bag and clean up.’”

Once upon a time, they used to say a gentleman never tells…And leave it to the Japan Times to fail to mention any of this in the interview.

After graduation, Tanaka at first joined the oil giant Mobil, only to leave three months later to pursue his career as a writer.

Tanaka also got married soon after joining Mobil, but got divorced 11 months later to pursue his career as a pero-guri writer.

…in 2002, conservative assemblymen who were upset by Tanaka’s challenge to tradition and decades of pork-barrel politics passed a no-confidence vote against him, and forced him from office.

Yes, they were upset by his challenge to pork-barrel politics…and creating undesirable attention for Nagano Prefecture by drinking in his glass-walled office with celebrities on his lap, his pero-guri tales, and endless self-promotion.

In the ensuing gubernatorial election, however, Tanaka made a successful comeback, thanks to overwhelming popular support.

Showing once again how desperately the Japanese voting public craves a reformer.

Then…he expanded his curriculum vitae yet again when he became leader of New Party Nippon, a new political party founded to challenge Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s Liberal Democratic Party in the Sept. 11 general election.

His party mates are strange bedfellows for a reformer—in addition to Mr. Tanaka, the other four members of his party all voted against Mr. Koizumi’s reforms in the Diet. In other words, they are anti-reformers who support the status quo of tradition and pork barrel politics.

At least the other members ran for the Diet, but Mr. Tanaka didn’t. He just went around the country giving interviews about his new party, leaving the citizens of Nagano to shift for themselves in his absence.

Though (the party) is small…

So small, in fact, that they had to “borrow” one member from another party of anti-reformers to meet the minimum requirements for selection in the proportional representation phase of the election.

Tanaka hopes his fledgling party will make a difference in Japan by encouraging people to think twice about Koizumi’s ongoing reform drives, which he believes fall far short of being true reforms.

Though his interview strangely lacks any concrete suggestions for reform.

On to the content:

Many young Japanese can only define themselves by naming the company they work for or the designer brand they wear. Our society is filled with people who can’t objectively describe themselves without the help of company names or brand products.

If I were Mr. Tanaka, I wouldn’t be so quick to complain about people incapable of objectively describing themselves.

Just as I described in my book, Japan is an affluent society with an abundance of material goods, where people have no need to worry about food or clothes. But who can be proud of, or be happy about, being a member of this society?

The basic needs of human beings are food, clothing, and shelter. Despite admitting that Japan is remarkably successful in providing the basics that so many other countries lack and offering an abundance of pero-guri opportunities, Mr. Tanaka thinks this is nothing to be proud of or happy about.

Japan’s debts have increased by 170 trillion yen since [Prime Minister Junichiro] Koizumi took office four years ago. What’s more, 100 people take their own lives each day.

That’s called a non sequitor. He might be able to do something about the first, but he’ll never be able to do anything about the second.

The interviewer, Sayuri Daimon, pipes up:

How can we reform this sick society?

Before you can call it a sick society, Sayuri, you have to show us some of the symptoms. Too much food, shelter, clothing, and pero-guri? Plenty of countries are just waiting to come down with that disease. But if the problem is pork-barrel politics, why is Japan being singled out for an illness that is endemic over the globe?

Back to the governor:

In my case, if someone gives me a hard time, I write or speak publicly about it. So I think people decided not to give me a hard time.

Was that before or after you were removed from office in a no-confidence vote?

Question:
What do you think about Koizumi’s postal reform drive?

Answer 1
Where would the money in the postal savings and postal life insurance go once they were privatized?

Uh, nowhere?

Answer 2:

What happens if a foreign company takes control of the privatized postal savings company and the postal insurance company?

Is his alliance with the anti-reformers beginning to make more sense now?

I think politics should be about what politicians actually say. For example, South American countries may have some political turmoil, but the debates in their parliaments are like an art formed by the politicians’ speeches.

Yes, Japan could learn a lot about parliamentary democracy from the politically stable and economically thriving South American countries.

…in other non-English-speaking countries, such as Thailand, there are foreign-language media that enjoy a leading position in those countries. But in Japan, unless something is reported in Japanese-language newspapers or it appears on Japanese TV, it does not become “evidence” to be taken seriously.

If the foreign-language media in Thailand have a leading position, what does that say about the indigenous media? And how can media that the Thai people—or Japanese people–can’t understand have a leading position?

My current girlfriend doesn’t seem to want to get married.

No surprise there.

Question:

Are you going to run for another term as governor?

Answer:

I will do what the Nagano people want me to do. I want to listen to what people in Nagano say, whether they say I should stay or leave office.

The people of Nagano were already speaking, but he wasn’t listening. As of the date of that interview, Mr. Tanaka had the lowest approval ranking of any Japanese governor. (35% unqualified approval, 40% unqualified disapproval; when combined with those who approve somewhat, his approval rating exceeded 50%)

In fact, he was defeated for reelection the following year in 2006. He began his term as a media favorite, but his stance against the kisha club system that allows major media outlets to monopolize information put the kibosh on that. (More than politics and government needs reforming in Japan.) He certainly didn’t help himself with the prefecture’s voters by neglecting local affairs to start his own political party and get involved in a national campaign. And what can you say about the lack of common sense demonstrated by his failure to escort a female companion to a private spot for a tête-à-tête rather than share a drink with her in his glass-walled office on government property?

Nevertheless, to his credit, he did succeed in producing budget surpluses seven years running and slashing the amount of money required to win bids on local public works projects by making bidding practices more transparent.

Now imagine what will happen if he wins the Hyogo seat and joins an alliance with a government led by the DPJ, whose membership ranges from Nanking Massacre deniers to de facto Socialists looking for a piece of the action instead of holding meetings in coffee shops with the rest of the faux Social Democrats. Team them up with the corrupt petty baron Suzuki Muneo, the paleos of the People’s New Party, and the Social Democrats themselves, and circus will not be the word to describe what ensues.

But even Charles Dickens could not find the words for that.

Afterwords:

Japan’s lax residency requirements for running in an election, which allow Mr. Tanaka to parachute into Hyogo at the last minute (though Ozawa Ichiro claims the decision was made a long time ago) are more conducive to political maneuvering in the back rooms of upscale Tokyo restaurants than they are to serving the people of a particular area.

The longer I’m in Japan, the more I’m convinced that the political class remains stuck in the Warring States Period:

(F)or all practical purposes, Japan by 1467 was in fact 260 separate countries, for each daimyo was independent and maintained separate armies. The political and territorial picture in Japan, then, was highly volatile. With no powerful central administration to adjudicate disputes, individual daimyo were frequently in armed conflict with other daimyo all through the Ashikaga period.

The only way this ends is if the electorate reminds these people just who serves whom and makes them unemployed every time they get the chance to vote.

Amae, amas, amat…

“JOURNALISM LARGELY CONSISTS of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive,” observed G.K. Chesterton, and that corresponds all too well to the reports earlier this week of the death of Dr. Doi Takeo. A psychoanalyst, Dr. Doi developed and presented first to Japan and then to the world his theories on the role of amae in the Japanese psyche and cultural behavior. As the obituaries noted, people consider him to have been the first Japanese trained in psychiatry to influence Western psychiatric thought.

Those with an interest in psychiatry and in Japan knew his work well. When I studied Japanese at university, it was considered de rigeur to have read Dr. Doi’s book, Amae no Kozo (The Anatomy of Dependence). For everyone else, however, Dr. Doi might as well have been Lord Jones, and that’s how the English-language press treated his passing.

That treatment is something of a tragedy, because his work and the concepts he presented offered an important new perspective for Japanese to understand themselves and for foreigners to understand them. Perhaps that’s shikata ga nai, as the Japanese say; it can’t be helped. The interest of the lumpen readership in either Japan or psychiatry is limited, and the concept of amae is difficult to understand for anyone not familiar with Japanese society. In fact, I suspect it would be next to impossible to understand unless one were Japanese or had lived in Japan for several years and paid close attention to what was going on.

Amae defined

Dr. Doi used the word amae because there’s no real English equivalent. Indeed, it is said to be a back formation he coined himself from the verb amaeru. The underlying emotions, said Dr. Doi, are instinctual and present in every society, but the Japanese have a greater awareness of those emotions because they have specific words to describe them. Thus, Western terminology is insufficient to describe the Japan psyche. That further complicates the understanding of subtle concepts difficult to describe and prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

One trustworthy source translates amae as “dependency wishes”, in which a person relies on the love, patience, and/or tolerance of other people or groups who form the other pole of an emotional relationship. Dr. Doi himself described it as presuming on another’s love, basking in another’s indulgence, or indulging in another’s kindness. Right away, that definition causes problems with misinterpretation. Westerners often view relationships and emotional dependence of that sort in a negative light. Dependency is to be outgrown because it is a manifestation of weakness and childishness.

That view does not predominate in Japan, however. The word amae has the same root as the word amai, or sweet, imparting a positive sense that makes it impossible to render into a single English word or phrase. In that spirit, the name of his book could also have been rendered literally as The Structure of Amae. Translators know better than anyone that converting from one language to another is not the same as handling an algebraic equation.

Amae in everyday life

A Freudian, Dr. Doi postulated that the origin of amae lies in the restoration of the lost mother-and-child union, a relationship that might be considered even more important in Japan than elsewhere. He then used it as a way to describe the dynamics of different relationships in adult life, including those between parent and child (in which amae is present even after children become adults), husband and wife, teacher and pupil, patron and acolyte, master and apprentice, and even feudal lord and samurai.

In many instances, the one-way direction of this relationship is only temporary, and in other cases, the dynamics move in both directions. People often use as an example of amae women indulging in emotional dependence on men, but that works in reverse from men to women as well. Also, pupils grow up to become teachers, and apprentices grow up to be masters. While Westerners may consider dependency a weakness, in Japan amae can strengthen the social fabric through a relationship between two people or among a larger group of people.

Dr. Doi used the concept to explain the importance in Japan of developing a rapport or relationship that transcends the feeling of simpatico, in which there is merging, or tokekomu. He held that amae helped explain the blurring of the distinction between subject or object—or self and other—in Japan, and why the notions of privacy and individual rights were different here than elsewhere.

He extended his theory by using it to explain the Japanese dislike of cut-and-dried logic, frequently referred to as “fart logic” (herikutsu), the nature of long-term business relationships, and the importance of nonverbal communication.

Giri-ninjo

Another layer of complexity was added by his application of amae to examine the contrasting feelings of giri, or obligations in social relationships, and ninjo, or human emotions—in other words, the conflict between what one should do or has to do, with what one would naturally want to do. This issue is a much greater part of both the daily dialogue and general cultural discussion in Japan than elsewhere. In Japan, Dr. Doi claimed, ninjo is characterized by both using and responding to amae, while giri is infused by ninjo.

While giri may seem to be an unpleasant burden that Westerners might prefer to shuck as soon as it becomes convenient, the Japanese recognize it as an important social lubricant. Unlike ninjo, it is not universal, so it is restricted to specific relationships. It can involve helping those who help you and returning favors to those who do one favors. People neglect these obligations at the risk of their social standing.

Of course these same obligations are present in the West, but they seem to have an added dimension here. Try giving an unexpected present, no matter how insignificant, to a Japanese with whom you are on friendly terms and watch what happens.

This side up

There’s still more. One of the first things a foreign student of Japan learns is that it is a vertical society, rather than a horizontal one. Dr. Doi claimed that amae was the reason for the prevalence of vertical integration in Japan to begin with.

Incidentally, the Japanese themselves are aware that vertical structures can be inefficient and frequently discuss them as an obstacle rather than an advantage. For example, people often criticize the excessive verticalization of the governmental bureaucracy when discussing ways to reform the system. Some think it was one reason for the poor performance of the military command structure during the war. That might provide a hint why bureaucratic reform has been so difficult to achieve–how does one change the natural default position of everyone’s emotional structure?

Those who disagree

Naturally, these theories were, and are, wide open to criticism. All the Japanese with whom I’ve discussed the book said that while they thought it was essentially accurate, the doctor tried to stretch the concept too far by applying it to every aspect of life. Perhaps that’s to be expected of pioneers anxious to spread the awareness of new ideas they’ve developed.

Some of this might also be dated. Dr. Doi was born in 1920 and formulated his theories after a psychological culture shock while visiting the United States in 1950s. For example, he thought that the phrase “help yourself” was rude. He assumed it meant “no one will help you”, when it actually means “do as you like”. (Let’s also not forget that some Westerners raise their children by emphasizing “no one will help you” as a way to inculcate self-reliance.)

Lately, however, it seems that some of these tendencies might be disappearing. Perhaps this is most apparent in the way that single women now deal with men. In passing, it should be noted that people often fail to consider just how fast Japan is able to change or adapt to change, and yet retain its stability. This was still a feudal society fewer than 150 years ago, and it is astonishing how quickly it has incorporated concepts for which it took hundreds of years to evolve in the West. Thus, it’s not surprising that emotional structures in place for more than a millenium might melt in the space of a few decades.

One of Dr. Doi’s Western critics was Peter Dale, whose book The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness no longer seems to be in print. (None of the on-line descriptions I found of Mr. Dale’s objections cite his qualifications, though he must have had some.)

Dale dismissed the whole concept as belonging to the class of ideas known as nihonjinron, or theories on the Japanese people. That was once a thriving cottage industry for the presentation of claims that the Japanese were unique, which itself gave rise to another thriving cottage industry for the snorters offended by those claims.

More specifically, Dale criticized Dr. Doi for irrationally expanding the meanings of common Japanese words to convey the idea of uniqueness. He compared it to the prewar twisting of such words as kokutai (national polity) and kokusui (national essence) for propaganda purposes.

One can imagine the criticism that would have erupted had Dr. Doi analyzed the Japan-U.S. relationship through the prism of amae.

The problems of nihonjinron

Discussions of nihonjinron from either perspective have always seemed like a waste of time. First, it has little or no practical application for anyone’s life in Japan, regardless of nationality, giving the whole enterprise an airy-fairy quality. Second, some of the ideas are grounded in the social sciences, whose limits tend to be reached very quickly. Third, the debate attracts the type of people who think intellectual discussion consists of inflated claims informed by emotional predispositions, again from either perspective, and who enjoy it for that reason. We’ve all heard it said that academic arguments are so ferocious because there is so little at stake. Is it a coincidence that many of those involved seem to be either the overeducated or people who insufficiently digested what education they did receive? Given a choice, I’ll take in vito over in vitro every time.

Not to be overlooked is that those who most intensely argue against nihonjinron often use it as a vehicle for their real motive—Japan-bashing. And in turn, Japan bashing is often a vehicle for lashing out at some demon in one’s personal background entirely unrelated to Japan. Perhaps more Japanese should consider developing the field of gaijinron as it concerns foreigners’ views of them.

Nor should we overlook that those most scornful of nihonjinron somehow fail to notice the libraries full of arguments claiming a similar uniqueness for the Americans, the English, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Koreans, and scores of small tribes throughout the world known only to their neighbors and anthropologists.

So who was Lord Jones?

A website post cannot do justice to all the issues required to fully examine a concept as important and as difficult to grasp as amae, both pro and con. That’s why journalists might honestly struggle to describe for use as corner space filler the life and ideas of Dr. Doi–a Japanese Lord Jones whom the public did not know, and whose reputation was formed in a different era for a subject with which few people are conversant and even fewer would want to be.

So how did they handle it? Here’s one example from AP (emphasis mine):

Takeo Doi, a scholar who wrote that the Japanese psyche thrived on a love-hungry dependence on authority figures, has died, his family said Monday. Doi…wrote the 1971 book, “The Anatomy of Dependence,” which introduced the idea of “amae” – a childlike desire for indulgence - as key to understanding the Japanese mind.

One wonders just how many people in journalism—helplessly watching their credibility vanish, their market shares vaporize, and their stockholders hit the silk—realize that much of the public has grown to detest them for the habitual and intentional professional malpractice the above excerpt demonstrates. There is no question that the person who wrote that–and I don’t care what her name was–deliberately chose the most unflattering way to describe the man’s work.

One also wonders if the journalists realize that for the same disgusted public, watching them commit suicide is an opportunity to pop some corn and crack open a beer. It’s obvious to those of us familiar with Japan that the journalists assigned to cover this country are (pick one or more) superficial, ignorant, incompetent, eager to play off negative stereotypes, or ready to create new ones. They have an attitude of charity towards none and malice towards all.

If all your information about Japan is derived from the Western mass media, then everything you know about Japan is wrong.

Afterwords: I was curious about the statement that Dr. Doi coined the noun amae (it’s been a while since I read the book), so I did a quick check of Japanese-Japanese dictionaries. The word does not appear in the 1984 edition of Kojien, which was the standard reference in those days, but it is defined in Sanseido’s 1984 Reikai Shinkokugo Jiten. That dictionary was compiled for younger students, but it has excellent examples and concise definitions that are useful even for adults. There’s now a fourth edition, and I highly recommend it for foreign students of the Japanese language.

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?

Cannibalism and torture part of everyday life in North Korea

THE ASIA TIMES has a curious article about the book Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor, by Kim Yong as told to Kim Suk-Young.

From the descriptions, it would seem that North Korea is run like a concentration camp on a national scale. Mr. Kim’s personal experience shows:

“…just how drastically North Korea had regressed – to the point that unimaginable acts such as cannibalism and torture have become part of everyday life.”

He was once a member of the elite who drove imported automobiles, but wound up in a prison camp after being accused of treason. He worked underground at the camp and came to think of daylight as a luxury. After six years, he escaped with the help of old friends and made his way to the U.S. and agreed to be interviewed for the book to present the facts of North Korea to the world.

As the article points out, it is a North Korean version of Solzhenitsyn’s expose of the Soviet gulag. But the curiosity of the article is that the author, one David Wilson, spends almost as much time on Kim Suk-Young, the person who put the book together.

While Ms. Kim is to be commended for her work, readers would have benefited from a further description of the book’s content instead of a personality profile of the transcriber/interviewer.

The problem is compounded because Ms. Kim, a performing arts professor at the University of California, is a naive geopolitical lightweight:

“(She) describes the country as “strange”, noting that there is nothing you cannot buy if you have money despite the abiding power of communist ideology.”

There’s nothing strange about that–it’s a salient feature of every communist government that’s ever existed. What’s strange is Wilson’s use of the term “abiding power of communist ideology”. That ideology has no abiding power, and North Korea is obviously not run according to communist principles.

Ms. Kim also finds it noteworthy that North and South Korea are very much alike because they share the same sense of humor and respect family ties. Why shouldn’t they be culturally similar? They’re the same tribe!

Mr. Wilson calls this a “twist” for some reason.

“She is convinced that America is equally guilty of propaganda. Before making any uninformed assumptions about North Korea, the West should try to understand it, she said. Treat the country with respect is her message.”

Cannibalism and torture are everyday occurrences while the elite lives in luxury, and the country is always last in the World Press Freedom Index Rankings. It floods the world with date rape drugs and counterfeit currency, and adamantly refuses to end its unneeded nuclear weapons program. What “uninformed assumptions” from the “equally guilty” propagandist America could be worse? And why should a country such as this be treated with respect? Would she have also had us treat the apartheid regime of South Africa with respect?

But then what else would you expect from a UC drama professor?

The Watanabe-Eda platform for reform in Japan

THE MOST COMPELLING STORY in Japanese politics today is the struggle to eliminate the control of politics and policy determination by largely anonymous civil servants in the bureaucracy rather than elected representatives. Many of those who seek to put the bureaucracy at Kasumigaseki in its place also advocate small, decentralized government. If that movement has a firebrand, it is surely the now-independent Diet member Watanabe Yoshimi, who has already been the subject of several posts here. (Click on the tag at the end of this post for more.)

Working with his political partner and fellow lower house MP Eda Kenji—himself a former bureaucrat—Mr. Watanabe is determined to ignite a citizens’ movement for a drastic change in the face of Japanese government.

On 20 April, the two men presented their political philosophy and objective with the publication of a book-length dialogue titled Datsu Kanryo Seiken, or very roughly, Eliminating the Political Power of the Bureaucracy.

At the end of the book, the authors conveniently provide a summarization and condensation of their objectives in a ten-point program that should serve as the basis for all discussion about governmental reform in this country. Perfection is not an achievable goal for any political system, but Japan is unlikely to find a better action plan for reform than this.

Students of government might find the resemblance of aspects of the program to the American conception of federalism to be striking.

The following is my quick and dirty translation of their platform.

*****
Ten Issues for the Citizens’ Movement, Eliminating Bureaucratic Control, and Regional Autonomy

There are steps that should be taken before taxes are increased! Diet members and the bureaucrats should be the first to sacrifice.

1. The complete prohibition of amakudari (The source of wasted tax money)
(Note: Amakudari is the practice of giving senior bureaucrats important jobs in government-affiliated organizations and private companies when they retire.)

• Immediately and completely prohibit watari recommendations and individual ministry and agency recommendations. (Further note: Watari is the name for the ministries’ arrangement of successive jobs for retired bureaucrats at government-affiliated corporations, with the former civil servants getting retirement money each time.)

• Eliminate personnel banks on a timed schedule. (Specifically mentioned is a center under the jurisdiction of the Cabinet Office that handles employment recommendations for bureaucrats in one organization rather than allowing individual ministries and agencies to make those recommendations.)

• Eliminate the practice of encouraging early retirement, and establish a personnel system based on working until retirement age.

• Revise the seniority-based salary system by overhauling the laws regarding remuneration, and reduce all personnel expenses.

• Conduct a private sector-type restructuring of government by loosening the restraints on the basic right to work for public employees.

• Establish oversight organizations operated by third parties. (Establish punitive provisions for violators and strictly enforce those provisions.)

2. Completely uncover the hidden funds in special accounts (30-50 trillion yen)

• Conduct a complete and thorough accounting of the differential between assets and liabilities in the special accounts, starting with the surplus and reserve funds for the three largest sources of those accounts: government investment and loans, labor insurance, and the special account for foreign reserves.

• Sell state-owned assets and stock held by the government.

3. Sharply reduce the number of Diet members and bureaucrats, as well as their salaries

• Reduce the number of lower house members to 300 (by eliminating the 180 proportional representation delegates) and the number of upper house members to 100 (by eliminating the 142 proportional representation delegates).

• Eliminate the jobs of 100,000 national civil servants (Introduce the state/province system and eliminate the central government’s organizations in regional blocs. There are now 330,000 national civil servants.)

• Cut the salaries of Diet members by 30% and their bonuses by 50%. Cut the salaries of civil servants by 10%-20%.

4. In principle, abolish or privatize independent administrative agencies, and drastically reform public interest corporations.

• The independent administrative agencies and public interest corporations are hotbeds for amakudari. These should, in principle, be abolished. Those independent administrative agencies that cannot be abolished should be privatized. The need for public interest corporations should be reevaluated on the premise of a zero-based review.

5. Eradicate collusive bidding at the initiative of public officials, and eliminate and conduct more rigorous oversight of the single tendering of contracts and designated competitive bidding

• Beef up the law to prevent collusive bidding at the initiative of public officials, thus preventing collusion with the organizations where amakudari is a problem (by expanding the application to former bureaucrats). Strengthen the Fair Trade Commission’s authority in regard to this collusive bidding.

• In principle, replace single tendering and designated competitive bidding with general competitive bidding. When such practices are unavoidable, require the reason for their need and the public disclosure of information on current amakudari-based employment at the contracting partner.

6. Integrate the management of senior personnel decisions through a Cabinet Personnel Bureau under the prime minister’s office, and hire general personnel simultaneously

• Put senior personnel decisions under the control of the prime minister’s office to ensure the primacy of political appointments.

• Foster a bureaucracy whose personnel are aware that they serve the nation rather than individual ministries or agencies. Eliminate vertical administration (of the ministries and agencies).

• Hire private sector personnel experts and place private sector personnel from outside the government in leadership positions.

• Require the provisional resignation of all senior personnel in the bureaucracy at the level of department head and above. Rehire some of those personnel in special positions for limited times only. Employ both politicians and private sector personnel as a state strategy staff and political appointees (political appointments).

• Create a mechanism for identifying the responsibility of bureaucrats for policy failures.

7. Maintain the authority to formulate budgets by a Cabinet Budget Bureau under the prime minister’s office

• Put budget formulation under political control by removing the work for budget assessments, government investment and loans, and tax planning and proposals from the Ministry of Finance and establishing a Cabinet Budget Bureau under the prime minister’s office. Zero-based budgeting will be the general operating principle.

• Disband the Social Insurance Agency and combine its functions with the Tax Administration Agency. In the future, create a public taxation and collection agency and integrate the work for collecting local taxes. This would kill two birds with one stone by improving the collection rate for taxes and social insurance premiums, as well as reducing the number of government personnel.

8. Completely prohibit contributions by corporations and other groups to individual politicians (the source of political corruption)

• Completely eliminate the branch offices of political parties. Allow corporate and group donations only to a party headquarters. (Implement the pledge made to the people when political party subsidies from public funds were created during the Hosokawa Administration.) Crush the connection between politicians and their vested interests on the one hand, and pressure groups on the other.

9. Establish local autonomy and adopt the state/province system to improve the lives of the people and a focus on the regional areas.

• Transfer “the three ‘gen’” (kengen, or authority; zaigen, or revenue sources; and ningen, or people) to the basic local government units: municipalities.

• Establish local autonomy and residential self rule for laws, taxation, and other measures.

• Abolish the system of “subsidies with strings attached” provided by central government ministries and agencies, and national taxes distributed to local governments. Introduce a new mechanism for allocating financial resources among local governments.

• Move to a state/prefecture system based on local autonomy in 10 years.

• Limit the authority of the national government.

10. Use all of the foregoing to dismantle Kasumigaseki (the ministries and agencies of the central government)

• Reorganize the ministries and agencies of the central government (Kasumigaseki) again to leave only the “national minimum” required for diplomacy, the maintenance of safety (including food and energy), public finances, monetary issues, and social insurance. Rid the country of governmental authority concentrated at the national level.

This agenda is ultimately a basis for discussion when forming groups (for political action). It is adaptable, and items can be added, subtracted, or amended in the future through activities in which citizens have the lead role.

Afterwords:

By the numbers:

1. Some people go no further than amakudari when discussing the abuses of the Japanese bureaucracy, but as this list demonstrates, the problems go much deeper than that. The personnel bank to which the two men refer was, ironically, established to reduce the impact of amakudari.

3. Reducing the number of national legislators is another step that would kill two birds with one stone. In addition to cutting the cost of government, a new (presumably) winner-take-all system in electoral districts would result in a real two-party system that sharply curtails the influence of the smaller parties. Even the non-reformers in both the LDP and the DPJ have been discussing this step as a way to eliminate their pesky coalition partners.

This measure would reduce the strength of New Komeito, the LDP’s coalition partners in government, from 31 seats to eight in the lower house and from nine to two in the upper house. The Communist Party would lose all of its seats in both houses—nine in the lower house and three in the upper house, and the Social Democrats would lose six of their seven seats in the lower house and both its upper house seats.

That’s fine by me. While I understand the argument that it shuts out minority views from the process, too often in parliamentary systems those minority parties wind up to be the tail wagging the dog. One of the problems of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan is that too many puppies are trying to wag the big dog’s tail, both internally and among the smaller parties aligned with it. The party can function efficiently only when kennel meister Ozawa Ichiro dictates party policy.

That’s no way to run a political party.

4. Yes indeed! These hotbeds of amakudari include:

The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, the National Agricultural Research Organization, the National Institute of Animal Health, the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, the National Traffic Safety and Environment Laboratory, the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency, the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization, the National Institute for Japanese Language, the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, the National Hospital Organization Kyushu Medical Center, the National Hospital Organization Kyoto Medical Center, the National Hospital Organization Hokkaido Cancer Center, the National Hospital Organization Nagoya Medical Center, the National Hospital Organization Kure Medical Center, the National Hospital Organization Osaka National Hospital, the National Hospital Organization Yokohama Medical Center, the National Hospital Organization Fukuyama Medical Center, the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo, the National Museum of Western Art, the Fukui National College of Technology, the Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute, Urawa, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, the National Livestock Breeding Center, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, the National Agency for the Advancement of Sports and Health, the Commemorative Organization for the Japan World Exposition ‘70, the Japan Student Services Organization, the National Research Institute of Fisheries Science, Fisheries Research Agency, the National Research Institute of Far Seas Fisheries, Fisheries Research Agency, the Japan Water Agency, the National Research Institute of Fire and Disaster, the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, the Welfare And Medical Service Agency, the National Center for Seeds and Seedlings, the National Statistics Center, the National Institute for Sea Training, the National Institute of Technology and Evaluation, the Center for Food Quality, Labeling and Consumer Services, Livestock Industries Corporation, the Kansai Advanced Research Center, Communications Research Laboratory, the Urban Renaissance Agency, the National Research Institute of Brewing, the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency, the Japan Organization for Employment of the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities, and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization.

Just imagine all the comfortable sinecures these organizations offer those bureaucrats who descend from Kasumigaseki heaven. They all have English websites paid for by Japanese taxpayers—pop any of them into Google and see if you think any of them really need to be spared elimination or privatization.

6. It is not easy for people outside of Japan to appreciate how a system of “political appointees”–a phrase that makes most Americans cringe–would be an improvement, but that again demonstrates the excessive influence and power of the Japanese bureaucracy in politics and government.

7. This is designed to eliminate the control exerted by the Ministry of Finance on the budget. The Finance Ministry is considered to be the Big Swinging Dick of all the ministries.

8. One can sympathize with the efforts to eliminate the influence of big business on politics through campaign contributions, but it’s probably impossible to do so. Similar reforms in the United States have failed miserably. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Candidate Obama refused public financing, and his website accepting credit card contributions intentionally had the address verification function turned off (which has to be done manually). That allowed people to donate under fictitious names to skirt contribution limits and the law preventing donations from foreigners. A lot of money (just how much will never be known) was collected for Mr. Obama in Africa. His campaign raised a record amount of nearly 750 million dollars, and included website contributions from Adolf Hitler, Mickey Mouse and all sorts of goofy fictitious people that the donors and the campaign, in their contempt for the law, didn’t bother to disguise.

After his election, Mr. Obama appointed Eric Holder as Attorney General. When he served as Deputy Attorney General, Mr. Holder facilitated outgoing President Bill Clinton’s scheme to sell presidential pardons for cash.

Senior Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod said that all fraudulent contributions would be returned, and my eyes rolled while typing that sentence just as much as yours did when reading it.

Nobody is going to be prosecuted for the obvious fraud. And corporate contributors in Japan will find a way to skirt the law, too.

9. I’ve wanted to do a piece on the proposed state/province system for a long time, but that really deserves a magazine-length article. This system would create anywhere from nine to 12 states or provinces that would eventually supplant the current 47 prefectures. The result would be a three-tiered structure of central government, state/province government, and municipal government, each with clearly defined functions and the power to levy and collect taxes.

The reorganization of government at the sub-national level is currently the subject of intense debate among the political class in Japan, and some hold that the introduction of such a system would be a powerful weapon to nullify the bureaucratic stranglehold on government.

This one’s fine by me, too. Anything that removes authority from the central government and puts it closer to the people is always fine by me. Power to the people, don’t you know.

10. Hallelujah!

Who would have thought that two decades after the unquestioned successes of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain that the working politicians most passionately devoted to small government, devolution of authority, and budget hawking would be in Japan?

As a Japanese taxpayer and permanent resident of Japan, I’d love to see all 10 of these platform planks implemented immediately–especially before any tax increase, most of which is likely to be wasted. Will they all come to pass? Probably not. It doesn’t take much imagination to hear the howls of protest from the smaller parties, particularly the ones on the left, that it is undemocratic and unfair to allow only those people who actually win elections to hold Diet seats. Yes, it’s beyond parody, but it also doesn’t take much imagination to know that the mass media will give them as much megaphone as they want.

Nevertheless, Mr. Watanabe and Mr. Eda do everyone a service by presenting these ideas in a coherent program, thereby redrawing the boundaries of the debate. The most successful politicians are the ones who drag the center in their direction.

The collapse of journalism in Japan

BIG JOURNALISM the world over is turning itself into dinosaur journalism before our eyes, and that process is also underway in Japan. One difference here, however, is that the problems are as much structural as they are attitudinal.

Freelance reporter Uesugi Takashi has published a paperback in Japanese that describes some of those problems. Called The Collapse of Journalism, it is reviewed in the November issue of Shokun! by Kawamura Jiro, himself a former reporter for the Asahi Shimbun. The following is a quick translation of that review.

*****

“After working as a government-paid political aide in the upper house of the Diet and as a salaried reporter in the Tokyo bureau of the New York Times, author Uesugi Takashi became a freelance political reporter. This book presents his descriptions of the behavior of political journalists working in the Japanese print and broadcast media, based on what he’s seen through his own work. It might be more apt to say, however, that it exposes their behavior.

“For example, the political reporters, known as ‘duty reporters’ are assigned (by their employers) to cover specified politicians only. When that politician gives a speech, the duty reporters get together and compare their notes. It’s no wonder all the newspaper articles read the same.

“Those reporters assigned to the ruling party are not able to interview opposition party members as they would like. The mass media often criticize the government and public offices for their vertical compartmentalization, but the media are guilty of the same practice themselves.

“The duty reporters sometimes act as watchdogs for the politicians. Whenever a reporter from a different desk at the same newspaper or a freelance reporter tries to talk to a politician, the duty reporters will try to prevent them from meeting. As a result:

‘Political reporters monopolize the right of access to politicians, are fully conversant with affairs at Nagata-cho, and take the government to task, yet still have never done any hard-hitting coverage of politicians. In every instance, scoops that terrify the prime minister’s office, articles that cause parliamentarians to resign, and stories about scandals that throw a politician’s reelection into doubt have been written by journalists not working the political affairs desk.’

“Come to think of it, the Asahi Shimbun broke the Recruit scandal, but the reporters who got the scoop were young journalists working at the Yokohama and Kawasaki branches, not the political reporters. At the time, the author was assigned to the weekly magazine Shukan Asahi, and it was common practice for the duty reporters to act as watchdogs for the politicians instead.

“I was struck speechless by the sentence, ‘Reporters who are superior journalists cannot survive at the political affairs desk.’

“When there are fewer journalists of excellence and more reporters with little ability, we shouldn’t be surprised at the appearance of op-ed writers who write pieces calling the Justice Minister ‘The Grim Reaper’. (The God of Death in the original Japanese)

“Many newspaper executives lament that people nowadays are reading less, and reading fewer newspapers, but the content of this book makes one wonder if this tendency to turn away from the print media shouldn’t be expected.

“Newspapers conduct polls to determine the public’s support for the Cabinet, but they just might be in urgent need of polls to find out how many people actually read what they’re writing, and whether the readers trust it. The first poll they should take is to find out whether their own employees are actually reading it. Make the poll anonymous for the sake of the cowards.”

*****
Afterwords:

During a newspaper interview conducted the day after Abe Shinzo assumed office, the book’s author predicted that the new prime minister would be gone in a year. The Abe administration lasted 366 days.

Here’s the Amazon link to the book.