Smokin’

A FIRE at the Umeda Station on the Midosuji Line of the Osaka Municipal Subway two months ago burned down a storage shed. The fire department’s investigation revealed that smoking was the likely cause. Any subway fire can have serious consequences, but that’s a busy station in the heart of the metropolis with several connections to other lines. The Osaka Municipal Transport Bureau then banned all smoking on the subway premises for everyone.

Last week, the assistant station manager at the Honmachi Station on the Yotsubashi Line lit up in the station manager’s kitchen/lounge at 7:40 a.m. before he was due to go on duty at 8:30. It set off fire alarms, delaying four trains by a minute each and inconveniencing about 1,000 passengers.

Smoking on the job is prohibited for all Osaka city employees at their workplace, and they’re subject to disciplinary action if caught. But when do unionized public sector employees face serious punishment for anything in any country? In fact, only one Osaka municipal employee had been disciplined for smoking before — a primary school teacher was docked a month’s pay in 2010 when he was caught tubing it on school grounds.

But now Hashimoto Toru is the mayor. On the day of the incident, he said the punishment would be severe. Two days later, he elaborated on what he meant by severe:

“I want him to think that dismissal is the standard.”

When it was pointed out this would be the first time such a harsh punishment would be meted out in Osaka, and the employee might take formal action to recover his job, the mayor replied:

“I don’t care if he takes it to court.”

How about that? A lot of people in the United States, to name just one country, would be thrilled by the approach of holding public sector sponges to private sector standards (not to mention salaries). The usual suspects would be appalled, and there are plenty of those people here too. But I suspect there won’t be much sympathy in general for the assistant station manager.

Those same usual suspects might be expected to amuse themselves with meta-snark about Mussolini making the trains run on time, but since Mr. Hashimoto isn’t a classical fascist/statist of the left, only among the circles of the secular holy ones will there be the pleasing vibrations of indignation.

There’s a desperate need for people in the advanced countries to get back to the basics on every level of their lives, both individually and as members of society. One place to start is an insistence that employees follow reasonable work rules established for public safety.

*****
The trains in Japan really do run on time, as do the buses. That doesn’t mean it’s a regimented society. It’s just a manifestation of the commonly accepted idea that doing your job and doing it well is the A of the ABCs. Some years ago, a group of workers from General Motors visited a Toyota plant here. When asked for their impressions, one of the Americans said, “These people work too hard!” Sure — by GM shop floor standards. From what I’ve seen of the insides of Japanese factories, people work at a normal pace. Is it a surprise then that Toyota is still a going concern while GM would have gone belly up had the government not stepped in?

*****
The Japanese are also serious about teachers setting an example, which was the reason the Osaka primary school teacher found his paycheck lighter after being caught in the act. In my American high school, on the other hand, the physics teacher used to walk around in the halls with a pack of cigarettes (Winstons) in his shirt pocket. He was also an assistant coach on the football team. Meanwhile, a student getting caught smoking in the boy’s room would be subject to a three-day suspension on the second (or perhaps third) offense.

*****
Just before summer vacation last year, I was talking to one of my university students outside of class. She’s from Okinawa, and she was anxious to get home because everything there is more relaxed.

That was a bit unexpected, because Saga is not the picture of urban bustle. There’s even a word in the local dialect for the default, take-it-easy attitude (nonbiraato). I asked her if she thought the pace was all that hectic here.

“Oh yes. In Okinawa, even the buses don’t run on time.”

My wife laughed out loud when I told her.

*****
That assistant stationmaster at Honmachi had to have been a fool for a cigarette.

Sunrise in the land of the rising sun

NOTHING is stronger than an idea whose time has come. Sakaiya Taiichi, the senior advisor to Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru, spoke to the Your Party convention in February. The speaker and his audience share a common purpose, and both know that the time for their ideas has come. This is what he said in English.

*****
Your Party is different from the other parties. It was not born in the Diet, but was born from a citizens’ movement — the first one in the postwar era. There might have been some in the Meiji period, but it’s a rare thing. Most parties are created when several MPs get together in the Diet. Most of those parties fall apart.

Your Party began when Watanabe Yoshimi advanced his own policies and started a citizens’ movement by himself. Mr. Eda (Kenji, party secretary-general) was in synch with that. It is a party of democracy that you should be proud of.

It happened again at the end of last year. Diet members scrambled together to form groups and receive the public subsidies given to political parties. They have no political views, ideology, ideas, or concept of what the state should be. Both the Liberal Democrats and Democrats are parties for creating political crises, trifling with the people and causing them misfortune. They leave policy to the bureaucrats, and never think about Japan the nation.

Postwar Japan had many splendid conceptions. One concept was in foreign affairs, in which it would stand with the Western powers, and become a small country in military affairs and an economic giant. The option to become a military power did not exist during the American occupation, so that is what happened. The second concept was economic: The (political) system of (19)55 (when the LDP was formed), bureaucracy-directed policy, the cooperation of the business world, and large scale mass production.

They thought that even if no one had any political views, all they had to do was defend these concepts. That continued until the 80s. After that, however, the times changed: The Cold War ended, and large scale mass production reached its limits. Despite that, however, no one still had any political views or a concept of the state. All they did was create political crises.

Then Watanabe Yoshimi became a minister in the Abe Cabinet, and continued to serve in the Fukuda Cabinet. He lasted longer than usual (laughter). He began to talk about something different — civil service reform. That earned him the enmity of the bureaucracy, but the amendment to the National Civil Service Law passed. I created the draft of that amendment in the advisory council.

But even though that amendment was passed, nothing changed. The bureaucrats are unyielding. The president of the National Personnel Authority did not appear in the Diet. In the end, the (Civil Service System Reform) headquarters revolted, and Deputy Chairman Koga was fired. Even though the law was passed, nothing happens. The reality is horrendous.

Watanabe Yoshimi is a rare politician. He thinks about the concept of the state. Those politicians have been extinct for a long time. Even if there are some drawbacks, the policies are truly great. This year — This is It! This is the year of decision. The one I uncovered was Mr. Hashimoto (Toru). The circle of reform is growing. This year is the year of decision.

Why will this be the decisive year? It will be an extremely difficult year for both the Japanese economy and the global economy. Thus, there are four parts to the agenda. One is a state/province system with regional authority. There are three forms of government administration: the nation, the prefectures, and the basic self-governing bodies. The Osaka Metro District concept would convert that into two levels. We must not mistake the state/province system as a model for merging prefectures. We must change the nation.

(After creating that system) the regions must not say anything about the affairs the national government will handle — specifically, foreign affairs, defense, and the currency. Meanwhile, the national government will not say anything about the affairs the regional governments will handle. That is how it should be.

Second is civil servant reform. Civil service is not a job, it is a form of status. Until the 80s, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare was a small government office. Both the health ministry and the labor ministry accepted only seven people each with a humanities background for the elite job track. At the same time, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry were large ministries and accepted 26 people each. But now the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare is a large ministry with oversight for 25% of the national income. The agriculture ministry has jurisdiction of no more than 1.8% of GDP.

Anyone can be a bureau chief in the health ministry. The agriculture ministry has no work. If you ask, what about transferring the career agriculture ministry bureaucrats to the health ministry, that would be absurd. It would be like entrusting the old Kishu domain (present-day Wakayama and part of Mie) to the people of the Satsuma domain (present-day Kagoshima). It isn’t a job, it’s a form of status.

Organizations and personnel must be based on the principle of functionalism, and selection must be based on ability and incentive. The organization of any body that defends its status will inevitably crumble.

Third is a growth agenda. Japan today is facing its third defeat. Defeat is not losing a war. Even if it loses a war, a nation will not collapse. True defeat is the collapse of an ethical view and the system.

The first defeat was the Bakumatsu period (at the end of the Edo period). The values of the Edo government were stability and equality. They purposely did not build a bridge over the River Oi (in Shizuoka). They sought stability and equality by preventing people from crossing the flow, and making the movement of people difficult. That’s when progress became important with the arrival of the Black Ships (Commodore Perry).

It goes without saying that the second defeat was in the war. Now Japan is in third period of defeat. The sense of ethics is in turmoil.

Now it is seen as a good thing to receive social welfare benefits. In Osaka, even if the primary school teachers scold their students by saying, “If you don’t study, you’ll have a hard time later,” the students retort, “I’ll get welfare payments, so I’ll be all right.” They say 10% of the junior high school students can’t do multiplication.

Mr. Hashimoto’s proposal is to conduct a relative evaluation of the teachers. Five percent of the teachers will be given the lowest grade of a D. Teachers who get Ds two years running will have to be re-trained. If they do not improve after re-training, they will be asked to leave. How many teachers receive the lowest grade under the absolute evaluation system now? It’s only 0.15%. That’s one-and-a-half people in 1,000. There’s maybe one in a school.

In Osaka, where the teacher evaluations are strict, the teachers’ union says the teachers there have three times the neuroses of teachers anywhere else. It’s a scam. The same statistics cite the cause of the neuroses. The primary cause is trouble with other teachers in the teachers’ lounge.

The fourth is creating an open Japan. That’s true also of the TPP. What did we do during the Meiji Restoration? The policy known as “The return of the lands and the people from the feudal lords to the Emperor.” In short, civil servant reform, giving up the status of samurai. That was the second year of Meiji (1870). Next, they cheerfully opened the country. (N.B.: The term Mr. Sakaiya invented for this idea, which he frequently uses in speeches, is suki suki kaikoku.) The Tokugawas grudgingly opened the country. In the brocade pictures (nishiki-e) of the times, foreigners are depicted as devils or tengu (monster-spirits). That changed.

The next thing they did in the Meiji Restoration was economic reform. In the new currency law of the fourth year of Meiji, the monetary units were unified as yen and sen. They started using paper money, and it became possible to create credit. In the Bakumatsu period, according to the calculations of Oguri Kozukenosuke, annual tribute accounted for only 40% of expenditures. Now, of the (government’s) JPY 104 trillion in expenditures, including quarterly adjustments, tax revenues account for JPY 42 trillion. Exactly 40%.

Annual tribute was only 40% of expenditures. Oguri Kozukenosuke worried that annual tribute would have to be tripled. That vanished in an instant with the start of the Meiji period and the new paper money under the new currency law. A deflationary economy has to be converted to an inflationary economy. In a deflationary economy, the past governs the future. There has to be nominal growth of about 3%.

The next thing they did in the Meiji period was eliminate the domains and create the prefectures. In other words, the state system. After that followed education reform. In Japan at that time, 40% of the boys and 25% of the girls learned reading, writing, and arithmetic at the terakoya, the Buddhist temple schools. It was the leading country in the world for education. Even in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution, only one in four boys went to school. There was only one educational institution in all of Europe that admitted girls.

They eliminated all the terakoya and created schools. That’s because the objectives of education changed, from stability to progress. Educating people suitable for large-scale mass production was required. That idea still remains today. That’s why they taught that individuality and originality was a bad thing. They called all individuality a “defect” and originality was chastised as garyu (not following conventional methods).

Of course basic education is important. Ten percent of first-year junior high school students can’t multiply. That is the responsibility of the teachers, and they should be fired. Attending Board of Education meetings is a part-time job for teachers once a month. A view of education as a whole is not possible. The people who think that’s fine are the education ministry bureaucrats supported by the status system.

Teaching is also a form of status. There are many English teachers incapable of English. On the other hand, they have teachers who’ve come back from living in the United States teaching social studies. That’s all they have a license for. Next to the teachers fluent in English are the English teachers who can’t speak English at all, and the teachers back from the United States teach about the Japanese Diet, of which they know nothing.

We must change this absurdity with systemic reform. The drawback of reformers is their tendency to splinter without limit. That’s causing a lot of trouble right now in Osaka (laughter). The conservatives are surprisingly united. This reform is good, that reform is bad, only about 20% can agree on each issue. As a result, the unfortunate situation will continue.

That’s why, even if there are problems to a certain extent, we must agree that it (reform) is better than what we have now. Persons of good character are not capable of reform. Have you ever heard anyone say that Oda Nobunaga was a person of good character? (laughter) The requirement for reform depends entirely on the ability to achieve breakthroughs. Watanabe Yoshimi has that ability.

This is it. This is the year of decision. Let’s put aside our small differences and unite behind the big things we agree on. This year, please work so that we can increase our number to 300 (in the lower house of the Diet).

(end translation)

*****
Meanwhile, here is one of the most astonishing newspaper articles I’ve ever read anywhere, and that it appeared in the Asahi Shimbun is more astonishing still. The Asahi is the newspaper of the left in Japan, and the DPJ is the major party to the left of center (with quite a few members quite left of center). Here’s the headline. Note the past tense:

DPJ’S GOVERNING FIASCO: Party never challenged Finance Ministry

It’s a condensed version of everything I’ve been reporting on for the last three years. They’re writing off the DPJ.

It’s difficult to find a passage to quote because every sentence is a dagger thrust. Let’s stick to this:

Successive DPJ administrations have failed to make meaningful spending cuts. Despite rounds of budget screening, the three budgets compiled by the party effectively ballooned to record levels on an initial basis.

You know what they say: Read the whole thing. Also note the background of former Finance Minister Fujii Hirohisa and his opinion about the respective role of bureaucrats and politicians.

That’s the same Fujii Hirohisa who was the secretary-general of Ozawa Ichiro’s Liberal Party before it merged with the DPJ, and who doesn’t know what happened to the party’s public subsidies that it was supposed to return to the Treasury when it folded. (Some in the print media suspect it wound up in Ozawa Ichiro’s safe before being spent to buy real estate for his political funds committee.) That’s the same Fujii Hirohisa who appeared on a Sunday political talk show one day before Hatoyama Yukio made his first speech to the Diet as prime minister in 2009 and admitted the party had no intention of keeping all the promises in the manifesto. They would just keep enough of them to keep the people so happy they would return them to office four years later. They didn’t, they didn’t, and they won’t.

Remember all those so-called journalists who wrote about the “fiscal hawks” of the DPJ?

ROTFLMAO.

*****
The lead story in the 12 April edition of the weekly Shukan Bunshun is titled, Farewell, DPJ. They report the results of their polling that asks voters the question, “If a lower house election were held today…” (It’s becoming a cottage industry.) While they have the LDP doing better than in other surveys, they think the DPJ would lose close to two-thirds of its seats. They also think all three DPJ prime ministers — Hatoyama, Kan, and Noda — stand a good chance of losing their seats. (Hatoyama’s been on thin ice in polling for a while.)

*****
Get ready, people — the train is coming.
Oh, yes it is.

Ichigen koji (66)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

The leftist mood is still the mainstream among Japanese intellectuals. It is extremely interesting that the closet leftists were flushed into the open by the nuclear power plant accident. The schema that “the government and Big Capital worked in collusion, and the nuclear power interests gluttonously devoured the privileges”, and the offered solution of deluded proposals to abandon all nuclear power in favor of natural energy, show they haven’t progressed in the slightest from their 60s vision of unarmed neutrality.

While Japan’s left wing is still dominant in academia, they wound up on the losing side and have had no influence whatsoever on real politics. Their final descendants are the anti-nuclear faction. By no means, however, does the right wing have a philosophy that has surpassed theirs. Marxism has poisoned Japanese intellectuals for such a long time that proper social science has never developed. Waiting for the baby boomer generation to withdraw from the scene is perhaps the only way to remove that poison.

- Ikeda Nobuo, university professor, author, blogger

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Japan’s political kaleidoscope (8): The new, the old, and the Noda

PLENTY of people were saying plenty of interesting things last week with the start of the Noda Cabinet. Here are some of them.

The Asahi Shimbun

It wasn’t what the Asahi said in an English-language article that was remarkable. Rather, it was the fact that they — Japan’s preeminent newspaper of the left and Kan Naoto’s only reliable water carrier — were the ones to say it. It started with the headline:

Noda, Finance Ministry Speak as One on Tax Hikes

The first sentence:

Having an advocate of tax hikes as prime minister is a dream come true for Finance Ministry mandarins who have long championed an increase in the consumption tax rate.

The body of the article contains a good description of how the bureaucracy in general, and the Finance Ministry in particular, becomes entwined in the political process. Now for the finish:

Senior Finance Ministry officials asked Noda to appoint either former Secretary-General Katsuya Okada or former Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku as finance minister because both men support tax increases.
Eventually, Noda picked Azumi Jun, handing him his first Cabinet portfolio.
“Noda chose a lightweight minister without losing any sleep over the matter because he served as finance minister himself,” a DPJ lawmaker said.

That last sentence is clever for the plausible deniability it provides. Did they mean Mr. Noda isn’t losing any sleep because he is capable of acting as his own finance minister, or because he was a lightweight finance minister himself who subcontracted policy decisions to the ministry. I suspect the latter.

I don’t recall much of this from the Asahi when Kan Naoto, the preceding Finance Ministry puppet and tax hike promoter, was in office, but perhaps I disremember.

Please note that I’m still having trouble with the link function. I just sent a note to WordPress. The article should be easy to find, however.

Hasegawa Yukihiro

It’s worth reading anything by Mr. Hasegawa, an award-winning book author, columnist, and member of the editorial board of the Tokyo Shimbun. Here are some excerpts from an article in Gendai Business Online commenting on Noda Yoshihiko’s use of the term “no side” after winning the DPJ presidential election.

The phrase comes from rugby and is (or at least was) used by the referee to signal the end of the match. I’ve read that it’s obsolete, but being from a country that doesn’t play rugby, you could fool me. Japanese politicians often use it in this context to call for party unity.

*****
“The use of the expression “no side” is straight from the Liberal-Democratic Party politics of a generation ago.

“In those days, Kasumigaseki (the bureaucracy) handled all the policy questions. Policy was essentially identical to that which they created, so the politicians in Nagata-cho promoted themselves using traits unrelated to the core of policy, such as decision and execution, or tolerance and compassion. It could even be said they had no other way to compete than to emphasize their capacity to execute policies or their broad-mindedness.

“People understood that politics of that sort was a failure, so the Democratic Party championed the cause of disassociation from the bureaucracy and political leadership during the general election two years ago. The politicians said they would retrieve policy from the hands of the bureaucracy. In the end, however, they were ensnared by Kasumigaseki, and their effort at eliminating the reliance on the bureaucracy failed. We’re now in the third DPJ government with the Noda administration, and there’s nothing else to say but “no side”….

“….The “no side” politics are unlikely to be successful because politics that are carried piggy-back by Kasumigaseki no longer functions. Kasumigaseki has gotten too big. It micromanages everything in the private sector (literally, every time [the private sector] raises or lowers its chopsticks), and maintains a system of skimming off taxes through amakudari. There will be no revival for the Japanese economy.

“The recognition that the root cause of the economy’s stagnation is the system of Kasumigaseki leadership has begun to spread throughout the population due to the bitter experience of the Tohoku disaster and the Fukushima accident. In Nagata-cho, they are beginning to realize that perception is growing.

“Many Democratic Party MPs are in a mouth-to-mouth feeding relationship with Kasumigaseki, and the politicians have noticed they’ll be at risk in the next election. While Noda won the DPJ election, many within the party are still opposed to a tax increase.

“The euphoria following the selection of the new party president had an immediate feel-good effect, but the Diet members will shortly return to reality. The turbulence will reemerge with a vengeance as soon as a serious effort is made to pursue a policy of higher taxes.

“What’s more, that day will soon arrive. They’re now at the stage of formulating a third supplementary budget calling for an increase in core taxes as a funding source for Tohoku reconstruction. They also plan to present a bill by next March to raise the consumption tax to fund social welfare. In short, the debate begins in the fall.

The thaw

The first of the highly publicized governmental policy reviews held by the DPJ in November 2009 was one of the most transparent political dog-and-pony shows ever staged. The idea was that the politicians would put the bureaucrats’ feet to the fire by grilling them about questionable policies. They would end the wasteful enterprises and use the money to fund their campaign promises.

It didn’t take long to find out that the reviews were scripted — literally — by the Budget Bureau of the Finance Ministry, complete with recommendations on which policies to cut. It was a convenient way for the ministry to strengthen its control relative to the other ministries. Further, the recommendations of the review panel had no force in law. Some of the programs ostensibly cut, such as one for the Education Ministry, were quietly restored into the budget of a different ministry a few months later.

The panel did have some good ideas, however. One of them was a freeze on building new housing for national civil servants, other than reconstruction in the event of an emergency. (This is often a job perquisite in both the public and private sectors.)

But it seems there’s been a late summer thaw. Construction began on 1 September of an 800-unit apartment block in Asaka, Saitama. Whatever debate was conducted about lifting the freeze hasn’t been reported, and there’s no indication the Government Revitalization Council was involved.

Each of the apartments has a living room, dining room, kitchen, bath, and three extra rooms. The rent and deposit are free, courtesy of the taxpayers. The cost of the project has been estimated at JPY 10.5 billion. Despite a location next door to the Asaka municipal offices, only national civil servants are eligible to live there. It’s prime real estate 10 minutes on foot from the train station.

The housing accommodations for national public employees are under the jurisdiction of the Finance Ministry, so the Finance Minister had to give his authorization to end the freeze and begin construction. Based on the timing, that means the person who approved the project in apparent contravention to government policy was the new prime minister, Noda Yoshihiko.

How thoughtful of him to let us know.

If the government was serious about ending wasteful government expenditures, all these properties would be sold and no new ones built. The private sector has no problem handling housing construction. The public sector has the problem of funding rent-free accommodations for its employees with public funds.

Eda Kenji on the polls

Mr. Eda is the secretary-general of Your Party. Here are excerpts from two blog posts last week:

“It was predictable to an extent, but all the polls conducted over the weekend showed the support rate for the Noda Cabinet at roughly 60%. The highest was the Yomiuri at 65%, and the lowest was the Asahi at 53%. Interestingly enough, the rate of support in the newspaper polls was highest at those papers leaning to the right, perhaps because Mr. Noda leans to the right himself. (Note: Does the motivation for the first Asahi article make more sense now?)

“This high support is likely the result of the effect of the Aida Mitsuo poem (about the dojo fish), Mr. Noda’s personal modesty, and the good feelings about the Cabinet selections made with party unity in mind. The polls also probably reflect the reaction to the fact that Mr. Kan was so terrible.

“Nonetheless, I think the people of Japan are really kindhearted. (To use the analogy of the traditional wedding present of cash), the amount of the present for a third wedding and honeymoon in two years shouldn’t be the same as it was for the first….If this continues, I am deeply apprehensive about the disappearance of a sense of tension from politics and the politicians. Most politicians are risk-averse opportunists. They’ll look at the going rate for wedding presents. If the Cabinet is a failure, they’ll think all they have to do is replace the head….At any rate, when the yearend budget formulation is finished, the rate of support will have plummeted and the government will again be on the verge of collapse….

“…Meanwhile, some in the LDP are saying it will be difficult to combat the Noda Cabinet and its initial support rate. Well, of course it will be. The LDP has joined with the DPJ as two of the parties in the three-party agreement, they’ve laid out a course of tax increases to pay for reconstruction, and they’re on board with a 10% consumption tax increase for social welfare schemes. With the difference between the two parties on these issues so small, no wonder the LDP finds it difficult to attack.”

A note on polls

Some in the Western media have reported that the new Cabinet has received “strong voter support”. If this is the best they can do when filling space, they should consider syndicated horoscopes instead. The support is nothing more than a first impression, it’s skin deep rather than strong, and since the polls are conducted by random digit dialing, no one knows whether the respondents are voters or not.

One doesn’t have to have a long memory to recall that Kan Naoto had even higher ratings in June 2010 when he displaced Hatoyama Yukio and shut Ozawa Ichiro’s supporters out of the Cabinet. As summer turned to fall, however, he lost more than 40 points in one newspaper poll in two months over his government’s mishandling of the Senkakus incident. Mr. Noda’s numbers are only a tad better than those of the LDP’s Fukuda Yasuo when he took over in 2007, and he lasted just a year.

Besides, there’s no reason to pay serious attention to what the foreign media writes about Japanese politics until they demonstrate that they understand most Japanese prime ministers aren’t “leaders” as understood in the Western sense, but the principal spokesmen for the decisions of their party.

The obvious exception was Koizumi Jun’ichiro. His successor Abe Shinzo tried to do the same, and did have some success (as the next excerpt shows). But Mr. Koizumi was an act nearly impossible to follow, and the primary audience was a news media more irritated than a pack of gunpowder-fed junkyard dogs after five years of success and popularity by someone who wasn’t a European-style social democrat. Kan Naoto tried too, but because character is one of the prerequisites for leadership, he was unlikely to succeed from the start.

Okazaki Hisahiko

Mr. Okazaki was once ambassador to Thailand, and he writes on diplomacy and foreign affairs. Here are some excerpts from a piece that appeared in the Sankei Shimbun.

I have hopes for the Noda Cabinet

“After it seized power, the DPJ offered only those anti-establishment arguments that are the critical elements of their defining characteristics, were uncontrolled in their self-indulgence, and were rebuffed at every turn. They learned from those lessons, and their promise to change the planks of their party platform for the three-party agreement is the most concrete example….They tested the most childish ideas of postwar liberalism, such as anti-Americanism and an approach to Asia, and they learned how unrealistic that is…

“They get the sequence backwards when they ask for experts’ opinions after something has happened. They should be listening to opinions regularly, and when something happens, they must decide. Their subordinates are already busy, and the excessive workload of selecting and convening the members of a commission is too heavy….

“If they’ve learned the lesson that the people have suffered and had to bear heavy burdens since they’ve taken power, it will be a positive for the two-party system in the future. Most important, I think, has been the generational change….In the DPJ, the generation of radical student demonstrators has left the scene, and they’ve moved on to the next generation.

“The LDP has also changed during this time. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo stepped down due to illness, having amended the three laws regarding education, established the legal framework for a national referendum (for amending the Constitution), and came right to the point of permitting the exercise of collective self-defense. The party responsible for frustrating the end of the postwar regime was not the DPJ, however, but the LDP. Since it’s been in the opposition, the LDP has firmed its support for recognizing the exercise of collective self-defense as party policy…

“With the new administration, they should not be so niggardly as to worry about the DPJ recovering its reputation and the effect that would have on the next election. If there is an offer to cooperate on policy, it would be best for them to humbly accept it and cooperate. It’s more important to deal with the crisis in Japan of the continuing (political) vacuum.

“I returned from a banquet in a taxi on the night the DPJ held their presidential election, and even the other passengers were saying how relieved they were that it went well. No one knows what’s going to happen in the future, but those were the voices of relief that the days of Hatoyama and Kan, who used the nation of Japan as the subject in a vivisection experiment for amateurs, are over.”

Takahashi Yoichi

The relentless Mr. Takahashi is a former Finance Ministry bureaucrat, author, journalist, and university professor. He is not as sanguine about Mr. Noda as Mr. Okazaki:

“Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko wrote the book The Enemy of Democracy when the DPJ was still in the opposition. In it, he said:

26,000 former national civil servants have taken amakudari jobs in 4,700 (public) corporations, and JPY 12.6 billion of hard-earned tax money flows to these amakudari corporations annually. No matter what budgets we formulate, we will be unable to overcome our economic crisis until this gimmickry is ended.

And

The facile recognition of an increase in the consumption tax represents the suspension of thought, and it ends the elucidation of such gimmicks as the wasteful use of the special account.

“The people’s hopes in these words were betrayed. The DPJ was unable to compile a budget or effectively utilize the Finance Ministry or the Bank of Japan because they did not reform the civil service system. That meant their plan to assert political leadership went nowhere. What I look forward to is to the extent to which the Noda administration will reform the civil service system.”

—————-
The aforementioned Eda Kenji thinks it’s impossible for the DPJ to reform the civil service system because they depend on public union support.

Kono Taro

Mr. Kono presents himself as a small-government classical liberal, but he’s not quite there yet. Here’s a sentence from a recent website post:

We’ve attacked the ruling party by saying, for example, that the child allowance was just an example of doling out of baramaki, i.e., lavish entitlements (which it was) and we made them stop. But I cannot say the LDP has explained how it will support child-rearing.

And neither does it have any business supporting child-rearing. They can explain that government can best support child-rearing by creating an environment in which the economy thrives and allowing parents to handle child-rearing by themselves. In other words, by butting out.

Mr. Kono would do well to examine the tax proposal by former ambassador to China and Utah Gov. Jon Hunstman, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination in the U.S. Mr. Huntsman is no small-government classical liberal, but he’s got the best idea for tax reform presented by any of the candidates. From The Wall Street Journal:

The heart of the plan lowers all tax rates on individuals and businesses. Mr. Huntsman would create three personal income tax rates—8%, 14% and 23%—and pay for this in a “revenue-neutral” way by eliminating “all deductions and credits.” This tracks with the proposals of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission and others for a flatter, more efficient tax system.

That means economically inefficient tax carve outs for mortgage interest, municipal bonds, child credits and green energy subsidies would at last be closed. The double tax on capital gains and dividends would be expunged as would the Alternative Minimum Tax. The corporate tax rate falls to 25% from 35%, and American businesses would be taxed on a territorial system to encourage firms to return capital parked in overseas operations.

Mr. Huntsman would repeal two of President Obama’s most economically debilitating creations, ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law. Mr. Huntsman has it right when he says, “Dodd-Frank perpetuates ‘too big to fail’ by codifying a regime that incentivizes firms to become too big to fail.” He’d also repeal a Bush-era regulatory mistake, the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules, which have added millions of dollars of costs to businesses with little positive effect.

Mr. Huntsman says he’d also bring to heel the hyper-regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration and the National Labor Relations Board, all of which are suppressing job-creation.

In addition to the foregoing, Mr. Kono should consider restoring the policies to promote agribusiness that were begun under the Abe administration and ended under the Hatoyama administration. There was quite a bit of unused farmland in Fukushima Prefecture, to cite one example, even before the nuclear accident. The DPJ chose to offer baramaki in the form of individual farming household supplements to take advantage of the disproportionate representation of agricultural regions in the Diet for electoral purposes.

Both Japan and Mr. Huntsman would also do well to heed the success of Russia, which introduced a 13% flat tax a decade ago. That resulted in a string of annual budget surpluses that started in 2001. They had a deficit of 3.6% of GDP in 2009, not the best of years for government budgets, but were back into surplus last year.

While he’s at it, Mr. Kono might also take a tip from Gouverneur Morris, who wrote much of the American Constitution:

If the legislative authority be not restrained, there can be neither liberty nor stability. However the legislative power may be formed, it will, if disposed, be able to ruin the country.

And Morris wasn’t a classical liberal — he believed in a natural aristocracy.

The high yen

The sharp appreciation of the yen hasn’t been all bad for Japanese businesses. Japanese companies are shopping till they drop in corporate supermarkets overseas now that prices are at bargain levels. According to M&A originator and executor Recof, their purchases of overseas firms from January to August alone were valued at JPY 3.8842 trillion, already more than last year’s JPY 3.7596 trillion. They amounted to JPY 465.8 billion in August, double the amount for July. The buying is on a pace equivalent to that of the second-highest year, 2008, when JPY 7.4256 trillion was spent to snap up overseas corporations. Recently Kirin Holdings bought a large Brazilian beverage company, and Asahi Holdings now owns an Australia/New Zealand-based liquor manufacturer.

It’s all in the name

Here’s the first sentence from an AP article yesterday:

Typhoon Talas dumped record amounts of rain in western and central Japan on Sunday, killing at least 25 people and stranding thousands as it turned towns into lakes, washed away cars and set off mudslides that buried or destroyed houses.

Forget the AP’s frustrated novelist prose — What is this “Typhoon Talas” of which they speak, which isn’t a name a Japanese person would come up with? Here in Japan, it’s Typhoon #12.

It turns out to be the creation of the Typhoon Committee of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, and the World Meteorological Organization, a revealing bit of nomenclature itself.

While those bodies need a way to quickly differentiate the storms, how is their function enhanced by names they don’t need and no one other than they or the news media use?

An article on the Discovery News site explains about the lists of names:

The two lists most Americans are familiar with cover the Atlantic and East Pacific. But there are also lists with culturally appropriate names that cover the Central North Pacific, Western North Pacific, Australian Region, Fiji Region, Papua New Guinea Region, Philippine Region, Northern and Southern Indian Ocean.

In other words, it would be news to Discovery News to discover that Talas isn’t “culturally appropriate” for Japan, the only country affected by WNP #12.

The article concludes:

As to whether using human names is the best approach: “That actually is an issue that comes up,” said Read (director of the National Hurricane Center). “Is there a better way to do this?”

Yeah. The way the Japanese do it.
*****
Sounds like an Okinawan/Indonesian blend to me.

Gun fun in Japan

LAST WEEK, we had a post featuring high school students competing in a calligraphy performance contest and a manga contest. Not all of the competitions for kids in Japan are so artistic, however. Some are just an excuse for having a ton of goofy fun and laughing until your stomach hurts.

Take for example the All-Japan Water Survival Contest held at the end of last month in Yoshinogawa, Tokushima. That was an organized water pistol shoot-‘em-up with rules. The junior gunslingers were split up into gangs of five each, which had an eight-minute showdown on a 20-meter-square court with obstacles placed inside. The idea was to shoot at the round paper targets they wore on their heads, but of course a miss was as good as a hit. The winners were the team that tallied the most head shots. The players could use the obstacles for cover, and having five team members meant they could employ pincer attacks to gang up on someone and squirt themselves silly.

About 250 people took part in the event sponsored by the local Yamakawa-cho JCs to promote outdoor sports. It also seems as if it would be a healthful way to promote the application of some old-fashioned masculine instincts. Among them were nine teams of primary school students, and the last men standing from that group were an outfit of desperadoes called the Buriburis. The team captain, a sixth-grader said:

It felt good to get drenched and it was a lot of fun. I want to do it again next year, too.

Shoot, anyone who’s ever been a boy knows exactly what he means. And if they wanted any practice beforehand, they could have joined the Wakuwaku Yuki Shooting Competition held in Nanyo, Yamagata last August. Instead of water pistols, they used rubber band guns made by hand from waribashi (splittable chopsticks).

This was part of a Saturday recreational program for local kids that sponsors monthly events. Participants came from Nanyo and nearby Nagai. The employees of the hall where the program is conducted taught them how to make the guns.

For targets they used the city’s promotional characters, the Nanyo Public Relations Groupe Arcadion. (To see what the Groupe looks like, try this Japanese-language website.)

Said one of the participants:

The gun was hard to make, but it was a lot of fun because the rubber bands flew farther than I thought they would.

Yeah! Wow!

Hey, look out! Here’s a clip of the Japan Rubber Band Gun Maestro firing off some clips during a television appearance…with his bazooka, machine gun, and gatling gun.

Did you notice that sign for the Japan Rubber Band Gun Shooting Association? You betcha they exist. They’ve even got a Japanese-language website with national championship rankings and everything!

The only problem I can see would be having to pick up all those rubber bands after you shot your wad.

In addition to having a good time, another benefit of the second contest would be for children to acquire the manual and mental dexterity required to make the guns.

I wonder…Would either of these events be possible in the United States today, or would some of the self-righteous find a way to drape a large wet blanket over them?

*****
Shoot ‘em ‘fore they run, now.

‘Tis the season for Koshiens

THE summer edition of the national high school baseball championship got underway at Hanshin Koshien Stadium in Hyogo this weekend. That is a very big deal in Japan: NHK broadcasts every game of the tournament live, nationwide, without commercials. One of the classic scenes of daily life is the family get-together during the mid-August O-bon holidays with the eating, the drinking, and the attention of the males alternating between the people in the room and the games on television. The format of an elimination tournament adds an element of spice to the drama — the losers go home, while the championship team will have been undefeated, starting with the first game of the local prefectural round.

All the games are played at Hanshin Koshien Stadium in Hyogo. The park was built in 1924 specifically to serve as the venue for the summer tournament, which dates from 1915, and the smaller spring invitational tournament, which debuted the year the stadium opened. So closely is the park associated with the championship that the event is referred to simply as Koshien. Ask someone whether their high school has ever been to Koshien, and they’ll know immediately what you mean.

In fact, the term Koshien is now applied to other summertime high school competitions, including events that have nothing to do with sports. One of these is the Calligraphy Performance Koshien, staged on 31 July in Shikokuchuo, Ehime. Though it is based on calligraphy, it was conceived in the 21st century — this year’s competition was only the fourth. Teams of 10 calligraphers use brushes and ink on sheets of paper four meters high by six meters wide to render artistic and/or philosophical messages as they dance to music that accompanies their performance.

Representatives from 15 high schools around the country participated in the finals, and the squad from Oita High School in Oita City, Oita, won for the second straight year. This year, most of the participating schools created works based on the theme of earthquake/tsunami recovery. In addition to the normal criteria used to evaluate calligraphy, the teams were judged on the degree of completion of their work, the movements of the team members as they brushed on the characters, and their dance routines.

The creation of the Oita High champs was based on the theme of compassion (思いやり) and they used the form of a mid-summer greeting card (shochu o-mimai) as their motif. Said the team captain:

We can thank the people around us for our consecutive victories. We wondered what we could do to help the people in the area, and decided to encourage them with our calligraphy.

The students of the calligraphy club at Mishima High School in Shikokuchuo came up with the idea as an event to attract people to the local shopping district. Their inspirational spark fired everyone’s imagination, they were invited to appear on television, and then the rest of the country got into the act.

See you in the funny papers!

You don’t even have to ask — of course there’s a Manga Koshien for high school students. That’s the term commonly used to refer to the annual High School Manga Competition, which was held this past weekend in Kochi. This year’s event was the 20th, and the winning team came from Tochigi Girls High School, which inked it out with 24 other schools in the final round.

In this competition, the teams are given the same topic and have to create a comic on that topic immediately. They do this twice — the topics for the Saturday preliminaries and the Sunday finals are different.

The topic for the final round this year was “The 100th Manga Koshien”. The Tochigi girls came up with a comic depicting the 100th anniversary event, which in their imagination offered a prize of JPY one million (100 man en in Japanese), had 100 judges, but very few schools participating because of the population decline due to the low birth rate.

The head of the judge’s panel, Makino Keiichi, said:

Some (judges) thought that was a negative concept, but it is (in the spirit of) manga to depict things honestly.

Said Oki Ayano, one member of the winning team:

It was a good idea to deal straightforwardly with a social issue. I’m really happy.

The cartooning champs said they’ll donate their JPY 300,000 award to the Tohoku relief effort.

Consider what these two events have to say about the health and cultural dynamism of the Japanese. Who else would have thought to combine the elegance of the centuries-old art and discipline of calligraphy with pop music dance routines and turn it into an extra-curricular activity for high school students? Consider also that the winning Manga Koshien high school team was aware of a contemporary social issue, had the wit to come up with an idea based on that issue on the spur of the moment, incorporated it into the general outline presented to them, and had the guts to put it on paper as their entry in the championship round.

Now consider how seriously to take those people who enjoy talking and writing about the malaise in Japan.

*****
Here’s the Oita High School team strutting their stuff in the paint at the first Calligraphy Performance Koshien four years ago. Notice the touch of placing the seal on the lower left-hand corner of their work at the end. Baby love!

Dang, I got to find a way to get me to Ehime next summer!

Ichigen Koji (22)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

“Noda, Maehara, and Haraguchi (of the Democratic Party) are all graduates of the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management, but they learned nothing of Matsushita Konosuke’s thought. They were merely enrolled there, or else just passed through the MIGM tunnel. They certainly didn’t study Mr. Matsushita’s political philosophy. Theirs is nothing more than the earnest wish to advance in the big corporation that is the Democratic Party of Japan Co., Ltd. If it were possible, I’d like to ask them what they think Mr. Matsushita’s political philosophy was, or what his view of humanity was. Their answer would probably be, “…”. They have not made the Matsushita philosophy or political philosophy a part of their lives. That’s why I, who was involved for 15 years with the establishment of MIGM, do not want them to publicly state that they are graduates of that institution.”

- Eguchi Katsuhiko

Mr. Eguchi was a close associate of Matsushita Konosuke, the founder of Panasonic. He was elected last year to the upper house of the Diet as a member of Your Party.

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An explanation or an excuse?

FREELANCE journalist Itagaki Eiken has some observations on the authorities’ handling of events after the Tohoku disaster:

“Immediately after the Hanshin Earthquake, I published the book ‘Restoration Day for the Home Ministry’. It was based on interviews with senior members of the former Home and Local Autonomy ministries. Here are the recollections of one of those men:

‘After the war, GHQ made it a policy to purposely weaken Japan’s governance. Symbolic of their policy was the elimination of the Home Ministry. That Ministry had two functions: first, it provided services to residents, and second, it was the axis of state governance. As part of its second function, it had the Special Higher Police (Tokko), which terrified the citizenry by arresting people for thought crimes.

‘The GHQ was alarmed by the Home Ministry’s strength after they discovered that the ministry was disseminating GHQ orders throughout the country in just 15 minutes. They decided to break it up to remove it as a threat.

‘Since then, combined with Article 9 of the Constitution that renounces war and forbids the maintenance of military forces, the country has been unable to fully manage national crises. That weakness was exposed after the Hanshin earthquake.

‘Unless there is a government office such as the Home Ministry that can act as a headquarters for the centralized issue of orders and control following a disaster, a recovery will be next to impossible.’

Mr. Itagaki adds the following comment:

“Most politicians, starting with the Cabinet and Prime Minister Kan, lack an awareness of crisis management. What’s more, it is regrettable that very few politicians are capable of the adaptable, timely, and appropriate exertion of political power (the power to mobilize people, hardware, and money) when there is a national crisis.”

At first glance, some might think that blaming one’s shortcomings on the Americans is a convenient excuse for crisis mismanagement. After all, the Allied occupation ended a long time ago.

The argument of the veteran bureaucrat has some merit, however. Consider his assertion that the problems stem from a combination of the breakup of the Home Ministry with the Constitution’s Article 9. These and other factors contributed to the creation of a psychological climate that resulted in a certain passivity that some critics call heiwa boke — addled by peace. The people responsible for dealing with both the Hanshin earthquake and the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami were born, reared, and educated in that climate.

The Home Ministry wasn’t the only organization capable of managing a crisis in those days. In the book Hoshigarimasen Hoshigarimasu, the late novelist and dramatist Inoue Hisashi compiled excerpts from the in-house histories of national newspapers, the national railroad, NTT, NHK, large banks, and other entities, in which they described how they maintained their operations throughout the most difficult parts of the war. The daily American bombing caused disruptions and hardships much more serious than those of the Tohoku earthquake, yet they all continued to function using the available resources until the surrender.

National character doesn’t change so drastically absent the action of powerful agents acting for change, welcome or not. The desultory amenities of Modern Life alone did not sap the essential elements for crisis management from the class responsible for it.

But just as the nation that was Imperial Japan no longer exists, neither does the partially enervated world that followed it. The people whose outlook was formed by that era will shortly give way to younger generations, as Kan Naoto has been talking about so enthusiastically over the past two weeks. Whether they will recover the vigorous resourcefulness of their ancestors when faced with a crisis or sink deeper into heiwa boke remains to be seen.

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Yet more true facts

THE PREVIOUS POST about misconceptions elsewhere of Japan-South Korea relations reminded me of similar misconceptions overseas about a supposed waning of the spirit of Japanese enterprise. That’s illustrated by the recent rash of ADD-impaired stories presenting Japan shuffling off the world’s stage like some forgotten old duffer with hair growing out of his ears.

Oh, really?

Here’s a sample of stories featuring developments that occurred over the past two months in Kyushu alone. Decide for yourself who’s shuffling and who’s strutting.

* Kitakyushu Hydrogen Town Project

Trials of the Hydrogen Town project in Kitakyushu got underway on 15 January and will run until the end of March. The trials involve using underground piping to send hydrogen to individual residences and commercial facilities, where it will be used in fuel cells to generate electric power and heat water. The hydrogen used is created as byproduct at local steel mills. The project organizers hope to resolve any issues regarding consistent hydrogen supply and its safe use. These will be the first large-scale trials in the world for the use of hydrogen in urban areas.

* Nanosatellite Testing Center Opens at KIT

The Kyushu Institute of Technology opened the Center for Nanosatellite Testing, a facility for conducting trials with artificial satellites no larger than 50 centimeters in diameter and weighing less than 50 kilograms. It is the world’s first facility with the capacity to conduct all the required performance tests for nanosatellites, including the ability to withstand temperature changes and vibrations. These satellites, used primarily for taking photos of Earth, have become increasingly popular in recent years because they are somewhat inexpensive.

* New Development in Cancer Stem Cell Treatment

Dr. Nakayama Keiichi and a team of researchers at Kyushu University’s Medical Institute of Bioregulation discovered that a certain protein will change the state of cancer stem cells, which are impervious to chemotherapy and radiation, into a state that allows them to be attacked. Even when other cancerous cells are removed, the remaining cancer stem cells have the potential to create a recurrence of the disease. Converting the protein into a usable medicine might bring a cure within reach.

* Honda to Conduct Electric Vehicle Trials in Kumamoto

Honda announced it will begin trials of new model electric motorbikes, electric cars, and plug-in hybrids next year at its Kumamoto Prefecture plant. The recharging station used in the trials will employ solar power to generate the electricity. The motorbike trials are slated to begin next spring, while those for automobiles will begin in the latter half of the year.

* Desalinization Certification Plant Built in Kitakyushu

Water Plaza Kitakyushu, Japan’s first desalinization certification plant capable of certifying both the conversion of seawater to fresh water and the purity of reclaimed sewage water, will begin operation in April. The plant was built by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). The operators hope to disseminate the technology and operational expertise gained from the plant both in Japan and overseas.

* NEECO to Make Energy from Chicken Dung in India

Fukuoka City-based Nishi-Nippon Environmental Energy Co. plans to launch a biomass power generating business in India by the spring of 2012 using chicken dung as fuel. If the enterprise is successful, the company hopes to expand the business throughout India and the rest of Asia. The company is using the expertise gained from operating a similar enterprise in Miyazaki Prefecture, which produces 25% of Japan’s chickens.

* Ecogenomics Sells DNA Chip Technology to China

Bio-venture company Ecogenomics is now selling to Chinese government agencies its DNA chips, which are devices for genetic testing. The adhesion and reaction of bacteria and chemical substances on the DNA chips makes them effective as medicine for pathological conditions. They are also said to be effective for preventing cancer and infectious diseases. The company has its own technology for the comprehensive processes from design to manufacture to create products that meet the individual testing needs of its customers.

While putting this post together, I discovered another example from outside Kyushu, as described today in the Asahi:

Researchers at RIKEN, Yokohama City University and The University of Tokyo have uncovered how gut bifidobacteria protect the body against lethal infection by enhancing the defenses of colonic epithelium. Published in this week’s issue of Nature, the finding provides first-ever clues on the mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of gut microbiota, promising more effective probiotic therapies for a variety of disorders and diseases.

*****
To find this information, however, one has to read Japanese newspapers.

*****
Chemistry is another popular field in Japan.

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Still more true facts

SCROLLING THROUGH the comment section of an American website recently, I read a note in which the author blithely asserted, as if it were common knowledge, that Japanese and Koreans despised each other. There were dozens of other comments on that post, but nobody objected to his. The other readers probably thought it was common knowledge too.

The author of the note knew this, he said, because he lived in Japan for a couple of years. Ah, that explains it. A man of the world.

Meanwhile, here’s some uncommon knowledge about what’s actually been happening in this part of the world, where the Japanese and South Koreans are just a hop, skip, and a 30-minute flight from each other.

So far this month.

* Saga Prefecture and Jeollanam-do Friendship Pact

Saga is a small, largely rural prefecture with a population of about 800,000 between Fukuoka and Nagasaki and next to the Sea of Japan. The prefectural government this month signed a friendship agreement with Jeollanam-do of South Korea. Saga Gov. Furukawa Yasushi called it the first step in the prefecture’s plan to develop greater ties with regional governments throughout Asia. At the signing ceremony, Jeollanam-do Gov. Bak Joon-yung said he believed the agreement will help promote ties between the two countries, not just the two regions. It is Saga’s first friendship agreement with a local government from a foreign country.

* Starflyer Plans Busan Route

Kitakyushu-based budget airline Starflyer announced plans to begin roundtrip flights to Busan in July 2012. There are already many flights between Busan and Incheon in Korea and Fukuoka and Kitakyushu in Kyushu, as well as several high-speed ferries operating between the Port of Hakata and the Port of Busan. Starflyer intends to establish a niche in the highly competitive market with early morning and late night flights.

* Ferry Service Begins between Gwangyang and Shimonoseki/Kitakyushu

Gwangyang Ferry of South Korea will begin ferry service between the city of Gwangyang in South Korea and the cities of Shimonoseki and Kitakyushu in Japan. (Shimonoseki is in Yamaguchi Prefecture, just across a narrow strait from Kyushu.) The ferry will have a capacity of 740 passengers and make two round trips a week to Shimonoseki. It will also sail once a week to Kitakyushu on a trial basis. The operators see the potential for demand from travelers (and freight shippers) from the western and southern parts of the Korean Peninsula to Kyushu. Gwangyang is South Korea’s second largest container port after Busan. Currently, people traveling between the two cities by sea have to go through both Busan and Fukuoka City.

* Fukuoka City Sponsors Educational Homestays with Busan, South Korea

Fukuoka City sponsored 10 first-year junior high school students from Busan, South Korea, for a local homestay for six days through the 17th to provide them with an understanding of junior high school life in Japan. The students attended English and other classes at three junior high schools, and teachers from both countries took the opportunity to get better acquainted. Fukuoka City said its objective is to help foster children with an international perspective.

* South Korea’s Jin Air to Operate Budget Charters to Saga Airport

Low-cost carrier Jin Air of South Korea began to fly regularly scheduled charter flights from Incheon Airport in Seoul to Saga Airport for tourists, which will continue until 1 March. They plan to operate a total of 19 round trips in all. They are the first flights by any low cost carrier into Saga Airport.

* South Korean Baseball Team Shifts Camp from Miyazaki to Beppu

Last year’s foot-and-mouth epidemic among livestock in Miyazaki Prefecture (and the new outbreak of avian flu there last week) could have kept the Dusan Bears of South Korean professional baseball from their annual training camp in Miyazaki, but they came anyway for a shorter session. They’ll move to Beppu in Oita on the 26th.

OK, I’ll cheat. Here’s one from last month

* Record High for Air Busan’s Occupancy Rate

Air Busan, which launched daily roundtrip flight service between Busan, South Korea, and Fukuoka City last March, revealed they had a flight occupancy rate of 83% for the month of November, the highest monthly rate ever on the route. The rate from May to September ranged from the 60th to the 70th percentiles, but the higher yen and lower won began to have an impact in October. The increase came mostly from Japanese passengers.

OK, I’ll cheat again. This one includes China

* Regional Economic Partnership Agreement in Works

Ten cities in Japan, South Korea, and China, the members of a group promoting economic exchange in East Asia, held their fourth meeting in China and signed a memorandum agreeing to create an economic partnership agreement for the Yellow Sea rim region. The group includes four Japanese cities, including Kitakyushu, Fukuoka City, and Shimonoseki; four Chinese cities, including Dalian; and three South Korean cities, including Busan and Incheon. The idea is to create a free trade agreement of their own in the region without waiting for their respective national governments.

We’re going to be reading the inevitable Closed to the Outside World stories about Japan written by the bien pensants in the upcoming months as the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks get serious. Let’s see how many of these stories will be mentioned, particularly the last one.

******
American journalist P.J. O’Rourke has spent much of his career traveling overseas as part of his work. He once wrote that the best way to improve international relations was to sleep with someone from overseas.

In that spirit…

Pop quiz

THERE’S a digression worth noting in a long article about the consumption tax written by Takahashi Yoichi for Gendai Business Online.

Mr. Takahashi writes:

“The following problem appeared on the 2008 Center Test.”

(The Center Test is the preliminary university entrance examination administered every January by the Japanese government for national and public universities. The results are also increasingly being used by private universities. It is similar to the SATs in the United States.)

“Question: Select one from among the following as the most suitable measure it is thought a central bank can take.

1. Reduce the money supply during a deflationary period.
2. Reduce the required ratio of cash reserves to deposits during an inflationary period.
3. Purchase government bonds from commercial banks during an economic downturn.
4. Reduce the interest rate on funds lent to commercial banks during an economic upturn.

“Of course the correct answer is #3. Since 2000, however, the Bank of Japan has actually done #1. This question can be answered by the ordinary high school student, but it seems to be too difficult for the Governor of the Bank of Japan, the academics carrying water for the Bank of Japan, and the mass media.”

*****
Reat that again and let it sink in: This is information a Japanese high school senior who wants to attend university is expected to know. Not the elite universities—any university.

How many American high school seniors would know the answer to that question? Wait, scratch that—how many American college seniors would know the answer to that question? Wait, scratch that one too—how many American (or Western) adults with a university degree would know the answer to that question?

And some people think there’s a crisis because the youth of Japan is shunning American universities?

I think not.

*****
Here’s what American students know about school and U.S. bonds.

Music class

ALL THE BOYS had mixed emotions whenever we heard the sound of the upright piano rolling down the hall as the music teacher pushed it to our primary school classroom. Our initial reaction was delight because we would be spared some the rote drudgery of what passed for public school education even then. But in the back of our minds was the realization that we would be forced to sing some of the most dismal gloop ever put to music. The girls seemed to enjoy the act of singing more than we did, and they have more patience for that sort of thing, but they too must have been disappointed in the school songbooks.

Both the boys and the girls at the Yamagata Daihachi Primary School (P.S. #8) in Yamagata City appear to have more fun with their musical instruction, however. The school held a special class in traditional Japanese music for 91 sixth-graders last week. A local group of six amateur musicians performed on the shakuhachi and the so, and then divided the students into two groups for instruction.

Making a noise with a stringed instrument is easy, but they had trouble with the shakuhachi. Said 12-year-old Oka Fumika, “I play the trumpet and music for wind instruments, but the blowing techniques are different and very difficult.”

Here’s what it looked like:

The song they’re practicing is Sakura, Sakura (Cherry blossom), which all Japanese have long known by the time they reach that age. I’ve even heard some people suggest it would make a good compromise choice as national anthem to placate those Japanese republicans who dislike Kimi ga Yo. (The lyrics to the latter are a millennium old and were originally a love poem, but it’s now associated with the Imperial house.)

Here’s what Sakura, Sakura sounds like without its lyrics—performed on a chromatic harmonica!

Afterwords:

To call that stringed instrument a koto is technically incorrect, as I understand it. A koto was originally something else and is written with a different kanji. The so has moveable bridges, while the similar kin has none. The report from Yamagata called it a so and specified that reading.

And to get linguistically carried away with myself, the Japanese have a different architectural term instead of bridge for the structure of traditional instruments. They use the kanji for column or post (柱), but pronounce it ji instead of hashira or chu.

Edumacated fools

NOT LONG after I arrived in Japan, the students in a sixth-grade class I taught at an English school told me about a mock test they had taken earlier that day in their regular school. To say that they were astonished by the test content would not adequately describe their reaction. They had learned something very important, but it had little to do with the subject matter of the exam.

The test given to the sixth-graders was a collection of math problems culled from American textbooks used for ninth-graders, i.e., third-year junior high school students. My students were shocked at how easy the questions were. As one girl told me, “We learned all this stuff a long time ago.”

A few years later, the subject of studying abroad came up while talking casually with another student, a girl who intended to go to medical school. (She is now practicing medicine in Nagano). She wasn’t interested. “The academic level at American universities isn’t very high. The only reason to study in the United States would be to conduct advanced, specialized post-graduate research.”

To be sure, these were students of the local schools for the academically precocious; the primary school the first group of students attended is affiliated with a nearby university, and it accepts only the brightest children. But that is precisely the point.

Today Japan Realtime, the pseudo-blog about Japanese matters that appears in the Wall Street Journal, ran a piece about the sharp decline in the number of Japanese students enrolling in American universities. They—and some in the Japanese government and media—think this is somehow not a good thing:

It is a troubling concern for Japan in what is yet another symptom of the “Galapagos syndrome” afflicting the country — where a complacent Japan is increasingly looking inward while rival countries are globalizing at a clipped pace.

Putting aside the presumptuous bagatelle that (a) Japan needs to “globalize”, and (b) attending an American university is the royal road to globalization, the author of the piece demonstrates the mindset of the frog at the bottom of the well. For example, the article cites concerns that only one Japanese student would be part of this year’s freshman class at Harvard. Meanwhile, Americans realized long ago that the primary reason for attending Harvard or other similar schools is for the members of a certain class—not necessarily economic—to create personal networks, rather than receive the ultimate in educational opportunities. The piece also contains this passage, which I would have called illogical if there were evidence that logic was in any way involved with it:

Worried that a lack of exposure to the U.S., a key Japanese ally, will inevitably cloud future views of the relationship, not to mention the reason behind the heavy U.S. military presence in Japan, the government announced a series of initiatives to increase the flow of Japanese students and others sent to the U.S.

The lack of exposure to the U.S. in Japan is a problem that ranks in seriousness somewhat below that of say…the lack of an adequate supply of fingernail clippers in mass merchandise retail outlets. What is a serious problem is the attitude in some American circles that the slopes and gooks need to come to the seat of colonial authority so that the educationally and culturally deprived can attend a finishing school for the international credentialed gentry.

Might it be that the increasing unwillingness of Japanese to attend American universities is an indication of the intelligence and perspicacity of the Japanese, rather than their complacency? Why spend an enormous sum of money for a degraded education of dubious value? Why would a student wishing to become an automotive engineer, for example, relinquish the opportunity to learn the way they do things at Toyota to learn how they do things at General Motors instead?

There are several reasons for the decline of American universities. Here’s a recently published article by Michael Barone warning that the American education bubble is about to burst:

Government-subsidized loans have injected money into higher education, as they did into housing, causing prices to balloon. But at some point people figure out they’re not getting their money’s worth, and the bubble bursts.

I saw elsewhere within the past week that the tuition at one four-year school in the United States will be raised to $50,000 per year. In 2007 American college costs averaged $31,000 per year. What do the students get for that king’s ransom? Nothing for a foreign student to write home about:

The National Center for Education Statistics found that most college graduates are below proficiency in verbal and quantitative literacy.

And those are American proficiency standards, mind you.

The American Council of Alumni and Trustees concluded, after a survey of 714 colleges and universities, “by and large, higher education has abandoned a coherent content-rich general education curriculum.”

They aren’t taught the basics of literature, history or science. ACTA reports that most schools don’t require a foreign language, hardly any require economics, American history and government “are badly neglected” and schools “have much to do” on math and science.

The students in my small Japanese city had that sussed out long ago.

But if the students at many American universities are no longer being properly educated, what—other than learning how to binge drink—happens to them? Exposure to the great minds and great ideas of the day? I think not:

Far too many of today’s tenured faculty are political activists first and teachers only secondarily, if at all. Their agenda is indoctrinating students in their own political prejudices, while their academic colleagues who are not activists or ideologues studiously refuse to notice the abuses that are going on.

This dry rot has spread far beyond the courses taught or lectures given by the denim jacket and black turtleneck-clad denizens of the Che Guevara Memorial Faculty Lounge, or the empty majors in Gender Studies and Queer Theory that qualify graduates either to teach similar courses at another university or to train for counter work at McDonald’s.

Now students at American universities can take courses in “The Phallus”, “Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music”, or “The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie”. Then there’s the UC Berkeley course, “Pornographies On/Scene”:

This seminar will bring together debates about the nature of pornography with debates about the nature of the visual. Both will be considered in relation to the (mostly unwritten) history of American visual pornographies and with an eye towards imagining, and even contributing to this history. What, for example, is the canon of hard core pornography? We will concentrate on two moments in the history of moving image pornography: an earlier era of “obscenity,” in which explicit sexual images were kept off-scene for the consumption of private elites in the era of the stag film, and a more contemporary, and increasingly electronic era of “on/scenity” in which pornographies of all sorts become available to wide varieties of consumers, including those to whom it was once forbidden. Although moving-image pornographies will be our primary objects of study, this seminar will also consider the different rhetorics of still and image moving images which aim to arouse, techniques of arousal, and related popular images which also aim to “move” the bodies of spectator/users. Approximately one third of the class will be devoted to general readings in the growing “field” of pornography studies, another third to the question of what constitutes the canon of the stag era (here I will invite those interested to imagine a two disk DVD with notes arguing for what constitutes this canon) and another third to the burning question of electronic, interactive pornographies on small screens.

It was no surprise to see that the first among the required texts was written by Michael Foucault (and another was titled, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy). It was also no surprise that the lecturer added a note to discourage students from auditing the course.

In 2007, Swarthmore students could have taken a course called “Non-Violent Responses to Terrorism”. (The syllabus said the course would “deconstruct terrorism (and) build on promising nonviolent procedures to combat today’s terrorism.”) The Johns Hopkins University—my alma mater—offered a course called “Mail Order Brides: Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian Context”. Mount Holyoke College had a course on “Whiteness” and Occidental College—Barack Obama’s alma mater—had a course on “Blackness”. Students at the University of Pennsylvania could get academic credit for a course called Adultery Novel, which offered “various critical approaches in order to place adultery into its aesthetic, social and cultural context, including: sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of family as a social and economic institution (and) feminist work on the construction of gender.”

The first sentence of the WSJ “blog” post read:

Japanese students are increasingly content on staying put in the classroom – at home.

And, assuming they put time and effort into their schoolwork, are probably learning a lot more—and wasting a lot less of their parents’ money—because of it.

That The Wall Street Journal thinks this is an important issue is evidence of a nasty strain of cultural chauvinism among the American elites.

There’s an obvious cure for their myopia, of course.

Studying abroad.

******
Afterwords:

* There are problems in other English-speaking countries, too. Asian students in general might find themselves subject to quotas at Canadian universities, as this MacLeans article explains:

When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s Havergal College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which university to go to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of Toronto. “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,” explains Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an Aritzia billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.”

Alexandra eventually chose the University of Western Ontario. Her younger brother, now a high school senior deciding where he’d like to go, will head “either east, west or to McGill”—unusual academic options, but in keeping with what he wants from his university experience. “East would suit him because it’s chill, out west he could be a ski bum,” says Alexandra, who explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also looking for a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic reputation that can be a bit of a killjoy.

Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in this article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a “reputation of being Asian.”

* One wonders if the people at the WSJ website have any idea of how many foreign students come to study at Japanese universities. I teach a few courses at my local university, which is a national school. The students and teachers would be the first to admit that it is not the first choice of the academically inclined. Yet they attract quite a few people from abroad to study engineering and agriculture. Among my acquaintances, past and present:

- A Sri Lankan man who received a doctorate in engineering. His Japanese was only OK at best, so after I got to know him I asked him if he had any difficulty with his classes. “Oh, no. All our classes are in English.” He and his Sri Lankan wife enjoyed Japan so much they named their first child Hiroshi.

- An Egyptian man studying for a graduate degree in agricultural engineering. (I don’t know what happened to him; he stopped hanging out after 9/11.)

- A Ugandan woman who told me she was studying “rice”. She left after receiving her graduate-level degree to work for some international agency in New York. While here, she worked part-time at a Country and Western music-themed bar.

- Just last weekend they had a school festival, and I went to see what it was like. I spent about 15 minutes chatting with some Malaysian engineering students there on scholarship and eating the food at their booth.

- The professor to whom I answer at the school is a Japanese man who is an expert in Faulkner (whom a lot of native speakers can’t understand).

- Then there are the many Chinese and Korean students, most of whom have no trouble finding part-time jobs in shops around town.

Ah, but the Japanese have to globalize…

* If they had enough money, the Japanese students wouldn’t have to do any real work at all at an American university. They could easily hire someone else to write their papers for them.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

All the news they think is fit to print

We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press. It is not we who silence the press. It is the press that silences us. It is not a case of the Commonwealth settling how much the editors shall say; it is a case of the editors settling how much the Commonwealth shall know. If we attack the press, we shall be rebelling, not repressing.
- G.K. Chesterton

EARLIER THIS MONTH, customers of the Mainichi Shimbun opened their copy of the newspaper and read the following passage:

The reports of China’s state-run Xinhua news agency of the anti-Japan demonstrations appeared only in their English-language edition. The Chengdu demonstrations culminated in attacks on stores operated by Japanese companies, but Xinhua reported that no violent acts occurred. The news agency did not distribute articles on these demonstrations in their Chinese language edition. It is thought media coverage was restricted to avoid sparking demonstrations in other parts of the country with the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment.

That superficially clever strategy might have worked not so long ago. The East Asian Janus faces the West to create the impression of an open news media, while its better half turns inward to keep the blinders on the more important audience at home. Through this and other attempts at censorship, the Chinese leadership understands that Internet age technology has raised the bar of success for superficial cleverness, but they’re no longer able to make the leap. Those with an interest in these matters in the West are now told of the deception, and the Chinese public with an interest in these matters finds out anyway.

We all know the point of the exercise. The Chinese government initially encourages the anti-Japanese demonstrations by helping plan and finance them. That’s another two-headed strategy—they hope to gain a diplomatic advantage by creating a negative impression of the Japanese abroad, and use the common enemy to defuse popular dissatisfaction with the regime at home. Once the young and the restless make their point, the authorities close the spigot before the demonstrators start getting ideas and turn their attention to what’s really bugging them. The Japanese sussed out the charade long ago. They bide their time and wait until the storm blows over, or until the authorities stop seeding the clouds.

We’ve now reached that point. Last Monday’s Asahi Shimbun reported that about 2,000 young people demonstrated the day before in Baoji, Shaanxi Province, carrying banners that read, “Introduce a multi-party system”, and “Housing costs too much”.

Perhaps some of those who read the Mainichi article or similar reports in the Anglosphere were relieved to live in a country where the flow of information is free and competing points of view are accessible.

Pity the fool who believes it.

*****

Journalists have superficially clever deceptions of their own. They claim to “speak truth to power”, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”, or “give a voice to the dispossessed”.

In the advanced industrialized countries, however, they are more likely to be a semi-autonomous wing of the ruling class working as press agents for their own causes.

Consider the following excerpt from the Lexington column in the 7 November 1992 Economist. It’s not on-line; I used to subscribe to the magazine, so I clipped and saved it.

The Bill Clinton Nobody Knows

On the last night of the Democratic Leadership Council’s annual meeting in Cleveland in 1991, several journalists were enjoying themselves at a reception. Bill Clinton, then just the governor of Arkansas, came over to join them. He had been the chairman of the conference, at which six potential Democratic candidates had spoken. By general agreement, Mr. Clinton had wiped the floor with the competition; so the journalists had every reason to think he was going to be as convivial as they were.

But he wasn’t. Instead, finger jabbing, he tore into one of the journalists (Adam Nagourney of USA Today) for allegedly twisting Mr. Clinton’s views on whether it was sensible to hold the Democrats’ national convention in “liberal” New York. The event was illuminating. Politicians, of any nationality, rarely lose their tempers with journalists unless they are drunk, which Mr. Clinton (who rarely drinks) was not. What he was, was angry. And he gets angry (and, when angry, loses his temper) often.

Journalists who have followed him this year keep a little list of his blow-ups both at them and—in public—at his staff. One of his closest advisors reckons Mr. Clinton loses his temper with his staff five to 10 times a day; more, during those days in the last week of the campaign when his lead seemed, for no clear reason, to be slipping away. Then he was constantly irritable…(E)ven in an age of when media scrutiny of a politician is supposed to be intense, Mr. Clinton is in many ways an unknown quantity.

Customers of The Economist thus discovered in the first issue published after the 1992 American presidential election that Bill Clinton was temperamentally unfit to govern. The American news media had known about Mr. Clinton’s personality problems for at least a year, but as with the Chinese government’s approach to covering local demonstrations, pretended they didn’t exist. They had a preferred candidate in the 1992 election and worked as hard as any political action committee to elect him. The American public didn’t find out about Mr. Clinton’s dark side until former aide George Stephanopoulis published his memoirs in 1999, well into the president’s second term after it was assured he would never run for office again.

Of course The Economist also knew of Mr. Clinton’s problems, but they chose not to reveal them until immediately after the election, giving them the chance to play little Jack Horner. Besides, the British run the same routine themselves—starting with the BBC, whose budget is primarily financed by the coercion of funds from the public.

But in those pre-Windows 95 days, it was still possible to keep this information out of the hands and minds of most people. People—or at least some of them—still read and took seriously such publications as Newsweek. People did not yet understand the lengths to which television networks would go to manage the news. That wasn’t apparent until bloggers revealed (in a matter of hours) CBS news reader Dan Rather’s blatant attempt to influence the 2004 presidential election with bogus information. His exposure was as much a coup d’etat as the unseating of any President For Life in a banana republic.

Now it’s a lot more difficult to get away with managing the news in the United States.

It’s still possible in Japan, however.

On 3 October, roughly 3,000 people gathered in Tokyo to protest Chinese behavior in the Senkaku islets and the decision of the Kan government to release the fishing boat captain without a trial. Other demonstrations were also held in 47 municipalities in 30 prefectures on the same day.

Not one of the nation’s print and broadcast media reported those demonstrations. It wasn’t as if they were unaware of them—the Tokyo demonstration started in Shibuya near NHK headquarters.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Just as happened in China, the demonstrations in Japan were reported outside the country. The CNN headline read, “China accused of invading disputed islands”, while the The Wall Street Journal blared: “Tokyo Protests Blast China’s Response to Collision”.

The media arm of the Japanese ruling class seems to share the same DNA as their fellow guild members overseas. When asked by their customers to explain the standards they use to determine newsworthiness, every one of the media outlets refused to answer. Their attitude was just as full of snot as any of the News Department chiefs at corporate headquarters in New York or London.

But perhaps those standards can be established by roundabout means without their input.

For example, a few days before the 3 October demonstration with 3,000 people, the Kyodo news agency, the Mainichi Shimbun, and the Tokyo Shimbun reported on a different demonstration at Miyashita Park in Tokyo. Nike Japan has purchased the naming rights to the park through a 10-year contract worth JPY 17 million per year to Shibuya Ward. Nike will build a skateboarding area in the park, which will require paid admission, and a free climbing area, next year.

This transaction required the eviction of some homeless people camped out in the park. They and their supporters held a demonstration and chanted, “Give us back our park.” It was their contention that a public space was not the place for corporate advertising, but a perfectly good campsite for vagabonds. The protest drew 200 people, thanks to some promotion on the labor-net website, whose name tells you all you need to know about their political orientation. Some news reports said 20 people (labornet said 60) held a sit-in and placed obstacles at the park entrances. The police removed both. The sitters-in got frisky and resisted. Those demonstrating against the Chinese caused no trouble at all.

*****

Here’s another piece of the puzzle: This July the Asahi Shimbun ran a story on a demonstration in Tokyo of students attending Chongryon high schools seeking tuition supplements under the new DPJ program which began in April. (Indeed, the papers are full of these stories lately.) The name of Chongryon in English is the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, and the allegiance of the organization is to Pyeongyang rather than Seoul. Six of its senior officials are members of the Supreme People’s Assembly. (That’s assuming you want to give North Korea credit for having a legislature.) Many of the students are not Japanese citizens despite being born here, a state of affairs for which they can thank their parents. All the instruction in the school is conducted in Korean (presumably the North Korean version of the language). The institutions do not follow the standard Japanese educational curriculum, so they are not classified as Japanese schools. Instead, the curriculum in the 12 Chongryon high schools is based on the juche philosophy.

Demonstrating at Tokyo’s Shiba Park in July were 1,000 people, 350 of whom were students at the school. The number of parents who accompanied the march for the money was not cited. The Asahi quoted 18-year-old Rim Seol-ju:

My friends who go to the South Korean school are eligible. That is clear discrimination.

She’s right, it is discrimination, and it’s an excellent example of discrimination at its finest. But the Kan Cabinet last week started the machinery of government moving in the direction of granting the allowances, which will amount to about JPY 118,800 per student per year. That will surely come in handy. Chongryon has had problems funding the schools since North Korea decided in 2002 it no longer had the money to spare.

Surveys have consistently shown that nearly 60% of the Japanese public thinks the government should not provide the supplements to these students (58% in the most recent poll, against 33.1% who support it).

Article 89 of the Japanese Constitution reads:

No public money or other property shall be expended or appropriated for the use, benefit or maintenance of any religious institution or association, or for any charitable, educational or benevolent enterprises not under the control of public authority.

Article 2 of the Basic Law on Education says that one of the objectives of education is to foster an attitude of respecting other countries and contributing to the peace and development of international society.

Education Minister Takaki Yoshiaki says that he wants to encourage the schools to “improve their curriculum”, but will not compel them to do so.

While the media has offered its spotlight to the enemies of Japan using the Japanese sense of fair play to shake the Japanese down for money, demonstrations conducted by the families of the Japanese abducted by the North Koreans have often not been given any coverage at all. At one of those demonstrations a few years ago, even the American embassy sent a car by to give the participants free beverages, but the domestic news media deemed all of that nonessential for the public to know. Dr. Norbert Vollertsen of Germany, a campaigner for North Korean civil rights since his first-hand experience of conditions in that country, later asked a TBS reporter why the media didn’t cover the events. “Ah,” he was told, “they’re just a bunch of nationalists.”

So, presumably, is former chief of staff of the Air Self-Defense Force Tamogami Toshio, who was the leader of the 3 October Tokyo demonstration. He is well known for having been cashiered when it came to light that he wrote an essay claiming that Japan was not an aggressor nation in World War II, and that the Japanese occupation was beneficial for China, Taiwan, and Korea.

The retired general also led another demonstration two weeks later, but that one was covered by the Sankei Shimbun and the Jiji news agency. (One English-language blogger claimed that only the right-leaning Sankei covered it, perhaps to belittle it in the minds of his readers, but he was either lazy in his research or guilty of his own news management.)

While Gen. Tamogami is perhaps a nationalist in the true sense of the word, it is unlikely that most of the other demonstrators were. More probably, they were concerned citizens upset by the behavior of the Chinese fishing boat captain in Japanese waters and the manner in which the Japanese government released him. It is just as unlikely that the families of the North Korean abductees are nationalists, particularly since Dr. Vollertson pointed out the information the North Koreans provided about the abductees they claimed had died–the relatives of the demonstrators–was bogus.

The dismissal of the demonstrators as nationalists opens a window into the reasoning of the Japanese media, some of whom are blame-your-country-first fifth columnists aghast at the exhibition of ordinary patriotism. For them it is a matter of personal belief and principle to manage the news and present their version of the truth (or pravda, as they say in Russian). It’s an international phenomenon.

There are other factors at work as well. That none of the major Japanese news outlets covered the initial demonstration, including those that were surely sympathetic, suggests the government might have applied pressure through the kisha club system. In that archaic arrangement, the major media outlets are granted a semi-monopoly on news coverage. The price they pay is a de facto restriction on what they are allowed to report. Everyone knows the government can selectively withhold information from anyone who incurs their displeasure, placing them at a disadvantage to their competitors.

Those in leadership positions in the current Japanese Cabinet are also anti-nationalists just as aghast at displays of patriotism as those in the news media, despite their position as representatives of the nation in the community of nations. Some even dislike the national anthem and cite the Second World War as the reason. That camouflages the real reason–the Japanese version of republicanism.

There are also, without question, many Japanese of a certain age who are neither pacifists nor of the left, and who are proud of their country, but are still uncomfortable with overt public displays of the flag and worry that people might get carried away with themselves again. (That’s another sizable group of Japanese one won’t read about in the English-language media.)

Regardless of the reasons, the decision to ignore those demonstrations is still censorship that would deprive the people of their right to know. It is still an arrogation of an assumed authority that should belong to no one. It is still an outer expression of the inner contempt in which a self-appointed ruling class holds the déclassé and the petit-bourgeoisie, to bring the French into the discussion.

Some parts of the Anglosphere have at last passed the tipping point of public awareness, and the supremacy of the newsrooms in the ancien régime has evaporated. In 1992, the reporters of a local television station could have discussed among themselves ways to discredit a candidate they opposed in an election–and perhaps succeeded–with no one being the wiser. Now those discussions are exposed within days before the election is held. As a result, the reputation that’s been smeared is that of KTVA in Anchorage, Alaska, rather than the candidate, whose political affiliation you already know before reading it.

The tipping point has yet to arrive in Japan, but its arrival is inevitable. Indeed, the mainstream Japanese mass media has guaranteed it will arrive by behavior that differs from the Chinese—or the Americans, or the British—only in degree, rather than in kind.

Suicide takes many forms. This is one of them.

Afterwords:

Savor the multiple ironies in this video of the lyrics of this song, the singer, his condition, and the venue at which the song was performed.

It took the better part of a lifetime, but the singer-songwriter and his audience have become that which they once sang about. The important lesson is likely to go over the heads of the people who need to hear it the most.

That’s an excellent arrangement, though…

From Kroc’s to crocs

FRUSTRATED by the McDonald brothers’ lack of interest in expanding their operations, Ray Kroc bought out his partners in the hamburger restaurant business in 1961. He went on to build the largest fast food chain in the world and make $US 500 million in the process.

Try a scrumptious waniburger!

McDonald’s Japan opened its first restaurant in 1971 in Ginza’s Mitsukoshi Department Store, and the chain quickly spread throughout the country. For example, the city of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, now has 23 shops where residents can eat a Kroc burger. Last weekend, however, the Hamamatsuans got their first chance to eat croc burgers—hamburgers with meat made from crocodile tails inserted into a bun with lettuce and other condiments.

The crocodile burgers are the brainchild of Uejima Tsuneo (that’s an educated guess on the reading), the owner of a Hamamatsu nightclub called Madowaku (Window Frame). Mr. Uejima isn’t out to become as fabulously wealthy as Ray Kroc; instead, he views the business as an opportunity to give young people who dropped out of school or stay holed up in their rooms a chance to get work experience through cooking or sales. One of his burger flippers is a 20-year-old male who hasn’t attended school since fifth grade.

In addition to his nightclub, Mr. Uejima operates what he calls a Free School for dropouts on the third floor of his nightclub building. He also opened another class called the Madowaku Gakuin to help people prepare for employment. He has nine students in the second class, ranging in age from 15 to 26.

Said Mr. Uejima:

Many of the junior high and high school students who come to see the live shows are troubled about problems in their life. I thought it would be a good idea to create a place they can come to.

He opened the crocodile burger shop on the same site as the Gakuin on the 10th and called it Aozora (Blue Sky). The shop sells both crocodile burgers and crocodile cutlets for about JPY 1,000 each (about $US 12.19). He also plans to sell croc burgers on the road, and next weekend he’ll load up a van with cooking equipment and a take a few of the employees on a sales expedition.

The meat comes from an establishment called Koike Wani Sohonpo, crocodile breeders in Kosai, Shizuoka. A local restaurateur helps out by preparing the meat to make it more appetizing. (Perhaps that’s a hint why crocodile is not a common dish on dinner tables around the world.) Mr. Uejima also hopes to create some buzz and bring new business to Hamamatsu. There’s been a mini-boom in Japan over the past few years of people creating their own burger specialties with unique ingredients and using that to build a regional brand identity.

Last weekend he and two of his charges cooked up some crocodile burgers for Shizuoka Governor Kawakatsu Heita to get some PR. Yes, politicians in Japan have to eat all sorts of stuff to please the voters, too. The governor swallowed and said:

This new fusion of crocodile meat and a bun is really delicious. I hope they work hard and make a go of it.

Was he serious, or did he think discretion was the better part of valor? If I’m ever in Hamamatsu, I’d try one, but at 1,000 yen a pop, they’d better be awfully good to go back for a second helping.

Of course Koike Wani Sohonpo has a website–doesn’t everyone? Here it is, but be advised it’s Japanese-language only. For more examples of other Burgers À la Japonaise , here’s a post about the Minami Burger and the Ninja Burger, another one about the Boar Burger, yet another about the Sasebo Burger, and finally, one about the Whale Burger. But let’s not forget this one about shark (hot) dogs in Hiroshima. To complicate matters, they’re called wani doggu locally, because wani is the word in the Hiroshima dialect for shark. But in the rest of Japan, a wani is a crocodile.

No matter what they’re called, Ray Kroc probably could have gotten rich selling any of them.

Man, all this burger talk is giving me an appetite. Let’s eat!