Suckers

“I have a lot to say,” said the fish, “but my mouth is full of water.”
- Georgian proverb

WHEN last we met, I promised that the next post would discuss Japan’s best options for responding to geopolitical conditions in East Asia. That post has required a lot of time to collect, translate, and organize the information, however. At the same time, my primary attention shifted to a large influx of paying work, which still continues. Finally, it has been difficult to resist the temptation to slide over to YouTube and watch and listen to the videos in the excellent Pakistan Coke Studio series.

The stimulus which pulled me out of that mini-orbit was the festival of cheap thrills in the English-language blogosphere this week touched off by another provocative bit of Japan-related flummery.

Specifically:

A startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found.

The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had “no interest” in or even “despised” sex. That’s almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.

If that’s not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.

Not only did everone fall for it, they sucked it up so quickly one could almost hear the kids loudly slurping the last drops of the beverage at the bottom of the cup through their straws.

Now really: Are the popular perceptions of Japan so warped that anyone anywhere 16 years of age or over could take that story at face value? I’ve regularly associated with Japanese kids of high school and college age — in the Japanese language — since 1984, and the idea that they have a widespread aversion to sex caused a snort louder than any straw slurp. But then I’m also familiar with the dissatisfaction many Japanese have with the inferior quality of local public opinion surveys, which seldom finds expression in English.

Some research on the Japanese-language sector of the Internet was in order. The first place I headed was the website for the Japanese Family Planning Association, which is the Japanese affiliate of Planned Parenthood. I spent a few minutes at their Japanese-only site looking for the report, but found nothing. Then I plugged their name into the Japanese version of Google News, but I still came up empty.

I returned to the original article, published by that paragon of accuracy and sobriety in journalism, the Huffington Post. The headline read, “Japan Population Decline: Third of Nation’s Youth Have ‘No Interest’ In Sex”. Part of their article is quoted above, including the claim that this is a “new survey”.

How odd that nothing about this new survey and its remarkable findings can be found on the Japanese Family Planning Association’s website or Google News Japan. The reason became apparent when I accessed the link at the HuffPo piece to a related Wall Street Journal article. Rather than being “new”, the survey was released in January 2011 — more than a year ago.

That explains the absence of stories in Google News; links to Japanese newspaper stories seldom survive longer than a year. After I added some terms to the search query, some information finally started turning up. It helped that the survey was sponsored by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare.

Nevertheless, it was curious how little information actually surfaced. Blog post links last longer than a year, but Japanese bloggers were rather uncurious about this report. Then I ran across this comment from University of Tokyo grad school researcher Furuichi Noritoshi, a sociologist who specializes in studies of contemporary Japanese youth. Mr. Furuichi — who is just 26 himself — wrote in the weekly Pureiboi:

The viewpoint is growing among young people today that it is “smart” (i.e., stylish) to behave as if one has little interest in sex. People think they should not superficially demonstrate that interest, even when they are interested. They even consider it a pain to put up with the generation that spun their tales of triumph, bragging about how many people they bagged. I suspect that viewpoint is reflected in the answers to the survey.

In addition, they only surveyed from 61 to 162 men or women in each generation. That’s a rather small sample size. Further, the response rate was only 57%. It would be difficult to gain an understanding of an entire generation from this survey alone.

N.B.: In Japan, “difficult” is usually a euphemism for “impossible”.

After that observation about the sample size, I knew I was getting close. Sure enough, the next site that turned up was the original Japanese-language report from the Ministry itself on the survey. (You can read the .pdf file here.)

Here’s how the survey was conducted: 3,000 people from the ages of 16-49 were selected at random from residential rolls. The association explained and distributed questionnaires to 2,693 people, eliminating from the original 3,000 those who were never at home or not at the address. They returned to pick up the completed questionnaire later, and received 1,540 (671 from men and 869 from women). That’s a recovery rate of 57.2%.

As page four of the .pdf file shows, they broke down the respondents into seven different age groups. For the age group of 16-19, they received responses from 61 males and 65 females.

In other words, the Internet was agog over a report that 22 males and 38 females aged 16-19 said either that they had no interest in sex or despised it. When the Huffington Post spun this story as “a third of the nation’s youth” disliking sex, they were basing it on the response of 60 self-selected people. The HuffPo also thinks 38 girls is a “whopping” number.

That explains why so few people in Japan took the survey seriously. We already knew there was little reason to take the HuffPo or Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Japan seriously, based on their track record. This story follows the pattern: Discovering the essentials of this survey took only 10 to 15 minutes, but then I was interested in the truth instead of entertainment.

Another peculiarity was the survey’s finding that only 6.6% of the boys and 1.6% of the girls had their first sexual experience at the age of 16-19. That’s not even close to the numbers from this data reported by Kyoto University for surveys of high school students in Tokyo over a 20 year-period. In 1984, the percentage of the no-longer virgin among the big city boys and girls in their senior year was 22% and 12% respectively. By 2002, a decade ago, that had risen to 37% and 46% respectively. (Yes, the girls were getting more action than the guys.)

Is this not curious? If a survey with findings that goofy were to appear in America, folks on the Internet would have mobilized immediately, and the information to refute it would have been found, presented, and widely disseminated in fewer than 24 hours. Recall what happened to Dan Rather of CBS News when he tried to use bogus documents to discredit George W. Bush in 2004. Just last week, an attempt to discredit Newt Gingrich among Republicans by deliberately misquoting his comments about Ronald Reagan was also exposed in less than a day.

When Japan is the subject of goofy surveys, however, the same people forego their critical facilities and become Grade-A suckers.

This phenomenon demands ruthless truth-telling, and it is not possible to be too ruthless. Here’s the truth: If you choose to believe what you read in the English-language mass media about Japan, you choose the course of ignorance.

Conrad the Gweilo

I read this report on the Instapundit website run by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds. A rational man, Prof. Reynolds presented only the link and a quote, and offered no comment of his own. He did, however, later add a comment mailed in by an ex-blogger whose site he once enjoyed. The commenter identified himself as the former author of the Gweilo Diaries. That would have been “Conrad”, a man writing from Hong Kong who chose to remain anonymous even when active.

I bring up his comments only because they are a superlative example — even for the Internet — of a person unwittingly exposing himself as a horse’s ass through the confident assertion of ignorant nonsense. Here’s what he said:

As a preface: my wife — yes, I’m now married, monogamous and very content — is Japanese. Many of my friends and clients are Japanese. I speak passable Japanese and I am still intrigued (and sometimes repelled) by Japanese culture.

Here’s what he’s telling us: He doesn’t live in Japan, knows a few Japanese people, and is not fluent in the language. Any time spent in the country has been short and shallow. He might fool the linguistically challenged Americans (and himself) with this “passable” business, but there is no “passable” when it comes to language skills — you’re either fluent or you’re not.

What is “passable” supposed to mean? Passable is going to the dentist with a toothache and getting it fixed, explaining why Barack Obama is now so unpopular in the United States after the false euphoria of 2008, or describing the difference between an alpha male and a beta male without any English dialogue or recourse to a dictionary. Passable is being able to read the first 25 signs you see walking down the street. Passable is explaining to someone in English the content of a Japanese newspaper article selected by someone else at random.

His primary means of communication with his Japanese wife would seem to be in a language other than Japanese. My Japanese wife and I will have been married 25 years in May, and she does not speak English. One learns early that the choice is simple: either get fluent fast or live forever behind the eight ball. Passable is not an option.

And of course, if he could read or write Japanese, he would have mentioned it.

His admission that he is “sometimes repelled” by Japanese culture demonstrates a disqualifying bias. Somewhere in the world there is a nation that is the gold standard for culture, from which the Japanese are so far removed that their behavior is repellent? Or does that cultural gold standard only exist in the kingdom between his ears?

If you wonder why that would make a difference, try this perspective: Picture yourself as an American who is listening to someone commenting authoritatively about the United States, but whose culture sometimes repels him. The commenter doesn’t live in the US, speaks only “passable” English, and can’t read the language. He knows a few Americans, including his wife, with whom he converses in some other language.

Now ask yourself how seriously you’ll take whatever this man has to say.

We do learn, however, about the Japan of his imagination.

Young Japanese guys are as horny and desperate to get laid as any guys in the world. Probably more so, since only young Arabs get less actual sex.

The Japanese Family Planning Association survey found that the age at which the 50% threshold was crossed for the first sexual experience was 19, but Conrad the Gweilo in Hong Kong, or wherever he is now, knows more about the frequency with which people in Japan (and the Arab world) get laid. He must be a lucky man to have avoided arrest as a Peeping Tom for all these years.

Unfortunately, three lost economic decades has resulted in a plethora of un- or under-employed young beta men, without real jobs or prospects of success, and young women who look at these prospective suitors and despair.

Unfortunately Conrad the Gweilo seems to be under the impression that the years from 1980-1990 were an economic loss in Japan. He also isn’t aware of the statistics showing that Japanese economic performance in recent years has been comparable to that of other developed countries. Nor is he aware that the nation with a plethora of young beta men without real jobs has an unemployment rate just a skoche more than half that of the United States, where the official unemployment figures are just as fraudulent.

Then there is the deficiency in his reading skills. The report on this survey covered only the results for people from ages 16-19, when most kids are in high school, and many in the first year of college. It is not clear why figures dealing with full-time students prompted him to discuss un- or under-employment among young men.

His use of the term “beta men” is also noteworthy, especially in combination with the following:

Young Japanese guys who can’t attract women turn to magna, gaming, and juvinalia (sic) Young Japanese women, in a society without f*ckworthy guys, turn to fashion, girl friends and the passive/aggressive “cute culture” prevalent among Japanese girls. It turns out that economic stagnation if the enemy of hot sex.

Though the Pukka Sahib of East Asia has “many” Japanese friends and clients, he doesn’t have a high opinion of their masculinity. For all his extensive experience and knowledge, he seems to have overlooked the fact that the dynamic for interaction between the sexes is different here. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on him. Unable to read Japanese, he doesn’t have access to this information.

Nor is the cute culture among young Japanese women a recent phenomenon, but Conrad the Gweilo is probably too young to know that. Why he thinks the buzzword “passive-aggressive” applies to it is beyond my ability to speculate.

That facile use of the term “beta men”, by the way, also identifies him as someone who is likely familiar with what has been called the manosphere and the new masculine awareness. Yet it is strange how quickly he buys into this:

Many commentators in the Japanese and international media have laid the problem squarely at the feet of soshoku danshi – “herbivore men” — a term coined by pop culture columnist Maki Fukasawa in 2006.

One of the staples of the English-language manosphere is the presentation and takedown of articles written by women (especially pop culture columnists) publicly airing their dissatisfaction with contemporary men. As soon as one is brought up as the subject of a manosphere blog post, the author is pelted with a volley of spitballs and put in her place as a whiner frustrated that she isn’t hot enough to attract guys.

But when they turn the cyberpage and see the Japanese version of the same thing, the suckers swallow it whole. Perhaps that’s because American men are so studly compared to those geeky Japanese grass eaters. After all:

Once upon a time, video games were for little boys and girls—well, mostly little boys—who loved their Nintendos so much, the lament went, that they no longer played ball outside. Those boys have grown up to become child-man gamers, turning a niche industry into a $12 billion powerhouse. Men between the ages of 18 and 34 are now the biggest gamers;… almost half—48.2 percent—of…males in that age bracket had used a console during the last quarter of 2006, and did so, on average, two hours and 43 minutes per day. (That’s 13 minutes longer than 12- to 17-year-olds, who evidently have more responsibilities than today’s twentysomethings.) Gaming—online games, as well as news and information about games—often registers as the top category in monthly surveys of Internet usage.

And:

Today’s pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn’t say. He has to compete in a fierce job market, but he can’t act too bossy or self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but not cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, his advisers and confidants are generally undomesticated guys just like him.

Single men have never been civilization’s most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with “Star Wars” posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn’t be surprised.

Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men’s attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There’s nothing they have to do.

Ah, so sorry. That was Kay Hymowitz writing about American men.

Perhaps his time overseas has left Conrad the Gweilo behind the curve:

The US is not Japan, but if present trends of debt, unemployment, lack of mobility and stagnation continue, the end result will be similar.

Well, we know that the US is not Japan, but a report last year from the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the percentage of young Americans aged 15-24 with no sexual experience had risen from 22% for both sexes in 2005 to 27% for men and 29% for women. That’s an extra five years of prime sexual time beyond the ages referenced in the Japanese study. The percentage of high school virgins was 53% for men and 58% for women, not so different from Japanese surveys. In fact, that percentage for girls with their innocence intact is higher than the percentage for Japanese girls in the study of Tokyo I cited above.

What would Conrad the Gweilo make of the book Furuichi Noritoshi published last year? Mr. Furuichi wanted to examine why people were so concerned about Japanese youth when a 2010 survey found that 65.9% of men and 75.2% of women in their 20s said they were “satisfied” with their current lives.

Perhaps if he could read it, he might tell us.

Afterwords:

Please use this link to Instapundit to access the HuffPo and Wall Street Journal articles. Links are only for the legit.

Next time for the geopolitical post for sure!

*****
To say that the Pakistan Coke Studio videos are excellent might be an understatement.

Handling Japan

A GLANCE at the article that ran in the English-language edition of the Mainichi Shimbun suggested it was the sort of filler that often appears in such publications in this country. It was a brief account of a talk by Columbia University Prof. Gerald Curtis at a lunch held at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. When viewed through the prism of a Japanese-language blog post that appeared a few days later, however, one sentence in the article hints at greater, unexplored depths.

The Mainichi’s report of Prof. Curtis’s appearance focused on his comments about political conditions in Japan today:

“This is totally a dysfunctional government … and the party (DPJ) is in disarray.”

It’s reassuring to know that at least one of the Western academia grovers is paying attention instead of bloviating on a cloud of wishful thinking.

For the first time in his 45-year career as a scholar of Japanese politics, Curtis said he recognizes that “the public is uniform in its view that politics is just awful.” He said, “This cannot go on forever this way. Something is going to blow because the extent of public disgust is quite extreme.”

The extent of public distrust was also quite extreme in the early 90s, which led to the birth of the Hosokawa government in 1994-95. The difference between then and now is that people have realized the Democratic Party of Japan, formed in the late 90s with the intention of creating a credible two-party system, is a far worse option than most ever imagined.

Prof. Curtis’s observations make for entertaining reading. He mentioned Mr. Kan’s taste for government by coup de theatre and presenting ideas seized on the spur of the moment as policy. He cited the Trans-Pacific Partnership and renewable energy scheme, but the Mainichi didn’t tell us whether he said anything about the stress tests for nuclear power plants. He also said the political vacuum in Tokyo has led to the emergence of interesting and effective local political leaders, and that private sector activism is on the rise due to a loss of confidence in the government.

It’s entertaining because the entire content of his address as reported should have been old news for the FCCJ clubsters had any of them bothered to read Japanese-language newspapers and periodicals, not to mention this website. Instead, they were clued in by an American professor stopping by for lunch after coming all the way from New York to visit Iwate on his fourth trip to the Tohoku region since the earthquake/tsunami.

Well, that’s what the Mainichi said. But is that really what he’s doing in Japan? Consider this:

“Kan will be gone by the end of August but he may not go quietly,” said Gerald Curtis, professor of political science at Columbia University in New York, at a luncheon meeting of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ).

He seems sure of himself, doesn’t he? Very few people in Japan are willing to predict when — or if — Kan Naoto will relinquish his position, but Prof. Curtis is speaking as though it were a done deal.

There might be a reason for that. The following is a quick translation of a Japanese-language blog post by author and former diplomat Amaki Naoto.

******
Here’s what I saw when I read a newspaper summary for Prime Minister Kan’s activities on 25 July.

1:49 p.m to 3:20 p.m.: Gerald Curtis, Columbia University professor; Aide Tsujimoto Kiyomi also attended.

It would be a good idea for people to picture this scene in their minds. Gerald Curtis is known to the cognoscenti as one of the Japan Handlers.

He has advised Japanese prime ministers since the days of the LDP governments, starting with Prime Minister Nakasone. He approached the DPJ government when they took power and began giving advice to them.

He is the typical “crony capitalist” scholar. (政商学者)

Japanese politicians, both in government and in the opposition, and media members with no connections in the United States, praise him worshipfully.

What did Prime Minister Kan hear when he summoned this man to the Kantei?

Also present was Tsujimoto Kiyomi, ever alert to power in the same way.

What did these three people huddle together and talk about?

Of course we don’t know. But it’s not necessary that we know.

What is clear is that their discussion involved nothing that would benefit the people of this country.

They were using the prime minister’s office to hold discussions for their own benefit.

(end translation)
*****
Japan Handlers is the title of a book published by Nakata Yasuhiko in May 2005, who also wrote a book called Reoccupied Japan. The term gets more than 22,000 hits on Google Japan.

The author identifies 197 people from universities, think tanks, and government agencies whom he claims manipulate Japanese politicians and businessmen in pursuit of the ends of the “American empire”.

Busy man, this Gerald Curtis — an American college professor delivering a quick lunchtime seminar (or briefing) for the FCCJ, visiting the Kantei in mid-afternoon on a weekday and getting 90 minutes with the prime minister. Prime ministers are busy people too, especially ones trying to put together and pass legislation to deal with the effects of an immense natural disaster.

Did you ever wonder why former Prime Minister Hatoyama and the DPJ, at such great speed and public humiliation, dropped their initiative to move the Marine air base at Futenma in Okinawa after making the pledge a prominent part of their election campaign? I did. The Americans are supposed to be in Japan to defend the country from foreign attack. It is not the mission of American Marines to defend anything. They’re the offense, not the defense.

And what the deuce was Tsujimoto Kiyomi doing there? It’s bad enough that she’s part of the government to begin with. Here’s a reprise of what I wrote about Ms. Tsujimoto in 2009:

Tsujimoto Kiyomi came up with the idea for taking cruises on a Peace Boat to the countries that Japan invaded during the war when she was a Waseda undergraduate in 1983. It’s not easy for a spunky coed to organize a project on that scale, regardless of her commitment or idealism, so she needed some help.

She received that help from Kitakawa Akira, who later became what is described as her common-law husband, and Oda Makoto.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and intelligence service archives became available, it was discovered that Mr. Oda had been a KGB agent. Mr. Kitakawa was a member of the Japanese Red Army, a revolutionary terrorist group formed in 1971 that was responsible for bombings, airplane hijackings, and armed attacks throughout the world. One member was caught with explosives on the New Jersey Turnpike in the 1980s and spent time in an American jail. Several members were granted asylum in North Korea, and the Japanese government is trying to extradite them. It remains an obstacle to the normalization of relations.

Though vicious, the group’s membership was always small, and they immediately had problems finding the money to survive. It was provided by Palestinians starting in 1972.

The Peace Boat, meanwhile, expanded the range of its voyages and visited the Middle East. Cruise members met several times with Yasser Arafat, perhaps to thank him for his money and ask for more.

Mr. Kitakawa was responsible for JRA activities in Europe, and he was eventually deported from Sweden. Back in Japan, he founded the Daisansha publishing company, which has released six of Ms. Tsujimoto’s books.

She was recruited by former Socialist Party leader Doi Takako to run for the Diet, and she won her first election in 1996. A few years later, Shigenobu Fusako, the founder of the Japanese Red Army, was arrested in Takatsuki, Osaka, Ms. Tsujimoto’s home district. She was in the company of Yoshida Mamoru, a member of Tsujimoto’s staff in Takatsuki.

As an MP, she started receiving national exposure in the early years of the Koizumi Administration with her semi-hysterical challenges of the prime minister during Question Time. She does have spunk, however, and it was great television, so a star was quickly born.

It just as quickly faded after her success went to her head and she accused MP Suzuki Muneo during his questioning in the Diet of being a “trading house for suspicion”. Mr. Suzuki, semi-hysterical himself, blew up in a memorable rant.

Those of you who enjoy interesting coincidences will be delighted to know that not long afterwards, investigators just happened to discover that she had been raking off funds from the money that was supposed to be paid to her political aides. It was suspected that she gave some of the money to Mr. Kitakawa. She was sentenced to two years in jail with a five-year stay of execution.

Ms. Tsujimoto resigned her Diet seat, but Japanese voters can be a forgiving lot, and she’s back.

One of the reasons she’s back is that the DPJ chose not to run a candidate in her electoral district in 2009, despite the likelihood of a DPJ victory. It was, in part, a favor to their soon-to-be coalition partners, the Social Democratic Party of Japan, from which Tsujimoto Kiyomi has since resigned.

Here’s a Wikilist of Tsujimoto quotes:

* “I don’t want to be a Japanese. I want to be an international person.”

* “It’s not possible that the peace-loving North Koreans would abduct anyone.”

* “Immediately and unconditionally normalize diplomatic relations with North Korea.”

That’s from one of her books. The text helpfully includes the parenthetical information that North Korea is the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”.

* “At present, the Self-Defense Forces are unconstitutional, both from the perspective of their equipment and the regulations.”

Long-time friends will remember that this one is my favorite:

* “They say a Diet member should protect the lives and property of the citizens, but that is not my intention. My role is as a ‘national destroyer’ MP who will try somehow to destroy the framework of the state.”

(The word for Diet member is 国会議員 (kokkai gi-in). She replaced the first two characters with the homonym 国壊 (kokkai), which means “national destruction”.

In the aftermath of the Hyogo earthquake in 1995, when everyone else rushed to the area to provide assistance, Ms. Tsujimoto rushed to the area to pass out leaflets attacking the government and calling for its ouster.

The Hatoyama administration appointed the national destroyer to the post of Deputy Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport.

Based on this stellar career of public service, Prime Minister Kan tapped Ms. Tsujimoto to be his special advisor to coordinate post-disaster volunteer efforts in the Tohoku region. The twisted sense of humor of Democrats the world over is entertaining in its own right, is it not?

Mr. Kan even quotes her in his “e-mail blog”:

As Ms. Kiyomi Tsujimoto, Special Advisor to the Prime Minister, often says, it is not simply the reconstruction of society’s “hardware” buildings and so on that requires budget allocations and policy measures. We will also be engaged in “reconstruction of the heart” for each individual affected by the disaster and “reconstruction of kizuna (bonds among people)” that have been disrupted in society.

If they don’t know by now how intellectually vapid that is (and impossible for government to achieve), they ain’t never gonna get it.

Doesn’t this appointment remind you of Barack Obama’s appointments of Van Jones, Anita Dunn, and Ron Bloom? Birds of a feather, don’t you know. (Even better is the Japanese equivalent of that proverb: Mix with crimson and you turn red.)

Be that as it may, why is Prof. Curtis meeting with these people at all, unless he’s telling them that everything they know is wrong? That wouldn’t take 90 seconds, much less 90 minutes.

It’s curious. For the past two months, Kan Naoto has insisted that he never made a deal with Hatoyama Yukio to step down. He’s dropped scores of broad hints that he either intends to stay in office for as long as possible, or call a lower house election.

Last week, however, a few days following his meeting with Prof. Curtis, he allowed as how he might resign sooner rather than later after all. And remember, the professor is certain that Kan Naoto will be gone at the end of the month.

Further, there’s a report today that four senior members of the Democratic Party have created a firm schedule to topple Mr. Kan in an intra-party coup. The group supposedly includes acting party president Sengoku Yoshito, Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio, Secretary-General Okada Katsuya, and Diet Affairs Committee Chairman Azumi Jun. The report states they will have the prime minister removed as party president in mid-August, and hold an election to replace him on 27 August. The principal justification is that the “out-of-control prime minister is sacrificing the beleaguered Tohoku region and the national economy to extend his term in office.”

Where’s Wikileaks now that we really need them?

*****
The secret Asian men and their groupies get it on!

Whale of a good time

Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you and remain silent.
- Epictetus

WE’VE ALL seen websites and blogs where people upload photos of food they cook at home or eat at a restaurant. I’ve never done that before — it never looks as appetizing as the bloggers think — but let’s give it a try and see what happens. For example:

Whale chirashizushi!

Whale nikujaga! (stewed meat, potatoes, and onion)

Deep-fried whale skewers!

Whale stewed in citron juice!

Whale tongue stew!

Smoked whale hors d’œuvre! (Meat and hide)

And this unidentified lip-smacker!

Or this!

And this one too!

Some dietary ideologues would never be happy unless they were unhappy that somebody somewhere might be enjoying these dishes, none of which I’ve eaten but all of which I’d try. I’ve always liked the whale I’ve been served, including the meals my wife cooked with whale as the main ingredient.

Some other ideologues wouldn’t be happy unless they were unhappy about those barbaric Japanese butchers cleavering away at the sacred cows of the sea.

Their bad. Those photos come not from Japan, but from Ulsan, South Korea, where the local whale festival was held at the end of May. An annual event more than 10 years old, the festival runs for three or four days and attracts upwards of 250,000 people. (See this previous post on the festival for more information.) The Ulsanians developed a taste for whale during the colonial days, which will make another group of ideologues happy by reminding them of the unhappy days before they were born, but — who cares!

The theme of this year’s festival was a whale cuisine exchange with Kumamoto in Kyushu, with which Ulsan has long had ties. The Japanese were happy to attend.

The woman at right is from Nagasaki, the woman in the center is from Kumamoto, and the two women at left are chums from Hokkaido, whale-chomping centers all. The woman dressed in the traditional chima chogori operates one of Ulsan’s 20 whale restaurants. (It’s not possible to give an accurate rendition of her name because it appeared only as Shin in katakana in Japanese.) In addition to her crimes against humanity by serving cannibal fare, she was also the food coordinator for the internationally successful South Korean television show Daejangeum, known in English as “Jewel in the Palace”. Here’s a summary of the program from the show’s website:

“The miniseries…is based on the story of a real historical figure (Jang-geum) who was the first and only woman to serve as head physician to the King in the rigidly hierarchical and male-dominated social structure of the Joseon Dynasty. Daejanggeum, in English, ‘the Great Jang-geum,’ caught the attention of Korean TV viewers with its unique combination of two themes: the successful rise of a female, which is rarely covered in historical genre, and the elements of traditional food and medicine.”

The series was very successful on cable in Japan, and it has been rebroadcast several times. One of the spin-offs was a cookbook featuring the dishes presented on the program, which the woman in the photo surely had a key role in compiling. The cookbook was also sold in Japan, though it probably contained no whale dishes.

Maybe it should have. The theme of the show was traditional food and medicine, and the red meat of the whale contains the dipeptide balenine, which some athletes now take in supplement form because it improves blood flow and restores resiliency to muscle after workouts.

The Ulsan — Kumamoto connection dates back to the late 16th century when Kato Kiyomasa, the first daimyo of the Kumamoto domain in Higonokuni, participated in Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of the Korean Peninsula. Kato built a castle in Ulsan (of which a few foundation stones remain) that became the model for the Kumamoto Castle, which he also built. The latter structure was finished in 1607, but most of it was torn down during the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. It has since been restored and is now a major tourist site.

Some workers from Ulsan helped build the Kumamoto version, and legend has it that the view from the hill on the southwest side of the castle reminded them of home. That’s how the district they spied later became known as Urusan-machi. The area is now part of Shin-machi after a municipal reorganization, but the Urusanmachi name survives as one of the Kumamoto City trolley stops:

Meanwhile, action on the Festivus Balaena front will shift to Japan later this summer, as the folks at the Sumiyoshi Taisha, a Shinto shrine in Sakai, Osaka, decided to revive their own whale festival. Both the facility and the event are as old as the hills, or perhaps in this case, as old as the waves. The shrine is celebrating its 1,800th anniversary this year, and it was already a millennium old when they began holding the whale festival, which dates from sometime in the Kamakura period. That ended in 1333.

The event has been held only sporadically since the Meiji Era (which began in 1868). Once upon a time, it was offered every 20 to 30 years. That’s unusual for Japanese festivals, most of which are annual affairs. This year’s revival, however, will be the first in 57 years. It is held in supplication for sea safety, and originated in a dance to placate the unhappy fisherman who came home empty-handed on whale-hunting expeditions. The Osakans thought it would be an excellent idea to bring it back as a way to help calm the waters after so many people died in the Tohoku tsunami this year. One of the advantages of such a long national history is that when something new is called for, it’s always possible to dive into the past and retrieve something old that most people didn’t know existed.

It’s been so long since the last time, however, that most everyone forgot how to do it. The Sakai municipal government worked with local historians to study photos and jog the memories of festival vets who were around during the last big blow in 1954. The main attraction is a 27-meter-long bamboo and cloth whale float, which is roomy enough for people inside to open and close the beast’s mouth, move its tail, and spurt water. Meanwhile, people alongside will chant the whale chant and dance the whale dance. Megafauna fans in Sakai will get to see all this on 24 July if they visit the shrine, and on 1 August when the leviathan is paraded from the shrine to the city.

Said one historian:

“I’m glad they’re bringing it back. Several generations now don’t know about the festival, but I want them to enjoy the vitality and spirit of fishermen of old.”

And while we’re on the subject of of big game hunting, some of the pretend buccaneer/junior ideologues of Sea Shepherd are in Japan to do what they do best — irritate the hell out of normal people — by traveling to Iwate to take photos of the dolphin hunt. Iwate’s local catch accounts for more than half of Japan’s dolphin and whale industry by tonnage. It is also one of the three prefectures most seriously damaged by March’s earthquake/tsunami. The Mainichi Daily News explains what happened:

“Earlier this month, the members took pictures of a fish market devastated by the disaster as well as fishing boats and posted the photos on the group’s website, triggering anger among some local fishermen over their return to the town.

“A local fisherman said, ‘Dolphin hunting is not done in May. Many boats were swept away due to the quake and tsunami, and the fish market is also in a terrible condition. There is nothing left to take pictures of.’”

We shouldn’t be too harsh on the swabbies — you know they’re determined not to be happy unless they can be really unhappy about whaling or dolphining. If they had something productive to do with their lives, they’d already be doing it. After all, it takes more than a few degrees of eccentric warp to think one is doing the world a favor by getting in the way while the people who suffered one of history’s greatest natural disasters are trying to rebuild their lives and homes.

If it’s pictures they want, I can’t help them with dolphins, but I could send them the link to the Japanese site promoting whale cuisine where I swiped the photos above. All they have to do is ask.

Afterwords:

It was entertaining to re-read the comments on my old post to which I linked above. It’s curious how some people aren’t happy unless they aren’t happy that other people are happy about living in Japan.

*****
The Sea Shepherd recruiting song

Letter bombs (18): Flybaits

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
– H.L. Mencken

AN E-MAIL came from Peter in Toronto telling me of his blog about Japan. Peter wants to move to this country and reform it from the inside out by becoming a Japanese politician.

As the law stands now, Hong Kong-born Peter would have to become a naturalized citizen to run for public office here, but there is a precedent for him to follow. Martti Turunen was a Lutheran missionary who came to Japan from Finland in 1968. He divorced his Finnish wife two years later, married a Japanese woman in 1974, became a Japanese citizen in 1979, and moved to Kanagawa in 1981.

Six years after arriving in Japan, he ditched the missionary gig and started teaching English. He must have a taste for lathering hot air over groups of fidgeting listeners, because he ran for and won election to the municipal council of Yugawara-machi in 1992. Three years after that, he got really ambitious and ran for the Diet. Four tries later — three for the upper house, one for the lower — he finally hit the big time in 2002 when celebrity pol Ohashi Kyosen got tired of being a small fish in a large pond after just six months and resigned his upper house proportional representation seat. Mr. Turunen, whose Japanese name is Tsurunen Marutei, replaced him because he was the runner-up in the previous election.

Mr. Ohashi, by the way, is a specimen in his own right. He was a well-known master of ceremonies in the broadcast media, an operator of gift shops overseas with Japanese-speaking staff for Japanese tourists, and a showbiz racetrack tout. He was recruited to run for the Diet by Kan Naoto — you know him — and won a PR seat in 2001.

He proved to be the prickly type almost immediately, however. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in America occurred shortly after he took office. He was the only DPJ member to vote against the Diet resolution condemning the attacks because it was tantamount to “supporting America”. He tried to convince then-party leader Hatoyama Yukio that the DPJ should join Socialist International and come out of the closet as a left-wing party. He said the Japanese Democrats should position themselves as a “center-left” party, which reveals what the Anglosphere mass media means when they use that term to describe the current Japanese government. (That also gives us an idea about Mr. Kan’s eye for talent and his own political proclivities). Mr. Hatoyama deflected the suggestion, saying there was no consensus for it within the party. When Mr. Ohashi made his exit stage left, he complained that he didn’t realize the Democratic Party of Japan had become so undemocratic.

But let’s return to Mr. Turunen, though there’s little of consequence to say about him. He doesn’t seem to have done much in Nagata-cho for the past 10 years except sit there and (presumably) vote. From what I could dig up on the web, his political philosophy consists of growing and eating organic vegetables, recycling food waste, and using the suffix –san when addressing everyone, regardless of social status. He is so excited about “effective micro-organisms” he has 11 articles about them on his website. He favors giving Korean citizens born in Japan the right to vote. Instead of Lutheranism, he now proselytizes for the Church of Global Warming. He once described his outlook for the Japan Times:

“I don’t need to try to be Japanese or assimilate too much. I want to be accepted as a foreigner and still contribute to this society.”

That’s a curious attitude for someone who went to the trouble to become a naturalized citizen.

Therefore, being born a non-Japanese outside of Japan will not prevent one from becoming a politician in Japan. Judging from Mr. Turunen’s record, the absence of any recognizable ability, real-world accomplishments, or worthwhile insight isn’t a serious obstacle either. (Indeed, judging from his curriculum vitae, one doesn’t have to be a native English speaker or to have lived in the Anglosphere to operate an English language school in this country. Now that’s what I call the land of opportunity.)

The highlight of his career seems to have been the day he was sworn into office, an achievement he shares with Barack Obama, another politician with a variegated citizenship history. Considering that the voters of Kanagawa have chosen to award their PR votes to the DPJ for the past decade with people such as Mr. Ohashi and Mr. Turunen on the list, anyone has a plausible shot at a seat. That would confirm Margaret Thatcher’s advice to a young person who thought there wasn’t any room at the top for a person interested in a political career. “Nonsense,” said Mrs. Thatcher. “There’s plenty of room at the top.” Nature abhors a vacuum, even if it’s only dust filling the empty space.

The real problem with politics as a profession in any country isn’t that the chief job requirement is to have the character of a party balloon, either fresh and inflated or limp and slobber-filled. Rather, it is explicit in the Mencken observation quoted at the top of this post. Though his comment was in reference to American politicians almost a century ago, it applies to all of them, everywhere, in any age. Even Nikita Khrushchev noted that politicians were alike the world over: “They promise to build a bridge where there is no river.” Imagine what he might have said had he spent his career in a system that required he periodically lubricate the voters.

One Japanese politician who validates the universality of Mencken’s assertion is Matsubara Jin of the ruling DPJ, though as the Japanese would say, the choice of pols for that distinction from among any party is yoridorimidori; i.e., the options are multitudinous and varied. Mr. Matsubara appeared on Beat Takeshi’s Terebi Takkuru on Monday night. That’s a television program on which politicos, academics, commentators, and celebrities are invited every week to discuss current events and issues. Host Beat Takeshi, a comedian who also directs films under his original name of Kitano Takeshi, usually limits himself to the occasional interjection, leaving it to his guests to provide the polemical fireworks.

Over the past few weeks, the panelists have been discussing Kan Naoto’s plan to increase taxes to pay for the reconstruction of the Tohoku region. It’s gratifying that the program is providing plenty of airtime for opponents to make their case and fry the Finance Ministry in the process. (A discussion program on a major network bashing a left-of-center government and its representatives for that reason would be unthinkable in the United States.)

This week’s lineup of guests included a few members of the recently formed group of Diet members working to stymie a tax hike, which we discussed a few posts ago. In addition to Mr. Matsubara, others who appeared were Eda Kenji of Your Party and ex-Finance Ministry bureaucrat and current academic Takahashi Yoichi, both of whom I frequently quote here.

The discussion eventually flowed in the direction of the Kan Naoto proposal to cut national civil service salaries by 10% to help with the financing of the reconstruction. That’s when Mr. Matsubara lost the plot.

Even though he cites Margaret Thatcher as his primary political inspiration, Mr. Matsubara said that if the salaries of public sector employees were to be temporarily reduced, then private sector employees should be made to take home lighter pay envelopes too.

Had Mrs. Thatcher heard anyone say that in a policy debate, much less one of her admirers, she would have verbally filleted him and lined his giblets in a neat row on the cutting board before he could say Ginsu Knife. It took only a few seconds more for the rest of the panelists to hoot him down.

Now that’s a politician who has become indistinguishable from a streetwalker. Mrs. Thatcher saved England by walking into the union’s den with a stool and a whip. Meanwhile, both private and public sector unions are the backbone of organizational support for Mr. Matsubara’s DPJ. If his political ideals really are similar to Mrs. Thatcher’s, he’s sold them out for the salary and perks of a Diet seat. The price he pays is to be a party hack in public and a hypocrite in private.

A few years ago, I followed an Internet mailing list devoted to the discussion of music. One list member was a musician who wrote a minor hit song in the late 60s and led a band with a minor hit record in the early 70s. One day he told a story about a meeting he had with a record company executive in Los Angeles. They were joking around at lunch, and the musician mused, “You know, what I’d really like to do is become governor of (his home state).”

He said the executive turned serious and replied, “That can be arranged.”

I understand and appreciate Peter’s desire to make a difference through the political process, particularly because I once thought about doing the same thing myself. But I suspect it’s not possible to put oneself in a position to accomplish something in politics and still get to sleep at night, absent a narcissistic personality disorder or enormous alcohol consumption.

Postscript:
It’s long been the practice for show business or sports celebrities to make politics a temporary second career by running for an upper house seat. Both major parties actively recruit them for their name recognition. It’s not essential to already have a fully formed politicial philosophy; the point of the exercise is to be a safe vote doing their sponsor’s bidding once in office. The latest example was the Olympic gold medalist in judo, Tani Ryoko, whom Ozawa Ichiro recruited as a DPJ candidate for the 2009 upper house election. There’s more on the phenomenon in a previous post here.

*****
Speaking of H.L. Mencken, here’s what he wrote about the public speaking abilities of then-President Warren Harding about 90 years ago:

“It reminds me of a string of wet sponges, it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble, it is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

That’s such an apt characterization of Kan Naoto’s public speaking abilities it’s enough to make me wonder whether there’s something to that reincarnation idea after all.

******
Here’s a video credited to a Malaysian group called Fredo and the Flybaits. Does not the word flybait perfectly capture the essence of a politician?

In this video, however, the Flybaits don’t show up. It’s just a solo Fredo performance. (Freedo is a misspelling.) We should be so lucky with the other flybaits.

Wait for the Elvis impersonation!

If we can’t have the perestroika, how about the glasnost?

VASILY Golovnin, the Tokyo Bureau Chief for the ITAR-TASS news agency, recently filed a critical report on the Japanese response to the problems at Fukushima. I looked around on the web and couldn’t find it in English, so here’s the English version of a Japanese-language excerpt. Forgive the clumsiness, but that’s due to translating from a language once removed.

“Where are the robots? Japan is known for robotics, but why did it take more than one month for them to be used? All of the work at the nuclear power plants was done by manual labor. That is not the image of an advanced, industrialized country. Both the technological level and the ideas used to deal with the accident were negative. I think the collapse of the myth of a safe, technologically advanced Japan will have serious repercussions…

“The crisis presents a chance for a new beginning. But Japan’s political system is in a cul-de-sac. It resembles an old man. The complexity of the decision-making process is like that of the former Soviet Union and the former Communist Party—introverted and self-righteous. It will be very difficult to escape from that…

“Russia has begun to supply Japan with LNG. Russia wants to sell, and Japan needs to secure energy. This is a good opportunity for Japanese-Russian relations — if Japan thinks of it that way.”

So — A Russian journalist for Tass based in Tokyo observes the DPJ government in action and is struck by its resemblance to the former Soviet Union and the former Communist Party.

Really, who needs to read fiction?

N.B.: The word I translated as self-righteous was 独善的 in the Japanese excerpt. Japanese critics of the DPJ-led government and Prime Minister Kan often use the same word.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

White lightning in Northeast Asia

IN THE WEST, the primary consumers of sweet alcoholic beverages are usually either young people slightly above or below the legal drinking age, unaccustomed and ill-disposed to the taste of the real thing, or women a few years older. (Southern Comfort was the liquor of choice for the well-known juicehead Janis Joplin.) I’ve never seen an adult male drink a rum and coke. Daiquiris might be an exception, but they’re more tart than sweet. And I’ve never seen anyone drink a mint julep at any time other than the first Saturday of May — Kentucky Derby day.

Sweetness seems to be more to the taste of northeast Asians in their tippling traditions, however. While there are both sweet and dry varieties of Japanese sake, the original beverage was probably sweet. The Japanese version of white lightning, doburoku, is sweeter still. That’s a milky white form of sake that isn’t fully pressed from the fermenting rice solids, which are left floating inside.

Nongju

Sweet white lightning made from rice is another of the many elements Japanese and Korean culture have in common. The Korean analog is called makgeolli, and it shares several attributes with doburoku: It’s just as white, just as sweet, and just as likely to cause those who consume it to wake up the next morning convinced there’s an axe embedded in their forehead. The background story says it was originally brewed for farm workers to drink instead of water while in the fields, which might be the reason Korea has never been an agricultural superpower. It was originally called nongju, a name that translates as farm liquor. Japanese will recognize it from the kanji: 農酒. Both doburoku and makgeolli are 6-8% alcohol by volume, slightly more than local beers, but less than sake.

There are an estimated 40 different kinds of makgeolli, and rice is not the only farm product used to brew it. When then-Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio visited South Korea in October 2009, President Lee Myong-bak used makgeolli for the toast at the state dinner. That variety, however, was made from a purple variety of sweet potato known in Japan as satsumaimo. The Kagoshimanians of Kyushu use it to make their own hairy-chested version of shochu, which isn’t sweet in the slightest. This particular satsumaimo was created by cross-breeding the Japanese and Korean types. Using that beverage on that occasion was a brilliant idea, and whoever in the Blue House came up with it deserves a toast in their honor.

Most of the doburoku in Japan sits in a corner of the liquor store shelf gathering dust, while the South Koreans have succeeded in turning makgeolli into a popular commercial beverage, as we’ve seen before. Sales have gotten high rather quickly. A year or so ago (there was no date on the article), a Korean outfit called GS25 analyzed liquor sales at 3,700 convenience stores nationwide as of August and found that makgeolli ranked fourth, behind beer, shochu/soju, and whiskey, and one slot ahead of wine.

Those rankings might be a reflection of the type of customer likely to shop for grog at convenience stores. A survey conducted by the Lotte department stores in South Korea of liquor sales at their own outlets for a recent July-September period revealed that makgeolli was in third place behind wine and whiskey, and ahead of beer and Japanese sake. The ranking the year before was whiskey, wine, beer, sake, and makgeolli. Of course, you don’t need to see the stats from the marketing survey division to know that women do most of the buying at department stores. Another factor is seasonal and cultural—chusok, the Korean version of o-bon, falls in September, and makgeolli has become a popular choice for gifts.

Soju distiller Jinro ignited the boom by producing more marketable versions of the beverage. (There’s a good video with details at the link above.) Suntory is trying to do something similar in Japan, as they’ve brought out a slightly carbonated version in a can they call Seoul Makgeolli. It’s safe to assume Suntory thinks the foreignness of makgeolli will hold more cachet for young women than the familiarity of doburoku, the choice of hayseeds.

But before you hard guys snort with derision and reach for something more manly, get a load of this: A team at the Korean Food Research Institute announced last month their discovery that makgeolli has anti-carcinogenic ingredients in quantities up to 25 times greater than beer or wine. Specifically, they mean farnesol, which is also one of the critical elements that add aroma to wine.

The team made a point of examining liquors commonly sold on the market. The amount of farnesol in makgeolli tested out at 150-500 parts per billion, 10-25 times the 15-20 ppb of beer and wine. Their research showed the cloudiest parts of the beverage had the greatest amount of farnesol, so it was best to shake up the sediment before drinking it.

These tidings of good cheer come with the chaser of some bad news, alas. The head of the team said that a real effect would be achieved by drinking three or four cups about twice a week. I had that much one evening in Busan (and a similar amount of doburoku that I bought in Nagasaki and broke out at a party), and I’ll stick to other health maintenance methods. As Voltaire is said to have replied when declining a second invitation by the Marquis de Sade to another orgy after he’d enjoyed the first one: “No thanks. Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.”

That research team seems to have performed their task with single-minded devotion. There’s only a small amount of farnesol in makgeolli, which is 90% water, so it was difficult to extract and analyze. They had to develop new technology just to perform the analysis. Now for the unfortunate news: They used the announcement of their discovery as an opportunity to let their Korean little man complex out of the closet for some fresh air:

“Through this research, we developed for the first time the technology to analyze the farnesol from the traditional alcoholic beverage makgeolli. We thus obtained the basic technology enabling the scientific verification of the superiority of South Korean makgeolli.”

Use your new technology and run the tests on doburoku before you say that, guys. It’s the same stuff, after all.

*****
The Japanese and South Koreans also share a cultural taste for a more sedate beverage — tea, which some of them are using to further cross-strait ties. Chomu-kai (朝霧会), a tea ceremony group in Yame, Fukuoka, (a noted tea production area) last week welcomed the “tea culture research group” Unnim Chahue (雲林茶会) from Gwangju, South Korea, to celebrate 10 years of friendship. The chairman and six members of the Korean group hopped over to Yame for two days of tea parties and planting.

The Yame group was formed to promote interest in local tea using the tea ceremonies of the five major Japanese schools. Bak Guang-sun, the husband of the Unnim Chahue chairman, found out about the group when he taught at nearby Kurume University. He thought hanging out with them would be an excellent way to pursue his study of the tea culture in Japan.

The tea bushes they planted together will take four or five years to sprout drinkable leaves, and when they do they’ll have a friendship party and savor it together. Maybe as the night wears on they’ll switch to makgeolli/doburoku and conduct some research into rice culture while they’re at it!

Those who don’t want to wait that long to conduct their own research can analyze this previous post about a Shinto festival with doburoku, or this one about doburoku ice cream.

Here’s how Jinro is plugging makgeolli on Japanese TV. I’m tempted to buy some and invite the ladies over for a pajama party. That game looks like fun.

Meanwhile, Suntory imported Jang Geun-seok from South Korea to pitch Seoul Makgeolli, as you can see in this ad. The company’s choice in models shows they know exactly which market segment they’re trying to capture. Isn’t he precious? Isn’t that earring just darling? And what an adorable hairstyle!

If you’ve worked up a thirst after all this talk about booze, maybe it’s time to get on the ladder—i.e., go bar-hopping in Japanese—with Sabor de Gracia from Spain as they set fire to a few themselves.

Bar-hop far enough, and you might walk into this joint in England. (That’s a flash file.) Whether you walk out again in one piece is a different matter.

Hammers and sickles

THERE’S AN acid test guaranteed to separate the bogus from the bona fide for those who pass themselves off as Japan hands. It’s easy to apply, too: Anyone who uses the alleged proverb, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered in” to proclaim that the Japanese repress originality is a fraud. That’s a reliable signal to turn the page, change the channel, or click on the next website.

The most important of the several reasons why that test is infallible is that they’ve botched the proverb. The handful of people who cite it and actually know some Japanese assume it is Deru kugi ha (wa) utareru, but that’s a mistake. Instead of kugi, or nail, the word is kui (杭), a post or a stake. And—because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing—they’ve also botched the meaning.

The Japanese employ the concentrated insights of proverbs in speech and writing more often than people in the Anglosphere, and their long political, cultural, and literary history means they have a large supply from which to draw. That also means there are plenty of inexpensive proverb dictionaries available in bookstores, with more examples than anyone will ever be able to use in a lifetime. I have one published by Goto Shoin in 1979 that runs more than 500 pages and has definitions for roughly 10 proverbs a page. The author sources the oldest Japanese proverb as coming from the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), which was completed in the eighth century.

Here’s how the author defines this proverb:

“A post that protrudes too far will be driven in further. In the same way, people who assert their pre-eminence over the general public will be envied and meet with difficulties as a result. There’s nothing wrong with excelling or becoming a prominent figure, but human emotion resists that logic. Indeed, people who push themselves forward despite a lack of talent generally receive no forbearance from others.”

He cites one variation on the proverb as, “The post that sticks out is pounded by the waves.” He finally mentions the variation with the nail at the end of the entry, but dismisses it as a mistake. (In fact, he uses the word “bad” to describe its use.)

Therefore, the adage has nothing to do with enforcing conformity to a rigid social order. Rather, it combines a warning that one shouldn’t get too big for one’s britches with the observation that jealousy can have unpleasant consequences. And we all know that the latter is a universal human phenomenon rather than a Japan-only attribute. After all, the belief of some that the redistribution of wealth by a government through confiscatory taxation is a “progressive” concept didn’t originate here.

It doesn’t take much thought to see what happened. Either a foreigner misheard kui as kugi and jumped to the wrong conclusion, or he was steered in the wrong direction by a Japanese fuzzy on the details himself. That the proverb with the nail mistake circulates in some English-speaking circles shows it is being parroted by foreigners with a parrot’s understanding of what they’re saying. The same thing occurred when people used to believe the myth that Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow.

Feffered

The subject comes up because reader Get a Job Son sent in a link to an article by John Feffer in the Huffington Post titled Gambling in Japan. Feffer is described as having lived in Japan in the 90s, though the extent of his stay isn’t mentioned. Considering what little he knows, it couldn’t have been that long. Try this:

“On the outside, Japan appears to be a clean, well-ordered place. The Japanese are, stereotypically, risk-averse. According to the Japanese adage, deru kugi wa utareru: the nail that sticks out will be hammered down. This apparent preference for order and conformity helps explain the patience with which the Japanese have responded to the triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami, and the partial meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear facility – that has afflicted the country.”

Feffer doesn’t explain why a preference for conformity explains the Japanese response to the disaster, or why conformity would be a factor at all. The preference for order is certainly not unique to the Japanese, as few people anywhere are interested in the alternative. And to use one small example, neither order nor conformity explains why Hitachi’s Ibaragi plant, which manufactures generators and gas and steam turbines, resumed post-earthquake operations on 30 March and reached 90% of their productive capacity by 4 April.

Feffer’s point does not rest on a simple, shallow argument, however. It’s not possible to be a convincing public intellectual unless one uses a more complicated shallow argument. That’s why he digs up an irrelevant old anecdote of a 19th century kabuki performer who died because he couldn’t discipline his taste for the potentially poisonous blowfish, and uses it as a metaphor for the country’s mindset:

“Beneath this façade of conformity, however, lies a more interesting reality. Like Mitsugoro Bando VIII, the Japanese have become almost inured to calamity. They’ve accepted – and in some cases courted – extraordinarily risky behavior.

“Consider Japan’s dependence on nuclear energy.”

His discussion of nuclear power plants in Japan, which overlooks the placement of large hydroelectric dams on fault lines in India and China, suggests his agenda is something other than explicating the nature of Japanese behavior. Sure enough:

“Embracing nuclear power isn’t Japan’s only risky behavior. For years, the Japanese government has boasted of a “peace constitution” that restricts the country to a defense-only posture. But this constitution hasn’t prevented Japan from amassing one of the world’s most powerful militaries, confronting China and Korea over disputed islands, cooperating with the United States on a missile defense system that destabilizes the region, and playing host to dozens of U.S. military bases that endanger human lives and the surrounding environment.

“Is there somehow a contradiction between the stereotypical conformity of the average Japanese and this tendency to court disaster in the economic, military, energy, and humanitarian sectors?”

What do you know! A walking, talking strawman!

Hey, why stop at one caricature when you can use several?

“When I lived in Japan in the late 1990s, it wasn’t uncommon late at night to come upon office workers passed out on the street, vomiting in alleyways, or being carried home by their equally inebriated colleagues. Excessive drinking after work was part of the salaryman culture. Indeed, it could be awkward for a businessman to demur from such rituals. When such behavior becomes the norm, then engaging in risky activities becomes just another way of conforming. Of course, it’s only a sector of Japanese society that drinks to excess.”

Feffer doesn’t know anything about salaryman culture, of course, because he wasn’t part of it. (He would have been sure to tell us otherwise). Nor would he know about who does or doesn’t demur from such “rituals”, what is or what isn’t the norm with drinking habits, what is or what isn’t a ritual, who does or who doesn’t conform, and who does or who doesn’t drink to excess.

Many Japanese men drink prodigious amounts of alcohol, regardless of whether they are salarymen, carpenters, or even politicians, including Prime Minister Kan Naoto and the late Nakagawa Shoichi. It has nothing to do with “salaryman culture”, which in any event had already begun to wane in the late 90s when Feffer blew through town. Had he kept his wits about him when writing this piece, it might have occurred to him to blame all the boozing on the stress of conformist behavior to avoid getting pounded in like the nail that sticks out, rather than conforming to “salaryman culture”.

In fact, had he taken the time to do some reading, he would have discovered the many stories of sake-loving divinities in Shinto mythology, created millenia before salarymen existed. The Japanese have always had a taste for the rice. People were singing out of tune and carrying each other home long before the first joint-stock corporation was formed.

But none of that is his real point anyway. He edges up to it here:

“An oligarchy of gamblers holds sway over the majority of cautious Japanese.”

An “oligarchy” controlling a race of conformist, red-nosed lushes too wimpy to express themselves, eh?

The choice of the inappropriate word “oligarchy”, the statement about a mighty Japanese military confronting China and some entity called “Korea”, the claim that a missile defense system is destabilizing, the use of the ruse of environmental concerns (about an endangered species of dugong) to object to American military installations, and the unexplained assertion that Japan is courting disaster in the “humanitarian sector” all point in the direction of a certain worldview.

Once again, Google is our friend. The Huffpo identifies Feffer only as the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus. The FPIF website announces that they are a “project” of the Institute for Policy Studies. That institute openly identifies itself as a “left-wing think tank”, as even Sidney Blumenthal, the American political version of Sid Vicious, notes with approval. Noam Chomsky is an associate.

A group that so quickly cops to being leftist is sure to have some rather large rocks on their turf to provide cover for some rather slimy worms and ugly slugs. This particular left-wing think tank cooperated with the KGB in planting disinformation in Europe about NATO. A brief scan is enough to discover the usual cast of Bolshies, Reds, Pinks, Crimsons, communitarians, Gramsciites, and the other undifferentiated hairballs who use eco-lunacy, pacifism, and similar counterfeit issues to conceal their real motivations and the sweat-stained Che Guevara t-shirts under their more socially acceptable haberdashery.

Japan is not Feffer’s chosen field of study; North Korean apologistics is. Still floating around unflushed on the web is his justification of Pyeongyang’s 2009 missile launch:

“North Korea is clearly interested in still reaching out, working with, engaging with the international community.”

The Foreign Policy in Focus website informs us that a detailed statement of their positions is contained in the paper, Just Security. Feffer edited the paper, which is found on the IPS website. Here’s one of the planks of their program:

“Start a managed resource transfer from rich to poor countries through climate-friendly global justice, trade, and aid policies. This would involve a border fee on “dirty trade” that would help developing countries shift to clean energy.”

Feffer is not the first to pretend that a brief stay in Japan qualifies him to discuss the nation as if he knew something about it, nor is he the first to unload hearsay misinformation as a way to present himself as a big league thinker. This might be the first time, however, that someone has used the overseas manga edition of the country to promote an agenda that has nothing to do with Japan.

Cococala-mura

It’s curious that some would swallow the idea that the Japanese advocate pounding in posts, nails, or people as a part of everyday life. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that Koizumi Jun’ichiro, no one’s idea of a conformist, spent five successful years as prime minister. The cautious Japanese electorate would love to have that reckless gambling oligarch back tomorrow if they could. They’d be so overjoyed, in fact, they might force each other to get falling down drunk and pass out in the streets. Then again, people of a certain political orientation are loath to portray a man of Mr. Koizumi’s beliefs in a positive light. Calling attention to the Koizumi record of accomplishment would only accentuate the failures of their own heroes.

The people who come to Japan and pay attention to their surroundings soon realize it is almost impossible to get through a day without discovering unpounded posts sticking out all over the place. Just yesterday, for example, I read a newspaper article about private sector efforts to hire people from the Tohoku area who have been put out of work by the disaster. At the end of the piece, the author briefly mentioned that Cococala-mura of Awaji Island would make it a policy to give preference to hiring young people from that region. Accompanying the article was the photo shown here of people working in the Cococala fields.

It was easy to turn up their Japanese language website, which reveals it to be an enterprise that would be in imminent danger of a raid by mallet-bearing thought police were the myth a reality. The project is operated by Pasona, a company specializing in temporary staffing, recruiting, and human resource consulting. Pasona hires as employees young musicians, actors, dancers, and others in the arts to work at local farms or regional businesses while they take courses in business, arts management, and agriculture. The idea seems to be to have them to do something tangibly productive with their time as they learn to become self-supporting professionals.

A company in Japan has come up with a capital idea for nurturing self-reliance and providing the means for success to people in a field in which it is difficult to make a decent living. It’s better in every imaginable way than using public funds for national arts subsidies. Is it a coincidence that Takenaka Heizo, Mr. Koizumi’s privatization guru, is the company’s chairman?

Meanwhile, a political extremist without the slightest interest in Japan is so unwilling to let a crisis go to waste that he parades the Trojan horse of his ignorance as knowledge to disguise the parasitic bacteria inside.

Something would benefit from being pounded in, but Japanese fence posts ain’t it.

*****
My use of the word “pound”, incidentally, is as figurative as that of the Beatles.

Good news, bad news, and no news at all

HERE’S SOME good news: More South Koreans are ignoring their jingoist news media and taking the initiative to forge positive ties with Japan. The latest example is the Daejeon Development Research Institute, which signed a research exchange agreement with the Fukuoka Asia Urban Research Center in January. That’s not news for the Fukuoka center, however—it’s their third agreement with an institution from another country. Both cities are located on high-speed rail lines, and the institute in Daegeon wants to conduct joint studies of the use of high-speed rail to promote industry and urban development.

Speaking of high-speed rail, the Kyushu leg of the Shinkansen will be fully operational in a fortnight, and the Kyushuans are getting ready for an influx of tourists from both South Korea and China. Folks everywhere like the hot springs and the potential for year-round golf. The Nishinippon Shimbun of Fukuoka and the Tokyo Chizu Publishing Co. recently published a guidebook of Kyushu tourist destinations in Korean and Chinese for distribution at local airports and hotels throughout the region and at travel agencies overseas. The first print run was 100,000 copies each.

To make sure that those guidebooks get read, the mayors of Fukuoka City, Kagoshima City, and Kumamoto City visited Seoul last month to talk up their cities as tourist destinations. The three mayors spoke at a conference at which about 100 people in the Seoul travel industry attended.

*****
Here’s more good news, if the premise is correct: Eamonn Fingleton uses his own site and borrows James Fallows’s blog space to claim that the conventional wisdom of Japan’s lost decades is a myth and to challenge 10 public intellectuals pushing the stagnant Japan line to debate that subject. While Mr. Fingleton’s posts offer a couple of dubious assertions to go with some excellent points, it’s always good news to see someone challenge conventional wisdom, especially since wisdom is seldom present when the Western bien pensants hold forth on Japan.

What he says that people need to know:

* “(M)uch of what is reported (about Japan) in America’s major newspapers — and even more so on American television — is appalling.”

Repeat play city! If what you know about Japan you learned from the English-language media, then everything you know is wrong.

* “Japan’s surplus is up more than five-fold since 1990, and the Japanese yen has actually boasted the strongest rise of any major currency in the last two decades.”

* “Since the 1980s…the Japanese people have enjoyed one of the biggest improvements in living standards of any major First World nation in the interim.”

* “A story of extraordinary progress by Japanese manufacturing”:

“The reason you don’t hear much about Japanese manufacturers these days is that the best of them have moved from making consumer goods to concentrate on so-called producers’ goods — items that though invisible to the consumer happen to be critical to the world economy. Such goods include the highly miniaturized components, advanced materials, and super-precise machines that less sophisticated nations such as China need to make final consumer goods. The label on everything from cell phones to laptop computers may say “Made in China” but actually, via producers’ goods, highly capital-intensive and knowhow-intensive manufacturers in Japan have quietly done much of the most technologically demanding work.

“America’s current account deficit multiplied five-fold in the 20 years to 2010 and the reason in large measure is because American corporations have exited the producers’ goods business.”

He doesn’t mention that Americans have also abandoned the robotics sector, while the Japanese are one of the world’s leaders, if not the world’s leader in that industry. The only thing most Americans know about Japan and robots is that the Japanese love ‘em and Japanese robot stories provide snicker filler for their newspapers and blogs.

Mr. Fingleton shouldn’t be holding his breath waiting for the Japan hands to accept the challenge of a debate. For one thing, they’re Somebodies and he’s not. For another, having to defend themselves in a debate would expose their ignorance on the subject.

Still, give the man credit for treating them with deference. For example, on his own site he writes:

“I appeal to you — in the interests…of your own reputation for intellectual honesty…”

One of the men he’s calling out is Paul Krugman. The suggestion that Krugman retains any intellectual honesty should result in thick mucous dripping from computer monitors worldwide after the explosion of derisive snorts.

Mr. Fingleton’s post has begotten more good news. Economics professor Mark Perry has two posts with charts on his blog. In one, he notes:

“(W)ith economic growth in Germany and Italy and many other European countries that is comparable to Japan’s growth, we never hear about the “lost decades” in Germany or Italy or the U.K.”

In the other, he writes:

“Compared to 1980, Japan’s real GDP per capita in 2010 was nearly 70% higher, vs. a 66% increase for US real GDP per capita over the last 30 years. Japan had higher economic growth than the U.S. during the 1980s, slightly lower growth during the 1990s, about the same growth during the 2000s, and slightly higher overall growth during the entire 30-year period from 1980 to 2010.”

And here’s some late-breaking good news from the United States:

Consumer Reports has named Honda Motor Co., Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. (Subaru) and Toyota Motors Corp. as the best all-around automakers for the third year in a row in its annual auto issue…Chrysler Group LLC had the worst ranking. Mercedes-Benz, BMW and General Motors were also near the bottom…Toyota, which has dealt with massive safety recalls, fared well in the magazine’s top picks for 2011 across 10 different vehicle segments. Toyota had the most with three picks (the RAV4 small sport utility vehicle, Sienna minivan and Prius hybrid).

Chrysler and GM at the bottom, and Toyota near the top? If you can’t lick ‘em, slime ‘em in the media and sit on government reports absolving them of any blame.

Be that as it may, Mr. Fingleton should be careful about treading on thin ice himself. First, he tends to talk about “Japan” as if it were a monolithic entity. While that’s unavoidable to a certain extent, it only works if one is discussing international diplomacy. In every other context, however, this thing people call “Japan” doesn’t exist. That’s too facile a formulation for the breadth of diversity on these islands, and someone who’s been here as long as he has should know that.

More serious, however is his suggestion that the Japanese government is deliberately underestimating national economic growth to avoid foreign retribution for their trade surpluses. Worse, he offers no concrete evidence—it’s just a feeling he has.

If his assertion is true, it means that everyone in the Japanese government and media are party to history’s largest conspiratorial deception. Not only have they fooled overseas governments—whose experts can analyze economic and production statistics as well as Prof. Perry—they’ve also fooled the rest of the Japanese nation. The entire range of public debate among government officials, the political class, and the commentariat inside media and out is based on the premise of lost decades of low growth. His idea contains echoes of the Western conspiracists of the 80s and 90s who warned that the samurai Japanese businessmen were going to wreak economic revenge on the world for having been defeated in the war.

*****
Speaking of what passes for reporting on Japan and East Asia, Michael Turton at The View from Taiwan takes the AFP news agency to task for its “ethnocentric crap”.

“Superstition Still Widespread Across High-tech Asia, AFP reported today in article appearing in the Taipei Times. This tiresome feature reporting has been around ever since westerners first reported on Asia”:

(Quoting the article)
The services of witch doctors remain popular in multicultural Malaysia, while in hi-tech Japan, Shinto priests hold purification rites for new bullet trains and many entrepreneurs are said to seek the advice of palm readers and star gazers.

“Why is this a load of ethnocentric crap? Because you will never ever see a piece from AFP that writes about the west in a vein similar to the paragraph above:

The services of Christian faith healers remain popular in multicultural America, while in hi-tech Britain, Anglican priests bless new stadiums and many movie stars and politicians in both countries are said to seek the advice of astrologers.”

Mr. Turton’s observation is on the mark, but I’ll take it one step further. The F in AFP stands for France, where the news agency is headquartered. We’ll never see the AFP, or any other Western news outlet for that matter, write with such casual disparagement about the beliefs of the Muslims in that country, including the Shari’a punishments for theft, homosexuality, and (for the victim and not the offenders) for rape. Those media outlets won’t even say that Muslims are responsible for what has become an annual automotive auto-da-fe in France. They’ll only go so far as to call the perpetrators “youths”.

*****
Now for the bad news—Foreign Minister Maehara Seiji held forth in Tokyo for some institutional investors, and everything that came out of his mouth should have stayed inside it.

According to the Kyodo report:

“Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara vowed Monday that Japan will carry out fundamental agricultural reforms modeled after the European system of direct payments to farmers to help strengthen the local farm sector’s competitiveness and promote trade liberalization.”

What is this use of the word “reform” to describe pork (or a wealth redistribution scheme) for farmers? Were he serious about improving competitiveness and promoting trade liberalization, he would instead encourage agribusiness to replace the country’s dwindling number of people who farm exclusively for a living.

But then he couldn’t do that—when the LDP took a step in that direction with the Koizumi/Abe reforms, Mr. Maehara’s DPJ used as an election weapon the excessive representation given to rural areas in the Diet by promising to repeal those measures and provide subsidies to individual farming households instead.

What will he propose next—subsidies for every exporting manufacturer in the country to facilitate the import of competing overseas products?

“He pointed out that the direct payment system in the 27-nation regional bloc has “succeeded in achieving two goals at once: bringing benefits to the consumer by reducing high tariffs and making producers more competitive.””

Ben Franklin should have added a third certainty in life to go with death and taxes—a perpetual stream of drivel from politicos. Farm subsidies make farmers less competitive, not more. That system allows farmers to stay in business, but at the cost of reducing the purchasing power of every non-farming taxpayer, which is most of us. Imported agricultural products may be cheaper, but lavishing public funds on farmers means the city consumers will be able to buy fewer of them. As we’ve seen before, the companies in Japan who would operate agribusinesses believe they can be competitive internationally.

“Maehara said Japan needs to study accepting more foreign nurses and caregivers under free trade agreements.

More than a thousand Indonesian and Filipino nurses and caregivers have come to Japan since 2008 under bilateral FTAs, but only a few of them have passed the Japanese national qualification examinations to continue working beyond the initially set length of stay.”

Mr. Maehara seems to think Japan needs healthcare personnel incapable of effective communication with either physicians or the patients in their care, in places where the patients’ lives or quality of life are at stake.

As for a nursing shortage, that isn’t a problem in “Japan”, but rather in a few big cities in Japan. That’s the claim of my family physician, who should know. He’s the chairman of the prefectural medical association this year.

If Mr. Maehara is so concerned about a nursing shortage in the cities and so anxious to use public funds to fix it, he might take a hint from the ROTC program in the United States. The American government foots the bill for the university education of qualified high school students if they spend four years as a military officer after graduation.

Other than a lack of common sense, what’s to prevent the Japanese government from offering free rides to Japanese high school graduates for nursing school on the condition that they work for a certain number of years in medical institutions after finishing school? Everybody wins, and no one has to worry about the language barrier causing a medical accident.

The worst part of the news story is the implication that Mr. Maehara is presenting himself as a future prime minister. That won’t be news to the Japanese: He’s a failed former president of the DPJ, and the failed former Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito is thought to be grooming him for the job to succeed the failed Prime Minister Kan Naoto. If the party continues to mimic the worst aspects of the old LDP without its redeeming qualities and has Mr. Maehara replace Mr. Kan without an election, it would represent another failure of the DPJ to bring about the change in the conduct of politics they promised.

It also isn’t news that a political party which is doing its damndest to turn itself into a fictional entity would install another lightweight in the Kantei doomed to failure as prime minister.

*****
More bad news: Japan’s lower house passed the FY 2011 budget this morning, albeit with a few defections from the ruling party. That makes two years in power, two record-high budgets for the DPJ.

What happened to all those journos who kept telling us that Mr. Kan was a “fiscal hawk”?

Speaking of Mr. Kan, it will be no news to people who pay attention that he loosed on the public yet another absurdity that calls into question his daytime sobriety. This time he said he’d always doubted the feasibility of what passes for his party’s signature accomplishment—the removal of tax deductions for families with children from 0-15 and their replacement with direct cash subsidies from the government.

After all, a month or so ago he claimed that the adoption of the same policy was “epochal”. A year or so ago, Mr. Fiscal Hawk argued in the Diet as Finance Minister for the inclusion of that budget buster—JPY 5.5 trillion this year alone–in what was then Japan’s highest-ever budget. It was obvious to everyone they couldn’t find the money to pay for it when they stole the idea from New Komeito, and that finally seems to have dawned on even them. DPJ Secretary-General Okada Katsuya on the 28th said the allowance, which expires at the end of the current fiscal year, wasn’t permanent, and that the party might give it up altogether.

Now that’s good news.

*****
Finally, here’s the best news of all: I’ve gotten a handle on a post that I’ve been working on for two weeks. Look for it soon!

*****
This might be good news for beginning and intermediate students of Japanese. I received a note asking that I bring to your attention a website presenting Japanese-language study aids, as well as other observations. Here it is.

*****
There’s no better way to celebrate the circulation of all this good news than by putting the party in the hands of Chico Trujillo, Mr. Popular Music of Chile. Who knew that horn band cumbia and surf guitar would go together as well as green tea and ice cream? Chico knew!

And just wait until you see the man dance!

Third rate

It’s not your business model that sucks. It’s you that sucks.
- Andrew Breitbart, addressing the media covering a political meeting

READER Aceface sent a link to an article from the February issue of Factia Online. The title, roughly translated, is The Tokyo Bureaus of the Overseas Media: A lineup of third raters. Here it is in English. Be advised that this is a translation for the purpose of providing information. Factia is solely responsible for the accuracy of the content.

*****
To hear the Tokyo correspondents of the overseas media tell it, there is no more degraded journalism than that produced by the Japanese media. But what about those reporters from the overseas media? As the documents that surfaced in Wikileaks demonstrate, they’ve given up their function of monitoring authority. The extent to which they’ve all become mere carrier pigeons is just a matter of degree.

Disbelief rippled through Nintendo’s investor relations office at about 2:30 on the afternoon of 29 September last year. The company’s stock, which had firmed slightly at around JPY 24,500, suddenly jumped to near JPY 25,000, then plunged again just before the close of trading.

The reason for the volatility was a report from the American news agency Bloomberg that the company’s Nintendo 3DS, their newest handheld gaming device and a product critical for their earnings recovery, would go on sale for JPY 18,000 on 28 October. The Nintendo stock reacted, as it had been expected the new game would not be ready in time for the yearend season.

Nintendo executives denied the story at a Makuhari game show the same day. Investors started selling, and as if it were on a roller coaster, the price fell to nearly JPY 23,000.

The villain was a group of Bloomberg reporters assigned to breaking stories called the Speed Team. The leader of this team filed the report after mistaking the existing DS package with Super Mario and others for Nintendo’s 3DS.

The Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission launched an investigation, and Bloomberg deleted the erroneous article with the author’s byline. They then published an article under a different byline stating that Nintendo had delayed the sale of the 3DS, and hung it on the peg of Nintendo’s downgrade of their results forecast announced after the Tokyo Stock Exchange closed.

Bloomberg did it again a week later, on 6 October. They reported that the Financial Services Agency was considering more rigorous capital requirements for megabanks in Japan only. That touched off a plunge not only in bank stocks, but the market as a whole. The Financial Services Agency, however, denied the story. What happened was that the Bloomberg reporter had a quick, casual conversation with a Diet member, became too eager for a scoop, and got carried away.

It’s the same story with the New York Times, whose reporters don’t even understand the fundamentals. A female reporter in their Tokyo bureau who covered last year’s story on the Toyota recall became angry at an out of order coffee machine in Toyota headquarters and tweeted “Toyota sucks”. That’s the behavior of a bratty delinquent.

The Tokyo bureau of the Wall Street Journal is criticized for what appears to be conflicts of interest. They have a rule that reporters cannot cover organizations at which a spouse or other close relative is employed. The husbands of two of the bureau’s female reporters are executives at Morgan Stanley, a leading American financial services company. The husband of a deputy bureau chief is a banker in Hong Kong. The husband of another is the chief administrative officer of the Tokyo branch of Morgan Stanley. She writes stories on finance, and Morgan Stanley’s competitors complain there’s no guarantee her articles will be impartial.

The problems are not exclusively those of American-affiliated outlets. A Japan-U.S. financial symposium was held last October in Hakone with financial experts from both countries. What puzzled participants was that a reporter for The Economist, who was rumored to have left the company, attended with name cards identifying that reporter as a special business and financial correspondent for the magazine. A different Economist reporter with the same title was in Tokyo at the time. Those in attendance who were interviewed wondered which one was legitimate.

Also attending was a female reporter whose father is a well-known economist. Known as a troublemaker who sued The Economist, she claimed the company was at fault because she developed a neurosis as a result of a dispute with the magazine’s editorial board. The reporter is said to be on sabbatical, but the magazine allows her to walk around with the company’s name cards after leaving their employ, just to cover up the stench.

The Financial Times, another British publication, is no better. They’re known for having been critical of Goldman Sachs, but when Goldman purchased advertising for a book review event, the criticism was suddenly softened. Not a sound is heard from their former bureau chief, who wrote a book about the bankruptcy of the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan.

The Japanese media is second rate? They’re the ones who are intolerable prigs with preconceived notions and vanilla coverage. How long do they think what they really are will remain hidden? The overseas media, and the reporters at their Tokyo bureaus in particular, are unquestionably third rate. They’re the ones who suck.

(end translation)
*****
Chin-don is my preference for infotainment delivered by a vehicle for advertising. Here’s the face-off for the championship in last year’s national chin-don competition in Toyama. They’re pretending to advertise a stomach remedy. The second team won.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Letter bombs (15): Flagrant fouls

READER Andrew in Ezo sent in the following to the Comment section. It deserves wider reading:

“I was interested in seeing the reaction from the Asian press (and the inevitable Western mirroring of opinions) about the winning goal scored by Lee Tadanari in the Asia Cup football finals. Being that Tadanari is a naturalized Japanese of Korean descent, it would generate more than usual interest from non-fans, I assumed. Sure enough, here is an article from Straits Times:

Headline: “Japan embraces ethnic Korean star but many face discrimination”

“But there is no mention of said discrimination in the article body, and there is a weak caption mentioning “a minority of Japanese netizens were unhappy that the winning goal had come from a naturalised Korean player”. I guess that’s evidence that Japanese hate Koreans and discriminate relentlessly against Zainichi, kind of like how white Americans are all secret racists, based on the number of US-based extremist hate groups and their web presence.

Sheesh…”

- AIE
*****
It’s worth reading the article, if only to remind oneself of the egregious nonsense published every day throughout the world masquerading as serious journalism about Japan. (That sentence works just as well without the last two words.)

This article in particular is remarkable for its incoherence, starting with the headline.

*****
Another article in the Dong-A Ilbo is only marginally better. As is typical with South Korean newspapers (and rather unlike the Japanese mass media), they’ll never pass up an opportunity to complain about their neighbors. The article gets off to a promising start, however, by citing an example of positive discrimination:

“Keikyu Aburatsubo Marine Park, an aquarium located in the southern part of the Miura Peninsula in Kanagawa, Japan, started a unique event Tuesday to celebrate Japan`s win in the Asian Cup soccer finals. The event allowed free admission to the aquarium by people who have “Ri” or “Lee” in their names to honor Tadanari Lee, who scored the winning goal against Australia in the tournament final.”

They quickly revert to form by following up with an interview of the soccer player’s father. A great deal seems to have been lost in translation, but Lee the Elder is a bit lost himself:

“Many in Japan are still unaware of why ethnic Koreans live there.”

Considering that 90% of the forebears of the ethnic Koreans in Japan came voluntarily–economic opportunity beckoned–one wonders who is unaware of what.

“Negative sentiment prevails in Japan on ethnic Koreans because they`re considered poor and violent. I`m happy that my son contributed to breaking down such prejudice.”

We all share his sentiments about his son. But the Straits Times article did mention the most common perception of ethnic Koreans in Japan:

“The ethnic Korean Japanese player…turn(ed) the spotlight once again on Japan’s ethnic Korean community and their strong presence in sports and entertainment.”

Yet there’s another side to the story. In the September 1996 issue of the monthly Ronza, the late Takayama Tokutaro, the ethnic Korean head of the Aizukotetsu gang (birthname: Kang Oe-su), was quoted as saying:

“About 30% of yakuza are Koreans. My group is 20% Korean.”

In those days, ethnic Koreans accounted for 0.45% of the Japanese population. When that interview took place, Takayama’s group was engaged in a feud with Japan’s largest gang, the Yamaguchi-gumi. It involved gunplay in the streets. The membership of ethnic Koreans in the Yamaguchi-gumi in those days was estimated to be 10%.

The author of an article for the monthly Gendai in January 2001 reports that the National Police Agency told him seven of the 33 designated yakuza groups from 1993 to 2000 were led by ethnic Koreans.

Perhaps there is a reason for the perceptions Mr. Lee mentioned. If those perceptions have a basis in reality, it will take more than a flash of athletic glory to erase them.

That reality is inconvenient for the Dong-A narrative, however–as are the sentiments of Lee Tadanari himself:

“I was born in Japan and brought up in Japanese culture. To win as a member of the Japanese team is the supreme happiness.”

- A.

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…

Nerds

WHILE LOOKING for something else, I rediscovered the clippings of a two-part article Rick Kennedy wrote for his Tokyo Toe column in the Japan Times circa 1991/2. (Tokyo Toe is a pun on Tokyo-to, the Japanese name for the sub-national government entity known as the Tokyo Metro District.)

He wrote the articles during the golden age of yellow journalism about Japan. People in the United States had worked themselves into such a paranoiac crescendo American periodicals were filled with rants written by people frothing at the mind about what they saw as the emerging Nipponese economic superiority.

Many of the “Japan is down and out” stories of today are the contemporary obverse of that coin. It is a form of gloating.

Nonetheless, the attitudes Mr. Kennedy addressed still inform much of what passes for commentary about Japan. He could have been writing yesterday.

The articles predate the widespread use of the Web and so are not on line. Note that the word otaku in its present sense had not yet entered the general awareness. The italics are those of the author.

*****

Nerd Gap (I)

American undergraduates call people they deem not with it nerds. Nerd is a term of high derision. It is understood that nerds and non-nerds can never communicate in a meaningful way.

Some examples may help to define the term more precisely.

Nerds wait for the light to change and never jaywalk. Nerds have protective mothers, who buy them encyclopedias. Nerds are shy, awkward with the opposite sex, and eschew confrontation. They wear white shirts and often white socks, too, and are given to keeping their neckties from flapping with a clip. They may very well wear a company pin in their lapel. In winter, they wear long underwear.

Nerds carry a pocket diary in the back of which they inscribe the local bus schedule. There is an atlas of the country in the glove compartment of their automobile.

Nerds tend to have esoteric hobbies like butterfly collecting, star gazing, or building model locomotives out of toothpicks. If not, they have an obscure passion, like beating computer games, which they are very good at.

Nerds have a giggly sense of humor. They do not seem to sense the world’s sharp edges. Nerds are dedicated to their work and put in long hours without complaint. Nerds are very polite to their bosses and plan their vacations far ahead. They are not naturally spontaneous and are very precise when called on to fill out a form. They respond earnestly to requests for directions from passersby and pride themselves on their ability to draw accurate maps. Nerds listen each morning to the weather report for advice on whether or not to carry an umbrella.

No one in Japan makes fun of what Americans call a nerd. It is nerds who, lying on their backs on their roofs of a summer evening, discover new stars. Teams of nerds design machines of unparalleled complexity. Nerds are not embarrassed to work 15 hours a day and admit they don’t mind at all. Nerds, comfortable with detail and discipline, are the engine of Japan.

It would appear that Americans must learn to communicate with nerds.

Nerd Gap (II)

I suggested last time that Americans have a problem communicating with Japanese because in American eyes a large percentage of Japanese males appear to be “nerds”. In the American frame of reference, anyone who is proficient at mathematics, makes a habit of securing his tie with a clip, and is diffident about making friends outside his circle falls into the social category of nerd, a species beyond the social pale. (The British equivalent is swot.).

Americans are captives of this Mad Magazine-inspired, subtly anti-intellectual image, and it inhibits their ability to sympathize with people who do not feel comfortable with the American social style of rowdy openness, in which there is a heady component of Mexican banditry.

Americans should not be surprised if Japanese, confronted with their style of social intercourse, draw a blank. In Japan there is no word for nerd. The closest we can come is a combination of doji, someone who performs an action awkwardly (compare bumbler and klutz); majime ningen, someone who takes life too seriously; and dasai, a bumpkin indifferent to the prevailing fashion.

Here we have a clear-cut conflict of styles. While Japanese tend to see themselves as Clark Kent, Americans like to think that given the right circumstances, they would come off as Superman. In the United States, the heroic assumes many forms, but it does not include a facility with calculus.

Stylish cynicism does not come easily to very many Japanese. In the American universe, a slavish attention to detail is not encouraged. There is in Japan a certain fascination with swashbuckling, but swashbuckling is recognized as the stuff of late-night samurai movies, and is in the end a behavior model only for bosozoku, young motorcycle edge-riders who have opted out.

It is clear, is it not, that a very large percentage of the male population of Japan falls into the category the Americans have labeled “nerd”. In Japan, to be a nerd is entirely acceptable—in fact, it is a behavioral model. In the U.S., nerds are despised as being without cool, as being too serious, as having no (acceptable) individual style.

We should not be surprised that Americans and Japanese have trouble communicating.

(end article)
****
A related aspect of the Japanese personality that Mr. Kennedy did not discuss is described with the untranslatable word sunao. Some dictionary definitions include gentle, mild, meek, and “in a teachable spirit”, but it also includes the nuances of honest, frank, and guileless. It is a sort of straightforward innocence without naïveté when dealing with the affairs of daily life. It is the utter absence of ‘tude.

When I started teaching two classes a week during the spring semester for second-year students at the local university four years ago, I was happy to discover that young people here are still sunao, despite the many changes in society that have occurred over the past quarter-century. The parents of those students would disagree and object that their children are not as sunao as their own generation. They are surely correct. Yet the attitudes of the Western counterparts of those Japanese students lie in a direction 180º from the true north of sunao.

Mr. Kennedy gave us a hint: “Stylish cynicism does not come easily to very many Japanese.” People with an interest in spending time in Japan should be aware that hip irony will usually be met with blank, uncomprehending stares. Those Japanese who do catch on are unlikely to be impressed.

One of the reasons I enjoy living in Japan is that the people are sunao.

****
Mr. Kennedy also gave us a hint about one of the reasons for the popularity of Weird Japan stories in the Western media, their authors’ almost perverse aversion to a sense of proportion, and the anti-Nipponistic websites of the self-righteous kvetchers. The authors and their audience clutch at their perception of the nerdiness of the Japanese as if it were an emotional life raft. They have at last found someone they can belittle to relieve years of frustration at being belittled as nerds themselves.

Pass that bottle to me

IT’S ONLY the first bottle that’s expensive, goes a French aphorism about wine, and that’s one universal insight we can all drink to. The Japanese have a saying of their own: Sake ga sake o nomu, or the liquor drinks the liquor. In other words, once you work up a head of steam, it’s time to clear the tracks.

Bacchanalians in both American and Europe have taken a shine to the traditional Japanese beverages of sake and shochu in recent years, as these statistics show. Now they’re also beginning to get hip to the fact that the Japanese can mash it up with Western grog as well.

For proof, Minoh Beer Imperial Stout, made by the A.J.I. Beer microbrewery of Minoh, Osaka, was named the World’s Best Stout earlier this month. In a British beer contest. For the second straight year.

The organizers of the World Beer Awards said the stout is “silky textured with a sweet rounded malt opening”, and perhaps that’s better understood after you’ve got one or two Minohs under your belt. Here’s a quick look at Minoh and some other winners at the World Beer Award 2010 website. The page also features the best brews by region, and Japan is well represented here too, with awards for different beer varieties in the Asia division.

That’s not even the best part of the story. The World’s Best Stout is brewed by the Oshima sisters—Mayuko and Kaori—whose father was a liquor store owner and got them started in the business. Who could ask for better in-laws than that? Here’s a detailed report in English by a beer-loving gent who visited the brewery in person and took plenty of photos. (The dude really likes production equipment.) There’s also a cutout of a newspaper photo that shows a third sister, Nozomi.

This site has a nice English-language interview with Kaori, who is identified as the brewmistress. It also has a photo of the world’s best stout poured out in a glass, and yes, it does look tasty, doesn’t it? Finally, the Minoh beer website has plenty of information about all the beer they make and where to buy it, but only in Japanese.

If there’s anything better than a pleasant surprise, it’s two pleasant surprises, and here’s the second. Japanese vintners, aided by Ernest Singer, have begun attracting attention among overseas oenophiles by turning koshu—the local version of Sneakin’ Pete—into an upmarket white wine that the New York Times says “could become the first Asian wine to draw international recognition”.

In yet a third surprise, it turns out that the New York Times is also capable of excellent journalism, albeit in the Dining and Wine section. Their article on the development of koshu wine is very readable; it’s rich, full-bodied, and smooth on the palate, with only subtle hints of snoot and condescension.

Mr. Singer was a Tokyo-based wine importer who became intrigued with the potential of koshu when he drank an experimental batch of dry white wine made using koshu grapes, which are grown mostly in Yamanashi. The article describes how he leased some land and came up with the concepts for using the grape to make some top drawer tipple. (The heavy rains of summer and fall mean that Japan is not the ideal place to grow grapes for wine, though the grapes grown for eating are quite good.)

A group of Japanese koshu producers and Mr. Singer have formed Koshu of Japan to promote the beverage overseas. Here’s their English-language website, and here’s a page that provides some information on the history of the koshu grape in Japan. (It’s been around since the 8th century.) Finally, here’s the Japanese-language website of one of the leading Japanese producers. They go by the name of Grace Wine in English, but Chuo Budoshu (Central Wine) in Japanese.

They make more than koshu in Yamanashi, by the way. The Sadoya Winery in Kofu is holding a special sale of 100 bottles of 50-year-old wine, one red, one white, made with European grapes from their own vineyard. The crop was particularly good that year, as the vines were recovering from a typhoon the year before and rainfall was light. If you’re in Japan you can stock your wine cellar by calling the winery direct at (055) 251-3671, but be prepared to pay JPY 15,000 a bottle.

Grape stompin' in Hiroshima

Nothing goes better with wine than women and song, so it’s about high time we got to that part. Not long ago the Miyoshi Winery of Miyoshi, Hiroshima, held their annual fall wine festival. One of the attractions was a wine-pressing dance performed by 10 ladies from a local ballet class stomping on 200 kilograms of merlot grapes in a four-meter-diamter tub, though in the photo it looks more like a plastic wading pool for adults. They created the dance themselves based on their observation of traditional European wine-stomping methods.

Of course they’re barefoot! (And keep your foot fetish fantasies to yourself.)

It was so much fun, the reports say, that some kids jumped in spontaneously and began dancing on their own. One second-grade girl interviewed admitted it was a little painful at first, but after a while she started to enjoy the lumpy feeling on her feet.

What the heck—a little toe jam probably enhances the bouquet.

UPDATE:
Now Japan has the world’s top whiskey as well:

Suntory Liquors Ltd.’s Suntory Single Malt Whiskey Yamazaki 1984 has been awarded the top prize among some 1,000 entries in an international liquor competition held in London…

Not only was it the best among 300 whiskies, it was also named the Supreme Champion Spirit among all the prize winners in every category.

*****

And now for the song! If you’re a beer hound, you’d better drink it while you can, because there isn’t any in heaven, assuming you’re sober enough to head in that direction. In Heaven There Is No Beer is originally a German tune that’s often performed as a polka, but if the three Oshita sisters of Osaka can make the world’s best stout, then surely Flaco Jimenez can perform the song Norteño style, singing both in English and Spanish. The embed code isn’t coming up for some reason, so here’s the straight YouTube link. Don’t let that stop you from clicking.

For those who prefer the grape to the hops, Sticks McGhee proves that no one outfunks wine drinkers by performing Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee. It isn’t the most exciting video around, but that’s by far the best version of one hot song that put Atlantic Records on the map. Hoy hoy!

And what better sums up the spirit of today’s post than this traditional Chinese song whose title translates to Liquor Crazy. Despite the name, it’s rather elegantly performed on the ruan, or four-stringed moon lute. It sounds like the sort of tune the late John Fahey would have liked, but then he was liquor crazy too—particularly about bourbon.

Kampai!

Experts unwrapped

ASIA UNBOUND is a blog on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations, which also publishes the renowned Foreign Affairs quarterly. The website touts the blog with this line: “CFR experts give their take on the cutting-edge issues emerging in Asia today.”

Their Japan Hand is Sheila A. Smith. Here is her website bio:

Sheila A. Smith is a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where she directed the New Regional Security Architecture for Asia project. Dr. Smith joined CFR from the East-West Center in 2007, where she specialized on Asia-Pacific international relations and U.S. policy toward Asia and directed a multinational research team in a cross-national study of the domestic politics of the U.S. military presence in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. As an Abe Fellow at Keio University in Tokyo, she researched and wrote on Japan’s foreign policy toward China and the Northeast Asian region.

Senior Fellow for Japan Studies Sheila A. Smith’s latest blog post is about the Japanese reaction to the Senkakus Incident. People with those credentials spend a lot of time at conferences, and sure enough, she just got back from one:

I have just returned from a week in Tokyo, where I attended the annual CSIS-Nikkei conference on U.S.-Japan relations.

Sheila A. Smith talked about the debate in Japan:

The debate began with opposition party critique of Japan’s “weak” diplomacy (yowagoshi) in the face of Chinese pressure, but by week’s end, the Kan government had deftly resorted to imagery of willow branches to express their sense that Japan needed to demonstrate more flexibility in its approach to a rising China.

“Deftly”? That’s the first time I’ve seen or heard anyone describe the Kan government’s explanation of their flustered, seat-of-the-pants response as “deft”. In fact, that’s the first time I’ve seen or heard anyone outside of government say anything positive about it at all. Translated into English, the opinion of most Japanese is that their response was “daft”. My opinion is that they choked.

With a whisker short of 80% of the Japanese public giving a thumbs down to the government’s handling of the incident and a similar percentage saying they think the government is lying about how it was handled, Senior Fellow for Japan Studies Sheila A. Smith’s opinion is not going to find many backers here.

Was it the willow imagery that appealed to her, or was it just wishful thinking? Wait, it gets worse:

This conversation kept me close to my Japanese-English dictionary as I sought to understand the nuances afoot in this linguistic battle over diplomatic style.

Do I really have to say anything?

I will note, however, that anyone who uses phrases such as “the nuances afoot in this linguistic battle over diplomatic style” is more in need of an English language style manual than a Japanese-English dictionary.

Sheila A. Smith follows that with several paragraphs light on the insight and heavy on the jargon:

“Multiple avenues of global cooperation are available for this conversation…”

“(Japan) is now well positioned to demonstrate what it means to be a ‘responsible global stakeholder’.”

“Issue by issue, Japan should seek out opportunities and partnerships for collective action as it seeks to address its concerns.”

Are you nodding your heads in agreement with the sagacity of the observations or because you’re trying not to fall asleep?

Sheila A. Smith observes:

(I)n the Diet conversation there seemed little interest in analyzing the interaction or in devising prescriptions for improvement. Rather Japan’s faults were magnified, and the current government chastised. Today’s opposition in Japan was yesterday’s government, and with a half century of diplomatic experience in dealing with China, one would think there would be greater room for advice and constructive feedback than in the past.

Japan hands who pay attention and read newspapers and other periodicals without constantly flipping through dictionaries already know that the DPJ government—whose defining traits were arrogance and incompetence even before this incident—was determined to go it alone and didn’t bother to consult with the Foreign Ministry, let alone the LDP. Yet Sheila A. Smith hints the opposition should have helped more.

Rather than 50 years of political experience, it would have been more practical to rely on the nearly two millenia of cultural experience the Japanese have had in dealing with the Chinese and the common sense most people have developed by the time they reach middle age. But the leaders of the DPJ government ignored the former and have none of the latter.

And yes, the willow imagery did strike her fancy.

In its bilateral relations with China, the graceful elasticity of the willow imagery works in the sense that Japan should be patient and supple in its response to Beijing’s assertiveness.

The latest post on Asia Unbound, by the way, is a comment about the comparative development of high-speed trains in the U.S. and China by Yanzhong Huang. This was of particular interest after last week’s guest post here about China’s semi-extortion of foreign technology to build their own trains. Not a whisper of that from Mr. Huang, however. With traces of an ancient tribal pride, he hails the Chinese:

The development of high-speed train epitomizes China’s rapid emergence as a great power.

And frets over the U.S. failure of will:

Where is that “can-do” and “get-it-done” attitude that had characterized America’s state-building experience?

China shunned standard international business practice and instead demanded that foreign companies transfer the technology to satisfy a 70% domestic production requirement, in exchange for promises of large contracts for other business in the country that never materialized.

Now that tonic would certainly energize any country’s “rapid emergence as a great power” and fuel a “can-do” attitude.

Frankly, the author of the guest post here and the people who contributed comments seem to be more knowledgeable about this subject than the CFR expert.

And Mr. Huang also misses the point of New Jersey Gov. Christie’s cancellation of a project to build additional train tracks between his state and New York City.

This is a think tank? Please. This is a self-congratulatory joke dressed in expensive clothing. They probably do a bang-up job of organizing conferences and selecting après-conference restaurants, though.

America has reached a critical point in the public consciousness with the realization that those who consider themselves to be an educated elite are nothing more than a credentialed gentry. People now understand that most of the experts in fields other than the hard sciences have little in the way of real expertise.

Guess who’ll be the last ones to get it.

Marching through Yamagata and Tokyo

ARE YOU READY for this musical mix? The Tohoku University of Art and Design in Yamagata City held a concert on Tuesday night with performances by two groups. The first was by the school’s taiko group, called Taishin (太悳), and the second featured an American bluegrass group called The Fox Hunt. Then they tried a jam session.

How’s that for hip in a regional city of 255,000?

You can hear for yourself what it sounded like in this short video. It starts with Taishin, follows with The Fox Hunt, and ends with them both. The MC is John Taylor, who’s in charge of the cultural exchange programs at the American consulate in Sapporo.

His idea was to have young people think about world peace through music. I don’t know how much of that went on, but the audience seemed to enjoy themselves, even though rain forced the event indoors.

Seeing this made me wonder if there wasn’t a Japanese music style that would make a better partner with bluegrass than taiko. You know, something like…chin-don! Besides, I was way overdue for a chin-don post.

But the Japanese were way ahead of me, as it turns out–by almost a century. In 1919, a teenager named Soeda Satsuki wrote some goofy lyrics about Tokyo that he called Painopainopai, that also became known as Tokyo-bushi. He borrowed the music to Marching Through Georgia, written by Henry Clay Work in 1865 about Gen. William Sherman’s March to the Sea at the end of the American Civil War. The tune was already popular in Japan when Soeda wrote the lyrics.

Here’s a version of Tokyo-bushi performed by Daiku Tetsuhiro—from Ishigaki on one of the smaller Okinawan islands—in chin-don style. Does it work? Is makizushi wrapped in seaweed? The scenes in the video are of Tokyo in the 1930s, including the Marunouchi, Ginza, and Asakusa districts.

Now for a comparison, here’s a video of Marching Through Georgia that combines two versions–the first by a bluegrass band, which lasts about a minute, and the second done marching style. Yeah, that’s Tokyo-bushi all right.

The singer in the second version, by the way, is Tennessee Ernie Ford. In short, a native Southerner is singing a song about the Union army burning its way through the Confederate South.

And for more on the wonderful world of chin-don, get clicky with the tag below.