From the overseas media

TO SLIP BRIEFLY into blogging mode, here are two quick hits from the foreign media instead of another piece I was working on. (My wife suggested a trip to the baths, and that’s a suggestion I always agree to.)

The first item concerns the apprehension of the prime suspect in the Lindsay Hawker murder case, which aroused intense interest in Britain. A long-time lurker sent me this link to an article written by Jenny Holt for the Comment is Free section of The Guardian. I don’t follow police blotter/natural disaster stories very closely, so please accept my apologies if you’ve seen it already.

Ms. Holt pulls no punches in her description of the coverage of this country in general, and of the Hawker case in particular. The Uzai! she snaps off to the media suggests that she had reached her limit and could contain her disgust no longer. For example:

“(T)he mainstream media has seized on the crime as an excuse to indulge in practically the only form of overt racism still tolerated today – the demonisation and denigration, en masse, of Japanese men.”

I’d replace that last word with “people”, but after a start like that, I’m not about to pick nits with Ms. Holt. Then she shifts into second gear, referring to:

“…(T)he same xenophobic caricatures about an uptight society with an underlying streak of insanity that refuses to co-operate with western forces of reason and justice.”

Preach, sister!

“And it is not just the Blackman and Hawker cases that invite this approach. The same ignorant stereotypes are rolled out at any opportunity…Television programmes seek out oddballs to portray as mainstream…And cinemagoers would be forgiven for thinking that every other Japanese was a geisha or a yakuza. Any half-informed piece of disinformation seems to suffice where Japan is concerned.”

Hallelujah!

“I have lived in Japan for nine years, I have a Japanese husband and son, and I can honestly say that the most striking thing about people here is how downright normal they are.”

Lord have mercy!

“This is modern normality, and if foreigners who came here actually bothered to learn the language and find out what ordinary Japanese people think they would appreciate that.”

Yes! And now for the slam dunk:

“The stereotyping also speaks volumes about the western psyche. It suggests that westerners resent and fear successful non-white cultures and that they cope by denigrating and dehumanising them. What Britain chooses to see in Japan says more about its own insecurities than about the Japanese…”

I stand in awe—in a few paragraphs, she’s precisely laid on the line what I’ve been banging on about for several years, though I include the entire Anglosphere rather than just Britain. Thank you, Ms. Holt.

Allow me to make just one addition, if I may make so bold. Of the other countries in Northeast Asia, South Korea has become a successful society, and it isn’t on the butt end of ignorant stereotypes. China is making rapid strides toward success on Western terms, despite some serious handicaps of its own device. It is subjected to serious criticism in the Western media for its failings, but seldom does one see any of the schoolboy raillery aimed at Japan.

I submit that is because neither fought a war with the Western powers and lost. Imperial Japan was flattened and left a smoldering ruin at the end of that war, which is still within living memory for some. Yet while most of the veterans of that war were still alive, Japan not only reconstructed itself, it thrived, and surpassed in economic power all of the victorious Allied powers save one. Additionally, the residents of that one remaining superpower, the United States, had to face the fact as long as 30 years ago that the formerly humiliated Japanese now excelled them in the production and quality of the symbol of their economic power and personal freedom–the mass-produced automobile.

The attitude of the Western media, I suspect, is fueled by chagrin and mortification at the defeated nation’s demonstrated ability to outdo them all, and to do it so quickly.

Uzai, by the way, is a rough expression that packs quite a message into one blunt and compact word. The user is telling the listener that since he has his head up his posterior, just STFU and go away.

The second item concerns one of those minor teapot tempests that I wouldn’t have ordinarily bothered with until I had an uzai moment of my own.

That would be U.S. President Barack Obama’s two-for-the-price-of-one, super-sized bow and handshake offered to the Japanese Tenno and Kogo during his recent visit.

This caused some gnashing of teeth in America for several reasons. They include:

• Heads of state do not bow to heads of state

• Americans in particular do not care for their heads of state to bow to royalty any time, anywhere, for any reason. 1776 and all that.

• He already got slammed for bowing to the Saudi head of state earlier this year, which the ninnies staffing his White House initially denied, even in the face of video evidence.

• He gallivants around the world bowing and scraping but can’t be bothered to put his hand over his heart during the playing of the national anthem—another breach of American presidential protocol.

In other words, despite spending part of his childhood living as a Muslim in Indonesia, Mr. Obama is no more cluey about dealing with foreign cultures than those Americans in flyover country he denigrates as bitterly clinging to guns and religion.

Some rushed to his defense. A reader of Glenn Reynolds’s Instapundit blog, who said he had spent seven years in Japan, pointed out that the Japanese always bow when meeting each other. The correspondent overreached himself, however, by including bows to “repairmen coming to fix the kitchen sink”.

Sorry Charlie, but only a horse’s ass would bow from the waist to a repairman, and that goes double for men. Besides, I would hesitate to use the term “bow” for a slight forward tilt of the trunk combined with an exaggerated but quick nod.

And regardless of the angle of incline, it is never combined with a handshake.

To be fair, it wasn’t just Mr. Obama. It turns out that Richard Nixon also bowed years ago, and Bill Clinton offered a semi-bow to the current Tenno. The New York Times offered some semi-criticism of Mr. Clinton here, observing succinctly that “Americans shake hands.” They also said he “put his hands together”, which is not what Japanese do with their hands when they bow.

Memo to Bubba: Thailand is several thousand miles away to the south.

Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for the American network ABC, consulted a friend in academia whom he described as having some expertise in things Japanese. The response was every bit as excellent as Ms. Holt’s:

“Obama’s handshake/forward lurch was so jarring and inappropriate it recalls Bush’s back-rub of Merkel.
“Kyodo News is running his appropriate and reciprocated nod and shake with the Empress, certainly to show the president as dignified, and not in the form of a first year English teacher trying to impress with Karate Kid-level knowledge of Japanese customs.
“The bow as he performed did not just display weakness in Red State terms, but evoked weakness in Japanese terms….The last thing the Japanese want or need is a weak looking American president and, again, in all ways, he unintentionally played that part.”

That line about the first-year English teacher trying to impress with Karate-kid level knowledge of Japanese customs is so good I wish I had thought of it myself.

My uzai moment, however, came with this post at the Contentions blog at Commentary by John Steele Gordon. After getting his displeasure with Mr. Obama out of the way, he continued:

“President Obama goes abroad apologizing for the supposed sins of a country that defended and extended freedom around the world at a staggering cost in lives and treasure and then grovels before the man whose country has yet to apologize for the Rape of Nanking. As my mother used to say, ‘Pardon me while I throw up.’”

Before Mr. Gordon heaves all over his CPU and makes a smelly mess, he might consider the following:

• The Japanese government has apologized to the Chinese for its behavior on more than 20 occasions, according to former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in his book, Toward a Beautiful Japan. Those in the nether regions of the commentariat and blogosphere might scoff and suggest we consider the source, but I suspect the source could come up with a list in short order. I also suspect that none of the scoffers would be informed enough to dispute it.

• Since diplomatic relations have been restored, Japan has lavished enormous amounts of ODA on China as de facto war reparations. This largesse continues even though China is likely to surpass Japan as the world’s second-largest economy in the near future.

• The LA Times story to which he links notes that soon after assuming the throne, the current Tenno formally expressed his remorse to the countries that were the victims of Japanese behavior during the war. Yes, those are apologies. They’re also more of an apology than Queen Elizabeth has ever given for British colonial behavior.

• Inputting the name Askew in the Search function on the left sidebar will turn up a paper written by a professor of that name. It will help demonstrate to those with only superficial knowledge of the event the fact that real scholarship into the Nanjing Massacre is broader, deeper, more extensive–and more honest, all things considered–in Japan than in China or the United States.

And I don’t have the time for the research now, but as a regular reader of the Contentions site, I wouldn’t be surprised if the stomachs of most of the contributors there would start jumping at an American presidential apology for slavery.

Isn’t it time to do something about those double standards?

Afterwords:

The LA Times article contains this sentence:

“The future emperor learned English during the U.S. occupation, but, inexplicably, his father ordered that his oldest boy not receive an Army commission as previous imperial heirs always had.”

Why should this be “inexplicable”? The Japanese were determined to eliminate militarism in their country after the war, and what better place to start than at the top? Did not the Americans intentionally try to create a culture of pacifism in Japan? Is it so surprising that they succeeded? Is the LA Times so clueless as to be unaware of this?

The words emperor and empress are inaccurate substitutes for the Japanese terms Tenno and Kogo, so I no longer use them. A case could be made that “pope” is more accurate than emperor, were that a hereditary position. Also, we already have the precedents of the English use of the terms Kaiser and Czar.

To those who would ask why I don’t follow customary usage, I would answer that they have their style manuals, and I have mine.

Peace and love

IT WOULD BE EASY to understand if people outside Japan were to swallow the media-created image of the country as being populated by dorky otaku, airhead gyaru enthralled by designer brands and octopus tentacles, sexless married couples, whale-murdering xenophobes, and loners so socially inept they have to rent friends. What else are they given a chance to see? Even some self-isolated foreigners living in the country carrying their excess baggage of preconceived notions fall for it.

But there’s more to Japan than meets the media eye. As old American television program had it, “There are a million stories in The Naked City. This is one of them.”

Here’s one of the 127 million stories in Japan, translated from the 1 October issue of the weekly Shukan Bunshun.

*****
The new Democratic Party candidate Kushibuchi Mari (41) defeated Liberal Democratic Party incumbent Ito Kosuke in Tokyo’s District 23 in the recent election. A former official of the NGO Peace Boat, Kushibuchi was all smiles when she and her husband were photographed in front the Diet building on her first visit. Her husband seems to be receiving more attention than she is, however.

Li Song

Her husband is Li Song, one of the directors of the Japanese branch of the Federation for a Democratic China, an activist group working for Chinese democracy. According to a Chinese journalist, “He is quite well known among the democracy activists in Japan. At the torch relay ceremony last year in Nagano (for the Beijing Olympics), he was involved in activities related to the Tibet issue.”

Born in Harbin in 1967, Li came to Japan in 1989 after the Tiananmen massacre. A Chinese activist describes how he met Kushibuchi: “The two of them met in 1994 while working on Peace Boat activities. Li also worked with Peace Boat the next year on relief efforts after the Hanshin Earthquake. When Tsujimoto Kiyomi ran for office the first time as a Social Democratic Party candidate in 1996, Kushibuchi managed her election office and Li drove her campaign car.”

Li earned a reputation as an extremist during a June 1997 demonstration eight years after Tiananmen. The activist explains:

“When Wu’er Kai-shi, a student leader during the Tiananmen demonstrations, visited Japan, he was refused entry to the Chinese embassy at Motoazabu. Li was following Wu’er as his driver. He got upset and crashed the car into the barrier at the checkpoint set up by the Japanese police.”

Li was arrested for obstructing police officers in their official duties. Newspapers at the time ran photos of the car and its windshield, which the police had smashed with their riot sticks. This directly led to his marriage with Kushibuchi.

“After Li’s arrest, it was found that he had overstayed his visa. For some reason he had not applied for a special activities visa. To prevent his deportation to China, Ms. Kushibuchi came forward and said she was his fiancé.”

He was provisionally released from custody, and the two were later married.

Li instantly become a hero to some for his bold action, but not all of his compatriots were pleased. Said one, “We’ve been working peacefully for democratization, but that one incident tarred us as a violent organization. After that, the police shadowed us whenever we had a meeting.”

Kushibuchi Mari

Before this month’s 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese embassy’s public safety division was concerned that “the anti-government activist who is the husband of a new Diet member might stage a political disruption when Prime Minister Hatoyama was visiting from Japan.”

This reporter tried to contact Li by telephone to ask him about it, but he replied, “I am not accepting any interview requests. If you want to know about the Diet member, ask the person herself.”

Ms. Kushibuchi’s office replied, “We consider the activities of Li Song and the political activities of Kushibuchi to be separate. We will not respond to a request for an interview.”

We hope this does not become a headache for the Hatoyama Administration when a new feeling of friendship is emerging between Japan and China.

*****
Afterwords:

I translated this article for the reasons I stated above.

But as a personal opinion, I hold no truck for either of these two. Working for the democratization of China and earthquake relief is indeed commendable. One has to wonder, though, about Li Song, a political refugee who couldn’t be bothered to get his visa straight after eight years in the country, and who thought he was going to accomplish something by pointlessly ramming a car into a police roadblock at a foreign embassy in that country. All he accomplished was discrediting his organization in the eyes of the authorities.

As for Ms. Kushibuchi, all she’s ever done in her adult life is work for Peace Boat. That organization was founded by Tsujimoto Kiyomi with the help of her Significant Other, a Japanese Red Army member expelled from Sweden for terrorist activities, and a man later identified as a KGB agent. They admired the peaceful Yasser Arafat so much they sailed to visit him several times. As for Ms. Tsujimoto, now part of the new Government, she inadvertently told a reporter her aim was to destroy the Japanese state.

It is not unreasonable to assume that Ms. Kushibuchi chose to run as a DPJ member because she realized she would be unlikely to win as an SDPJ member. So few of them do, after all. It is also not unreasonable to assume that she shares some, if not most, of Ms. Tsujimoto’s political philosophy.

Nor does it speak well to her view of openness as a servant of the people in a democracy by stiffing a request from a reporter to ask reasonable questions about her husband. That’s a basic requirement for people in political life.

Then again, there are probably many things she’d rather not talk about publicly.

More journo snickering at Japan, #4,625

HERE’S ANOTHER overseas correspondent in Japan wasting his own time and that of his readers at the breakfast table: Justin McCurry of the Guardian.

His latest article falls squarely into that old standby category of space filler: Japan as the Goofball Kingdom of East Asia. This one’s about how the Japanese are so desperate for companionship they’re renting “fake”, “phony”, and “bogus” friends.

Here’s the first sentence:

Best man Ryuichi Ichinokawa took his place before the assembled wedding guests, cleared his throat and for the next few minutes spoke movingly about the bride and groom.

So who’s the fake, Justin? This is a dead giveaway that McCurry has (a) never been to a Japanese wedding, (b) didn’t go to this one, or (c) doesn’t understand enough Japanese to understand what went on if he did. I’ve been to about 20 nuptials here, and I’ve never heard a nakodo (go-between), or what McCurry is referring to as a “best man”, speak “movingly” at any of them. Indeed, most people have trouble staying awake during those speeches.

Perhaps he means that Mr. Ichinokawa pinch hit for one of those people who give separate introductions of the bride and groom. They’re usually more interesting, because they give guests a glimpse of what the man and woman have actually done in their lives, but “moving” is not a word that applies to the ones I’ve heard.

After a successful debut making the wedding speech, the requests came flooding in, says Ichinokawa, who takes days off from his job at a toy manufacturer to go on assignment.

How much is a “flood”? Don’t ask the author. I doubt it would be enough to get his stockings wet. It’s probably not even the word that Mr. Ichinokawa used. People with full time jobs in Japan have a lot less discretionary time off than in the U.S. (and presumably Britain), and fewer opportunities to use them. Approval also requires a lot more explanation, both to one’s superiors and to one’s colleagues. Mr. Ichinokawa is unlikely to be devoting very much time to this sideline, which is apparent from this sentence:

He even managed to keep his wife in the dark about his extra-curricular activities until two months ago, when she spotted him in a cafe being interviewed by a Japanese reporter.

Keeping one’s wife in the dark about one’s comings and goings, particularly on weekends or holidays when weddings and school sporting events are held, is no easy matter in Japan. Yet a Japanese reporter knew about it and his own wife didn’t?

Note also that one Japanese news outlet found this phenomenon so unusual they decided to file their own man-bites-dog story about it.

The number of rent-a-friend agencies in Japan has doubled to about 10 in the past eight years.

It took as many as eight years to go from five agencies to “about” ten in a country of 127 million? Ah, sang McCartney, look at all the lonely people!

The best known, Office Agent, has 1,000 people on its books.

How many of these 1,000 people are active, and how much time they spend at this job, are more true facts that McCurry can’t be bothered to find out doesn’t tell us.

In recent months demand has surged for…

What constitutes a “surge”? Nah, don’t ask the author.

But as with the other members of his guild elsewhere, he does manage to find the space to practice sociology without a license:

The rise of the phony friend is a symptom of social and economic changes, combined with a deep-seated cultural aversion to giving personal and professional problems a public airing.

Snort! And what social and economic changes might those be?

Don’t ask the author.

As for being averse to airing one’s dirty laundry in public, the U.S. and Britain could certainly learn a thing or two—or three or four or five—from Japan. I know which cultural standard I prefer.

There are hundreds of fascinating stories McCurry could file about Japan if he would only bother to look. But hey, why do some real work when you can spitball your way through life?

Most puzzling of all is why McCurry thinks this minor “rent-a-friend” trend in Japan is worth writing about. The journalistic puffery employed to fill column inches is apparent before one is halfway through the piece.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on him. Maybe he led a sheltered life in England before his Tokyo assignment. That might explain why he’s so unfamiliar with the concept.

The lad seems to have never heard of gigolos.

Or prostitutes, for that matter.

The Japanese dream?

THE NISHINIPPON SHIMBUN is running a multi-part feature examining the approaching centenary of the Japan-Korea colonization/merger next year. One article this week focused on 81-year-old Kim Yong-un (金容雲), who was born and grew up in Japan and first set foot in his ancestral homeland at the age of 17.

This introductory paragraph is directly under a photograph of Prof. Kim.

***

The Koreans Who Came to Japan

“An estimated 2.10 million Koreans were in Japan when the war ended in 1945. Most of them had come to Japan voluntarily looking for work after the merger. Of those, 90% were from the southern part of the peninsula. Some of them were subject to the citizen mobilization of 1944.”

***

The following is the text of the article. It is unclear whether this is a synopsis of an interview or whether Prof. Kim wrote it himself. In either event, since Prof. Kim is fluent in Japanese, it is likely that nothing was lost or modified in translation.

*****

My father came to Japan on the Shimonoseki-Busan ferry in 1917, after the Japan-Korea merger. To use a modern expression, you might say he had the Japanese Dream; he dreamt of succeeding in Japan.

He was a landowner in a farming village in South Cholla, but the village was impoverished and didn’t produce much. A Japanese man who settled there discovered that the land was suited for the cultivation of pears and peaches, however, and he successfully created a fruit orchard. This inspired my father, who came to believe that he might be able to accomplish something in Japan, so he moved there.

He worked at first as a laborer in Shinagawa, Tokyo, but he later operated a small casting foundry. He seems to have had leadership ability, and he brought some relatives over from Korea to work in the plant. He got on well with the local police, and easily received their authorization for his relatives’ passage.

I was born in Tokyo in 1927, so that made me a zainichi kankokujin (Korean resident in Japan). When the name-change program came into effect in 1940, my father was reluctant, but he thought a Japanese name would make things easier. The Japanese name he adopted (Kanemitsu 金光) was convenient for business, and I didn’t have to continually explain my background at junior high school.

As far as I was aware, there was no great opposition to the name change program among Koreans in Japan at the time, even though they came from a different country.

But I was subject to some discrimination as a primary school student, which might have been the reason for the effort to hide our origins. We knew that some Japanese mothers didn’t want to have Korean children seated next to their children in the classroom, and that would hurt a child’s feelings. I didn’t particularly like it when my mother came to sports day dressed in the chima chogori, the traditional costume for Korean women.

Our family returned to Korea after the war. Eventually I began lecturing in mathematics and the theory of civilization, and I became a professor at Dankook University.

Actually, I was slightly acquainted with Kim Dae-jung, the hero of Korean democracy. We shared a similar world view, and I was asked to serve on the committee that drafted his speech when he assumed the presidency in 1998.

It is true that in his autobiography, he says that the period of Japanese rule “was filled with humiliation and hardship”. That might have been the case for his generation who stayed in Korea, but for me, I think it was evenly divided between the bad and the good.

Postwar Korean textbooks that deal with the name change program say that our names were taken from us by force. For the Koreans in Japan, however, it wasn’t as one-sided as that, as you can see from what I previously said. The same is true of the land survey from 1910-1918, which the textbooks treat as the ultimate thievery. In this operation, the Japanese took the land whose ownership was unclear and developed it. Before we went to Japan, my mother lamented that our land holdings were reduced because part of my father’s land was converted into dykes.

But at that time, the land next to ours was managed by one family group, and no registration papers (were needed). It is a fact that the land was left undeveloped because the ownership was unclear.

Were those bad times, or were they not? That question is tantamount to asking “if…” about historical matters, and simplistic judgments are not possible.

Afterwords:

* Prof. Kim is the author of 醜い日本人　「嫌韓」対「反日」をこえて (The Ugly Japanese: Transcending hatred of Korea and anti-Japanism), which is published in Japanese. There are reports he will publish a new book this month in both Japan and South Korea claiming that his research shows the Korean language is derived from the old Silla language, and that the Japanese language is derived from the old Baekche language.

* The card on the lectern in the photograph of Prof. Kim reads, “Korea-Japan Exchange Symposium”.

* Japanese sources suggest the 1940 name change program was optional based on Japanese law.

Self-respect

PART TWO of my honeymoon was a visit by my wife and me to my hometown and a few other cities in the United States. (Part One was a trip to Unzen before the eruption.) As we were driving around the former seat of the Ampontan manor one day, she suddenly turned and asked me a question:

“Doesn’t this city have any garbage collectors?”

I assured her that it did. In fact, I told her, all of us former municipal employees held the city’s sanitary engineers in the highest esteem. The only way we got a pay raise is when they threatened to go on strike.

“Then why is all this trash lying around in the streets?”

That’s a good question I was never able to answer to her satisfaction. The best I could do was to shrug my shoulders. Guess what inevitably became a topic of every conversation with her friends when we returned to Japan and they asked her what America was like?

One reason she was taken aback by all the refuse in the road can be discerned from the accompanying photograph, taken last week at Clean City Kagoshima 2009. That’s an annual event in Kagoshima City, and this year an estimated 78,000 people in a municipality of about 600,000 turned out early on a Sunday morning to pick up where the garbage men left off in the local parks and roads.

In the city’s Tenmonkan shopping district alone, about 700 people representing 54 groups voluntarily came out to collect trash and do some weeding at a nearby park. The municipal authorities reported that 50 45-liter bags of empty cans and weeds were collected there.

Said one high school student, “There wasn’t as much trash as I thought there would be, but I was surprised at the number of cigarette butts. I wish people wouldn’t just throw them out on the street.”

Cleanup campaigns such as these are not exclusive to Kagoshima City. One of the best pieces of advice my boss ever gave me was to suggest that I participate in the neighborhood kawasoji two days after I arrived in Saga. Kawasoji is literally “river cleaning”, but that’s a bit of a misnomer. The rivers are really a network of small waterways throughout the city connected to the nearby bay. The banks have been concreted, the water is seldom more than knee-deep, and a grade school boy could easily throw a ball across them.

Twice a year, on a Sunday in March and September, residents gather at a pre-arranged spot at 8:00 a.m. to pick up equipment and head off to work. The job includes both cutting back the weeds and other natural growth at sections of the river nearest their home and removing the trash. (One year we even fished out a bicycle.) It only takes about two hours, and after cleaning up, we go to a nearby Shinto shrine to collect our pay—a bento lunch—and have some snacks. The beverages provided include tea, or for the hardy types that early on a Sunday morning, beer or sake. Some people stay only for a quick bite to eat and a drink, while others hang out longer and chat.

This actually does strengthen neighborhood cohesiveness among the people who participate. How could it be otherwise? People take each other more seriously after they’ve sweated and gotten dirty together, particularly when it improves conditions in their immediate surroundings.

Perhaps the people of my hometown could learn something from this. I sure did.

Anti-Nipponism

“…This is but one example of the encounters that I have on a regular basis with friends, family, and colleagues who have no idea what is going on in the world. They read the New York Times and believe they are informed. There is no intellectual curiosity, no questioning of reporting, and no analysis of what the mainstream media is pouring out to the masses. While we all like to blame the…media…at some point we all have to take responsibility for our own thoughts and decisions.”
- Lauri B. Regan

A FEW WEEKS AGO, a man associated with a well-known American mass media outlet called from Tokyo for a pleasant chat that at one point touched on the media’s coverage of Japan overseas. He asked me how I thought the broadcast and print media could improve their reporting on this country.

I replied that the media’s reporting on Japan is never going to improve, and gave as my reason their preference for offering a preexisting narrative rather than providing factual descriptions of events in news articles and leaving their interpretation or agenda to the op-ed pages.

What I didn’t tell him is equally germane: There are two reasons the media relies on preexisting narrative templates for countries, issues, or people. (In addition to the one for Japan, there are templates for Israel, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, the UKIP in Britain, and dozens more.) First, the narrative is meant to simplify issues and personalities for readers in bite-size form, converting them to a form of entertainment that helps sell their product and the accompanying advertising. It also spares the readers from the time required to peruse an in-depth characterization and the trouble of having to think too much about something they might not be interested in to begin with. Serious consumers of news realize at an early age that what the media really offers is infotainment, and that it’s a feature of the product, not a bug.

Second, it should now be obvious to even the casual observer that the Western media and its public intellectuals will never accord even-handed treatment to Japan, despite an exemplary record of conduct unmatched by any of its G7 counterparts for more than 60 years. Alone among the nations of the world it combines the absence of military aggression with an altruistic financial generosity that is ignored, taken for granted, or unrecognized. It contributed $US 13 billion to the reconstruction of oil-rich Kuwait after the Gulf War, for example, but when the government of Kuwait took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post to thank the nations that came to its assistance, Japan was left off the list.

Saddam Hussein deliberately drained the wetlands where roughly 500,000 Shiite Arabs lived in southern Iraq, destroying the local ecology and forcing them to become refugees. How many people realize that Japan paid $US 11 million for the restoration of those marshes, much less give them credit for it?

No, it’s much easier and more entertaining to fill the space with annual stories about whalers and the whacked-out eco-pirates who ram them broadside. Bad Oriental guys, rakish Hollywood-funded good guys, and photos of bloody whales sells product. Then recall how many stories you’ve seen about the imminent resurgence of Japanese militarism that somehow never seems to resurge.

After seeing the pattern repeat itself time and again in the stories published by every important Western print media outlet in English and the op-eds and magazine articles of public intellectuals on both the left and right over several decades, one can only conclude that the media’s narrative template about Japan is informed by an ill-concealed deformity of thought that deserves a term of its own: anti-Nipponism.

The following is yet the latest demonstration that the default view of Japan for Western elites is the Goofball Kingdom of East Asia, populated by otaku xenophobes and female children aged 18 to 80. It has all the disfiguring characteristics on display: media presentations that are a superficial gloss of the facts–whenever they crop up amidst the editorializing and inaccuracies–and rendered so as to present Japan in the worst possible light.

These presentations were swallowed whole by soi-disant public intellectuals who make elementary mistakes in reading comprehension that seem to derive from seeing what they want to see regardless of what the words say. They toss off a combination of sophomoric snark and anti-Nipponistic criticism before losing interest in toying with the lightweights of the world, furrowing their brows, and turning their attention to serious issues.

You think I’m exaggerating? First we’ll look at the facts. Then we’ll look at the people who can’t handle the facts.

Let’s start with this Japanese-language link to a 31 March announcement from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare about a voluntary government plan to provide assistance allowing financially strapped ethnically Japanese foreign workers with no job prospects to return home. My English translation follows. (Keep in mind that a bureaucrat wrote the original.)

*****
Re: Providing financial assistance to displaced workers of Japanese descent for returning to their home country

With the prevailing social and economic conditions, it is extremely difficult for laborers of Japanese descent in unstable types of employment, such as seconded workers or subcontractors, to be reemployed once they have lost their jobs. Some have insufficient Japanese language ability, are unfamiliar with Japanese employment practices, and lack work experience in this country. Therefore, reemployment after returning to their home country is increasingly becoming a realistic alternative.

In view of these circumstances, the ruling party’s project team for new employment measures has proposed that financial assistance be provided to these persons of Japanese descent who wish to return to their home country for that purpose. The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare will implement a program starting in business year 2009 (i.e., 1 April) offering financial assistance to those displaced workers who have decided to return to their home country, under the following specified conditions, to respond to their acute need. (Refer to separate document.)

In addition, we are working to utilize all the existing programs and financial assistance for obtaining housing in support of their efforts to find new employment, and to maintain that employment for those people who continue to stay in this country and seek reemployment, just as we would for Japanese people. In the future, we will provide appropriate support, including that for reemployment, through the expeditious enhancement of systems for support and consultation with such measures as increasing the number of people providing interpretation and consultation services in accordance with local circumstances, and efficiently implementing employment preparation training that increases skills, including Japanese language ability.

*****
The first Ministry page links to the separate document (pdf) with charts that contain more detail.

* There we find out that guest workers who are still receiving unemployment compensation and choose to return will be granted an additional JPY 100,000 if they have 30 days remaining in unemployment benefits and JPY 200,000 (about $US 2,100) if they have more than 60 days remaining in unemployment benefits.

* It also mentions that in those regions where the nikkei (ethnically Japanese) workers are concentrated, 9,296 foreign job-seekers visited Haro Waaku, the government employment agency, for the first time ever from November 2008 to January 2009. That is a roughly 11-fold increase from the year-before period.

* The page emphasizes that the offer is being made to those people who are “extremely unlikely” to find employment due to a lack of Japanese language ability or job skills.

* The workers are being given special help for finding jobs at nine separate branches of Haro Waaku, and the help included interpretation. By mid-March, one-stop service centers to deal solely with this issue were established in municipal offices in 33 locations.

* An additional three new centers for consultation and advice have been established in areas with many foreigners and the benefits have been increased

* The site says these measures implement activities to enhance support for reemployment and maintain present employment. These include subsidies for trial employment and compensating employers for hiring them. There are also measures to enable people to retain their housing.

* Starting this year, the government will offer more interpretation and consultation services. They will also conduct job training programs to improve their job skills, including Japanese language instruction, during the period they are receiving unemployment compensation. They have budgeted JPY 1.08 billion (about $US 11.355 million) for the current fiscal year to help roughly 5,000 people.

* The training programs will be the responsibility of the Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE), a non-profit foundation that conducts human resource development programs for developing countries.

* The training will be conducted over a three-month period with the objective of improving Japanese language communication ability, and inculcate an understanding of working conditions, employment practices, and government benefits for employment and other social insurance schemes. It also provides unemployment benefits for a minimum of 90 days to assist the unemployment find new work and to take part in this training.

* When basic training is finished, they will be eligible to move to more advanced training, with subsidies provided during the extended training period. Special “navigators” for the guest workers will be assigned to help them until they find steady work.

Asahi Shimbun

Brazilian nikkei

Here’s a link to a Japanese-language newspaper article that appeared in the Shizuoka edition of the Asahi Shimbun. It contains a range of opinions from native Japanese and nikkei alike on the program, including those from Japanese who think the government should have done more to encourage the nikkei to stay. This is not unusual; the Japanese media is just as capable of examining their behavior from different perspectives as the Western media, if not more so.

One of those who thinks the departure of the nikkei is a “great loss” also had this to say:

“This is a test case. There are still many adults who chose to live only among foreigners without learning Japanese. If they lose work at the seconding company, their inability to speak Japanese prevents them from getting another job…the national government’s support for those people who came to Japan as migrant workers and don’t have the funds to return home is perhaps a humane policy.”

Insisted one ministry official involved with the program:

“The assistance for returning home is provided at government expense to those people who are suffering from unemployment and do not have the funds to return if they want to. The intention is not to remove the nikkei from the country.”

The new policy is good news for local governments, which are financially responsible for welfare payments and are having trouble finding the money due to the sharp increase in households consisting of foreigners receiving government assistance. Said one local government official:

“It would be cheaper for Japan if they returned home.”

The city of Hamamatsu is where the most Brazilians live. At the end of February, it had 116 Brazilian households receiving welfare benefits, compared to 70 at the same time the previous year. The benefits total more than 100,000 yen per month per family. They receive the welfare benefits after their unemployment compensation runs out.

Michiko Ramos, a third generation nikkei, commented:

“Brazilians are too lax. If they don’t like the government program, they don’t have to use it. Each person should decide for themselves how they’re going to live, and it’s their responsibility to do so.”

The article also notes that the Japanese government will pay travel agencies for the tickets and deposit the remainder of the money in dollar-denominated accounts in the recipient’s name in Brazil.

Private correspondence

One reader of this site is employed by a national Japanese media outlet. He spent two months covering this issue on the ground, and here is some of the information he provided to me.

* The program targets almost exclusively Brazilians (with either Japanese ancestry or a Japanese spouse) in Japan on working visas who can not speak Japanese and have no savings. Most have at least $US 30,000 dollars in annual income, with their housing expenses paid by the company.

* The same program was not offered to Okinawans who came to the same part of Japan to work and were laid off at the same time for the same reasons. (Okinawa is roughly 800 miles from Nagoya, the hub of the Japanese auto industry, and is only accessible by air or sea from there.)

* The correspondent notes that the workers can be divided into two broad groups: Those who “have a plan” and those who don’t. The people in the former group put their children in Japanese public schools, learned to speak and read Japanese, and received permanent residence visas.

* The workers’ hourly wages start at JPY 1,200 yen for unskilled labor, but the auto industry in that part of Japan often pays JPY 1,400 (about $US 14.70) an hour. Most households have two workers because the wives also work. The income of many Brazilian families is about 4 to 5 million yen annually, not counting inexpensive or non-existent housing costs, because the company covers them.

* Some Brazilian workers rejected the option of becoming full-time employees because doing so meant that pension and insurance funds would be withheld from their salaries. They see themselves as migrant workers and wanted the cash immediately.

* Why do some people need financial assistance to return home? As my correspondent reports, in what he admits is an extreme example:

“Many simply spend too much. I’ve been to a house in Shizuoka where all four family members work in a factory. This family has four cars (although you do need cars for everyday life in that part of Shizuoka), a house, and a racing car and trailer. (Drifting has become a popular sport among Brazilian youth). They can’t speak Japanese despite being here for 17 years…Many Brazilians who don’t have money to buy tickets back home are not literally broke. Many of them have houses in Brazil built with their money they earned working in Japan. They just don’t want to sell them for the tickets, which is (a) rational (decision). However, if they are in Japan asking for welfare to sustain (their lifestyle) in Japan, that’s another story…”

* They are not ordinary guest-workers, because they have become “spoiled in a way” now that their community has become established in all “dimensions of life” (i.e., media, schools, supermarkets, and entertainment). (N.B.: the Brazilian primary school in Hamamatsu recently closed.) Therefore they no longer need to associate with Japanese and live in a Portuguese-only environment. He also notes that municipal transportation facilities in Nagoya have Portuguese-language announcements.

* He reports this direct quote (his English translation) from the Brazilian vice-consulate and said he’s got it word for word in his notes:

“They are in their mess, because they are in their mess. We didn’t put them in their mess. It’s called self responsibility.”

The reporter wryly notes that Nissan (and Renault) CEO Carlos “Cost Killer” Ghosn, a Brazilian (and French and Lebanese) national was lionized by the Western media as the savior of Japanese business when he turned around Nissan some years ago by laying off thousands of Japanese workers. The BBC described his moves at Nissan as “savage”. CNN and the Detroit News dubbed him a “superstar”.

This February, the Brazilian Cost Killer brought out the knife again and announced he will cut 8.5% of the company’s staff worldwide by laying off 20,000 workers. Not all of the cuts were specified, but of those 20,000, 10% were in Japan.

My correspondent points out that when the CEO of Toyota lays off Brazilian workers for the same reason, and the Japanese government provides the funds to those unskilled workers with no Japanese ability and no savings who choose to return home voluntarily, it becomes a “humanitarian crisis”.

Sidebar 1: Mr. Ghosn was in Tokyo this week to unveil the new Nissan Leaf, an all-electric car. He says he spends 40% of his time in Japan, and he has been head of Nissan for more than a decade, yet he chose to speak to the Japanese broadcast media in English.

There’s a reason I provided this information. The following is a description of a newspaper article and a magazine article, with an attendant blog post for each one. They all presume to criticize Japan for its policy, yet 95% of the above information is not included.

Freakonomics

University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York journalist Stephen J. Dubner published Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything in 2005. It has since sold 3 million copies, and they operate a blog on the New York Times website called Freakonomics: The Hidden Side of Everything to “continue the conversation”.

Somebody named “Freakonomics” wrote the following post this April.

When Japanese unemployment edged up to a three-year high of 4.4 percent in February, the government started looking for creative ways to lower it. One solution: get the unemployed out of the country by offering citizenship buyouts. The program applies only to unemployed people of Japanese descent who were born abroad but now live in Japan (they’re known as nikkei). The plan pays out-of-work nikkei $3,000 to return to their country of origin, not to return until economic conditions improve in Japan. Like other strange Japanese ideas, we don’t expect this one to spread to our shores any time soon.

Somehow, Mr. Freakonomics—the journalist or the university professor, whoever—got the idea that the Japanese program is a “citizenship buyout”, despite having nothing to do with (a) citizens, (b) buying anything, or (c) buying out citizens.

In fact, the author was so enamored of this idea that he created a hot link for the phrase to a Time magazine article, which you can see here.

Time magazine conveniently saves their readers of taking the trouble to weigh the factual evidence and make up their own minds by giving the article the deliberately misleading headline of, “Thanks, but you can go home now”.

Immediately under the headline is a photo captioned, “Brazilian workers of Japanese descent stage a protest against layoffs in central Tokyo on Jan. 18, 2009.”

One wonders what the point of the protest was. Japanese automakers are also laying off Japanese workers, so the protest isn’t going to get them rehired. None of them live or work anywhere near central Tokyo, so perhaps they were demonstrating in front of corporate headquarters, though Time can’t be bothered to tell us that. Another possibility is that they were angling for media coverage. For that matter, one wonders why Time printed the photograph, which is of only tertiary importance to the issue, and gave it this page positioning, unless it was for propaganda purposes.

The photo is followed by two paragraphs more suitable for a daytime soap opera than a news story, which includes the claims that the Japanese government has made the unemployed feel “unwanted”. The first person quoted—indeed, the first person mentioned—is the leader of the nikkei labor union crying “discrimination”.

After all, we know that labor union leaders are the go-to source of information about government programs.

The seven-paragraph article contains only one sentence about the Japanese government offer. The third paragraph is a straightforward description of current domestic economic conditions. The rest is nothing more than an anti-Nipponistic editorial, and Time manages to mangle the facts while it’s at it:

The money isn’t the problem, the Brazilians say; it’s the fact that they will not be allowed to return until economic and employment conditions improve — whenever that may be.

No, they will not be allowed to return at all on a special nikkei work visa, and the reason for the incorporation of that restriction should be obvious: to prevent repeated use of the program and scamming extra money off the deal.

Then Time benevolently dispenses to its readership the wisdom of the Western biens pensants regarding how Japan should conduct itself as a nation:

“The U.N. has projected that the nation will need 17 million immigrants by 2050 to maintain a productive economy.”

Yes, we all know how accurate UN projections are for 40 years in the future, particularly for global warming climate change.

Does Japan need to add a total number of immigrants equal to 13% of its present population to “maintain a productive economy”, or does it need that many people to maintain its social welfare system for an aging population—which is not the same thing—and in so doing, eliminate the concept of “Japan” as we know it as a functioning entity? But what’s that to public intellectuals and their acolytes in the West?

As we saw here recently, the Canadians have concluded that large-scale immigration is not the answer. And we’ve also seen how the huge influx of Muslim immigrants, specifically admitted to fill unskilled labor jobs and prop up the social welfare system for an aging population, has worked out in Western Europe. (By the way, they’ve been rioting in France again, and this time it’s so bad the French government has forbidden the police from disclosing the statistics.)

There’s some input from Carlos Zaha, a “community leader”:

“I don’t think [the government] thought this through well.”

The government is offering a generous financial assistance program that is entirely voluntary. The ones who have to think it through are the Brazilians—take it or leave it. Leaving it means that to survive in this economic climate, they’ll actually have to do stuff like learn Japanese and job-related skills for something other than sweeping up the shop room floor. Fortunately, the Japanese government is making it easier for anyone with the motivation to do just that.

The article also quotes the union leader’s son:

“They have to help people to continue working in Japan,” he says. “If Brazilians go home, what will they do there?”

If we know “they” are helping people to continue working in Japan, why doesn’t he? Perhaps he’s one of those who didn’t bother to study Japanese, but then again the Japanese government provides free interpreters to explain the program. He also doesn’t explain why the government “has” to do things for a group specifically targeted because they chose the easy money route rather than the assimilation route. Nor does he explain why it is the business of the Japanese government what Brazilian citizens do in Brazil.

But back to Mr. Freakonomics. He/they conclude(s): “Like other strange Japanese ideas, we don’t expect this one to spread to our shores any time soon.” The gratuitous “other strange Japanese ideas” phrase (there are so many, after all) is hot linked to another post by that Freakonomics guy presenting some photos of “Only in Japan” strange “products”. They discovered this hidden side because a reader of their blog sent them a chain e-mail letter.

If you have a Windows machine and right click the photos as if to save them to your computer, which is what Freakonomics did, you’ll see that they’ve already been given a title at their site. I’ll show two of those photos here; their site’s title for the first photo is “Japs 1”, and the title for the second is “Japs 3”.

Hmm, the hidden side of everything…

Here’s the photo of the first product at “Japs 1″.

Yes, that is a strange product. It looks like something a junior high school student might buy if she were in a spending mood and had some money to burn. But since I’ve never seen this product in anyone’s home, any store, or in any broadcast or print advertising, that’s only speculation on my part. Perhaps they’re hidden in this country somewhere.

Maybe the money earned from the book transformed the lives of Messrs. Freakonomics so much they no longer have to shop where the simple folk do. Or perhaps they had a refined upbringing. That would explain their unfamiliarity with the idea of novelty products.

Still, they should be old enough to remember Pet Rocks. In 1975, American advertising executive Gary Dahl bought ordinary rocks for a few cents apiece, wrote a tongue-in-cheek manual to accompany them, and packaged the combination as Pet Rocks. Each product unit cost less than 30 cents to produce, and Mr. Dahl sold them for $3.95. In fact, he sold an estimated 5 million pet rocks in six months, earning him about $US 15 million. I’ll bet those cushion makers wish they could cash in like that.

Another example of a highly profitable American novelty item is mood rings. These rings are most often made with a sham gemstone covering a thermo-chromic liquid crystal that responds to body temperature. The people who take these rings seriously claim that body temperatures change in tandem with emotion, and that the rings turn specific colors to match the specific emotion of the wearer. Though they were a faddish novelty item of the 1970s, they’re still being sold today, sometimes for less than $US 4.00. Indeed, the concept has spread, as you can see from one note on this page:

“Ahh, but the newest version of the mood ring? Mood Piercing! That’s right, body jewelry with the mood ring twist. It’s a curved bar bell with the mood piece on the lower ball. It’s intended for a navel ring, but I have mine to determine my sexual mood, if you catch what I’m saying. It was a joke between a friend and I who both have our clitoris hoods pierced how cool it would be, so I got us each one. I’m not sure it’s ever really been accurate…”

Moving on to “Jap 3”, here’s a photo of what the post’s author thinks is a Japanese “product” because that’s what someone told him in a chain e-mail.

Long-time friends of this site will immediately realize that isn’t a product at all. It’s a one-of-a-kind item known as chindogu, or “unusual tool”, and could best be described as comical pop art with an avant-garde twist. Those who want to delve into the hidden side of chindogu can read this previous post. Who knows, a gallery exhibition in Western countries might be quite successful.

Actually, this is not the first time someone’s been made the sucker by chindogu. This post describes how the New York Times interviewed another chindogu artist who stitched together some fabric to make herself look like a soft drink vending machine. Somehow, this was enough to convince the Times it was a sign the Japanese were concerned about crime in the streets.

The horse laughs over that journalistic pratfall still reverberate through cyberspace. My post on the topic received quite a few links from around the world, and ranks #2 on the site Hit Parade. I suspect Messrs. Freakonomics are right about this strange idea being unlikely to spread to their shores, though. That would require having a sense of humor.

Besides, they don’t need any more strange avant-garde artwork over there. They’ve got plenty of their own. For example:

That’s the notorious 1987 photograph Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, which shows a plastic crucifix in a glass of the photographer’s urine. It won an award in the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art’s “Awards in the Visual Arts” competition, partially sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that funds artistic projects. Mr. Serrano received $US 15,000, some of that from the taxpayer-funded NEA.

In addition to strange Japanese novelty products or pop art, Messrs. Freakonomics are convinced the U.S. won’t go for this strange Japanese immigration relief measure either. That’s probably because they think America has a perfectly wonderful immigration system.

Well, the perfect part has it right. The American immigration system is perfectly dysfunctional and has been for years. The United States lost control of its borders decades ago and shows no sign that it will ever regain that control.

Consider:

* Immigrants account for 13% of the current U.S. population, and 30% of those are illegal aliens. Except now they have their own lobbying organizations that wet their pants in indignation for a living, so the phrase “undocumented migrants” is often used instead. In raw numbers, estimates of the latter range from 12-20 million in a country of 300 million.

* Between 1-2 million immigrants, both documented and illegal, arrive every year. On the whole, they have fewer job skills and less education than Americans, and they receive more from taxes than they contribute by a 3-1 ratio.

* Many of these immigrants never intend to assimilate. For several generations, it’s been possible to live from birth to death throughout the country, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami, and most of Texas, without speaking a word of English, much less become a legal resident. An estimated 85% of the Mexicans living in the U.S. are thought to be there illegally.

This has been a problem for some time. Here’s a direct quote from the New York Times, circa 1951, in the days before the political correctness of language:

“The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican ‘wetbacks’ to a current rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal Government.”

One of the several concerns was that the illegal immigrants worked in the agriculture sector for half the salary paid to Americans, which put the Americans out of work. That concern is ongoing, and opponents of guest worker programs in the United States often point out that the lower salaries distort the economic structure.

In contrast, the nikkei in Japan were paid salaries identical to those of Japanese in the same positions.

In 1986, the U.S. government threw up its hands entirely by passing an amnesty bill that allowed an estimated 2.7 million illegal aliens to receive citizenship. Many naturally complain that this was a reward for breaking the law. Six additional amnesties (not all blanket amnesties) were passed from 1994 to 2000.

The American political class is incapable of formulating a coherent immigration policy. Business interests want to keep the cheap labor source, and they are abetted by politicians in both parties. (Not just the big business GOP, either; as a senator, the later-to-be President Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat, favored lax immigration enforcement.) Labor unions dislike guest worker programs, but their favored party, the Democrats, realize that the beneficiaries of so many government programs tend to vote for that party, and that guest workers usually wind up as permanent residents. President George W. Bush failed to gain passage of an immigration reform act that included amnesty, but President Barack Obama is going to try again, even though Mr. Bush’s legislation was defeated due to public opposition. As the New York Times put it:

But, (Obama) said, immigrants who are long-time residents but lack legal status “have to have some mechanism over time to get out of the shadows.”

Nothing describes current immigration policy and enforcement in the U.S. better than this lead sentence from a CNN article.

“Six months to the day after Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi flew planes into the World Trade Center, the Immigration and Naturalization Service notified a Venice, Florida, flight school that the two men had been approved for student visas.”

So it’s entirely understandable that the Messrs. Freakonomics, Americans both, would find the Japanese success at controlling their borders and the influx of guest workers to be a strange idea that wouldn’t work on their shores.

If I were Japanese, I’d be proud of the country for their handling of the situation.

Sidebar 2: Some people were impressed the two Freakonomics authors discovered that sumo wrestlers in certain situations tend to lose matches they statistically should be expected to win, which suggests that they’re throwing the matches for the benefit of their fellow rikishi.

Except the Japanese have known this for centuries, and have never been shy or hesitant to write or talk about it. You just have to be able to read mass-market Japanese paperbacks and talk to Japanese people in Japanese for all these hidden sides to come to light.

Imagine if you will the reaction in the West, particularly by these media outlets and public intellectuals, if a Japanese were to observe pet rocks, mood rings (including those on pierced clitoris hoods), Piss Christ, and an endemic problem with illegal immigration, and wrote:

Like other strange Western ideas, we don’t expect this one to spread to our shores any time soon.

Not an attractive image, is it?

Daniel Drezner

Mr. Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts University. He is given space to write a blog for the Foreign Policy website, which is part of the Slate group, which in turn is part of the Washington Post/Newsweek group.

Prof. Drezner decided to weigh in on the Japanese government policy. The title for the link to his post, which shows up at the top of the Internet browser page, is “A Demographic Disaster of a Country Kicks Out Immigrants”. His post is headlined, “Reason #347 Japan is less influential than it should be.”

His post is not quite as bad as the Freakonomics post, though I realize that is damning it with faint praise. But he still lets fly with this corker:

“Apparently, Japan is trying to kick out some of the paltry number of immigrants it currently has in its territory.”

Readers, it’s time to congratulate yourselves. By now, you are already more knowledgeable about Japanese policy toward Brazilian immigrants than a grad school professor of international politics at an elite American university writing a blog on a mainstream media website. The difference, however, is that you don’t get paid to spout off.

Prof. Drezner was so taken with his “kick out” line that he turned it into a hot link to this New York Times article.

Incidentally, he doesn’t attempt to make any connection between the specific policy and Japan’s “punching below its weight” in international politics. Perhaps he’s used to students nodding at everything he says so they don’t jeopardize their chances for a post-graduate degree.

In regard to what he terms this “puzzling maneuver”, he concludes: “In terms of demographics, about the best thing one can say about Japan is that at least it’s not as bad as Russia.”

The snark may be on a more sophisticated level than in the Freakonomics post, but it’s still snark. According to UN statistics, the Japanese fertility rate is slightly below that of Russia, equivalent to that of Italy, and higher than Bulgaria or South Korea. It isn’t significantly different from that in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Belarus, or the Ukraine. While it’s still less than that for the countries of Western Europe, all those countries are still under the population replacement level even when counting the offspring of their fertile Middle Eastern immigrants. What specific contribution the latter makes is difficult to say because many of those European countries forbid the breakdown of demographic statistics by ethnic group.

Here’s an idea: Is the reason Japan is “punching below its weight” due in part to the fraudulent coverage given at every turn by an anti-Nipponistic Western media and the dismissive indifference to the facts shown by anti-Nipponistic public intellectuals?

A comment on this post at the site is also worth looking at.

“The xenophobic mindset of Japan, is something akin to the Wahabi equivalent in Islam – if it goes so far as to exclude ethnic Japanese, from Brazil!”

Lord knows the man can’t stop ignoramuses from posting in his comment section, but that’s clearly anti-Nipponism, and all the more revealing because one would expect the site itself would attract a highly educated and aware readership.

But Prof. Drezner still has no justification for his claim that the Japanese are “kicking out” the nikkei, based on the New York Times article.

The New York Times

This article is written for a section called Global Business, but only 212 of the 1,261 words describe the actual policy itself without editorializing. It includes only the barest of facts. Another 120 words blandly describe the economic circumstances that led to the formulation of the policy. There are 10 direct quotes. Three of those are sob stories, three are direct criticisms of the Japanese position by Japanese calling it a “disgrace”, “baffling”, “cold-hearted”, and “an insult”, and two are accounted for by a simple question and answer. There is an unattributed quote calling it “short-sighted” and “inhumane”. The single quoted Japanese who defends the policy is also given a chance to say, “I don’t think Japan should ever become a multi-ethnic society”.

And I don’t think the New York Times should stack the deck, but let’s proceed.

The government will pay thousands of dollars to fly Mrs. Yamaoka; her husband, who is a Brazilian citizen of Japanese descent; and their family back to Brazil. But in exchange, Mrs. Yamaoka and her husband must agree never to seek to work in Japan again.

Not only is this incorrect, but the author knows it. She later says that they can return on different visas:

But those who travel home on Japan’s dime will not be allowed to reapply for a work visa. Stripped of that status, most would find it all but impossible to return. They could come back on three-month tourist visas. Or, if they became doctors or bankers or held certain other positions, and had a company sponsor, they could apply for professional visas.

My, but isn’t that “certain other positions” a convenient formulation? The author doesn’t mention it also includes recent graduates of universities with bachelor’s degrees in the contemporary equivalent of basket weaving hired to teach English at chain schools.

Notice also the doctor/banker part. That’s inserted to offer a frisson of righteous indignation over the injustice of it all to the newspaper’s upper-middle class/upper class readership, some of whom are doctors or bankers, who will then finish reading the paper and head off to their six- or seven-figure jobs elsewhere on the island of Manhattan, or in a private cubicle in some ivory tower.

Here’s the first direct quote:

“I feel immense stress. I’ve been crying very often,” Mrs. Yamaoka, 38, said after a meeting where local officials detailed the offer in this industrial town in central Japan.

Yes, that’s the Grey Lady and not the National Enquirer.

Here’s the first quote from a Japanese:

“It’s a disgrace. It’s cold-hearted,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, an independent research organization. “And Japan is kicking itself in the foot,” he added. “We might be in a recession now, but it’s clear it doesn’t have a future without workers from overseas.”

Prof. Drezner also repeats that last sentence approvingly, as if everyone with functioning cognitive facilities can see the blinding clarity of its correctness. Perhaps he needs to read the Canadian report issued above showing that immigration isn’t going to solve anyone’s population problem. It’s also not so clear that the aging of society would be a problem if citizens assumed a greater liability for their own social welfare benefits and responsibility for long-term care, combined with growth-friendly taxation policies and reductions in the sheer mass of government.

And it’s also clear that most of Western Europe—as we know it—does not have a future with workers from overseas.

The guest workers quickly became the largest group of foreign blue-collar workers in an otherwise immigration-averse country, filling the so-called three-K jobs (kitsui, kitanai, kiken — hard, dirty and dangerous).

Japan isn’t so averse to immigration from people with job skills, a willingness to assimilate, and a desire to learn the language. I’m one of those in “some other position” who easily received a permanent residence visa. I know many more who did, and I have no doubt they and I could just as easily become naturalized citizens.

Sidebar 3: Recruitment of Chinese and Korean workers in Fukuoka
From a Nishinippon Shimbun article, buried in the local news section:

Fukuoka Prefecture and other groups sponsored a joint job interview conference on 30 May for foreign students looking for work in Japan. A total of 194 students at regional universities and graduate schools attended. Many companies are not hiring at present due to economic conditions, so only seven companies sent representatives. That was less than half of the companies represented last year, which caused some uneasiness among the students. This year’s conference was the eighth, and the prefecture said that about 30 students are hired as a result of the interviews every year.

“Naturally, we don’t want those same people back in Japan after a couple of months,” Mr. Kawasaki (Jiro, an LDP official formerly with the Health Ministry) said. “Japanese taxpayers would ask, ‘What kind of ridiculous policy is this?’ ”

That’s the first sensible thing I’ve read in any of those articles or blog posts yet.

At the packed town hall meeting in Hamamatsu, immigrants voiced disbelief that they would be barred from returning. Angry members of the audience converged on officials. Others walked out of the meeting room.

And I’m sure others went to the rest room, wandered aimlessly in the hall looking at the artwork, or went outside to smoke a cigarette. Why should they be angry about an optional program? Are the comments of Michiko Ramos and the Brazilian vice-consul above beginning to make sense now?

Claudio Nishimori, 30, said he was considering returning to Brazil because his shifts at a electronics parts factory were recently reduced. But he felt anxious about going back to a country he had left so long ago. “I’ve lived in Japan for 13 years. I’m not sure what job I can find when I return to Brazil,” he said. But his wife has been unemployed since being laid off last year and he can no longer afford to support his family.

Note that Mr. Nishimori and his wife both worked and that Mr. Nishimori has been here 13 years, presumably employed the whole time, yet he has neither the financial wherewithal to survive a layoff of a few months nor the job skills to find employment elsewhere. Nor, obviously, the desire to participate in the Japanese government’s job-training and language instruction program.

“They put up with us as long as they needed the labor,” said Wellington Shibuya, who came six years ago and lost his job at a stove factory in October. “But now that the economy is bad, they throw us a bit of cash and say goodbye….We worked hard; we tried to fit in. Yet they’re so quick to kick us out,” he said. “I’m happy to leave a country like this.”

With that attitude, Mr. Shibuya, I suspect that “a country like this” is even happier with your decision than you are.

Summary

There is nothing inherently wrong with privately owned media outlets using a preexisting narrative template to offer their information. That’s how they choose to present themselves to their customers, and their customers are free to accept or reject the template as they choose, according to their time, level of interest, and intellectual inclinations.

The problems arise when the templates are manifestly inaccurate and biased. There is no question that the employees of these media outlets are accomplished and intelligent people, and that the outlets themselves have the financial resources and access to information to enable those people to get it right.

Yet, as I have noted here often in the past, those media outlets seldom, if ever, get it right when the subject is Japan. That accomplished, intelligent people with the resources to get it right never do cannot be laid to incompetence. It must necessarily be the result of intentional design, either on their part or the part of ownership.

The articles by Time magazine and the New York Times plainly do not get it right. Just as plainly, it was because they chose not to get it right. I submit that the cause of this disfigurement and abuse of their resources and customers is anti-Nipponism.

There is also no reason to object to privately owned media outlets having a point of view. That point of view belongs in sections clearly labeled as opinion, however. As with both articles under review here, editorial opinion should not masquerade as news. If these were opinion journals, such The Nation or Commentary, for example, it would be a different matter entirely.

But these two media outlets insist on calling themselves news organizations. The two articles here are putatively news articles that present the facts, yet both are unfair and ugly distortions of the facts. I submit the cause of these distortions is anti-Nipponism.

Let’s not pretend any longer, shall we? These are not honest mistakes. This is not sloppy research. Someone, somewhere, has made a conscious decision to depict the Japanese as negatively as possible, however possible, whenever possible. These depictions of Japan are the rule rather than the exception.

University of Chicago Prof. Levitt and Mr. Dubner of Freakonomics are also without question intelligent and accomplished people. Yet the Messrs. Freakonomics read a Time magazine article and draw the breathtakingly incorrect conclusion that it is about a “citizenship buyout”. They find a harmless novelty item to be yet another one of those strange ideas from the Goofball Kingdom, while overlooking even stranger—and financially successful—novelty items from their own back yard. At least the Japanese product is functional.

They take the word of a chain e-mailer that an innocent, amusing, and obscure work of pop art is a commercial product, and snicker with their oh-so-hip audience at the Japanese weirdness for even conceiving of it. Yet they seem oblivious to situations in their own country (how often this happens!), in which a downright peculiar work of art was given a cash award partially funded by taxpayers, and which was the subject of a loud public controversy for that very reason.

They are citizens of a nation with perhaps the most dysfunctional immigration system in the modern world, yet they conclude that the Japanese government’s generous and considerate offer of a voluntary program to people in need, who seem to more closely resemble Aesop’s grasshopper rather than his ant, is stranger still.

Certainly Tufts University Prof. Drezner is equally accomplished and intelligent. Yet he reads a New York Times article and draws the breathtakingly incorrect assumption that it is about “kicking out” people from Japan. He then suffers an intellectual short-circuit and concludes this is one of the reasons Japan lacks diplomatic clout. He (or someone at that site) thinks Japan is a “demographic disaster”. Well, perhaps it is, but if it sinks, it’s going to go down on the same ship as Western Europe, South Korea, and Singapore. Yet he will only allow that it’s not as bad as Russia.

If either of those university professors were submitted a paper that reached those conclusions based on evidence that slim in any other subject, they’d flunk the student faster than you can say Cliff’s Notes.

Perhaps that is due to what might be called a big-league complex, common among people of certain professions (particularly lawyers). They think it’s their job to behave as if they know something about everything, and so act accordingly to uphold their professional reputation. Freakonomics is about “the hidden side of everything” after all, and “international politics” covers quite a lot of territory. But I don’t think that’s the reason.

I’m sure they would vehemently deny they are guilty of what amounts to knee-jerk prejudice—some of their best friends are Japanese, no doubt. But I submit the cause of their misguided thinking and behavior is anti-Nipponism.

As Ms. Regan (a financial attorney) says in the quote at the start of the article, it is time for people to ignore the fishwrap farce that the New York Times, Time magazine, and their ilk have become, and take responsibility for their thoughts and decisions. Unfortunately, the people described here seem to have used those publications as giftwrap to beautify their preconceived notions.

As for the Japanese, it is time to start drawing conclusions from the fact that the anti-Nipponism of the Western media and its public intellectuals will always prevent them from getting it right.

Shelby Steele, part African-American, a former university professor, and current research fellow at the Hoover Institution, long ago wrote that one of the most important things he ever learned he heard during a conversation with an elderly Jewish woman. “No matter how hard you try,” she told him, “they’re never going to love you.”

It doesn’t make any difference how pacific your behavior or generous your contributions have been for the past few generations. Most media outlets and many influential people in the West have become so infected with anti-Nipponism that they are never going to love you.

If those conclusions you draw require that Japan choose a more independent course of action in the world, so be it. As the Arabs say, the dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.

Afterwords:

* Anti-Nipponistic attitudes are apparent in more than just political or pop culture reporting. Note how the AP handled their obituary for a prominent Japanese psychiatrist at the end of this recent post.

* I didn’t include Chinese or Korean examples in this post, though anti-Nipponism is of course present in those countries, too. But Japan’s relationships with the Han Chinese on the mainland and the people of the Korean Peninsula are deep and stretch back for millennia, so the current strand of anti-Nipponism in northeast Asia has a different meaning. It is most often fomented or exacerbated by the political class for domestic advantage. Westerners have no such excuse.

* This post doesn’t begin to address the problem of Brazilian workers who either chose not to participate in the national pension system to begin with, or have not worked long enough in Japan (25 years) to quality. The Brazilian workers have been coming to Japan for more than 15 years, and those who came in their mid-40s are now hitting the age of 60. That’s when many Japanese retire, and the unskilled Brazilian laborers working through employee seconding agencies that age are not going to be called as frequently for work. As a result, they receive welfare payments and other benefits from the Japanese government. In those areas with a concentration of these workers, the older ones who can no longer find employment are now starting to hang out during the day on street corners and park benches. One can imagine the reaction of younger Japanese taxpayers who work for a living and are footing the bill. Why should the Japanese government support the elderly citizens of another country with whom it has no pension reciprocity? That’s Brazil’s responsibility, is it not? (Japan does have agreements with the U.S. and Germany, among others.)

* As the New York Times article in particular hastened to assure us, some Japanese are also critical of their government’s policy. Higuchi Naoto, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Tokushima, expressed his criticisms in this English-language article in the Asahi Shimbun.

While I disagree with Prof. Higuchi’s solution, he gets to the crux of the matter here:

I have interviewed more than 300 Japanese-South Americans, and according to my observation, those who graduated from unstable non-regular employment to regular work had one thing in common–strong Japanese-language skills….To survive in the labor market, Japanese language skills are more important than academic qualifications or work experience.

Yes. However:

The majority of these have never been given the financial support or time to acquire Japanese language skills, without which they have virtually no chance of finding new work at a time when they need it most.

Disclaimer: I have a biased outlook in this matter. Not one of my great-grandparents was a native speaker of English, yet all of those who reached the United States acquired English language skills. (That includes two grandparents.) All the men were originally unskilled laborers, and one grandfather had only one year of schooling in Russia.

Needless to say, none of them were given financial support or the time to acquire English-language skills. They just went ahead and did it on their own. One great-grandfather died at the age of 40. His five children quit school and went to work, and his German-born wife did the nurses’ laundry for the nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital. She studied English by reading the newspaper aloud every evening to her twin daughters and having them correct her pronunciation and explain unfamiliar words.

The article also has internal contradictions:

Some 400,000 Japanese-South Americans are said to live in the country. One-third have already obtained permanent residence visas. Many families have also taken out loans to buy homes…In order to earn 300,000 yen a month from a job that pays 1,200 yen an hour, a worker needs to put in 250 hours a month. With such long hours, it is almost impossible to spare time for studies.

It’s also almost impossible to take out a home loan with that sort of income, either. But as for language studies, you know what they say about there being a way if there’s the will. Turn on the TV or radio and voila! Instant language instruction 24 hours a day.

Because there was no need for them to learn Japanese, there was also no motivation.

Living here is not motivation enough? Surely the reason they came was because they thought they would have more opportunities in Japan than in Brazil. The opportunity to stay and make the most of those opportunities should be sufficient motivation for anyone.

The government should devise a learning program under which participants are paid aid equivalent to one year’s unemployment benefits, allowing them to focus solely on the language…. A system is needed to allow them to enroll in Japanese-language schools on a full-time basis for a year so that they may acquire communication skills, including reading and writing, needed to work in Japan.

In other words, the sociology professor thinks that people whose motivation was such that they were unable to use whatever education they received at home to acquire rudimentary job skills are going to be able to read and write Japanese after a one-year course, rather than a three-month course.

As someone who has spent the last 18 years working full-time as a Japanese-English translator after spending a considerable chunk of my life gaining Japanese-language fluency, and who also has taught English, I can only conclude that Prof. Higuchi is a cockeyed optimist.

That’s the basis of most Japanese complaints—the government didn’t do enough to help the nikkei assimilate. But there are two serious problems with that suggestion. First, it completely ignores the responsibility of the people themselves to take charge of their own lives. Ten ha mizukara tasukuru mono wo tasuku—Heaven helps those who help themselves.

Second, it also completely ignores the lesson that everyone left of the political center has failed to learn, and alas, probably never will learn.

If it were so easy for governments to accomplish these things, socialism would have been a success.

A big thanks to the people who helped with this post. You know who you are!

UPDATE: I just found out the program has been amended to allow for re-entry after three years. In other words, it is almost identical in terms to a Spanish offer to unemployed immigrants for repatriation. According to that article, more than 5,000 people accepted the offer. Most of them are from other Spanish-speaking countries, so linguistic assimilation should not have been at issue.

The fertility rate in Spain, incidentally, is nearly the same as that of Japan.

Does this mean there will be a sudden outbreak of Spain-bashing or a let-up in anti-Nipponism from the Western elites?

I think not.

Fukuoka-Busan: The gateposts of the Asia Gateway

IT’S A CURIOUS PHENOMENON that the farther people are from Japan and South Korea, the more likely they are to think folks in the two countries get along like dogs and monkeys, as the Japanese say about dogs and cats. If the articles and snide asides that the print media offer as infotainment are to be believed, it’s taken as a given in the West that the Koreans and Japanese can’t stand each other, and it’s mostly Japan’s fault.

But that’s not the picture that emerges in the part of the world where the two countries are closest to each other. It’s a mere three-hour boat ride or 50-minute flight across the Korean Strait separating Kyushu and the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula. Here in Kyushu, it’s no big deal to eat a leisurely breakfast while listening to a Busan radio station, and then follow that with a leisurely lunch in Busan. In fact, I’ve done it myself.

It’s not as if I’m a trend-setter, either. That trip has become an everyday occurrence for people in both countries. The sister cities of Fukuoka City and Busan know better than anyone that their bread is buttered on both sides, and they’ve been working together to whip up more tempting treats.

That’s why the two cities have embarked on their Asia Gateway campaign for encouraging people in both regions to drop by and set a spell, and in the process drop as much money as they can afford. They took the next step in the campaign today when they launched the joint Asia Gateway website. Their concept for the overall tone of the site is that the two cities are actually “neighboring towns” where people regularly travel back and forth, rather than cities in foreign countries that people visit occasionally for business or pleasure.

Considering the state of modern transportation and the real people I’ve seen traveling across the strait, that’s no exaggeration. For starters, young single women in both countries think nothing of hopping on the boat for a weekend cross-strait shopping expedition.

The website is jointly managed by the Nishinippon Shimbun and the Busan Ilbo newspapers. The homepage is in both languages, and from there visitors can access the separate Japanese- and Korean-language content. The section created in Fukuoka for Koreans contains videos of local attractions popular with Koreans, as well as blogs. There’s also a map of the Tenjin district in Fukuoka City, Kyushu’s largest commercial area, translations into Korean of Nishinippon Shimbun articles, and information on the Kurokawa Hot Springs in Kumamoto, another destination popular with Korean tourists.

The ties between the two areas aren’t PR dreamed up by the respective Chambers of Commerce. Coming soon to the site is an interview with a bi-strait married couple. The husband is Japanese and lives in Fukuoka City, while his wife is Korean and lives in Busan. Now that’s my idea of bisexuality!

Later this month, Busan plans to add more information in Japanese about their tourist attractions and Korean-style fortunetelling.

But you don’t need yuk hak to get a glimpse of the future in this part of the world, and now you’ve got more to go on than the English-language press. Just take a look at the Asia Gateway website and see for yourself.

Afterwords: The interview with the married couple is already supposed to be up there, but I couldn’t find it. Perhaps in the next day or so.

Hatoyama Yukio, Yuai, and the fraternal revolution

The chaos of modern politics will only…find its end when a spiritual aristocracy seizes the means of power of society: (gun)powder, gold, ink, and uses them for the blessing of the general public.
- Practical Idealism, Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi

ON A COLD DAY in Tokyo in 1891, 17-year-old Aoyama Mitsuko rushed to help Count Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austrian diplomat whose horse had slipped and fallen on the ice. Her father was an antique dealer and oil merchant descended from a samurai family, and the Count was a frequent visitor to the antique shop because the Austrian legation was nearby.

Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi

As so often happens, one thing led to another, and the diplomat married Mitsuko over her parents’ objections after he had first succeeded in getting her a job as a parlor maid in the Austrian embassy. They had two sons, the second of whom was Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi, born in Tokyo in 1894. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi became a prominent political thinker and activist who founded the Pan-Europa movement in 1923, which is widely recognized as the forerunner of the EU.

The primary objectives of the oldest European federalist organization were to create a free and united Europe with a joint foreign policy and currency and a focus on the family and strong property rights. The Count wanted to create an ethnically diverse European nation with a common culture. A polyglot, he expected that the language of common use throughout the European nation would be English, while everyone would use their native language in their home regions. He said that such a nation would be “the only way of guarding against an eventual world hegemony by Russia”.

In the book Theories of European Integration, Ben Rosamond wrote that Coudenhove-Kalergi wanted to create a conservative society that superceded democracy with “the social aristocracy of the spirit”. Others have described him as a social democrat with aristocratic tendencies, and the Count himself said that he favored government by “the best and the brightest”. He sought to reconcile the conflict between capitalism and communism through cross-fertilization rather than the victory of one over the other. He also thought the world should be divided into five blocs, with Japan and China controlling the Far East.

Meanwhile, back in Japan…

Sometime during the period from 1946 to 1951 in the upscale mountain resort of Karuizawa, Nagano, Hatoyama Ichiro happened to read one of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s many books, The Totalitarian State against Man. Hatoyama was a politician who entered the Diet in 1915 and later served as chief cabinet secretary and education minister before the war.

He was elected again to the Imperial Diet in 1942 despite being an “unofficial candidate”, but he was expelled to Karuizawa for his opposition to the Imperial Rule Assistance Association and the policies of Tojo Hideki. He returned to Tokyo after the war and formed the Liberal Party, which became the largest party in the postwar Diet. Just as he was to be named prime minister, the GHQ barred him from holding public office on the charge of cooperating with militarism, and he returned to Karuizawa for a second period of exile.

When reading The Totalitarian State against Man, Hatoyama was so moved by Coudenhove-Kalergi’s idea of a “fraternal revolution” that he translated the book into Japanese. He chose the Japanese term yuai kakumei for fraternal revolution. Yuai is also used in the translation of the slogan of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Coudenhove-Kalergi himself believed in this ideal, but thought the French achieved only the first of the three.

Hatoyama was captivated by the European’s insistence that following a fraternal revolution, the world would transcend the limits of race, religion, ethnicity, state, and language to usher in a true age of coexistence among people, and between people and nature.

Despite suffering a stroke in 1951 just before his banishment order was lifted, Hatoyama stayed active in politics. He became prime minister at last when he succeeded Yoshida Shigeru in December 1954, and he served to December 1956. Personal and philosophical differences with Yoshida had caused him to leave the Liberal Party and form the Democratic Party. These and other conservative groups formed the Liberal Democratic Party in November 1955, and it has been the governing party of Japan continuously since then with the exception of an 11-month period in the mid-1990s.

L-R: Grandpa Yoshida and Grandpa Hatoyama

In addition to his political work, Hatoyama formed the Yuai Youth Association in 1953 and served as its first president. The group’s objective was to inculcate in young people the yuai spirit and thus contribute to the rebuilding of Japan during the postwar period. The association still exists and remains active today.

The word yuai is not commonly used in everyday life, and its presence in Japanese politics faded after Hatoyama Ichiro’s death. The term was briefly revived with the formation of the small New Fraternity Party in 1998, which consisted primarily of Diet members with social democrat tendencies. The party was a temporary receptacle that lasted only from January to April that year, when it merged with the newly created Democratic Party of Japan. One NFP member, Naoshima Masayuki, is still a senior executive with the DPJ.

The keeper of the flame

Ichiro’s grandson Hatoyama Yukio was chosen as the DPJ president earlier this month. Mr. Hatoyama is also a champion of the concept of yuai. He is on record as stating that he wants to change the name of the party he helped found to the Yuai Minshuto—perhaps the Fraternal Democratic Party of Japan—and create a yuai shakai, or fraternal society.

His intense focus on that goal and the nature of the goal itself has subjected Mr. Hatoyama to heavy criticism, and his devotion to the cause exasperates even his allies. One of his political associates recently told the weekly Shukan Bunshun that he interviewed Mr. Hatoyama 10 years ago with the idea of writing a book to further the latter’s political career. The associate said that over the course of 30 hours of interviews, Mr. Hatoyama did not express a single idea about policy, but kept returning to the idea of yuai instead.

Last year, he and his brother, LDP member and Cabinet minister Hatoyama Kunio, established the Yuai Juku, an institute to “develop prominent men and women to create a society, nation, and world whose keynote is the concept of yuai”. Their older sister, Inoue Kazuko, serves as the institute’s director. The first class of 20 students began the year-long course in April 2008 and paid an affordable 130,000 yen (about $US 1,350) to attend classes at the former Hatoyama mansion from 6:10 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The criticism

Not everyone thinks yuai has a place in Japanese politics today. Television commentators, particularly the brash types who consider themselves entertainers first, and who come from a different social milieu than either the Count or Mr. Hatoyama, have derided the new DPJ president’s philosophy as being beyond the average person’s understanding. One—who didn’t do his homework—even claimed that it was entirely unrelated to politics. Journalist and political commentator Ito Atsuo, who is sympathetic to the DPJ and promoted in print Mr. Hatoyama’s opponent Okada Katsuya in the party’s recent presidential election, said it cannot be practically applied to policy.

L-R: Grandsons Taro and Yukio

Of course the political opposition knows an opening when they spot one. Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has recently raised his public profile after spending almost two years in a self-imposed exile of his own, recovering from medical problems and the strain of office after resigning his position in August 2007. Before becoming prime minister, Mr. Abe published a book in 2005 called Toward a Beautiful Country that presented his policy positions to the general public. He used the “Beautiful Country” phrase as his political slogan during his term of office.

Mr. Abe’s slogan was also mercilessly ridiculed by the opposition, particularly the DPJ and the Social Democrats (formerly the Socialists). SDP President Fukushima Mizuho said she didn’t know what the phrase “beautiful country” was supposed to mean.

The former prime minister has hurled some slings and arrows of his own at Mr. Hatoyama and his pet cause. Perhaps he did it for a taste of revenge, or perhaps he would have used it in any event as a weapon against the leader across the aisle. But at the Hatoyama press conference following his election as DPJ chief, a reporter brought up Mr. Abe’s criticism:

“The other day, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo said, ‘Yuai diplomacy will absolutely not pass muster with North Korea.’ Will you apply Yuai diplomacy to North Korea?”

Said Mr. Hatoyama:

“Well then, former Prime Minister Abe may have rejected Yuai diplomacy, but it might be that he doesn’t understand Yuai diplomacy. Yuai diplomacy is by no means an insubstantial thing. It is how countries with different value systems can achieve the position of recognizing the existence of each other in this world. I think that is a very important, significant concept.

“Of course, for countries of the type that no one knows what they’re going to do, such as North Korea…he might simply be envisioning something like a sunshine strategy, as in the story of the north wind and the sun, but it might not be possible to have North Korea remove its cape with the sunshine idea alone. It might be necessary to combine a strategy of both, with the north wind, but I…that’s why we must leave behind the type of diplomacy in which countries with different value systems don’t recognize each other…I suspect we’ve reached an extremely important phase. That’s what I think, and I think it is necessary for the government to delve more into Yuai diplomacy in the future.

Mr. Hatoyama and Prime Minister Aso Taro squared off in a debate of the party leaders in the Diet on 27th. Some were astonished when the former brought up the subject on his own:

Hatoyama Yukio’s question:

“I…just the other day, during the DPJ presidential election…(to hecklers) please be quiet…what I said…I said that I wanted to build a Yuai society. I’ve heard many people criticize this. But, this is an extremely…this in one sense is an old idea, but also a new idea, that’s what I think. What I think this country lacks today, is that the ties in society have been shredded, and all of us as individuals don’t have a place of our own. I think this is a very grave situation. I used the word love, but I want to build a society in which every person can discover their place with ties (to society), in which everyone feels that they are useful, and in which everyone feels happy. In a word, I want to create a world in which people can think that another person’s happiness is their happiness. That’s what I think, but at any rate, politics in Japan today is not like that at all. When people are envious of another person’s happiness, when they are happy to see someone unhappy, this sort of a world, in the end, ruins politics, and doesn’t it also ruin society? Why has such a state arisen? I want to ask the prime minister what he thinks.”

Aso Taro’s answer:

“Well…the spirit of Yuai, that was a word used when Hatoyama Ichiro was prime minister in 1955. I was about in the third year of junior high school, and that’s a word I remember, so, that word is used with great esteem…and I have absolutely no objection to feelings of affection (joai) for other people.”

Are Hatoyama and Yuai the answer?

Abe Shinzo’s grandfather was Kishi Nobusuke, Aso Taro’s grandfather was Yoshida Shigeru, and Hatoyama Yukio’s grandfather was Hatoyama Ichiro. Five of those six men have served as prime ministers of Japan, and the sixth might reach that position before the year is out. If he does, both the older trio and the younger trio will have held that office within fewer than three years of one another. The more things change…

The Yuai concept includes an admirable set of personal ideals that, like all such philosophies, are unachievable in this world. (It also includes a dangerous elitism.) But reality, as the former Marxist Thomas Sowell is fond of noting, is not optional. If these ideals were achievable, we wouldn’t need the political process to begin with. Such a world cannot be created from the top down or the outside in. If it is capable of achievement, it requires a conscious effort by each individual on a personal level from the inside out, and most people have neither the time nor the inclination to bother.

Doubtless Hatoyama Yukio is motivated by sincerity and good intentions, and one cannot help but respect what seems to be his lifelong commitment. But none of us can say for certain why he really got into politics in the first place: a sense of ambition as ruthless as that of the next hack, a sense of idealistic public service, or to enter the family business. It’s also regrettable that he has chosen to ally himself and his party with some unpleasant people. And it’s not out of the question that those same people are using him as a vehicle while viewing him as a sap behind his back for what they consider to be his loopy ideas.

But Mr. Hatoyama is an adult responsible for his own actions, and we all understand that people do not pursue and maintain a career in politics unless they are willing to barter their soul, either piecemeal or in a single lot.

In fact, maybe it’s time for the new DPJ president to do some rereading. He could start with this sentence from the Yuai Youth Association website:

Unless the ideal will widely spread over the years to come, politicians will not stop doing such foolish acts as breaking commitments or making election pledges to do what they really are not going to do at all.

Breaking commitments? This is the man who was going to resign from his senior party position together with Ozawa Ichiro, but then chose to run for party president instead.

As for election pledges, Mr. Hatoyama should take another look at his party’s election platform and eliminate the ones that “he’s not going to do at all.” He could then consider the blatant contradition of promises to cut the bureaucracy and promote regionalism, while at the same time proposing massive spending increases that will only enlarge and enhance both the bureaucracy and the central government. Then he could explain how the DPJ’s alliance with the People’s New Party and promise to halt postal privatization will downsize the bureaucracy.

Afterwords

Enough of this strawberry alarm clock incense and peppermints crap. Let’s get funky!

Now you know why Nakasone Yasuhiro referred to Hatoyama Yukio as being like melted ice cream, and why other people call him the man from outer space.

Ozawa Ichiro has finally arranged/blundered into the situation that suits him best, and now he has another semi-aristocratic squish to act as his front man while he wields a tire iron in the alley. Isn’t that a tasty dish to set before the people?

The Shukan Bunshun reports that Mr. Hatoyama was feeling a bit giddy during an impromptu press conference outside his office after winning the DPJ presidency. He started talking about himself without any prompting, and said, “The Hatoyama color (i.e., his defining traits and beliefs) is the power of love!” Then he began speculating about his real hue on the spectrum. He thought that gold was probably an exaggeration and over the top at this point, so he settled on deep crimson.

Prime Minister Aso said that this week’s debate would determine which of the two men would be more suitable as prime minister.

Reading the words of both men, one seems like a teenaged girl, while the other seems like her indulgent uncle.

It’s not hard to figure out which one is which.

P.S: Some people think the Guerlain perfume Mitsuko (originally Mitsouko) is named after Aoyama Mitsuko. It was created in 1919 and has been continuously available since then.

Everything you know about Japan is wrong

If all your knowledge about Japan comes from the overseas mass media, then everything you know about Japan is wrong.
- The motto of this website

FREQUENT POSTER MAC has just sent in a note to the Comments section that is too very extremely good to be overlooked. Here it is, brightened up a bit for the wider public.
*****
We had a festival up at our local castle which I attended. Bear in mind, I don’t live on the mainland, and where I am there is only a single railtrack on the way in and out.

I only managed to befriend a few folks, but the first I did had studied Swahili and toured Africa with her judo master teaching out there. Now she is going to Korea to live. The second spoke of her affinity with the gypsies of India where she had traveled widely and studied yoga. We shared memories of Spain and Morocco. She is not alone in the Indian connection–the guy that does the curries at our local farmer’s market spent over 10 years as a saddhu (naked India holyman) before returning to Japan. The guys next to us are currently living in a native American teepee whilst they build their eco-house in the hills somewhere.

Yup…just your average, quiet, rainy weekend in a racist, inward and conservative country like Japan.
*****
Mac’s experience is yet another example of what I see every day in the part of the sticks where I live, and have seen every day for the past 25 years. I first came to Japan to teach at an English school that is affiliated with an NGO and a sort of day care center for pre-schoolers called Yume Gakko (Dream School).

The man who started and ran the English school was fluent in French and English (with interpretation certification in both languages) and lived in both France and Canada. He was also conversationally passable in both Korean and Chinese. I never counted, but he must have visited at least 20 countries as part of his activities.

The man running the English school now spent a year in Alaska as a high school student and liked it so much he chose to attend and graduate from the University of Alaska. He got a master’s degree in theater arts from Towson University near Baltimore and taught for several years at a college in Massachusetts. Before leaving the U.S. to take up his current position, he decided to take a two-week vacation in Costa Rica before coming back home.

Another teacher at the school did postgraduate work in England and then received a master’s degree at UC Santa Barbara in pre-school education. She’s now an interpreter (who’s appeared at the side of Yo Yo Ma on national television) and translator, and is also involved with the Yume School and volunteer activities for UNESCO.

The school’s primary native-speaking English teacher was born and grew up in the Bahamas, and they have also employed teachers from Sri Lanka (several), The Philippines, Pakistan, India, Jamaica, Zaire, and Egypt.

The man now in charge of the NGO lived–with his wife and pre-school aged daughter–in Myanmar for two years. One of the women working there has spent some time in Europe, and her English is good enough to handle a telephone conversation (foreign languages are hard to do over the phone). Another woman working there lived for several years in South Korea. They all regularly visit Myanmar, where they helped build a school, and Thailand, where they run a scholarship program at an orphanage out in the boondocks.

The man running Yume Gakko graduated from the University of Montana.

Do you think these people are exceptions? Also in this city of 180,000, 45 minutes by train from the nearest metropolitan area, is a bar that plays nothing but American country and western music. It is operated by one man and his female assistant, a graduate student at the local university from Uganda. One night I walked in there in the midst of a loud argument about soccer with people banging on in both English and Japanese, involving two Japanese, two New Zealanders, an Australian, an Irishman, a Welshman, and a Moroccan. It was an interesting experience to listen to them go at it, sip a beer, and chat with the Ugandan waitress while Johnny Cash played on the sound system.

Then there’s my barber, a woman of about 45 who has lived in Indonesia and Hawaii, competed in international surfing championships, and went to Jamaica for her honeymoon because she was nuts about reggae. The entire staff of the shop takes a three-or-four day tour together every year overseas. Her father used to be an OISCA volunteer and traveled every summer to several countries in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific as part of his activities. During one haircut, her father stood next to the chair and told me about the two weeks he had just spent in Fiji. (I encouraged him to talk; I always wanted to go there myself.) Her sister lived for a decade in Los Angeles. Her daughter in junior high school has already visited more countries than I have, and am ever likely to.

I grew up in the United States (and had grandparents whose first language wasn’t English), a country that was built by immigrants and used to claim that it was a melting pot.

While I’ll be the first to admit that it was indeed a melting pot, I never met even a handful of Americans with those sort of international experiences–and I grew up in a city of a million people (at that time) and graduated from a world-class university. And don’t even try to tell me about international mixing and mingling. When I go to the U.S. with my wife and we stand in line at a shop or the bank talking Japanese, people look at us (particularly me) as if we came from another planet.

At one shop we visited in New York, the Latino clerk complimented me on my ability to speak another language and expressed the wish that more Americans were as willing to do the same.

Some people would like to have you believe that Japan is “racist, inward, and conservative”, as Mac put it. Other people seem to enjoy believing it. But most people prefer reading fiction to non-fiction, too.

Japan is racist, inward, and conservative?

Compared to whom?

Personality disorder or genetic disposition?

The media are less a window on reality than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.
- Paul Weaver

LET’S HAVE a thought experiment: Imagine you are a journalist and you are to interview Japanese figure skater Asada Mao at a meeting of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.

The 18-year-old Ms. Asada, who was just graduated from high school, is the third-ranked figure skater in the world. She has won the Japanese national championships three years running and was world champion last year. Ms. Asada is the only woman to have successfully performed two triple axel jumps in the same program at an official competition.

But as part of this thought experiment, you will be interviewing Ms. Asada when she was still only 16 years old.

A normal person might ask how she got involved in figure skating, to what she attributes her success, what daily training routine enables her to perform at that elite level, what she does for fun when she’s not figure skating, and how much longer she plans to complete.

But Gebhard Hielscher, the former Tokyo correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and a member of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan—in fact, the former head of the organization—chose to ask a different question when he interviewed the 16-year-old girl in April 2007:

For instance, when you are in the U.S., are you asked, you know, about your being a Japanese, or your country has done some very bad things, and your Prime Minister is not honest or something?

A normal person can guess what she said even before they hear the answer:

I’m training in Los Angeles right now, but everyone is very friendly and they talk to me a lot.

The reason a normal person could predict her answer is that most people behave the same way when they want to get acquainted with people or make new friends, whether they live in Los Angeles or Lagos, Kuala Lumpur or Kingston, or even, I daresay, in Berlin.

That’s because normal people everywhere want to enjoy themselves and the companionship of other people. They already understand that people in every country have “done some very bad things”, and that politicians everywhere tend not to be honest. That’s why there’s an expression about people who live in glass houses and stone throwing.

It wouldn’t occur to normal people to make an innocent 16-year-old girl uncomfortable in front of a room full of foreigners old enough to be her parents.

But Mr. Hielscher did.

Let’s try another thought experiment. Why on earth would he?

What other reason could there be than to demonstrate his own moral superiority that he presumes was granted by through his adoption of a specific political agenda? Even though it’s apparent the man lacks social skills and common sense, he surely must know how normal people interact. He surely must realize that normal people have their own lives to lead and their own futures to look forward to, and therefore don’t care about events that ended and were resolved more than 60 years ago—nor is there any reason they should. That’s particularly true for a 16-year-old whose parents weren’t alive at the time of those events, and whose grandparents, if alive, were probably younger than she is now.

The reason he asked the question wasn’t to reveal contemporary American attitudes toward the war, nor to uncover how Japanese visitors to that country are treated. It wasn’t about raising awareness of events of the rapidly receding past, nor to seek truth and justice.

The Japanese who frequently read this website might not believe this, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with Japan, either. Repeatedly dredging up selected parts of Japan’s history is just one of many means to the same end.

Instead, it has everything to do with using the event as a pretext to steal the spotlight. It has everything to do using that spotlight to indulge a vain and condescending elitism derived from his sociopolitical views, and to bask in the approval of an audience of foreign journalists that he assumes—probably correctly—shares those views. It has everything to do with humiliating anyone who might have other ideas, even a teenager too young, too far removed from what for her is the distant past, and too involved with living today to care. It has everything to do with mounting the stairway to what he assumes is a higher moral plane than the unthinking, uncaring rabble.

It’s all about showing us how wonderful he is because he is one of the self-anointed politically elect.

The key here is the unspoken assumption that Japanese behavior was–and remains–so detestable that it would be perfectly understandable if people in another country were to confront children about it during casual social encounters. Happens every day!

Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of the incident is that he doesn’t realize how transparent his behavior is.

It is a recognizable phenomenon that people of this type often gravitate toward the news media as a profession. That line of work enables them to advance their views through the conduct of advocacy journalism, which prevents normal people from making up their own minds by telling them only part of the story—either true or made up from whole cloth. It allows them to lead the sheep to the pen and to the conclusion they want them to reach.

Is this a form of personality disorder that might be called the Little Jack Horner Syndrome? (He stuck in his thumb, pulled out a plum, and said “What a good boy am I!”) Or, because it seems to be present in every country and can be traced back for at least a couple of centuries, is it a genetic predisposition?

That this man was selected to be chairman of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan and thought it perfectly natural to ask this question of a teenager in front of his peers has much to say about the membership of that organization and the nature of the profession itself.

Once again: If your knowledge of Japan is derived from the news media, everything you know about Japan is wrong. And now you know one of the reasons why.

Here’s another thought experiment: guess which part of the political spectrum Mr. Hielscher identifies with.

Normal people won’t have to be told that, either.

He is (or was) head of the Tokyo office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The namesake of the organization was a former President of Germany and a member of the Social Democratic Party who bequeathed money in his will to create the foundation. The party’s yearbook from 1926 explains its objectives:

“The Friedrich Ebert Foundation pursues the goal of giving young, empowered proletarians government aid to fund an education at state-accredited institutions. As a basic principle, only those people who have a recommendation from the party organization will receive funding.”

In other words, you have to spout the party line to get the money.

The foundation also has a museum and study center housed in the Karl Marx House in Trier. The center was established, in part, to study the life and works of Karl Marx and the history of socialism.

That does not mean everyone in that part of the political spectrum behaves the same way—they can’t all be that pushy and vulgar—but rather that most of the people who behave this way are found in that part of the spectrum. If you want to see a duck, look in a marsh instead of a downtown office building.

And if you want to see the incident, here’s the Youtube video. It lasts 53 seconds.

Mr. Hielscher asked another question first:

Do you have a boyfriend? If you don’t have a boyfriend, who would you like to be your boyfriend?

Ms. Asada answered that she didn’t have a boyfriend, but ducked the second part. The girl missed her chance. She should have told him that her social life isn’t his business. But that would offend his sense of entitlement as a journalist, based on the mistaken presumption that he has the inalienable right to ask anyone any question at any time.

It’s pointless to engage these specimens in logical argument, present facts for their attention, or attempt honest debate. They are not interested in inconvenient facts, and will try to deny or denigrate any facts presented that prove them wrong. As the man said, they can’t handle the truth. They are not interested in honest debate, either. They are only interested in congratulating themselves on their superior humanity, asserting the inferiority of those who think otherwise, and ultimately exterminating any views other than their own.

How normal people should deal with them might well be the subject of another thought experiment.

Thanks to Aceface for the tip.