Yum yum the sun

SOME STORIES require no comment. They speak for themselves. Here’s one from the Times of London about Hatoyama Miyuki, the wife of Japan’s next prime minister, Hatoyama Yukio.

“While my body was sleeping, I think my spirit flew on a triangular-shaped UFO to Venus,” she said.

And:

…she spoke of her past-life friendship with Tom Cruise and her ambition to make a film with him. “He was Japanese in his past life, and we were together so when I see him, I will say, ‘Hi. It’s been a long time . . .’, and he will immediately understand,” she said.

And then:

…she described how, as part of her health regimen, she “eats the sun” every morning for breakfast. She closed her eyes and mimed the act of removing bite-sized pieces from Earth’s star. “Yum, yum, yum!” she said, placing the imaginary solar morsels in her mouth. “I get energy from it. My husband also does this.”

Her husband, too? That explains a lot.

Well, his nickname is The Man From Outer Space, isn’t it? Now doesn’t it sound as if that’s a match made in the heavens?

Mrs. Hatoyama seems like she might be fun. I’m serious. Really, wouldn’t you rather be married to her than someone like Hillary Clinton or Eleanor Roosevelt? Can you imagine Michelle Obama breaking her fast every morning by nibbling on Old Sol?

Wait–and this is after I said some articles require no comment. Somebody stop me!

Hey, wouldn’t it be wild if this man were appointed to the Cabinet a second time?

Jane, stop this crazy thing!

Tokyo on tap

A CONTROVERSY HAS ERUPTED in Scotland over a new beer created by the microbrewers BrewDog that has the highest alcohol content by volume of any beer in the U.K.: 18.2%. James Watt, one of the brewery founders, said their goal was to create high-quality “progressive” beers with exceptional taste that encouraged safe alcohol consumption and kept people from drinking too much.

Scotland and the rest of the U.K. have been dealing with a serious binge drinking problem, however. As you can imagine from that staggering alcohol content, the criticism of the beer—actually an oak-aged imperial stout—has been loud and immediate.

• Alcohol Focus Scotland chief executive Jack Law:

“This company is completely deluded if they think that an 18.2% abv (alcohol by volume) beer will help solve Scotland’s alcohol problems. It is utterly irresponsible to bring out a beer which is so strong at a time when Scotland is facing unprecedented levels of alcohol-related health and social harm.”

• The British Liver Trust:

“The notion of binge-drinking is to get drunk quick, so surely this beer will help people on their way?”

• Ross Finnie, the Scottish Liberal Democrats’ health spokesman:

“I am not sure at all what place producing stronger strength beer has in a Scottish society where, across all age groups and all socio-economic categories, the medical evidence is that, as a nation, we are drinking too much alcohol.”

The brewer has its defenders as well. Zak Avery, a former UK Beer Writer of the Year:

“To claim that this type of beer is part of the alcohol abuse problem is akin to blaming Michelin-starred restaurants for the oft-reported obesity epidemic.”

Yet one aspect of this story that doesn’t seem to be piquing anyone’s interest is the name of this beer.

It’s called Tokyo* (with the asterisk).

Now what could the reason be for that?

Most people overseas would associate Japan with sake when thinking of alcoholic beverages. While there are some fine beers in Japan, the country is not known for oak-aged imperial stout. Most of the beer on the market here is no higher than 5%-5.5% alcohol by volume. In fact, one company is promoting a new brew it just released with a large number 7 on the container denoting that it has 7% alcohol by volume. (Asahi, I think, but I’m not sure.)

Tokyo* beer is made with jasmine, cranberries, malts and American hops, and is fermented with a champagne yeast to boost the alcohol content. None of those ingredients has a Japanese connection. Binge drinking is not really a problem here.

BrewDog has gotten in hot water before over the name of one of its products. They named a beer Speedball, which is a slang term for a mixture of heroin and cocaine. The brewery claimed then it was producing a quality product for responsible drinking and was educating people from misusing drugs. (Does there seem to be a pattern developing?) A local liquor watchdog group sent a non-binding letter to merchants asking them not to sell the product unless the name was changed.

There are no reports of the group thinking there was anything wrong with this name.

So the company has already produced one beer and “pushed the envelope”, as they say, by giving it a name with strong connotations of dangerous, illegal behavior and death. Is the intent the same with this product? You know, kamikaze pilots, World War II…

The spirits industry likes to promote itself this way. We’ve all heard the stories about the pictures of skulls hidden in ice cubes in magazine liquor advertisements. And really, naming a beer Speedball is blatant.

What would the Scottish reaction be if a Japanese brewery produced a new type of sake with an ABV content more than triple that of ordinary sake and named it after one of their cities? Raucous drunken laughter? Pride in the national reputation abroad?

The company also produces a beer named Trashy Blonde. Why should Japan be flattered to be included in a product lineup like that?

If I were the Japanese ambassador—or in the Foreign Ministry—I might want to have a word with someone in the Scottish government.

Afterwords:

Scotland is not known for a healthful attitude toward food and drink to begin with. They even eat deep-fried chocolate bars.

Not surprisingly, the residents have the lowest life expectancy of any developed country in the world.

UPDATE: Reader Durf sends along a link to an Internet beer merchant in York for a Cumbrian ale known as “Dent Kamikaze”, which is a mere 5% alcohol by volume. Fortunately, the illustration on the label is of a ram’s head other than something more lurid.

The DPJ otsefinam

IT’S WORTH TAKING a close look at the photo accompanying this post even if you don’t read Japanese. The picture shows Hatoyama Yukio, the head of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, holding up a booklet with the party’s campaign slogan, Seiken Kotai, or Change of Government, as the title. Just below that the English word “manifesto” is visible. (The Japanese have imported that British term directly into their language to describe what Americans would call a party platform.) At the bottom right of the booklet is the party symbol and the name of the party.

Who are you going to believe--me or your lying eyes?

The photo was taken at a Tokyo press conference on 27 July attended by roughly 500 members of the media when Mr. Hatoyama presented the party manifesto for the upcoming lower house election just one month away. As the vernacular edition of the Asahi Shimbun reported, it specifies the schedule for implementing the party’s primary policies if they wind up forming a government. The Asahi adds, “The DPJ positions this manifesto as its basic policy for budget formulation.” The event itself was surely the best-attended press conference in Japanese history for the presentation of an opposition party’s political platform, and that’s just how the DPJ wanted it. It was a prime opportunity to demonstrate to the nation that they are indeed capable of governing.

This time, however, the picture is not worth quite a thousand words–it helps to have some supplementation from the following three short videos of television news reports. The first video is a report of the press conference. It starts off with Mr. Hatoyama saying, “We will fight our campaign for a change in government based on the manifesto.” At the 1:25 mark, the news reader reveals that the DPJ says it will continue for the time being Japan’s UN-approved Indian Ocean refueling mission in support of the NATO effort in Afghanistan. Trying to stop that mission was the first ploy the party used to try to bring down the LDP government in the fall of 2007 after it took control of the upper house of the Diet. (It didn’t work.) Then, at about the 1:30 mark, there’s a close-up of the booklet with a clear shot of the word “manifesto”.

The news reader continues by noting that critics charge the DPJ’s spending proposals are unrealistic and will have problems finding the money. A DPJ official appears at about the 2:00 mark to say, “It’s not possible that there aren’t any funding sources.”

The second video also offers coverage of Mr. Hatoyama’s press conference. It shows the banner above and behind the podium that describes the event as the “announcement of the manifesto”.

Further, it shows Mr. Hatoyama saying that if he becomes prime minister and is unable to achieve the promises in the manifesto, “I will accept responsibility as a politician”.

It concludes with a brief clip of Prime Minister Aso Taro: “The funding sources are irresponsible. It’s extremely vague. That’s the biggest problem.”

Finally, here’s a third video of a television report with a male and female news reader. It was broadcast on Wednesday, 29 July, just two days after the DPJ presented its manifesto.

The male news reader leads off with Mr. Hatoyama’s claim that what he presented as the party “manifesto” isn’t the “official manifesto”. The female news reader adds that people think his about-face stems from Osaka Gov. Hashimoto Toru’s criticism of the platform, and that the DPJ is going to make some additions.

This video is worth watching if only to see the facial expression and demeanor of Mr. Hatoyama from 20-40 seconds in when he lies to the reporters realizing that every last one of them knows he’s lying as he stands there talking. What’s he saying?

“What I presented before was a “Collection of Government Policies”. It wasn’t the official manifesto. I have given instructions that language be inserted regarding a deliberative council for the nation(al government) and the region(al governments).”

The female reporter then explains Gov. Hashimoto slammed the party’s failure to include a plank in the platform calling for the creation of that body to discuss devolution.

She adds that Mr. Hatoyama now says the party won’t extend the Indian Ocean refueling mission after it expires on January 15, despite what he said two days before.

The Osaka governor has good reason to be upset. For starters, devolution is his pet policy–it’s the foundation of his political career, and it’s kept his public approval rating at the 80% level. That rating is why the DPJ is courting his support. Not long ago, they sent party bigwig Okada Katsuya to Osaka to sorta kinda promise that the DPJ would back the creation of a state/province system, which Mr. Hatoyama strongly supports.

The party’s pas de deux with the Osaka governor is made more complicated by the fact that they backed his opponent in the last election.

Then, as you can see from this English-language page on the DPJ website, four other DPJ officials paid a call on Mr. Hashimoto on 8 July. The DPJ’s report on the meeting contains this sentence:

“…in order for decentralization to take place, he wanted the DPJ to include a reference to it as a governing mechanism that would fundamentally change the relationship between the central government and the regions in the party manifesto.”

That’s not the best translation, but it’s understandable. In other words, the governor asked the party to create a deliberative council for devolution, and fewer than three weeks later, they blew him off. Were they so busy scouting around for funding sources for their other platform planks that it just plumb slipped their mind, or was their hot interest in devolution just so much hot air to attract votes?

My, but aren’t the DPJ a piece of work? They play kissy face with one of the country’s most popular politicians and then forget completely about him before the month is out. On a Monday, they hold a press conference to unveil their long-awaited party platform. Mr. Hatoyama calls it a manifesto, the banner in the hall calls it a manifesto, it says manifesto on the cover, and the mass media calls it a manifesto.

On a Tuesday, Mr. Hashimoto wonders what happened with all those sweet nothings the party fed him earlier this month. On a Wednesday, Party President Hatoyama Yukio, looking for all the world like a teenager talking to a store manager while desperately hoping the shoplifted merchandise he’s stuffed under his shirt isn’t showing, says, oh, that, that was no official manifesto, that was just a “Collection of Government Policies”.

Oops! Too bad he forget to tell the rest of the party. Clicking on the link to the Democratic Party of Japan on the right sidebar will take you to their English site. That in turn has a link to a 47-page PDF file in English that has Manifesto written all over it. It’s even there in English on the Japanese version. Hey, maybe that’s it! The word “manifesto” is written in English and not in Japanese, so maybe it really doesn’t count!

Then again, at the bottom of the last page of the English version, it says:

Date ***, *** 2009

Now you know why the percentage of undecided voters for the upcoming election is still hovering between 35-40%, even though the LDP is so clapped out as a political force they probably couldn’t muster the energy to rig the election if their lives depended on it.

The DPJ has been trying to convince everyone for two years that they’re finally ready to take over the reins of government. Yet two days after rolling out their party platform, they come up with a dog-ate-my-homework excuse to deny it was the platform to buy time for rewriting it and include a plank to placate an important, non-DPJ governor they were flirting with earlier this month.

During the same two-day period, Mr. Hatoyama did another 180-degree spin on his statement about the Indian Ocean refueling mission.

Here’s the funniest part: If the DPJ wins the election and forms a government, pundits and talking heads around the world will try to fill newspaper space, airtime, and websites with predictions on what the party will do while in office. But every last column inch, broadcast second, and pixel will be a waste of time for the news consumer.

The DPJ itself doesn’t have a clue what it’s going to do from day to day. How is anyone else supposed to know?

The party and its supporters like to claim it’s full of policy wanks. Maybe they’re right–who else would have so little experience with retail politics and actual government to think that the most important document in the party’s history is a cut-and-paste collage subject to change at a moment’s notice?

Manifestly, it’s no exaggeration to say that if the party’s not ready for prime time now, it never really will be.

Afterwords:

Reading the entire DPJ platform is mildly interesting if you have some time to kill. As with most documents of this sort, it’s a combination of some good ideas and some arrant nonsense.

It was a bit of a surprise to see that they stuck with their old plan to eliminate 80 proportional representational seats from the lower house. The Social Democrats threatened to withhold any cooperation with the DPJ in government if they included that plank. Perhaps the DPJ has calculated that they don’t need their help after all.

On the other hand, they claim they have to freeze postal privatization because the LDP decided to take the step without “public engagement”. Before you ask yourself if they expect anyone to believe that bologna, remember that the party also expects people to believe that Monday’s Manifesto was really only Wednesday’s “Collection of Government Policies”.

Those who remember the lower house election of 2005 don’t need to be reminded that then-Prime Minister Koizumi dissolved the Diet and fought the campaign entirely over the issue of postal privatization. That’s the most “public engagement” a politician or party has ever offered the Japanese public in the last quarter of a century, and it electrified the country.

Then again, maybe the DPJ forgot about that, too. Okada Katsuya was party president at the time, and he does often seem as if he’s sleepwalking during broad daylight.

It’s also worth noting that the “Collection of Government Policies” does not include a call for providing voting rights in local elections to non-citizens; i.e., the people born in Japan who choose to retain Korean citizenship. All the top DPJ brass support that measure, but a reported 51 of the party’s Diet members are so strongly opposed that it created concerns of a rupture. (The constitutionality of that measure is also on the iffy side.)

And one wonders what Mr. Hatoyama means by “taking responsibility as a politician” if he’s unable as prime minister to implement the policies in the platform. The last time he said he would take responsibility, it was in the context of resigning from his party leadership position if former president Ozawa Ichiro resigned over a fund-raising scandal.

On a Monday, Mr. Ozawa did resign. On the following Saturday, Mr. Hatoyama “took responsibility” by taking Mr. Ozawa’s place.

UPDATES:

Mr. Okada has since chimed in by saying he thinks having flexible policies is A-OK:

“We shouldn’t be reluctant to amend (the manifesto) if it’s necessary.”

In fact, the DPJ had one of its local Osaka party members visit Mr. Hashimoto for an explantion.

But everyone had to wait for the man who some think still calls the shots for the DPJ behind the scenes: disgraced former party president Ozawa Ichiro. You betcha he had an opinion, too.

“It wouldn’t be (a) bad (idea) to include (the plank about the deliberative council), but we’re saying that we will make a fundamental change to the current government mechanisms. It isn’t necessary to conduct a debate on the premise of the current mechanisms.”

In other words, he thinks the manifesto doesn’t have to be changed.

Now there are reports (which I haven’t seen first-hand), that the party has pirouetted once again and is saying their first manifesto is official after all.

If true, it would seem as if they had to go ask daddy to straighten up their most recent fine mess. It brings yet another dimension to the phrase, in loco parentis.

FURTHER UPDATE: How interesting that YouTube pulled the third video for the lack of proper authorization, but the two initial reports remain available.

Somebody somewhere obviously doesn’t want you to see something. I think we can all draw our own conclusions.

Now I get it…

EFFICIENT USE of the Internet has often been a problem for me right around the witching hour in Japan. Accessing web pages, or even different parts of the same web page, slows to a crawl. It’s taken me as long as an hour to put up a post on this site around midnight, when it would have taken only a few minutes had I performed the same tasks during normal working hours.

At times it’s been so frustrating, I’ve felt like taking an axe to the computer.

Now I know why. This Bloomberg article explains the reason. The title? “Porn Downloads Strain Japan Phone Network”.

“We can’t see customers’ data but can surmise the biggest portion of it is probably movies,” said KDDI spokesman Keiichi Sakurai. “We can’t deny the possibility those movies include adult content.”

Customers have complained about stoppages or slow Web access, mainly around midnight when traffic from “heavy users” spikes, Sakurai said. Japanese carriers spent $74 billion building their networks since 2000, based on data provided by Wireless Intelligence, a London-based researcher.

One reason for the problem is that Japan was among the first to use advanced technology:

“When you have unlimited data, you’re going to have an issue with capacity — it’s an issue that’s been waiting to happen,” said Windsor Holden, principal analyst at Juniper Research Ltd. “It wouldn’t surprise me that it happens in Japan first because they’ve had 3G for so much longer.”

It’s forcing DoCoMo and others to take steps to limit access:

While profiting from the traffic, Tokyo-based mobile carriers DoCoMo and KDDI Corp. say they’ve been forced to impose limits on the heaviest users as the $74 billion network feels the strain.

And:

“Pornography will eventually open a debate about how carriers should modify their business model as data traffic swells,” said Yusuke Tsunoda, a telecommunications analyst at Tokai Tokyo Securities Co. “It may prompt even tighter access restrictions.”

Thanks for nothing, dudes. Here’s an idea: Why don’t you do the rest of us a favor–and yourselves most of all–and find yourself a real woman? You know, get some flesh-and-blood action instead of the self-defeating vicarious jollies you’re trying to pretend is “pleasure”. Or is that too much to ask?

There’s a very simple rule with women: if you make them happy, they’ll make you happy. You don’t have to be a doormat, and you don’t have to pretend to be a stud; just put a smile on their face and a song in their heart. It’s not that hard as long as you are. Heck, if you use your natural-born imagination, you don’t always have to be that, either.

Some of them might even be so happy they’ll volunteer to cook you a meal. Now wouldn’t that taste a lot better than the crappy convenience store plastic-flavored bento you’ve been dribbling down the front of your dirty tee-shirt while you watch the semi-pros go through the motions?

Hokuto’s Web site offers 2-minute video clips for phone users for as little as 100 yen and sells full-length movies for DoCoMo subscribers.

“Whenever there is a new distribution method for adult content, adult content will go that medium,” said Holden at Juniper Research. “It’s gone that way since cavemen drew adult pictures in the cave.”

But at least the cavemen were using live models and drew those pictures based on experience.

Here’s a timeless tip: There’s no finer medium for enjoying your adult content than to use the old-fashioned distribution method.

Trigger-happy Tokyo

SLIGHTLY MORE than six years ago, the American blogger Jim Treacher wrote this in response to the Michael Moore suggestion that Saddam Hussein be removed from power non-violently:

Good Idea! First we’ll coax Saddam out of his bunker with a trail of delicious candy. Then, once his belly is full and he’s all sleepy and happy, we’ll calmly explain that we don’t approve of what he’s been doing and it’s not very nice and we wish he’d stop. And he’ll be like, “Whoa, I never thought of it that way. You guys are my friends! I like you!” And then everybody will hug and cry, and then get a little embarrassed about crying, and then make some jokes to cover up being embarrassed. And then a beautiful rainbow will appear, and a shy unicorn will walk down it, and Saddam will ride the unicorn to the North Pole, and he’ll spend the rest of his life helping Santa make wonderful toys for all the good little girls and boys, and there’ll be hot chocolate, and, and, and, and nobody will ever ever die again for any reason ever. THE END

No, it’s not nice to quote someone else’s blog post in its entirety, but it’s even worse to mess around with a dead-on Internet classic.

I bring this up because it turns out that even though Saddam and his psychotic sons have met their final reward, the Pollyannas are still with us. Tom Plate has come up with an idea for dealing with Kim Jong-il remarkably similar to the parody above. Except Mr. Plate is serious. His suggestion?

Better to execute an Obama…and run circles around the North Koreans with an embarrassment of recognition and riches. Drop the embargo, establish a U.S. embassy in Pyongyang (we have no official representation there now ― can you believe it?), fatten the regime up with aid, accumulate leverage, change the behavior, establish regional peace ― try to be subtle, indirect and smart for once.

Now I ask you: How often does one encounter the combination of an ignorance of history (of the world, not just this part of Asia in the recent past), the apparent absence of practical life experience, and the Little Jack Hornerism of proclaiming oneself subtle and smart?

I understand that the Obama administration seems intent on throwing as many devalued dollars it can into a big ditch and burning them, but that’s no reason to encourage them to export the practice.

And yes, I know that the U.S has no official representation in Pyeongyang, and I think it’s a capital idea.

I ran across this at The Marmot’s site–I don’t have time for Mr. Plate any more–and he handles it well. He also provides a link to the Plate article for those disposed to read it.

I’ll take exception to one more thing that The Marmot overlooked:

…we don’t do that and here’s what we get: probably a destabilizing regional arms race ― amid a trigger-happy Tokyo. For it is hard to believe that the Japanese will sit tight with Pyongyang on a missile-test spree. For Japan, North Korea, in the midst of a leadership succession, is far more the enemy than China and, in case we haven’t noticed, the politics in Tokyo these days is volatile. The government is unstable and the opposition under reorganization. So Pyongyang is to Tokyo what Tehran is to Tel Aviv: a constant temptation to launch a preemptive strike.

A trigger-happy Tokyo? To paraphrase the immortal Calvin and Hobbes, someone’s been eating too much paste in art class.

And while the political situation in Tokyo may well be about to undergo a drastic shift, it’s hardly “volatile”. It’s just democracy at work.

Perhaps distracted by unicorns and moonbeams, it is Mr. Plate who has failed to notice a few things. Namely, that Tel Aviv has already done the world several favors by launching preemptive strikes on Iraqi and and Syrian nuclear plants, while Japanese preemptive military strikes have been non-existent since the early 1940s (they haven’t rattled so much as a kitchen knife, much less a saber, since then), and that the only method for dealing with psychotic thugs is the threat of a two by four across the snout while stepping firmly on their windpipe.

Ah, but Mr. Plate has written for Time, Newsday, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others, and he’s now a professor at UCLA and writes syndicated columns about Asia on the side.

He’s got credentials.

This is all the more inexcusable considering a previous comment he published about Japan…

Remember that Japan remains, to its honor and credit, a largely pacifist and non-nuclear nation.

…for which I commended him in this piece. But he seems to think the country’s turned trigger happy in the past two years. Either that or his opinions change with the phases of the moon.

In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s rule in Soviet Russia created a famine that killed an estimated 14 million and a system of prison camps and terror that killed millions more. As he was doing so, he was showered with praise, in Malcolm Muggeridge’s words, by “the great ones like Shaw and Gide and Barbusse and Julian Huxley and Harold Uski and the Webbs, down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, and drivelling dons…” To show how little the world has changed, the New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, which largely consisted of cover-ups and outright lies about the Soviet regime.

Do not misunderstand: I am not suggesting that Mr. Plate is guilty of the same crime against humanity that Mr. Duranty was, nor that he has become a willing dupe in the same way that Shaw and the Webbs were.

But Kim Jong-il is the closest replica the modern world has to Joseph Stalin, including the famines, the purges, and the prison camps. If one would retch at the idea of extending to Stalin “an embarrassment of recognition and riches”, why are we supposed to think that doing the same to the Kim Family Regime would be subtle and smart?

Afterwords:
Jim Treacher used to call his blog, Mother, May I Sleep with Treacher?, but he changed it. More’s the pity!

Yacurling we will go

THERE MAY BE nothing new under the sun, but big fun often results when imaginative people modify and adapt whatever’s at hand to create something semi-new. One such group of people, led by 66-year-old physical education instructor Kita Ryoko in Mima, Tokushima, decided they wanted to invent a new sport that could be played by people of any age.

What they came up with was yacurling. It’s similar to curling, but played on a gymnasium floor with a kettle instead of on specially treated ice with a granite stone. Curling has shown up on everyone’s radar in Japan since the better-than-expected performance of the women’s team at the 2006 Winter Olympics. The women’s team also finished fourth at the 2008 World Championships, though they didn’t fare so well this year. (The women from China won instead.)

Ms. Kita and her crew started with a five-liter yakan, which is a Japanese-style kettle. (There are different sizes, but they all look the same.) They cut three holes in the bottom of the kettle and inserted casters to allow it to roll. To make sure it moves along smartly, they put 2.5 kilograms of ballast inside.

The players stand nine meters away from the target (which in curling is called the house). The house in yacurling has a diameter of 0.65 meters. The winner is the player who can roll the stone (yakan) closest to the center. Unlike curling, the stone is recovered after each toss, so strategic placement and knocking the the other team’s stones out of the way aren’t factors in this game.

The inventors worked out the kinks at a local sports club on Saturdays and were delighted to discover that it was harder than they thought it would be. Now they hope to get other people interested.

For the sake of comparison, a curling stone is from 17 to 20 kilograms in weight (and costs several hundred dollars). The house is 3.7 meters wide, and the players stand from 45 to 46 meters away.

Yacurling looks like an inexpensive way to have fun to me. Of course it’s just a game rather than a new sport, but who wouldn’t want to try it at least once?

About that name—Japanese vowels have only one pronunciation each. The Japanese A is always pronounced like the A in “father”. Curling in Japanese is rendered ka-ri-n-gu, so the first two syllables in yakan (N at the end of words is a separate unit) are pronounced the same as the first two in yaka-ringu (yacurling).

The reports didn’t say whether it was an individual sport or a team sport, so I don’t know if the team members use a mop on the floor to help the kettle roll home!

Afterwords:
The more I think about this, the more it reminds me of something the members of my college fraternity would have cooked up. One night well past the witching hour, two of the members stole a wheelchair from a nearby hospital (I know, I know), and within 24 hours, we were having contests in the living room to see who could do a wheelie the longest (i.e., ride around balanced on the two back wheels with the front wheels in the air).

From hot naked men to a cold snowy temple

IF THERE ARE PEOPLE ANYWHERE who are more blasé about the human body and less squeamish about the facts of life than the Japanese, I’ve yet to meet them.

That’s why it was so puzzling earlier this year when JR East—the train company serving Tokyo and the Kanto region—refused to display a poster in its stations publicizing a centuries-old Iwate festival with a photo of a shirtless, hairy-chested man shouting at the top of his lungs. JR East was afraid some people would become offended if they thought the images constituted “sexual harassment”.

More than a few Japanese, who grow up from the age of zero going to public baths with their parents and are aware that all sorts of rowdiness and revelry can go on at a traditional festival, were boggled by the news. Yet JR East held its ground. (Here’s my post from earlier this year, which includes a brief explanation of the festival and some links.)

The story resurfaced in the national media again today when the sponsors released the poster that will be used to publicize next year’s festival, which will be held in February. Fortunately, we also have a brief TV report from TBS that includes shots of last year’s offending poster, next year’s poster, and some of the wild and wooly behavior of the nearly naked men getting primitive while surrounded by flaming torches. A translation follows below.

The Somin Festival of the Kokuseki Buddhist temple of Oshu, Iwate, garnered nationwide attention this year due to controversy over a poster it used to advertise the event. Festival organizers have now released the poster for next year’s festival. Based on the theme of tranquility, it features a photograph of the temple during a snowstorm.

The festival is known for combining (nearly) naked men and fire rituals. JR East refused to hang last year’s poster because they thought the photograph of the naked upper body of a man giving a loud roar would cause discomfort to some. This touched off a national controversy.

Oshu alternates the themes of the poster every year from tranquility to dynamism. Officials say the change this year is nothing special.

Afterwords: JR East’s decision still mystifies me, as well as the Oshuites I saw interviewed on TV this evening. Anyone who would think this year’s poster was an example of sexual harassment needs to schedule an appointment with a competent psychologist. And stop subjecting the rest of the world to their personality quirks.

Taiwan’s pig bile shampoo

‘Twas a brave man that first ate an oyster.
- Jonathan Swift

WHILE LOOKING FOR something else, I stumbled across this article explaining that Taiwanese merchants have created a shampoo out of pig bile.

“Using pig bile as a shampoo is not a new invention. It had just been forgotten about for a while. In fact, it is an ingredient that the older generation is quite aware of,” said Chen Chih-hao, the manager of the meat market in Nantou.

Mr. Chen says that his grandmother would visit the home of people in the neighborhood who slaughtered a pig and ask specifically for the gall bladder.

Never underestimate the resourcefulness of women when it comes to discovering and using without hesitation new beauty aids or cosmetics, regardless of the source.

It’s not surprising that people would use something once it was shown to be safe and effective, but think about this: Who was the brave woman who had the idea to put that stuff on her head to begin with? And why did she do it?

Too long in Japan

IN THE EARLY 1990s, there was a Tokyo-based English-language message board for PC users called TWICS. That was before the advent of Windows 95, when few people knew about the World Wide Web, much less used it.

As is the norm for Internet message boards, there were separate areas where people could discuss different topics. Many of the members were translators who had joined specifically to discuss Japanese-English translation subjects with other translators in a topic called “Honyaku”. (Honyaku still lives as an independent mailing list through Google.) There were also areas for discussing such topics as music, movies, books, Tokyo restaurants, and politics.

Early in the summer of 1993, a German member named Rene Rentzell created a topic called “Too Long in Japan”. The premise was simple: Finish the sentence that began, “You know you’ve been in Japan too long when…”

The topic was an instant hit, and more than 1,400 messages were submitted in slightly more than a year. (TWICS no longer exists, I think, going out of business not long after that when the Web exploded in the mid-90s and it did not offer competitive prices as an IP.)

Many of those original messages were quite funny, and almost immediately they began to be passed around Japan and the world on the Net in shorter lists. Just about all of the lists I’ve seen cherry-picked the best from the original TWICS topic, however. For example, long-time poster Ken (the Japanese Ken) sent in a link to a website earlier this week that has some of the messages, and every one of them originated on TWICS.

I was a member of TWICS in those days and participated in that topic. As luck would have it, I stumbled across a nearly complete copy of the list, including the message headers, on a German site last year while looking for something else. (It was probably put there by Rene, who might have been understandably proud of what he started.)

I hesitated to put it up on this site because I wasn’t sure how some Japanese might react, but Ken assures me there will be no problem. Therefore, I’ve added the TWICS Ur-list as a separate page, which you can access either here or on the masthead at the top.

All the Internet lists I’ve seen have stripped away the headers identifying the posters. The list I found still had the headers, and I’ve retained them because some of these ideas are so clever that the original authors deserve the credit. Rene in those days wrote under the name RRR. One of the best and most prolific posters was Bill Lise (writing as Billlise), who inspired another Ampontan post here. (Bill came to Japan around 1965, so he had plenty of ammunition.) I also contributed to that topic under my real name, and one pleasant Sunday afternoon in July 1993 Bill and I engaged in a friendly battle royal over the Internet, which is included in toto here. (It starts at around post #312.)

Some of the jokes are obvious, but some are deliciously subtle, such as #90, #210, #396, and #917. If I had to choose a favorite it would be #543.

There were more than 1,400 notes for this topic, but I’ve removed off-topic chatter and the inevitable duplicates where I spotted them. Nevertheless, there are still about 1,000. For some reason, the list I found on the German site started at #13, so the ones before that are probably lost to history. This is a long list, so it might be difficult to read through it all at once. Think of it as a giant box of chocolates: It’s not possible to eat the whole thing in one sitting.

Also, one of my own originals wasn’t on the list I found:
You know you’ve been in Japan too long when–
– You’re talking on the phone to your father overseas and he suddenly asks, “What the hell are you grunting for?”

This particular joke was one of those often included in the early lists that circulated on the Internet, and that’s when I realized that the idea for this topic had struck a chord among long-term foreign residents. It resonated in particular because it was a true story, and readers remembered something similar happening to them, or could imagine it happening to them. In a way, the Japanese should feel pleased. It is an implicit recognition by the foreigners living in Japan just how much the country has meant and still means to their lives.

Once you get started, it’s hard to stop. Just while preparing this post, I came up with:
You know you’ve been in Japan too long when–
–You can listen to sumo on the radio and follow the action (which I’m doing right now!)
–You walk down the street and someone you don’t know all that well asks you, “Where are you going”, and instead of thinking, “What a nosy question”, you smile and say, “Oh, just over there.”
- You are talking to another person, who, while making jokes about a third person who is also present, says, “Oh, this is that,” and you immediately understand.
–You walk into a traditional sushi shop and aren’t surprised to see Christmas decorations.

The list dates from 1993-1994, so some of the messages (particularly about TV programs and personalities) might be difficult to understand for people who hadn’t come to Japan yet. A case in point is #504; getting that joke requires the knowledge of two different people in show business, a TV program that was popular in the early 90s, and another TV program that was popular more than a decade before that. There are occasional references to obatarian, a word I don’t hear so much any more, so I suppose that could be the basis for another joke: You know you’ve been in Japan too long if you know what an obatarian is!

If anyone is inspired to add to the list, feel free to add your own in the Comment section!

Obama is beautiful world

HERE’S A YouTube video lasting just under four minutes with a catchy song and video performance based on the idea that Obama (the man, not the city in Japan) is Beautiful World. (Though the city is probably where the shoe store in the video got its name.)

It’s a lot of fun and is worth watching regardless of your political preferences, because it’s a great demonstration of how positive and unselfconsciously playful the Japanese can be. It’s one of the reasons I like Japan so much. There’s not a lick of cynical irony or tiresome politicizing in there at all–just a bunch of people goofing off and having a good time.

That said, I have to wonder whether the guy wearing the helmet with the blue plastic dolphin on top has been hanging out with too many Obama supporters from the other side of the Pacific.