Bad penny

HAVING the proverbial bad penny turn up is already inauspicious, but when the bad penny in circulation is the founder of the ruling political party and a disaster as its first prime minister, the current prime minister’s government has a 20% rate of support and sinking in the latest Asahi Shimbun poll, and the party itself could disintegrate after the next election, if not before, there aren’t enough synonyms for headache to describe the reaction.

Yes, Hatoyama Yukio, the Loopster himself, is back in the news, and perhaps the only person in Japan who’s happy about it is his mother. His wife can’t be that oblivious to her surroundings.

Then again, the DPJ has only itself to blame for its bad fortune. It was their bright idea to give him the title of supreme advisor for international affairs. Perhaps they hoped he would consider it a substitute for a gold watch as a keepsake for founding the party with his mother’s illegally contributed money. It would also give him an excuse to sit at the head table at banquets and seminars that no one of consequence attended or took seriously, thus keeping him out of everyone else’s way.

As with all of the party’s other bright ideas, that one didn’t work either.

The United States, Europe, and Israel are at sixes and sevens trying to find a way to deal with, or find a plausible excuse to avoid dealing with, Iran and its nuclear program. That country, which has the world’s third-highest total of oil reserves, is currently the subject of four different UN resolutions for its refusal to stop enriching uranium. The Iranians claim they are only working to develop nuclear energy capabilities, and not even Hatoyama Yukio believes them.

Multilateral negotiations with the country ended in disarray a year ago, but resumed this month and will continue again next month. Japan hasn’t taken a prominent role in these negotiations, but has been working behind the scenes with the EU and the U.S. to apply pressure on the Iranians to cease and desist.

That’s when Mr. Hatoyama decided he could help by having a face-to-face meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and persuade him that the path of unicorns, sunbeams, and strawberry alarm clocks was preferable to apocalyptic visions of the 12th imam and the destruction of the Zionist entity.

In other words, it would be the Loopy Summit.

This was the reaction to the news in Japan:

The government did its darndest to keep him from getting on the plane for a four-day visit that started on the 6th. The Foreign Ministry’s talking mannequin Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro implored him to at least postpone the trip, but Mr. Hatoyama wouldn’t hear of it. He said the arrangements had already been made, and added:

“This country will not endure if the government alone is capable of conducting diplomacy. I will say what should be said to Iran as a friend, and work to ensure that they do not take any military action.”

You didn’t think I was joking about facepalms, did you?

The meeting went ahead as scheduled. Mr. Hatoyama got his photo op sitting in a chair next to the Iranian president, with an interpreter between and the national flags of the two countries in the background. You know, just like all the real playas in international diplomacy. He thought everything went swimmingly. So did the Iranians. Their news agency quoted him as saying:

“It is unfair of the IAEA to apply double standards (to Iran).”

While everyone in the Japanese government and media did a double facepalm, Mr. Hatoyama registered an objection at the Iranian embassy in Tokyo and asked the Iranian government to remove that statement from their website. He insisted that he asked the Iranians to cooperate with the IAEA and added:

“The article is a complete fabrication. This is very regrettable. I am going to tell them that I didn’t say that…Japan has worked to dispel the skepticism of the international community.”

Lamented Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu:

“We kept telling him it wasn’t a good idea to go now, even unofficially as an individual.”

Trying to limit the damage, DPJ Policy Affairs Chief Maehara Seiji said:

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the party.”

Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko was close to being at a loss for words:

“I want to believe Mr. Hatoyama. But…well, it is what it is.”

Across the aisle in the opposition ranks, New Komeito head Yamaguchi Natsuo thought it was “extremely regrettable”. The LDP wants him to testify in the Diet and answer to the charge of harming the national interest. But El Loopo disagrees:

“I’m glad I went….I strongly stated my position that I wanted to create a world without nuclear weapons, and President Ahmadinejad listened carefully. My message was conveyed to him.”

That wasn’t the only message conveyed to him. Everyone tried to pin down exactly what he told the Iranian president, and Mr. Hatoyama finally admitted that he did say this:

“It is a fact that countries already with nuclear weapons have an advantage under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and in a real sense that is perhaps unfair.”

In other words, the Iranians are guilty only of rephrasing instead of lying.

If you think it can’t get any worse, you’re forgetting that this is the Loopmeister we’re talking about.

This Monday, Mr. Hatoyama announced that he wants to return to Tehran for another conference.

“I do not think I was trusted by making just one visit…What can a person who has been a prime minister do? I want to continue to make some sort of effort in the future”.

Here’s the definition of working at cross purposes: Hatoyama Yukio is trying to remind everyone that he is important because he was prime minister, and the rest of Japan is trying to forget it ever happened.

Nope nope nope. We’re not finished yet. His Royal Loopiness met Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian national authority, in a Tokyo hotel last week — I see that facepalm! — and said after the meeting:

“I’ve been asked to go to Palestine, so I hope I have the chance to visit as soon as possible. I support self-determination for all people.”

People are now finding the determination to remove the right of self-determination from Mr. Hatoyama for his overseas junkets. Last week, he attended a DPJ meeting in Tomakomai, Hokkaido, a city in the district he represents in the Diet. Polls have been showing for two years there’s a good chance he’ll lose his seat in the next lower house election — that requires no explanation — and even the people who have supported him in the past are unhappy with his decision to unretire a few months after he said he would retire when his term ends. Added another supporter:

“I think it would be best if he showed some restraint with his feeling of being a former prime minister. It’s more important that he come here than go to Iran.”

Remember: It was on the Monday after this weekend meeting that he said he thought he should have another tete-a-tete with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

The local branch of the LDP is already at work recruiting a potential challenger. They’ve asked Horii Manabu to consider running in the next election. Mr. Horii won an Olympic bronze medal in speed skating in 1994 and is now in his second term in the Hokkaido prefectural assembly. In addition to his name recognition and experience in local government, Mr. Horii is a native of the area, which Mr. Hatoyama is not.

But even if Mr. Horii decides to run (it looks like he might) and wins, that won’t get rid of the bad penny. Under Japan’s proportional representation system, Mr. Hatoyama can get himself placed at the top of the list for generic party voting and be returned to the Diet even if he loses.

Yes, the politicians in Japan have created a system that prevents the voters from throwing the bums out even when they vote to throw the bums out. Not even the Democrats in America have come up with a plan that brilliant.

It cannot be dismissed out of hand that Mr. Hatoyama’s brain is so vacuum-packed and shrink-wrapped that he is unaware of the problems he’s causing. As I’ve written before, he was the first junior high school girl to serve as the prime minister of Japan. Another possibility is that he is following the example of former American President Jimmy Carter and promoting himself for the Nobel Peace Prize, AKA the Lifetime Achievement Award for Social Democrats. There’s one significant difference, however. Mr. Carter is a spiteful, malevolent, and obnoxiously self-important little man.

Hatoyama Yukio is just plain loopy.

Afterwords:

The Asahi Shimbun also noticed the Carter-Hatoyama similarities. The primary difference between the two men in their opinion is that Mr. Carter is “realistic”.

But then the Asahi is to newspapers what Hatoyama Yukio is to politics and governance.

Here’s one possible explanation for his behavior:

Ichigen koji (95)

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

Why are there so many people here? Important matters are decided by five or six people. Quit screwing around! Get a smaller room ready!

- Former Prime Minister Kan Naoto on 15 March 2011 at Tokyo Electric Power headquarters, as quoted by the Tokyo Shimbun. He was in the Operations Room, where more than 200 people had stayed up all night the night before dealing with the Fukushima nuclear accident. He thought he was in the Conference Room.

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

Blackballing the red ball

Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.
- Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing

THOUGH some of us are loath to admit it, all of us love lowbrow humor. We always have and we always will. It’s marbled throughout the Canterbury Tales, the existence of Fawlty Towers and the Gong Show depended on it, and Shakespeare loved it, as the line above shows. In fact, the lowbrow humor in that play starts with the title: the word “nothing” in Shakespeare’s day is said to have been a euphemism for the female genitalia.

One of the highest forms of low humor results when some people try to engage in serious sociopolitical discourse. During his brief campaign for president of the U.S., for example, Herman Cain offered a proposal to rework the American tax system into three segments with a rate of 9% each, which he called the 9-9-9 plan. A few people otherwise inclined to support his candidacy were apprehensive, however, because turning 9-9-9 upside down results in 6-6-6…

There’s also the buffoonery of some Barack Obama supporters, convinced since 2008 that racism is the reason for every criticism of their man. That racism is found in charges that he acts too “professorial”, is “elitist”, “out of touch”, or “skinny”. Just as amusing is that they like to refer to this disguised nastiness as a “dog whistle”. (If that’s the case, how come they hear it?) Then there’s the whole topic of political correctness, which might as well be Comedy Central.

Anyone looking for laughs in Northeast Asia can dip into anything that Hatoyama Yukio says about anything, listen to the arguments that Ozawa Ichiro is being railroaded by prosecutors, or eavesdrop on the perpetual South Korean domestic conversation about Japanese phantasmata.

The latest installment of the latter circulated last month when South Korea’s Grand National Party, known locally as Hannara, was in the process of remaking its image. The party, which holds the most seats in the national assembly, changed its name to Saenuri in Korean and the New Frontier Party in English. They also adopted a new logo in conjunction with the new name, and the changes took effect this month.

The old design featured a red circle with a blue line underneath. Here’s what it looked like.

That’s an artistic representation of a human figure, right? Nah. This is South Korea. The posse irritati complained that the red circle in the logo was something that a Japanese company would use.

Some comments from the Internet:

* Doesn’t the red of the Hannara logo symbolize the Japanese flag?

* The Hannara logo is just like the Japanese flag!

* The Japanese flag is hidden in the Hannara party logo and Seoul city logo!

Apparently those wily Japanese imperialists and their traitorous allies will stop at nothing to sneak their national symbol into the very heart of Korean politics.

The criticism wasn’t confined to the Internet —- politicians never pass up an opportunity to stoop as low as they can to pick up a vote or two. Besides, they had evidence!

That shows a comparison of the party logo with those of a few Japanese companies. Residents of the region know that type of stylized human form has often been used in logos and symbols for close to 20 years now. (It probably started in Japan. Most regional fashions of that sort do nowadays.) The choice of some of the companies also provided unintentional humor. Herald Pictures disappeared into Kadogawa Herald Pictures in 2005. KKC Wellness (logo at bottom left) operates healthcare facilities in the Kinki region and is mostly unknown anywhere else. Finally, the red circle in all of those logos, the Korean ones included, is clearly meant to represent a human head.

Recall that one Koreanetizen referred to the Seoul logo, which some people have been indignant about since its adoption in 1996. It consists of a red circle to symbolize the sun and arty blue and green swatches to represent the sea and the mountains. City officials in Seoul have somehow managed to weather the criticism for incorporating the Japanese motif, and it’s still the municipal emblem:

The Japanese became used to all this long ago, so their comments were characterized by polite bemusement. One journalist wrote, “I can’t say I don’t understand” that the party symbol might be mocked for looking Japanese, but added that the idea any red circle = the Japanese flag is rather extreme.

Still, the Hannara/Saenuri/Grand National/New Frontier Party has to face a general election in April and a presidential election in December while down in the polls. Accusations that their logo contains the Mark of the Beast might offset any of the benefits of an image change. So their official logo now looks like this:

While we’re on the subject of national flags and symbols, it’s worth noting that the South Korean flag contains hexagrams from the I Ching. I’ve always thought that was a cool thing to put on a flag. Maybe it’s time for some of the local Dogberries to take up the I Ching for a remedial reading assignment instead of just looking at the pictures.

*****
There’s a reason both the Globe Theater and the Gong Show had groundlings. Who knows what they’d think in Seoul of that semi-sunburst at the back of the stage?

Suckers

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

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

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

Specifically:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conrad the Gweilo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterwords:

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

Next time for the geopolitical post for sure!

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

Who’d a thunk it?

The press is so powerful in its image-making role that it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal.
– Eldridge Cleaver

THE late Black Panther and codpiece trouser purveyor was speaking the truth, but he was also speaking before the Internet, personal computers, and social networking changed the topography forever. As Glenn Reynolds, a law professor and proprietor of the Instapundit website, put it 10 years ago:

We’ve got computers…21st Century warfare turns out to be marked, as much as anything, by the inability of people to spread outrageous lies undetected. This is a major loss of comparative advantage for the Fisks of the world.

By Fisks, he’s referring to the British journalist Robert Fisk, whose name has become a verb denoting the dismantling of a piece of journalism or op-ed of greater-than-usual stupidity, nonsense, or prevarication from the industrial mass media. Fisk himself was the original target of Fisking, and that target was as easy to hit as the proverbial broad side of a barn. Nowadays, however, people have bigger Fisks to fry and have moved on. Fire has more recently been focused on economist Paul Krugman, who shut down the comment function of his New York Times blog after so many people so easily and so frequently made sport of him. One can understand the Krugmanian dilemma — rare is the Nobel Prize laureate who will sit still for being exposed as a third-rate hypocrite.

After all these years — well, about 15 or so, starting with the launch of Windows 95 — even the lesser lights among them should have gotten a glimmer. They’re still groping in the dark, however, in part because they still manage the odd success, as those who paid attention to their treatment of candidates from both parties in the 2008 American presidential election will remember. Further, one aim of most of those working in the smokestack industry of the 21st century, young and old alike, is to push a narrative and specific political objectives. (As one of them explained to me, that is “to fight for social justice”.) The True Believers never give up, no matter how often they get their noses rubbed in their own fun, like puppies that have ruined a carpet.

They’re still marching resolutely into the 20th century at the Foreign Policy website operated by the Washington Post, one of the most porculent of the remaining Pterodactylus Americani. The parent company should have known the jig was up after the meltdown of Newsweek, the weekly newsmagazine they once owned. It was sold last year for the princely sum of one US dollar. The price was right, considering how many people still read it.

In this case, the gang at Foreign Policy offers a feature profiling the 100 Top Global Thinkers 2011. This exercise in mid-20th century journalistic self-importance has nothing to recommend it apart from the brief and unintentional comedy that results from wondering what FP thinks is thought after seeing their selections for the Hot One Hundred. One of the funniest choices is their token Japan representative: Fukushima Mizuho, head of the Social Democratic Party, and her “partner”, Kaido Yuichi. They were deemed global thinkers because they are anti-nuclear activists.

The Japanese are understandably thrilled when one of their countrymen wins international recognition. Nobel Prizes, Olympic medals, Academy Awards, and astronauts are usually front page news, but not this time — one could almost sense the puzzled looks on the faces and unspoken WTFs in the minds of the reporters who were assigned to write up the story for the print media. Ms. Fukushima’s honor rated two short paragraphs at the bottom of page two in my local newspaper. It was as if they were embarrassed to even bring it up. I read three accounts (from that newspaper, the Asahi, and the Sankei), and none of them had much to say about it, other than a brief recitation of the facts. That even the Asahi, which shares the WaPo/NYT political philosophy, couldn’t get excited, tells the casual observer all he needs to know.

This isn’t a case of the prophet without honor in her own country, either. The only reason anyone knows about Fukushima Mizuho is that she has a Diet seat. The only reason she has a Diet seat is the proportional representation system, as she is incapable of winning a popular vote in an election district. (In fact, only one of the party’s handful of Diet members sits there because of an outright election victory.)

As for her “partner” (i.e., common-law husband) Kaido Yuichi, I’d bet cash money that I could stop 100 people at random on the street and no one will have heard of him…unless, perhaps, we were standing across the street from the Social Democratic Party headquarters.

What Foreign Policy didn’t tell their readers about Japan’s Foremost Global Thinker says a lot about Foreign Policy:

* The party she heads, the Social Democrats, was just the plain old Socialists until the fall of the Berlin Wall forced them into rebranding. Their charter included kind words for Karl Marx. They developed close ties with North Korea, and sponsored an annual “Peace Cruise” to Pyeongyang. (They disliked South Korea because it was a dictatorship rather than a People’s Republic.) As an attorney, Ms. Fukushima has been associated with the defense of radical terrorists of the left.

* She believes that Japan should adopt Costa Rica’s stance of unarmed neutrality. (Even the famously neutral Swiss are armed to the teeth with private weapons.) This is for a country whose immediate neighbors include China, Russia, and North Korea. Perhaps that position is not as suicidal as it seems: After all, the Social Democrats do share a philosophy with China, the old Soviet Union, and North Korea.

* When Japan sent troops to the Middle East in a UN peacekeeping operation, she objected because they were to be given sidearms for self-protection.

* She opposes Japan’s use of the anti-ballistic missile system. One of her arguments against the system in the Diet was that the successful interception of a missile over Japanese territory could create debris that might injure people on the ground. This caused audible laughter in the chamber.

* Not only is she opposed to nuclear power, she is opposed to all but the greenest power. If she has ever come forward with a credible plan for economic growth (she’s a party leader, remember), it’s escaped everyone’s notice.

* She managed to hoodwink the Wall Street Journal’s reporters last year into believing that her opposition to American military bases was limited to the Futenma installation in Okinawa. To be sure, there is some truth to that. The Japanese left has admitted that the American presence allows them to have their cake and eat it too. They get to bash the Americans in public while tacitly accepting their presence. They know the Japanese public would demand a robust domestic defense establishment if the Americans weren’t there to pretend to do it for them.

Stand up for the defense of one’s own country? Perish the thought!

There’s more, but you get the idea. Connect the dots and you get the same sort of blame-yourself-first leftist common in the West. The two paragraphs the Foreign Affairs website allots to her global-level thought are so thin, they’re almost not worth fisking. Here’s a sample:

Fukushima, the lawmaker who leads Japan’s Social Democratic Party, and her partner, Kaido, a public-interest lawyer, have spent three decades resisting Japan’s nuclear rise in their respective arenas: parliament and court. But the cozy nuclear plant operators and government officials who make up Japan’s so-called “nuclear village” largely ignored their efforts — that is, until this year.

The so-called “nuclear village” residents, as well as the rest of the country, are still ignoring their efforts, and will continue to do so. (Note, by the way, that “cozy” works in this sentence only if it modifies an invisible noun.)

The Fukushima Daiichi disaster has now forced the island country to re-examine the safety of its nuclear facilities.

Duh!

And isn’t it interesting that Foreign Affairs thinks it needs to remind its presumably adult readers that Japan is an “island country”?

Naoto Kan, Japan’s prime minister until he resigned in August, called in July for Japan to wind down its nuclear program, and his successor, Yoshihiko Noda, agrees.

As soon as Mr. Kan called for the nuclear program to wind down, his chief cabinet secretary, Edano Yukio, explained that the prime minister really meant “one of these days in the future”. Mr. Noda has offered lip service of his own, but he’s unlikely to offer more than that.

Kan also requested the closure and upgrade of a power plant in the earthquake-prone coastal city of Hamaoka, a facility whose safety Kaido had called into question nearly a decade earlier.

Since no one at Foreign Affairs seems capable of reading a Japanese newspaper, here’s what actually happened: Work on upgrading the safety measures at Hamaoka had already begun before the problem with the Fukushima plant. Kaieda Banri, then Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry, which is responsible for the oversight of nuclear power in Japan, had quietly negotiated with the plant operators and reached agreement with them for a voluntary suspension of operations. When Mr. Kaieda was about to make the announcement, Kan Naoto instructed him to stand down and went before the public with a demand for the shutdown himself.

And people wonder why Japanese prime ministers don’t last long in office.

Today, Fukushima and Kaido see a changed political horizon. As Fukushima told the New York Times in August, “Although I won’t be able to change the past, I think I can change the future.”

The national political horizon is still as occluded as ever, and she can’t change the future, no matter how much her fellow travelers in the West would wish it to be so. She doesn’t have what it takes to make a difference, either in the Diet or the greater marketplace of public ideas. Indeed, just this week the lower house of the Diet authorized the export of Japanese nuclear power technology to Vietnam, Jordan, Russia, and South Korea.

But to fully understand the pointlessness of this Foreign Affairs space filler, we can put aside Fukushima Mizuho and look at the other people cited as Global Thinkers. One of them was His Adolescency himself, the recipient of an equally irrelevant trinket — the Nobel Peace Prize — that renowned public intellectual and thinker of deep thoughts, Barack Obama.

Stiffen your stomach muscles — they actually praise him for his foreign policy vision of “leading from behind”. (This qualifies as comic relief too.) The FP also shows some diversity in their choice of “intellectual heavyweights”, as they put it. On the one hand, they hail the pacifist Fukushima, and on the other give Obama credit for greasing Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, Ben Bernanke and Dick Cheney also make the list.

To conclude, here’s some credit where credit is due. The illustration of Fukushima Mizuho on the Foreign Affairs website, crude though it is, does capture her personality well. Still, it is curious they didn’t use a photo of her, yet managed to come up with one for the other 99, including an obscure Egyptian novelist.

*****
Bonus bogus journalism postscript from Forbes!

Here’s the headline:

Japan to adopt Bhutan’s principles of Gross National Happiness

This will come as news to the Japanese. With the DPJ government, adopting a fairy tale as public policy is a real possibility, but no one’s agreed to adopt anything yet.

Here’s the facepalm lede:

After a visit from the young King of Bhutan and his beautiful new pride (sic), Japan got “Gross National Happiness” fever, it seems…

Either Lisa Napoli needs to use a different thermometer, or should use the one she has on herself.

A minimally competent journalist aware of events in Japan would have known that then-Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio was scheming with Kan Naoto and Sengoku Yoshito in January 2010 to hold meetings on GNH that summer. The fever caused by the pride of Bhutan had nothing to do with it. Since Mr. Hatoyama didn’t make it to the summer himself, I thought this idea had been relegated to the back of the closet, but it seems not. Leave it to the DPJ to ignore the real for the mochi in the picture.

It’s hard to tell what’s going on from the Forbes article, because the link they provide is a kissing cousin of gibberish. The article concludes:

Lots of other governments are investigating these principles, like France, Great Britain, Brazil, the state of Maryland and the city of Seattle….as it becomes apparent that numbers only aren’t enough.

Yes, lots and lots of other governments, and numbers aren’t nearly enough. Other “principles” need to be factored in, such as this one from the Bhutanese GNH pioneers:

Concerns about safety were high in Bhutan’s rural areas, for example, not because of crime, but because of fears of wood spirits and wild animals.

While it’s true that GDP is an inaccurate metric, as China’s potempkin cities demonstrate, there’s nothing to be gained from moving from the inaccurate to the invisible. Well, other than excuses for creating new, air-based and public money-funded social programs. How like the left to ignore the activities that provide the most people with the most well-being, security, and health in favor of taking the national temperature and worrying about passing clouds of emotional ephemera. How unlike Forbes to fall for it.

*****
The last word on honors should go to the late Richard Feynman, a man who won the Nobel Prize for doing something real.

Letter bombs (23): Big surprise in every tranche

IT’S not a good sign when the Japanese government lifts a PR strategy from Cracker Jack.

Reader Marellus sent in a link to this story of the Finance Ministry’s big idea for boosting sales of reconstruction bonds:

Japanese Finance Minister Jun Azumi will be rewarding investors who buy more than 10 million yen ($129,000) in reconstruction bonds with gold in the government’s latest attempt to bolster demand for the debt.

Individual investors who hold the bonds for three years will be eligible for a gold commemorative coin valued at 10,000 yen, the Finance Ministry said in Tokyo today. At 15.6 grams, (0.55 ounces), it would be worth about $948 based on prices for the precious metal.

I’m not joking with the Cracker Jack crack, either. Here’s what Frito-Lay, the owners of the brand, did in 1998:

Cracker Jack announced today its first-ever holiday prize give-away of limited edition collector jewelry designed exclusively by Neiman Marcus. Cracker Jack will replace the customary toy surprises in 16 packages of the caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts with special certificates for the jewelry. The holiday certificates will be sealed in the traditional Cracker Jack surprise envelopes and randomly distributed inside the new 4-ounce bags and 7-ounce box of Cracker Jack sold at retail stores nationwide…

Cracker Jack’s seasonal surprises include eight 18-karat gold rings with a ruby, emerald or sapphire stone and valued at $950 each.

Even accounting for the increase in gold prices over the last 14 years, some Cracker Jack purchasers got a bigger surprise than buyers of Japanese government bonds. (Note: For readers outside the United States, Cracker Jack is perhaps the world’s first commercially produced junk food. It is molasses-flavored, candy-coated popcorn and peanuts, created in the late 19th century. Everybody in America knows about them if only because they’re mentioned in the song, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”. For that reason, every boy in America buys them once to see what they’re like. I don’t know anyone who bought them twice. The only thing surprising about the big surprise in every box was how cheap and pointless they were.)

But back to Azumi the Lad. He bought JPY one million worth (roughly $US 12,860) on his own, perhaps deducted from the salary he gets as finance minister on top of the one he gets as a Diet member.

All investors receive a thank-you note from the minister, who showed his to reporters in Tokyo today as proof of his purchase.

In other words, he showed reporters a note he wrote to himself. Why yes, he did get his start in television. How did you guess?

So there we have the DPJ government in miniature: Big kids in short pants playing grownup without realizing how childish they look.

Reader Yebisu comments:

The fact that Japan is having to bribe people with gold shows that they are starting to realize that it is going to get very difficult to find buyers of J bonds. The game is coming to an end.

I agree that’s possible. But off the top of my head, here’s another possibility: Most Japanese debt is bought by institutional investors, i.e., the private sector side of what they used to call Japan Inc. If I’m not mistaken, the government (or rather the Finance Ministry) is offering these bonds to individual investors, and has added this Big Surprise as a bonus to encourage prospective punters to pitch in financially and promote national solidarity while doing their part for the recovery effort. The U.S. government sold War Bonds for the same reason, albeit without a trinket to accompany the coupons.

In any event, the Cracker Jack aspect of the promotion is demonstrated by the return. Purchasers recieve a JPY 10,000 gold coin for a JPY 10 million investment that pays 0.05% for the first three years. Assuming that same rate over the full term of the bond, that’s only a 2% increase in total yield. What is there to say about a finance ministry that would trade on public fears of a financial panic, the belief that gold is a safe investment in troubled times, and the nagging suspicion that the gold might be worth more than the face value of the bonds when they mature?

One thing we could say is that it’s offensive, because neither the promotion nor the bonds themselves might be needed at all. Many observers insist the Japanese government has the resources, both in cash reserves and property, to fund the recovery without issuing bonds at all. Indeed, they could use the proceeds from privatizing Japan Post, a step 70% of the public favored during the Koizumi administration, and which the DPJ halted. But that would upset their junior coalition partner, the People’s New Party, a splinter group formed to thwart the popular will block the privatization. The exercise of power and the use of the funds in the postal savings and life insurance system is more important than effective and efficient governance, after all.

And one final word:

Azumi, whose hometown was devastated by the March 11 disaster, said today he bought 1 million yen of the debt to support rebuilding efforts from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

A report emerged a week or two after the disaster that Azumi pulled strings to divert gasoline deliveries to stations in his Diet district before full-scale recovery efforts got underway, even though there was a serious gasoline shortage throughout the entire Tohoku region and supplies were limited. The story was lost in the deluge of other events at the time.

UPDATE: From Japanese reports, the bonds are 10-year instruments with three different yields ranging from 0.18% to 0.72%. That means the premium received from the gold coin is worth even less than I thought. They’re going to be sold through banks, and one of the bankers interviewed said they were going to make a special effort to sell them to people who normally don’t buy JGBs.

*****
This Cracker Jack commercial won an award at Cannes in the 70s. Perhaps they should show it to the Finance Ministry. Some in the DPJ might enjoy it too. The actor, Jack Gilford, was fingered as a Red in the 1950s.

Letter bombs (20): Que?

A semi-occasional commenter who chose the name Peace Tax for his latest note wrote:

I am convinced that the “no common ownership-privatise everything-let the market decide” crowd are as nutty, and would be as damaging, as Stalin at the other end … and certainly achieve less than the Stalins in the long run.

In truth I don’t know much about Japanese politics but am interested to learn. I have come to think of it as a kind of “Brand Bag Stalinism” … as in a Stalinistic total state control but with a shallow veneer of choice and comfort provided by permitted access to high-end consumerism in order to keep the people satiated enough not to complain about the distaste of the shafting.

Aqua vitae Osaka style

IF YOU had trouble wrapping your head around the concept of “designer jeans”, wait until you read this: The city of Osaka is selling its tap water in PET bottles.

Or this: The water won a Gold Quality Award in the 50th Monde Selection awards this May. Monde Selection describes itself this way:

Founded in 1961, Monde Selection’s mission is to test consumer products and grant them a bronze, silver, gold or grand gold quality award. This quality label, awarded by a totally independent professional jury, offers the consumer and the producer numerous advantages. No less than 2830 products, coming from over 80 different countries, are tested each year.

See, it's true!

It’s the first time any municipality that produces and sells water in PET bottles has won an award. That’s not as surprising as the fact that there are municipalities that turn on the tap and fill bottles to compete with the likes of Evian to begin with. To be sure, the city says the beverage is regular tap water that has been rigorously purified. They launched sales of the product in 2007 to encourage more people to drink tap water, and flog 500 millimeter-bottles for JPY 100 yen ($US 1.30). It’s sold under the name of Honmaya, which means “It’s true” in the Kansai dialect, and it’s available in convenience stores and anywhere finer beverages are sold.

If you had trouble wrapping your head around that concept, try this one: They’ve sold well over a million bottles in four years. It’s not surprising at all that the city is thrilled to receive international recognition of the safety and taste of its water. Now that it has legitimate cachet, they’ll probably start plugging it as Gold Label H2O. Honmaya!

Not so long ago, they used to warn travelers to certain countries not to drink the water. They don’t have to worry about that in Osaka at all.

Speaking of which, teachers and dance folk might enjoy this video presenting a new technique for bilingual dance instruction in English and Chinese. Heck, I’d study Chinese with that schoolmarm, and bring her anything she wanted to drink in lieu of apples.

Death be not proud

JAPANESE festivals can be more fun that a barrel of monkeys ripped on fermented fruit, but a Taiwanese folk custom, explained by anthropologist Marc Moskowitz, outdoes them all. The website Digital Dying interviewed the professor, and here’s the first question and answer:

What does a Taiwan stripper funeral look like?

Women sing and dance as a truck with blinking neon lights follows a funeral procession through the streets. The trucks are called Electric Flower Cars, or EFCs. Vendors sell things alongside and there is some really fabulous singing and a whole range of performances, taking off clothes is just one part. Often there’s a host, a middle aged man or woman who tells jokes and interviews performers between events. Usually the strippers wear bikinis, or an outfit like you might see at a nightclub.

Usually, but not always, as he explains in the interview.

Now that’s my idea of a going away party!

Of course it’s on You Tube. One caveat — the actual scenes from the documentary were filmed at a temple rather than a funeral. But as one of the commenters notes (Taiwan resident Dan Bloom, who knows what he’s talking about), the performances are the same.

Heck, if that’s what goes on at Taiwanese temples, I think I might have found religion.

There’s a more detailed interview at the io9 site with another trailer from the film. (It’s worth watching for the song’s subtitles alone.) And here’s Prof. Moskowitz’s site.

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

What is reality?

THAT won’t be an idle question after you read this article in the Weekly Standard:

Last month an American woman living in Kunming, the capital of China’s Yunnan Province, wrote about her experience in a fake Apple Store. An entire store selling Apple products​—​iPads, iPods, laptops, and software​—​was replicated. It looked like a real Apple Store. It had the same stainless-steel-and-natural-wood style you see in upper-middle-class suburbs across America. It had the same posters on the walls and product displays on the floor. The employees were wearing Apple Store uniforms. The only tip-offs were shoddy construction on the store’s spiral staircase and the fact that the words “Apple Store” incongruously appeared beneath the Apple corporate logo…

The fakery was so complete that even the employees thought that they actually worked for Apple. Once the story of the faux Apple Store got out, the manager assured customers and the press that even though the store was “unauthorized,” all of the gadgets they sell are genuine. And maybe they are—because most of the silicon goodies Apple sells are made in China, too.

How fitting that the source of all this is China.

I make a point of avoiding posts based only on links, but I thought the story and its multiple dimensions deserve as large an audience as possible.

The plant party

THE Nagata-cho Deep Throat column in the 13 August edition of the weekly Shukan Gendai reports that Prime Minister Kan Naoto spoke at a meeting with the bureaucrats from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in late July and said the following:

By all means, I will see through the cleanup of the nuclear accident and the recovery. I also want to form a new political party. It will be called the Plant Party. (植物党)

That story’s got to be true if only because no one would dare make something like that up and try to fob it off on anybody. One staff member in the Kantei said no one had any idea what the Plant Party was about, but suggested the concept might be based on coexistence with nature and sustainable energy.

The anonymous author of the column (there are probably several) speculated that Mr. Kan was spinning a scenario in which he would leave the DPJ after they ousted him from the party presidency and supported a successful no-confidence motion to remove him from the premiership. The idea seems to be that he would then dissolve the Diet and call a general election. Mr. Kan assumed he would have to form a new party because the DPJ might not officially support him in that election.

One DPJ Diet member affiliated with the Hatoyama group told the magazine the following:

The prime minister has recently immersed himself in the books of environmental activist C.W. Nicol (originally Welsh but now a Japanese citizen). He’s also been spending a lot of time talking to Tama University Professor Tasaka Hiroshi, a Cabinet Secretariat advisor who is somehow involved with religion. The idea for a Plant Party probably came from that.

The columnist concludes the article by suggesting that the prime minister’s animal instincts function only during a political crisis when his position is at stake.

I’ve been comparing Kan Naoto with Barack Obama lately, but perhaps Al Gore is the better comp after factoring in the element of the whacked-out sidewalk preacher warning that the end of the world is nigh.

If anyone thought I was off base with The Barstool Philosopher post, maybe it’s time you thought again.

Incidentally, Prof. Tasaka’s academic specialty is something called social entrepreneurship, and I’m sure you can identify the contours of that UFO long before it enters earth orbit. A social entrepreneur is defined on the Web as “someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change…(they) assess their success in terms of the impact they have on society. While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many work in the private and governmental sectors.”

Yes, he has a blog. Yes, I looked at it. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away.

Prof. Tasaka likes to write in short sentences that he probably thinks are poetic. I translated one of his entries and kept as many of the original line breaks as possible.

On the evening of 27 March
A turning point came in my life.

The Fukushima nuclear accident
Was caused by the Tohoku earthquake.

I was asked to give advice to the government
As a nuclear power specialist, for measures to deal with the accident.

When I received the prime minister’s request to be an advisor to the Cabinet Secretariat
What I heard, as always
Was “The Voice of Heaven”.

If that doesn’t go a long way toward explaining the dysfunction of the Kan Cabinet and their inability to get cracking on the Tohoku cleanup, you can dip me in chocolate and feed me to the hyenas.

And speaking of plants, where are all those killer tomatoes now that we really need them?

The barstool philosopher

READER Camphortree wrote in this week to suggest that incipient Alzheimer’s was one possible explanation for Prime Minister Kan Naoto’s behavior. While that’s possible — nothing can be ruled out with Mr. Kan, after all — my suspicions lie in the direction of a long, lush life of alcohol consumption.

Consider, for example, what a columnist in the Nikkei Shimbun reported him as saying in the Diet on 20 July:

The earth has passed through 4.6 billion years of history, but we have relied on nuclear power for only a few dozen of those years. Therefore, I do not think it holds that we must rely on it for eternity.

Doesn’t that sound like the sort of wisdom you might hear dispensed with a solemn, authoritative air by a slightly gasping and swaying geezer with purple veins in his nose and gravy stains on his lapel, sliding over a few bar stools to strike up a conversation?

The sort of fellow who would seize on any comment you made, no matter how brief or noncommittal, to expound on his liquid insights in a different direction altogether? Such as this one the prime minister belched forth at a public meeting in Nagano, which was reported in the press on 1 August.

The old men (おじいさん) who went to the mountains 200 or 300 years ago to gather wood were able to manage everything with that firewood or whatever. All we have to do is to convert that into a new technology, and that is completely possible.

Don’t forget, he was awarded an engineering degree from a reputable university. It brings new meaning to the word “technocrat”.

It’s a mystery why guys like this never seem to have to go to the bathroom so you can move to another part of the bar (or another bar altogether) before they get back. The amount of fluids they consume combined with the size of their prostates should mean their frequency of head calls would be higher instead of lower.

My favorite is this one from the same speech:

We can’t take a risk even once that would destroy the planet, even if there’s just a one-in-one hundred million chance.

It has to be the liquid courage that gets him out of bed and out of the house every day to defy the odds that the earth could split open at any moment and swallow him up right there on the sidewalk!

*****
Here’s another speaker three sheets to the wind who leaves his audience in tears.

O (yeah!) Canada

THE Canadians scored a hat trick even though hockey season hasn’t begun yet.

As the News Canada website reports:

Canada has been blasted at the United Nations by none other than the brutal and dangerous dictatorship of North Korea for boycotting the Conference on Disarmament while the backwards terrorist state is the temporary chair.

Here’s how it started:

Earlier in July, (Foreign Affairs Minister John) Baird announced Canada would boycott the conference until mid-August when North Korea will no longer be chairing the Geneva-based meetings. The chairmanship of the Conference on Disarmament is rotated alphabetically among the 65-member states, though Canada has pledged to try and change the way the chair is selected to avoid presidencies of aggressive states like North Korea and Iran.

The report reminds its readers:

North Korea has repeatedly defied UN resolutions on arms control and continues to enrich uranium to develop a nuclear arms program. Last year, it sunk a South Korean naval vessel with a torpedo.

Let’s not forget they ended the year on a high note by shelling South Korean territory. And the Japanese don’t forget the periodic threats to turn their country into a sea of flame. (Frustration caused by the censorship of fiction must be the reason the propaganda ministries of the people’s republics of the world have a taste for such imagination-snapping invective.)

But to return to the matter at hand, the foreign affairs minister explained Canada’s position:

Baird said Saturday it’s “absurd” and “ridiculous” to allow North Korea to chair the international Conference on Disarmament, and somebody had to stand up against it.

Evidently the truth hurt:

But the North Korean delegate shot back, saying they have every right to chair the disarmament conference because they are a member of the UN, which should be a place for dialogue and multilateralism, not for Cold War-type “confrontation.”

The North Korean delegate also blasted Canada for taking similar principled stances in the past, saying Canada has set a “very disgraceful precedent.”

“It is not the first time by a Canadian delegate boycotting international forums “¦ and (setting) a very disgraceful precedent in the practice of international multilateralism,” the North Korean delegate said. “This is the third time by a Canadian delegate to take such an action in the (Conference on Disarmament) in Geneva, and therefore the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) strongly condemns this behaviour of the Canadian delegate.”

The third time’s the charm — or the hat trick.

Mr. Baird said that Canada would wear the criticism as a “badge of honor”, and also said that the conference was “effectively broken”.

Here’s the only possible gripe with the Canadian position: Why stop there? The entire United Nations is effectively broken, assuming there ever was a time when it was in good repair.

For their part, the Japanese have a puzzling attitude toward the UN. It’s understandable they would seek a permanent seat on the Security Council. Their behavior over the past 65 years demonstrates that they deserve it. The French have a seat, and their contribution to global security consists largely of meddling in the affairs of their former African colonies and ineffective NATO missions when a Democrat is in the White House. The Chinese have a seat, and when they haven’t been an active threat to global security during that same 65 year period, they’ve actively obstructed the efforts of everyone else.

But Japanese membership is a moot point as long as the South Koreans see the UN as a place for getting cheap thrills from working out their han-grudge instead of a place for — ahem — dialogue and multilateralism.

With the possible exception of some subsidiary organizations, the UN is the picture of preposterous pointlessness. Wait, scratch that, it does have one redeeming quality — its existence is an ever-visible testament to the fatuity of the idea of global governance.

In fact, the Japanese have an expression that describes the UN perfectly: Muyo no chobutsu.

To say something is muyo no chobutsu is to say that it is worse than useless.

*****
Afterwords:

Can you imagine the Obama administration doing th—pfft! Ha ha ha!

*****
Take your problem to the United Nations, and you’ll wind up with the Summertime Blues all year round.

And yes, this version is just as hot as the air temperature today in Kyushu.

Safe as milk

THE STORY is old enough to have curdled, but it’s news to me. MSNBC-Reuters reported in June:

Scientists at China’s Agricultural University in Beijing announced that they had produced human breast milk from genetically modified dairy cows and expect supplies to be available in supermarkets within three years. Employing technology once used to produce the sheep “Dolly,” researchers created a herd of 300 modified cows, which yielded milk that was reported as “sweeter” and “stronger” than typical cow milk.

Whatever for?

The Brits get more upset about GM foods than the Yanks, so while the American reports were filed in the Weird News section, the British newspapers were Very Concerned. There’s a wealth of detail in the Telegraph article in addition to the justification for the research:

Human milk contains high quantities of key nutrients that can help to boost the immune system of babies and reduce the risk of infections.

The scientists behind the research believe milk from herds of genetically modified cows could provide an alternative to human breast milk and formula milk for babies, which is often criticised as being an inferior substitute.

They hope genetically modified dairy products from herds of similar cows could be sold in supermarkets. The research has the backing of a major biotechnology company.

I’m not opposed to scientific research that pushes everyone’s envelope — I’m a progressive, after all — and there are so many ignorable whining weenies among the environmentalists and other variegated Nature Activists it’s easy to discount whatever it is they’re banging on about this week, but I thought the spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals got it right:

“Why do we need this milk – what is it giving us that we haven’t already got.”

Professor Ning Li, the scientist who led the research, unwittingly makes another important point:

“As our daily food, the cow’s milk provided us the basic source of nutrition. But the digestion and absorption problems made it not the perfect food for human being.”

He’s right, and many Health Activists (including the late Jack LaLanne) argue that milk is not intended for human consumption, much less as a daily food. (Disclaimer: I like ice cream and yogurt!) In fact, LaLanne once said:

Milk is for a suckling calf. How many creatures still use milk after they’re weaned? Man.

Most mammals become lactose intolerant as they grow, but it’s thought humans became lactose persistent due to a mutation on a chromosome resulting from the pastoral lifestyle in both Europe and East Africa.

Then again, LaLanne didn’t eat beef either.

Oh, one last thing (to channel Colombo): The China Agricultural University is a state school under the control of the Ministry of Education. Its president is appointed by the Chinese government.

Is this a case of Chinese tax yuan at work, or is the research funded by the premiums Uncle Sam pays to those who purchase his bonds?

*****
Probably the only worthwhile song this group ever did, but then Graham Gouldman was the one who wrote it.

And now for something completely different…

REUTERS reports that South Korean scientists have created a dog that glows:

South Korean scientists said on Wednesday they have created a glowing dog using a cloning technique that could help find cures for human diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, Yonhap news agency reported.

A research team from Seoul National University (SNU) said the genetically modified female beagle, named Tegon and born in 2009, has been found to glow fluorescent green under ultraviolet light if given a doxycycline antibiotic, the report said.

That brings up the obvious question: If people eat glowing dogs, will they glow too?