From the overseas media

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preach, sister!

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

Hallelujah!

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

Lord have mercy!

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

Yes! And now for the slam dunk:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Heads of state do not bow to heads of state

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterwords:

The LA Times article contains this sentence:

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

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

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

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

Why journalism is important

Do you love it?
Do you hate it?
There it is
The way you made it.
- Frank Zappa

READER and frequent commenter Aceface, who is also employed by a major Japanese media outlet, has been keeping abreast of the reaction to the Justin McCurry article in The Guardian about Japanese “rent-a-friends” that has generated some discussion here recently.

He’s been reading through the comment section to see what The Guardian’s readers have to say about that article.

Now I understand that the folks who post in The Guardian’s comment sections are the subject of considerable mockery and disdain in Britain. I’m also well aware that the same sort of people hang out and write in those sections of American newspapers, where the same sort of bilge is never far from the surface.

But those comments give us an idea of how the consumers of news view Japan. Here are three that Aceface dug up:

“I find it rather sad actually. That the Japanese, in all their “efficiency,” have not managed to be able to find a balance between wealth and “society” is lamentable. That people, in a related matter, are willing to become spouses of robots, rather than seeking to connect with other humans, seems to me to be pretty scary.”

Or:

“Because of the Japanese sense of superiority and homogeneity, I imagine, they’d rather associate with a fake friend that actually befriend the Korean or other non-Japanese-born person next door. Truly sad and scary.”

And:

“The (Western) First World ranks above the rest of the world, not just because of its wealth, but in its ability to create a society made up of social human beings of all stripes. That Japan has chosen to deviate completely from this trajectory is to its detriment, and I believe that ultimately, it will be proven to have erred in placing so much faith in machines rather than encouraging real human contact.”

Why do these people “know” that Japanese marry robots, have a sense of superiority and homogeneity, would rather associate with fake friends than Koreans, or have chosen to deviate from the civilization that is the Crown of Creation?

Because they read it in the newspaper.

Here’s another commenter on the blog of Daniel Drezner writing about a slapdash post stemming from a short-circuited conclusion–which in turn was inspired by a hideously deformed article in The New York Times about the Japanese government’s policy toward Brazilian guest workers.

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

He knows because he read it on a blog written by a university professor who read it in a publication that likes to pretend it’s The Paper of Record. (For more detail on that particular story, here’s my post on the subject.)

Tyler Cowan is an economist at George Mason University who has a blog called Marginal Revolution. During a trip to Japan, he was surprised to see so many vending machines and wondered why in this post.

I was astonished at the content of some of the comments on a blog written for educated and presumably well-informed people. Here is my comment in full. It explains why I thought there were more vending machines here than elsewhere and responds to what the other commenters said.

*****

Some points to consider, offered by a resident of Japan for 24 years:

1. Most vending machines in Japan are owned outright by the commercial establishment where they’re located. That means they are an extension of the business enterprise itself. That includes Shinto shrines and medical clinics.

2. Beware of the trap of thinking that Tokyo=Japan. Most people in Japan don’t live in Tokyo and they DO use (and depend on) their cars. Toyota didn’t get where it is today by selling all its product overseas.

3. Beware of the trap of thinking that American dietary habits=the global gold standard. Most refrigerators sold in Japan today are larger than the ones I grew up with in the United States. Yet very few Japanese will buy immense bottles of soft drink or buckets of ice cream and stick them in the refrigerator/freezer. They tend to eat smaller quantities at one sitting.

My Japanese wife was initially impressed by her first visit to an American supermarket, but wound up close to appalled before she walked out the door. It is difficult for Americans to realize how gluttonous it all seems to someone not used to that lifestyle.

Of course, Japanese men will buy cases of beer–in larger bottles–but instead of putting them into the refrigerator all at once, or taking up space in the house, place the bottles on the porch or outside the kitchen door, secure in the knowledge that the beer is unlikely to be stolen.

And while I’m at it…

“Use a vending machine and you get to avoid human interaction. Prejudice?”

No, just completely unaware of daily social interaction in Japan.

“They sell cars door-to-door in Japan…”

That’s not how most people buy them, however.

“…could it have anything to do with the fact that it’s been easier to carry coins in Japan since they’re hollow in the middle?”

Only two coins have holes in the middle, the holes don’t make them easier to carry, and they are not the coins most likely to be used in vending machines.

“Most urban Japaneses rarely make a meal at home…”

I would love to see the statistics on that one. Particularly for families.

“The “high ratio of small stores” is a byproduct of law: super-malls and big stores like Carrefour/Walmart aren’t allowed to be built there…”

Twenty years out of date.

“Vending machines in Japan must…carry products that are not easily accessible.”

The overwhelming majority of Japanese vending machines sell either beverages, cigarettes, or less frequently, ice cream.

“I have heard from expats that the painful level of politeness demanded of even small human transactions adds to the appeal of automation.”

Bum steer. If an expat told you that, I can almost guarantee that their degree of language fluency is negligible.

“Vending machines are, of course, always open.”

Not for beer or ciggies after 11:00 p.m. where I live.

“Japan has few immigrants and I don’t think their teenagers work.”

The jobs that high school students in the US do are performed by college students in Japan. I teach two college classes at a national university, and 95% of my students have part-time jobs working in shops and restaurants.

I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, but you know what Keynes said about truth-telling.

Still, the lack of accurate information about Japan–in the information age, no less–is sobering.

*****

Why is so much of the educated public’s knowledge of Japan so incorrect?

Because they got it from the newspaper.

I urge those of you with the courage to wade through the cloaca of public opinion to read this previous post on what sort of comments the moderators at the BBC website think are acceptable about Japan. Keep in mind that the network warns posters in advance about defamatory comments or comments about racial hatred. The BBC didn’t think its rules applied to people calling for the wholesale murder of Japanese.

How did those posters from their opinion of Japan?

They based it on what they read in the newspaper or saw on the BBC.

*****

The late author Michael Crichton delivered a speech in 2002 in which he addressed the issue of media credibility. He observed:

“(T)here are some well-studied media effects which suggest that a simple appearance in media provides credibility. There was a well-known series of excellent studies by Stanford researchers that have shown, for example, that children take media literally. If you show them a bag of popcorn on a television set and ask them what will happen if you turn the TV upside down, the children say the popcorn will fall out of the bag. This effect would be amusing if it were confined to children. The studies show that no one is exempt. All human beings are subject to this media effect, including those of us who think we are self-aware and hip and knowledgeable.”

Here is his conclusion. I’ve emphasized the last part:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect…

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t.

*****

Responsible citizenship, however one chooses to define that, depends on a fully informed citizenry. People form their conception of issues based on what they read and watch in the print and broadcast media. That is particularly the case for international issues and circumstances in a country they are unlikely to visit or ever know much about.

While journalists are not responsible for the reactions that take place once the chemicals are placed in the beaker, they are responsible for the content of the inserted chemicals that cause those reactions and their deliberate placement of the beaker over a Bunsen burner to accelerate the reactions.

Responding to my post about his Guardian article, McCurry wrote:

I now feel totally vindicated in my choice of profession.

I’d feel totally ashamed if the fruits of my labor were partially responsible for creating this image of Japan overseas. I’d think the time had arrived for hansei, or serious self-reflection on my errors.

Instead of contributing to the world’s enlightenment about things Japanese, journalists as a class bear the primary responsibility for creating the environment in which the ignorance shown above breeds. But that’s not exactly what they would have us believe they’re doing, is it?

If what you know about Japan is derived from the English-language mass media, then everything you know about Japan is wrong.

And we all know why.

More from the mailbag

AN E-MAIL MESSAGE arrived today from a Westerner who works for a Japanese government office in the European Union and recently started reading this site.

The correspondent agrees with the view that the English-language mass media does an inadequate job of covering the news about Japan. He related an incident that he allowed me to quote here. The emphasis is mine:

I…often attend Japan related seminars. At one last year where former Tokyo BBC Bureau Chief William Horsley was speaking, I challenged him on why the Western press is so silent on Japanese matters. His response was something along the lines of “tell me anything about Japan that is newsworthy”.

That explains a lot, doesn’t it?

He continued:

If only the Western press decided to dig a little deeper they would find a plethora of newsworthy stories – Japan’s true relationship with China and East Asia (Yasukuni aside), the true level of influence Japan has in Western, particularly American, economies, the justice system that finds 98% of people guilty, technology innovations, environmental issues etc. But no, we get stuck with articles on anime, panty vending machines and rent-a-crowd weddings. Why is that?

That’s an excellent question.

I’d also add that Japan is still in the process of reordering and remodeling its government, both at the national and sub-national level. While the subjects at issue can be a bit dry, the debates about those subjects and the people participating in those debates can be fascinating.

Thanks to the correspondent for allowing me to quote the e-mail.

More journo snickering at Japan, #4,625

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

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

Here’s the first sentence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In recent months demand has surged for…

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

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

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

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

Don’t ask the author.

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

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

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

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

The lad seems to have never heard of gigolos.

Or prostitutes, for that matter.

You decide…

HERE ARE two YouTube videos of recent television commercials in Europe. Both are about 30 seconds long.

The first seems to be for a paper manufacturer in The Netherlands. You can see it here.

Now for the second. I think, but am not certain, that the Dutch advertisement came first, because the second is currently being shown on British television.

We all know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, particuarly in television, but one wonders about the motivation for the imitation in this instance. While the first did have a connection with the product–paper–the second is the identical advertisement, but this time for a confection called Mikado. The link is rather far-fetched. And while the lady on the copier certainly is lovely, Asian models aren’t really needed to sell the idea. Other commercials for the same product use Western models. Here you go.

I don’t know…

Incidentally, the second is being shown after 9:00 p.m., known as the “watershed” hour in Britain for allowing more adult content on the airwaves. Neither advertisement would have been possible in the U.S. when I lived there, but I haven’t lived there for some time now. And considering the publicity the problems with cell phone camera use received here a few years ago, I’m not sure it could be shown in Japan, either.

Anti-Nipponism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asahi Shimbun

Brazilian nikkei

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

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

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

Insisted one ministry official involved with the program:

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

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

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

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

Michiko Ramos, a third generation nikkei, commented:

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

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

Private correspondence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freakonomics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article also quotes the union leader’s son:

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

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

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

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

Hmm, the hidden side of everything…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not an attractive image, is it?

Daniel Drezner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the first direct quote:

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

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

Here’s the first quote from a Japanese:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterwords:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. However:

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

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

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

The article also has internal contradictions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think not.

Monkey see, monkey don’t

ONE RECURRING VOICE IN THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION in Japan when I first arrived here was the tendency by some people to promote a political, social, or cultural cause by claiming that it was already a common practice in the West (usually the United States), so therefore Japan should adopt it too. Those who didn’t care for the ideas countered by accusing the proponent of saru mane, or monkey imitation—in other words, monkey see, monkey do.

Japan’s postwar success means they no longer have to crane their necks to look up at other countries they think might be more advanced. That means fewer pet theories are justified by pointing to behavior in other parts of the world. But the practice hasn’t entirely disappeared, and the following describes two examples that I ran across last week.

Rather than advocating a particular position, the first example is the unnecessary use of the United States as a standard for comparison. It’s harmless in this case, but it was presented by a man who should know better. In contrast, the second example has the potential to bring about some downright ugly changes to Japanese society.

Japanese Unemployment

Appearing on a recent NHK TV program, Prof. Noguchi Yukio of the Waseda Graduate School of Finance, Accounting, and Law created a stir when he claimed that Japan’s unemployment rate, which as of May was officially 5.2%, is really about 9%.

Here’s what Prof. Noguchi said:

“If the (effectively) unemployed still working at companies due to the Employment Adjustment Subsidy were counted, the unemployment rate would be more than 9%, a level not much different from that of the United States.”

The subsidy is offered by the government to companies who are cutting back on operations due to deteriorating profits as a result of the economic downturn. The government provides part of the funds for job furloughs or the rent of employees temporarily furloughed or seconded elsewhere. The government calls it a “subsidy for corporate efforts”, but it’s in fact a measure to keep those companies from terminating the people they’d rather lay off.

Noguchi Yukio

The program has mushroomed over the past seven months. The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare reported that in October 2008, 140 companies received these subsidies for 3,632 workers. Those figures had risen to 67,192 companies and 2,338,991 workers by May 2009. Technically, those workers are not unemployed, but that’s only because the government is subsidizing their continued presence at their place of employment.

Prof. Noguchi’s point is that adding those 2.3 million people to the unemployment roll would lift the rate to 9%. In fact, the unemployment rate might be higher still. It does not count NEETs (people not currently engaged in employment, education or training), or the furiitaa, the underemployed youth (15-34) who tend to live with their parents after leaving school and shift from one low-skilled, low-paying job to another (such as convenience store clerk) rather than start a career. The latest figure for the former category is 640,000 and 1,700,000 for the latter.

Of course Prof. Noguchi is trying to drive home the point that employment conditions in Japan are much worse now than the government cares to admit, and he’s probably right. But the man received his doctorate in economics from Yale, so he is well aware that the American government is just as likely to blow smoke over employment statistics as its Japanese counterpart. The United States is not the gold standard for government honesty, assuming that any such standard exists.

American unemployment

To look behind the smokescreen covering current American unemployment figures, try this article in the Wall Street Journal by Morton Zuckerman, the editor in chief of the US News and World Report.

June’s total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse.

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don’t count on the unemployment roll.

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted…(b)ecause they hadn’t searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

- The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That’s 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago…If Americans were still clocking those extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration).

So while unemployment in Japan might be worse than people realize, conditions could be harsher still in the United States.

The 9% number should be shocking enough for the Japanese public. There’s no need to bring the United States into the picture, but old habits die hard.

But as I said, that’s a harmless example. The second is a classic case of saru mane that is troubling because, while based on what the advocate thinks is commonly accepted conditions in the United States, it combines a failure to understand the real circumstances with a transparent sense of self-importance. If adopted, her proposal would seriously degrade the Japanese political dialogue.

Election Reporting

Oguri Izumi began working for the Nihon Television Network as a newscaster in 1988, and spent three years on the Kyo no Dekigoto (Today’s Events) late-night news program. Her husband is a reporter for the Tokyo Shimbun.

Oguri Izumi

Ms. Oguri left the network in August 2007 to accept a Fulbright Scholarship to the Edwin O. Reischauer Center For East Asian Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in The Johns Hopkins University.

She released a book last month about her observations of broadcast journalism in the U.S. called Senkyo Hodo, or Election Reporting. (It’s an inexpensive Chuo Koron Shinsha paperback on display in bookstores now.)

I haven’t read the book, but I have read the promotional material, and here’s the scoop:

During her stay in the US, she was shocked to see many television journalists openly declare their support for presidential candidates.

Ms. Oguri thinks this is a capital idea. She proposes that all Japanese television journalists be allowed to become “opinion leaders” and openly advocate the candidates they favor on the air—not as a disclaimer, but as a matter of practice.

She claims that supporting a party is not necessarily a violation of fairness or neutrality, and offers her book as a plan for creating a “good country”. She added that she had a hard time maintaining her own fairness or neutrality while on the air in Japan.

Specifically, she says that newscasters should make their choices based on their reading of party platforms and then explain those choices to the viewers.

Let us count the ways in which that is a very bad idea.

Had Ms. Oguri turned off the TV set and talked to off-campus America, she might have discovered that they too were shocked—and angered—that many television journalists openly declared their support for presidential candidates. They do not watch television news to see manipulated reports or hear a talking head tell them what they should think.

The consumers of news are intelligent enough to know where to find political opinions when they want them. There are already plenty of outlets for that expression, both in the United States and in Japan. What the consumer of basic news programs seeks is a straight accounting of the facts.

The job of journalists in the print and broadcast media outside the op-ed corner is to present just the facts, and nothing but the facts. That so many of them feel compelled to twist those facts to conform to their own biases, and then aver that true neutrality is not possible, is testimony to flawed temperaments underpinned by a belief in their superior intelligence.

It should be a simple matter to stick with the facts, regardless of what the biens pensants would prefer us to believe. I have no doubt that if I were a television journalist, or responsible for the production of television news programs, that—unlike Ms. Oguri—I could handle that part of the job in my sleep. It would be easy money. Indeed, it would be a lot more difficult (not to mention creepy) to insert propaganda while trying to pretend that I wasn’t.

All Ms. Oguri is trying to do is to take the difficulty out of pushing her own views on everyone else by hijacking a medium that should remain neutral. Supporting her pet plan by saying that the Americans do it–without realizing that many Americans detest the mockery the practice has made of the political process–is nothing but saru mane.

It’s tempting to buy the book to see how she tries to make the case that open advocacy isn’t a violation of the principle of neutrality, but who has the time for what is likely little more than a string of excuses?

One reviewer stated the obvious objection that since private-sector television is supported by advertising, overt support for specific candidates could subject the network or the station to pressure from those advertisers. The pressure from ownership cannot be overlooked, either, considering that the press is really only free for those who own the enterprise. It’s one thing to claim to speak truth to power; it’s another thing entirely to speak truth to the man who signs your paycheck and tells you to parrot his line.

Broadcast journalists who openly support candidates will surely do so on the basis of pre-existing beliefs. The idea that they will read and judge a platform is a false front, and it’s hard to believe that they’re even fooling themselves. Anyone can find reasons for either supporting or opposing the planks of any specific platform, based on their own cast of mind. Lawyers do the same sort of thing every day with the law and legal precedents. It’s their job.

Taking this one step further, broadcasts journalists freed from the obligation to be objective will then be guided by their political preferences. That would prevent them from exercising the self-examination required to root out the idea that they alone have the intelligence or the right to decide which facts should be broadcast, which should be emphasized, and which should be glossed over. Does Ms. Oguri seriously believe this would not happen? Has she even thought this out?

That would leave us with an overtly biased media, which would mean that none of its news content could be trusted. If this sector of the media cannot be trusted to stick to the facts, they have eliminated the reason for their existence. They would have in effect become the PR wing for a particular politician or a cause using an enormous megaphone. Let the politicians and the activists do that on their own time.

Far from being a model for Japan, the former news gatherers of the American print and broadcast media now find themselves in exactly this predicament. That’s why so many of them are going out of business, in the case of newspapers, or ignored, in the case of network news.

The electorate does not need opinion leaders, and the idea that it does is insulting to its intelligence. All it requires is that the facts—as many as the limited programming time allows—be reported. Self-appointed elites are not required to filter those facts for anyone, especially since the people on camera don’t seem to be any more intelligent than anyone else on the street. Indeed, viewed from the perspective of day-to-day life, they’re likely to have less practical intelligence than most people on the street.

People are capable of figuring things out for themselves. If Ms. Oguri lacks the insight to understand that, she lacks the insight required to offer us her political opinions while claiming to be fair and neutral.

And if she has that much trouble squelching her bias on the air, she should find another job.

Are Japanese broadcasters unprejudiced now?

In passing, I should note that more than a few Japanese would laugh at the idea their broadcast media is neutral to begin with. The general approach of the Asahi network is from the left, and even I could see the slant in their broadcasts before I was able to make the connection between the announcers and the network.

Some Japanese have long thought that the news on the quasi-governmental network NHK is also tilted. A common observation is that they are soft on China and hard on the United States.

It should be obvious that anything other than strict neutrality for a public broadcaster is an affront to the ideals of democratic government. The network is supported by funds that all citizens are required to pay, so they have a moral obligation to present the news impartially. If people do not care for the programs offered by a private sector broadcaster, it costs them nothing to stop watching. If enough people take that step, it will lower the network’s ratings and cut into their ad revenue. Viewers can even go over the head of the network itself directly to the sponsors to complain.

From reporting to making the news

Regarding the connection between the media and politics, by the way, I recently ran across a Japanese-language article reporting that more people from both the print and broadcast media are becoming professional politicians. For the upcoming lower house elections, the opposition Democratic Party of Japan is running at least 23 people who came from that industry, either recently or longer ago, while the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is running 10.

Takeuchi Ken, former mayor of Kamakura, founder of the Internet newspaper JanJan, and a visiting professor at Waseda University, thinks he knows why there are more in the DPJ. It’s not necessarily because of political philosophy:

“The DPJ most definitely have the wind at their back, but a careful examination of local conditions shows that they lack an organizational base. That’s why, as a party, they look for people who can catch that wind. In contrast, the LDP is an organizational party from the candidates’ perspective, and younger people have a difficult time obtaining their recognition. People from the mass media have name recognition due to their exposure, and they’ve mastered communication skills, which makes it easier for them to pick up votes. As a result, more of them have gravitated toward the DPJ.”

Perhaps Ms. Oguri should take the hint. If she thinks her analyses are so penetrating, she should try her hand at retail politics instead of making Olympian pronouncements from a TV studio.

Or get a blog!

Afterwords:

Ms. Oguri also represents another aspect of saru mane, and that’s what some Japanese refer to as the madoguchi phenomenon. It dates back at least to the beginning of the Meiji period, when the country reopened to the outside world and was hungry for knowledge of other places and the technology of the modern age.

Madoguchi is the word for a clerk’s window at a bank, venue for ticket sales, or other similar facility. There has long been a tendency for some people here to go abroad to study some specialty—Chinese regional cuisine, Scotch whisky distillation, Italian sports cars, British politics, watermelon cultivation in Missouri, black gospel music recorded but unreleased by local labels in the American south in the 1960s—in short, anything and everything. Then they return to Japan and create the equivalent of a madoguchi (glorified lemonade stand?) to offer their knowledge, much as the delegations dispatched overseas by the Meiji-era governments brought back knowledge from their observation tours of Western countries. The idea is to make a career out of their specialty.

The easy accessibility of international travel has removed many of the obstacles that prevented people from pursuing their interests abroad, so the practice is less prevalent than it once was. It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a clear example, but with this book, Ms. Oguri seems to be setting up a madoguchi of her own.

Incidentally, I have no idea what Ms. Oguri’s political ideas might be. Another former newscaster on the Kyo no Dekigoto program, Sakurai Yoshiko, is quite conservative politically, and now quite active writing opinion pieces for monthly magazines.

Amae, amas, amat…

“JOURNALISM LARGELY CONSISTS of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive,” observed G.K. Chesterton, and that corresponds all too well to the reports earlier this week of the death of Dr. Doi Takeo. A psychoanalyst, Dr. Doi developed and presented first to Japan and then to the world his theories on the role of amae in the Japanese psyche and cultural behavior. As the obituaries noted, people consider him to have been the first Japanese trained in psychiatry to influence Western psychiatric thought.

Those with an interest in psychiatry and in Japan knew his work well. When I studied Japanese at university, it was considered de rigeur to have read Dr. Doi’s book, Amae no Kozo (The Anatomy of Dependence). For everyone else, however, Dr. Doi might as well have been Lord Jones, and that’s how the English-language press treated his passing.

That treatment is something of a tragedy, because his work and the concepts he presented offered an important new perspective for Japanese to understand themselves and for foreigners to understand them. Perhaps that’s shikata ga nai, as the Japanese say; it can’t be helped. The interest of the lumpen readership in either Japan or psychiatry is limited, and the concept of amae is difficult to understand for anyone not familiar with Japanese society. In fact, I suspect it would be next to impossible to understand unless one were Japanese or had lived in Japan for several years and paid close attention to what was going on.

Amae defined

Dr. Doi used the word amae because there’s no real English equivalent. Indeed, it is said to be a back formation he coined himself from the verb amaeru. The underlying emotions, said Dr. Doi, are instinctual and present in every society, but the Japanese have a greater awareness of those emotions because they have specific words to describe them. Thus, Western terminology is insufficient to describe the Japan psyche. That further complicates the understanding of subtle concepts difficult to describe and prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

One trustworthy source translates amae as “dependency wishes”, in which a person relies on the love, patience, and/or tolerance of other people or groups who form the other pole of an emotional relationship. Dr. Doi himself described it as presuming on another’s love, basking in another’s indulgence, or indulging in another’s kindness. Right away, that definition causes problems with misinterpretation. Westerners often view relationships and emotional dependence of that sort in a negative light. Dependency is to be outgrown because it is a manifestation of weakness and childishness.

That view does not predominate in Japan, however. The word amae has the same root as the word amai, or sweet, imparting a positive sense that makes it impossible to render into a single English word or phrase. In that spirit, the name of his book could also have been rendered literally as The Structure of Amae. Translators know better than anyone that converting from one language to another is not the same as handling an algebraic equation.

Amae in everyday life

A Freudian, Dr. Doi postulated that the origin of amae lies in the restoration of the lost mother-and-child union, a relationship that might be considered even more important in Japan than elsewhere. He then used it as a way to describe the dynamics of different relationships in adult life, including those between parent and child (in which amae is present even after children become adults), husband and wife, teacher and pupil, patron and acolyte, master and apprentice, and even feudal lord and samurai.

In many instances, the one-way direction of this relationship is only temporary, and in other cases, the dynamics move in both directions. People often use as an example of amae women indulging in emotional dependence on men, but that works in reverse from men to women as well. Also, pupils grow up to become teachers, and apprentices grow up to be masters. While Westerners may consider dependency a weakness, in Japan amae can strengthen the social fabric through a relationship between two people or among a larger group of people.

Dr. Doi used the concept to explain the importance in Japan of developing a rapport or relationship that transcends the feeling of simpatico, in which there is merging, or tokekomu. He held that amae helped explain the blurring of the distinction between subject or object—or self and other—in Japan, and why the notions of privacy and individual rights were different here than elsewhere.

He extended his theory by using it to explain the Japanese dislike of cut-and-dried logic, frequently referred to as “fart logic” (herikutsu), the nature of long-term business relationships, and the importance of nonverbal communication.

Giri-ninjo

Another layer of complexity was added by his application of amae to examine the contrasting feelings of giri, or obligations in social relationships, and ninjo, or human emotions—in other words, the conflict between what one should do or has to do, with what one would naturally want to do. This issue is a much greater part of both the daily dialogue and general cultural discussion in Japan than elsewhere. In Japan, Dr. Doi claimed, ninjo is characterized by both using and responding to amae, while giri is infused by ninjo.

While giri may seem to be an unpleasant burden that Westerners might prefer to shuck as soon as it becomes convenient, the Japanese recognize it as an important social lubricant. Unlike ninjo, it is not universal, so it is restricted to specific relationships. It can involve helping those who help you and returning favors to those who do one favors. People neglect these obligations at the risk of their social standing.

Of course these same obligations are present in the West, but they seem to have an added dimension here. Try giving an unexpected present, no matter how insignificant, to a Japanese with whom you are on friendly terms and watch what happens.

This side up

There’s still more. One of the first things a foreign student of Japan learns is that it is a vertical society, rather than a horizontal one. Dr. Doi claimed that amae was the reason for the prevalence of vertical integration in Japan to begin with.

Incidentally, the Japanese themselves are aware that vertical structures can be inefficient and frequently discuss them as an obstacle rather than an advantage. For example, people often criticize the excessive verticalization of the governmental bureaucracy when discussing ways to reform the system. Some think it was one reason for the poor performance of the military command structure during the war. That might provide a hint why bureaucratic reform has been so difficult to achieve–how does one change the natural default position of everyone’s emotional structure?

Those who disagree

Naturally, these theories were, and are, wide open to criticism. All the Japanese with whom I’ve discussed the book said that while they thought it was essentially accurate, the doctor tried to stretch the concept too far by applying it to every aspect of life. Perhaps that’s to be expected of pioneers anxious to spread the awareness of new ideas they’ve developed.

Some of this might also be dated. Dr. Doi was born in 1920 and formulated his theories after a psychological culture shock while visiting the United States in 1950s. For example, he thought that the phrase “help yourself” was rude. He assumed it meant “no one will help you”, when it actually means “do as you like”. (Let’s also not forget that some Westerners raise their children by emphasizing “no one will help you” as a way to inculcate self-reliance.)

Lately, however, it seems that some of these tendencies might be disappearing. Perhaps this is most apparent in the way that single women now deal with men. In passing, it should be noted that people often fail to consider just how fast Japan is able to change or adapt to change, and yet retain its stability. This was still a feudal society fewer than 150 years ago, and it is astonishing how quickly it has incorporated concepts for which it took hundreds of years to evolve in the West. Thus, it’s not surprising that emotional structures in place for more than a millenium might melt in the space of a few decades.

One of Dr. Doi’s Western critics was Peter Dale, whose book The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness no longer seems to be in print. (None of the on-line descriptions I found of Mr. Dale’s objections cite his qualifications, though he must have had some.)

Dale dismissed the whole concept as belonging to the class of ideas known as nihonjinron, or theories on the Japanese people. That was once a thriving cottage industry for the presentation of claims that the Japanese were unique, which itself gave rise to another thriving cottage industry for the snorters offended by those claims.

More specifically, Dale criticized Dr. Doi for irrationally expanding the meanings of common Japanese words to convey the idea of uniqueness. He compared it to the prewar twisting of such words as kokutai (national polity) and kokusui (national essence) for propaganda purposes.

One can imagine the criticism that would have erupted had Dr. Doi analyzed the Japan-U.S. relationship through the prism of amae.

The problems of nihonjinron

Discussions of nihonjinron from either perspective have always seemed like a waste of time. First, it has little or no practical application for anyone’s life in Japan, regardless of nationality, giving the whole enterprise an airy-fairy quality. Second, some of the ideas are grounded in the social sciences, whose limits tend to be reached very quickly. Third, the debate attracts the type of people who think intellectual discussion consists of inflated claims informed by emotional predispositions, again from either perspective, and who enjoy it for that reason. We’ve all heard it said that academic arguments are so ferocious because there is so little at stake. Is it a coincidence that many of those involved seem to be either the overeducated or people who insufficiently digested what education they did receive? Given a choice, I’ll take in vito over in vitro every time.

Not to be overlooked is that those who most intensely argue against nihonjinron often use it as a vehicle for their real motive—Japan-bashing. And in turn, Japan bashing is often a vehicle for lashing out at some demon in one’s personal background entirely unrelated to Japan. Perhaps more Japanese should consider developing the field of gaijinron as it concerns foreigners’ views of them.

Nor should we overlook that those most scornful of nihonjinron somehow fail to notice the libraries full of arguments claiming a similar uniqueness for the Americans, the English, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Koreans, and scores of small tribes throughout the world known only to their neighbors and anthropologists.

So who was Lord Jones?

A website post cannot do justice to all the issues required to fully examine a concept as important and as difficult to grasp as amae, both pro and con. That’s why journalists might honestly struggle to describe for use as corner space filler the life and ideas of Dr. Doi–a Japanese Lord Jones whom the public did not know, and whose reputation was formed in a different era for a subject with which few people are conversant and even fewer would want to be.

So how did they handle it? Here’s one example from AP (emphasis mine):

Takeo Doi, a scholar who wrote that the Japanese psyche thrived on a love-hungry dependence on authority figures, has died, his family said Monday. Doi…wrote the 1971 book, “The Anatomy of Dependence,” which introduced the idea of “amae” – a childlike desire for indulgence - as key to understanding the Japanese mind.

One wonders just how many people in journalism—helplessly watching their credibility vanish, their market shares vaporize, and their stockholders hit the silk—realize that much of the public has grown to detest them for the habitual and intentional professional malpractice the above excerpt demonstrates. There is no question that the person who wrote that–and I don’t care what her name was–deliberately chose the most unflattering way to describe the man’s work.

One also wonders if the journalists realize that for the same disgusted public, watching them commit suicide is an opportunity to pop some corn and crack open a beer. It’s obvious to those of us familiar with Japan that the journalists assigned to cover this country are (pick one or more) superficial, ignorant, incompetent, eager to play off negative stereotypes, or ready to create new ones. They have an attitude of charity towards none and malice towards all.

If all your information about Japan is derived from the Western mass media, then everything you know about Japan is wrong.

Afterwords: I was curious about the statement that Dr. Doi coined the noun amae (it’s been a while since I read the book), so I did a quick check of Japanese-Japanese dictionaries. The word does not appear in the 1984 edition of Kojien, which was the standard reference in those days, but it is defined in Sanseido’s 1984 Reikai Shinkokugo Jiten. That dictionary was compiled for younger students, but it has excellent examples and concise definitions that are useful even for adults. There’s now a fourth edition, and I highly recommend it for foreign students of the Japanese language.

So pointless it’s comical

ONE MEANS by which the opposition Democratic Party of Japan promises to finance some of the extravagant spending promises in its platform is to eliminate government waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s plausible on the surface, because waste, fraud, and abuse is the hallmark of governments (and large organizations) everywhere. Even the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has formed a project team to ferret out and eliminate waste in government.

A Satonaka work of media art

Earlier this month, the LDP team called for the elimination of a government plan to build what was described as a national media and arts center that would collect and exhibit comics, cartoons, and video games.

The plan was contained in the FY 2009 supplementary budget passed at the end of May, which allocated JPY 11.7 billion (about $US 122,500,000) for the center. Some ruling party MPs were opposed from the start, but their opposition went for naught.

Explained a bureaucrat:

“As a content industry, (this industry) has a role in supporting the Japanese economy. There is meaning is pursuing this as a national policy.”

The Agency of Cultural Affairs calls this “world-renowned ‘media art’” and hopes it “creates a whirlwind of new art originating from Japan.”

To his credit, DPJ President Hatoyama Yukio has repeatedly criticized the project. During a debate with Aso Taro in the Diet, he said:

“I know the Prime Minister likes comics and cartoons, but is it necessary to spend 11.7 billion yen to create a giant state-run comic book coffee shop and further enrich an independent administrative agency?”

Replied the prime minister:

“I think it is important now to create an international center for the media arts, referred to as the Japanese Cool, for cartoons, comics, and games. It will be a core institution for promoting Japanese culture. The new National Media Arts Center will be established as part of the Independent Administrative Institution, National Museum of Art, but the management and operation of the center will be outsourced and the funds it requires will be self-generated.”

Is that the stench of amakudari—cushy second jobs for retired bureaucrats—wafting through your monitor? And who really believes this center will be financially self-supporting?

Some also criticize the project for lacking originality. A panel of experts produced a lackluster report that proposes the center be housed in a four-or-five story building in Tokyo with exhibition rooms and a hall for screening films. They’ve yet to offer suggestions for the content to be displayed.

The lack of clear standards for the content troubles more than a few people. Perhaps the panel of experts would exclude items that many would find objectionable. (Or perhaps they wouldn’t, if the controversy of the public funding to exhibit Piss Christ in the United States is anything to go by.) The unanswered question is who knows where they would draw the line. One can almost guarantee it: The wrong place.

The panel of experts initially consisted of seven people, to which another seven were added. They are primarily from academia and the related industries. One of them is University of Tokyo Professor Hamano Yasuki, a specialist in Media Environment in the Department of Human and Engineered Environmental Studies. He has written several books, one of which is called Media as an Ideology.

Another is cartoonist Satonaka Machiko. Golly, what do you suppose she thinks of the project? On her blog, she says it is too easily misunderstood, and adds:

“Unless Japan is recognized overseas, there will still be a tendency to look down on Japanese culture. This must not be allowed to continue forever. We need a center to promote the country and say, ‘Here’s how wonderful the Japanese media arts are!’”

What Ms. Satonaka doesn’t seem to realize is that if any people overseas do look down on Japanese culture (and I suspect there aren’t many, rather than it being a tendency), their disregard is more likely caused by those who want to pretend that comic books and cartoons have serious artistic value. Why not just admit that the project is designed to attract the cash of the people attracted to chewing gum culture and be done with it?

Project team member Kono Taro of the LDP told reporters the project should be halted immediately because insufficient consideration was given to the taxpayer’s liability and the selection of the items to be exhibited.

When Mr. Kono was asked why he voted to approve the budget, he replied:

“The ruling party must also accept the responsibility.”

After speaking to the media, Mr. Kono briefed the chair of the project team and the Diet members aligned with the Education Ministry (the so-called tribal MPs), which is also involved with cultural affairs. Are the dots starting to connect yet?

The Cultural Affairs Agency plans to acquire land for the center this year and open the doors sometime in FY 2011. They haven’t stopped work, the project team’s objections notwithstanding. The preparatory committee plans to meet on 2 July and formulate the standards for the content to be displayed later this month.

Ms. Satonaka claims the annual Japan Media Arts Festival is insufficient to promote the industry. The 13th festival begins in mid-July and continues until mid-September; here’s their website. Take a look and see if you think a permanent government-financed home for all that is worth an investment of more than 120 million dollars.

Let’s be clear about this: This project is a perfect illustration of what people mean when they say they want to smash the Kasumigaseki bureaucracy. Japan’s infamous Iron Triangle still exists. The three legs of the triangle are the bureaucracy, the legislature, and industry, and they’ve formed a unit for their mutual enrichment at the expense of the taxpayers. People usually associate the Iron Triangle with public works projects, including highways and bridges to nowhere, but this plan demonstrates there is no limit to the imagination of bureaucrats with nearly unlimited public funds at their disposal.

It’s time to cut out the nonsense, admit that former Prime Minister Koizumi, Takenaka Heizo, and their allies were right, and maintain the fight against this expensive foolishness. It’s not possible to say, “end it once and for all”, because this fight never ends, anywhere. Mr. Hatoyama may be on the side of the angels in this battle, but he’s just as anxious to stop the privatization of Japan Post as he is to stop this project. Just as there’s no reason for the government to fund a comic book museum, there’s also no reason for the government to operate a retail financial institution, life insurance company, resort chain—or even deliver the mail.

Maintaining this fight requires the vigilance of the mass media, but they’re unreliable allies because they often pay attention to the wrong things. They require ratings and consumers, and that means pandering to the popular imagination. For example, they’ve filed few stories about this issue over the past month, yet found plenty of time and space to cover a flu epidemic that will infect very few in Japan and kill even fewer.

I stumbled across this story by accident in Akahata, the house organ of the Japanese Communist Party. That the controversy was semi-buried in the mainstream media speaks volumes about their priorities. Their failure to cover the debate despite their knowledge of it makes them just as culpable for producing this barrel of pork as the bureaucrats and the self-serving “media arts” content producers.

Afterwords:

One of the winners in the Manga Division of the 2008 Media Arts Festival was a comic called Real Clothes. Here is the summary from the MAF website:

Kinue, a woman of 27, works for a major department store in Shinjuku, a very competitive environment. Unexpectedly, she is transferred from the bedding floor, where she loves to work, to the women’s clothes floor. This is the story of her search for meaning in dressing, working, and living, and also of her personal development through her work and dealings with devious new coworkers.

Here is the reason given for the award:

I was not only captivated by the artist’s outstanding drawing skill and sharp, effective lines, but also by the clever storytelling, and healthy elegance and liveliness of the heroine, who almost seemed as though she were coming out of the picture. Although the same can be said of her other works, the exhaustive research into the thematic subject matter is amazing. This story is set on a women’s clothes floor, one of the topliner sections in a department store. She lives positively and energetically. However, her romance begins to hinder her work, and she must choose between them! It is the sort of life-changing turning point that all working women have to face once in their lives. The artist faces this matter squarely, portraying the naked soul of humanity. The heroine eventually chooses her work, and breaks up with her beloved boyfriend. The expression of her intense feeling of loss is strongly conveyed and the reader cannot help but feel deep compassion. This modern heroine’s way of life is very interesting, and I hope that women currently facing similar decisions in the workplace have the opportunity to open the pages of this manga.

Another award was given to the comic Shiori to Shimiko. The creator was asked about his motivation. He said:

“With regard to Shiori to Shimiko, my main intention was to produce a horror manga for girls.”

Taxpayers might consider this: You’ve spent at least 12 years of study to graduate from high school, and many of you have devoted an additional four or more years to university study. You’ve hopped through all the hurdles to finding employment, and now spend the better part of the day five days a week to provide for yourself and your family.

But instead getting to spend the money you earn on your priorities, a band of brigands in Tokyo (it makes no difference that they wear business suits instead of masks and work in offices instead of hiding in caves) has decided to confiscate part of your income to create a comic book/cartoon/gameboy museum. One of their excuses is that some people overseas still don’t take Japanese culture seriously.

Who’s serving whom here? Is the government (including both the legislature and civil servants) serving you? Or are you shackled in servitude to them?

To conclude, Japanese readers should not misunderstand. This isn’t about Japan; it’s simply a Japanese example of what goes on every day, everywhere else. The United States, where I come from, is just as bad, if not worse. It’s just that I pay taxes to the Japanese government now instead of the American one.

The pictures of Japan inside your head

WALTER LIPPMAN ONCE OBSERVED that the popular conceptions of people, places, and events outside the range of our direct experience are informed by pictures inside our heads, and that these pictures are often created by journalists incapable of seeing beyond the pictures in their own heads.

As long as we realize that the prime directive for the print and broadcast media has always been to entertain rather than to inform, the damage will be no greater than that caused by the stories we habitually tell ourselves in our daily lives anyway. The problems arise when the journalistic drones start believing the pictures they create and cause real trouble by spreading falsehoods among people without the means to educate themselves otherwise.

While this phenomenon exists in the print and broadcast media everywhere, it is endemic in the overseas English-language media dealing with Japan. The pictures in their heads amount to a full-blown hallucination.

Here are brief descriptions of three newspaper articles that appeared today, all about the preparation of food. What sort of cognitive dissonance is created with the pictures in your head when you read them?

Japanese cooking school in Seoul

Shunted off to the side of page 11 in the Nishinippon Shimbun was a brief article covering the announcement that the Nakamura Culinary School of Fukuoka City will open a Seoul branch in September to provide instruction in the preparation of Japanese cuisine and Western confections. Licensed chefs in both fields will teach the classes assisted by Korean interpreters.

The school will offer two courses—one for prospective chefs, and one for professionals already working as chefs. The course for the pros will be limited to 24 students, and will include 132 hours of instruction over a six-month period. In addition to the school’s regular instructors, food preparers at well-known Japanese hotels, ryotei (traditional Japanese restaurants, very expensive) and patisseries will also be used as teachers for the course.

The Nakamura Culinary School thinks it sees a business opportunity because there has been a surge of popularity in Japanese food in South Korea over the past few years. More than 1,000 South Koreans came to Japan last year alone to learn how to prepare Japanese food at local culinary institutes.

But the sharp depreciation of the won caused attendance to dip this year. School head Nakamura Tetsu decided to offer instruction in Seoul to make it cheaper for the students. It’s also easier for the students to learn from courses conducted in the Korean language. (Instruction at cooking schools in Japan is of course entirely in Japanese.)

The article notes this is the second cooking school to open a South Korean branch, after Osaka’s Tsuji Culinary Institute.

Now how does this—and the many other similar stories I’ve presented here—clash with the pictures in the heads of people who have been entertained with tales about how the Koreans and the Japanese just hatehatehate each other?

Incidentally, the Fukuoka Asian Urban Research Center conducted a survey by questionnaire in February and March of residents in the major cities of South Korea to determine the city’s name recognition and its image in those areas. The survey found a name recognition of greater than 80% for their sister city in Busan, South Korea. That percentage soared to 95% for Busan women in their 20s and 30s.

The reason cited by the center for that stratospheric percentage among young Korean women was the frequency with which they or their friends hop across the Korean Strait to go shopping in Kyushu.

That doesn’t surprise me at all, but then I live near Fukuoka City, have seen and met many of those same young women, and know how easy it is to travel between the two cities because I’ve done it myself. Forgive me for believing the picture inside the dim cave of my own head.

The reggae izakaya

Takeo in Saga is a town of about 50,000 people roughly midway between the two slightly larger towns of Saga City and Sasebo, Nagasaki. It takes about a half hour to get from Takeo to either city, and an additional hour or so to travel to either Nagasaki City or Fukuoka City.

Buried even further in the back of today’s Nishinippon Shimbun was a blurb about a new dish being served at a “reggae izakaya” in Takeo called Nuf Nuf. (An izakaya is a traditional Japanese eating and drinking place.)

Nuf Nuf is run by 36-year-old Koga Manabu. The photo accompanying the piece showed a man with a genial smile and a knit tam covering what appears to be an impressive growth of dreadlocks.

Mr. Koga created a new dish that his customers think is quite tasty. He started with Sicilian rice, added wild boar meat, and used locally grown lemongrass as a flavor enhancer. He said he slices the boar meat very thin to neutralize its distinctive odor.

He offered it first at a trial tasting party on 31 May, and it went over so well he put it on the Nuf Nuf menu. He serves it with soup on the side and charges JPY 800 ($US 8.14), which sounds reasonable.

I’ve never been to Nuf Nuf, but I know people who have—including a Jamaican woman who enjoyed living in Saga for several years. She told me Koga Manabu was a nice guy and the food was good.

But aren’t the Japanese supposed to be xenophobic islanders turning even more inward and nationalistic? What’s this about some guy in dreadlocks in a town in the middle of the sticks creating new recipes using Sicilian rice? He’s going to ruin all those pictures in your head of Japanese who can’t abide foreigners or bear to put any kind of rice past their lips other than the plain but pure white variety grown on the islands.

Robo-chefs to take over Japanese kitchens

That’s what the headline in the New Zealand Herald said, and who are we to quibble with a source chosen as the Best Media Website in 2007, 2008, and 2009 in the Qantas Media Awards?

Here’s the first sentence in the article:

“They’ve got ones that clean, and others that pour drinks, so it was only a matter of time before Japanese inventors came up with robots that can cook.”

Just out of curiosity, have you seen one of those robots cleaning a house or pouring your drinks anywhere?

Neither have I.

But the best media website for three years running says it was just a matter of time before those robot-mad Japanese inventors came up with robot chefs.

Various prototype robo-chefs showed off their cooking skills at the International Food Machinery and Technology Expo in Tokyo, flipping “okonomiyaki” Japanese pancakes, serving sushi and slicing vegetables.

When did machines start to have “skills” instead of functions? And when did either machines or people start to “flip” okonomiyaki? Is poetic license the reason they’ve won that string of awards? It certainly isn’t because the person who wrote that article has seen anyone make those “Japanese pancakes”.

The real story here is that the Japanese have a knack for automating different types of labor that the biens pensants once lamented as dehumanizing, particularly on assembly lines in auto plants.

Robots are also efficient, dependable, show up for work sober and on time, and don’t have labor unions that demand retirement packages preventing the company from making a profit on the cars they manufacture. Ask the management personnel who used to work at General Motors, assuming you don’t have to chase them down on the golf course while they enjoy their severance packages.

“We all know that robots can be very useful. We want to take that utility out of the factory so that they can be used elsewhere,” said Narito Hosomi, president of Toyo Riki, manufacturers of the pancake-cooking robot.

Well, why not? Isn’t this just a logical progression from machines that mix carbonated water and flavored syrup in on-site dispensers at restaurants to give customers the soft drinks they order? Or the machines at any other plant the world over that manufacture and package food products in processes that are almost entirely automated?

Take a few seconds to think about it, and it turns out to be just the normal course of events in the development of any kind of technology. People come up with different ideas, spend the time and money to make them a reality, and see if they fly in the marketplace. If their ideas are useful, they make a profit. If not, they might be able to apply the new technology to different fields. It makes the world turn around that much more smoothly, and it’s even worth an article in the daily paper.

But how much more entertaining it is to create pictures in peoples’ heads of Robo-Chefs Taking Over Japanese Kitchens to flip okonomiyaki, presumably leaving the human Japanese to march around their rabbit hutches plotting new ways to conquer the Korean Peninsula! This time for sure! Taking an occasional break for sex with their inflatable dolls, of course.

If the media thinks they have to provide fictitious images to their consumers for the sake of entertainment, when the real information is much more entertaining, more enlightening—and much less dangerous—that’s the business model they have to live with.

But it’s too bad for them the soaring number of media bankruptcies and disappearing ad revenue isn’t just a picture inside their own heads.