The wolf is at the door

IT was almost the Aesop’s Fable in reverse: Officials have for so long been so little forthcoming with real information about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, some people wouldn’t believe them even if they were to tell the truth that the shepherd boy is warning about a fictitious wolf.

Other people, for reasons that are not clear, seem determined to create a situation which will manifest that wolf and bring him to the doorstep.

Most of the 30 (or 40, or 50, depending on the account) people who showed up for a good, old-time sit-in on Tuesday in the city of Kitakyushu were expressing honest concerns. They came to block six trucks hauling 80 tons of debris created by last year’s disaster from Ishinomaki, Miyagi, for a trial incineration at the Hiagari facility. The demonstrators plopped down in front of the gates to prevent the trucks from entering, which they successfully did for more than eight hours. One even crawled under a truck. The police finally dispersed them, arresting two in the process. That cleared the way for another 21 trucks to arrive later that evening.

Officials said the first burning of the debris over three days at two locations in the city went ahead as scheduled. It was packed in 140 plastic bags each measuring two meters in diameter. The announced radiation count was less than 100 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram. The health ministry’s lowest acceptable limit for radioactive cesium is 200 becquerels per kilogram of drinking water and 500 for vegetables.

The debris was mixed in a one-to-nine ratio with ordinary municipal refuse and incinerated in a method the city claims will remove more than 99.9% of the toxic material, even that contaminated by radioactive cesium. The city will then measure the radioactivity of the trucks and the equipment after the work is completed, and decide by mid-June whether to allow full-scale incineration to continue. If they agree, they will be the first municipality in western Japan to do so.

The small number of demonstrators is significant for two reasons. First, Kitakyushu was once a heavily industrialized city with serious pollution problems, but has won international recognition for converting itself into an “environmental city”. As a result, most residents do indeed trust them in matters of this sort. One 34-year-old woman griped about the demonstrators: “These people have a narrow viewpoint and think only of their immediate surroundings.” The city admitted, however, that they were negligent in promptly explaining the procedure to citizens’ groups and focusing on agriculture and fishery groups instead.

The low number is also significant because the Japan Revolutionary Communist League, AKA Chukakuha, wasn’t able to round up any more than that for the demo. Chukakuha is a revolutionary/terrorist outfit that arose in the late 60s/early 70s, when that sort of thing was in vogue. More than a hundred of its members have been arrested for murder (sometimes of themselves), assault, and homemade bomb production. They’re still around, though less active and with less coverage than before. One member fired a mortar at the guest house for heads of state at the 1986 Tokyo summit, and others set fire to the homes of public sector employees in Chiba in 2002/3. Here’s the JRCL English-language website, which gives you an insight into their avocation. Japanese-language ability is required to read one member’s report boasting of how they held up the incineration, however.

It’s said to be an “open secret” that Chukakuha were behind last year’s Energy Shift Study Conference, attended by then-Prime Minister Kan Naoto. Mr. Kan is no dupe, by the way; he’s hung out with people of this sort since his own days as a student demonstrator, and has spoken more than once of his sympathy for Zenkyoto’s “cultural revolution”.  Another fellow traveler is one of Japan’s leading punitive leftists, the head of the Social Democratic Party of Japan, Fukushima Mizuho. She and her unofficial husband have given legal advice to Chukakuha members, spoken at conferences organized by their members, supported some of their activities, and were (jointly) named as one of the most 100 influential people of the world last year by Time magazine for their anti-nuclear energy crusade. What, you hadn’t heard?

The news readers in this clip don’t offer any more information than you already know, but it’s worth watching to see how things went down. Where else in the world do policemen dressed in freshly pressed white shirts and neckties drag off demonstrators to the pig box?

Whistling for the wolf

While a certain amount of public hysteria about a nuclear power plant accident is to be expected, professor/author/alphablogger Ikeda Nobuo charges that the mass media in general and the Asahi group in particular are deliberately provoking it and making it worse. The Asahi group operates both a newspaper and a television network, and their political/social views are roughly similar to those of the New York Times in the U.S. and The Guardian in Britain.

Prof. Ikeda is scathing in his criticism of the Asahi, not for their general philosophy, but for their readiness to reverse their positions to enflame public opinion and benefit in the form of higher circulation/ratings. Once a strong editorial supporter of nuclear energy in the 1970s, the newspaper has shifted its stance over time and became a nuclear-free advocate after the Fukushima accident. He asserts that the newspaper’s approach is typical of behavior stretching back decades, and is reminiscent of their editorials and articles written to whip up martial spirit during the war. He quotes from an Asahi editorial written on 14 August 1945.

“There is no question that the atomic bomb has considerable power. Nonetheless, while all new weapons have power in the beginning, historical fact bears out that their power suddenly wanes when measures are eventually established against them….the opportunity for revenge on the enemy’s atrocities will arrive when first, the belief of the people burning within their breasts becomes a ball of fire that quietly hardens and bursts at once into flame.”

Note that the editorial was published after the two atomic bombings and Japan had already agreed to surrender unconditionally, but the newspaper was still talking about “revenge on the enemy’s atrocities”.

After Japan’s surrender the following day, the Asahi wrote an editorial saying that the country must establish “a nation of peace”. Since then, they have trumpeted the necessity to “defend the Peace Constitution”.

Prof. Ikeda then presents for comparison an editorial written by the newspaper’s Ono Hirohito calling for a nuclear power-free society that reverses their pro-nuclear stance:

“Isn’t declaring that we should examine whether or not to give up nuclear energy the same as saying the accident of 11 March didn’t occur? We should first make up our minds whether or not we should give up nuclear energy, and then confront the subsequent challenge of whether or not we are able to give it up. The Fukushima accident compels us to change our thinking in that way.”

Says the professor:

“It is eerie how closely this resembles the editorial of 14 August 1945. What they have in common is the approach of proclaiming a hardline policy based on an ideal without considering whether or not it is possible. During the war, they pandered to Imperial Headquarters, and after the defeat they reversed themselves and pandered to the GHQ. During the period of rapid growth, they pandered to the power companies and supported nuclear energy, and after the accident they reversed themselves and support a nuclear-free Japan. For the Asahi Shimbun, the Fukushima accident was the second defeat in the war.”

He deals with the behavior of the television network in a separate blog post:

“It is a simple matter to cast off a sense of shame, pander to fools, and boost ratings, as Asahi TV has done. It is the same as the Asahi Shimbun boosting its circulation during the war by writing of the “explosion of the ball of fire that is the people” to enflame public opinion.

“This is the fateful dilemma of mass society. Democracy is based on the premise that the people are wise, but in fact the people are emotional and short-sighted. In a national referendum, they would likely vote to give up nuclear energy and reduce taxes to zero. The people who believe that is true democracy have the intellectual facilities of a junior high school student.

“A consensus can be created by emotion, but results cannot be changed by emotion. The losses incurred by stopping nuclear power generation have exceeded JPY six trillion, which is already more than the damage from the accident at Fukushima reactor #1. Any large power blackouts that occur will likely cause immense human damage far greater than that of Fukushima. When that happens, one wonders if Asahi TV will align itself with the victims and strike the anti-establishment pose.”

The Asahi isn’t the only Japanese newspaper responsible for spreading paranoia. The EXSKF site (which enjoys a bit of paranoia itself) demonstrates how the Yomiuri Shimbun’s mishandling of technical information — beyond the comprehension of the average journo — has created the false impression that the Fukushima nuclear contamination is four times worse than that at Chernobyl. It isn’t, and the poster at the site provides and explains the correct calculations:

Cesium-137 released from Fukushima: 400,000 terabecquerels

Cesium-137 released from Chernobyl: 3,400,000 terabecquerels

Kansai Electric’s Oi nuclear reactors

Media wolf whistling is bad enough, but downright despicable is the use of nuclear energy as an issue by politicians and their associates who already enjoy broad public support. It is difficult to see how they can benefit from pandering. Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru has galvanized attention as the symbol of serious, bottom-up government reform in Japan, and his rise has ignited a renaissance of dynamic criticism and debate, particularly among those under the age of 50. Yet he has chosen over the past few months to detour into a call for a nuclear-free Japan with emotional appeals characterized by the absence of proposals for replacing the lost energy source. In particular, he is speaking out against resuming operations at the Oi nuclear power plant in his neck of the woods. Here’s an example of his rhetoric:

“If you say you’re putting peoples’ lives first (the slogan of the ruling Democratic Party), putting the peoples’ lives in danger by restarting the nuclear plants would not be possible.”

Kansai Electric Power, facing the worst potential power shortfalls of the country’s utilities if the plants are not restarted, has warned that it will have to raise rates otherwise. Osaka Prefecture Gov. Matsui Ichiro, Mr. Hashimoto’s primary political ally, retorted by threatening wolf-like behavior to oppose a rate hike:

“Mayor Hashimoto Toru and I can only resort to holding a sit-in in front of their offices in opposition.”

Kansai Electric says their thermal power fuel costs (oil, coal) were JPY 500 billion higher than last year (to compensate for the shutdown of the nuclear plants), and will amount to another JPY 400 billion this year. Their total fuel costs are double those of 2010, and they are warning of insolvency.

The City of Osaka is the largest single stockholder of Kansai Electric. Thus, the man who represents that ownership stake is behaving as if he would bankrupt the company. Ah, but one of his advisors has a solution. That would be “energy scientist” Iida Tetsunari, a member of various institutes, recipient of various government appointments, founder of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, and a promoter of the idea that Japan can go 100% renewable energy by 2050:

“At this rate, Kansai Electric will go bankrupt next year. The government should offset the fuel expenditures. That way they won’t have to raise rates.”

Save the facepalm — It gets worse. Former Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry high-flyer Koga Shigeaki, a University of Tokyo graduate, former principal administrator for OECD, radical reformer of the bureaucracy, and another key Hashimoto advisor has started dancing with the wolves.

Not so long ago, he knew better. Last year, he said that the biggest problem with nuclear energy was how to dispose of the fuel. Now he too wants to shut all the reactors down.

He attended a recent meeting of the Municipal Energy Strategy Council in Osaka and started an argument with a representative of the national Agency for Natural Resources, who was there to advocate restarting the nuclear plants.

Koga: “Just what is the reason you are thinking of restarting the reactors?

NRA rep: “At the minimum, we have confirmed their safety is such the reactor core would not be damaged to the extent of that which occurred during the Fukushima accident.”

Koga: “Don’t you understand any situations other than Fukushima?

And:

Koga: “METI’s ties with the power company are too close, so they are lenient. Your whole argument is based on the assumption that they will be restarted.”

NRA rep: “It’s harassment when you talk about close ties.”

Then they got emotional.

Still not time for a facepalm — That’s not the half of it. Here’s what Mr. Koga told the viewers of the Morning Bird TV program on the Asahi network on 17 May:

“I can only think that (Kansai Electric) will create a state of “power outage terrorism”. They’ll intentionally cause an accident at the thermal power plant, or stop operating it if an accident does occur, to create a panic due to a large power shortage. They’ll say their only choice is to restart the nuclear power plants.”

Over-the-top rhetoric in Osaka must be contagious. Another Hashimoto aide, former Finance Ministry official Takahashi Yoichi, also plays with fire in this excerpt from a column in Gendai Business Online:

“It has gotten difficult for the DPJ government after Mayor Hashimoto’s declaration that he and One Osaka will bring them down. The best chance for cutting him down to size, regional devolution, is already beyond their capability. In the end, the concern would be, though it is difficult to imagine, Kansai Electric suicide terrorism by creating an insufficient power supply during the peak period of summer use. What crosses the mind is the response of the Social Insurance Agency during the Abe administration when the subject of their privatization was broached. The agency released a stream of information that was fatal to the Abe administration (loss of pension records that occurred a decade before). The falsehoods of the “suicide bombing” of the Social Insurance Agency circulated at the time.

“Kansai Electric is a private sector company, and the company would collapse if they really did something like that. I don’t think it’s possible, but it is a fact they can control the supply of power, and there is a touch of uncertainty that rolling blackouts are not out of the question. That subject already has arisen. If the situation continues in which they have no measures for dealing with peak load (they probably can’t), then it is perhaps possible they might consider a little shock therapy, though I really don’t want to think about it.”

What some people really don’t want to think about is that these people are creating a wolf from a figment of their imaginations. Try this from Bloomberg:

“The highest reading reported on the health ministry’s website so far has come from a sample of spinach collected on March 18 from Hitachi city, 97 kilometers (60 miles) south of the plant. The spinach, which didn’t enter the food chain, contained 27 times the safe limit of radiation for I-131, according to the health ministry.

“The spinach contained 54,100 Bq/kg of I-131 and 1,931 Bq/kg of cesium. That means consuming 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of fresh spinach would yield a radiation exposure of 1.2 millisieverts, or half the average annual natural exposure from soil and cosmic rays, based on Bloomberg calculations using a formula posted on the website of Japan’s Food Safety Commission.”

Some of the wolf whistlers would probably accuse them of hiding something. Maybe a UN scientific committee is hiding something too. From Nature magazine:

“Few people will develop cancer as a consequence of being exposed to the radioactive material that spewed from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant last year — and those who do will never know for sure what caused their disease. These conclusions are based on two comprehensive, independent assessments of the radiation doses received by Japanese citizens, as well as by the thousands of workers who battled to bring the shattered nuclear reactors under control.

“The first report, seen exclusively by Nature, was produced by a subcommittee of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) in Vienna, and covers a wide swathe of issues related to all aspects of the accident. The second, a draft of which has been seen by Nature, comes from the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, and estimates doses received by the general public in the first year after the accident. Both reports will be discussed at UNSCEAR’s annual meeting in Vienna this week.

“The UNSCEAR committee’s analyses show that 167 workers at the plant received radiation doses that slightly raise their risk of developing cancer. The general public was largely protected by being promptly evacuated, although the WHO report does find that some civilians’ exposure exceeded the government’s guidelines. “If there’s a health risk, it’s with the highly exposed workers,” says Wolfgang Weiss, the chair of UNSCEAR. Even for these workers, future cancers may never be directly tied to the accident, owing to the small number of people involved and the high background rates of cancer in developed countries such as Japan.”

Or even MIT:

“A new study from MIT scientists suggests that the guidelines governments use to determine when to evacuate people following a nuclear accident may be too conservative.

“The study, led by Bevin Engelward and Jacquelyn Yanch and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that when mice were exposed to radiation doses about 400 times greater than background levels for five weeks, no DNA damage could be detected.

““Clearly these studies had to be done in animals rather than people, but many studies show that mice and humans share similar responses to radiation. This work therefore provides a framework for additional research and careful evaluation of our current guidelines,” Engelward says.

“It is interesting that, despite the evacuation of roughly 100,000 residents, the Japanese government was criticized for not imposing evacuations for even more people. From our studies, we would predict that the population that was left behind would not show excess DNA damage — this is something we can test using technologies recently developed in our laboratory,” she adds.”

Power shortages this summer would not only cause inconvenience and discomfort, they could also lead to the creation of an economic wasteland resembling the remains of the Fukushima nuclear power plants — all due to the popular delusion of crowds encouraged by the self-aggrandizing behavior of wolverine media outlets and politicians disguised in Granny’s clothes .

It will take six weeks to get the Oi nuclear power plants running again in the Kansai area, where the shortage will be the most critical. That means it’s very close to being too late. Rather than find a secret air-conditioned room to hole up in, the editorialists and the politicians will more likely put on a show of making a virtue out of hardship. They did that in 1945, too.

*****

Got to watch out for those wolves. They sure can be sneaky.

Ichigen koji (104)

一言居士

- A person who has something to say about everything

No one in the mass media can read an academic paper. Not only are they too busy, they have no specialized knowledge.  Everything they know is what they’ve heard.  If you work in the news department for five years, you turn into an idiot (literally, アホ).

What I realized from working in television for 15 years is that television is a waste of time.  The best thing about quitting the network was that I don’t have to watch television anymore.

- Ikeda Nobuo, university professor, author, and blogger. He was employed at the quasi-public broadcaster NHK, spending part of that time as a program director. He says he resigned when it came time for promotion to a management position and he discovered it wouldn’t be possible to continue his involvement with program production.

Ichigen koji (97)

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

I never cease to be amazed at how foreign newspapers, especially American or British ones, fail to report the truth about Italian politics. Since I moved here in 1998, I cannot recall a single article that was not a grotesque distortion of the political reality. If they get Italy so wrong, what about the rest of the world?

- Nicholas Farrell

I could well have written that second sentence about Japan, changing only the date to 1984. As for the first sentence, I ceased to be amazed long ago. As for the third sentence: He has to ask?

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Read it in the news

STILL dealing with an influx of work, but in the meantime here are some links providing an update on the state of the industrial media in the U.S.

One Free Korea examines the working relationship between the Associated Press and the North Korean government. No one else will.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is now on the payroll of the Chinese government.

As Harry Truman once said, I feel sorry for the man who reads the newspaper at the breakfast table and thereby thinks he has an understanding of what is happening in the world.

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Corrupt

Corrupt: 1. orig., changed from a sound condition to an unsound one; spoiled; contaminated, rotten 2. deteriorated from the normal or standard; specif., a) morally unsound or debased; perverted; evil; depraved…c) containing alterations, errors, or admixtures of foreignisms; said of texts, languages, etc.
- Webster’s New World Dictionary

THE Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, a panel consisting of 30 “university professors, lawyers, and journalists”, released its report this week on the response of the Japanese government and industry to the Fukushima nuclear disaster last March.

The coverage of that report by some elements of the mass media, both in the Anglosphere and Japan, can only be described as corrupt.

The foundation’s founder, Funabashi Yoichi, is the former editor in chief of the Asahi Shimbun. The New York Times’ Martin Fackler writes the following in his article on the release of the report:

“(Mr. Funabashi) said his group’s findings conflicted with those of the government’s own investigation into the accident, which were released in an interim report in December. A big difference involved one of the most crucial moments of the nuclear crisis, when the prime minister, Mr. Kan, marched into Tepco’s headquarters early on the morning of March 15 upon hearing that the company wanted to withdraw its employees from the wrecked nuclear plant.

“The government’s investigation sided with Tepco by saying that Mr. Kan, a former social activist who often clashed with Japan’s establishment, had simply misunderstood the company, which wanted to withdraw only a portion of its staff. Mr. Funabashi said his foundation’s investigators had interviewed most of the people involved — except executives at Tepco, which refused to cooperate — and found that the company had in fact said it wanted a total pullout.

“He credited Mr. Kan with making the right decision in forcing Tepco not to abandon the plant.

“‘Prime Minister Kan had his minuses and he had his lapses,’ Mr. Funabashi said, ‘but his decision to storm into Tepco and demand that it not give up saved Japan.’”

Ah, so. Kan Naoto is the savior of Japan.

The AFP news agency report identifies Kitazawa Koichi as “the panel head” and contains the following passage:

“The panel said as the situation on Japan’s tsunami-wrecked coast worsened, Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) had wanted to abandon the plant and evacuate its workers.

“But the utility, which refused to co-operate with the study, was ordered to keep men on site by then prime minister Naoto Kan.

“Experts concluded that if the premier had not stuck to his guns, Fukushima would have spiralled further out of control, with catastrophic consequences.

“‘When the prime minister’s office was aware of the risk the country may not survive (the crisis)…TEPCO’s president (Masataka) Shimizu….frantically called’ to tell the premier he wanted his staff to leave the crippled nuclear reactor, panel head Koichi Kitazawa told a news conference.

“Kitazawa said Kan threatened to break up the powerful utility if the company insisted on pulling its men out.

“He said Kan’s refusal to bow to TEPCO’s demand had averted a worse crisis.

“Kan told Shimizu: ‘It’s impossible. If you withdraw staff, TEPCO will be demolished,’ according to Kitazawa.”

That last sentence is a mistranslation, perhaps deliberate, but we’ll get to that later.

“‘Consequently, it’s Mr Kan’s biggest contribution that the Fukushima 50 remained at the site,’ added Kitazawa, referring to dozens of operatives who worked to contain the accident and were feted as heroes.”

In their haste to set the agenda and disseminate their narrative, both the New York Times and AFP omitted some details.

For example, here is what Mr. Kitazawa actually said, from the original Japanese:

“(Mr. Kan) himself rushed into Tokyo Electric’s headquarters, which had requested that they be allowed to leave the site. In the end, 50 workers remained on the site. It is thought by some that this ultimately averted the worst-case scenario and was a great achievement. However, most of the excessive intervention on the site by the Kantei (i.e., Japan’s equivalent of the White House or 10 Downing St.), including the former prime minister’s involvement — down to the size of one of the batteries at the site — cannot be praised. In addition, the prime minister’s information disclosure was a failure and caused a sense of mistrust to spread among the people. We have no choice other than to say that overall, their response was a failure.”

(N.B.: The second use of the word failure was fugokaku, which has the sense of failing a school examination.)

Of the English-language reports that I read, only Reuters conveyed the panel’s conclusion that Mr. Kan was a failure, and then only on the second page of the website report I saw (The Chicago Tribune).

Fackler and the New York Times quotes Mr. Funabashi as saying that Kan Naoto saved Japan. No Japanese media report I’ve seen — and I’ve read several — has quoted that statement. Of course they quote extensively from the report on the behavior of Mr. Kan and the Kantei, but the tone is quite different.

Some direct quotes from the report follow. In regard to the intervention of Mr. Kan and the Kantei:

“It is not clear that it was useful in preventing the spread of the damage, and it undeniably increased the risk of needless confusion and the further development of the accident.”

And:

“The prime minister and the Kantei command center fell into an abnormal state of tension and confusion.”

That allows you to put into context the breathless “reporting” in the West, such as this from AFP:

“A worst-case scenario sketched out by the Japanese government foresaw the end of Tokyo in a chain of nuclear explosions as the Fukushima crisis erupted, an independent panel said.

“Chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano told investigators: ‘I had this demonic scenario in my head’ that nuclear reactors could break down one after another. If that happens Tokyo will be finished’.

“Plans were drawn up for the mass evacuation of the capital as Edano — the government’s point man on the nuclear crisis — fretted that reactors all along the coast could go into meltdown and engulf the city of 13 million people.”

No excerpt of the official report I read contained the conclusion that Tokyo was in danger of being “finished”. They did say that Mr. Kan and Mr. Edano had lost their heads, however. Though the AFP calls Edano Yukio the government’s “point man”, it does not mention that Mr. Edano’s sole professional experience before becoming a politician was that of a lawyer specializing in the defense of labor union radicals.

The portions of the report the Anglosphere media omitted present a rather different picture of events. Such as this in regard to the venting of Reactor #1 on the night of 11 March and the morning of 12 March:

“At a minimum, it cannot be recognized that the decision of the Kantei, the order of the Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry, and the prime minister’s demand were useful in promptly achieving the venting.”

In regard to the decision to insert seawater into the reactor on the evening of the 12th:

“The debate at the Kantei had no effect in the end, but if the Kantei’s (Kan’s) order to stop the insertion had been obeyed, it would have resulted in a dangerous situation with the possibility that the work would have been delayed.”

In regard to the insertion of seawater in Reactor #3 on the 13th:

“The Kantei expressed the opinion that fresh water should be preferred to seawater, and that opinion was conveyed from Tokyo Electric to (Fukushima plant manager) Yoshida….the switch to fresh water in the end brought about little or no improvement in conditions. The change in course had the possibility of needlessly exposing the workers to radiation. Not only did the Kantei’s instructions delay the work, there are suspicions that it increased the danger of failure of the water insertion into the reactor.”

There’s more:

“There are few examples in which the Kantei’s intervention into accident management on-site were an effective response to the accident. In most cases, it had absolutely no effect, or it increased the risk of worsening the situation due to needless confusion and stress.”

And:

“The risk involved in the leader of government intervening on-site in the response to the nuclear disaster should be an important lesson from the Fukushima accident to be shared by all.”

And:

“The Kantei’s initial response after the Fukushima accident was a series of crises. During the systemically unexpected developments, the core (of those responding) consisted of a handful of politicians without specialized knowledge or experience. Their grandstanding response continued as the crisis unfolded. It cannot be said that (this response) was at all sophisticated. Rather, this was immature and slapdash crisis management.”

Remember, these are direct quotes from the report.

On Mr. Kan specifically:

“The excessive involvement and intervention under Kantei leadership was criticized for its micromanagement. The Prime Minister was deeply involved in accident management, and it is undeniable that he was negligent in providing sufficient attention to overall crisis management.”

But wait: Martin Fackler and the New York Times quoted Funabashi Yoichi as saying that Kan Naoto saved Japan. In fact, Fackler also wrote:

“Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor in chief of the daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun, is one of Japan’s most respected public intellectuals.”

Keep in mind which newspaper that respected public intellectual edited as you read the following website commentary by Abiru Rui of the Sankei Shimbun. Mr. Abiru begins by noting that every major Japanese newspaper extensively quoted the report’s criticisms of Mr. Kan and used that criticism for their headlines.

Except one.

He explains the reason for that:

“Though all of the newspapers accurately reported the private sector panel’s severe criticism of Mr. Kan and the Kantei, the Asahi did not include any of these problems in its headlines. The text of the articles does not refer to them at all. The newspaper ignored them completely. This can only be said to be abnormal.

“The Asahi (previously) ran a series of articles titled The Trap of Prometheus. They praised Mr. Kan to an unbelievable degree, and continued to beautify his behavior to the extent it sets one’s teeth on edge…Of course, the Sankei will insist on its own viewpoint, and it can be understood that the Asahi will do the same. But to go to this extent to avoid writing about Mr. Kan’s problems, and not informing its readers of the facts, is to betray its subscribers.

“The articles in The Trap of Prometheus are written as if Mr. Kan’s behavior was calm and collected from start to finish, but the panel’s report says that he panicked. Were the circumstances inconvenient for them? In any event, (the articles in) The Trap of Prometheus had the appearance of thoroughness — they even captioned a photograph of a sandal of Terada Manabu, one of the prime minister’s aides.

“The chairman of the group that conducted this investigation was the Asahi’s former editor in chief, Funabashi Yoichi. It seems as if they didn’t care what anyone unconnected with the company had to say. Rather, it was a case of “We will convey the Asahi’s strong determination and resolve to protect Mr. Kan.”

Do I need to mention that the New York Times, the Asahi Shimbun, and Kan Naoto share the same political philosophy?

The sober and steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state

You also won’t read that when Kan Naoto “ordered” the Tokyo Electric Power officials to keep personnel on the site, he had no authority to issue an order to them, as a private-sector company, to do anything at all. There are only glancing references to his threat to dismantle the company if they didn’t listen to him (which he also has no authority to do). His threat to break up the utility was the mistranslated part of the AFP piece.

In fact, there’s quite a lot of information that you won’t read in these accounts — That Mr. Kan did order the Self-Defense Forces to leave the site when he thought it was too dangerous. (Government employees should be saved, but private-sector employees should be sacrificed?)…That Mr. Kan told Tokyo Electric that employees “60 years old or older” could be sent to the site (Younger employees should be saved, but older employees should be sacrificed?)…That it is widely suspected Mr. Kan promised to save Tokyo Electric if the utility started contributing to his Democratic Party instead of the opposition LDP.

The Japanese mass media — other than the Asahi — didn’t miss any of that.

It is curious. Many news media consumers in the Anglosphere would never take at face value anything the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News, or the BBC had to say about Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, or the EU, to cite a few of many examples.

Yet they think that turning the cyberpage somehow waves a magic wand of objectivity and credibility over the cesspool. For some reason, the readers swallow it whole and start “retweeting” and “liking” and getting all social media about everything. You know — “having their say”.

More than 60 years ago, former U.S. President Harry Truman said that he felt sorry for the average citizen who wakes up in the morning, reads the newspaper, and thereby thinks he knows something of what is happening in the world.

Sixty years and many revelations later, however, I am not inclined to be so generous.

It is no longer possible to be sympathetic to people who accept without reservation the work of those who are so clearly corrupt.

Afterwords:

Tokyo Electric Power officials chose not to be interviewed by the panel. The panel thinks there is insufficient evidence for the utility’s claim that it did not intend to fully withdraw from Fukushima. While agreeing that the panel could very well be correct, some people in Japan are now wondering if that conclusion was influenced by the statements of Mr. Kan and other government officials, who might have gotten carried away by their panic and mistrust of the utility. They are even finding some evidence to suggest that might have been the case. But this post is long enough already…

As always, links are only for the legit. Certainly not for the corrupt.

UPDATE: The Asahi English edition finally has an article on line that is critical of Mr. Kan and his government’s response. Some of the Japanese to English translation is amusing. For example:

“He cannot be given a passing grade from the overall perspective of his handling of the crisis,” Kitazawa said.

As I noted above, Mr. Kitazawa clearly said “He failed”.

Also:

The report quotes Kan as saying: “How large is the battery that you need? What are the dimensions? Weight? Can it be transported by helicopter?”

One participant who overheard the exchange told the investigative committee: “I became somewhat frightened when I thought about whether it was good for the nation to have the prime minister looking into such details.”

“Somewhat frightened”, eh? The original was zotto shita. That means “I shuddered to think that…” It can even be rendered in more intense language, such as “It made my flesh crawl”, “I was horrified to hear”, or “It made my blood run cold”.

But in Asahiworld, that’s “somewhat frightened”.

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TV or not TV

I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you–and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience-participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials–many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you will see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, try it.

- Newton Minow, to the National Association of Broadcasters on 9 May 1961 after his appointment as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission

REMEMBER when parents would nag their children about watching too much television? Parents in today’s Japan, however, don’t have to nag — teenagers and young adults in their 20s are abandoning television in numbers that are alarming people in the industry.

The weekly Shukan Post provided the details in last year’s 11 November issue. They began by reporting that the highest-rated program for the week of 3-9 October was the long-running comedy favorite Shoten at 18.1% — the lowest rating for the leading program in Japanese television history. One week before that, shows with 12% ratings were ranked in the top 30. Ratings at that level were considered poor in the days when TV had captured everyone’s attention.

Some industry sources dismissed the numbers with the claim that more people are recording programs for later viewing, and that younger people are watching on portable terminals such as cell phones. Those aren’t the conclusions to be drawn from a report issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications last August, however. The ministry has been conducting surveys of television viewing by age group, and the results clearly show that the decline in viewership is more pronounced for younger, rather than older, viewers.

For example, teenagers in 2005 watched TV an average of 106 minutes per day. By 2010, that had fallen to 76 minutes, a drop of more than 30% in only five years. The turnoff was almost as pronounced for people in their 20s. The only groups spending more time with television than before were people in their 50s and 60s, and that only by a very slight percentage. The average decline over all age groups was four minutes per day.

An NTT Communications survey in March 2010 found that 14.7% of people in their 20s, part of the prime demographic for advertisers, said they seldom watch TV. Also, only 17.3% of the respondents recorded programs for later viewing, and the number of people watching on cell phones and other terminals was miniscule.

That would tend to refute any assertion that TV has been so dumbed down only an adolescent would watch it. They aren’t. The people watching are their grandparents.

There was a complete conversion in Japan last July to terrestrial digital broadcasts, and some evidence suggests people used that as the opportunity to “graduate from TV”, as the Shukan Post put it. According to Cabinet Office surveys, television ownership peaked at an average of 252 per 100 households, or about 2.5 per home, in 2005. That was down to 239 in March 2011. The market survey arm of the Jiji news agency found that 2.1% of the respondents still hadn’t gotten around to obtaining the required equipment for the digital broadcasts by October, three months after the conversion. That corresponds to about 2.5 million people nationwide. Also during that period, about 98,000 people had cancelled their contracts for NHK TV (which people are supposed to pay for).

Perhaps one of the contributing factors to the decline last year is that people are less likely to view television as a reliable information source after the 11 March Tohoku triple disaster. The Nomura Research Institute conducted a survey to discover which sources people found more credible and less credible post-disaster. The group whose credibility took the biggest hit was national and local governments, cited by 28.9% of the respondents. The second highest percentage was for private-sector television networks, at 13.7%. Oddly, NHK (TV and radio) was the information source that received the most votes for having increased its reliability.

*****
This is worth keeping in mind when one considers the amount of time people interested in political and social issues spend watching and complaining about what passes for news programming on the private sector networks in the United States, the megaliths and all the tabloid cableistas included. There’s also the continual undercurrent of resigned frustration in Britain at being forced to pay for BBC programming produced by people with a specific worldview shared by only a few.

Japanese television is really bad, goes the complaint of the auslanders — some of whom have no idea what’s being said. Really? Compared to what?

Television in the West is different only in the sense that a fast-food hamburger is different from instant ramen.

*****
I prefer educational television myself.

Suckers

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

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

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

Specifically:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conrad the Gweilo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterwords:

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

Next time for the geopolitical post for sure!

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

Kiss

ONE segment on a Japanese television program tonight featured an experiment in kissing with participants from five different countries.

The program hired an attractive young woman in each of those countries, had each of them stand for an hour outdoors in an urban district with a lot of pedestrian traffic holding a sign that read, “Kiss me please”, and filmed the events that transpired. Of course they counted the number of kissers, but only kisses on the cheek were allowed. All of the models were very kissable. Women were free to kiss the model too. The results:

Italy: 24
United States: 11
Japan: 7
The Philippines: 4
South Korea: 0

That Italy was the champion by such a large margin isn’t surprising at all. Nor was it surprising that a large share of those 24 were old men who kissed quite stylishly.

Two of the seven Japanese kissers were young women who were photographed in the act by their women friends with cellphone cameras. One said she wanted to upload the photo on Twitter. Two college-aged men walked by the model, but only one kissed her. The other said he would be uncomfortable with people watching.

The South Korean woman attracted a crowd, but no kissers at all during the hour. One middle-aged woman briefly scolded her. A group of older men stood back and watched, but none could bring themselves to approach. Interviewed later, one of the men said he wanted to kiss her, but couldn’t because he was with his wife. The Japanese on the program thought the influence of Confucian culture might have been responsible for the Korean goose egg.

Some foreign residents and visitors say that Japanese television isn’t interesting.

Oh? Compared to what?

*****
Think I better dance now!

Who’d a thunk it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duh!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the headline:

Japan to adopt Bhutan’s principles of Gross National Happiness

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

Here’s the facepalm lede:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ichigen koji (77)

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

From tonight’s Shoten television program

Utamaru (the moderator of the panel of rakugo comedians, explaining the premise for the weekly joke contest): You’ve been out drinking with people from work and had too much, and now you want to go home early. I’ll play the part of a supervisor you don’t like. You say to me, “I’ve got to be going now because XXX”. I’ll try to dissuade you and say, “No, let’s go to one more place!” You continue the conversation from there.

Enraku (one of the comedians on the panel): Prime Minister, I can’t drink any more. I just can’t drink any more, so let’s call it a night.

Utamaru: No, let’s go to one more place!

Enraku: But we’ve done nothing but drink (i.e., swallow) all the American demands so far!

When one of the comedians comes up with a joke or routine that is particularly funny or clever, the moderator awards the comedian with a zabuton, or cushion for seating on the floor.

Enraku was awarded a zabuton for this joke.

Utamaru is in the pale green kimono at the far left, and Enraku is in the lavender kimono third from the right.

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Jiji on the Noda cabinet

THE Jiji news agency’s public opinion polls have the most value for gauging popular sentiment in Japan for several reasons. Unlike the other major news media polls, they’re conducted by targeted door-to-door interviews rather than by random digit dialing. That means they incorporate more fully the younger demographic that uses only cellular telephones. They’re also conducted by Jiji’s marketing survey unit, which will not be profitable and viable for the company unless it produces accurate results — unlike those individual outlets in the print and broadcast media that grind a political axe. Further, Jiji does not always release their results, even though they conduct the polls monthly. They only appear when they contain significant information.

Jiji released the results of their last one, taken from 11-13 November. That period coincided with the start of the sharp reaction to Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko’s uninspired performance as a pawn in the human chess match of TPP negotiations. It does contain significant information. Here are the Jiji figures for Cabinet support:

Support: 35.5% (down 6.7 points from previous month)
Do not support: 36.0% (up 9.2 points from previous month)

While the result is within the margin of error, this is the first national poll to show greater non-support for Mr. Noda than support. His support is also well below the 40% level, which is the first sign of trouble for a Japanese prime minister.

As always, the secondary numbers are worthy of note. Respondents were allowed multiple choices to state their reasons for either approval or disapproval. Here’s the leading reason for the support of the Noda Cabinet:

There is no other suitable person: 13.8%

Approval of his policies didn’t make it into the top three.

Jiji also polled for party support. Here are the results:

LDP: 12.8% (down 2.6 points)
DPJ: 12.6 (up 0.5 points)

This is the lowest percentage of support Jiji has recorded for the LDP since it went into the opposition in September 2009. In other words, the voters think there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties. The LDP is not benefiting from the public’s rejection of the DPJ.

They also think the rest aren’t worth wasting a dime on:

New Komeito: 2.5%
Your Party: 1.5%
Communists: 1.4%
Social Democrats: 1.1%
People’s New Party: 0.2% (see what I mean when I said their support was fractional?)
Sunrise Japan: 0.1%

And the most important number of all:

Do not support any party: 66.4%

Since 2005, Jiji polls have shown that “independent” is the default political mindset of the Japanese public. One or two months before an election, the electoral tides start shifting in one direction (that was one reason for the timing of the Hatoyama/Kan leadership switch in 2010), and then recede to their normal level after the election.

It’s clear that the global rift between the people and the political/governmental/social elites, created and continually widened by the latter, extends to the Japanese archipelago.

UPDATE: Commenting on these poll results, Your Party Secretary-General Eda Kenji reminds his blog readers that he predicted the decline to the 30% level before the end of the year, and a further decline to the 20%-25% level — or lower — next spring when the 2012 budget is being debated in the Diet. He adds:

At this rate, we’ll see a fourth DPJ prime minister by perhaps next summer…as long as the “all talk and no action”, “do as the bureaucracy says” DPJ government stays in power, this (pattern) will be repeated.

Afterwords:

They’re called universal truths because they apply everywhere at all times, whether Britain in 1911, or Japan (and the United States, and the EU, and — yes — China) today.

THE MONSTROSITY

“When a dead body is rotting, it does not diminish; it swells. Ignorance of this elementary truth is at the back of nearly all our political blindness. When we speak of a decaying people or a dying institution, we always have somehow the notion of their dwindling; of sparser and sparser tribes gathering on their mountains, of meaner and meaner buildings arising in their skies. But it is not so that social bodies really rot. They rot like physical bodies, being horribly distended from within by revolting gases demanding egress. Institutions, like corpses, grow larger and larger as they grow more and more shapeless. A dying monarchy is always one that has too much power, not too little; a dying religion always interferes more than it ought, not less. Our own country is really in this state of swollen decay, and the test of it is this: that every function of the State has grown more formless and more vast. Every power, public and private, has been stretched long past all sane definition and we live under a government of entangled exaggerations. It is a government that has all the practical effects of anarchy. Indeed, it is something worse than chaos; a warring polytheism. It is a conflict of incalculable autocracies, under any of which at the moment we may fall.”

- G.K. Chesterton (1911)

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South, west…over there somewhere

ABOUT a century ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote that “Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.” If Chesterton were writing today, he’d have to amend his observation to read “Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ when the deceased was actually Lord Smith”, and then botching the pertinent facts about both of them.

That would be followed by a codicil to the effect that English-language journalism about Japan is even worse.

Here’s an article — for lack of a better word — in The Independent of Great Britain written — for lack of another better word — by Enjoli Liston. We’re off!

Japan to build new city as back-up to quake risk Tokyo
New metropolis south of the capital will house 50,000 people and boast world’s tallest structure
Developers in Japan have unveiled plans to build a “back-up” capital city in case Tokyo is hit by a devastating natural disaster.

A prosecuting attorney could rest his case right there. The first sentence declares the city will be built. But later we find out:

The proposed city remains in the planning stages, though the developers behind it already claim to have the support of more than 100 politicians.

And:

In addition to government buildings and sprawling office complexes, it would boast hotel resorts, urban parkland, casinos and a 652-metre-high skyscraper, which would become the tallest building in the world.

In other words, what we really have is a big money infrastructure/pork barrel wet dream floated by some construction companies, developers, and the politicians to whom they financially contribute, rather than a concrete plan passed by the Diet.

Two pols are prominently cited as backers of the scheme:

…the developers behind it already claim to have the support of more than 100 politicians, including former Prime Minister Naoto Kan and Shizuka Kamei, a leading member of Japan’s opposition People’s New Party.

Kan Naoto, he of the teen-level approval rating, the nightmarish hangover from which the nation has recovered, will have as much influence in getting this project approved as Lindsay Lohan.

Note also the description of Kamei Shizuka. It’s accurate to say he’s a leading member of the PNP. It would be even more accurate to say he’s the head of the PNP. But it’s not at all accurate to say that the PNP is an opposition party. They’re still part of the governing coalition. Easy to forget, I know, but a fact is a fact.

Then again, it’s not as if anyone outside the PNP takes seriously their position as junior coalition partner. The only reason they even exist as a political party was to roll back the Koizumi privatization of Japan Post. More than two years and three prime ministers later, the DPJ still hasn’t gotten around to submitting that legislation.

As for the party’s influence, its backing in national surveys of party support is always in the single digits, assuming “0.X%” (and sometimes too low to register) is a single digit. Let’s go with “fractional” instead.

Where’s New Town going to be?

The city, which has been given the functional name IRTBBC (Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City), would span approximately five square kilometres and would potentially replace Japan’s Itami International Airport located near Osaka, around 300 miles west of Tokyo.

Hold on…just a few paragraphs ago they were saying it was “south”. Now it’s “west”. Yes, technically, both are true, but Japanese consider Osaka to be more west of Tokyo than south. So do all the maps.

South…west…you know, over there somewhere.

That gives us some insight into the reason the paper’s called The Independent. Their reporting is independent of the facts, the sentences in a given article are factually independent of each other…

Then there’s the idea that IRTBBC would replace Itami Airport. As you can see from its website, Itami still has hundreds of takeoffs and landings a day. To build the New City on that site would first require that Itami be shut down after another new airport for mostly domestic flights was built in Osaka (which, to be sure, some Osakans want).

Calling this a new city, by the way, would only be of administrative significance. The Osaka metro district is huge, and Itami is well within it. (You can see how close it is to the city from the photos at the website.) What they’re really talking about is just urban redevelopment with special branding created by somebody’s PR department. As was the “Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City” name.

Far from being a ghost city during less turbulent times, the developers behind the plans have proposed that the city would have a resident population of around 50,000 people. They also expect the state-of-the-art offices to attract around 200,000 workers from nearby Osaka.

Meanwhile, the percentage of vacant offices in Osaka at the end of March was 8.9%, the highest ever recorded. This plan sounds like something a politician could get behind.

Here’s my favorite part:

Tokyo escaped the disaster relatively unscathed, as most of the city’s buildings were constructed to withstand tremors, unlike more traditional buildings in rural areas.

Yes, out in the inaka, especially down here in Kyushu (south of Tokyo, west of Tokyo?), all the government buildings and downtown commercial structures are built of wood with thatched roofs and have sliding paper doors.

The reason roughly 20,000 people died in the Tohoku region was not the earthquake, as intense as it was. It was the once-in-a-millennium tsunami.

Finally:

Planners have asked the government for 14 million yen (£115,000) to research the feasibility of the proposed developments. It is thought the full cost of building the city would mostly be met by private investors.

Does that mean all the facilities to be part of the “back-up capital city” and “the stand-by base for parliament” will be donated to the government out of a sense of civic virtue?

And see what I mean about the need to update Chesterton? The first sentence of the piece says it’s a done deal. Four sentences from the bottom, Enjoli Liston is telling us they’re asking the government to fund a feasibility study.

One more time!

If your knowledge of Japan is derived from the English-language media, then everything you know about Japan is wrong.

*****
Who knows? Maybe Dreams Come True for Osaka Lovers.

I always liked Yoshida Miwa.

Prickly

EARLIER this week, a post from Prof. Shimojo Masao described a lawsuit filed by a South Korean citizen in New Jersey to prevent a school for Japanese students (enrollment: 90) from using a history textbook that states the islets of Takeshima are Japanese territory despite the current Korean occupation.

Those familiar with the conduct of affairs in Northeast Asia already know that behavior of this sort — over-dramatized, malicious pettiness made grandiose — is a not-uncommon attribute of the Joseon mindset. Yet another data point surfaced this week when Korean netizens fulminated over a scene in a Japanese television program. The drama was Boku to Sutaa 99 Hi, which translates to something like The 99 Days of Me and the Star. It was broadcast earlier this month on the Fuji Television network. One of the stars of the show is Korean actress Kim Tae-hee, who occasionally appears on Japan TV.

The scene at issue is brief. A child asks about the location of South Korea, and another actor spins a globe, points to the country, and says, “It’s here.” Those people with the time and the interest to give very extremely close scrutiny to fictional television programming noticed that the writing on the Japanese globe identifies the Sea of Japan as the Sea of Japan and the islets of Takeshima as Takeshima. Everyone else on the globe would consider that unremarkable, but the Koreans insist they’re called the East Sea and Dokdo, respectively.

This caused an uproar in the irritable bowels of the South Korean Internet, and the flatulence generated was sufficient to provide content for that country’s mass media. Someone on the net in South Korea claimed to have read a tweet from a Fuji TV staff member saying the network had used a graphic to erase those two place names to avoid giving offense, but that it wasn’t used in the final editing for the initial broadcast. The tweeter supposedly said it would be used in rebroadcasts and DVDs.

Fuji TV, however, denied they will alter the scene for rebroadcast and said their plans were to do nothing in particular. Fuji also reported that a producer looked into the matter and found there was no such tweet from a staff member. That’s only logical; this was a Japanese TV program broadcast in Japan, and it’s not as if many people off the peninsula are concerned about how to avoid offending the global network of Korean nationalist vigilantes. The first rebroadcast was very early in the morning today, and there’s been no word yet on what that showed.

What did the scene in the drama look like? Here’s a screenshot of how it was presented on a Korean website:

The report on the J-Cast website in Japan doesn’t mention whether or not Kim Tae-hee will be forced to wear the scarlet letter in her homeland for her contribution to this inexcusable affront to the national honor. She might already have some built-in credibility, however, because this isn’t the first time Ms. Kim has been involved in a political incident. In May 2005, the South Korean branch of the Swiss government’s tourism department filmed a video to promote Korean tourism in Switzerland, and she was the spokesman. One month before that, the international website of the Korean Broadcasting System (English-language) put up an apparently bogus page that suggested the Swiss government supported Korea in its territorial disputes. The Swiss denied the assertion. That same month, they confiscated a shipment of t-shirts with similar political messages being brought into the country by an employee of the South Korean branch at the Zurich airport. (See what I mean about over-dramatized, malicious pettiness?) The Swiss government stays clear of international territorial disputes and doesn’t allow proselytizing of that sort in the country. Everyone knows about Swiss neutrality, which is probably what attracted Korean interest to begin with.

During her stay in Switzerland, Ms. Kim is said to have worn one of the propaganda t-shirts. Her career on Japanese TV had already begun by that time, so to prevent any blowback she denied the charge to the Japanese branch of the Swiss tourism department. That’s not what people at the Japanese branch learned when they made inquiries, however.

After she returned to South Korea from Switzerland, her agents told the local media that she thought it was only natural to please the expectations of her Korean fans. Shortly thereafter, she visited Japan to promote a TV show. She told the media there that she had been a science major in school and needed further study in politics and history. She should also check the library for any books on how to concoct plausible excuses.

Those readers inclined to believe the puffenstuff they see elsewhere about the rabid nationalism of the Japanese should note that Ms. Kim has continued to appear on Japanese television since her small contribution to the Korean propaganda campaign. They might also speculate on what it would have meant to Ms. Kim’s career had the situation been reversed and she departed from the Joseon cultural party line while on an overseas trip.

When Japanese Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko visited South Korea last week for a summit with President Lee Myun-bak, one English-language newspaper ran the headline, “Japan seeks to smooth prickly ties with Seoul”. That’s an apt description, but none of the prickliness originates in Japan.

Indeed, we can improve that headline. It’s the job of newspaper headline writers to find short, punchy words that fit into a limited space and attract the reader’s eye. There’s a shorter alternative for “prickly” that would also improve its accuracy.

Just remove the l.

*****
Here’s an another update on the East Asian Ein Volk, Ein Reich front. Last week in a post about Hatoyama Yukio, I wrote:

Without exception, every young Japanese I’ve known with an interest in China who has gone to study or to spend an extended period of time in that country has returned with their illusions shattered following their encounter with kokumin who mainline on ethnocentric nationalism.

To see what causes the shattering, here’s an older article by John Derbyshire describing his experience on a Chinese-language mailing list for software engineers in the United States infected with the Black Plague strain of ethnocentric nationalism:

Bear in mind, please, that the writers of these e-mails are the intellectual cream of Mainland China, now immigrants to the U.S. Few do not have Master’s degrees; many have Ph.D.s. The average age is around thirty, I suppose. Their academic and professional qualifications, and their command of English, are sufficient to have impressed an American consul into awarding them a visa—no easy matter, allegedly. Yet for all this, their notions about national sovereignty were essentially those of the Ming dynasty mandarinate, and their knowledge of history a collection of false and preposterous clichés.

You have to read it to believe it.

These attitudes could be of significance beyond the circulation of a mailing list. Did any of those engineers know Kexue Huang, I wonder?

While he was working for two American chemical companies, a Chinese scientist was stealing trade secrets and sending them to accomplices for further research, assisting the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) long-term strategic goals in the science field, according to court documents in a recent case.

There were also reports in Japan yesterday that a committee in the PRC’s National Peoples Congress began discussing a revision of the citizens’ identification law that would require inserting the fingerprints of all the country’s citizens on individual IDs. It would seem that the decision won’t require a lot of discussion, however. The Chinese began issuing new IDs in 2004, and one billion have already been distributed — carrying chips designed for the input of fingerprint information.

Consider what might happen when an entire nation populated by citizens of this sort, who view themselves as the flower in the center of the universe, decide that now is the time to bloom. Some overseas observers are unconcerned because they think a collapse of the Chinese economy and the resultant domestic anger might stop international mischief before it starts. They point to the observation of others that the Chinese real estate bubble is beginning to look as if it’s started to pop.

Then again, a pessimist might wonder if the rest of the world will follow the Chinese economy down the open elevator shaft, or if the Chinese leadership decides international buccaneering is the surest way to deflect internal dissent.

Or further still, if it is not a question of “either/or”, but a question of “both”.

*****
Let’s end with the rousing finale of Leni Riefenstahl’s cinema classic to keep our flagging spirits high.

Media cred

WHILE looking for something else on the Japanese-language sector of the Web, I ran across a reference to survey results that were cited in a 2009 book by Masuda Etsusuke, Kakusashakairon ha Uso De Aru, or The Argument (that Japan is a) Society of Inequality is a Lie. (Doesn’t mince words, does he?)

The nature of the survey and the people who conducted it weren’t mentioned in the source I found, but the part he thought worth discussing included questions asked of people in 45 countries about which media they use for news.

The results for some of those countries follow. Category one is the country, category two is the percentage of respondents who said they get their news primarily from newspapers, and category three is the percentage of respondents who thought the news media had a beneficial influence on society.

United States / 47% / 65%
Russia / 47% / 61%
Germany / 62% / 77%
China / 63% / 89%
India / 75% / 80%
Japan / 75% / 48%

Japan and India were tied for first in the percentage of citizens who got their news from newspapers. In other words, the survey results suggest that the Japanese are the people most likely both to read newspapers and to assume that what they read is probably full of bologna.

This reminds me of a story about the late Watanabe Michio, a former Finance Minister and Foreign Minister in LDP cabinets and the father of LDP renegade MP and Your Party founder Watanabe Yoshimi.

Watanabe ranked the five media sources in Japan that a politician had to employ to get out his message. First was television, second was weekly magazines, there were no third and fourth, and newspapers were fifth. The elder Watanabe, by the way, started his career as a reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun.

This result isn’t as surprising as it might seem. The kisha club system has allowed the government and Big Media to create a symbiotic relationship of controlled access that allows the first to manage the news and the second to monopolize the news, a state of affairs with which all Japanese newspaper consumers are familiar. As a result, weekly magazines in Japan have long served as a combination samizdat press and print media proto-blogosphere to provide information that the politicians would prefer people not have. Their sources for political stories are often reporters who would be shut out of the loop if they published that information in the newspapers that employ them. (The magazines preserve their anonymity by quoting “a political journalist for a national daily”, for example.)

One curious aspect of this relationship is that people in both the large media outlets themselves and the freelancers who are their critics tend to think this problem exists only in Japan. An illustrative example is freelance journalist and disillusioned Democratic Party of Japan supporter Uesugi Takashi. Mr. Uesugi was one of the fiercest critics of the response of the government and Tokyo Electric to the Fukushima nuclear accident, and to the mass media’s coverage of all of it. He became so disgusted with the mess he vows to cease his activities as a journalist at the end of the year.

While his reaction is understandable, less so is his not-atypical belief that the Western news media is superior to that of Japan. He often cites the behavior of the New York Times and CNN with approval, and uses them as a positive contrast to the third-rate Japanese news media. (One possible reason for his myopia is that he once worked as the Japanese-language go-fer for the NYT Tokyo correspondents.)

That leads one to wonder about Mr. Uesugi’s familiarity with how the American news media conducts itself these days. Speaking of illustrative examples, here’s another: Upset with the political agenda of the Democratic Party in the United States after they took full control of government in 2008, some Americans as an act of protest created the Tea Party movement, named after the famous incident in which revolutionaries among the American colonists threw tea from ships into Boston Harbor. “Tea” was an acronym for “taxed enough already”, and the website of a group calling itself the Tea Party Patriots said they supported three “core values”: fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets.

This really upset Big Media in the United States; how dare people object after they had spent so much time and effort to drag the Democrats across the electoral finish line. The news media’s knee-jerk response was to delegitimize the movement, and their weapon of choice was juvenile humor. They started referring to the Tea Party people as “teabaggers”, a deliberate reference to a sexual practice that is reportedly most often performed by homosexuals. Rachael Maddow of MSNBC seems to have been the first in the news media to use it, followed a week later by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. Mr. Cooper was:

…interviewing David Gergen, the political pundit. And Gergen was saying that, after two very bad elections, conservatives and Republicans were “searching for their voice.” Cooper responded, “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.”

Those two were perhaps more familiar with the term than their broader audience. Rachel Maddow is out of the closet and living with a woman in an openly gay relationship. Mr. Cooper declines to talk about his personal life (good for him), but Out magazine named him number two on its list of the 50 “Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America”. (David Geffen was first.)

The phrase was then picked up by people on the PBS network, ABC news, and columnists for the Washington Post and New York Times…and the President of the United States. Such is what passes for political discourse as led by the American Fourth Estate today.

Everyone forced to rely on the American news media for information realizes the real motive behind their response was the fear of the success of a political outlook opposed to their own. Why else would some of the same people so quickly hail the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators as the Tea Partiers of the left — but this time, with approval? (And it isn’t just the Americans, either.)

The issue is not, of course, one’s political preferences, or the sex of the partner one prefers as the cup for dipping one’s teabags. It is, as they say, a free country. Rather, the problem is the news media’s utter disregard of anything even remotely resembling journalistic standards, not to mention standards for behavior in public. Wait, scratch that — the real problem is the lack of any sort of standards to begin with.

These are the organizations on which Mr. Uesugi thinks the members of the Japanese news media should model themselves. These are the people the members of the Japanese news media think should be taken seriously for their coverage of current events.

Back to that survey: It certainly looks as if the Japanese public is ahead of the pack in more ways than one.

*****
The Japanese aren’t the only ones in East Asia with tea ceremonies — it’s a Korean tradition too. The Koreans also have tea ceremony music, called da’ak. Here’s a taste.

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Atonement

Because nothing is attained, the Bodhisattva, through reliance on prajna paramita, is unimpeded in his mind. Because there is no impediment, he is not afraid, and he leaves distorted dream-thinking far behind. Ultimately Nirvana!
- The Heart Sutra

FORMER Prime Minister Kan Naoto — you remember him — is bringing back his atonement shtick. Politicians are attention vampires, and the media’s need to fill enormous amounts of space every day, regardless of quality, is just as compelling. That explains the infotainment industry’s interest in the non-story that Mr. Kan has resumed his pilgrimage to the 88 temples of Shikoku.

One of these days, he might finish it. He started in 2004, and this is his sixth crack at feigning interest in a life of religious asceticism. On Monday, he showed up at Enmei-ji in Ehime, which is temple #54. The idea behind the pilgrimage, which began more than a millennium ago, is that an earthly desire is eliminated for each temple visited. Hey, who knows — after another 34, Mr. Kan might even wind up on the wagon. Adding to the comic incongruity is the custom of pilgrims to recite several prayers at each temple they visit, including the Heart Sutra twice. If the former prime minister hews to form, he’ll read the sutras from a large-print cheat sheet prepared by a bureaucrat.

He embarked on his first pilgrimage following his first resignation from the Democratic Party presidency to atone for his failure to pay into the pension system. Several photographers from the industrial media happened to be in the area when he showed up in pilgrim duds, making it a fair trade: He gave them content, and they gave him publicity. It later emerged, however, that the Social Insurance Agency canceled his enrollment in the system by mistake, so he was guilty only of exhibitionism and not negligence. In other words, he went on a partial pilgrimage to atone for a sin he didn’t commit. That says more about a politician’s priorities than I ever could.

Come to think of it, that might explain why he’s had so much trouble finishing the tour. It also might provide a hint to the degree of sincerity behind his stated reasons for resuming the pilgrimage this time: to pray for the souls of the Tohoku disaster victims and to resolve the crisis from the nuclear accident. He could do all of that at a temple near his Tokyo residence, assuming he ever goes, but that would have no PR value.

Be that as it may, Mr. Kan has a legitimate reason for visiting the religious institution of his choice, or even all 88 of them in Shikoku, but praying for the repose of the dead isn’t it. Rather, it would be to atone for his sins in office.

To cite one of many, former Cabinet advisor Matsumoto Ken’ichi revealed last week that it was Mr. Kan and Sengoku Yoshito, then the Chief Cabinet Secretary, who decided to release the Chinese fishing trawler captain arrested after ramming two Japanese Coast Guard vessels near the Senkakus Islets last September. Both men insisted at the time that they had nothing to do with the decision, and claimed it was the responsibility of the public prosecutors in Okinawa. Mr. Matsumoto didn’t take up his advisory position until the following month, but he later discussed the matter with Mr. Sengoku — an old friend responsible for his appointment — so he was therefore in a position to know. Several Cabinet ministers have said off the record that Mr. Kan ordered the captain’s release, but Mr. Matsumoto is the first government source to go public.

Leave it to the journos to slough off a Richter-scale magnitude abdication of responsibility while enjoying themselves with the pilgrimage story. Then again, none of this would have surprised anyone in Japan who chanced on the report; nearly 80% of those surveyed in opinion polls at the time thought Mr. Kan was lying.

Mr. Matsumoto also explained that a debate was held within the government about how best to dispose of the matter, and that Mr. Kan finally gave the order by telephone to release the captain when he was in New York on 19 September for a meeting of the UN General Assembly. The captain was set free five days later.

Said Mr. Sengoku at the time:

“It’s my understanding that it was the decision of the prosecutors alone.”

Said Mr. Kan at a 25 September news conference in New York:

“The prosecutors involved comprehensively examined the nature of the case and other factors, and the result was a sober decision based on Japanese law.”

According to Mr. Matsumoto, the Kantei justified the decision by saying the video the local prosecutors sent to Tokyo was “defective”. He also pointed out that the prosecutors thought there were no problems with the video at all, and that the Kantei used that excuse to avoid the charge that they were applying pressure. In fact, a panel of prosecutors in Okinawa reviewed the evidence in July, including the video, and determined that the captain should have been prosecuted.

The Naha prosecutors, however, are sticking with the original story. Now who among these people isn’t telling the truth?

Remembering that Matsumoto Ken’ichi has embarrassed the government in public before might help answer that question. After meeting with Prime Minister Kan on 13 April this year, Mr. Matsumoto held a news conference and passed on the information that Mr. Kan told him it would be 10-20 years before people who lived within 30 kilometers of the Fukushima nuclear power plant could return to their homes. He added that the prime minister said those people could be housed in a new Eco-Town, based on the German version of the Garden City concept.

That night, Mr. Kan told reporters he never said any such thing, and he called Mr. Matsumoto and made him walk his previous statement back. The Cabinet advisor called a second news conference to do just that. He also told the press that he explained to the prime minister that people wouldn’t be able to live near the plant for a while. Further, he said he suggested the idea of the Eco-Town, and Mr. Kan liked it.

In August, Mr. Kan traveled to Fukushima to meet with some of the evacuated people. He told them they wouldn’t be able to live in their old homes for 20 years.

Australian television ran an interview with Matsumoto Ken’ichi last week that was dubbed into English. Here’s how they translated one of his statements:

“The cabinet knew right after the disaster that some people would not be able to live in their communities for 10 or 20 years. The Government should have conveyed the truth to the evacuees, but it felt scared. It feared telling the truth to the people.”

When it was revealed that former South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan was responsible in part for the Gwangju massacre of 1980, he apologized to the nation in a public address, withdrew from politics, and went to live in Baekdamsa, a Buddhist temple in Gangwon-do, for two years.

The least Kan Naoto can do to atone for his sins is to finally finish his pilgrimage to the 88 temples in Shikoku.

But he won’t.

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