Get the number of that fish!

WHAT DO YOU GET when you combine the Japanese love of new technology and gadgets with their insistence on food freshness and concerns caused by recent incidents of falsely labeled food products, particularly those from overseas?

Maritime mug shot

Several possibilities come to mind, but one is now undergoing trials conducted by the Nagasaki Prefectural Institute of Fisheries and the Yokohama-based National Research Institute of Fisheries Science. The two groups are working with a Nagasaki fishing cooperative to test the viability of a system in which tags with QR codes are placed on individual fish to allow consumers to trace the region where it was caught, the cooperative that caught it, the network used to distribute it, and the date it was shipped. It’s the first system of this type in Japan, and one of the innovations for this particular application is that the tags don’t require a special reader.

Here’s how it works: Consumers use their cell phones to photograph the QR code on the tag attached to the fish head, connect to the Internet, access a site jointly operated by the Japan Fisheries Association (link at right sidebar) and the Fishing Boat and System Engineering Association, and get the fish story firsthand. In fact, consumers don’t need even need a cell phone camera—they can get the same information by using their PCs to input the tag number at the website.

The fish being used for the trials is a type of horse mackerel (aji in Japanese) caught in the strait between the Goto Islands and Nagasaki Prefecture. Reports say this fish was selected because it’s easier to trace from catch to shipment, though the reports didn’t say why. Each of the 150 fish in the initial trial shipment weighs at least 250 grams (8.8 ounces). They will be sold for about JPY 1,000 apiece (about $US 11.11) within four or five days at Tokyo department stores, which are about 966 kilometers (600 miles) away from the point of shipment.

The two groups conducting the trial say the system could benefit consumers because it will enable them to quickly check fish quality and freshness. That’s not always easy to determine with the naked eye, and some Japanese distribution routes are complicated. The consumer will also know just where the fish was caught.

The fishing co-ops hope it promotes this particular kind of fish and boosts slack fish prices. The trials are also being used to determine the amount of work required to tag each fish and the amount of additional distribution costs. The system will go into full-scale operation if it functions smoothly and if the producers and the consumers are comfortable with it.

Here’s the website that will be used for the system, for those who read Japanese.

Now I ask you: Did you ever think you’d see the day when you could use your own telephone while shopping at a retail outlet to check the freshness of a fish on display in a bin?

Boxers or briefs?

JAPANESE MEN have a reputation for disdaining household chores, but even they might think Wakata Koichi went too far—he showed up at work every day for a month straight wearing the same underpants.

Wakata Koichi

It wasn’t as bad or as malodorous as it sounds, though. None of the 12 coworkers in his office complained, which means the experiment for which Mr. Wakata served as the guinea pig was a success.

His u-trou were special–they’re called J-Wear and were designed by JAXA, the Japanese space agency. Going without an underwear change for a month was one of the duties the Japanese astronaut handled while spending the last 138 days aboard the International Space Station. The space shuttle Endeavor gave him a lift back to Earth yesterday. There was no word on whether his underpants started walking around under their own power.

That wasn’t all he did when he was in orbit. As this article in The Scotsman describes:

One had him flying through the cabin standing upright on a white sheet that performed like a surfboard. Another was to administer eye drops in space. That involved him squeezing the liquid into a tiny ball at the tip of the bottle and effectively head-butting it to get it into his eye.

Mr Wakata’s J-Wear included more than futuristic Jockey shorts. JAXA also provided him with special socks, T-shirts, and trousers. He brought all this dirty laundry back home, just as any man on a business trip might do. Instead of leaving the laundry with his wife, however, he gave it to JAXA scientists for study and testing. How’d you like to be one of their lab techs?

And give the spaceman credit, too. Would you want to wear the suit in the photo knowing that you wouldn’t be able to scratch your itchy crotch?

But this wasn’t an outer space first. Doi Takao wore the underpants on the ISS last year, though his experiment lasted for only 16 days. That means a new outer space underwear endurance record has been set!

As chance would have it, I saw part of a television program last night that featured interviews with American astronauts who went to the moon. One described how difficult it was to deal with bowel movements in a weightless environment. Since everything floats, it wasn’t easy making sure everything stayed in the bag without sailing through the cabin.

When people say space is the final frontier, they’re not kidding about the frontier part!

Incidentally, Mr. Wakata made 2,208 earth orbits and traveled for 57,000,000 miles during his more than four months on the space station. The space shuttle has now become a de facto ferryboat, providing taxi service to the station and back.

Perhaps the most newsworthy part of the story is how blasé we’ve become about all this. Mr. Wakata’s adventures didn’t even rate an article in today’s Nishinippon Shimbun.

Afterwords: Here’s what the duds look like.

UPDATE: The coverage of this story by the Japanese media came a day late. It’s on the front page of the newspaper today.

Amae, amas, amat…

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

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

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

Amae defined

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

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

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

Amae in everyday life

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

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

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

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

Giri-ninjo

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

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

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

This side up

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

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

Those who disagree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problems of nihonjinron

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

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

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

So who was Lord Jones?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now I get it…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One man’s gunk is another man’s gold mine

FOR MOST PEOPLE, seaweed is just unpleasant gunk that gets in the way of a good time. It’s the stuff everyone tries to avoid when swimming at the seashore, or that gets tangled in fishermen’s lines and stuck on the bottoms of boats.

But the Japanese, of course, love to eat it.

And now, the Okinawans are beginning to view it–as well as other aquatic plants—as a marine bioresource.

The grapes of the sea

To turn all that gunk into products that are beneficial for the user and profitable for the consumer, the Okinawa government, through the Okinawa Prefectural Fisheries and Ocean Research Center, has been working for the past three years with the University of Tokyo, the University of the Ryukyus, and bioventures and health food companies in the private sector to develop the marine bioresource industry. They’re also working to establish better control of intellectual property, primarily through the Okinawa Technology Licensing Organization, to ensure that research results and benefits flow to local enterprises. The Ministry of Education is kicking in 100 million yen (about $US 1.026 million) to help with the effort, and the prefectural government is adding another 41 million yen to the pot.

One project they’re working on is the cultivation and promotion of so-called green caviar (Caulerpa lentillifera), or sea grape, as it is known in Japanese. Usually found on sandy or muddy sea bottoms in shallow protected areas, it is eaten in salads and all sorts of other dishes, as you can see from this link. They’re also studying ways to maintain hygiene in the production of the plant as a food item, the creation of secondary products using the plant (such as shampoo), methods for increasing yield, and the development of a fertilizer specifically for the plant.

Try to imagine the fertilizer delivery mechanism for a plant that grows on the sea bed!

Another project is an examination of the efficacy of fucoidan, a substance present in such popular Japanese seaweed varieties as hijiki, kombu, and wakame, and which some think has potential for cancer treatment. In the same way that many local governments in Japan are doing with other products, the Okinawans are trying to boost its value by creating a regional brand.

Still one more project is the development of a kit for the simple and quick detection of ciguatera toxins, which are found in some subtropical fish.

One man’ s meat is another man’s poison, some say, but Okinawa is hoping that some people’s gunk turns into a treasure for all the islanders!

Japan missing the bus on expanding ties with India

SOME SCOFFED at the time, but former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s plan to develop and strengthen ties between India and Japan was a capital idea on several levels. It wasn’t that the scoffers frowned on a closer relationship–they just didn’t care for the source of the proposal. Mr. Abe’s opponents would have hailed it as a major diplomatic initiative had someone from their side presented it instead.

But as a recent agreement between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Indian Space Research Organization to use satellites for disaster management shows, the two countries understand the logic and potential benefits of greater cooperation.

Unfortunately, some in Japan are showing a lack of foresight by throwing a wet blanket over an excellent opportunity not only to further expand the political relationship, but to expand the economic relationship as well.

As this Zeenews of India report explains, Japan is one of 45 member nations of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The NSG oversees the trade in dual-use nuclear fuel, materials, and technology to prevent their conversion from civilian nuclear energy programs to nuclear weapons systems.

It is NSG policy to sanction transactions only with countries that are signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that permit full inspections by the IAEA. That leaves out India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.

The Indians became persona non grata among nuclear regulatory authorities because they diverted civilian nuclear assistance from Canada some years ago to develop their own atomic weapons. After Herculean efforts by the United States, however, the NSG agreed in September to grant a waiver to India exempting them from the rules and enabling other countries to provide assistance for nuclear power development. As one might imagine, the Chinese (also NSG members) fought to prevent the waiver, but they finally relented and abstained from a final vote after U.S. President George W. Bush telephoned Chinese President Hu Jintao for some one-on-one persuasion.

India’s nuclear power industry is underdeveloped compared to G-8 nations, so the waiver means those countries with superior technology and expertise in the field are making a beeline to New Delhi. Nuclear power companies in the U.S. already have visited India to present their proposals. The Russians plan to build four reactors there and want to build still more.

Japan is a world leader in the use of nuclear energy for power generation, so India is naturally interested in exploring the potential for greater cooperation with domestic companies too. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh flew to Tokyo in late October for discussions, but the Japanese government held back due to what was described as “strong lobbying by the (domestic) non-proliferation lobby”.

Hitachi, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Toshiba sent representatives to Mumbai this week for talks with the Indian government and the state-owned Nuclear Power Corp. But the prospects for Japanese participation remain cloudy.

That’s because India also had another Japanese visitor this week: Hattori Takuya, president of the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum. According to the group’s website:

The Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, Inc. (JAIF) was incorporated as the comprehensive non-governmental organization on nuclear energy in Japan on March 1, 1956. JAIF is a non-profit organization incorporated under the auspices of the industry to promote peaceful utilization of nuclear energy for the benefit of Japanese nationals in consideration of the importance of the peaceful use of nuclear energy, radioisotopes and radiation in a wide variety of fields.

As unbelievable as it may seem, Mr. Hattori and his group are proving to be more recalcitrant than the Chinese, who saw this as a national security issue. Despite the NSG waiver, JAIF wants India to sign the test ban treaty anyway and commit to nuclear disarmament before they’ll consider cooperation. Here’s Mr. Hattori talking to the Indian press:

“Japan is the only country which suffered due to two atom bombs in the history of mankind and Japanese people are very sensitive.”

It’s about time to bury this line in a vault in the back of a museum warehouse. Victimization is a craven excuse on which to base policy in any context, and it’s outmoded in this one. Fifty years ago, everyone fully understood Japanese sensitivities, and the stance also served the national interest because it helped convince the rest of the convincible world that the old Japan was dead and buried.

But when more than a few politicians in Japan talk sotto voce about the country acquiring a nuclear deterrent of its own, it is both obsolete and in bad faith. During his term as Chief Cabinet Secretary, even former Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo, whom some overseas observers considered “dovish”, said that Japan should consider going nuclear in a private conversation with some members of the media. He backed down when asked about it in a public press conference the next day.

Continued Mr. Hattori:

“If Japan goes for civil nuclear cooperation with India, it amounts to following (a) double standard. We cannot then talk about North Korea and Iran at the international platform if we have civil nuclear cooperation with India now when your country has nuclear bombs.”

Those who cannot or will not differentiate between India’s program and those of Iran and North Korea lack the qualifications either to speak on or set policy for nuclear issues.

It is true that India has not signed the treaty. The Indian government says it has voluntarily suspended nuclear testing and adopted a no-first strike policy. In contrast, Iran has signed the treaty, for what that’s worth. Yet the latter country is governed by religious fanatics who speak openly of destroying Israel. They also clearly state it wouldn’t bother them very much if they were to be destroyed in the process—killing the infidel Jews punches their ticket to paradise and an eternity with all those virgins.

North Korea, which signed the treaty, violated it, withdrew, and likely still violates it, doesn’t even belong in this conversation. They are governed by a Stalinist family regime for whom nuclear weapons technology is a shield against German-style reunification and a hard currency earner when exported to rogue states or malevolent non-state actors.

Mentioning either of those countries in the same breath with India is fatuous. Indeed, who could blame the Indians if they were to find it insulting?

There’s more:

“We strongly ask India to keep up (the) commitment with Nuclear Suppliers Group to pursue nuclear disarmament and also follow other international treaties like CTBT in order to continue the peaceful uses of (the) atom in the form of nuclear energy.”

Preventing nuclear power cooperation with India by tying it to nuclear disarmament is arrant nonsense. By that logic, Nation A should reject a civil aviation pact with any other nation that has an air force in its military.

Not that the issue of nuclear disarmament isn’t absurd to begin with. It is no joke to say that if nuclear weapons are outlawed, then only outlaws will have nuclear weapons—and that would make the world an unacceptably dangerous place. Those who would claim that nuclear disarmament is an achievable goal should begin any justification of their position by explaining the failure of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Mr. Hattori also said:

“We have little information about India’s nuclear program…”

But added:

“India has a need for tremendous manpower resources well-trained to keep up high standards of non-proliferation safeguards, safety and security. India has to expand its training program to increase its huge manpower needs urgently.”

If the JAIF has little information about India’s program, why is it qualified to speak about its manpower resources and training program?

Finally:

“There is a win-win situation and it is meant for a long-term relationship.”

The win-win situation for the long-term relationship is to begin cooperation for nuclear power generation immediately.

Where to point the finger?

At this point, one has to wonder who in Japan apart from JAIF is trying to stymie the cooperation. Japan’s nuclear power industry is in India and ready to talk turkey. As noted above, some politicians of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party are interested in a nuclear deterrent of their own, and even those who wouldn’t be willing to go that far are nothing if not pragmatic when it comes to business. So who could have enough sway in the current government to prevent Japan and India from coming to terms?

Here’s one possibility:

Abolish nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction as part of our longstanding commitment to diplomatic initiatives to advance peace. Introduce proposals facilitating the earliest possible ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, including implementing the treaty on a provisional basis should a minimum necessary number of signatories be secured.

That’s from the party platform of New Komeito, the lesser partner in Japan’s governing coalition. It sometimes is difficult to see how the party, widely seen as the political arm of the lay Buddhist group Soka Gakkai, benefits from their participation in that coalition. The LDP gets to stay in the driver’s seat in Nagata-cho through New Komeito’s considerable get-out-the-vote efforts and their representation in the Diet. And that means they have to hold up their end of the quid pro quo.

Therefore, it’s not out of the question that the obstacle to greater cooperation with India for the peaceful use of nuclear power is New Komeito.

If the party is indeed holding up an agreement in this instance, it’s yet another reason why Japan desperately needs a major political realignment. Those who insist on incorporating into national policy an ideal that would be counterproductive if it weren’t impossible to achieve are doing the country a disservice.

Afterwords: In addition to reconsidering their hesitancy to assist India with civilian nuclear power development, Japan should also consider backing U.S. Senator John McCain’s suggestion to drop Russia from the G-8 and replace it with India. Unfortunately, that will never happen as long as Russia holds the four islands to the north of Hokkaido it seized just after Japan’s surrender in World War II.

Japan-India space alliance raises eyebrows

ONE PLANK of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s foreign policy was to forge closer ties with regional free market democracies, including Australia and India. While there is nothing inherently unusual about such alliances–indeed, they are natural–the idea raised some eyebrows in Chinese circles, for geographical reasons alone.

Mr. Abe didn’t stay in office long enough to make any headway in formalizing such an alliance, but Japan and India continued to discuss their mutual interests. These discussions bore fruit last month when the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) agreed to expand cooperation for disaster management.

As this article in the Asian Times by Peter J. Brown notes:

Japan has been using its weather satellites to provide free weather data to countries throughout Asia for many years without any hint of controversy, but this is quite different from deploying a new generation of surveillance satellites to monitor disasters.
Virtually all existing satellite-based multinational disaster management initiatives such as the “International Charter, Space and Major Disasters” depend upon the ability of the signatories to engage in the rapid tasking of their respective surveillance satellites. In other words, quickly altering the flight patterns of the surveillance satellites in question so they zoom right over a disaster zone is essential to the success of the mission at hand.

And the capability to alter the flight patterns of surveillance satellites means that the satellites have an obvious potential for dual use.

The article states that the Chinese are wondering if the United States is behind this cooperative venture and are using it as a means of containing them. Perhaps that is the case, but it is also true that the Japanese and Indians are more than capable of coming up with the idea on their own, and have the incentive to do so.

Mr. Brown fills a limited space with a lot of information, and the resultant lack of focus makes the article difficult to read. He quotes several people who are following regional events, but not all of them are convincing. For example:

Dr Joan Johnson-Freese, chair of the Department of National Security Studies at the US Naval War College, does not believe the Japan-India space relationship is picking up steam. “The consensus-driven decision making process used in Japan means that pretty much everything moves at a glacial pace,” said Johnson-Freese.

Dr. Johnson-Freese should be in a position to know, but she doesn’t account for the possibility that the Japan-India space ties could already have been under discussion for quite some time. She also overlooks the potential of the Japanese to move much more quickly than glacier speed when they’re concerned about their security. Satellites in the region can also monitor North Korean moves, for example.

Mr. Brown also quotes Dr. Gregory Kulacki, senior analyst and China project manager at the Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists, about Chinese development of space:

While they would welcome the opportunity to be a competitive commercial space player, especially in the international launch services market where they have a strong advantage…

Perhaps I’m missing something, but if they have a strong advantage in the international launch services market, woundn’t they already have the opportunity to be competitive?

Says Dr. Johnson-Freese:

“China very much wants to be seen as both the leader of space efforts in Asia, and for developing nations. They are using their manned program to reap all the prestige awards it renders – which are considerable, if only in perceptions created – including that it is beating the US”.

Do people really think the Chinese are beating the Americans in a manned space program? The same Americans who flew to the moon and back 40 years ago and have been flying space shuttles for more than a quarter of a century?

But the article is still worth reading to gain an understanding of the growing Japanese interest in the possible military exploitation of space. Japan recently enacted the Space Basic Law, which incorporates considerations of the use of space for national security. And the Yomiuri Shimbun further revealed that the country is thinking of putting an early warning satellite into orbit that can detect the launch of enemy ballistic missiles.

It might be the case that the American input into Japanese strategic thinking is more limited than some suspect.

All aboard!

HOW DO YOU TRANSPORT a train from the factory to its depot? If it’s the latest version of the Shinkansen bullet train, you send it by ship.

The photo shows the newest model of the Shinkansen’s lead car being loaded on a barge at the Kobe plant of Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which manufactured it. The car will be used on the direct run from Osaka to Kagoshima when the first leg of the Kyushu route on the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands begins service in the spring of 2011. (For some reason, the system has been partially opened at the southernmost end of Kyushu from Yatsushiro, Kumamoto, to Kagoshima.)

After arriving at the JR West storage area in Fukuoka, it will be connected to eight other cars assembled at a different plant for trials scheduled to begin at the end of the month and last until next spring. Mass production will begin after the results of those trials are reviewed.

The train will cover the 900-kilometer distance (about 560 miles) from Osaka to Kagoshima in roughly four hours. When they say four hours, they mean it—in 2003, the Shinkansen’s average actual arrival time was within six seconds of the scheduled time.

And since the only fatality on the 40-year history of the line occurred when a door closed on a passenger, it’ll get you there in one piece, too!

Riffing on tatami

HERE’S GOOD NEWS for fans of traditional Japanese home furnishings: science has proven that tatami mats have medicinal benefits.

A research team at the University of Kitakyushu discovered that the rushes used for the surface of tatami mats have an antibacterial effect inhibiting the reproduction of both Trichophyton rubrum, the little buggers that cause athlete’s foot, and the microorganisms that make your feet stink.

The rushes permit the absorption of excess moisture in the air spaces in the mats. That inhibits the reproduction of the bacteria, which thrive in high-temperature, high-moisture environments. The researchers said that a barefoot lifestyle in rooms with tatami mats prevented the occurrence of athlete’s foot.

The researchers also reminded us that daily foot washing was required to achieve this result, lest anyone misunderstand the implications of their findings.

The experiments clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of the rush. The researchers used two cultures for their trials in the lab: One contained no rushes, and one in which the rush content was 5%. They put two strains of the athlete’s foot bacteria in each one, raised the temperature to a balmy 30°C (86°F), and let them make whoopee and reproduce for five days.

At the end of the five-day period, there was no bacteria reproduction in the culture with the rushes, while the control culture was swarming with baby microorganisms.

That should be good news for the Kyoto-based Japan Tatami Industry Promotion Association, which is trying to reverse the trend of declining tatami production and use, according to this Kyodo article.

Entire homes were furnished with tatami mats in Japan by the Muromachi Period (1333-1568), but the article reports the number of tatami stores nationwide has fallen by nearly half over the past decade to 12,000. Farm households growing rush for tatami in Kumamoto, which once accounted for 90 percent of domestic production, has slid from 10,000 in 1975 to 800 last year. This is partly due to the growing import of cheaper rush from China.

To offset this downturn, the association formed a team to devise new uses for tatami. So far, they’ve come up with a tatami necktie, a tatami toilet seat cover, a tatami guitar, and tatami car seats, as you can see from the second photo. Yes, that’s a tatami apron the young lady is wearing.

Other companies in the industry have come up with new ideas of their own. These include a new tatami rental conference room in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, and square tatami mats for condo residents, which are selling quite well. (The traditional tatami mat is rectangular.)

Meanwhile, the TTN Corp. in Hyogo has boosted sales by accepting orders for the mats round the clock. These orders are placed by hotels and traditional drinking establishments that just have to have new tatami mats in the middle of the night. Who knew?

Discovering new uses for tatami is also an international phenomenon. Famed German sandal company Birkenstock, which was established in 1774, is now offering a new line of tatami sandals and shoes worldwide:

Tatami shoes and sandals are the ultimate evolution of footwear comfort. Perfect for demure style and awesome for surf and sport action, Tatami has revolutionised the sandal market.

For those of you still harboring doubts of tatami’s wonderfulness, here is the clincher. This is the website of the Japan Tatami Industry Promotion Association, which, alas, is only in Japanese.

But Japanese isn’t required to enjoy the Tatami Bizu song! At the top of the page is a photo of two young ladies dressed as maids standing in a large tatami room with several children. At the bottom of the photo is a yellowish-green bar. Click on the bar to see and hear the video of them singing and dancing to the song, backed up by the Tatami Bizu band.

The lyrics are thoughtfully provided for anyone who wants to sing along!

If that doesn’t put you in a tatami state of mind, then you’ll probably spend the rest of your life getting athlete’s foot and rug burns from synthetic carpeting!

Disclaimer: The first time I stretched out to relax on a tatami floor, it took me about 10 minutes to realize that I wanted to live in a dwelling with tatami rooms forever. It’s better than lying on a sofa or on a carpet that people walk on wearing shoes. And lying on a futon on top of a tatami is the best of all.

And if you missed it the first time, try this recent post on the farmers in Okinawa who grow the rushes.