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!

Sumo, the Olympics, women, and sex

WILL SUMO soon be an Olympic sport? The Japanese have been promoting the idea for a while, but now they’ve got plenty of other people on their side. According to one recent report:

“Japan has been active in the Olympic Games bidding campaign. Once a Japanese city succeeds in the bid, it will be time for sumo’s entry into the Olympics,” Mai Yaoxiang, vice president of the Asian Sumo Union, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

He thinks it would be easy to arrange:

“We have organised sumo championships on every continent. Currently, an international sumo system has been founded, establishing a strong foundation for the future development of the sport,” he said.

Japanese efforts over the past 20 years to popularize the sport internationally through the International Sumo Federation are bearing fruit. Many of the top rikishi in Japan are not Japanese, and Europeans in particular do well in amateur international competitions, according to this Xinhua report:

“At the sumo world championships, eighty percent of the gold medals go to Europe,” said Stephen Gadd, the General Secretary of the European sumo union, at the first SportAccord Combat Games here on Sunday.

This shouldn’t be surprising. The rules are simple—put the opponent out of the ring, or put any part of his body other than his feet on the ground, and you win. Anyone who can handle Greco-Roman wrestling, the defensive line in American football, or rugby should be able to transfer those skills to sumo.

A few sports seem more closely related. Some people cite Mongolia as the point of origin of sumo. Here’s a video of Mongolian buh, which is performed in a field rather than a ring. Note the bird-like dance, which makes for an intriguing comparison with the ceremonies of sumo rikishi.

It then spread to the Korean Peninsula before arriving in Japan. Try this video of Korean ssireum. Note the loose sand in the ring rather than the packed dirt.

The article was distributed by IANS (the India-Asia News Service), who in the space of a few paragraphs display an incompetence equal to that of their fellow guild members overseas. For example:

In Japan…wrestlers have strict restrictions in dressing.

Strict? They wear what’s called a mawashi, which is essentially a beefed-up loincloth. That’s it, unless you include the hairstyles.

They also claim:

In Japan, women are not allowed to play sumo.

Yes, women do not compete at the highest professional level, but otherwise this statement is incorrect, as a glance at the photo will show. Or, you could look at the photo gallery of champions in the annual women’s tournament in Fukushima-cho, Hokkaido, on this Japanese-language page. And there’s no mistaking the sex of these children, some of whom are of pre-school age, having a go in matches last year.

Those willing to do the basic research will find a lot of information and misinformation on the web about women’s sumo, both in English and Japanese.

Here’s a Kyodo report from five years ago about moves to revive—not start—women’s sumo.

The author states that women’s sumo was as popular as men’s sumo in Japan, Taiwan, and Hawaii until the 1960s, when it disappeared. She also claims there’s a “persistent prejudice” against it, and “many people remain tight-lipped about women’s sumo”. Speaking of tight-lipped, she neglects to mention that any avoidance of the subject is due to the connections between women’s sumo and prostitution, as we’ll see in a bit. Then again, I’ve yet to meet any Japanese who are tight-lipped about anything that was supposedly popular until the 1960s, not to mention anything to do with sex.

She’s also incorrect when she says that women’s sumo originated in the 1880s, but does get it right when she says it was banned in the 19th century as being harmful to public morals. Novelist Hayasaka Akira, who at the time was planning to write a stage play about the sport, said he saw a women’s sumo tournament under a tent on a vacant lot in Ehime around 1941. (He wrote the screenplay for this TBS drama called Onnazumo, or Women’s Sumo.) On the other hand, a Mainichi Shimbun article no longer on line states that women’s sumo originated with World War II and the shortage of men.

Meanwhile, this page on a Russian website comes closer with its assertion that onnazumo began in Osaka in the 1700s and was performed by prostitutes. They also report that women competed with blind men. (Feel free to take a few minutes to consider all the possibilities of those matches before continuing to read. I did. And I dare you to say you wouldn’t pay to see that at least once.)

The site contains the claim that it was banned in 1926, which contradicts other sources. It also asserts that people in Japan don’t talk about it, but they openly cite the associations with prostitution. That makes sense on a superficial level, but it still doesn’t sound like any Japanese people I know. Where I live, more than one person has shown me the location of the red-light district during the Edo Period. (Small apartment houses now occupy the site.) Come to think of it, that might explain the Kyodo article’s statement that it was more popular than men’s sumo at one time.

Keep clicking at that site, by the way, and you’ll find photos of enormous Russian women grunting, grabbing, and shoving each other. One of them is performing a split that’s quite impressive considering all that poundage on her frame. But be warned: Just because the photos are work-safe doesn’t mean you should eat lunch and look at the same time.

Japanese-language sources clear up a lot of the confusion. According to one, the earliest reference to women’s sumo is found in the Nihon Shoki (The Chronicles of Japan), which was finished in the 8th century. In fact, this is supposed to be the earliest written reference to sumo at all in Japan. It appears in Vol. 14, which describes women removing their kimono to put on loincloths and grapple in the presence of the Yuryaku Tenno (The 21st Emperor) in September 469. So yes, the idea was to appeal to the prurient interests of the spectators. The sources also say the next written references didn’t appear until the 17th century, but they assume the raunchy and randy aspects of the bouts meant that people continued to do what comes naturally; they just didn’t write about it. They suspect it was most often performed in those days as a titillating diversion for men and women in the pleasure quarters.

The women’s matches went public again in 1744, and the Osakan blind man’s bluff described by the Russians began in 1769. Throughout the Edo period, women wrestlers assumed professional names in the same manner as the men, but their names were often sexual puns. It was banned shortly thereafter, but emerged yet again in 1848. You can’t keep a good woman down, now can you? Well, some people try–It officially became forbidden fruit once again in 1874, perhaps this time to forestall the newly arrived Westerners from puritanical moralizing or to prevent them from grabbing all the ringside seats for themselves. There are also reports of public performances in 1890, however, which suggests the ban was more nominal than real. Perhaps the Western influence had an effect; women began dressing more modestly in the ring and competing seriously. At the turn of the century there were as many as 23 barnstorming troupes of various sizes, based mostly in Yamagata. The Hawaiian performances were popular from 1930 until they ended in 1941, and then resumed in 1951.

There were other differences between the male and female versions besides the sexual aspects. Sumo began in Japan about 2,000 years ago as a way to entertain the deities during festivals, and many Shinto rituals are still used for the matches today. (Here’s a good summary of the religious aspects, though the information at the end is dated.)

That was not the case with women’s sumo, however. Entertainment seems to have been the primary objective, even during the 19th and 20th centuries. Japanese women participated in tournaments called gonin nuki (beating five wrestlers in succession), which is not part of the men’s tournaments, and performed hajikara. The latter is a type of entertainment that more closely resembles the circus: The wrestlers picked up rice straw with their teeth and pounded steamed rice on their bellies into the dough used for rice cakes. (That’s probably a variation on mochitsuki, a New Year’s custom in which a special variety of especially glutinous rice is pounded by friends, family and neighbors to make the rice cakes, or mochi, which are eaten during the holiday.) Performances also included traditional singing and dancing.

There’s a touch of irony to all this. Women were banned from sitting at ringside to watch the professional sumo matches until the 20th century, and they’re still forbidden to enter the ring. The ban has to do with the Shinto insistence on purity. Women in primitive societies were considered unclean because they menstruate, and big-time sumo still hasn’t gotten over it. Even the men have to purify the ring before they step into it; that’s why they throw salt into it first.

The International Olympic Committee refused to go along with the idea of sumo in the Olympics in the past because of the lack of female participation. But those grounds for opposition no longer apply.

Besides, as Mr. Mai explained, everyone’s stepping into the ring. The Women’s Sumo World Championships have been held every year since 2001. Here’s an article about women’s sumo in the U.S. written by California Sumo Association President Andrew Freund that same year. Taking advantage of journalistic privilege, he quotes himself in the third person: “We are very proud of our women’s team.” And here’s a 2003 article from Britain’s Daily Telegraph that focuses on British sumo.

A national organization for women’s sumo was formed in Japan in 1996, called the “New Sumo Federation” to forestall any objection to the participation of women, and their first tournament was held in Osaka 1997. Try this YouTube clip of an attractive NHK announcer showing off her moves during a tournament. She seems a bit too slender to go for the Olympic gold, but the intensity of her fighting spirit certainly caught her opponent by surprise.

I had hoped it would show the women competing in the traditional style wearing only loincloths, but no such luck!

Afterwords:

A comparison of the statements in the Kyodo article in particular and the last video, made just four years later, demonstrate the pitfalls in accepting at face value blanket statements about Japan and the Japanese, particularly those that are negative, and just how quickly the silent path of change in Japanese society renders those statements obsolete.

For those of you who read Japanese, some of the shikona for women in the Edo period included 玉の越, 乳ヶ張, 姥ヶ里, 腹檜, 貝ヶ里, 色気取, 美人草, and 穴ヶ淵.

Letter bombs (6): Ignorance goes viral

For people whose job it is to describe the world, journalists often seem to have remarkable difficulty imagining life in other people’s shoes.
- Michael Kinsley

The buzzing of the flies does not turn them into bees.
- Georgian proverb

JOURNALISTS and their employers have always been dependable for providing an undependable view of events that is more agenda-driven entertainment than information. Former American President Harry Truman once sighed that he felt sorry for his fellow citizens who woke up in the morning and read the newspaper, thereby thinking they knew something of what was happening in the world.

Isesaki flag

The revolution in information technology that has occurred since Truman’s time has given us much more tech than info. Though more pixels are hurled onto more screens, and more talk is belched into the ether, its accuracy and value are in indirect proportion to its quantity. The new technology also allows anyone to participate, but as the Georgians had it, the buzzing of those flies does not turn them into bees. The cacophony they create resembles nothing so much as a conductorless orchestra of vuvuzelas on a radio with a missing volume knob. Ignorance has gone viral.

They’re even more dependably undependable regarding Japan, a subject they almost never get right. A Japanese friend still keeps a clipping from an American newspaper he saw while on a trip to that country with a map of Japan showing Yokohama where Osaka is. (Osaka is 241 miles almost due west.) But as this post will show, they really don’t want to get it right.

This edition of Letter Bombs contains three items sent in by readers, one of which has an embedded fourth item. To these I’ve added a discovery of my own. All of them demonstrate that neither the bees nor the flies care a whit about the facts. They’d rather feed on the offal of a narrative of Weird Japan, the Goofball Kingdom of East Asia, populated by losers and perverts.

The Bogus #1

Mac sent in the first article by The Guardian’s man in Japan, Justin McCurry, whose body of work suggests his ambition is to become the thinking man’s WaiWai. McCurry slid forward on his stool at the FCCJ bar and pulled out another one. There are too many fascinating stories in this country of 127 million to cover them all, but the one McCurry selected for his Guardian readers was about the municipal government of Isesaki, Gunma, a city of 209,000 people, ordering its employees to shave their facial hair.

His manner of presenting information about Japan has become so predictable it deserves to be recognized as the McCurry Method ™. This consists of blending dollops of mythomania into meaningless generalizations applied to the entire population and to entire eras with the journalistic equivalent of an industrial paint sprayer, propelled by a condescending sense of superiority.

He starts with a line straight out of the Ryan Connell WaiWai stylebook:

(B)ureaucrats in one town could find themselves sent to the bathroom, razor in hand, for sporting even the suggestion of a five o’clock shadow.

There’s a reason they don’t issue artistic licenses to the people writing for a daily paper. None of this works even as hyperbole, least of all the idea that the average Japanese man is capable of producing a five o’clock shadow. Well, some are—by five o’clock the next day.

Authorities in Isesaki, Gunma prefecture, have ordered all male employees to shave off their facial hair, and banish all thoughts of growing any, following complaints from members of the public who said they found dealing with bearded bureaucrats “unpleasant”.

Might as well use that counterfeit artistic license until it expires from overheating. Imagine an Isesaki municipal bureaucracy capable of mind control, banishing thoughts of banned beards from all those who dare enter its precincts. You can’t even look out the window and daydream of a tidy Van Dyke.

Here’s a textbook application of the McCurry Method ™:

The Isesaki ban is reminiscent of the strict rules on physical appearance enforced by conservative companies in the postwar period in the belief that Japan’s rise to economic superpower required absolute conformity.

That’s in contrast to the wild and crazy guys with beards to their sternums, ponytails to their shoulder blades, and rings in their ears, lips, and noses to the grindstones at the hip, tolerant, a-go-go American and British industrial corporations of the 50s and 60s.

Shall we hold a pool to speculate where McCurry got the idea that the Japanese corporate establishment “believed” that “absolute” conformity was the key to becoming an economic superpower? Here’s where I put my money: He pulled it out of his backside.

What’s he going to write next? The robotic Japanese are automatons and economic animals who live in rabbit hutches, dream of conquering the world economically because they couldn’t militarily, and are so xenophobic they think Wogs begin at Calais?

Whoops, sorry about that last one. That comes from McCurry’s neck of the woods.

For an illustration of the strict ban on facial hair in Japan during the postwar period, here’s a photo of the man at the top of the social ziggurat in those days:

But this was the first time that an absence of whiskers had been enforced among civil servants, the internal affairs and communications ministry said.

But this was probably not the first time McCurry rewrote something to enhance the narrative. What the ministry really said was that they had “never heard of” any municipality in the country introducing such a rule, not that it had never happened.

The ban, the first of its kind among Japanese public officials, applies to any manifestation of facial hair, from lovingly cultivated full beards to trendy goatees and designer stubble.

And we all know that the range of facial hair from lovingly cultivated full beards to trendy goatees and designer stubble constitutes the A to Z of masculine hirsuteness.

A more realistic view was offered by Nakata Hiroshi, now running for an upper house Diet seat. When he was the mayor of Yokohama, he would have been in a position to institute such a ban.

Some beards are stylish, and some are unsightly, and it’s not possible to clearly define what would or would not make other people uncomfortable. This is a service industry whose employees should be aware that they interact with the public, and that everyone is checking out everyone else’s appearance.

Here are some more things McCurry didn’t see when he wasn’t looking: Facial hair for male employees is also banned at 7-Eleven Japan (full-time employees and student part-timers alike), Oriental Land, the operators of Tokyo Disney Resort, and the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, the country’s premier sports franchise.

He also missed this site for a business consulting firm in the U.S.:

(E)mployers in the USA have a legal right to ask you to adhere to dress codes:
“A person can be fired because the company doesn’t like your shoes,” explains Robert D. Lipman, who manages the New York employment firm Lipman & Plesur, LLP …“People say ‘This is America. We should be able to do what we want.’ But I tell them that once you walk into a private employer’s workplace, your rights are limited.”

Less than a minute of research turned up this site from solicitors in Britain:

Standards of dress and personal presentation are relevant to most employers and having a policy on dress code can be important.
Where the employees meet customers and are effectively the shop window for the company, the benefits of presentable appearance are obvious. But even where the employee’s work is internal, there are less tangible benefits such as:
•creating a team atmosphere,
•engendering standards of professionalism, and
•creating a corporate image.

McCurry seems to fancy himself a successor to the tradition of British essayists, so it’s fitting to close this chapter with a quote from one of the best, William Hazlitt:

“The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.”

The Bogus #2

Aceface found an article by people who didn’t look very hard either: a group of Internet hucksters calling themselves Business Ideas International, who claim to be based in Japan. A look at their website turns up business ideas resembling the sort of suggestions that used to be advertised on matchbook covers in the United States. (Start a DJ business and rock your way to financial freedom! How to get paid to play video games!) The combination of lackwits producing junior high school prose and preening with the conceit that they know what they’re talking about makes one wonder how they succeed in business even when they really are trying, much less offer advice to others.

The title is: 5 Twisted Business Ideas (That Could Only Have Come From Japan)

Sushi, Geisha, Schoolgirls and Anime are usually among the first things that come to mind when people mention Japan. Business Ideas International is based here in Japan though – and we’ve got the inside scoop. We can tell you from first-hand experience that the quirkiness of the land of the rising sun is not just limited to these usual pop-culture icons.

Give the business mavens credit for thinking outside the box. Who else would consider sushi and geisha “pop-culture icons”?

As someone who has regularly interacted with both Japanese and American schoolgirls, by the way, I’d say the Japanese variety are considerably less quirky.

(H)ere’s just a sampling of five twisted business ideas that could only have come from Japan.
#1 Love Doll Rental
It’s weird enough that some guys settle for a “real life” doll instead of a real girlfriend. But leave it to the Japanese – the place where these dolls-as-partners were invented – to take things a step further.

The earliest recorded instances of love dolls are the “dama de viaje” or “dame de voyage”. Those are Spanish and French terms for female dolls sewn out of old clothes for use as substitutes on sailing ships during long voyages. The Japanese and German navies performed similar experiments in the 1930s, and the Germans called theirs seemannsbraut. The Japanese like the term Dutch wives.

There was a big to-do in Britain in 1982 when a company called Conegate tried to import inflatable sex dolls from West Germany, but customs seized them. They were so anatomically accurate the authorities considered them indecent. The High Court overturned the verdict of an initial hearing on appeal and allowed the sale of seemannsbraut in the UK.

You see, here in Japan, if you’re not a “one-fake-woman” kind of guy, and prefer to “work the scene” you can opt to rent a love doll by the hour.

Thus demonstrating the aptness of Henri Amiel’s epigram that cleverness is serviceable for everything and sufficient for nothing.

But there’s a reason for the rentals.

With $2 million in sales last year, (Matt) McMullen now employs 14 people at his San Marcos, Calif., company (Real Doll) and makes about six or seven dolls a week, each requiring 80 hours of labor.

The linked article says that some dolls sell for as much as $US 6,500. To get an idea of what’s available, here’s a website with immaculate English offering “realistic latex & silicon love”.

Could it be that BII is chagrined they didn’t come up with the rental idea themselves?

Business Ideas International prides itself on being a publication that is SFW, so we won’t go into too many more details. Needless to say, let your imagination wander – what ever pops into your head, yup, that’s what they do.

How would the people of Business Ideas International know what Japanese men do with sex dolls? Unless…

#2 Roadside Alcohol Vending Machines
Nothing takes the edge of (sic) the morning drive to work like an early A.M. beer-buzz right? If you agree, you’ll love Japan. Here there are literally thousands of street-side alcohol vending machines. You can just pull up to one, stick in your ID and a couple hundred yen, and out pops a can of premium beer or potent Japanese sake. Open her up and keep on driving. Gives a new meaning to “one for the road”.

Anyone who thinks the Japanese show up for work with a morning buzz because they bought some beer at a vending machine instead of pulling into a 24/7 convenience store offering a greater selection of the same product is not old enough to work for a living. Incidentally, drunk driving laws in Japan are more stringent than in the US. Any alcohol in your system at all lands you in jail. No malarkey about blood alcohol percentages.

Remember, these people claim to be based in Japan.

The vending machines selling alcohol are for walk up (or pedal up) business, not drivers, but let’s not judge Business Ideas International too harshly. Anything to do with business, ideas, or Japan seems not to be their forté.

#3 Every Invention By Dr. Nakamatsu – Ever
If you don’t live in Japan, chances are you haven’t heard of Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu.

Even if you do live in Japan, chances are you haven’t heard of Dr. Nakamatsu.

Dr. Nakamatsu’s most notable invention is one that helped change the world at the time – the floppy disk. IBM made a deal with him in the late 70’s for his floppy-disk related patents that are bound by a non-disclosure agreement, so they may take most of the credit. Although the sum paid to him has never been revealed, he has lived the life of an extremely eccentric multi-millionaire ever since. Besides the floppy disk, Dr. Nakamatsu also holds patents for the core technology behind the CD, the DVD, the digital watch and even the taxi-cab meter.

They missed the patent for the automated pachinko machine, but what the heck. BII thinks that every invention by Dr. Nakamatsu ever is twisted. However, they do note that he also sells:

Pyong-Pyong Flying Shoes, Love Jet 200 Anti-Impotence Perfume, Yummy Nutri Brain Food…

Put “eccentric inventor” into Google and you’ll get almost two million hits. Dr. Nakamatsu actually appears in a few of them, but most of them refer to the tradition of eccentric English inventors.

Either Business Ideas International is jealous that Dr. Nakamatsu has more money than they ever will, or this is some undergrad’s idea of a put-on.

#4 Maid Cafes
Cute Japanese girls dressed in French maid costumes take your order and serve you food. They also occassionally (sic) get up on stage and sing and dance for you. ‘Nuff said.

Nah, not nearly “‘nuff said”.

Let’s talk about the American-based restaurant chain Hooters. The waitresses wear orange shorts cut at crotch level, tanks tops designed to show off their superstructure—hence the name “Hooters”–pantyhose, and bras. This is taken from the company’s website:

Hooters of America, Inc. is the Atlanta-based operator and franchiser of over 455 Hooters locations in 44 states in the US, Argentina, Aruba, Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, England, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Korea, Mexico, Paraguay, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Venezuela and the Virgin Islands. The privately held corporation owns 120 units.

Now there’s a Business Idea International! Hooters has yet to hit Japan, however. Maybe all that latex & silicon love is squeezing them out of the market.

The element of female sex appeal is prevalent in the restaurants, and the company believes the Hooters Girl is as socially acceptable as a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, or a Radio City Rockette…Claims that Hooters exploits attractive women are as ridiculous as saying the NFL exploits men who are big and fast. Hooters Girls have the same right to use their natural female sex appeal to earn a living as do super models Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell. To Hooters, the women’s rights movement is important because it guarantees women have the right to choose their own careers, be it a Supreme Court Justice or Hooters Girl…Sex appeal is legal and it sells.

They’re feminists!

Hooters does not market itself to families, but they do patronize the restaurants. Ten percent of the parties we serve have children in them. Hooters is in the hospitality business and provides the best possible service to anyone coming through the door. For this reason, the chain offers a children’s menu.

So to sum up: A children’s menu in a restaurant called Hooters wink wink nudge nudge is normal, but some Japanese men patronizing restaurants with waitresses wearing French maid outfits is twisted.

#5 Live Seafood Restaurants
While many English-speaking countries have caught the Sushi Restaurant buzz, food connoisseurs abroad are still missing out on the REAL seafood dining experience here in Japan.
Apparently for the Japanese, just serving your food raw was not good enough for them. “If we’re not going to cook it”, an enterprising restaurant owner apparently thought, “why should we even bother killing it?”…

Apparently.

…and so the live seafood restaurant was born. That’s right, in Japan, you can go to a restaurant and be served a plateful of food that’s still alive and kicking.

Putting aside the image of kicking seafood, the folks at Business Ideas International apparently have not been to China or South Korea. Not very international of them, is it? Neither do they read Britain’s Telegraph, nor visit YouTube:

Chinese diners eat live fish in YouTube video
Animal rights campaigners have criticised the Chinese over their extreme eating habits after a video of diners eating a live fish became a hit on the internet.

The article is dated November 2009. The BII piece was posted in May 2010.

The Telegraph article contains this passage:

Reports have claimed some restaurants offer monkey’s brains. Other dishes include rats, dogs, snakes, lizards and baby mice.

I’ve also heard the monkey brains story from a Japanese man who operates a small restaurant and likes Chinese food. He visited China on a special tour for people in the industry.

Yesterday, I did a search at Google Videos and YouTube: “China live food” got 2,400 and 1,780 hits respectively. “Japan live food” got 1,800 hits and 1,410 hits, and “Korea live food” got 1,140 and 911. Not all of them were about the actual consumption of live food, however.

Incidentally, unless you’re interested in getting ill, all shellfish must either be eaten live or be cooked while live. The Health Department of the State of New York has issued an official warning. Raw oyster bars have long been popular on the American East Coast and in France. They’re so common in the U.S. the dish is called shooters.

Hey, who’s up for some shooters at Hooters!

At the very least, we hope this post has made you realize that no business idea is too strange or outlandish.

It also made me realize the extent to which ignorance has gone viral.

The Bogus #3

As we saw from the previous example, there exists a type of low intelligence that’s become convinced of its cleverness without seeing through the transparency of its oafdom. An even clearer demonstration is the Adam Frucci post at Gizmodo sent in by Dokushoka. It’s the journalistic equivalent of picking one’s nose in public.

The title is: Elderly Japanese Would Rather be Tended to by Robots than Foreigners

Frucci provides no specific information on what elderly Japanese think. How can he? That’s because he pulled it out of the primary source for people who write about Japan: His own backside.

What he does is provide in this “article” is a hot link at the bottom to the BBC, which is presumably his source. The link covers the space of only three letters inside parentheses, meaning most people will miss it or not bother with it. That’s the point.

Those few who do click on the link will be directed to a BBC report by Roland Buerk. It has no text—only about 2:40 worth of video, which means even fewer will bother. That’s also the point.

I watched.

That title is: Japan MAY accept robots over immigrants. (Emphasis mine) It’s about the nursing shortage in Japan. In his own variation on the McCurry Method ™, Buerk provides no specific numbers about a national nurse shortfall, but just expects everyone to take his word for it. He does talk to one woman employed at a hospital who says it’s difficult to find staff.

Back to Frucci:

Many of the potential nurses to tend to said old people happen to be from neighboring Asian countries. Not so fast! What about robots?!

Not so fast indeed! What about reality?! Frucci eliminates a critical part of Buerk’s story, which is that nurses must pass a medical terminology test in Japanese to stay more than three years. The failure rate is 98%. Buerk calls this “an example of Japan’s barriers to immigration”.

I’d call that another example of faux journalism and cultural arrogance. How loathsome of those Japanese to spend 1,500 years developing a difficult written language just to prevent other people from moving there.

The BBC briefly interviews a Filipino nurse complaining that even Japanese people have trouble reading the test vocabulary because they’re specialized kanji.

But of course they’re specialized kanji—they’re medical terms. Most laypeople in English-speaking countries couldn’t pass a medical terminology test in their own language either. How many people do you know who could define nosocomial infection, iatrogenic illness, or lethologica without looking them up? The English-language Internet is filled with advice to students for dealing with medical terminology tests.

Had anyone involved with the story known what they were talking about or cared to discover the truth, they’d know that learning kanji is sometimes a beneficial shortcut. Before I came to Japan, I had no idea what nephritis was. When I came across it in kanji, I understood immediately: inflammation of the kidney.

Back to Frucci:

Japan is a very racially homogenous society, where immigration is frowned upon and genetic purity is seen as a good thing.

Putting aside what Frucci thinks he knows about Japanese attitudes toward “genetic purity”, here’s a link to an article published in the monthly magazine Voice—available at newsstands everywhere—almost seven years ago by six members of the now ruling Democratic Party in Japan calling for the immigration of 10 million people. Two of them are now in the Cabinet.

And with the birthrate slowed, they’re moving towards an era where (sic) a full half of the population will be over 65.

His source, Buerk at the BBC, says only that a quarter of the population is over 65 now. He says nothing about an era “where” a “full half” of the population is over 65.

See what I mean about pulling stuff out of their backsides?

Buerk’s turn:

Compared to the melting pots of London and New York, foreigners really stand out here.

On the contrary, the many Chinese and Korean foreigners here don’t stand out at all, but then some people think they all look alike. As Britain’s Prince Philip had it, they’re all “slitty-eyed”.

In passing, I’ll note this belief that the term “foreigner” belongs exclusively to them is endemic among Caucasians in Northeast Asia.

The possibility of allowing mass immigration is barely even discussed.

Buerk doesn’t seem to be big on reading Japanese either. He’s also not the first European to look the other way when the subject is the impact of mass immigration in Europe. After all, Mohammed has been the most popular name for baby boys in London and Yorkshire since 2008. Here’s a headline from a Swedish newspaper a few months ago: “Gothenburg Man Arrested over Somali Terror Plot”.

Eventually they COULD be put to work in restaurants and shops…Accepting a robotic future in Japan COULD be more popular than accepting mass immigration. (Emphasis mine)

Eventually somebody COULD do some real research about this country—it’s easy if you try—but that’s not bloody likely, is it?

The Beeb and Buerk knew enough to use the weasel word to give them plausible deniability against the charge of overt statements without a basis in fact, but that flew over Frucci’s head. He writes:

That means they’ll need one of two things to take care of that aging population: foreign nurses or robot nurses. Guess which option seems more reasonable to them?

Frucci is also a masterful prose stylist…

Yes, robotic fucking nurses.

…whose primary source after Buerk is his buttocks:

(H)ospitals are going to be shut down because of a lack of staff and people are going to be left without vital medical care.

Not even Buerk claimed people were going to be left without vital medical care.

Here’s some more glittering prose:

Sooner or later, they’re going to need to allow immigrants from neighboring Asian countries to enter the country and work in much greater numbers in order to make up from (sic) the soon-to-be greatly diminished Japanese workforce.

Soon according to Buerk was 40 years, if current demographic trends hold.

And not just to build goddamned robots.

But perhaps I misunderstand. Frucci may be deliberately adjusting the level of his writing and intellectual content for his audience. From the comments:

I just wrote a research paper on this same subject. The Japanese are very xenophobic and homogeneity is important to them. So to except about a million (yes I said a millions about 15 million to be exact) immigrants is a tough thing for them.

Here’s another:

Japan is such an odd place that I am willing to believe that they think robots are better than humans of a different ethnicity. Stay classy Japan.

Recall what President Truman said about the effects of newspaper journalism? Here’s one more:

Foreigners also prefer that robots take care of old Japanese people.

How much do you want to bet that guy fancies himself a master of wit and repartee?

The Bogus Bonus!

I ran across this article in Britain’s Telegraph by Danielle Demetriou. That it was the only article about Japan on an American site with political and social commentary demonstrates the poisonous effect journalists have on the views of their product’s consumers in the Anglosphere.

It’s a perfect fit for this post. It now contains links to an aggressively ignorant business promotion site and an aggressively ignorant tech blog sandwiched by poorly researched articles from British broadsheets of the left and the right.

Here’s the headline:

Tokyo sees rise in ‘divorce ceremonies’
As Japan’s divorce rate soars, couples in Tokyo are ending their marriages with as much care as they began them. (Emphasis mine)

It includes this sentence:

Their introduction is timely: more than 251,000 divorces took place in Japan in 2008, a figure blamed partly on the poor economic climate and the end of the salaryman-led family units which used to be the bedrock of much of Japanese life.

Comparing that with this section of the English-language website of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications brings up some intriguing questions.

In Japan, divorces were on a generally upward trend from the 1960s until 2002 when they hit a peak of 290,000. Since then, both the number of divorces and the divorce rate have declined for six years straight. In 2008, the number of divorces totaled 251,000, and the divorce rate was 1.99 (per 1,000 population).

Did Demetriou access this herself, get the accurate divorce statistic, and pull the rest out of her backside to juice up the story? Or did someone access it for her first and fail to provide the full context, forcing her to pull the rest out of her backside to juice up the story?

And just what is “soaring divorces blamed on the poor economic climate and the end of salaryman-led family units” supposed to mean?

Japan’s divorce rate per 1,000 population is one of the lowest in the world and is declining. The unexplained and inexplicable reference to the “end of salaryman-led family units” is a borrowing of the McCurry Method ™. Now I’ll borrow the pretentious phrase of those thin-skinned scribes caught with their pants down pulling stuff out of their backsides: I stand by my claim that the journos are making stuff up to ridicule the Japanese and thereby sell product.

Saori Teshima had long dreamt of the moment.

How would Demetriou know?

So goes another divorce ceremony – a bizarre, but increasingly popular ritual among Japanese couples, who choose to end their marriages with the same pomp and ceremony with which they began them.

Who is Demetriou to use “bizarre”, the contemporary teenager’s default term of derision, to describe a preference for ceremonies to mark the milestones of one’s life? I was graduated from school twice in my life—once from high school and once from university. Japanese also have graduation ceremonies for those finishing kindergarten, primary school, and junior high school. They also have entrance ceremonies and ceremonies to mark the start of the school year.

Saturday night, I attended a party for a man’s kanreki—his 60th birthday. The Japanese have observed customs associated with kanreki for several hundred years.

But it’s understandable why some British would consider a divorce ceremony bizarre. Their divorce rate is roughly six times that of Japan. From the Office of National Statistics, UK:

The rate of divorce in the United Kingdom has been dropping in recent years. In 2007 the divorce rate in England and Wales was recorded at 11.9 people per every 1000 of the married population. This is the lowest divorce rate recorded since 1981.

If they started conducting divorce ceremonies, when would they ever sober up enough to go to a pub for the binge drinking required to properly enjoy a soccer match?

Britain also has the highest number of unmarried mothers in Europe. Ceremonies and commitments? Screw that for a lark.

Pioneering the trend for divorce ceremonies is Hiroki Terai, 29, an entrepreneurial former sales man from Japan’s Chiba district…

Chiba is a city and a prefecture (i.e., province or state) right next to Tokyo. Odd that The Telegraph’s Japan correspondent wouldn’t know that it isn’t a “district”.

…who dreamt up the idea after friends of his decided to separate last year. Since setting up a company devoted to divorce ceremonies in March, he has been contacted by more than 700 people and conducted 21 divorce ceremonies – costing from £44 to £700 – with a further nine booked.

In other words, this “increasingly popular ritual” is performed for 0.01% of all divorces.

Roland Kelts, a Japan culture expert and lecturer at the University of Tokyo, described how divorce ceremonies were a welcome tool for Japanese to deal with shifting family structures.
“Today’s Japanese women are well-educated and worldly,” he says. “They watch Sex and the City and wonder why their husbands are not more dynamic. And their husbands, having lost the security of lifetime employment and its perks, are wondering why their wives are so impatient. No wonder divorce has risen to a third of Japanese marriages.”

Only an academic could achieve the hat trick of pulling something from his backside, applying the McCurry Method ™, and beclowning himself in a few meaningless sentences. My favorite was the non sequitur of men losing their lifetime employment perks and then wondering why their wives were impatient.

Kelts’s “discipline” is pop culture in general and manga in particular, which might explain why he’s hit an intellectual glass ceiling here. Yes, an entire nation of Japanese women, just recently backwards and uneducated, knew nothing about sex before they married and even less afterwards, but turned on the cable to Sex and the City and found it so believable they got impatient with their limp, uninterested husbands.

And so the divorce rate has fallen for six years straight.

The Bona Fide!

It’s time for a palate cleanser after swallowing all that inedible fare. Fortunately, Mac also sent in a Youtube video of a live performance by the Shibusashirazu Orchestra, whom he says played at his local rice festival. The music is a heady blend of modern jazz and pop played with straight-ahead gusto on both Western and traditional Japanese instruments. To this they add free-form stage performers and modern and traditional Japanese dance. Their name literally translates to “not knowing tasteful sobriety”, and that’s no joke.

If they were from America or Europe, you’d know about them already. But after you watch the clip to the end, you’ll know something McCurry, BII, Frucci, Buerke, Demetriou, and their readers don’t.

Afterwords:

* Any municipality with a flag such as the one used by Isesaki has to be a cool place no matter what happens there.

* Haruyama Fumio, the chair of the human rights committee of the Gunma Bar Association, says the Isesaki facial hair ban restricts the freedom of individuals.

Count on a human rights lawyer to know nothing about human rights.

Part of the transaction between the employer and the employed is that the employed voluntarily gives up certain rights at the employer’s request. That’s why none of the staff at the elegant hotels in London’s Mayfair district wear Hawaiian shirts and beach sandals to work, for example.

If Justin McCurry wants to work out of his rabbit hutch, he has every right to wear a French maid costume, paint his face to look like Hello Kitty, and identify himself as Justine on the telephone if he chose to do so. No one would care. But his employer would surely object if he were to dress and behave that way on the rare occasions he sallies forth to interact with the Japanese public as part of his job.

Of course, if people found dress and facial hair codes to be an infringement of their rights, they’re free to refuse a job offer.

All of this should be elementary.

The studliness of grass-eating men

“GRASS-EATING MEN” is an expression used to describe the allegedly limp and wimpy young Japanese man of today. It became a catchphrase of sorts last year, and was soon glommed by those elements of the Anglosphere mass media who scarf up this type of story quicker than a free hamburger and beer. From their perspective, it also dovetailed nicely with their other stories of bra- and makeup-wearing Japanese men.

There are other perspectives, however. One of them was presented by the prolific author Hashimoto Osamu in the February issue of Chuo Koron as part of a rumination on the Tiger Woods affairs. Here it is in English.

*****
The phrase “grass eating men” appeared in the 2009 Buzzwords of the Year contest, and some people are saying that today’s young men are not aggressive in pursuing affairs of the heart.

While that may well be true, it is not a recent development. The idea that studly Japanese men do not make aggressive moves on women is a sort of aesthetic value that became established during the Edo period (1603-1868), so it will not be shaken that easily.

The kabuki and joruri puppet dramas of the Edo period have determined the disposition of the Japanese in profound ways. The “studly men” (ikemen) who appear in these dramas do not readily assert themselves with women. They are approached by women even when they do not assert themselves. The greatest pickup line for Japanese is when a Japanese woman approaches a man, snuggles up to him, and says, “ne~”. With this one word, a romance that is going to happen will happen. All a man has to do is be a grass-eating animal who pokes his head into a feeding trough that has approached him.

That’s why the highest standard for judging a Japanese man’s eroticism is his attractiveness to women. Japanese men unconsciously believe it is not possible to think of how to make oneself attractive to women; the Japanese man who is attractive to women has been allotted that role by fate.

And that’s why the studly Japanese man does not have to be aggressive when pursuing romance. They will come to him even if he doesn’t do anything. That is stoicism on the face of it, and it also allows him to be self-indulgent in these matters. Japanese men were not at all criticized for this in bygone times; even today, women infatuated with studly men will seldom criticize them for this.

In Edo period dramas, it is the men who are aggressive in affairs of the heart that women do not find attractive. Women see them as unappealing, so they have no choice but to be aggressive. These men are not suave in manner. Therefore, when those men who are not attractive to women are sexually aggressive, women will dismiss them with the complaint that they are offensive. (Note: “Iyarashii“; this has sexual connotations.)

That’s why the men who aren’t fancied by women but who are sexually aggressive are suited only for the role of cheap heavies. That can’t be helped—that’s what they are.

In fact, as the Japanese “grass-eating men” trend shows, the longer that periods of social calm prevail, everything somehow seems to take on the air of the Edo period.

Afterwords:

Here’s the list of top 10 buzzwords in 2009 for those who can read Japanese. “Grass-eating men” made the cut.

Once upon a time in America, a woman who found a man’s advances unpleasant would have dismissed them with the word, “Fresh!” That’s probably the best translation for iyarashii, but it’s not contemporary.

Love Boat on the Korea Strait

WHAT IS IT with those folks in Fukuoka and Busan anyway? They keep confounding the people whose misconceptions masquerade as conventional wisdom and overturn every tired old cliche of Japanese-Korean relations.

Now they’re at it again. The accompanying photo depicting a traditional Japanese wedding ceremony was taken during the filming of a television drama in the Kushida Shinto shrine in Fukuoka City. The filming, which occurred on the 6th, is for a program being produced by MBC-TV in South Korea. The name of that program translated into English from Japanese from Korean is The Korea Strait Wedding War (玄海灘結婚戦争), while the Nishinippon Shimbun translated it into Japanese as The Great Japan-South Korea Wedding Operation (日韓結婚大作戦).

The groom in these telenuptials is a Busan native, played by Korean actor Im Ju-hwan. In the role of the bride, a Japanese woman from Fukuoka studying in South Korea, is Akiba Rie, who has appeared on Korean television before. Both characters have to overcome parental objections before the (presumably) happy ending. The character played by Im also has to overcome his self-doubt. He bolts during the ceremony at the shrine, declaring, “I can’t go through with it!”

And here I thought women were the ones who usually got cold feet at the critical moment. Most men who bug out hit the road before they show up at the church.

The Koreans say they selected Fukuoka for filming the Japanese scenes because it has close ties to Busan—which will be no surprise to long-time friends here—so it’s the best location for depicting mutual understanding between the two countries. They’ve already done some location work in Iizuka, and plan to film some more at a hotel and the local fish market, a Kyushu version of Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market. (Check the link on the right sidebar.)

Here’s the best part: The program will be broadcast on 1-2 March in South Korea. The first of March is a national holiday in that country commemorating the 1919 outbreak of the local movement for independence from Japan.

Actor and musician Hakuryu (literally, White Dragon), who plays the part of the Japanese father, said:

It is a ground-breaking step to take up the subject of international marriage between Japanese and Koreans in South Korea on 1 March. The show tastefully depicts the tension between the families.

Give credit to MBS for their gutsy move. Not every commercial enterprise dependent on public sentiment would behave that way in a potentially volatile environment.

Chon Je-won, the show’s producer, said:

I want to examine friendly ties between the countries in the future. Let the past be the past.

Said Ms. Akiba:

I hope that Japanese-Korean ties grow closer through this drama.

The program will be broadcast in Japan on the northern Kyushu regional network TNC in April.

*****
While MBC is on the side of the angels here, this might once again be a case in which the big institutions are behind the curve. There were 7,813 marriages in Japan between Japanese and Koreans in 2007, the latest year for which I could find statistics. The percentage of international marriages in Japan is close to 6%, and about 13% in South Korea, so the Japanese-Korean marriage rate in that country might be higher.

It’s a good rule of thumb that the people at ground zero will be way ahead of the folks in the corner offices on the top floors of corporate or government headquarters.

Afterwords:

Some people—the usual Diapered Ones, whose preferred form of entertainment is to indulge their coarser emotions—have already decided they won’t enjoy the program. You can have three guesses about the reason, but the first two don’t count.

The main body of the article includes a comment from the Internet that asks: “Do you know how much hurt this will cause for some people?”

To answer with a question: Do you know how little anyone else cares about your petty whining? The world around you isn’t responsible for your failure to control your emotional state, nor is it obligated to modify its opinions or behavior because of it.

The idea that a person’s employment depends on following the party line should have died with the various democratic people’s republics, not to have been preserved in a free market democracy.

A commenter to the main article identified as American Kim provides a more temperate view.

***
The actor/musician Hakuryu, a native of Imari, Saga, is a second-generation Korean-Japanese. The name on his birth register is Chon Jong-il. He also uses the name Takayama Sadaichi in Japan. Mr. Hakuryu/Chon/Takayama frequently appears on Korean television.

Horns of a dilemma

HERE’S A BRIEF REPORT in The Scotsman explaining that Chinese authorities are concerned that never have so many ever had so few opportunities to transmit their precious bodily fluids:

Guangdong, China’s export powerhouse, is home to about 30 million migrant workers, the most in the country. Many leave wives, husbands or children in their native villages to seek the higher wages factories pay compared with agricultural work.

That’s not counting the millions of randy young men who don’t have wives, girlfriends, or a reasonable facsimile thereof because of the demographic overhang created by those authorities.

Well, one solution would be to handle the problem the way the Korean government handled one of theirs, according to this report in the JoongAng Daily.

And what’s this “Or children” part? They’re not that desperate, are they?

You decide…

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

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

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

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

I don’t know…

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

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.

Matsuri da! (105): The festival for manly men

DESPITE THE INTENSE COMPETION that is often part of Shinto festivals, which can range from events resembling ad hoc sporting events to those that look like shrine-authorized street rumbles, few of the matsuri have a martial air. One exception is the yabusame festivals, during which archers mounted on galloping horses fire arrows at targets as they race by.

A manly man and his manly men

Another exception is the Lord Shingen Festival, one of the largest in Kofu, Yamanashi. That annual event is held in early April near the anniversary of that manly man’s death on the 12th. The event honors the life and times of the local daimyo, Shingen Takeda, who was quite the 16th century warlord and the city’s founder. He strutted his ruthless stuff during the bloody Warring States period in Japanese history, which means he didn’t fight by Marquis of Queensbury rules. He reached the top by knocking off his predecessor—his father—and then spent the rest of his 52 years war-gaming for real through various military campaigns.

We don’t know whether it was the genes or the Yamanashi water, but Shingen’s eldest son was a chip off the old block who plotted to accelerate his own succession. Dad, having traveled down that road himself, sensed what was afoot and had the lad confined to quarters. Number one son died under mysterious circumstances two years later. Perhaps he should have considered himself lucky. When Shingen discovered a similar plot by his cousin, he ordered the man to cut his belly open on the spot.

Shingen is sometimes referred to as The Tiger of Kai for his mastery of the battlefield, Kai being the name of his ‘hood in those days. But the daimyo had a sensitive side as well, and during his youth he was known for writing excellent poetry.

Kofu spares no effort to recreate his history in its 450-year time slip to those glorious days of yesteryear, when the warriors were brave, courageous, and bold manly men. Replicas of furinkazan, Lord Shingen’s personal flag, are hung throughout the town during the event. The festival is a two-day affair that kicks off with a parade featuring a brass band, musical performances, and a fireworks exhibition. There are also special readings for parents and children of folk tales in which Shingen plays a prominent role, and a lecture titled Takeda Shingen and His Times. The organizers offer a walking tour of local sites associated with the lord that passes through the remnants of the Takeda shrine. Visitors tuckered out after all that walking can relax free of charge at a local hot spring facility. And because the event takes place in early April, they can appreciate the beauty of the cherry blossoms at the former Shingen residence. Perhaps some of them are moved to write poetry of their own.

But the real fun begins on the second and final day. Around 11:00 a.m., twenty-four mounted horsemen wearing the battle dress of Takeda’s generals are joined at Takeda shrine by 1,600 local men dressed as samurai infantry in period costumes, as well as performers of the Shingen dance. They march through the center of Kofu bearing torches and hauling cannon on what is now called Heiwa-dori (Peace Street), just as the proudly non-pacific Shingen and his army did before pushing off for the Battle of Kawanakajima. Along the way, they meet up with a procession of wheeled floats. During the course of the parade, the mounted samurai gallop from Kofu City Hall to the train station. The entire procession stops by the old Takeda Shinto shrine to pray for victory. The festival’s climax occurs in a riverbed at Isawa Kawanakajima during a recreation of the 1561 battle in which Shingen defeated Uesugi Kenshin. The latter was known as the Dragon of Echigo, which suggests that he was a manly man as well, despite his defeat.

Stout-hearted lads they all must have been, but Lord Shingen was no shrinking violet it came to expressing his tender side. The historical archives of the University of Tokyo contain a written love pact signed by Shingen and Kosaka Masanobu, a boy of 16. As part of the love pledge—a samurai pre-nup?—the 22-year-old Shingen swears that he hasn’t and will not dally with another, specifically-named retainer. He also promises that he won’t harm the boy since his intent is a sexual relationship. (This information is derived from Gary Leupp’s Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan.)

Relationships of this sort were common among the manly samurai for several centuries, which presents an interesting parallel with ancient Greece. Some men even encouraged the practice, in part for the benefits that accrued to the younger partners, as they were supposedly given instruction in virtue and the appreciation of beauty. (Another possibility was that it was a workable justification for the seduction of a comely youth.) Thus, as in ancient Greece, the relationship combined the way of the warrior with cultural development. In contrast, some manly men claimed that the love for women caused men to become more feminine. (You could have fooled me, but then again a teenaged boy wouldn’t start bugging his patron to lift up the toilet seat and take out the trash.)

The famous Hagakure, the how-to book for samurai written by Yamamoto Tsunetomo in the early 18th century, even provides some advice for samurai man-boy love:

“A young man should test an older man for at least five years, and if he is assured of that person’s intentions, then he too should request the relationship… If the younger man can devote himself and get into the situation for five or six years then it will not be unsuitable.”

The Japanese term for this practice is wakashudo, sometimes shortened to shudo. Waka is the word for young, shu can sometimes mean companions, and do means way or path. The younger men in the relationship were called wakashu, while the older men were known as nenja. That word is composed of nen, which combines the senses of solicitude, desire, and attention, and one of the words for person.

Those familiar with things Japanese will have already picked up that this practice was thought to be a do, in the same way that budo is the way of the warrior. The same kanji also crops up in kendo, kyudo, judo, aikido, and even Shinto.

Kendo literally means the way of the sword. Perhaps wakashudo represented a different form of swordsmanship!

Afterwords: Some of the information on waksashudo came from this website. The creator asks that this form of citation be used: Andrew Calimach, World History of Male Love, “Homosexual Traditions”, The Beautiful Way of the Samurai, 2000. There you go. The site is well done and has links that are worth following, so I’ve added it to the right sidebar. The link to the Hagakure is already there.

The author of the first website suggests that the influence of Western Christian ideas conveyed through missionaries and after the Meiji Restoration, “a direct result of the opening of Japan carried out under the threat of American guns in 1854”, spelled the end of wakashudo. I’m not sure I agree. Some say that prostitution was outlawed for (ultimately) the same reasons, but men today interested in purchasing those services won’t have any trouble finding them. The same cannot be said of wakashudo, though men of any country today with means, power, and those sexual preferences are probably able to indulge themselves just as easily as Lord Shingen.

Update: My passing reference to yabusame drew some interest, and reader Tomojiro sent along this Youtube clip of a BBC report on the art/discipline. Give credit where credit is due: there’s a lot of worthwhile information and video, and it’s light on the snark. Thanks Tomojiro!

Japanese court gets it wrong in sex-ed suit

THE TOKYO DISTRICT COURT ruled in favor of 31 plaintiffs employed as teachers and staff members at a Tokyo school by ordering three Tokyo Metropolitan District assembly members and the Metropolitan government to pay them 2.1 million yen (about US$ 21,440) in compensation. The court said the politicians were wrong to criticize the teachers at a special public school in the Nanao district of Hino for using dolls to teach sex education to children with mental disabilities. The court also found the government liable because local education officials were present during the the politicians’ visit in 2003 and did nothing to stop them.

In fact, the politicians didn’t stop the teachers either. They merely criticized the teachers to their faces (apparently in the classroom), as well as the materials the teachers used during their visit. It was later that year that the Metropolitan Education Committee severely reprimanded the Nanao 31 for failing to follow guidelines.

The Asahi article reporting the story (here’s the English and here’s the Japanese; the links won’t last long) says the plaintiffs were thrilled because the decision strikes a blow in support of the “independence of education”.

Japan’s Fundamental Law of Education prohibits “undue control” of the educational system by government authorities. (Undue is the paper’s translation for 不当, which can also be translated as improper or wrongful.) Japanese courts seldom support teachers over school authorities in cases involving undue control.

The Asahi closes with the by-now standard quote from a college professor that allows journalists the world over to editorialize in the context of a news article by having others speak for them:

Teruyuki Hirota, a professor of educational sociology at Nihon University, welcomed the ruling as it stressed the education board’s role to protect teachers from political interference.

Why are the 31 teachers, the Asahi Shimbun, and Prof. Hirota dead wrong in this case?

Because public schools are not the private fiefdoms of school teachers.

The reason the decision is wrong has nothing to do whatsoever with the manner of conducting sex education in school. It has nothing to do with the boorish behavior of politicians on a field trip. The guidelines for teaching anything in a public school are for the Education Committee to decide–not for teachers in individual schools to ignore while acting as independent philosopher-kings responsible only to themselves.

That’s because the school in question is a public institution supported by taxpayers. And that means their entire operation must be subject to public oversight–and public oversight of public institutions is the legitimate responsibility of government.

Yes, it would be improper if politicians demanded that classroom teachers extol the virtues of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But it would be just as improper for classroom teachers to sell their students on the idea that “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” was the proper way for a government to organize the economy. Indeed, the latter is more likely to be a problem in Japanese schools today than the former.

The question, therefore, is what constitutes “undue control”. Did the three politicians (at least one from the LDP and one from the DPJ) exert “undue control”? Is it undue control for educational authorities to set teaching guidelines? Obviously not, but that didn’t stop the judges from trying to exert undue control of their own by advancing what is surely their personal agenda.

Those who disagree should consider this: The military is another public institution supported by taxpayer funds. Civilian (i.e., political) control of military forces is a prerequisite for a democracy to effectively function. Any democratic nation that allowed military officers in the field to determine their own operational strategy without civilian oversight would soon be transformed into a military dictatorship with the potential to create serious problems both at home and abroad.

The principle here is precisely the same. If civilian oversight is essential for the military, it is just as essential for school teachers. Do you think teachers should be allowed to use dolls to teach sex education to the mentally handicapped? That’s a valid and defensible position.

So either start a private school funded without taxpayer money, or choose politicians who will appoint administrators that agree with your position. That’s what elections are for.

Still, there are two questions that the Asahi doesn’t address (natch). First, why sue the politicians? If the teachers oppose the educational policies of the authorities, they should sue them–or take the self-congratulatory stand of resigning in protest. The assembly members were on a one-day visit. It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that spite was the motivation for including those three in the suit.

The other question has to do with the teachers’ justification for using the dolls in classroom instruction. They claim that mentally deficient children often don’t understand what body parts are being discussed through the use of words alone.

The article doesn’t say how old the children were (natch again), but the website for the Nanao school shows they have classes for students from the primary school to the high school level.

If the students are incapable of understanding the body parts being discussed without some show and tell, would they have the mental capability to benefit from education regarding sexual behavior to begin with?

The case is yet another example of Little Jack Horners claiming a personal exemption from principles and policies they insist must be applied to other people. The Tokyo court should have known better than to award the plaintiffs money merely because their feelings were hurt. But evidently the temptation for judges to shape society to their own preferences is just as difficult to resist in Northeast Asia as it is in Europe and North America.

Wired magazine short circuits on Japan article

A FASCINATING ASPECT of learning a foreign language is the encounter with proverbs and colorful expressions that open a window into a culture and offer insights into the character of the people. That these phrases are either untranslatable into one’s own language, or have an enigmatic strangeness, adds to the appeal.

This is particularly true of the Japanese language. The Japanese love proverbs, and estimates of the number of proverbs in the language run as high as 20,000 to 30,000. The ability to employ one appropriately in everyday speech and writing is a sign of the culture and erudition of the user. I have a proverb dictionary published in Japan that is more than 500 pages long, and each page contains an average of 10 proverbs with explanations of their origin and meaning.

One example of a proverb that wouldn’t make much sense in English was brought up in the Comments section here the other day. A few posts down is a story about a Hiroshima festival conducted in a Shinto shrine in which sardine heads are roasted to create an unpleasant odor and drive away evil spirits. Frequent posters Overthinker and Camphortree discussed a proverb related to this practice, which is “Even the head of a sardine can become holy”. Understanding that proverb would be impossible without being aware of the custom.

Here’s another interesting expression: Jibun no koto wo tana ni ageru. Literally translated, that means, “To put one’s ‘thing’ (oneself, one’s attributes, behavior, etc.) on a shelf.” But that doesn’t make much sense without context, does it? Here’s an illustration that might make it clearer.

Today’s issue of Wired magazine has an article in the Culture and Lifestyle section called Inside the Bizarre World of Japanese Pickup Schools.

It is a brief feature on Fujita Satoshi, who operates a school for teaching backward men how to be successful with women. Mr. Fujita has also written three self-help books. Attending one of his classes costs 30,000 yen, which the author, one Lisa Katayama, says is worth about $280.

Here’s how Ms. Katayama describes him:

Satoshi Fujita is not a good-looking man. He has oily skin, beady eyes, short legs and a boy-band wig to cover his balding head.

But since a picture is worth a thousand words, it would be easier to show a photo of him. Here’s what he looks like:

Mr. Fujita admits that he used to be an introverted geek until he bought a wig and learned some magic tricks. He also made a study of the science of seduction. Here’s what happened next:

Women like laughter, compliments and magic tricks. Using these concepts, he devised a proprietary “science” for picking up women that takes into consideration things like reading signals and timing. After 10 years and 10 new wigs, he’d become so successful with women, he says, that he decided to quit his job and make dating his profession. Among other tricks, Fujita’s method involves a deck of “psychoanalytic” cards that help him determine what kind of girl he has picked up. He’s also got a bag of tricks — literally — that includes flaming wallets, talking ferrets and animated algae balls. “This may seem ridiculous, but if you follow a specific equation, it really works,” he says.

The article also suggests that bizarre pickup schools are becoming a trend in Japan, because there are six schools for seduction in the Tokyo area alone.

How, you may be wondering, is this an illustration of the proverb of “putting your ‘thing’ on a shelf”? And if it is, how does it apply to the Wired article?

Stick with me a little longer. I’m coming to that.

Ms. Katayama and Wired magazine put Mr. Fujita on parade for their readers to symbolize this “bizarre world”. They describe this world by focusing on a geek with a wig and “beady eyes” who teaches men how to be successful with women—for a fee–by carrying flaming wallets and animated algae balls on the street.

We all understand the intent of this article. It is yet another installment in the never-ending stream of stories from the Western media that portray Japan as the Goofball Kingdom of East Asia. The 24/7 media machine needs a constant supply of infotainment for the breakfast table.

Now if Wired thinks this is bizarre, we should assume they believe guys like Mr. Fujita just don’t exist in the United States, where the magazine is published. Bizarre people live in smelly rabbit hutches in Tokyo, not New York or Los Angeles, where all the men are straight-up studly guys who know how to handle the ladies and make them love it.

Presumably, here’s what Ms. Katayama and Wired think is perfectly normal: in the U.S., there is now something called the “seduction community”. It has become a profitable business, with Internet forums, mailing lists, more than 100 clubs nationwide, and its own Wikipedia page. It has been the subject of a best-selling book called The Game by Neil Strauss, who calls himself a pickup artist (PUA) and cruises under the nickname “Style”.

When the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed his book, it said:

“…if women in the book are sometimes treated as a commodity, they come out looking better than the men, who can be downright loathsome — and show themselves eventually to be pretty sad, dysfunctional characters.”

There are quite a few so-called “seduction gurus” in the United States these days, many of whom choose to be known by colorful names. In addition to Style, there is Mystery, Juggler, Zan Perrion, Steve P/Piccus, Carlos Xuma, Hypnotica, Gunwitch, Tenmagnet, Savoy, and Gambler, among others.

Others use their real names. One of them is Ross Jeffries. He is a former insurance claims adjuster and failed comedian who discovered a practice initiated by Richard Bandler called Neuro Linguistic Programming ©.

Many books have been written about NLP, and there is no space here for a full description, but briefly, it is based on the theory that people are moved by the emotions expressed in the language patterns used by other people, and that the speaker can therefore covertly influence the behavior of the listener. Mr. Jeffries applies this theory to seduction by claiming it is possible to sexually arouse women with preconceived word patterns, sometimes with phonetic ambiguity.

For example, one might say to a woman, “I’d like to explore your mine.” The woman will hear this as “mind”, but it will subconsciously register as “mine”, as in “mine shaft”. Wink wink nudge nudge. One of his more well-known verbal techniques is the use of “below me” as a substitute for “blow me”. His term for hunting for women is “sarging”, which he named after his pet cat Sarge.

He also uses the technique of “anchoring”, in which the man begins by creating a pleasant emotional state in the woman through the use of language and suggestion. When he has successfully created that state, he touches her in an innocuous location, such as her wrist. The theory holds that when he touches her wrist in that same location again, he will recreate that state in her mind, which he can then utilize to influence her behavior; i.e., seduce her.

Mr. Jeffries holds seminars and has a home study course with 13 CDs and a 107 page book. He charges $1,500 for an hour of his personal time. He calls this Speed Seduction ® and claims that a man can use these techniques to get a woman in bed in about 20 minutes from the time he meets her.

What does he look like? Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, they say:

Another seduction guru with a colorful name, one R. Don Steele, claims that once upon a time Mr. Jeffries was a sweaty-palmed nervous virgin that came to him begging for help. He doesn’t seem to need help now. Here’s the Ross Jeffries home page, where you can sign up to master the art “as seen by millions on TV worldwide”.

If Mr. Jeffries’s techniques do not suit your fancy, perhaps you might prefer those of the man called Mystery. He is the main character of Mr. Strauss’s book. He teaches the Mystery Method of seduction, which he now refers to as the Venusian Arts. Mystery also charges thousands of dollars for seminars, and has introduced new techniques into “the game”. One of these is called “negging”, in which the man indirectly insults the woman and makes her want to please the PUA.

Here’s an example of negging: The man says to the woman, “You have beautiful nails. Are they real?”

Like both Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Fujita, Mystery was a backwards boy who was a flop with chicks. And like Mr. Fujita, he also became skillful at magic, though he probably doesn’t use flaming wallets. He also has lost some of his mystery, now that he has allowed his photograph to be used. It too is worth a thousand words:

He has beautiful nails. I wonder if they’re real.

One thing that is definitely real is the money he makes. He had a falling out with his business partner—nicknamed Savoy—and this led to a costly legal battle. This page is worth reading to discover the various financial and personal spats that can arise between pickup artists. It concludes this way:

After hanging out with Mystery, Lovedrop, and Matador this past weekend, it seemed none of them are too concerned with the legal stuff. Apparently they’re making good money from their workshops and the VH1 show, and there’s talk of a season 2 and possibly a spin off show, so money is the least of their worries. Lovedrop even told me that he doesn’t mind dropping loads of cash on lawyers and legal fees to fight this – possibly $15,000 – $20,000 a month, so who knows how long this feud will go on.

Speaking of Savoy, he’s still in “the game” himself, using the Mystery Method that Mystery developed. That method requires an investment of a few hours, which is longer than Ross Jeffries’s 20 minutes.

Savoy sells a book called Magic Bullets. He says he’s developed a new aspect to the Mystery Method called Transitioning, which he describes in his book:

MAGIC BULLETS contains the most complete explanation of Transitioning available ANYWHERE. In MAGIC BULLETS I explain – in detail – how to use a Transition to bridge the gap between Opening and Attraction. I also explain different types of transitions like Content Transitions, Observational Transitions and making a Transition without using a transition at all.

If he can make a transition without using a transition, he must be using magic bullets!

Here’s what else Savoy promises:

• An in-depth discussion of the opener “risk-reward continuum” that allows you to use the best opener for ANY situation you find yourself in. And the best way to transition from each type of opener to the next phase of the model.

• How to create your own material and bypass “lines” and generic routines. NEVER AGAIN get caught running something she’s heard before!

• How you can effectively approach a woman with NO OPENER at all.

• The situations where you should never “neg” a woman.

• A completely new phase that you NEED to install in your game RIGHT NOW. Adding this phase will make your sets go 100% smoother. THE VERY FIRST TIME YOU USE IT!

• An in-depth chapter on Seduction that will allow you to evolve your game beyond Last Minute Resistance and freeze-outs. Through an understanding of state-breaks, how they work – and how to avoid or minimize them – you’ll virtually eliminate Last Minute Resistance. AND WATCH YOUR CLOSE RATE GO THROUGH THE ROOF!

• A chapter on Day Game written by Sinn – THE UNDISPUTED MASTER OF DAY GAME.

• Sinn’s ten rules for MEETING AND DATING STRIPPERS.

I’m sure it would be instructive to see a picture of Savoy, but I couldn’t find one.

Instead of Savoy’s picture, however, here’s a page on the Love System’s 2008 Super Conference, which promises to be the commercial event of the year in the seduction biz. Aspiring Casanovas will have the chance to meet and study at the feet of Savoy, Sinn, Tenmagnet, and Carlos Xuma all at the same place. Fortunately, the price of attending one of the big presentations has been discounted from $1,700.

Read that page, and then ask yourself this question:

Where is the Bizarre World of Pickup Schools really located–Japan or the United States?

I’m sorry for going the long way around, but I thought that was the best way to describe the meaning of the Japanese expression, “to put one’s ‘thing’ on a shelf”.

Unfortunately, Wired didn’t put their thing on a shelf high enough out of sight.

The Marmot and the foreigner

WHAT IS IT ABOUT FOREIGNERS in Northeast Asia? Judging from this post at The Marmot’s Hole, called Foreigner Learns About Prostitution, Writes Letter to Editor, the outlanders in South Korea are every bit as clueless as their cousins in Japan.

Adding to the amusement is that the foreigner in question tries to act as if he is knowledgeable about Korean customs despite the fact that he is clearly oblivious to his surroundings. Factor in his deadly earnest attitude and a whiff of priggishness, and that wraps up the package.

It’s worth reading to see how deftly the Marmot handles it.

Matsuri da! (44): Bon odori and butt pinching

THIS WEEK IS O-BON SEASON IN JAPAN, and bon odori, or bon dancing, is a part of every midsummer festival. Women, often middle-aged and elderly, dance on platforms erected in the middle of the street or on open lots. People of all ages perform the dance during parades down Main Street, usually as part of a group from their place of employment—bank employees, school teachers, department store clerks…

It’s pleasant to watch, albeit rather tame. This style of dancing involves waving your arms in the air, swaying to and fro, and following a pattern of steps. No shaking of hips or smacking of lips—it’s all perfectly respectable.

But according to this article from the Daily Mainichi’s WaiWai, passing on information from the monthly magazine Cyzo, that wasn’t how it used to be in the old days. In a reversal of the usual trend, the now domesticated bon odori was once a much wilder affair. So wild, in fact, that it was banned as indecent.

Now doesn’t that pique your interest? It certainly piqued mine, so I had to find out more—in the spirit of strict scientific detachment for my matsuri studies, of course. I looked for some Japanese language sources on the Web and was surprised to discover there wasn’t a lot of information available on line about dirty O-Bon dancing. I did find out there was a common perception a century or so ago that bon odori was synonymous with an orgy. Apparently, the authorities banned it several times, starting in the Edo Period.

It seems that the lewd bon odori was not a problem in the cities, but rather in the rural areas. Living on the land is always a difficult proposition, and it’s even more difficult for young people looking for some excitement out of life. They had to work hard for little return and had few opportunities for socializing. In fact, early Japan had the custom of tsumadoi, in which women continued to live with their family after marriage. Their husbands paid them occasional conjugal visits. The women didn’t leave the household because they were needed for farm labor.

New Year’s and summer festivals were one of the few opportunities for young men and women living out in the country to meet each other, and the weather at New Year’s is not conducive to outdoor fun. Young people didn’t let their chance for summertime socializing go to waste, so bon odori in those days was just a quick prelude to finding a dark spot in the bushes.

That didn’t happen in the cities because people had more opportunities to mingle with the opposite sex. In fact, the custom of bon odori had died out entirely in the urban areas.

The WaiWai article notes that some customs from those days are still alive today in slightly altered form. One of these festivals is the Shineri Benten Tataki Jizo in Niigata Prefecture’s Uonuma. During this festival, held annually on June 30, a special area is set up in which any woman who enters is liable to be pinched, and any man who pinches a woman is likely to be whacked on the shoulders.

Golly, matsuri research sure does turn up a lot of fun facts!

Ah, so. I should have known. It turns out that the word shineri is derived from a combination of the words shiri, which are the buttocks, and tsuneru, which means to pinch. Tradition has it that the women who get pinched and the men who get whacked will have good fortune for the coming year. Sounds like a good excuse as any to me! By all accounts, things get a bit rambunctious during the night of the festival.

I’ll bet!

Of course I scouted around for some photos, and I found some, too. I’ve posted one here—still in keeping with a strict scientific detachment for matsuri research, of course. The children are sitting astride a shinten, which is the object at a Shinto shrine or festival in which the spirit of the divinity dwells. They dance around it during the festival.

I have to admit, if one is on a spiritual quest and looking for God, that’s as good a place to find him as any. And a lot better than most places!

Now doesn’t this religious ceremony seem to be a more pleasant way to spend a summer evening with your children than going to a church supper?

For a slide show of this year’s Shineri Benten, try this site in Japanese. If you can’t read it, click on the area with the gold lettering above where it says “new”.

In Japan, love will find a way

IF YOU’RE out on the town by yourself on a Friday night in the West and encounter the girl/guy of your dreams (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), the question at the end of the night often becomes, “Your place or mine”. If one or both of you are married or otherwise engaged, it then becomes a matter of finding the closest Holiday Inn or motel (or so people tell me).

Those solutions are not an option for most Japanese, however, as many Japanese young people, particularly women, still live at home. Japan also doesn’t have the interstate highway system of the United States, and people are more likely to take a train or airplane for longer trips, so the motel industry is nonexistent.

Love will find a way, however, and in Japan that way is usually in a “love hotel”. Since the urge is eternal, the Japanese have no problem with recognizing and calling a spade a spade, so there are plenty of businesspeople looking out for the main chance. That’s why love hotels are a major industry in Japan and are found everywhere—including sedate suburban neighborhoods. I live in a quiet, older part of town, and three blocks away from my house is an establishment with a small neon sign in front announcing itself as the Hanazono (Flower Garden). Discreet as it is—the entrance and exits are hidden—everyone knows exactly what it is, and no one seems to mind. The initials NIMBY (not in my back yard), often used in the U.S. when people do not want certain facilities or enterprises in their neighborhood, don’t seem to apply here. They’re in everyone’s backyard.

They’ve been there for a long time, too. Love hotels offer rates for stays of two hours or less, or for all night, and short-stay hotels for couples have existed in Japan since the early 1600s. The forerunner of the modern love hotel was called a tsurekomi ryokan. Ryokan are Japanese style inns and tsurekomi means bring your own, and they’re not talking about bottles. These facilities were mandated by the government for the use of Occupation servicemen after WWII, when prostitution was still legal in Japan. After prostitution was outlawed in 1957, the hotels spread out, grew, and transformed into a different kind of lodging entirely.

The original tsurekomi ryokan had little or nothing in the way of amenities, including toilets or air conditioners. They were for servicemen and hookers, after all. But to stay in business after the Occupation forces left, the operators developed the modern love hotel that became a financially lucrative industry. How lucrative? Try four trillion yen a year. Statistically, there are 951 couples in a love hotel somewhere in Japan this very minute. The hotels have an occupancy rate of 260%, compared to 70% for the normal hotel. Rates are so reasonable that a room can be rented for the night at a price lower than that of a standard hotel, and there is no falloff in amenities. In fact, some tourist guides suggest that travelers to Japan looking for inexpensive accommodation consider staying in love hotels.

It goes without saying that they are discreet. The entrances and exits are hidden. Customers park in a lot that is often underground, and there are devices resembling traffic barriers or other means to hide license plate numbers from the nosy or the cameras of private detectives. There is no front desk and no cheerful staff member to greet you (or recognize you in town during the day two weeks later). Modern hotels allow customers to select a room, find it, and pay for it through a completely automated system. In the old-fashioned places, couples inform the staff by in-house telephone when they’re going to leave, and the cash is anonymously collected through a slot in the door.

Due to the number of hotels and the intense competition, hotels are often decorated using specific themes to attract visitors. Some try to capture the romance of Europe, while others try to create the mood of Greece with its view of the Acropolis. Doing the research for this article, I saw a photograph of one hotel that offered rooms with the ambiance of a “European port”. Not the area close to the docks, I hope. Some feature amenities not usually seen in the home, such as a rotating bed or a ceiling mirror. Others duplicate the sets of movies popular in Japan, such as Roman Holiday or Gone With the Wind.

In fact, the services and benefits provided by Japanese love hotels are as diverse as the Japanese imagination. Some have karaoke rooms (why?), Jacuzzis, or swimming pools. If swapping is your adventure, some hotels have adjoining rooms so you can switch back and forth. If you like to watch, some hotels have in-house video channels, but of course you’ll be watched while you’re doing the watching. Some also offer party rooms for groups, and naturally, there are S&M facilities for folks with that preference.

Believe it or not, the primary customers for love hotels are women in their 20s, so the hotels are designed and decorated with female customers in mind. The highest outlay by owners for an individual room is the bath, which of course has a Japanese style tub. They’re stocked with brand name shampoos, hair conditioners, and other beauty products to attract repeat customers. The nearby photo on the left shows a sink that the hotel says upfront was designed to appeal to women, while the one on the right shows the expense hoteliers will go to for the bath.

And they offer more than décor. Hotels often provide free drinks in the refrigerator and dinner or breakfast on the house, while others have chefs on the staff to whip up something for those who have worked up an appetite, at no charge. Then there are the bonuses. One hotel offered a free trip to Tokyo Disneyland to any couple who stayed in all 24 rooms of their rooms within six months and a free trip to Hong Kong for those that did it twice.

The amenities offered by hotels even differ by region. In the Kansai area (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe), the love hotels tend to use free food to attract customers, while those in the Kanto area (Tokyo, Yokohama) emphasize rooms that create a specific mood or atmosphere.

And who could fail to enjoy the names of these establishments? Some of the names I found on the web include: Hotel Rose Lips, Châteaux Belle, Paradise, Casablanca, Hotel J-Mex, Hotel Liberty, Green Green, Hotel Palau, Executive Hotel Grand Garden, Hotel I-N-G, Hotel BaRong, ReStay, Hotel Laporti, Hotel Ash, Hotel Birth (maybe they ought to reconsider this), Grand Chariot, Hotel Vie-Bonheur Kobe, Hotel Wien Bel Magic (Wien is Vienna), Wimbledon (singles or doubles?), Hotel 24°C, Hotel Prelude (isn’t that part over?), and the Hotel Stellate. The latter, astonishingly enough, sells its own line of products, such as robes with the name of the hotel monogrammed on the front. Not something you’d want your wife to find in the suitcase after an overnight business trip.

If you’re thinking that the Japanese are a nation full of rabbits, however, consider these statistics. Japan usually ranks last in sexuality surveys for frequency of sex. They average 36 times a year, compared to 97 times annually worldwide. When asked what activities they prefer to sex, 20% of Japanese said sleeping and 13% said shopping. They do have a higher ranking for number of partners per person, however. Their average is 10.2, placing them seventh and above the world average of 7.7.

If you ever find yourself in Japan and want to find a love hotel on the net, there are plenty of nationwide directories, including one here and another here. If you can’t have a good time in some of these places, check into a monastery instead!