Hashimoto Toru (7): Exasperation

OSAKA Mayor Hashimoto Toru might be Japan’s Most Exasperating Person, if such a title existed. As often as he says or does something that makes the advocates of small and sensible government feel like firing confetti from cannons, he just as often says or does something that gets people thinking about dressing him in tar and feathers. Here are two examples of each.

Culture

One of the many candidates for Exhibit A in the trial against public sector profligacy is the redistribution of other people’s money to buy art. Some people seem to believe cultural activity would cease to exist, or not exist at all, unless The State writes the checks.

When serving as Osaka Prefecture governor, Mr. Hashimoto ended the annual JPY 450 million handout to the Osaka Century Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was established in 1989 and operated by a foundation with a 2005 budget of JPY 700 million. Solvency was a problem despite the largesse, and people began discussing the possibility of merging the four Osaka area orchestras to save money. The governor started paring in 2008 and eliminated the subsidy last year.

Despite the savings, the response from some quarters was that the philistine Hashimoto was hindering the promotion of culture.

Frédéric Bastiat had an answer for that — and many other things besides — in an 1850 pamphlet titled The Law. It has never been bettered:

“Every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”

Some people make the excuse that the civilized Europeans, those pillars of fiscal sanity, have state-supported culture, and that we too will become just as civilized if we allow government to pay for it all.

Roger Kimball, the editor of the New Criterion, a magazine of culture/arts/politics criticism, had an answer for that — and many other things besides:

“Have you taken a look a Europe and its state-supported culture recently? Really, this objection is almost too embarrassing to answer. What makes you think that state involvement of culture leads to anything other than the growth of the state and its insinuation into areas of life they have no business being in? Take your time.”

Mr. Hashimoto was less elegant in his rebuttal, but no less accurate. During the debate conducted over orchestra funding in 2009 at a business planning meeting for the prefecture, one conscientious objector said that the government should recognize its responsibility. Rebutting logic of that sort doesn’t require elegance, so Mr. Hashimoto said:

“If you want to keep the orchestra, your employees should join a fan club.”

The orchestra survived, though there were no reports on whether a fan club was formed. It’s now called the Japan Century City Orchestra. The Kinki Sangyo Credit Union in Osaka announced they’ll pick up JPY 200 million of their tab.

Now Mr. Hashimoto has to do it again as Mayor of Osaka. The Osaka Philharmonic receives a JPY 110 million subsidy from the city government, and the city’s project team looking into government expenditures is recommending a 25% cut. They’re also thinking of eliminating entirely the subsidy to The Osaka Municipal Symphonic Band, which operates an outdoor concert venue near Osaka Castle. The municipal band, formed in 1923, is the oldest orchestra in Japan and the only one affiliated with a local government.

The welfare queens started moaning en chorale. The choirmaster is composer/songwriter Miyagawa Akira, who organized a concert to support the band with 40 other musicians. Said Mr. Miyagawa:

“It would be reckless if the city decides to simply end the subsidy with no concern for its image.”

But even he understands that carte blanche no longer applies. He allowed that the municipal band needed to change “partially” to get public support.

As Mr. Hashimoto tweeted after the philharmonic found a sponsor, ”Culture will also have to do its share.”

They’ve already started. The municipal band holds four Friday evening concerts every July, which attract 20,000 people during the month. They’re now soliciting money in exchange for naming rights.

Japan’s Communist Party charges that Mr. Hashimoto is opposed to cultural funding because it doesn’t turn a profit. But we should consider the source, which never considers the possibility that anything should exist outside of the public sector. They also never consider the possibility that profitability is an excellent indicator of popular support.

At the end of April, I attended a concert presented by the symphony orchestra of the local university, which was augmented by area amateurs. The program included Beethoven’s 7th and a piece by Saint-Saëns. The hall was 75-80% full on a fine Sunday afternoon, and we were treated to an excellent performance. Culture worthy of the name is strong enough to survive on its own. Confiscating the assets of private citizens in support of a dubious proposition leads to “the growth of the state and its insinuation into areas of life they have no business being in”.

Human rights

Mayor Hashimoto is not calling into question the public funding of the Osaka Human Rights Museum, AKA Liberty Osaka, but rather the nature of its activities. That is unfortunate; the name alone suggests that the museum’s objective is to violate the human rights of the majority by promoting privileges for selected minorities.

While still governor, he told the foundation that some changes would have to be made. He has a voice in the institution’s management because both Osaka Prefecture and the city subsidize the foundation.

Said the mayor:

“When I was governor, I instructed the museum to change some of its exhibits because they were terrible. I spent quite a lot of time discussing the concept of the changes with the museum authorities. I wanted an educational institution that thought about what had to be done to enable children to think about their own future and to make their dreams and wishes come true.”

Some museum visitors were unhappy about the changes the museum made and complained about it. He returned with Osaka Gov. Matsuo Ichiro for another look, and they weren’t happy about the changes either. Mr. Hashimoto described it as “the usual parade of discrimination and human rights” themes.

As the mayor described the “dreams of the future” section, there was something hanging on the museum wall…Do you want to be a carpenter? Apply to the want ads from building contractors. Do you want to become a baseball player? Be selected in the draft. Do you want to become a teacher? Pass the certification test for teachers and get appointed by the Board of Education. He tweeted:

“What part of this is an educational facility that thinks about the future? This is grotesque.”

A cybertrip to the museum’s Japanese language website (no English) reveals the grotesqueries right away. The museum says its mission is to raise consciousness about those people suffering from discrimination, such as the burakumin, Koreans resident in Japan, Uchinaanchu, the Ainu, the disabled, women, lepers, people with HIV/AIDS, sexual minorities, the homeless, and “others”.

To break that down:

Burakumin: It has been widely reported that Mr. Hashimoto’s father and his family were burakumin, a social (not ethnic) minority that has been subject to discrimination. He and his mother deny it, his uncle affirms it, and almost no one in Japan cares. Attendant to legitimate anti-discrimination activities, burakumin rights advocates run hustles of the sort people in the States have long been familiar with. (Books have been written about it.) A publicly funded museum in Osaka promoting burakumin rights is roughly equivalent to insisting that the U.S. needs to maintain affirmative action programs with Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office.

Korean residents in Japan: There are about 610,000 Japan-born and –bred ethnic Koreans who voluntarily choose Korean citizenship, some of whom have never set foot on the Korean Peninsula. Some people think their choice of national loyalties should not prevent them from having voting rights in Japan, as championed in the fine print of the ruling Democrati Party’s manifesto. Those with South Korean citizenship can vote in South Korea. Those with North Korean citizenship are represented by Chongryun, whose chairman and five other officials are members of the Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyeongyang.

Chongryun also operates schools for ethnic Koreans, with pictures of Kim I, II, and (presumably) III on the walls, and implements a curriculum that promotes the juche philosophy. Some people think it is discriminatory that these schools do not receive the same Japanese government financial assistance as Japanese schools.

Uchinaanchu: That’s what some Okinawans call themselves in the Okinawan dialect/language. Everyone else in Japan calls them “Okinawans” when a distinction is necessary. The museum’s choice of that term suggests they might support a separatist movement. Most Okinawans don’t. In fact, the younger they are, the less likely they are to be separatists. The museum’s choice of the term also suggests an eagerness to be me-too multiculturalists. Can’t miss that progressive bus!

I watch Okinawan Japanese interacting with non-Okinawan Japanese all the time. I have never seen or heard non-Okinawan Japanese discriminating against Okinawan Japanese. Or even make jokes about them. Doesn’t happen.

The Ainu: Perhaps some of this ethnic minority are still discriminated against, if anyone could find any of them. There aren’t that many left, their numbers are dwindling, and the government is already paying people to be Ainu for a living.

Women: With his new Cabinet evenly split 50-50 between men and women, French President François Hollande has shown he thinks gender is a more important qualification for high-level personnel appointments than competence. Some Japanese think it is discrimination to not behave as M. Hollande. That opinion even extends to the personnel choices of  private sector companies, which are nobody’s business but the companies.

Then again, if the Cabinet ministers in France are anything like those in Japan, competence is not one of the criteria for their selection to begin with.

Sexual minorities: Some Japanese men have become fabulously well-to-do by queening it up on national television for decades. (I can think of six off the top of my head, and I almost never watch television.) This week, Tokyo Disney Resort — yes, Tokyo Disneyland — said two lesbians can have a wedding ceremony at a hotel on the site.

As the AFP news agency puts it:

“Homosexuality in Japan is widely accepted but not openly discussed.”

What’s to discuss? You either do it or you don’t. If you don’t believe the AFP, by the way, hit the link to the Beautiful Way of the Samurai on the right sidebar.

John McKeller, the leader of HOPE (Homosexuals Opposed to Pride Extremism, has an answer for that — and many other things besides:

“(E)ven as a young, radical college student, I had no time for the clubby, leftist lemmings who comprised the early gay activists. They were dull, they were depressing, they always looked and acted as if they were born to be offended and victimized, they could never discourse for more than 5 minutes without hitting some tiresome barrier of resentment or ideology…

…In 1967, Pierre Trudeau supposedly liberated us when he said “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation”. Subsequently, matters of privacy and discrimination were laudably and necessarily dealt with in the early 1970′s. But today, the bedrooms of the nation are in everybody’s faces. Today, it’s all about benefits, privileges, social engineering, nihilism and redefining normalcy. Today, it’s all about blurring every distinction between personal and political issues and vigorously stifling any attempts at discussion or debate.”

Ignore the false front of idealism and look at the reality: the objective of the museum and the similar activities of NGOs and GOs the world over is not “equality”, but power. Fertilize it with public money and it will reward the behavior of such grifters as Harvard professor and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. Or even this guy.

The inspiration is not positive, but punitive. Among the fellow travelers on the same road are those whose taste in intellectual fashion favors the jackboot. Here’s an impressive display of semi-literacy and word manipulation from a woman in Britain, who concludes that it’s all very sweet. Read it all the way through and see if you don’t feel like throwing a satsuma at her.

Some elements of the ruling DPJ are at the forefront of the Japanese vanguard of rights hucksterism. They slipped into the election manifesto of 2009 the establishment of a “human rights committee” as a wing of the Justice Ministry. Prime Minister Noda (further to the left than is generally recognized) thought it was so important, he wanted to submit a bill creating that committee to the Diet this year. He didn’t explain why it was important, but explanations are not his forte. Justice Minister Ogawa Toshio also thinks “it is essential to establish a human rights committee that can respond appropriately to human rights violations.”

It was stymied not by the opposition parties, but by opposition within the ruling party. Enough people in the DPJ thought the whole business was a violation of free speech and Article 21 of the Constitution. Finally the bureaucrats stepped in and said “it was too early” because there has been no debate among the people. If a debate eventually does occur, it would be helpful to translate Mark Steyn into Japanese:

“I regard (human rights commissions) as an abomination. All the key protections of common law, the presumption of innocence, truth as a defence, the right to due process, the right to confront your accuser in open court, all these things go by the board under a human rights commission system, which is essentially a hierarchy of fashionable victim groups…essentially if someone feels offended by you, you are guilty…because we have elevated the human right not to be offended into a bedrock human right. I think particularly in multicultural societies that governments are very comfortable with this because they regard themselves as the sole legitimate arbiter of acceptable public discourse between different social groups.”

Alas, Mr. Hashimoto drops the ball in the end. He wants to have museums of modern history that present both sides of historical arguments. Just call the whole thing off. Historical arguments are as hardy as cultural activities, and have no trouble surviving on their own.

Money

Amamiya Masayoshi, the Bank of Japan’s Executive Director of Monetary Affairs and Financial Markets, was recently appointed the head of the bank’s Osaka branch. The Osaka office serves as the primary cash backup for the Tokyo office. (It took three hours to transfer stewardship of the funds when Mr. Amamiya assumed his duties.). The appointment caught even some inside the BOJ by surprise. Most speculation has it that the bank wanted someone in Osaka capable of explaining the economic facts of life to Mr. Hashimoto.

One of the Osaka mayor’s primary advisors is former Finance Ministry official Takahashi Yoichi, so it does seem odd that he would need additional tutoring. Then again, Mr. Hashimoto has some odd ideas that he got from somewhere. For example, he wants to amend the Bank of Japan law to permit the government to establish price targets.

Godfrey Daniel!

Prices are established by all of us acting alone together in our best legal interests. It’s called the Invisible Hand. The Visible Ham-Hand of the public sector is incapable of establishing prices that are legitimate. If it were, the Soviet bloc would still exist.

But that’s not all. The mayor also thinks the BOJ is too independent and the government should also set monetary policy targets.

Mother of Pearl!

If that happens, we should get the government to provide everyone with free yoga lessons. All the better to kiss our backsides goodbye. Society’s weak will need a Head Start on the physical training.

If anything is sure to screw things even further up than the financial bureaucracy has already screwed things up, it would be to allow the human airbag ventilating system in Nagata-cho/Washington/Brussels/Anywhere Else to determine prices and monetary policy.

Spit on a stick!

The man whispering these sour nothings into the Osaka mayor’s ear is likely the aforementioned Takahashi Yoichi, who also advises Your Party. One thing all these people have in common is an admirable understanding of the problems and an execrable understanding of the solutions. It is all the more puzzling because Mr. Takahashi was closely involved with the Japan Post privatization of Koizumi Jun’ichiro.

The first thing Mr. Amamiya of the BOJ should whisper in Mr. Hashimoto’s ear when they meet is that the government is no more capable of handling the market for money than it is for cars, cabbages, or medical care.

Most people thought Frederich Hayek was whacked when he called for the denationalization of money. But read what he wrote:

“Since the function of government in issuing money is no longer one of merely certifying the weight and fineness of a certain piece of metal, but involves a deliberate determination of the quantity of money to be issued, governments have become wholly inadequate for the task and, it can be said without qualifications, have incessantly and everywhere abused their trust to defraud the people.”

And:

“The government monopoly of the issue of money was bad enough so long as metallic money predominated. But it became an unrelieved calamity since paper money (or other token money), which can provide the best and the worst money, came under political control. A money deliberately controlled in supply by an agency whose self-interest forced it to satisfy the wishes of the users might be the best. A money regulated to satisfy the demands of group interests is bound to be the worst possible.”

Now those are ideas whose time has come. While few people expect a legitimate free market in money to emerge any time soon (underground markets are a different story), it should be now clear to most people that a government which regulates money or monetary policy will always do so to satisfy the demands of group interests. (That includes businesses too big to fail.) It should be especially clear to the people who operate human rights museums. They’re working the same street corner, after all.

Darkness

Mr. Hashimoto can be fairly charged with populism for his anti-nuclear power stance justified solely by emotional harangues, without offering an alternative of any sort. But that’s not the worst part. Here’s the mayor as quoted by the 14 May Yomiuri Shimbun on the question of restarting the Oi nuclear power plant in the Kansai area:

“There will never be a situation such as this again. The next generation must fully experience what it will be like to live under government decree to restrict energy usage.”

Jesus Menstruating Goldfishes! What tar pit of the soul did that bubble up from?

Emotional distortions projected in public have nothing to do with logic, but since this is a policy question, let’s apply it as logic — ”The next generation must fully experience what it will be like to live under government decree to restrict bandage and antiseptic usage and apply buffalo dung poultices instead.”

Even in the event that he one day becomes prime minister, his own supporters wouldn’t let him get away with that. In fact, his closest political ally, Osaka Gov. Matsui Ichiro, already has objected:

“Last year’s rolling blackouts had a major impact on the economy. There’s no reason to so facilely accept restricted energy usage.”

And if you use too much energy? Mr. Hashimoto didn’t come up with a solution for that, but the Energy Strategy Conference of the city and prefecture of Osaka did. According to the 15 May Osaka edition of the Mainichi Shimbun, they suggest creating an Energy Conservation Notification Center to which citizens could report offices and shops that they think are too bright.

Sorry. All out of colorful oaths.

The standards these neighborhood informants would use to determine whether the illumination of the establishments was too bright were not specified. Human nature being what it is, however, one of the standards will surely become, “That guy/company/shop clerk is a creep.”

They also suggest shutting down government offices during the hotter hours of the day in summer, which is not a bad idea in theory. I’m self-employed and work at home, and I often take a siesta or read at those times. But I can work at night, on weekends, and whenever I feel like it, deadlines permitting. What would employees do with two or three hours of free time at a job site far from their home? (Stop that snickering!) Returning home is not possible for most people. Will they be made to stay late at night to catch up?

Rather than the idea of government restriction of energy usage, they should be focusing on deregulation that permits increased energy supply and distribution. A system will go into effect this July in which the existing utilities will be forced to pay roughly twice the cost of nuclear-generated power to enterprises generating energy from alternative sources. Of course the people really paying for it will be the consumers.

See what happens when the government sets price targets?

But since the government. or a government monopoly, is as incapable of dealing with the power market as it is with anything else, the plan should be to borrow the idea of that crazy guy Hayek and denationalize/deregulate supply as well as production (and prices), create smart grids, and throw the market open to everyone.

That brings us to the most puzzling and exasperating aspect of all. Those people who, like Hashimoto Toru, talk about privatizing the public sector and operating the government on businesslike principles, are usually the same people who immediately understand the problems with culture subsidies and human rights scams. They are seldom the people who think government control of prices and money is a good idea. They are almost never the people who talk about the need to experience life with government restrictions on power. (That’s what these people do.)

I would have thought it impossible for these ideas to coexist. Hashimoto The Exasperating has achieved the impossible.

Afterwords:

These are serious questions about the role of government in society, but the story in the English-language media about Hashimoto Toru this week was his prohibition of tattoos for Osaka city employees. Such is the media’s four-panel comic strip approach to the world. While they noted that most public establishments, including public baths, and several large private companies have the same prohibitions due to the association with yakuza, they missed one of the key parts of the story. More than half of the 110 or so city employees with tattoos are employed at the Environmental Division, which is a euphemism for garbage collectors. There are unlikely to be many gangsters on the garbage trucks. In Osaka, those trucks are much more likely to be manned by burakumin.

*****

In a demonstration of non-government funded cultural diversity, Kevin Kmetz plays a Bach prelude on the shamisen in Tokyo.

 

Collision course

THE political and social forces in Japan are now arrayed and moving on a course that makes a noisy electoral collision inevitable. How the forces sort out post-collision isn’t possible to determine, but one thing is certain — the collision will be just one of the major engagements in an ongoing war.

Nagoya Mayor Kawamura Takashi in Tokyo

That much is clear now that we’ve seen the evisceration of the work of Koizumi Jun’ichiro after he steered Japan to the course of reform. The reactionary Politburocrats included the old guard of his own party, the bureaucratic establishment at Kasumigaseki seeking to reclaim sovereignty over policy, and the chancers of the Democratic Party snouting around for any excuse to rise to the level of Politburocrat Nouveau. They accomplished their work in less time than the five years Mr. Koizumi spent in office.

Last week, the Men of System demonstrated again how they operate. The ruling Democratic Party lacks an upper house majority, so it was unable to prevent the opposition from censuring two Cabinet ministers: Maeda Takeshi of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport (for political misbehavior) and Tanaka Naoki of Defense (for being a doofus on the job).

Upper house censures are non-binding, so the two men can technically stay, but the opposition parties are refusing to participate in negotiations until they’re removed. Said LDP head Tanigaki Sadakazu:

“As long as those two stay in office, there will be no progress on the bill to combine social security and the tax system.”

Added New Komeito chief Yamaguchi Natsuo:

“We cannot respond to any parliamentary proceedings in which they have jurisdiction.”

Everyone understands that it’s a chabangeki farce staged to gain political advantage. Mr. Tanigaki and most of his party already back a consumption tax increase, and the ruling Democratic Party intends to use only 20% of the revenue from the increase for social security. A larger amount will be allocated for public works projects. Just like the old LDP.

The DPJ understands the farce better than anyone because upper house censure was a weapon they created to gain political leverage after they and their allies took control of that chamber in 2007. They censured then-Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo in 2008 for reasons that were trivial then and which no one can remember now.

But when the plastic sword was used to smack them around, Prime Minister Noda and DPJ Secretary-General Koshi’ishi Azuma decided they didn’t like the idea after all. Both men are protecting the censured miscreants, and Mr. Noda won’t remove them from office. Said Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu last Friday:

“The prime minister’s policy is clear. He wants them to fulfill the responsibilities of their job.”

Both men of course realize that’s beyond the capabilities of Mr. Tanaka, but they have appearances to maintain and the Ozawa wing of the party to mollify.

Their display of plastic backbone has caused some consternation in Japan’s real ruling class, however. That spurred one of their agents in the DPJ to give the prime minister his marching orders.

That would be Fujii Hirohisa, the former head the Finance Ministry’s Budget Bureau — Dirigiste Central — also the former secretary-general in Ozawa Ichiro’s old Liberal Party, the first finance minister in the DPJ government (for all of three months), the head of the Tax Commission in the Cabinet Office, one of the DPJ’s Supreme Advisors, and (if the rumors are to be believed) a daytime drinker.

Mr. Fujii and his comrades worry this will delay their objective of raising the consumption tax to European social democrat levels. Therefore, Mr. Fujii called on the prime minister to “remove the thorns”, because:

“The two of them have definitely done something wrong.”

But he quickly added the real reason:

“Whenever the prime minister makes a decision on what to do, the basis for everything is to pass the consumption tax increase by any means necessary.”

Now what is Mr. Noda to decide to do? He wants to project himself as a man of vision with the unwavering resolve to gouge the public and maintain the system do what is best for Japan. He also reportedly hates being called a Finance Ministry puppet.

On the other hand, Mr. Fujii has been molding Mr. Noda since the DPJ formed its first government, when the latter was the deputy finance minister in both the Hatoyama and Kan administrations. The prime minister is also aware that the Finance Ministry is capable of using the various means it has developed for staging de facto internal coups d’etat.

In other words, look for Messrs. Maeda and Tanaka to start cleaning out their desk drawers, soon rather than late.

Weapons

Kasumigaseki in general and the Finance Ministry in particular have developed a substantial armory over the years to maintain their citadel. For example, all the national dailies have now published several editorials supporting a consumption tax increase. Most of them used nearly identical phrases, probably because they all received the nearly identical Finance Ministry briefing. The most enthusiastic member of the print media has been the Asahi Shimbun. They ran an editorial on 31 March titled “A consumption tax increase is necessary,” which included this content:

“With the rapid aging of society, we must provide even a small amount of stability to the social security system and rebuild the finances that are the worst among the developed countries. The first step requires that we increase the consumption tax. That is what we think.”

And the next day:

“It is important to come to a prompt decision without evading a tax increase.”

Another column appeared on 6 April with the title: “Politics and the consumption tax increase – stop the excuses”. It contained this passage:

“While you’re saying “first”—such as first reduce government waste, or first let’s end deflation, or first dissolve the lower house for an election — Japan will become insolvent.”

The Asahi insists the voters can have their say after the tax increase has been safely passed. That’s the same strategy foreseen months ago by ex-ministry official and current reformer Takahashi Yoichi.

As a newspaper of the left, the Asahi might be expected to favor higher taxes and stronger central government, but perhaps they have a more compelling reason. That would be explained by another news report that the Asahi tried to hide in an overlooked part of the paper, but which the rival Yomiuri Shimbun gave more prominent coverage on 30 March.

It seems that a tax audit revealed the Asahi failed to report JPY 251 million in corporate income over a five-year period that ended 31 March 2011. They were required to pay substantial penalties.

Golly, what a coincidence!

On the other hand, the bureaucrats are not picking on just the Asahi. All the newspapers and their reporters are being audited, which is a process that can take from several weeks to several months. The reporters treat their sources, anonymous or otherwise, to food and drink, and we all know that expense accounts are there to be padded. Tax officials are even said to be visiting the eating and drinking places listed on the returns for confirmation. Both the Asahi and the Yomiuri already had to refile their taxes in 2009.

The Asahi insists their editorials are unrelated to the audits, and they might have a point. There are about 20 people on the paper’s editorial committee, and all of them support a tax increase. Most of them once covered the Finance Ministry as members of the ministry’s kisha club, a system that combines short leashes with exclusive access. And many of them are also graduates of the University of Tokyo, which is the institution of choice for the Finance Ministry’s recruitment.

It’s natural to assume that the members of the old boys’ club would think alike, but a tax audit certainly helps to focus their thinking.

Not a rhetorical question

Fortunately, irresistible forces are headed straight for these immovable objects. Nagoya Mayor Kawamura Takashi, one of the squad leaders in those forces, launched his political juku in Tokyo on Saturday. He told his 200 students:

“I want to change the mechanism of this country, in which taxes are not reduced by even one yen.”

Mr. Kawamura is screening and preparing candidates for the next lower house election by using the same juku mechanism employed by Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru and Aichi Gov. Omura Hideaki. There will likely be an alliance of some sort between those local parties and Your Party at the national level. Their message is the largely the same.

Delivering that message on Saturday as the first lecturer was former METI official turned bureaucratic reformer Koga Shigeaki. Mr. Koga rebuffed requests to run for governor of two prefectures to serve as Mr. Hashimoto’s senior advisor, and he also has connections with Your Party. He told the juku students something that everyone in Japan apart from the Politburocratchiks understand: The current system of governance is dead, and the creation of a new system starts with civil service reform.

Part of the problem

The experience of Koga Shigeaki illustrates one of the many reasons that Japan’s Democratic Party has become part of the problem instead of the solution. He was selected as an aide to then-Reform Minister Sengoku Yoshito in the Hatoyama Cabinet, but that appointment lasted only a few days. Kasumigaseki wouldn’t stand for it, and Mr. Sengoku is not one to stand on principle when his place in the power structure is at stake. Indeed, the former lawyer confronted Mr. Koga with a semi-gangsterish threat (likely picked up from his former clients) during the latter’s Diet testimony on reform at the request of Your Party.

Try this for a thought experiment: Imagine that the cities of Chicago and Los Angeles, and their respective states of Illinois and California, are governed by local parties calling for radical governmental reform. One of the primary planks of that reform is putting a leash on the public sector. Three of those four chief executives were once members of the two major parties. The deputy mayor of New York is a colleague, and the mayor is a sympathizer.

Need I mention that this would be topics #1, #2, and #3 in the American mass media 24/7, and that the Journolist-coordinated efforts to slime them all would be rank even by their standards?

(Of course, this is only a thought experiment. California is actually heading 180° in the other direction.)

Japan has the oldest and most dynamic of the modern anti-elitist reform movements of the world’s major democracies. It’s the one with the greatest chance of success, and it’s also possible to make the case that it is the most positive in outlook. (The French just gave 18% of the vote to Marine LePen, though in their defense the Eurabia concept was idiotic even by Eurocrat standards.)

Predictions are usually a waste of time, but here’s one you can hold me to: The English-language media in general, and the FCCJ lackwits in particular, won’t bother to notice what’s happening in Japan until they find themselves ankle-deep in the muck after the bloodletting of the next general election, and some well-coiffed and -dyed heads will be adorning the tops of pointed stakes. The media will then be “surprised”.

And then they’ll launch a slimeball fusillade. Take it to the bank.

Kasumigaura

Yes, this is a national phenomenon. It’s happening again, this time in the city of Kasumigaura, a largely agricultural town of 43,600 in Ibaraki Prefecture.

After the city was created in 2005 through the merger of two smaller municipalities, the residents expected to benefit from the economies of scale. They really should have known better. Instead of one unified municipal office, the new city officials created two, one in each of the constituent entities. One of them required the construction of a new building. They also separately maintained their former methods of collusion for deal-cutting: one controlled by the civil service, the other organized by private sector industry.

It got worse after the new city’s second mayor took office in 2007, when he was unopposed in the election. Opposition quickly materialized after the city council voted themselves a 40% pay raise. A citizens’ group was organized, and they ran Miyajima Mitsuaki for mayor in the next election. He upset the incumbent by a 276 vote margin.

The problem, however, was that there was little turnover in city council members. Four are reformers, 11 are in the flybait class, and one is a fence-sitter. In one year and eight months, City Council has rejected 32 of the mayor’s initiatives, including the rollback of the salary increase, other salary cuts, and a bill to provide free medical care for children through the third year of junior high school. (That last is an idea common to many of the reformers in local government. There are several possible explanations for this mixture of welfare statism into what is primarily a small government philosophy, but it does suggest they are not ideologues.)

The mayor therefore announced last week that he and the citizens’ group will start a petition drive to recall City Council. They’ll have a month to come up with 15,000 signatures. It won’t be easy, but Mr. Kawamura overcame the same hurdle in Nagoya, and his hurdle was much higher because of that city’s larger population. I wouldn’t bet against them.

*****
It bears repeating that the next lower house election will not be the last battle of the war, regardless of the result. The reformers at the regional level have found their voice and their allies are not going to go away. Meanwhile, the Politburocrats are stocking the moat with as many alligators as they can breed.

The current system of governance requires that the bureaucracy oversee the process as the Cabinet formulates a bill and the ruling party examines it before it’s submitted to the Diet. Defying the wishes of Kasumigaseki requires a thorough knowledge of policy and some serious spine, neither of which is a hallmark of the political class anywhere. The civil servants devote a lot of time to anticipating objections to their favored policies and formulating arguments against those objections to feed to the politicians.

One advantage of the reformers is that people such Your Party’s Watanabe Yoshimi and Eda Kenji, Hashimoto advisors Koga, Sakaiya Taiichi, and Hara Eiji, as well as advisor to both Takahashi Yoichi, have extensive knowledge of policy and Politburocrat tactics, and took a clear public stand long ago.

Another man who combines both is Takenaka Heizo, a Cabinet member throughout Koizumi Jun’ichiro’s entire term of office, and the man responsible for producing the Japan Post privatization package. Mr. Takenaka has said that victory will require 10 years of continuous guerilla warfare.

In short: Japan is in the midst of the most civil Civil War a modern democracy has ever seen.

Drunken sailor watch

The Prime Minister’s Office unveiled its new website earlier this month, which they created as a portal site to provide comprehensive information on policy. That’s a fine idea, but the Jiji news agency reported the redesign of the old site required an expenditure of JPY 45.5 million (almost $US 560,000 on the nose).

What? You didn’t hear the detonation on the Internet?

A lot of people thought it could have been done for 10% of that amount, and some said they would have been happy to take the job at that price. They also said they wouldn’t have created a site with text that was unreadable for those using Apple’s Safari browser and without the kanji errors on the page for children.

Prodigy

Piano prodigy Okuda Gen appeared on television again Sunday night. Now ten years old, Gen has been playing piano since the age of four and giving concerts since the age of seven. He’s composed 50 pieces of his own. He likes all sorts of styles and plays classical music well, but is a particular fan of jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. On Sunday, he performed as an equal with an adult drummer and bassist.

The boy is remarkably self-assured for his age, even without his musical ability. It seems unlikely at this point that he’ll acquire the problems that usually attend children such as these when they enter The Jungle of Puberty.

But the most astonishing part of Gen’s story is that he started playing because he thought he would like it. Neither parent is involved with music, and they say he’s never taken a music lesson.

Here he is at age eight. Pull your socks up.

Matsuri da! (126): It’s ganko!

THE festival tradition in Japan stretches back for centuries, and some festivals are more than a thousand years old. But in Japan any old excuse is fine if it’s in the cause of a good time, so new festivals are always being created. Unlike the traditional events, they have no Shinto underpinning.

Representative of the new wave in free public entertainment is the Hamamatsu Yosakoi Ganko Matsuri, held last month in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka. This year’s festival was just the twelfth. Hamamatsu is known as the home of motorcycles and musical instruments—Yamaha and Kawai are headquartered here—and it was also the site of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s worst military defeat before he became the first Tokugawa shogun in 1603.

Ganko is a word from the local dialect that translates into standard Japanese as hijo ni (extremely) or sugoi (a word used to excess in everyday speech in the same way that “awesome” is used to excess in the United States, with much the same meaning). So, you could say that the name Ganko Matsuri means Super Festival, and that’s exactly what the organizers suggest in Japanese.

There’s only one rule, and it’s simple—anyone may participate as long as they have a musical instrument, no matter how rudimentary, and they dance. Until a few years ago, the rule was that participants had to use naruko, or wooden clappers. That was later amended to include any musical instruments, traditional or modern, including the clappers. Other than that, people are free to do what they like, including design their own costumes and create their own dance, whether it be old-fashioned bon odori or hip-hop. And they do.

Participation is by team, and last month about 4,300 people from throughout the country showed up to perform in 119 groups ranging from 15 to 100 people. Some in the group may specialize in singing or chanting, waving banners, or playing the musical instruments or clappers. In addition to parading down the city’s streets — which the gives the residents the opportunity to get in on the action — the teams get individual time on stage to be judged for awards. They have all of five minutes and 30 seconds to get on, line up, perform, and leave.

The Organizing Committee has a high-minded list of festival objectives, which include boosting the city and its industries, promoting interaction with people from other parts of the country, and encouraging citizen participation in local activities, but it’s really just a cover for “Have a good time.” Many of the performers are college students enjoying themselves in extracurricular activities. Here’s a taste of what it looked like this year. If what you’re seeing or hearing at any given moment doesn’t appeal to you, wait about 30 seconds. You’ll be seeing and hearing something different.

Sunrise in the land of the rising sun

NOTHING is stronger than an idea whose time has come. Sakaiya Taiichi, the senior advisor to Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru, spoke to the Your Party convention in February. The speaker and his audience share a common purpose, and both know that the time for their ideas has come. This is what he said in English.

*****
Your Party is different from the other parties. It was not born in the Diet, but was born from a citizens’ movement — the first one in the postwar era. There might have been some in the Meiji period, but it’s a rare thing. Most parties are created when several MPs get together in the Diet. Most of those parties fall apart.

Your Party began when Watanabe Yoshimi advanced his own policies and started a citizens’ movement by himself. Mr. Eda (Kenji, party secretary-general) was in synch with that. It is a party of democracy that you should be proud of.

It happened again at the end of last year. Diet members scrambled together to form groups and receive the public subsidies given to political parties. They have no political views, ideology, ideas, or concept of what the state should be. Both the Liberal Democrats and Democrats are parties for creating political crises, trifling with the people and causing them misfortune. They leave policy to the bureaucrats, and never think about Japan the nation.

Postwar Japan had many splendid conceptions. One concept was in foreign affairs, in which it would stand with the Western powers, and become a small country in military affairs and an economic giant. The option to become a military power did not exist during the American occupation, so that is what happened. The second concept was economic: The (political) system of (19)55 (when the LDP was formed), bureaucracy-directed policy, the cooperation of the business world, and large scale mass production.

They thought that even if no one had any political views, all they had to do was defend these concepts. That continued until the 80s. After that, however, the times changed: The Cold War ended, and large scale mass production reached its limits. Despite that, however, no one still had any political views or a concept of the state. All they did was create political crises.

Then Watanabe Yoshimi became a minister in the Abe Cabinet, and continued to serve in the Fukuda Cabinet. He lasted longer than usual (laughter). He began to talk about something different — civil service reform. That earned him the enmity of the bureaucracy, but the amendment to the National Civil Service Law passed. I created the draft of that amendment in the advisory council.

But even though that amendment was passed, nothing changed. The bureaucrats are unyielding. The president of the National Personnel Authority did not appear in the Diet. In the end, the (Civil Service System Reform) headquarters revolted, and Deputy Chairman Koga was fired. Even though the law was passed, nothing happens. The reality is horrendous.

Watanabe Yoshimi is a rare politician. He thinks about the concept of the state. Those politicians have been extinct for a long time. Even if there are some drawbacks, the policies are truly great. This year — This is It! This is the year of decision. The one I uncovered was Mr. Hashimoto (Toru). The circle of reform is growing. This year is the year of decision.

Why will this be the decisive year? It will be an extremely difficult year for both the Japanese economy and the global economy. Thus, there are four parts to the agenda. One is a state/province system with regional authority. There are three forms of government administration: the nation, the prefectures, and the basic self-governing bodies. The Osaka Metro District concept would convert that into two levels. We must not mistake the state/province system as a model for merging prefectures. We must change the nation.

(After creating that system) the regions must not say anything about the affairs the national government will handle — specifically, foreign affairs, defense, and the currency. Meanwhile, the national government will not say anything about the affairs the regional governments will handle. That is how it should be.

Second is civil servant reform. Civil service is not a job, it is a form of status. Until the 80s, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare was a small government office. Both the health ministry and the labor ministry accepted only seven people each with a humanities background for the elite job track. At the same time, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry were large ministries and accepted 26 people each. But now the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare is a large ministry with oversight for 25% of the national income. The agriculture ministry has jurisdiction of no more than 1.8% of GDP.

Anyone can be a bureau chief in the health ministry. The agriculture ministry has no work. If you ask, what about transferring the career agriculture ministry bureaucrats to the health ministry, that would be absurd. It would be like entrusting the old Kishu domain (present-day Wakayama and part of Mie) to the people of the Satsuma domain (present-day Kagoshima). It isn’t a job, it’s a form of status.

Organizations and personnel must be based on the principle of functionalism, and selection must be based on ability and incentive. The organization of any body that defends its status will inevitably crumble.

Third is a growth agenda. Japan today is facing its third defeat. Defeat is not losing a war. Even if it loses a war, a nation will not collapse. True defeat is the collapse of an ethical view and the system.

The first defeat was the Bakumatsu period (at the end of the Edo period). The values of the Edo government were stability and equality. They purposely did not build a bridge over the River Oi (in Shizuoka). They sought stability and equality by preventing people from crossing the flow, and making the movement of people difficult. That’s when progress became important with the arrival of the Black Ships (Commodore Perry).

It goes without saying that the second defeat was in the war. Now Japan is in third period of defeat. The sense of ethics is in turmoil.

Now it is seen as a good thing to receive social welfare benefits. In Osaka, even if the primary school teachers scold their students by saying, “If you don’t study, you’ll have a hard time later,” the students retort, “I’ll get welfare payments, so I’ll be all right.” They say 10% of the junior high school students can’t do multiplication.

Mr. Hashimoto’s proposal is to conduct a relative evaluation of the teachers. Five percent of the teachers will be given the lowest grade of a D. Teachers who get Ds two years running will have to be re-trained. If they do not improve after re-training, they will be asked to leave. How many teachers receive the lowest grade under the absolute evaluation system now? It’s only 0.15%. That’s one-and-a-half people in 1,000. There’s maybe one in a school.

In Osaka, where the teacher evaluations are strict, the teachers’ union says the teachers there have three times the neuroses of teachers anywhere else. It’s a scam. The same statistics cite the cause of the neuroses. The primary cause is trouble with other teachers in the teachers’ lounge.

The fourth is creating an open Japan. That’s true also of the TPP. What did we do during the Meiji Restoration? The policy known as “The return of the lands and the people from the feudal lords to the Emperor.” In short, civil servant reform, giving up the status of samurai. That was the second year of Meiji (1870). Next, they cheerfully opened the country. (N.B.: The term Mr. Sakaiya invented for this idea, which he frequently uses in speeches, is suki suki kaikoku.) The Tokugawas grudgingly opened the country. In the brocade pictures (nishiki-e) of the times, foreigners are depicted as devils or tengu (monster-spirits). That changed.

The next thing they did in the Meiji Restoration was economic reform. In the new currency law of the fourth year of Meiji, the monetary units were unified as yen and sen. They started using paper money, and it became possible to create credit. In the Bakumatsu period, according to the calculations of Oguri Kozukenosuke, annual tribute accounted for only 40% of expenditures. Now, of the (government’s) JPY 104 trillion in expenditures, including quarterly adjustments, tax revenues account for JPY 42 trillion. Exactly 40%.

Annual tribute was only 40% of expenditures. Oguri Kozukenosuke worried that annual tribute would have to be tripled. That vanished in an instant with the start of the Meiji period and the new paper money under the new currency law. A deflationary economy has to be converted to an inflationary economy. In a deflationary economy, the past governs the future. There has to be nominal growth of about 3%.

The next thing they did in the Meiji period was eliminate the domains and create the prefectures. In other words, the state system. After that followed education reform. In Japan at that time, 40% of the boys and 25% of the girls learned reading, writing, and arithmetic at the terakoya, the Buddhist temple schools. It was the leading country in the world for education. Even in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution, only one in four boys went to school. There was only one educational institution in all of Europe that admitted girls.

They eliminated all the terakoya and created schools. That’s because the objectives of education changed, from stability to progress. Educating people suitable for large-scale mass production was required. That idea still remains today. That’s why they taught that individuality and originality was a bad thing. They called all individuality a “defect” and originality was chastised as garyu (not following conventional methods).

Of course basic education is important. Ten percent of first-year junior high school students can’t multiply. That is the responsibility of the teachers, and they should be fired. Attending Board of Education meetings is a part-time job for teachers once a month. A view of education as a whole is not possible. The people who think that’s fine are the education ministry bureaucrats supported by the status system.

Teaching is also a form of status. There are many English teachers incapable of English. On the other hand, they have teachers who’ve come back from living in the United States teaching social studies. That’s all they have a license for. Next to the teachers fluent in English are the English teachers who can’t speak English at all, and the teachers back from the United States teach about the Japanese Diet, of which they know nothing.

We must change this absurdity with systemic reform. The drawback of reformers is their tendency to splinter without limit. That’s causing a lot of trouble right now in Osaka (laughter). The conservatives are surprisingly united. This reform is good, that reform is bad, only about 20% can agree on each issue. As a result, the unfortunate situation will continue.

That’s why, even if there are problems to a certain extent, we must agree that it (reform) is better than what we have now. Persons of good character are not capable of reform. Have you ever heard anyone say that Oda Nobunaga was a person of good character? (laughter) The requirement for reform depends entirely on the ability to achieve breakthroughs. Watanabe Yoshimi has that ability.

This is it. This is the year of decision. Let’s put aside our small differences and unite behind the big things we agree on. This year, please work so that we can increase our number to 300 (in the lower house of the Diet).

(end translation)

*****
Meanwhile, here is one of the most astonishing newspaper articles I’ve ever read anywhere, and that it appeared in the Asahi Shimbun is more astonishing still. The Asahi is the newspaper of the left in Japan, and the DPJ is the major party to the left of center (with quite a few members quite left of center). Here’s the headline. Note the past tense:

DPJ’S GOVERNING FIASCO: Party never challenged Finance Ministry

It’s a condensed version of everything I’ve been reporting on for the last three years. They’re writing off the DPJ.

It’s difficult to find a passage to quote because every sentence is a dagger thrust. Let’s stick to this:

Successive DPJ administrations have failed to make meaningful spending cuts. Despite rounds of budget screening, the three budgets compiled by the party effectively ballooned to record levels on an initial basis.

You know what they say: Read the whole thing. Also note the background of former Finance Minister Fujii Hirohisa and his opinion about the respective role of bureaucrats and politicians.

That’s the same Fujii Hirohisa who was the secretary-general of Ozawa Ichiro’s Liberal Party before it merged with the DPJ, and who doesn’t know what happened to the party’s public subsidies that it was supposed to return to the Treasury when it folded. (Some in the print media suspect it wound up in Ozawa Ichiro’s safe before being spent to buy real estate for his political funds committee.) That’s the same Fujii Hirohisa who appeared on a Sunday political talk show one day before Hatoyama Yukio made his first speech to the Diet as prime minister in 2009 and admitted the party had no intention of keeping all the promises in the manifesto. They would just keep enough of them to keep the people so happy they would return them to office four years later. They didn’t, they didn’t, and they won’t.

Remember all those so-called journalists who wrote about the “fiscal hawks” of the DPJ?

ROTFLMAO.

*****
The lead story in the 12 April edition of the weekly Shukan Bunshun is titled, Farewell, DPJ. They report the results of their polling that asks voters the question, “If a lower house election were held today…” (It’s becoming a cottage industry.) While they have the LDP doing better than in other surveys, they think the DPJ would lose close to two-thirds of its seats. They also think all three DPJ prime ministers — Hatoyama, Kan, and Noda — stand a good chance of losing their seats. (Hatoyama’s been on thin ice in polling for a while.)

*****
Get ready, people — the train is coming.
Oh, yes it is.

Hashimoto Toru (5): Onishi Hiroshi speaks!

ONISHI Hiroshi is the head of a marketing and management consulting company who also blogs about politics and business. His thoughts in a recent post about One Osaka and contemporary Japanese political conditions were quite sensible. Here it is in English.

*****
The One Osaka political juku received applications from 3,326 people, and after examining the applicants’ essays in the first screening, they selected more than 2,204 candidates from 46 prefectures for the start of lectures. There will be five sessions until June, when they plan to reduce that number to 400-1,000. Immediately, one ran across criticisms and concerns expressed in the mass media and blogs.

It’s my sense that most of them are wide of the mark. Because expectations are high, the criticisms and concerns were hurled in the way that fans of the Hanshin Tigers (baseball team) hurl harsh language at the players. The people who assembled at the One Osaka juku, went the criticisms, were after all just a group of amateurs. These people can’t be expected to shoulder the burden of national government.

But if we are to learn from the business world, innovation comes from the frontier and not the center. It teaches the lesson that many of the people who break through the limits of the industry experts and the mature business mechanisms are those who come from the outlying areas of the industry.

Speaking of political experts, that describes the Liberal Democratic Party, with their many years of experience of heading governments. But LDP politics have come to a dead end. There is no question that the current problems of a declining population, fiscal deficits, pensions, and nuclear energy are the bill left by the LDP government. Just because people are experts does not mean they are capable of good politics. Experts have their limits too.

There is also the criticism that the people who have come to the juku are the shades of the Koizumi Children and the Ozawa Children (younger Diet members elected on the coattails/influence of those two politicians in 2005/2009). It is nothing more than a rerun of people climbing on board a temporary trend, they say.

But the Koizumi Children and the Ozawa Children were a temporary grouping of people resulting from elections based on whether one supported or opposed the Japan Post privatization, or whether the LDP/New Komeito coalition should remain in government or be replaced by the Democratic Party.

The decisive difference is whether or not One Osaka can generate an impact on national government now, and whether they can become a force that spurs the reorganization of the political parties. They are not at the stage where they can suddenly take control of government. Even with the lecture courses and the further screening of the 2,000 students in June, they can not be treated in the same way. At this point, criticisms and concerns of that sort are not fair.

Certainly, there are different ways to go about it. Possible methods include selecting people after repeated workshops, or discovering the talented among them during dialogues. Perhaps they could somehow use social media. But that’s something for political parties other than One Osaka to think about. It’s not possible to arbitrarily determine that something absolutely won’t work at a stage when no results are visible.

Another frequent criticism is that they are being led astray by a superficial fantasy of reform. This feeling of doubting reform is understandable with the sense of disappointment that the Koizumi reforms didn’t continue, or that the DPJ was unable to proceed with the reforms the people expected.

It’s my feeling that the subject of the criticism is incorrect. One thing that prevents innovation is found in the saying, “The road to failure is paved with good intentions.” It seems to be something close to that. The classic comeback to crush new ideas in the business world is, “We did that before. We’d just be doing the same thing again.” That seems to be a superficial rejoinder along the lines of not wanting to be fooled. But that’s a poor position which results in protecting the politics of today and eliciting a condition from which there is no exit.

It doesn’t need to be said that Japan is in need of many reforms. It is self-evident that we must break free from the developing country model of bureaucratic leadership and the systemic fatigue and detrimental effects of a national structure with centralized authority. We must create the foundation in which more diverse industries can be created. We must change the national mechanisms for thinking about such issues as the government’s efficiency in responding to the problems of an aging society, or rebuilding the regional communities.

Both the DPJ and the LDP proclaimed they would move from the center to the regions, and raised the issue of dealing with the bureaucracy at Kasumigaseki. But there are limits to how both parties put their own interests first, and their concrete efforts lagged or faltered. Rather than regional sovereignty, the state/province system as proposed by Kasumigaseki was a shabby thing that, from the center’s perspective, would place daimyo throughout the country to maintain authority and complete control over the regions.

In reality, the concrete measures and efforts toward regional sovereignty have originated in the regions, as symbolized by One Osaka. At present, the existing parties are looking for a way to join in that effort.

The reform of the phrase “from the center to the regions” is not at all the superficial issue of changing procedures or the legal system. Rather, it means shifting the center of gravity for authority. In other words, there will be tremendous discord created over the question of authority, both on the surface and behind the scenes, as authority is seized from the existing political parties and the bureaucracy and shifted to the regions. If this were a period in which democracy had not been established, that sort of problem would result in hostilities or warfare.

In light of history, it is unnatural to think problems of that magnitude could be resolved by the Koizumi reforms or the change of government to the DPJ. To brush that aside by saying reform is nothing more than a fantasy is the same as defending the status quo. It is only that the elements who will address the issues of reform have not yet appeared, or have not yet matured.

True reform will be cultivated with the active and continuous participation of the people. Achieving that will require the creation of momentum and growth into a larger movement. Rather than abruptly take control of the government, the thinking and political methodology of One Osaka is likely that of increasing their influence on national politics and growing into a force while joining hands with the existing political parties.

Also, one becomes aware that the criticism and concern arises because of the ill will toward the “one phrase politics” in which One Osaka, and Mayor Hashimoto in particular, creates an enemy and uses that as an opening for repeated attacks. It is perhaps a good idea for commentators to talk of many subjects, or for politicians having it out in Diet skirmishes to talk of many subjects, but (one phrase politics) is a method that should be recognized for delivering a message to the people of the city and the country, and creating a sense of sympathy.

How you approach someone depends on whom you’re approaching. If you’re approaching mass media commentators, it’s a good idea to have the long messages those people prefer. But approaching the people of the city or the country requires something easily understood. Had One Osaka stopped there, however, I think they would not have been able to achieve their current high level of support, nor would they have been able to influence the existing political parties. Indeed, American presidential elections use the political methods of former Prime Minister Koizumi and Mayor Hashimoto; perhaps they employ them even more. Further, the criticism of One Osaka as unrealistic, or full of desktop theories, or that they champion the difficult-to-understand Osaka Metro District concept, cannot be ignored.

Just what is it that the people with the criticism and concerns are afraid of? Why are they so concerned over the One Osaka whirlwind that is now spreading. Wouldn’t that rather serve to heighten interest?

My sense of the current competition for authority between the DPJ and the LDP is that the differences within each party are greater than the sense of values and policy differences between each party. Further, the points at dispute have increasingly narrowed, and their debate centers on competing proclamations of their ability. Situations are often seen in the business world in which companies expand their battle for market share over minor differences.

In most of those cases, they have gradually become detached from the main issue of offering the higher value the market demands. New market entrants arise by creating an opening between the two. This sort of competition for share that creates no innovation has little meaning now in this great age of transformation from industrialization to digitization, and to globalization.

It is the same with politics. They have become detached from the needs of the people, and their struggle for authority is based on their self-interest. Politics have come to a dead end. Further, even if the LDP were to win a large victory in the next election, it will have been nothing more than an own goal brought about by their enemy’s blunders. They have not gained the support of the people, so their second collapse is clearly visible.

The reason for the very parties’ existence will be threatened unless they begin to address the people more directly, and make greater efforts to gain the sympathy and support of the people. These circumstances do not call for criticizing other parties, and enhancing one’s presence by repeatedly criticizing other parties is too short-sighted.

Nor are these the circumstances for existing political parties to play the game of political warfare within the party or the Diet, detached from the people. Speaking realistically, the existing political parties still have the forces to assume control of the government in national politics. I have a strong sense that if they have the spare time to criticize One Osaka, then we should more strongly present our requests to the existing parties.

(end translation)
*****
Some minor points:

1. Mr. Onishi specifically mentioned the problem of the “declining population” as one item on the bill left by the LDP. No political measures anywhere exist to halt or reverse a declining population. In fact, they’re usually counterproductive.

European style child allowances were one of the major policy initiatives of the Democratic Party government when it took power in 2009. Prime Minister Hatoyama justified it by citing the example of France, where subsidies are attributed to boosting the birth rate from 1.8 to about 1.9 (the last I looked). The French, however, offer many more benefits than the DPJ’s now rescinded straight cash payments, have higher income tax rates than Japan, and a VAT north of 19%.

The French also do not break down census information by religious affiliation, but some estimate that Muslims account for 40% of the population aged 20 or younger. Prof. Julien Damon of Sciences Po in Paris reports that approximately 20% of French births are accounted for by migrant families or those with one foreign-born parent. Foreign-born Muslims are likely to have more children than the ethnic French. Government benefits are irrelevant (unless it is a factor for Muslims with large families overseas moving to France to receive them.)

Pavel Kohout writes, in an article now behind a paywall:

“In 1927, Italian duce Benito Mussolini launched a program called Battle for Births. Mussolini believed that Italy had fewer people than it needed in order to play the part of a major world power. By the beginning of the 1920s, Italy had 37 million citizens. Il Duce set the number of 60 million by the year 1950 as national target. To achieve this target, Mussolini introduced generous benefits, especially for families with multiple children. Fathers of six or more paid no taxes at all. Of course, tax penalties for the unmarried were introduced, too. Abortions were outlawed, and contraception was hard to obtain. Later, career obstacles for unmarried men were officially introduced, mainly in government administration.

“The fascist government in Italy lasted long enough in peacetime that we may know its results. Exactly as economic theory would predict, the birthrate fell from 1927 to 1934. So did the number of marriages. Not surprisingly, the average age of marrying couples increased.”

And because this was a DPJ initiative, they couldn’t help tripping over their own diapers. In the first two months of the program, they paid about JPY one billion in public funds to foreign residents for 7,746 children living outside Japan. (It is an interesting bit of trivia that when New Komeito first proposed such payments in the Tokyo Metro District, the harshest opponents were the DPJ.)

All of this money was spent to boost a birth rate that fell below the 2.1 replacement level in 1957.

Of course the real problem lies elsewhere. Said Lord Sachs, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth:

“Parenthood involves massive sacrifice of money, attention, time and emotional energy…where today in European culture with its consumerism and instant gratification – because you’re worth it – where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not yet born?”

Then there’s the attitude of Barack Obama, who used his daughters as an example of his reason for supporting abortion:

“If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”

The more likely explanation is the extension of the concept of survival of the fittest. Natural selection is weeding out the offspring of those people incapable of dealing with the modern world, in which today’s predators are psychological rather than saber-toothed tigers. How else to explain the phenomenon of the anti-lifers who think children are a “luxury good”, or who want to levy a carbon tax on people who have children? It’s natural contraception without the pill.

But I digress.

2. The Japanese deficit is not attributable to all of the LDP, as Mr. Onishi suggests. It was slightly over JPY 20 trillion when Mr. Koizumi took office. It hovered around that level for two or three years while his government dealt with the post-bubble problem of banks saddled with non-performing debt. It started to drop three years into his term, and fell to JPY seven trillion three years after that in the year of Abe-Fukuda. The deficit began to climb again under the anti-reformers Fukuda and Aso, especially after the global economic crisis of 2008, when Mr. Aso and the mudboaters saw an excuse to dish out the pork labeled as economic stimulus. Since 2009, the DPJ governments have set three new records with a debt explosion that is positively Obamanian. The Koizumi policies slashed it to less than one-third in six years. The rejection of those policies has resulted in annual deficit about twice what it was during his first year in the Kantei, or more than JPY 40 trillion.

UPDATE: The budget for FY 2012 was passed a few hours after I wrote the foregoing. The lower house approved it, and the upper house (where the ruling DPJ does not have a majority) rejected it, so it was enacted anyway in accordance with the Constitution. It came in at just a skoche more than JPY 90 trillion, which is the first DPJ budget to be lower than that of the previous year. It is also the lowest budget they have ever submitted, IIRC. However, that is only for the general account. The special accounts for the Tohoku recovery and pensions, which are also the responsibility of the national government, bring the total above JPY 96 trillion, the highest ever. This fact has been noted in all the news reports, so the Noda Cabinet will not get credit for “budget reduction”.

3. Mr. Onishi seems to offer a slight internal contradiction. He says that in another age, the required solutions for today’s problems would have resulted in warfare. If that’s the case, it’s difficult to see how joining hands with the people who created the problems will solve them.

4. He also thinks the Osaka Metro District concept is difficult to understand, but that seems to be a minority view. Most thought the arguments during last November’s election, pro and con, were easy to understand.

*****
I haven’t read the article yet, but the latest issue of the weekly Shukan Gendai (14 April, out yesterday) reports the results of their voter preference survey in the Kinki region. They say Hashimoto Toru’s One Osaka would sweep all the single-seat districts in a lower house election. It would be a historical rout for both the DPJ and the LDP. They also say both DPJ bigwig Maehara Seiji and LDP President Tanigaki Sadakazu would lose their elections (both are from Kyoto). That would not necessarily throw the bums out, however; with the odious proportional representation system, their parties would probably put them at the top of their respective PR lists.

Meanwhile, Yayama Taro has an article in the April issue of Voice about the phenomenon. The headline reads: The Hashimoto Whirlwind Will Not End as a “Diverson” (asobi, literally, play or pastime).

Here’s the first paragraph:

“One Osaka, led by Mayor Hashimoto Toru, has engulfed the political world in a whirlwind. Looking at the Tokyo editions of the major newspapers, it seems they treat the Hashimoto whirlwind as a local Osaka phenomenon. Pure and simple, this must be viewed as a major development that will lead to the reorganization of the central government. Having sensed that, I subscribed to the Osaka edition of the Sankei Shimbun.”

There’s a whole lotta shaking goin’ on.

He won’t have to read the Osaka editions if any bad news emerges. The Asahi Shimbun will be sure to cover that.

In any event, Mr. Hashimoto is also getting plenty of television coverage.

*****
The next posts in the Hashimoto series will examine his largest controversies/battles as governor and mayor in Osaka.

*****
What we need is some local funky diversity, and that’s what Cicala Mvta (pronounced “muta” in Japanese) offers. Any ethnic/folk/pop style of music that calls for a clarinet, leader Okuma Wataru plays.

21st century Class A war criminals

It’s been one year since the Tohoku earthquake. What we need now is not words, but actions. Not repeated words, but repeated actions — actions in which everyone shares a bit of the burden. There is nothing else.
- Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru

If Australia is to get the government it needs (and deserves) it must first experience the full horror of the government it doesn’t deserve.
- James Delingpole, who could just as well have been speaking of Japan

LAST Sunday was the first anniversary of the Tohoku triple disaster — the fourth-largest recorded earthquake in history, a monster tsunami, and the nuclear accident at Fukushima. The Nishinippon Shimbun presented the numbers in a small box on the front page of its Monday edition:

Dead: 15,854
Missing: 3,155
In shelters or temporarily in other areas: 343,935

Also in the Monday newspapers were the results of a recent poll:

* How would you evaluate the government’s response to date for recovery efforts in the stricken area?
Good: 25%
Bad: 67%
No answer: 8%

* How would you evaluate the government’s response to date for the nuclear accident at Fukushima?
Good: 12%
Bad: 80%
No answer: 8%

There are no excuses when four out of five people think you stink. It’s time to reach for the soap.

Fortunately, the public is doing it for them. Among the noise and distortion and useless pallid confetti of media discourse, a low but distinct signal is emerging. Long before 11 March, people understood the crimes of commission and omission of the so-called Iron Triangle: the political establishment in Nagata-cho, the governmental establishment at Kasumigaseki, and the business establishment everywhere else. The voters have persistently expressed the wish to destroy that triangle. But the national disaster seems to have focused their attention and made vivid the futility of relying on the long-running disaster that is the triple establishment. Another poll released this week revealed that pre-existing political trends are accelerating. The question asked was about the contours of the government they’d like to see. The answers:

A government centered on the Democratic Party (the current ruling party): 7%
A government centered on the Liberal-Democratic Party (the largest opposition party, and the ruling party for more than half a century): 10%
A DPJ – LDP coalition government: 26%
A government with a new framework after a political reorganization: 50%
No answer: 7%

Note that the current DPJ government could manage only a rating equal to that of the stragglers in any poll who can’t be bothered to form an opinion. It was lower than the No Answer response to the previous two questions. The LDP is not viewed as an acceptable option.

The people have thus disqualified the major political brands from serious consideration. While their enthusiasm for alternatives was evident before, it’s so strong now that even the Three Disasters in Tokyo have noticed. They see that the tsunami of popular will is surging in their direction. No one knows when it will break, but when it does, there is no levee big enough to stop it.

Kusaka Kimindo, born in 1930, a former director of the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, and a commentator on business and governmental affairs, recently released a book called The Collapse of the Japanese Establishment. He welcomes that prospect. The blurb on the front cover reads:

The government-patron academics, the Western-worshipping intellectuals, and Big Mass Media have lost their authority.
A new wind has begun to blow.

The next few posts, and others from time to time in the future, will focus on aspects of the speed and direction of that wind. Perhaps it might blow as strong as a third kamikaze, the divine wind, combining the salvation of the first with the internal origins of the second.

First, however, we must look at what is collapsing, and why.

The Kan Cabinet: Class A War Criminals?

That’s the question asked in the lead article of the 18 March weekly Sunday Mainichi, issued to coincide with the anniversary of the disaster. The tone of Japanese weekly magazines is often wild and woolly, but this time they’re quoting someone else: political commentator Kinoshita Atsushi, a former lower house member from the Democratic Party — the same party as Kan Naoto.

It’s the job of a leader to create a more comfortable working environment, but Mr. Kan did the opposite. You could say he was a Class A war criminal.

Mizote Kensei is the secretary-general for the LDP bloc in the upper house, and a former Minister for Disaster Management. He expressed the same sentiments in a different way:

If this were a backward country, they’d be taken to court, and might even be executed.

The Sunday Mainichi thought that was extreme, but they did spend an entire page discussing the possibility of court action against several former Cabinet members, including whether it would be a criminal or civil proceeding, the precedents for such action, and what might happen. (They conclude it would be possible in theory, but difficult to pursue in practice.)

Lower house LDP member Kajiyama Hiroshi doesn’t have Mr. Kan to kick around any more, but he called for the immediate resignation of Madarame Haruki, the chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission:

The LDP certainly has responsibility for promoting nuclear power. But beyond that, Tokyo Electric and the government, particularly Prime Minister Kan, bear a heavy responsibility. After the Fukushima accident, Mr. Kan spoke only to Madarame Haruki, chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, about technical matters. That’s because no one else capable of expressing a different opinion was there.

That only Mr. Kan would listen to Mr. Madarame’s personal views on technical matters was decisive. Also, there are no records of their discussions. There is no choice but to assume that the information we’ve received has been doctored, and there are even doubts he didn’t want to hear the views of other technicians….The other members of the commission should have met together to create a consensus, and that should have been the advice given to Mr. Kan.

In addition to allowing other people to use the term Cabinet Class A war criminals, the magazine referred to Kan Naoto as a “self-righteous hothead” and said that Mr. Madarame was “unconnected to the real world”.

Then again, it’s not as if Mr. Kan listened to Mr. Madarame even when he was listening to Mr. Madarame. During the prime minister’s universally lambasted helicopter trip to Fukushima on the morning of the 12 March 2011 to view the facility from the air, the NSC chair tried to communicate several of his concerns en route. Mr. Kan issued an order: “Just answer my questions.” (It sounds even worse in Japanese.)

One of his questions was whether there would be a hydrogen explosion. Mr. Madarame thought not. There was an explosion, however, about eight hours later. When the prime minister saw it on television, he exploded himself:

Isn’t that white smoke rising? It’s exploding, isn’t it? Didn’t you say it wouldn’t explode?

See what they mean about “self-righteous hothead”?

The technicians thought a meltdown was possible at Fukushima the night of the accident, and detected evidence that it had started early the next morning. They informed the government, but Kan Naoto lied about it, not only the next day, but for several months thereafter — including on the floor of the Diet.

He also says he failed to receive information from SPEEDI, the system that generates projections on the dispersion of radioactive material. There are even claims that he didn’t know the system existed. Had the information from SPEEDI been employed, it could have limited the region’s exposure to radiation.

Itabashi Isao, a senior analyst for the Council for Public Study, explains that Ibaraki Prefecture publishes a book for high school students to explain nuclear energy, and that the book contains a description of the SPEEDI system.

They say the data reached the crisis management center and stopped there without going to Mr. Kan or the others. When politicians say they didn’t know something that’s being taught to high school students, it should not be the end of the discussion.

To continue the discussion, in October 2010, five months before the earthquake, a disaster prevention drill and simulation were conducted based on the premise of failure in the cooling function of Chubu Electric’s Hamaoka nuclear plant. The drill used data generated by SPEEDI. The government formed a group to oversee and monitor the drill and simulation. The head of the group was Kan Naoto, the man who supposedly didn’t know about SPEEDI.

But of course he did. Hosono Goshi was then an aide to Mr. Kan. He was later appointed as the minister in charge of dealing with the nuclear disaster, and added the Environmental Ministry portfolio with the inauguration of the Noda Cabinet. Last May, two months after the accident, Mr. Hosono said that SPEEDI information was not made public because of worries the people would panic. (There are also suspicions in some quarters that he held on it to it to enhance his career prospects.)

The Sunday Mainichi quoted a journalist:

They hid information because they thought if they told the truth, the ignorant people would panic. It is an indication of their viewpoint based on the premise of stupid people, stupid thinking (gumin guso).

We already know that’s the way they think — it was clear in the fall of 2010 during the incident in the Senkakus with the Chinese “fishing boat” captain. The government wouldn’t release their video of the incident because they thought it would inflame both the Chinese government and the Japanese people, but someone in the Japanese Coast Guard solved that problem by uploading it to YouTube. The government also claimed that the Naha prosecutors were in charge of the disposition of the case. More than 80% of the public thought they were lying.

Now the phenomenon of the circular firing squad is emerging as the Fukushima investigation continues. Mr. Madarame has been testifying to the Diet committee looking into the nuclear accident, and said the following about then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio:

From the perspective of those of us who work with nuclear power, saying (as Mr. Edano did) ‘there will be no immediate effect’, sounds as if he is saying the effect would be late-developing cancer. We would not say anything like that. Therefore, I did not make any suggestion of that sort to the chief cabinet secretary.

Not everyone in the Cabinet was complicit in the war crimes. One of those was Katayama Yoshihiro, then the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications. A former governor of Tottori Prefecture, he has an idea about the way government executives are supposed to conduct themselves. He’s on the record about Mr. Kan:

Who was the leader of the operations? It was impossible to understand the intent of too many of the various demands and requests (from the government command center). They were fragmentary and childish. There was no leadership at all.

Mr. Katayama also cited the breakdown in communications between the underground command center for the crisis in the basement of the Kantei, and Mr. Kan’s fifth floor office. He said that the prime minister never took the elevator downstairs, but communicated with the center only by cell phone. Mr. Kan, meanwhile, complained that 90% of the raw data came through Tokyo Electric, and that “the gears of communication did not move”, even when he put Mr. Hosono and then-METI Minister Kaieda Banri on the job. Shifting the blame to someone else is a Kan hallmark.

It will be difficult to find out exactly what happened in the Kantei because no record was kept of governmental discussions immediately after the disaster. It is widely assumed that Kan Naoto didn’t want people to know.

There are no records of the first 18 of the 23 meetings of the main group tasked with dealing with the Fukushima problem. An official with the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency took records of the 19th meeting on his own initiative, but there is no organizational record.

One of the unindicted co-conspirators is then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio, who as the government spokesman said a meltdown had not occurred, and repeatedly insisted there would be no harmful effects from the nuclear accident. Mr. Edano is now the Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry, the body overseeing nuclear power operations in Japan. He has reportedly aligned himself with the METI bureaucrats promoting the continued use of nuclear power. He’s interested in becoming prime minister, and thinks this will help him win the support of Big Business. (A former attorney who defended radical labor unionistas, he could use the credibility.)

Mr. Edano is also backing the METI position in the ministry’s dispute with Tokyo Electric Power. Remember how the Democratic Party was going to take political control of the bureaucracy?

Showdown at the hypotenuse

METI and the past two DPJ governments want to temporarily nationalize TEPCO. Their plan is to inject JPY one trillion of public funds into the company to help offset what could be tens of trillions of yen in eventual liabilities. They would receive a two-thirds ownership stake in return, replace all the top executives, and sell off the generating division. (That last one’s a good idea, and should be applied to all the power companies as part of the implementation of a national smart grid, but that’s yet another one beyond the capabilities of this government.)

Tokyo Electric objects. They think the government is incapable of operating a utility — can’t argue with that — and charge the government has no clear plan for divesting itself of ownership in the future.

So in classic Old Japan fashion, Tokyo Electric Chairman Katsumata Tsunehisa is getting chummy with the Finance Ministry to head off nationalization. The Finance Ministry is sympathetic to the utility, if only because they don’t want to put the government on the hook for paying off the liabilities. Katsu Eijiro of the ministry, serving as an aide to Prime Minister Noda (and dubbed his puppeteer by the press), told his subordinates they should not permit government control of the utility in negotiations, and to draw the line at 49% ownership, no matter how much they have to compromise before reaching that point. With that capital stake, the government could only reject major proposals, and the Tokyo Electric leadership would stay.

Prime Minister Noda, however, has left the responsibility for negotiations with Mr. Edano, as he is said to be too involved with a consumption tax increase to handle anything else. Mr. Noda wants to unify social welfare programs using the consumption tax as funding. The people backing this idea are calling it a “reform”, a term the Western media echoes. Yet the reform so far consists of allocating just one-fifth of the assumed revenues from the tax increase to social welfare programs (JPY 2.7 trillion) while earmarking JPY four trillion to public works projects. Remember how the Democratic Party was going to shift the emphasis from concrete to people? Nor has the Noda Cabinet come up with a specific proposal for the future form of the social welfare system. They just want the taxes first.

What they don’t want is to remind everyone that the last time the consumption tax was raised, during the Hashimoto administration, it had a negative impact on the economy that further decreased tax revenue.

Edano Yukio, however, says there will be no government support without a two-thirds stake. For negotiations, he has enlisted his political patron, Sengoku Yoshito, who became a Class A war criminal as chief cabinet secretary in the first Kan Cabinet during the Senkakus incident.

The METI bureaucrats are said to like Mr. Sengoku, including those with greater political ambitions, as well as banking industry veterans now in subordinate Cabinet positions. They think he’s a genius at lobbying and working behind the scenes. (Yes, they said “lobbying”; in Japan, the politicians in government are the lobbyists.) Mr. Sengoku is thought to be interested in shifting the power industry’s votes and money from the Liberal Democratic Party to the DPJ.

Another aspect of the stalemate is another Old Japan struggle for the authority over the nuclear power industry itself, with METI, the Ministry of Education (which includes science affairs), Defense, the National Police Agency, and the Cabinet Office duking it out.

While the servants of the people have been attending to what they perceive as national affairs, others have offered many good ideas for recovery programs. These included making the Tohoku region a special economic development zone as a trial for a move to a state/province system, giving tax breaks to donations (there are donation boxes nowadays in most public places and commercial establishments), and issuing long-term bonds bought by the Bank of Japan.

Neither the Kan nor the Noda governments could manage any of that.

Shiva’s second coming

Talk of dinosaurs brings up the subject of Ozawa Ichiro, the former president and secretary-general of several political parties, and now suspended as a member of the ruling DPJ, though he was their secretary-general until May 2010 and president until a year before that.

He’s back in the news because the government he wants to topple this time is the one led by Mr. Noda — ostensibly for failing to uphold the party’s 2009 election manifesto, but really for not paying attention to him.

One of the weekly magazines conducted an interview with him on 14 December 2011 and published it in their 31 January edition.

Ultimately, I look at Japan with doubt, wondering whether it is a democratic state…In Japan, the power of the citizenry is not linked to changing politics.

No one has to doubt who’s ignoring the democratically expressed desire for change. The Japanese say hansei, or reflecting on one’s past conduct, is a national trait, but that’s one mirror Mr. Ozawa passes by without looking in.

The interview contained the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here’s the good (or at least the accurate) part:

If Japan had the ability to negotiate with the US as equals, there would be no worry about TPP. But the present government isn’t capable of doing anything like that. The people are concerned that in the end, it will turn out the way America wants it.

It isn’t just TPP. It’s everything, including the security issue, starting with the Futenma base. It’s the same with economic issues. What has to happen is that the Japanese become independent. But the government has to be able to stand up for the Japanese national interest….I agree in principle with free trade, and we should negotiate based on that. If the government had any ability to negotiate, there’d be nothing to worry about.

Now for the bad:

To prepare for the market opening, the DPJ put in the manifesto a domestic policy of income supplements for agricultural households. If we (upheld) that, agriculture would survive.

The legal vote-buying schemes of power politicians might buy a few votes, but that wouldn’t ensure the survival of agriculture. The romantic vision of the family farm is no longer enough to put food on the nation’s table, especially considering that most farmers in Japan are not exclusively engaged in farming. Policies that promote agribusiness are the means for survival, but few politicians want to campaign on that.

Now for the ugly:

People who criticize my assertions don’t understand anything at all.

He also sat for an interview with the Asahi Shimbun earlier this month, which they thoughtfully translated into English:

Question: It has been two and a half years since the change of government, but the political sector does not appear to be functioning. Why?

Ozawa: That means that democracy has not matured to a point of taking hold in Japan. It is often said that politicians are only as good as the people who elect them.

Remember what the journalist said about stupid people and stupid ideas?

Ozawa: The change in government with the Lower House election of August 2009 was a major decision by the Japanese public, which dislikes change. I believe they held a dream.

The Japanese public likes change a lot in politics. They keep voting for it. They don’t get to realize the dream they hold because Mr. Ozawa and his party keep stepping on it.

Ozawa: However, the DPJ did not have the qualifications necessary to respond to those expectations. It was unable to fulfill its role because the responsibility may have been just too large.

Either that or their capacity to fulfill their role was too small.

Noda Yoshihiko: a chip off the old blocks

Noda Yoshihiko isn’t as appalling as the vaporous Hatoyama Yukio or the repellent Kan Naoto, but the performance of those two has jaundiced the media’s view of anyone who would lead the DPJ government. Here’s the 16 March edition of the Shukan Post:

It is usual for prime ministers to make frantic efforts to get the people on their side when managing the affairs of state becomes difficult, but this man, who has little experience or few accomplishments at the upper levels of government, does not understand the meaning of authority. He increasingly curries favor with the bureaucrats, the Americans, and his powerless supporters, while showing his fat ass (肥えた尻) to the people.

What has been appalling are his Cabinet appointments, despite his trite claim that he was putting the right people in the right places. A career bureaucrat was quoted on his opinion of Finance Minister Azumi Jun, a former NHK broadcaster:

He’s pretty good. Like Kan, he doesn’t pretend that he knows anything. He admits that he doesn’t understand fiscal policy. He stands up for (Finance Ministry policy positions) in the Cabinet. He’s also cute, and has a cute personality.

Yes, he said kawaii.

With public sentiment running against his plan to increase taxes, Mr. Noda is trying to trim expenditures to convince the public that he actually is the fiscal hawk in the portrait the spin doctor present.

He’s announced a plan to reduce public sector hiring 40% from 2009 levels in 2013, to about 5,100 people. The figures are likely to be similar in 2014. Hiring was already down in 2011 and 2012, however.

Another plan to cut civil servant salaries by 7.8% passed the Diet rather quickly. Japan’s industrial media played up the legislation, but one of the jobs of kisha club reporters is to circulate the PR handouts for the Finance Ministry.

The Shukan Post points out that’s officially only JPY 300 billion a year for two years, and probably closer to 270 billion. The politicos said the savings would be spent on Tohoku recovery, but the bill contains no specific mention of that, nor has a framework been created for that expenditure. It hasn’t even been allocated to the special recovery account.

Meanwhile, Mr. Noda not only rescinded the freeze on civil servant salary increases in place since 2006 this spring, he gave them a double bump. That increase will also be reflected in overtime allowances. The bureaucrats still get overtime while attending to Diet members, i.e., sitting and watching the Diet in session or going out drinking with MPs after the session is over. They also get taxi vouchers for the trip home.

He’s also retained the special allowances public employees receive in addition to their salary — JPY 26.4 billion a year in residential allowances, apartments in Tokyo at roughly 20% the rent of commercial properties, and JPY 7.1 billion for cold weather assignments. There’s even a special allowance for those assigned to work at a ministry or agency’s main office, which eats another JPY 10.2 billion a year.

Former bureaucrat and current freelance journalist Wakabayashi Aki asked them why they needed a special allowance to work at headquarters. She was told assignments there had the unique and difficult responsibility of formulating legislation and policies.

In other words, they get a bonus on top of their salaries to do the jobs they were hired to do.

But the generosity of the Japanese public sector doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. They’re also giving the money away overseas.

International exchange

This week the Foreign Ministry released its 2011 white paper on ODA, which offered their explanation of the reasons for foreign aid. They emphasized the importance of international cooperation and pointed out that the feelings of trust and thanks toward Japan from overseas were fostered by lavish ODA. To support their assertion, they cited the assistance received from 163 countries, including developing countries, after the Tohoku disaster.

You might have thought money can’t buy you love, but the Foreign Ministry has other ideas.

Some of it read as if it were a script for the TV commercials of the kind that oil companies produce to convince viewers of their environmental awareness: Students in Sierra Leone sold their meals and collected US$ 500 for donations, and all the national civil servants of Mongolia donated one day’s salary to Tohoku relief. While Japan’s ODA has declined for 13 straight years, the Foreign Ministry touts it as a great success, saying “active donations to the international community are connected to Japan’s own benefit.”

The prime minister thinks so too. Mr. Noda met Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on 7 March in Tokyo and promised to help rebuild her country’s infrastructure, including expressways, railroads, and IT, after last year’s floods.

Said Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osama at a news conference:

A friend in need is a friend indeed. We will never forget the goodwill of the Thai people, who offered us support as a country during the Tohoku disaster. There are many Japanese in Thailand working for companies in the Japanese manufacturing industry, and the expectations toward Japan are great. We want to formulate solid measures that will not betray those expectations.

The folks at the Seetell website are on the case again. They quote this from the Nikkei:

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has decided to provide Japanese companies with subsidies for their 18 infrastructure-related projects in China and other Asian countries, The Nikkei learned Saturday. The subsidy program mainly targets projects for building smart communities in China and Vietnam. It covers not only exports of infrastructure facilities and systems but also smart community projects involving land development in China, Thailand and Vietnam, sources said.

After providing some details about the programs, the paper added:

The ministry will extend subsidies of tens of millions of yen to these projects, sources said.

Seetell asks several excellent questions:

So, the bureaucrats at METI can allocate funds to build cities in China, Thailand, and Vietnam, but no one in the government can seem to rally any focused effort to rebuild cities in Japan? What could possibly cause such a mismanagement of resources and priorities? Are not the Japanese people of greater concern than the Vietnamese, Thais, and Chinese?

And how does it fit that Japan is building cities in China when the US occupation of Okinawa continues for its 67th year because China is seen as a threat to Japan?

Here’s one Seetell missed:

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria today welcomed a $340 million contribution by Japan, the highest amount that Japan has ever made in 10 years of vigorous support for the Global Fund. Japan is now making its first payment of US$ 216 million for its 2012 contribution.

“Japan has always been a leader in the fight against disease, but this is a great vote of confidence in our commitment to saving lives,” said Gabriel Jaramillo, General Manager of the Global Fund. “We recognize Japan’s determination to see real advances in global health, and we are equally determined to deliver.”

This new contribution represents a significant increase over Japan’s previous highest contribution of US$ 246 million in 2010. In 2011, Japan’s contribution was reduced to US $114 million following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeast Japan in March of last year, but this new contribution demonstrates that Japan’s commitment to the Global Fund remains steadfast.

The Boy Finance Minister Azumi the Cute is warning of a Greek-like catastrophe, people in the cold Tohoku region spent the winter in prehabs, but Japan had to almost triple the amount of money it gives to this group? The Global Fund couldn’t get by with just 100 million again this year? Japan was the only country they could tap for cash?

Here’s another from the Shukan Post. The IMF wanted $US 100 billion (about JPY 8 trillion) from Japan to help bail out the Europeans. Japan said it could only contribute about half of that, but the IMF insisted. The Finance Ministry finally told Mr. Azumi to cave again, so now Japan will help bail out the unbailable Greeks. The magazine points out that this amount of money, if kept in Japan, would remove the necessity to raise taxes for the Tohoku recovery, and the necessity to float bonds to cover national pension outlays.

To be fair, returning favors and gifts for favors and gifts received is an important element of Japanese culture. Nonetheless, one has to suspect that part of the motivation is the fear of government ministries and agencies that they’ll lose the budget money they don’t use. Besides, the government has been selectively generous about which favors it returns. Taiwan, which contributed JPY 20 billion to the Tohoku recovery, sent a representative to the memorial service in Tokyo last Sunday. They were left off the list of donor acknowledgments, and the representative was shunted to the general seating area on the second floor while the other foreign delegates sat downstairs in a VIP section.

Prime Minister Noda later said he was sorry if he offended anyone, but his lack of sincerity was offensive in itself. Chief Cabinet Minister Fujimura admitted the seating arrangements were settled at the Foreign Ministry and the Cabinet Office.

Na Nu Na Nu

Former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio enjoys his nickname of The Alien, but one has to wonder if the entire DPJ that he once led is just the Martian Space Party morphed into human form.

Last week, the DPJ announced the appointment of Mr. Hatoyama as their supreme advisor on foreign policy and Kan Naoto as their supremo for new energy policies.

How fitting. One screwed up relations with the U.S., and the other screwed up Fukushima.

Mr. Kan also gave a speech to a DPJ study group on the 5th, attended by mid-tier and younger party members. The topic: Achieving real governance by the political class. “Japan should give serious thought,” he said, “to its approach toward state governance organs.”

Considering his accomplishments in office, that speech was over before his listeners could settle in for a nap.

If this were a backwards country, as the man said, Ozawa Ichiro might wind up being hung. But civilized Japan instead hung his portrait in a room in the Diet chambers last week.

A rule allows those MPs with 25 years of service to put their picture on a wall as long as the governmnent doesn’t pay for it. One of his political protégées did the painting, so he didn’t have to dip into his well-stocked safe at home for the petty cash.

If this were a backwards country, he might also be in the dock along with the other war criminals. But then again, he already is in the dock for political fund problems.

The party that insisted every day from 2007 to 2009 that elections be held immediately is none to excited about holding one themselves now that the executioner is motioning for them to stick their head into the hole of the guillotine. During a TV interview on the morning of the 10th, Deputy Prime Minister Okada Katsuya said:

If we dissolve the lower house now, the anger of the people will be directed at the existing political parties.

It already is, but then Mr. Okada is not known for his insight into popular sentiment.

They would complain that we were only holding elections without accomplishing anything.

Instead, they’re complaining that the DPJ has done little, what little they did was bad, and what they want to do now is what they promised they wouldn’t do.

Anachronisms

It is clear to everyone that these are men whose time has gone. They are living relics of a now irrelevant age. Their approach and viewpoint, while stemming in part from the self-interest endemic to politicians everywhere, is as obsolete as the Cold War. Adding their evident contempt for their own citizens to the list of charges means they’ll have a dread judge to face in the next election.

Disturbed as much by the failure of the Iron Triangle to deal with the triple disaster as they were by the disasters themselves, the people — wiser than their leaders — have moved on. Former Koizumi privatization guru Takenaka Heizo recently published a book-length dialog with former Yokohama Mayor Nakata Hiroshi, who is working as an advisor to Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru. Mr. Takenaka observed:

The people now have high hopes for new regional parties, and I think there’s a good reason for that. The era of putting government administration in the hands of the bureaucracy and somehow achieving consistent growth is over. This is now an era for solving our problems. In society’s terms, people are looking for new CEOs. In fact, the best CEOs are the heads of local governments.

The next posts will examine Mr. Hashimoto, the most prominent of those local government heads.

Afterwords:

Try this for a refresher of what democracy means in Ozawa World.

Worried about the potential unpleasantness of Kusaka Kimindo’s comment about “Western-worshipping intellectuals”? Don’t be. Nothing bad will happen, and a renewed appreciation for Japanese values might be salubrious. Besides, even a cursory glance at current social, political, and economic conditions in the United States and Europe is enough to know how well contemporary Western values are working out.

*****
Here’s Takeuchi Mari singing Genki wo Dashite (Cheer Up!).

There’s a good reason this is an evergreen song in Japan, and it’s not just the melody. The premise of the song is that a woman is singing to a friend who’s down in the dumps because she’s been dumped by a man.

But the lyrics have other applications as well:

All you have to do is start again at the beginning…

If you feel like you want to be happy,
Tomorrow will be easy to find.

Life isn’t as bad as you think
So cheer up and show me that smile.

Ichigen koji (93)

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

During the Edo period (1603-1868), when a townsman started a fight with a samurai, people would listen first to the townman’s side of the story. If they learned that the samurai was at fault, the samurai would take responsibility by committing seppuku (ritual suicide). Thus, there was a certain relationship of trust between the general public and the samurai.

In today’s Japan, however, the politicians and the bureaucrats, who correspond to the samurai of the Edo period, take no responsibility at all, even when they are political failures. The relationship between the policymakers and the people has collapsed. We don’t know who took responsibility for the events of 3/11 (last year’s Tohoku disaster). Therefore, can we not say that the system of governance was much more advanced during the Edo period?

- Nakano Mitsutoshi, professor emeritus at Kyushu University

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This could be the start of something big

水は方円の器に随う
- Water conforms to the shape of the vessel; i.e., a ruler’s actions determine those of the people (Japanese proverb originating in China)

LAST week I presented the argument that Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, the so-called peace clause, was a misunderstood anachronism used as the means to stifle Japanese nationhood, and should be amended. I didn’t discuss the practical obstacles to that endeavor, however. (The post was long enough as it was.)

The primary obstacle to amendment is the same as that for any controversial issue: It would require a long, contentious debate to mobilize popular opinion, and inertia will always be the default position of the people absent a sense of urgency.

The support in Japan for maintaining the status quo is expressed in Japanese as “defending the Constitution”. Supporters of the status quo both in Japan and overseas often cite polls showing that a majority of the Japanese public opposes amending Article 9.

While that is correct as far as it goes, the flaw in the assertion is that it doesn’t go very far. The polling used to back their claim is shallow and two-dimensional. In his superb Yoron no Kyokkai (The Distortion of Public Opinion), University of Tokyo Prof. Sugawara Taku examines how the responses of the public to polling on this issue change depending on the questions asked.

For example, when asked for a straight yes/no response to a general question about amending the Constitution, the majority of participants answer yes. When asked for a straight yes/no response to a question about amending Article 9 of the Constitution that includes an explanation of the article’s contents, the majority of participants answer no.

But then Prof. Sugawara examines a poll that allowed five different answers, rather than a simple yes or no. Those five answers were:

1. No (i.e., keep Article 9 as is)
2. Can’t say for sure, but lean towards no
3. Don’t know
4. Can’t say for sure, but lean towards yes
5. Yes (i.e., amend Article 9)

The responses to this poll are revealing. The answers can be grouped into three categories of roughly the same size. Those are the people in the No group (1 and 2), the people in the Yes group (4 and 5), and the people in the Don’t Know group (3). In the survey Prof. Sugawara cites, all three groups were at the 30% level. Only one percentage point (well within the margin of error) separated the totals for the No group and the Yes group. The group with the highest percentage was the Don’t Know group.

Those results suggest public opinion on the issue remains fluid after all these years. It also suggests that a leader with conviction and with broad popular support in general could create a national consensus to amend the Constitution. As the proverb at the top indicates, it is the duty of the national leader to create the framework for any consensus.

Few politicians or leaders in any country, however, are capable of talking directly to the people over the heads of the political and commentariat classes, expressing themselves in accord with popular sentiment, and arousing the people in a positive way. Few anywhere even try. Japan hasn’t had a leader of that sort since Koizumi Jun’ichiro relinquished higher office in 2006 (though he kept his Diet seat for three more years). Mr. Koizumi, having several other rather large fish to fry, spent little or no time talking about Article 9. There hasn’t been a public figure capable of mobilizing public opinion on that or any other major issue since his withdrawal from politics.

Now there is.

In something of a surprise, Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru — the cynosure of politics in Japan today — addressed the issue last week. He started by reminding everyone of the obvious:

Japan’s national security is weak. That has an impact on everything…Nothing will be determined about national security, even with policy discussions, until we come to a conclusion about Article 9.

He then suggested holding a national debate for two years, followed by a national referendum on the issue. Constitutional amendments require passage in the Diet by a two-thirds vote as well as a majority vote in a national referendum. He would urge that national legislators vote for the amendment if that is the result of the referendum. In other words, he proposes to reverse what people would ordinarily consider the sequence of the process.

Once we see the results, the people can move in that direction. I will conform (to that direction) even if the result differs from my own opinion. That is democracy capable of making decisions.

What is Mr. Hashimoto’s opinion on Article 9?

It represents a sense of values in which a person says he won’t do something he dislikes to help another person in trouble. If there is to be no self-sacrifice, I think I might want to live in another country.

That first part is a bit elliptical, even for Japanese political debate, but it means he wants to either broadly amend or ditch Article 9 altogether. Take it for granted that he thinks he is just the man to drive the discussion. Considering his past electoral successes and approval ratings, it also may be taken for granted that he thinks he can bring about a result close to his own views. It would be a mistake to assume that he will be successful, but it would more of a mistake to assume that he has no chance of success.

Within days after Mr. Hashimoto’s statement, the opposition Liberal Democratic Party revealed their own proposals for amending the Constitution. Fancy that coincidence. Their plan for Article 9 would maintain the language about renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. It would specifically permit military forces, which would be renamed the jieigun rather than the current jieitai. (Jieitai is translated as Self-Defense Forces. The change from tai to gun means they are unambiguously referring to military forces.) The role of the jieigun would be defined as protecting territorial land and waters. The new Article 9 would specifically permit collective self-defense. (The old LDP government’s interpretation was that the Constitution allowed collective self-defense, but that they would not exercise that right.) Finally, the party’s proposed amendment would establish a military court system.

Collective self-defense is authorized by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, for those people who take the UN seriously. It grants a country the right (but not the obligation) to come to the defense of another country when attacked, on the conditions that the threat is immediate and that the response is proportionate to the original attack or threat. There is no requirement for UN approval in advance.

Mr. Hashimoto does not care for the LDP proposal. His view is that it is a mistake to conduct the debate through the prism of political platforms and election programs. He thinks the process in the Diet should be the last step, rather than the first, and that the primary debate should be conducted in the nation at large rather than in the Diet. He also knows that the nation does not trust the national legislators, and he shares their mistrust.

We all know that if this debate gains momentum, overseas commentators, both in the West and in East Asia, will generate enough uninformed drivel, hysteria, intellectual incontinence, and geopolitical rent-seeking to dwarf the Tohoku tsunami. One would have to be a masochist to read or listen to it.

Whether or not the debate moves forward remains to be seen, but Mr. Hashimoto has brought it to the forefront of the nation’s attention at a moment when he knows the nation’s eyes are on him.

*****
The Japanese electorate have made their political wishes as clear as Waterford. Their preference, loudly expressed over several elections, is for smaller government, lower taxes, and an end to the collusion between politicians, the bureaucracy, and Big Business. While they do not fill town hall meetings or occupy public parks, march on the Mall or threaten public health and public order, their voting behavior predates both the American Tea Party and Occupy movements by almost two decades. It should have been obvious to local politicos that it would be perilous to ignore them, but the flybait class is too stupid, too avaricious, too convinced of its superiority (and too afraid of offending the powerful bureaucratic class) to pay attention instead of lip service. For that, they have paid, and will continue to pay, with their political lives.

Koizumi Jun’ichiro’s support ratings during his five years in office started out higher than 80%, ended at 70%, and never fell below the high 40s. During his term, he dissolved the Diet to take to the people the issue of privatizing Japan Post, whose bank accounts and life insurance policies provide the money to purchase the bonds that fund Big Government spending without relying on overseas investors. He led his party to the second-highest majority in postwar Japanese history.

His successor Abe Shinzo also started with a 70% rating, but that lasted only until he allowed back into the LDP the paleo-cons Mr. Koizumi booted out for opposing his program. Two years later, the LDP had turned its back on the Koizumi path, and the public turned its back on them.

The opposition Democratic Party knew enough to run on a program of reform, though much of it wasn’t Koizumian. It is impossible to determine the relative weighting of seriousness and opportunism in their subject-to-revision-at-any-moment program, but the leadership showed signs they weren’t serious even before the election that swept them into office. That they were either charlatans with no intention of keeping their word, or cowards without the will to try, was apparent in fewer than two months after they formed a government. (Their first prime minister, Hatoyama Yukio, started with a public approval rating of about 70% in the fall of 2009. It was in the teens by the spring of 2010.) After the party’s betrayal of reform, their mishandling of the Senkakus incident, and their rank incompetence in dealing with the Tohoku disaster from the day it occurred, it is just as apparent that their brand is so disgraced the party may not survive in its present form after the next election.

Having seen that both the LDP and the DPJ are not to be trusted, the voting public supported with even greater enthusiasm those politicians running on reform platforms at the local level throughout the country. Some of those politicians are imperfect vessels, but the people are willing to overlook a lot to get what they want. The triple disaster in the Tohoku region last March seems to have kindled a quiet sense of urgency in everyone except the national political class.

That Hashimoto Toru is an imperfect vessel of reform is known to everyone, but after four years of superlative ratings as the governor of Osaka Prefecture and a cakewalk of an election for the mayor of Osaka last November in the face of establishment opposition, it should be obvious to even the most oblivious that The People don’t give a flying fut about that.

*****
The American Horace Greely is well known for his exhortation to “Go West, young man” in the latter part of the 19th century. After Mr. Hashimoto’s victory, the call went out — literally — for young people eager to build a new Japan to head to Osaka. Among those heeding the call are the former bureaucrats and reformers Koga Shigeaki (subjected to gangsterish threats on the Diet floor by former DPJ Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito and forced out of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry) and Hara Eiji. Their numbers also include the leaders of the small Spirit of Japan Party, former Yokohama Mayor Nakata Hiroshi and former Suginami-ku head Yamada Hiroshi, as well as the former bureaucrat and non-fiction author, Osaka native Sakaiya Taichi.

It is difficult to characterize Mr. Hashimoto’s political beliefs in brief, other than that they tend toward empowering the people and disempowering the elites, and toward smaller government that is stronger at the subnational level. For example, he intends to privatize the municipal public transport systems of Osaka and eliminate the subsidy for the symphony orchestra. (He does support some social democrat-type welfare schemes, however.) He is what most people would consider patriotic, and what the left would (and increasingly will) disparage as nationalistic.

It is impossible to know what will happen with or to Mr. Hashimoto in the future. He might become the national leader the nation seeks, spearhead the reforms that the nation wants while allowing others to serve in a national role, or he might just as easily fall victim to hubris. As I noted above, however, he knows that the people listen when he speaks to them directly. It will be hard to lose if that’s the stuff he’s going to use.

He’s already been subjected to fierce criticism and low blows, and transcended some spectacular disclosures. Just before the November election in Osaka, several national publications revealed that his father and uncle were members of a now disbanded yakuza gang associated with the gambling business. (His father committed suicide when Mr. Hashimoto was in the second grade, though his parents were not living together at the time.) It is also possible that his father was a burakumin, a member of the Japan’s former untouchable class. (His gravestone is in a burakumin cemetery.)

It cannot be stressed enough, however, that the public is so desperate for real reform, they don’t care about the man’s background. He keeps winning elections, after all. That Mr. Hashimoto has now chosen to address Article 9 suggests he has the confidence to overcome whatever’s thrown at him. He’s already dodged the kitchen sink.

But regardless of what happens to Hashimoto Toru the man, the public will not be denied. It might require many more years, and many more flushes of the electoral toilet, but the public will get what it wants in the end. They might even get a new Constitution — and a new nation — in the bargain.

Afterwords:

Books have already been written about (and by) Mr. Hashimoto, and he is such a distinctive figure that a fortnight’s worth of website posts would be insufficient to describe him or the phenomenon he represents.

For example, he thinks special districts for casinos and the sex industry are a good idea. Also, though his father’s family might have been burakumin (his uncle says they were, but his mother says they weren’t), he favors ending local governmental subsidies to organizations that support them.

It should also be remembered that Mr. Hashimoto’s first career was as an attorney. That would not be remarkable of itself in the West, but admission to the bar in Japan requires a high level of both intelligence and commitment to serious study. Style points notwithstanding, the man is not a lightweight.

That few Japanese are bothered about his father’s background indicates the Japanese aren’t as prejudiced as some outside observers would like to think. Some of the naturalized zainichi (Japanese residents of Korean ancestry) in the Democratic Party — such as Maehara Seiji — should take the hint and come out of the closet.

No, I haven’t seen Mr. Maehara’s family register. Yes, I do have it “on good authority”.

*****
This could be the start of something big.

TV or not TV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****
I prefer educational television myself.

Legs

IT seems the Chinese waste just as much time on websites speculating about Japanese people as Western folks do, with roughly the same result: readers learn more about the writers than anything else.

Some Chinese language-fluent Japanese found a thread on a message board associated with the Baidu search engine titled, “Japanese women can really withstand the cold”. The thread’s original poster included photographs of younger women wearing short skirts on cold days. They thought some of the comments and interpretations were interesting enough to translate into Japanese, and here they are in English (along with a link to the photos).

* Japanese women wear school uniform skirts from primary school through high school except for physical education classes. Universities have no uniforms, so they wear skirts all year round to be fashionable. I don’t think it’s so difficult for them even when it snows and is very cold. In South Korea it was popular to wear long stockings above the knee, but the Japanese are very strict about enforcing the rule on socks below the knee. That exposes their thighs and knees to the cold. Aren’t Japanese women cold? Have they evolved to a level beyond the Chinese?

(N.B.: Most primary school girls don’t wear uniforms at all, much less skirts. The university I’m most familiar with does have a non-mandatory uniform for women. It’s an attractive black pantsuit with a white blouse. The fad last year was short cutoff jeans with long black pantyhose-type stockings. I didn’t have a problem with that at all.)

* They do that from the time they’re small. They’re probably cold, but they’re used to it.

* (Original Poster) Here’s the latest information! Japanese men also don’t wear many clothes. Most young company employees in the Kanto region don’t wear long underwear because they think it’s for old guys.

* They have really big legs.

* Japanese women have such big legs because they like to play sports from a young age.

* They’ll get sick when they get older. Like with rheumatism.

* Where I am the junior high school girls wear stockings. (I think that’s the usual practice.)

* It’s all culture. Generally, women who think they’re beautiful wear skirts. (Is that the general opinion?)

* They’ll have to be careful about arthritis. They shouldn’t damage their bodies just to try to look good.

(N.B.: If female arthritis is a problem in Japan, it’s escaped my notice.)

* Cold, cold! I’m cold just looking at them!

* They have big legs because they sit in seiza for a long time.

(N.B.: Not any more they don’t.)
*****
Here’s the Chinese page with the photos they were commenting on.

It used to be the practice of parents to have their children (until junior high) run around in short pants throughout the year because they thought it was a healthful practice that built up their strength. (At least here in Kyushu, where it’s not as cold as elsewhere.) That doesn’t happen any more, though short pants are the rule for boys at the one primary school in my city that requires uniforms. (Full-length dresses for girls.)
*****
Those thighs don’t look fat to me.

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.

Back to front

ALL of the following stories appeared yesterday in the back pages of newspapers or the less well-traveled sections of websites. All of them present aspects of a reality quite different from the narrative of major news media outlets outside the region.

Linguistics

The National Institute of the Korean Language conducted a survey of the Korean language ability of foreigners in South Korea married to Koreans, based on the results of a language competence test conducted from 10 September to 20 October. The highest score possible for the test was 100.

The institute broke the results down by nationality and found that the Japanese had the best results, as 62.8% of that group scored 90 or better.

They were followed by Chinese of Korean ancestry at 55.7% and Mongolians at 45.6%. In last place were natives of The Philippines at 21.3%.

They also broke down the results by region of residence. (They do things like that in East Asia.) Foreign spouses in Daegu did the best with 45.5% scoring over 90 points. By province, Gangwon was at the top of the table with 40.8%, closely trailed by Gyeonggi at 40.0%.

Business

Speaking of Daegu:

Daegu City and Yeungjin College jointly launched an investment seminar on Dec. 8 for 11 invited Japanese-member companies of the Technology Advanced Metropolitan Area (TAMA)….

The investment seminar catered to 14 to 19 attendees representing a total of 11 Japanese companies. In addition, officials from Japan’s Kanto Economy and Commerce Department attended the event, with the number of participants estimated at 20. Another 30 local companies from Daegu participated in the seminar, providing one-on-one consultations with Japanese companies on technology and business partnerships.

The participating Japanese companies are located near Tokyo and specialize in electronics and mechanical metal parts. The participants were able to look forward to possible exchanges and cooperation with established auto- and machinery-parts manufacturers in Daegu and the North Gyeongsang Provincial region. According to Daegu City, the occasion paved the way for some Japanese companies to consider entering the Korean market.

The governments of Japan, South Korea, and China are talking about having talks about a free trade agreement, but local governments and the business sectors in both countries aren’t futzing around. Similar articles appear nearly every day in the middle or back pages of the Nishinippon Shimbun, with reports of South Korean and Chinese businesspeople coming to Kyushu for discussions and signing business agreements. Governments and business associations in Kyushu, the southern Korean Peninsula, and Northeast China have been working together for several years to create a de facto free trade zone.

Oh, and if you hit that link, you’ll see a photo of cherry blossoms in Daegu.

Sailing

Seoul-based Harmony Cruises has begun sales of cruise packages to Kyushu that will call at Fukuoka City, Beppu, Nagasaki, and Kagoshima (as well as Jeju) from home ports in Busan and Incheon. The initial sales are for 19 cruises between February and April. The company plans to offer almost 100 cruises per year. The Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport says they will become the first South Korean company to operate cruises to Japan.

There’s also been a sharp increase in the number of Chinese cruises to Kyushu over the past five years. They already call on six Kyushu ports 118 times a year, and more are planned. The Kyushu Economic Research Center says the economic effect for each city of each port call for each cruise is JPY 44 million.

There are plenty of things to do and see in Fukuoka, Nagasaki, and Kagoshima, ranging from theme parks to historical and cultural attractions. Beppu is famous for its hot springs, and many Koreans like to come to Kyushu to play golf.

Flying

Low-cost carrier Jeju Air of South Korea announced plans to inaugurate regularly scheduled daily flights between Fukuoka City and Seoul this year, beginning sometime after March. The number of flights and their times are undecided, pending authorization by South Korean authorities. (If the project has gotten this far, however, they’ll get the authorization.) Jeju Air has been operating three flights a week between Kitakyushu (Fukuoka City’s neighbor) and Seoul since March 2009.

Said a Jeju Air spokesman:

The Fukuoka Airport has many users from both Japan and South Korea, and it has excellent access because it is close to the city center. (It’s 10 minutes by subway.)

Jeju will be the second Korean LCC to operate flights to Fukuoka; the first was T’way, which also flies to Osaka and Nagoya.

And that’s in addition to the Japanese LCCs and the major Japanese and Korean airlines flying the same route.

Read the primary articles in the English-language media about Japan-South Korea relations, and you can’t get past the second sentence without them dipping into all the bad blood. Oh, it’s there all right, kept at a boil and stirred by the politicos and their Greek chorus in the commentariat and academia.

But read the newspaper back to front and you see that it’s a different story altogether on the ground.

Afterwords:

The Daegu story is a couple of weeks old, but I found out about it yesterday in an e-mail alert from the Korean Herald.

*****
Happy New Year is a Matsutoya Yumi (“Yuming”) song, but here she performs it in a duet with Suga Shikao

Finis for the fins?

Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you and remain silent.
- Epictetus

SOCIAL critic Miyazaki Masahiro offered some observations on recent trends in Chinese cuisine earlier this week. Here they are in English.

*****
With everything else being destroyed in China, is the core of their food culture also at risk? Shark fin soup, the sine qua non of sophisticated Chinese cuisine, has become a target of attack. This has surprised both the Chinese and the Japanese, who export shark fins to China. Activists have converged on Shanghai to strip the Chinese of their dietary culture by demanding that people stop eating shark fin on some pretext or other — environmental protection, ecological protection, anything will do.

Japan has been deprived of the whale. In China too, bear paws and dog meat are now de facto illegal. (Manchuria is an exception. There, dog meat restaurants still flourish.) Stewed bear paw has, for all intents and purposes, been banned for about two years. The primary reason cited was hygiene, and now there is mock bear. But bear paws are considered an indispensable part of elegant dining, though it took a month of stewing in a pot to soften them and remove the toxicity.

Whole grilled squab is popular in Guangdong, but the shops serving civet have disappeared from the main streets. A campaign promoting a trial tasting of dog meat had been scheduled, but was canceled.

Most people in Beijing no longer eat dog meat. Even in Guangdong, owl eyes, which had been a favorite of young women (because they were said to improve eyesight), are not as popular as they once were, and there are signs that grilled squab (doves) will be the next target. (Why it is that Japanese women’s groups don’t criticize the Chinese for eating the symbol of peace, I don’t understand.)

And then there is shark fin.

It’s said that 30% of the world’s shark species are threatened with extinction, and most of those have disappeared into Chinese stomachs. China imports most of its shark fin from Japan. It became so scarce after the Tohoku earthquake that local fishermen began receiving premium prices.

WildAid was held on 22 September 2011 in Shanghai, and many Chinese were surprised to see basketball star and national hero Yao Ming in attendance. Most Chinese love shark fin soup (N.B.: It’s traditionally served at wedding banquets), and a controversy erupted when Yao Ming and Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group, held a news conference to declare that eating shark fin was barbaric and should be banned.

I wonder — is this the first time Chinese food culture has come under simultaneous attack from inside and outside the country?

(end translation)

*****
The World Park Junkies have survived all these years, so maybe shark fin soup will too.

Bare trees and lonelyhearts

ONCE upon a time, they say, university life for the Chinese was a combination of the military and the monastery. Students lived more than 10 to a dorm room and became ghouls, as my university’s slang had it, haunting the libraries and carrels until late at night. Had they the time, most still wouldn’t have had the money to pursue one of the primary extracurricular activities of Western students — pursuing the opposite sex.

Today, however, the partial application of market economics and the single child policy have made more Chinese financially comfortable, if not gloriously rich, and many students have refocused their priorities: Now, everyone’s got a love jones. Though the government still pledges public allegiance to communism, the first thing the students learn is that everyone is not equal in matters of the heart. The monkey on the back that comes with the love jones is that nobody is guaranteed to score.

As in Japan, a side effect of the increasing openness and prosperity in China has been the popularity of American-style celebrations of Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and a secular Christmas. But the lonelyheart Chinese students soon became frustrated when they saw those more equal than others having all the fun on Valentine’s Day (and perhaps Christmas, too; Christmas Eve in Japan has become a heavy date night for young lovers). Instead of moping, their solution was to create a celebration for themselves that has become a national phenomenon.

Most people attribute the origin to Nanjing university students circa 1990, and the festivities began to spread throughout society as they graduated. It gained momentum in the new century and broke out nationwide in 2005. Now the events of the day receive regular coverage in the media and have become a part of social life similar to Valentine’s Day in the United States.

That day is called Guang Gun Jie (光棍節), and it falls on 11 November. The first two characters are the word for stick (with the bark peeled off, by some explanations), and it was chosen to represent a tree trunk with no branches, i.e., someone with no spouse or children. The word has now come to be used as a synonym for single people. They picked the date of 11 November because 11/11 can be visualized as a row of four tree trunks without branches. (This sort of creativity is a trait common throughout Northeast Asia, by the way.)

What do all the lonely people do on 11 November? They try to get dates, of course, and if they can’t get dates they get goofy. Some of the goofiness is a bit more innocent than the baroque time-wasting schemes concocted by American college students. One example is this fight using pillows stuffed with paper scraps instead of feathers. The release of all that intensity is to be expected when people lack other outlets for their energy.

They also get risqué, for China anyway. In Chinese, the character 脱　(second from the right on the sign) also means to remove one’s clothes, as well as to break away from something (the sense in which the Japanese use it). These guys got all barechested to show how ready they are to break away from Mary Palm and her five sisters:

Nowadays, however, it’s not just for students any more. The public at large has gotten behind it, as you can see from the poster in the first photo, one of many of which were hung throughout the city of Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. The folks in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, went so far as to hold a mass o-miai (marriage meeting) in a public park.

It’s also no surprise that the Chinese found a way to turn 11/11 into another shopping opportunity, and the event has become a golden goose for merchants. That raises the question of what people would buy to celebrate the day instead of the usual Valentine’s or Christmas presents, other than a fifth of liquor. Reports suggest there’s a lot of traffic in normal merchandise sold at special discounts. The big seller this year was the iPad.

Another question is whether the event has mushroomed into something that’s just as depressing as Valentine’s Day or Christmas for the people stuck with penny stocks in the sexual market. Here’s a message from a young woman on a Net bulletin board:

Everybody else has got someone, but only I am alone. I’m looking for someone to spend the holiday with. We’ll split the costs.

And yes, that facilitates the manifestation of the natural Chinese mercantilism in other ways, too. Here’s some bulletin board advertising:

I’ll spend the holiday with you for 8 yuan an hour. (JPY 96, which is about US$1.25 these days)

The Joseon solution

A more clever response to datelessness comes from those holding a losing hand in South Korea. They have a similar, informal tradition, but their solution contains more humor. The bare trees in that country, referred to as the Solo Squad (솔로부대, which Japanese will recognize as ソロ部隊), celebrate Black Day on 14 April. On that day, the folks who drilled dry holes on Valentine’s Day or White Day (14 March) dress up in their best black clothing and get together to commiserate with each other by eating jajangmyeon, a dish of white Korean noodles with black bean sauce, washed down with black coffee. Jajangmyeon is the Korean version of zajiang mein, a northern Chinese dish of thick wheat noodles with ground pork stir-fried in zajiang (炸酱), a fermented soybean paste.

In passing, it’s interesting that the Koreans have adopted the Japanese creation of White Day, despite the studied Korean ambivalence in some quarters for things Japanese. (There’s more of that going on than outside observers might think.) An important part of Valentine’s Day in Japan involves women giving giri-choko (obligatory chocolate) to their male co-workers on 14 February. The men are supposed to return the favor one month later, often with confections that are white. (Japanese merchants certainly one-upped their American counterparts in creating profit opportunities with that one.)

While Guang Gun Jie or Black Day might not appeal to everyone’s taste, they certainly are a more pleasant, innocent — and tasteful — response than the Western solution.

*****
Maybe the Japanese have the best solution of all. This is Rockappella from Hitotsubashi University in 2009.

Ichigen koji (66)

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

The leftist mood is still the mainstream among Japanese intellectuals. It is extremely interesting that the closet leftists were flushed into the open by the nuclear power plant accident. The schema that “the government and Big Capital worked in collusion, and the nuclear power interests gluttonously devoured the privileges”, and the offered solution of deluded proposals to abandon all nuclear power in favor of natural energy, show they haven’t progressed in the slightest from their 60s vision of unarmed neutrality.

While Japan’s left wing is still dominant in academia, they wound up on the losing side and have had no influence whatsoever on real politics. Their final descendants are the anti-nuclear faction. By no means, however, does the right wing have a philosophy that has surpassed theirs. Marxism has poisoned Japanese intellectuals for such a long time that proper social science has never developed. Waiting for the baby boomer generation to withdraw from the scene is perhaps the only way to remove that poison.

- Ikeda Nobuo, university professor, author, blogger

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