Southern comfort

PATTERN RECOGNITION is crucial to the successful conduct of foreign policy. Identifying, recognizing, and then anticipating recurring behavior eliminates the need to speculate about another party’s objectives and facilitates decisions on ways to respond to those parties.

Though it should be obvious that pattern recognition is a survival skill, some people continue to survive despite an inaptitude at spotting patterns that repeat so often they might as well be on a tape loop. One group of American politicians, for example, is incapable of recognizing the two or three patterns employed by Russians over the past few centuries, regardless of whatever state format the rulers in Moscow happen to be employing at the time. The inability of others to recognize the one and only pattern from North Korea causes wonderment at how they manage to cross the street unaccompanied.

The Japanese have become adept at pattern recognition because their nationhood has been in a state of suspended animation since the end of the Second World War, their most amicable neighbor is a Drama Queendom whose leaders view hysteria as a diplomatic trump card, and they are still in the process of scraping off a Constitution that contains the uplifting buncombe of entrusting national security to the goodwill of the peace-loving peoples of the world.

Then again, that part was written by some of those Americans unable to recognize Russian behavioral patterns.

Japanese pattern recognition skills are especially useful in bilateral ties with South Korea. The realization that they’ve seen it all before and know what happens next enables them to skip a few steps in the diplomatic process — particularly because they realize that doing nothing works splendidly.

Those skills have been useful again over the past year, as South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who entered office pledging a policy of realism and focusing on the future in foreign affairs, finally succumbed to the vapors in the penultimate year of his term. Perhaps he should be commended for resisting as long as he did.

Here’s how it started: During his first three years in office, Mr. Lee’s approval ratings settled in the 45-50% range, but started to side last year.

January 2011: 42.9%

February: 38.8%

March: 36.6%

April: 31.4%

June: Into the 20s

The figures were buoyed after the IOC announcement of 6 July that they had awarded the 2018 Winter Olympics to Pyeongchang, South Korea, but stalled around the 31% level. The Dong-a Ilbo commissioned a poll for this year’s April legislative and December presidential elections, which found that 48% of the respondents said they’d switch their vote from the previous ballot. People in their 20s supported the opposition Democratic United Party by 42.6% to 19.3%. More ominous for the ruling Saenuri/New Frontier Party was that even those 50 and older had switched allegiances.

The reasons were multitudinous and variegated. One was a severe outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease that resulted in the slaughter of 12％ of the nation’s pigs — some of which were buried alive — and more than 100,000 cattle. The losses from the unanticipated butchery were estimated at KRW 3 trillion (about $US 2.6 billion).

Another was that consumer prices rose 4.5% in February 2011, the highest increase since 2008, and continued to climb after that. The price of Chinese cabbage, essential for winter kimchee, skyrocketed by 94.6% in one year, while pork soared 35.1%, oil products 12.8%, and industrial goods 5.0%. Unemployment was at its highest level in 2010 since 2002; the official unemployment rate was 3.6%, but under the ILO standards used in Western countries and Japan, it was closer to 13%.

Wrote the Dong-a Ilbo on 7 March:

“The government is starting to hear criticism that it is amateurish, and they have no reply for that criticism”.

In addition, several large national projects boosted by the Lee administration were either defeated or abandoned, including a proposed canal across the peninsula (which would have partially traversed North Korean territory), and the construction of a new airport in the southeast part of the country. Further, a large oil development project in Kurdish Iraq has been de facto suspended, but not before a substantial amount of money had been invested in the enterprise.

The English-language media has been full of reports over the past year describing how some large Korean companies have overtaken their Japanese competitors, particularly in the field of consumer electronics products. Few of those reports examine the negative aspects of that story, however. Exports account for 43.4% of South Korean GDP, the highest percentage in the G-20, but the profits do not enrich the nation as a whole. Much of those exports are accounted for by inexpensive goods with low profit margins, and the real competitor nation is often China, not Japan.

The relative poverty rate for working class urban residents is 11.4%, up from less than 8% in the 1990s. A government-affiliated think tank estimates that 9.9% of households nationwide spend 40% of their income on debt repayment.

So: Widespread dissatisfaction due to the failure in domestic governance…the failure to respond to Pyeongyang’s sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of South Korean territory…the failure to improve the economy…

What is a South Korean government to do?

The Japanese have seen this pattern before. The South Koreans do what a failed South Korean government always does when its support craters:

Talk the comfort women talk!

*****

The groundwork for the Lee administration shift was laid in August 2010, when then-Prime Minister Kan Naoto, one of the luminaries of the local Blame Yourself First faction, slipped into his hair shirt and issued a statement on the 100th anniversary of the Japan-Korean merger:

“We again keenly reflect on our errors and (humbly) express our heartfelt feelings of apology for the immense damage and anguish we brought about through our colonial rule.”

Mr. Kan used the word “again” because the Japanese have repeatedly apologized to the Koreans, who repeatedly pretend they aren’t sincere. It is precisely what helpful Western commentators have repeatedly insisted that Japan should do to “heal the wounds” of a condition that lasted all of 35 years, ended 67 years ago, and was part of a world that no longer exists.

What the commentators repeatedly ignore, however, is the Korean response. One apology is enough in normal human intercourse, especially when it’s accompanied by the equivalent of 800 million 1965 U.S. dollars. Not on the Korean Peninsula, however — holding han grudges is more satisfying than forgiving and getting on with it. The Democratic Union Party response was not atypical: “It’s just a repetition of what they’ve said before, and nothing more than an apology for show.”

So much for Western commentators, and so much for Korean perceptiveness: Kan Naoto and his chief cabinet secretary at the time, Sengoku Yoshito, were the politicians most likely to give the Koreans what they really want — abject servility in perpetuity — and to congratulate themselves for that servility. They are also lilely to be the last leaders from Japan’s mea maxima culpa generation. That’s not looking gift horse in the mouth; that’s failing to recognize a gift horse when it nuzzles them.

President Lee was more conciliatory in those days. He praised the statement as a “step forward” on 15 August, though that praise presumes the Japanese are taking baby steps toward the servility sought. The same Koreans who think that Japanese apologies are insufficient also thought Mr. Lee’s response was insufficient. They asked if he was going to go along with the “phony apology”.

Two weeks later, at the end of August, it was announced that a Seoul-based group planned to build a memorial to the comfort women in front of the Japanese embassy. The construction was approved by the Seoul city ward where the embassy is located, on the recommendation of the health and welfare minister. The memorial depicts a young woman next to an empty bench. It is called The Monument of Peace.

Remember, this was after Mr. Kan apologized. Again.

That same month, the South Korean Supreme Court ruled the 1965 Basic Treaty between that country and Japan was “unconstitutional”, for whatever reason, though that has nothing to do with Japan. It’s just quasi-legal cover to repudiate a deal that legally stymies the rent-seeking of today’s leaders. Under the terms of that agreement, Japan paid South Korea $US 800 million, more than 600 million of which was an outright transfer of funds. The treaty specified that South Korea thereby relinquished the right of individual citizens to make claims on the government of Japan. President Bak Jeong-hui used part of the money to compensate some families whose property was confiscated by Japan, but gave no money to any of the comfort women.

The treaty also provides for the resolution of disputes by recourse to a neutral third party. If either side is dissatisfied with the terms of the pact, or with the response of the other party to their requests, they can employ a mechanism by which the dispute can be resolved by a neutral third party.

In September 2010, the South Korean Foreign Ministry asked the Japanese government to ignore the terms of the treaty and recognize individual claims. Yet in the 47 years since the treaty was signed, South Korea has never sought neutral third party resolution.

Such is the nature of the polity and political discourse in South Korea.

One year down the road, the foreign ministry said President Lee would broach the subject with Prime Minister Noda Yoshiko at their New York summit in September 2011. Mr. Lee seems not to have mentioned it then, but the South Korean government began preparations to have the matter discussed at the UN.

The next steps by both governments are as described in testimony in the Japanese Diet earlier this year.

Diet questioning

Yamatani Eriko, an upper house member of the opposition LDP, questioned both the prime minister and Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro in the Diet about the so-called Kono Declaration, a 1993 document that admitted state responsibility for the comfort women. It should be noted that in the following, Mr. Noda is speaking for himself, and Mr. Gemba is presenting the view of the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Ms. Yamatani was once a member of the DPJ (the current ruling party), and was even in their Shadow Cabinet, but left after two years. She later served as an aide to LDP Prime Minister Abe Shinzo.

Yamatani: (The next question) is about the so-called “comfort women monument” that has been erected in New Jersey, in the United States. The problem of the military and sexual matters is an extremely vexing one for all countries in every era. We must be modest before history, but we must also clearly explain what is not true and disseminate that explanation. I beg your pardon, prime minister, but I would like you to read four lines from the foreign ministry’s provisional translation.

Gemba: You asked that it be read as is, so I will: “We will fix in our memory the more than 200,000 women and girls abducted by the armed forces of the government of Imperial Japan during the period from the 1930s to 1945, which resulted in the violation of the human rights for these women, known as the comfort women, which no one should overlook.”

We have filed an objection about the construction of the monument with the appropriate people involved. This monument is in a town (in New Jersey) of about 17,000 people, of whom about one-third are ethnic Koreans. It has the highest percentage of ethnic Koreans of any city in the United States. Therefore, we will continue to monitor the situation and respond appropriately.

Yamatani: This question is addressed to the prime minister. The more than 200,000 women abducted on the intent of the Imperial Japanese government, is it a fact that they were abducted by the military?

Noda: More than 200,000 women abducted by the military…I do not think there any grounds (for this claim), including the numbers and the circumstances.

Yamatani: The only one without lobbyists in Washington is Japan. The South Koreans are tireless. (We should conduct) diplomacy by clearly explaining the facts as part of our foreign relations strategy. There is a statue of a girl in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, called the Monument of Peace. The weekly Wednesday demonstrations in front of the Japanese embassy to resolve the sexual slavery issue of the Japanese military began on 8 January 1992. The 1,000th demonstration was held on 14 December 2011. This peace monument was built to commemorate the spirit of the Wednesday demonstrations over their long history.

Diet members from the DPJ (i.e., Mr. Noda’s party) have taken turns participating in these Wednesday demonstrations. Private sector businesses at the time (during the war) submitted advertising in mass market publications that solicited comfort women. They specified the monthly salaries, the destinations, and the ages of the women sought. But there were no abductions, and there were no sex slaves. Answer, prime minister — was there Japanese military sexual slavery?

Noda: There are different explanations about the circumstances and the conditions, but if you ask whether this is an accurate record, I think there is a great divergence (from the facts). I also asked the president (Lee) to quickly have this monument removed.

Yamatani: But President Lee, during the Japan-South Korea summit in Kyoto on 17 December, said there would be a second and a third memorial. What explanation did you give him?

Noda: It is true that the president expressed his concerns about the comfort women issue to me, but I would prefer to refrain from commenting on what and how much he said. I clearly conveyed to him the Japanese position that the matter has been legally resolved.

Yamatani: That’s the Basic Agreement between Japan and South Korea. But morally speaking, we have provided money to the women from the Asian Women’s Fund. Successive prime ministers have apologized. Is your recognition of this state of affairs the same?

Noda: Successive governments have consistently said that the issue has been legally resolved with the 1965 treaty. Beyond that, another perspective is that the women have received private sector cooperation as humanitarian assistance under previous governments through the Asian Women’ Fund. It is a fact that follow-up efforts continue to this day.

Yamatani: No documents have been found indicating forced removal by the military or the authorities. A cabinet official testified to that effect in 1997, and a member of the government gave the same testimony in the Diet in 2007. Is the present Noda Cabinet in agreement with that?

Gemba: Basically, the government conducted an investigation. And (our position) is basically in view of the results of that investigation. As you say, no evidence has emerged, but I think we just can’t repudiate it.

Yamatani: What’s that supposed to mean?

Gemba: Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono’s statement says that businesses were subcontracted by the military to recruit the comfort women, and that is chiefly what happened, but there were many cases in which the women were gathered against their will, through cajolery or coercion. Also, the authorities and others were complicit in this. The Korean peninsula was under our rule at the time, and in general, the solicitation, transport, and management of the women were done in opposition to their will, through cajolery or coercion. That is my understanding of the Kono statement.

Yamatani: So there’s no proof, but you won’t repudiate it. That’s a strange answer. If this government is going to create all sorts of cabinet ministers, how about creating a minister for recovering the national honor?

Gemba: The government’s basic position is as recorded in the Kono statement.

The brass tacks

Ms. Yamatani didn’t mention another key part of the story. The South Korean government told the South Korean comfort women that anyone who accepted compensation from the Asian Women’s Fund in Japan would thereby become ineligible for South Korean government assistance.

One reason the foreign ministry is hesitant to disavow the Kono declaration — based in part on evidence that was found to have been fabricated — is that they realize the corrupted Western media will not report that half of the comfort women were Japanese, who certainly weren’t abducted. Nor will they report that the evidence is tainted when they can have and eat their J-school cake by dabbling at tabloid journalism on the legit and flashing the phrase “sex slaves”.

Journos that they are, they prefer the much larger 200,000 figure, though it is an estimate at the high end of the range, and the person who came up with it gave 50,000 as the low end of the range. (In other words, no one has any idea how many there were.)  Nor will they mention that the US Army knew all about the system in 1944.

This year

Kuroda Katsuhiro, the Seoul correspondent for the Sankei Shimbun, wrote an article for the April edition of the monthly Will in which he asserted that the recent South Korean conversion of the surviving comfort women into dashboard saints has rendered any solution to the issue impossible. No South Korean politician is capable of crossing the anti-Japanese elements in South Korea, which includes that country’s industrial mass media. The essence of his piece is that they have been made “sacred” and elevated into heroes of the independence movement against Japan.

Mr. Kuroda cited several examples. First, it will require special permission to remove the so-called Monument of Peace, which will not be forthcoming. All the comfort women who die now get full-scale obituaries with photos in the South Korean papers. President Lee gave a special address on 1 March, the Independence Movement Day holiday, which included attacks on Japan. This year, he also sent individual letters for the first time to the roughly 60 surviving comfort women. The letter said the issue was addressed “from the start to the finish” during the Kyoto bilateral summit meeting. The South Korean president referred to this issue as “more urgent than any other foreign policy question”. That would mean he considers it a matter of lesser urgency that North Korea shelled his territory and sunk a naval vessal during his term of office, killing both civilians and military personnel. But that was before the North Koreans began jamming the Global Positioning System of commercial and military air and sea traffic.

That would also mean his countrymen either agree with him or are too unconcerned about the truth to object.

Mr. Kuroda said he was startled to receive a call early one morning from a female reporter at the Munhwa Ilbo (Culture Daily). She informed him that the Dong-a Ilbo had attacked him the day before in an editorial titled, “Japan – Take Part in Discussions about the Comfort Woman Problem”. Half of the editorial, he said, was rehashed Japan bashing using comfort women as the stick. The other half was Kuroda bashing. He had already been savaged on the Korean Internet; one person thought the article was “another absurdity from Kuroda, the absurdity machine”.

Mr. Kuroda spoke to the reporter for half an hour, explaining both the official Japanese position and his view that the real problem is the activist groups and mass media who use the comfort women to brainwash the people and promote anti-Japanese sentiment.

She must have believed him. The woman’s next article for the Munhwa Ilbo had the following headline:

It’s South Korea’s Fault the Comfort Woman Issue Isn’t Resolved

The text noted that Japan had prepared financial compensation and apologies, including those from prime ministers, but the government of South Korea refused to accept them. Yet Mr. Lee still wants an apology.

She concluded:

“Hardline anti-Japanese sentiment caused this country to miss its chance.”

Mr. Kuroda concluded that she had more sense than the president of South Korea.

Reasonable people will say that allowances should be made for Mr. Lee in view of the difficulties of navigating the sometimes surreal, hothouse nature of public debate in South Korea. Until one reads this bit of guerilla theater pretending to be news:

South Korea wants Japan to take steps to address long-running grievances of elderly Korean women who suffered as sex slaves. Lee has strongly urged Japan to resolve the issue, stressing it is becoming increasingly urgent as most victims are well over 80 years old and may die before they receive compensation or an apology from Japan.

No allowances should be forthcoming for a politician who frames an issue in shrouds of mendacity.

The three issues

Lee Myung-bak publicly states there are Three Great Issues for the Korean People: Historical Awareness, Takeshima, and the Yasukuni Shrine.

Taking those from back to front, whatever happens at Yasukuni is the business of no one but the Japanese. Takeshima was Japanese territory illegally seized by force because the Koreans couldn’t convince the Allies it was theirs when the Treaty of San Francisco, which disposed of the conquered Japanese territory, was drawn up. The courageous sons of Jeoson knew they could safely snatch it because the Japanese/American Constitution prevented a Japanese response. Refer to the two articles on the masthead for more information.

Finally, let us agree with the South Korean president when he insists on Historical Awareness, because that is the real issue. Koreans themselves are all too aware of their history, and Mr. Lee must deconstruct it, revise it, and turn it inside out, because accepting that history would be emotional hemlock for the nation.

The Koreans know that some of their mothers and grandmothers were willing prostitutes for Japanese Imperial forces. How could they not? The newspaper advertisements for a then-legal activity still exist. So do articles in Korean newspapers in which Japanese authorities warn the public of unscrupulous Korean brokers.

They know the Japanese were the ones to bring them out of their Hermit Kingdom spider hole into the 20th century. They know there was a pro-Japan faction during the merger period, inspired not by the base motive of “collaboration”, but by a desire to join the modern world. They know some of their great-grandparents saw it as their version of the Meiji–period opening of Japan.

They know that roughly 90% of the Koreans who went to Japan did so voluntarily to seek a better life in same the way that Europeans emigrated to the United States in the previous century.

They know that some of their grandparents fought willingly in the Japanese armed services during the war, and that some even volunteered as kamikaze pilots.

They know that had Japan not stepped in when it did, it is possible they would all be speaking Russian now. They know another possibility is that they would have spent several more decades in darkness as black as the North Korean night, but without the gulags.

But at least their cousins in the north provide public education for girls. They know that was another Japanese innovation on the peninsula, too.

Perhaps most galling of all, they know that they were incapable of achieving independence on their own and owe it to the Japanese defeat in the war.

The intensity of contemporary Korean anger toward Japan is not derived from what Japan did or did not do. It is derived from what Korea did and did not do. The emotion is all the more intense because it is self-anger projected onto contemporary Japan.

As the Munhwa Ilbo reporter now understands, the issue of comfort women and all that it represents is no longer a Japanese problem. It is a Korean problem.

Indeed, in some ways, it always has been.

Afterwords:

* It would seem that the attitude toward international agreements south of the 38th parallel differs from the attitude in the north only in degree, not in kind.

* Nathaniel Branden wrote the following in Six Pillars of Self-Esteem:

“In addition to the “adult-self” that we all recognize as “who we are”, there is within ourselves a “child-self” — the living presence of the child we once were….But we may have repressed that child long ago, repressed his or her feelings, perceptions, needs, responses, out of the misguided notion that “murder” was necessary to grow into adulthood. This recognition led to the conviction that no one could be completely whole who did not reconnect with and create a conscious and benevolent relationship with the child-self. This task is especially important for the attainment of autonomy. I saw that when this task is neglected, the tendency is to look for healing from the outside….Does it need to be argued that we cannot have healthy self-esteem while despising part of who we are?”

Perhaps that book needs to be translated into Korean.

* Mr. Lee’s party wound up doing a lot better than everyone expected in the April elections, but only because party leader Bak Geun-hye (President Bak’s daughter) politically disowned him. The opposition picked up 47 seats, falling a whisker short of a majority. The ruling party wound up losing two more seats in post-election horse trading, eliminating the majority.

* Geopolitical affairs in Northeast Asia are much too complex for drive-by commentators, particularly the industrial mass media and its four-panel comic strip approach to the world. But it would be too much to expect them to leave well enough alone. They have to sell all that advertising space somehow.

For example, we cannot overlook the difficulties level-headed people in South Korea face when they try to do something sensible. Japan and South Korea are on the verge of signing a pact to achieve military cooperation. It is in the interests of both nations to do so. But:

A Seoul analyst said military accords with Japan would spark strong opposition from China and North Korea.

“China would consider it as an expansion of (the US-led) alliance in the Northeast Asian region,” Baek Seung-Joo, of the Korea Institute for Defence Analyses, told AFP.

“South Korea also faces unfavourable public opinion at home over any military agreements with Japan, regardless of their contents,” he said.

There are more subtexts to relations in the area than found in Moby Dick. The recent trilateral summit in Beijing resulted in a pledge by the leaders of Japan, China, and South Korea to pursue a free-trade agreement:

A “milestone” investment agreement between China, Japan and the Republic of Korea was signed in Beijing yesterday, after years of negotiations, while the leaders of the three nations announced that talks focusing on a free-trade agreement (FTA) would be launched within the year.

Aside from substantial economic benefits, experts said that the FTA, if realised, could help ease regional tension and possibly lead to a more integrated Northeast Asia.

Beware of the chirpiness in that article, however. The Chinese are trying to blunt the effect of the Americans’ TPP proposals on Japan. South Korea is more interested in a bilateral agreement with the Chinese to narrow the gap between their companies and the Japanese in the Chinese market. They’re not as interested in a bilateral FTR with Japan because they have a JPY 2 trillion trade deficit with the Japanese and continue to rely on Japan for advanced electronics parts and materials.

Meanwhile, President Lee brought up the comfort women yet again (or said he did) with the Japanese at the summit, while the Chinese complained about the Tokyo Metro plan to purchase the Senkakus from their private owners (they’re getting a lot of volunteer funds to pay for them, too), and the Uyghur conference now being held in Japan:

Beijing yesterday lodged strong protest over Tokyo’s permission for the separatist World Uygur Congress meeting to be held in Japan, and slammed Uygur separatist Rebiya Kadeer’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine.

Fancy that. Japan’s doing more for human rights in China than the U.S. or Europe. Imagine the American self-congratulation if the Congress were being held in Los Angeles.

To his credit, Mr. Noda diplomatically deflected them both. He even politely told Mr. Wen where to get off:

In their meeting in Beijing, Wen took up the issue of the Senkakus, reiterating China’s claim that the islands have been Chinese territory since ancient times, according to a senior Japanese official who briefed journalists about the talks.

Noda stated Japan’s position that the islands, which China calls Diaoyu, are an integral part of Japanese territory, the official said.

Noda called for China to respond in a “cool-headed” manner on the issue, citing China’s growing activity in waters near the Senkaku Islands, which has provoked the Japanese public.

Considering that public contributions to purchase the Senkakus have likely passed the million-dollar mark by now, it would be more accurate to say that the Japanese public has woken up, rather than been provoked.

*****

Percy’s not the only one who could stand some comforting.

 

Corrupt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s more:

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

And:

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

And:

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

Remember, these are direct quotes from the report.

On Mr. Kan specifically:

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

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

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

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

Except one.

He explains the reason for that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterwords:

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

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

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

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

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

Also:

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

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

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

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

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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.

Bottom feeders

The dojo, you know
Doesn’t try to play goldfish
- Dojo, a poem by Aida Mitsuo

NODA Yoshihiko, the new prime minister of Japan, realizes that he’s not the type of man to excite an audience to the point of spontaneous combustion. That’s why he used the analogy from the poem above to present himself to the Japanese public. It was nicely done — most Japanese, including people who will never be Mr. Noda’s political allies, seem to have found it endearing. Some are familiar with the calligrapher/poet Aida Mitsuo, the author of the poem, who lived from 1924 to 1991. Everyone is familiar from childhood with the work of calligrapher/poets, especially anonymous ones, because their creations are a part of daily life. Schoolchildren make their own as part of their classroom work.

The poem

Mr. Noda says he’s always liked Aida’s poems, and people take him at his word. The Japanese will also find that endearing and view it as a positive. There are still plenty of people in this hip-hop world who nod in appreciation at Aida’s explanation of what he did: “I merely express the natural way people should be as humans and the true way to live. To accomplish that, I borrow the format of brush-and-ink calligraphy.”

In fact, there’s been a sharp increase in visitors to the Aida Mitsuo Museum in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward since Mr. Noda’s speech. There were 1,500 on 30 August, which is half again the usual number. The anthology in which the poem appears has been sold out in bookstores, and a new edition of 5,000 copies is being printed to meet the demand. The general theme of that anthology, Okagesan, is “Don’t compare yourself to other people”.

The politicians of his party like it too. Mr. Noda appointed Hirano Hirofumi, the chief cabinet secretary in Hatoyama Yukio’s government, to the important position of Diet Affairs Committee chairman for the party. Promised Mr. Hirano:

I will become the comfortable mud for the dojo.

That presented the fratboy spitballers of the Fourth Estate with a faux problem. Mr. Noda used a fish analogy that everyone in Japan immediately understood. Rather than a physically attractive and eyecatching kingyo, or goldfish, he likened himself to an ordinary dojo that lives near the mud.

But while every Japanese knows what a dojo is, few people in the West are familiar with what is sometimes called the Oriental Weatherloach, or, for the scientifically minded, Misgurnus anguillicaudatus .

So, after their Japanese go-fers at the Tokyo bureau provided them with the English translation, the foreign correspondents pulled a reference book down from the shelf, blew off the accumulated dust, and licked their fingers as they turned the pages. They discovered that:

It is omnivorous, eating a range of food including insect larvae, crustaceans, algae and detritus.

They found what they were looking for. The headline in The Australian the next day read:

New Japan PM Yoshihiko Noda says he is ‘bottom feeder’

It wasn’t just The Australian, either; when I Googled the phrase early yesterday evening in combination with Mr. Noda’s name, there were more than 700 hits.

No, he did not say he is a bottom feeder. He said he was a dojo. A bottom feeder in English has negative connotations that dojo does not have in Japanese. For Mr. Noda, it was an innocent, self-effacing remark to which his listeners responded favorably, if they had any reaction at all.

But the English-language media outside Japan employed Mr. Noda’s comment to make the man look like a dweeb. Of course they did it on purpose. That is what they do.

Journalists become so upset when they are attacked, it’s apparent they have no idea why they are so detested. One reason, of course, is that they are self-important airheads of unparalleled hebetude incapable of stringing together two sentences without revealing just how little they know. Another is that being a smirking, juvenile twat is no way to win friends or influence people — unless your social circle consists exclusively of smirking, juvenile twats.

Imagine that: Japan’s prime minister enjoys the work of a calligrapher/poet in a country with a culture that encourages such appreciation. Now imagine the sort of person who would see that as a prime target for mockery.

*****
Time magazine in the U.S. employs spitballers of a higher caliber, however. Instead of writers who attended red-brick colleges, they prefer graduates of universities where ivy covers the brick, or better yet, stone. Their headline for Mr. Noda’s selection was:

Another Slice of ‘Cold Pizza’? The Man Most Likely to Lead Japan

They were more clever about it by giving themselves plausible deniability. The line doesn’t come until halfway down the page, when they quote Yamamoto Yoshi quoting Westerners about former Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo, who died in office of a stroke.

Oh, they’ve been to the finest schools, all right, but the psychological deformity is the same. Obuchi was another dojo, which few Japanese thought was a handicap. People liked him, including his political opponents, as I suspect they will also like Mr. Noda. I remember watching a film clip of Obuchi talking outdoors to people in the Diet district he represented, and the reasons people liked him were obvious. He was friendly, warm, and genuine in a way that can’t be staged as a photo op.

But perhaps we’re being unfair to the journos. Being unfamiliar with friendly, warm, and genuine behavior, they’re unlikely to recognize it when they see it.

*****
The first article I posted on this website in 2007 was the About page on the masthead. I wrote then that Japan does not receive the baseline respect of other countries, and that people who write about it “seem to enjoy indulging themselves in a comic book vision of the country that depicts Nippon as the Goofball Kingdom of East Asia.”

See what I mean?

For contrast, consider the treatment of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She denied that the first Greek bailout would happen, she denied that the second Greek bailout would happen, and she denied that the Portuguese bailout would happen. They all happened. In fact, she said “we have a treaty under which there is no possibility to bail out states in difficulty”.

Do you remember anyone from the industrial mass media dismissing her in a straight news story with the likes of “bottom feeder” or “cold pizza”? Has anyone in the English-language media taken her to task — much less flicked spitballs at her — for being incompetent, muddle-headed, or wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong?

Please! She’s European, not Asian. Even better, she was born a member of today’s privileged and pedestalized gender. They’re never mocked by the media dinosaurs, unless they’re American women who believe in small government. (Or, in Hillary Clinton’s case, unless they’re running against someone from a subset on an even higher pedestal.)

*****
Isn’t all the commentary filled with brow-knitting concern about how Mr. Noda is Japan’s sixth prime minister in five years just so precious? (Or seventh, if you start counting with the outgoing Mr. Koizumi). There’s a bit of that in Japan, too.

But then I ran across an article yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, in which Daniel Henninger interviewed former American Vice-President Dick Cheney. Here’s an excerpt:

I asked Mr. Cheney why there isn’t a stronger tradition of firings or resignations in American government. He chuckled, noting that one of the chapters left out of the book was “People I have fired.”

“It’s an important issue in terms of trying to manage an administration,” he says. “My experience generally has been that it doesn’t happen often enough. That’s sort of a general statement of why government doesn’t work.”

So, Mr. Cheney thinks American government doesn’t work because there are too few resignations and firings, while others think the Japanese government doesn’t work because there are too many resignations and firings.

Yet if the American government were conducted under the Japanese version of the Westminster system, Bill Clinton would have been gone at the end of 1994, sparing the nation of six lost years, tales of cigars used as adult toys, and testimony of semen-stained dresses. George W. Bush would have been gone after Katrina, sparing the nation of the first pointless bailout and the beginning of the degradation of the currency. Barack Obama, the Sizzling Hot Pizza himself, with more self-regard than the average journalist with even less justification, might have failed to match Hatoyama Yukio’s nine months in office, sparing the nation of agony akin to having all one’s teeth pulled without anesthetic.

And some people think the Japanese have it all wrong.

*****
Finally, we come to The Economist. As befitting the elite status of the in-flight magazine for Davos man, the ink-stained wretches they employ as journalists rank in the highest percentile for vapidity, laziness, and self-importance in their profession. No other similar publication in the English-speaking world has contributors who bray so loudly so consistently and know so little about Japan. Consider this on the selection of Mr. Noda:

But there is at least one thing to be thankful for in today’s victory: Mr. Noda sidelined one of the main forces of paralysis in the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), Ichiro Ozawa, who continues to head the largest faction within the party though he has been indicted in a money scandal and his party membership is suspended.

Mr. Ozawa backed Banri Kaieda, a trade minister who looked increasingly in danger of becoming a puppet for the backroom fixer. But though the first vote put Mr. Kaieda in front, thanks to the support of Mr. Ozawa’s cronies, it was not enough to win him an outright victory. In the run-off, Mr. Noda’s supporters joined forces with those of Seiji Maehara, another anti-Ozawa candidate who lost in the first round (and whom we had thought would be the front-runner, because of his support among the electorate at large). Mr. Noda won with 215 votes to Mr. Kaieda’s 177. It is the second time this year—the first was a no-confidence vote against Mr. Kan in June—that Mr. Ozawa has failed to impose his will on the party, though that is not to say that he will stop making mischief for the new leader.

Two paragraphs, two errors with a throw weight measured in the megatons. Mr. Ozawa did not try “to impose his will on the party” through the no-confidence vote. The opposition parties introduced the June no-confidence measure and might have done so in March had it not been for the earthquake. They were already discussing it at the end of February. It would have passed, too, with members of several Democratic Party factions voting for it — acting as antibodies against the human bacteria that is Kan Naoto. But Sengoku Yoshito and Edano Yukio, attorneys at law, put off the inevitable by devising a document that everyone except Kan Naoto thought was a commitment to a quick resignation. It took the rest of the summer, but Kan Naoto is solid gone, leaving behind the odor of sulfur and slime.

So: Viewed from a time frame of longer than a fortnight, how was this a failure for Ozawa Ichiro? If his allies had opposed the no-confidence measure from the start, we still might have Kan Naoto to kick around some more.

As for putting Mr. Ozawa out of business, Mr. Noda just appointed Ozawa ally Koshi’ishi Azuma to be the party secretary-general (head of the party in the organizational sense). In Japan’s version of the Westminster system, the secretary-general is essentially the Number Two man of the party. He controls all the money, runs the election campaigns, and conducts negotiations with the other parties. We’ve also seen that Mr. Noda appointed Hirano Hirofumi to be the party’s Diet Affairs chairman, which another important role. Mr. Hirano is a close associate of Hatoyama Yukio, who is also allied with Ozawa Ichiro.

In other words, reading The Economist on Japan wastes even more time than reading the Japan Times. The former is longer than the latter.

******
Speaking of Koshi’ishi Azuma, his presence and positions of authority within the party are the reasons the DPJ will never have the party unity that the journos keep wishin’ and hopin’ for.

Mr. Koshi’ishi is one of several DPJ legislators to have a Socialist Party background (from the days when their charter included favorable references to Karl Marx), and he once headed the Japan Teachers’ Union-affiliated Yamanashi teachers’ union. The JTU backs the DPJ in the same way that teachers’ unions everywhere back political parties of the left. In the past, they’ve been caught squeezing members to donate to Mr. Azuma’s political campaigns in Yamanashi. They even had teachers working the phone banks to bug voters at home. The teachers themselves admitted the money went into a dummy bank account for Mr. Koshi’ishi, who wound up with JPY 3 million.

The JTU once harassed a Hiroshima school principal to the point of suicide. They think competitive tests are bad for education and singing the national anthem is bad for any reason at all. Another favorite JTU technique is to mail razor blades to the people that displease them.

Mr. Koshi’ishi was a member of the JTU when Makieda Motofumi was chairman. Mr. Makieda is the author of チュチェの国朝鮮を訪ねて (Visiting Joseon, the Country of Juche), in which he praised the North Korean educational system. It contains this passage:

“There are no thieves in this country. Thievery occurs in those places where there is a prejudice toward wealth. There is no need for thievery in this country. Since there is no thievery and no murder, there are also no police. There are only public safety personnel standing at the corners and intersections to direct traffic and deal with any injuries.”

He’s also written:

“After my visit to North Korea, whenever I’m asked whom I think is the most respected person in the world, I immediately bring up the name of Chairman Kim Il-sung. That’s because I have met him personally. I believe that he is loved by the people of his country, and is worthy to be revered by them as a father….Kim Jong-il is the duplicate of his father, and he can be trusted without reservation.”

Makieda Motofumi received a medal from North Korea in 1991.

During the Aso administration, there was talk of Japanese participation in efforts to board North Korean ships suspected of transporting nuclear weapons material to the Middle East. Said Mr. Koshi’ishi at a press conference:

Rather than inspecting North Korean ships, we should inspect the Aso Cabinet.

Mr. Koshi’ishi frequently speaks of the relationship between politics and education:

There is no such thing as education without politics.

At a JTU meeting in Tokyo, he once said:

It is not possible to be politically neutral in education…We will change education through politics.

These statements come close to violating Japanese law, and are of course a de facto pledge to indoctrinate students. Mr. Koshi’ishi’s opposition to singing the Japanese national anthem in schools is perhaps because he favors the Internationale instead.

But in a book published in July 2009, 民主の敵－政権交代に大義あり (The Enemy of Democracy: There is righteousness in a change of government), Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko recalled his experience in primary school as the son of a man in the Self-Defense Forces:

It’s often said there are teachers who tell the children of members in the Self-Defense Forces that “Your father’s job is to kill people”. That atmosphere did in fact exist.

Mr. Noda has also insisted on a firm stance against North Korea and for the revision of the Constitution to allow Japan the use of the military for legitimate self-defense. Though he is the sort of man to whom Mr. Koshi’ishi’s comrades enjoy mailing razor blades, he asked Mr. Koshi’ishi to lead the party.

Mr. Noda is still talking about a grand coalition, but this appointment kills that deader than the proverbial doornail.

The boys and girls covering Japan for the English-language media will never tell you this. Instead they keep asking the pointless question of whether this or any prime minister will unify the DPJ in an equally pointless attempt to present themselves as serious people doing a serious job.

The Democratic Party of Japan will never be unified for the same reason a party whose membership included both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin would never be unified. Mr. Noda is trying, but I suspect he himself knows it’s a matter of buying a few more months of time.

You read it here first, but only because the credentialed media either doesn’t know, or can’t be bothered to tell you about it.

Afterwords:

Though Mr. Ozawa is an ally of Mr. Koshi’ishi, he most certainly does not share the latter’s beliefs. Explaining that relationship will have to wait for another day, however.

Sorry for the lack of hotlinks, but still having the software problem. It should be easy for people to find what they want to see, however. I recommend the Aida Mitsuo Museum site.

The New York Times: As much currency as the Zimbabwe dollar

“Prime Minister Kan has been extremely busy during this unprecedented disaster. He’s screaming at people in the Kantei, he’s barging into Tokyo Electric and screaming at them, and he’s screaming when he comes back. The problem with the prime minister screaming without regard to time or place is that none of it brought about an improvement in the situation.”
- The 2 April issue of the weekly Shukan Gendai

THOSE still interested in smokestack-industry journalism might find it fun to go slumming at the New York Times website and read their article, Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust, about the Japanese government’s initial efforts to deal with the nuclear accident at Fukushima.

A more apt title would be Media Crisis, Crippling Mistrust. That the article contains a substantial amount of distortion, manipulation, and unintentional, spit-out-the-beverage humor will be no surprise — it’s a collaborative effort by two of the Times’ journalistic gimps, Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler. The former is well-known for his hatchet jobs on Japan when he was that paper’s Tokyo correspondent, while the latter’s primary talent seems to be opening his mouth wide and saying Ahhh to receive DPJ government spoonfeedings.

But perhaps that assessment is too harsh. The pair had to work under a greater handicap than usual because the Kan administration, whose party promised greater access to the media when they were in the opposition, excluded overseas reporters as well as freelance and net journalists from the prime minister’s and chief cabinet secretary’s news conferences updating earthquake/tsunami information because “it was an emergency”.

So the Times did the next best thing and faked it by rewriting the government’s handouts.

The following is a comparison of what the Japanese government wanted the Times to tell those people it still thinks are American opinion leaders, and what the Japanese government doesn’t want them to know.

The Times Tale #1:

The Kan government essentially left the handling of the nuclear crisis in the crucial first three days to Tepco, focusing instead on relief efforts for the hundreds of thousands left homeless, Mr. Terada and other aides said.

What Everyone in Japan Knows #1:

When the earthquake occurred shortly after 2:00 p.m. on 11 March, Mr. Kan and his advisors immediately went to the government’s crisis center. That night, the prime minister himself conducted discussions about ways to deal with the nuclear crisis, drawing up scenarios on a whiteboard. The discussions lasted all night.

At about 5:00 a.m. on the following day, he skipped a meeting of a group organized to deal with the emergency and flew by Self-Defense Force helicopter to view the Fukushima reactors from the air. (The trip itself remains very controversial in Japan. Critics charge it delayed the start of measures to cool the reactors. Others claim the trip had no intrinsic value, and that the prime minister made it only because of his taste for performance politics.)

After he returned, the prime minister told aides:

“The nuclear problem can be handled under Kantei leadership.”

(NB: The term Kantei in Japanese is analogous to the terms White House, the Kremlin, or 10 Downing St. in English.)

At 1:00 p.m., still fewer than 24 hours after the quake, a deputy minister addressed a news conference and said the fuel rods at the Fukushima reactors might already have started to melt. The Kantei was already aware of this possibility. That night, the prime minister and Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio removed him from his job and reassigned him because he had “alarmed the people”.

At roughly 3:00 p.m. on 12 March, slightly more than 24 hours after the quake, Mr. Kan chaired a meeting of all party heads in the Diet and told them:

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The nuclear reactor is fine…Even at the worst, there will be no leakage of radiation.”

TT #2

“…(A) nationwide system of radiation detectors known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi. Mr. Terada and other advisers said they did not learn of the system’s existence until March 16, five days into the crisis.

“Mr. Kawauchi (Hiroshi, an MP from the prime minister’s party) said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.”

WEIJK #2

The Nuclear Safety Technology Center (NSTC), which administers SPEEDI, sends out information in real time during an emergency over dedicated circuits to the Nuclear Safety Commission (NSC), all the related agencies in the government, and all prefecture governments. Tokyo Electric informed the government of the power loss at Fukushima on 3:42 p.m. on 11 March, slightly more than one hour after the earthquake. The government immediately instructed the NSTC to operate in emergency mode, which it did at around 5:00 p.m. SPEEDI began sending data hourly, and the amount of data transmitted reached 6,500 pages by 20 April. The government had released only two pages of that data by the end of April. The NSC published the first page on 23 March, 12 days after the earthquake/tsunami, and the second page on 11 April.

An article in the 6 May edition of the weekly Shukan Post claims that Mr. Edano had to have known about the SPEEDI data from the start of the emergency, which means that Mr. Kan had to have known too. The Post interviewed the head of the bureau in the Education Ministry responsible for SPEEDI, who said,

“A senior official at the Kantei ordered that information from SPEEDI was not to be made public (on the 15th). The next day (the 16th) the responsibility for SPEEDI was transferred from the Ministry to the NSC.”

The Post also interviewed the head of the NSC, who denied the story, but the magazine didn’t believe him:

“All the local governments involved told us the (system began functioning immediately). In accordance with the system’s guidelines, maps (showing radiation dispersion) were transmitted to the Fukushima Prefecture government office from the start (of SPEEDI operation). The prefectural government did not issue warnings to municipalities and residents, however. Explained a member of the Fukushima Prefecture group established to deal with the accident, ‘NSC decided whether or not to release the information, and we were prevented from releasing it on our own’.”

Incidentally, the Times found the space for the quote above from Kawauchi Hiroshi, but missed his statement published in the 31 March edition of the weekly Shukan Shincho:

“The prime minister has further stressed political leadership and Kantei leadership, but I do not think that was functioning at all during this crisis.”

TT #3

“(O)n March 14, the gravity of the plant’s situation was revealed by a second explosion, this time at Reactor No. 3, and a startling request that night from Tepco’s president, Masataka Shimizu: that Tepco be allowed to withdraw its employees from the plant because it had become too dangerous to remain.

“When he heard this, Mr. Kan flew into a rage, said aides and advisers who were present. Abandoning the plant would mean losing control of the four stricken reactors; the next day, explosions occurred at the two remaining active reactors, No. 2 and No. 4. ‘This is not a joke,’ the prime minister yelled, according to the aides.

“They said Mr. Kan convened an emergency meeting early on March 15, asking advisers what more could be done to save the reactors. Then he gave Tepco barely two hours’ warning that he planned to visit the company.

“At 5:30 a.m., Mr. Kan marched into Tepco headquarters and stationed one of his most trusted aides, Goshi Hosono, there to keep tabs on the company.

“Mr. Kan gave a five-minute impromptu pep talk, said his aide, Mr. Terada.

“’Withdrawing from the plant is out of the question,’ Mr. Kan told them.”

WEIJK #3

That’s not all he told them in the ensuing 15 (not five) minutes. Mr. Kan ordered the press corps accompanying him out of the room. The prime minister grabbed a microphone and started shouting loud enough for the reporters standing outside in the hall to hear. He told Tokyo Electric officials, ‘Kakugo wo kimete kudasai’, (i.e., their workers should be prepared to die) and said that if they withdrew from the plant he would crush the company (100％ 潰れる). He wound up staying for a three-hour conference, but he was still screaming when he returned to the Kantei.

Five-minute impromptu pep talk, eh?

The utility’s workers were exposed to radiation initially reported to be 2.5 times over the acceptable limit. On the 16th (the next day), however, the prime minister ordered Self-Defense Forces dropping water on the reactors from a helicopter to withdraw because of the risk of radiation exposure.

While recognizing there was a lot for which to hold TEPCO accountable, the Japanese media wondered why Prime Minister Kan issued a de facto order to the utility to send its employees into a situation that had the potential of resulting in their death from radiation exposure (which he mentioned himself), though he has no legal authority to tell a private sector company what to do. In contrast, he pulled back the SDF — public sector employees whose job involves receiving orders that might result in their deaths — because of dangerous radiation levels.

That Mr. Kan screams a lot is common knowledge in Japan. One DPJ member — again, a member of the same party — told the media that when the prime minister barged into Tokyo Electric headquarters and started yelling at them it was nichijosahanji. (A daily occurrence; literally, “daily rice and tea”)

“Everyone’s disgusted with him because he calls in officials off the top of his head and starts screaming at them. When an official with a better grasp of the situation tries to point out his errors, he yells, ‘I’m not listening to anything you say!’ When they resign themselves to just conveying the facts, he loses his temper and says, ‘Are you trying to make me decide?’ Everyone knows something serious is bound to happen unless there’s a change, but no one can stop him.”

The cover headline of the subsequent issue of the Bungei Shunju, Japan’s most prestigious monthly, read: Kan Bangs the Table and Yells / Senior Bureaucrat: “I don’t want to look at the prime minister’s face for even a second”

TT #4

“On March 12, about 28 hours after the tsunami struck, Tepco executives had ordered workers to start injecting seawater into Reactor No. 1. But 21 minutes later, they ordered the plant’s manager, Masao Yoshida, to suspend the operation. They were relying on an account by the Tepco liaison to the prime minister, who reported back that he seemed to be against it.

“‘Well, he said that was the atmosphere or the mood,’ Sakae Muto, Tepco’s executive vice president, explained at a news conference.

“Mr. Sassa (Atsuyuki), the former head of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office, said: ‘Mood? Is this a joke? Making decisions based on mood?’”

WEIJK #4

When the man with the ultimate authority is psychologically unsound and is emotionally out of control as a matter of nichijosahanji, sends people over whom he has no authority to their possible deaths, and threatens to destroy their company if he is not obeyed, of course the people who must deal with him make decisions based on his mood. They can’t afford to joke around. Here’s another report:

“When a member of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency explained a point to him, he retorted, ‘You haven’t been to the site and seen it (like I have), have you?’ He phoned a bureaucrat he had never met out of the blue and issued instructions. He concluded with, ‘It’ll be your fault if something happens’.” (That English cannot convey the faux tough guy roughness of the original Japanese: 何かあったらお前らのせいだぞ)

TT #5

“Mr. Aritomi said that even with Mr. Hosono stationed inside Tepco, the company still did not disclose crucial information until mid-May, including final confirmation that three of the plant’s four active reactors had melted down.”

WEIJK #5

Tokyo Electric told the prime minister at about 10:00 p.m. on the night of the earthquake that they expected a meltdown to occur. Their readings of iodine levels at the plant early the next morning confirmed their expectations. In any event, instead of telling other people in the Diet that he wasn’t sure, Mr. Kan was flatly denying that a meltdown had occurred into mid-May.

TT #6

“(T)he Japanese met an hour beforehand (on 20 March) to discuss developments and to work out what they were going to tell the Americans. Mr. Nagashima said the meeting brought together the various ministries and Tepco, with politicians setting the agenda, for the first time since the crisis began.”

WEIJK #6

Onishi and Fackler pulled that last sentence from their backsides; as we’ve seen, the politicians set the agenda from the day the crisis started. That was the problem.

Here’s one freelance journalist:

“The prime minister and his ‘political leadership’ are suspected to be the reason for the confusion of the blackouts, and the disrupted transport, business, schools, medical institutions, which were implemented on the spur of the moment with no input from ministries. He criticized Tokyo Electric for providing information late, but ignored his own inability to gather information.”

And another:

“Mr. Kan’s greatest mistake was that he was supposed to be the commander but acted like a squad leader on the ground. He established a headquarters within the offices of Tokyo Electric. This was just a performance designed to catch the attention of the mass media and promote himself among the people. Meanwhile, he treated the government’s emergency and disaster relief headquarters as a side job, giving it short shrift. That’s because there’s no glory and no media coverage in it.”

Here’s a headline in the Daily Yomiuri on 17 March:

“Distribution channels blocked; Government has done nothing for six days / No specific plans from disaster headquarters”

The problems extended to foreign affairs. The Taiwanese government got in touch with the Japanese government on the day of the earthquake to tell them they could dispatch an emergency rescue team to the area immediately. The prime minister made them — and the people in Tohoku stranded by the earthquake — wait for two days until after the Chinese rescue team arrived.

All of this goes without saying for the people who know Mr. Kan best. Sengoku Yoshito was the chief cabinet secretary in the first Kan cabinet, and returned as the deputy chief after it became apparent that Matsumoto Ryu, nominally the Minister for Disaster Measures, was incapable of doing his job. He reportedly told a close aide:

“Handling affairs from the earthquake to the recovery is beyond Kan’s ability.”

Here’s an example of what that means: The prime minister has been widely quoted in the Japanese media as telling people that he is an expert on nuclear energy. Meanwhile, the Nikkei Shimbun reported that he wanted a “second opinion” from people not associated with the bureaucracy or Tokyo Electric, so he called in outside experts for a discussion. One of the first questions he asked was, “What is this ‘criticality’?”

Loathe to criticize too harshly someone who shares their political beliefs, the New York Times couldn’t find the space for any of the above. They did find the space for this bagatelle, however:

“Critics and supporters alike said Mr. Kan’s decision to bypass this system, choosing instead to rely on a small circle of trusted advisers with little experience in handling a crisis of this scale, blocked him from grasping the severity of the disaster sooner.”

Who anywhere has the experience in handling the deaths of more than 20,000 people and more than 80,000 people still in shelters as the aftermath of the fourth-largest earthquake in recorded history, the largest recorded tsunami in an area where large tsunami occur roughly every 30 years, and the resultant meltdown of three nuclear reactors?

As for his alleged inability to grasp the severity of the disaster sooner, he understood a meltdown was likely on the day of the disaster and he started ordering evacuations the next day. He was thrashed by the media and the public when it was reported on one occasion soon after the disaster that he said northeast Japan might be rendered uninhabitable, and on another occasion that no one would be able to live there for 10 to 20 years.

Of the many criticisms of the Kan administration, one of the most frequent is that they never accept responsibility and always blame someone else. Either the New York Times fell for it (which means they need new correspondents in Tokyo) or are acting as accomplices.

One reporter assigned to cover the Democratic Party of Japan told the Shukan Shincho that Mr. Kan’s behavior in the first week after the earthquake/tsunami resembled that of Adolph Hitler in the final days of the Third Reich.

Speaking of the Third Reich, anyone who wants to read the Times article and see what an English-language article in the Völkischer Beobachter might have looked like in the heyday of that publication can use the search engine of their choice to find it. No links from me.

Links are for journos on the legit.

*****
Such dubious souls

They can see for miles

They are a bus without a destination sign.
- Tanaka Shusei, former director-general of the Economic Planning Agency, speaking at a forum in Nagoya last fall about the Kan Cabinet.

THE USUAL clique of overseas observers who understand Japanese issues better than the Japanese themselves has morphed into a gaggle of schoolmarms exasperated by the political turmoil of the past week, after the dastardly plot by caped mustachioed men to tie the maidenly Kan Naoto to the tracks for slicing and dicing by the Shinkansen was foiled in the nick of time. How much better it would be, they insist, to stop the childishness and allow Mr. Kan and his Cabinet to continue directing the Tohoku recovery, which they have heretofore conducted with such selfless efficiency and dispatch.

Typical was the comment of Michael Auslin writing at the National Review website. He is the director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a Wall Street Journal columnist, and occasional television commentator. He made the obligatory reference to the short lifespan of Japanese prime ministers, with the obligatory glossing over of the Koizumi years. He also wrote:

“Japan’s politicians, busy stabbing each other in the back in the narrow alleyways of Japan’s neon-lit entertainment areas, are oblivious to the fact that they are driving their country off the cliff.”

Yes, it would be so much better if the Japanese modeled themselves after American politicians and stabbed each other in the back in spacious, klieg-lit television studios on programs in which the sharpness of the knives are in inverse proportion to the channel’s ratings.

It would be so much better if the political class of Nagata-cho were as self-aware as the American pols barreling down the royal road to peace and prosperity, generously forcing banks to provide home loans to people unable to afford the payments and penalizing the institutions that didn’t cooperate, thereby fueling the economic crisis of the century. It would be so much better if the Diet were to function like the American Congress, whose superior processes were used to pass — or to deem to have passed — the Obamacare legislation. It would be so much better if Japanese government debt were held by foreign interests, as the United States so magnanimously permits, instead of domestic interests.

How much more efficient the Americans are at encouraging national diversity with a strategy of leaky and lawless southern borders, resulting in Balkanization Español in California, Arizona, and Texas and providing the opportunity to criticize the Japanese for being chary of large-scale immigration. How much better that local government is on such a sound financial footing and is always working to improve the lives of its citizens.

And that dysfunctional Japanese political system with rotating papier-mâché prime ministers! How much better it was for the Americans to have benefited from the wise and steady leadership of Lyndon Johnson after the Tet offensive, Richard Nixon during his last year in office, Jimmy Carter during his last three years and six months in office, Bill Clinton after his historical 1994 repudiation or post-Lewinsky (take your pick), George W. Bush post-Katrina, and Barack Obama post-21 January 2009.

How much better instead would it be for Japan to have a system that would have allowed Hatoyama Yukio and Aso Taro to serve out their full terms of office.

These latter-day Mrs. Jellybys and the other fly-by telescopic political philanthropists don’t seem to have closely tracked events in Japan during the past year. Here’s a quick summary to remind them.

*****
In June 2009, Mr. Kan was elected president of the Democratic Party, whose Diet majority meant he became prime minister. He took office with 60% approval ratings, not because the public thought he was the man for the job — please — but because he was not Hatoyama Yukio, with approval ratings at 18% and falling, and because he shut out from a leadership role Ozawa Ichiro, whose negative ratings were north of 80% then and at 89% today.

Mr. Hatoyama stepped down to avoid a DPJ bloodbath in the July upper house election. It was a critical election for the party: Had they picked up a few more seats, they could have ruled without pesky and incompatible coalition partners. It seemed as if the leadership switch had worked, until Mr. Kan broke the party’s no new taxes pledge in their 2009 lower house election manifesto and waxed ineloquently about the need for a consumption tax hike. That managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by creating a quick about-face in voter sentiment in fewer than six weeks. The party lost seats instead.

For two years after the LDP’s defeat in the 2007 upper house election, the DPJ’s quotidian demand was a dissolution of the lower house and a general election because, they said, that vote was the most recent expression of popular will. The DPJ mislaid the pages of that script after the 2010 election.

In September, Mr. Kan was challenged for the DPJ presidency by Ozawa Ichiro, upset that the prime minister had reneged on the party no-new-tax pledge, leading to the electoral debacle, and that his many allies were deprived of a voice in government. Mr. Ozawa’s electoral skills and money management, after all, were instrumental in the party’s rise to power in 2009. The challenge failed, but the residual bad blood has placed the DPJ on the verge of disintegration, able to act with unity only when their existence and power are at stake.

Later that month came the epic failure of Mr. Kan’s government when it was incapable of upholding national sovereignty with their handling of the Chinese fishing boat captain who rammed Japanese Coast Guard vessels near the Senkaku islets. Credentialed overseas observers like to think the territory is at dispute, but forget that both China and Taiwan recognized it as Japanese territory until 1971, when the possibility of enormous seabed oil deposits was discovered.

Rather than accept responsibility for the disposition of the sea captain, the government insisted it was all the doing of the public prosecutors in Naha Okinawa, a claim disbelieved by three-quarters of the nation. The Chinese responded with in-your-face threats, starting with wildly fictional accounts of the incident and continuing with economic pressure by cutting off rare earth exports and thug state pressure by arresting on espionage charges Japanese nationals helping the Chinese deal with their dismal ecological problems.

The cowed Kan government locked up a video of the incident verifying that the Chinese were at fault so as not to anger the Chinese government or to stir up the backwards nationalist sentiments of the non-progressive Japanese public. It didn’t work; anger was the diplomatic policy of the Chinese government regardless of the Japanese response, while the Japanese public accused him of betraying the nation. The video was released anyway on YouTube by an upset Coast Guard officer.

Demonstrating his diplomatic skills, Prime Minister Kan went all the way to Brussels to tug on the sleeve of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in a hallway and get him to sit on a chair and chat for 25 minutes, pretending they met by accident. He also held consultations with President Hu Jintao at the APEC meeting in Yokohama that fall by reading from memos prepared by the Foreign Ministry.

Encouraged by the Kan Doctrine in foreign policy, Russian President Medvedev visited the occupied Northern Territories in November, which the Soviets seized in 1945 after Japan’s surrender. Mr. Kan was livid. Mr. Medvedev told him to bugger off.

The key person of the first Kan Cabinet was Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito, widely assumed to have been the man actually running the government because the task is beyond Kan Naoto’s skill set. (Those hangovers can be a bitch until the fog clears around noon.) But Mr. Sengoku had so alienated everyone in government with bullying behavior, lies, evasions, insults, and gangsterish threats that he was censured by the upper house and forced to resign in six months. (An opposition MP also revealed that Mr. Sengoku told him the Japanese had been in vassalage to the Chinese for some time.)

The ruling Democratic Party’s thrashing in local elections nationwide started in February this year with the balloting for the Ibaraki prefectural assembly and continued through two more rounds in April. An estimated half of all local DPJ candidates left their party affiliation off their campaign posters lest it encourage the voters to choose Anyone But Them.

During Question Time in the Diet with the other party heads that month, Mr. Kan’s blink rate was measured at more than 100 times a minute, leading one psychologist to wonder if he was suffering from panic syndrome. His rate of support fell to Hatoyama levels, New Komeito party chief Yamaguchi Natsuo warned that the Cabinet was in “a perpetual state of collapse”, and talk of a no-confidence motion began.

The government’s response to the earthquake/tsunami of 11 March has most closely resembled that of headless zombie chickens with a taste for duplicity. They’ve been lying and concealing information about the Fukushima nuclear accident. (They really don’t trust the people they’re supposed to represent, do they?) To be fair, one reason they can’t get their stories straight is that they themselves don’t know which story is straight to begin with.

The Kan Cabinet formed 20 separate government bodies to deal with the recovery, creating a situation in which the centipede’s left legs don’t know what its right legs are doing. Nevertheless, neither the Cabinet nor the 20 appendages have formulated a basic law of reconstruction for the Diet, much less submitted one, even though the opposition pledged national unity and were resigned to putting up with the prime minister for another two years.

The Kan Cabinet had passed no legislation for the recovery within the first 40 days of the event, whereas the Murayama government had passed 16 recovery-related bills in that same time after the Hyogo earthquake. The Cabinet pulled back one recovery funding measure from the Diet just before introducing it last month because DPJ party leaders had yet to give their approval.

Less than two weeks ago, Kan Naoto gave a speech at the G8 summit and pledged to commit the country to a breathtakingly expensive program of promoting solar energy use. He inserted the proposal in his speech at the last minute without telling anyone in his Cabinet. Some wonder if he cooked up the scheme over a two hour-plus lunch with Son Masayoshi, the third-wealthiest businessman in Japan. A former supporter of nuclear energy, Mr. Son has donated an enormous amount of money for disaster relief, but is also positioning himself with local governments throughout the country to promote the construction of solar power plants. (The DPJ understands crony capitalism as well as the LDP and the Americans.) They intend to build the plants on unused farmland, which might not be unused had Mr. Kan’s Democratic Party not ditched the previous LDP government’s initiatives for promoting agribusiness to institute a legal vote-buying scheme of cash subsidies to individual farm families.

Even without the earthquake, the Kan Cabinet would have submitted a record-high budget with record-high debt for the upcoming fiscal year. It would have broken the records of the previous year’s budget passed under the Hatoyama administration when Kan Naoto was Finance Minister.

Kan Naoto is widely viewed in Japan as a hysterical hothead whose primary talents are self-aggrandizement and the evasion of responsibility. He is seen as more interested in perpetuating the life of his administration and putting his name in capital letters than working for the nation’s best interests.

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George Orwell put pacifism in its place during the Second World War when he wrote that it was objectively pro-Fascist and derived from intellectual cowardice.

By their criticism of the no confidence motion, the Jellybys have demonstrated they are objectively pro-Kan, support his behavior in office over the past year, and think he’s just the man to handle the coming challenges. Rather than intellectual cowardice, however, I suspect their position is derived from intellectual laziness.

All politicians seek personal and party advantage, but it should be apparent to the casual observer who examines the record that the politicos behind the no-confidence motion believed they were part of the solution rather than part of the problem, and were acting to prevent the nation from being driven off the cliff that so frightens the overseas critics.

It should also be apparent to the casual observer that Die Drei Weisen of media, academia, and thinktankia prefer spitballing to real research and comparisons with their own environment. Anyone who says that Japanese politicians are oblivious to the problems facing their country are oblivious to the world of Japanese politics.

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This one’s for all the telescopic political philanthropists. Be careful not to choke on it too.

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Political manga for the left

READER Get a Job Son and I have been discussing an op-ed that appeared in the Japan Times this week by Michael Hoffman. The author read a dialogue between two prominent social conservatives which appeared in a weekly magazine and became concerned the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami might cause the Japanese equivalent of swastikas to come shooting out of the national orifices like shuriken. It’s titled, Extreme nationalism may emerge from the rubble of the quake.

I didn’t read the original dialogue, but the only extremism I saw in the rubble of the Japan Times article was an extreme lack of a basis for the author’s frisson of delicious fear. People have been warning about extreme nationalism emerging in Japan since 16 August 1945, but it never does — nor will it this time.

Hoffman is worried about two things in particular. First is the suggestion by the two participants that the Japanese people might look to the Tenno (emperor) for moral support during a national crisis. Were they to do so, it wouldn’t be unusual in the least; that’s what the Meiji Restoration was all about. He doesn’t explain why this would be a problem, but instead gets in a lather because some Japanese see themselves as unique. That’s a trait shared by most of the rest of the world’s nations — does Hoffman ever read the American or British or Russian or Chinese or Korean (South and North both) press? — but he doesn’t explain why that’s a problem either.

Second is his observation that the Saudis have been so impressed by Japanese post-quake behavior that a Japan boom is underway in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps there is. And?

Extreme nationalism, whether one uses the concept as understood by normal people or the one that exists in the imagination of Michael Hoffman and the rest of the staff at the Japan Times, is as likely to emerge in Japan as the music of the spheres will be audible at a Kan Naoto news conference. Pretending that it might, however, is a favorite form of masturbatory mentalism for the Adullamites with a passing interest in Japan.

Those who have a taste for political manga by and for the left know how to find this particular cartoon panel if they want to see it.

Comparison

THOUGH he has since backed off his comments, Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio tried to jawbone the creditors of Tokyo Electric Power to write off some of their debts in a scheme to keep the utility afloat. I wrote about it here last week.

The New York Times also chose to write about the same subject, which you can read here. Floyd Norris’s interpretation of the circumstances differs from mine. Then again, he left out most of the important information.

It’s fascinating what the New York Times will do to provide cover for a left-of-center government, or in this case, a failed left-of-center government.

They’ll even champion free market principles.

More fascinating still is that the free marketeers who read the Times piece believed it, even though they would take any article published by that newspaper on Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Sarah Palin (to name just a few subjects) with a sack of salt.

No, wait — it’s not fascinating. It’s astonishing.

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Stale cigars

AUTHOR and columnist Mark Steyn is well known for having brought to public attention global demographic trends and their implications for the future.

People who achieve greater prominence after becoming identified with A Big Idea, however, often fall into the trap of shaking their moneymaker at anything that passes by, no matter how remote or nonexistent the connection. That seems to be the source of the problem with Mr. Steyn’s 5 April column in the National Review on the relative absence of post-earthquake/tsunami looting in Japan. The title of the piece as it appears on his website is Earthquake Demographics, and no, I have no idea what that pairing of words is supposed to mean either.

Mr. Steyn is also well known for a sense of humor that can be devastating when used in the appropriate context. This was not an appropriate context.

‘Why is there no looting in Japan?” wondered a headline in the Daily Telegraph. So did a lot of other folks. Various answers were posited:
The Japanese are a highly civilized people — which would have been news to the 22 British watchkeepers on the island of Tarawa who were tied to trees, beheaded, set alight, and tossed in a pit less than 70 years ago.

Rather than making a point about the Japanese national character, that passage works better to demonstrate the aptness of the Henri Amiel aphorism that cleverness is serviceable for everything, but sufficient for nothing. This Pavlovian flick of the wrist was serviceable for quickly distracting the reader from a positive explanation for the lack of looting and getting down to the real business of the article: promoting the author’s idée fixe.

As a serious observation, however, it was sufficient for nothing. Are we also to consider the Germans uncivilized (or, to be fair to the original wording, less than “highly civilized”)? A few more flicks of the wrist at the keyboard or in the card catalog of a library would be both serviceable and sufficient for finding examples of similar behavior from people in every country.

For example, is this the sort of thing British lads learned on the playing fields of Eton?

The deadline for his National Review piece prevented Mr. Steyn from reading an article that describes what everyone else would consider highly civilized behavior. The headline is, “Millions of ‘lost’ cash found in tsunami-hit coastal areas”. By millions, they mean yen, which translates into several hundred thousand dollars:

Rescue workers and Japanese citizens have handed over millions of ‘lost’ cash to police, which they have found while carrying out their tasks in the mud-covered coastal areas in northeastern regions of the country that were devastated following the March 11 earthquake-cum-tsunami.

Not only would most people consider this behavior highly civilized, they would also find it exceptional — unless Americans have moved to a higher evolutionary plane since I left, and it’s now possible for someone to leave a bag unattended on a seat in a bus station waiting area while making a lavatory stop.

It is in Japan.

After that, we’re treated to a megadose of Mr. Steyn’s trademark of marbling a serious argument with wisecracks:

Most analysts overlooked the most obvious factor: Looting is a young man’s game, and the Japanese are too old. They’re the oldest society on earth. They have a world-record life expectancy — nearly 87 for women. A quarter of the population is over 65 — and an ever growing chunk is way over. In 1963, Japan had 153 centenarians; by 2010, it had 40,399; by 2020, the figure is projected to be just under 130,000. This isn’t a demographic one would expect to see hurling their walkers through the Radio Shack window and staggering out under a brand new karaoke machine only to keel over from a massive stroke before they’ve made it through the first eight bars of “I Will Survive.” Any looting in Japan’s future is likely to come from rogue platoons of the “Yurina” — the well-named robot developed a year or two back by Japan Logic Machine to help out at the old folks’ home: Yurina can change your diaper and then carry you over to the tub for an assisted bath. But I would imagine we’re only a half decade away from advanced-model Yurinas that can unionize, negotiate unsustainable retirement packages, and rampage through state legislatures menacing non-humanoid politicians opposed to collective bargaining.

Well, perhaps that’s more a case of the wisecracks being marbled with a serious argument, assuming the cracking is all that wise and the argument has anything to do with looting after an earthquake. It isn’t often one sees so many contrived laff lines dragooned into service to disguise the lack of a point other than advertising the author’s brand.

And that brings us to the real point: the entire premise of the piece is goofy. It would be unfair to call Mr. Steyn an armchair intellectual — he did travel to Iraq, armed, when few civilians would have done so — but I suspect he hasn’t been in the presence of serious looting if he thinks it’s a young man’s game.

I have.

When Martin Luther King was killed and rioting erupted in several cities in the United States, I was nearing the end of my first year of pretending to study as an undergraduate at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The impact of the event was amplified for me because Baltimore is my hometown, though my family had moved away a few years before that. Watching a riot in a distant city on television is one thing, but it’s quite another to watch it as it’s happening in the place where one grew up, while armed National Guard troops patrol in jeeps.

Being of a particularly stupid age, one of my black friends and I decided we would stroll through the East Baltimore ghetto to see for ourselves what was happening. We thought our presence together would be visible evidence to some very unhappy people that it was still possible for folks of different complexions to get along. (It was potentially more stupid for him than it was for me, as we learned that given a choice, people will threaten traitors with violence before they threaten enemies, but that’s another story.)

While walking down one street and discovering the reason tear gas got its name, we saw people streaming out of a small supermarket with all the groceries they and their clothes could carry. Just as one woman, old enough to be our grandmother, passed us going in the opposite direction, the bottom of her paper shopping bag collapsed. About two weeks’ worth of potatoes fell to the sidewalk and rolled in several directions. We stopped to help her pick them up and redistribute them among her other bags. In retrospect, that was an odd thing to have done, but it seemed natural to us at the time. Besides, our generation was among those taught that helping old ladies across the street was proper behavior.

“You aren’t going to tell the police about this, are you?”

After we assured her that we wouldn’t, she smiled, thanked us, and went on her way.

Old people will loot when the opportunity presents itself. It’s just that their judgment is more mature about prioritizing what to snatch while the snatching is good.

Perhaps it is ungenerous to be too critical — after all, when someone’s knowledge of Japan is derived what they’ve read or seen in the Anglosphere media, they won’t know much of anything about the country. Wisecracks aside, however, Mr. Steyn surely understands there are young families with children even in Japan.

His understanding might have been enhanced had he watched NHK-TV the Sunday after the column appeared on his website. The network broadcast a program about the people of the area coping with the effects of the disaster. One segment showed a married couple in their mid-30s on their daughter’s 10th birthday. They spent the day wading through the wreckage and muck looking for her body, which was still missing after a month. They had already found the body of her seven-year-old brother a week before that.

Pitching their walkers through a window to haul off a karaoke machine was not part of the birthday celebration.

There is a persistent urban legend about the American comedian Groucho Marx. After his success on stage and in Hollywood, he began a third career as the host of a radio and television quiz show called You Bet Your Life. It was a quiz program in only the most perfunctory sense, however. The real idea was to provide Marx, celebrated for his quick wit and ad-libs, a vehicle to say whatever popped into his head.

The story goes that one of his contestants was a woman with nine children. When Marx asked her why she had such a large brood, she answered that she loved her husband very much. He is supposed to have blurted, “I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth every once in a while.”

Marx insisted in several interviews that the incident never happened, but the story lives on, in part because it sounds like something he might have said on the spur of the moment. That’s too bad, because in addition to being funny, it also contains some excellent advice.

I’m sure Mark Steyn loves what his discussion of demographics has done for his career. Now it’s time he realized how foolish that stogie looks when it’s permanently stuck in his mouth.

*****
Speaking of cigars and demographics, here’s an idea from a manufacturer of the former about how to improve the latter.

Newspapers east and west

THE CHUBU SHIMBUN, a regional newspaper based in Nagoya, ran an editorial on Sunday titled The Key to Recovery is the Strength of the Private Sector. Here’s most of it in English:

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More than two weeks have passed since the Tohoku earthquake, and the rebuilding work has already begun. While government measures are of course necessary, full consideration must be given to policies that utilize the strengths of the private sector…

…Many from the private sector are contributing to the relief effort. Toyota and Panasonic have pledged JPY 300 hundred million, and the head of the clothing company Uniqlo has offered JPY one billion as an individual. Doctors, nurses, and other volunteers have gone to the stricken area. We believe that the real strength supporting the recovery will arise from these expressions of goodwill, charity, and self-sacrifice.

Unfortunately, from the perspective of the victims and private sector support, the relief and rescue activities of the Kan Naoto government have been insufficient. While it is true that the unprecedented size of the disaster has probably caused delays in gaining a clear view of the situation, we wonder if the government’s efforts to exert control have been so harsh as to squeeze out the private sector’s rescue and support activities. For some time after the earthquake, for example, expressways leading to the Tohoku region were restricted to emergency vehicles from the police, fire departments, and Self-Defense Forces. Private sector vehicles carrying food, fuel, and other supplies found it difficult to enter the area.

It’s natural that the government would be in control of the efforts, but on the other hand, it’s not possible for them to have an accurate understanding of all the circumstances. It is essential that the activities be both detailed and adaptable, and that is possible only in the affected areas and the shelters.

The Democratic Party government were the ones one to have brought up the concept of a “new public commons” to begin with. They also should have been the ones to actively support private sector NGOs shouldering the work of the public sector. Gemba Koichiro combines his portfolio as the Minister for National Policy with the special portfolio of Minister of State for the New Public Commons.

When considering full-scale recovery measures, the government should use the perspective of the New Public Commons to think long and hard to devise measures that utilize the strengths of the private sector

One idea might be a sweeping expansion of the Furusato Nozei to create the funds for recovery. Under the current system, that is a mechanism in which households can contribute to specified local governments through deductions from their residential tax and income tax. The limits on these deductions could be raised. The mechanism could also be expanded to companies paying the corporate tax. The government would thereby encourage the private sector sentiment to help the people in the affected areas. We think this would be a splendid example in accord with the concept of a New Public Commons.

LDP Head Tanigaki Sadakazu has proposed a tax increase to fund reconstruction, but it is not the work of government to conduct rebuilding enterprises using tax money. If the distribution of funds was entrusted to the private sector without government intermediation, it is likely that the money would be used effectively.

Another idea is to establish a special recovery district. This district would be defined as the stricken territory without regard for prefectural or municipal borders. Preferential measures could be devised to enable private sector investment in the district and the use of tax money and subsidies for recovery activities. Again, the private sector should take the leading role–not the government.

Measures designed to maximize human resources are also necessary. Many in the affected area are at loose ends after losing their families and their homes. If they were to be hired by NGOs or companies, the government might subsidize their salaries. This would better serve their needs than being hired by the government directly.

The work of recovery presents employment opportunities. It is important that the basic approach should be to have the private sector take the lead in performing the work and to have the government provide support.

The financial hit from the disaster will probably reach 11 figures in yen, if the amount resulting from the expected radiation leakage is included. We should not be surprised if the cost of the government’s recovery measures also reaches 11 figures. Finding the money to pay for those measures will present problems.

Some have observed the confusion attending the implementation of the rolling blackouts and suggest that a surtax be levied on electric bills, citing energy conservation as the reason. Considering the chilling effect the disaster will have on the economy, however, tax increases should be avoided for the time being.

We think it would be a better idea to have the Bank of Japan subscribe to bonds floated by the government. The BOJ might also increase the money supply by purchasing the bonds in the market. In any event, a joint effort by the government and the BOJ should send a strong message of the intent to rebuild even if extraordinary measures are taken.

The basic issue when dealing with a crisis is the reasons for a government’s existence, and what a government is capable of doing. The fundamental job of the government is to protect people’s lives and their livelihoods. Nevertheless, the government is by no means omnipotent. We should have faith in our own abilities first.

(End translation)
*****
N.B.: The Furusato Nozei idea was devised a few years ago by current LDP head Tanigaki Sadakazu and championed by Suga Yoshihide as a way for people to contribute financially to their hometowns after they’d moved to a more urban area.

*****
The basic ideas in this common-sense editorial are quite good (except the one about the BOJ), but if we bet on form, it will go over the heads of the Kan administration. The most apt explanation for that is the Japanese expression Uma no mimi ni nenbutsu—Buddhist sutras in a horse’s ear.

It as if Mr. Kan and his Cabinet are taking a page from the book of the unlamented Rahm Emmanuel, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, who said that a crisis shouldn’t be allowed to go to waste. They’ve wasted little time in bringing up again the tax increase they’ve always wanted but were unlikely to achieve before the earthquake. One of the deals they cut to gain approval from Big Business for the increase was a reduction in the corporate tax rate. Now they’re ready to take that off the table.

The Yomiuri Shimbun reported that talk was circulating of nationalizing Tokyo Electric, if only temporarily. Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio denied that it was being discussed by any organ of government, demonstrating that he is just as capable of mincing words as he is at slicing bologna. It was certainly mentioned within the Democratic Party, which controls the government. That was evidenced by Mr. Gemba’s rebuttal of Mr. Edano, saying that nationalization couldn’t be ruled out. Further, no one needed another demonstration that the left hand of the DPJ doesn’t know what its right hand is doing, but there it is.

The nationalization of utilities can never be ruled out with governments of the left, and the Kan government in particular might find it a convenient step. They’re also thinking of applying the Act for the Compensation of Nuclear Damages for the first time and assume the complete liability for damage compensation. Those who qualify would be the 220,000 people who evacuated the area near the Fukushima plant, companies whose business suffered, and farmers who can’t sell crops due to concerns—even though the Kan government created the latter concerns themselves with bans of uncontaminated vegetables. The damages are estimated to exceed JPY one trillion.

The law states that the power company should be liable for any damages from a nuclear accident, but one provision allows the government to assume that burden after large natural disasters or social upheaval.

That raises the question of why anyone should be compensated for damages resulting from a natural disaster, absent a finding of negligence. That’s what insurance is for. But that’s a question the DPJ is incapable of answering.

Unless they need an excuse to raise taxes.

It’s not as if the DPJ is entirely serious about finding ways to save money and use the savings on relief. Even after the disaster, they wanted to maintain their unaffordable child subsidy scheme that most people didn’t want to begin with (and winds up costing some households money with the elimination of the income tax deduction for children). It’s one of the few pieces of legislation they’ve managed to pass that represents a clear difference from their predecessors. The subsidy is due to expire at the end of this month. Indeed, rather than cutting back, the government wanted to increase the payments to parents of children up to age three, but the DPJ’s lack of an upper house majority prevented its passage. Most of the opposition parties wanted to eliminate it altogether, but at the last minute the Communist Party said they would vote with the government to extend it.

There you have the augend of two and the addend of two producing the sum of four as the motivation for the payments. It has nothing to do with increasing the birthrate, because that’s not possible. It has nothing to do with helping parents financially, because the income tax deduction was eliminated. Rather, it has everything to do with getting people accustomed to depending on cash payments from the government for things they should handle themselves. In other words, it’s a gateway drug program.

******
Truman Capote famously said that he lost a point of IQ for every year he spent on the American West Coast. The endemic West Coast virus has infected the United States from sea to shining sea since Capote’s time, rendering geographical location irrelevant. The same effect can now be achieved, however, by reading any New York Times article on Japan. Those confident in their intellectual rigor can use their favorite search engine to find the Times’ latest exercise in the use of distorting mirrors. It’s headlined In Deference to Crisis, a New Obsession Sweeps Japan: Self-Restraint.

Self-restraint is the term most commonly used to translate the Japanese word jishuku. This self-restraint is exercised, both individually and socially, when celebrations of any sort would be unseemly. For example, one funerary custom is to refrain from sending New Year’s cards when a close family member has died during the preceding year. People in Japan consider New Year’s to be a happy and auspicious occasion, which is evident from the o-medeto gozaimasu phrase used as a greeting during the season. Some people send cards later to explain the reason they didn’t send a New Year’s card.

That same custom is observed by society after national disasters, such as the death in 1989 of the Showa Tenno and the Kobe earthquake in 1995. That the nation would respond in the same way after the Tohoku earthquake earlier this month should have been anticipated by anyone familiar with Japan.

That leaves out the Times.

The international section of a newspaper is supposed to be a window on the world presented by people employing nation- or region-specific expertise to provide information of interest or of use to the lay reader. What the Times presents instead is an upper-middle class Weird Japan article that gives its readers another excuse for self-congratulation.

That much is obvious from the use of the words “new obsession” in the headline to describe a social custom that is probably more than a millennium old and isn’t obsessive in the least. And no, that word wasn’t chosen by some slope of a headline writer—the authors of the piece use the same term in the body of the article.

Here are some examples of the attitude:

Even in a country whose people are known for walking in lockstep…

A fact known only by those people who don’t know anything about the country.

…a national consensus on the proper code of behavior has emerged with startling speed.

Nothing startling about the speed at all—it arose naturally, as long-established customs do. The unfamiliarity of freewheeling Manhattanites with walking in lockstep seems to have rendered them incapable of recognizing a shared sense of national purpose.

…anything with the barest hint of luxury invites condemnation.

They of course offer no specific examples of the barest hints of luxury resulting in condemnation. In contrast, it would have been easy to find examples of Japanese commentators urging people not to get carried away with self-restraint—for those who read the Japanese-language print media.

For example, Tobita Hidekazu, the director of the Kanagawa Keizai Doyukai, a business group, gave a speech in which he warned that self-restraint in areas unaffected by the earthquake–most of the country–could bring the economy to a standstill. He added that this was a good opportunity to implement tax breaks for companies that choose to relocate their headquarters or factories outside of Tokyo in regional areas.

But his speech wasn’t delivered in central Tokyo, so the Times missed it.

Cosmetics and karaoke are out; bottled water and Geiger counters are in.

They could do their consumers a favor by choosing the appropriate tone–either that of the paper of record they pretend to be or that of a supermarket checkout stand tabloid. Smirking is incompatible with the former.

The almost overnight transformation is likely to continue for months, if not years.

At least this sentence is unobjectionable, including the last three words. The self-restraint won’t last years.

The hot summer ahead is expected to further strain the nation’s electrical network, leading to more disruptive blackouts that make it hard for business to be conducted the Japanese way, face to face and often into the night.

The authors seem not to have noticed that the Japanese also use e-mail these days. They also seem not to know that the western and eastern parts of the country are on different grids. That means the amount of electricity Western Japan can contribute is limited, so the strain on the network will not be nationwide.

The vast entertainment industry that greases corporate Japan, including sushi bars and cabarets, is likely to be deeply hurt.

Last weekend, my wife, two brothers-in-law, a sister-in-law, and I took the Shinkansen to another city to attend a wedding. We spent the night there, so 10 of us went out to dinner together afterward. The downtown restaurant was so crowded we had to wait for half an hour to be seated. We decided to stick it out because the wait at all the other restaurants in the building would have been just as long.

The Kyushu leg of the Shinkansen began full service one day after the earthquake. There were supposed to be ceremonies commemorating the start of service, but they were cancelled. The Shinkansen service itself began as scheduled. That is typical of what self-restraint means in these circumstances.

Japan has gone through spasms of self-control before…

Were the editors on a coffee break, or is contorted prose and a superior attitude part of the Times stylebook?

The authors mention that politicians running in the upcoming gubernatorial election for the Tokyo Metro District have toned down their campaigning. They quote only Higashikokubaru Hideo, however, and identify him as a “politician” and “former comedian” without citing his successful term as governor of Miyazaki Prefecture. Conforming to the guidelines of the Weird Japan style manual, they also present examples of politicians who will not exercise self-restraint in the election—the Communist Party, which few people pay attention to, and a vanity candidate.

And they think the Japanese are insular?

*****
While the Chubun Shimbun editorial is full of good suggestions, and the New York Times article is just full of it, a recent Dong-a Ilbo editorial is chock full of the deep-space eccentric wackiness that characterizes much of the South Korean approach to the Takeshima issue. In baseball terms, you might say it’s the face of the franchise.

The Japanese government recently restated its claim to the islets, which the South Koreans seized by force more than 50 years ago. That was all it took for the newspaper to break out in a truther/birther/Heaven’s Gate rash.

The Dong-a finds it mighty suspicious that the Japanese bring up their claims anywhere from four days to one month after one of several North Korean outrages, and “soon after” the Lee Myung-bak administration was inaugurated and anti-American protests about beef imports evolved into anti-government protests. It hasn’t occurred to them how easy it would be for any event to occur in temporal proximity to the most recent unanswered Pyeongyang provocation or a South Korean street demonstration. They don’t explain what they think the point of the timing would be, or what they think the Japanese might gain from it. They’re just sayin’.

There are other possibilities than the figment of Japanese neo-colonialism in the Joseon imagination, however. One might be that the default state of mind about anything to do with Japan in the Korean media is semi-hysteria. Another is that some South Koreans share a personality quirk with the fictional Basil Fawlty, who thought an order for shrimp cocktail from a German patron in his dining room was a reference to the Second World War.

If it is true, as some South Koreans suggest, that the Japanese restatement of the claim puts a damper on the former country’s sympathy following the earthquake, then that sympathy was only ankle deep to begin with.

*****
The Chinese in Tokyo also succumbed to the vapors. The following photo was taken in Narita Airport on the 18th. The lines at the Chinese airline company counters were reported to have been 400 meters long.

****
Linkage

Speaking of hysteria, here’s a link to an article about how the problems at the Fukushima reactor have caused frothing at the mind in Europe.

And to close on a more realistic note, here’s a link to an article that offers six reasons why Fukushima is not Chernobyl.

Thanks to Get A Job Son for the link to the Times article.
*****
Talking loud and sayin’ nothing in New York, Seoul, Nagata-cho…and Shinjuku too.

Self-references and side glances

The greatest cause for optimism about Japan is that it’s full of Japanese.
- Dennis Mangan

THE AMERICANS say that the sport of baseball doesn’t develop character, it reveals it. After 11 March, we now know that natural disasters do the same. They also tend to bring out the self-referential in people.

Reader TonyGoalder (AKA Tony) sends in a BBC article about the Chinese response to the earthquake in New Zealand in February. Of the 166 people who were killed, 60 were foreign students (including some Japanese). The article explains:

“The families of visitors killed in New Zealand are eligible for a one-off funeral grant of up to NZ$4,500 (£2,071;$3,327) and a one-off survival grant of $4,700 (£2,163;$3,473) for a spouse and $2,351 (£1,082; $1,737) per child or dependent.”

That’s a generous policy; most countries wouldn’t consider themselves liable at all. But that’s still not enough for China. Because seven Chinese students also died:

“Both the Chinese ambassador Xu Jianguo and embassy officials were reported by Radio New Zealand to have asked for higher compensation payments because the one-child policy made China unique.

“”You can expect how lonely, how desperate they are, not only losing loved ones, but losing almost entirely their source of economic assistance after retirement,” embassy official Cheng Lee said.

“Higher payments would be “a demonstration of the importance the New Zealand government attaches to the Chinese international” students, he added.”

Opposition Labor Party leader Phil Goff politely disagreed:

“”I’m sorry, you can’t base your policy on that, there may be many students here that are only children in their families whether they be Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Filipino,” Mr Goff said.”

Mr. Goff must live on a remote island somewhere. Doesn’t he realize that the Chinese are the flower in the center of the world? The Japanese know I’m not exaggerating. The combination of “center” and “flower” are exactly the characters used to write the adjectival form of “Chinese”, which has been borrowed for use in Japanese in the phrase chuka ryori, or Chinese cuisine.

At least the New Zealanders seem to have been diplomatic enough to refrain from telling the Chinese diplomat that they aren’t responsible for the Chinese one-child policy.

*****
Less loathsome, but just as self-involved, is the decision American columnist Mark Steyn made about his website content this week. Mr. Steyn often revisits his past columns, a practice that anyone who writes for an audience on the Internet will understand. But here’s the lede for his latest bit of recycling:

“In Japan, the tsunami has wreaked death and devastation, and what looks (so far) like a nuclear near-miss. What comes next is the politics.”

Not quite yet in Japan. There’s still some tidying up to do. Mr. Steyn is always worth reading, but he writes little about this country and probably knows even less. What was he was getting at? Read the next sentence:

“Here’s what I had to say in the Telegraph after the last front-page tsunami swept across the Indian Ocean just after Christmas 2004:”

Here’s part of what he had to say:

“But the waters recede and the familiar contours of the political landscape re-emerge – in this case, the need to fit everything to the Great Universal Theory of the age, that whatever happens, the real issue is the rottenness of America.”

For Americans, apparently, everything provides a reason to talk about themselves, including the long-dreaded arrival of The Big One on the other side of the world. He does make some excellent points in the article, but that was more than six years ago. It would have been more seemly had he run one of his Song of the Week columns instead.

*****
The events of the past five days have made some Japanese self-referential too. Reader 21st Century Schizoid Man (a Japanese guy who isn’t schizoid at all) sent in a blog post in Japanese by Matsuoka Yuki. Mr. Matsuoka is the president of a company offering web services and English language instruction. Here it is in English:

We’ll rebuild without a sound

I’m often asked where I’m from when I travel. In the past, I would hesitate to answer clearly that I’m Japanese, because it would sharply increase the possibility that I’d be gouged or deceived by local merchants.

But I’ve visited more than 30 countries and had the opportunity to work with the people of many of them. As a result, I’ve come to think that the Japanese might be the most exceptional ethnic group in the world. It’s not due to patriotism, but rather to a simple comparison. That’s why I always clearly answer that I’m Japanese when I’m asked that question now.

Many people have died in the Tohoku earthquake, but at the same time many people throughout the world have praised the Japanese for their behavior. One reason cited for that behavior is that we always envision the worst-case scenario, and that we are educated to do so. We always envision what can happen in an earthquake, a tsunami, or a fire, and are not negligent in our preparations. There aren’t many countries that prepare for disasters by building 10-meter-high dykes.

The same can be applied to work. When working with people from other countries, I’ve noticed that if I ask them to do something requiring an effort of 10, the most I’ll get is 5 or 6. They won’t perform unless I give them detailed instructions. Many don’t even try to meet deadlines.

Japanese people are capable of performing at a level of 10 even if they are given instructions on the level of 1. They always have the worst-case scenario in mind, and are not negligent in giving their best effort to deal with that scenario. They conduct their work as objectively as possible, and the range of their behavior does not come close to encompassing egocentrism. They will bend over backwards to meet a deadline.

The worst-case scenario infrequently comes to pass in other countries, but that isn’t true for Japan. We were defeated in the war, and became the first country to have atomic weapons used against us—not once, but twice. Typhoons and earthquakes are always a concern. The Kobe and Niigata earthquakes are fresh in our memories.

For Japanese, the worst-case scenario is always a familiar one.

Every time it occurs, however, we recover brilliantly. Intending to do all that we can do, we rebuild—without making a sound, and without causing a commotion.

Prime Minister Kan gives speeches with the expression of a beaten man and demonstrates no leadership whatsoever. But when has a Japanese prime minister ever demonstrated leadership?

We are a people who haven’t relied on others, but have made it this far through our own individual efforts. We integrate those efforts to make outstanding industrial products. We’ve also developed a sense of service that wouldn’t be possible anywhere else.

As always, the government has lost the plot, and the mass media uses emotional broadcasts to arouse a sense of crisis in Japan. But now we have Twitter, which we use to share information and encourage each other, and we’re connected to the world with Facebook.

We will recover brilliantly without making a sound–so quickly the world will be astonished.

(End translation)

Does Mr. Matsuoka strike you as arrogant and self-centered? Perhaps he is.

He’s also right.

Side Glances

Let’s get this one out of the way now. People who should know better will subject us to a lot of glop in the coming months and years. One who really should know better–and should have known since his undergraduate days–is Larry Summers, the former Harvard University President, the former Director of Obama’s National Economic Council, the former Chief Economist at the World Bank, and the former Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton.

Mr. Summers offered an idea that was identified as the “broken window fallacy” more than 150 years ago by Frederic Bastiat. Said the economist:

“(The disaster will) add complexity to Japan’s challenge of economic recovery. It may lead to some temporary increments ironically to GDP as a process of rebuilding takes place. In the wake of the earlier Kobe earthquake Japan actually gained some economic strength.”

Several people noticed immediately. David Theroux quotes Ryan Young’s rebuttal:

“If this were really the case, then the best possible way to boost Japan’s economy would be to level the entire country. Every building should be destroyed, brick by brick. The number of jobs that policy would create would dwarf any tsunami stimulus.”

Mr. Theroux calls it Keynesian nonsense and quotes Mr. Ryan further:

“Here’s why: if the tsunami had never happened, people would still have all the buildings and cars that they had in the first place. They would be able to spend their money on other, additional goods that they want.”

There’s a lot more at that post that’s worth reading too.

Another one we should get out of the way quickly is the issue of price gouging after natural disasters. I haven’t seen any reports of that occurring in Japan, and it may not occur, but it’s always possible. Some people find this so offensive they pass laws preventing it. This is one of many explanations of why that’s a bad idea, and can be counterproductive. There are several reasons:

“Price gouging legislation, like any price cap, reduces the ability of the market to send signals on how to reallocate resources. Without higher prices, potential suppliers do not have an extra incentive to increase supplies to an affected area, or to stockpile additional supplies in case they are needed.”

And:

“Without the price increase, fewer items will be supplied, and the shortage will be worse during the next blackout. On the demand side, higher prices send a signal for consumers to use less….if prices increase the people at the head of the line have an incentive not to buy the second, third or fourth unit, which allows a greater number of people to meet some of their resource needs.”

And one that should be common sense:

“(I)f prices are allowed to fluctuate, the first entrepreneurs to bring the needed supplies in will be able to charge very high prices, which will distribute those goods to the ones that need them most. As other entrepreneurs see the potential for profit they will bring additional goods in and this competition will drive the price down until the price stabilizes and nearly everyone can purchase the goods at a cost they are willing to pay.”

*****
The popular reaction to the earthquake/tsunami caused the always worthwhile David Warren to lament the deluge of absurdity and triviality that is Twitter. He recalls how easy it was to ignore the print media, and concludes:

“There were tabloids for people who did not “need to know,” but only to be distracted. Alas that, and only that, is expanding, in our seven-billion channel universe.”

*****
Reader Slim assures us that there were reams of sober and factual news coverage by responsible members of the media in the West. That must not include the New York Times. Their slide show is headlined, “Paralysis Across Japan”. No, it’s an obstruction across one part of Japan. Where I live, and most other places, people don’t have the palsy. They’re moving around like they always do.

It also doesn’t include the Irish Times, which headlined an article, “Japan’s belief that technology could tame nature is shaken”. True, it’s not the first time David McNeill has presented the consumers of his journalism with figments of his imagination, but anyone who spends more than three weeks in this country should know that, if anything, Japan’s belief is just the opposite. He probably does too, but I guess you gotta write what your editors want you to write. Shame he enjoys it so.

Then there’s the headline writer of the Times Colonist, a Canadian newspaper. The paper ran an article by Reuters for the hanky brigade about how tough things are now for many people, but the headline writer was gripped by a seizure of fantasy and wrote, “Desperation and Panic Grip Japan after Massive Quake”.

Desperation and panic probably gripped the considerably fewer than 127 million people who thought their lives were ending, but not after they survived. Again, if anything, the truth lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction. If anyone is desperate and panicky, it’s the stockholders of newspapers looking over the latest quarterly report.

Jay Alabaster of the AP combined with the headline writer of the Sacramento Bee to present a gruesome little piece headlined, “Tsunami-Ravaged Hospitals Leave the Sick in Misery”. Neither the hospitals nor the people working there, of course, are doing anything of the sort. The limited amount of supplies that have reached some areas are being provided to shelters first. The article is an exceptional piece of crap that luxuriates in masturbatory emotionalism. Here’s how it starts:

“Within the dark and fetid wards of the Senen General Hospital, some 120 patients lie in their beds or slumped in wheelchairs, moaning incoherently.

“”There is no food!” cries an old man in a blue gown, to no one in particular.

“Last week’s powerful earthquake and tsunami heaped untold new misery on those already suffering – thousands of elderly, infirm and sick people in hospitals that were laid to waste by the violent shaking and the walls of water that followed.”

Readers who can hold their noses through the dark and fetid swamp of prose will find that the hospital is without power and running water, and the people who work there are doing the best they can. I hope Alabaster helped them out and brought along plenty of food and water when he came to interview them.

Simon Tisdall emits a massive dose of radioactive tedium in the Guardian in an article headlined, “Japan needs leadership, but can Naoto Kan deliver?” Mr. Matsuoka’s blog post makes clear that Japan does not need political “leadership” in this situation, but that should have been obvious to a correspondent in Japan anyway. Putting aside the reality that in the Japanese system, the chief cabinet secretary is the person who most frequently appears before the public, Mr. Kan can’t deliver, and no one expects him to. (And he’s not; he’s even more punch-drunk than usual.) Here’s one sentence:

“Perceptions of Kan’s performance over the coming days will undoubtedly affect Japan’s future political course.”

Tisdall’s trunk and limbs might be in Japan, but the part of his body above the collarbone isn’t. The perceptions of Kan’s performance were set in cement months ago. The piece is so disjointed and incoherent it’s one of the most skimmable pieces of journalism I’ve ever encountered, as well as one of the most painful whenever the eyes happen to alight on a random sentence. Mine had the misfortune to fall on these:

“North Korea’s alarming military stunts, which almost provoked a war with South Korea last year, are another unwelcome reminder of Japan’s shaky geostrategic position. Maybe Beijing and Pyongyang will offer earthquake help: it would be a positive if unexpected gesture.”

It takes real talent to follow a non sequitur in one sentence with nonsensical filler passing as geostrategic analysis in the next. How useful that talent is, I don’t know, but it is a gift.

His article does raise a question, however. Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, think of themselves as autonomous, free-thinking units, and the Japanese as rabbit hutch-dwelling drones too timid to upset group harmony by acting on their own. Why then is it that the Westerners think a disaster demands a secular sermon from the political leader of the moment to heal the wounds and stop the waters from rising, while the Japanese couldn’t give a flying furoshiki what the man in the Kantei says and get on with the work that has to be done?

Those readers who wish to subject themselves to the complete versions of these sober exercises in factual journalism have enough clues to access them through the search engine of their choice.

******
Japanese readers have been the first to point out that we shouldn’t expect all of them to be saints. Reader Get A Job Son (haven’t you gotten a job yet?) offers a short Japanese language piece from NHK about looting in Miyagi. The local police say that in the 72 hours after the earthquake, there were 40 incidences of theft, mostly food from closed shops. The value of the losses was JPY 1.6 million (just under $US 20,000), but one incident alone accounted for roughly JPY one million of that total. That’s not sainthood, but it’s not perdition either. Most countries would be glad to use that as an excuse to self-reference their wonderfulness.

People have been remarkably level-headed and composed, but there are always exceptions. Wouldn’t you know that one of them would be Tokyo Metro Gov. Ishihara Shintaro?

“Japanese politics is tainted with egoism and populism. We need to use tsunami to wipe out egoism, which has rusted onto the mentality of Japanese over a long period of time…I think (the disaster) is tembatsu (divine punishment), although I feel sorry for disaster victims.”

He wound up apologizing after his remarks irritated Miyagi Gov. Murai Yoshihiro. What he really should do is apologize to the people of Tokyo for running for a fourth term in the election next month.

*****
He doesn’t say whether it’s tenbatsu, but Indian astrologer Lachhman Das Madan thinks the worst is yet to come:

“The period ending 2nd June, 2011 is horrible and they must take effective measures to protect themselves from severe troubles like escalation of military operations, more ferocious weather and nature including volcanic eruption. Setback to Govt and Parliament, eruption of violence, loss of huge property and loss of life is feared. Unexpected types of diseases and epidemics are feared. Cases of suicide are also likely to be reported…The periods around April and May, 2011 are more horrible….. The year 2011 is highly ominous and the people should remain ready to meet the unexpected challenges which may develop in this year.”

Maybe there’ll also be frogs, birds, and swastikas falling from the sky.

******
James Delingpole in The Telegraph allows Roddy Cambell a guest post to put anti-nuclear hysteria in perspective. Fukushima is unlikely to be as bad as Chernobyl–and that wasn’t as bad as you think it was. Mr. Cambell covers deaths up to 2005, potential deaths, cancer victims, and birth defects. He concludes:

“(T)he health and environmental impacts of Chernobyl, while not a Good Thing, are far less bad than people thought and indeed still think. That’s what the reports say. And the impacts derive from a really bad disaster; one might exaggerate and say it’s difficult to think of how a civil nuclear disaster could be worse. And you have to compare nuclear impacts over decades to the deaths, illnesses and environmental impacts caused by other energy generating businesses, which are the natural comparatives – coal mining, oil drilling, gas. So let’s not exaggerate. Stick to nuclear. Overall it is clearly a Good Thing.”

*****
Have no fear for atomic energy
Cause none of them can stop the time.

Good news, bad news, and no news at all

HERE’S SOME good news: More South Koreans are ignoring their jingoist news media and taking the initiative to forge positive ties with Japan. The latest example is the Daejeon Development Research Institute, which signed a research exchange agreement with the Fukuoka Asia Urban Research Center in January. That’s not news for the Fukuoka center, however—it’s their third agreement with an institution from another country. Both cities are located on high-speed rail lines, and the institute in Daegeon wants to conduct joint studies of the use of high-speed rail to promote industry and urban development.

Speaking of high-speed rail, the Kyushu leg of the Shinkansen will be fully operational in a fortnight, and the Kyushuans are getting ready for an influx of tourists from both South Korea and China. Folks everywhere like the hot springs and the potential for year-round golf. The Nishinippon Shimbun of Fukuoka and the Tokyo Chizu Publishing Co. recently published a guidebook of Kyushu tourist destinations in Korean and Chinese for distribution at local airports and hotels throughout the region and at travel agencies overseas. The first print run was 100,000 copies each.

To make sure that those guidebooks get read, the mayors of Fukuoka City, Kagoshima City, and Kumamoto City visited Seoul last month to talk up their cities as tourist destinations. The three mayors spoke at a conference at which about 100 people in the Seoul travel industry attended.

*****
Here’s more good news, if the premise is correct: Eamonn Fingleton uses his own site and borrows James Fallows’s blog space to claim that the conventional wisdom of Japan’s lost decades is a myth and to challenge 10 public intellectuals pushing the stagnant Japan line to debate that subject. While Mr. Fingleton’s posts offer a couple of dubious assertions to go with some excellent points, it’s always good news to see someone challenge conventional wisdom, especially since wisdom is seldom present when the Western bien pensants hold forth on Japan.

What he says that people need to know:

* “(M)uch of what is reported (about Japan) in America’s major newspapers — and even more so on American television — is appalling.”

Repeat play city! If what you know about Japan you learned from the English-language media, then everything you know is wrong.

* “Japan’s surplus is up more than five-fold since 1990, and the Japanese yen has actually boasted the strongest rise of any major currency in the last two decades.”

* “Since the 1980s…the Japanese people have enjoyed one of the biggest improvements in living standards of any major First World nation in the interim.”

* “A story of extraordinary progress by Japanese manufacturing”:

“The reason you don’t hear much about Japanese manufacturers these days is that the best of them have moved from making consumer goods to concentrate on so-called producers’ goods — items that though invisible to the consumer happen to be critical to the world economy. Such goods include the highly miniaturized components, advanced materials, and super-precise machines that less sophisticated nations such as China need to make final consumer goods. The label on everything from cell phones to laptop computers may say “Made in China” but actually, via producers’ goods, highly capital-intensive and knowhow-intensive manufacturers in Japan have quietly done much of the most technologically demanding work.

“America’s current account deficit multiplied five-fold in the 20 years to 2010 and the reason in large measure is because American corporations have exited the producers’ goods business.”

He doesn’t mention that Americans have also abandoned the robotics sector, while the Japanese are one of the world’s leaders, if not the world’s leader in that industry. The only thing most Americans know about Japan and robots is that the Japanese love ‘em and Japanese robot stories provide snicker filler for their newspapers and blogs.

Mr. Fingleton shouldn’t be holding his breath waiting for the Japan hands to accept the challenge of a debate. For one thing, they’re Somebodies and he’s not. For another, having to defend themselves in a debate would expose their ignorance on the subject.

Still, give the man credit for treating them with deference. For example, on his own site he writes:

“I appeal to you — in the interests…of your own reputation for intellectual honesty…”

One of the men he’s calling out is Paul Krugman. The suggestion that Krugman retains any intellectual honesty should result in thick mucous dripping from computer monitors worldwide after the explosion of derisive snorts.

Mr. Fingleton’s post has begotten more good news. Economics professor Mark Perry has two posts with charts on his blog. In one, he notes:

“(W)ith economic growth in Germany and Italy and many other European countries that is comparable to Japan’s growth, we never hear about the “lost decades” in Germany or Italy or the U.K.”

In the other, he writes:

“Compared to 1980, Japan’s real GDP per capita in 2010 was nearly 70% higher, vs. a 66% increase for US real GDP per capita over the last 30 years. Japan had higher economic growth than the U.S. during the 1980s, slightly lower growth during the 1990s, about the same growth during the 2000s, and slightly higher overall growth during the entire 30-year period from 1980 to 2010.”

And here’s some late-breaking good news from the United States:

Consumer Reports has named Honda Motor Co., Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. (Subaru) and Toyota Motors Corp. as the best all-around automakers for the third year in a row in its annual auto issue…Chrysler Group LLC had the worst ranking. Mercedes-Benz, BMW and General Motors were also near the bottom…Toyota, which has dealt with massive safety recalls, fared well in the magazine’s top picks for 2011 across 10 different vehicle segments. Toyota had the most with three picks (the RAV4 small sport utility vehicle, Sienna minivan and Prius hybrid).

Chrysler and GM at the bottom, and Toyota near the top? If you can’t lick ‘em, slime ‘em in the media and sit on government reports absolving them of any blame.

Be that as it may, Mr. Fingleton should be careful about treading on thin ice himself. First, he tends to talk about “Japan” as if it were a monolithic entity. While that’s unavoidable to a certain extent, it only works if one is discussing international diplomacy. In every other context, however, this thing people call “Japan” doesn’t exist. That’s too facile a formulation for the breadth of diversity on these islands, and someone who’s been here as long as he has should know that.

More serious, however is his suggestion that the Japanese government is deliberately underestimating national economic growth to avoid foreign retribution for their trade surpluses. Worse, he offers no concrete evidence—it’s just a feeling he has.

If his assertion is true, it means that everyone in the Japanese government and media are party to history’s largest conspiratorial deception. Not only have they fooled overseas governments—whose experts can analyze economic and production statistics as well as Prof. Perry—they’ve also fooled the rest of the Japanese nation. The entire range of public debate among government officials, the political class, and the commentariat inside media and out is based on the premise of lost decades of low growth. His idea contains echoes of the Western conspiracists of the 80s and 90s who warned that the samurai Japanese businessmen were going to wreak economic revenge on the world for having been defeated in the war.

*****
Speaking of what passes for reporting on Japan and East Asia, Michael Turton at The View from Taiwan takes the AFP news agency to task for its “ethnocentric crap”.

“Superstition Still Widespread Across High-tech Asia, AFP reported today in article appearing in the Taipei Times. This tiresome feature reporting has been around ever since westerners first reported on Asia”:

(Quoting the article)
The services of witch doctors remain popular in multicultural Malaysia, while in hi-tech Japan, Shinto priests hold purification rites for new bullet trains and many entrepreneurs are said to seek the advice of palm readers and star gazers.

“Why is this a load of ethnocentric crap? Because you will never ever see a piece from AFP that writes about the west in a vein similar to the paragraph above:

The services of Christian faith healers remain popular in multicultural America, while in hi-tech Britain, Anglican priests bless new stadiums and many movie stars and politicians in both countries are said to seek the advice of astrologers.”

Mr. Turton’s observation is on the mark, but I’ll take it one step further. The F in AFP stands for France, where the news agency is headquartered. We’ll never see the AFP, or any other Western news outlet for that matter, write with such casual disparagement about the beliefs of the Muslims in that country, including the Shari’a punishments for theft, homosexuality, and (for the victim and not the offenders) for rape. Those media outlets won’t even say that Muslims are responsible for what has become an annual automotive auto-da-fe in France. They’ll only go so far as to call the perpetrators “youths”.

*****
Now for the bad news—Foreign Minister Maehara Seiji held forth in Tokyo for some institutional investors, and everything that came out of his mouth should have stayed inside it.

According to the Kyodo report:

“Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara vowed Monday that Japan will carry out fundamental agricultural reforms modeled after the European system of direct payments to farmers to help strengthen the local farm sector’s competitiveness and promote trade liberalization.”

What is this use of the word “reform” to describe pork (or a wealth redistribution scheme) for farmers? Were he serious about improving competitiveness and promoting trade liberalization, he would instead encourage agribusiness to replace the country’s dwindling number of people who farm exclusively for a living.

But then he couldn’t do that—when the LDP took a step in that direction with the Koizumi/Abe reforms, Mr. Maehara’s DPJ used as an election weapon the excessive representation given to rural areas in the Diet by promising to repeal those measures and provide subsidies to individual farming households instead.

What will he propose next—subsidies for every exporting manufacturer in the country to facilitate the import of competing overseas products?

“He pointed out that the direct payment system in the 27-nation regional bloc has “succeeded in achieving two goals at once: bringing benefits to the consumer by reducing high tariffs and making producers more competitive.””

Ben Franklin should have added a third certainty in life to go with death and taxes—a perpetual stream of drivel from politicos. Farm subsidies make farmers less competitive, not more. That system allows farmers to stay in business, but at the cost of reducing the purchasing power of every non-farming taxpayer, which is most of us. Imported agricultural products may be cheaper, but lavishing public funds on farmers means the city consumers will be able to buy fewer of them. As we’ve seen before, the companies in Japan who would operate agribusinesses believe they can be competitive internationally.

“Maehara said Japan needs to study accepting more foreign nurses and caregivers under free trade agreements.

More than a thousand Indonesian and Filipino nurses and caregivers have come to Japan since 2008 under bilateral FTAs, but only a few of them have passed the Japanese national qualification examinations to continue working beyond the initially set length of stay.”

Mr. Maehara seems to think Japan needs healthcare personnel incapable of effective communication with either physicians or the patients in their care, in places where the patients’ lives or quality of life are at stake.

As for a nursing shortage, that isn’t a problem in “Japan”, but rather in a few big cities in Japan. That’s the claim of my family physician, who should know. He’s the chairman of the prefectural medical association this year.

If Mr. Maehara is so concerned about a nursing shortage in the cities and so anxious to use public funds to fix it, he might take a hint from the ROTC program in the United States. The American government foots the bill for the university education of qualified high school students if they spend four years as a military officer after graduation.

Other than a lack of common sense, what’s to prevent the Japanese government from offering free rides to Japanese high school graduates for nursing school on the condition that they work for a certain number of years in medical institutions after finishing school? Everybody wins, and no one has to worry about the language barrier causing a medical accident.

The worst part of the news story is the implication that Mr. Maehara is presenting himself as a future prime minister. That won’t be news to the Japanese: He’s a failed former president of the DPJ, and the failed former Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito is thought to be grooming him for the job to succeed the failed Prime Minister Kan Naoto. If the party continues to mimic the worst aspects of the old LDP without its redeeming qualities and has Mr. Maehara replace Mr. Kan without an election, it would represent another failure of the DPJ to bring about the change in the conduct of politics they promised.

It also isn’t news that a political party which is doing its damndest to turn itself into a fictional entity would install another lightweight in the Kantei doomed to failure as prime minister.

*****
More bad news: Japan’s lower house passed the FY 2011 budget this morning, albeit with a few defections from the ruling party. That makes two years in power, two record-high budgets for the DPJ.

What happened to all those journos who kept telling us that Mr. Kan was a “fiscal hawk”?

Speaking of Mr. Kan, it will be no news to people who pay attention that he loosed on the public yet another absurdity that calls into question his daytime sobriety. This time he said he’d always doubted the feasibility of what passes for his party’s signature accomplishment—the removal of tax deductions for families with children from 0-15 and their replacement with direct cash subsidies from the government.

After all, a month or so ago he claimed that the adoption of the same policy was “epochal”. A year or so ago, Mr. Fiscal Hawk argued in the Diet as Finance Minister for the inclusion of that budget buster—JPY 5.5 trillion this year alone–in what was then Japan’s highest-ever budget. It was obvious to everyone they couldn’t find the money to pay for it when they stole the idea from New Komeito, and that finally seems to have dawned on even them. DPJ Secretary-General Okada Katsuya on the 28th said the allowance, which expires at the end of the current fiscal year, wasn’t permanent, and that the party might give it up altogether.

Now that’s good news.

*****
Finally, here’s the best news of all: I’ve gotten a handle on a post that I’ve been working on for two weeks. Look for it soon!

*****
This might be good news for beginning and intermediate students of Japanese. I received a note asking that I bring to your attention a website presenting Japanese-language study aids, as well as other observations. Here it is.

*****
There’s no better way to celebrate the circulation of all this good news than by putting the party in the hands of Chico Trujillo, Mr. Popular Music of Chile. Who knew that horn band cumbia and surf guitar would go together as well as green tea and ice cream? Chico knew!

And just wait until you see the man dance!

Third rate

It’s not your business model that sucks. It’s you that sucks.
- Andrew Breitbart, addressing the media covering a political meeting

READER Aceface sent a link to an article from the February issue of Factia Online. The title, roughly translated, is The Tokyo Bureaus of the Overseas Media: A lineup of third raters. Here it is in English. Be advised that this is a translation for the purpose of providing information. Factia is solely responsible for the accuracy of the content.

*****
To hear the Tokyo correspondents of the overseas media tell it, there is no more degraded journalism than that produced by the Japanese media. But what about those reporters from the overseas media? As the documents that surfaced in Wikileaks demonstrate, they’ve given up their function of monitoring authority. The extent to which they’ve all become mere carrier pigeons is just a matter of degree.

Disbelief rippled through Nintendo’s investor relations office at about 2:30 on the afternoon of 29 September last year. The company’s stock, which had firmed slightly at around JPY 24,500, suddenly jumped to near JPY 25,000, then plunged again just before the close of trading.

The reason for the volatility was a report from the American news agency Bloomberg that the company’s Nintendo 3DS, their newest handheld gaming device and a product critical for their earnings recovery, would go on sale for JPY 18,000 on 28 October. The Nintendo stock reacted, as it had been expected the new game would not be ready in time for the yearend season.

Nintendo executives denied the story at a Makuhari game show the same day. Investors started selling, and as if it were on a roller coaster, the price fell to nearly JPY 23,000.

The villain was a group of Bloomberg reporters assigned to breaking stories called the Speed Team. The leader of this team filed the report after mistaking the existing DS package with Super Mario and others for Nintendo’s 3DS.

The Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission launched an investigation, and Bloomberg deleted the erroneous article with the author’s byline. They then published an article under a different byline stating that Nintendo had delayed the sale of the 3DS, and hung it on the peg of Nintendo’s downgrade of their results forecast announced after the Tokyo Stock Exchange closed.

Bloomberg did it again a week later, on 6 October. They reported that the Financial Services Agency was considering more rigorous capital requirements for megabanks in Japan only. That touched off a plunge not only in bank stocks, but the market as a whole. The Financial Services Agency, however, denied the story. What happened was that the Bloomberg reporter had a quick, casual conversation with a Diet member, became too eager for a scoop, and got carried away.

It’s the same story with the New York Times, whose reporters don’t even understand the fundamentals. A female reporter in their Tokyo bureau who covered last year’s story on the Toyota recall became angry at an out of order coffee machine in Toyota headquarters and tweeted “Toyota sucks”. That’s the behavior of a bratty delinquent.

The Tokyo bureau of the Wall Street Journal is criticized for what appears to be conflicts of interest. They have a rule that reporters cannot cover organizations at which a spouse or other close relative is employed. The husbands of two of the bureau’s female reporters are executives at Morgan Stanley, a leading American financial services company. The husband of a deputy bureau chief is a banker in Hong Kong. The husband of another is the chief administrative officer of the Tokyo branch of Morgan Stanley. She writes stories on finance, and Morgan Stanley’s competitors complain there’s no guarantee her articles will be impartial.

The problems are not exclusively those of American-affiliated outlets. A Japan-U.S. financial symposium was held last October in Hakone with financial experts from both countries. What puzzled participants was that a reporter for The Economist, who was rumored to have left the company, attended with name cards identifying that reporter as a special business and financial correspondent for the magazine. A different Economist reporter with the same title was in Tokyo at the time. Those in attendance who were interviewed wondered which one was legitimate.

Also attending was a female reporter whose father is a well-known economist. Known as a troublemaker who sued The Economist, she claimed the company was at fault because she developed a neurosis as a result of a dispute with the magazine’s editorial board. The reporter is said to be on sabbatical, but the magazine allows her to walk around with the company’s name cards after leaving their employ, just to cover up the stench.

The Financial Times, another British publication, is no better. They’re known for having been critical of Goldman Sachs, but when Goldman purchased advertising for a book review event, the criticism was suddenly softened. Not a sound is heard from their former bureau chief, who wrote a book about the bankruptcy of the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan.

The Japanese media is second rate? They’re the ones who are intolerable prigs with preconceived notions and vanilla coverage. How long do they think what they really are will remain hidden? The overseas media, and the reporters at their Tokyo bureaus in particular, are unquestionably third rate. They’re the ones who suck.

(end translation)
*****
Chin-don is my preference for infotainment delivered by a vehicle for advertising. Here’s the face-off for the championship in last year’s national chin-don competition in Toyama. They’re pretending to advertise a stomach remedy. The second team won.

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Now they tell us

THIS REPORT from the New York Times tells us something we knew before they printed the story: There were no design flaws in Toyota automobiles despite claims a few had accelerated for no reason at all.

After dissecting Toyota’s engine control software and bathing its microchips in every type of radiation engineers could think of, federal investigators found no evidence that the company’s cars are susceptible to sudden acceleration from electronic failures, the government said Tuesday.

Rough justice was done by having Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood deliver the verdict:

“As a former member of Congress, I thought we should listen to these members,” said Mr. LaHood, who represented a district in Illinois until President Obama named him transportation secretary. Speaking of his former colleagues, he said, “I hope they get the message today.”

In claiming victory, though, Mr. LaHood was far different in his tone toward Toyota than he was last year when news of the acceleration problems broke. At one point, during a Congressional hearing, Mr. LaHood said that owners of recalled Toyotas should stop driving the vehicles if they were having a problem and take them back to the dealers, though he quickly backtracked.

It took the government quite a while to pull its thumb out and release the report, however. As the site Overlawyered points out, people suspected last summer that the Obama administration was sitting on the information that would have exonerated Toyota. Overlawyered also sticks its fork into the government’s media mouthpiece. Last July they wrote:

An editorial today in the New York Times — a newspaper that almost comically underplayed the revelations earlier this month about the NHTSA probe’s pro-Toyota results — flatly asserts that the Japanese automaker’s vehicles suffer “persistent problems of uncontrolled acceleration,” and demands that the sweeping new legislation “be passed into law without delay.” It’s almost as if they are afraid of what might happen if lawmakers pause to take a closer look.

Why was this predictable? We had a choice of taking the word of the Obama government, which had just taken de facto control of General Motors, and which was backed by its enablers in the dinosaur wing of the American mass media, or taking the word of Toyota engineers. Spotting politicized science doesn’t require a lot of thought, especially considering the sources.

As for linking to the New York Times and contributing to their hit count, I can only say, shikata ga nai.

UPDATE:
The story won’t go away, however.

The government studies were conducted by NASA engineers, but that was before the patient came down with the American disease:

“Our experts tell us that the report is just wrong, and they are confident that they are going to be able to show that the electronic throttle control contributed to unintended acceleration,” said Steve Berman, co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel in a class-action suit filed on behalf of millions of Toyota owners who say the controversy caused their cars’ value to drop.

If they insist on using a class-action suit to gouge for money, the defendants should be the government and the news media.

Behind the mask

We are all hypocrites. It is in our very nature to be so. So much so that even our protestation of hypocrisy is, in itself, patently hypocritical.
- Claire Worthington

THE CURRENT two-day teapot tempest blowing through the Japanese news media is the story that police, in the course of a gambling investigation, discovered evidence from cell phone messages that sumo rikishi in the sport’s second division fixed matches.

What a surprise.

Since this is just the sort of story that matches well with the sludge-colored glasses the Western journos wear when promoting their Japan narrative, scandal-mongering is the meat and potatoes of the news biz, and coverage requires little in the way of taxing research, the overseas media is filled with the reports as well. It’s no surprise that The Guardian’s Justin McCurry, who’s built a career on finding unpleasant things to write about the country, hopped on the story like a fly on stink. He’s even Tweeting updates to stay on top of events as they emerge. Perhaps his editors make him do it.

Roughly two-thirds of his story by volume is an attempt to parlay the revelations into a fugue on the general malaise affecting the sport. Among the incidents reprised for the article was one in which “several wrestlers were expelled following revelations of widespread marijuana use” two years ago. Readers who follow his hot link for “widespread marijuana use” will find one of his earlier stories about the bust of three Russian-born rikishi.

In fact, the police confiscated the cell phones because they were investigating the wrestlers’ gambling on other sports. He would have his readers believe this is a sensational revelation.

He saves more important information for paragraph 7 in a 17-paragraph story—match-fixing in sumo is not illegal, and none of the rikishi seem to have bet on the matches themselves. (In this case, they bet on baseball, but they also wager on golf, cards, and mahjong. Also, the law forbids match-fixing for profit for other specified sports, but not sumo.) He adds toward the end the information that the Sumo Association has never investigated match-fixing charges.

But he neglects to mention the most important information of all: The reason the association is so negligent is that everyone above the age of 10 in Japan not only knows there is match-fixing in sumo, they know there has always been match-fixing in sumo. They also understand that none of the people involved think they’re doing anything wrong.

The word for throwing a sporting event in Japanese is yaocho, said to be a portmanteau derived from sumo. While linguists caution the explanation cannot be confirmed, most accept the theory that the word was coined when a merchant named Chobei in the produce business (a yao-ya) became the favorite go partner of sumo stable master Isenoumi in the early Meiji period. (That began in 1868, and Isenoumi died in 1888.) The story has it that Chobei was a much better player than Isenoumi, but he often lost on purpose to ingratiate himself. Others put the man’s name and occupation together when they discovered Chobei’s real skills on their own.

The concept began much earlier, of course. Sumo was originally a Shinto ceremony (the referees’ uniform is still that of a Shinto priest), and there was a ritual in which a rikishi would enter the ring alone, mime a match with the divinities, and take a fall in the hope of receiving a blessing. The competitions in many Shinto festivals were a form of divination; a victory by a person or team meant that they had received divine favor, and their home district would enjoy a good harvest or catch of fish. Thus it was common for one rikishi in local sumo competitions to throw a match to another from an area where people were worried about a poor harvest.

During the Edo period, feudal lords became the patrons of individual wrestlers, who were given samurai status within that lord’s domain. An informal system of tradeoffs for wins and losses developed to allow the lords to maintain face. It included tie matches and simultaneous falls by the rikishi.

A modification of that system still exists today. There is a rigid system of promotion or relegation in rank, and the rikishi make arrangements among themselves to help those for whom a win or a loss could mean a rise or fall in their standing–and therefore, their income. Also, cash is said to change hands between rikishi of the two-highest ranks when they face the same situation. That’s what’s been reported in this incident. That those of a lower ranking are implicated may be the reason the Japanese media is taking a keen interest in the matter.

Indeed, Ikeda Nobuo, a professor at SBI Graduate School, titled a blog post “Yaocho is a Japanese Tradition”. He says it is praiseworthy (literally utsukushii, or beautiful) because it is a win-win proposition for those involved, and because it’s an arrangement through which they can help each other out when they’re on a losing streak. (Prof. Ikeda used yaocho in the post as an example to make a broader point about bandwidth use in Japan.)

In short, the news about match-fixing in sumo isn’t really news to the Japanese, and some of them even view it as a beautiful tradition. It isn’t really news for the Western media, either—for them, it’s just another excuse.

So why is this story being broadcast so widely?

If it weren’t for the fascination with the social lubricant of hypocrisy, the only news would be the weather report.

*******
All sorts of things are exposed when you look behind the mask.