The wolf is at the door

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whistling for the wolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Says the professor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cesium-137 released from Fukushima: 400,000 terabecquerels

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

Kansai Electric’s Oi nuclear reactors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

Then they got emotional.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or even MIT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

Ichigen koji (105)

一言居士

- A person who has something to say about everything

Politics until now has been a world in which policy has been neglected in favor of “I like that guy, so I’ll ally with him,” and “I can’t stand that guy, so I’ll drive him out.” Policies and beliefs are nonchalantly changed one after the other for the sake of political crises.  Unless we deliver ourselves from that sort of politics, Japan will never improve.

- Matsuda Koji, upper house member from Your Party

Thanks for nothing, Mr. Keynes

THE Wall Street Journal has a brief editorial with that title (sort of), emphasizing once again that the experience of Japan should put to rest forever the idea that it is worthwhile for a government to apply the theories of John Maynard Keynes:

But since the 1980s bubble burst, Japan has been closest to a sustainable upturn only when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi pursued genuine structural reforms. With his successors backtracking from that agenda, Tokyo is back to its old spend-and-spend ways and all it has to show for it is another debt downgrade.

The world’s formerly second-largest economy stands as a rebuke to those who argue Keynesian sprees help unleash private-sector-led growth down the road. Japan is a long way down that newly built, and rebuilt and rebuilt-again road and, as the latest quarter shows again, the country is still waiting for the private growth to materialize.

Finally, a recognition in the English-language media of the Koizumi contribution, albeit a fleeting one. If the stars align in a once-in-a-millennium phenomenon similar to that which resulted in the eclipse earlier this week, the upcoming meeting of the rehabilitated Ozawa Ichiro with Prime Minister Noda might also be of some assistance. Rumor has it that Mr. Ozawa will agree to accept the Noda tax increase plans on the condition of sharp cutbacks in government spending. There is no word, however, as to what constitutes “sharp”, whether Mr. Noda would be amenable, whether he could convince the rest of the party to go along if he were, or whether any cuts would be vitiated by the famed Japanese bureaucratic rhetoric. That’s why a once in a millennium alignment is required.

The highest hurdle among the potential obstacles might be the prime minister. Noda Yoshihiko has self-identified as a Third Wayer, and has actually said there are times that “equality” (as in equality of economic outcomes) has to be given priority to liberty.

Such is the fascisto-progressive mindset, though Mr. Noda’s is just a slightly more concentrated mix than the diluted variety practiced by the LDP over the years. (The arrogance masquerading as fairness required to even make that claim, and to assume that one is a member of the elite who knows the unknowable and is capable of exercising the authority to decide when, how, and to what extent that equality should be compelled, is stupefying, but not atypical.)

Speaking of the fascisto-progressive mindset brings us back to Keynes. Jeffrey Tucker on the Mises Economics Blog quotes the man himself:

As he wrote in the 1936 foreword to the German edition of The General Theory: “Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a lance measure of laissez-faire.”

Mr. Tucker comments:

I can easily imagine his dispassionately narrating events in a Gulag, justifying every horror with a pseudo-scientific rationale made up on the spot.

Well of course.  Keynes was one of the directors of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944, a period that overlaps the rule of some other eugenicists on the European continent. He later said that eugenics was ”the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists.”

The politics, sociology, and economics behind this are all of a piece. Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek quotes David Malpass explaining the governing idea behind Friederich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom:

Contrary to much misunderstanding, Hayek never argued that the slightest deviation from laissez-faire capitalism launches a society on an unstoppable march toward tyranny.  Instead, he reasoned that tyranny is the inevitable result of government policies aimed at preventing market competition from ever threatening anyone’s economic prospects.  As long as voters demand that government protect them from all downsides of economic change, governments can oblige them only by shutting down, one after another, all avenues for economic change.  Competition; entrepreneurship; innovation; consumer sovereignty; workers’ freedom to change or to quit their jobs; even changes in demographics.  Government must obliterate these and all other sources of change if no one is to be exposed to the risk of losing a job or of having her wages or benefits cut.

There’s no excuse for prolonging the miserable charade any longer. A century, give or take a decade, is long enough. Japan is an example of the least worst that can happen.

N.B.: WSJ articles have a tendency to disappear quickly behind a paywall. Click quick!

The sky’s the limit

EARLIER this week, Japanese politicos filled their Twitter litter boxes with tweets of chirping delight about their VIP preview visit to the Tokyo Skytree, which opened to the public on Tuesday. Now the world’s largest tower, Skytree will be used for television and radio broadcasts. As with the tower it replaces — the Tokyo Tower — it is also expected to become a tourist destination and a symbol of the city.

The Christian Science Monitor and others, however, couple the news with the observation that building projects of this immensity might also be an indicator of impending economic decline. It’s based on a theory called the Skyscraper Index, and they explain it this way:

The skyscraper index works because developers tend to make ambitious gambles with huge new towers at the point of the business cycle when interest-rate and price signals can get distorted, wrote Mark Thornton, a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, in a 2005 research paper.

On the Mises Institute website, Mr. Thornton adds:

It is a broadcasting and observation tower and so it does not qualify as a skyscraper and therefore it does not signal a global economic crisis. However, with regional records being set in the Pacific Rim, China, India, and Europe, as well as a new world record skyscraper in development in Saudi Arabia, it reinforces the warning signals from the Skyscraper Index.

Here’s the Wikipedia explanation, which in this case is acceptable as something other than a collection of links. When Mr. Thornton refers to skyscraper development in China, he’s talking about the developments described in this article, which contains the following quote:

Investors should therefore pay particular attention to China – today’s biggest bubble builder with 53% of all the world’s skyscrapers under construction…

China will complete 53% of the 124 skyscrapers under construction over the next six years, expanding the number of skyscrapers in Chinese cities by a staggering 87%. China’s skyscrapers are not only increasing in number – it now has 75 completed skyscrapers above 240m in height – but the average height of the skyscrapers that it is building is also increasing as past liquidity fuels the construction boom.

For a more visually arresting and concentrated report on the Chinese high-rise boom, try this video report from Reuters. (I wanted to embed the video, but couldn’t figure out how to appease the cranky WordPress software.) This is not your average uptick in construction activity.

That would explain the data points on this chart of cement consumption from Goldman Sachs via ZeroHedge:

*****

George Gershwin composed the theme music for this manic erection of phallic cement and steel long ago — little more than a year into the Great Depression. His working title was Rhapsody in Rivets, suggesting his inspiration was the skyscrapers sprouting in the rocky soil of Manhattan during the Roaring 20s. The final title was the Second Rhapsody.

Ichigen koji (104)

一言居士

- A person who has something to say about everything

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

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

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

Just deserts

Upon a pillory – that al the world may see / A just desert for such impiety.

- Warning Faire Women (1599)

IF it were possible to bestow a person with a medal for services rendered to society, pin the medal to his chest, cover his eyes with a blindfold, stick a final cigarette in his mouth, and stand him against a wall to be executed by firing squad, Public Enemy/Hero #1 would be Julian “Wikileaks” Assange. While his behavior is undoubtedly execrable by any standard, we are also undoubtedly better off for knowing some of the information he was responsible for revealing. Much that information demonstrates the contempt the international political oligarchy has for the people they rule. Some of that information involves the Japan-U.S. security alliance.

Recall that in the summer of 2009, Hatoyama Yukio and the Democratic Party of Japan made the specific promise during their lower house election campaign to tear up the agreement with the Americans and move the Marine air base at Futenma in Okinawa outside of the prefecture “at a minimum”, and ideally outside the country altogether. Negotiations for dealing with the base began after Marines raped a schoolgirl near there in 1995.

To briefly recapitulate: The United States governed Okinawa from 1945 to 1972, even though the Allied occupation ended in 1952. It took 20 more years for the Americans to give Okinawa back.

Cross my heart and hope to die!

It would be entertaining to hear someone deny the argument that they still occupy it. The Ryukyus account for 0.6% of Japan’s land area, but host 75% of American military facilities in the country. Those bases occupy 18% of Okinawa’s land area. Roughly 70% of the people on the country’s four main islands support the military alliance with the United States, compared to only 10% of the Okinawans. (A higher percentage is willing to put up with it for the economic benefits.) More than 50% of Okinawans think the unwillingness of the rest of the country to either reduce their burden or accept American military facilities themselves is a form of discrimination. That makes it the ultimate manifestation in Japan of the Not In My Back Yard phenomenon.

The American military is stationed in the country for Japan’s “defense”, but Futenma is a Marine air base. Marines attack; they don’t defend.

When negotiations began with the Clinton Administration, there was an American promise to return Futenma to Japan (who built the first air base there during the war) in five to seven years. That somehow morphed into a project to build a new airbase in northern Okinawa.

There are four directly elected lower house seats in Okinawa Prefecture. Before the election, two seats were held by the then-ruling LDP, one by the Social Democrats, and one by the People’s New Party. Buoyed by the anti-LDP sentiment nationwide, the Aso government’s use of the Koizumian two-thirds lower house majority to push through the Guam Transfer Agreement, and the DPJ promise to move Futenma, the DPJ snatched those two LDP seats in the 2009 election. They didn’t run any candidates in the other two districts; the incumbents were members of parties that were part of their alliance and which joined the ruling coalition.

Several things became apparent within days after Mr. Hatoyama took office. Among them were that he had no idea what he was doing, neither he nor his party could be trusted to keep any of their campaign promises, and he had no business holding any executive position whatsoever, much less the prime minister of Japan at a turning point in the country’s political and governmental history.

To telescope a long story, two months after he opened the fall session of the Diet with a speech at the end of October 2009, he couldn’t keep his own story straight about his government’s plans for the Futenma base or their negotiations with the Americans. Statements made in the morning became inoperative before the end of the day. He would decide before the end of the year and then he put it off until May. He famously asked Barack Obama to trust him, and people wondered what it was he could be trusted to do. By early January, the Japanese media already assumed that his days as prime minister were numbered. His support numbers were in free fall after he had squandered both his honeymoon period and one of the most golden of opportunities ever available to a new government and its leader.

By May 2010, Mr. Hatoyama confirmed what had been obvious since the beginning of the year when he announced that Futenma would stay in Okinawa as originally planned. He traveled to Okinawa himself to apologize to the governor:

“I tried to do different things, but I came face to face with the difficulty of the actual problem of (moving) everything outside the prefecture.”

Mr. Hatoyama resigned at the end of the month after one of the shortest terms and with one of the lowest support ratings in postwar Japanese history.

The Beans are Spilled

One year ago this month, Wikileaks released American governmental cables sent from Japan to the U.S. about the Futenma discussions. They didn’t generate much comment, even in the English-language media, because the focus of Japan-related news was still the Tohoku disaster of two months before.

That information made Mr. Hatoyama and his government look even worse, as difficult as it is to imagine. Try this account from the Economist:

LESS than a month after a new government took office in Japan in September 2009, American officials talked their Japanese counterparts through a longstanding frustration: stalled plans to build a new airbase for American marines on the southern island of Okinawa. According to confidential minutes of the meeting sent to Washington, DC by the American embassy in Tokyo, leaked by WikiLeaks, Kurt Campbell, an assistant secretary of state, said a new airstrip was necessary because of China’s growing military strength. But that could not be discussed publicly, “for obvious reasons”.

A few months later Mr Campbell went further, according to another cable. Because of potential threats from North Korea, China and elsewhere, America and Japan faced “the most challenging security environment” in 50 years. However, he said the messages to the public often glossed over that reality. Presumably that too was to avoid offending China, even though it would have helped Okinawans to understand why the new facility is deemed so important.

And:

The WikiLeaks cables show that the number of marines and their dependents slated for removal to Guam has been inflated in order to soften opposition. (The 2009) agreement mentions the removal of about 8,000 marines and 9,000 dependents. But an American embassy cable in 2009 says that when the plan was formulated in 2006, “both the 8,000 and 9,000 numbers were deliberately maximised to optimise political value in Japan.” Okinawa officials suspect that the number of Guam-bound marines may be as few as 3,000—if they go at all.

When it came to power in 2009, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, which had opposed the relocation plan in opposition, came under intense pressure from Washington to push ahead with it. American officials urged the new government not to discuss alternatives in public, warning of a strong American reaction if it did, according to WikiLeaks.

The Eurasia Review Newsletter provided more details in an article by Rajaram Panda. ERN deserves a milder form of the treatment appropriate for Assange: They should be commended for presenting additional information and then kicked in their backsides for entrusting the article to Mr. Panda, who combines a tendency to exaggerate with an ignorance of Japanese politics remarkable even for non-Japanese who write about the country.

The article begins:

In a startling revelation, the US cables posted on the whistleblower website WikiLeaks said that, in 2009, the US had warned the then Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio about Japan’s wavering policies on bilateral ties.

It doesn’t take them long to screw it up:

When Hatoyama took office in September 2009, Japanese people believed that he was a sincere but helpless politician who was unable to fight the influence of the US.

Not one word after the comma in that sentence is true. No one knew how he would deal with American influence, and he gave every indication beforehand that he intended to create some distance in bilateral relations. While it is true that some view him as sincere, it is also true that they view as childishly naive the few policies he’s sincere about.

The revealed documents now show that Hatoyama and the DPJ had lied to the Japanese people during the 2009 election campaign. The DPJ and the Japanese government officials were never committed to relocating the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma outside of Okinawa Prefecture, as the revealed documents indicate.

That’s true, but only in an interpretative sense. The American arm twisting of the DPJ does not seem to have begun until after the election.

Between 2009 and early 2010, Hatoyama and his officials conveyed to their US counterparts that Japan would seek alternatives to the 2006 Agreement to relocate Futenma to the Henoko district of Nago in Okinawa Prefecture. However, in a secret pact, they said that Japan will honour the 2006 Agreement if the US rejected the proposed alternative.

The Obama administration knew early on that the Hatoyama administration would go along with the 2006 Agreement as long as the US continued to reject any alternative. Hatoyama had secretly said this to the US six months before he decided to break his promise to the people to relocate the base outside Okinawa.

Six months before he announced that he broke his promise was in December 2009, post-election and post-arm twisting.

The US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific affairs, Kurt Campbell, complained in October 2009 that Hatoyama told his Chinese and South Korean counterparts in Beijing that Japan depended on the US too much. Campbell told Japanese Parliamentary Defence Secretary Akihisa Nagashima that such remarks “would create a crisis in US-Japan relations… Imagine the Japanese response if the US government were to say publicly that it wished to devote more attention to China than Japan.”

We don’t have to imagine the Japanese response, because we know what it is — official sycophancy. The U.S. government has been devoting more attention to China than Japan without saying it publicly for the past two decades.

Now they don’t bother to hide it. This week the U.S. government allowed China the exclusive privilege of purchasing U.S. debt directly from the Treasury, without having to buy the bonds through Wall Street brokers and pay their commissions. The Chinese are now the leading American debt underwriters. Japan formerly starred in the role of Number One Sponge and still buys nearly the same amount as China, but they’ve never gotten the star treatment.

As Mark Steyn frequently points out, the Americans will be paying enough interest on the debt held by China to finance the annual outlays for the People’s Liberation Army by 2016. Meanwhile, Japan pays far and away the highest vigorish of any overseas country to support American troops stationed on its territory. This is justified in part by the need to defend Japan from China.

Finally, a contemporary use of the word “bizarre” that isn’t hyperbole.

But that’s unless the Chinese are actually unloading on the secondary market what they buy from the Treasury to satisfy their desire to get out of US debt and into gold while satisfying US demands to buy more of its debt. (There’s another interesting Wikileak in there, too.)

The Japanese people now feel that Hatoyama’s US policy was fraught with duplicity and backroom deals. Being the Land Minister, Maehara was dabbling with foreign affairs and was playing a crucial role in handling Japan’s US policy.

He’s speaking here of Maehara Seiji, who was involved with the discussions. Mr. Panda thinks that Mr. Maehara’s participation was due to his connections with the American government, and were improper because he was the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport. He is not aware that Maehara Seiji held another Cabinet portfolio at the time — Minister of State for Okinawa and the Northern Territories. It was his business to be involved.

In other words, Mr. Panda doesn’t know the A of the ABCs of Japanese politics/government.

The Obama administration was aware that there was a section of politicians in Japan who sought distance from Washington. Even many Japanese people started to view Japan’s policies as being dictated by the US and described their own country as “America’s baby”. In particular, right-wing nationalists vouched for reducing reliance on the US and argued that Japan must not be afraid to take a confrontational position in foreign policy.

“Started to view”? That view started among many Japanese people on 16 August 1945. And if there is a certified demonstration of lazy thinking/no thinking/no real experience among people writing about Japan, it is their wishful thinking about the effect on modern politics of “right-wing nationalists”, whatever either of those debased terms mean nowadays. The psychopundits either overlook or never saw that the same arguments attributed to those unenlightened and unintelligent dregs of society have been made even more stridently by the left-wing internationalists in Japan. The leading figures of the Democratic Party government are among the country’s most well-known left-wing internationalists.

The Obama administration is believed to be instrumental in Hatoyama’s ouster from office because of the latter’s inept handling of the Futenma base relocation issue.

Not in the US and Japan of Planet Earth. Last rites were already being prepared for Hatoyama Yukio a few months after he took office, for a galaxy of reasons. Futenma was the coup de grace. People are not without their suspicions about American string-pulling in the Japanese government, but the Democratic Party did not want to go into the July 2010 upper house elections led by a man whose support ratings were maxing out at 19% in the polls.

The inept handling of the Futenma base relocation issue? Mr. Hatoyama broke his pre-election promises — which of course the U.S. knew about — to do what the United States wanted to do. This doesn’t make much sense.

Besides, Campbell complained in October 2009 about Hatoyama’s policy towards China and South Korea. At the Nuclear Summit in April 2010 held at Washington, Obama snubbed Hatoyama and weeks later Hatoyama resigned and was replaced by the more US acceptable Kan Naoto. Kan immediately confirmed that the Futenma base issue would proceed according to the US desire. No wonder, when the leaks surfaced, he declined to comment and said that the announcement of information was “not legitimate”.

Kan Naoto is one of the leading left-wing internationalists of the DPJ, though he is also known as a trimmer most interested in power. Japanese arms were almost certainly twisted to cause the DPJ to cry uncle, but the crying had already happened before Mr. Kan’s turn arrived. As deputy prime minister, he had a ringside seat.

It is too soon to assess how the public will digest the dishonesty of the DPJ and how the Japanese government succumbed to the US pressure to follow its line of thinking. The opposition is likely to mount a campaign again calling for Kan’s resignation. Maehara was seen as an agent of the US and the Japanese people are unlikely to forgive him.

It will always be too soon for Mr. Panda to offer analysis about Japan. None of this happened. The opposition mounted a campaign calling for Kan’s resignation, but none of the many compelling reasons had anything to do with the United States. Mr. Maehara has been relegated to the sidelines, not because he was seen as an “agent of the US”, but because he’s viewed as an opportunistic lightweight with an unexplained affinity for North Korea.

Japan-US ties are too complex and its real value cannot be evaluated from this single incident.

Nor can they be evaluated by a drive-by observer lacking field-specific knowledge. The only solution for dealing with people such as Mr. Panda is to persecute them to the fullest extent of the Internet Law of the Jungle.

Finally, here’s how the Ryukyu Shimpo, an Okinawan newspaper, handled with the revelations:

According to U.S. official telegrams disclosed by WikiLeaks, while the DPJ administration was seeking the relocation outside of Okinawa Prefecture of the U.S. Marine Corps now based at Futenma, a staff member of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan suggested to United States government officials that they should not compromise on the Futenma relocation plan. The cable indicates that both governments inflated the numbers involved in U.S. Marine Forces Transfer Plan from Okinawa to Guam. The Roadmap for Realignment Implementation agreed to by both governments in the spring of 2006 states that 8000 Marine Corps personnel and 9000 dependents would move to Guam, but leaked telegrams indicate that these numbers were inflated to optimize their political value.

And:

The cables also include an example of a Japanese career bureaucrat recommending to United States officials that they stay on course with the Roadmap for Futenma relocation after the regime change to the Democratic Party of Japan. At an unofficial lunch meeting October 12, 2009, Director General of Bureau of Defense Policy Shigenobu Takamizawa is reported as warning the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt M. Campbell “against premature demonstration of flexibility in adjusting the realignment package.” The cables also reported that a counselor in charge of political affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan made the basically the same remark to his counterpart of the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. The cables therefore indicate that career bureaucrats moved to prevent the Hatoyama administration from seeking the relocation of the facilities at Futenma outside of Okinawa.

This is more evidence, by the way, that the Japanese bureaucracy considers itself to be the permanent ruling class of Japan. That exonerates neither Mr. Hatoyama nor the DPJ, however. Another of their campaign promises was to bring the bureaucracy under control, and they have the authority to do so if they choose to use it. But enjoying the perquisites of political status is more attractive than exercising that authority and touching off a de facto civil war that few of them have the ability to contest.

Diplomatic cables from this period show that despite the DPJ’s formal efforts to find a new candidate site for Futenma, the United States from an early stage thought the Hatoyama administration would go along with the 2006 agreement as long as the United States continued to reject any alternatives.

On Dec. 10, the U.S. Embassy inTokyo dispatched a cable that was classified “secret” and for American eyes only.

The cable said, “Five DPJ Cabinet members (Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa and Maehara) met on the evening of December 8 and agreed that they could not accept moving forward with the Futenma Relocation Facility (FRF) because of opposition from the DPJ’s coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party.”

According to the document, Maehara explained to Roos that Japan would seek a number of alternatives that might be acceptable to both the United States and the Okinawa people.

But the cable shows that Maehara also said, “If the U.S. does not agree to any alternative to the existing FRF plan, the DPJ would be prepared to go ahead with the current relocation plan and let the coalition break up if necessary after Golden Week (April 29 to May 5 in 2010).”

Thank you, Julian Assange.

But there’s more:

On Dec. 21, 2009, then Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka had a lunch meeting with (US Ambassador) Roos. Their discussion was included in a cable classified as “secret.”

Yabunaka referred to the Dec. 17 meeting in Copenhagen between Hatoyama and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The cable has Yabunaka saying, “Prime Minister Hatoyama confirmed to the secretary in Copenhagen that if the (Japan) review of the FRF alternatives to Henoko did not yield viable proposals, (Japan) would return to the 2006 FRF agreement.”

Immediately after his meeting with Clinton, Hatoyama told reporters accompanying him: “It would be very dangerous to force through (the 2006 agreement). We have begun efforts to think about new alternatives.”

However, the cable has Yabunaka referring to those media reports as “inaccurate.”

And:

On Jan. 26, then Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yorihisa Matsuno met with embassy officials. A cable classified as “confidential” and titled, “Hatoyama confidante on Futenma, Nago election,” described Matsuno as “Hinting at current Kantei (Prime Minister’s Office) thinking.”

Matsuno is further quoted as saying, “Hatoyama and the Okinawa Working Group will have to consider ‘for form’s sake’ Futenma options outside of Okinawa, but the only realistic options are to move Futenma to Camp Schwab or another ‘existing facility.’”

The cable also has Matsuno saying, “The Camp Schwab landfill option was ‘dead.’”

Turning over a New Loop

A flood of media features timed for the 40th anniversary of the reversion of Okinawa to Japan and the related events washed over news media consumers last week. Hatoyama Yukio went back to Okinawa for the first time since he dined on crow with the Okinawa governor in May 2010, and delivered a speech at a Ginowan hotel.

Here’s how he started the speech:

“I love all Okinawans.”

You’re such a lovely audience!

He continued by whining:

“I wanted to let some air into the (base) issue. I wanted to make some progress during my time in office, somehow.”

Before he appalled the nation:

“I have not been able now to satisfy the emotion of “outside the prefecture, at a minimum”. I can clearly state that one who has not satisfied that emotion does not fully understand the emotions of everyone in Okinawa. I intend to have that belief always.”

Everyone in Japan knew what he meant despite the vacuum-packed circumlocution and euphemism. All the headlines in the print media trumpeted the Hatoyama claim that he still supported moving the base outside the prefecture.

There was remarkably little anger, incidentally. People long ago realized he’s an eternal adolescent (most closely resembling a junior high school girl) with too little sense and too much money who had no business becoming prime minister. They intend to have that belief always.

One of his excuses was that he wasn’t able to do devote all his attention to the issue because he was too busy putting together a budget, despite having thousands of subordinates at his disposal. Nobody believed that, either, coming as it did from a man who preferred to attend galas with his trophy wife, the royalty of showbiz, and the Imperial household rather than attend to the business of government.

There was also the usual externalization of the internal fog:

“My thinking got too far ahead of itself, and I wasn’t able to fully convince many people.

“When I think about it, I wonder if it was an unreasonable course. When I think about it now, that’s what I think.”

Nonaka Hiromu, the chief cabinet secretary under LDP Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo in 2000, attended the same event as Mr. Hatoyama. When it was his turn to speak, he looked directly at the former prime minister and said:

“Men are supposed to have a sense of shame. Did you come so casually to Okinawa to dishonor (literally, hurl mud at) the Okinawans?”

Later interviewed by the Ryukyu Shimpo, he added:

“A person who stands on the dais and dishonors the Okinawans makes my blood boil (literally, steams my guts).”

Mr. Hatoyama was his oblivious self when he too was interviewed by the Ryukyu Shimpo the next day:

“It was natural to raise the issue of moving the base outside the prefecture.”

By this time he had found a new excuse:

“The Defense and Foreign Ministry bureaucracy struggled to decide how to return the base to Henoko (in line with the pre-existing agreement). They introduced the logic through the Americans that it would be inappropriate to take the base outside the prefecture, and only Henoko was acceptable.”

He’s confirming the Wikileaks revelations about Messrs. Takamizawa and Yabunaka above, and indirectly contradicting Mr. Kan’s denial. All he had to do to end the malarkey was put his foot down, but there wasn’t enough time to put him through a series of testosterone injections.

*****

After His Majesty’s Firing Squad in the Kingdom of Just Deserts dispatches Assange, it will be the turn of Hatoyama Yukio to stand blindfolded against the wall for his high political crimes and misdemeanors. Pinned to his lapel will be a medal for the service he rendered his country by using his mother’s money to buy the party that ended single-party rule in Japan.

*****

Meanwhile:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters now believe the United States should remove all its troops from Western Europe and let the Europeans defend themselves. Only 29% disagree, but another 20% are undecided.

That number will probably continue to grow and extend to Asia, if it already doesn’t.

*****

Mr. Hatoyama isn’t the only one who wanted to go back to Okinawa. I’ll bet the other guys had more fun, though.

Last laugh

DURING the global financial crisis of 2008, then-Prime Minister Aso Taro was one of many leaders around the world who chose to further damage their economies by urging budget-busting stimulus expenditures.

Current Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko was a relatively unknown backbencher in those days. Straining to be clever, he referred to Mr. Aso on his website in December that year as Baramaki Obaka, in reference to the government’s contributions to the IMF. Roughly translated, baramaki is pork-barrel spending, and obaka is big dummy. The similiarity in the pronunciation to the name of Barack Obama, who had been elected president the month before, was intentional, though it was not a reference to Mr. Obama personally.

In the Diet today, Mr. Noda said, “That was not an appropriate expression. I must apologize.”

The prime minister was answering a question put by LDP Secretary-General Ishihara Nobuteru. Mr. Ishihara noted the substantial contributions the Noda administration has made to the EU bailout, and asked, “How are you any different from the Aso administration?”

Ordinarily, that would have been the last laugh, but the amount of money of the mind Japan has firehosed other countries with during both administrations isn’t a laughing matter — particularly for Japanese taxpayers.

The Noda administration wants to raise the consumption tax AND the income tax AND the inheritance tax AND the gasoline tax AND the capital gains tax AND eliminate business tax breaks, while being extraordinarily generous with foreign aid of various kinds, from forgiving Myanmar debt to bailing out European banks.

Fiduciary responsibility? It is to laugh.

Further, Mr. Ishihara is threatening to introduce a no-confidence motion in the lower house unless the government submits its consumption tax increase legislation. That seems strange, until one remembers that Mr. Noda is talking about delaying the bill so he can patch up the differences with Ozawa Ichiro and the anti-tax faction within his own party AND the loud rumors of discussions between the DPJ and the LDP to create a grand coalition for a tax increase. That would give them enough time to screw the public before they both get neutered in the upper and lower house elections that must be held by next summer, resulting in their electile dysfunction.

No one will be laughing at that pratfall.

Ichigen koji (103)

一言居士

- A person who has something to say about everything

I still clearly remember the words of (then) Democratic Party President Ozawa Ichiro when he proposed a grand coaltion to the Fukuda Yasuo administration (in November 2007). I was LDP secretary-general at the time. “The Democratic Party,” he said, “lacks both the ability and the qualities to lead a government. You must allow them into the Cabinet to study.” The idea of a grand coalition foundered due to Democratic Party internal opposition, but looking at them now as the ruling party, it is just as Mr. Ozawa said.

- Ibuki Bunmei

Hashimoto Toru (7): Exasperation

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

Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human rights

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

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

Said the mayor:

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

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

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

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

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

To break that down:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the AFP news agency puts it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money

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

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

Godfrey Daniel!

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

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

Mother of Pearl!

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

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

Spit on a stick!

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

Darkness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry. All out of colorful oaths.

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

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

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

See what happens when the government sets price targets?

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

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

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

Afterwords:

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

*****

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

 

Straight talk

SOME straight talk from Steve Forbes in Forbes Magazine:

Japan has been strangling its economy since the early 1990s. FORBES columnist Nathan Lewis, a noted economist and money manager, recalled recently that when asked about Japan’s prospects seven years ago he blurted out: “They will tax themselves to death.” And that is precisely what Tokyo continues to do.

Japan’s political leaders are more obtuse and irresponsible than those found in Europe. They have completely forgotten the prescriptions of sound money and ever lower taxes that fueled their nation’s extraordinary postwar economic expansion. As if in the grips of a death wish, Japan has, since the late 1980s, repeatedly raised taxes, with new levies of all kinds imposed. In the early 1990s the capital gains tax on property was boosted to 90%—and this was before a slew of other property exactions were piled on. To stimulate the tax-strangled economy Japan has gone on spending binges that would make Paul Krugman, Barack Obama and other big-government believers drool with envy. Today Japan’s gross national debt—more than 200% of GDP—vastly exceeds even that of Greece. Nevertheless, Japan is in the process of enacting a new array of tax increases: The top income tax rate, the gasoline tax, the payroll tax, the inheritance tax and the capital gains tax are all slated to go up. The corporate tax rate was cut slightly, but this was more than mitigated by the elimination of numerous deductions. Notes Lewis ominously, “The government is plainly on the road to default.”

The title of the piece is Japan and Europe are Killing Themselves.

Not much else to say, is there?

There is one factor that mitigates his opinion, however. He thinks positive change is coming in the United States, which will then lead everyone to The Promised Land.

Delusions abound, and not just in Japan and Europe.

UPDATE:

ZeroHedge  is calling it a “truly historic move” in a post called The Canary in the Gold Mine:

“Okayama Metal & Machinery has become the first Japanese pension fund to make public purchases of gold, in a sign of dwindling faith in paper currencies.” Not our words: the FT‘s.”

When Japanese pension funds start avoiding government debt purchases, the sage old financial fossils will be able to unfurrow their brows and stop gumming over their plans to end deflation by targeting a 1% inflation rate. Inflation will kick down the door without an invitation.

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.

 

Big mothers in Hokkaido

GIRL FIGHTS — the physical kind — create strange dissonances in the masculine imagination. In one set of circuits, there is a disquieting, innate sense that This Should Not Be Happening. Coursing through a different part of the wiring, however, is an irresistible electromagnetic desire to watch and enjoy every second of the awe-full spectacle.

And take sides!

I’ve never seen any girl fights in Japan (probably live in the wrong part of town for that), but in addition to normal quotient of female wrestlers and boxers, there are also female sumo rikishi. Most of them get grunty for the sheer fun of it, because there isn’t much money to be made. In fact, some big mothers enjoyed grappling their way through a sweaty Mother’s Day in Fukushima-cho, Hokkaido, today.  A total of 58 rikishi-ettes, some from as far away as Tokyo, took the trip to the far north to push each other around and down. Reports say the spectators also had a grand time pulling for their favorite pugs.  I’ll bet!

Sumo rikishi choose colorful, almost poetic names when they turn pro, but these motherbruisers selected more fanciful handles for the day. One fought under the name of Tonkatsu-maru. (Tonkatsu are pork cutlets, and maru is the suffix given to ship names.) Another called herself Bakushuppara. (Bakushu is the old word for beer, so this literally means “beer belly”). The referees contributed some comedy of their own by creating amusing names for the victorious techniques. These terms are codified in professional sumo, but none of them include “twist and crush”, which is how one of the mamas came out on top.

Today’s grand champion was a 46-year-old magazine editor from Tokyo sparring under the name of Etsukonoumi, who normally answers to Abe Etsuko. Etsukonoumi is shown in the photo during the championship bout knocking out of the ring an American known as Odoriyama (Dancing Mountain), who is twice her weight.  The triumph of fighting spirit over size surely made the event that much more satisfying for everyone. Except Odoriyama.

The term for her winning move was legit — yorikiri, or pushing the opponent out by the belt.

It was Etsukonoumi’s second title; the first came nine years ago. Here’s what she said through the tears in the post-match winner’s interview:

“She was heavy, but I slammed into her as hard as I could. I’m happy to win after such a long time.”

Some fathers give the mothers in their lives flowers or chocolate to celebrate the day. These women probably would have been happier to be treated to a trip to the hot spings, followed by a massage.

While we’re on the subject, try this report on international sumo and the origins of women’s sumo in Japan. Unless the idea of female prostitutes wrestling blind men in the 18th century doesn’t intrigue you, in which case you can skip it.

*****

Not all of the Mother’s Day news was as entertaining, however. It was also reported that the body of Donald “Duck” Dunn, the bass player for Booker T and the MGs, was found alone in his Tokyo hotel room early this morning. He was in town for some concerts.

The obits mentioned his full career, including playing with the Blues Brothers and Neil Young, but that part was irrelevant and immaterial. It was what he did in the MGs, both as an independent band and as the studio band for everything recorded at Stax in the 6tees, that made every news outlet run an article and a photo on his life and career.

Booker-Loo will show you why.

Ichigen koji (102)

一言居士

- A person who has something to say about everything

Unless the Noda Democratic Party swallows whole the tax increase proposal of  the Tanigaki Liberal Democrats and dissolves the lower house (for a general election), it will only create a synergistic effect of unpopularity for both the Tanigaki LDP and the Noda DPJ. The lower house will have to be dissolved next year anyway (when its term ends). Will that dissolution occur when the synergistic effect is at its maximum? That might be even more invigorating for everyone. It would give (Hashimoto Toru’s) One Osaka enough time to get ready.

- Hasegawa Yukihiro, author and member of the Tokyo Shimbun editorial board.

DPJ Secretary-General Koshi’ishi Azuma and other party members are now coming out in favor of holding a double election next year,  when the current lower house term expires and an upper house election will be held as scheduled by law.

Others, however, such as LDP upper house member Yamamoto Ichita, one of the last of the party’s Koizumians, notes that Prime Minister Noda, Deputy Prime Minister Okada, and Finance Minister Azumi are suggesting they are open to modifying the DPJ tax hike plan. Mr. Yamamoto is appalled, because he thinks this is a sign that (a) they will swallow the LDP plan whole, and (b) that will lead to a grand coalition without a Diet dissolution.

And that will lead to even more support for One Osaka.

¿What are these people thinking?

IT’S impossible to scan the news articles either on paper or in pixels without seeing several that make one wonder, “¿What are these people thinking?” “These people” can refer either the subjects or the authors of the reports, and often both. Here are three examples involving Japan from the past week alone.

Socialism in action

Japan on Tuesday warned French president-elect Francois Hollande to keep the nation’s fiscal discipline in place amid worries that the new leader will overspend in a bid to boost the economy.

Of course no one can expect the capital-S-socialist-and-proud-of-it M. Hollande to have the first idea of how an economy functions — even socialists know that’s not the point of socialism. But the last thing the French need is advice from a news reader-turned-politician serving as the Finance Ministry press secretary, who knows less about finance than a teachers’ union apparatchik selected at random from a May Day parade, and who represents a government that wouldn’t know fiscal discipline if it walked up to them wearing a name tag that read, “Hello! My name is Hayek”.  The Noda administration managed to avoid a third consecutive record-high budget this year only because they shifted some expenditures to “special accounts”. Government debt instruments still account for half their revenue.

He’s worried about the French overspending? That’s all the DPJ’s been doing since they took office in 2009.

In Tokyo Finance Minister Jun Azumi told a regular news conference…”We want (France) to do what has been decided so far, and I’d like to tell them about that if there is the opportunity,” he added, according to Dow Jones Newswires.

The Dow Jones Newswires did not report if there was any snickering among the reporters present.

“I don’t know whether Mr Hollande will immediately act on what he has said in heated debates during the election campaign…

Now Mr. Azumi is talking about a subject on which he has some expertise — the winning party in a national election reneging on the campaign promises that got them voted into office.

“…but realistically, I think it is impossible (for European nations) to give up on fiscal-rebuilding efforts,” the finance minister said, adding that he was “convinced (Hollande) will respect this movement.”

Realistically, it is very possible that several European nations will give up on “fiscal-rebuilding efforts”, whatever it is he means by that term.  Any conviction he has about what M. Hollande might or might not respect is derived entirely from the script his Finance Ministry aides wrote for him.

Hollande ousted conservative Nicolas Sarkozy from the Elysee Palace on a platform promising growth rather than further cuts, which has worried many European leaders who fear it will lead to another region-wide crisis.

Growth? ¿What are these people thinking? Economic growth would be an excellent way to solve France’s — or anybody’s — fiscal problems, if it were real growth created by the private sector.  The Europeans and the people reporting on them seem to have created a new political pidgin in which “austerity” means something other than what it really means — not spending so bloody much — because French government spending has risen every year from 2002 (€816 billion) to 2011 (€1.1 trillion). It has a budget deficit closer to that of Spain than to Germany.

What they are pretending is “growth” is the public-sector spending of borrowed money of the mind on infrastructure projects. The new French president also wants to hire 60,000 new teachers, 1,000 new police a year, and create (Abracadabra!) 150,000 state-funded “jobs” for youth.

In other words, he thinks Mr. Obama’s policies worked out very well for the United States and wants to try them in France.

Well, to be fair, those policies did work out, if hobbling private enterprise and the free market was the goal. Considering the backgrounds of the two men, that cannot be dismissed out of hand.

For example, what Mr. Hollande means by “raising revenue” in the new political pidgin is to place a tax on financial transactions and increasing the tax on dividends and rich people, thereby ensuring there will be fewer of all of them. He’s got to conjure up some kind of revenue to pay for this government spending, to which will be added the bill for rolling back a Sarkozy reform and reducing the retirement age to 60 from 62.

And he thinks this will result in an extra €29 billion? No wonder people are worried. Especially Japan:

But Japan and China — which hold huge amounts of European debt — raised concerns about the region’s future policies.

By huge, they mean:

Tokyo bought 13.0 percent of the eurozone rescue fund’s bond sale in December, worth about 260 million euros ($338.0 million), while purchasing 10.0 percent, or 300 million euros worth, in November. That was lower than the average 20.0 percent purchased in three other bond sales from the start of the year.

There’s been a lot speculation about why the Japanese and Chinese bought all that European debt issued to allow taxpayers the privilege of bailing out European banks. The people at Seetell wonder if Japan’s real objective was to prop up American banks, rather than European ones.  That explanation would work just as well for the Chinese too.

Meanwhile, what are all of these people thinking?

In communist China Monday the state-owned Global Times, which is known for its nationalistic tone, said the anti-incumbent results in France and Greece bore out the dangers of democracy running to “extremes”.

If you’ve read anything in the Global Times, you know that the newspaper’s tone is better described as jingoistic rather than nationalistic. Media consumers also know that a presumed connection between nationalism and a criticism of democracy is a non sequitur, but newspapers are full of those, starting with “All the news that’s fit to print”.

And what would anyone at the Global Times know about democracy, much less what constitutes an extreme form of it? But then the Chinese have a political pidgin of their own.

Still a colony after all these years:

Japan Post Insurance Co., one of the key arms of the government-backed Japan Post Holdings Co., will delay its entry into the cancer insurance field amid the U.S. industry’s misgivings about such a move, a Japan Post official said Wednesday.

Japan Post’s envisaged entry into the domestic cancer insurance market, which is dominated by U.S. insurers, “must not obstruct” Japan’s participation in U.S.-led multilateral talks on joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade pact, the official said. Participation in the TPP talks requires consent from all countries involved.

So: A Japanese enterprise, partially owned by the Japanese government, chooses not to sell a product in the Japanese market because the government of the companies now dominating that market won’t like it and might not let Japan participate in discussions that Japan hasn’t officially decided it will participate in?

¿What are these people thinking?

This time we have a good idea what they were thinking. The DPJ needed the votes to get bills passed in the upper house after they formed a government in 2009, so they created a coalition government with two small, incompatible parties. One of them was a reactionary splinter group that thinks only the government is capable of delivering mail, offering savings deposits, and selling life insurance, and that city dwellers should pay higher prices for mail delivery to offset the costs of delivering it to people who choose to live on out-of-the-way islands.

Well, that and using the money in those accounts to buy 20% of Japanese government debt so it isn’t sold overseas at higher interest rates and really screw up the calculations of Azumi Jun’s tutors.

Also, some people pretended to be concerned that foreigners would buy a controlling interest in the bank (even though government approval would be required), which would mean foreign countries would have an unacceptable presence in the Japanese financial and insurance sector.

You know, like if they dominated the cancer insurance market…

Given the situation, Japan Post Insurance will concentrate on improving its educational endowment and other existing policies for the time being, according to the insurer. The arm has extensive nationwide access to potential customers in the over-the-counter market.

And it will voluntarily relinquish that extensive nationwide access in one sector to prevent the Americans from raising their voices.

On April 27, the Diet enacted a law to rethink the full privatization of government-backed postal services. The revision to the 2005 privatization law stipulates that the banking and insurance entities can launch new services after the government sells half of its shareholdings.

Which they have no intention of selling. The politicos’ “rethink”, by the way, is of a policy that won its advocate, Koizumi Jun’ichiro, 70% approval ratings.

Neo-Luddism

Last weekend, the last operating nuclear plant in Japan shut down for regularly scheduled maintenance, meaning no nuclear plants were operating in the country.  It was easy to see what many in the media were thinking from their choice of language and focus on one aspect of the closure. This from the Independent in Britain:

Activists celebrate as Japan is nuclear-free for first time in 42 years

Will they celebrate after an extended period  of “nuclear-free” power generation results in several other –free conditions, namely “economic growth-free”, “prosperity-free”, and “employment-free”?

Those neo-luddites just got to be free!

Thousands marched through the streets of Tokyo yesterday to celebrate the closure of the last of Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors. The switch-off meant the country, for the first time since 1970, was being electrified without the use of atomic power.

Campaigners said it was fitting that the day Japan stopped using nuclear power coincided with the nation’s annual Children’s Day, because of their concerns about protecting children from radiation, which Fukushima Dai-ichi is still releasing into the air and water.

Yoko Kataoka, a retired baker and grandmother in a T-shirt with “No thank you, nukes,” handwritten on the back, said: “Let’s leave an Earth where our children and grandchildren can all play without worries.”

Since they’re only children, their play won’t be disturbed by having to worry about coming up with the average 10.28% increase in household electricity bills for those receiving power from Tokyo Electric, starting in July. Or that the replacement for nuclear energy at Japanese power plants is oil, which produces nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, methane, mercury compounds, and other air enhancers that are not healthy for children and other living things. The tots also won’t be the ones who have to work nights or weekends at factories rescheduling their shifts to reduce large-scale demand at peak periods.

Before the crisis, Japan relied on nuclear power for a third of its electricity needs. The crowd at the rally, estimated at 5,500 by organisers, shrugged off government warnings about a power shortage. Activists said the shutdowns had proved the country could live without nuclear technology.

True, all but 30 countries live without nuclear technology, but most of them in the industrial world are small and/or functional economy-free, such as Portugal, Greece, and Italy. The singular exception is Australia, a continent with a widely dispersed population roughly that of metro Tokyo-Yokohama.

And even then, the organizers — if they are to be believed — thought it was a mighty big deal that 5,500 celebrants from the megalopolis showed up to rejoice and congratulate themselves for royally screwing up everyone else’s lives. They added:

Electricity shortage is expected only at peak periods, such as the middle of the day in hot weather, but critics of nuclear power say the proponents are exaggerating the consequences to win public approval to restart reactors.

We’ve already seen that noxious pollution, significantly higher electric bills, and social disruption are some of the consequences of a nuclear-free Japan. That last is unlikely to bother most of the demonstrators. If any of them are working nights, it’s at convenience stores rather than factories.

There’s more, however: Kyushu Electric Power just announced a loss of JPY 166.3 billion for the fiscal year ended March 2012, after recording a profit of JPY 28.72 billion the previous year. Kyushu Electric attributed the loss to the delay in restarting the idled nuclear reactors and the additional fuel costs for operating their thermal power plants. The costs associated with the idled nuclear reactors runs to several billion yen per day. As a result, the utility’s stock price is below JPY 1,000 for the first time since 1984.

Even then, summer temperatures at 2010 levels could cause power shortages of as much as 10%, the utility said last week. (The figures for the Kansai area are even worse.)

Combine that with a continued high yen, as economic craziness continues to masquerade as sanity in the United States and Europe, and even more Japanese companies will find it in the interests of their survival to shift production overseas.

Meanwhile, an article appeared on the same day in the Yomiuri Shimbun that suggested the youth of Japan will have more to worry about than the absence of fatalities from a once-in-a-millennium combination of circumstances:

More than 80 percent of people aged 15 to 29 are very concerned about whether they can earn enough money or receive public pensions after retirement, according to a draft of an annual government report.

The draft of the government’s white paper on children and young people for fiscal 2012 shows that younger generations are not optimistic about the future due to unstable employment conditions amid the nation’s aging population.

Also:

Although the overall unemployment rate was only 4.5 percent in 2011, it remained disproportionately higher among young people. The jobless rate was 9.6 percent for people aged 15 to 19, 7.9 percent for people aged 20 to 24 and 6.3 percent for people aged 25 to 29.

A few years ago, WHO compiled a report on the deaths attributable to the Chernobyl accident, which was much worse than the one at Fukushima. They found:

As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.

There were also 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer found as a result of the accident, but the survival rate is 99%.

In contrast, the death toll from the Fukushima accident now stands at one: a worker cleaning up at the plant who collapsed from overexertion.

More important, the report also stated:

Persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation have resulted in “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of affected areas.

The problem with the 5,000 or so Tokyo celebrants is the opposite. They weren’t suffering from a paralyzing fatalism last Sunday. Their excitement stemming from a belief in the myth of nuclear danger rendered them oblivious to the potential paralysis of their country.

¡What are these people thinking!

*****

After all the lights go out, this will be about the only thing left.

Japan’s back pages

THE Japan that emerges in stories printed below the fold and in the back pages of newspapers, or on less frequently accessed news websites, is a different place than that presented in the industrial mass media. Here are some stories that demonstrate why.

Water business

The phrase “water business” in Japan is usually a euphemism for the enterprises conducted in entertainment districts at night, particularly drinking establishments.

But most people outside the region are unaware that Japan is a global leader in another sort of water business — that for the technology used in water supply and sewage systems. In fact, a paperback was published a few months ago with the premise that Japan is the global leader in water technology systems. Whether that claim is true or not, several entities in the country have established a reputation for expertise in the sector, and they are working to expand their operations.

For example, the Fukuoka City government recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, for joint research in water supply and treatment.

The Kyushu city developed the technology for reusing waste water from the necessity to deal with its own chronic water shortages. They became so successful that they now want to make a paying business of it. Fukuoka City was also the first municipality in Japan to process waste water for use as water in the toilet, and they also are known for building a network of tunnels that carry off the water from the heavy summer rains to prevent flooding.

Meanwhile, the growth of the economy and the population in Vietnam strained that nation’s water systems infrastructure, and they chose to look to Japan for help. In fact, the city of Haiphong is already working with the city of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka City’s neighbor, to prevent leakage from their water supply systems.

Kitakyushu has been active in this sector in Cambodia for some time. As of last December, they were serving as the technical consultants for water technology in nine Cambodian cities, and last month they began helping two other cities in that country to expand their water supply systems.

Fukuoka City is also involved in the water business in Burma. The Water Department dispatched a technician to Rangoon last month to conduct surveys and provide guidance, and they’ll send a full team later. The Burmese government also sent one of their technicians to Fukuoka City for training.

Apart from altruism, one objective is to increase the opportunities for local businesses to receive contracts from the Southeast Asian countries for infrastructure improvements. The Fukuoka City project in Burma is being conducted in tandem with the UN Habitat Fukuoka office. That organization is particularly interested in water purification and desalinization systems.

Rare Earth

The temporary Chinese suspension of rare earth metal exports during the standoff over the Senkakus in the fall of 2010 certainly got the attention of Japanese industry.  They wasted no time to start looking for new sources for the metals that couldn’t be used as a political weapon. For example, it was announced earlier this week that imports of rare earth metals would soon begin from India. Also, Mitsui Mining and Smelting Co. and Kurume-based Shibata Sangyo have teamed to launch the world’s first business for recovering and recycling the rare earth metal tantalum from discarded electronic products. Tantalum is used primarily as a material for condensers in PCs and Smartphones, but all of it is imported. The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry estimates that recovering the tantalum from products discarded in Japan in a year would yield about 64 tons, accounting for 14% of the amount used here annually. Fukuoka Prefecture and Mitsui plan to commercialize the recycling technology and to create a structure that enables electronics parts manufacturers to procure the metal without concerns of interrupted supply.

More than a year ago, Japanese researchers announced they had produced the first artificial rare earth metal, an alloy similar to palladium. That metal is essential for making electronic parts, and is also used as a catalyzer to clean exhaust gas. While their method is not feasible for the commercial production of palladium, the researchers intend to apply it to create other alloys as rare earth substitutes. They say they’ve begun joint research projects with automobile manufacturers, but are keeping the details under the hood for now.

Power

A ryokan, or Japanese-style inn, in Yufuin, Oita, will generate electricity from the hot springs on the site using a 70 kW generator that Kobe Steel put on the market last fall. They plan to sell some of the power generated to Kyushu Electric Power through the system for the sale of renewable energy at a fixed cost that will begin in July. Kobe Steel says that if the power is sold at JPY 20 per kW, the spa could recover the costs by 2015.

Space

Japanese astronomers using a Hawaii-based telescope said last month they had discovered a “proto-cluster” of galaxies 12.72 billion light-years away from Earth. They claim that’s the most distant cluster ever discovered, which would also make it one of the first structures formed by the Big Bang.

“This shows a galaxy cluster already existed in the early stages of the universe when it was still less than one billion years into its history of 13.7 billion years,” the team of astronomers said in a press release.

But the discovery may already have been superseded.

Researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have previously announced the discovery of a possible cluster of galaxies around 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, but that has not yet been confirmed, the Japanese researchers said.

Vanity

What Japanese women call with a smirk the “bar code” — the hair style created by follically deficient men, otherwise known as a combover in the English-speaking world — may, along with toupees and implants, be obsolete a decade from now:

Japanese researchers have successfully grown hair on hairless mice by implanting follicles created from stem cells, they announced Wednesday, sparking new hopes of a cure for baldness.

Led by Professor Takashi Tsuji from Tokyo University of Science, the team bioengineered hair follicles and transplanted them into the skin of hairless mice.

The creatures eventually grew hair, which continued regenerating in normal growth cycles after old hairs fell out.

The process has the potential for applications greater than flattering oneself in the mirror, however:

Tsuji and his researchers found hair follicles can be grown with adult stem cells, the study said.

“Our current study thus demonstrates the potential for not only hair regeneration therapy but also the realisation of bioengineered organ replacement using adult somatic stem cells,” it said.

Stop the snickering, ladies — before long another recent discovery in Japan might produce more satisfying answers when you interrogate the mirror about the fairest of them all.

Two different teams of university researchers have found the gene that causes freckling and skin blotches after exposure to the sun. One team was from Osaka University (working with cosmetics manufacturer Kanebo), and the other team, using different methods, combined researchers from Nagasaki and Kumamoto universities.

Both groups focused on ultraviolet hypersensitivity, a rare condition of which only five cases are known in the world. The condition was first identified in 1981 in Japan, but little effort was put into treatment because the only problem it causes is sunburn. The Osaka-Kanebo group inserted mouse chromosomes in the nuclei of cells from two patients with the condition to determine which would provide better protection to ultraviolet rays. Exposure to the rays would prevent multiplication of the cells, which would die after six weeks, but cells with the new chromosome were resistant to ultraviolet rays.

Crab computing

Here’s a story that made a lot more sense after spending the past week trying to make sense of the functions on my new PC:

A team of scientists from Japan and England have built a computer that uses crabs as information carriers, to implement basic circuits of collision-based computing.

The explanation:

Researchers at Japan’s Kobe University and the UK’s University of the West of England, Bristol, found that when two swarms of soldier crabs collide, they merge and continue in a direction that is the sum of their velocities. This behaviour means that swarms of crabs can implement logical gates when placed in a geometrically constrained environment.

And:

The swarms were placed at the entrances of the logic gates and persuaded to move by a shadow that fooled them into thinking a predatory bird was overhead. Results closely matched those of the simulation, suggesting that crab-powered computers are possible.

The experiment builds on a previous model of unconventional computing, based on colliding billiard balls.

That set the author of the article to wondering:

The paper’s authors did not say whether public money was used to fund their experiments.

Regardless, it doesn’t seem as if the experiment would be so expensive that a university couldn’t fund it on its own. The author might be suggesting that futzing around with crab-powered computers is a frivolous enterprise with no apparent application, but there might be some there there.  Explains Josh Rothman:

What’s the point? Increasingly, computer scientists are interested in the ways that natural systems solve computing problems. Often, they do so in surprising (and surprisingly effective) ways. Other researchers have investigated the ways in which honeybees compute the most efficient route through a field of flowers (see a well-reasoned take on that research here); one of the crab-computer researchers, Andrew Adamatzky, has been exploring the possibility of slime-mold computing. Future generations of computers, they argue, may well be inspired by nature.

Kampai!

The Moji Customs Office in Kyushu reports that the value of beer exported through the Port of Hakata in 2011 totaled JPY 1.225 billion, an increase of 6.3 times from the previous year. The volume of exports totaled 10,960 kiloliters, a year-on-year increase of 9.2 times. That set a record, and it was the first new record in 10 years. South Korea accounted for 57% of the exports, and there’s a story behind that. Premium Japanese beer has become popular in that country, which is closer to the Port of Hakata (also in Kyushu) than to Tokyo. Sapporo also established a sales company in South Korea last June. And don’t forget that the Japanese built the first breweries on the Korean Peninsula to begin with when the two countries were merged a century ago.

Does this mean tastes are changing in South Korea? The mass market beer in that country may be even weaker and thinner than the adult soft drink that pretends to be beer in the United States. That’s perhaps due to the robust and hearty nature of Korean food, with its industrial grade spices. It would make sense that people preferred something less intense to wash it all down with.

Hand grenade hotline

To conclude, here’s something I’ll bet nobody expected. The Fukuoka police became the first police department in the country to institute a hot line for tips on hand grenades. They’ll pay JPY 100,000 for each hand grenade found or confiscated as a result of a tip.

Concerns have been growing lately over the use of hand grenades to attack companies or in gang fights. Hand grenades were used in six incidents in the prefecture last year, the most in the country. Rewards will also be given for the discovery of homemade bombs. They’re serious — the police have printed 2,000 posters and 5,000 flyers.

They’d better be serious if gangs are bringing grenades to a gunfight.

Afterwords:

This clip of an English-language news report provides further info on the changing Joseon tastes for beer. They mention that 60 brewpubs have been established (by then) in South Korea since laws were relaxed in 2002. Pardon the goofiness with the Youtube link.

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Considering (a) that microbrewing had already taken off in Japan at that time, and (b) the substantial but largely unacknowledged influence that Japan still has on Korean culture, it is quite possible that the Korean laws were changed after the Koreans sampled some of the Japanese beverages.

Not that they’d ever admit it.

*****

Here’s another change: When I arrived in Japan in 1984, most funerals were still conducted in the home of the deceased. Now, however, they’re usually held in funeral parlors.

I attended a funeral in one of those establishments a week ago today for a pleasant man who passed away at the age of 86. I’ve been to enough of them by now to be familiar with the customs, but I was intrigued when I recognized the song the pianist was playing just before the service started: Hana (Flower), by Okinawan roots rocker Kina Shokichi. It is interesting to reflect on which things eventually become accepted as part of the common culture. No English translation can do the lyrics justice, so I won’t even try, but the song works in that context.

Here are three different versions spliced into one video.