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.

 

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.

 

Blackballing the red ball

Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.
- Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing

THOUGH some of us are loath to admit it, all of us love lowbrow humor. We always have and we always will. It’s marbled throughout the Canterbury Tales, the existence of Fawlty Towers and the Gong Show depended on it, and Shakespeare loved it, as the line above shows. In fact, the lowbrow humor in that play starts with the title: the word “nothing” in Shakespeare’s day is said to have been a euphemism for the female genitalia.

One of the highest forms of low humor results when some people try to engage in serious sociopolitical discourse. During his brief campaign for president of the U.S., for example, Herman Cain offered a proposal to rework the American tax system into three segments with a rate of 9% each, which he called the 9-9-9 plan. A few people otherwise inclined to support his candidacy were apprehensive, however, because turning 9-9-9 upside down results in 6-6-6…

There’s also the buffoonery of some Barack Obama supporters, convinced since 2008 that racism is the reason for every criticism of their man. That racism is found in charges that he acts too “professorial”, is “elitist”, “out of touch”, or “skinny”. Just as amusing is that they like to refer to this disguised nastiness as a “dog whistle”. (If that’s the case, how come they hear it?) Then there’s the whole topic of political correctness, which might as well be Comedy Central.

Anyone looking for laughs in Northeast Asia can dip into anything that Hatoyama Yukio says about anything, listen to the arguments that Ozawa Ichiro is being railroaded by prosecutors, or eavesdrop on the perpetual South Korean domestic conversation about Japanese phantasmata.

The latest installment of the latter circulated last month when South Korea’s Grand National Party, known locally as Hannara, was in the process of remaking its image. The party, which holds the most seats in the national assembly, changed its name to Saenuri in Korean and the New Frontier Party in English. They also adopted a new logo in conjunction with the new name, and the changes took effect this month.

The old design featured a red circle with a blue line underneath. Here’s what it looked like.

That’s an artistic representation of a human figure, right? Nah. This is South Korea. The posse irritati complained that the red circle in the logo was something that a Japanese company would use.

Some comments from the Internet:

* Doesn’t the red of the Hannara logo symbolize the Japanese flag?

* The Hannara logo is just like the Japanese flag!

* The Japanese flag is hidden in the Hannara party logo and Seoul city logo!

Apparently those wily Japanese imperialists and their traitorous allies will stop at nothing to sneak their national symbol into the very heart of Korean politics.

The criticism wasn’t confined to the Internet —- politicians never pass up an opportunity to stoop as low as they can to pick up a vote or two. Besides, they had evidence!

That shows a comparison of the party logo with those of a few Japanese companies. Residents of the region know that type of stylized human form has often been used in logos and symbols for close to 20 years now. (It probably started in Japan. Most regional fashions of that sort do nowadays.) The choice of some of the companies also provided unintentional humor. Herald Pictures disappeared into Kadogawa Herald Pictures in 2005. KKC Wellness (logo at bottom left) operates healthcare facilities in the Kinki region and is mostly unknown anywhere else. Finally, the red circle in all of those logos, the Korean ones included, is clearly meant to represent a human head.

Recall that one Koreanetizen referred to the Seoul logo, which some people have been indignant about since its adoption in 1996. It consists of a red circle to symbolize the sun and arty blue and green swatches to represent the sea and the mountains. City officials in Seoul have somehow managed to weather the criticism for incorporating the Japanese motif, and it’s still the municipal emblem:

The Japanese became used to all this long ago, so their comments were characterized by polite bemusement. One journalist wrote, “I can’t say I don’t understand” that the party symbol might be mocked for looking Japanese, but added that the idea any red circle = the Japanese flag is rather extreme.

Still, the Hannara/Saenuri/Grand National/New Frontier Party has to face a general election in April and a presidential election in December while down in the polls. Accusations that their logo contains the Mark of the Beast might offset any of the benefits of an image change. So their official logo now looks like this:

While we’re on the subject of national flags and symbols, it’s worth noting that the South Korean flag contains hexagrams from the I Ching. I’ve always thought that was a cool thing to put on a flag. Maybe it’s time for some of the local Dogberries to take up the I Ching for a remedial reading assignment instead of just looking at the pictures.

*****
There’s a reason both the Globe Theater and the Gong Show had groundlings. Who knows what they’d think in Seoul of that semi-sunburst at the back of the stage?

Peace-loving peoples

We, the Japanese people, desire peace for all time and are deeply conscious of the high ideals controlling human relationships and we have determined to preserve our security and existence, trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world.
- From the Preamble to the Japanese Constitution

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
- Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution

The United States has some 70 bases — in Japan. This (state of affairs) is not that of an independent country. I want to eliminate this abnormal state of affairs, and have Japan capable of defending Japan. Absent that concept, how can we conduct discussions with other countries?
- Yamada Hiroshi, former chief municipal officer of Tokyo’s Suginami Ward

(A)n editorial cartoon published during the war years in London’s Daily Mail…shows a neat little man in a bowler hat unhappily shaking hands with a dishevelled colossus. The caption reads: “Ah, Mr. Policy, young Side Effect here has been anxious to meet you …”
- George Jonas

ONE use to which the late author, student of psychology, and man of the world Idries Shah put his many books was to convey certain perspectives on form, function, and how they are frequently misapprehended. Shah held that forms have limitations, and that among those limitations are time, place, culture, and language. If they are neither changed nor discarded, they become fossilized, becoming both museums and exhibits. Some choose to become attached to a form rather than its content. They are unable to make the distinction between the container and its function, and assume the fossil still functions as it did in the past.

The creation of the Japanese Constitution as a way to bend the nation’s behavior is an excellent illustration of the perspectives on form and function Shah wished to convey.

Consider the language of the preamble shown above, which some Japanese find more objectionable than Article 9, the “peace clause”. The nation is supposed to rely on the “justice and faith” of the “peace-loving peoples of the world” for its security and existence. Pluralizing the word people, assuming that peoples are peace-loving, and proclaiming that national survival can be entrusted to their goodwill identifies the sort of people who wrote it, their worldview, and the general time period in which it was written. It belongs in a vitrine in a corner of the museum near the quill pens and dialed telephones, rather than as the first statement of principle atop a document that would express the national consensus for the survival of the state.

In retrospect, it’s curious that people expected a Constitutional requirement in that form to function at all. The authors knew well that the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact also prohibited the use of war as an “instrument of national policy”, so only an ideologue would have thought the Japanese Constitution in isolation would succeed. By 1945, technology had enabled the Europeans to realize the objective inherent in centuries of behavior and turn the continent into a smoldering ruin of a charnel house. Justice and faith in the love of peace were not the motivation for the Western world’s colonization of East Asia. Nor were they the motivation that impelled them to eliminate the East Asian nation that would usurp their position. Such were the high ideals controlling the human relations of the age.

Further, there is no real consensus on what Article 9 even means. Some people claim it was to make Japan a pacifist nation, but that’s difficult to see when the commonly accepted meaning of pacifism is applied. Here’s a brief description of how the Constitution was put together:

Although an American directive allowed him to order reforms “only as a last resort,” with the first postwar general election just two months away and with an 11-nation commission due to take over the issue of a constitution, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Allied Commander, intervened.

He ordered his own 24-member Government Section staff to draft a constitution, and on Feb. 4, his aide, Brig. Gen. Courtney Whitney, convened a meeting and declared: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a historic occasion. I now proclaim you a constitutional assembly.”

Lieut. Col. Charles Kades, who had been in Japan since a week before Japan’s formal surrender the previous summer after taking part in the invasion of France in 1944 and serving on the War Department’s General Staff, was put in charge of the steering committee and told to produce a constitution by Feb. 12.

But Kades denied that it was strictly pacifist in intent when Japanese journalist Komori Yoshihisa visited him at his Wall Street office in New York in April 1981 and spoke with him for three hours:

“I myself wrote Article 9, including the section about the renunciation of war. I was given a page from a yellow legal pad by Whitney with instructions on three or four main points. I think they were notes he took from a conversation with MacArthur. But every nation has the right to its own self-defense. That’s why I thought (the part prohibiting self-defense) was illogical, and I took the liberty to remove it.”

The references to military forces, war potential and the “right of belligerency” were as written on the paper he was given. Kades admitted, however, that he didn’t understand the meaning of the “right of belligerency”. He said that if Japan had objected to that phrase, he intended to remove it.

“The intent of this Constitution was at first to keep Japan disarmed forever, but that had the effect of tying America’s hands in bilateral relations with Japan, and for the United States, that created a situation that was ill advised.”

Now there’s the unanswerable question: how is a nation disarmed forever supposed to defend itself? By some interpretations, Japan is ranked ninth worldwide in military strength, yet to take the language of the Constitution at face value would mean that it has the world’s largest and most potent police force.

The Constitution also enables the United States to use Japanese territory for its own ends. Here it is from the horse’s mouth. In this case, the pony is Kevin Maher, the former director of the Office of Japan Affairs at the US State Department:

“I don’t think Article Nine of the Japanese constitution should change. If the Japanese constitution was changed the United States would not be able to use Japanese land to advance US interests. The high host nation support the Japanese government currently pays is beneficial to the US. We’ve got a very good deal in Japan.”

Regardless of what one thinks of the Japanese left, their caricature of their own country as an American aircraft carrier has some justification.

Another function of the Constitution has been to contribute to the neutering of the Japanese political class. With domestic policy largely in the hands of the bureaucracy and foreign policy outsourced to the Americans, the Japanese political class has devolved into a group of parasites engaged primarily in emitting gusts of hot air, concocting Byzantine power struggles, and consuming the nation’s time and money.

Defense Minister Tanaka Naoki

Typifying the problem is that the Noda Cabinet has already had two Defense Ministers since its inception five months ago. The criterion for their selection was to balance intraparty factions rather than their ability to oversee the national defense. The first, Ichikawa Yasuo, was known to be aligned with the Agriculture Ministry and had little expertise about defense matters. Mr. Ichikawa insisted this inexperience was the ideal demonstration of civilian control of the military. He was replaced four months and a half-dozen verbal pratfalls later, though he blamed it on bureaucratic backstabbing.

His successor is Tanaka Naoki, another AgMin zokugiin. He is distinguished only as the husband of former Foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko, who knew as much about diplomacy as her husband knows about national defense. Mr. Tanaka stepped in it even more quickly than Mr. Ichikawa. During a live interview on NHK the first weekend after his selection, he confused a question about relaxing the standards for the use of weapons by self-defense forces overseas with the reexamination of weapons export prohibitions. Asked specifically about the first by the NHK moderator, he talked about leaving behind construction equipment after participating in peacekeeping operations overseas. Struggling to rescue Mr. Tanaka, the interviewer asked him whether he had a positive attitude about the use of weapons by self-defense forces. The Defense Minister answered that it was neither positive nor negative.

The one function the Japanese Constitution has not performed, however, is the one it was created for: to prevent the “peace-loving peoples” in the neighborhood from piecemeal attacks on the country to seize or attempt to seize Japanese territory outright. Meanwhile, the Americans either declare it isn’t their business and look the other way, or have been actively complicit in that seizure.

Who indeed are the peace-loving peoples in Northeast Asia?

* The peace-loving people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

Persons of sound mind can stipulate that the North Korean government neither qualifies as a member of the region’s peace-loving peoples nor can be trusted to behave as if they were. Persons of sound mind also know there are some who will disagree with that characterization, but taking them seriously isn’t worth the time or trouble.

While North Korea has no apparent designs on Japanese territory, they have, for reasons that make sense only to them, threatened to turn the country into a sea of fire. They also occasionally fire missiles in a direction where only Japan exists. (To be sure, Pyeongyang actually attacks only South Korea, but in an erratic manner that gives the Americans an excuse to bug out on their promise to defend South Korea as well.)

* The peace-loving people of the People’s Republic of China

It would be possible to agree with the Chinese assertion they are peace-loving people if we overlook their post-WWII invasions of the Korean Peninsula, India, and Vietnam, and their current buccaneering from southern Japan to the South China Sea.

The Chinese boosted their defense budget by 12.7% in FY 2011 to roughly 601.1 billion yuan. That was a resumption of 22 consecutive years of double-digit defense budget increases, a string that ended briefly in 2010, when defense expenditures were limited to a single-digit rise. In contrast, the Japanese Finance Ministry wants to cut the 155,000 members of the Land Self-Defense Force to 141,000. Japan is the only major country whose defense budget has continually declined since reaching a peak in 2002.

The Chinese cited as their reason increases in equipment and military training, personnel training/education, and salaries and benefits for the military.

When asked by reporters whether the increase was to apply pressure to neighboring countries, a government spokesman replied it was still less than 2% of GDP and lower than that of many countries. He also said that China was pursuing defensive policies and would not threaten any country.

Shortly thereafter, the Chinese had their first trial flight of a new stealth fighter. Here’s a look at some more of their new defensive infrastructure.

They didn’t behave as a peace-loving people in the fall of 2010, when they were the belligerents in the Senkaku islets , which they and the Taiwanese recognized as Japanese territory until seabed resources were discovered circa 1970.

This behavior should not have been unexpected. Noted Shimizu Yoshikazu in the monthly Chuokoron:

President Hu Jintao said at the Communist Party Conference in March 2009 that the country will staunchly defend its sovereignty, security, and territory. He also said the country would be more assertive in defending its maritime interests. Mr. Hu modified the dictum of Deng Hsiao Ping, who said, “Hide our abilities, build our strength, and move forward little by little.” The new policy is “Maintain hiding our abilities and building our strength, but be more aggressive diplomatically.”

Mr. Shimizu said that few people noticed because the full text of his address was not published. A senior official in the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it meant the country would perform a more aggressive role in international affairs.

Here’s what the Chinese mean by their “maritime interests”:

“Japanese government officials are weighing China’s intent after the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the Communist Party, called the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea part of Beijing’s “core interests.”

“…The People’s Daily article said Japan’s plan to name uninhabited islands near the Senkakus, known in China as the Diaoyu Islands, “is a blatant move to damage China’s core interests.””

The Chinese also refer to Tibet and Taiwan as part of their core interests.

Chinese newspaper editorials reflect a similar peace-loving attitude. For example, Hu Feiyue was one of four “experts” who presented views in a one-page special on the Senkakus dispute in the China Daily:

“Since Japan has been continually strengthening its control over the Diaoyu Islands (Senkakus), it is not enough for China to only send patrol boats to the islands. Instead, China should continue to modernize its navy. Considering Japan’s actions and the effect of China’s countermeasures, Beijing should think of employing another strategy,”

He also referred to the Japanese arrest of the Chinese fishing boat captain after ramming two Japanese Coast Guard vessels as “Tokyo’s affront”.

More specific was this from the Dongfang Ribao (Oriental Daily) in Hong Kong on 5 April last year:

There will not be peace between China and Japan unless China shows the resolve to use nuclear weapons. Japan is the only country in the world to have been attacked with nuclear (weapons) in the past century twice. The first was when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb, and the second was during the Fukushima nuclear accident. The Japanese are extremely sensitive to nuclear issues, and China is not without the means to employ this means…For most Japanese, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a nightmare that can not be forgotten, and it has wounded their spirit. The uneasiness and dread due to the nuclear accident has paralyzed Japanese officials and the public, and politicians continually spout nonsense.

Japan can say no to China, but it cannot say no to nuclear weapons. For China to gain Japan’s respect it must refer to these weapons and present an attitude of not renouncing their use…Japan is a country with a high degree of self-regard, and it bows only to those who defeat it. Even though it lost to the U.S. in World War II, it does not think it lost to China, and pressures China with this strong approach….Now it challenges China through its textbooks on the Senkakus issue. Why should China promise a country such as this that it will not be the first to use nuclear weapons?

China is thought to have deployed 300 nuclear warheads, by the way.

This rhetoric has been backed by the Chinese military harassment of Japan, which began in the Senkakus long before the 2010 incident.

In September 2005, the Chinese sent five naval vessels, including a guided missile destroyer, to the vicinity of the Chunxiao gas field. That’s four kilometers into the Chinese EEZ, but the Chinese have been using it as a platform to siphon off gas from the Japanese side. One of the ships aimed a gun at a Japanese P3-C surveillance aircraft.

A day before the resumption of Japanese-Sino talks on the status of the gas fields, China revealed it had established a “reserve vessel squadron” in the East China Sea capable of “fighting during wars” and equipped to “eliminate obstacles at sea.”

They’ve been engaging in similar activities near or in Japanese air space, particularly in the past five years. From April to December 2010 alone, Japanese Air Self-Defense Forces scrambled 48 times against Chinese aircraft. That was the highest total of the past five fiscal years (starting in April), and did not include the January to March figures. More recent incidents have involved a refusal to provide identification after entering the Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). The Chinese military aircraft used to stay outside the ADIZ, but that changed in October 2010.

Last March, a Chinese State Oceanic Administration helicopter flew to within 70 meters of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) destroyer Samidare. Then-Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi said, “It was an extremely dangerous act.” That was countered by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu, who replied that China’s right to claim the islands was “indisputable” and that its actions were in accord with international law.

On 30 December 2010, the Asahi Shimbun reported on People’s Liberation Army planning to land on and seize the outlying islands of other countries. The envisioned operations would include the use of bombers and amphibious vehicles.

On 2 January 2011, a commenter in the Communist Party-run Global Times claimed that the Japanese were just trying to worsen relations and suggested the Asahi ran the article at the government’s request.

*****
More troubling still is the Chinese interest in Okinawa. Some in China are now calling for the establishment of a Ryukyus Autonomous District. In other words, they think it’s Chinese manifest destiny to swipe the islands from Japan. Here is a public announcement of an apparently well-funded group to work toward that objective:

Former National Police Agency investigator Bando Tadanobu translated into Japanese an essay that appeared in the Chinese media calling for such a scheme as part of the PRC’s launch of a national strategy — the so-called Ryukyus Millennium.

“The Ryukyu islands must be recovered and a Ryukyu Autonomous District of the People’s Republic of China established for the millennium development of China. The law guarantees China sovereignty of the Ryukyus under the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Declaration. It must be turned into a forward base facing the Pacific Ocean….China will build the Ryukyus, the Japanese and American military shall depart from the East Sea (i.e., what everyone else calls the East China Sea) and the Ryukyus will be a breakwater for Chinese security.”

The essay also asserts that the time to seize Okinawa is now, and the Ryukyu Islanders, who are part of the Chinese people, also seek this. Mr. Bando reminds his Japanese readers that the Chinese government insists the Senkakus are Chinese territory and that senior PLA members openly discuss planning for an invasion of Japan.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. The same argument has also appeared in other Chinese media sources, including three times in the Apple Daily and once on the Boxun News website.

Tang Chungfeng, a specialist in Japan research at the Chinese Ministry of Commerce who also served in the Chinese embassy in Japan, has championed the cause in the aforementioned Global Times, as well as the Ifeng.com news site (for Phoenix TV). Mr. Tang claims that the real Japanese objective is not to maintain control of Daioyutai (Senkakus), but to legalize its “illegal control” of the Ryukyus.

He lists four reasons for this.

1. The Ryukyus become the starting point for Japanese territorial waters.
2. It is a strategic move to obtain maritime resources and to keep northern Taiwan in check.
3. It draws their territorial line in the East China Sea.
4. It wipes away the shame of having been defeated in World War 2 by an “inferior race”, the Chinese. The Japanese still say they were beaten by the Americans and the Russians, not us.

Mr. Tang says this is the signal flare for the resurgence of Japanese militarism, in which Japanese bushido will again rule the world. It is a psychological demand of the Japanese right wing, which is more important than natural resources.

With two university professors, Mr. Tang wrote a similar article for the Global Times of 10 November 2010. In the same newspaper two days before that, he urged China to support the Okinawan “independence movement”.

Demonstrations were held in Chengdu in October 2010 after the Senkakus Incident of 7 September. Student leaders said they had been organized a month before with the help of the government. Some of the demonstrators carried signs saying, Recover the Ryukyus, Free Okinawa.

Occasionally the well-meaning superficialissimos of the Western mass media and thinktankeria get nosey and parade their wonderfulness by advising the countries involved it would be so much better if everyone got along and shared the wealth of the sea near the Senkakus instead of fighting about it. The Japanese have always been amenable to that. Now to get the Chinese to match their behavior with their words:

Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura told reporters Wednesday that Japan protested to China after a flare was seen Tuesday at a Chinese structure at an undersea gas deposit. Japan has made similar complaints several times in the past.

“We have detected a flare, a sign that it is highly likely that there is a gas development going on,” Fujimura said. “Any unilateral exploration is unacceptable.”

The deposit, known as Kashi in Japan and Tianwaitian in China, sits near a median line of the two countries’ overlapping exclusive economic zones.

Japan and China agreed in 2008 to suspend unilateral digging in that field while continuing talks, but talks have stalled since 2010, following a diplomatic spat stemming from a maritime collision near disputed southern islands claimed by both countries, as well as Taiwan.

Two (back-translated) comments allow us to draw conclusions from all this. The first is from Dean Cheng, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. (The emphasis is mine.)

China has of course warned that Japan is positioned as part of the American alliance, but we must recognize that is not the only point. I interviewed a general with the People’s Liberation Army, who said, “We might be able to achieve accommodation and cooperation with the U.S., but that will not happen with Japan. For China, Japan will likely remain a military threat”. There is a special historical animus towards Japan.

Meanwhile, Dan Blumenthal, current commissioner and former vice chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said:

In China, there is a memory and anger at Japan based on history, and an intense awareness of revisionism. That awareness is strengthened and inflamed by Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Now, the Chinese think this should be rectified, even with military force, by becoming superior to Japan, and having the ability to threaten Japan.

* The peace-loving people of Russia

Japan and Russia signed the Treaty of Commerce, Navigation and Delimitation on 7 February 1855. The treaty both established official relations between the countries as well as their borders. The Russians confirmed that the islands of Etorofu, Kunashiri, and Shikotan, and the Habomai Islets (just seven kilometers from Hokkaido), were Japanese territory, distinct from the Kurile Islands.

Article 2 of the treaty states:

“Henceforth the boundary between the two nations shall lie between the islands of Etorofu and Uruppu. The whole of Etorofu shall belong to Japan; and the Kurile Islands, lying to the north of and including Uruppu, shall belong to Russia.”

Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai Islets are to the south of Etorofu. They were not mentioned in the treaty because they were understood to be part of Japan.

They stayed part of Japan until after World War II ended. The Soviet Union renounced its neutrality treaty with Japan and declared war on 9 August 1945, three days after the Hiroshima nuclear bombing. The Japanese surrendered unconditionally on 15 August, and on 18 August the Soviets started occupying what Japan calls the Northern Territories. That process lasted until 5 September, three days after the surrender documents were signed.

For reasons impossible to explain, the English-language mass media finds it impossible to simply state these facts. Though the Soviet occupation of the islands occurred after the Japanese surrender, Reuters uses the expression “near the end of the war”. Even though the Japanese position is that the islands are not part of the Kuriles, based in part on the 1855 treaty language, the New York Times accepts the Russian formulation and calls them the South Kuriles. (Then again, the Times thought it was copacetic for the Americans to write the Japanese Constitution, as the text at the above link about Charles Kades shows.)

The Soviets occupied the islands because American President Harry Truman allowed them to. Stalin wanted the entire island of Hokkaido to create a Communist North Japan, as he did with North Korea and East Germany. Truman made a deal to prevent that by tossing Stalin the four smaller fish. This has been confirmed by historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (an American citizen) from diplomatic cables and detailed in his book Anto. (That can be translated as Secret Strife or Hidden Battle).

Thus, the Soviets chose to exact their revenge for losing the 1905 war by kicking Japan when it was down. In the 1956 agreement between the two countries that ended the state of war between them and restored diplomatic ties, the Russians agreed to give two of the islands back as part of a future peace treaty. They show no signs of fulfilling their promise.

The Russians saw that the Democratic Party-led government of Japan flinched badly in its confrontation with China in the fall of 2010. Should it be surprising that one thug state would imitate another? Their own military testing of Japan’s territory and defensive posture began almost immediately thereafter and continues to the present.

The Russian navy sent 24 ships through La Pérouse Strait, which separates the southern part of Sakhalin from the northern part of Hokkaidō and connects the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk. This was the largest group of Russian ships to make this passage in 10 years, and included cruisers, destroyers, supply ships, tank carriers, and hospital ships.

In September 2011, the Russians conducted their largest military exercise off Kamchatka after the end of the Cold War — with 50 ships and 50 aircraft — to maintain the defense of their continental shelf area. One never knows when the Japanese or the Canadians are going to attack. It is curious that Russian exercises of this sort pass with little or no comment overseas, but the Japanese dispatch of an airplane to observe Chinese provocations is the signal for Western academics to write papers calling for the joint peaceful development of resources.

In early December 2010, Russian maritime patrol and anti-submarine aircraft flew directly above a joint U.S.-Japanese military drill. The main sea drill continued, but the air drill was halted to prevent the exposure of any tactics.

Though it is natural to observe military drills of neighboring countries, the Russians chose to be obnoxious in their observation and their justification afterwards. Said fleet spokesman Roman Markov:

“The area is our zone of responsibility. The airplanes carried out a planned flight in an area of the Russian Pacific Fleet’s regular activity.”

That was a month after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made the first visit of a Russian/Soviet head of state to the islands since they became Russian territory. Previous leaders had refrained from doing so to avoid antagonizing the Japanese, but discretion in bilateral relations is no longer a priority. A more recent visitor was Nikolai Patrushev, former director of the FSB (the new KGB) and secretary of the Security Council of Russia. This visit, also seen as out of the ordinary, was ostensibly to check on border security and economic development. These two men were followed by the first deputy premier, the regional development minister, and the defense minister.

One reason cited for Mr. Medvedev’s visit was to boost his image of strength before elections. That is standard operating procedure for the countries of East Asia — if the national government’s popularity needs a tonic, bash the Japanese. That’s been the drink of choice of Chinese and South Koreans for more than 60 years.

The timing was also right. Japanese defense policy at the time called for a shift in focus from defense of the north and a reduction of equipment and personnel in Hokkaido to upgrade security around the Nansei Islands of Okinawa and in the East China Sea.

What was then-Prime Minister Kan to do? He and his government had already been flayed for their mishandling of the Senkakus incident, and now the Russians were capitalizing on his demonstrated weakness. But Mr. Kan had to trust “in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world”. He lacked options for dealing with people who are ambivalent about peace and act with injustice and in bad faith. Having only a single dimension as a politician, he reached into his bag of trick and reverted to his origins as a street-corner loudmouth by criticizing Mr. Medvedev’s visit as “an unforgivable outrage”. (He got away with that sort of language in Nagata-cho for years because no one took his New Left grandstanding seriously.) He also said it was “an act of violence”.

The Russians, knowing all about shouting shoe-pounders in diplomatic venues, easily swatted that one away. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded that the Japanese prime minister was being “undiplomatic”. Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko noted:

“The Russian president independently selects routes of his domestic trips. Any recommendations from abroad are inappropriate and unacceptable.”

The time for using the phrase “unforgivable outrage” came that summer after Mr. Medvedev signed a law passed by the Duma making 2 September an annual holiday to celebrate the Soviet victory over Japan. In other words, it took the Russians 65 years to commemorate their week-long struggle in 1945, their postwar seizure of the Northern Territories, and their postwar use of 600-700,000 Japanese servicemen as slave labor from 1946 until 1956 (though most were released by 1949). An estimated 10% of those Japanese died in Soviet captivity.

Why now? Don’t look to Reuters or the New York Times for an explanation.

Mr. Kan might also have chosen to take a stern view when the Russians conducted Vostok 2010, their operational/strategic military exercises, from 29 June to 8 July in the Kuriles over Japanese objections. Or when the Russians established three new artillery and missile testing areas near the Kuriles and the Kamchatka Peninsula.

But it’s too late for that — especially now that there are signs of an anti-Japanese alliance among the peace-loving peoples of the region.

On 8 September 2011, Air Self-Defense Force jets scrambled to meet Russian *and* Chinese military aircraft approaching Japan. Two Russian TU-95 bombers flew around Japan accompanied by refueling aircraft. They started flirting with Japanese airspace from the Tsushima Strait off Nagasaki prefecture, passed south of Okinawa, and then swung up along the Pacific Ocean coast northward to an area near the Northern Territories. It was the first confirmed circumnavigation of Japan by Russian military aircraft, and it was obviously intentional. They passed Fukushima Prefecture in the Pacific at precisely the time Prime Minister Noda was there to view the damaged nuclear plant. The entire flight, including refueling, took 14 hours.

While the Russians were still airborne, a Chinese Y8 intelligence-gathering airplane flew across the dividing line between China and Japan in the East China Sea and came within 100 – 150 kilometers of The Senkakus.

(The Russia must have enjoyed their aerial tour of Japanese territory, as military aircraft made another circuit just outside Japanese airspace last month. Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro called his Russian counterpart to ask for self-restraint and more information; three days later it was reported that his call hadn’t been returned.)

One year before, on 27 September (shortly after the Senkakus Incident), Mr. Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao met in Beijing to sign a joint statement calling for “mutual support for each other’s core interests, including national sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity.”

It also contained these passages:

“During the war (World War II), people in China and Russia sustained major aggressions from the fascists and militarists, and they endured the cruelest ordeals and suffered the heaviest casualties…The fascists and militarists schemed to conquer and enslave us two nations, other countries, and the whole continent. China and Russia will never forget the feat of those who checked those two forces…

Most telling of all was this sentence. It’s worth reading twice:

The glorious history, imprinted with the friendship the people of the two countries forged in the war and their mutual help, has laid a sound foundation for today’s strategic partnership of coordination between China and Russia.

The Russians have even teamed up with the North Koreans. When the late Kim II visited Russia in August 2011, they finalized an agreement for joint military exercises, an unusual step for Pyeongyang. Kim suggested full-scale military maneuvers, including offensive exercises, but that was too much even for the Russians. They also did not respond to requests for aircraft and parts. Meanwhile, the North Koreans kept interaction with Russian forces at a minimum for lower-ranking soldiers. That limited the initial exercises to pilot rescue operations.

It is not clear what peace-loving purpose the Russians — whose navy obtained access to a Sea of Japan port through a 2010 agreement with the North Koreans — think this serves. Only allies conduct joint military operations, after all.

* The peace-loving people of South Korea

Birds of a feather, they say, flock together, so one might assume that South Korea, the only other nominal free market democracy in Northeast Asia, would think its best interests lie in an alliance of some sort with the Japanese. That assumption would be mistaken.

The Japanese suspect that when Chinese pushing comes to shoving, the Koreans will accommodate themselves to the Chinese, regardless of the specifics of the situation. An example is the language in an editorial from the Joongan Ilbo of South Korea. They’ve noticed that today’s Chinese are acting like the Imperial Japanese a century ago. They’re also aware that Chinese behavior could cause nearby countries to behave as Finland traditionally has toward its Soviet Union/Russian neighbor. But that was fine with them:

“(We) must act judiciously. China’s existence is a threat to our security, but essential for us economically. Therefore, for several decades at least, we must ride the wave of an economically prosperous China. That will require South Korea to stay neutral in the struggle between Japan and China.”

They seem to have overlooked that the struggle in East Asia is not between Japan and China, but between China and everyone else in the region with territory the Chinese claim.

Not that the South Koreans are immune from junior grade militarism of their own. They’ve already chosen to stick their saber in the face of the one country that won’t fight back. As detailed by two posts on the masthead here, South Korea seized the Takeshima islets by force after they failed to convince the United States to include it in the San Francisco Peace Treaty specifying what would and would not be Japanese territory. So, despite having ignored the rocks for centuries, they took the islets while the taking was good — knowing the Japanese were relying on the justice and faith of peace-loving peoples.

As this post describes, some South Koreans have their eyes on Tsushima too, and senior members of their military use the invisible Japanese military threat to Takeshima to urge the expansion of their military capabilities. Meanwhile, the North Koreans are the ones who are actually sinking their naval ships, shelling their territory, and murdering their tourists.

But Seoul is buckled up and ready to do battle with the Japanese. On 5 July 2006, their Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs sent a ship to survey ocean currents in Japan’s EEZ near Takeshima. Japan responded by sending a Coast Guard patrol boat to monitor the ship, contact it by radio, and ask them to stop. The Koreans ignored the Japanese request and dispatched their own Coast Guard vessel, which sailed between two ships. Nothing untoward happened, but the Japanese prime minister at the time, Abe Shinzo, said at a symposium in the fall of 2010 that the Japanese government was told the Korean captain had been given permission by South Korean President Roh Mu-hyon to fire on the Japanese ship. The expression used was “attack with the intent to harm”.

Mr. Abe consulted with the Foreign Ministry and the Coast Guard and decided not to stop the Korean ship by abordage. He later explained:

“With China, we would understand what they’re going to do because diplomacy to them is completely a game. One side can predict what the other will do if one does certain things…Roh, however, was strange and even other Korean officials and military men found him somewhat confusing. We didn’t know what he would do, because there seemed to be no logical thought or calculation of profit and loss, and the situation could have escalated beyond imagining.”

Of course, that’s not how the South Koreans remember it. (The emphasis is mine.):

Roh Moo-hyun instructed the military to destroy unauthorized Japanese ships heading for Dokdo while in office, a close aide to the late President said Friday.

This indicates that President Lee Myung-bak’s predecessor braced for the worst possible diplomatic relations with Japan to thwart the neighboring country’s territorial ambitions of Korea’s easternmost islets.

The revelation came amid escalating criticism of the government’s stance of dealing with the issue in a low key manner.

Kim Byung-joon, a former senior presidential secretary for policy planning, said in an article posted on the Roh Moo-hyun Foundation’s website, “In April 2006, when Seoul-Tokyo relations were chilled by Japan’s territorial claim of Dokdo, President Roh instructed his secretaries to consider destroying Japanese ships crossing into our territorial waters without permission.”

Among considered measures for destruction was using a Korean military ship to ram the targeted vessel from Japan, Kim recounted.

What to do?

Many Japanese have always known what this situation requires. When the Liberal-Democratic Party was formed in 1955, its new charter called for Japan to rewrite the Constitution. The members eventually found it easier to indulge in the more profitable political activity of pork distribution, and turned into the Japanese version of RINOs in the bargain. The LDP could have served as the role model for the American GOP to become stealth social democrats.

Somura Yasunobu, then a professor of international politics at the Tokyo University of Science, wrote an op-ed for the January edition of Keizai Orai in January 1991. It was rendered in English by the Translation Service Center Asia Foundation and run in the 23 April edition of the Japan Times that year. (That predates the Internet as we know it today, so it is not online.).

Prof. Somura said then all that needs to be said. Note how one passage echoes the statement of Charles Kades.

During the Persian Gulf War, Americans accused Japan of hiding behind the postwar Constitution to avoid involvement, while liberals here claimed the administration of Prime Minister Kaifu Toshiki was ripping it up in an attempt to send troops overseas. The Americans were right and our poor, pacifist Constitution was both more controversial and ridiculous than ever.

The document was foisted upon Japan when it was still under the thumb of the US occupation (1945-1952). Common sense tells us that the policies pursued by even the most benevolent of conquerors are not designed entirely for the benefit of the conquered. By the same token, a national charter adopted when Gen. Douglas MacArthur ruled Tokyo is irrelevant today.

When Japan regained its sovereignty in 1952, all legislation imposed by the Occupation should have become null and void. Anyone who still wants to preserve this Constitution in effect favors perpetuation of American rule….

…Until recently, many people have justified retaining this made-in-USA instrument as expedient, and in terms of realpolitik, Japan’s most advantageous option. I admit that I have not been among those clamoring for revision. Patchwork reform of a document so fatally flawed makes no sense…

…The heart of the Constitutional issue is the famous war-renouncing Article 9, which says in part, “the right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” From the standpoint of international law, this makes no sense.

…In the old days, the concept of a belligerent party was used, for example, regarding rebel separatists. It provided the basis for subsequent recognition of a group as a legitimate government or the territory under its control as an independent nation. The 1947 Constitution did not even accord this minimum standing to Japan.

When Japan regained its pro forma independence in 1952, we entered into a mutual security treaty with Washington that left national defense and internal security in the hands of the U.S. military. The pact was later revised, and the Japanese government assumed the latter responsibility.

Nevertheless, the treaty made Japan, for all intents and purposes, a U.S. protectorate. Any Japanese eager to maintain this relationship after all this time is like a middle-aged man who still wants to be breast-fed by his mother.

Of course, the notion of a right to wage war has been rendered absurd by weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and conventional. The only just wars are those of self-defense; the right of belligerency simply means that a nation can protect itself.

It is contradictory to argue that Japan has the right of self-defense but not the right to wage war….This anachronistic document belongs in the national archives, not on the books as the supreme law of the land.

What to do? The Japanese should rip up the American neo-imperialist document dashed off in less than a fortnight and become a nation again.

After all, based on actions rather than words, they’re the only peace-loving peoples in Northeast Asia.

Afterwords

* It is easy to identify the peace-loving peoples of the world even at international sporting events.

Japan has hosted the Olympics in exemplary fashion three times. It is beyond the realm of imagination that the incidents in Seoul and Hangzou could have happened anywhere in Japan. It is inconceivable that a Japanese crowd would boo another country’s national anthem, boo a national team throughout a sporting event, throw garbage on players and fans, and behave so badly the army is required to keep them in line. International sporting events in Japan have never been cancelled due to public health concerns. And no Japanese officials have ever thrashed a judge from another country because they were unhappy with the decision.

* Here’s a report of how American soldiers in Japan keep in training.

* The drive-by academic, Walter Russell Mead, drove by again:

“Japan, Russia Build Ties As Asian Balance Shifts”

Note that he calls the islands the Kuriles and says nothing about how they were occupied. Does he know? His wishful thinking is based on a few quotes in one Kyodo report that could have been recycled by every Japanese and Russian foreign minister for the past half-century.

He missed this in the rearview mirror as he drove away:

Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba said on Saturday that a heated, decades-long territorial dispute with Russia was far from solved even as they agreed to boost security and economic cooperation.

Gemba said the territorial issue must be solved before Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, invests further in the islands and Russia’s underdeveloped Far East region.

“We would consider joint business activities if it helps solve the sovereignty issue,” Gemba said.

“But we must not violate Japan’s legal stance…In that sense, the positions (between Japan and Russia) remain far apart.”

*****
The day the other countries in the region can produce an indie band like Kiwi and the Papaya Mangoes is the day they reach the level of Japanese internationalism.

On their previous album, KPM did a Brazilian forro tune with Indian percussion and a flute. The Korean writing seen briefly in this video spells out the name of the Japanese national anthem.

Kiss

ONE segment on a Japanese television program tonight featured an experiment in kissing with participants from five different countries.

The program hired an attractive young woman in each of those countries, had each of them stand for an hour outdoors in an urban district with a lot of pedestrian traffic holding a sign that read, “Kiss me please”, and filmed the events that transpired. Of course they counted the number of kissers, but only kisses on the cheek were allowed. All of the models were very kissable. Women were free to kiss the model too. The results:

Italy: 24
United States: 11
Japan: 7
The Philippines: 4
South Korea: 0

That Italy was the champion by such a large margin isn’t surprising at all. Nor was it surprising that a large share of those 24 were old men who kissed quite stylishly.

Two of the seven Japanese kissers were young women who were photographed in the act by their women friends with cellphone cameras. One said she wanted to upload the photo on Twitter. Two college-aged men walked by the model, but only one kissed her. The other said he would be uncomfortable with people watching.

The South Korean woman attracted a crowd, but no kissers at all during the hour. One middle-aged woman briefly scolded her. A group of older men stood back and watched, but none could bring themselves to approach. Interviewed later, one of the men said he wanted to kiss her, but couldn’t because he was with his wife. The Japanese on the program thought the influence of Confucian culture might have been responsible for the Korean goose egg.

Some foreign residents and visitors say that Japanese television isn’t interesting.

Oh? Compared to what?

*****
Think I better dance now!

Back to front

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

Linguistics

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

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

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

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

Business

Speaking of Daegu:

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

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

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

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

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

Sailing

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

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

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

Flying

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

Said a Jeju Air spokesman:

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

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

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

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

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

Afterwords:

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

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

The Korean hue in Japan

ONE of the guilty pleasures this website provides is the chance to contribute to the disappointment of those people overseas, particularly in the West, who think it is a matter of received wisdom that the Japanese hate Koreans. It would be more pleasurable to think it contributes to their enlightenment, but that would assume they’re interested in being enlightened.

Page 38 of the 1 January edition of the Nishinippon Shimbun (which runs to 40 pages, with page 40 being an advertisement) has an article about the popularity in the Kyushu region of a Busan vocal duo known as Hue. The article reports that the duo, Kim Ji-hyeon (she) and Ryu (or Yu) Mu-yong (he), will make a concerted effort to extend their popularity throughout Japan this year. They’ll start with their first solo concert in the country in Fukuoka City on 6 March.

Once members of the Busan Municipal Chorus, they formed their duo in 2005 to perform what they call popera. Their repertoire seems to consist of pop music that requires sophisticated vocal technique, as well as some opera selections.

Hue’s first Japanese appearance was in Fukuoka City at a Fukuoka City – Busan Friendship Commemorative Concert in 2009. They’ve since performed here more than 10 times, mostly in Fukuoka City. That’s easily arranged, because the city is accessible from Busan by a three-hour jetfoil ship service, or dozens of daily flights that take less than an hour.

They were encouraged to step up their activities in Japan after Yoshida Fumi (56) formed a fan club for them in Fukuoka City. Ms. Yoshida cried when she heard them perform the Japanese song Sen no Kaze ni Natte with Korean lyrics. That’s a translation of the line “I am a thousand winds that blow” from the English-language poem Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep. The song, a tear-jerker suited to a semi-operatic performance, was originally released by the Japanese composer on only 30 privately-produced CDs. It became a national phenomenon in slow motion, however, and eventually inspired a special television drama with that name.

Ms. Yoshida’s fan club, which consists mostly of junior high and high school girls, turned out for Hue’s three Fukuoka City concerts last year, as well as a performance in Busan. Hue returned the favor with an expression of thanks to the club on their newest disc, which was released last fall. They also printed all the lyrics in Japanese and recorded the song Prologue, the lyrics of which are by Ms. Yoshida’s favorite poet, Yun Dong-ju.

Poet Yun studied English literature at two Japanese universities in 1942, but was arrested as a thought criminal by Japanese police and sentenced to two years in jail in 1943. He died in prison in 1945 in — get ready for it — Fukuoka. There’s plenty of information available about him on the Japanese-language part of the Web.

The newspaper report notes that the duo is almost unknown in South Korea.

Now roll all of the above information around in your head one more time and marvel at how amazing life its own self can be.

Here’s a YouTube clip of an appearance they made on Kumamoto television promoting a concert in that city in December 2009. The interview before and after the song consists of the pleasantries you might expect; Ms. Kim (who now has red hair) says she looks forward to seeing the local tourist attractions, such as Kumamoto Castle and Aso. It’s easy to understand why they’re popular. They’re quite talented, though the style of music won’t be to everyone’s taste. But that isn’t the point, is it?

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: They sing in English.

When they’re not singing in Italian, that is:

Afterwords:

Speaking of those in the West who either can’t be bothered or are too thick to get it, BBC introduces a Roland Buerk report this way:

South Korea’s K-pop music has overtaken Japanese music as the industry’s most popular genre in the country.

Relations between the two countries have been difficult after Japan’s colonisation of Korea in the first half of the 20th century.

But with the growing popularity of Korean culture, will attitudes to people of Korean origin, who make up a large ethnic minority in Japan, soften?

Let’s see…in the first paragraph, someone writes that South Korean pop music is more popular in Japan than Japanese pop music, but in the third paragraph asks if Japanese attitudes towards the Koreans living in Japan will change. Spit out that gum before you try walking, son.

Buerk even mentions the growing popularity of Korean restaurants in Japan, but still can’t see beyond the end of his nosenetwork’s pre-packaged narrative.

Further, he fails to provide actual statistics for his claim about K-pop dominance. Taking a mass media report on faith has been a suckers’ proposition for decades. Korean music could very well be the Top of the Pops in Japan, but he has to show us the numbers to be credible.

Finally, he still can’t competently pronounce Japanese place names, despite having lived in the country three years this month. Any native English speaker can learn proper Japanese pronunciation in a matter of minutes. Buerk’s failure to do so demonstrates his level of commitment to his assignment.

If you’re interested in seeing the clip, please hit the search engine of your choice. Links around here are reserved for serious journalism.

Ichigen koji (81)

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

If Japan (the government) makes a political decision and shows even more good faith, (this issue) could be resolved at any time…If it is not resolved, Japan will forever bear the burden of its inability to resolve unsettled bilateral issues.

- Lee Myung-bak, President of South Korea, referring to the comfort woman issue while speaking to a group of zainichi in Osaka during his visit to Japan for a summit with Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko

In contrast, most Japanese consider the issue to have been resolved long ago. In 1965, the Japanese government paid South Korea $800 million in grants and low-interest loans as war reparations. One of the terms of the agreement, reached with South Korean President Bak Jeong-hui, was that South Koreans would relinquish the right to make individual claims against the Japanese government.

Indeed, many Japanese insist that it should never have been an issue at all.

As I’ve written before:

“No one should be under any illusion that the issue of Imperial Japan’s behavior in the war is anything other than a convenient stick for the leadership in China and both Koreas to wield in their relations with contemporary Japan, or to cynically stir up domestic anger at the Japanese, deflecting attention from domestic problems.”

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Bare trees and lonelyhearts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Joseon solution

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

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

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

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

Prickly

EARLIER this week, a post from Prof. Shimojo Masao described a lawsuit filed by a South Korean citizen in New Jersey to prevent a school for Japanese students (enrollment: 90) from using a history textbook that states the islets of Takeshima are Japanese territory despite the current Korean occupation.

Those familiar with the conduct of affairs in Northeast Asia already know that behavior of this sort — over-dramatized, malicious pettiness made grandiose — is a not-uncommon attribute of the Joseon mindset. Yet another data point surfaced this week when Korean netizens fulminated over a scene in a Japanese television program. The drama was Boku to Sutaa 99 Hi, which translates to something like The 99 Days of Me and the Star. It was broadcast earlier this month on the Fuji Television network. One of the stars of the show is Korean actress Kim Tae-hee, who occasionally appears on Japan TV.

The scene at issue is brief. A child asks about the location of South Korea, and another actor spins a globe, points to the country, and says, “It’s here.” Those people with the time and the interest to give very extremely close scrutiny to fictional television programming noticed that the writing on the Japanese globe identifies the Sea of Japan as the Sea of Japan and the islets of Takeshima as Takeshima. Everyone else on the globe would consider that unremarkable, but the Koreans insist they’re called the East Sea and Dokdo, respectively.

This caused an uproar in the irritable bowels of the South Korean Internet, and the flatulence generated was sufficient to provide content for that country’s mass media. Someone on the net in South Korea claimed to have read a tweet from a Fuji TV staff member saying the network had used a graphic to erase those two place names to avoid giving offense, but that it wasn’t used in the final editing for the initial broadcast. The tweeter supposedly said it would be used in rebroadcasts and DVDs.

Fuji TV, however, denied they will alter the scene for rebroadcast and said their plans were to do nothing in particular. Fuji also reported that a producer looked into the matter and found there was no such tweet from a staff member. That’s only logical; this was a Japanese TV program broadcast in Japan, and it’s not as if many people off the peninsula are concerned about how to avoid offending the global network of Korean nationalist vigilantes. The first rebroadcast was very early in the morning today, and there’s been no word yet on what that showed.

What did the scene in the drama look like? Here’s a screenshot of how it was presented on a Korean website:

The report on the J-Cast website in Japan doesn’t mention whether or not Kim Tae-hee will be forced to wear the scarlet letter in her homeland for her contribution to this inexcusable affront to the national honor. She might already have some built-in credibility, however, because this isn’t the first time Ms. Kim has been involved in a political incident. In May 2005, the South Korean branch of the Swiss government’s tourism department filmed a video to promote Korean tourism in Switzerland, and she was the spokesman. One month before that, the international website of the Korean Broadcasting System (English-language) put up an apparently bogus page that suggested the Swiss government supported Korea in its territorial disputes. The Swiss denied the assertion. That same month, they confiscated a shipment of t-shirts with similar political messages being brought into the country by an employee of the South Korean branch at the Zurich airport. (See what I mean about over-dramatized, malicious pettiness?) The Swiss government stays clear of international territorial disputes and doesn’t allow proselytizing of that sort in the country. Everyone knows about Swiss neutrality, which is probably what attracted Korean interest to begin with.

During her stay in Switzerland, Ms. Kim is said to have worn one of the propaganda t-shirts. Her career on Japanese TV had already begun by that time, so to prevent any blowback she denied the charge to the Japanese branch of the Swiss tourism department. That’s not what people at the Japanese branch learned when they made inquiries, however.

After she returned to South Korea from Switzerland, her agents told the local media that she thought it was only natural to please the expectations of her Korean fans. Shortly thereafter, she visited Japan to promote a TV show. She told the media there that she had been a science major in school and needed further study in politics and history. She should also check the library for any books on how to concoct plausible excuses.

Those readers inclined to believe the puffenstuff they see elsewhere about the rabid nationalism of the Japanese should note that Ms. Kim has continued to appear on Japanese television since her small contribution to the Korean propaganda campaign. They might also speculate on what it would have meant to Ms. Kim’s career had the situation been reversed and she departed from the Joseon cultural party line while on an overseas trip.

When Japanese Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko visited South Korea last week for a summit with President Lee Myun-bak, one English-language newspaper ran the headline, “Japan seeks to smooth prickly ties with Seoul”. That’s an apt description, but none of the prickliness originates in Japan.

Indeed, we can improve that headline. It’s the job of newspaper headline writers to find short, punchy words that fit into a limited space and attract the reader’s eye. There’s a shorter alternative for “prickly” that would also improve its accuracy.

Just remove the l.

*****
Here’s an another update on the East Asian Ein Volk, Ein Reich front. Last week in a post about Hatoyama Yukio, I wrote:

Without exception, every young Japanese I’ve known with an interest in China who has gone to study or to spend an extended period of time in that country has returned with their illusions shattered following their encounter with kokumin who mainline on ethnocentric nationalism.

To see what causes the shattering, here’s an older article by John Derbyshire describing his experience on a Chinese-language mailing list for software engineers in the United States infected with the Black Plague strain of ethnocentric nationalism:

Bear in mind, please, that the writers of these e-mails are the intellectual cream of Mainland China, now immigrants to the U.S. Few do not have Master’s degrees; many have Ph.D.s. The average age is around thirty, I suppose. Their academic and professional qualifications, and their command of English, are sufficient to have impressed an American consul into awarding them a visa—no easy matter, allegedly. Yet for all this, their notions about national sovereignty were essentially those of the Ming dynasty mandarinate, and their knowledge of history a collection of false and preposterous clichés.

You have to read it to believe it.

These attitudes could be of significance beyond the circulation of a mailing list. Did any of those engineers know Kexue Huang, I wonder?

While he was working for two American chemical companies, a Chinese scientist was stealing trade secrets and sending them to accomplices for further research, assisting the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) long-term strategic goals in the science field, according to court documents in a recent case.

There were also reports in Japan yesterday that a committee in the PRC’s National Peoples Congress began discussing a revision of the citizens’ identification law that would require inserting the fingerprints of all the country’s citizens on individual IDs. It would seem that the decision won’t require a lot of discussion, however. The Chinese began issuing new IDs in 2004, and one billion have already been distributed — carrying chips designed for the input of fingerprint information.

Consider what might happen when an entire nation populated by citizens of this sort, who view themselves as the flower in the center of the universe, decide that now is the time to bloom. Some overseas observers are unconcerned because they think a collapse of the Chinese economy and the resultant domestic anger might stop international mischief before it starts. They point to the observation of others that the Chinese real estate bubble is beginning to look as if it’s started to pop.

Then again, a pessimist might wonder if the rest of the world will follow the Chinese economy down the open elevator shaft, or if the Chinese leadership decides international buccaneering is the surest way to deflect internal dissent.

Or further still, if it is not a question of “either/or”, but a question of “both”.

*****
Let’s end with the rousing finale of Leni Riefenstahl’s cinema classic to keep our flagging spirits high.

Shimojo Masao (15): The school for Japanese in New Jersey

LEADERLESS Japan has been devoting its energy to domestic issues since the Tohoku earthquake and has been neglecting foreign affairs. An incident occurred in the state of New Jersey at the end of September that we cannot afford to ignore. I would like to examine a few issues that bear on the future course of events in East Asia.

The 24 September online edition of the Hankook Ilbo in the United States reported that a South Korean in that country brought an administrative suit against a school for Japanese in the state of New Jersey (with 90 students), the New Jersey Department of Education, and the Oakland Board of Education. The suit charged that the school for Japanese was using a civics textbook that, in regard to the Takeshima islets (Liancourt Rocks), which are a subject of dispute between Japan and South Korea, contains the passage, “Takeshima is being illegally occupied by South Korea.” This was a problem because “an American educational institution was educating its students with a Japanese textbook that distorted the facts.” The plaintiff said that unless the matter was resolved by eliminating the offending passage and the Board of Education rescinded its approval of the school’s curriculum, it would bring a civil suit.

But Takeshima, in the Sea of Japan, is Japanese territory both historically and under international law. There is no truth to the assertion in the lawsuit that the textbook’s statement is distorted. The plaintiff objects to the phrase, “South Korea claims it that governs Takeshima, and has control of it, but under international law and historical fact, it is Japanese territory.” This description is in accordance with the facts of history. Why was historical fact ignored to bring suit against a small school for Japanese in New Jersey? In South Korea, students are taught that Takeshima is Korean territory, an outlook that differs from the textbook’s statement that Takeshima is illegally occupied by South Korea.

But Takeshima was incorporated as Japanese territory in 1905 based on international law and the concept of terra nullius. It was controlled by Japan for nearly a half century thereafter. It became the center of a land dispute in January 1952, when the South Korean government proclaimed the existence of the Syngman Rhee Line in international waters, with Takeshima on the Korean side of the line. When the South Korean government occupied Takeshima by force in September 1954, the Japanese government immediately proposed to the South Korean government that the matter be referred to the International Court of Justice. The South Korean government refused, however, and the matter remains unresolved to this day. That this abnormal state of affairs continues is due to the fact that Japan presents absolutely no threat to the South Korean government.

Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution prohibits the resolution of international disputes through war or the force of arms. The South Korean government knows that Japan cannot regain control of Takeshima through military action. Japan is therefore precluded from either the use of force or recourse to the International Court of Justice. Explaining the historical background of the illegal South Korean occupation is its only option.

If the administrative lawsuit is successful in prohibiting the use of a textbook that explains Takeshima is illegally occupied by South Korea, it would thwart Japan’s chances of seeking the return of the islets. A court in Superpower America would have delivered that verdict. Their idea of using a great power to achieve one’s objectives, based on the worship of the powerful, is not limited to this administrative lawsuit. South Korea has already been partially successful with it before.

When Japan claims sovereignty over Takeshima, the South Koreans impute that to Japanese territorial ambitions, and then turn the tables by criticizing Japan as an aggressor nation. They validate that latter assertion by bringing up the name of the Sea of Japan, saying it should be the East Sea instead, or the issue of comfort women (prostitutes) during the Second World War. Using the UN and the international community as a stage, they have plotted to isolate Japan as an aggressor nation.

The South Koreans explain that what is now called the Sea of Japan is known as the East Sea in South Korea, and that name has been used since before the birth of Christ. Later, the explanation goes, the Sea of Japan name spread due to Japanese expansionism and colonial domination. A South Korean group in the U.S. claims that “The Japanese insistence on the (name of the) Sea of Japan is the means for imperialism, which includes the ambition for sovereignty over Dokdo (the South Korean name for Takeshima).” They have begun a campaign to change the name to the East Sea, which they insist is correct. The group has disseminated South Korean public opinion abroad by collecting signatures for a petition and submitting them to the American Congress and the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO).

There is no historical basis that the Sea of Japan was ever the East Sea, however. In fact, some people in South Korea think the name should be the Sea of Hanguk (韓国海) and not the East Sea. Respect for historical fact should the determining factor for the name of the body of water. Facts should not be determined by petition drives. The method of using a petition drive to stop the use of the name of the Sea of Japan in favor of the East Sea is similar to the idea of employing an administrative suit to prohibit the use of a textbook that says Takeshima is illegally occupied by South Korea.

The issue of the prostitutes referred to as comfort women also originates in the South Korean historical view of Japan as an aggressor state. The existence of women whose vocation is prostitution for military forces during wartime, however, is an issue that humankind has not been able to overcome. There have been comfort women in South Korea for the American forces since the start of the Korean War. The existence of comfort women for the South Korean army during the Vietnam War is also not irrelevant in this regard.

South Korea created the history that the comfort women were forcibly impressed and controlled by the Japanese government, and has used that to repeatedly criticize Japan. But women from the Korean Peninsula were not the only ones that became comfort women — many of them were Japanese. Poverty drove women to sell their bodies.

Today, the Northeast Asia History Foundation, which the South Korean government established as an instrument of national policy to deal with the Takeshima issue, is the driving force behind the comfort woman issue. It has a division that works to link the comfort women, the name of the Sea of Japan, and Japanese history textbooks with the Takeshima issue to use them for political propaganda. It works with the South Korean organization in the United States and a group of juveniles acting as cyber-terrorists to promote anti-Japanese propaganda in the United States and the rest of the world in regard to these three issues.

It is a fact, however, that the territorial issue of Takeshima is entirely unrelated to the issue of the comfort women and the name of the Sea of Japan. South Korea occupied Takeshima using military force in 1954, but the other two issues predate that. The South Korean government has shouted to the international community about comfort women and the Sea of Japan, and plotted to seal off the Takeshima issue by declaring Japan to be an aggressor nation. At the 2007 UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names — whose work is overseen by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and who has also played a central role in the Takeshima dispute — the South Korean representative called for the joint use of the historically groundless East Sea name. South Korean efforts have also resulted in the U.S. House of Representatives and the national legislatures of Canada and The Netherlands passing motions condemning Japan over the comfort women issue.

That these efforts now extend to an administrative lawsuit prohibiting the use of a textbook in a small school for Japanese in New Jersey is likely the result of their past successes. But the claim that the textbook used by the students “is in violation of the U.S. Constitution, and betrays the universal expectations of humankind for education” in a lawsuit that uses superficially democratic procedures is merely an attempt to justify the aggressive act of South Korea. This cannot be overlooked.

My role is to disclose the circumstances surrounding this issue for the school for Japanese in New Jersey and the New Jersey Department of Education, which have been dragged into this false accusation. I trust that the court will clarify the facts of history based on law and justice.

- Shimojo Masao

*******
Ampontan P.S.:

1. Japanese sources say that at least 40% of the WWII comfort women were Japanese, and I’ve never seen an attempt to rebut that.

2. It is worth noting in regard to the South Korean claim for the East Sea name that the body of water lying to the west of the Korean Peninsula is known in Korea (and even by an English-language blogger there who should know better) as the West Sea. The rest of the world knows it as the Yellow Sea. There seems to be no South Korean effort to have international bodies recognize that particular name, from which we can draw our own conclusions.

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Compensation

READERS might assume from some of the posts on this site that I’m opposed to all things governmental, but that assumption would be mistaken. In fact, here’s a story about a South Korean government decision that is of such exquisite and perfect wisdom, I would be happy to buy a drink for the man responsible for it.

Over the years, the veterans affairs ministry of the South Korean government has paid compensation to families of victims of the 1950-1953 Korean War. Recently, the government has come under civilian fire for first refusing compensation to a woman whose brother was killed in that war, and then offering her KRW 5,000. That’s the same amount paid to families 50 years ago, but today it’s worth just $US 4.20.

Here’s the first paragraph from ABC News Australia:

The South Korean government has been slammed by a civil rights commission for offering a woman a little over $4 in compensation for the death of her brother in the Korean War.

Followed by the inevitable wailing and pants-wetting:

The presidential Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission has called the decision “incomprehensible”, saying the government failed to take into account six decades of inflation.

“We hope that this case will lead to forming a system of adequately compensating the families of Korean War veterans who continue to live with deep pain,” the commission said.

Now that we’ve gotten the bathetic fru-fru out of the way, here’s the important stuff:

The South Korean woman, 63, only discovered a few years ago that her brother had been killed during the war…she never knew of his existence until told of his death by a neighbour, local media reported, adding the children’s mother suffered from dementia.

In a 1964 obscenity case, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his concurrence to the majority opinion that hard-core pornography was hard to define, but added, “I know it when I see it.”

It is also difficult to define which demands for compensation are legitimate and which are just a racket, but, like Justice Stewart, we know them when we see them.

I wish I knew that anti-racketeering G-man in Seoul. His bar tab would be on me.

Betting on the bulls now legal

IN MOST Western countries where bullfighting is performed in front of spectators in the guise of an art form, the fight ends when the matador kills the bull in the ring. (They are killed outside the ring in Portugal after the fight.) Indeed, there are reports that as many as 24,000 of the specially bred bulls are killed every year in bullfights in Spain. The artistry is held to derive from the toreador’s interpretative moves while very close to the bull, which means that he is in danger of being gored or trampled. To minimize that possibility, the bull is tranquilized, weakened by laxatives, beaten in the kidneys, partially blinded by petroleum jelly, confined in darkness before the fight, and stabbed by picadors and other men immediately after it enters the ring.

Bullfighting is also performed in front of spectators in Japan, Korea, and China. There is one significant difference, however — in this part of the world, two bulls face off against each other rather than a drugged and blinded bull charging a bully wearing a funny hat, tight pants, and twirling a cape and a sword. The winner is determined when the other bull backs off and runs away, and both bulls survive the match.

This academic paper (.pdf) offers a brief but informative description of bullfighting in Japan:

Although bullfighting occurs in six Japanese prefectures – Okinawa, Kagoshima, Ehime, Shimane, Niigata and Iwate – it is most popular in the Okinawa islands, in the Amami islands of Kagoshima prefecture and in Ehime. In Okinawa, there are eleven bullrings and thirty games a year in six locations – Okinawa City, Uruma, Ginowan, Motobu, Imakijin, and Yontani. (On the island of) Tokunoshima (Amami), there are thirteen bullrings in Tokunoshima, Isen, and Amagi and twenty games a year. In Ehime, there is one bullring, in Uwajima and five games a year.

This is what happens after a bullfight in Spain:

This is what happens after a bullfight in Japan:

The winning bull’s owner, his family and supporters always spill into the bullring to show their delight by riding on the back of the bull and dancing with hands and legs while singing Waido-bushi.

In South Korea, meanwhile, a bullfighting festival is held every year in Cheongdo:

The age-old tradition of Korean bullfighting is no longer just a simple tournament. While it was once only basic bullfighting, the sport has developed into an international event hosting tournaments such as a national bullfighting tournament, a Korea-Japan bullfighting festival, a rodeo tournament with US Army force participants in Korea, a tournament by world-renowned professional bullfight champions and the national bullfight picture-taking tournament.

The Cheongdo Bullfighting Festival is held for five days in April in that city in the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula, about one hour north of Busan by train. It attracts roughly 300,000 people, some of whom come from Japan. (The festival website has a Japanese page to facilitate visits.) In fact, bullfighting is part of the thriving non-governmental exchange between Japan and South Korea. Here’s another passage from that academic paper:

There has been an exchange program between Korea and Tokunoshima since 1999 when three Tokunoshiman black bulls were sent to Chongdo and fought against Korean red bulls. The match was named the ‘Korea-Japan match-up’ and attracted an audience of several hundred thousand in Chongdo. After the event, goodwill ambassadors from Chongdo were sent to Tokunoshima. Honorable guests were also sent to the Bullfighting Summit in Japan (the fifth in 2002, the eighth in 2005 and the ninth in 2006).

The bullfighting in Cheongdo isn’t limited to the five-day festival, however. There are matches every weekend throughout the year in a domed ring with a capacity of 12,000. There’s no telling how the bulls will behave, so a 30-minute time limit has been set for each match. Ten matches a day are held in the 31-meter ring.

The spectacle is popular enough in South Korea that, starting on the 3rd of this month, spectators can now wager on the bulls, with the chance to win anywhere from KRW 100 to 100,000. (The max is only about $US 87.00 or JPY 6,644.) It is South Korea’s first public sector gambling operation.

Here’s a look at the Cheongdo bullfighting festival with red bulls:

And here are some scenes from Tokunoshima bullfights with black bulls, though the last features a battle between le rouge et le noir. There’s also a scene of the happy supporters riding the back of one of the winners. The last one on the bull’s back might be about the same age (six) at which some Mexican bullfighting schools accept trainees.

As a rule, my position is that comparisons are odious, particularly comparisons between East and West. This is one of the exceptions to the rule.

Afterwords:

The title of the academic paper is Transperipheral Networks. While it is worth reading to learn about Japanese bullfighting, it was written to present a different argument. As so often happens in the social sciences, the argument is trite and already obvious to the average junior high school student:

The Bullfighting and cattle raising networks discussed in this paper show that major centres are not essential to cross-regional networking. In this manner, the seemingly ‘backward’ activity of bullfighting shares aspects with the more general globalisation of information in which every (facilitated) individual in the world can relate to each other through the medium of the internet. The formation of a ‘transperipheral’ network among the bullfighting areas thereby suggests another entrance to the world of globalisation that actively counters the massification and homogenisation of centrally-produced culture in favour of translocal difference.

Ah, well. On the one hand, it gives the three authors something to do with their time and keeps them off the streets. On the other, all the authors are affiliated with Kagoshima University. That’s a national university, which means the professors are paid with public funds.

Cruisin’

PEOPLE who think they have to go out of their way to find current events-based political or social satire just don’t know where to look. Alert observers have long understood that actual events and their presentation by witless media jesters contain more real mirth than anything contrived for a mass audience. Why buy a ticket or sit through commercials to consume the humor of expensive gag writers? Pay attention and the comedy comes to you.

And here comes example number one from USA Today Travel:

North Korea’s first cruise ship set sail last week with 130 or so passengers, most of them Chinese tour operators and foreign journalists traveling on a junket, an attempt by the poverty-stricken pariah state to woo visitors – and foreign currency.

See what I mean?

“A lot of people like going to obscure places. And this is the most obscure part of a very obscure country in tourism terms — the least visited part of the least visited country,” Simon Cockerell head of the Koryo Group, a Beijing-based tour operator specializing in North Korea, told AFP.

I’m willing to bet cash money that the intrepid travelers flush enough to make this trip to Obscuria and fork over their foreign currency to the Kim Family Regime are the same sort of people — if not the same people and their children — who insisted on economic sanctions of the South African government a generation ago to prevent them from getting their hands on foreign currency. And I’d wheel a quinella that they’ll use the experience of their vacation cruise as material for an arch monologue at the dinner party they’ll throw when they get back home.

The newly refurbished, yet reportedly rusty, 39-year-old Man Gyong Bong, a former ferry, made the 21-hour cruise from the coastal city of Rason to the resort area of Mount Kumgang.

To get the joke, you have to know that the Man Gyong Bong is the same ship that once cruised between North Korea and Niigata, Japan, until the Japanese prohibited its entry as a navis non grata. But now it’s been refurbished, or “repurposed” as an article in the Huffington Post amusingly had it.

Understatement makes for the most elegant of satire:

The mountain resort opened in 1998 with financing from South Korea and the prospect of thawing the freeze that has existed between the two Koreas since 1953. A series of problems – including the shooting death of a South Korean tourist in 2008 by a North Korean guard – didn’t help business. Then last month, the North Koreans seized the resort’s assets. Now they’re actively seeking Chinese visitors, London’s Daily Mail reports.

Dumb and Dumberer must be one of the Western films in the Dear Leader’s personal library. The North Koreans had an excellent source of foreign currency through a resort at a tourist destination that the South Koreans paid for because many South Koreans were willing to pay to visit. But killing a tourist and nationalizing the facility is not the sort of hospitable welcome that will attract well-to-do Chinese and Americans with money to burn for trips to obscure locations.

Americans comprise a tiny segment of foreign visitors to North Korea, whose tourist scene isn’t exactly robust. But 2012, the 100th anniversary of the birth of “Eternal President” Kim Il Sung (which could spark some spectacular public spectacles) could be an opportune time to visit.

One wonders whether USA Today Travel would have thought the Rally of Victory during the fifth Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg — recorded for posterity by Leni Riefenstahl — was another spectacular spectacle that could have been an opportune time to visit.

The English-language edition of the Asahi Shimbun was just as entertaining. Their humor starts with the dateline:

MOUNT KUMGANGSAN, North Korea

Though the USA Today sensibly stuck with Mt. Kumgang, the Asahi retained the – san suffix, which means “mountain”. In other words, the Asahi journalist is filing a report from Mt. Kumgang Mountain. It’s even funnier when you realize that the same construction is used in Japanese for Japanese mountains. The patient explanations of the redundancy by the Japanese over the past few decades have resulted in smoother usage everywhere but in a Japanese newspaper.

The ship, the Man Gyong Bong, used to ply a route from North Korea to Japan, but Tokyo banned port visits to protest North Korean missile tests in 2006.

To which should be added the Japanese suspicion that Japanese-born Korean nationals with ties to the North were using it to transport hard Japanese currency. And let’s not forget that a former North Korean engineer testified before the U.S. Congress that the vessel was also used to ship missile parts.

Some stories are so good they’re worth repeating.

North Korea, which desperately needs foreign currency, is hoping to woo Chinese to the Mount Kumgangsan resort to fill the void left by South Korean visitors after a woman tourist was shot dead by a North Korean soldier in 2008.

And the result:

The disappearance of South Korean tourists is believed to have dealt a serious blow to the North Korean economy. South Korean sources estimate that North Korea gained at least $480 million (37 billion yen) from the inflow of South Korean tourists.

Pyeongyang has regrouped by formulating a business plan:

North Korean authorities hope to attract 100,000 Chinese tourists a year.

Here’s how they’ve executed that plan:

(F)acilities on the Man Gyong Bong are pretty primitive. The wash basin did not work most of the time.

Orange-colored lifesaving equipment was manufactured in August 1988, according to descriptions written in Japanese.

It took 27 hours from Mount Kumgangsan to Rason, seven hours longer than scheduled, because of strong winds, according to a sailor.

How long will it be before they decide to speed up the voyage by employing the enormous labor pool at local concentration camps as galley slaves?

The ship was repainted just a week ago and finished trial operations the day before we went out.

Unfortunately, the Asahi reporter didn’t mention whether the entire ship has been painted this time. When it sporadically sailed to Japan, there were reports in the Japanese media that only half of the Man Gyong Bong had been painted — that half of the ship facing the shore when docked.

The North Korean authorities seem to like that half-and-half concept. Here’s the painted side of the resort:

Mount Kumgangsan was almost deserted the day we visited. A bathing resort on a stretch of a white sand beach was desolate, duty-free and other stores were closed, and a beautifully tended golf course was empty.

And the unpainted side of the resort:

Barbed wire lined the roads, and soldiers kept guard. Many districts had signs that they are managed by the military, and there were warnings of land mines.

No wonder the golf course was empty. What duffer would risk life, limb, and his favorite mashie niblick after his drive sliced off the fairway?

A Chinese media representative said, “North Korea has made more progress in opening up its economy to foreigners than before.”

Yes, they haven’t gunned down any tourists for three years now.

Eavesdropping on the arguments between the Joseon neighbors is always entertaining:

Kim Guang Yun, a senior North Korean government official in charge of the Mount Kumgangsan international tourist zone, was scathing of South Korea’s decision to suspend tours to the mountain resort.

“It is the South Korean government that suspended the Mount Kumgangsan tourism for three years for political purposes and broke the long-term contract (to develop the area),” Kim told the participants of the observation tour. “I want you to clearly understand this point.”

Gotcha.

According to South Korean officials, North Korea gave 50-year exclusive rights to the Hyundai group and agreed to solve disputes through negotiations and protect investors’ assets. But North Korea announced last year that it would confiscate the assets held by the South Korean government. It also deprived the Hyundai group of exclusive rights this year. Sources said South Korean companies, including Hyundai Asan, invested a total of $320 million in the Mount Kumgangsan area.

Meanwhile, the South Koreans display their own considerable talent for farce:

The South Korean government is considering bringing the case to an international organization to settle the dispute.

When another country steals their steals their property and kills their citizens, they’re hot to trot to an international organization for dispute resolution. When they stole Takeshima from Japan and killed some Japanese citizens during the heist, and the Japanese suggested dispute resolution by an international organization, they just got hot.

Taking the comedy to another dimension is a YouTube video of a report on the cruise. If the scenes of the sink, the staterooms, and the on-board entertainment don’t have you boiling tea in your navel, the narration surely will. The author was shooting for the pose of ironic snark that passes for wit and repartee in some circles these days, but he missed so badly it’s turned into two minutes of verbal pratfall.

And speaking of verbal pratfalls, wait’ll you hear the narrator’s pronunciation of “karaoke”.

Really, this story has more laughs per minute than The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, with the bonus of not having to watch the host mug shamelessly for the camera or playing pretend on different levels.

Finally, if the people in charge of this enterprise are thinking of hiring Western entertainers for the Man Gyong Bong cruises, here’s the perfect match. The combination of performer, performance, and audience are funnier by accident than the previous video tries to be on purpose, and Kim II’s heir apparent Kim Jong-Un could mingle with the other candidates for metabolic syndrome and feel right at home

The memoirs of Im Mun-hwan

IM MUN-HWAN was born on the Korean Peninsula in 1907, three years before the merger with Japan. Bright, ambitious, and willing to work hard, he left Korea for Japan at the age of 16 to better himself. That was not unusual; Japanese sources claim that more than 90% of the Koreans who went to Japan to live and work during the period of merger did so voluntarily. Korea was a backwater in those days, and some Koreans moved to Japan for the same reasons Europeans emigrated to America.

Im pulled jinrikshaws, delivered milk, and worked as a cleaner while attending school, first at Doshisha middle school (which still exists as part of an educational corporation that includes the well-known Doshisha University). He also received private financial assistance.

He pursued an elite educational program that is still the model for young men and women with certain objectives today, and graduated with honors from the Law Department of Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo). He then passed the difficult test for upper level bureaucrats.

Hoping to contribute to the betterment of his homeland, Im went to work for the government-general of Korea. He was stunned by the harsh prejudicial treatment he received from fellow Koreans, particularly because he had experienced nothing of the sort in Japan.

When Korea became independent with the Japanese surrender in 1945, he stayed in Korea — where he was vilified as “Japan’s dog”. Nevertheless, the Korean government hired him to work in the bureaucracy, which valued him for a “fastidious” approach to money that he said he learned in Japan. He eventually rose to the position of Agriculture and Forestry Minister, while managing to keep private his astonishment at the “irrationality” of the Yi Seung-man (Syngman Rhee) administration.

Late in life, Im Mun-hwan wrote The Memoirs of a Bureaucrat in the Service of Imperial Japan and the Republic of Korea, the source of these stories, in Japanese. It was republished this June by Soshisa, 18 years after his death, and sells for JPY 2,940 yen.

It is unfortunate that so many Korean politicians, academics, and opinion leaders demand that the Japanese look honestly at history while so few of them are willing to take that same look themselves. Perhaps they’re frightened of what they might see.