The White Peril 白禍

Ruh-roh:

A Japan Airlines (JAL) jetliner barely avoided a collision with a plane that had just landed at New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido in January after it began to race along the runway for takeoff without clearance, government regulators said Tuesday.

It was not until last Friday that JAL reported the incident, which occurred on Jan. 22, to the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry in accordance with the Civil Aviation Law.

...

The JAL jet's captain has told company officials that he failed to confirm that his plane was cleared for takeoff. "I was preoccupied with preparations for takeoff and failed to confirm whether my plane was cleared. I thought no other aircraft was ahead of us."

At around 9:16 p.m., the captain of JAL Flight 1036 bound for Tokyo's Haneda Airport was ordered by an air traffic controller to wait at the south edge of the 3,000-meter-long Runway A, according to ministry and JAL officials. Nevertheless, the pilot of the Boeing 777 with 201 passengers aboard increased the engine's thrust and began to race along the runway for takeoff.

The controller who noticed that the jet was about to take off immediately ordered it to halt saying, "Stop! You're not cleared for takeoff yet!"

Details, details. JAL hasn't had a fatal incident in 20 years--in fact, I believe it'll be exactly 20 years this August. It was the single-plane incident with the highest number of fatalities in history, I think. At least, it used to be, and I don't think any have exceeded it since then. Japan's air safety record since then (and, for that matter, then) has been the envy of the world, and justifiably so. But there's a crew-error incident like this every few months nowadays; a few years ago, it was control-tower error. Luckily, there's always been only one person in la-la land, with everyone else on top of things and ready to make up for him.

It's inconceivable that anyone reads this site and doesn't read Virginia Postrel, yeah? Well, just in case, she has a beautifully done, economical little photo essay on George Hurrell at Slate. You have to see it. The picture of Pancho Barnes was interesting to me because I first encountered her name in Chuck Yeager's autobiography as a boy. I must have read that book a hundred times. By the time Yeager knew her, Barnes had hardened into an acridly foul-mouthed survivor, but Hurrell captures her much earlier. Actually, she may already have been an acridly foul-mouthed survivor by the time of this photograph, but that's not the side of her that comes through.

BTW, another photo essay posted the same day as Virginia's is worth reading also. It's about Oscar-gown blandout, and it (the phenomenon, not Julia Turner's well-written photo essay text) may help to explain the climate that's led to such weirdnesses as the dropping of jaws over Condoleezza Rice's get-up the other day. Don't get me wrong--I loved it. An athletic woman with good carriage, great legs, wintry coloring without a pair of tall black boots? Inconceivable. Where's she been hiding 'em until now? is what I'd like to know. I know that Laura Bush has been trying to recenter the role of First Lady visually (though word is, she's planning to relax a bit in her husband's second term), and if starlets in their notice-me! phase aren't dressing daringly, you can't expect much from high-ranking women politicians. Still, it's sad that everyone's so bowled over at the slightest eccentric gesture.

Japan's H2A Rocket has been launched successfully. Good news. Japan's last several high-profile rocket launches have frequently ended in malfunctions and shoot-downs, so there was a lot of pressure for today to be, as the Nikkei blandly puts it, the first step in restoring confidence in Japanese aerospace development. That communications anomalies were discovered and delayed the launch by an hour and a half didn't help matters, but everything's fine, including the putting into orbit of the MTSAT (multifunctional transport satellite, or 運輸多目的衛星 if you prefer the Japanese mouthful) it was carrying, which will be used for air traffic control and meteorological observation.

Of course, this is a civil, not military, satellite. Whether its success bodes well for needed improvements in Japan's ability to gather strategic information by satellite is not clear. More military satellites are supposed to go up in the next year or so, so we'll see.

Dean links to this post by political scientist R.J. Rummel. It's the first in a series, which--given that the topic is problems with the UN--promises to be lengthy. What he's arguing here is that the UN is no longer an agent for global justice, and this passage in particular caught my eye:

Out of the vast array of facts that make this case, I will select a few. But first, as one who made considerable use of UN reports, studies, and statistical services, such as the Demographic Yearbook and Statistical Yearbook, for my research, the story of the United Nations is not entirely negative. Indeed, some will make the argument that on balance the UN has contributed to the welfare of countries. But, then, one would have to downplay or ignore the political functions of the UN.

It's that last item that interests me. The "has contributed" part could simply indicate that if we take the UN's entire post-war history, the net influence of its non-political organs has been for the good. I can see arguing that, if you qualified it. But Rummel's main point is not about the UN's cumulative history but about where it is now, and if you downplay its political functions, that leaves.... Hmm. I'd be very interested to see it argued that the UN has not roamed off-course in its economic and humanitarian roles, too.

There's the World Health Organization, with its shift in focus from life-threatening diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria toward the sorts of voluntary behaviors that have become favorites of first-world busybodies: auto safety and smoking, for example. UNICEF's goals haven't diffused so alarmingly, but you have to wonder why WHO isn't attending to several of them already.

Look, even cursorily, for criticisms of the efficacy of World Bank lending policies, and prepare to drown. The tone of this Guardian piece is as snidely anti-capitalist as you'd expect, but the essential charges don't need to be. Giving countries money for vainglorious public works projects they may not be able to maintain, requiring privatization of a major industry in a country where only a tiny group of cronies have the means to own anything, and expecting to end corruption without changing the circumstances that make it attractive--you needn't be a socialist to see the folly there. (Note also that the World Bank has taken to joining forces with WHO on its global-nanny territory, issuing a finger-wagging report about the pitfalls of alcohol abuse.)

Anyway, Rummel's posts look to be interesting, given that he acknowledges he spent decades as a true believer. If he continues to tackle political functions specifically--and why not? he is a political scientist--I'll be eager to read what he thinks about the latest push to change the terms of membership on the Security Council.

Congratulations to Susanna Cornett, whose Cut on the Bias was three years old yesterday (her time). I don't know that I've been reading Susanna since her first Instapundit link, which is when most of us who don't know her from real life were first likely to have heard of her, but I definitely remember that page. Good for her. She's been occupied with other things lately, but her intermittent posts are still good. She's gone out of her way to be kind to me since our first few contacts, and, of course, I've learned a tremendous amount reading her. Best wishes.

One of these days, I'm going to come up with a rule. Well, I've already sort of come up with it, I just haven't gotten it into perfected, catchy form yet. The basic idea is:

job as vaguely-defined counselor/consultant/therapist + list of multiple degrees prominently showcased after one's name = RUN AWAY!

For the latest proof, look at 365Gay's Ask Angelo. (I don't know whether his columns are archived; I'm pretty sure this one just appeared today.)

Yes, before you say it, I'm in a pissy frame of mind and huffing and puffing over something trivial. My boyfriend has been making me feel his faraway wonderfulness all the more piercingly this week by going out of his way to e-mail me get-well messages over lunch, even though he has to make some excuse to absent himself from his colleagues and knows that he'll be talking to me between 11 and midnight as always, anyway. I'm ill and feeling crappy. The tribulations of guys who can't keep it in their pants even with their boyfriends in the same city are not high on my list of things to sympathize with at the moment.

More on that later. First, here's letter 1:

Dear Angelo,

After three years of a most fulfilling relationship with my bf, I was unceremoniously dumped. How do you accept someone you love telling you that they're out of love with you?

Signed, Shocked 



Dear Shocked,
I do not know if you'll ever really accept that he is not in love with you anymore per se. I mean you may not believe it or be OK with it for a long while. It was not something you expected, chose or wanted. Loving someone romantically involves our deepest experience of oneness. When we are in love we are as close as we can be physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually to anyone. Surprising insensitive rejection from a love is a terribly painful feeling. A gut wrenching unbearable pain. If we are lonely, emotionally wounded or need more love in our life, this pain can be excruciating.

You may ask, "how can this be?" You may think: I feel the love between us. I still see the look in his eyes. [You may say to yourself: this is not my beautiful stapler! *Ahem* Sorry.--SRK] Maybe he's afraid. Maybe he's in a funk. Maybe he's on drugs. Maybe he's gone crazy. And the list goes on.

Yeah, I bet it does. I wonder whether the list includes, "Maybe I've spent the last three years being a selfish little bitch. Maybe he's been sending me big, flashing warning signs that things were going awry. Maybe I ignored them because I was getting what I wanted. Maybe he finally decided the only thing that would get it through my thick skull was to ditch my ass."

I mean, sorry. Of all the long-term relationships I've seen go sour (including my own pre-Atsushi versions), invariably, when the dumpee has said, "This is so sudden!" his entire complement of friends and acquaintances has risen with one voice to say, "WHAT?! How could you NOT SEE THAT COMING?" Are there people who genuinely and innocently get stuck with jerks who don't reveal themselves as such until late in the game? Probably. I'm afraid probability isn't on the side of that one, though.

...

Grieving is an active process that you have to move towards. Blocking it makes it worse. It is by allowing yourself to be sad, to scream, to cry, to "fall apart" that you heal. Lean into the pain and let it all out. Inviting in this kind of deep agonizing pain will take some effort on your part. Feeling your feelings is the key to getting better. The only way out is through. This intense pain will not last forever even though it seems like it will. The pain will lessen. Get support including counseling....

Yeah, there's nothing in life more difficult than convincing a fag who's just been dumped to get self-indulgently mopey about it. Like killing the freaking Hydra, is what it is.

My degree isn't in psychology, but I venture to say that the problem most guys I've seen have isn't that they're incapable of owning their grief. It's that they can't put a lid on it and fake being even-keeled until their heart catches up with their façade, not even after a decent amount of down time.

And nowhere in Angelo's reply do I see anything at all about the possible need for self-criticism on the part of the letter-writer--either to figure out what he himself might have done to contribute to the undoing of the relationship or to learn what to look for so he doesn't get taken again.

Letter 2 is even, uh, better:

Dear Angelo, 

I am happily partnered in a monogamous relationship for 4� months now. My boyfriend and I have a great sex life and I feel complete. However I can't stop looking at porn, going to book stores, playing with strangers, and I can't stop myself from cruising the locker room at the gym either.

Signed, Prowler 

Playing with strangers, honey? Since your relationship is monogamous, I assume you're referring to canasta?

Angelo's answer to this one starts off promisingly:

Dear Prowler, 

Newsflash! If you're honest with yourself, you know you're not in a monogamous relationship if you're playing with strangers behind his back. This is cheating. You are being dishonest with your partner and yourself. You are also putting your partner at risk if you're not playing safe. Your behavior does not match your statement that you're happy, great and complete in your relationship. If this is so, for what reason do you cheat? If you truly feel happy, great and complete with him, your behavior suggests you may have a sexual addiction that helps
you feel good about yourself. You would want to seek counseling to control it. 



Like many men, perhaps you don't know how to, or are afraid of getting emotionally close to another man. Your sexual behavior could be an exit for you to feel safe. Many men equate relationship with engulfment and may cheat to feel more independent.

Interesting, the way this guy recommends coun$eling for everything.

More importantly, we have an inquiry from a guy who wants to screw around all the time. And what explanations are we offered? Maybe he's afraid of intimacy. Maybe he's greasing an exit. Maybe he has an addiction.

Here's a thought: maybe he's like the rest of us--a horny gay man who needs to learn that it's possible to go for 18 consecutive hours without doing it, even if you spend part of that time at the gym and in Christopher Street bookstores. Why is it that plain old lack of discipline is the last explanation people reach for to explain bad behavior? An old complaint, I know, but give me a break. If this character's willing to game some guy into providing him the safe feeling of a monogamous relationship while cheating on him, I'm not sure that telling him an open arrangement might suit his needs better addresses the real problem.

The Diet's Committee on the Constitution (or however it's being anglicized) has released the draft of its proposals, which are due in finalized form in April. The summary at the Yomiuri pulls things together pretty well.

The hottest topic at the meeting was whether the amended Constitution should clearly state the right to exercise collective self-defense.

An advocate of the change said, "It would be bad if the government's interpretation of the stipulation could be easily altered after a change in administration. An ambiguous constitution is problematic."

But an opponent said, "It's a matter of course that the nation can exercise the right to collective self-defense. There's no need to put it in the Constitution."

Of course this is the...culmination is probably the wrong word, since this could keep going indefinitely...latest stage in a protracted series of negotiations. The Shin-Komeito is the LDP's partner in its ruling coalition; one of the issues on which their alliance is shaky is the use of the SDF. The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the chief opposition party, opposes changing the constitution. I'm not sure whether its was a DPJ member or someone else who made the statement quoted as "It's a matter of course that the nation can exercise the right to collective self-defense," but it's hard to figure what that could mean. If conservative interpretations of the constitution didn't regard Article 9 as prohibiting Japan from entering international conflicts, this debate wouldn't be going in the first place.

Here's what Article 9 says:

1. 日本国民は、正義と秩序を基調とする国際平和を誠実に希求し、国権の発動たる戦争と、武力による威嚇又は武力の行使は、国際紛争を解決する手段としては、永久にこれを放棄する。
2. 前項の目的を達するため、陸海空軍その他の戦力は、これを保持しない。国の交戦権は、これを認めない。

1. 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 preceeding 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.

Added after looking at Reuters: You know what I don't get? Look for the latest Japan-related headlines on Reuters. I can see why Livedoor's attempted takeover of Fuji Television is a big, big story. I haven't written about it because, well, I usually don't report on business stuff; the case does say interesting things about the state of Japanese media, but nothing that's moved me to go off on it. The nice thing about having a vanity site (verging on Apollonia in my case) is that you get to write about whatever you please.

Reuters is not a vanity site (stop sniggering, you boys in the back!), and you'd think that it would see fit to give some attention to a proposed change in the Japanese constitution. I don't think it's especially newsworthy because I live here, you understand. Japan has the first ever constitution to renounce war explicitly. It's America's chief ally in a volatile region. We're not talking about a potentially insignificant shift here.

You would think that, being reasonably familiar with the salacious ways of the world, I'd know that using certain words is asking for trouble. Obviously not:




I should have seen what was coming when I tossed off a reference to b---- w---- a month or so back, but...well, maybe I'm only attuned to my own turn-ons. I almost have to feel sorry for anyone who was looking for pictures of b---- w---- and washed up here. Bet it was a surprise!

And, man! Apparently, there are 300 million people in America: one is K---- C------, and the other 299,999,999 want to know whether he's queer. Believe me, what you're seeing above are just the two most common strings. There are plenty more where those came from. It's mind-boggling.

On the bright side, I'll be in great shape to become known to millions if the tabloids ever start linking K---- C------ to b---- w----.

Added on 24 February (barely): It did occur to me that Spanish questions are supposed to have that inverted interrogation mark before them, but since Spanish isn't a language I've studied, much less had reason to type in, I didn't know how to make it. Turns out it's iquest. I mean, that's what you put between the ampersand and semi-colon. ¿ So intuitive I'm sure I'll forget it. Not that I have any reason to have to remember it, anyway.

A Typical Joe commented to my most recent effusion on gay marriage with this:

I don't agree with the argument (from Sean at The White Peril via Dean's World)
but it is not anti-gay.

That's a more civil response than one often gets on this topic; for that I thank him. [Uh, either I just got dizzier or there was just an earthquake...lessee, 22:00...have to check NHK.] I feel at a distinct disadvantage disagreeing with someone who looks so adorable with his partner (I think there's some kind of law: only one smiler per gay couple), but I'm going to do my best, at least on one important point.

I know, or at least am willing to believe, that for a lot of rank-and-file gays, the fundamental issue isn't psychological affirmation. But, you know, as long as overachieving, careerist urban guys are the ones making the public arguments, status is going to sneak into them somehow. Believe me, I am not casting stones here--I am perfectly capable, in my weaker moments, of detestable thinking along the lines of, Dammit, I was the obedient show-child growing up. I have the summa cum laude Ivy League degree and the management job. I don't do drugs or hang out at sex clubs. I donate to charity and pay my taxes and NO POSSIBILITIES SHOULD BE CLOSED TO ME.

You cannot just look at Andrew Sullivan's and Jonathan Rauch's and Dale Carpenter's CV's and have a comprehensive map to their psychology. But you also can't tell me that the milieux they move in don't color what they think should be theirs for the asking. Again, I'm talking about men I much admire, despite Sullivan's recent shakiness. And it's pretty much a truism that those who get the public microphone are going to be those who (1) want it and (2) have resources to compete for it.

I just wish that people with a different point of view (just so it's clear, I'm not ascribing this thinking to Joe, just using his post as a lead-in to it) would take more opportunities to stand up and say, "Look, we'll take care of being respectable in our day-to-day interactions with our family and neighbors--leave that out of it. It's not that we're not as smart as you are, or that our expectations are blinkered, or our horizons are shrunken, or anything. We don't want to be prom queen for a day. We don't want attention. We just want the government to make it possible for us to count on being able to provide for each other and then get out of our lives." I can certainly understand why they don't, though.

Added on 24 February: In the comments, Michael refers to his latest post on marriage. It's here.

If you never hear from me again, you can assume that my neighbors decided they couldn't take any more Linda seeping through the walls, broke down my door, and offed me. I've been trying to propitiate them by consistently skipping over that squalling, momentum-killing version of "Dark End of the Street" toward the end of Side 1, but Tokyo is a stressful place, and you never know what will be the last straw for people.

You know how I figured last night that I just had a 24-hour bug? I was mistaken. I forgot that aspirin, despite its commonplace-ness, is very, very good at what it does, and my reduced fever and achiness were its doing. The good news is that, since yesterday, my stomach has remembered that it's supposed to send things downward when it's done with them. The bad news is that I'm still lightheaded. Fortunately, there's news to match my mood. Take a gander at this, geese:

An overwhelming 96.7 percent of single women are bugged when they see men wearing trousers that are either too short or too long for them, a joint survey by two Japanese companies has found.

...

The women were asked to rate their response to such appearances in four levels, ranging from "It bothers me a lot," to "It doesn't worry me."

The appearance that bugged women most was "Trousers that don't match (are too long or too short)." A total of 69.4 percent of women responded, "It bothers me a lot," while 27.3 percent said it vexed them "a little" -- a combined total of 96.7 percent.

...

The survey also found that women took notice of what kind of socks men were wearing. When asked, "What item can cause you to become disillusioned and think that the person has no style?" a total of 18.4 percent of the women said, "Socks."

There are probably more than a few self-professed "stylish" businessmen in Japan who give a lot of thought to what kind of necktie they wear, but based on the results of the survey, maybe a look at their socks may also be in order.

The article focuses on the "stylish" angle, but I think that's probably not quite right--even if the women themselves were addressed that way in the questions. After all, we've all seen a billion and one of these hokey surveys about what drives women nuts about the way men dress, and when it comes to trousers, what's the usual top-ranked complaint? They bag around the ass, that's what. And Japanese women are no different from women elsewhere in that regard. (No, I haven't researched this scientifically, but tell me you seriously doubt me? Thought not.) That it either wasn't asked about or didn't concern the women surveyed suggests that the real issue isn't "stylishness" in the sense of attractiveness. (Well, I guess it could also suggest that wearing highwaters is an unusually common problem among Japanese men, but let me riff here.)

There are many lines of work that have adopted casual dress in the States but not in Japan; unless you work in a record store or funky cafe, you probably wear a suit to work. Straight guys in Japan don't care about clothes any more than straight guys in the States--yeah, yeah, generalization, outliers, nothing femme about troubling to dress well, lots of gay guys wear chambray shirts and dumpy khakis every day, blah, blah, blah, fine; the pattern is still a pattern. So if you see a man whose shoes are expensive and polished, whose suits are carefully selected to drape over his shoulders and break over his shoes correctly, and whose socks are discreetly dark, it probably means that he's management-track at a good company and dresses that way because he's figured out through trial and error that he has to. (There's also the fact that upscale men's magazines routinely carry pages and pages of completely scripted outfits for guys to copy in toto--they make John T. Molloy look like a total amateur.)

Now, before anyone goes bananas on me, I should clarify a few things. Japanese society still expects women to leave work to have children soon after marrying, to the point that the number of women even from the most prestigious universities who score management-track positions is very, very low. That means that the vast majority of women can realistically expect to have to run their households on their husbands' salary and status, returning to part-time work only when the children are grown. You may denounce this as retrograde or get Danielle Crittenden-type shivers of pleasure from it, but it's a fact that governs women's lives here, and they all know it.

Further, fewer women find their husbands through meetings arranged by family or company than used to. Clothing-related status markers aren't all that important to pay attention to when you know your suitor's entire CV from your elders' background check--once you're running the home, you can probably tell him what to wear, anyway. But they may be all you really have if you're meeting guys under self-introduction circumstances at a party.

I've started and jettisoned this post about a dozen times over the last week or so; actually, I think I've been stopping and starting it for the past year, but Michael may have given me an in to the point I want to address.

I can understand why conservative Christian parents and elders would not want to bankroll or otherwise support a life they regard as sinful. The Bible says what it says, and I don't think there's any getting around that it doesn't approve of sexual relationships outside marriage--that's not what I mean. What I find bewildering is when children come out to their parents and are told that they're inevitably headed for addiction, a string of abusive relationships or worse, and an early demise. I mean, the flat declaration that there's nothing whatever affirmative or affectionate about homosexual relationships at all.

You would think that sheer pragmatism would prevent parents from talking this way. After all, isn't the idea to bring the child back to the fold and convince him to be chaste, or what have you? I doubt that I'm alone in that the major thing that made me feel ready to come out to my parents was the knowledge that I wasn't just going to spend the rest of my life looking to score--who the hell is going to start a potential family feud to deliver that message?--I wanted a relationship, and whether they approved of its nature or not, I wanted them not to have to feel I wasn't being taken care of. In that context, I think a lot of kids, hearing their parents decry homosexuality as inherently selfish and exploitative, conclude that they have no idea what they're talking about and stop listening to them all together. I'm not trying to help the conservative Christians win back gays; I know my homosexuality isn't going anywhere, and I think that's the case for most of us.

On the other hand, there are people who are plain screwed up in the head, and if some of the gay ones can't handle their sexuality, using religion to give their lives a purpose beyond finding ever-more-imaginative ways to destroy themselves sounds to me like a good plan. When parents prophesy the worst for such children and push them away, it seems to me that there's a pretty high risk they won't figure that out before they reach the point of no return. You'd think it'd be obvious that staying warmly involved with the rest of their lives, perhaps avoiding discussions of homosexuality because they're obviously not going to go anywhere, would be the better strategy.

Darn. I slept quite a bit of the day, because when you're sick, you can usually nap for most of the afternoon and still be ready to hit the hay at your regular time.

Well, this seems to have been one of those 24-hour things, which is good; but now I'm wide awake at 1 a.m. which is not, considering I plan to be back in the office tomorrow. Unfortunately, I'm still not quite focused enough to read anything serious until I fall asleep.

I actually passed a pretty interesting day--hardly pleasant, but interesting. Being feverish and suggestible, I was in the mood to read from The Golden Bough. I never would have thought to put the two together before, but I happened to have Heart like a Wheel in the stereo, and it was a strangely inspired accompaniment to Frazer.

Somehow, all those eerie details about ancient bonfires and harvest sacrifices seemed sharper and more electrifying. Maybe it's because, while Linda Ronstadt couldn't convey emotional complexity to save her life, when she's on, she can personify a single emotion very primally, as if she were its prehistoric deity. (Of course, the material they picked for Heart like a Wheel helps. When you have a song whose chorus goes, "You're no good, you're no good, you're no good / Baby, you're no good / I'm gonna say it again / You're no good, you're no good, you're no good / Baby, you're no good," it's kind of hard not to get the point, no matter how obtuse an interpreter you are.)

Ooh, Charlie's Angels just came on! I'm pretty sure my brain has unclouded sufficiently for me to follow that--was there ever a hit show with more fabulously dumb plotlines? Let's hope that by 2:45, all the nailbiting suspense--OMG, Kelly's going into that office to search and she could totally get caught and be, like, killed, or something!--will have worn me out to the point that I can sleep through the rest of the night.

I know this isn't really funny, but I'm kind of febrile from the flu, so I'm doing that cough-giggle thing while I type this. Holy moly:

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made an unusual angry outburst on Tuesday after seeing a police officer flee from a bat-wielding man in a news program.

"I watched a scene in which a police officer fled from a criminal. It's disgraceful for an officer to act like that," Koizumi reportedly said during Tuesday's Cabinet meeting.

...

The case Koizumi spoke of involved a 26-year-old man suspected of being addicted to drugs.

After he caused a traffic accident in Tokyo's Minato-ku on Feb. 19, an officer rushed to the scene and tried to arrest him. During the process, the man grabbed a metal baseball bat and approached the officer, reportedly saying, "Don't come near me or I will kill you."

Jeez Louise. You can only hope the cop completed the effect by fluting, "Help me, mommeeeeee!" as he ran along. Those reports a few months ago that the police here feel overwhelmed are starting, disquietingly, to make more sense.

I do understand that most Japanese police don't have to deal with much more dangerous than someone's getting a little huffy over being busted for having an outdated bike license. It does seem to me that if you're going to freak out at having a blunt instrument brandished at you, though, you might want to consider a different line of work from being a police officer.

BTW, those outside Japan may not know this, but Koizumi is thrillingly convincing when he gets pissed. There's not a trace of the scripted high dudgeon you often get with politicos; his eyes narrow, his voice gets clipped, and by God, you notice. I've said this many times before, but his speeches in support of the Bush administration's approach to the WOT and preservation of democracy are often, to my mind, more stirring than Bush's.

Damn. Earthquake in Iran, reports the Nikkei. Magnitude 6.4 and at least 130 people killed. As was, I think, the case in Bam, mud-brick buildings have been collapsing. The current Reuters story, clearly more recent, says 400 dead already, in a region with a population of about 30,000. I feel guilty making this sort of downward comparison, but there's nothing like seeing a quake happen in another part of the world to make you fervently grateful for modern technology and infrastructure. The heart breaks at the thought of what the final numbers will be, but best to the Iranians in minimizing them.

Wow. Just, wow.

Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai urged countries to take a leaf out of Japan's book by practicing efficient environmental protection aimed at cutting down "mottainai" wastefulness.

...

"I love the 3-Rs -- reduce, reuse and recycle. I think that's a wonderful call to the world. One of the reasons why some of the countries don't want to support the Kyoto Protocol is exactly because they don't want to reduce their over-consumptive life pattern. One way of reducing that over-consumption is by learning to reuse a lot of the resources that we use and just throw away," Maathai told Yoshinori Kando, the Mainichi's Director and Chief Editor of the Tokyo Head Office.

"This concept is extremely useful. I must congratulate the Japanese people. I don't know how they developed that in their culture."

Well, they mostly developed it because Japan is a row of volcanic rocks in the ocean with few resources and places to put junk. Before it was plugged into the modern economy of global trade, Japan's only choices were to make do or to take over Korea to get access to what it needed. It's been known to exercise both options.

That's not to say that the Japanese can't be congratulated on making conservation into an ethical value. Japanese resourcefulness is one of the things that make many of us foreigners fall in love with the place. Not only in use of materials for building, but also in food, poetry, and decoration, the Japanese ability to combine a few choice elements to achieve what other cultures could only do with a truckload of stuff is inspiring.

But let's know when to reel it in here, too, okay? Japan's illegal dumping problems are well-documented (though many of the most famous individual cases don't seem to be on-line, occurring as they did before the Internet became a commonly-used news source). There's a reason the illness that results from long-term, low-grade methyl mercury poisoning is named after a Japanese town (Minamata Disease).

I'm not arguing that Japan is actually the world HQ for environmental evil. I'm only pointing out that Japan has had its problems with the unforeseeable consequences of chemical emissions, the very foreseeable consequences of state-funded construction orgies, and moral hazard--neither more nor less than other countries that industrialized over the last two centuries. As Ms. Maathai's example illustrates, too many people take Japan's famous love of nature at face value and assume it indicates more than it does.

Oh, and I nearly forgot the kicker: word is, of course, that Japan has no coherent policy in place to implement the Kyoto Protocols. That doesn't bother free-market types such as me, but you'd think it would give pause to people who get all rapturous about austere living.

This was the lead story on yesterday's print edition of the morning Nikkei: "US and Japan agree on strategic goals for joint measures against terrorist threats to their regions." The result of this meeting (in Washington last week) isn't a surprise, or anything. There was, obviously, lots of hot air about peaceful solutions to problems in Korea and Taiwan and getting the DPRK to return to 6-party talks. Not that those things aren't important, but general statements that democratization is a good thing that the world could use more of aren't exactly revelatory. Two items that approached substantiveness:

• acceleration of talks related to the roles of the Japan SDF and US Armed Forces, and a reevaluation of the structuring of US forces deployed in Japan
  
• a strengthening of cooperation on missile defense

Attendees included Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Nobutaka Machimura, and Japanese Defense Agency Chief Yoshinori Ono. Their unsurprising conclusion was that poor sources of information (the Japanese use 不透明性, which literally refers to "opacity" or "lack of transparency") and instability made the DPRK and the Strait of Formosa the places to watch.

If you're in Japan, you might have seen the subtitled broadcasts from North Korean state television sputtering that recent changes in Japan's defense policy are a cover for a plotted full-scale invasion. There are plenty of long-standing animosities to go around in this region, and the DPRK milks every one of them regularly--one of its favorites, of course, being the understandable lingering Korean resentment over the Japanese occupation. Just to make sure the other big East Asian player isn't left out, we have the PRC trying to get the DPRK to return to the 6-party talks it huffily left last week. In the midst of all this, Japan knows it needs its partnership with the US, and as a proud American who loves Japan, I'm glad the ties are only getting stronger.

If the push for gay marriage does not express people's longing for self-esteem-boosting through government policy, why is it that I read something like this at least once every few weeks?

The second argument against civil unions as an intermediate step to marriage is that civil unions send the unacceptable message that gays are second-class citizens. Civil unions, says Stanback, are "a firm message that we are less deserving of dignity, respect, and rights than other citizens and taxpayers." Marriage, by contrast, "is a universally respected cultural, legal, and social institution," she notes. "Very, very few opposite-sex couples would trade their marriage for something called a civil union."

All of that is true and counsels against being satisfied, in the end, with anything short of marriage.

You know, I've read this stuff very carefully. I've reread it. I've hung myself like a bat from the side of my bed and looked at it upside-down to make sure I'm seeing all the angles. I still come back to a point Eric Scheie made at Classical Values some months ago:

Homosexuality is not heterosexuality. There are many differences between gay and straight relationships. The laws and social mores designed for the heterosexual scheme of things reflect these differences. I see no reason why homosexuals should feel the need to ape heterosexuals, and even less reason why they should be forced to do so. This is my biggest objection to same sex marriage.

One of the things that frustrate me about this is the way gay activism constantly hoovers up the stalest, least wholesome feminist crumbs. For decades, political-action feminism argued that women and men are the same (there were certainly Mary Daly-type nutcases arguing to other academics that women were different in a superior way, but they didn't affect social policy any more than Michael Warner does), and that anyone who defended social and legal distinctions of any kind between them was a tool of the Evil Dominant Culture. You may have noticed that none of this changed the fact that women have children and men do not, that we have different hormonal systems and biological strengths and weaknesses.

I'm talking about general patterns, obviously--only a troglodyte wants to go back to the days when a woman with a bent for theoretical physics rather than mothering was coerced into choosing an unsuitable vocation just to make everyone else happy. Parenthood is the single most important job in civilization; but that doesn't mean that everyone has to be a parent to live a worthwhile life. We wouldn't be a civilization without creating and maintaining lots of systems and artifacts that are quite unnatural, in the sense that they wouldn't occur if we left the world to its own brute devices. The problem was that feminism didn't stop at making the point that she should be allowed to choose or to strike such balances as were feasible. It said that society should make the choice painless and that women who left the lab for the nursery were thereby expressing lack of self-respect.

So let's see...what's gay activism up to right about now? Society should make gay relationships eligible for marriage so we know we're respected, and if you supported President Bush for reelection or you don't support gay marriage, you're not self-respecting.

[Gets self another Scotch so he can bear to continue. Okay. Back. Mmmm...peat.]

The thing is--or one thing is--these arguments about respect always end up arriving at assertions that we love our partners, we take care of our partners, and we're not all promiscuous. These are all good things to affirm. But when you use them as underpinnings for social policy (illustrated by Andrew Sullivan's moist-eyed NYT article "Integration day" with statements such as "Gay couples will be married in Massachusetts � their love and commitment and responsibility fully cherished for the first time by the society they belong to"), it seems to me that you're essentially saying, "Approve of my sex life, please." Can't imagine why that would fail to convince anyone that we're not deserving of dignity.

After all, if it's "love and commitment" we're worried about, why shouldn't two friends (we all have friends we adore to pieces and would take a bullet for) who've decided to form a household, because neither has plans to marry and they're content with each other, be able to take responsibility for each other that includes health insurance and hospital visitation? Or be able to have one vouch for the other's application for permanent residency as a non-citizen? Okay, that second one would need careful consideration, but I don't think it's risible on its face.

When I read articles by gays built around gloopy declarations of how much they love their partners, designed to show our worthiness for marriage, I find it frankly humiliating. Such writing probably does sometimes convince a few straight people that we actually do fall in love and care for each other. I think it also serves an important function in letting gays who are in the very fragile first stages of coming out know that there's something worth shooting for beyond easily-obtainable sex and drug kicks. Where I draw the line--where I cannot imagine not drawing the line--is at some point before we start talking about the power of government to confer dignity.

The person this is directed at is not one of the acquaintances I expect to be reading this, but just to contribute to the edification of the world at large:

An e-mail message is not a summons by royal bugle. I don't check every account I have daily, and I often wait until I have a meaningful response before, you know, responding. It doesn't mean I'm dead or ignoring you. Surely you can find something to do for 48 hours of turnaround time.

A client or colleague writing to my work address has a right to expect a prompt response. Additionally, any of the following three people conveying the following three messages can assume I will respond immediately, possibly before I've read to the end:

Hi, Honey.

Accident at the plant. Your father's in the burn unit, but he'll be out in a few weeks. They think. Call me for an update--don't worry about the hour.

Love,
Mom

*******

My love,

The pressure from my boss is too great, and I've finally decided to cave and marry that eligible Todai grad in the HR department. I adore you more than life itself, but I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to be out of the apartment by the end of the month. Feel free to take the Imari, but leave the Bohemian glasses.

Atsushi

*******

Mr. Kinsell,

Word is you're a revelation in the sack. I'm in town to shoot a Toyota commercial; meet me, 11 p.m., Shinjuku Park Hyatt, Room **** to see how much these bagpipes can still blast.

S. Connery

If you're not any of the above, I will write back on my own time--not because I think I'm busier and more important than you are, but because that's all I expect of people I'm corresponding with myself. There's enough pointless hurry in modern life without adding it to shoot-the-breeze private correspondence. Good grief.

Now-former US Ambassador to Japan Howard Baker left yesterday. The Mainichi reports on his last few statements before leaving Japan. Close Bush associate Thomas Schieffer is his replacement.

You know this from fifty other people already: Senator Arlen Specter has Hodgkin's Disease. Best to him and his family. He's been one of our senators pretty much since we Pennsylvanians in our early thirties can remember; I can't pretend to be crazy about all his triangulations, but he's gotten my vote since I've been of age.

Uh, incidentally, this might be a nice time for the HRC (not Hillary--she'll do the politically advantageous thing intuitively; the Human Rights Campaign will not) to say that, despite their differences in the last election cycle, it's grateful for his record of gay-friendliness and robustly wishes him well. Of course, in order not to come off as (and be) cynically opportunistic, the HRC would have to have done some reflection. What chance is there of that?

Speaking of Jonathan Rauch, he's started a website, linked to by IGF. Cool (even if the design does give me distracting cravings for the Neapolitan ice cream of my childhood). The links to his articles appear to pull together what you'd get from looking him up on IGF and Reason, which is a good thing. His book on gay marriage is disappointing, but not much of his other writing is. I've been a fan since Kindly Inquisitors.

And he doesn't know what a trackback is, which gives me comfort. I thought I was just a moron, but maybe it's a fag thing. (Homos who always knew what trackbacks were because they helped invent them, or whatever, will kindly refrain from disillusioning me.)

Right Side of the Rainbow says everything I've ever wanted to say about defenses of traditional marriage against gays here. If I read his tone correctly, he's dead serious but also being arch. I particularly like this point:

Strip marriage of the rules that make it unappealing to gay men but keep all the nice perks that come with it — what, you think we don't want our partners to have health insurance? — and you get the inevitable. You get a political campaign driven by middle class gay men, possessed as all middle class Americans are of a suffocating sense of entitlement, that will not relent until it succeeds.

People talk about gay activists as if their sense of entitlement were some kind of evidence of special gay selfishness. But entitlements are the way modern civic life works--remember Jonathan Rauch's chapters on lobbyists in Demosclerosis? I'm happy to deplore this, and to join in any principled objection to the excesses of leftist gay advocacy. It's a target-rich environment, to be sure; however, I get very uneasy when it's treated as some sort of freakish aberration in American politics, rather than the wack-job end of a continuum that runs all the way through it.

Added on 17 February: Eric at Classical Values has mentioned common-law marriage in connection to gays, and I was sure that, somewhere, he'd pointed out that some gay-marriage advocates might not be so hot on the prospect of being considered a de facto married couple after cohabiting for seven years. Can't seem to find the post I'm thinking of, but the point was a good one.

Oh, and one more thing: childrearing is the single most important thing most people do in life, and the amount of sacrifice it requires is considerable. The view one hears nowadays that childrearing = selflessness and altruism, however, is coarse and misleading. Everywhere outside the developed world, people recognize very matter-of-factly that they're having children not just to let happy new life loose in the world but to provide work for the household, including elder care when the parents themselves are old and incapacitated.

The same mechanism operates here in the First World, of course; it's just that our money economy means that people are less likely to need their children's financial support and that the literal care they need can come from other people's children in the form of strong, young nurses and deliverymen. The investment of energy in child-rearing feels obvious and real. The payback from the pool of workers who keep the economy going feels diffuse and is easy to gloss over (in that one often hears people talk about parenting as an investment in the future, as if the effort went in a single altruistic direction only).

One must also consider that, in a world in which many of us don't do physical labor, and those who do are rarely involved in the farming of life's essentials, sex and the production of children is one of the few experiences left that serve primal, animal urges--which civilization teaches us to subsume but doesn't actually banish.

I am not arguing here that parenthood is on balance a selfish project. What I do think is that it paints a false picture to posit child-bearing straightness in an unqualified way as saintly and self-abnegating, which I think is the effect (however unintended) of quite a bit of the current discourse on marriage and parenting.

The Asahi seems to me to be a bit slow on the uptake on this one, since it's been said for the last several years that the Kyoto Accord is basically impracticable for developed countries, but the results of its new survey at least provide dry humor on a topic that's often treated with poker-faced do-gooder high seriousness:

With the landmark Kyoto Protocol on global warming finally taking effect today, Japan probably should own up to a major embarrassment: that it may well be unable to meet its obligations under the treaty.

This possibility, suggested by an Asahi Shimbun survey, contrasts sharply with the fanfare that greeted Japan's decision to hold an international conference on climate change in 1997 in Kyoto to set reduction goals.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, Japan has agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions between fiscal 2008 and 2012 by an average 6 percent from the fiscal 1990 level.

The Asahi Shimbun established that only a few prefectural and municipal governments have done anything about it. In fact, a nationwide survey found that only three of the 47 prefectural governments and seven of the 13 major cities can actually boast decreases in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Also, latest statistics offered by about half the prefectural and municipal governments surveyed showed double-digit increases over the fiscal 1990 level in greenhouse gas emissions.

Unlike the central government, prefectural and major municipal governments are not obligated to establish emission reduction goals, and so are still not feeling the heat.

Well, that'll work. We'll just make sure the Diet Building only uses its incinerator on alternate Tuesdays. The archipelago will be pollution-free in no time.

Now, I cropped that segment of the article just at the laugh line, so it's only honest to point out that the next paragraph says, "On the other hand, many drew up plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and do away with chlorofluorocarbon replacements." You have to wonder, though, whether this is motivated by environmental consciousness? Market forces? Production costs? Consider:

Even local governments that reported emissions cuts acknowledged that the changes were not due to any particular policy measures being implemented.

For example, an official with the Osaka prefectural government said, "With our faltering economic base, a number of factories decided to move elsewhere."

A Kawasaki municipal government official said, "Basically, it was only by a stroke of luck that some companies were able to reduce their output of products that emit greenhouse gases."

What Osaka means by "elsewhere," of course, includes poorer areas in Japan but mostly refers to developing countries, especially China--and those places don't have the luxury of sufficient prosperity to devote resources to casting about for cleaner energy sources.

BTW, I wasn't aware that today was Kim Jong-il's birthday and the day the Kyoto Protocols were supposed to go into effect. Sheesh. It's enough to make you want to stay in bed until Thursday.

Added after the caffeine took effect: Some may remember that, a few months ago, some of those developing countries joined with the US to say no to the Protocols. I haven't seen any statements from Japan, but the EU is, naturally, talking:

"We will continue to pressure hard for all of our international competitors to hamstring their economies for our benefit partners to come on board," European environment chief Stavros Dimas said last Wednesday as the European Commission proposed such post-2012 steps as extending emissions reductions to aviation and shipping.

One must note, however, that the EU has instituted a point-trading system for emissions that is designed to adhere to the agreement it ratified.

Yesterday, Koizumi's cabinet finalized its proposal (Japanese, English) to give the Self-Defense Force more leeway in defense. Specifically, if there's a missile headed toward Japan, the proposal would allow the SDF to shoot the damned thing down without getting approval to mobilize from the Prime Minister.

Perhaps since I'm a military strategist the way Madonna is an actress, this sort of news makes me say, "This is a new proposal? What the hell was the idea before?" From the looks of things, the idea before was that a missile attack would come with plenty of warning. The cabinet is now considering that it may not.

There have been cases (as when our forces shot down an Iranian airliner) in which soldiers have misidentified aircraft, but the Prime Minister isn't exactly in a position to help with that. Preventing those mistakes involves the segment of the command chain a lot closer to those who first sounded the alert. Of course, I assume the expense of anti-missile missiles, which the government can hardly afford to sling around like arrows, was also taken into account. Even in these times of tension in the region...well, it's always tense, but a certain birthday boy has made things extra-special tense of late...one feels safe in presuming that the SDF is not going to get too trigger happy.

Added at 22:40: I'm not a military strategist or historian, apparently. The Iranian Airbus thing was bothering me--I associated it with high school, which for me ended the year before the Gulf War, so I did what I should have done initially and looked it up. I've fixed it above, but, you know, for any persnickety people who noticed....

There was an earthquake this morning. I think I felt it, but I may be dreaming...or something. Anyway, its epicenter wasn't far from Tokyo, in the southern part of Ibaraki Prefecture. Magnitude 5.4, not much below that of some of the severe quakes Niigata Prefecture had last autumn. It looks as if about 37 people were seriously injured, which is a higher figure than I can remember for any earthquake besides the Chuetsu Earthquake (that's what the seismologists call the Niigata quakes, after the village under which the biggest quakes were centered) in recent memory. Luckily, the Tokyo area hasn't come off a summer's worth of poundings by typhoons, which was the case in Niigata; there was lots of liquefaction that led to mudslides and cliffslides. It also is called the Kanto Plain for a reason: it's not as mountainous as most of Japan, so the number of rocks higher than your head is a lot lower. On the other hand, Tokyo has plenty of reclaimed land, which proved to be a real menace in the Great Hanshin Earthquake ten years ago.

I know everyone will join me in wishing Kim Jong-il a happy birthday tomorrow. I'm sure all in North Korea will be celebrating!

And they'd better.

Joanne Jacobs gives us this wonderful little bon-bon:

Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, is funding liberal newspapers on already liberal college campuses. "Isn't that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?" the Washington Post asks.

"We're not winning the battle of ideas on campus," says David Halperin, who is running the project for the Center for American Progress. Conservatives "have this insurgency mentality, even though they run the world."

"We're being outhustled," says Halperin's colleague Ben Hubbard. "We want to cultivate the media stars, much like the right has done with Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza."

Toward that end, the center will give $750,000 to nine liberal campus publications at such places as Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Wisconsin, and help launch four at the universities of Michigan, Chicago, Kentucky and Ohio State. This is dwarfed by the more than $30 million a year that they estimate conservative campus organizations receive from such groups as the Young America's Foundation and Leadership Institute.

The web site, CampusProgress.org, has a cartoon showing a blonde female cheerleader, dressed in blue, kicking off the head of a red devil-monster, revealing the cowering male within.

I don't know about his colleague, but Halperin himself had a brush with media stardom of his own. In fact, I doubt that I'm the only person for whom he's been positively immortalized. Halperin, you see, was one of the subjects of Camille Paglia's climactic essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," which fourteen years ago helped push her through to fame from buzz. Most people didn't see its original Arion printing but rather its climactic inclusion in her second book, Sex, Art, and American Culture. Here's a paragraph from near the beginning of the (very long) essay:

One Hundred Years of Homosexuality is a short collection of essays that seems to have only one coherent aim: the nomination and promotion of David Halperin as a major theorist of sex. But Halperin, like most of the American academics who have wandered into sex studies, lacks the most elementary understanding of the basic disciplines of history, anthropology, and psychology necessary for such work. The exposition of these essays is tortured, bloated, meandering, pretentious, confused. Halperin's first book, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient History of Bucolic Poetry (1983), is quite different. Whether its precision and clarity of argument--not to mention skill in simple paragraphing--are due to the editors of Yale University Press or to a helpful dissertation director, it is evident that in One Hundred Years we are getting Halperin lui-même.

That's one of the more mild passages. It gets much sharper and funnier and basically doesn't let up until the end. At least the author of the other book under review was spared by death from seeing his idiocies ruthlessly enumerated and refuted. The whole essay is recommended most highly to anyone of generally kind-hearted disposition who nevertheless has an eensy mean streak that does not suffer fools gladly. It was a source of tremendous comfort to me when I was coming out, indicating as it did that the spoiled, upwardly-mobile LGBA types at college and the lugubriously noble AIDS sufferers of pop culture were not the only possible model for homosexual life.

This recent quotation from Halperin (in the article Joanne cites) is interesting because he appears not to understand its implications in the most meaningful sense. I mean, the "insurgency mentality" part. Conservatism includes a lot of people, and obviously there's a lot I find to disagree with when examining the ideas of some of them; but I do think that as a generalization, it's fair to say that conservatives have "hustle" because they see their ideas working and are thus energized and want to find new ways to implement them.

The left insists on retaining the why-aren't-they-flocking-to-us-when-we-know-what's-good-for-them? attitude that people REALLY DISLIKE in a free society. Tossing coins at a bunch of liberal campus newspapers seems to me unlikely to do much about that because it doesn't involve reexamining their own motivations and hold on reality.

Ghost of a Flea has yet another Kylie picture up, but what caught my attention even more was a link to this site, which gives animated instructions for Westerners about to go to Japan to work. You have a sequence about navigating the office, one about visiting people at home, and one about going out drinking with colleagues. If you can stand to watch the Beavis and Butthead-ish characters (I mean, they don't act like them, obviously, they're just drawn like them), the information is pretty good. Telling points:

• Like a lot of explanations of tricky Japanese ceremonial maneuvers for Westerners, the one for exchanging business cards on this site doesn't tell you about the little parts that can get you in trouble--in this case, how you're supposed to hold two at one time. I mean, obviously, there's nothing difficult about it physically, but if you've just received your visitor's card, is there a certain set of fingers you're supposed to hold it between while proffering yours? If you get it wrong, you could make it hard for your visitor to take your card from you. Or someone could get a nasty paper cut. Theoretically speaking, you understand.
  
• The house depicted in the home entertainment section is of the traditional Japanese kind with shutter-type front door, tatami rooms, side garden with stone lantern, and tokonoma (display alcove). What do the animators put right next to the front door to let you know you're looking at the exterior of a realistic Japanese house? A beer vending machine.
  
• The proprietress of the bar in the sequence about drinking looks like Barbara Hale.
  
• The writer of the text keeps saying that Japan doesn't differentiate between right and wrong. I think that's a bad way to put an excellent point. What she's talking about is the idea that Japan believes in extremes of behavior rather than moderation. In the West (sweeping generalization alert!), we like to get a sense of people's real, essential personalities even in formal circumstances. If you know someone who acts one way at work and 180 degrees the opposite way outside it, you regard him as untrustworthy. In Japan, the opposite is true. You defer utterly to the group and the demands of ceremony at work, and then you let off all the resulting stress by being sloppily demonstrative while getting drunk later. Being too honest about your actual opinions in formal circumstances makes you look, paradoxically, untrustworthy--because what you need to be trusted to do is cooperate, and you may not attend to other people's needs if you're busy articulating your own.
  
• On the same token, those of us who were ruthlessly schooled in most of these little rules are often told, after we arrive in Japan, "You sound like an old man--no one acts like that anymore!" Years ago, a friend of mine presented a gift of sweets to her middle-aged host mother and that lady's friends with the respectful words, "お口に合うかどうか分かりませんが" (o-kuchi ni au ka dou ka wakarimasen ga: "I'm not sure this will [be good enough to] suit your exalted palate, but [please take it]"). The assembled ladies were silent for a few beats and then burst out laughing. "You're talking as if you were about to be interviewed! We'd be more likely to say, 'Hey, I think you'll like this!'" True, meeting a group of elder friends for lunch isn't the same as doing a presentation at a prospective client's place, but friends who are around my age and older are always complaining when we get together that they've had to drop a lot of the etiquette with which they were brought up. The last half-decade's worth of hires at work don't understand them.
  
• I think my favorite sequence is when the guy's in the bathroom and there's an excursus on windchimes in the middle of the directions for using the Asian-style toilet. What might have been more useful was a warning that there may not be soap or a guest towel at the hand-sink, so you need to be satisfied with splashing your hands very thoroughly and having a handkerchief in your pocket to dry them on. I can't imagine how they missed that, since it's one of the first things people express shock over on arriving here. If you want to give yourself a fighting chance of avoiding nasty germs, you can get alcohol-soaked wet handwipes at any convenience store. Not soap and hot water with a clean, soft towel to follow, but better than nothing.
  

Oh, and while we're on this topic, I would just like to point out that in the months that Simon World has generously linked my little pieces on Japan Post privatization, Social Insurance reform, and Japanese views of the WOT, the link that has gotten me the most traffic from his site is my post about a musical toilet. I'm pretty sure there's a life lesson there, but I'd prefer not to know what it is.

Added on 12 February: And, as Atushi just reminded me, I forgot to congratulate Japan on its Founding Day. But, congratulations on Founding Day, Japan!

Having seen it first from Japanese sources, I was kind of surprised at the wording of the English wire reports on the DPRK's huffy departure from 6-way talks on its nuclear programs:

The United States has assumed since the mid-1990s that North Korean is able to make nuclear weapons, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday, playing down a dramatic announcement from Pyongyang.

"Playing down"? "Dramatic"? I mean, sure, it's newsworthy when high officials in a dictatorship have a fit of pique and storm out of a meeting, but these six-way talks have been rocky for months, and--maybe because its test missiles are fired directly over our heads--here in Japan, we've pretty much taken it as a given that North Korea has been developing nuclear weapons capability as quickly as it can. It's hard to imagine who could have been caught off-guard by today's announcement.

Michael Demmons has decided to tell us what he really thinks about gay marriage:

It�s not like being polite is going to make some backward a**hole change his mind. So why should I try? People tell us to stop calling people bigots and homophobic because they don�t want us speaking the truth. They think �baby steps.� Well, sorry folks. We�ve been taking baby steps since the 60�s and long before.

Why should you be polite to people who are determined to behave horribly? Well, for one thing, there's the old-fashioned injunction against sinking to their level. Sometimes taking the high road convinces a**holes to act more civilized, but even when it doesn't, it has its benefits. For one thing, non-a**holes are often listening to these exchanges, and it's not a good idea to turn them off. For another, there's no faster way to turn yourself bitter than to get involved in games of combat-vituperation.

Besides, not everyone who has "a different opinion on the matter" is anti-gay. I hate to sound like a broken record, but our interests are not helped when strategy is conceived in hippy-dippy terms like "Marriage is love." Give me a break. I care whether my boyfriend recognizes my love for him. I care whether my parents do. I care whether my friends do.

I don't care whether the state does, which is one of the reasons I have such a hard time figuring out what "equality" gay marriage advocates are looking for. Power of attorney and transfer of benefits, I get. The ability to get residency for a partner who's a foreign national is obviously something I'm deeply interested in. I just grow very suspicious at the way arguments for gay marriage veer quickly into the territory of what would make us happy or unhappy. We cannot fall into the trap of offering the government that kind of power if we want our relationships to be integrated into society in a way that's best for everyone, and if we want to put men and women who come out in the future in the best position to live happy and productive lives. If we do, we will lose, and so will they. I would be more than...well, happy...to see gay advocacy proceed in strides larger than baby steps if I thought the foundations of its arguments were more solid. As it is, we're still in the middle of debates over first principles, such as what constitutes a "right" and what makes someone a "second-class citizen." In that context, I don't think you need to be a patsy in order to espouse caution and slow, deep-rooted, organic change.

I had gratefully forgotten his existence, but Living in Pink links (or was just displaying a link on one of its newsfeeds) to this Queer Day link to this Inquirer article about James McGreevey, who is settling into life as a Recovering Governor. Be sure to read the last sentence of Baker's statement--pricelessly dry. And though it's only February, I think Sabato has clinched the award for Drollest Use of a Participial Modifier, 2005:

Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political science professor, said the former governor did a masterly job of erasing memories of much of his scandal-riddled 2 1/2 years in office with his "I am a gay American" speech.

"I think he probably pulled off one of the most extraordinary acts of self-labeling in modern history by reducing the entire episode of Golan Cipel to 'I am a gay American,'" Baker said. "He defined the reason for his resignation as his sexual orientation and not other things that were less attractive about the McGreevey administration--like corruption."

Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, agreed that McGreevey's portrayal of himself has made him more marketable--"assuming he isn't indicted."

I might have known you could trust PennDOT to make on-line processing just as delay-prone and frustrating as an actual trip to the DMV. After all, why let modernization deprive you of the old-fashioned niceties? Thank you, Harrisburg! It's a comfort to know that, even a continent and ocean away, I've got a friend in Pennsylvania.

(No one needs to bother pointing out that if I'd renewed my license as soon as my parents forwarded the form to me, I wouldn't have been in the kind of hurry that makes "connection timed out" messages into major obstacles. That's not the point. What government of a commonwealth of 12 million people, which used to have more paved roads than any other state, has its flippin' DMV site down at 7 a.m. local time on a work day? Pfft!)

You know how your friends who have been to Tokyo complain about the groping problem? We are not kidding:

A record 2,201 cases of women molested on trains were reported in Tokyo last year, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) said.

However, MPD officials said that they believe this is just the tip of the iceberg, noting that numerous victims of such crimes choose not to file criminal complaints against their molesters.

Among the 2,201 cases, the MPD arrested, or sent investigation reports to prosecutors, on 1,886 suspects aged 14 to 80. Those in their 30s, some 37 percent, accounted for the largest number of suspects. About 30 percent of the victims were high school girls.

Now, before anyone starts drawing conclusions about fundamental kinkiness in the Japanese character...uh, well, truth be told, there is some of that. But I think it's fair to say that this is more a function of (1) having people packed so ti