Gay News reports that Connecticut's civil unions bill has passed its three General Assembly committees and is ready to go to the State Senate:

Gov. M. Jodi Rell has endorsed the concept of civil unions, though she said last week she would like the bill amended to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Rell has not said failure to adopt such an amendment would provoke a veto.

If the bill becomes law, Connecticut would become the first state to allow same-sex civil unions without the threat of court action.

Wouldn't that be cool?

Oh, great--this discussion again.

I'm not sure if I'm a neolibertarian or not, but I think I'm awfully close to what they're driving at.

Speaking of libertarianism in general, I've long thought of the hard-core libertarians--the really serious, no-compromisers--as the Marxists of the right. Interestingly enough, Scott Kirwin sent me an article in The American Conservative recently which makes that exact point, and makes it quite well: Click here to read Robert Locke's "Marxism of the Right."

Dean's correct. The article is good. I do think, though, that it only addresses those who are hard think-tank/political-activist libertarians:

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government.

Wacko Libertarian Party types might believe that, but Virginia Postrel, for example, certainly doesn't. As you read Locke's article, it becomes increasingly clear that what he's refuting is only the perfectionist libertarians, who can't see any grey areas in anything at all. Those people annoy the living bejeezus out of me, as they do a lot of other people, and I found very satisfying Locke's temperate-but-vaguely-aghast tone in pointing out their flagrant idiocies.

But still. I voted for Bush. I'm in favor of free markets, private gun ownership, school vouchers, the WOT, strict readings of the Constitution, and social security privatization; I'm against hate-crimes laws, campus speech codes, campaign-finance reform, the push for gay marriage, the ruthless secularization of the public sphere, UN-worship, and Richard Gere. I've had plenty of people tell me, "Dude [or sometimes Bitch], whatever you call yourself, you're a conservative," and that's fine if they feel that way, but I persist in referring to myself as a libertarian, not a conservative.

It's not something I have a hang-up about. It's just that, in the grand scheme of things, I think liberty is more fragile and needs more protection than tradition. The reason so many sensible people are calling themselves conservatives is that, at this historical moment in America, tradition has taken a bruising, with insights passed down through the ages flung aside or simply ignored over the last 40 years. Recapturing that wisdom is a big and important job, but I don't think it's the vast mission that animates civilization. The world is chock-a-block with societies that respect tradition just fine but offer their citizens miserable lives. It's our liberty that makes us different and makes us a beacon to them. For the use of the word, it's worth being occasionally mistaken for a LP head case; and it has the added advantage of alerting people that they'll have to listen to you to find out what you actually believe.

The cherry blossoms have started to open in Atsushi's city. They're late again this year and are still closed in Tokyo, so the following is anticipatory:

ねがはくば花の下にて春しなんその如月の望月のころ

西行法師

negawakuba/hana no moto nite/haru shinan/sono kisaragi no/mochidzuki no koro

Saigyō Hōshi

If I have my wish,
I will die beneath the boughs
laden with blossoms--
Spring, the night of the full moon,
second moon of the new year.

The Priest Saigyo

All right, I had to shove the "spring" after the caesura and pad the part before the caesura with "boughs" (in case you don't know where the flowers on trees grow). And Saigyo doesn't actually indicate that he's talking about 夜桜 (yo-zakura: "night viewing of cherry blossoms"). Anyway, I think the point gets across. This is one of Saigyo's most famous poems, and it has an uncharacteristic swooning tone (not that there's anything wrong with swooning occasionally). It antedates the practice of appreciating the cherry blossoms by getting mortally tanked and singing karaoke, rather than dying, beneath them.

Actually, I suppose they were getting tanked back then, too. I'm pretty sure they weren't singing karaoke.

See, if I were able to write headlines as hilarious as the one on this post, I wouldn't just slap on the first song lyrics that come to mind and consider my entry finished. As Samizdata's Johnathan Pearce says, "God forbid that alcohol should be sold on the basis that it is to do with fun, ooooh noooo." Fun might lead to not only sex but also spontaneity and the formation of irreverent individual opinions. Then where would we be?

BTW, I see that the old nannyculture.com has been transformed entirely into consumerfreedom.com, which is missing the fabulous finger-wagging-granny logo of old but is still depressingly informative.

Japan is contemplating an environmental tax:

On 29 march, the government's advisory body on global warming policy (Chair: PM Koizumi) decided on a new proposal for achieving environmental goals; the purpose is to hit targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions set by the Kyoto Protocols. The main pillar of the plan is to urge industries to make efforts independently, so factory-based reduction targets were increased and home- and office-based targets were relaxed. The proposal names an environmental tax as an possibility to be investigated but does not specify whether such a tax will actually be introduced. The proposal contains few concrete policy recommendations, so some have raised concern that targets are in danger of not being achieved.

Should we laugh or cry? All of this is in response, of course, to the realization several weeks back that the Kyoto Protocols were going into effect, but Japan had no plans in place to implement them.

Apparently under the assumption that any publicity is good publicity, Mitsubishi Fuso is taking the tack of spacing out its revelations of product malfunctions to make sure there's always a new one circulating:

The transport ministry started questioning executives of Mitsubishi Fuso Truck & Bus Corp. on Monday about suspicions the commercial vehicle manufacturer had hidden defect-induced accidents yet again, this time under new leadership.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport summoned three executives, including Hideyuki Shiozawa, senior executive officer in charge of recalls, for questioning over suspected violations of the road transportation vehicles law.

After a spate of scandals over defect cover-ups as well as pledges for improvement, it was discovered that Mitsubishi Fuso had delayed by six months reporting a series of vehicle fires and other problems involving its large trucks.

It was not until March 18 that the company reported 22 incidents, including seven fires, that took place after it filed for recalls of 4,454 large trucks due to faulty suspension parts in September 2004.

It's literally been years that these recalls have been in the news.

Christian Grantham and IGF have interesting comment threads going over GayPatriot's precipitous exit from blogging. Of course, some of the back-and-forth is little more than "You suck!"--"No, you suck!" stuff, but most of it is pretty thoughtful. Michael, who e-mailed GayPatriot himself about the whole thing, has a post of his own. I agree that the real story is not GP's identity. What most deserves attention is the vileness of Michael Rogers, which isn't new but has yet again manifested itself in a way that any honorable person should condemn. May I point out, briefly, though, that there really is a lesson or two to be learned in the other direction?

First, don't strike out at someone if you're not prepared to deal with his counterstrikes. You don't have to defend the behavior of a knife-brandishing rapist to point out that someone is stupid take him on with nothing but a squirt gun. As it happens, through dumb luck I clicked on GayPatriot when the original post with photographs and "terrorist" accusation was still up. I thought it was just his being overheated again and forgot about it; but I do not think like people who practice outing. It is not exactly unheard of for a miscreant to try to work vengeance through an enemy's employer, even if it's not Rogers's usual MO.

Second, when you routinely proceed from a Pharisaical stance of uncritical faith in your own rectitude, you are eventually going to get yourself into a pickle. Leftist gay activists do a lot that's destructive to our interests and those of society as a whole; there isn't a thing wrong with GP's wanting to rant about them and having a sense of mission about doing so. But that sort of operation requires a sense of proportion. It simply isn't true that gay activists cause every hangnail. (Not that they wouldn't if they could, especially if someone convinced them that hangnails were somehow transgressive.) He seems to have gone so far off the deep end in enthusiasm for sticking it to the gay left that he didn't realize, before pushing "Publish," that it might not be the wisest idea to post about the "terrorists" in our midst with a vague exhortation to strike back against them. I blame Michael Rogers for being outrageous, but I regret that GP gave him an opening.

Added on 30 March: Eric agrees that we should all post limeshurbert's newly laid-out adaptation of GP's original post. Fine by me:







One final thing: I find it thrilling to be able to look at comment threads and see so many gays debating outing under their own names, purely out of a desire to protect the privacy of others on principle. I can't imagine such a discussion here in Japan.

So, how often does it happen that the new Kylie single and the new New Order album come out the same day? Pretty cool! Waiting for the Sirens' Call makes me think basically what Get Ready made me think: glad to hear the Brotherhood guitars come back, but I miss Gillian's keyboard lines. But, hey--you can't have everything.

As for Kylie, okay, "Giving You Up" sounds kind of like "Can't Get You out of My Head" a whole lot like "Can't Get You out of My Head" like the backing track for "Can't Get You out of My Head" with 80% of Cathy Dennis's little noises erased and a new melody slathered on top. But who cares? There are worse things than sounding like "Can't Get You out of My Head." And I'll tell you--that Kylie may not be much of a singer, but she was born to sigh "Ah-ha ah-haaaah" over a dance track. And since boys who know how to handle themselves in the sack but can't have an adult relationship show no signs of decreasing in number, I don't see why there's shouldn't be more songs about them. The London-as-Lilliput video's pretty good, too.

Jonathan Rauch's newest column is about a topic of great interest to us on the Pacific Rim:

China — yes, repressive, aggressive Communist China — is now more highly regarded in the world than is the United States. A pair of recent BBC World Service polls of more than 20 countries finds that the plurality of respondents (47 percent to 38 percent) and of countries (15 out of 21) regard America's influence in the world as "mainly negative." A plurality of respondents (48 percent to 30 percent) and of countries (17 of 21, excluding the U.S.) regard Chinese influence in the world as "mainly positive."

Why the sharp turn against America? Not just because President Bush is personally unpopular abroad; Pew notes that world opinion of America did not plunge until 2003, well after Bush's election. Nor, Pew finds, is the trans-Atlantic values gap wider today than it was in the early 1990s. Rather, says Pew, "in the eyes of others, the U.S. is a worrisome colossus," quick to throw its weight around and selfish in its aims. In a 2003 Pew survey, majorities in seven of eight predominantly Muslim nations (including Turkey) said they regard America as a potential military threat to their own country. In a Eurobarometer poll of European Union nations in 2003, respondents placed America on a par with Iran as a threat to world peace. Pew finds that in France, Germany, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey, many people believe that America's real goal in the war on terror is not to reduce terrorism but to dominate the world.

Rauch is focused on how America's motivations are viewed. His conclusions ring true to me, though, of course, data from polls have to be used with caution.

I do think that another part of the problem is that too many of us take "people the world over long to be free of tyranny" to imply "people the world over long to live like Americans." We Americans tend to take the idea of government by the people pretty literally. (Of course, sometimes we do so even while trying to offload risk and its consequences on the government--which is why the mention of social security, the public schools, or health care policy gives us out-of-my-face-with-you! libertarians high blood pressure.)

To a lot of people, that looks like chaos--the lawlessness of a country formed by people who swore off the traditions of their homelands to follow their bliss. While many of the traditions peoples repair to in structuring their societies are illiberal, I don't think the overall results are flat-out unjust if everyone has the right of exit and those who stay do so out of choice. If Karen Hughes can emphasize to foreign audiences how the Afghan constitution, the transition government in Iraq, and the democracy movement in Lebanon represent the adoption of democracy in a way that's sensitive to local preferences, she'll be doing a good thing.

Japan's spy satellite development program combines technological research, communications infrastructure, and procurement of components from international sources. It is, therefore, the perfect project to fall prey to just about every weakness in Japanese organizational behavior.

You have a mishmash of government ministries, private corporations, and neither-here-nor-there public corporations in charge, which maximizes the number of people who can put claims on funds without being questioned too closely:

About 5 billion yen that went into the development and manufacture of Japan's first spy satellites was siphoned off by middlemen who added little value, sources said.

...

The three independent institutions involved in the spy satellite procurement are the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).

The chartered corporation is the Japan Resources Observation System Organization (JAROS).

...

The former Science and Technology Agency was in charge of the satellite and rocket. The former Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) was given authority over the satellite radar, and the former Posts and Telecommunications Ministry was in charge of data transmissions.

Get it straight--there will be a quiz later.

You have an initiative that sprang from ad hoc worries and that no one bothered to fit into an overall plan or mission:

The Cabinet of then Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi approved acquisition of a spy satellite in November 1998.

The main catalyst for that move was North Korea's launch in August 1998 of a Taepodong missile over the Japanese archipelago.

You have the sub-contracting of work in chains that recede into the infinite distance, sometimes crossing in odd places:

NEDO, for example, commissioned JAROS to do most of its work, such as radar design.

And you have the involvement of the Mitsubishi conglomerate, which just cannot stop getting itself in trouble lately (and frequently in ways that result in fires and explosions at inopportune moments--just what you want in a satellite):

The spy satellites were manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

Created ostensibly to provide guidance, the process actually led to some money being used to pay the difference in salaries for Mitsubishi Electric employees loaned out to the intermediaries, sources said.

Further, sources said that those institutions did little of the actual oversight work.

That Japanese link above, BTW, is to a story about soil pollution in Osaka by Mitsubishi Estate and Mitsubishi Materials for housing development; several executives are being investigated.

Notice that there's no mention of the Japan Defense Agency or the SDF anywhere in the article. Presumably, they're the ones that are actually going to be using the satellites? Did they have a say in things? If not, why not? Then again, given the size of the crowd, maybe it's just that no one noticed their absence.

The president and two other top men at Kansai Electric (KEPCO) will be stepping down over last year's disaster at the Mihama nuclear plant:

To take responsibility for Japan's worst accident at a nuclear power plant, Yosaku Fuji will step down as president of Kansai Electric Power Co. in June, the company said Friday.

The accident occurred at the Mihama nuclear power plant's No. 3 reactor last August. Five workers were killed and six injured when steam spewed from a ruptured, corroded pipe.

Fuji's resignation was also influenced by repeated requests that came from a government investigative committee asking KEPCO to revise an outline of measures to prevent a recurrence of the accident.

...

Investigations revealed that the pipe that ruptured had not been replaced for years, despite clear signs of corrosion.

By "years" they mean "almost three decades."

It's the Charlie's Angels episode where Kris is kidnapped by a hick family whose mother she picked up for prostitution while she was a SF cop, and the agency hires a psychic to help find her. This is so great I can't stand it. See, at some point, the psychic says she thinks Kris is headed toward a big light, and Julie, the Fulbright scholar (well, she took over for Shelley Hack, who took over for Kate Jackson, who played the Smart One), thinks it might be "The sun!" Okay...here we are. Better than I remembered! Wind machines, you gotta love 'em. And, of course, this was the recapture-the-ratings gambit that involved taking the whole cast to Hawaii for a bunch of episodes.

You know how I was all talking about how much I love high-toned ancient stuff? Forget I ever mentioned it. (It's the Hansel and Gretel allusion part when Kris drops her purse out the back of the truck. And her barrettes are still in place even though she was full-on tackled by the daughter while she was trying to get away. So 70s!) As long as they play reruns of Charlie's Angels on cable, I will never think of Catullus again. Or Saigyo. I mean, the psychic is played by Jane Wyman in a twin set. Does it get better than this?

Ilyka Damen is one of those people I read all the time but never link. Her latest post deserves link love, though (however unfortunate the surrounding circumstances):

Can we just for once admit we don't know everything there is to know, not even a tiny fraction of what we need to know, about the crazy? We're as bad as people in the Middle Ages were about the plague. Maybe someday the crazy will also turn out to be caused by something as simple as bacteria; I kind of doubt that, but I'm not ruling it out.

My point is, we're only a tiny step up from sending for the parish priest to perform an exorcism; we still have largely no idea how to fix this level of crazy, the "pardon me I have to go shoot my grandad now" sort of crazy. We have counselors and psychiatrists and psychologists and evaluation teams and social workers and medications and treatment plans and rehabilitation centers--but even with all that, every so often the crazy wins one. And it's always tragic when it does, but scapegoating Prozac, bad films, and chat rooms doesn't get us any closer to fixing the crazy.

Americans have a real problem with this. Actually, with these, because it's two issues:

1. Some problems can be identified but not fixed.
   
2. Some problems can be identified but not traced to a comprehensive set of finite sources.
   

One of our most endearing traits is the belief that everyone is redeemable and that there's always a second chance, but, like anything else, it can be taken to an extreme. There are plain wrong-'uns in the world. It's a shame that it has to be that way, given all the resources and goodwill we have available to help people, but it's something we may never be able to solve.

It's common for first-year students of classical Japanese to use the 方丈記 (Houjouki: "Written from a Modest Hut") by 鴨長明 (Kamo no Chomei: lit., "duck" + "long" + "bright") as a text. You memorize its first paragraph, which was frequently quoted after the Kobe earthquake:

ゆく河の流れは、絶えずして、しかも、もとの水にあらず。淀みに浮かぶうたかたは、かつ消え、かつ結びて、久しくとどまりたる例なし。この世にある人とすみかとまたかくの如し。

The flow of the running river is uninterrupted, and its waters are constantly changing. The froth that floats up in its pools now vanishes, now gathers into foam, but there is not a single instance of its enduring for long. So, too, are the men of this world and their dwellings.

Like learning Latin through Caesar or Old English through The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, studying the language of the ancient Japanese is, in many ways, learning it through their suffering. Chomei's famous introductory paragraph has a tone of philosophical ruefulness, but there are times when he uses very similar wording to achieve a much more piercing and personal effect:

すべて、世の中のありにくく、わが身とすみかとのはかなく、あだなるさま、また、かくの如し。いはんや、所により、身のほどに随ひつつ、心を悩ます事は、あげて計ふべからず。

Existence in this world is wholly a hardship, with one's body and one's dwelling fleeting and not to be relied on, as this [my previous discussion of the great fire] indicates. Beyond that, depending on one's environment and station in life, the things that immiserate the heart can hardly be exhaustively cited and enumerated.

Chomei had status as a writer and poet in his lifetime, but there was plenty to immiserate his heart: he recounts Heian Period disasters from the aforementioned fire to a great earthquake to the ill-advised movement of the capital.

Some comments to this recent post by Eric reminded me of something I started writing and then never wound up publishing last year. Virginia Postrel had a fascinating post on megalopolitan development in China and Saõ Paolo. The usual projected scenario (as in Rolling Stone's long mid-'90's showpiece article on Saõ Paolo's development--it doesn't seem to be on-line, but if you're also a former subscriber, you probably remember it) makes huge cities in developing countries out to be Black Holes of Calcutta. That is, the rural poor keep pouring and pouring in, setting off water and energy crises and flooding the job market until the unemployed occupy entire shantytowns. The argument that the sweatshop work available in the cities is the only way people can eke out a living is often given at the same time, with no comment on the contradiction.

The articles Virginia cited indicate that desperate poverty is, of course, still a horrible problem. They also indicate, though, that (surprise!) people are not gonzo idiots. If work in the big city dries up, they can move to a thriving smaller city. If work in the big city comes with inhumane conditions, they can go back home and make do while they figure out Plan C.

Eric's post was about the guilty rich, but the comments I'm referring to are more specifically about our trade with developing countries:

Money, in and of itself is not an evil thing. However, the way we have designed our free market to create large sums of money off the backs of 3rd world countries is egregious.

For example, is it moral to buy clothing that was made from a slave labor camp in indonesia? WE don't allow these camps in the US, because we know it's immoral, but that doesn't stop our malls from selling it. I buy this stuff too, I'm guilty.
We artifically inflate prices of grains coming into the country to help our farmers, but that means 3rd world nations cannot make enough money to continue growing crops, even when that nation is literally starving to death!

[I'm cutting the rest because the point I want to deal with has been made.--SRK]

Posted by alchemist

alchemist (whose comments at Eric's I always find worth reading, though I rarely agree with her conclusions) got the following response:

Briefly, the production of goods is farmed out to other Countries because the labor is cheaper. The laborers work in these third world Country factories because they want to - they get paid more than their other options would get them. This provides a net gain in jobs and wealth for that Country. There is no reason to pay these laborers more than the labor market will bear, and reasons not to, and reasons why it simply can't be done [simple labor competition]. The goods shipped elsewhere become cheaper, holding down prices of competitor products, making currency more potent and actually stimulating greater production. Standards of living increase in the involved Countries. No one is taking profits off the back of the poor. Risk takers and organizers of the whole enterprise need the reward to even try it and keep the businesses in business. Marx was wrong.

Posted by J. Peden

I'm a supporter of free markets like J. Peden, but I do think people such as alchemist have a point when they note that reality isn't a shiny and happy as his (her?) outline above makes it sound. Children have worked to contribute to family welfare since time immemorial, so I'm not against child labor wholesale (an issue alchemist addresses in a later comment). Nevertheless, you don't have to look far to find ample evidence that children who work in Third World production facilities are often treated worse than First World livestock. While such treatment is carried out by well-connected and ambitious locals, we are, in fact, subsidizing it by buying the products it yields.

There are other questions to be considered, though. For one thing, while the PRC certainly has a pronounced strain of draconianism, it is notoriously bad at enforcing laws like safety standards at the ground level. Suppose it passed child labor laws--could we reasonably assume, even if it had the best intentions, that it would be able to enforce them? There's the fact that China has over a billion people, there's ingrained corruption, and there's the increased mobility that comes with the beginnings of prosperity. The countries of Southeast Asia may not (except Indonesia) have such huge populations, but they certainly don't lack for corruption and fly-by-nights.

Another question is, Does funding sweatshops actually make it possible for them to maintain their exploitative practices without end? There's evidence that it may not. Rural areas start to become richer (or, given where they started out, less poor) as more wealth comes into the economy, as J. Peden said. And once sweat shops become common, word starts to leak back to rural areas about what really goes on in them. People begin to decide that they might be better off staying on the farm. And factory owners have no choice but to make the work more attractive to employees.

None of this works perfectly. First World economies have plenty of exploited workers, too, after all. The problem is, in order for our wealth to help the poor elsewhere, it has to get to them. For that to happen, either we give it to them as a gift, or they produce things of value that we want to buy. In the first case, we have to hope against hope that powerful family and cronyist networks don't siphon it all away as it trickles down to the village level, or waste it on vainglorious public works projects that no one can actually benefit from. Yes, there are wonderful direct-aid organizations with hands-on programs that help real people, but one of the things that seem to prevent them from being taken over by greedy opportunists is precisely that they do slow, un-flashy, long-term work in a small area. That's a genuine economic contribution, but it takes a long time to show its effects on the grand scale.


In the second case, we have to trust that the increased choice of newly available work will give them more control over their lives than they have now. While that mechanism doesn't work perfectly, it offers a short-term alternative to subsistence farming and the long-term possibility of a greater number of opportunities.

The World Organization for Animal Health (for which the acronym is OIE--which, in addition to its long Japanese name of 国際獣疫事務局, makes it look as if there should be an Epidemiology in there somewhere) is proposing relaxed BSE policies:

The international organization OIE, which establishes safety criteria for livestock, has established a new set of standards that would broadly relax safety criteria related to BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy)* and is presenting them to its member nations, including Japan.

...

Japan has mandatory inspection of every head of cattle, but other countries have been able to set their own standards.

However, the judgment of the WTO (World Trade Organization), which deals with trade issues that arise between countries, is that the OIE rules are the standard. When the OIE adopts new standards, if exporters such as the US appeal to the WTO with claims that Japan has placed limitations on beef imports based on its own excessive safety criteria, Japan could be backed into a corner.

Why, yes, it could, especially since even a cursory look at the information available on CJD (with its prefix-indicated variants, the human form of BSE, scientists think), reveals that most of it consists of "We don't really know..." and "While far fewer than the predicted 900,000 people have been infected, it's still theoretically possible that...." Of course, Japan's propensity for protectionism is the stuff of legend by this point, and though citizens may cry for their 牛丼 (gyu-don: lit., "beef bowl"), it seems inclined to keep dragging its feet in lifting the beef ban.

*******

* Interesting side note: the Japanese for BSE is, like many scientific terms, a direct translation: 牛海綿状脳症 (gyuukaimenjounoushou: "cow + sponge [as in, a member of the animal phylum Porifera, though the kanji sequence is literally "sea + cotton"] + form + brain + disease). They also, like us, informally call it 狂牛病 (kyougyuubyou: "mad + cow + disease").

*******

Whoa. Through Gay Orbit, I see GayPatriot is cutting himself off from the blog he started:

For personal and professional reasons that I am unable to fully discuss, I have to stop blogging as GayPatriot effective immediately.

I agreed with GP's conclusions about 99% of the time, but I thought his reasoning was frequently sloppy and cagily selective; the few times I linked him, it was mostly to take issue with his line of thought. At the same time, he really poured himself into the worthwhile task of making conservative and/or Bush-supporting gays visible in the blogosphere, and it worked. He can be proud of that. Like his other readers, I wish him the best and hope this move wasn't the result of some kind of threat. (BTW, GP West will apparently keep running the blog.)

This is probably on-line at the embassy website, but I don't feel like looking it up. Anyway, this is for your own good, so BE WARNED!

Lighters Prohibited At Airport And On Planes
---------------------------------------------------------
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has announced that all lighters will be prohibited from sterile areas of airports and onboard aircraft beginning April 14, 2005. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 requires that "butane" lighters be added to TSA's Prohibited Items List.

After carefully evaluating the security threat, Congressional intent and operational considerations, TSA determined that passengers should be prohibited from carrying all lighters on their person or in carry-on luggage in the sterile areas of airports or onboard an airplane. The policy will be fully enforced beginning April 14, 2005. All lighters will be banned from sterile areas beyond security checkpoints at airports. This includes, for example, butane, absorbed-fuel (Zippo-type), electric/battery-powered and novelty lighters. [That's for you Epsilon-minus semi-morons who can't figure out that "all lighters" includes all lighters.--SRK]

The Department of Transportation classifies lighters as hazardous materials and prohibits them from being stowed in checked baggage. TSA will dispose of lighters brought to checkpoints. Passengers at some airports may be able to ship them via a private company for a fee, but TSA strongly urges passengers to thoroughly inspect their carry-on and checked baggage for these items before going to the airport.

See http://www.tsa.gov for additional information.

Thanks. I feel much safer. Especially since some of our security checkers can't seem to detect anything smaller than a turret gun without help, particularly if it's in a "cluttered" bag. Man, sometimes I seriously think we're doomed.

I adore Kim Carnes's version of "More Love" to pieces. Same goes for Fleetwood Mac's "You Make Loving Fun," though I think more people would feel the same there, if only because "Bette Davis Eyes" is the only Kim Carnes song most people remember.

Atsushi and I listened to both while we were driving around Kyushu this weekend. I'm not much of a photographer, as you will now see; but we did get to see some satisfyingly primal sites.

Kyushu is mountainous, and where we were, farmers were burning off the fields:









Note the inescapable power lines in the upper-right.

Especially while we were driving through the valley, the fires on the slopes were really breathtaking. You could see them on all sides, though, of course, it's not as if the whole mountain were on fire. Speaking of which, we also went to the top of 阿蘇山 (Aso-san, "Mt. Aso"), an active volcano with a huge crater and steam vent:








I love Tokyo, but, as you may imagine, going into the countryside sometimes is a nice relief and counterbalance. The cherry blossoms will be blooming pretty soon, so at least those streets with cherry trees on them will look less stark for a few days.

The PRC is once again set to send warships on a diplomatic visit to Japan. That "once again" describes "set" and not "send," since the last view plans for maritime military visits were scotched because of the pilgrimages of high Japanese politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine. The pilgrimages are also the reason that visits between heads of state have been suspended over the last few months, so this new development could mean either that the PRC is softening its stance (possibly because Koizumi did not go to the Yasukuni Shrine over New Year's) or that it recognizes that cold-shouldering Japan is bad policy.

The meeting at which this was decided, by the way, took place between Takemasa Moriya, the Administrative Vice-Minister at the Japanese Defence Agency, and the Vice-General Chief of Staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. He has a name, too: "bear + light + what I'm guessing is some kind of tree." I can't seem to find a Japanese source that has the pronunciation given (Yu Kou-kai?), or a Chinese source that Romanizes it.

By the way, I know what 次官 means just fine, but I wasn't sure how it was usually rendered in English. The JDA is an agency, not a ministry, but of course the Prime Minister is considered ultimately in charge. For those who are interested, this is the JDA organizational chart in Japanese, and here it is in English. Moriya is about the fifth level down.
*******

Japanese politicians are looking into the possibility of suing for sovereignty over Takeshima in international court:

Former Ministry of Foreign Affairs Masahiko Takamura indicated that he believes that Japan should investigate the possibility of taking its case for the ownership of Takeshima to the international courts, saying in a joint meeting of the LDP on diplomacy, "At this point, finding and coming to a resolution of this issue between the two countries [Japan and Korea] will be difficult. We need to seek a way to communicate through a third party."

Most of the attendees approved of Takamura's plan, and it seems to be set to solidify as the party's stance.
*******

A Diet panel (lower house) on the constitution has recommended that the SDF be permitted to participate in collective self-defense (with Japan's allies). How that can be permitted given the constitution remains the subject of debate:

With regard to the exercise of the right to collective self-defense, however, the panel's opinions were mixed, with some saying the legal basis for such use should be provided in the Constitution, while others argued such use could be permitted by changing the interpretation of the current Constitution.

In any case, the LDP's coalition partner, the Shin-Komeito, is blocking the introduction of a bill that would change legislation governing the SDF. The bill, if passed, would have made deployments abroad regular duties (as opposed to just extraordinary measures in exigencies) for the SDF.

What is going ahead is the plan to make SDF equipment production and management better:

The Defense Agency has decided to establish multifunctional teams to ensure uniform control of some Self-Defense Forces equipment, such as next-generation, short-range surface-to-air missiles, from the research and development stage right through to disposal, agency officials said.

Following private sector examples, the agency aims to streamline operations by organizing multifunctional teams for each type of equipment, bringing together needed personnel for each team from different divisions in the agency and the SDF as well as from the private sector.

That part about lack of horizontal communication is typical of Japanese organizations. People often forget that the inefficient 70% of the economy that serves the domestic market is carried by the 30% that has to compete on international terms. If the SDF actually succeeds in restructuring to put the highest priority on getting results (which is not a given), it can only be a good thing.

What the SDF is and is not allowed to do is of increasing importance not just because of the WOT but also because of Japan's petition to become a permanent member of the UNSC. Kofi Annan has said that if the reforms that are put through involve expanding the number of permanent seats, two of the six new memberships will be reserved for Asia, of which "one would naturally go to Japan." How natural it would be to have a permanent UNSC member that may not be permitted, under normal circumstances, to participate in collective defense is still a matter for discussion.


Added on 25 March: The Yomiuri has a story this morning that itemizes the limitations on the SDF better than it did yesterday, for those who haven't read them. When it calls these the recommendations of "the government," though, I don't know that that conveys what's actually going on. This is an internal panel of LDP lower house Diet members. As the Asahi reported yesterday, the Shin-Komeito doesn't seem to want to go quite this far right now, and that means that these recommendations may be held in abeyance for some time.

The government has some important information for us Japan-dwellers:

The government's Earthquake Research Committee has compiled a nationwide "map of earthquake risk," which indicates through different colors the probability that different regions will be visited by a severe earthquake. The map was released on 23 March. Areas in which it is believed there is at least a 26% chance that an earthquake of a weak 6 JMA or above will occur in the next 30 years (equivalent to once in every hundred years) extend across 24 prefectures from Tokai to the Kii Peninsula, centered around the Pacific coast of Shikoku.

These things are probably useful to seismologists and insurance companies, but they don't seem to be much more than dark entertainment to us laypeople. After all, what's most meaningful to people in Fukuoka is that there's a 100% chance there was an earthquake of a weak 6 JMA or above this weekend. That no one expected it to happen there rather than, say, here in Tokyo doesn't count for a whole lot.

Indeed, if you prefer to bet on precedent and let your math be a little dodgy if need be, the last ten or so years would seem to indicate that the next major earthquake is likely to hit somewhere outside a hot zone. Hokkaido and Miyagi Prefecture have had their expected high-magnitude quakes recently; Japan's other severe ones have been in places such as Fukuoka on Sunday, Niigata last autumn, and (of course) Kobe ten years ago.

What all this indicates is something that should be fairly obvious: Japan is a row of volcanic islands along a major plate boundary. Some of the volcanoes are still active. (Ooh, speaking of which: Atsushi and I went up to the crater of one on Kyushu over the weekend. I'd upload a picture or two, but I'm apparently not posting my graphics files properly to avoid chewing up bandwidth. Once I figure out what to do, I'll post them. I tell you, sometimes nature is almost as cool as a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.) That means that, pretty much wherever you are in Japan, you're somewhere that's at risk of a serious earthquake, and you need to plan accordingly.

I thought going to Kyushu to visit Atsushi would be a break from the news cycle. It was not. Saturday and Sunday, especially, were big days, so for anyone who hasn't gotten the rundown:

There aren't many serious earthquakes in northern Kyushu, but there was one when I was there (go figure). We felt it at level 4 in Atsushi's city--quite a lot of shaking, but nothing disturbed. The quake was centered just off Fukuoka, a city of about 2 million, where it registered a weak 6. There was an island with about 700 inhabitants, I think, that had bad damage. The houses were built into a hillside, so they slid on top of each other. The greater part of the population has had to be evacuated. There were also a few Fukuoka downtown buildings that had windows that broke and dropped out onto the street. A few water mains burst--things like that. Of course several hundred people were injured, though there was only one death. All things considered, the damage was minimal. There are still, however, lots of evacuees who can't return to their houses.

*******

20 March was exactly ten years after the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system. Last year, NHK (I think it was NHK) ran a documentary that dramatized the network of rescue workers, civil engineers, police investigators, and chemical analysts that springs into action when something like this happens. This year being the tenth, the coverage largely consisted of short interviews with the wives of a few of the commuters who died. (There were 12 deaths out of thousands injured.) In most Japanese Buddhist sects, the tenth year after a death isn't considered significant. Most have special rites on the seventh anniversary, and the focus on Sunday was on Western-style laying of wreaths. There was also a statement of apology from Aum Shinrikyo, which has renamed itself Aleph and changed leadership since conducting the attacks.

*******

Talks during Condoleezza Rice's visit were focused mostly on the ban on US beef imports, the tiresome back-and-forth over which is going to turn all our brains to mush even if we never eat a morsel of the stuff again. The ban may be lifted...it may not be lifted...our two great nations cherish their close allegience but that's not contingent on it's being lifted...we're considering lifting it...you said that before but you still haven't lifted it. Et c., et c. Condoleezza Rice and Jun'ichiro Koizumi have the exact same hair, which made them look comically symmetrical in their poses together for the press. That's about the most interesting thing that seems to have come out of her being here. It was certainly more interesting than the beef and rice jokes.

If you want to find out what Rice said about non-cow issues, you'll have to see the reports of her visit to Seoul after she left Tokyo. (She and President Roh agreed that the DPRK should return to the suspended six-party talks, for instance. Of course, South Korea has also imposed a ban on US beef imports, so it was a topic there, too.)

*******

Three crewmembers of a Japanese tugboat were released by their pirate captors yesterday. (Okay, that didn't happen on Saturday or Sunday, but it's a story I've been following.) The Asahi article has pretty much all the details that were being reported yesterday. Well, it leaves out the fact that the chief-engineer guy is gorgeous, but I assume that was a question of column-inch restrictions.

*******

There's also been more about Japan Post reform and shifts in the SDF structure, but I've been busy since arriving back and haven't really had a chance to look closely at what's going on.

Added at 22:20:
Joel at Far Outliers posted about the anniversary of the subway attacks here, with fascinating information about the angles the media used when covering them at the time and, further, about whether Aum Shinrikyo's nature and motives were adequately understood.

I got my hair cut today, and just in time, too. It had grown to the point that I could feel it touching my ears. Hate that! I feel much better, though it's still chilly enough that I felt kind of mentholated up there when I walked outside. It surprised me, since my hair guy had, as always, put styling wax into it. I would have thought that would be nice and heat-retaining. What is it that makes people who work in hair places, BTW, think that they're doing a disservice if they send you back out into the great wide world without glopping something onto your head? I've been getting my hair cut by the same man for eight years; as he is well aware, there isn't a strand longer than an inch or so when he's finished. It's not going to flop anywhere, for pity's sake.

It's a three-day weekend, so I'm flying down to see Atushi tomorrow. I was all ready to gloat about what a risk-taking adventure type I am, since JAL was just warned by the Ministry of Land, Transportation, and Infrastructure that the only reason none of its string of mishaps has resulted in serious embarrassment or tragedy is that it's been darned lucky. But check out Ghost of a Flea: he may be about to take a trip in an Airbus 310 (with EZ-Detach rudder and tailfin) on the same airline that had the frightening incident a few Sundays ago. I feel much less butch now.

On the upside, in 12 hours, I will be in Kyushu with Atsushi, and in 24 hours, I will go to sleep smelling his hair. (I'm working on sort of a hair theme for the weekend.) I probably won't post much, unless the Diet passes a resolution to have Japan Post privatized and the SDF deployed for combat abroad starting Sunday.

Oh, yeah--almost forgot the reason I'm posting this (you may have noticed it's not exactly heavy on content). The URL whiteperil.com will start showing my new site this weekend; I will retain iwamatodjishi.com, but it will still take you to this MT page for another week or so before switching over to the new place. The design won't change a whole lot; though, thanks to Chris as PowerBlogs, the subtle differences are improvements. This is probably also a good opportunity to thank publicly Christine and her crew at Verve Hosting, who will not have my inane questions to deal with after the end of this month but who have been unremittingly helpful over the past year. (Trust me--the flue is open, but I can be kind of slow on the uptake when it comes to tech stuff.)

Patterico pontificates that the FEC's noises about political expression on the Internet mean a significant new stage in the erosion of personal liberties:

Yesterday I said that, if the FEC regulates blogs, I will continue to blog the same way I always have. Some have warned me of the dangers inherent in such a position.

This led to me wonder how unusual my position really is. I suspect that my attitude is widely shared by bloggers, including those who have signed the open letter to the FEC.

I think it�s time to put the question to you directly. Who out there will make this pledge:

If the FEC makes rules that limit my First Amendment right to express my opinion on core political issues, I will not obey those rules.

Since I write from Japan but my blog lives back home in the States, I don't know how things would play out for people such as me in practice, but as an American citizen, yeah, I pledge.

I've never refrained from posting about something because of its political content--and that's as someone who's a guest in this country and frequently says critical things about its government and society. The reason I don't feel the need to watch my step is that 60 years ago, we began the process of turning Japan from an empire into a democracy, complete with constitutionally-mandated freedom of speech. The following is from Chapter III of the constitution Japan has had since after the war:

第二十一条

１　集会、結社及び言論、出版その他一切の表現の自由は、これを保障する。

Article 21:
1) Freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other forms of expression are guaranteed.

Because America was concerning itself with extending the gift of liberty to its former enemies, Japan today has the same free-speech protections we have. It's a beautiful thing to live around.

Our government's current enthusiasm for curtailing the constitutionally protected speech of its own people is not beautiful. It's immoral, unethical, illegal, and outrageous. It's also not new. McCain-Feingold, with its little numbered permissions and categories, is already law, after all.

By the way, as someone who lives abroad, I think there's something else we might consider. I don't believe it's our right or duty to install democracy throughout the world, but there is nothing wrong with seeing ourselves as a symbol of what to aspire to. We'd be selfish and mean if we didn't want to give people hope; we all have ancestors who were once in their position, after all. And there are governments all over the place that would be overjoyed beyond measure to see the US start clamping down on political speech on the Internet--as in, "See? Even America doesn't consider it a civil right to speak out about the candidate of your choice without permission. Now, stop bitching, citizens." Happily, the proper response to this particular threat is something Americans are already good at: keep talking, and loudly. Best not lose that ability by indulging in another American habit: taking our good fortune for granted.

Simon World's Asia By Blog feature is up for this round. One (among many) of the interesting links is to this discussion by Riding Sun of an Australian professor who appears to do that horrid the-only-reason-Japanese-customs-seem-unethical-to-us-is-that-we-can't-understand-their-nuanced-underpinnings thing:

In general, Japan is very welcoming to foreigners. Nevertheless, people who are not ethnically Japanese are regularly shut out of certain bars and restaurants here. Some are shady nightclubs connected to the Yakuza � the Japanese Mafia. But others are completely legitimate establishments that just don�t feel like dealing with gaijin.

...

Clark [the professor in question--SRK] has consistently argued that Japanese storeowners are justified in banning all foreigners if they claim they've had a bad experience with particular foreigners in the past. (Or, presumably, if they suspect they might have trouble with foreigners in the future.)

Riding Sun cites Clark's reply to a book review that mentions him unfavorably. To me, the interesting part is this:

I also object to the automatic and pejorative use of the term "racial discrimination" when people or societies decide that some of the many cultural distinctions that are needed for fair and effective social organization should be based on race, ethnicity or nationality rather than some other cultural characteristic. It was the moralistic efforts to deny these distinctions that led directly to the tragedies of former Yugoslavia and the tragedy of the Aborigine community in Australia.

Well, you don't have to deny that the distinctions are meaningful to people and argue that we can all be one big happy family to say that there are certain things you shouldn't be allowed to do to someone just because of his ethnicity.

But let's assume that the guests are supposed to follow the hosts' rules on their territory without complaint. If the Japanese believe that that rule applies to the Japanese activities abroad, they have a funny way of showing it. And the issue's not always as trivial as where you get to take a bath, either. Remember the Daiwa Bank scandal?

In Iguchis confessional letters to Daiwa in mid-summer 1999 (he sent a stream of letters and notes to the bank after that initial July 13 letter) the rogue custody officer suggested that his superiors keep the losses secret until appropriate measures could be taken to stabilise the situation. It was a suggestion that was taken up. In the period after July 13 and before about September 18, when Daiwa belatedly advised the Federal Reserve Board of the loss, certain of Daiwas managers connived with Iguchi to prevent the losses being discovered, despite a legal requirement to report misdoings immediately to the US regulators.

For example, during September 1995, Iguchi was told to pretend to be on holiday so that a scheduled audit would have to be postponed; he was in fact in the New York apartment of a Daiwa manager helping to reconstruct the trading history of his department. Daiwas managers seem to have been hoping to transfer the loss to Japan, where it could have been dealt with outside the scrutiny of the US regulators and markets.

After Daiwa told regulators about the loss on September 18, Iguchi was taken to a motel and questioned directly by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. He told FBI agents about what had gone on in the months following his initial confession to Daiwa, and the bank was shocked to find itself facing a 24-count indictment for conspiracy, fraud, bank exam obstruction, records falsification and failure to disclose federal crimes.

Daiwa argued, rightly, that not a single customer of the bank had lost any money. At the time of the incident, Daiwa was one of Japans top 10 banks and one of the top 20 banks in the world in terms of asset size. Like most other Japanese, and some European, banks, it had massive hidden profits on its balance sheet that were not accounted for due to the legitimate historical accounting method that it employed. That gave Daiwas management considerable freedom of action if unexpected problems arose. One of the bank's crisis management actions after Iguchi confessed was to pump back into the defrauded account securities equivalent to those that their New York head of custody had sold off.

But the US regulators were deeply unhappy at the attempted cover-up, and at the way Daiwa had seemed to ignore regulatory warnings over a number of years. They were also unhappy that at least one senior member of Japan's ministry of finance knew about the Daiwa scandal in early August and had not informed his US regulatory counterpart.

This pushed the Daiwa scandal onto the international political stage and led to a telephone conversation in which Japans finance minister, Masayoshi Takemura, was obliged to make apologetic noises to US Treasury secretary Robert Rubin for his staffs failure to pass on the information. (The call was made only after Takemura had annoyed US officials by denying at an earlier press conference that his ministry had failed in its duties; his aides later denied that any formal apology had been made to Rubin.)

I've cut and pasted all of that to help make a point: my understanding is that the initial problems that made it possible for Iguchi to do what he did were not specific to Japanese trading operations; it was the shameless cover-up and the protesting (not mentioned here) that the US government was only flipping out because it didn't understand cultural differences. You know, like reporting losses even if they made you look bad.

Now, there were rogue traders seemingly everywhere in the early 1990s. I'm not saying that blowing large sums of money illegally is a characteristic Japanese activity, any more than possibly having diseases from weeks in close quarters on-sea is a characteristically Russian activity. But much as I love the Japanese, many of them really do have a way of regarding their own ways as special and others' as not.

Then, too, maybe they don't feel the need to because they keep themselves apart abroad. Atsushi and I usually travel using tour packages run by JAL, and as a working-class boy, I can tell you, they're the darnedest thing I've ever experienced in my life. Especially in Singapore, Malaysia, and Bali ("For faggots, you two sure like visiting police states," one of our friends once remarked), I was floored. We didn't go for the super-premium packages, but there was a Japanese-speaking guide to meet us at the airport, whisk us into a car, and explain on the way to the hotel all the things Japanese people like to do and the dangers they might encounter. Hotels frequently have a separate reception/concierge desk for Japanese guests. In Singapore, we were on one of several all-Japanese floors.

The Japanese are comparatively rich, and if they can pay to have things to their liking, why not? If I thought it were somehow immoral, I wouldn't shell out for it myself. The more tourist money, the better for many of these economies. And as an American, I'm well aware that the Japanese are not the only people with a reputation for being demanding abroad. But I do think that it serves to illustrate that for many Japanese, travel abroad means mostly interacting with artifacts and not with people. A society this structured does not work if too many unexpected things are possible. People are brought up to stick together in safety, and they do. Adventure means the unexpected, which is one reason so many disaffected young Japanese are taking the backpack-across-Asia route.

Foreigners also mean the unexpected, to get back specifically to Riding Sun's original topic, which is the reason some Japanese who stay at home want to avoid us. I disagree with their reasoning, but UN resolutions about discrimination aside, the law isn't likely to change here any time soon. Some change requires experience. I've more than once had people I meet, especially shopkeepers and cabdrivers, tell me that I was so easy to deal with that I'd changed their assumptions about foreigners. It's not that I'm particularly charming; it's just that I acted like a regular old person, didn't make special requests, and spoke politely. They hadn't figured that was possible.

But it is, which is why logic such as Clark's is so screwy. Much of what we're talking about here isn't just reliance on well-documented cultural characteristics. It isn't even using a poor experience with a single person to tar everyone of his ethnicity, bad as that is. It's often, as Riding Sun, making preemptive judgments about hypothetical bad experiences one might have with people one knows nothing about. What does that have to do with "fair and effective social organization," pray tell?

People frequently compliment me for not filtering everything through my homosexuality, so I would like to take this opportunity to cash in some of that goodwill to finance a short blast of unadulterated faggotry:

I know a lot of people enjoy taking their frustrations out on Maureen Dowd, with her prominent position and steady stream of ridiculous pronouncements. She doesn't usually do much to get me going, but I almost had a coronary when I clicked through a link of Michelle Malkin's and saw this opening paragraph on Dowd's most recent emission:

When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit, giving a kung fu kick to any diabolical mastermind who merits it.

Okay...Maureen? Hi! Here's some advice you might profit from:

YOU JUST KEEP

YOUR MITTS

OFF DIANA RIGG,

BITCH!!!!!

Got that? Off. Your paws. Diana Rigg. Off. You no compare self to Emma Peel. To Emma Peel, you self compare, no. No, no, no. Not you compare self Emma Peel. To. No.

No.

I mean, WTF? I cannot think of a more un-Emma Peel-like person on Earth than Maureen Dowd, unless I missed the episode in which she plunked herself down opposite Steed and tried this maneuver:

In 1996, after six months on the job, I went to Howell Raines, the editorial page editor, to try to get out of the column. I was a bundle of frayed nerves. I felt as though I were in a "Godfather" movie, shooting and getting shot at. Men enjoy verbal dueling. As a woman, I told Howell, I wanted to be liked - not attacked. He said I could go back to The Metro Section; I decided to give it another try. Bill Safire told me I needed Punzac, Prozac for pundits.

Words fail me.
So let's try images. Now, lookit this. The Dowd photo is from her column, and the Rigg photo is from her biography here:




"He'll never kill again."




"I am so going to win that tiara this year."



I mean, seriously. Unlike Dowd, I'm not very photogenic, so I'm sensitive to the fact that you can't judge someone's whole personality from one exposure. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that the NYT sends some guy with an Instamatic around the office to take one-click-and-that's-it of its high-profile columnists. Someone--maybe not Dowd herself, but someone--thought she was best presented with that smug expression. It's unfortunate, actually, because she's a very attractive woman. (That's an impressive head of hair.)

But to move on...uh, the grey shell and pearls? The only way I can see that get-up on Emma Peel is if she has to infiltrate some embroidery club that's actually a front for an assassination squad...say, whose weapons are the Petits-Fours of Death. Otherwise, no go.

*******

Okay, this is pretty high snark for me, and I assume it's clear that the Diana Rigg thing, important as that is to those of us who want to preserve the torch of aesthetics in this benighted age, is not all of it.

The thing is, Dowd is touching on a real issue. I don't just mean the issue of how women's impulses differ from men's. In broad-brush terms, it's probably true to say that, when using instinct to navigate through a scary and unfamiliar situation, more women are likely to fall back on trying to make nice and more men are likely to fall back on emotionally-detached readiness to spring into action. The thing is, both those instincts can be wrong at different moments, and no matter what your sex, it's your job as an adult to discipline yourself into figure out what's best and do it. The word for someone who wants "to be liked--not attacked" at all costs is not woman. Or man. It's ninny.

But as I say, that's not even the big issue. The big issue is the old problem of whether equality of opportunity means equal access or equal outcomes. I could take a job I'm not suited for and then go whining to my boss that I was on edge because it wasn't serving my strengths. Would that be the fault of the job? Dowd, defining the desire to be liked as an unalloyed womanly good, seems to figure that it is. In some cases, it might be. Some workplaces really are structured in ways that confound both employees and clients. But it's hard to figure out how an op-ed page or its readers would benefit from telling columnists it's okay not to be opinionated. Maybe Dowd--not women in general, but Dowd--really should have gone back to the metro section.

In the meantime, women journalists whose nerves are not frayed are articulating opinions quite nic...uh, well. Joanne Jacobs's deadpan is even more refreshing than usual after Dowd's wet-noodle prose. And she links to Anne Applebaum and Kay Hymowitz on the matter (well, Applebaum is responding to Susan Estrich). You can imagine what they have to say.

Virginia Postrel has a post and column today about consumer choice--as in, does the existence of too many options throw people into states of high anxiety over whether they've selected the one perfect flavor of Wilkin & Sons' jam? By extension, the question becomes whether research indicates that privatizing social security and providing a profusion of investment options would decrease people's satisfaction with the results they get. An interesting left turn.

A story in today's Asahi English version is also interesting, though it follows a more conventional consumer-advocacy script: providing choices to Japanese consumers in the produce aisle wastes resources, drives prices up by deluding them that lettuce is better from X Prefecture than from Y Prefecture, and sucks up fresh water to produce feed for beef cattle. And, really, next to smoking--which the Japanese do plenty of, anyway--what better evidence could there be that the Japanese have gone over the cliff of capitalist sin than they they eat beef?

The weird thing is the measure that's touted in the article:

Takashi Shinohara, a Lower House member of Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), has expressed concerns about the future of Japan's agriculture. At a Feb. 22 Lower House Budget Committee meeting, he asked Yoshinobu Shimamura, the agriculture, forestry and fisheries minister, about the current situation concerning Japan's food mileage.

Food mileage is calculated by multiplying the transportation distance with the volume of food transported. The higher the food mileage the larger the load placed on the global environment for the sake of a more varied diet for a nation's population.

The agriculture ministry's calculations in response to Shimamura's query confirmed the worst: Japan's food mileage for 2001 was about 900 billion ton-kilometers, the largest figure in the world.

Since Japan is an island nation, transportation distances are expected to be high. But still, Japan's food mileage is about 2.8 times that of neighboring South Korea. Compared to the United States, which has about twice the population and is the most affluent nation in the world, Japan's food mileage is about three times as large.

Of course, this doesn't follow the usual line that it's okay for Japan to be obscenely rich because its nature-worshipping culture makes it an inspiration to niggling conservationists everywhere. But the yardstick used strikes me as strange. Multiplying food volume by transportation distance seems to me to be a good rough number that could tell you...erm...some things that you already know, such as that Japan consumes a lot of food that's transported long distances and doesn't grow a whole lot itself (comparatively). I have no trouble believing it was devised by a consumer advocate rather than a research economist--or, more precisely, that it's a consumer advocate who's pushing it as an indicator that policy Must Change. The same volume of different foods can deliver different levels of nutritional value and can have different unit costs; transportation can be efficient or inefficient.

That the Japanese agricultural distribution system is full of inanities is well-known. There are a few major federal ministries and dozens of agencies and public corporations involved--always a way to guarantee that decision-making will be distorted like a fun-house mirror and the amount of huffing and puffing involved in getting broccoli from field to supermarket will be maximized. At the same time, this is disturbing:

Four years ago, when Shinohara was director-general of the Policy Research Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, he said he was stunned by what he saw at a supermarket in Kagoshima Prefecture at the southern end of Kyushu. Among the vegetables sold was lettuce grown in the highlands of Honshu.

"I thought it was such a waste to bring lettuce from so far away when it can easily be grown nearby," Shinohara said.

But that's how things are in Japan. Many vegetables that have never been associated with one particular locale are now displayed at supermarkets with ads boasting their place of growth, often a prefecture hundreds of kilometers away.

...

The availability of food from around the country could be one reason why there is so much waste.

It's one thing to question whether lettuce from Honshu is better than lettuce from Kyushu--but hearing that it's a "waste" to ship vegetables from one place to another to see whether consumers go for them is a little unsettling coming from a government official. What solution does he have in mind? you kind of have to wonder.

Since any moves by the government would be likely to create more regulations and hoops for producers and distributors to jump through, we can take small comfort in the knowledge that officials seem to be sufficiently baffled that they're not sure how to proceed:

One agriculture ministry official couldn't find a specific explanation for the leftovers.

"It may be because they were busy, or maybe they were on special diets," the official said.

Uh, what? People waste food because Japan is rich and the generation of grandparents who lived through wartime and post-war deprivation, complete with rice rations, has faded into lack of influence on most of today's workers. Most people can afford to leave behind some miso soup or rice or even high-quality fish without feeling prodigal. It's also not clear from the wording of the article whether the part of the food that's pared away before serving was counted.

Anyway, there's more about the beef ban and about agricultural subsidies for those who are interested. The reporter doesn't seem very critical, but the descriptions of how policy plays out, while abbreviated, give you a sense of how things work.

Usually, talk of piracy in Southeast Asia refers to DVDs nowadays. But a Japanese tugboat has encountered the real deal, being attacked in the Strait of Malacca--very important shipping lane, which sees a lot more than tugboats--with three hostages taken. Two are Japanese; one is Filipino. It looks as if it just happened a few hours ago, so there's little news. The rest of the crew are fine, and the Malaysian police are looking for them and their abductors. Very odd. Hope they're recovered safe.

Added on 17 March: The English Asahi has a follow-up story:

The tugboat was on its way to Myanmar (Burma) from Singapore while towing a barge, Kuroshio 1, which carried 154 Japanese and Malaysian workers.

In most cases of abductions committed by pirates, captains and chief engineers are taken simultaneously, and key documents stolen. Several days after an attack, the pirates demand ransom from the vessels' owners after finding the right phone number written in the documents.

The amount of ransom is usually several million yen so that the ship owners can easily pay, according to marine transportation industry sources. Once the ransom is paid, the hostages are released in one or two weeks at the earliest, they added.

The Malacca Strait is notorious for pirate activity. But after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami off Sumatra in late December, there were no reports of piracy incidents for about two months. Some pirates apparently died in the disaster or lost their weapons.

All of that makes sense. I mean, not as an honest way to make a living but as the way crime would work in the Strait of Malacca. I still think--sorry, guys--that this story is weird. You just don't hear about things like this in Japan, unless I'm missing all the stories. And it's not as if I were particularly hawk-eyed, but I do read multiple Japanese news sources per day, often watch the news on NHK or another network, and (most importantly) subscribe to the dead-tree Nikkei. Piracy in a major shipping lane is the sort of thing that affects commerce. If Japanese ships were being raided consistently, I'd expect the Nikkei, of all news outlets, to be all over it. You do hear about lots of encounters in the Sea of Japan (that's the East Sea if you're Korean), in the East and South China Seas--you know, suspicious boats passing without identifying themselves, or turning out to be North Korean patrols, things like that.

In any case, no word today that I've seen that there's any update on the case itself. Japan is, however, offering to help patrol the Strait of Malacca. There's good reason:

The decision, which came Tuesday, represents the first time the government will offer vessels to a developing country free of charge to deter pirates.

The Malacca Strait has long been plagued by piracy. About 90 percent of Japan's oil supply from the Middle East passes through this sea artery.

South Korea is considering--it's not clear how seriously--recalling its ambassador to Japan. The points of contention include a disputed island (called Takeshima in Japanese, called Tokto in Korean). Shimane Prefecture claims it and is poised to celebrate "[We Own] Takeshima [So Leave It the Hell Alone] Day." Korea takes this as a diplomatic affront. The other major issue is that perennial favorite, Japan's history textbooks, which the ROK understandably believes demonstrate that Japan has not fully owned its actions of the early 20th century.

Added on 15 March: China sees Korea's bitterly-disputed island and will raise it one renegade-province-type island:

[PRC Premier Jiabao] Wen proposed that three conditions be met in order to resume the top leaders' visits. The conditions involve looking at the future while reflecting upon past history, supporting a "one-China" policy apparently aimed at reuniting Taiwan, and stepped up cooperation between Beijing and Tokyo.

...

Wen also insisted that the issue of Taiwan was China's issue, asking both the United States and Japan to stay out of the matter. The premier explained that he was concerned about references to Taiwan by U.S. and Japanese officials in a recent meeting.

China's National People's Congress on Monday enacted a law designed to block Taiwan's declaration of independence. [More at Reuters on that--SRK]

"Looking at the future while reflecting on past history" refers to visits by federal politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine. At least, that's what's mentioned in the Mainichi article. China is no more fond of Japan's history textbooks than Korea is, however, and I imagine that figures in, too.

Jonathan Rauch's new National Journal column discusses a recent outcome in a Boston sexual-abuse-by-a-priest case:

Last month, Paul Shanley was sentenced
to 12 to 15 years in prison for child rape. Because Shanley was 74, this was effectively a life sentence. His accuser--not [Gregory] Ford [the one originally mentioned] but Paul Busa, a 27-year-old Boston-area firefighter who recounted a similar story -- said in a victim-impact statement, "However he dies, I hope it's slow and painful." The city of Boston, outraged by priestly pedophilia scandals and clerical cover-ups, agreed.

The jury was convinced that Busa was telling the truth. So is Busa himself, to judge from what's presented here. The problem that his testimony is based entirely on "recovered" memory:

The theory underlying this claim is that of traumatic amnesia. The notion is that some experiences are so horrible that the mind pushes them down into the subconscious, where they can fester and cause all sorts of physical and emotional distress. Eventually, often under the guidance of a therapist or on being cued by some stimulus, the amnesiac brings the memories into awareness.

This theory has a checkered legal past. Recovered-memory cases alleging sexual abuse, sometimes by satanic cults, surged into the
hundreds in the early 1990s. Many alleged victims were steered by insistent therapists, and in many cases the recovered memory itself was the only evidence of abuse. (One plaintiff said her evidence of having been sexually abused from age 2 to 11 was based on "just what's wrong with me today ... [and] I'm still afraid of spiders.")

I shouldn't have to make this disclaimer, but I will anyway: I'm not making light of actual traumatic abuse. It's possible that some of these people did have vague memories of real violation, and that their therapists were able to prod them in the right direction to remember more and come to terms with it. That doesn't appear to be the general pattern, though. For all the reasons Rauch gives, backed up by trained researchers but mostly familiar from everyday experience, it is difficult to accept that an incident can seem to disappear entirely from the memory and then be miraculously restored in perfect detail--at least in any consistent and reliable way you could use in court.

Rauch's last example above is clearly an extreme one. It does seem suspicious in a general way, though, that all these memories happened to start being restored in a cultural environment in which people were looking for someone to blame for all of life's downers (abetted by all those therapists, naturally). Rauch also cites an article from Legal Affairs that indicates that the complainants in this case (the testimony of only one ended up being used) had their share of downers. Shanley is obviously no innocent, but he was being tried on particular charges, not his entire record of moral misjudgments as a priest.

It's understandable that Gregory Ford and his family wouldn't be able to understand why he turned out to be a wrong 'un and would look for a single, concrete, external explanation. Sadly, that doesn't mean there is one.

Japan has absorbed the term 不安定の弧, or arc of instability, to refer to the line that runs from North Korea down through to North Africa by way of Southeast Asia. The SDF plans to use imaging satellites to cover it:

The system is expected to draw controversy over increased fears of unified military deployment with the USAF, since sharing capability at the highest command levels will jump significantly.

That's a gentle way of saying that Japan's military use of satellites is still pretty primitive. There are dedicated military transmission channels, but they're sonic, low-speed, and low-capacity. The new satellite system will be of the same commercial type used by television; SDF personnel deployed abroad will be able to transmit images back in real time.

The "fear" mentioned above, of course, is not just that Japan is casting its lot with favorite-target America, but also that the two defense agencies will get so chummy that they go overboard on the information-sharing. The LDP's major partner in its ruling coalition, the New Komeito, is generally dovish and has called for caution. Article 9 of the constitution still hasn't been revised, after all, so the degree to which Japan can legally contribute to "collective self-defense" with its allies remains debatable.

I understand what the issue here is supposed to be, but I don't see the bind (which, pace Right Side of the Rainbow, would mostly be ethical and not exactly intellectual). The story was out a few weeks ago:

Rep. Brian Duprey (R-Hampden) has submitted a bill to the State Legislature to shield potentially homosexual fetuses from discrimination. LD 908, "An Act to Protect Homosexuals from Discrimination," attempts to protect homosexuals from death because they might carry the gene that could lead to homosexuality.

This bill as drafted would make it a crime to abort an unborn child if that child is determined to be carrying the "homosexual gene." Duprey said that no such genetic marker has yet been discovered. But considering rapid advancements in genetic mapping research, he wants legislation in place should such a breakthrough occur. "If the homosexual gene is ever determined to exist," he said, "I want to ensure that a woman could not abort an unborn child simply because that child is determined to be carrying this gene."

Duprey received the idea for this bill when listening to the Rush Limbaugh radio show. "I heard Rush saying that the day the 'gay gene' is determined to be real, that overnight gays would become pro-life," Duprey said.

Not this gay, buddy. If anyone finds a way to argue that it's okay for a woman to have an abortion because the child would interfere with her law-school plans but not okay because the child's going to be gay, I hope he's considerate enough to do it out of my earshot.

I suspect that if I went around talking to women who've had abortions, I would find a lot of their reasons frivolous. But I don't, because it's none of my business. I can't see abortion in the first trimester as murder, but I also can't imagine how anyone could have one without a serious crisis of conscience. It's not like going to the dermatologist to get a mole removed. If a woman decides to go through with it, for whatever reason, she has to deal with the consequences. That's what pro-choice means. You can approve or disapprove of a woman's choice, but she gets to make it.

I don't think the scenario depicted here is likely, though, in any case. What strikes me as far more probable is this: a set of genetic markers for a predisposition toward homosexuality is found. In 45% of known cases, the child grows into a homosexual adult; in the other 55%, the adult is heterosexual. Environmental factors must be involved, but no one has figured out exactly what they are or when sexuality gels. It's probably different for different people, anyway. (It's hard to get good stats on gays because psychologists tend not to know about those of us who don't have messed-up lives.) So parents have the children--whom they spend the next 18 years driving berserk with their frantic efforts to make sure they don't turn out queer.

Well, now, isn't this nice. Susan Estrich decided to challenge Michael Kinsey on the dearth of women writing op-eds for the LAT, and things have escalated:

As the controversy drags into a fourth week, Estrich continues to bounce from conciliation to confrontation. She seemed near tears in an interview, saying she never intended the fight to get so personal. She blamed the operators of her website for improperly posting comments about Kinsley's mental health and contended she didn't think e-mails to Drudge and others in the media would get into the public domain.

Oh, super! Nothing like giving fuel to those who contend that chicks are too emotional and flighty and irrational for the world of ideas--though I'm not sure irrational is a sufficiently powerful word to cover the stupidity of sending e-mails to media figures (including MATT DRUDGE!!!!!) and assuming there was no way they'd be publicized. Nice blame-passing about the website thing, too, counselor. Way to help out those of us who want to see women who with a talent for public life have their shot at maximizing it!

I found the story above through Virginia Postrel (emotional! flighty! irrational! NOT!), who addresses it with dry distaste and appends an experience of her own:

The whole silly brouhaha reminds me of how the LAT used to handle this question: through rigid, numerical quotas. I remember visiting Bob Berger, the op-ed editor, back in the early '90s. An old-style newspaperman, Bob didn't like the paper's demands that he demonstrate "diversity" on the op-ed pages. I especially remember his complaint that he not only had to find gay writers but gay writers who would mention that they were gay. No gay foreign policy experts need apply.

When I was in high school and college, I always envisioned myself as a professor or journalist of some kind. This malarkey makes me more grateful than ever that my path changed and I ended up in the fulfilling but anonymous and artisanal job I have. How hard should it be to judge writers by whether they write well?

There's nothing wrong with wanting to build a reputation based on your name, of course, or with using it as currency when you do. Nor is there anything bad about inviting commentary on feminism and gay issues from women and gays. Yeah, yeah, yeah--this issue's been around for thirty years, and getting worked up over it just raises the blood pressure. It still boggles the mind that people who think this way can get their silly little hang-ups enforced--be sure to read the last paragraph of Virginia's post.

My energy has been diverted elsewhere, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, before the date expired around the globe, that yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the fire-bombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 people during World War II. Atsushi and I watched the hour-long NHK special over the weekend. Information about the sequence of events is, to my knowledge, covered well here. I believe war is essentially a fact of human nature, and I'm thankful daily that I've spent my entire life in powerful, dynamic societies with bad-ass armed forces staffed by volunteers. I also, naturally, am glad we did what we needed to do to win World War II.

But winning a war against a ruthless opponent requires ruthless tactics:

The Superforts returned in force at the end of the month, flying at altitudes that insured immunity from attacks by Japanese defenders. Although their high altitude provided a shield for the bombers, it also decreased the accuracy and impact of their bomb runs. To correct this deficiency, Major-General Curtis Lemay (newly appointed commander of the American Bomber Command) ordered a dramatic change in tactics. The bomber runs would be made at night, at low altitude and deliver a mixture of high explosive and incendiary bombs. The objective was to turn the closely-packed, wooden homes and buildings prevalent in the Japanese cities into raging infernos and ultimately into the most destructive of all weapons - the firestorm.

The Allies had first encountered the phenomenon of the firestorm when the British bombed the German city of Hamburg in August of 1943. The night raid ignited numerous fires that soon united into one uncontrollable mass of flame, so hot it generated its own self-sustaining, gale-force winds and literally sucked the oxygen out of the air, suffocating its victims. Lemay hoped to use this force to level the cities of Japan. Tokyo would be the first test.

A successful incendiary raid required ideal weather that included dry air and significant wind. Weather reports predicted these conditions over Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945. A force of 334 B-29s was unleashed - each plane stripped of ammunition for its machine guns to allow it to carry more fire-bombs. The lead attackers arrived over the city just after dark and were followed by a procession of death that lasted until dawn. The fires started by the initial raiders could be seen from 150 miles away. The results were devastating: almost 17 square miles of the city were reduced to ashes. Estimates of the number killed range between 80,000 and 200,000, a higher death toll than that produced by the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki six months later.

Those who've studied the reconstruction of Japan after the war will recognize Lemay as a key figure--it's worth noting that, while he was willing to go to extreme lengths to fight the Japanese, he was also there to get their country going again--by structuring the SDF!--after they surrendered. That doesn't necessarily make him a nice person, but, unfortunately, you don't win wars by being nice.

Journalist David McNeill ran a piece yesterday asking why the Japanese don't pay much attention to the anniversary of the Tokyo firebombing. In it, he raises and then glides over that issue. He finishes with a quotation from one of the survivors:

�Youngsters do not understand the horror of war,� agrees Mrs. Suzuki Ikuko. �When the Iraq War started I couldn�t watch it on TV. It was too painful. But my grandson said he though it was cool. He said it was like a videogame.�

I agree that Mrs. Suzuki is entirely justified, having lived through an incendiary raid that leveled part of her city, in shying away from war footage. But ending the discussion here implies that her example is generalizable--that the only possible reactions to the carnage of war are raw sensitivity or complete insensitivity. Both postures are sometimes necessary: we don't want soldiers flying off the handle and murdering civilians out of revenge or frustration, and we do want them shoving aside their finer feelings to go after enemy combatants however they must.

But most situations are murkier. The calculations that led to the bombing of Tokyo 60 years ago included the fact that one of the city's primary industrial sectors was located next to a residential district. Perhaps if the Japanese had put all their factories in isolated, easy-to-target rural areas and bussed their workers in from a safe distance, the US would have had the choice of taking out the facilities without hurting women and children. But for obvious reasons, the Japanese didn't build that way, and we didn't bomb that way. Furthermore, it's an exaggeration to say that every last Japanese citizen worshipped the emperor as a god, but it's not an exaggeration to say that Japan was working as one big machine to maintain the war effort. Fears about what would happen if we had to invade the Japanese mainland were well-grounded. We'll never know whether incinerating 100,000 civilians saved, in some direct way, more from dying in combat; but we do know that breaking Japan's will required that we demonstrate as unpleasantly as possible that we could hurt them bad. It was a war. May all who died rest in peace, and may we continue to look for non-deadly ways to address conflict without flinching from the deadly ones when we need them.

Which brings me to one last thing: I'm sure McNeill was overjoyed to have a link between the Tokyo fire-bombing and the Iraq invasion provided for him so he didn't have to force it himself. (Usually, I try to avoid reading the feelings of writers, but the slant in his article is not exactly hidden.) But it doesn't work the way I'm guessing he thinks it does. America has put lots and lots and lots of energy into making its bombs work more precisely and efficiently. Much of that comes of non-humanitarian considerations--we don't want to waste personnel, material, and materiel. But we also don't like wrecking people's lives for the hell of it and will avoid doing so where we can. And pre-invasion Iraq was not a racially homogeneous nation that mostly supported its half-divinized leader. And we haven't wiped out a 100,000-person section of a city.

I don't think it's exploitative to use yesterday's anniversary to raise questions about whether we could have won with fewer civilian casualties. Self-criticism is good.* But the implication that goes "Tokyo fire-bombing barbaric" = "Subsequent wars barbaric" = "Iraq invasion barbaric" is cheap.

Added on 12 March: Joel at Far Outliers did something I elected not to do here: he posted parallel (so to speak) information about Dresden, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. He's right--you can't really see the significance of the bombing of Tokyo without having a handle on the way the war was going in general. By the way, I hope I made it clear above that I think the fire-bombing of Tokyo was justified. While I don't believe it's wussy to ask whether an air raid that killed 100,000 people was really necessary, investigating the question requires more than just saying, "Women and children died? A barbarism!" And even if you do accept it as iffy, it says nothing about the Iraq invasion.
* McNeill may not be American, but I'm assuming he's from a country that's part of the coalition in Iraq.

I haven't seen this on Reuters or CNN yet, but maybe I just haven't wandered into it. The Japanese Yomiuri says the following:

General Leon LaPorte, the commander of US forces stationed in South Korea, addressed the Senate Armed Services Committee on 8 March, reporting that the DPRK's air force pilots get no more than 12 to 15 hours of flight training per year and that its army is in such straits that it uses only one-third to one-half of the combat vehicles and tanks it possesses. Additionally, he indicated that, in his opinion, that North Korea's conventional military capability has weakened remarkably has motivated it to develop WMDs such as nuclear, biological, and chemical arms.

None of this is shocking news. It was widely rumored during the worst of the North Korean famine in the late 90s that things had gotten so bad that soldiers' food rations were being cut--unthinkable in a country that had so burdened its armed forces with maintaining national glory. I hadn't heard those actual numbers for flight training, though. Also, you usually don't, for some reason, see that last connection so baldly stated: making nuclear and bio-chem weapons takes technology, some gifted scientists, and manufacturing capability, but it has to be cheaper than the daily investment in keeping a million soldiers fed, equipped, and trained, decade upon decade, when you have lousy agricultural and distribution systems.

In other news, did everyone see that press conference given by the PRC Foreign Minister over the weekend? Atsushi was here for my birthday, so we had a great time chortling over what China's devotion to "peaceful solutions" for problems involving Taiwan, the DPRK, and its own military could mean in concrete terms. I considered the whole thing a present from the CCP.

Okay, in all seriousness, sandblast away some of the diplomo-speak, and you got some actual interesting content. The growing feeling that Taiwan is becoming a closer partner with the US and Japan in Asia was addressed:

In my view, the military alliance between the US and Japan is a bilateral arrangement that occurred under special circumstances during the Cold War. Therefore it ought to be strictly restricted to a bilateral nature. If it goes beyond the bilateral scope, definitely it will arouse uneasiness of the rest of Asian countries and also bring about complicating factors to the regional security situation. Taiwan is a part of China and the Taiwan question is an internal affair of China. Any practice of putting Taiwan directly or indirectly into the scope of Japan-US security cooperation constitutes an encroachment on China's sovereignty and interference in China's internal affairs. The Chinese government and people are firmly against such activities.

Not a surprising sentiment. On the China-Japan-DPRK love triangle, specifically in response to a question from Tokyo Broadcasting System about the current cessation of diplomatic visitors between the Chinese and Japanese heads of state:

It is imperative for the two countries and for the peoples of China and Japan to carry forward their friendship from generation to generation. In the past couple of years, the leaders of China and Japan have met for several times on multilateral occasions, where they had very good discussions. We hope China and Japan can proceed from the fundamental interests of the two peoples and work to create proper conditions and atmosphere for the high-level exchange of visits between the two countries in the spirit of taking history as a mirror and looking to the future.

With regard to whether the DPRK has already possessed nuclear weapons or whether it has uranium enrichment program, I believe maybe you know more than I do. [If I recall correctly, this was a laugh line at the press conference. Or maybe just Li laughed.--SRK]

Let me tell you that after receiving the relevant verbal message from President Hu Jintao, the DPRK supreme leader indicated that the DPRK side still pursues the objective of a nuclear-weapon-free Korean Peninsula and remains ready and willing to continue to participate in the six-party talks and that the DPRK side hopes to see more sincerity to be displayed by the relevant parties.

No mention of the Yasukuni Shrine issue, even obliquely, which is odd. Assurance that the DPRK is sincerely seeking peace and stability in the region, which is not odd.

There's a lot more--the al Jazeera reporter invokes the current atmosphere of "unilateralism and hegemony" to ask about China's energy consumption, China Radio International asks about the Foreign Ministry's overall course for the foreseeable future, and the reporter from Singapore asks a more flattering version of a question Simon posed after the tsunami disaster: does China really see itself as ready to be a leader as well as just a really big-ass country?

One last thing that struck me. This is from Li's reply to a question from The People's Daily about those in Washington who still view China as a potential threat:

Although they are living in the new century, their minds still linger in the Cold War era. It is those few people who are spreading the so-called "China threat theory," which is totally unfounded.

It's fascinating to hear someone from a region in which centuries-old resentments are routinely thrown around as reasons for this or that diplomatic conflict--and, specifically, from a country that is more than happy to play on lingering ill-feeling from the Japanese occupation--accuse cautious figures in the US of not putting the Cold War behind them. This isn't the first time China has shrewdly used the end of the Cold War to make bland arguments that, in this new and friendlier time, we should let Communist-era bygones be bygones. But Li is very good at working the angle, and he seemed relaxed and affable. As always, there's plenty to pay attention to around here.

Atsushi arrives for the weekend any minute, so one last bit of news from the Nikkei: Japan, Germany, India, and Brazil have come to an agreement on their joint proposal that permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council be expanded to include them. Some of you may take comfort in the knowledge that airy diplomatic clichés sound just as trite in Japanese as in English, even if they contain truth:

日本は「現在の安保理は国際社会の多様化に対応していない」として常任理事国の拡大を主張。

Japan argued for the expansion of permanent UNSC membership this way: "The current UNSC does not address the diversification of our global society."

Japan and Germany have more specific issues than that, of course. Japan itself is involved in a more general debate over the recognition that the Self-Defense Force is no longer as strictly reactive as it used to be, and the UNSC petition is connected. A permanent member of the Security Council that can't get involved in international disputes would be in a strange position.

Added after lunch: Man, I'd forget my head if it weren't attached. In my haste to edit this down for clarity--yes, I do that sometimes; just imagine what my posts look like when I draft them!--I cut out the interesting part of today's story. The interesting part of today's story is that the four petitioning countries agreed that the reforms should be decided by vote (including all UN member countries, not just those on the UNSC, and certainly not just the permanent members of the UNSC); Germany and India had been balking.

As Japan continues to strengthen its ties with the US, it's naturally moving away from the PRC:

Now that China is no longer considered a developing nation, Tokyo has told Beijing it plans to begin cutting the size of its low-interest yen loans from this fiscal year, aiming to phase them out entirely by fiscal 2008, sources said.

Beijing likely will protest, the sources said.

Some members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party are calling for an immediate end to all official development assistance (ODA) to China.

This would be the rightist wing of the party, which believes (not without justification) that, in financing China, Japan is aiding a trade and military rival.

However, loans will continue to be extended for projects that have already started, and grants and technical aid will be given for training and environmental protection programs.

The decision to turn off the loan tap to China reflects the government's belief that China's economy has taken off and the country has taken its place in the international community, the sources said.

In addition, development in China's coastal cities is now about equal to that of industrialized nations, meaning that China no longer can be regarded as a developing nation, the sources said.

Sources close to both governments said Beijing will press Japan to continue the loans beyond 2008 because provincial authorities across China are pressed for funds to develop their economies. Also, Beijing is unhappy about being told unilaterally by Japan that the ODA well will soon run dry.

...

Japanese officials would like to reach agreement on the loan reduction plan this month so that the government can begin implementing cuts soon, the sources said.

But LDP hard-liners want ODA to China stopped right away, sources said. Thus, there likely will be strong opposition to the plan for gradual reductions.

...

Criticism in Japan of ODA to China surged following anti-Japanese outbursts at the Asian Cup soccer matches last summer in China. Further straining relations was the November intrusion by a Chinese submarine into Japanese territorial waters.

Tokyo is also finding that ODA no longer carries much diplomatic leverage in talks with Beijing.

Meaty Fly, by the way, has posted twice in the last several days. Japan-China relations are right up his alley--his last post in September was, after all, headlined "Japan to designate China as military threat"--so it's possible that he'll get back to more regular writing. On his blog, I mean.

I find it very cheering to read things like this:

The Montana Senate has passed a bill that could allow limited rights to same-sex couples. The measure would create a statewide registry where people could designate their next of kin.

Although the legislation does not specifically mention gay and lesbian couples it was assailed by opponents as being pro gay. The bill would allow people in relationships to name their partners as next of kin, regardless of sexuality. Single people could also take advantage of it by naming a relative, friend or caregiver.

The measure gives the next of kin the right to hospital visits, the right to make medical decisions and also allows them to receive the dead person's remains. It provides an easy mechanism so that a lawyer is not needed.

Supporters of the bill stressed the advantages it would provide the elderly, the ailing and the disabled.

"I think it's got a much broader impact than gay-rights legislation," Sen. Jon Ellingson (D-Missoula) told the Billings Gazette after the debate.

"This is a simple bill that allows folks, whether they're married or single, to manage their personal affairs."

See? Notice--no mention of whether anyone's getting it regularly, which is not the government's problem. Now if gay activists start bellowing that this bill is discriminatory because it doesn't exalt our relationships in every damned finicking little detail, I will throw myself off a bridge.

Okay, I won't. If I'd made a practice of keeping promises of that nature, I'd've been dead long ago. But I find it hard to be hopeful that our activists will ever learn to see our issues as woven into those of the broader society, even if other good-hearted people already can.

The Japanese government has put out its guidelines for how to proceed in the event of a military or large-scale terrorist attack. Comfortingly (I'm using that word straight for once), it lays out in detail what's to be done to secure Japan's nuclear power plants and fuel processing centers. Authority rests with the Ministry of Economics, Trade, and Industry and, in connection with research facilities it operates, the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. Japan, of course, has few natural resources, including hydroelectric potential and fossil fuels. We use a lot of nuclear power.

The prefectures and special metropolitan areas are expected to have their own plans in place by the middle of this year. Municipalities are to have theirs finalized by this coming year.

Idle thought: several months ago, there was talk that Japan was going to be modeling its new security measures on Israel's. I wonder whether it ultimately did; today's Nikkei article doesn't really mention anything about the background of the new policies.

Eric is angered about honor killings in the Islamic world, and rightfully so. He also links a City Journal article by Kay Hymowitz. It's well written, of course, and there's nothing she says that isn't true, or arguably true, to my knowledge. I couldn't help feeling what she was emphasizing wasn't the major point, though.

I'm not saying that Hymowitz and Eric are worried over nothing. If anything, I think the problem is a little darker than it looks from what she's written. Most of the people Hymowitz cites are, if not insane, not the sort of people any sane person ever goes to for reliable depictions of reality. I mean, her conversation with one Miriam Cooke of Duke University, president of something called the Association for Middle East Women's Studies, is pricelessly appalling; but most academics, while to the left of the American public, are not that airheaded. And how illuminating really is it to demonstrate yet again that Michel Foucault was and Gayatri Spivak is a professional reality-dodger?

After all, the throughover moral relativists and post-structuralists are in the minority, even among humanities and social science professors. Really, they are. My experience can't be universalized wholesale, but it squares with what Christina Hoff Sommers (mentioned by Hymowitz) found when researching Who Stole Feminism? and with experiences friends from other colleges have reported to me over the years. Liberals who love genuine diversity of thought don't go after their multi-culturalist/post-colonial idiot colleagues in public because (1) they underestimate the influence of their ideas (on people who run foundations and think tanks, as well as the more impressionable students), (2) they feel guilty about their own relative privilege and can't figure out how to acknowledge that without undermining their criticisms, and (3) they don't want to start trouble. I hate to say it, but I'd bet that that last is the most important factor.

I had a professor (not an advisor of mine) explain to me that he knew Foucault was garbage but could still see his value as someone who shook up people's assumptions, so why get all bent out of shape at people who cited him? That's nice, but questioning your assumptions isn't an end in itself. You're supposed to be trying to figure out whether you should retain them because they've remained intact through testing, or you should discard them because they have not. Someone who plays fast and loose with facts, as Foucault did, is exactly the wrong sort of person to be looking to for help in that operation.

In other words, what worries me is less that there are amoral crazies in the academy than that the moderates who know better do not very loudly call BS when they start spouting nonsense. The very way such incidents stick in the memory--remember Martha Nussbaum's attack on Judith Butler in The New Republic a few years ago?--testifies to their relative rarity. Of course, it's 25 years too late to prevent post-structuralism from gaining ascendancy; but one might have thought that 9/11 would have a galvanizing effect on the reasonable types, as it did on a lot of other liberal Americans. It appears not to have, and it's a shame.

BTW, not exactly the same topic, but has anyone else noticed a lot of blog posts lately with titles of the "X, Y, and Z" form? You know, like "Feminism, Commercialization, and the Bobbie Ann Mason Protagonist." I'm not criticizing, though it does make me feel a bit as if I were doing readings for a senior seminar. My own titling habits probably don't gladden many hearts, and I used a mock-academic title here because of the subject matter. It's just odd that they seem to be cropping up everywhere.

Added later: Amritas addresses something I hesitated over before posting this originally:

What is so great about the word 'moderate'? Would you approve of someone who was 'moderately' in favor of freedom - or of evil? "He's not an - ugh! - extremist. He's a moderate. He's OK with a theft here, a killing there. Isn't inconsistency what life is all about?

Actually, while I wouldn't use the words "in favor of," I do think most of us are moderate in the sense that we prefer not to achieve perfect safety through draconian measures. Providing people with the means and confidence to defend themselves from miscreants may not erase crime, but it's the compromise most of us prefer.

I probably should have been clearer about this, but I hope it's obvious that I wasn't using moderate to mean "gloriously wishy-washy." If I had to pinpoint the types of moderation I was referring to, I'd say there were two aspects. One is that, while it's perfectly acceptable to arrive at an extreme position, a scholar should get there through sober, methodical consideration of the unvarnished facts, such as they're available. A second is that, when thinking about social change, it's generally (not always, but generally) wiser to look for ways to bring it about organically and...I was going to say slowly, but I suppose it doesn't always have to be slowly, exactly. It just can't outrun people's ability to adjust to it.

So that's what I was talking about. A professor who, for example, may believe that there is something inherently unfree about head coverings for women but would not advocate policies that ban them because she recognizes that real, living people used to existing standards of modesty may need time to get used to thinking of women in less constricting clothing as respectable. Perhaps I should just have said "pragmatic" rather than "moderate."

It's snowing in the Tokyo area, so we are all much in distrait. The news team is interviewing people in the requisite posture of windmilling the arms and screaming, "AIEEEEEE! What is this white stuff? And why is there a whole centimeter of it?!" It's like the manna story in the Exodus. Well, except for the fact that not even G-d himself could convince me to ingest anything that falls out of the sky in Tokyo. (And since it's Friday, we'd have to hold it over in the freezer for tomorrow's ration. I'm sure particulate matter is even yummier when it's allowed to ripen for a day.)

Anyway, it's accumulating, sort of. The ground wasn't frozen most places in the city--that heat-island effect you get in population centers that are hopelessly lost to capitalism and commerce. I haven't seen anything to say that there are major train lines closed, which tends to be the biggest potential pain; and in any case, we always settle into a general well-at-least-it-wasn't-an-earthquake feeling before long. Atsushi's flying in for the weekend tomorrow, though, so I hope flights aren't disrupted. The snow's supposed to fall all weekend.

The chief known conspirator in the Bali bombing has gotten a sentence of 30 months in prison:

Australia and the U.S. have expressed disappointment at the 30-month jail sentence handed to Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir for his part in the Bali bombing.

An Indonesian court found Ba'asyir guilty on Thursday of an "evil conspiracy" to commit the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

He was acquitted on the more serious charges of direct involvement in the Bali attack and in the bombing of the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, which killed 12 people in August 5, 2003.

Australia and the United States consider Ba'asyir to be the spiritual head of the al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group, which is blamed for the Bali bombings, the Marriott bombing and last year's blast at the Australian Embassy.

Intelligence officials say the group has cells across Southeast Asia.

That comes to 4.5-ish days for each victim who died. Now, I guess, it goes to appeal.

A gay crime of passion in my native Lehigh Valley! Gay guys in Bath? We really are everywhere. How exciting:

A 37 year old Pennsylvania man has been charged with setting fire to his ex-lover's home in an attempt to kill him.

Police in Bath, northeast of Allentown, say that Donald K. Albright went to the home of Wayne Keeler in the early hours of Sunday morning, chained the doors, sealed the windows and then doused the exterior with gasoline before lighting it.

Keeler managed to get out of the burning structure and was unharmed.

The house was badly burned on the outside and a car belonging to Keeler was destroyed.

...

After the relationship ended, Albright left numerous text and voicemail messages for Keeler which police describe as sounding suicidal and angry.

Albright also had been discussing the breakup in the chat room where he and Keeler met according to investigators. In one chat message recovered by police Albright said that Keeler loved his Volkswagen more than he loved him.

That last part is poignant, but if I were the jiltee, I'd take it as a signal that I need to spend a full weekend getting blotto and listening to the Go-go's immortal "Skidmarks on My Heart" on Repeat 1. In fact, I'd do the whole album. Then look for a new boyfriend. Maybe I'm just too tightly wound.

Added at 21:39: Our local paper has the story in slightly more detail. In all seriousness, I hope the poor guy wasn't closeted, because he obviously isn't anymore.