The White Peril 白禍

Apparently miffed by all the attention the rail system has gotten this week, the air system has stepped up to the plate. Happily, if merely fortuitously, it hasn't killed 100 people in the process. Note that this time it wasn't poor JAL's fault that it was involved:

At 9:40 p.m., 29 April, a JAL jet landed, per instructions, on Haneda Airport's Runway A, which had been closed for inspection and repairs. Another JAL jet was in the middle of descending toward Runway A and was forced to change course when the mistake was realized in the control tower several minutes later. According to the Ministry of Land, Transportation, and Infrastructure, the source of the error was that the controller on duty forgot that the runway was closed and therefore gave incorrect instructions. The Ministry has launched an investigation because of the possibility that the error could have led to a major accident.

The controller is lucky that he made his screw-up when he did; the construction on the runway was set to begin at 11 p.m., an hour and change later. He's also lucky that the plane that landed on it, an Airbus 300, was carrying only 51 passengers and crew. The plane that was diverted was a Boeing 777 with 161 aboard; it reascended and landed 10 minutes later.

Added on 1 May: Good grief.

The air traffic controller has told the ministry's Haneda Airport office that he had forgotten that the runway was closed. Another 17 controllers on duty at the time also forgot about the closure of the runway even though all controllers working at the airport had been notified in advance.

The ministry was apologetic about the incident. "I express my apologies from the bottom of my heart for causing anxiety to the public," Yoshinori Furukawa, director of the ministry's Air Traffic Control Division, said at a news conference on Saturday.

Am I the only one who thinks it's a little creepy the way NHK is profiling the driver who, it seems to be all but certain, caused Monday's train derailment? We know that he loved sports, played basketball in junior high school, was kind of a party guy, and seemed to have been excited about being hired by JR West. I don't get it. If he were a serial killer, or something, I could understand looking for clues in his background to what animated him. Profiling him as if he'd just won some kind of prize, I don't understand.

There is one way in which information about Ryutaro Takami's breezy personality is possibly meaningful. He overran platforms several times--once by 100 meters!--and had been reprimanded and sent to retraining. According to the conductor's wife, Takami asked him to underreport the extent of Monday's overrun at the station before the derailment, presumably to avoid being relieved of his duties and receiving a more stern reprimand. And it's looking as if he decided on Monday that keeping his personnel record clean was worth risking the lives of his passengers by speeding.

That kind of thing happens all over the world, but it's a particular problem in appearances-are-everything societies like guess-where. One of Takami's colleagues also relates that the company's version of retraining involves mostly scolding by groups of superiors and pointless essay assignments about topics unrelated to railroad work, raising the possibility that JR West is in effect telling employees that avoiding the ire of higher-ups trumps every other priority. It'd be nice if that were more surprising than it is.

Added on 30 April: In the interest of translating ideas rather than words, I rendered 再教育 (saikyoiku: "re-education") as "retraining," since that's normally the word we would use for what goes on in the workplace. Re-education has totalitarian overtones.

It turns out that it might have paid to be more literal-minded. This Asahi story expands on the information in the NHK telecasts we've been seeing:

One great fear among train drivers for West Japan Railway Co. is being forced to take a ``re-education program'' after making a mistake on the job. Drivers are known to skirt safety procedures just to avoid the humiliation and financial loss of taking the program. One driver even committed suicide just after he started the re-education process.

...

Re-education of drivers who commit mistakes is a JR West policy. The mistakes include being behind schedule.

The main component of the re-education process is writing reports about the mistake to reflect on the error and think of ways to prevent a recurrence.

JR West workers who make mistakes are also assigned menial tasks, such as pulling weeds from gardens at JR West facilities, washing windows or painting company buildings.

There are one or two things that are important for context here. One is that, in Japan, those who are hired even at management level spend their first year or two going through "rotations," in which they work alongside people who do sales, clerical work, and other low-level tasks. There are a few reasons for this. One is to give future managers a sense of all the little things that have to get done to keep the organization going. Another is to make them feel a sense of kinship with people at all levels of the hierarchy. Another is to show them the side of the company that customers see. The idea is to keep managers from being out of touch about the practical effects of the policies they set once they're helping to run the place.

Against that backdrop, having people pull weeds or wash windows (or clean toilets, which is a job that's been mentioned on the broadcasts as another common punishment) is not just supposed to shame people into not transgressing again. Rather, it's also supposed to serve as a reminder that the drivers who do the crucial job of running the trains have a whole organization of people with less visible jobs depending on them.

I'd be willing to bet that that's the way the re-education program is officially conceived. There's evidence, though, that the message of humiliation ends up being so disproportionately emphasized that it drowns out the message that the employee should do his job more responsibly:

One driver was so upset at being forced to undergo the re-education program that he hanged himself in 2001. The then 44-year-old man was late by about 50 seconds in pulling out from Kyoto Station.

Bereaved family members sued JR West for compensation. The father claimed that bullying was the cause of his son's suicide.

In February, the Osaka District Court rejected the plaintiffs' request for compensation on the grounds that JR West could not have foreseen that the man would kill himself.

But the court did state that the re-education program caused the suicide.

According to the ruling, the man was forced to write up to seven reports a day about his mistake. He was told by the deputy head of his train district that he was being paid to "just study."

There's no mention of any other suicides in the Asahi article, but there is evidence that the desire to avoid re-education causes drivers to push their trains to the speed limit if they feel they're losing time. Drivers on the Takarazuka Line have apparently developed a practice of charging down the straightaway at full tilt toward Amagasaki Station and then jamming on the brakes so they can make the curve where the derailment happened Monday. It's likely that Takami was attempting such a maneuver and didn't make it.

Ace Pryhill has a beautifully-written post up about gay advocacy:

I fully understand the psychological conflict that coming to grips with my sexuality has had on me; it's strong and it's real. I could have very easily gone down some wrong paths because of it. Almost any gay person will tell you they didn't choose to be gay, but the element of choice always remains when it comes to actions. You can choose not to cheat, you can choose not to do meth, you can choose to avoid tempting situations, you can choose to talk about a problem before it tears you apart, you can choose to get professional help before you make a decision you'll later regret. Instead of letting other people fix our problems, let's do what we can to fix ourselves...the rest will follow.

You can also choose not to hang out with the kinds of people who encourage you to be dissolute. (That includes straight friends who think it's gays' job to add color to their boring, settled lives with stories of sexual adventure and political shenanigans.) Coming out is often an explosive finish to years of carefully-concealed torture; but it simply isn't possible to make up for that by relying on other people to make adult choices easier for us from then on. Nor is it wise to go overboard on the now-I'm-going-to-live-just-for-me bit, which is a poor long-term strategy for productiveness and happiness.

I tell you--this month! Lots of planning and administrative-document-writing, which I realize is necessary but which tends to make me a little cranky. To top it off, my assistant's been out sick since Monday. No, I'm not one of those managers who need to ask the receptionist to help him work the fax machine, but my workload went up measurably, of course, and a lot of it was stuff that I haven't had to do for years. Not a slack minute.

I did, however, have to shoehorn in time to go to my dermatologist so she could irradiate my chin again. I'd managed to become the proprietor of a rather large wart, probably because I shaved over it for a good week or two before realizing it wasn't my usual acne. Irradiate is, I presume, the medical term for what she did; to a layman like me, it sounds as if she were going to kill off all the Montezuma's revenge while leaving me fresh and juicy. In reality, she used some kind of pulsing-laser thing to burn away the virus. She tried to get it all three weeks ago, but, apparently, there's a danger of scarring if you get too thorough, so she just zapped down as deep as she dared. I had to keep it bandaged and slick it down with an antibiotic ointment of singularly repellant texture.

Unfortunately, they can't always extirpate it with the first treatment, and sure enough--damn!--it started growing back in one tiny place, and several new little ones (I have a heavy beard and give myself little nicks a lot) had grown in. Thus I found myself being "irradiated" yet again today, only this time in little places dotted around my chin. Three more weeks of ointment.

This normally wouldn't bother me too much--I don't like looking weird, but it's not as if I were in the market, or anything, and if Atsushi's not here, he doesn't have to deal with it. It's just that Japan's big spring bank holiday starts tomorrow, and he's coming home. He's had kind of a stressing run at work lately, and we're going to have an early birthday celebration because we can't get together on the actual day. So I'd been hoping to be back to normal when he got here, but no such luck. Another three weeks of looking like a sci-fi movie monster. And it's my chin, of course; there are only one or two places I can imagine that would interfere more with uninhibited amorousness. Guess I'm going to have to be really good with my hands.

Uh, so, yeah. I don't have any aspirations to being a one-stop source for news, but I normally do try not to offer up several consecutive days of scattiness. I've been kind of distracted, obviously; if it's shown, I'm sorry. Oh, yeah! And I think we're giving a dinner party, maybe? Have to check with Atsushi about that, given that I do the cooking.

Anyway, the weather's been gorgeous. Puts you in the mood for summer songs and hot-weather food. And Tokyo will be relatively empty for a few days, which is nice. For any Japan-based readers who are traveling for Golden Week, stay safe and have a great time. It's probable that I'll actually be back to more regular posting tomorrow-ish. Atsushi has a bunch of errands and will be spending some time with his parents while he's here, and while we have plans to enjoy the outdoors, I think we're both going to be tired enough to enjoy sitting at home and lazing plenty, too.

If my eyes are shining and my lower lip is trembling, you must believe that it IS NOT out of a desire to guffaw at the Moebius strip of ironies in this story, via Gay News:

A bar owner in the predominantly gay Castro neighborhood violated numerous city civil rights codes by discriminating against black patrons, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission announced Tuesday.

The case has been closely watched by the city's gay community, many of whom said they were incredulous that an establishment in what's considered one of the country's most progressive and socially liberal neighborhoods would actively keep black customers out of the popular nightspot Badlands.

In particular, the commission said club owner Les Natali referred to blacks as "non-Badlands customers" who should be discouraged from patronizing the club.

"The Castro should be a place of homecoming for gays worldwide and this was a betrayal of everything this community stands for," said Don Romesburg, organizer for the community group And Castro For All, which filed the complaint. "That's why it's so important that we hold them accountable."

The part I think is interesting is this: the investigation took 10 months, right? Don't tell me that in that amount of time, word didn't spread to every fag in the Bay Area about what was going on. And in that case, why didn't people stop going there? Or protest outside the place? It's possible that business has, in fact, dropped off; but the article doesn't say so, and it seems like the sort of thing that would have been mentioned by the reporter. I myself am not recommending ruining people based on hearsay, but boycotts are the sort of showily self-righteous gesture the left seems to specialize in, and, I mean, it's racism we're talking about here. What's more important than that? Any gay club owner who would set racist policies has clearly internalized his own Otherness in the eyes of society and needs to be educated.

Maybe the part of the story not told by the SF Gate article makes things clearer. The SF Badlands website (note prominent black guys in photos) is here, and there is an ad hoc website about the charges of racism here. As someone who lives in a city in which not allowing foreigners, allowing Westerners but not Koreans, or not allowing military guys is a pretty common bar policy, I find all this fascinating.

The number of deaths from Monday's train derailment has reached 91. The Mainichi English edition has a good roundup of the rumors that are flying around about possible causes of the accident. From the very beginning, reports have emphasized that the driver was young (23) and that, having overrun the platform at the previous station and had to back up to let passengers board and get off, he might have been speeding to stay on schedule. Also (I didn't see this in the Mainichi article), he was driving a relatively old train with an emergency brake system that's somewhat less sensitive than those on newer models. That doesn't mean it was substandard, but it could mean that it was part of the combination of factors that made this a disaster rather than a close call.

As to questions by Western reporters about whether this shakes Japanese people's faith in the rail system--well, I doubt it. If one of the major airlines had a crash (especially JAL), I think there would be a real hue and cry. Air safety violations have been in the news a lot lately, so there's an existing sense that there's something wrong with the system. An accident would validate that.

The last train crash--actually, it was more like a sideswipe--happened five years ago. There are way, way, way, way more commuter rail departures than airline departures in Japan, and my sense is that people just figure that, even in the best-run systems, there's going to be an accident some time. Of course, it could come out that JR West was skimping on safety measures in order to keep to schedules. I haven't heard any evidence of that, mind, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. In that sort of case, there might be something of a fuss raised, though the only way for the market to punish the company would be for lots of people and businesses to move off its rail lines. (Is that the best way to say 沿線?) Such a mass movement seems unlikely.

My guess is that most people are hoping that the first suggested factor turns out actually to have been the decisive one: the driver, who had a history of overruns and other little problems, tried to catch up with the line schedule by speeding and unfortunately chose exactly the wrong stretch of track to do it. That would let just about everyone off the hook. We'll have to see.

One of the more well-known Japanese escapees from North Korea has gone to the DPRK embassy in Beijing and asked to return:

The return to North Korea of a Japanese woman who came back to Japan in 2003 for the first time in 43 years has raised questions over whether her moves were voluntary or part of a political "game" played by North Korean officials.

The woman, Fudeko Hirashima, 66, appeared at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing on April 18 and held a news conference, saying "evil people" had deceived her into going to Japan. She headed back to North Korea, where her grandchildren are, after throwing her hands in the air and saying in a tearful voice, "Long live the great general Kim Jong Il!" referring to the North Korean leader.

Hirashima said she wanted to be reunited with her children and grandchildren, who are still living in North Korea.

The Japanese government figures that DPRK agents got to her:

Hiroshi Kato, secretary-general of the Life Funds for North Korean Refugees said North Korea appeared to be involved in Hirashima's return.

"It's a perfect game by the North Korean side," he said. "It's a commonplace method for North Korea to use family love against people. They will probably use Hirashima as an example and say that Japan abducts people, too."

That last part is almost a certainty. How much of a push Hirashima needed is debatable, though. You can imagine how bewilderingly different Japan is from when she left in 1959. She may have little family left here (and she may not have departed on the best terms with them--when Japanese marry Koreans, family approval is frequently not forthcoming from either side). Her son has died, her daughter and grandchildren are still in North Korea, and she has little money to live on. Perhaps she decided it was worth proclaiming her love for Kim Jong-il in order to spend her final years where she would be happier.

Like a lot of North Koreans, she has reason not to like the regime much. The Japanese version of the Mainichi article gives a timeline of her years there with wrenching terseness:

14 December 1959: Went with husband, a North Korean living in Japan, to North Korea through cooperative repatriation project

December 1969: Husband taken away by authorities, not heard from since

May 1970: Domicile moved to village along China-Korea border

November 2002: Escaped northward into China

The Japanese version also contains a run-down of what she said at the press conference. She refers to the DPRK as 共和国 (kyouwakoku: "the Republic").

I cherish freedom of assembly as much as anyone, but it sure does bring out the lamest in some people, on all parts of the political spectrum. You have puns that not even Dad would stoop to:

On the Capitol steps, Brian Mock held a sign chastising the governor that read "Truth is not RELL-ative." He said he had little hope that lawmakers would repeal the civil union statute, but said they need to know voters are watching.

Especially the majority of Connecticut voters who approved of the idea of civil unions?

You have self-refuting inanities:

"Civil unions are merely a stepping stone to redefining marriage," he said at Sunday's rally. "Anyone who voted for this bill voted for same-sex marriage."

Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell signed the bill last week after it overwhelmingly passed the House and Senate. The law, which takes effect in October, also defines marriage as being between one man and one woman.

And you have those tin-eared folks who think satire has unlimited usefulness:

Meanwhile, about 80 gay rights activists took part in a mock wedding ceremony on the Capitol lawn Sunday, criticizing civil unions as second-class citizenship. Many said they were happy the state approved civil unions but wished lawmakers had given gays and lesbians full marriage rights.

One thing I'd like to know--the article doesn't mention, and there may be no way of finding out--is how many of the 3000 protestors against the bill were from Connecticut. I suppose you could say the same about the participants in the mock wedding, but there were only 80 of them.

Kelvin is guest-posting at Simon World and wrote yesterday about how Chinese news sources are discussing Prime Minister Koizumi's remarks the other day. Kelvin doesn't want to get into a lengthy discussion about what constitutes a sufficient apology, so I'll just pause to clarify a single point: Koizumi did not, unlike many past Japanese politicians, use the formulation 遺憾に思う (ikan ni omou: "I regard it as regrettable"), which is a way of saying that something is unfortunate without taking responsibility. The word お詫び refers to an acceptance of responsibility, though it can be debated whether the level of abjectness is fitting.

As for the whether actions and words are in harmony, this is translated with my customary awkwardness from the Yasukuni Shrine's official website. There is an English page, too:

Among the spirits enshrined here are these: Men who fell while standing on the front lines fighting fires ignited by bombings of Japanese cities by enemy planes. Military nurses, who stoutly wore the Red Cross insignia and were adored like mothers and sisters on the battlefields. Sailors who sank to the bottom of the sea on their supply ships while heading toward the battle zones to the south. Reporters and cameramen in the press corps accompanying the armed forces who were felled by enemy fire while gathering information on the battlefield. All these people offered up their lives for their ancestral land of Japan and, because of that, they are enshrined with great reverence as exalted spirits. Also, there are those who, after the Great East Asian War* ended, shouldered all responsibility for the war and gave up their lives. Furthermore, after the war, the Allied Powers that had fought Japan (the US, the UK, the Netherlands, China, and others) unilaterally declared 1068 persons "war criminals" in perfunctory trials and pitilessly executed them on false charges. At the Yasukuni Shrine, they are referred to as "Showa Martyrs" and are all enshrined as spirits. The Yasukuni Shrine is a shrine to which all citizens can make pilgrimages. We hope that you have come to understand here what kinds of spirits are enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine. The spirits at the Yasukuni Shrine offered up their precious lives in battle, seeking for Japan's independence and peace to continue forever and for Japan's glorious traditions and history, left to us by our ancestors, to continue until the end of time. The peaceful and prosperous Japan we know today exists thanks to those enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine and others like them.

A commenter--another blogger who knows Japan well--put it to me several months ago that it really isn't the business of the Chinese or Koreans who goes to what shrine in Japan. I agree in principle, but I hope it's a little more clear from the above why any affiliation with this particular shrine could be seen as provocative.

Westerners learn that shinto is Japan's native religion, which is basically true but also kind of misleading. The purification rites and ancestor worship developed by early agrarian Japanese were largely displaced in official life after Buddhism arrived, though the two were practiced side-by-side. During the Meiji Restoration, there was a push for Japan to reclaim its Japaneseness, and a campaign began to dislodge Buddhism and replace it with shinto. Doing so required thinking of shinto as an actual system rather than just a hodge-podge of ancient rituals, and that was, in fact, a change. (This is true of many elements of Japanese culture that we're taught to think of as parts of its history. The Japanese "warrior code" didn't really exist in any coherent form until it was retrospectively given one during the Meiji Period, either.) In shinto, everyone who dies becomes a 神 (kami: "spirit"). There are good or bad kami, depending on how the person lived, so calling the kami in general "gods," as people frequently do in English, fails to translate the idea very well.

I don't believe that Koizumi or most other high officials visit the Yasukuni Shrine in the spirit of full agreement with the shrine's administrators. I can't read minds, but I imagine that most politicians want an opportunity to honor those who really did sacrifice their lives in good faith and, perhaps, to pray that the bad spirits have been dealt with justly in the next world and have as little chance as possible to influence the affairs of this world from here on.

There was a train derailment in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture (where Kobe is), this morning. A commuter train slammed into an apartment building, and there have been 25 people killed and over 200 injured according to NHK. The driver and some other passengers are still trapped in one of the cars, so there's a good chance there will be more fatalities. There's been no information about the cause of the derailment yet.

Added at 13:00: NHK is now reporting 37 fatalities. The worst train accident since the 60s caused 42 deaths, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that today's could displace it. (I must have misheard NHK before--there was an accident in Yokohama in 1963 that killed almost 200 people.)

Added at 17:15: Up to 50 fatalities. One thing that's good is that the weather is clear and pretty warm today, and the derailment happened at about 9:30 in the morning. Up to just a week or two ago, or on a rainy day, or at night, the rescuers wouldn't have had a seven-hour cushion of relatively good conditions in which to work. The footage is horrifying; the second car is flattened and wrapped around a corner of the apartment building like tin sheeting, and two of the other cars are on top of each other.

New rule! New rule! It's improper for legislators to vote on any issue that wasn't an explicit plank in their campaign platform. I don't think many US congresscritters mentioned military responses to terrorism in the election cycle before 9/11, but you didn't hear the right squawking when they voted to authorize them, even most of those who represented leftist urban enclaves. Yes, I know--that was an emergency, and it was at the national level. But that's all the more reason to conclude that Connecticut voters have had ample time to register their opinions on civil unions with Hartford.

What Amritas says and links to in this post about interpreting squares with my understanding from those I know who do it. Coincidentally, I ran into a guy who was still in school learning to interpret when I last saw him five or six years ago. The training sounded absolutely hellish--in the sense of being repetitious, since your brain basically needs to be rewired to think in both languages at once, which is harder than it sounds. That's especially true, as Amritas notes, of languages such as Japanese and English, in which both word order and the principles that govern expression of thought are often at loggerheads.

I can only imagine what Amritas's unfiltered reaction, as a linguist, was to this page on the history of Japanese. In 1500 BC, the only markings the Japanese were making were decorative rope imprints on pottery. The Japanese kana system is a syllabary, not an alphabet; and while there were some spelling simplifications around the end of the nineteenth century (we no longer write よう as やう), kana themselves have existed since the Heian Period. Really a startling display of ineptitude.

You have got to be kidding me (Japanese, English):

Postal workers' jobs are to be safeguarded in the privatization planned for 2007, with the new postal entities to keep the same employment levels, government sources said.

After all, that is the point of privatizing an inefficient government organization--improve operations by not changing anything.

Regarding the establishment of a fund to maintain universal postal savings and postal services in remote areas, the postal services holding company will save a portion of its revenues each fiscal year, as stipulated by an ordinance, until the sum reaches 1 trillion yen.

The bills state that the fund cannot be tapped, with the exception of a situation in which the revenues alone cannot support the holding company's universal service obligation, the sources said.

The six bills are designed to privatize postal services, establish a postal services holding company, a mail delivery company, an over-the-counter service network firm, and an independent administrative organization for postal savings and kampo life insurance, and to pass laws related to the privatization.

Increasing the number of organizations involved sounds like a great move toward streamlining, too, though that structure's been part of the proposal forever. Good grief.

And that new food pyramid? The USDA has seriously outdone itself in purposeless bureaucratic condescension. Ann Althouse is justifiably irritated at the cutesy site title, but it's the graphic that does it for me:



I had to laugh out loud at the irony. The rainbow is so dear to the hearts of I'm-okay-you're-okay types as a way to say we're all equally adorable, so it's no surprise that it recommended itself to the tofu-worshippers at the USDA. But, of course, the whole point of this particular project is to push the value of whole grains while banishing trans-fats to outer darkness, so equal ROYGBIV bands would not have worked.

The site is pretty snazzy and easy to navigate, but it illustrates the problems with having federal programs for this sort of thing. Read the information and tips and you start to wonder very quickly just who the target audience is. Some samples:

• To eat more whole grains, substitute a whole-grain product for a refined product – such as eating whole-wheat bread instead of white bread or brown rice instead of white rice. It’s important to substitute the whole-grain product for the refined one, rather than adding the whole-grain product. (link)
  
  
• Freeze leftover cooked brown rice, bulgur, or barley. Heat and serve it later as a quick side dish. (link)
  
  
• Try different textures of fruits. For example, apples are crunchy, bananas are smooth and creamy, and oranges are juicy. (link)
  
  
• Cut-up fruit makes a great snack. Either cut them yourself, or buy pre-cut packages of fruit pieces like pineapples or melons. Or, try whole fresh berries or grapes. (link)

Most of the advice is like this, so I initially figured MyPyramid was the site geared toward children and that there was another, stuffier one elsewhere. But each page about the food groups (or food EMS bands or whatever they're to be called now) also has a section at the bottom that's explicitly directed at kids, and you can get calorie intake recommendations based on your age, so we grown-ups are clearly the main audience.

In other words, the USDA is looking at adults who don't know what instead of means, don't know that their freezer can be used to store leftover rice as well as Lean Cuisine dinners, don't know that apples and bananas have different textures, and don't know a whole lot of other perkily-explained things I'd drive myself into the madhouse by quoting. At least we're still trusted to handle sharp knives.

None of this stuff is untrue, of course, and those of us who were taught to cook when we were little can fall into thinking that much of it is intuitive when it really isn't. Why can't you freeze a lot of vegetables without blanching them? Why should you add the salt at the beginning some times and at the end others? The thing is, despite all the blaring about the latest scientific information and the effort our trusty USDA folks have expended on compiling it, most of what's on MyPyramid.gov isn't anything you couldn't learn from a collection of a half-dozen basic cookbooks and some Julia Child reruns. I do think the standardized nutrition label is a good idea; the Japanese have essentially adopted it, and it makes it easier to avoid foods that are half additives. But all of this huffing and puffing and throwing tax money around like confetti--just to tell us that fresh plant-based foods are healthy, in case we didn't already hear it from Mom and the home ec teacher--is asinine.

I can't read Spanish and haven't seen the text of the bill, so I can't determine whether the hilarious spelling mistake in the second paragraph of this Reuters report is accurate:

Spain's parliament gave initial approval to a law legalizing gay marriage on Thursday in a move likely to rekindle conflict with a Catholic Church that has just elected a new conservative pope.

A packed public gallery erupted in cheers and applause as the speaker announced approval of the Socialist government's proposal, making Spain the third European country to legalese gay marriage.

"It's unfair to be a second-class citizen because of love," Socialist legislator Carmen Monton said. "Spain joins the vanguard of those defending full equality for gays and lesbians."

I can't say I'm entirely impressed by the reasoning used by one quoted activist: "I'm going to get married for the sake of activism, for love, and for a question of dignity." Getting married to make a point? Lovely. But then, activists of any stripe often do have a serious case of single-issue-itis.

In any case, the bill has another round or two of approval to go through, but it's apparently expected to pass. It also appears to have good public support.

PM Koizumi spoke today in Jakarta:

Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi spoke at the Asia-Africa Summit that began in Jakarta 22 April. He cited the talk given in 1995 by then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama to commemorate the end of World War II, in which he apologized for past actions such as the way occupied territories were governed. "We must humbly absorb all the facts of history, and keep always etched on our souls a sense of keen self-reflection and regret."

There's an English translation of some of Murayama's remarks here, and there's a further discussion here. I do think it's important to bear in mind that mutual hostilties in this region are as old as the hills. From that perspective, every Japanese government worker down to the Diet Building janitors could apologize for the atrocities of World War II, and the Chinese might very well still be complaining. At some point, it's unreasonable to expect Japan to keep asking to be forgiven.

At the same time, it's not hard to understand where the ire comes from. Simon linked to this terrifically-done list of Japanese politicians' apologies to Korea, and the one of apologies to China is now up, too. I have rarely heard any of these politicians accused of being insincere, though some of them are on the vague side. The point that's usually made is that, given things like the treatment of Iris Chang's work, the pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine, and the repeated controversy over history textbooks, it's pretty clear that there are other people in positions of power over how the War is semi-officially depicted who are very frequently successful in making sure that no wrongdoing is ascribed to the Japanese. That raises questions over the extent to which those issuing the apologies are speaking on behalf of the Japanese government.

Whichever side you come down on, the PRC has transparently taken a have-it-both-ways-at-once approach to the protests: it condoned them while people's rage was directed at Japan and deflected away from the CCP--and the minute they got enough out of hand that there was a danger the protestors might start remembering how much they dislike about their own government, too, the serious warnings started. Not surprisingly, the Japanese ambassador to Beijing is still warning Japanese citizens that China may not be safe, despite officially stating that there is no information to indicate that demonstrations will continue within the jurisdictions of large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Being an ambassador, he's chosen the most tactful possible wording: "In such a large country as China, it is impossible to guarantee that nothing will happen." Gotta love that litotes.

Added at 22:38: Oh, yeah, almost left this out: 80 Diet members decided to visit the Yasukuni Shrine today.

Civil unions have been signed into law by the Connecticut governor. No court case. Very cool. Even the marriage-or-bust types are reeling it in enough to recognize that there's much to celebrate:

Love Makes a Family, a gay rights organization that wanted legislators pass a gay marriage bill, called civil unions an important step toward protecting the rights of same-sex couples. But Anne Stanback, the group's executive director, said the fight is not over. ["Love Makes a Family" sounds like the kind of entity that should have a headmistress, not an executive director--SRK]

"As important as the rights are, this is not yet equality," she said.

Naturally, it's that last quotation that 365Gay has seen fit to use as its quote of the day. Whatever. On the opposite side of the country, the Montana domestic partnership bills were voted down by its House of Representatives this week; that it passed the Senate was apparently big news. Things go in fits and starts.

The LDP will ask the government to provide 2 trillion yen to ensure that universal service is maintained. This is double the previous recommended amount:

The government will accept a request from the Liberal Democratic Party to increase a fund to maintain universal banking and insurance services by at least 1 trillion yen in negotiations on postal privatization bills, government sources said Wednesday.

The government also is expected to study the need to raise the amount to be stated in the bills from 1 trillion yen to up to 2 trillion yen.

The government also will not ensure capital ties among postal saving, kampo insurance and other new companies in the bills.

My first thought on reading the news that the pope had been selected this morning was, as you might imagine, "Hmm...I wonder whether Andrew Sullivan has torn himself clean in half with rage yet, like Rumpelstilskin, or I'm a little early." I was just in time, apparently, but QandO already has it covered.

Camille Paglia dealt with this amply in an essay when I was in college, but it's not an issue that's likely to go away soon. To add to what Dale writes at QandO: if you believe that your principles are moral and just, and you believe that external, obdurate reality bears them out without the gloss of wishful thinking, that's that. Religions don't have line-item vetos. There are gay-friendly churches around, and I'm at a loss to figure out why gay Christians don't join them instead of trying to shift thousands of years of tradition to fit their beliefs this very minute.

That doesn't mean they should just sit down and shut up if they seriously believe that scripture is being misinterpreted or interpreted too narrowly. It's just that lasting change happens slowly. If their chief concern is that the long-term trajectory of Christianity be in the direction of truth, they have to accept that their arguments may take hold slowly and not have any effects on doctrine within their lifetimes. And if what they're arguing really isn't clearly supported by the Bible, it may never take hold in the church in which they were reared. They must be content with serving God to the honest best of their understanding, and standing firm in the face of earthly disapproval. I still think Andrew Sullivan has contributed a great deal to the public discourse, but I can't get his position on religion to boil down to anything but "I'll fuck whoever I damn well please, and the church will love me for it." That seems to me just a bit off the mark.

Added on 21 April: Susanna is back to posting more frequently, which is a good thing. She had this to say about the ascension of the new pope and Andrew Sullivan's reaction to it.

Also, Michael thinks I'm engaging in pro forma Sullivan-bashing. Well, I'm not. When people attack or belittle Andrew Sullivan as if he were useless, I am more than happy to defend him. But you can defend his overall contribution to the public debate and still conclude that his recent positions are either not well supported or mutually inconsistent, and that the flibbertigibbety way he's taken to expressing them doesn't do him any favors, either.

Since I would prefer to keep my blood pressure in the healthy range, it's probably just as well that the new federal reports on the efficacy of airport screening are not available in all their depressing detail.

The Florida Republican said he would ask the Bush administration and Congress to hand the function back to the private sector, which would be overseen by homeland security officials.

"This annual multibillion-dollar system has received its second poor performance report card," Mica said.

Details of the two reports are classified but Mica described a system — which he helped create even though he opposed it — as inefficient and struggling despite a $20 billion investment at 429 commercial airports.

The Transportation Security Administration oversees nearly 50,000 screeners.

The homeland security report, parts of which were publicly released, noted screeners performed no better in covert tests after a stinging assessment last year on failures to detect prohibited items at airport security checkpoints.

And now they're supposed to be making sure luggage is purged of every last lighter, among other things. Those who fear that the system may actually be re-privatized can probably rest easy, though:

Democrat Peter DeFazio of Oregon, the former ranking member of the aviation subcommittee, sharply criticized TSA. But he said it would be a mistake to return to private screening and doubted Congress would agree to do so.

"It's time we give screeners 21st century tools to combat 21st century threats," DeFazio said.

Uh-huh. I predict a bipartisan vote to give the screening agency lots of money for new procedures and equipment. Perhaps they'll revamp training to enable screeners to identify big, scary knives without assistance.

Fukuoka has had another strong earthquake--M 5.8. This one wasn't as strong as the one in March, but they're reporting multiple injuries already. Also, it happened at 6:11 on a weekday morning, so a lot of commuter lines have been affected. I haven't gotten a message from Atsushi saying he felt it in his city, though I assume he must have.

This shouldn't need to be said again, but it does, and Ghost of a Flea says it.

Man, you know how sometimes you wish you could take some of your good fortune and give it to someone else? It never becomes easy to see a friend who's open and giving and true get screwed over by some shallow charmer, even if you know that he'll get the guy he deserves eventually.

New US Ambassador to Japan certainly picked a nice, tranquil time to start his duties. He's understandably making the bland diplomatic best of things, according to the Nikkei. From his first press conference:

[On the anti-Japan demonstrations in China]: "The relations between the two are crucial with respect to the stability of the entire Asia region. It is our hope that they will aim to find a peaceful resolution through dialogue."

[On the reform of the UN]: "Complex issues have been piling up, and it is not desirable that we set a firm deadline at this point.... The US government, and I as an individual, do support Japan [in its petition for permanent UNSC membership]."

[On the first East Asia summit to be held at the end of this year in Malaysia]: "The US is a Pacific country. We would like to participate if it means that we will have a chance to have a hand in setting broad policies that will have an effect in the region."

The East Asia summit will feature the ASEAN members plus inseparable buddies Japan, the PRC, and the ROK. Australia has already been snubbed after hinting that it would like an invitation. Malaysia and China are (go figure) those who are are most hesitant over the participation of Australia, let alone the US. Incidentally, Schieffer's last post before Japan was Australia.

The Japanese do not permit themselves to be upstaged in the sly dig department, so the PRC's remarks that Japan may, perhaps, not have enough "respect" (for history or from the rest of Asia) to be a member of the UN Security Council have not gone unanswered. Shinzo Abe, head of the LDP, was in Sendai today and mused,

They [the PRC government] are supposed to host the Olympics and the World Expo. One wonders whether they'll really be able to manage, assuming the situation continues as it is now. Doubts cannot but arise.

The "situation" he's talking about are this weekend's repeat-performance protests, which were the headline news yesterday and today here. The news here has been stressing the violence of some of the protests, though it's hard to have a good sense of how out-of-hand things really got. Reuters's version is here:

China has come under fire for tacitly encouraging the anti-Japanese unrest but Beijing denies the charge. But authorities have pledged to protect Japanese businesses and nationals in China.

In the third weekend of violent protests, thousands marched Saturday to Japan's consulate in Shanghai, smashing windows, pelting it with paint bombs and eggs and attacking Japanese restaurants along the way.

Relations between the two Asian powerhouses are at their worst in decades and China's official Xinhua news agency put the number of protesters in Shanghai at 20,000.

"The students and citizens spontaneously took to the street to demonstrate and protest, expressing their discontent with the right-wing forces in Japan on violating the Sino-Japanese relations," it quoted Shanghai municipal government spokeswoman Jiao Yang as saying.

It's rather interesting how the PRC regime's ability to keep protestors in check varies. Personally, I find it improbable that the protests were engineered by the Chinese government--or even encouraged in the active way we usually think of it. All kinds of unrest have been building in China, though, and it seems likely that the PRC is taking advantage of the fact that this ill-feeling is directed outward and hoping to use it as a pressure release.

Japan itself is not a protest-heavy country, compared with its neighbors; but, of course, anti-Chinese feeling is never a really hard sell here, and there are small but real fears that some Japanese will get into the counter-protest act:

The violence has raised concerns about a backlash in Japan, and police have tightened security at the Chinese embassy, consulates and residences after several incidents of harassment.

A man hurled a bottle at the Chinese consulate in Osaka, western Japan, Sunday and set himself on fire when officers tried to subdue him, police said. Right-wing groups were driving around Tokyo in trucks fitted with loudspeakers, but riot police prevented them from approaching the Chinese embassy.

For anyone who doesn't know Japan, that "right-wing groups were driving around Tokyo in trucks fitted with loudspeakers" part is not, heaven knows, a distinguishing feature of this weekend; the exhortations to defend Japan's purity and honor are probably a bit less generalized in tone, though. Japanese foreign minister Nobutaka Machimura is in Beijing for a meeting with the Chinese foreign ministry.

Added on 18 April: Japan demands that China apologize for letting demonstrations get out of hand; China says it's Japan's responsibility to apologize first. At least the two countries' foreign ministers, meeting this weekend in Beijing, were able to agree on something: there should be a joint China-Japan center for historical research. That's the least likely issue to help resolve the immediate problems, but, hey--you have to start somewhere.

BTW, here's the original Japanese report on the Mainichi poll referred to at the end of the Reuters story. For once, the Japanese version doesn't contain much that was left out of the English story.

Joe Riddle has a simple but good post up at Ex-Gay Watch about one of my pet peeves: the way ex-gays (at least, those whose profiles are published as inspirational) tend to blame homosexuality for all their hang-ups:

Blaming the "gay community" sure seems like a convenient way for them to avoid taking responsibilty for their own behavior, dontcha think? Still, there's probably a kernel of truth there... Chances are, their gay friends were not questioning their reckless behavior, and in fact may have been enabling it. Sometimes we out gays are reluctant to encourage responsible behavior in our friends because we don't want to be viewed as another moralizing voice. While the "gay community" isn't responsible for the bad choices of Paulk, Bennett, et al, it's possilbe we did contribute to driving them into the arms of the ex-gay movement. If I thought my only options were to be a drug-addicted slut or ex-gay, I'd choose ex-gay every time.

Sure, so would I; but the nurturing, supportive part of the gay community that brings out the best in you is there (and not as icky as that description makes it sound). I found it without having to look terribly hard. My friends are perfectly capable of encouraging responsible behavior without turning into sanctimonious hard-asses.

If there are people who can't handle their homosexuality, then I seriously wish them the best in celibacy or learned heterosexuality or whatever allows them to live happier lives. But I have no patience with those who act as if all the non-sex-dungeon hang-outs and non-abusive boyfriends were somehow in hiding and could only be discovered with superhuman effort and an oscillating electron microscope. That's malarkey. If drawn to nothing but ephemeral pleasures and exploitative people, you've got more fundamental problems than being gay.

Oh, and this is what I really wanted to read the day before Atsushi flies in for the weekend:

In an astonishing admission aimed at explaining its troubled record in recent months, Japan Airlines on Thursday said safety had not been its top priority.

All efforts and attention were focused on punctuality. The airline was careless about safety, JAL said in a report to the transport ministry on steps it is taking to restore its tarnished reputation.

Anyone who flies out of Haneda knows that, whatever JAL is achieving by giving inspections short shrift, it ain't punctuality, so exactly what is really being prioritized, one would like to know? Perhaps all those little screw-ups lately have been a blessing in disguise. They haven't caused any fatalities, but they've been serious enough to get the attention of the government:

And in a case of worst-possible timing, part of the flap from the wing of a JAL aircraft that landed at Narita International Airport on Thursday was found to have fallen off in flight, officials said.

Flight 73, carrying 428 passengers and crew members, arrived at 5:10 p.m. from Honolulu.

Mechanics found the component had detached from the main left wing.

The airport's 4,000-meter runway that the aircraft used was closed for three minutes from 6 p.m. to search for the missing part. It was not found.

JAL said the mishap did not compromise flight safety.

Upon receiving JAL's report, officials of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said they will regularly inspect facilities and airports used by the airline to confirm that the company's safety measures are being observed.

The ministry also grounded a JAL pilot for one month beginning today for starting takeoff procedures without clearance from air traffic control at New Chitose Airport near Sapporo. The pilot of the Tokyo-bound flight was forced to abort takeoff at the last moment in January because another aircraft had just landed on the runway about a kilometer away.

In another incident, at Inchon Airport in South Korea, the pilot and co-pilot of a flight bound for Narita misheard the control tower's instructions to wait, and taxied onto the runway, forcing another plane to restart landing procedures.

Reprimands or warnings were issued in both incidents.

On March 17, a clearly fed-up transport ministry ordered JAL to improve its operations.

Yes, that would be most obliging.

The lower house of the Diet's exploratory committee on constitutional revision has come to a resolution:

On the morning of 15 April, the committee (Taro Nakayama, Chair), made up of members from the LDP, DPJ, and Komeito, approved by majority vote a finalized report summarizing 5 years of debate. They clarified in detail the necessity of revising the preamble and Article 9, in which Japan renounces war powers. This is the first time the Diet has demonstrated intent to revise the constitution since 1947, when the present constitution went into effect. Also manifested [in the proposal] are the intention to make reforms on a broad range of other issues, such as stipulating environmental rights and redistricting prefectures into larger administrative regions.

Bear in mind that this is the lower house committee, so there's no guarantee that the bill won't be nearly unrecognizable by the time it's voted on in the houses. The upper house committee, for its part, is expected to come to a resolution on 20 April.

Added on 16 April: The Nikkei evening edition had a chart I didn't feel like translating before going out last night, but there's an English article in the Mainichi that lists things pretty well. The part that's relevant to the SDF is here:

The principle of renouncing war as a means to settle international disputes, which is provided for in Clause 1, Article 9, should be retained, according to a majority opinion. The report says a majority of members "appreciate the role that Article 9 has played in ensuring Japan's peace and prosperity."

However, it does not rule out the possibility that the article will be amended to clearly provide for minimum use of force to defend Japan from possible military attacks.

The report shows that the commission was divided over whether Japan should be allowed to participate in collective self-defense arrangements.

Some demand that Japan be allowed to participate in collective defense arrangements without limitations, while other panel members said some limitations should be placed on Japan's involvement in such arrangements. Another group said the Constitution should ban Japan's involvement in it.

Japan's codified renunciation of war is one of the biggest sticking points in its bid to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

It's nice to see stories like this:

Sen. Paul Koering, who publicly revealed Wednesday that he is gay, received nothing but kindness from his colleagues on the Senate floor today.

He was greeted with hugs and handshakes from both conservative Republican and liberal Democratic senators and from moderates of both parties. Many of the senators said they have long known of the Fort Ripley Republican's sexual orientation.

Koering, who was described as a teddy bear by several other Senators, was beaming Thursday and told one Senate colleague that he felt liberated.

No kidding, buddy. The truth shall make you free, to coin a phrase.

I do look forward to the day when the tone of these stories carries a bit less astonishment about people's goodwill--you could almost headline this one "State Senator not shot by fellow Republicans after outing self." But progress is progress.

The US government plans to survey Okinawans about how they view US bases:

The committee is attempting to determine which bases on U.S. soil should be closed to improve the efficiency of defense operations under an inquiry ordered by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

It plans to complete a draft proposal in May and seek approval from Congress in autumn.

The plan is expected to meet with strong opposition since many regional economies in the United States depend on military bases.

Okinawa's relationship with the US military is more complicated. It's Japan's least wealthy prefecture, and our bases add to the economy. At the same time, crime and high-handedness have accompanied our presence there, and Okinawans are more outspoken than your average Japanese; the survey report should be an interesting read, whatever effect it does or does not ultimately have on troop realignments.

ROK President Roh Moo-hyun addressed South Korean residents in Germany this week and made some statements that are...well, here's what he said:

"North Korea is willing to give up its nuclear programs," Roh told the meeting in Germany.

He said Pyongyang and Washington distrusted each other but were in agreement on how to resolve the problem -- security guarantees and economic aid for the North in return for dismantling its nuclear programs.

"They don't seem to trust each other," Roh said. "But distrust is not a problem of substance, so it will be resolved if you talk long enough," he said.

Is that a fact? I understand that he was probably trying to soothe the homefolks--and the part about not encouraging the collapse of the DPRK certainly makes sense, since it would do all kinds of nasty things to the ROK economy--but whenever a politician says something wacky, there's always a scary chance that he actually believes it. I mean, maybe the connotation is different in Korean, but "distrust is not a problem of substance" strikes me as quixotic in this situation. So does "North Korea is willing to give up its nuclear programs."

BTW, did you hear what Condi said about the current state of the Axis of Evil? I liked this part: "I do think the North Koreans have been, frankly, a little bit disappointed that people are not jumping up and down and running around with their hair on fire because (they) have been making these pronouncements." Yes. Laboring under the assumption that we'll actually convince North Korea to dump its nuclear arms program would be pretty dimwitted, but there's a line to be trod: we can't freak out at its antics, but working to keep negotiations going makes the DPRK feel respected and decreases the chances that it's going to do anything psycho on an international level.

You know how the Japan Post privatization proposal was presented to the LDP last week? It's still, not unpredictably, stuck there:

A group of 101 Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers met Wednesday to reiterate their opposition to the government's postal privatization plan and ruled out any compromise on the issue.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi meanwhile renewed his pledge not to change the postal reform framework adopted by his Cabinet earlier this month.

The standoff between Koizumi and his opponents in the LDP, of which he is president, is making it increasingly difficult for the government to meet its goal of submitting its postal privatization bills to the Diet by the end of the month.

At Wednesday's meeting, organized and chaired by former House of Representatives Speaker Tamisuke Watanuki, the lawmakers adopted a resolution opposing the government's plan and released their own outline to reform Japan Post while keeping it a semigovernmental corporation.

Someday when my stomach is less on edge, we'll talk about Japanese semi-governmental corporations in all their resource-hoovering glory. Suffice it to say that, while "semi-governmental" sounds like a nice, friendly compromise, in execution it ends up increasing the number of people who have access to the goodies and decreasing the number of people who feel compelled to husband them. The Sankei did report that not everyone who went to Watanuki's "study session" last week symptathized with his anti-privatization position (one is cited as saying that because he'd received his invitation from the leaders of his faction, he felt unable to refuse it). But there were 96 Diet attendees there, and 101 who joined him in his resolution this week, so maybe he was pretty persuasive.

In any case, Prime Minister Koizumi has been adamant that the proposal not be doctored before officially becoming a Diet bill. The deadline he set was the end of April, so there's still plenty of time for fun.

There's been another mix-up of patient records at a hospital, with tragic results:

A 70-year-old man died in March following a misdiagnosis brought about when his CAT scan results were accidentally switched with those of another patient at a hospital in Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Tuesday. Hospital authorities have denied responsibility for the man's death.

The man, from Numazu, died of a cerebral hemorrhage two days after being taken to the hospital and given the CAT scan following complaints of difficulty swallowing. The results of his scan were accidentally switched with those of another patient who underwent the scan the previous day.

According to hospital officials, the cranial CAT scan was performed on the man immediately after he arrived at the hospital. The technician, however, accidentally gave the wrong scan results to the man's attending physician, leading to a misdiagnosis that the man had suffered a stroke.

This sort of thing is not at all uncommon--a famous mix-up at a Yokohama hospital led to heart and lung surgeries being performed on the wrong patients--and I wonder whether its roots lie in more than just the way health care, specifically, is run.

Everyone in Japan who works for a decent-sized company has found life somewhat reordered by the new laws, which went into effect this month, governing the handling of personal information. Because Japan is famous for order, carefulness, and semi-conductors, people often make the easy assumption that the handling of information here must be first-rate; but in many ways it's not. Japanese offices are full of clutter--folders and vertical files and post-it notes piled everywhere are a common sight. True, any office anywhere in the world that hasn't been prepped for a magazine shoot is going to look worked-in, and because space is at a premium here, separate rooms or closets to keep unattractive piles of paper hidden away are less easy to manage. It's still true, though, that most Japanese prefer the traditional use of paper documentation and name-stamp approvals to computerized MIS. Most documents go through many hands on their way to being approved or filed, and Japan has had relatively little crime since the war, so it's not uncommon for documents that contain personal information to be lying about all over the place because there aren't any policies to prevent it.

Oddly, while information tends to go through many people vertically up and down chains of command, it often isn't shared horizontally. The in-group consciousness can mean that marketing departments don't always know what their own R&D people are creating, or how to communicate to them what the customers would like it to do.

Of course, computers aren't perfect either, and territoriality is not a trait the Japanese invented, as we all know. But so many of the problems you hear about in Japanese health care seem to result not from garden-variety incompetence or questionable judgment but from a specific mishandling of documents: mixing up patients' charts, not reading warnings about an employee's conduct, not having received the crucial information in report A. Apparently, the hospitals are run less like the rest of the domestic economy.

So something has come of those plans for Japan to seek help from Israel in upgrading its defense capabilities (via Gaijin Biker). Good. Ever since it was first announced, I'd been hoping more information indicating that plans had materialized would be forthcoming. It's taken a few months, but I'm glad it's here. It looks as if equipment, as well as procedure, may be included.

The Connecticut House has passed its civil unions bill. The governor hadn't threatened a veto, but she had supported an amendment (eventually added) to define marriage as between a man and a woman.

Following the House vote Rell issued a statement saying, "I am pleased that the House of Representatives passed this amendment and made it clear that while we will recognize and support civil unions, marriage in Connecticut is defined as the union of a man and a woman.

"Passage of this bill will extend civil rights to all couples, no matter their gender, and send the unmistakable message that discrimination in any form is unacceptable in Connecticut."

Good for them.

This Yomiuri article doesn't seem to know how funny it is--unless the reporter who wrote it has the driest sense of humor in all of Japan. It's about former employees of private companies who move to government work:

Those who successfully make the leap from the private sector to the public sector are often troubled by a lack of coordination between ministries and agencies in implementing government policies. But they find their new jobs rewarding because of their public nature and the contributions to local communities.

He was appointed section chief before the city had clearly determined what the responsibility of the new section would be. He decided to work on something that had interested him since his student days--involving the public in the creation of a town. He invited younger employees and residents to a meeting to discuss the future of the town. Discussions at the meeting bore fruit and resulted in the improvement of cable television network services and the launch of a local bus service that passengers can use for just 100 yen. [after they pay for the rest of the running cost with their taxes--SRK]

...

Tanaka earns less than he did in the private sector and at times has felt at odds with the local government's bureaucratic ways. For example, the workload of every section is strictly predetermined and no one wants to take on extra work.

The article isn't what you'd call a revelation, but it does raise the hope that people with experience working in more results-oriented environment can (slowly) influence things when they move to government work.

You should be reading Eric even when he's not gallantly quoting me, but the follow-up to his original post on Bill Clinton's ridiculous comments about campaign strategist Arthur Finkelstein's opposition to Hillary's political ascendancy makes a point that deserves to be raised more often:

The fascinating thing about self-loathing is that if we assume that there is such a thing (and obviously there is) why would it be restricted to gay conservatives? Is it not possible that gay leftists might also suffer from self loathing?

And how about heterosexuals? Liberal, conservative, moderate, libertarian... What's to stop any of these individuals from hating themselves?

You would think that if these jokers (as in, the sorts of gay activists Clinton is likely to have picked up the wording from) were serious about combating self-loathing among gays, they'd devote their energy to outreach programs for gay youths who are terrified out of their minds at what they've just discovered about themselves. Or for drug and sex addicts, whose behavior is flat-out self-destructive. It seems to me that the last place a reasonable person would go looking for self-loathing is among centered, ordinary people going un-hysterically about their daily lives; but, then, for some people, the opportunity to take potshots at political opponents is a good that trumps all others.

Okay, I know that complaining about Salon's culture criticism is pointless, so this is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Dead fish. But still, there's something unusually dunderheaded about this whine about how Gwen Stefani and others don't understand the Asian iconography they're appropriating:

They shadow her wherever she goes. They're on the cover of the album, they appear behind her on the red carpet, she even dedicates a track, "Harajuku Girls," to them. In interviews, they silently vogue in the background like living props; she, meanwhile, likes to pretend that they're not real but only a figment of her imagination. They're ever present in her videos and performances — swabbing the deck aboard the pirate ship, squatting gangsta style in a high school gym while pumping their butts up and down, simpering behind fluttering hands or bowing to Stefani. That's right, bowing. Not even from the waist, but on the ground in a "we're not worthy, we're not worthy" pose. She's taken Tokyo hipsters, sucked them dry of all their street cred, and turned them into China dolls. [Am I the only one who wants to blow groceries when people use words like hipsters and street cred with no irony?--SRK]

...

Stefani fawns over harajuku style in her lyrics, but her appropriation of this subculture makes about as much sense as the Gap selling Anarchy T-shirts; she's swallowed a subversive youth culture in Japan and barfed up another image of submissive giggling Asian women. While aping a style that's suppose to be about individuality and personal expression, Stefani ends up being the only one who stands out.

Sweetie? How 'bout you try this? Go to Harajuku. Watch the way Harajuku girls actually behave. You will see them acting just as giggly, catty, and coy around cute boys as teenaged girls anywhere else. They use the same helium voices as other good Japanese girls, too. In fact, you can think of it this way. Which of the following do you think Harajuku girls more aspire to be like?

1. Gwen Stefani, who has millions of fans, makes millions of dollars, is fawned over by stylists and journalists, designs her own line of clothes, and used to screw Gavin Rossdale
   
2. A leftish SF journalist who sulks that Asians aren't being presented soulfully enough in pop culture and seems not to have been sassy enough to put a bigot in his place when he condescended to her

Remember, Japan is a culture that really, seriously values surfaces. That's not to say that Harajuku girls' sense of style isn't fun and invigorating, but I think it's safe to say that it's mostly a fashion thing and really isn't about the sort of full-on punkish rebellion that it might be among teenagers in the West. (The really disaffected Japanese kids are either locking themselves in their rooms or attacking classmates with knives.) And there's just as much insider conformity visible among Harajuku girls as there is in any other Japanese group; that some of them have rejected the larger exam-hell scheme their parents might like them to stick with doesn't change that.

Personally, I find Stefani's new music and videos annoying. I think her use of her entourage is a rather witty way of making the same oddly-humble point Madonna made 15 years ago in the "Vogue" video, though: a star is a star because she's surrounded by people whom she depends on, utterly, to help make her one. Of course Stefani ends up being the only one who stands out. Pop music thrives on groups of anonymous backing singers and dancers whose sole duty is to magnify the charisma of the headliner. I'm sure her four back-ups are at least being paid pretty well for the job they do, and it probably beats temping or meat packing.

Making them speak only Japanese is a bit on the cute side (it's not geisha-like, either, since geiko were trained in multiple art forms and expected to make intelligent conversation on whatever topics their clients raised). Then again, I can see how the effect might be ruined if Love and Angel were seen slouching around and saying things like, "Oh, wow. That guy over there? With the press pass and the hair in his eyes? I think I know him? Uh, from sophomore year at Oberlin? Before I became, you know, a performance artist?"

Japan is set to begin the process of exploratory drilling in the contested East China Sea natural gas fields. Sort of:

The government officially resolved on 13 April immediately to begin proceedings to grant permits to private enterprises for exploratory drilling to open the natural gas fields in the East China Sea that have become an issue in Japan-China relations. The government's assessment is that, since China has proceeded with its own opening of gas fields close to the China-Japan boundary line (midline), Japan is in danger of losing access to critical natural resources if it delays the process any further. Resistance is expected from China, and the government is carefully weighing whether drilling should actually be permitted to go ahead [presumably even if permits are formally issued].

Minister of Foreign Affairs Nobutaka Machimura is to travel to Beijing for a meeting with Chinese officials and plans to raise the issue there.

He has also been quoted, for what it's worth, on the textbook issue:

If our Chinese counterparts agree, an effective way to go would be to establish a place for joint Japan-PRC historical research.

Japan and the ROK already have such a joint program. It doesn't seem to have had much effect on Japanese textbooks, political speeches, or pilgrimages to shrines, unless I'm missing something.

Added perilously close to the end of lunch: Okay, just one more thing. Here's CNN's latest article on the contretemps, including this quotation from PRC Premier Wen Jiabao:

In the latest flare-up between the two former rivals, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told reporters in New Delhi on Tuesday that Japan must "face up to history squarely" and that the protests should give Tokyo reason to rethink its bid for a permanent council seat.

"The strong responses from the Asian people should make the Japanese government have deep and profound reflections," Reuters news agency quoted him as saying.

"Only a country that respects history, takes responsibility for past history and wins over the trust of the people in Asia and the world at large can take greater responsibility in the international community," he added.

That's fine, but I'm not entirely sure China wants to be raising doubts about who's qualified for permanent membership on the UNSC, since the obvious flip-side question is, what does China do to justify its existing membership except sit there and, you know, be huge? You may not always like what the US, UK, France, and Russia do with their global influence, but you can't deny that they're involved in world affairs. China has a booming economy and sends a lot of people abroad, but you don't see it playing a key role in incidents of major international dispute or cooperation. I'm not, obviously, suggesting that it would be a good idea to kick the PRC off the UN Security Council, but respect for history and respect from the neighbors are hardly the only criteria worth considering here.

Speaking of enjoying the city, I think I'll take the new Garbage album and listen to it for the first time while walking up Meiji Avenue, with the machines being used to build the redundant new subway line hulking alongside. and a lot of very large, garish billboards on strategic corners. Shirley in her natural habitat.

Via everyone, comes this website. My trust-no one instincts say it could be a well-intentioned fake (the guy is utterly adorable--Japan is like a chest-hair deprivation tank, lemme tell you--but it seems odd that he would use those pictures as part of a testament of how tradition-minded he is...not that I mind). Assuming it's genuine, the guy has balls. It's the easiest thing in the world for guys like me to be out at home; I fled my little hometown for college so fast there were skidmarks on Main Street, and since then, I've lived in Philadelphia, New York, and Tokyo--I go back to Emmaus because that's where my family and a friend or two are. If they weren't, I'd be perfectly happy to forget the place existed, though I don't look down on others for choosing to stay or make their home there. Good on Daniel for not backing down and for being able to write with feeling without getting drippy. I'm moved.

You gotta love that Dean. He takes that book quiz that's floating around and decides that one of the people he's going to pass it on to is "Sean Kinsell because he's fun to pick on." (Word to youngsters in the audience: You know how your parents keep telling you that when you grow up, you'll find like-minded people to hang around who will love and respect you for you you are? It's a total crock. Trust me--the best policy is swift and unapologetic VENGEANCE.)

I wasn't going to do anything with this, but today happens to be exactly one year after my first post. I never really planned to start a blog; I liked commenting at other people's places. But when Atsushi was transferred last March and I wanted something to help fill time while I felt sorry for myself, I asked Dean to set this up for me. As in, I got out my credit card and signed up for MT and hosting, and Dean presented me a week later with a blog ready for writing to (of course, I immediately set about changing the fonts and faggifying the color scheme, but I could have gone with his original template and had a respectable blue-and-white theme...sort of like on-line ticking). He's also helped me out a lot with my dumb-ass tech problems and by linking to me frequently.

And, as you can tell, I've warmed to it. The number of readers I get amazes me; I'm very grateful. And it's been good, I think, for my relationship with Atsushi. His English is great, but we speak Japanese at home and watch Japanese television and have all Japanese friends. There's nothing about that that's a problem--it's the life I've chosen--but it means that he rarely gets to see me be a full-bore American in my native tongue. With the blog, he does, and, while I know I don't always show myself to best advantage here, I think it's a good thing that he has a fuller idea what kind of man he's with.

Uh, so anyway, thanks again to Dean and to all of you. For more about the Real Me, here's that book quiz:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Don't we all die, anyway? If I could be any book until either the firemen or the bomb got me, sheer arrogance would make me want to be the Bible (the KJV--none of that bowdlerized "accessible" crap), which is probably more important in Western history than any other single book.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

I really don't think so.

The last book you bought is:

Singular? Like one at a time? This test was obviously not written by a book addict. Uh, say 破戒 (hakai: "broken commandment") by Shimazaki Toson. That wasn't actually it, I'm pretty sure, but it's kind of first in line for me to read next.

The last book you read is:

To be brutally honest? There was a copy of The Rules lying around our office--heaven only knows why--and I drifted through it while waiting for a friend.

What are you currently reading?

The book I'm carrying around with me and officially trying to get through is The Golden Bowl by Henry James; this time I'm going to finish it.

Five books you would take to a desert island.

• 恍惚の人、有吉佐和子作 (kokotsu no hito, ariyoshi sawako saku: "The Ecstatic Ones by Sawako Ariyoshi," translated pretty effectively as The Twilight Years)
  
• A History of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel
  
• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
  
• 新古今和歌集 (shinkokinwakashu), the third of the anthologies of Heian Court poetry
  
• Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

I beg your pardon! I don't discuss my stick with anyone but my boyfriend.

Simon has still more information on the anti-Japanese protests--well, in some places, they really are accurately called riots--so I won't write much on what others have been covering so ably.

One thing to bear in mind, though, is that not only aren't all these protests really just about the textbooks and the UNSC, they're also not really just about Japan. I'm not a China scholar, but back when Lu Xun was writing, he was ending stories with characters' crying on the beach and wailing, "Oh, China--why don't you prosper and strengthen?" China feels that it should, by rights, be the big cheese in Asia. That the country that trumps it economically is Japan is certainly a twist of the knife, and that Japan continues to take the maddening tack of skirting close to apologizing for its atrocities without ever actually doing so is a legitimate issue--but a lot of what's erupting is frustration that China's such a basket case in ways that, I think, are only indirectly related to Japan. I don't want to deflect attention from Japan's questionable conduct; much as I love this country and its people, it's let-bygones-be-bygones attitude toward its own sins upsets me. But there are reasons specific to China itself that these things are unfolding as they are, and that's important to remember, too.

Added at 21:37: And trust that ace diplomat Shintaro Ishihara, our Metro Governor here in Tokyo, to pour oil on the waters:

A fishing boat chartered by the Ogasawara Island Fishermen's Cooperative using a Tokyo Metropolitan Government subsidy left on Tuesday for the disputed Okinotorishima Islands to show the area is part of Japan's exclusive economic zone.

At the urging of Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, the metropolitan government allocated 500 million yen from its fiscal 2005 budget to subsidize fishing activities around Japan's southernmost islands to counter surveys Chinese research ships have frequently conducted in the area.

"We will prove that the area is Japan's exclusive economic zone," Ishihara said when the metropolitan government decided to subsidize fishing in the area.

Even though it remains to be seen whether fishing operations around Okinotorishima Islands will be profitable, the metropolitan government has offered to cover any possible losses. "The metropolitan government is prepared to make up for any losses from such operations," Ishihara said.

So it's not the fishing that's important, it's the f**k-you. Marvelous.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Man, what Tokyo could use more of is underpopulated hotels. And you are in luck. The latest wonder of pointless hypertrophied hostelry opened for business during this morning's rain:

Seibu Rail Group opened its new Tokyo Prince Hotel Park Tower (Minato Ward) on 11 April; the conglomerate has invested about 30 billion yen in the project. This is the 53rd Prince Hotel. The structure consists of 33 floors above ground, two floors below ground, and a total of 673 guest rooms.

The hotel is supposed to be a symbol of the rebirth of the Seibu Group, which has suffered an extraordinary number of scandals lately even for a Japanese conglomerate.

BTW, that little sentence about this being the 53rd Prince Hotel? Ha. That doesn't tell you the half of it. Here in Tokyo, there's a complex called Shinjuku Park Tower, home of the famous Park Hyatt Hotel. Of the Prince Hotels, possibly the best-known is the Shinagawa Prince Hotel, though there's also a Shinjuku Prince Hotel. Neither of these is to be confused with the grandiloquent Park Hotel Tokyo, which has towered over Shinbashi for the last several years. And don't forget the Hotel Century Southern Tower, officially in Shibuya Ward but considered part of the Shinjuku orbit. One begins to feel something like affection for the old Hotel Okura for at least having a name that you've got a fighting chance of remembering. The Seibu Group's strategy of simply stringing all the common words together into one super-nomen might prove to be pretty clever.

Actually, come to think of it, the same sort of rules govern the naming of apartment buildings here. I live in a building in the Park House chain; you commonly see things like Sun House, Sun Heights, Garden Heim...stuff like that. The strategy seems to be kind of like what happens in suburban housing developments in the States, where, after the meadow is ploughed under and paved over to build the neighborhood, the new street is un-ironically called Meadowview Terrace. All the Garden/Park/Sun buildings just serve as a constant, vicious reminder of how decidedly un-green and sun-deprived Tokyo actually is.

Then again, it's hard to imagine how the nomenclature could be made more honest without chasing people away. Who wants to live in a place called Rebar Villas or stay at the Hotel Phallic Boondoggle?

Can some of you people get it through your thick heads that civility is a value in its own right?

Just a second...something a little off about the tone there...[takes restorative gulp of plum-wine spritzer]...there we go....

There's a thread running through several of the blog posts that have gotten me exercised this week. That Riding Sun post that kind of annoyed me the other day may have sprung from a comment he made on this spot-on post of Japundit's, which I found through Plum Blossom. [Ooh, plum! Time for another sip!] Japundit says the following:

Talking about the weather or chopsticks may be trivial, but they [Japanese people] figure it's the easiest way to create and maintain a pleasant relationship without ruffling any feathers. Getting involved in a discussion about politics or any other subject that generates strong opinions could easily become unpleasant for both parties and nip the potential for a harmonious encounter in the bud.

I find that once you get to know Japanese people, they will lay out their opinions on just about any issue in startlingly direct terms. But that's once you get to know them. First, a relationship of trust has to be established--and you do that by demonstrating that you're capable of having lively but scrupulously polite conversations about things that don't really matter. Topics start with the weather or how hard it is to learn English--if you show yourself to be a gentleman there, things get more interesting. If you show yourself not to be a gentleman, your conversation partner can drop you without feeling embarrassed about having made some personal revelation that you can now hold over him. Polite society works this way in America, too, though it's hard to find.

Oh, yeah, speaking of which, Gay Orbit notes an exchange Another Gay Republican has had with a member of Sister Talk. The Sister says this:

We should be kissing conservative ass and playin' nice, according to the Republican homos; for them, it's our best chance at accomplishing anything for our team. SINCE WHEN? Since when has diplomacy ever won an oppressed group of people any damn thing?

AGR's response, in part:

I don't see how confrontation gets us anywhere. Railing against hypocrisy may make us feel better, but the people that aren't molesting their kids, beating their wives, divorcing, and running gay porn web sites, tend to get pissed off when they're tagged with guilt by association. Just like liberals get all worked up when they're accused of being the root of all evil. Once they're mad, they tend to shut their minds to anything you have to say.

How is it, I am frequently moved to wonder, that people have not figured this out? I'm talking about those who believe that every conversation must be seized on as an opportunity to Make a Point ("I actually am cool enough to know how to use chopsticks," "I speak languages that are actually harder than Japanese," "There are right-wingers who make a buck from behavior they condemn") in the most literal political sense, without recognizing that the subtext can be equally important. We all have to live with each other. I love Japan, but I'm American through-and-through--I like plenty of good-natured rough-and-tumble argument mixed in with my harmony. It keeps all of us alert and makes life interesting.

There are limits, though, and people who don't stay within them when it comes to political debate raise the suspicion that they won't in the actions of daily life, either. If all you ever do is criticize your political opposition while making excuses for your team, people start to wonder whether you're capable of mature self-criticism in your work and sex lives, too. If you hog the floor all the time, you might be the sort of person who takes a ME-ME-ME! approach to other resources, too. There's no law against being a pain in the ass, but there's no reason people should encourage you to be one, either.

You don't have to be a pushover to be polite; I certainly don't think I am. You just have to be willing to give people a chance unless they've put themselves outside the bounds of civility from the get-go. You can always distance yourself later if they prove to be jerks. It's hard to undo the damage of dismissing them out of hand if you later realize you should have been more sympathetic, though.

Demonstration going on in Beijing, says the Nikkei:

A demonstration was being held on the morning of 9 April in the western part of Beijing to call for boycotts of Japanese goods. The reasons given were opposition to Japan's possible permanent membership in the UN Security Council and dissatisfaction with Japan's history textbook approval system. Participants numbered in the several thousands, many of whom were shouting their criticisms. The organizers, who had called for participants over the Internet, had predicted that between 10,000 and 20,000 people would gather.

Protesters have also named a disputed island chain--there are a lot of them in Asia--as an irritant. The area in which the demonstration is being conducted has a lot of places that deal in Japanese electronics.

It's up on Reuters, also.

Added on 11 April: Simon, naturally, has a whole lot of links about the demonstrations, which were held across China. I was going to update this post, but he and his folks have pretty much got it covered.

Ah, socialized medicine. No one gets extravagant care, no one gets inadequate care--we all get good, solid, top-of-the-line care delivered as cost-effectively as possible.

Except when we don't:

The deaths of four patients at Tokyo Medical University Hospital as a result of coronary artery bypass operations performed by one of its surgeons has highlighted the fact that the hospital failed to properly operate a system under which the surgeon's skills could improve.

An external committee investigating the hospital on suspicion of malpractice pointed this out at a press conference on March 30 in Tokyo following its probe of the hospital's second surgery department, to which the 45-year-old surgeon belonged.

The independent committee was established in December and comprises five heart surgeons from outside the hospital.

One of the committee members said at the press conference: "The surgeon was unskilled. He hadn't acquired the basic knowledge required for heart surgery."

Do be sure to click on the link and keep reading--it gets worse from there. Bear in mind that Tokyo Medical University Hospital is not some little backwater institution, either. And heart surgery, in a first-world population that is rapidly aging, is not an obscure little specialty. And screw-ups in the health-care system have been news for at least the near-decade I've been here.

Of course, Japan's nationwide certification systems--not just those of the hospital--may need review:

Japan has about 260,000 doctors, but there are about 300,000 specialists as some doctors hold more than one specialization, an indication of how easy they are to get.

I don't really know what to make of this--maybe the US is as bad. I'd have no trouble believing that it isn't, though. The Japanese, in all fields, love certifying boards, but that doesn't necessarily mean high standards are consistently maintained.

*******

In related news, a committee of the Japan Society of Intensive Care Medicine has proposed guidelines for treatment cessation--again, a very sticky issue in an aging society (English version, which differs in small points from my translation, here):

The committee proposed strict conditions as grounds for cessation of treatment: (1) multiple doctors have administered the highest-level of treatments currently available [for the patient's illness], (2) the medical facility has informed the family that it has the option to seek a second medical opinion from a different hospital, (3) doctors with the fullest available experience and specialized knowledge have confirmed repeatedly that it is impossible to save the patient.

In addition, the proposal establishes four options that a medical facility must offer to the family [of a patient whose case meets the above conditions]: (1) intensifying of treatment, (2) maintenance of the current course of treatments, (3) decrease in amount of medication or treatment, or (4) cessation of treatment. However, in the case that cessation of treatment is chosen, it is forbidden to detach the patient from an artificial respirator, oxygen supply, or minimal supply of water and nutrients.

Mercy-killing is an issue that's started to bubble through the Japanese medical system, erupting most recently in the conviction of a Kawasaki doctor for murder:

Suda has insisted that she removed the tube and instructed the nurse to give him muscle relaxant without attaching a respirator in a bid to help him die in a natural way at the request of his family in November 1998.

...

Presiding Judge Kenji Hirose denied her claims.

"There was a possibility of recovery. The court doesn't find that she provided the best treatment," the judge said.

As for Suda's claims that the patent's family approved of her actions to help him die naturally, Hirose said that the doctor misunderstood the family's mindset.

As reasons for suspending the sentence, Hirose said that Suda tried to help the patient die naturally for the sake of his family although she misunderstood his family's sentiment at that time.

In this case, the tragedy was pretty clearly a misunderstanding. The patient was comatose; the prosecution acknowledged that he was expected to live only a few weeks. The doctor claimed that she had given him not a lethal dose of muscle relaxant but just enough to try to keep his airway open after the tube was removed. I've seen no medical evidence to prove or disprove that; if it existed, I think it would have come out in the two or three years the case has been around.

However, health care costs are skyrocketing in Japan, for obvious reasons. For now, Social Insurance still makes it possible for the four options enumerated above to be equally feasible, I think, for most people. It's not hard to imagine that triage-minded doctors, constrained by funding and resource shortages, will in the not-too-distant future gradually begin more frequently urging family members to approve cessation of drug and surgical treatments, with only nourishment provided.

*******

I know that American readers will be reminded of a recent, similar (thought not entirely parallel) case in our own country. I haven't said a public word about that case in two years, and I'm not going to make it a topic here, because I've found that no one on either side of the debate has been able to do so without speculation about who really loves and understands whom, within a family most of us don't know at all. So if anyone is inclined to comment, be it known that any comment mentioning that case explicitly will be deleted. I don't care whom it's from.

Two announcements:

1. My old e-mail address doesn't work anymore, but you can e-mail me at skinsell[at]gmail[dot]com. I have not been trying to keep my contact information a secret; if you use the contact page at left, it sends a message to my gmail account with the address you enter as the reply-to, so I just figured people would figure it out. I guess it's not as obvious as I thought. Sorry about that. You don't have to look for a comment by me somewhere and lift the address from there.
   
   
2. Some of you could stand to learn how easy it is not to read a website. You just kind of...don't click on it, you know? If you want a website that's more gay, less gay, more Japan-focused, less Japan-focused, gay but without the jokey pop-culture stuff, nicer, nastier, more concise, lefter, righter, libertarianer, or not as pink and purple, by all means (1) find it and (2) read it instead of me. See? Easy.
   
   I'm not trying to avoid criticism or counter-arguments, and I've been known to respond favorably to requests that I comment on something I hadn't myself thought to address, if the subject interested me. I've received only two messages ever that I'd call hate mail, and only a handful more that I'd consider obnoxious about making an actual point; my mail volume is relatively small, but most of it is above-average in level of civility.
   
   I'm grateful for that, just as I'm grateful for those who read this site without commenting. Nevertheless, even if the tone is friendly, I don't see the purpose of messages that are the on-line equivalent of "You know, you'd be really cute if you were blond." Okay, so...no hard feelings, and good luck scamming on Brad Pitt over there. You can't please everybody, and I'm not interested in learning how I could if I were a different person.

This AP story about a gay soldier who would like to continue serving after recovering from his wounds is making the rounds; it was Gay News where I first saw it.

Out of all the sticking points over gays, I have to say, this is one of those I understand the least. The Center for Military Readiness, whose president is quoted in the AP article, has a full page of links on gays in the military, including one to the exclusion law. But the actual nuts-and-bolts reasoning given for the exclusion is very thin. It's self-evident that the armed forces should only train those elibigle for service, but eligible is one of those words like efficient or positive; it only means something if we all agree on the criteria by which it's being applied to a given case.

The CMR releases and the text of Public Law 103-160, Section 654, Title 10 refer to the fact that the armed forces are a special environment requiring unusual discipline, close quartering, little privacy, and unit cohesion. That having gays around would compromise these things is an assumption--it's not even really asserted, much less justified. I understand the value of tradition, and I know it's been found that military service is not a constitutional right.

But you'd think that the reasons for declaring people unfit (that "ineligible" bit is a PC euphemism worthy of the English department at Duke, and it conveniently avoids the question of whether people such as the discharged linguists were more qualified for their jobs than others who might have been trained for them) would be less vague. Given that "Don't ask, don't tell" has been in effect for a decade, if homosexuals were going to throw a wrench into the works, wouldn't we know it by now? Not having two gay guys serving in the same unit makes sense--family members are separated, too, unless they've done away with that rule.

But a lot of opposition, when you press people to be clear about what it is they're so afraid of, comes down, in my experience, to the old shower-room argument. And try as I might, I can't find it in me to take the whole "Well, see, I'm such a tough guy that I'm obliged to get spazzy if I think some gay guy just looked at me cross-eyed" routine seriously.

In any case, Sgt. Stout was wounded while operating a gun, so whether or not he has any influence on policy, he did his job defending his unit and at least serves as an example that all gay guys don't compulsively flee physical conflict. I'm grateful for his service, and here's hoping he's recovered fully. (I'm assuming so, but the article doesn't say.)

Added during a particularly overdone episode of Homicide: Apparently, Michael's trackbacks are not, in fact, getting through. Here is where his response, in addition to his comments here, is.

Riding Sun seems like a good guy, but he and a few of his commenters have an all-too-common reaction to one of the irritations of living in Japan:

So, over time, I've developed a standard response I use whenever someone comments favorably about my ability to use chopsticks:

Why, thank you for noticing my chopstick technique! It didn't come easy, let me tell you. I studied under a chopstick sensei every day for five years. My father took a second job to pay for the lessons. I even withdrew from school at one point to devote myself full-time to chopstick mastery. Long into the night, I would practice picking up dried peas until my fingers ached...

I carry on in that vein until the other person realizes I'm being sarcastic. It usually takes longer than you'd think.

Personally, I find that the reply "Well, you know, it's like everything else--it just takes a little practice" works better than sarcasm. If you're with people you know from work, you can deliver it with that cringey little bow you give when being complimented, to convey gratitude along with the gentle message "Japanese language and forms are learnable skills if you apply yourself; they're not as hocus-pocusy as you may think." If you're with your new landlord, you can deliver it with an extra-respectful cringe to convey, "I'll be sure to learn which garbage goes out which night so you'll never see bags sitting there for days." If you're with a guy who's flirting with you, you can deliver it with The Look to convey, "I'm an all-around quick study, baby."

The problem with sarcasm in these situations is twofold. For one thing, it's a no-no in formal Japanese interaction with near-strangers, so using it kind of casts doubt on the idea that you understand the culture here more than your interlocutor thinks you do. (If Japanese people seem not to be picking up on it, it may be that they're laboring to give you the benefit of the doubt rather than just leaping to the obvious conclusion that you're being ungentlemanly.) For another, sarcasm deflects goodwill. Yes, it's trying to be constantly informed how especially special Japan is. But when people compliment your ability to do Japanese things, they're saying, "I'm proud of my heritage, and I'm honored that you're learning to navigate it." What's the harm in acknowledging that and letting it drop?

The Yomiuri has taken a poll and found that 61% of respondents (all eligible voters) favor revision of the constitution--mostly centered around Article 9. (Thinner English version here.) More than half of those who agreed the constitution should be revised stated (or chose from a list--it doesn't say), "New problems have arisen in the world that the existing constitution cannot address." That included privacy and environmental issues as well as Japan's role in world peace. The percent of DPJ supporters who endorsed constitutional revision (67%) was actually higher than that of LDP supporters (64%). Even when the issue of Article 9 was broken out, LDP (50%) and DPJ (49%) supporters were nearly even.

The editorial in this morning's Nikkei was about Japan Post reform and addresses several sticking points:

Prior [to the release of the plan] the LDP compiled a document called "Modes of Thinking for Japan Post Reform." In it, there were several problems with the government's proposal indicated, including (1) the corporation that will be financed by the government will be state-owned and privately-managed, and so there are fears that its projects will fall prey to corruption, (2) the division of Japan Post into four companies simply increases the number of positions available for 天下り (amakudari: lit., "descent from the heavens"), (3) it has not been proven that the four new companies (posts, savings accounts, insurance, and counter services) will really be independent.

Amakudari is similar to what we'd call a revolving door: the system in which high government officials retire to semi-public management or "consulting" jobs in which they can use their accumulated connections and influence to manage resources. Civil servants make less than they could with equivalent credentials in the private sector because the assumption that they'll retire in their mid-50s and take more-lucrative jobs related to their fields. Government officials have complained about attempts to reform the system because--and it's hard not to sympathize with them to some degree--they've all gone through their entire careers with the understanding that things would work this way. On the other hand, the number of redundant positions boggles the imagination, and attempts at reform are seen as suspect by the Japanese people.

I normally don't talk this way, but...

Man, I'm old.

Look at this:

My partner of 12 years, Alison Maddex, gave birth to a baby boy in November 2002 — Lucien Harry Maddex. I am Lucien's adoptive parent — but certainly NOT his mother! Alison is Lucien's one and only mother. That "Heather Has Two Mommies" business gives me the creeps! — and it can only confuse a kid.

12 years?! Oy. I remember when that relationship was all rumor--Paglia's a local celeb in Philadelphia, and I was in college at the time.

Of course, she talks about a bunch of things: the absence of poets from the pop-culture landscape and the limitations of blogging in helping people develop as writers among them.

Watch yourself, Amritas. Not even a dear buddy like you is going to get away with sideswiping Kylie. I know an insinuation when I see one. (Additionally, the idea of a straight guy who's so busy looking at pious plucked chickens like Brad Pitt and Bono that he doesn't notice Kylie on-stage is frying my brain serious-big-time. ;) ) Whether she understands free markets in general as well as she knows how to market herself, I do not know; on the evidence of this particular charity she supports, probably not. But, you know, I've been a Madonna fan for twenty years. I'm used to adoring a diva's music and videos while simultaneously wishing she'd stop offering opinions about what life must be like for anyone with a fortune of less than US$200 million.

Speaking of Kylie...well, we'll get back to Kylie. I'll start by saying that, if you're looking for a song to escape into through your headphones while on an inbound Tokyo commuter train at 8:30 a.m., "Rush Hour" by Jane Wiedlin is a very bad choice. Yeah, I know--the lyrics are metaphorical. Somehow, "Feel it gettin' hot in here / Feel me gettin' close to you, dear" does not feel metaphorical when it's one of the first warm mornings of spring and you're jammed against a middle-aged salaryman who clearly took his last cigarette puff immediately before boarding. I tried closing my eyes and picturing the video, which was all zooming dolphins and stuff, but it didn't work.

Oh, yeah, and while I'm on the subject of Jane: Yoo-hoo! Mr. Three-Word-Dismissal? Vacation did not suck. NOT. Five of the songs sucked, but that's out of twelve. It's worth it for "Worlds Away" alone, one of the best songs to take a solitary bath to ever.

Now, Kylie, she's got some good bathtub songs, but her single from a few months ago, "I Believe in You"? Perfection as a crowded-train song. You could say to yourself, "I'm not actually being crushed to death by enough people to staff an oil tanker squeezed into a space the size of my entryway. I'm standing alone in a cage of abstract neon tubing, with such a lot of invitingly cool, dark space around me, singing devotional lyrics and making climbing-ivy hand gestures of serene ecstasy." It just took one jab from an umbrella to bring you out of it, but it was a nice place to float off to.

It's touching that Dean has the patience to keep coming up with new anagrams of his position on gay marriage, as if one day one of his gay friends might listen. But then, as someone's bound to point out, I'm sitting here writing this post, so who am I to talk?

Anyway, one thing he's going off about in the comments is the epidemic of revisionist history among quite a few SSM advocates. I think it's worth expanding backward on that point a little.

People used not to understand fertility. I don't just mean human fertility--they didn't understand why crops grew and hunt animals were plentiful sometimes but not others, either, any more than they understood why sex sometimes produced children and other times didn't. Further, the competition for precious resources was fierce. Even after the invention of cavalry and chariots and catapults and cauldrons of pitch, war essentially meant hand-to-hand combat; and there was a lot of war. There was also a lot of disease.

What all this boiled down to was that human societies knew they desperately needed to keep replacing themselves and the things they subsisted on, but they were never quite sure what was going to work. Things like nitrogen-based fertilizer, filmstrips of sperm and ovum meeting under a microscope, and mechanical refrigeration are all very, very new in human history.

You already know this, so why am I bringing it up? Because I think it's easy to forget how the pressure to ensure fertility at all costs has shaped civilization. (Well, Japan, with its disorienting blend of super-modernity and raw primalness, has not lost a lot of its old rites.) When people oppose gay marriage because they assume there's no love or commitment in our relationships, they're being ignorant and need to be told so. Even in old times, there were people who reproduced and people who didn't. There's no reason gay people can't contribute to civilization just because we're not contributing children, and having two people willingly take stewardship over each other's welfare has obvious benefits.

But you can argue that, and argue that our ability to care for each other needs protecting in a world of competing interests, without necessarily concluding that marriage has to be expanded to do it. The ability to choose your own life partner is a pretty new thing. Maybe it needs a new institution. Maybe it would do better without any overarching institution but a range of contract options. Maybe, maybe, maybe. The point is, the debate is still going on, and not even all of us who are gay can agree that SSM should be legalized or why. Its advocates are not doing themselves any favors by acting as if the correct conclusion were obvious to, like, any fair-minded person with a brain.

It was kind of weird to look at one of ASV Michele's recent posts of downloadable songs. Among them, the last of the four, was "Possession" by Sarah McLachlan. Good grief--the flashbacks! I still listen to most of the stuff I liked in college occasionally, so it doesn't feel frozen in 1991-95.

But "Possession" was one of those songs you didn't have to own. It was on college radio all the time. All your arty women friends had the album. (They loved that horrible flippin' song near the end that went, "Your love is better than a butterscotch sundae with extra marshmallows," or whatever, too. Girls can be such chicks sometimes.) Every a capella group that had women soloists performed it.

Personally, I already had a favorite smart-folk-Canadian
-woman-adds-hip-hop-rhythms-to-her-neuroses-circa-1993 album, so I wasn't all that impressed. Anyway, I don't know what I'd think of the whole album now, but hearing the single for the first time in 10 years...wow. What a beautifully-modulated song. Pretty and creepy in just the right proportions. Perfect for listening to at night in a darkened apartment. Well, assuming you're not in the middle of an unrequited obsession in real life, in which case that's probably not such a good idea. Personally, I find it strangely comforting, since when it was out, I still had no idea I was a repressed homosexual and was figuring I'd become one of those professors who never fall in love with anything but their books. I'm glad I ended up with books and an Atsushi, if not the professorship.

Those planning the privatization of Japan Post talked this weekend about selling off in stages the remaining government-held stake in the two new firms that will handle postal savings and life insurance. Some were still balking at the idea of offloading the entire government stake in ten years, but an agreement appears to have been reached: all government shares are to be sold by the end of March 2017. The government will unveil its basic proposal tomorrow after presenting it to the leaders of the LDP and Shin-Komeito.

BTW, people occasionally ask me how much money we're talking about here. The answer: a WHOLE LOT OF MONEY. There are about ¥230 trillion (US $1.9 trillion) in postal savings accounts. That's between one-third and one-half of the personal savings in Japan, and the "bankers" that manage it are in a special department of the Ministry of Finance. Much of it has been invested in government bonds that no one else is buying, much of the remainder serves as a sort of slush fund for favored government projects, and the rest is invested elsewhere. This Q&A-style piece from The Japan Times last fall gives some of the figures and major problems (consider that I haven't discussed the insurance money). I'm in favor of privatization, but--like bank, pension, health care, and social insurance reforms--it's going to be painful.

Added at 19:20: PM Koizumi has announced his joy over the completion of the proposal. Something I've kept forgetting to mention, though it's at the bottom of most articles about the issue: if the new computer systems aren't ready in time, the beginning of the switchover will be delayed by up to six months.

Added on 5 April: The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, naturally, was not looking forward to the loss of control--its objections are not surprising. The somewhat thornier issues involve how to ensure that mail delivery continues to isolated communities, and they've been around for months. There are still questions about the plan that raise California-energy-fiasco-type worries. From the Yomiuri:

After the two units are fully privatized, the holding company will be allowed to buy back some of the shares it sells. In addition, the outline includes a provision that allows the four postal entities to hold shares in each other after the privatization process ends in 2017.

The outline also stipulates the creation of a 1 trillion yen fund to cover the privatized entities' potential losses in providing postal savings and life insurance services in less populated areas as part of their universal service obligations.

So they're being privatized but only partially deregulated. From what I can tell, the opening is also made for a version of 持ち合い (mochiai: "mutual-shareholding"), a Japanese business practice that may, as that page states, "[create] a sense of shared responsibilities and obligations of each other's business success" but also makes you wonder what the point of having four separate companies would be.

I meant to draw attention to a link I got from Joe yesterday, but I got sidetracked by spring cleaning. (Is there anything worse than having dingy sheers at your windows? I feel so much better now.) Anyway, here's part of his response:

I realize that for me hypocrisy is the trigger, but the justification is political. Outing is a legitimate and reasonable political response to the current political climate. It's a deliberate, open, and peaceful act of nonviolent resistance, an act in some ways similar to civil disobedience. (And not, as Mike Rogers suggests, merely reporting.)

I know it's obnoxious to assume that people are disagreeing with you because they don't understand what you're saying, rather than that they do and just think you're wrong. Nevertheless, I think Joe isn't focusing on the real point.

One of the most precious things in a free society is the ability an individual has to set his own priorities, to make his own trade-offs when he can't optimize all values at once. In traditional societies, the wider group decides what trade-offs are best, which is why people who have their own ideas about where their talents lie or what means happiness for them so often leave them. Outing someone takes away that right. It says that self-assigned arbiters of the proper way to be gay get to dictate that someone has to be openly homosexual and just deal with the resulting loss of options. Anyone who plans on doing such a thing had better be armed with something less lame than "But he's a hypocrite." (Sorry, Michael. I know you're not writing a dissertation here, but when we're talking about revealing things about people's private lives without their consent, you're going to have to do better than that.)

It's not just that hypocrisy is insufficient as ethical grounds for outing--though it is. It's that there may be nothing hypocritical about these people at all. If some people believe the best work they can do is as legislators or campaign leaders, and they're willing to keep quiet about their private life to facilitate it, where's the hypocrisy? I'm about as big a flamer as you can get without physically being on fire (as a straight acquaintance once put it), but I oppose the campaign for gay marriage, I oppose hate crimes laws, and I oppose the endless workshops for elementary school students about the variety of sexual options open to them. Perhaps I sincerely and mistakenly believe a few things that are inconsistent with each other, but I can assure you that there's no double-dealing or cowardly self-preservation involved. It's not at all hard to believe that there are conservative gay politicians in the same situation, and that's their lookout.

And as for the civil disobedience analogy, I'm sorry, that just doesn't work. Civil disobedience involves putting yourself on the line and risking arrest in order to make a point. Outing involves screwing up other people's lives without risking anything of yourself. There's no comparison.

Michael has posted a review of a new book on gay marriage. It's an issue he and I disagree over, and from what he says, the book doesn't break a whole lot of new ground--though even I hadn't heard Naomi and Ruth described as lesbians. Did Orpah leave because she felt like a third wheel? Anyway, Michael's a fair-minded guy, and his evaluation is worth reading. The book is In Support of Same Sex Marriage and Gay Rights in America.

The conflict between Japan and China over fossil fuels continues, since Japan has few natural resources and China's mushrooming economy is consuming more:

Shoichi Nakagawa, minister of economy, trade and industry, announced the results of a study Friday that he said shows a link between China's undersea exploration and Japan's exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

...

The study found that the subterranean structure of the oil fields being explored by China was connected to an area that Japan claims as part of its EEZ.

...

While the study concludes that the structure is connected to parts of the seabed in Japan's EEZ, it also found a complex number of faults around the area in which China has been exploring.

Experts said it was too early to determine if China's continuing exploration would result in valuable natural resources rightfully belonging to Japan being sucked out from under its EEZ.

The oil fields in question are in the East China Sea.

The Pope has died. Reuters, which is attracted to cutesy-poo constructions like iron filings to a magnet, goes for the gravitas-free opener:

Pope John Paul II, whose globetrotting papacy inspired millions but left a divided Church, died Saturday, ending years of painful physical decline for the Polish prelate once known as God's Athlete.

Like Reagan's funeral and memorials last year, the Pope's death watch has been very moving. There's plenty of hot-headed, off-the-cuff hysteria going around these days, but it's rare that you get a chance to see deep-rooted devotional ecstasy. It's not my place to determine what Catholic dogma is, but his native Poland (from which my mother's grandparents came to the US) and the rest of Europe are the better for his political influence. He stood for hope and the belief in larger things we can't entirely understand. May he rest in peace.

Added at 11:21: The BBC has a compilation of statements from heads of state around the world. I was hoping to see something from Margaret Thatcher. She's the only one left now.

Megan McArdle has an essay up about gay marriage, which is a fascinating read. It's fascinating both because she makes good points and because she falls all over herself to assure people that she's not just ragging on gays. Personally, I find it a little insulting to be approached so gingerly, but I can understand where she's coming from. These days, we're flatly informed that anything less than full marriage equality is a mark of second-class citizenship.

Added on 4 April: Megan says that there's nothing wrong with assuring friends and loved ones that you're not trying to stick it to them. Point taken, especially since she didn't soften her argument itself in order to do so.

Eric has his own post up that, as always, is worth reading. I think there are gays who are sincere in wanting to commit to the obligations of marriage in order to get the benefits, but the far louder talk about getting our relationships respected sure makes it hard to believe that the majority aren't more concerned with self-esteem-building. It's a mark of how mainstream we've become that we're as entitlement-minded as everyone else now.

Those who know Yukio Mishima's 仮面の告白 (kamen no kokuhaku: "Confessions of a Mask") may be interested in this (English, Japanese):

A diary that novelist Yukio Mishima kept when he was a student is believed to have provided material for his later novels, contradicting previous theories on his works.

...

"Railway fare, 1 yen," and "Nikkan Sports (a sport newspaper), 0.5 yen," the diary partially reads.

...

In the diary he kept from 1946 to 1947, Mishima described in detail his efforts to become a novelist, his relations with another famous novelist, Osamu Dazai, and his reunion with a woman believed to be the model of Sonoko, a woman in his masterpiece, "Kamen-no-Kokuhaku (Confession of a Mask)."

...

In the novel, after the main character rebuffs Sonoko's advances, she marries another man, but they are subsequently reunited.

Well, you could kind of put it that way. Here's a hurried translation from part of the café reunion scene, in which Sonoko tells the protagonist that she still doesn't understand what kept him from marrying her:

[Warning: clunky literalness below!]

At that point, my eye was drawn to one of them. He was a very rough-looking, swarthily handsome youth--22 or 23. He was shirtless, and he was retying a white loincloth, dingy and moist with sweat, around his waist. All the while, his chatter and laughter with his friends went on, and he seemed to be purposefully taking his time about winding the cloth band. The thick, taut swells of muscle on his chest were on brazen display; downward from the center of his chest fell more solid bands of muscle, deeply ridged. On his left and right sides were thick chains of flesh, like fast rope bindings. Around this smooth, hot mass of a torso the bleached loincloth was being wound and pulled tight. His naked suntanned shoulders glistened as if oiled. From the hollows of his armpits peeked a black thicket that threw off the sunlight in a glinting gold tangle.

Seeing these things--seeing, above all, the tatoo of a peony on his toned upper arm--I was assailed by lust. My feverish gaze was fixed on this rough, barbaric--this uncommonly beautiful--body. He was laughing beneath the sun. When he threw his head back, he showed the swell of his Adam's apple. A dangerous flutter ran beneath my chest. I couldn't tear my eyes away from him.

I'd forgotten that Sonoko existed.

In fact, much of the book is like this: the progtagonist lusts after the nightsoil man, an athletic boy at school, and a print of St. Sebastian. Gay humanists frequently make a big to-do about homosexual content that doesn't really seem to be there, but there's no mistaking it in 仮面の告白. Of course, it's no surprise that a Japanese newspaper would glide over it. For one thing, a lot of people still take the line that there's no homosexuality here. (I'll wait for you to stop laughing. Done? Okay.) For another, describing the book accurately might be skirting close to commenting on Mishima's own sexuality. This is, after all, a country in which you can find articles about Mutsuo Takahashi that don't mention his sexuality.

Japan Post reform is still in process. Yesterday morning, the big news was of PM Koizumi's growing impatience with the reform panel:

The outline is based on a plan to place the postal services under a holding company in April 2007 after dividing them into four units--mail delivery, counter services, postal banking, and postal insurance.

Government shares in the postal bank and the postal insurance firm would be sold by the end of March 2017.

The outline also includes the following points to gain LDP support in the negotiations:

-- The related bills will spell out that post offices will be established around the country to provide nationwide services and a ministerial ordinance will be issued to require post offices in remote areas not to close.

-- To maintain financial services, the postal bank and the postal insurance firm will be required to contract the counter services firm as their agent for the time being as a condition for receiving a license. After 2017, a fund to cover deficits in provincial areas will be established.

-- A system will be introduced to select postmasters for special post offices.

How to divide up Japan Post's current services has been one of the major remaining sticking points. The proposal is supposed to be submitted to the LDP on Monday.

Fukuoka (the city, not just somewhere in the prefecture) just had an earthquake of 4 M an hour ago. That level of quake doesn't usually cause damage here in Japan, but I'm sure it did little to cheer the residents, who are still righting things after the earthquake last month. Atsushi probably felt it in city, too, where he's probably already out with coworkers to welcome the new hires. (Because of Japan's school year, they start in spring.)

Of course, the Indian Ocean had yet another earthquake last week. Despite the high number of deaths, it looks as if the frame of mind that lingered after the December tsunami helped minimize losses. Still, there are fears of more disasters ahead:

Seismologists are already sure that Monday's magnitude 8.7 quake off Sumatra island was a direct result of raised stress levels in the earth's crust caused by the Dec. 26 tremor.

And they say there is now a heightened risk of further large quakes — not just aftershocks — in the area, although predicting them accurately remains impossible.

"Unfortunately that is a real possibility — the world works that way," Professor John McCloskey, head of environmental sciences at the University of Ulster, told Reuters by telephone.

I don't think it can ever be proved either way, but one explanation submitted by scholars for the rapid decline of Mycenean civilization is an "earthquake storm," which is pretty much what it sounds like: a series of quakes resulting from a long period of built-up pressure. Not everyone accepts that explanation, of course; the traditional one involves invasions from the "Sea People."

Michael uses a locution you see a lot in regard to outing:

I'm in. My perspective on outing is simple. If you are a public figure, like a politician or whatever, I'm tentatively ok with it as long as it's done to expose some hypocrisy.

Some months back, I was taken aback to see Dale Carpenter use it, too, in establishing what he thinks are the criteria for justifiable outing:

First, the outed person's homosexuality must be directly relevant to some matter of public policy.

Hypocrisy by an officeholder meets this test, as when a closeted politician opposes gay equality for homophobic reasons.

Second, there must be credible evidence made available to the public that establishes the person is probably homosexual.

The word that gets me is hypocrisy, an extremely useful term that unfortunately is extremely easy to use as a catch-all. Hypocrisy is acting in a way that clearly and directly goes against your professed beliefs. Someone who advocates a law against homosexual conduct and still indulges in it is a hypocrite.

Just about everything else is a grey area, though. Opposing pro-gay legislation for "homophobic reasons"? Who gets to decide what's homophobic? Does a politician just have to be "probably" homophobic the way she has to be "probably" homosexual? I'm afraid I still don't think this is sufficient justification for revealing things about people's private lives.

The way to treat people you think are hypocritical and up to no good is to shun them. This seems to be the last move anyone thinks of nowadays, what with all the opportunities to sue people or sell their stories to tabloid shows. It's still the best course, though. People who are just interested in tricks are unlikely to feel the sting, but those who act straight in public and then want to be all matey and down with the Family behind closed doors would, I think, get the message. And if they don't, there's not a whole lot we can do. It simply isn't possible to stick it to everyone who deserves it, and we all lose when the boundary between public and private becomes even more blurred than it is now.