The White Peril 白禍

So, is it the United Nations International Week of the Cad and no one told me? Am I the only one who didn't get his coloring book with "Well, honey, I'm here and your boyfriend's not" and "Why must you be such a stuck-up bitch?" translated into Swahili, Hindi, Maori, and other world languages? Did I miss the CNN broadcast of the kick-off statement by the chairman of the World Health Organization? 'Cause I swear, I had my own run-in a few days ago, Michael had one this morning, and in between, I heard from two or three friends on various major land masses that they'd practically had to punch guys out to get 'em to knock it off with the won't-take-no-for-an-answer come-ons. No, there's never a horndog shortage in urban gay life, but it really isn't the case (at least among people I know) that you have so many colorful encounters to dish about all at once. Cheese and crackers.

I have a few younger readers, so I think--if I don't sound too obnoxiously avuncular here--it's worth pointing out that there's a much more general lesson here. There's a little technique we fusty types call PAYING ATTENTION TO SIGNALS, and people who don't know how to do it end up getting themselves into all kinds of trouble, whether they're trying to make friends, establish business contacts, or realize whatever other designs they may have on people.

If your approach is failing, you need to change it. The number of people who don't get this is truly startling, and you can tell they don't get it because they keep repeating the same unsuccessful tactic, only more loudly/emphatically/insistently. Not everyone likes to give his phone number out to someone he's just met, or have rousing political discussions with strangers at dinner parties, or participate in impromptu sing-alongs. People who don't are unlikely to warm to you if you try to force such things on them, but they may be perfectly willing to get to know you if you settle for an e-mail address or talk about non-controversial interests the first few times you meet them. (I can't think of a good substitute for the sing-along except getting the hell out of there.)

Along with that, you have to make sure your opening gambit allows you to retreat gracefully if it doesn't succeed. If you launch into a political tirade under the assumption that your partner in conversation's views coincide with yours, you'll have a terrible time trying to backpedal into giving him a respectful hearing if they do not. Or (this example may drive the point home more memorably--thanks, Michael's neighbor!) if you show up on someone's doorstep drunk, naked, and tumescent, you'll find it difficult to save face with the pretense that you were just seeking a nice chat and some warm evening air.

More cracks showing in Japan's post-bubble educational system. (For once, the English article isn't much thinner than the original Japanese.)

The survey, conducted in November and December last year, covered professors, assistant professors and lecturers at universities and junior colleges belonging to the association.

About 28,000 full-time teachers, or 36 percent of those at all of the nation's private universities and junior colleges, responded.

Inadequate academic ability was cited as a problem by 60.1 percent of teachers at four-year course universities and 66 percent of those at junior colleges.

They were 24.8 and 22.1 percentage points, respectively, higher than the responses in the same survey in fiscal 1998.

The sense of crisis was especially deep among teachers of science and technology.

...

Many university lecturers said some of their students could not solve linear simultaneous equations that are taught in middle school, and some medical students did not take biology as a subject in high school.

Japan may be heading where the US is now: substandard high school instruction will have to be redressed at the level of community college equivalents such as the junior colleges and trade schools. Of course, it's important to note that only 36% of instructors responded; there's a SLOPs issue here. Also, only instructors at private colleges were included. That leaves out the public colleges, which include the super-exclusive Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, along with many of the other top institutions.

At the same time, most Japanese students don't get to go to 東大, so the experiences of instructors at modest tech colleges who are desperate to help their students catch up to high-school level proficiency may be more representative than the 36% figure would make it seem.

BTW, there's been quite a bit of interesting discussion of math teaching going on. Joanne Jacobs, as always, points to several good links, especially this post by Moebius Stripper about what skill and knowledge set should be required for high school graduation.

Joanne also posted about a boneheaded theory a few weeks back that math learning is extra-hard because of the way words are used. Though I was a literature major and expended quite a bit of energy memorizing the names of various seasonal plants and birds in Japanese, I have to say that math vocabulary is one of the more fun aspects of the language to learn. Many terms you can basically translate directly. Some of the more fun ones you can't, but they make sense once you get used to them: 負の数 (fu no suu: "owed number" --> "negative number"), 数珠順列 (juzu junretsu: "Buddhist rosary" + "order" + "line-up" --> "key ring permutation"), 放物線 (houbutsusen: "release/throw" + "object" + "line" --> "parabola"). Okay, fine, I only think they're fun because I'm a big dork. They still aren't that hard if you're also learning Japanese as an everyday language.

Added on 31 July: People sometimes ask me about the fabled Japanese math education system, whereby, it is assumed, a mystical blend of Zen and Euclid are employed to produce a new cohort of Karl Friedrich Gausses every year.

Don't you believe it. The Japanese (and Korean and Singaporean) systems are successful because they don't proceed until the kids know what they're doing. [Earthquake! Feelable but mild. I hope as always that it wasn't feelable and non-mild a few hundred miles away.] Two articles about a New Jersey school in deep trouble that used textbooks from Singapore and structural approaches from Japan to revamp their math classes show what I mean. If you're an American who sailed through a good school system and got a 5 on the AP Calc AB or BC test for your trouble, you're probably wondering what the fuss is about. Of course, the teacher introduces a concept by giving you a problem to solve and seeing whether you can figure out a profitable approach. Of course, you work alone or in groups so that, through trial and error, you can figure out the bone and sinew of what you're doing and why some plans of attack are bad or waste time. Of course, the lesson in the textbook is a point of departure and not a script.

But those aren't of courses anymore. The sad irony is that a lot of American public schools teach math the way Japan teaches other subjects: as an exercise in memorization with minimal imagination.

Added later: A while back I posted about one of the ads on my train line--from a cram school, not a public school--that was indicative of one of the ways the Japanese reinforce numeracy.

Added on 1 August: So AXN is showing this here Canadian movie from about ten years ago called Cube. I have no idea how popular it was; I do know that it assumes no one in the audience knows the first thing about math. The math genius chick keeps looking at three-digit numbers and trying to determine whether they're prime. Understandable for some numbers, but she lingers over every single one. You know, like, 548. Hmm...that would be an even number greater than two. I WONDER whether it's prime. Oh, the SUSPENSE. [pause...pause...gears turning in math genius chick's brain] Oh, it's not prime. Goody! No trap in that room! Next one: 153. Uh, 15 seconds for math genius chick to go 1 + 5 + 3 = 9? Pretty slow genius if you ask me. Especially now that it's toward the end and they're running out of time--why are we asking the autistic-savant how many factors the even numbers have? Who cares? 512 is the highest power of 2 with three digits, and if you haven't memorized all the values up to 2^9, what kind of math genius chick are you, anyway?

Ghost of a Flea posts about Kylie. (No, really!) No matter how heady an experience it is to watch Kylie's singing corpse half-submerged in rushes, my favorite Kylie video is still "Put Yourself in My Place"...although I have to say, that frickin' continuity error--the way she removes her left sleeve twice--is super-annoying. (I don't mind so much that the mole is on different sides of her face in different shots; you only notice it if you're paying close attention because of the sleeve thing.)

Japundit contributor Ampontan posted an interesting entry about the Japanese liquor shôchû a few days ago. If you don't know much about how it's made, it's an interesting read. This part struck me as being just a bit too tactful, though:

There are several ways to drink shochu. We've already talked about chuhai, and if you can mix a gin and tonic, you can make that. Obviously, you also can drink it straight, particularly if you're the kind of guy who likes sitting around in sweat-stained undershirts. Some people drink it on the rocks, but I can't help you there–I was never one for that style of drinking. People say the melting ice brings out the sweetness of the drink. Another way is to mix it with warm—not boiling—water. This drink, called oyuwari is popular during the fall and winter, and I used to like it this way myself. Some people with cast iron stomachs use more shochu than water in the mix, but I downed it in about a 1-5 ratio, which is how they usually serve it in restaurants and bars. This method brings out the aroma of the beverage, if you’re interested in such things, and it also warms you up on a cold winter night.

Maybe it's a regional thing...or a purist thing. At least around Tokyo, though, I don't think I've ever seen anyone drink national-brand shochu straight. People do drink the special varieties from Kyushu straight (we have friends who ask Atsushi to bring back a bottle of this or that sometimes when he returns to Tokyo). Jinro, Kyôgetsu, and the other major brands all taste like diluted rubbing alcohol. Otherwise, people use it as a mixing base.

For anything. And I mean anything. Of course, I'm most familiar with the gay pubs I go to, where they do bottle keep for regulars. (If you don't know Japan and are scratching your head at "bottle keep," the way it works is, you pay between, oh, $30 and $100 for your own bottle. Your name is written on the glass or, if the bar is fancy-schmancy, on a placard that's hung over the bottleneck. When you show up, the bottle is brought out for you and your guests. You also customarily invite the bartenders to drink with you.) The most common cold mixers people ask for are water, tonic water, green tea, oolong tea, and fruit juices. But I know guys who drink it with Calpis, or with Coke--both inexpressibly foul, in my opinion--or with a little liqueur (crème de cassis, or the Midori melon stuff, or Godiva) for flavoring. I once saw a fresh-faced young thing of about 22 or so ask for a Zima, drink a quarter of it, and ask the bar guy to fill 'er up with shochu--like a fraternity hazing ritual, or something.

Ampontan is right that drinking it oyuwari is very restorative in the winter, especially if you put a pickled plum in the bottom. Great for warding off colds, or for forgetting the one you already have is bothering you.

What Michael said:

While the outcome would be right if marriage were enacted in CT, the method is clearly wrong. If the state refused to do anything for gay couples, that would be one thing. Yet here we have a state that democratically gave gay couples most, if not all, of the rights of marriage. Why not let that sink in for a few years, then petition the legislature for marriage?

Here’s the thing: Civil Unions give you all the rights of marriage in Connecticut. What are you accomplishing by pushing for marriage rights? Answer: Nothing. Because any rights beyond what you have are Federal. And there is nothing that state can do about that. In effect, what these gay couples are doing is ruining it for the rest of us. They are ensuring that state legislatures will remain queazy about enacting civil union legislation in the future.

He's talking about the news that there are eight gay couples in Connecticut using the state's recent passage of a civil unions bill to sue for the ability to marry. I'm not sure that even breaking the argument down into the shortest possible clauses, as Michael obligingly did, will make people get it. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure his prediction is correct.

BTW, he didn't quote the most unpalatable part of the article:

"We really believe marriage best reflects what we've had together. We have a deep love and commitment, and civil unions don't reflect that," said Janet Peck of Colchester. She and her partner, Carol Conklin, will celebrate their 30th anniversary later this year.

"Civil unions just kind of feel like you're not good enough," Conklin added.

Other couples, such as Jeffrey Busch and Stephen Davis of Wilton, will apply for a civil union reluctantly. They feel they cannot pass up the legal protections the arrangement will provide--such as the right to sue for wrongful death and the ability to file taxes jointly--but they do not plan a celebration.

"Civil unions are humiliating. We're embarrassed by it," Busch said. "We will in essence be agreeing to be officially marginalized. I'm very hopeful that is a temporary step on our way to being considered a full family deserving the same respect as other families."

Sometimes I would love to break my own rule about not using any but the mildest four-letter words here. Would everyone be so kind as to imagine my letting fly with a stream of loud and hideous profanities right now?

Argh.

Early last month, a Love in Action administrator said that two male teens in the program were both enrolled for six-week stints in the "ex-gay" camp, and last week in an interview broadcast on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Zach’s father, Joe Stark confirmed his son's identity as one of Love in Action's clients.

"We felt good about Zach coming here ... to let him see for himself the destructive lifestyle, what he has to face in the future, and to give him some options that society doesn't give him today," Stark said.

"Until he turns 18 and he's an adult in the state of Tennessee, I'm responsible for him, and I'm going to see to it that he has all options available to him." [These are the statements to CBN that were quoted a week or two ago.--SRK]

A Los Angeles-based psychologist [Ruh-roh!--SRK] took issue with the father's statement.

"It appears that both Mr. Stark and the LIA director's public comments are highly defensive and indicate that their concern is less for the child's well-being and more for their own purposes," said Paul Chimubulo said via e-mail.

"The sort of homophobia they espouse has been shown to be rooted in anxiety and a feeling of threat. ... The gay child's expressions are recognized and interpreted as injurious to the parent's sense of self. With the publicity this has gathered, the father's internal anxiety and feelings of threat over his son's gay identity must really be ratcheted up."

I have no doubt that Joe Stark is doing quite a bit of hard thinking about his own performance as a father and how it might have "made" Zach gay, but can we please remember that people have convictions, too? It is perfectly possible--likely, as far as I'm concerned--that the Starks, at least, are genuinely acting as they think is best for their son, based on religious and other beliefs. That those beliefs are fed by factoids that play on confirmation bias doesn't make them less real, though it should make them easier to argue against.

My sense is that the wording Joe Stark used is probably the result of heavy-duty coaching--the focus on Zach's coming adult independence and the characterizing of LIA as showing "options" distract attention from the coercion involved so shrewdly that I find it hard to imagine their coming spontaneously from a distraught parent. But that doesn't mean he can be dismissed as acting out of a neurotic attempt to preserve his "sense of self." The word homophobia, paradoxically enough, could conceivably be justified here--for once, we're not just talking about anti-gay sentiment but about a real attempt to erase homosexuality in someone. But it's not a judgment call we can really make, and crappy reasoning is just as bad coming from our side as from the opposition. Couldn't the Washington Blade have found someone more level-headed to cite as an authority?

A slightly different group of six has also been meeting in Laos:

The world's top two air polluters — the U.S. and China — joined Australia, India, Japan and South Korea on Thursday to unveil a new Asia-Pacific partnership to develop cleaner energy technologies in hopes of curtailing climate-changing pollution.

They described the initiative as a complement to the Kyoto Protocol that commits 140 countries to cutting emissions of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, but environmentalists said the new pact lacked firm obligations to cut pollution and that it might undermine the Kyoto accord.

...

It said the countries could collaborate on clean coal, liquefied natural gas, methane, civilian nuclear power, geothermal power, rural energy systems, solar power, wind power and bio-energy. In the long-term, they could develop hydrogen nanotechnologies, next-generation nuclear fission and fusion energy, it said.

Environmental group Friends of the Earth was skeptical about the pact because it contained no legally binding requirements to cut emissions.

"It looks suspiciously as though this will be business as usual for the United States," said the U.K.-based group's member, Catherine Pearce.

"A deal on technology, supported by voluntary measures to reduce emissions, will not address climate change. This is yet another attempt by the U.S. and Australian administrations to undermine the efforts of the 140 countries who have signed the Kyoto Protocol," she said.

Well, nature girl, I have to wonder just how much there is to undermine. Remember this story from several months back?

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

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

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

I've been looking out for information since then that the federal government is somehow taking this into account and doing something about it (say by directly regulating industry). It's always possible that a pertinent article has slipped past me, but I kind of doubt it. The Nikkei, the major business newspaper, is the one I read most extensively on-line and subscribe to (morning and evening editions) in dead-tree form. And the way the issue was reported in native English outlets was so bland you might not have noticed that there was even a problem. This CBS report is typical:

In Japan, a tireless supporter of the pact, the enactment was being met with a mixture of pride and worry that the world's second-largest economy is unprepared to meet its emissions reduction targets.

...

Japan is struggling to find ways to meet its obligations. A report this month by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry showed that 11 of 30 top Japanese industries — steel and power among them — risked failing to reach targets unless they take drastic steps.

It makes me wonder whether many of the other countries that signed on really have a plan.

The 6-party talks are still going on, of course:

At the opening ceremony of the six-way talks, which resumed after 13 months of suspension at the the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan said concerned parties were required to have political will and make strategic decisions if they intended to make progress toward the denuclearization of the peninsula. He added that North Korea was fully prepared to do so.

...

But the North Korean chief delegate went on to say that he believed the United States and other participating nations should also be willing to make strategic decisions.

The delegates were again struck by Pyongyang's unyielding stance.

By referring first to its readiness to make a strategic decision, a course of action U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had urged Pyongyang to take, North Korea showed a positive stance apparently aiming at preventing other nations from increasing pressure on Pyongyang to scrap its nuclear program.

North Korea argued in the July 24 editorial of the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Workers' Party of Korea, that the United States had transformed South Korea into a nuclear arsenal by bringing in various nuclear weapons. South Korea has denied the allegation that any nuclear weapons are deployed in the nation.

In February, Pyongyang declared it possessed nuclear weapons. Denuclearization of the peninsula means that Pyongyang's own nuclear programs and nuclear weapons, and those held by the U.S. military stationed in South Korea, must be abandoned at the same time. North Korea therefore insists that the United States, which drove Pyongyang to develop its nuclear programs by bringing the weapons into South Korea, also should make a strategic decision to abandon its nuclear weapons.

Retaining this view, North Korea is able to argue that the two nations, as equal nuclear powers, can then proceed with direct negotiations.

Right...which means that the probability of the DPRK's actually disarming (what leverage would it have left then--economic might?) is around zero.

Everyone seems to agree that it would be a bad idea for Japan to push the abductee issue at this week's talks. Not everyone agrees on how the talks themselves could be "productive," but perhaps it really is possible for a sort of Dilbert-ish chain of never-ending committees and conferences and inquiries and stuff to be established and kept lamely going until the DPRK actually does collapse.

Joe has his thoughts up on Jon Stewart's Rick Santorum interview last night:

My belief is that we can win the debate, we don't have to denigrate. So that's what Sanotrum believes and I don't agree. I don't believe that good parenting requires one man and one woman and I find that the studies back me up.

I also don't agree that the only societal interest in marriage is children. It's one interest, even a primary interest, not the only interest. Stable relationships are themselves an interest. They foster a stable society, public health and safety, and better economics, which are all in our societal interest.

Joe also links to a transcript of the interview at Towleroad. I thought the infamous man-on-dog comparison from a few years ago was just silly--not only insulting but also poorly judged because it gave shrieky political activists an excuse to excoriate Santorum without paying the slightest attention to any distinctions he actually did make usefully.

Some people may find their brain fried at this segment of the interview:

Santorum: I would say that certainly people who are homosexuals can be virtuous and very often are. The problem is that when you talk about the institution of marriage as the foundation and building block of society which I say the family is, and the marriage is the glue that holds the family together. We need to do things to make sure that that institution stays stable for the benefit of children.

Joe disagrees in specific ways with Santorum that I do not, but his comments are, as always, respectful and worth reading.

Would everyone please keep the following in mind:

1. No one is ethically obliged to sleep with you just because you invited him to.
   
2. If you've flattered someone incessantly and he still won't sleep with you, refer to item 1.
   
3. If you've pointed out that you think someone's refusal to sleep with you constitutes a rejection of your shared gay heritage and is a manifestation of buried shame, self-loathing, and pathetic hetero-imitating...and he still won't sleep with you, study item 1 REAL HARD.
   
4. If you've pointed out that his refusal to sleep with you is, when you stop and think about it, a repudiation of the very principles of personal liberty and autonomy that make our civilization great...and he still won't sleep with you--hello? Item 1.
   
5. By this point, the poor guy may be laughing so hard as to need CPR. If you take this opportunity to put the moves on him yet again, you risk getting decked. *

Alice is thinking about Martha Stewart and the 80s:

It [Entertaining] is a great book, from a time when being completely over the top extravagance was just about to become more socially acceptable than it has ever been since (the 80s), and I wish Martha had just continued right into that stratosphere instead of becoming more small-scale domestic, but then everyone else downsized too, so one can hardly blame her for that. "The most sumptuous book on entertaining ever published" says the back cover, and when I read it as a teenager teaching myself to cook it seemed entirely fantastical and extraordinary: who were these people who threw "A sit-down country luncheon for one hundred seventy-five" in their back garden? Who would make eleven kinds of tiny weeny cocktail snacks for fifty guests? A gingerbread mansion for "The holiday party", complete with pediment, finials and cupola plus internal lighting? The mile-high lemon meringue pie- "My mother and I baked it when we had extra egg whites on hand, and made a meringue as high as the oven would allow"- went on my mental list of lifetime ambitions, along with plenty of other things nobody in England had heard of in 1982- pissaladiere, tabbouleh, filo pastry, tempura, and on and on.

I'm with her--aspiration is a good thing. They're broadcasting Nigella Lawson's show here in Japan now. It's fun to watch. Well, I don't think it's necessary to put green chilis in every freaking main dish. I also tire of her constant need to use olive oils "infused" with leafy green crap. And the I'm-just-bopping-around-my-home-kitchen-as-I-do-every-day vibe is ruined by the way she, like, makes raspberry sauce while wearing a pink cashmere twinset with no apron.

But the most annoying thing is the way she's always talking about how informal and easy and spontaneous cooking can be. I realize that she (and Martha and Delia and the others) are dealing with an audience that's used to living on prepared food. You'll just scare the bejeezus out of such people if you start at service à la russe; even so, must we go full tilt in the opposite direction and make everything out to be so accessible all the time? Atsushi and I entertain a lot--I cook and he socializes. (Imagine the disaster that would ensue if we switched duties, huh, darling?) It is indeed nice to have people over for drippy, luscious comfort food that can be pitched into bowls any old way and enjoyed while the wine and conversation flow all relaxed-like; but it can also be a real pleasure to deliver something to the table that's clearly been in the works for a week.

Anyway, Alice has more to say about inquisitiveness and inventiveness in general.

So, you know, Google Earth is kind of cool, but just how old are those images of Japan? For those whose lives are also 渋谷中心, check this out:





That section labeled "WTF?!" is the site of the Cerulean Tower Hotel. As you might imagine, that means the parking lot shown...





...has been gone for quite a while. The darned thing is 40 floors. It opened in 2001. Not even in Japan can they bring two halves of a modular skyscraper on flatbed trucks down National Highway 246, upend them on the foundation, and rivet them together. Maybe I'm seriously missing something, but I'm guessing the image dates from around 1997 or 1998. (The Infos Tower nearby is already there.) I mean, it's a free service--I'm not being ungrateful, and it's actually kind of cool to see things where they were right after I'd come to Japan. It's just odd. Maybe the version you have to shell out for has more up-to-date stuff?

I would just like to point out that it's not irresponsible of me to be sitting here reading and posting and eating cookies when I should be cleaning the bathroom, because, see, I'm thinking about the fact that I should be cleaning the bathroom. And that makes it all better.

The bathroom is funky by this point. Well, okay, since I'm a neatnik, by most people's standards it's probably not very funky at all. It's just that, having been at Atsushi's last weekend, I didn't get a chance to give it a really thorough scrub-down. In July in Tokyo, just spending five minutes wiping everything with Top Job does not count as bathroom cleaning for the week.

It's been very mild this year, though. Yesterday was kind of gross, but not as kiln-like as you often get. That was fortunate, given the number of people who were stranded by suspended train service after the earthquake. I haven't felt any aftershocks, though I probably wouldn't have been awakened by mild ones. Things seem to be back on track now.

Via Ace (Happy birthday!), this post Jason Kuznicki is a must-read...uh, must-view. It's both moving and understatedly hilarious. Ace points out something that cannot be repeated too often:

If there are folks who cannot accept themselves as homosexuals, or reconcile their faith with their orientation, then I support their desire for a heterosexual life and wish them happiness, however they have to accomplish that. However, I am beginning to notice a trend amongst "ex-gays." Just like Rev. Grace Harley, the testimonials at PFOX and Exodus, most of them had other problems: unhealthy sexual addictions, drug abuse, physical or sexual abuse, infidelity, mistrust. Remove these factors - ones that will cause discord in any relationship, gay or straight - and find that there are more and more gay people out there living happy, healthy, productive, emotionally and spiritually satisfying lives. Sometimes I wonder if the ex-gays' problems are not who they are, but what they were doing. They might actually agree with me on that statement since the program teaches you to view being gay as something you do, not something you are. I see the gay as who they are/were and the bad habits as what they were doing to bring them down.

You know it, girlfriend. When people claim to have found the key to beatific happiness, my suspicions are immediately aroused if they go on to insist desperately that no one living differently could ever anyway anyhow possibly be happy. It always sounds to me (when from ex-gays) like a need to seal off their own unvanquished need to find a same-sex mate lest it erupt again at any moment.

To Ace's suggestion that the ex-gays find a new marketing strategy, I would add this: Knock it off with the moist-eyed, unctuous, quivering-with-sympathy, soppy, sappy, sodden tone of patronizing helpfulness. (Jason Kuznicki captures it with truly frightening proficiency.) To even-keeled gays with a healthy sense of mischievous humor about the realities of life, it's like Lee Press-ons across the world's largest chalkboard. No one who truly feels he's found the path to rectitude needs to talk that way.

Thanks, Eric. I can understand why everyone wanted to jump on this story so quickly, but there are so many possible variables--the chief ones being Persian culture and the opportunistic thuggishness of the Islamic Republic in Iran. It made me wonder--the Iranian government is notorious for bringing sex-related offenses into cases in which its real motivations lie with other behavior.

"Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi"
To: "Eric Scheie"
Subject: Re: Photos of public execution of two youngsters in the city of Mash'had
Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 12:08:00 -0400

The story does not change...the info that the Mullahs gave out first was one thing and then activists outside Iran were informed that there was more to it than those two boys being hung for theft. ALSO, please note that they were not gay in the way people in the west would think of "gay" 'cause people in our part of the world have sex with men and women and in that part of the world, it's common for men to sleep with men and women...but to us, it's all sexuality and sexuality in and of itself, to the Mullahs is not acceptable. There are many dichotomies that one cannot properly explain for westerners; like the Eunuchs in our part of the world, etc. To people in the west, they're disgusting and bizarre...to us, they're wonderful and we love our Eunuchs! However, un P.C. that may be in this part of the world.

These two poor boys did have sex with each other but that was never what they were officially charged with and that is a fact. The reason WHY in fact they were executed, underneath it all was because the Mullahs often make an example of youngsters who are unruly and apparently these two had been also raped and sodomized by a local Mullah whom they wanted to expose. Like those two innocent 16 year old and 19 year old girls they executed last Oct. and Dec...Atefeh Rajabi and Leila Mo'aafi...they said that they were whores but it turned out that they had both been molested by the local Mullahs and
when these two poor girls had come to expose them, they got executed.

I hope this explains it. I cannot explain any more than this because if you aren't from that part of the world you will NEVER understand or grasp the height of the Islmo-Fascist mentality. Their psychosis is something HITLER could not even imagine and yet no matter what we dissidents try to explain to westerners...people refuse to believe what we impart...simply because your part of the world is not ancient (or the archaic'ness' was shed many moons ago) and your values entirely different AND at odds with what those people over there, do, say and think.

Actually, I think I do come closer to understanding this issue than many Westerners. I have heard about Muslim mullahs raping young men they've sentenced to death for "sodomy." And clearly Iran today is a country run largely by such sociopaths.

As to sexuality, we in the West have a different way of processing these things, and as I have said many times, in my opinion we have come up with unnecessary divisions based on "sexualities" which are as varied as the individuals. But the bottom line here should not whether anyone is homosexual or heterosexual, or should be labeled "gay" as we do in this country. It's the human freedom to be left alone in matters of one's bedroom.

Japan has normal relations with Iran, and you meet Iranian businessmen in the bars here occasionally. Eric's right about unnecessary divisions, but I think it's important to point out that there really are homosexuals as we think of them in Iran, too. As one (drop-dead gorgeous--good grief, was that man beautiful) guy put it to me a few years ago, "In Iran, it's not uncommon for men to marry and be bound to their wives while also being attracted to men or boys, but [conspiratorial smile] I'm like you." Also, setting artificial but meaningful boundaries is one of the most important things an advanced civilization does.

None of this means that I don't think we should protest against laws on the books that allow teenagers to be executed for sodomy. Nor do I think that gay leftists shouldn't be clobbered hard for the way they constantly make excuses for illiberal non-Western regimes and treat the Bush administration as the greatest threat to liberty for gays and lesbians. (Of course, given their own tendency to mewl that all their problems are everyone else's fault, their affinity for the Palestinians, at least, is pretty understandable.) It's just that in all the point-scoring, something gets lost: these people hate imagination and free thought and idiosyncrasy in all forms. Their hatred of homosexuality may be sincere, but in practice, they frequently invoke it as a means to the end of maintaining power and strongarming people back in line. Ms. Zand-Bonazzi has a final point to make:

The west is hugely to blame and in my opinion not so much the U.S. (though the U.S. has managed to make a mess of a few things big time), EUROPE...those European plutocrats are the ones at fault and though I hate the idea of those innocent people dying (there were also Iranians among the people who died on the bus on 7/7 in London), I'm sorry but I believe the U.K. government brought it all onto themselves...and NOT by backing the war on Iraq but by NOT backing off from doing business with CORRUPT Islamists, LIKE, the Mullahs for all these years. They were warned that the Islamo-Fascists have no good intention to ANYONE in the west...but the Euro bastards like to act like it's only the U.S. and Israel.

Well, the US could stand to be less cozy with the al-Sauds, but point taken.

Poor North Korea. All it wants is to get along with everybody, and then what do the democracies of the world go and do? Kim Il-sung's people abduct a few Japanese citizens from moonlit walks on their own beaches, and a quarter-century later the Japanese are still freaking out about it. It's not like it just happened yesterday, or anything. Can't people focus on the big picture?

The DPRK's Democratic Choson published statements on 23 July that, given that Japan plans to bring up the issue of Japanese abductees at the 6-party talks when they reopen for the fourth time in Beijing on 26 July, "Our definite feeling is that it is not necessary for us to sit in face-to-face meetings with Japan, given that it is determined to use its cunning to make a hindrance of itself at the 6-party talks." The statements indicated yet again the DPRK's position that it will not agree to direct talks with Japan for the duration of the meetings.

The CNN report is here. Check out the part about the flower. Good grief.

Oh, uh, if you're trying to keep a running count of slush funds in the Japanese federal government, you're going to have to increase your total by two:

Trade minister Shoichi Nakagawa admitted Friday that two more slush funds exist at his ministry, including one now containing 52 million yen that was created with payments from UNICEF.

The other slush fund came from money that was obtained for the wages of part-timers who never worked at the ministry. A total of about 1.4 million yen has been put into the fund at the Trade Policy Bureau's Americans Division, Nakagawa said.

Last month, the ministry said its policy-making office secretly kept unused research subsidies to build slush funds.

...

Over the past 30 years, only one payment, in November 1975, has been made from the slush fund, when 2 million yen was used to buy a membership to an exclusive restaurant. The membership was canceled four months later, and the money was returned to the fund.

The other slush fund revealed Friday was created from the wages of fictitious part-timers. The slush fund started in fiscal 1995.

A total of 1.39 million yen was put into the slush fund from fiscal 1995 to fiscal 2002. But 1.07 million yen had been withdrawn by June 2005 to pay real part-timers hired for busy periods, such as during Japan-U.S. trade negotiations, leaving 321,290 yen in the fund.

The ministry plans to return all of the 1.39 million yen plus interest to state coffers.

The number of deaths from yesterday's terrorist bombing in Egypt is up to 88. I've been wondering--if terrorism experts thought this was possible, surely we'd be reading it by now, so I'm probably wrong--whether the plan wasn't similar to that of the Bali bombers: set off an explosion or two to get people pouring into the street, then nail them with bigger explosions once they're out there.

A group claiming links to al Qaeda said Saturday's bombings were revenge for "crimes committed against Muslims," said an Internet statement. But the statement did not appear on major al Qaeda Web sites and it was impossible to authenticate the claim.

Egypt's biggest "crime against Muslims," from the perspective of Islamofascits, is probably being a reasonably functional democracy. It also has a cultural heritage of world-enamoring brilliance that predates its contact with Islam. Of course, the resort that was hit was popular with foreign tourists as well, so there are people of many countries among the dead; but naturally most of the victims were Egyptians.

Sincerest condolences to the Egyptian people, and best to President Mubarak and his government in the fight to keep the terrorists at bay. As Dean says, if we assume the flypaper strategy (which I have my reservations about), is working, it means that terrorist cells are going to be striking more frequently in the most Westernized Muslim countries. It's going to be a trying time.

Ghost of a Flea brings up one of the more annoying Anglospheric gaps in communication about the races:

Let us clear this up. In English-speaking North America the word "asian" is generally used to refer to people of East Asian descent while in the UK the word "asian" is generally used to refer to people of South Asian descent. Both terms are gross generalizations that obscure fantastic regional, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity within the groups for whom they act as shorthand and either shorthand ignores well over a billion people who are just as asian. If I was, say, Armenian both abbreviations would be a source of ongoing annoyance.

A close English buddy of mine and I were just having this discussion a few weeks ago. He was bewildered at the way a lot of Americans look at you as though you'd committed a hanging crime if you use the word Oriental, which, Edward Said's hex not having gained traction in the UK as it did in the States, is still the polite way to talk about the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese there. Of course, even in the States, people of East Asian descent who haven't gone through PC colleges still blithely refer to themselves as Oriental all the time, but you'd never hear a newscaster use the word.

Now that I think about it, the topic may have come up the night of the first London bombings. I do know that on 7 July we were sitting at our hangout when the video for Kylie's "Giving You Up" came on: a twelve-foot-tall woman in curve-hugging black strides through London as if she owned the place, good-naturedly vamping at guys of various races (there's an Asian, in the English usage, about 3/4 of the way through) along the way. It was very bolstering--the kind of sassy I can get behind.

FLAMIN' NORAH! Now, that was an earthquake. Nothing fell (here at my office where high bookshelves are ranged behind our desks), but man, did we feel it. I hope it wasn't a hell of a lot stronger anywhere else.

Added at 16:41: Looks like it was a weak 5 at the epicenter in northwestern Chiba Prefecture and in parts of Saitama and Kanagawa Prefectures. It was a 4 here. No tidal wave warnings.

Added at 17:58: The Nikkei says it was actually a strong 5 in Adachi Ward (northern part of the 23 wards of Tokyo proper). That's the JMA scale that measures surface vibrations, of course, not the measure of energy released provided by the Richter scale. (The estimated magnitude is 5.7.) It was strong enough to cause rides at Tokyo Disneyland to shut down automatically (elevators, too--those in this building are still closed until they can be inspected). Service on runways at Narita and one of the Shinkansen lines was interrupted, but everything appears to be back to normal. There don't seem to be any reports of actual damage.

Added at 19:42: I spoke too soon. Shibuya Station was a madhouse: the inner ring of the Yamanote Line (runs counter-clockwise) is still being inspected. Yikes.

Added at 21:36: Anyone who was in a coma this afternoon and missed the quake may be relieved to hear that the JMA is telling us to expect aftershocks of up to 4 in surface intensity. The magnitude of today's quake has also been revised upward to M6. I'm assuming train service is up and running everywhere again?

More from Irshad Manji, the Muslim lesbian from Toronto, in last week's Sunday Times:

Britain, she says, has been slow to introduce tests for imams on their mastery of the Koran. She recalls asking Mohamed al-Hindi, political leader of Islamic Jihad, where the Koran glorifies martyrdom; he insisted it was there, but even after looking up books and phoning colleagues, he couldn’t find one reference.

"His translator suggested I better go if I wanted to leave alive," she recalls. "I asked why he had even given an interview, and the translator said, 'Oh, he assumed you would be just another dumb westerner'."

Muslims, adds Manji, must find positive role models rather than jihadists: "Martyrs are the rock stars of the Muslim world, shown on the internet against a background of funky music. They feed on the self-esteem crisis of young Muslims." That could be addressed by history lessons paying greater tribute to the Muslim contribution to the Renaissance.

She denounces terrorism and the response to terrorism, which is not sufficiently robust. It is no good, she argues, for respectable Muslims to say "violence is not the Islamic ideal" if violence has become Islamic practice. And she attacks the proposed religious hatred laws, saying: “Society needs people who offend, otherwise there will be no progress."

Manji thinks Islam needs a reformation.

Walter Olson reports at Overlawyered that a new frontier in save-people-from-themselves-ism is being explored. This from one of the Guardian articles he links to:

According to Dr Judith Reisman, pornography affects the physical structure of your brain turning you into a porno-zombie. Porn, she says, is an "erototoxin", producing an addictive "drug cocktail" of testosterone, oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin with a measurable organic effect on the brain.

Some of us might consider this a good thing. Not Reisman: erototoxins aren't about pleasure, they're a "fear-sex-shame-and-anger stimulant". Reisman's paper on the subject The Psychopharmacology of Pictorial Pornography Restructuring Brain, Mind & Memory & Subverting Freedom of Speech has helped make her the darling of the anti-pornography crusade, and in November last year she presented her erototoxin theory to the US senate.

...

[Reisman and her fellow researcher] foresee two possible outcomes: if they can demonstrate that porn physically "damages" the brain, that might open the floodgates for "big tobacco"-style lawsuits against porn publishers and distributors; second, and more insidiously, if porn can be shown to "subvert cognition" and affect the parts of the brain involved in reasoning and speech, then "these toxic media should be legally outlawed, as is all other toxic waste, and eliminated from our societal structure".

Not being addicted to porn, I still have enough imagination to be stoked at the mere mention of a cocktail of testosterone, oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin. Where's that glass of iced water? [gulp...sigh] Okay.

Toxic waste is outlawed? Oh, excuse me--"legally outlawed"? I thought you just couldn't leave it lying around, not that it was illegal. Olson also links to this post at Nobody's Business:

Indefatigable at 70, Reisman continues her crusade against "the sexindustrial complex" mostly by trying to prove the existence of those elusive "erototoxins." Right now, only she knows what those are — she coined the word herself, and it seems it has yet to make it into anyone else's medical vocabulary. In fact, though she consistently identifies herself as "Dr. Reisman," that title refers to a degree in communication, not to any expert medical knowledge. (This echoes her fondness for reminding people that her maiden name, Gelernter, is German for "learned one." Indeed.)

Cheese and crackers, what a 24-karat quack. Of course, in a world after world-renowned agricultural chemist Meryl Streep's 1989 lecture to Congress about Alar, I supposed it's not a big shock that Reisman has given testimony before the US Senate about the neurological effects of pornography.

What's so annoying here is that there are real issues to be addressed. We expect teenagers to grow through adolescence to strike out on their own and choose their own life partners, often without much assistance from family and community elders. What does it mean to have recordings of live, impersonal sex acts cheaply and readily available when they reach adulthood (if not before)? I don't hold with the hard anti-porn line that pornography "causes" sexual dysfunction, and I'm against its criminalization. It's also patently untrue that you can't consume porn without spiralling helplessly into addiction. But you can't evade questions about social effects just by pointing out that there's no inherent shame in nakedness or sex; what you're exposed to does affect your attitude.

On the other hand--give me a break! The sex impulse doesn't obliterate free will. With all her blather about subverting freedom of speech, Reisman sounds exactly like the MacKinnon-Dworkin axis of feminism, with its line about how the power of the patriarchy means no woman in our society can ever give authentic "uncompromised" sexual consent. Another case of extremes meeting in the anti-pornography crusade.

If we don't show solidarity with London by buying lots of stuff at Fortnum & Mason, the terrorists win. Take that, Islamofascists!

And that!

Mmmm...and maybe some of that.

In all seriousness, I'm just very grateful that this week's crew of bombers only succeeded in displaying their incompetence to a media-saturated world. The police are apparently marshalling all their brain powers to figure who--who on Earth--might be behind the failed bombings:

Security analysts said the obvious carbon-copy attacks could have been masterminded either by the same group or by less sophisticated sympathisers — maybe young, disaffected Muslims.

"There is a resonance here," police chief Blair said, but he cautioned it would take time to tell who was to blame.

Fine, let's keep an open mind. But at this point, I'm thinking the probability that the bombers were not young, disaffected Muslims is pretty darned low.

A propos of nothing: it was at the Shepherds Bush Empire that I saw Alison Moyet perform ten years ago. One of the best concerts I've ever been to. I happened to stand next to a dyke couple who kept looking at me with expressions that clearly said, "Shouldn't you be at a Madonna concert instead, Mary?" But it was great; it was the tour for Essex, and the songs were flatteringly toughened up a bit for live performance. It's a shame Alison's career never really, really ignited internationally (especially since Vince Clarke went on to find major success after hooking up with that grating, self-pitying, quivery, histrionic, braying gay donkey Andy Bell and forming Erasure), though it's nice that she does well at home still.

This is good news:

Japanese researchers discovered a colorful, centuries-old Buddhist mural in a stone cave in Afghanistan that somehow escaped the destructive rampage of the Taliban regime in 2001, officials in Tokyo said.

The cave, about 3 meters wide, 3 meters deep and 2 meters high, is located at the west end of Bamiyan Valley, according to officials at the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties.

Parts of the mural are still covered with dust, but the painting is believed to cover all sides of the cave as well as the ceiling, the officials said.

The west wall depicts Buddha and other sitting Buddhist deities drawn with bold strokes.

We love bold strokes! The paintings could apparently help researchers determine how certain motifs in Buddhist art were transmitted through central Asia.

Congratulations, Canada:

Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin signed the legislation making it law, hours after it was approved by the Senate late Tuesday night despite strong opposition from Conservatives and religious leaders.

...

Churches have expressed concern that their clergy would be compelled to perform same sex ceremonies. The legislation, however, states that the bill only covers civil unions, not religious ones, and no clergy would be forced to perform same-sex ceremonies unless they choose to do so.

Charles McVety, a spokesman for Defend Marriage Canada and president of Canada Christian College, said he was "very sad that the state has invaded the church, breached separation of church and state and redefined a religious word."

Well, buddy, this is what you get when the religious word in question is closely tied to a government goodie bag. I still think there's reason for caution about a blanket extension of the legally designated category of marriage to cover gay relationships, but not all the opportunism in argument has been on the pro-gay side. And the sense of entitlement that has animated many gays in this debate is something that's been picked up from the general culture, not invented by our team and foisted on it.

More evacuations on the London Underground. Let's hope no one's been hurt.

I'm not sure whether it's the most depressing song ever, but Dolly Parton's "Down from Dover" is one of those country songs that play on the emotions very cunningly. From the very first verse, you know exactly what's going to happen:

I know this dress I'm wearing doesn't hide the secret I have tried concealing
When he left he promised me that he'd be back by the time it was revealing
The sun behind a cloud just casts a crawling shadow o'er the fields of clover
And time is running out for me--I wish that he would hurry down from Dover

It's not just that the story is as old as time--it's that Parton sets it in the autumn, when things begin to chill and die. Of course, real babies are born in fall all the time, but within the universe of symbols in the song, Parton's choice of season is significant.

He's been gone so long--when he left the snow was deep upon the ground
And I have seen a spring and summer pass, and now the leaves are turning brown
And any time a tiny face will show itself 'cause waiting's almost over
But I won't have a name to give it if he doesn't hurry down from Dover

My folks weren't understanding--when they found out they sent me from the home place
My daddy said if folks found out he'd be ashamed to ever show his face
My mamma said I was a fool, and she did not believe it when I told her
That everything would be all right 'cause soon he would be coming down from Dover

I found a place to stay out on a farm taking care of an old lady
She never asked me nothing, so I never talked to her about my baby
I sent a message to my mom with a name and address of Miss Elvah Grover
And to make sure he got that information when he came down from Dover

I loved him more than anything, and I could not refuse him when he needed me
He was the only one I'd loved, and I just can't believe that he was using me
He couldn't leave me here like this--I know it can't be so, it can't be over
He wouldn't make me go through this alone, oh, he'll be coming down from Dover

My body aches, the time is here, it's lonely in this place where I'm lying
Our baby has been born, but something's wrong--it's much too still--I hear no crying
I guess in some strange way she knew she'd never have a father's arms to hold her
And dying was her way of telling me he wasn't coming down from Dover

Look me dead in the pixels and tell me you're not depressed. The fourth verse was omitted from the original version on The Fairest of Them All, but Parton reinserted it on her wonderful remake a few years ago on Little Sparrow. She changed the phrasing in places, too. In either version, the story is beautifully paced--each step at which the protagonist is further isolated from people and still doesn't get what's going on positively hurts to listen to. Dramatic irony at its most devastating. And unlike many of the old ballads from which Parton (among a lot of other country songwriters, of course) drew inspiration, the poor girl doesn't end up dead and at least out of her misery.

This is one of the many reasons I love Susanna:

I just don't think they're [leftists, of course] being very realistic about the threat, which is not the same as questioning their honesty, morality or intelligence. I know a lot of people who I consider exemplary on all three counts who disagree with me on the WOT, both liberals and conservatives. So it's not that either. But there are a lot of liberals and leftists who do give cover - just consider any of your garden-variety pseudo-intellectual Hollywood types like, oh, Sean Penn, George Clooney, Susan Sarandon, etc. And consider the leadership of the Democratic party as well as the nattering leftists in the US and Europe, whose primary solidarity is built on anti-Americanism arising from their own sick envy. I consider them the rankest hypocrites, demanding the freedoms and excesses of the West while succoring the fascists of radical Islam whose first activity on taking over any country would be to end the freedoms and excesses Western civilization provides. And finally, I'm not parroting a party line - I'm a lot harsher than the party line tends to be.

Yeah, we only wish the party line were that uncompromising. Susanna quotes Peter Tatchell's statement on Unite Against Terror. In my opinion, Tatchell is one of the few lefty gay voices consistently worth listening to. He may stage wacko demonstrations and support "international socialism" [shiver], but he knows how to make arguments applicable to Earth and not Planet Clare.

Re. US-Japan security ties, the Yomiuri reports that the Department of Defense has asked Japan to give us a heads-up if, say, the DPRK fires a missile at us:

The United States, as part of its missile defense program, has asked the government to share any information obtained by advanced radar systems in Japan as soon as they detect a U.S.-targeted ballistic missile attack launched from such countries as North Korea, government sources said Tuesday.

Any such missile launch would probably first be detected in Japan by an advanced early warning radar system known as FPS-XX.

The next-generation high-performance radar system, which is in its final stage of development by the Defense Agency's Technical Research and Development Institute (TRDI), will be a pivotal component of the nation's missile defense system scheduled to be deployed 2007.

The government is set to accept the U.S. requests for assistance saying there would be no problem in sharing information in the event of a missile attack on the United States, the sources said.

The pattern for new gizmos with "next generation" attached to them is one of delayed roll-outs and lots of debugging after release, in my experience. Nevertheless, despite its trouble launching rockets and satellites, Japan's ground-based surveillance is very good.

Ambassador Thomas Schieffer has also asked Japan to extend the deployment of SDF personnel in Iraq again:

Schieffer told reporters at the National Press Club of Japan that it is Tokyo's decision, but countries in the multinational force are expected to make tough choices to help establish democracy in Iraq.

"We know that that was a threshold to cross for the Japanese government and the Japanese people. It is not an easy thing for them to be there," Schieffer said.

"But we think that their contribution is making a difference, and it is a contribution that they can proudly say they are making on behalf of the international community, and not because the United States is there," he said.

"All of us have to do things that we would prefer not to do from time to time," he added.

Schieffer's comments came as Tokyo and Washington have begun working quietly on how to interpret U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546 to allow an extension beyond the Dec. 14 expiry stipulated under the basic dispatch plan approved last year by the Cabinet.

With the brouhaha over Japan Post reform, other issues before the Diet and cabinet aren't really getting much play in the news here. It seems unlikely that Koizumi will be inclined to pull out early.

I still don't really know what to make of Schieffer. He's far less a media presence here than Howard Baker was. Not that the old ambassador was all over the society pages, or anything, but he was quoted very regularly in news reports. Schieffer is much quieter. Perhaps he's getting his bearings--he's not a really seasoned politician as Baker was. Or perhaps he simply finds it politic to shut up, given the topics there are to opine on lately: anti-Japan sentiment in China, friction over politicans' pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine, Japan's push for permanent UN Security Council membership. These aren't exactly easy shoals to navigate, and Schieffer has only been on duty here since April.

Hmmm.... Morning.... Cup of strong tea, scrambled eggs with way too much butter.... Classical Values.... WHAT?! [splutter]

Does this sick phenomenon called "outing" know no bounds? I mean, it's bad enough to go after a politician for "hypocrisy" when his personal life runs afoul of his stated political views. But to go after a family member? This was the kneejerk reaction of certain Daily Kos regulars, who wasted no time in calling for an investigation to determine whether John Roberts' son is gay.

This is now being dismissed as absurd because, of course, the son happens to be four years old.

Disgraceful. In fairness, two Kos commenters did have the decency to point out that going after Roberts's son was at least ignorant. (I would have preferred to see them point out that it was outrageous, but you can't have everything.)

Frequent commenter John has had his own blog for a few months--it's very good stuff.

There have been a lot of posts about math education floating around lately. His two (here and here) are great additions to the pool. Something that he says that more people need to understand (and that is pertinent to comparisons of American and Japanese educational systems):

So being Americans, and enamored of the idea that everyone can become a genius, we came out with systems that emphasized creativity over memorization, forgetting that in order to be creative you need at least a few facts in your head, otherwise you live in a world of make-believe.

Somehow, the conviction that your progress in life needn't be limited by the circumstances you were born into has changed into the belief that you can bluff your way through anything. (That actually doesn't work much better in literary study than it does in math, BTW, as anyone who's lost hours of life to an assigned "critical theory" reading of zero meaning can attest. It's just less noticeable because there's at least some fudge room in interpretation and criticism. And misinterpreting a poem doesn't make bridges fall down.)

Bush's nominee for the US Supreme Court seems to have surprised everyone. For those of us who don't believe the Constitution is a mirror, he sounds like a great choice. The Washington Blade cites this AP report:

"The court's conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion … finds no support in the text, structure or history of the Constitution," the brief [from Roberts] said.

In his defense, Roberts told senators during his 2003 confirmation hearing that he would be guided by legal precedent. "Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land. … There is nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent."

Of course, the usual spokespersons are saying the usual things, and they'll all be paraded across the news channels for the foreseeable future--I know some people like that aspect of politics, but I frankly find it wearying. One thing I would like to see, though, that I haven't come across in the news reports yet: Arlen Specter's reaction. He's a triangulating moderate himself, and he was fond of Sandra Day O'Connor. I mean, obviously, he's going to say something politic. When does he not? Still, Roberts looks more consistently conservative than he'd hoped for.

What's the latest trend in Japan? Class consciousness, according to Time:

Japan, a country that prides itself on social harmony, homogeneity and an equitable distribution of wealth, is bifurcating along geographic and social lines into camps of permanent winners and perpetual losers—the former a highly educated and trained core of élite employees and entrepreneurs working for internationally competitive companies, the latter an increasingly marginalized yet growing sector of society comprising primarily elderly rural poor and despairing urban youths like Ijiri. "In the past, people believed that the whole nation was getting wealthier, and the rich were simply the people who got there quicker," says Toshiki Satou, a sociologist at the University of Tokyo (U.T.). "But that is changing. People are becoming more aware of class."

It's funny that the writer, Jim Frederick, who happens to be Time Asia's Tokyo bureau chief, should say that. Long-term Asia residents may remember the puff piece from a few years ago in which he fawned over Japan and its resilience with embarrassing sycophancy:

In the wreckage of Japan's increasing inability to compete against the lower labor costs and rekindled ambitions of its rivals, however, a number of observers both inside the country and out are turning to the nation's creative and cultural enterprises as a source of potential salvation. For this has been one of the greatest Japanese ironies: even as Japan's economic leadership has been slipping for more than a decade, its cultural hegemony has only swelled. "Japan has changed from being a corporate manufacturing and industrial society to a pop-culture society," says Ichiya Nakamura, a visiting scholar at Stanford Japan Center and M.I.T. Media Lab. Pokémon has supplanted Astroboy in the hearts of schoolkids in more than 65 countries, and 60% of the world's animated-cartoon series are made in Japan. Games running on PlayStation 2 and (to a lesser degree) Nintendo's Game Cube rule the video-game universe just as tightly as before, despite a frontal attack from none other than Microsoft and its sinister-looking black Xbox. And high-end Japanese fashion designers such as Hanae Mori, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake are not only as vital as they once were; they have also been joined by a generation of young turks such as A Bathing Ape, Jun Takahashi and Naoki Takizawa who set the style for hipsters from Berlin to Bangkok and beyond. Japanese films, TV series, music acts and lifestyle magazines, meanwhile, routinely spark fads all over Asia. (Turn on MTV in Singapore or Hong Kong and you are just as likely to see Ayumi Hamasaki as J. Lo.) According to Tsutomu Sugiura, director of the Marubeni Research Institute, an economic think tank, Japanese cultural exports—such as from the media, licensing, entertainment and other related industries—have tripled over the past 10 years to $12.5 billion, while manufacturing exports have increased by only 20%. Granted, $12.5 billion seems like a rounding error in Japan's $4 trillion economy (Toyota alone hauls in nearly $11 billion in sales every month), but it's still the result of a growth rate almost unheard of anywhere else.

Note that in the article from this past week, it is exactly the imaginative/arty fields that he's pointing to as unable to take up the slack of Japan's domestic conventional industry. Of course, smart people discard prior assumptions as reality refutes them; I'm not finding fault with Frederick for changing his mind. The obnoxious part is the flat learning curve. His succession of articles over the past few years, each pushing the latest funky-news-from-Japan-of-the-week line, shows little to no ability to judge, based on long-term patterns in Japanese society, which trends are likely to last and why.

He also fails to ask some glaringly obvious questions:

Even if he could find work, Ijiri says he feels unprepared to join the winner-takes-all rat race of postindustrial Japan. He longs for his father's era, the heyday of Japan Inc., when young adults were whisked directly from college into a womblike corporate career, where they would be sheltered by a paternalistic business culture for life. "People like me who aren't particularly talented at anything are happier with the old system of lifetime employment and seniority-based salaries," he says. "The supposed 'chances and opportunities' that a competitive economy offers is for those who are already steps ahead." Ijiri later found work as a security guard, hardly the future he once envisioned for himself.

Frederick lets these observations pass without comment, but they are hardly self-evidently true. The most uncharitable interpretation is that, now that Japanese workers are being assigned their true market value, many of them are discovering that they were meant to be security guards rather than engineers. But even that isn't necessarily the case. Someone who wrote so rapturously about Issey Miyake and Hanae Mori and their successors must be aware that the post-War Japan, Inc., system worked by squeezing everyone into the mediocre middle. That meant that uninspired low achievers were lifted up, but it also meant that imaginatively brilliant oddballs were tamped mercilessly down. It may be, in fact, that Ijiri has talents that the educational system, bent on making him a good, noiseless cog, didn't help him to discover, much less develop.

A related point:

To get a glimpse of the wealth gap, travel 400 km from prosperous Tokyo to the Shimane prefecture town of Ohda, a listless burg struggling to support its aging population of 33,000. Along an incongruously wide, modern superhighway linking Ohda with the nearest train station, the only signs of economic activity are abandoned construction sites. Shimane is one of the poorest and least populated regions in Japan and has no industry to speak of save public-works projects; one out of eight residents is tied to the construction industry. But because of fiscal austerity measures implemented by the Shimane prefectural government, even public-works jobs are under threat.

Note the way a bottomless supply of public works jobs, even those that involve building unnecessary superhighways and other construction boondoggles, is considered normal, with any throttling back deemed a mark of "austerity." In fact, the river of concrete that washed over Japan's rural areas simply disguised what's been true for decades: Japanese citizens have urbanized and to a great extent abandoned the remote countryside. They've taken with them the need for most public works projects; facilities built in outlying areas have mostly served pork-barrel politicians and helped the LDP to mobilize its important rural supporters.

The 12.5% of Shimane residents in construction were laboring under an illusion long before the bubble burst. Taking the sensible abandonment of white elephants as a sign of some new "wealth gap" is just wacko.

I think my, uh, favorite part is here, however:

Yet, while the poor get poorer, the rich are getting richer. Last month, the national tax agency released its annual list of the country's top 100 taxpayers. Tatsuro Kiyohara, a 46-year-old fund manager at Tower Investment Management, ranked No. 1, with a tax bill that suggested a personal income of approximately $100 million. This marked the first time a wage earner had captured the top spot, an occasion that many writers and talk-show hosts alternately hailed and lamented as a signature moment in the new, more Darwinian society—for Kiyohara's pay is almost entirely performance-based. The Nikkei Weekly business newspaper opined: "This new era is one in which individuals can have a significant impact on a company and its image, as demonstrated by the enormous compensation paid to this one person for creating new revenue streams."

Yes, it's a sure sign of doom when people start earning money at a level commensurate with their productivity, huh? What's amazing about Frederick's article is that, except for a glancing quotation from someone else about the social-democratic system, no one ever gets around to pointing out the obvious: Japan's social and economic policy have painted it into a corner.

The effects are exacerbated by but were not caused by that chic bogeyman the global economy. Post-War Japan built a society in which globally competitive manufacturers accounted for about 30% of the economy; their staggering success allowed the other 70% to operate inefficiently without much notice. The school system trained students to think of themselves as interchangeable team members who would be taken care of for life and would not have to use their individual resourcefulness and imagination to solve their own problems.

But bills eventually come due. I feel very sorry for people like Ijiri--his elders assured him for his first two decades on this Earth that the world would work a certain way, and he has every right to feel betrayed now that he's learned it does not. One can only hope that he and others in his position are eventually galvanized into action by the experience. What Time casts as the unfortunate intrusion of class consciousness onto Japanese society is simply the realization that a major economic power cannot afford, indefinitely, to pay millions of workers to stamp papers all day and pretend they're actually getting something done.

Good weekend. It was sunny Saturday (it's supposed to be the rainy season, remember), so the view from the mountaintop restaurant we went to was fantastic. We'd had lunch at a lakeside cafe not far from the airport. At one very Japanese moment, we were looking out at the (many) dragonflies buzzing around the window. The flightpath to the airport was in the middle distance, and suddenly, a landing airliner glided into view so that it looked the same size as the dragonflies flitting around inches away. They seemed to be playing together for a moment. It was beautiful.

Sunday we went to the hot spring, stopping at an old aqueduct along the way. Water is released in a big, frothy arc for 15 minutes at noon; along with a lot of other tourists, we were there to take pictures and stuff. From there to the inn, Atsushi decided to follow the GPS map program's suggested route. Apparently, the suggestions were made by dryads. We found ourselves on a one-lane road snaking over a mountain, with leaves growing in so closely the car touched them on both sides. (They were great for visibility, too. Poor Atsushi took a deep breath before every hairpin turn.) Most of the way there was no shoulder--and I don't mean they didn't bother to pave anything beyond the white line; I mean the vertical dropoff began at the white line. At one point, where the forest canopy converged what seemed like inches above the car roof, I said, "I keep expecting to see a witch's cottage around every bend," at which point my much-tried man muttered, "No self-respecting witch would be caught dead living back here."

The inn was worth it, though. It was new, so there were more man-made materials and obvious machines around than one might have liked for a hot spring, but you can't get away from that. All the guest huts were named for flowering plants. We unfortunately didn't get the one called after the flower of Atsushi's family crest, but ours was on a high point with a great view of the valley and fields (and ubiquitous electrical-line tower--which wasn't nearly as endearing juxtaposed with nature as the passenger jet had been). We were in one of the baths when the lashing rains and lightning drew near. When I was no longer able to count "1-one thousand" between the flash and the boom, we decided bath time was over for now.

The drive back into the city was relatively uneventful. There's a national park with flower gardens at the edge of Oita Prefecture, so we stopped there. It's lavender season, so the fields were grey with it. It looked like purplish steel in the sun. We had lavender-flavored ice cream at one of the stands before heading back.

Needless to say, all of this butching it up took a lot out of me. I'm back in Tokyo and headed to the office and may or may not feel up to posting tonight. On the other hand, there was an article about Japan in Atsushi's latest Time Asia that got my blood boiling--Isn't July a little early for such a big turkey? I thought while reading it. I may be banging something out about it before bed. Few comments I want to respond to, too.

For now, I leave you with a summer poem by Princess Shokushi:

かへり来ぬ昔を今と思ひ寝の夢の枕ににほふ橘

式子内親王

kaerikonu / mukashi wo ima to / omohi ne no / yume no makura ni / nihofu tachibana

Shokushi Naishinnô

I float into sleep,
a past that will come no more
made now in my thoughts--
at the pillow of that dream
the scent of orange blossoms

The Princess Shokushi

The fragrance of orange blossoms is said to excite the memory. When the princess awakes, the scent makes her feel the more keenly that some nostalgic memory, which she knows she will never live through again, had actually returned to life in her dream. It's a little late in the summer for this poem, I think, and it's not one of those with 500 fascinating allusions you can write a thesis on. Lovely, though.

Hope everyone else had a wonderful weekend.

Added on 20 July: I think I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that I inserted that caesura above. Many Japanese waka are, in fact, constructed so that the first three lines (5-7-5 syllables) conjure up a feeling or reaction and the last two lines (7-7 syllables) give the concrete sensory stimulus for it. They can be difficult to translate because putting the caesura in the same place, in order to preserve the dramatic pause of the original as faithfully as possible, gives you less leeway in rendering each of the two parts.

Princess Shokushi's poem above is different. It's one of those that come out in a long rush. The m and n consonants that dominate give the description a heady feel, when the images are actually rather plain. The whole poem is a long prenominal modifier for the final word, 橘 (tachibana: "orange tree," which refers to a variety of citrus that's a little different, of course, from those that produce the baseballs you buy with "Sunkist" stamped on them). If you translated it directly and in English word order, you'd get something like this (I'd like to apologize in advance to the Princess's kami for the act of violence I'm about to commit):

The orange tree wafts its scent at the pillow of the dream in which I've gone to sleep thinking that the past that will not return is now.

Obviously, this was an occasion for compromise, and I figured that maybe making each line kind of self-contained and billowy would compensate for not being able to reproduce the liquidity of the original. It seemed most important to keep the orange tree at the end, where it supplies the moment of sensual awareness. I'm afraid the result was a little precious, though.

Today was one of those days when I really loved my job. I mean, I always love my job, but not every day comes together so beautifully. And tomorrow morning, to continue the theme of joy, I take off to see Atsushi for the three-day weekend in Kyushu. (I hope the hot spring we're going to hasn't been washed away.) If I'm feeling especially ambitious at 5:30 when I get up to go to the airport, I might look at the computer. Otherwise, there may be a post or two from Atsushi's place (we think of it as our country villa) but I probably won't be bloviating much until Tuesday. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Joe Stark, father of Zach of Love in Action fame, has spoken to the press (or at least CBN):

The father of a gay teenager who wrote in a Web log that he was being sent against his will to a camp run by a group called “Love in Action International” to "cure" him of his homosexuality is defending his actions.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network Joe Stark says he did the right thing when he sent his 16 year old son Zach to the camp near Memphis, Tennessee.

“We felt very good about Zach coming here because… to let him see for himself the destructive lifestyle, what he has to face in the future, and to give him some options that society doesn't give him today,” Stark told CBN. “Knowing that your son... statistics say that by the age of 30 he could either have AIDS or be dead.”

Stark also said that he did nothing wrong in sending the teen to the camp against his will.

"But until he turns 18 and he's an adult in the state of Tennessee, I'm responsible for him. And I’m going to see to it that he has all options available to him.”

Stark told CBN that when Zack is an adult he can make his own life choices.

Fair enough on that last part. I won't pretend to like it one bit, but we can't call in CFS for every parenting decision some of us don't like.

At the same time, anti-gays, can you please stop yanking statistics out of your asses? Of course a gay guy could be dead by 30. Anyone could be dead by 30, from a variety of diseases and misadventures. I'm trying to think of gay bloggers I read--just bloggers--who aren't over 30, and I can't dredge up anyone but Law Dork. And even he may have turned 30 when I wasn't looking. Let alone that most of my friends are over 30, in America as well as here. By all means, rail against promiscuity and the attendant physical and psychological costs. But don't insult people's intelligence to score cheap points.

Of course, Stark sounds like a PFLAG chapter chairman compared to this miscreant:

Ronnie Paris Jr. went on trial for his own life this week in a Tampa courtroom. The toddler's mother, Nysheerah Paris, testified that her husband thought the boy might be gay and would force him to box.

Nysheerah Paris told the court that Paris would make the boy fight with him, slapping the child in the head until he cried or wet himself. She said that on one occasion Paris slammed the child against a wall because he was vomiting.

The court was told there had been a history of abuse by Paris. Prosecutor Jalal Harb said that in 2002, the Florida Department of Children & Families placed the child in protective custody after he had been admitted to the hospital several times for vomiting.

He was returned to his parents Dec. 14. A month later he went into a coma and was rushed to hospital. Six days later he was removed from life support and died. An autopsy showed there was swelling on both sides of his brain.

Who knows whether the child had a predisposition toward homosexuality or was already gay? Gay, straight, or whatever, he won't have a chance to blossom into it, thanks to Dad.

Added later: Mike at Ex-Gay Watch has commented. He notes a few interesting things. One is that CBN's report cagily excises part of Zach's blog entry. The other is that, of course, this is not about "see[ing] to it that he has all options available to him" (Zach's father's words). A program that attempts to erase your existing expressions of self and replace them with different ones is shoving you down one path, not showing you options. As Mike says on a different topic, I wonder whether he's mouthing phrases he was told by Love in Action people to use or he just can't bring himself to articulate, in direct terms, what he's actually signed his own son up for.

For anyone who's wondering, of course I noticed that Prime Minister Koizumi has done a 180 on the revisions to the Japan Post reform bill. The line now is: "Revisions? I love revisions. Why, some of my best friends are revisions!"

I like Koizumi's support for the WOT, which I think demonstrates real vision and a keen sense of what civilization is up against. I also understand that putting reforms through in Japan is very tough. Even with the voters behind Koizumi's overall housecleaning program, he's had to deal with the multitudes of well-connected federal bureaucrats who know exactly how to press elected officials and party leaders to maintain their power.

But that doesn't mean that Koizumi has been handling things well. Japan Post reform is a hopelessly unsexy topic, and Koizumi has lost chance after chance to explain to the citizenry, in basic and lucid terms, why privatizing it is so important. (¥¥¥!) And it's really bad in strategic terms to set a pattern of coming on all tough and implacable and then blinking at a critical moment (cf. the selling down the river of Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka a few years ago) or going mealymouthed when the world is watching (cf. his non-explanation of why he continues to visit the Yasukuni Shrine).

The result is not surprising: there's a real chance that the opposition has made enough headway to keep the bill from passing in the House of Councillors:

Yomiuri Shimbun interviews with all 114 LDP upper house members revealed that opposition is mounting in reaction to Koizumi's high-handed manner in deliberation as much as on the substance of the bills.

"I'm upset about the fact that Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe and others in the leadership aren't even trying to tame the prime minister so that he won't use the threat," said an upper house member who wished to be identified only as a former cabinet minister. The former minister was referring to Koizumi's threat to dissolve the lower house if the bills are killed.

Even a member of the Mori faction, most of whose members are backing the postal bills, said he was not happy about Koizumi's style.

"He's only inviting more opposition. In the upper house deliberation he must adopt an extremely humble manner in answering questions and all that. Otherwise we can't improve the rough atmosphere," the member said of Koizumi.

Koizumi is still saying that people shouldn't fixate on his threat to dissolve the House or Representatives because, naturally, the bill will pass. Ten upper house members attended the strategy session for LDP opponents of the bill last night, however. All it will take is 18 LDP votes against for the bill to fail, and there are more than 8 Councillors still on the fence. We'll see.

Shocking news: there's a gay guy working in PR.

Well, okay, the shock is that he's Rick Santorum's communications director. Michael says he must be getting paid very well. I don't know; not being a supporter of the current campaign for gay marriage myself, I can certainly imagine that he might support Santorum's policy position. (Just to be clear, I don't. That is, I don't support the FMA.) You do have to wonder what he thinks of Santorum's remarks that, in essence, decriminalizing homosexuality logically commits you to decriminalizing bestiality and polygamy.

I understand that PR people are responsible for representing their employers. In that sense, you can't fault Robert Traynham for staying on-message. It would be nice, though, if these gays working for anti-gay politicians were willing to explain, with clarity and point, why they don't think there's any conflict there. Surely if you have the courage of your convictions, you should be able to articulate them. But Traynham wiffs:

When asked how a gay man could speak for one of the nation's most notorious homophobes, Traynham, left, protested that has "been with the Senator for eight years." Traynham went on to say "Senator Santorum is a man of principle, he is a man who sticks up for what he believes in, I strongly do support Senator Santorum."

When pressed on whether he supported the Senator's stands on lesbian and gay issues, Mr. Traynham abruptly ended the phone call by saying "Senator Santorum is a family man with "I have been with Senator Santorum for eight years and I am very proud to be with him."

An attempt to follow-up with a question was met with Mr. Traynham hanging up the phone.

Uh, honey? As his bleedin' communications director, surely you know that Senator Santorum himself is not afraid to discuss his stance on homosexuality. "I support the senator's positions on gay and lesbian issues" is not a sentence that should be all that hard to choke out if it's what you believe.

I think it's great that conservative gays can thrive in jobs with conservative politicians. I'm against outing them or declaring them a priori traitorous to other gays. But it's worth noting that always being able to respond to sticky questions with "I'm representing my boss's opinion, not my own" and other I'm-just-doing-my-job vagaries is a very convenient way to avoid taking your own stand.

Ghost of a Flea is driving himself crazy trying to get The Guardian's coverage of the London bombings to make some kind of sense. Looks like he's doomed to failure, but he has lots of links, and his own comments are good as always.

Master diplomat Shintaro Ishihara, Governor of the Tokyo Metropolitan District, has spread more of his trademark brotherhood among men. I still think that suing in response is silly:

Twenty-one people including the head of a French Language school in Tokyo have filed a damages lawsuit against Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara over his comment that "French fails as an international language."

The group of plaintiffs, which also includes French language researchers, is demanding that Ishihara publish newspaper advertisements apologizing for the remark and pay compensation of 10 million yen.

...

"I have a feeling it is aptly said that French fails as an international language because it is a language that can't count numbers," he said.

The governor apparently made the comment on the basis that French counts "80" as "four twenties." The lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday, objects to his remark.

"French can count numbers and it is used as an official language in international organizations and many countries," the lawsuit says. "(The governor's) false comments stain the reputation of people who are researching French and speaking it as their native language, and they obstruct the business of language schools by diminishing the desire of learners of the language.

Now, as anyone who speaks Japanese knows, if there is anything AT ALL that no Japanese speaker should be getting all smug about, it's counting. I love the Japanese language to death, but please! It has native Japanese numbers, imported Chinese numbers, and about five zillion different counters for different kinds of things. The math scores of Japanese citizens? Rational reason for national pride. The numerical facility of the Japanese language? No. I hardly think Ishihara's remarks affected language school enrollment, but...just, no.

Jon Rowe has an interesting post up about Japanese racism and cultural relativism. It strikes me as somewhat dodging the most fascinating and important question, though: is there a critical mass of institutionalized racism in Japanese society--that is, an amount sufficient to make it morally inferior to ours despite our important similarities as democratic allies?

Rowe cites a speech by Allan Bloom:

But the family is exclusive. For in it there is an iron wall separating insiders from outsiders, and its members feel contrary sentiments toward the two. So it is in Japanese society, which is intransigently homogeneous, barring the diversity which is the great pride of the United States today. To put it brutally, the Japanese seem to be racists. They consider themselves superior; they firmly resist immigration; they exclude even Koreans who have lived for generations among them. They have difficulty restraining cabinet officers from explaining that America's failing economy is due to blacks.

I hate to disagree with someone as estimable as Bloom. (And hey, he was a gay white guy with an Asian love-muffin, too--we share so much!) Nevertheless, it is exactly the "intransigence" of Japan's rigid homogeneity that I think is the key issue here.




Added on 15 July: That's weird--Dean and I both use PowerBlogs, and trackback pinging is automatic. Odd that it didn't go through. Since his post is, of course, good, here it is. (And thanks for linking, Dean.)

Via Ace via Michael, yet another baffled soul whose reasoning goes something like, "Homosexuality must be a choice; after all, the guys who were hitting on me in college thought so." Ace takes care of things ably and politely, but let me just add for those who've managed not to figure this out: We males are goal-oriented. A horny guy who's hitting on you will say anything if he thinks it will get you into bed. ANYTHING. "You're gay and just haven't figured it out yet (ergo, you should sleep with me)." "I want you, I need you, I love you (ergo, you should sleep with me)." "Fascinating! We're both at the same bar drinking the same brand of beer (ergo, you should sleep with me)." "The moon is made of green cheese (ergo, you should sleep with me)." The idea that the line some aroused guy feeds you in order to get into your pants can be taken as his sincere, fully-worked-out belief about the nature of his own sexuality is a very naive one.

Added later: Okay, so I thought better of the wording above and changed it. The writer of the original article probably isn't a garden-variety dum-dum; there are a lot of otherwise smart people who think that logic isn't really necessary when arguing against homosexuality.

This was great timing:

About 1,000 people were stranded on a subway train for about 40 minutes late Monday night after it came to a standstill because its brakes developed trouble, its operator said Tuesday.

At around 11:55 p.m., a 10-car train came to a halt between Kitasenju and Ayase stations on the Tokyo Metro Chiyoda Line after its emergency brakes activated, company officials said.

...

One of the stranded passengers said the lights on the train went out after it came to a halt, and that the conductor failed to explain what had happened to the train for 30 minutes after it stopped.

"It reminded me of terrorist attacks on the underground trains in London. Tokyo Metro should have explained what happened much earlier," said the passenger, 44-year-old Akira Hirai.

If it was a train running at 11:55 p.m., we all know what that means, don't we? It means the average passenger BAL was a good, oh, 0.07-ish. Also, while the nights have been cool over the last week, I'm guessing that it was not exactly refreshingly breezy in train cars with no air conditioning. At least they'd emerged from the tunnel before the train stopped. Kitasenju is pretty far out in eastern Tokyo, so the chances that it was a terrorist attack would probably have seemed minimal to most passengers. Still, pretty trying.

Secretary of State Rice was here yesterday to talk with Prime Minister Koizumi and Foreign Minister Machimura. (Japanese version)

"I recognize the importance of continuing to implement anti-terrorist measures," Koizumi told Rice at their meeting in Tokyo.

The prime minister, however, made no mention of what his government plans to do later this year on the status of the Self-Defense Forces dispatched to Iraq. The basic plan for the SDF dispatch expires on Dec. 14.

...

Japan and the United States agreed they would seek "concrete progress" from Pyongyang toward abolishing its nuclear weapons development program during the six-way talks.

At a joint news conference held after their meeting, Machimura and Rice said their two countries confirmed agreement on three points concerning the six-way talks expected to start on July 27:

*Concrete progress is needed in the discussions;

*Japan and the United States want North Korea to deal with the issues seriously and constructively; and

*Coordination between Japan, the United States and South Korea is crucial.

Japan and the United States will hold a trilateral meeting on Thursday in Seoul with South Korea to synchronize their stances for the six-party talks in Beijing, the first since June last year.

The diplomat-speak in that passage is, BTW, just as exquisitely devoid of content in the Japanese as in the English (though at least the Japanese reporter knew not to use the word synchronize).

Everything else was basically a reaffirmation of diplomatic ties: the US supports Japan in its pressure on the DPRK to resolve the abductee issue, supports Japan in its push to become a permanent United Nations Security Council member (just not yet), and wants the beef import ban lifted.

Oh, yeah. I guess I'm sort of duty-bound to to mention that the DPRK has announced that it will return to the 6-party nuclear kaffee klatsch. Whatever. Reuters quotes an AEI expert...

But officials traveling with Rice in Asia said they have seen no concrete sign the communist state would surrender its nuclear capability — which U.S. intelligence estimates at more than eight weapons. Many experts doubt this will happen.

"I don't believe that talks will convince the North Koreans to abandon their program," former Pentagon official Daniel Bluemthal, from the pro-Bush American Enterprise Institute, told Reuters by telephone from Washington, D.C.

"Pyongyang's nuclear aspirations go to the core of the regime's raison d'etre — ensuring its own survival and forcefully unifying the peninsula under its control," the Asia expert wrote in an analysis on the AEI Web site.

...but you don't have to believe that the contemporary DPRK is still motivated by the goals of the Kim Il-sung era in order to doubt that Kim Jong-il's regime is unlikely to disarm. By this point, sheer hubris strikes me as motivation enough. North Korea is aware that its inability to feed its people is so well-known worldwide that it's not even news anymore. The occasional puff piece hardly compensates. And the PRC, which has a growing economy and cannot afford to be as openly combative toward companies with large consumer markets such as the US and Japan, is less and less inclined to stand firm behind the DPRK when it gets adversarial.

Even so, it remains a North Korean backer, which makes me wonder about this:

A hardline Bush administration faction, including Vice President Dick Cheney, has been viewed as opposed to talks with Pyongyang and eager to shape U.S. policy to encourage the regime's collapse.

While we're making all nicey-nicey with China? While economists in the ROK look at the potential problems with reunification and reach for their nitro-glycerine pills? (South Korea has just announced that it will send more rice as aid to the North, BTW.) We all want the DPRK regime to collapse, but I can't imagine how the Cheney faction imagines we could seriously, openly pursue that as a policy goal.

The talks do serve a purpose, though: they give the DPRK attention and make it feel like a world power. (Rice recognizes that that's important--a few months ago she was chuckling that the DPRK was indignant because some press release of its hadn't caused a general spaz.) However galling it may be, keeping North Korea from feeling like a cornered rat is a worthy goal.

The Japanese government has decided to make a greater effort to encourage citizens to eat healthy foods--no surprise, given the collectivist bent of Japanese society and the paternalist bent of the federal ministries. Humiliatingly, it sounds as if what it comes up with may be less patronizing than the USDA's latest orgy of finger-wagging:

The government is aiming to start a trend of "dietary education" by which, through families, schools, and regional governments, proper knowledge and judgment about diet will be learned; by the beginning of September, a council to promote dietary education, headed by the Prime Minister and consisting of relevant cabinet officials and experts, will be created. The goal is to formulate a basic plan within the year that incorporates concrete policies efficacious in the preservation of [Japan's] traditional dietary culture and [improvements to] communication between local governments and farmers.

The potential for boondoggling here is nearly illimitable, of course--lots of pointless new boards and committees and community centers. Japanese agriculture and education policies are full of those already.

Yes, the Japanese diet is becoming less healthy. That always happens when people are rich. Still, even people who eat Western foods frequently seem to prefer to base their diets on Japanese foods, and it's hard to get fat on them. There are a lot of people in Tokyo who could stand to take in a far lower percent of their daily calories through alcohol, but I somehow doubt that's going to be one of the new council's focal points.

Oh, yeah, speaking of subways: something else I forgot to link last week was this post by Japundit, which in turn links to a fascinating website about Pyongyang's subway system. It's an unofficial site, but the site owner seems to take care to back up his speculations about how the Pyongyang Metro actually works. The number of cars ordered from the PRC and GDR--remember that entity?--suggests that there may be an entirely separate network for government officials only, for example. There's also been a suggestion, though the site owner doesn't take it very seriously, that the two stations through which foreign visitors are given tours are actually the only two in existence--that is to say, that the rest of the network is a fabrication and was never built.

One of the more interesting tidbits is this passage from the official guidebook:

An overseas Korean who was on a visit to the homeland gave his impression of the Pyongyang Metro to respected President Kim Il Sung. He said that in the country where he was residing it was out of the question to use high-quality stones in the buildings for common people.

At this point the president said that in our country we were building a metro not as a means of making money but for providing the civilized and convenient life to the people, so that we did not spare money to decorate the inside well and construct it solidly and modernly.

More than 30,000 square metres [sic] of natural marble and 40,000 square metres of granite have been used in the construction of the Pyongyang Metro. This is nothing but a negligible amount of materials used in the building of the metro by the Government of the DPRK.

Vainglorious Monument Syndrome has afflicted dictators since time immemorial, but its cruelty is particularly heart-piercing here. In rich countries, we move about freely and get to choose our own priorities. A lot of subway stations are dumpy, but we don't care because we're just moving through them on the way to things we want, or at least have chosen, to do. It's not hard to imagine, in North Korea's screwed-up economy, that the subway station could be the only fleeting moment of aesthetic pleasure some people get in a workday. (It's worth noting that the subway was built in the early 1960s, when the still-young DPRK was, according to official statistics, outpacing the South in economic growth--military, industrial, and public works hypertrophy gave people plenty to do. Of course, we all know what happened after that.)

Myself, I'm not so nuts about the marble columns; they're a bit bull-necked and graceless. The murals give me the Diego Rivera yawns, too. Let me have those light fixtures, though!



I think those on the left compare very favorably to, for example, that horrible neon epileptic fit that's scribbled witlessly down the concourse ceilings at O'Hare Airport. However, I don't know that I'd be so hot on them if, 40 years down the pike, the policies that produced them had also starved a few million of my countrymen.

The skies over Kyushu are active today. A satellite went up:

The Japan Aeronautics Exploration Agency announced that an astronomical X-ray satellite, launched from the Uchinoura Observatory in Kagoshima Prefecture, has successfully separated from its M5 Number 6 launch rocket. The satellite is called Suzaku ("the crimson sparrow"). It becomes Japan's fifth astronomical X-ray satellite, succeeding the Asuka, which ended its observation in July 2000.

Japanese rocket launches don't always come off so hot these last few years; it's nice that these last few have.

Of course, it's what's coming down in Kyushu that's the big story right now. Several prefectures there (Oita, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, and Nagasaki among them) are experiencing major flooding. The rainy-season rains weren't coming, weren't coming, weren't coming--and now all the water appears to be there at once. One person is dead, two are missing, part of a road has collapsed, and there have been mudslides. It's Atsushi's part of the country, but he's in the middle of a city where there doesn't seem to be any flooding. (Not that that's stopped me from getting on him about being careful when he goes outside.) Water is up to the second floor of some houses in the countryside, though.

Like the Gulf Coast in the US, which is also gearing up to be pummeled by an early hurricane, southwestern Japan is still storm-weary from last year's typhoon season, in which some luckless regions experienced wave after wave of torrential rains and battering winds. To friends in either place: stay safe.

With the bombings in London I basically forgot about this, but the LDP's committee on constitutional reform met Thursday:

On Thursday, 7 June, the LDP's New Constitution Drafting Committee (Chairman: former Prime Minister Yukio Mori) convened an executive meeting and approved an outline of proposed reforms put together in committee. With that outline as a basis, the committee plans to have the finalized list of proposed revisions drafted in time for release in November, the 50th anniversary of the formation of the party. The outline contains the precise wording "maintaining of a military for self-defense" and sets forth [Japan's] contributions to international peace and stability. It is also proposed that it be written into the preamble that the Emperor is to retain his current symbolic role, forfeiting power as head of state. The proposal also decisively retains the existing bicameral Diet system, with its House of Councillors and House of Representatives.

...

On the subject of national security, [the outline] decisively retains the principle of peaceableness expressed in the current Article 9. It does revise the clause in which Japan forswears the creation of a military, changing the wording so that the [standing] military nature of the self-defense forces is clarified. Provisions for the formation of a military court to adjudicate [in matters related to] soldiers have also been incorporated. Although it has not been written into the proposed Article 9 revision that Japan retains the right to participate in collective defense operations, which has heretofore been considered unconstitutional by the government, such an interpretation would now be permitted. Further stipulations that the armed forces are under civilian control, with the Prime Minister as commander-in-chief, are also being prepared.

Next to the new ability to participate in collective self-defense--as combatants, of course, and not in an administrative capacity as the SDF is doing in Iraq--the creation of a separate court system for trying SDF personnel may be the single most resonant item here. It conclusively marks off the SDF as different from civilians under the law and recognizes it as a standing military.

Of course, we're still in the draft stage, and once the finalized bill is submitted, its passage through the Diet is likely to be even more fun than what we're seeing with the Japan Post bill.

Topic 2 for discussion among talking heads this weekend:

Japan Post privatization, naturally:

Asked Wednesday whether he would dissolve the lower house and call a general election if the upper house votes down the bills, the prime minister said he would.

"The focal point of the campaign would be postal privatization," Koizumi said in Gleneagles, commenting on his strategy if a lower house election were to be held.

Firing a warning shot across the bows of antiprivitization [sic] forces within the Liberal Democratic Party, of which he is president, Koizumi said the LDP would not provide party tickets for lawmakers who opposed the bills.

Asked if he would regard an upper house rejection as tantamount to a no-confidence motion, the prime minister said, "Of course."

LDP Secretary General Takebe was on NHK today repeating a point that's been made a lot of late: the Koizumi administration has not explained, in language the public will warm to, why Japan Post privatization is such a good idea it's worth causing this amount of controversy for. (That's a problem he shares with his buddy President Bush--think of, say, Social Security reform.) Everyone--supporters, opponents, hangers-on--is holding to the line that his group will not waver when the upper house vote comes up. We'll see.

Topic 1 for discussion among talking heads this weekend:

How can Japan usefully tighten counter-terrorism measures after last week's bombings in London? The Asahi gives a list in its Japanese report:

At the Ministry of Justice, the Public Security Intelligence Agency has established an Emergency Intelligence Office to tighten up instructions to Immigration Control about screening of foreigners in Japan [to find] illegal entrants, especially those from England.

The Japan Defense Agency is conducting searches for suspicious items and inspections at SDF bases, including Samawa [in Iraq]. Weapons, ammunition, other hazardous materials, vehicles, documents of identification, and uniforms will be tightly controlled in close cooperation with [local] police.

The Police Agency has increased the level of alert at Japanese diplomatic posts abroad. Instructions have been issued to prefectural and metropolitan police agencies to reassess the state of defense measures.

The Ministry of Land, Transport, and Infrastructure has warned rail, airline, bus, and airport management corporations [of the need for increased safety measures]. In particular, instructions to look into information gathering about rail and air [system vulnerability] have been issued to the MLTI's counter-terrorism team.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry has increased the level of alert at nuclear power plants, in cooperation with the Maritime Security Agency and the Police Agency. Response measures have been strengthened at major industrial complexes and the Aichi Expo.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs has called on NHK to work toward [better] provision of information to Japanese citizens abroad through international broadcasting.

The Financial Services Agency is increasing cooperation between its own Overseas Finance Division and agents of international finance.

Police presence has been increased at possible terrorist targets, and the last few nights of news broadcasts have featured clusters of solemn station police prodding trash receptacles and looking in toilet stalls.

What do the people think of all this? The Yomiuri says that there's no stampede to cancel reservations on Tokyo-London flights, though of course the travel agencies have received some calls asking about safety. The Japanese may have their misgivings about Prime Minister Koizumi's robust support of President Bush's approach to the WOT, but if there's anything they're good at, it's making fatalistic adjustments to reality when necessary.

Anyway, everyone in Tokyo is, beneath the rhythms of daily life, already braced for a major earthquake that could kill 5000 to 10000 people. Every time you enter a thirty-year-old building, or descend a narrow staircase to get to a basement bar, or get in an elevator and press the button for the 40th floor, or drive over one of the many stacks of elevated highways, it's a shadowy thought that flits across your mind. The sarin gas attacks ten years ago showed that there were actually native Japanese nutcases capable of attacking the Tokyo subway system. And a few months ago, we spent a week watching bodies being dug out from the twisted wreckage of a derailed commuter train in western Japan; the final number of deaths was over 100.

It's impossible to assess how likely an Islamist terrorist attack is here. Japan's been on al-Qaeda's hit list for the past few years, but all the authorities have really discovered in the way of activity here was an Algerian-French money launderer. In any case, extra police and more-stringent inspections are a good idea, but they're likely to frustrate rather than actually foil attacks in the long run.

I think that most of us figure that, even in the event of multiple coordinated strikes on, say, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Shibuya, Tokyo, and Ueno stations (with maybe Kasumigaseki thrown in to stick it to the civil service) at 8:30 a.m. on a work day, the probability that any one of us is going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is pretty low. Like England, Japan has first-rate fire and rescue networks and citizens who are used to orderly, democratic civic life. We'll just have to deal with whatever comes.

Japanese news shows are so...cute is the only word I can think of. TBS (not Ted Turner's, obviously) has just been discussing the London bombings with the commentators sitting around a pop-up book model of London, complete with fluttering Union Flag printed in the upper right corner. Of course, there are all kinds of electronic bells and whistles crowding the edges of the screen, too--that mixture of hokey low-tech and hokey high-tech is very characteristic of news programs and yak shows here.

The number of deaths doesn't seem to be climbing rapidly, which is a relief. The Nikkei doesn't have any statement from Prime Minister Koizumi, who just arrived in Scotland yesterday, but it does quote other higher-ups:

Minister of Foreign Affairs Nobutaka Machimura revealed that he had sent a telegram to Jack Straw and said, "The crimes that have been committed today are detestable. From the bottom of our hearts, we extend condolences [to the United Kingdom] and our deepest sympathies." [It's impossible to translate the set phrases he used, but that's essentially what he meant.--SRK]

...

DPJ Secretary General Tatsuo Kawabata also issued a condemnation: "Acts of terrorism violate principles of humanity and justice, and they are absolutely impermissible. One can hardly suppress one's outrage." Social Democratic Party Secretary General Seiji Mataichi also spoke [publicly]: "I am very angry; we condemn these acts."

Kawabata expressed his anger as 強い憤り (tsuyoi ikidoori: "powerful" + "indignation"). Mataichi used a more common, informal expression: 強い怒り (tsuyoi ikari: "powerful" + "rage"). Like the US, Japan has raised its terrorism alert level. Station police are apparently sweeping through stations doing extra-thorough checks of trashcans and toilets. Otherwise, it's not clear what increased security measures may be implemented.

One final thought before I really do take off: the reaction of the world's self-consciously-hip leftists is going to be interesting, in a nasty way. Preening leftists like New York, but it is...well, there's no getting around it, is there? New York is American. Manhattan is cordoned off from the rest of the country by a few rather narrow rivers, but it's surrounded by America, and even New York's working class is mostly very patriotic.

The left doesn't have to have such misgivings about London, however, and its love for the place is, in my experience, unreserved. There are lots of little reasons it's okay to love London more than New York *: London paid its dues by actually being bombed by the Germans. Contemporary UK policy is comfortingly collectivist, but England also has a history of pioneering democracy. England is close to the European Continent that we're all supposed to bow down to, but being an island nation at the edge, it has its strain of funky non-Euro-conformism. Most lefty types I know think, even if they don't say so outright, that London is the center of contemporary civilization (in the intellectual and social, if not the aesthetic or culinary, sense).

The bombing of London is going to hit these people where they live, at least psychologically. If only to distract me from my rage at whoever planned this morning's attacks, I look forward, in a mirthless sort of way, to seeing them pulled in 50 different directions by their emotions over the next few weeks.

Once again, best wishes to the people of London for minimal death and damage.

* I don't want to give short shrift to the bombings in Bali and Madrid. Of course, they were appalling and they matter. But Bali is a faraway resort island, and Madrid is not a considered an iconic center of progressive thought and policy the way London is.

I hadn't looked at the news services for a while; Michael says there's been a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in London. CNN and Reuters are, naturally, taking forever to load, but the Nikkei already has a translated report up. It looks as if the Underground was the biggest target, though Reuters seems to be saying three buses were blown up, too. (As my English colleague just said, between this and the Olympics, expect the British National ID to attain Big Brother proportions very quickly.) It looks as if there may be 100 dead and injured at Aldgate alone, and those numbers always go up.

The IRA likes bombs, of course; you don't have to spend much time in London to get used to the signs that show abandoned bags with stern instructions to notify the authorities at once if you see one. But this looks very big, and London is one of our closest allies and a society that exemplifies everything the Islamist terror groups hate. It won't be surprising in the slightest if one of them takes...uh...credit. (Yes, there's the G8 summit, but London seems kind of far afield from Scotland for that to be the irritant.)

In addition to being a close kin of our American society, England is my grandfather's homeland. He emigrated as a teenager, and we still have family and friends there whom we visit frequently. I love London. And of course, being a foreigner in Tokyo, I have British friends all over the place here, too. And Japanese friends who live there, for that matter.

It looks as if all there is to do now is to wait for more news. Condolences to the people of England and to the family and friends of the dead and injured. London being a cosmopolitan city, they're certain to come from a number of different countries.

Just went to CNN Japan. A fuller report (in Japanese) is up.

Added a few minutes later: My prediction--a rather obvious one--is that this is going to be a BIG story in Japan this week. The tenth anniversary of the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway was months ago, and being packed into to tight, hard-to-escape spaces on public transport at morning rush hour is part of reality here. (Well, at least in Tokyo, but we are the largest population center and news market.) There will be lots of CGI reenactments on NHK and a great deal of yak-show discussion about what the implications are for Japan. I hope it doesn't seem callous to say this already, but one of the things I try to do here, when feasible, is to give a sense of how world events are covered in Japan and seen by Japanese people.

Added a few more minutes later: Dean has a BBC link (in English this time). It gives a map that shows points of attack. It also clarifies something I'd wondered about: the major station in question is Aldgate East (an interchange) and not Aldgate (which is on the circle line but not, I don't think, any kind of interchange).

Time to get on my packed commuter train and go home. I'm sure there are continuous developments to come.

I don't get a lot of comments, but those I do get are always good. Unfortunately, they're sometimes on older posts that I fear regular readers are no longer scrolling down far enough to see, so I've added the "List Recent Comments" code to the left sidebar. I was originally only going to list the last five. Then I remembered that I respond to most of them, so at least 40% of the last five are likely to be by me, so I switched back to ten, which is the default number.

PowerBlogs is working on a comprehensive internal site stats page. It promises to be very snazzy, but in the interim, I don't get to see what deranged search terms have led people here. It was posting about those that usually gave me the springboard for thanking everyone for reading, and I realized today that I haven't done so for a while.

So thanks for reading, everyone. If anyone had suggested last year when I started posting that I'd have 350 visits a day (excluding search engines and stuff) by now, I'd have told him to stop washing the happy pills down with Asahi Super Dry. Not that this is a popularity contest, or anything, but there's no denying that it's nice to reach people.

Along those lines, I'm occasionally asked for advice about starting a blog. I always feel kind of lame. There are already scads of bullet-pointed lists about how to achieve blog popularity; I don't have much to add to them. When I feel like posting a lot, I do. When I feel like spending a week of news reading propped up on my elbows on the floor and eating Orange Milanos, then sharing my astringent opinions with no one but Atsushi, I do that. But a few recent exchanges I've had have put me in mind of a couple of things that I rarely see mentioned but that are, I think, useful to bear in mind:

One is, everything you post will be read, even if you wouldn't know it from the lack of immediate comments and links on a given entry. A few months later, a blogfriend may refer to it, or a site you're not familiar with may link to it after discovering it by Googling the relevant topic, or you may get an inquiry about it from a reader who decided to dig through your archives.

The other is, if you post under your full name, everyone you have ever met in your life will know it. You will hear from the last woman you ever dated, the first man you ever dated, the guy who grew up up the street who also turned out gay, someone who was in your second-year Japanese class in college, former clients, and colleagues down the hall at work who have been reading you for months without letting on. I mean, depending on your life story, some of these may not be applicable, but you get the idea. Every time I've heard from one of these people, it's been great. I've ended up resuming consistent contact with some of them. But the first e-mail is always a jolt. I had my own reasons for deciding, from the moment I started making mouthy comments on people's blogs, to use my full name; but I can understand that there are perfectly legitimate reasons not to, and it's important to think carefully before doing so.

The Japan Post privatization bill passed the lower house today--this was the real deal, the plenary session and not committee. (The vote was 233 to 228.) Now it goes to the upper house. That means the fun is just beginning:

Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi, remarking on the upcoming House of Councillors debate over the Japan Post privatization bill, stated, "There are still gigantic hurdles to get over. I feel as if we were beginning at square one." He indicated that he plans to exert all his energy to the end of seeing the bill ratified. He denied the possibility that the bill might be revised yet again in order to squelch opposition in the upper house: "We've already made our accommodations. There will be no more." He answered questions at a press conference held at the Prime Minister's official residence.

It's been clear for a while that Koizumi's strategy is to bellow, "No compromise!" before every confrontation as a way of keeping concessions to a minimum; nevertheless, concessions continue to be made. Of course, there have been problems with the bill from the get-go, at least if you're actually, you know, pro-privatization. It will be interesting, if perhaps distastefully interesting, to see what the bill looks like when it comes to its final vote.

Okay, you know, this Cool Biz stuff? Seriously working on my last nerve. I've almost, in a way, gotten used to seeing top-ranking cabinet ministers show up on television looking as if they'd been yanked out of a golf game for an emergency press conference. It doesn't exactly give you the sense that the government is proceeding with sober, formal, rule-of-law predictability; but I guess it does save on air conditioning, which is good for the Earth and other stuff.

However, someone (Mrs. Takebe, are you listening?) needs to tell LDP Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe what 半透明 (hantoumei: "translucent") means. I didn't need to see that the undergarment he uses to rein in those man-boobs beneath his white-on-white sport shirts is a narrow-strapped tank-top. I really didn't.

When you live in Japan, you get used to thinking of catastrophic natural events as normal. It's not that villages are wiped out weekly, or anything; but what with the regularity of earthquakes, typhoons, tidal waves, simmering volcanoes, and drenching rains with the attendant mudslides, it's no surprise that the Japanese latched onto evanescence as a major aesthetic and philosophical principle. The raw, craggy landscape has its effect, too.

This week, the reminders of our frailty have come from the water department. The rainy season has been pretty dry here in the Kanto region, but places in Western Japan are getting a good pummeling:

Heavy rain pounded the western Japan regions of Chugoku and Shikoku for the second straight day Saturday, leaving one person missing, 2 slightly injured and more than 300 homes submerged, local officials said.

Another Kyodo report put the total number of flooded houses at 1000.

Then today, we had this item from Iwo Jima:

Ships have been warned to avoid traveling near Iwo Jima after the Japan Coast Guard said Sunday that an underwater volcanic eruption was the cause of the mysterious plume of vapor that shot 1 kilometer into the sky.

Coast Guard officials found gray mud was rising from beneath the water, which had turned to a reddish color.

The red water apparently indicates volcanic activity, but no signs of volcanic gases have yet been detected. Smoke billowed into the sky in the area.

BTW, the name Iwo Jima, known to most Americans as the site of the famous WWII battle, means "sulfur island."

Wow. This is totally through-the-looking-glass:

Lowering the cost of public works projects through competitive bidding does not reduce the quality of the work, 10 prefectural governments have concluded.

The finding was made in a recent Yomiuri Shimbun survey of such projects across the country.

The result casts doubt on the Construction and Transport Ministry's assertion that a system of completely open bidding to eliminate bid-rigging would cause a deterioration in the quality of construction work. [Yes, you read that correctly.--SRK]

The 10 prefectural governments reached the conclusion by analyzing the relationship between the quality of completed work and also actual contract prices compared with local governments' initial estimates.

The prefectural governments' findings indicate that if contract prices fell through open bidding, it would not negatively affect the quality of construction.

The ministry applies open bidding for only 2 percent of public works contracts, arguing that intensified price-cutting competition may result in shoddy construction work. The remainder have been arranged through bidding by designated companies, sparking criticism that the system is a hotbed for bid-rigging practices.

Ya' think? Now, of course, the big-guns companies have an incentive not to do sub-standard work even if they're awarded jobs through the usual rigged bids. If only because of the resultant bad publicity, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries doesn't want a bridge with its name on it, big as life, collapsing. (The Yomiuri piece goes on to explain how the quality of work for projects was assessed and compared to cost.) Whether the Ministry of Land, Transport, and Infrastructure is acting on saintly scruples regarding public safety is debatable, to put it mildly. What is not debatable is the flood of bennies that well-placed officials get for playing along with the bid-rigging game, particularly the connections that lead to a plum job after retirement.

The main practice, in case you haven't run into it in your previous Japan studies, is called 天下り (ama-kudari: "descent from heaven," or what we in the States would usually call "the revolving door" between civil service and private sector/lobbying jobs in which one's Rolodex can be used to advantage). Problems with the incestuous relationships thus produced have grown so visible that the Nippon Keidanren announced this weekend that it was looking into the possibility of suspending its practice of hiring retiring civil servants. The Keidanren is the largest and most influential federation of businesses in Japan, with about 1600 member enterprises. Of course, the body cannot force its members not to hire 天下り officials, but even its "encouragement" sends a message that would have been unimaginable until very recently. The Keidanren's public statements all endorse private-sector economic development--that's what the entity exists for--but they've also implicitly recognized how the game is played.

How much of a sea change these new statements represent--on the part of either the Keidanren or the prefectural governments--remains to be seen; but that they're being made at all is cause for cautious optimism.

While Koizumi's name may not have helped candidates in yesterday's election to win, it cannot be said that the opposite is true--at least, according to the LDP:

The LDP is taking the results of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election as a decisive vote of confidence in the policies of the Koizumi cabinet. The LDP Executive Committee is looking to get the Japan Post privatization bill passed by the House of Representatives by 5 July, with plans to exert all its power to suppress opponents of the bill within the party.

It is possible that the bill will be passed by majority vote in the LDP's House of Representatives Japan Post Privatization ad hoc committee by the night of 4 July. Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi will leave for the G8 summit at Gleneagles on 6 July, so the party is aiming to be able to send the bill to the House of Councillors before then. The DPJ has submitted a proposal for a no-confidence resolution against the cabinet, and is prepared to meet the bill with unwavering resistance. The vote in the upper house plenary session may end up being delayed until after 11 July.

Added at 18:05: The bill has been passed by the lower house ad hoc committee. Watanuki naturally voted against it; he was just on NHK looking dour.

One reason Atsushi had to come back this weekend was that yesterday was the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election.
Voter turnout was 43.99%, down from 50.08% in the last Metro election four years ago.

There were 127 slots up for grabs. The LDP lost three seats, and its coalition partner, the Shin-Komeito, gained two. (It's a shame the on-line Nikkei doesn't have the graphs that are in the dead-tree version, which illustrates everything very clearly.) The DPJ more than doubled its number of seats, going from 19 to 35. The Commies lost two. And then there were eight or so other seats divided among minor parties. Prime Minister Koizumi's take, at least as delivered to LDP Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe for release: "Given what we were up against, everyone did very well. The results are excellent. Very impressive." DPJ Secretary General Tatsuo Kawabata: "We made a big leap in the direction of changing the administration." He's referring to which is the ruling coalition, of course.

The reason people outside Tokyo care about the election is, of course, that the Metro Assembly is the second-most powerful elected body in Japan after the Diet. There are a lot of Tokyo voters, and how they cast their ballots can give an indication of where the national electorate might be heading in the next round of Diet races. Yesterday, the LDP needed to win as many seats as possible without relying too much on Koizumi's name for support--he's too controversial right now. Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara did step up and do a bunch of endorsements, smiling out from posters and leaflets everywhere. The DPJ's strategy was to put up candidates in as many races as possible, and it obviously worked. However, the net number of seats the LDP lost was still very low, indicating that voters are not ready to stampede toward the opposition despite recent crises of confidence.

So, yesterday I did, in fact, make chicken pot pie. What better recipe for a humid day with the constant threat of rain than one that requires you to make an egg-based dough that binds well enough to roll out smoothly, huh? Idiot. Luckily, it came out well, albeit with half the usual amount of water and a good, long chilling period.

I didn't have time to make dessert, but Atsushi offered to run to one of the many frou-frou pastry shops around here and pick something up. He came back and put the box on the counter: "Good news! Lavinia had sour cherry tarts." "Cherry pies? You must have read my mind." "Um, no, dear--I just read your blog." Oh. Or that. So it was prim, non-lascivious cherry tarts with whipped cream for dessert, after which Atsushi hummed me a verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" before I had to see him off. More than made up for the lack of grilled hamburgers and fireworks.

Since it's already 4 July over here, Happy Independence Day!

Atsushi's plane should be landing in the next half-hour, and since it's not a three-day weekend, he'll only be here until tomorrow. That means we have to celebrate the Fourth of July tomorrow, and planning to do anything picnicky is probably a bad idea. (It's the rainy season right now, and even though it's been uncharacteristically rainless, the weather's supposed to be iffy over the weekend.) There's no question of a cookout, so I'm thinking something from my upbringing. The Pennsylvania Dutch are big on the kinds of meaty, fatty, sugary foods that serve as a constant reminder that they've prospered after emigrating from the old country, which is always a nice all-American sort of message. I've nearly settled on chicken pot pie, which would have the additional resonance of being what my mother made for dinner the first night I brought Atsushi home to meet the family.

I don't have access to a wet-bottom shoo-fly pie for dessert--you should see what molasses costs here, and I actually think the little Mennonite bakeries make them better than you usually can at home. Of course, summer fruits are starting to come in, so we'll be covered. Cherry pie, maybe? There's always something satisfyingly lascivious about sharing a plate of that with your sweetie.

I also have to go to the office today, so I don't think there will be much posting until Monday. Fortunately, Japan seems to be in its usual groove:

• Emerging facts in the bridge-building scandal indicate that not only bid-rigging but also unlawful revolving-door employment is a pervasive problem at Japan Highway Public Corporation.
  
• A man who murdered five members of his family has explained that he only really wanted his mother dead, but, of course, he couldn't let the rest of the family live with the shame of being a matricide's relatives. That an expedient way to avoid such a problem would have been to refrain from murdering his mother in the first place doesn't seem to have occurred to him.
  
• An enterprising Sapporo man has been charged with stealing women's underwear so he could sell it door-to-door, with the ultimate intention of launching a web-based retailer. In an interesting twist, this was new, unused underwear shoplifted from stores--the idea was to sell it to women to wear, not whatever else you may have been (understandably) expecting. Wonders never cease.
  
• The government plans to introduce biometric scanning of foreigners at immigration to help deal with the problem of visa overstays and crime. The WOT, interestingly, hasn't really been mentioned.

And Atsushi's flight was delayed, though he's on the train from Haneda as I write. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Happy anniversary, Michael and Robert. (Touching picture, too.)

I don't want to give anyone a heart attack, but I think Andrew Sullivan's post about gay marriage yesterday was pretty temperate and mostly well-reasoned.

There, I've said it.

Christianist Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said of the Canadian decision, supported by a majority in the polls: "Similar to tactics here in the U.S., the move for gay 'marriage' in Canada was driven by a small minority and liberal activist judges." And a parliamentary and popular majority, Mr Perkins. And please refrain from those scare quotes around the term "marriage." Whether Perkins likes it or not, there are now no differences between gay and straight marriages in Spain, Canada, Holland, Belgium and Massachusetts. His scare quotes - and those routinely used by the Washington Times - apply to heterosexual couples as well. Are their marriages now phony, according to the religious right?

In Canada (where the bill still needs Senate approval) and in Spain, gay citizens and their sympathizers have been able to get a majority of legislators on their side to effect changes in legislation. Who was originally "driving" the movement doesn't alter that. And as for "activist judges," I believe the decision that was reached a few months ago was that gay marriage would not itself violate the Canadian constitution--not that denying marriage to gay couples was unconstitutional. The part about scare quotes is shakier, but the point that the law routinely and legitimately defines words in ways that are different from their ordinary usage is a good one.

I'm still skeptical about gay marriage as policy--for reasons that include those Sullivan raises at the end of his post, which are never far from my mind because of the kind of household I live in. But I'm unreservedly happy that barriers to our being able to form enforceable bonds with our partners are being removed. Neither piece of legislation affects Atsushi and me, of course, but they make a nice lead-in to the weekend. (He's coming home tomorrow morning.)

I get the sense that I have few readers who are interested in both gay stuff and Japan stuff, but for those interested in the brief Nikkei article on the Spain vote, it's here. The Yomiuri's is here, and it also has a report up about the Canada vote. Congratulations on Canada Day, BTW.

I don't know whether this woman has a legal case--is freedom of religious expression usually interpreted to mean that an instructor can be punished for assigning an individual paper with some weird criterion, even at a community college?

I do know that the instructor in question is a ninny:

Hauf's teacher approved her term paper topic — Religion and its Place within the Government — on one condition: Don't use the word God. Instead of complying with VVCC adjunct instructor Michael Shefchik's condition Hauf wrote a 10-page report for her English 101 class entitled "In God We Trust."

"He said it would offend others in class," Hauf, a 34-year-old mother of four, said. "I didn't realize God was taboo."

I'm an atheist, and I'm offended at the idea that a college instructor would seek to limit rather than expand his student's inquiry into a topic he approved. Well, okay, sometimes a student tries to bite off more than she can chew and has to be encouraged to focus, but that's a way different issue. One of Joanne Jacobs's commenters suggested another possibility: the teacher was trying to force each student to delve more deeply into his chosen topic by leaving out a word or two that he might be inclined to overuse. The part about "offend[ing] others in class," assuming Ms. Hauf is recalling correctly, makes that seem unlikely.

You know how some topics seem to follow you around until you're, like, "All right, already! Uncle! Uncle!" Two of my buddies and I were talking last night. We don't usually get around to talking about our preferred varieties of male hotness, but somehow we got on the subject of chest hair for a good 20-minute stretch. Just now, Ace Pryhill commented that a gentleman of her acquaintance once decided to feel the breeze where he'd never felt it before. The idea struck her as kind of gay, but according to Heather Havrilesky, it isn't anymore:

The smoothie's interest in his "look" is more deeply felt and sincere than that, not to mention slightly misguided and disturbingly meticulous: Baseball caps are molded, painstakingly, into the perfect C-shape; stubble is trimmed into the perfect Don Johnson-style 5 o'clock shadow; "distressed" jeans, with their calculated faded patches and hemmed rips, are cleaned and pressed and tugged just below the waist; eyebrows are waxed, as is back, chest and (gasp) the family jewels to boot. The smoothie spends a lot not just on clothes and haircuts, but on highlights, spray-tans, manicures and pedicures, bodybuilding formulas, gym memberships, dry cleaning bills, man jewelry and hip-hop classes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the smoothie is like a cross between a frat boy and Britney Spears.

Ew. Ewwwww. Ew, ew, ew. Ih-hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiwwwww.

We should probably applaud the newfound freedom and the joy these young men take in being objectified; we should probably stand up and cheer when these shiny boy toys shake their asses and pout like Britney; we should encourage them to dress with flair and enjoy those spa treatments and dream their big Chippendale's-style dreams.

We should, but we can't. Because these men might be looking for visual perfection, but we're not. There's just something a little bit unappealing about men who spend far more time on themselves than most women do. When the previews for next week's "Average Joe" flashed an invasion of blond ab monkeys in matching red sports cars, flashing white teeth and spiked hair and shiny, tan six-packs, all I could think was, Where's the variety? Who wants a bunch of pumped-up clones with the exact same body type?

And what's so wrong with a little chest hair, anyway? Doesn't anyone remember Tom Selleck, with his perfect, dark hair-patches that accented his fit-but-not-too-fit barrel chest? To plenty of women and gay men, chest hair gives the bare chest a signature touch or adds a unique feature to an otherwise featureless landscape. Sure, we loved that hairless, buff body in the black-and-white Soloflex ads when we were teenagers, but that was before every third jerk on the street had one.

Yes. Well, except for the part about "gives the bare chest a signature touch or adds a unique feature to an otherwise featureless landscape," which sounds as if the smoothies are working their deleterious way into Ms. Havrilesky's brain a bit more than she realizes. I think the word she's looking for is "touchable."

There's nothing wrong with being naturally smooth. But the thing is, even guys with "no chest hair" have that down you only see up close--we're mammals, right? When it's shaved or N'aired away, the skin left behind takes on the texture of vinyl. And I'm sorry, when you run your hand down a man's chest, it shouldn't skid like a Ford Explorer going into a hydroplane.

I don't plan to make ex-gays a running theme here--Ex-Gay Watch, whose contributors all know a lot more about various programs and theories than I ever will, usually have that stuff covered just fine. Still, the topic is obviously of more than mere passing interest to me, and in the vein of yesterday's post about MSNBC's blandified article about Love in Action, here is an interview with an ex-ex-gay in Bay Windows (via Gay News).

Naturally, my sympathies are going to lie with Wade Richards, but I can't judge how accurately he's actually portraying people and events. One thing that he says that jibes with everything else I've heard and read about de-gay-ifying programs drew my attention anew, though:

I took a break from the press stuff and was hanging out in Los Angeles and my boss's sister was in an open relationship for 12 years with her girlfriend. We would visit her, and when my boss wasn't around I'd ask her sister Jenny questions. She had really been in a relationship for 12 years? What? You don't do drugs, you don't drink, you work for a youth organization? You volunteer your time most of the time? How weird? And then I'd be in her house and see scripture verses taped up to her mirror and little inspirational things, and I was like, 'What's going on? I thought this doesn't happen. Gay people aren't in monogamous relationships.'

Reparative (or however they style themselves) programs don't have any ethical responsibility to give equal time to the opposition. If you're trying to bring people out of homosexuality, of course, you're not going to be dwelling on the fact that there are gays in stable, long-term, sustaining relationships.

But just because people are confused and depressed doesn't mean they're dum-dums. If you drum into their heads that all gays are dysfunctional, the immediate effect will doubtless be to spook them away from homosexual behavior. But it simply isn't true that we all end up in the gutter (such a dusty place, you know, and not the sort of backdrop that flatters the skin tone). Unless kept under virtual house arrest, they're eventually going to run into some of us gays in regular old couples and start to wonder what other facts you were playing fast and loose with. Irrespective of whose goals you support, bad strategy is bad strategy. Not to mention that, in this case, it's dishonest.

On the other hand, not all the noise this week is good. Lead story of the Nikkei evening edition that I plucked from the mailbox after a hard day at the office:

North Korea: Pieces in place for building of nuclear facilities, production of nuclear weapons

The DPRK has revealed that it has restarted the construction of two nuclear reactors, which was frozen after a 1994 agreement it had mapped out with the US. The move is regarded as an attempt mass-manufacture nuclear weapons; both reactors are low-velocity graphite reactors that can be used to extract weapons-grade plutonium.