The White Peril 白禍

Another important step in the "trinity reform" package:

On 30 November, the LDP's policy research committee approved a proposed agreement between the government and the ruling coalition on reform of the tax, financing, and administrative relationship between federal and regional governments ("trinity reform"). In order to decrease the amount Tokyo gives to regional governments in subsidies, the federal government lowered its contribution (in percentage terms) to allocations for children and expenditures on educators who work in public elementary and junior high schools.

The decrease comes to ¥654 billion. One way the agreement was finally reached was by saying goodbye (that's the metaphor in Japanese, too--well, it's more like "seeing off," but the image is the same) to cuts in livelihood protection expenditures, which the regional governments had viciously opposed.

For those who don't know, "livelihood protection" is basically the system that guarantees a minimum standard of living for citizens. Workers pay into it at the same time as they pay into the national pension system; the payouts they receive, by contrast, come from the pension system alone, unless they end up impoverished. Why would federal and regional governments get into a tussle over which kind of funding to cut? Take a look:

At the NHK Hall in Tokyo's Shibuya on Monday [14 November], where a meeting to promote the decentralization of power was held, Tamotu Yamade, chairman of the Japan Association of City Mayors and mayor of Kanazawa, criticized the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare for agreeing to even part of the subsidy cut proposal.

"The problem of livelihood protection costs is merely a transfer of the burden" to local governments, he said.

"Reforms without ideology will leave the root of the evil behind. We must staunchly fight," Yamade said, triggering thunderous applause from about 3,000 mayors and local assembly members attending the meeting.

At a news conference after the meeting, Aso said, "We would like the prime minister to take leadership this year to the last moment, unlike last year."

Local governments are opposed to cuts in subsidies for livelihood protection, which [sic] the Finance Ministry is pushing for such cuts. The local governments are willing to accept cuts in subsidies for facilities at public schools, but the ministry is against that.

From the beginning, the Finance Ministry has been reluctant to subsidy [sic] reductions which do not lead to spending cuts, but is poised to oppose reductions in subsidies for school facilities, whose source is construction national bonds.

Over the last fifteen years, the number of people drawing on livelihood protection has risen, naturally, at the same time as the economy was frequently slumping. Spinning off repsonsibility for the program could easily stick regional and local governments with new collection and accounting headaches without increasing their discretion over where money and resources go. Note also that it's about as easy to get the federal government to agree to issue fewer bonds as it is to get Courtney Love to take fewer drugs.

In separate but not unrelated news, the government plans to restructure out-of-pocket payments for patient care in the National Health system:

On, 30 November, the government and ruling coalition decided on the broad outlines of two-phase reform for the health care system that would raise the amount patients pay for medical care beginning next year. First, the percent paid by high-income patients 70 and over will increase to 30% from the current 20%; after 2008, the percent paid by middle- and low-income patients between 70 and 74 will as a rule increase to 20% from the current 10%. Conversely, the plan folds in an expansion--from younger than 3 to younger than 6--of the age at which payment for children is slightly decreased to 20%. The goal is to hold down increases in health care costs by keeping an eye on payments exacted from people during their child-rearing years while making those from the aged more appropriate.

Mark's Cloud Observatory doesn't have comments, and I can't find a contact address on his site, so I guess I have to post this here and figure he'll see it.

I've discovered that there are a lot of clouds shaped like the PRC. Not just China, but the whole thing including Xinjiang and (sorry, Richard Gere) Tibet. No joke, I see one at least, I'd say, every few weeks. (There are a lot of clouds shaped like Ireland, too, but the way the island is massed, I don't find that surprising.) Are there PRC-shaped clouds over the US, too, or just over Tokyo? The latter would sort of freak me out if I were the type to believe in omens and stuff.

On a more pleasing note, the entryway to our apartment is perfectly positioned for viewing Mars at around midnight right now. It gives you such a cool, primal feeling the way it hovers over all the rooftops and wires.

With holiday travel (including my frenetic trip next week) coming up, your friendly TSA has released its air passenger recommendations.

Note again that the first and most important contribution you can make the air security of the Republic is NOT TO BRING ANY LIGHTERS IN YOUR CARRY-ON BAGS.

Also note that you should be getting to the airport "in plenty of time." (Since the TSA, and not we hapless travelers, is in charge of safety procedures, perhaps it would be the better positioned to judge what "plenty" means. Say, two hours? Four hours? Just one hour if it's a domestic flight? I guess they figured specifying a time would seem, you know, coercive and arbitrary. Wouldn't want that.)

Also, you won't be required to take off your shoes. Well, unless you are.

Enjoy your trip!

There's a post at Right Reason about gay marriage. I know--the topic has been flogged to death already, but Steve Burton's post brings the topic back to some of the underlying social-fabric issues that can sometimes get lost as the debate gets pickier. The commenters also don't suffer fools gladly, so if you can still stand the topic, it's worth a read.

There's also a post that links to this piece about Julia Child as culinary conservative. Interesting, although if all cooks had followed known tradition and authority and been afraid to jump off a few cliffs, we might not have, say fugu in aspic. Or--generalizing beyond cooking--countries, such as ours, populated by venturesome immigrants.

The Julia Child thing reminds me of when I was growing up. We'd come home from services on Saturday evenings, and Julia Child and Company would be on PBS some time around sunset. Later, there would be Mystery!, which I loved even as a small boy. I'm not sure what it says about me that I was that keen on watching a show where people were murdered all the time, but I maintain that the draw was the restoration of the moral order at the end of every episode.

Anyway, the Mystery Channel in Japan has just launched and is part of my cable subscription, so I've encountered the odd nostalgic rerun--A Touch of Frost and the Joan Hickson Miss Marples and the like. (Not all of them are nostalgic. P.D. James couldn't plot her way out of a paper bag, so I quickly bail if I realize I'm watching a dramatization of one of her coherence-free Dalgliesh porridges.) The other day, it got me thinking about a Mystery! series--one of the many British imports--that was broadcast when I was in elementary school. Since I had the laptop here open, I decided to see whether that nice Mr. Google could tell me anything.

Man, there is nothing you can't find on the Internet now. All I'd remembered was that it was about a writer whose wife's Mini Cooper crashes, and that she's taken to a place called the Meadowbank Clinic and held there while her alkie husband tries to figure out what's happening to her. Looking for it, I came upon this page, which not only described the whole thing in impressive detail ("The Limbo Connection"--that's right!) but also reminded me of another series I'd completely forgotten.

It was called "Quiet as a Nun." In it, there's a convent being stalked by a phantom nun who blacks her face out with a fabric mask. The site has a video clip of the climactic moment when the protagonist, your typical girlie but plucky suspense-story heroine, decides to go up into one of the towers looking for the Black Nun. She finds her, all right. shivers Watching it again thrilled every fiber of my gay being.

So many dropped balls are coming to light in the Aneha scandal that I'm starting to expect Mr. Moose to wander by at any moment. One of the sticking points thus far had been over the degree to which the federal government should be helping out people who've been stuck with unsafe condos. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport has come up with a partial plan:

Residents of housing blocks built on falsified structural integrity data who took out loans with the government's Housing Loan Corporation to purchase their now unlivable homes, will be allowed to defer their loan payments, Construction and Transport Ministry officials said Sunday.

This will be the first step the government has taken to help those living in 230 condominiums in question. However, only 14 of the households, or about 6 percent, of them took out loans with the corporation.

Thus, the ministry is also looking into possibly assisting residents who borrowed from private financial institutions, the officials said.

...

The ministry holds that the condominiums' builders should fulfill the defect liability to rebuild the buildings free of charge before the ministry assists residents, but it is not clear how such firms, including Huser, will handle the problem and whether they have the necessary funds to rebuild the housing blocks.

The ministry is searching for a way to extend a helping hand, as it will take time for the residents to rebuild their lives and they may be forced to repay their loans at the same time they pay rent on new homes.

I hope my arch tone over the last week hasn't made it seem that I regard this story as a joke. While it's true that we're very lucky no one was killed here, a lot of people have poured savings into mortgages that are now proving worthless. There's nothing funny about that.

There's also nothing funny about the fact that, as the Asahi reported this morning, it's beginning to look as if everyone--and I mean everyone--involved in these construction projects failed to be vigilant:

The reports submitted by Aneha, who is based in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, were supposed to be thoroughly checked by eHomes Inc., a private-sector inspection company.

At the same time, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport only carried out perfunctory reviews of the work done by eHomes in its annual inspection of the company.

To compound matters, a number of local governments were also lax in their efforts to unearth irregularities in reports put together by Aneha.

Land ministry officials searched the offices of eHomes in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward on Thursday and Friday to look into the company's inspection procedures.

Sources said that eHomes apparently failed to reconfirm the information included in the structural-strength reports as required by the Building Standards Law.

The whole point of building redundancy into these sorts of procedures is to put as many pairs of eyes as possible on the same information: what one person doesn't notice, everyone else will. What actually appears to have happened--all Tragedy of the Commons-like--is that everyone assumed everyone else was being vigilant, so once Aneha had put his fraudulent structural integrity reports into circulation, the falsifications weren't discovered.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport made an announcement today:

On 28 November, reacting to the scandal in which Aneha Design falsified the structural calculations for apartment complexes and other buildings, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport firmed up new policies of systemic revision that would require the name of any architectural subcontractor that performed structural calculations to be recorded in any application for a building permit. The intention is to have revisions enacted and implemented in basic construction laws governing application documents by the end of the year.

Well, okay. I'm sure anyone who sees the name Aneha on a building permit application from here on will be sure to put it in the "Reject" pile. Otherwise, if there's a way this will help ensure greater vigilance on the part of those in charge of inspection and certification, I'm not sure what it is.

Like other federal ministries, the MLIT takes the tack that the safety of the public is too important for its operations to be spun off into private hands. Since protecting its citizens is the government's primary responsibility, I'd be inclined to agree. But the above policy appears to add only a little more paper pushing (never a hard sell on bureaucrats). The fact is that it's already the job of functionaries in government construction agencies to review structural calculations, and they didn't do it. Perhaps the rules themselves could use some revision, but the major issue is pretty clearly the mindset. It's not clear what anyone plans to do to change that.

If you care to depress or scare yourself, BTW, the Japanese Nikkei now has a handy category page dedicated to the Aneha scandal--certain to be updated frequently for the foreseeable future, if this week is any indication.

You know how there are pop culture artifacts that jolt you so forcefully back into the past that you physically catch your breath? Last week, for what must have been the first time in at least fifteen years, I heard "Electric Blue" by Icehouse. Not the greatest song in the world, but there are worse things to rip off than late-phase Roxy Music, and I'd liked it as a high school sophomore when it was out. I was listening to it on the train last week after work, on my way to Azabu Juban to meet a guy I know. In the sense that it reminded me of adolescent ways of thinking, it turned out to be a fitting soundtrack.

A woman S. is in grad school with studies the coffee industry, of all things, and was having a party of some kind at a coffee house there; he'd asked whether I'd go. The place was full of grad students in their mid-twenties, many of them flirting in their characteristic don't-forget-I'm-brainy way. Being a non-flirting guy ten years older than many of them and still dressed for the office, I kind of stood out.

Friends greeted him. One of them duly asked S. where we'd met. It was a perfectly natural question, but the response came several very noticeable beats later. "Hmmmmm. It was a while ago. I really don't remember." A complete lie. Also an unconvincing one. He looked over at me, pretending to want me to jog his memory. I tried hard not to look amused. This happened once or twice more before the party was over, and as we were walking back toward the station, S. said, "I hate that question. Why should people ask something like that?"

It was right around that point that I let myself show some unfiltered indignation. "Where did you meet?" I pointed out a little astringently, is probably the very least intrusive question it's possible to ask when first meeting the friend of a friend. You can't introduce someone to people without providing context; society and sociability simply don't work that way.

Either you bring a gay American guy in his thirties--who very clearly has no connection whatever to any world you're known to frequent--to a gathering of your friends and expect to have to account for your acquaintance, or you navigate social life with your school friends (including the attendant secrecy) without any help from other gay guys. I cannot for the life of me understand the temerity of people who want to play both ends against the middle--drawing on gay organizations while remaining officially straight to their friends in "real life"--and then complain that they feel isolated or put on the spot.

They've arrested Shingo Nishimura. I don't see much in the Nikkei report that adds to what we've heard over the last week, up to this anticipatory report from a few hours ago:

Opposition lawmaker [lower house, DPJ--SRK] Shingo Nishimura will likely be arrested today in connection with allegations he allowed a former employee to pose as a lawyer to work on out-of-court settlements, sources close to Osaka prosecutors and police said.

They said two of the Lower House member's aides likely will also be arrested.

Police believe the aides introduced Nishimura, a member of Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), to 52-year-old Koji Suzuki in 1998.

Suzuki, who formerly worked in Nishimura's law firm in Osaka Prefecture, was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of mediating insurance settlements for traffic-related cases even though he is not a member of the bar.

The sources said police suspect Nishimura permitted Suzuki to mediate in 40 or so settlements, all of which took place after December 2002.

Plenty of fraud to go around these days. It's alleged that Nishimura falsely claimed for tax purposes that Suzuki was a salaried employee of the firm but instead put the designated amount into an off-the-books fund.

When people say, "A long-distance relationship? I could never do that!" they usually don't mean it any more literally you would when saying, like, "Call me any time." It's an exaggeration. An exaggeration of an abstraction meant as a compliment. I take it that way and respond in kind.

Not infrequently, though, someone makes it clear that he means it literally, and that I do not get. I understand not starting a relationship with someone who lives too far away. Or if, say, your relationship has been rocky, a move away by one partner could be a convenient excuse for breaking up with no hard feelings before hard feelings break you up--I understand that, too. If it's all working, though, the whole point of a relationship is to support each other through difficulties. What would I have said? "Well, Kyushu's awfully far. And when I go out, I get a half-dozen numbers without even trying, so I'm thinking now might be a good time to explore some other possibilities"? I did enough exploring of possibilities in my twenties.

I knew how Japanese companies worked before Atsushi and I met. People are transferred frequently, and at some point, even married couples with children often find themselves living apart, with the wife in the family house in Tokyo and the husband in a little company-provided cell near a branch office in the provinces. This isn't some kind of unforeseen disruption. He's the one who's marooned in a boring city working a job that can often be dull. If he can bear it with a good grace, I don't see why I can't.

Besides, he comes home often. Last night, we ran into a couple--friends of ours since we got together--who commented, affectionately if somewhat drily, that given how often they run into Atsushi and me at our usual haunts on Saturdays, you'd never know he supposedly lives in another city. He was here yesterday and today both because he wanted to have Thanksgiving with me and because, with my conference and subsequent trip home, we won't be seeing each other for a month. Good, if brief, weekend.

This weekend's earthquake in China not only is sad in and of itself, but is especially sobering for those following what's happening with Japan's beleaguered construction industry and government bodies.

News is pouring in. The city of Hiratsuka in Kanagawa Prefecture (near Yokohama and the ancient capital of Kamakura) has acknowledged that it failed to check Aneha's structural strength report:

Municipal officials in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, failed to detect an architect's lies about the quake-resistance　of a hotel, saying his structural-strength report was simply too big to be checked in time.

Hidetsugu Aneha, the Chiba Prefecture-based architect at the center of the growing scandal involving unsafe buildings, compiled the report for Park Inn Hiratsuka.

...

"The structural strength report was a very thick one measuring about 10 centimeters, and it was very difficult to check it thoroughly in three weeks,'' Hiratsuka Mayor Ritsuko Okura said Thursday.

The oversight came to light after officials of the city's urban policy department reviewed the report.

The 14 columns on the first floor of the hotel had between 60 and 70 percent the required strength, sources said.

Sounds like responsibility-dodging, huh? It may be worse than you think. In the week-and-change over which this story has been unfolding, it's becoming clearer and clearer that at least some of Aneha's falsifications should have been caught a long time ago. An on-site manager for the construction firm that built Sun Chuo Home # 15 in Funabashi apparently alerted the company as it was being built that it had too few girders. I'm quoting this at length so I can inflict on my Japan-based readers the full, creeping sense of horror I experienced when first reading it:

An expert analysis has revealed that structural integrity data on two apartment buildings submitted by architect Hidetsugu Aneha had less than half the required earthquake resistance, with overly small pillars and girders used in the calculations.

The analysis was provided by a first-class architect asked by The Yomiuri Shimbun to evaluate the plans of Aneha, who has admitted falsifying structural strength certificates for 22 buildings in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

The expert said the structural data were an outright falsification, with various data combined to reduce material costs, and it was hard to imagine how the inspection agency involved failed to notice.

Concerning the structural integrity data for Sun Chuo Home No. 15, an apartment building in Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture, the architect said, "I had an uncomfortable feeling looking at it at first glance."

The 10-story ferroconcrete building was designed by Aneha Architect Design Office in Ichikawa in the same prefecture, and constructed and sold by Sun Chuo Home Co. The Construction and Transport Ministry's recalculation found the building has only 31 percent of the necessary strength.

Bear in mind that these two condominium complexes were in Chiba Prefecture; they are not the same hotel that Hiratsuka is admitting it rushed through, and maybe Aneha was more careful to cover his tracks there. For his part, Aneha is accusing three of the construction firms with which he contracted of pressuring him to allow them to cut corners on structural strength.

Several hotels have been closed. A few days ago, the city of Yokohama ordered a condominium evacuated, and now the federal government has stepped in, with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport taking the unusual step of threatening to invoke the building standards law to force people out of condos designated unsafe if they refuse to evacuate. It's also proposing, naturally more stringent inspection procedures:

Checks will be tightened on construction authorization procedures in the wake of a scandal that has uncovered dozens of apartment blocks and large buildings built using falsified structural integrity data, the government said Saturday.

The Construction and Transport Ministry plans to introduce a manual on how to check the structural integrity data of building designs, as well as a random survey of government-designated private inspection companies.

The ministry will submit the draft reform plan to the Panel on Infrastructure Development, an advisory body to the construction and transport minister, at a meeting to be held next month.

Reviewing the checking system is one of the most important tasks to prevent a recurrence of the problem.

"Until now, the system was based on trust in the inspectors," a ministry official said. "But we must base it on the view that human nature is inherently evil."

Those who want to see the original of that last dramatic sentence can find it here: "これまでは設計者や、建築確認を行う民間機関、自治体などへの信頼が前提だったが、今後は性悪説に基づいた制度に変える。"

I didn't mention the China earthquake just because of its fatalities, BTW. Its magnitude was 5.7. That's the Richter scale for released energy, not the JMA scale for surface vibration--still, by all accounts, the quake and aftershocks were strong but not major. I assume they were of about the intensity at which Aneha's falsely certified buildings are expected to be at risk of failing.

One of the things commentators have been saying since yesterday is that Jiangxi Province was lucky in a sense: most of the houses that are falling down are only one or two stories, so injuries and fatalities have been minimal. The hotels and apartments we're talking about here in Japan are all, to my knowledge, multi-story structures. (At least one mentioned above is ten.) If, in the worst-case scenario, one of them collapsed, dozens of people could be buried in moments.

Fortunately, counts of deaths and injuries in eastern China don't seem to have ballooned overnight, so resources can probably be devoted to assisting those who have been displaced. It's cold at night now, so keeping people out of the elements will be the first priority.

While Atsushi and I were spending the weekend shopping, eating, and otherwise amusing ourselves, the news cycle kept going. The Hayabusa landed successfully on Itokawa (its second attempt) and gathered its samples; the project manager was apparently elated at the press conference, as well he should be. This article from the English Yomiuri gives more information about the mission itself and its significance.

If you (1) majored in poetry and (2) are a Madonna fan, life can be very cruel. It's not just that she sometimes produces lines that could have been written while she was waiting for a bus. (Imagine Madonna waiting for a bus! I'll wait for your peals of laughter to die down.) I actually don't mind the sort of time-honored placeholders that rhyme "burning fire" with "my desire" and the like. They've become conventions, and every art or craft form needs conventions.

Thing with Madge is, she's often ten times worse when she actually seems to want to say something of importance. I think my favorite thing on the new album is "Jump," which is one of her always-charming songs about navigating through life with pluck and determination. There's one on every Madonna album somewhere, and she always pours feeling into it.

This is the second verse of this year's model:

We learned our lesson from the start
My sisters and me
The only thing you can depend on
Is your family
Life's gonna drop you down
Like the limbs of a tree
It sways and it swings and it bends
until it makes you see

The top four lines are fine. Unimaginative, but sincere-sounding.

The bottom four? I just...I don't...I have this thing, okay? I can't read a poem or listen to lyrics without trying to interpret them, and I am getting a serious cognitive short circuit here. It sounds as if "life" is what's supposed to be parallel with "the limbs of a tree," but it could be "you" instead. Is she comparing you to dead limbs being dropped by the tree? Dead leaves? The latter would be nicely seasonal, but they don't have a whole lot of the life force she's obviously trying to project. Maybe she's telling her fans we're all fruits (as if we didn't already know)?

Or maybe we're supposed to be kitty cats who have climed up the tree and have to take the risk of jumping off even though the...uh...wind is blowing? That would make sense given the chorus--but what would the tree be making you see by swaying, of all things? Does swaying make trees more instructive, somehow? You'd think that would have stuck in the memory during life science class in eighth grade. And how much bending around does the poor tree have to do until you see whatever it is you're supposed to see? I guess the other possibility is that the verse is supposed to work as a whole, so it's a family tree we're dealing with. Do family trees sway? I thought she just said family was the only thing that was stable.

This song is going to be so much easier to handle in a disco while surrounded by cute boys, fueled by a vodka or two, and moving it under seizure-inducing colored lights.

The friends I went out with last night are architects, BTW, so you can imagine that the Aneha scandal was one of our topics of conversation. New revelations include an admission that the firm falsified earthquake resistance certification for more buildings than we already knew about. Another problem:

But officials still have not managed to identify all of the buildings in question. Since the investigation by the Chiba Prefectural Government was limited to structures listed in Aneha's notes, officials have been able to identify only about one-third of all buildings, and the location of 20 buildings is unknown.

In Wakayama, where one hotel came under suspicion, city officials said an inspection failed to find any problems. However, officials added that Aneha's name had not come up in any of the city's own data, leaving doubt over whether the firm was involved in the construction of any other buildings in the city.

Another building was located in Gifu Prefecture. Officials said there was no evidence to suggest that data had been falsified, but added that they could neither regard the building as safe nor dangerous.

I'll bet that last bit of PR-speak is of significant comfort to people are wondering whether their house or hotel room could come crashing down on their heads. Of the buildings that are known to be unsafe, there are already plans to demolish some:

Three contractors involved in the construction of 22 metropolitan buildings built using falsified structural-integrity data have decided to demolish 13 housing blocks the government fears may collapse if hit by a temblor registering upper 5 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of seven.

At press conferences held in Fukuoka and Tokyo on Tuesday, Hideaki Shinohara, 40, president of Hakata Ward, Fukuoka-based real estate company Shinoken Co. and Susumu Kojima, 52, president of Huser Management Ltd., said they would reimburse costs incurred by those who had to be evacuated, but were divided on the idea of buying back the condominiums.

...

On Wednesday, Sun Chuo Home Co. of Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture, said it would demolish two 10-story buildings and a nine-story building--a total of 177 units in the city.

Managing Director Keiji Kudo of the real estate company made the announcement during a briefing in Funabashi to the residents, during which he also offered his apologies to them.

He told the meeting, organized by the Funabashi municipal government, that his company had thought of reinforcing the three condominiums but that emergency inspections of their earthquake-resistance had led to the conclusion that they needed to be pulled down.

Not being an engineer, I'm not sure how weak a building has to be before you're better off tearing it down than trying to retrofit it. It doesn't sound good. It's been determined that one building, inspected by a team of architects from the Funabashi municipal government, has only 31% of the level of earthquake resistance required by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport. That sounds even worse.

The rating scale, BTW, apparently works like this:

On Tuesday, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said it will compile a unified set of standards to be applied when local municipalities order buildings that are at risk from temblors to be demolished or repaired.

The ministry decided on the step because standards differ from one municipality to another. Officials reasoned that residents in the apartments at risk should not be worried further.

A benchmark of 1 describes strength that will withstand a temblor of upper 6 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7. Structures will be graded in proportion to the benchmark. A reading of 0.5 means that there is a danger the structure will collapse in an earthquake of upper 5 on the seismic scale.

Those classified as between 0.3 and 0.2 in quake resistance will be ordered torn down.

Of the 14 completed buildings in which Aneha, 48, was involved, the ministry said Monday that 12 were rated at 0.5 or less in quake-resistance levels. One was classified with a 0.56 reading.

As my friends and I were remarking yet again last night, an upper 5 is a significant quake, but it's not really what you'd call major. Nor is it a rare occurrence if you take Japan as a whole. As Taro Akasaka commented here the other day, the good news is that a scandal like this rivets the attention and could help prevent such fraud in the future. The Japanese will gamely put up with all kinds of discomfort, but tell them their houses aren't safe in earthquakes, and you will know their wrath.

Well, we didn't end up doing Japanese last night. There was a hole-in-the-wall restaurant-bar in the neighborhood, whose decorative scheme involved a chair rail with back-lit Superballs, that we decided to cast our lot with. Vaguely Italian, with good salad and rather nice chicken. (The wine, unfortunately, was apparently a throwback to the mid-90s here, when the red in all but a handful of very expensive places was vinegary and served ice-cold. Having been chastened by years of bad experience, I opted for white.) Not exactly traditional, but companionable and moving for me, since the friends I went out with were the couple who hosted the Thanksgiving dinner we had during my first year in Japan, when we were in language school.

The American element was supplied after dinner, when we decided to go to Starbucks. In 2005, it doesn't get much more all-American than a triple-shot latte and cranberry bliss bar, huh? Of course, it's not a holiday weekend here, so I'm back at the office today. (Later, I mean.) Hope everyone else had a great holiday.

When discussing the possibility of an attack by the PRC on Taiwan, people don't seem to say a whole lot about Taiwan's own army. Usually, the discussion is framed in terms of whether the US or Japan would have to enter the fray and what that would mean. This (via Simon) isn't a blog I'm familiar with, but the writer seems to know what he's talking about, and what he discusses is, precisely, how ready is Taiwan to defend itself against the PRC? His conclusions ring true based on the societies he's describing. The PRC army is run the way you'd expect it to be: corruptly, nepotistically, back-scratchingly, and patronage-ly. The ROC army has morale problems because it's conscription-based and, apparently, plagued by a sense that it would lose in a war with the mainland:

The primary difference between the two forces is the quality of training. The training of the Chinese military has been described as ranging "from spotty to poor." Taiwan’s forces, on the other hand, train to Western standards under a cadre of American educated and trained officers and NCOs. They are generally considered to be proficient at the application of military force with the exceptions noted above.

I wonder whether Taiwan has ever asked Israel for guidance on these things. Israelis serve mandatory IDF stints, and they're surrounded by enemies who think the land is rightfully theirs. Maybe commitment is better in Israel precisely because it is attacked regularly? In any case, MeiZhongTai (spelled 米中台, says the author, for obvious reasons) has provided an interesting read on the topic.

Ooh! This is cool:

A Japanese space probe successfully landed and then departed from the surface of an asteroid 290 million kilometers (180 million miles) from Earth, despite an initial announcement that the attempt had failed, Japan's space agency said.

JAXA officials had said on Sunday that the Hayabusa probe, on a mission to briefly land on the asteroid Itokawa, collect material, and then bring it back to Earth, had failed to touch down after maneuvering within meters (yards) of the asteroid's surface.

However, on Wednesday JAXA said that data sent from Hayabusa confirmed that it had landed on the asteroid on Sunday for about half an hour. However, the probe failed to collect material, JAXA said.

The Hayabusa is making a go-round and will attempt a second landing.

Thanksgiving is one of those things I have a hard time explaining to Japanese people. Occasionally, someone here will very frankly say that he doesn't see how the United States can think of itself as a unified culture and country--we've only existed for two hundred years and are of mixed ethnicities. Only once, to a particularly obnoxious interlocutor, have I ever mischievously replied, "Well, your ancestors arrived here on boats at some point in the past, even if it was quite a bit longer ago. They were from Korea, by the way, weren't they? Ethnography is so fascinating, though I'm afraid I don't have the head for it."

Mostly, I just try to explain that America was a set of ideas about individuals before it was a country. (Japan has a lot of ideas about what it means to be Japanese, too, of course; but the sense of uniqueness springs from the genetic heritage.) How you can read things from the Bible, things people were writing in ancient Greece and Rome, and things people were writing later in Western Europe--and you can see the formation of the United States as picking up these threads of the ideals of personal liberty throughout Western history and weaving them together. How we're taught, from the time we're very young, that people risked death to get to the Americas, risked death to stay there and establish hard-scrabble settlements, and later risked death to separate themselves from a motherland that was mistreating them. We actually have their written records, often thin but still there. Nowadays, it's hard to drive around the East Coast and believe that anyone once thought it, of all things, impenetrable or uninhabitable. (If the first settlers could see New Jersey now, huh!) But that was before central air and GPS navigation.

Today, by the unexpected favor of the elements, I'm going to be able to have Thanksgiving dinner not only with other Americans but with Americans who are dear, long-time friends. We were in language school together a decade ago, and they returned to San Francisco in 2001 or so. They've just come back to Tokyo now. We haven't decided on a restaurant yet--this Thanksgiving may be light on turkey and cranberries and heavy on raw fish and shiso; but I plan to make something more conventional when Atsushi and I have our dinner on Saturday.

So I get two Thanksgiving celebrations, which is good because we have so many riches to think about. I'm thankful for our forebears' long-ago perseverance. I'm thankful for our soldiers' current perseverance. I'm thankful that the new Madonna album didn't suck. I'm thankful that my family's in good health. I'm thankful that, of the thousands of available men in Tokyo, I was the one Atsushi asked out five years ago.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Repercussions from the Aneha scandal are still being felt. Just about the only bright side here so far is that it's given rise to one of those super-long kanji compound strings that can be such fun: 耐震強度偽造問題 (taishin kyoudo gizou mondai: lit., "earthquake-resistance strength falsification scandal"). It's not a whole lot of comfort:

The Mie Transport (Sanco) Corporation (Tsu City) announced on 23 November that it was halting operation of two hotels managed by its Sanco Real Estate subsidiary, the Sanco Inn Kuwana Station (Kuwana City, Mie Prefecture) and the Sanco Inn Shizuoka (Shizuoka City), until their safety and earthquake resistance could be confirmed. The design office at Aneha had participated in planning the structures.

Additionally, the Nagoya Rail (Meitetsu) Group's Meitetsu Real Estate (Nagoya City) similarly halted operations of its Meitetsu Inn Kariya (Kariya City, Aichi Prefecture) because Aneha had handled calculations for its construction.

When Atsushi called from Kyushu yesterday, he related that one of the construction firms for whose buildings Aneha had produced the inspection reports known to be falsified, Kimura Construction (Yashiro City, Kumamoto Prefecture) has already essentially gone bankrupt. Yesterday morning, the shutters were closed over the windows and a note was posted in one of them stating that it was unable to pay its bills and was consulting with attorneys.

It's hard to explain just how chilling this is. It's not just that the Kanto Plain is an earthquake zone. In Tokyo, we're also right next to the ocean. Parts of the city are below sea level or built on filled-in creekbeds and such. Our houses are shoehorned in close together. We also have perceptible little tremors here every few weeks or so--constant reminders that the ground is unstable.

People don't sit around having morbid discussions about earthquakes all the time. At least, the people I know don't. But you do think about it when you're deciding how close you want that new bookcase to be to your sleeping head at night, or whether it's okay to have your emergency supplies several steps from the bed and the sofa where you spend the most time. Things like that. Word is that some of the buildings Aneha certified might collapse in earthquakes at a strong 5 on the JMA scale of surface vibration. That's strong, but a quake at that level isn't exactly unlikely to occur at some point soon, and the instruction that you get about earthquake preparation usually explicitly tells you to factor in the age and certified earthquake resistance of your building, for obvious reasons.

The Liberal Democratic Party celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its founding yesterday:

The Liberal Democratic Party marked the 50th anniversary of its founding Tuesday and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told a celebratory convention the party's mission now is to implement structural reforms on a par with the Meiji Restoration and the postwar economic miracle to cope with a changing world.

"In Japan's modern political history, two big reforms can be called 'miracles.' One was the Meiji Restoration of 1867-68, and the other is the reform that came 60 years ago after the defeat in World War II," said Koizumi, who is also LDP president, at the convention in Tokyo.

The Meiji Restoration marked the transfer of power from the feudalistic Tokugawa shogunate to a new central government, ushering in the Meiji Era (1868-1912) and forcing the country out of three centuries of isolation.

Koizumi noted that the two reforms were achieved after many people were killed.

"How can we, in a peaceful way, implement reforms to deal with ongoing change around the globe?" he asked. "That is the duty of this governing party as it marks the 50th anniversary of its founding."

The party also publicized some of its new platform, including one that's been both controversial and anticipated:

Secretary General Takebe officially unveiled the new party platform, the goals of which are a new ideology that embraces "contributing to the realization of world peace," "passage of constitutional revisions," "revision of fundamental education law," and "achieving small government."

Former Prime Minister Mori, chair of the party's drafting committee for constitutional revisions, announced proposed revisions that stipulate that Japan maintains a "self-defense army" and add new rights related to privacy and the environment.

I haven't seen anything about phrasing that would give Japan the right to participate in "collective defense" missions, which was the other big military matter under discussion in the drafting committee.

What I love most about Madonna as a lyricist is her inventiveness with language, the way she's constantly stretching her idiolect to accommodate new contours in her idiosyncratic inner world.

For example, this is the chorus to "I Love New York" from the new album:

Other cities always make me mad
Other places always make me sad
No other city ever made me glad
Except New York
I love New York

It's like you're privy to her most private thoughts, huh?

Okay, enough with the deadpanning. WTF? I could have written that. In fact, I think I did write it--in first grade when Miss Cramer gave us an assignment that was, like, "Write a poem describing where you'll live after you grow up and decide you're too fabulous for the Lehigh Valley." Maybe Lourdes was helping Mommy at work that day?

Madonna's intelligence is generally, uh, of the non-verbal variety, and that's okay--she's a musician and dancer primarily. Her lyrics are almost never graceful--she likes clunky metaphors and lines that scan dicily--but when she's at her best, they're punchy and immediate. Frequently (as above), she's at both her best and her worst in the space of the same song. Of course, maddeningly enough, I love "I Love New York" to death. It's just, I swear I can feel that chorus making me dumber every time I hear it.

To complete the set of contentious meetings this weekend, Prime Minister Koizumi met with Russia's President Vladimir Putin:

In summit talks Monday, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to expand their economic ties but broke no new ground on the Northern Territories dispute.

Japanese officials described the Tokyo talks as frank and thorough. Both sides seemed happier skirting the contentious territorial issue--apparently for fear of having to make drastic concessions that would not win public approval at home.

The two sides signed 12 agreements ranging from energy development and telecommunications to fighting terrorism and promoting tourism.

...

Analysts suggested that Moscow feels it has the upper hand right now because the Russian economy stands to benefit from high oil prices. In addition, a swell in nationalistic sentiment in Russia may make it more difficult for Putin to give ground on the dispute.

After nine years here, I have to wonder: When and where is nationalist sentiment ever not swelling in Asia and its environs?

The Nikkei editorial on the meeting this morning added uncharacteristically little. Besides the dispute over islands, the negotiations for a Siberian pipeline didn't produce an agreement as firm as Japan would have liked.

Joe e-mailed me a week or so ago to say that the local paper where I grew up, The Morning Call, was getting a new publisher. It didn't mean anything much to me--I no longer live in Emmaus, and it's doubtful that the publisher cast a Katherine Graham-like cultural shadow, in any case. I did go back to the Call's website, though. Among its blogs is one by a guy from the Poconos who's stationed in Iraq. As you may imagine, he doesn't get to post much, and he seems to be in a hurry when he does, but it's interesting:

Yes, there are women here and after talking only with guys it is nice sometimes to talk to a woman. Female soldiers are mainly at the brigade level and the medical field. Recently we actually requested one for a mission. It met with great resistance. See, bringing women along on the mission actually helps a lot. We, male soldier, don't interact with the women in Iraq because of their culture but often come across them when we go into homes. Having a female soldier there to do searches on the Iraqi women if necessary and to hlep out with information gathering. The women of Iraq are very shy, but when there are female soldiers around they seem very eager to talk. One incident the other day a 8 year old boy was crying when we went into the home and our female soldier put her arm around him at what seemed to be the perfect time and he instantly stopped crying and felt comforted. We believe that this helps extremely with getting to know the Iraqi people and help them see us not as an invading force but as real people trying to help.

That was posted on 11 September, BTW.

The Harrisburg correspondent runs one of the paper's other blogs. I'm not sure he's quite the wit he appears to think he is, but lamentably few of us are. In his favor, he comments on federal as well as state legislators, meaning that he keeps an eye on how Specter and Santorum are voting.

There's a post I've kind of been meaning to make for the last few months, and given the fraternal love electrifying the atmosphere in the US Congress and blogosphere, this seems like a good time to make it.

I've been getting an increasing number of hits from people looking for information about Japanese defense. Quite a few of them are from university and US military ISPs, but I assume even they are mostly from people who are just kind of curious about what's going on here.

There's always the possibility that someone doing Real Research is blundering into me, though. If so, I hope this is obvious, but just in case: I'm not a moron, but I'm also not a political scientist. Still less am I a military strategist. I tend to choose each story I post about for one of a couple of reasons.

One is that Prime Minister Koizumi, while hardly perfect, has taken real political risks in so firmly and ringingly allying himself with the Bush administration in the WOT. A lot of Americans--educated general readers like me--seem not to pay much attention to Japan now that its period of dizzying economic hypergrowth has been over for fifteen years, but the Pacific Rim is a region of extreme importance to US interests. Japan's loyalty to us as an ally and the evolution of its own military policy matter a great deal, and I think they deserve more notice.

Another factor I consider when posting is that the usual media line about studious, slave-to-tradition, unfailingly safe, enlightened-social-democratic, mysteries-of-Zen Japan is grossly reductive. I'm sure most foreign correspondents make a good-faith effort to report things accurately, but you don't have to live here long to realize that some of them simply don't know what they don't know and can't formulate the right questions. When a story shows a side of Japan that doesn't fit the usual pattern, I often find it worth calling attention to.

Finally, there's a ridiculous idea abroad in the world that Americans are provincial while everyone else is cosmopolitan and intellectual. That kind of crap is bad enough when it comes from Everyone Else; when I hear other Americans buying into it, it drives me crazy. Japan, despite an educational system that's the envy of much of the world, displays plenty of what we now call cultural insensitivity...and sometimes plain ignorance. I think it's helpful to remind people that that kind of thing is a human, not an American, problem.

I might also say a word or two about my sources. Japan's tabloidish news magazines are frequently the first to report major scandals and such. I don't cite them because it's generally necessary to wait to see whether the major dailies pick up on a story, anyway, to find out whether it has any substance or was just a sensational rumor. The dailies are a little slower, but if there's meat in there somewhere, it's in their interest to get to it eventually. And they're usually far ahead of Reuters or CNN. If a link goes to a Japanese story, the translation that appears here is my own. That means you have to trust me; but I have several readers, at least one of whom comments regularly, who also read Japanese fluently. If I'm parsing anything incorrectly, I have no doubt that it will be pointed out to me immediately and triumphantly. (Don't make that face at me, boys. You know it's true.)

One more thing for those reading from the military: We support you. There's a lot of jabber lately about polls and yanking people out of Iraq by next Friday and stuff, but the Americans (and a handful of English and Japanese people) I know believe what you're doing, whatever your individual assignments happen to be, is worthwhile and meaningful. If the President says you're not done, you're not done. Thanks for staying on the job. We all owe you. I don't say that nearly often enough.

Added on 22 November: From the Grandstand kindly links this post and adds a Thanksgiving-specific message for our military folks to my general one.

Added on 23 November: Thanks to the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler for the link also. He adds his own thanks to our soldiers.

Darn. Too bad:

A Japanese research probe failed to touch down on an asteroid Sunday after maneuvering within meters to collect surface samples, JAXA, Japan's space agency said.

The Hayabusa probe, which botched a rehearsal earlier this month, was on a mission to briefly land on the asteroid, collect material, then bring it back to Earth.

When Hayabusa was 40 meters above the asteroid Itokawa, it dropped a small object as a touchdown target, then descended to 17 meters, said officials from Japan's space agency, JAXA.

At that point, ground control lost contact with the probe for about three hours, the officials said.

"Hayabusa reached extremely close, but could not make the landing," said JAXA spokesman Toshihisa Horiguchi, adding that the reason for the failure was unknown.

At least this project was launched successfully. Not all of them have been over the last few years, though normally I think it was satellites that were involved. This wasn't a military mission, of course, but Japan is justifiably keeping an eye on China's increased military spending, and visible tech screw-ups like this don't look good, either internally or externally.

I know this question is going to sound redundant coming from a homosexual, but what sort of man wants his children to enter the world through Christina Aguilera's baby chute? Sheesh.

DPJ leader Seiji Maehara spoke about ROK President Roh on Asahi Television this weekend:

On an Asahi television program on 20 November, DPJ party chief Seiji Maehara expressed the following judgment about the pursuit of a resolution sought by South Korean President Mu-Hyon Roh to the issues of Takeshima (Korean: Dokuto) and history textbooks: "I'm not sure what Mr. Roh is thinking--telling us to find a resolution to the Takeshima problem when they (Korea) are already actually governing it. On the textbook problem also, hasn't he [displayed] a shallow understanding of Japan's approval system?"

I think all the chumminess probably comes from their shared genetic heritage.

Some of the buildings with faked earthquake code certifications have been identified. You can guess the result:

Bureaucrats were busy taking calls from anxious residents Saturday following news reports of falsified structural strength data for 21 buildings in Tokyo and in Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures.

In Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture, structural strength reports of five apartment buildings--including two that have residents--were falsified, it was revealed by the Construction and Transport Ministry on Friday.

Seven officials of the Funabashi municipal government's building guidance division came to work Saturday to respond to residents' inquiries. They were kept busy answering a spate of phone calls from residents from about 8 a.m.

...

However, a ward official said: "We've also been waiting for the result of a reassessment of the building's structural strength from the ministry. We can't say whether the building is safe or dangerous at the moment."

Officials dealing with the issue in other municipalities also were having a hard time. One of them asked, "How can we explain to residents when we don't have any data?" Another asked, "Should I just tell the residents to evacuate their apartments?"

Oy. Another big, if (slightly) less urgent question: Who's going to be stuck with the blame when the dust settles? (Kind of a ghoulish figure of speech in this case, but I couldn't resist):

"Basically, the first-class architect, who holds a government certified qualification and acted dishonestly, bears heavy responsibility," Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara said at a press conference Friday in reference to 48-year-old Aneha, of Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, who owns Aneha Architect Design Office.

But Ishihara went on to say the government also was to blame because it failed to properly oversee eHomes, the Tokyo private organization that checked documents filed by Aneha on behalf of the government.

"I think it [eHomes] didn't read the documents properly and was slack about issuing approvals," Ishihara said.

"As the government commissioned the task to the private sector, the government should have properly guided the private sector," he said.

"The government should be blamed for the scandal," he added.

But the government is reluctant to consider providing assistance to the condominium residents.

"Basically, it is an issue that occurred as a result of private economic activities," a senior Construction and Transport Ministry official said. "As it is clear that the cause of the scandal was a deliberate falsification of documents, it is difficult for the government to help them."

The government has asked local governments to provide public housing for the residents, but moving costs and rent likely will have to be paid by the residents themselves.

...

Aneha, who provided the falsified reports, said the falsification is easy to detect if one does a simple calculation, but eHomes failed to spot it.

Apparently, so did the government agencies.

So I got this e-mail from my buddy Alan yesterday, asking whether I had any advice on improving reading comprehension in Japanese. It seemed odd. For one thing, his characteristic "Hiya darlin'" salutation was missing, and for another, he essentially works as a translator. If my reading comprehension is better than his--big if--it's not by much. It's certainly not by enough for him to be asking my advice about improving it.

But, having been asked, I wrote a paragraph of very earthy bitch-snark about the gross guy who'd been hitting on him when we were out a few nights ago and then a paragraph about reading fluently. Then I did what everyone who sends a lot of work-related e-mail does out of force of habit before clicking on "Send": I checked the address line. Whoops! The message had come from a different Alan, a reader with whom I've corresponded a few times who's studying Japanese in the States and who most assuredly was not sitting on the stool next to me being come on to by a falling-down-drunk guy in his 50s on Friday night. So I carefully excised the paragraph of bitch-snark and sent the rest along, thus sparing a fortunate reader a serious surprise in his inbox.

The surprise Atsushi got in his mailbox yesterday, on the other hand, was intentional. He's been worked to death lately, but he still makes time to come home at least once every third weekend, so I thought I'd get him a new business card case. You know, so even if he's meeting with trying clients, he can have a little reminder that I'm thinking about him. While I was at Seibu, it occurred to me that I forget to bring my own business cards places all the time--that constitutes a real problem in Japan, where exchanging them can be a multiple-times-a-day event--so I may as well pick one up for myself, too. The idea of his-and-his matching card cases struck me as a bit on the cute side, but...well, this is Japan. Cute rules. I absent-mindedly told the saleswoman to wrap them both as presents, and she looked at me askance. Probably thought they were Christmas presents for two girlfriends who don't know about each other.

Atsushi's officemates, on the other hand, will doubtless assume that the sudden appearance of an expensive new business card case is yet more evidence that he has a secret lady friend. A few years ago, when he brought Mozart chocolates back as his souvenir gift from our trip to Prague and Vienna, his colleagues joked that he must have gone with a chick because, as a man, he wouldn't have known about them. (Too precious, I guess? But the travel guides all tell you what the proper face-maintaining souvenirs to bring back to Japan are, and I would assume most single men just kind of get whatever's at the top of the list. I can't imagine Mozart chocolates aren't at the top of the Austria list, even if you don't do Salzburg, though I didn't really look. My own office got the Empress Elisabeth chocolates--I like the apricot and marzipan together--but they've known all about me from day one, so no eyebrows were raised. Need I mention that if we'd brought back anything but Mozart or Sissi for our gay friends, our status would never have recovered?)

I wonder whether the Dominican Republic--I've mentioned that I have a meeting there next month, yeah?--has any Japan-ready souvenir candy things. A sugar cane theme, maybe? If it's been a resort center long enough, getting them shipped back ahead of me so I don't have to carry them might be easy, but I don't think it has. Since I'm going home to the States, too, I'll probably bring back Jelly Bellys. They went over big when Atsushi and I brought them back two years ago. I have no idea why; they're just jelly beans, for crying out loud, even if you can mix them together to taste like pears poached in port with crème chantilly and slivered almonds, or whatever.

Speaking of desserts based on fall fruits, I have to think of something to make for Thanksgiving this weekend. Atsushi can't be home on Thursday, of course, but he's coming on Saturday. Our first Thanksgiving together was in 2001, so it's been obvious from the get-go that I'm not blasé about it the way I am other holidays. Maybe I'll even look into getting a turkey, though convincing Atsushi to take out a second mortgage might take some doing. And I'd have to dismember it to get it into the oven. But considering what the Pilgrims went through, the trial of shoehorning a farmed turkey into a little portable oven is hardly worth fussing over.

I hope no one has read this far expecting me to make a point. I've been a bit nettled lately by people praising Atsushi and me for maintaining a long-distance relationship and vaguely thought that might come up organically here, but we seem to have ended up on Plimouth Plantation exchanging business cards and faking Indian cornmeal pudding from three flavors of Jelly Bellys, so maybe I should save that for another post. (Yes, by the way, this is exactly what living with me is like.)

Wow. The revelations in this case just keep sounding worse and worse:

An architect falsified reports on the structural strength of 20 apartment complexes and a hotel, putting hundreds of residents at risk of injury or death in the event of a large earthquake, officials said.

The buildings are located in Tokyo, Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures, according to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

Two of the completed apartment complexes could collapse in an earthquake with an intensity of upper 5 on the Japanese scale of 7, ministry officials said.

...

In the past five years, Aneha worked on the strength reports for about 90 buildings, but he said he faked the reports for only the 21 buildings.

The land ministry will file a complaint against Aneha with the Metropolitan Police Department.

"We will adopt a stern manner in dealing with the architect and others who were involved in the illegal acts," said National Public Safety Commission Chairman Tetsuo Kutsukake, who has temporarily taken over as land minister for Kazuo Kitagawa, who is visiting Laos and China.

When asked about compensation for the residents living at buildings that need reconstruction or reinforcements, Kutsukake said: "Because this is a private matter, we will not be obliged to provide public funds. If the residents should wish to move out, we'd like to take measures, including helping them find accommodation at public housing or other facilities."

The numbers there are a little more specific than what we heard at the end of last week, particular the strength of a quake in which the buildings could fail. Upper 5 is not a minor little quake, but it's well within the realm of possibility for a seismically active region such as Kanto. Perhaps in practical terms this isn't as bad as it sounds; there are plenty of flimsy old wood-frame-and-corrugated-tin apartment buildings around Tokyo and environs. It's not as if these falsified inspection reports made possible the only unsafe buildings in the area. Still, they should open a serious can of Hammurabi on this guy's ass. Even if he wasn't the actual builder, he was the one whose job it was to deem buildings up to or not up to code, and people make their emergency plans based on the quake-resistance of the building they live in.

Somehow, it's easier to read about this stuff in Japanese. Drains some of the sting away:

On the night of 18 November, the lower house of the United States Congress voted down a resolution proclaiming that "it is necessary to end the stationing of US troops in Iraq immediately." The vote proved to be wind in the sails for President Bush, who opposes immediate withdrawal, but both the Republican and Democratic parties are thinking ahead to next year's midterm elections, and the haggling continued up to the final [vote].

You know, if congressmen want to be arguing over the WOT, instead of taking potshots at each other over who's a good Marine, how about looking into air security? Port security? Border security? Many of these characters have points of vulnerability right in the middle of their districts that their constituents--and by extension they--should be hopping mad about. On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that most of them are any better able to assess whether Iraq has stabilized enough to govern itself than the rest of us can.

Today the meeting was between Koizumi and the ROK's President Roh:

On the evening of 18 November, Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi met with South Korean President Mu-Hyon Roh in Pusan for approximately 30 minutes. The President expressed strong opposition to "the pilgrimages by the Prime Minister and multiple other politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine," which are "a provocation to Korea." The Prime Minister once again explained, "Those pilgrimages represent both a self-examination with respect to [Japanese conduct during] the war and a gesture of respect to those who died." However, the argument established no common ground; the planned visit by President Roh to Japan within the year could not be agreed upon.

For this region, that's relatively mellow, though most of the serious animosity usually isn't vented in face-to-face meetings. Of course, heads of state in this part of the world have a habit of refusing to visit each other...well, to visit Japan. (Balloon-Juice had a post the other day that made a few not-bad points about the dynamic between us and the PRC but struck me as a little bit flibbertigibbety and too-touchy about what constitutes a serious diplomatic insult in these parts.)

So Japan has managed to alarm both of its closest neighbors with which it has strong economic ties. Of course, there doesn't seem to have been anything from North Korea, but just you wait: the UN, presumably anxious to quell rumors that it thinks it was rather charming of the DPRK to kidnap fifteen Japanese nationals from their native beaches, condemned the late-70s abductions yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before--you know, all those UN announcements that we should play nice tend to run together. Kim's bound to have a reaction to that.

The extension of the SDF deployment in Iraq looks like a done deal--this Nikkei report is a little firmer than the last one I saw yesterday:

At the Japan-US meeting between heads of state on 16 November, Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi revealed, for all intents and purposes, that the deployment of SDF personnel in Iraq, which comes up against its existing end date in December, will be extended. The extension is based on a judgement that, since other countries contributing to the multi-national force will keep their troops stationed there, the US will not be understanding if Japan alone withdraws. However, the UK and Australian forces that serve as escorts for the SDF are set to be withdrawn in May of next year. The [US] president expressed appreciation for Japan's support; the prime minister, in the meantime, is already looking to set a withdrawal date.

"Japan, as a member of international society, must continue to support Iraq towards its goal of standing on its own."

With that roundabout utterance, the prime minister conveyed to the president that the troop deployment would be extended.

President Bush is in Kyoto and met with Prime Minister Koizumi today. The Nikkei reports on Xinhua's reaction:

On 16 November, the PRC state news agency Xinhua reported of Prime Minister Koizumi and US President Bush's meeting that "they emphasized the importance of the Japan-US alliance" and displayed alarm as it related such items as Koizumi's mention of the importance of US military personnel stationed in Japan.

The Asahi has a more wide-ranging rundown, including this related point:

The Japanese prime minister also brushed aside criticism that he has focused too heavily on U.S. relations while ignoring ties with Japan's Asian neighbors.

"There are some people who believe that Japan should not pursue its relations with the United States too far, and if that creates some negative elements, then Japan should strengthen friendly ties with other countries.

"But that is not my thinking."

Bush also had a message for China, saying leaders should not be afraid to give freedom to their society.

The U.S. president went on to say that the Liberal Democratic Party's landslide victory in the Sept. 11 Lower House election underscores the strength of democracy in Japan.

Koizumi and Bush confirmed that their countries will work in close cooperation so that China becomes a constructive partner.

The evening edition of the Nikkei has a picture of the two at Kinkakuji, which unfortunately doesn't appear to be on-line. This is the only one I can find posted.

A friend says he thought I might enjoy this bit of a Houston Chronicle editorial (which is fileted by James Taranto in the 15 November Best of the Web). I assume he means "enjoy" approximately in the sense of "be driven to punch through the monitor by." This is the operative paragraph from the editorial:

Inner city black voters in Harris County, many of whom have long experience with the denial of civil rights, favored the marriage amendment by an even higher majority than the general Harris County voting population. Black discomfort with homosexual marriage is rooted less in conscious discrimination than in religious belief, but support for the amendment brought blacks into incongruous accord with members of the Ku Klux Klan, whose members rallied in Austin in support of Proposition 2.

I don't agree that the civil rights and gay rights movements are comparable all the way down--and what civil rights have black people been denied for the last three or so decades, one wonders?--but I do think that gays and other minorities are very similar in the ceaseless way our soi-disant allies manage to patronize us. As Taranto says, "If you're a person of pallor and you oppose same-sex marriage, you're guilty of 'conscious discrimination,' whereas if you're black, you're following 'religious belief' and presumably discriminating unconsciously. Oh, and does this mean people who favor same-sex marriage are religious unbelievers? Seems to us the Houston Chronicle has just managed to insult pretty much everybody."

As a homosexual unbeliever who doesn't favor same-sex marriage, I think the most insulting part is unmentioned by Taranto: the attribution of any opposition to that boneless PC animating force, "discomfort." People can't believe things are right or wrong, or constructive or destructive, anymore, apparently--the only opposition sympathetic characters are to be permitted is decorously vague unease.

I was hoping someone would get around to saying this so I didn't have to (it's Dale Franks posting):

So we're starting to see articles like this one from Khaled Duzdar, the Palestinian co-director of the strategic affairs unit at the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information in Jerusalem. Now, I don't know anything about Mr. Duzdar. For all I know, he's been a beacon of sanity and peace in the Arab Muslim world for all his adult life. But there's something about his article that strikes me as...odd.

Last week's suicide attacks against innocent civilians in Amman shocked us all. It is unclear what message the suicide bombers were conveying and there is no logical cause justifying such insane acts. What could the aim of such attacks be, and what were the mad executioners aiming to achieve? For some time, they have claimed they are defenders and combatants of Islam and the Muslim world. However, Islam has no use for such people and their acts and ideologies - if we believe they have any ideology at all. They promote nothing more than killing and aim only to bring about a state of lawlessness and instability in the Middle East.

Yeah. All of the sudden, terrorist acts have gone from the acts of frustrated national aspirations on the part of a helpless people to wondering, "What could the aim of such attacks be?" Yep. All of the sudden, terrorism is just incomprehensible.

No kidding. For years, many--if not most--of the Arab and Muslim condemnations of terrorism have come with qualifications on the order of "But let's remember the sense of rage and powerlessness such people feel" or "But their bodies are the only weapons they have to fight with." (To be fair, Palestinian-sympathizing Westerners have taken the same tack, too.)

It's all very strange. There are certain things that generally good-hearted, disciplined, civilized people simply do not do when they're cracking under pressure. Chilly premeditated murder of dozens of random people peaceably going about their business is one of them--even, I would submit, if the killing conveys a clear "message." I was saddened and outraged by the bombings in Jordan this weekend, but like Dale, I'm having a little trouble getting myself worked up into extra-special shock, grief, and epistemic crisis just because it was Amman and not Tel Aviv that was hit.

At Romeo Mike's Gumption, Ross notes an example of psycho-PC-ism via the Telegraph:

"Paintings of traditional wedding scenes have been removed from a register office in case they offend gay couples, it has emerged.

The pictures at Liverpool Register Office are being replaced with landscapes ahead of the introduction of "gay weddings" later this year."

Two problems with this. If homos are supposed to be genuinely equal then we should be able to meld in with the mainstream. Ditching traditions to humour us defeats the purpose, so the removal of the pictures is actually the offensive part.

Secondly, it's also offensive that the Telegraph has to include a pic of a couple of queens kissing to illustrate gay marriage. Ordinarily, news photos of newlyweds have them smiling proudly at the camera. That photo only serves to reinforce the stereotype of minorities' 'differences' requiring 'special' treatment.

Question 1: Did the guy on the right burst into tears immediately after the photo was snapped and yell, "It's our wedding, darling--couldn't you have worn something more dignified than a turtleneck?!"

Question 2: Given the Telegraph's generally approving spin, what's up with the scare quotes around "weddings"? Does it (editorially) agree that gay ceremonies aren't genuine weddings? I'm just wondering.

Question 3: Why is the word gay so listless and dull, ending in that irresolute diphthong, while the insulting words for homosexuals can be written and spoken with such flair? Ross is presumably being sardonic in using homos and queens, but stripped of meaning associations and possible playground resonances, aren't they just cooler words? Personally, I'm very partial to faggot--I just can't help it. It's one of those words you can eject from the mouth with a little explosion, whether of playfulness or of anger. It is impossible to utter the word gay in an aesthetically pleasing manner. A real pity.

BTW, not quite on the same topic, but along those lines, an acquaintance asked me--very earnestly, which was what made it funny--a little while ago, "So, Sean, you call everyone 'honey.' And [my close friend, who's English] Alan calls everyone 'darling.' Is that, like, some kind of American-vs.-British thing?"

Ghost of a Flea has clearly not met my boyfriend, who would not only not be fleeing for his life but would be furrowing his brow and saying, "Hmmmm. Fire truck's out of the way. Hon, how about standing a little bit off to the left there?"

(Of course I'm just kidding, dearest.)

This morning, a M 7.1 earthquake rumbled the ocean floor off the coast of Japan, spreading fear and panic among normally-placid sea anemone and vent-dwelling tubeworm populations and raising troubling concerns about the ability of local ecosystems to cope with such disturbances without comprehensive planning at the seabed-wide level.

Okay, maybe it didn't. Being a child of the media age has kind of conditioned me to think of everything as a crisis. Well, I've also had people asking me whether I'm okay.

The quake was 300 miles offshore--and the focus was buried unusually deep. I didn't feel it at all, and the reports on the websites of the major dailies are buried by this point--the Princess's wedding and the Koizumi cabinet's budget capers, you know. There was a tsunami warning, but it was downplayed even as it was being made.

Quick Japan news: the ROK Foreign Minister took a swipe at Japan for the Yasukuni Shrine issue at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Pusan:

Ban stated, "Japanese leaders have not been capable of squarely acknowledging past history; their pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine are undesirable." While he avoided mentioning Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi and Foreign Minister [Taro] Aso by name, he did criticize the policies of the Japanese side.

I believe that Ban is usually referred to as the "Foreign Minister" in English, though the kanji title would mean something closer to "Minister of Diplomacy and Trade." Whatever his title, and however generic his statement, it is evidence that the ROK is not softening toward Japan on the Yasukuni issue--not surprising, given that Koizumi's new cabinet includes a new member or two known for nationalist leanings.

...

The seven federal ministries asked to cut their budgets have come up with only ¥28.9 billion of the requested ¥630 billion. That's a whopping 4.6%. Let's hope the regional government bodies don't spend it all in one place.

...

The government has established a central processing center for information about possible money laundering and financing of terrorism.

...

Has anyone heard anything about Minerva? Minerva is the probe that was launched off the Hayabusa spacecraft and was supposed to land on the Asteroid Itokawa. Apparently, the Hayabusa was ascending too fast and so the Minerva's trajectory was screwed up--such aerospace geeks who may be reading this will probably be wincing at that description, but I was only half-paying attention to NHK when the announcement was made. There didn't seem to be a way to get the Minerva back on course, so they were fearing it might be lost. I hope not. Japan's aerospace programs have had a lot of embarrassing failures over the last several years.

Yoo-hoo! Madonna? You're a native speaker of English. STOP OVER-PRONOUNCING YOUR Rs LIKE AN EXCESSIVELY EARRRRRRNEST ESL STUDENT! Okay?

I did like this part, though: "If you don't like my attitude then you can F off / Just go to Texas--isn't that where they golf?" Heh-heh. Funny.

Audrey...whoops!...Jeff has been posting at Beautiful Atrocities with some regularity again. Here's the latest. Hilarious.

You may recall that even of the federal ministries have been instructed to cut their budgets for subsidies; the odds are that they won't reach their targets:

The deadline passed at noon today for responses from seven federal ministries to a proposal to cut a collective ¥630 billion from their budgets, as apportioned by the Prime Minister. By noon, the number of submissions was stalled at two: from the Ministry of Economics, Trade, and Industry and from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The other five, such as the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, are set to submit their proposals this afternoon, but [their proposed cuts] are not expected to meet the ¥630 billion objective. The Prime Minister's office indicates that it expects things to be settled up by the end of the month, but the journey promises to be rough.

I haven't seen an update since that story was posted at 13:00, and if there was one on NHK, it was delivered while I was out of the room.

*******

So this whole bird flu thing? Gives me deep thoughts. Like, you know, what if we all totally get sick and die? We've certainly been hearing about it, though there was nothing that seemed interested enough to post. Today, the Ministry of Health, Labor...oops! Labour--the u is very important...the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare announced that it's going to take a six-phase approach to preparation:

On 14 November, the MHLW unveiled a "plan of action" that stipulated a phase-six policy to contend with new forms of influenza; the risk that such forms will appear has increased. [The policy provides for] coordination if certain measures become necessary: the stockpiling of antiviral drugs will be increased on a large scale; in the event of a global outbreak, schools will be closed and large assemblies banned, commuting to workplaces will be restricted, and citizens will be instructed to restrict their movements by international air and maritime transport. Taking the MLHW's directive into account, prefectural governments will begin generating independent proposals [for their own local policies] in earnest.

The worst-case scenario, as projected at the moment, is one fourth of the Japanese population infected.

*******

Among other threats to health, there've been a lot of interesting homicides in the news here lately. One of the more chilling is one that, fortunately for the intended victim, didn't come off. The chilling part is that the plan could be put into motion in the first place:

The arrest of a 16-year-old girl who allegedly tried to poison her mother to death with thallium raises the question of how the student was able to obtain the poison so easily even under tightened controls following similar crimes.

The investigation by the Shizuoka prefectural police has so far found that the high school student in Izunokuni possessed various kinds of chemicals. About 30 substances, including thallium, were seized during the police search of her room at her home.

The girl told the police she had bought the thallium at a nearby drugstore.

However, the Poisonous and Deleterious Substances Control Law bans drugstores from selling such poisonous substances to those aged under 18.

It also requires buyers to submit a form listing their name, address, occupation, the amount of chemical they have bought and other items when they purchase such substances.

The Health, Labor [!] and Welfare Ministry instructs drugstores to check buyers' identity and ask them why they want to buy toxic substances.

Someone apparently read Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse.

In another archetypal case--this time with a more tragic ending--a high school girl in one of the outer municipalities in Tokyo Metro was killed by a classmate with a crush that spiraled out of control:

A schoolboy accused of killing 15-year-old Yua Koyama last week because she had gone cold on him had been seen gazing longingly at her suburban Tokyo apartment for hours some weeks ago, a witness told the police.

The 16-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, also told investigators that he burst into the Koyama home without prior notice as soon as Yua's mother, Kimiko, left for work on Thursday, the day he is alleged to have killed the fellow student from his high school.

Police have transferred the boy to the Hachioji Branch of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, where he awaits his fate.

NHK reported the day after the killing that a neighbor had heard noises coming from the apartment, including the girl's screams for help, but assumed that she and her mother were having a fight.

Atsushi was here this weekend, one of his short stays--in the door at 11 a.m. on Saturday and on the train back to the airport at 5 p.m. on Sunday. But he's been stressed lately, so it was good to be able to attend to him, even if only for thirty-six hours. We went to the Meiji Shrine, where the leaves hadn't yet turned but the wooded walk was beautiful as always. Saturday night, we went out with two friends for Korean barbecue.

Actually, come to think of it, we went for drinks at a Scottish-themed pub first, so I guess we were subconciously working a peninsular-peoples-persecuted-by-their-more-aggressive-neighbors kind of thing. When I asked where the toilet was, one of the bar guys (Japanese) gave me the most frankly lascivious once-over I've gotten in quite a while--and it wasn't a gay bar, BTW. Must be the influence of that fiery Celtic spirit.

Anyway, about more literal kinds of fire: Several months back Japundit linked to this NYT article about Korean restaurants in New York, and it made me wonder anew why they haven't caught on more. That Korean food in Korea is way hotter than what most Westerners are going to want to contend with isn't a difficult problem to address, after all. And unlike the Japanese food that was made fashionable, which emphasized raw flesh and bizarre creatures of the deep, Korean barbecue and rice dishes are comparatively, comfortingly familiar-looking to Americans. Oh, and they're delicious--the stuff in Japan is toned down, but it's still spicy enough to be stimulating. Great cold-weather food. And as far as the service goes...uh, complaints about brusque service in New York? Whatever.

The one problem I can see is when the hot stone bowls and open-fire cooking hit America's skittish-schoolmarm safety obsession. On Saturday, Atsushi, our friends, and I sat around a gas-lit brazier in the middle of the table, spreading sliced beef, chicken, and vegetables over the metal grid. It was all you can drink. We drank. Well, except for Atsushi, who doesn't.

So after an hour or so, there were three tipsy fags flinging rounds of beef tongue rather sloppily over the flames. (I was reminded--frankly but not at all lasciviously--that I was the only one with hair on the backs of his hands that might get singed. A little lasciviousness might actually have been nice at this point, given that the reminder was coming from my boyfriend, but he's not big on even mild PDAs.) A lot of those last pieces of kalbi were probably just a little more well-done than they might have been under more alert supervision, but hey, it all goes to the same place. Good weekend, and Atushi gets to come home again the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Should I be worried about the facility with which Eric can unravel truly loopy states of mind? Our junior senator in Pennsylvania kind of wigged this weekend:

Santorum, a conservative Republican and usually a strong Bush ally, said the unpopularity of the war should be shared between the White House and the media.

"Certainly, mistakes were made," Santorum said of the war's conduct. "But that's a criticism you can make of every conflict."

...

"Terror is nothing more than a tactic," Santorum said.

He noted Bush recently redefined the conflict as a war on Islamic fundamentalists.

Bush, however, used the "war on terror" moniker in his speech at Tobyhanna.

I've always thought the designation "War on Terror" was silly-sounding. Perhaps it might have been better if the Bush administration had sat around for a few extra days, with ad hoc committees and posterboards and magic markers, and devised a better one. But it's been around for years now, it's basically serviceable at signalling that we're fighting anyone who would resort to a particular unconscionable low, and we all know what it means. Making a dramatic point of dissing it makes you sound kind of lame.

Eric writes:

Santorum has my sympathy, as it must be tough facing a pro-life Democrat. But if he runs to the right of himself and Casey holds the center, I'm not sure there are enough Toomey-style voters to carry it for him.

There don't seem to be. While the hard right has its complaints about Bush, I'm not sure it's going to see back-stabbing as the right approach. Those who aren't so hard-right are likely to be even less receptive.

Today, Alice's teatray offers this slice of very good seedcake:

I've finally figured out what I want to say about Maureen Dowd's argument about most men only marrying women who are younger/ poorer/ dumber than themselves: (a) what else is new, and (b) why would anybody want to marry "most men" unless they are distinctly average themselves and therefore perfectly happy with the status quo anyway?

...

It isn't easy to find a fantastic life-partner. The best things in life are not supposed to come free, you have to work at them. But not necessarily in the way you might expect: attending hundreds of singles-meets might be part of the job, but more important than that is living your life as well as you can, reaching out to other human beings in an attempt to contribute to the world on a personal as well as professional level, and stretching your own preconceptions and seeking out life's challenges rather than shrinking from change.

It's a real head-scratcher when people who aren't looking for ways to be thoughtful and interesting wonder where all the thoughtful and interesting people are. Why would they be hanging out around you? one wants to ask.

I think Dowd may have some other problems, though.

She was on Larry King this morning; somehow, I don't think I'd ever seen her live. Well, the show was taped, but I mean, I knew what she looked like from her photograph, but I didn't remember her voice and mannerisms.

Oh, my.

I suppose I should have expected this--in fact, once I saw her, it all made sense. Maureen Dowd is a major tease. It was so obvious I giggled into my apple streudel. She flipped her hair. She simpered. She did that thing where girls cast their eyes downward momentarily and then--with their heads still tilted slightly, intimately forward--glare liquidly up at you from under arched brows and thick lashes. Her mouth worked itself into a sassy-petulant moue so frequently you could have made a drinking game out of it. I didn't see her move her upper arms forward surreptitiously to squeeze her boobs together, but every other arrow in the flirty-girl quiver was there.

Now, personally, I say: Work it, baby. But if you're going to work it, at least in that fashion, there's something important you need to do. You have to integrate your intellectual jousting with your girliness (or maybe some women find a way to divide them firmly) so they don't seem schizo. Otherwise, you're sending potential mates a subliminal message that you don't know what you want and aren't quite together. Not knowing Dowd, I wonder whether she does in person what she does in her writing, which is to careen, seemingly uncontrollably, between analytical chilliness and giddy sassiness. It's the uncontrollable part that gives off "STAY AWAY!" vibes. In a culture in which couples make lives in their own little households, without the constant presence of the larger clan to bring things back to equilibrium when tensions arise, you'd have to be nuts to choose a spouse who promises to be an emotional pig in a poke.

This opinion piece is an excellent example of why I avoid The Japan Times. It's full of hot air about "cultural diversity," and if the triteness of that inescapable phrase isn't enough of a turn-off, just wait until you see where the writer, one Kazuo Ogoura, goes with it:

What I find worrisome is not the general American reluctance to adopt this phrase but rather the underlying trend in contemporary American society of apparent opposition to the notion of cultural diversity. Specifically, there appears to be a movement in contemporary U.S. society to restore a more traditional form of American culture while simultaneously pushing back the inroads made by Hispanic and other cultures. A somewhat alarming thesis imagines floods of Mexican immigrants dividing and weakening traditional American culture. Whatever the intentions of those who expound them, the existence of such ideas suggests an undercurrent of thought in American society that seeks to restore a more homogenous vision of America, to the detriment of cultural diversity.

If this trend continues, and if cultural diversity is denied or neglected, it will endanger the development of human society, for diversity ultimately provides flexibility. One can easily grasp this link between diversity and flexibility by considering biological diversity in nature. Unless biological diversity is maintained, living species cannot survive climatic and ecological change. And just as biological diversity guarantees the survival of species in spite of environmental changes, so cultural diversity provides for the survival of human civilizations.

I expend a lot of energy extolling the politeness and respect for ceremony that makes life in Japan, even in super-crowded Tokyo, work smoothly. But I'm sorry, the nerve--THE NERVE--of some Japanese government flack sermonizing at AMERICA about domestic cultural diversity and fear of immigrants is just way too much. This is the country in which a nurse with a Japanese mother and Korean father, born and brought up here, was denied promotion because her citizenship is not Japanese, a decision that was upheld by the Supreme Court. (BTW, if you read that article, there's more to the situation than nasty Japanese and noble, put-upon Koreans, but it serves to illustrate the point that if former Japanese officials are going to address respect for diversity, criticism should start at home.)

It's certainly possible to find rank xenophobes in America, but anyone with even a passing familiarity with the public debate over border security knows that any "thesis" that "imagines floods of Mexican immigrants dividing and weakening traditional American culture" is held by very few. The major worries with regards to Mexico are economic (expensive welfare programs for illegal aliens, for example) and defense-based (slack security could allow terrorists in along with migrant workers and other job-seekers). You don't necessarily have to favor numerical caps on immigration to favor strict policies to deal with those who come in without permission and documentation.

The most mainstream "cultural" concern that I'm aware of revolves around the use of English. Many of us oppose hand-holding bilingual public school classes because a lack of native-level English impedes the assimilation of immigrant children into the workforce--not just American, but global. However, no sensible American wants to interfere with people's ability to speak Spanish at home or in businesses established to cater to immigrant markets, or to celebrate festivals from the old country. If there's a movement to get us all to start living like some fantasy-nostalgia version of Connecticut WASPs in the 50s, I haven't heard of it. And Professor, Mexicans are Chicanos, not Hispanics. Don't make that slide in front of a Puerto Rican if you expect to remain known as a diplomat.

Speaking of theses, Ogoura's--"And just as biological diversity guarantees the survival of species in spite of environmental changes, so cultural diversity provides for the survival of human civilizations"--is inane, or at least conveniently foggy. If we view the globe as a cultural ecosystem, then sleekly gorgeous, genetically pure, low-birthrate Japan is the equivalent of, like, the cheetah. America may, in 2006, be looking for ways to limit immigration, but it is already the product of a hodge-podge, a century and a half in the making, of peoples that have contributed their different resources to the general culture. In a world of nations brought closer together by technology, perhaps diversity can be achieved not by walling each country off in its little cell of cultural maintenance but by allowing disparate influences to be more subtly woven together within nations, or even cities and neighborhoods.

And I haven't even gotten to what, as the friend who sent me the link remarked, is the biggest problem: "the inherent assumption that 'cultures' must be protected from individual choices." Yes, one does have to wonder how these American cultural exports are finding consumers where no one is interested in buying them. Must be our mind-control rays. Sheesh.

Thank you to all Americans who have served in the military--always, but especially this Veterans Day. The rest of us are in your debt. Since I have relatives still in England, thanks and a happy Armistice Day to British veterans as well.

A few months ago, a soft-spoken Japanese guy in his early 20s came up to me and struck up a very tentative conversation. Later, he called and asked whether I was free for dinner on the weekend. I carefully selected a this-is-not-a-date-little-buddy outfit and met him in Shibuya. (Well, okay--a few friends I met later were all snarky and "That's your this-is-not-a-date outfit?" which I thought was kind of uncalled-for. It turned out that there was a bigger issue, though.)

After dinner, I took Teru to one of my hangouts, run by half of a couple Atsushi and I know. (The other half runs the bar where we were introduced, right down the street. They're in their early 50s, together for two decades; it's fun to to go to one bar after the other and listen to them bitch, serially, about each other's managerial and customer service skills.) It was a Sunday night, not very late, so when we arrived there were only two other guys there.

Then, just after we'd gotten our drinks, a dozen men came in. The other bar had had a bowling party or something, so they were all regulars. After they swept in, I was busy being greeted and teased and teasing and greeting back. I introduced Teru to those who were within bowing distance. Two old buddies I hadn't seen for ages asked about a third friend who'd dropped off their radar. Another long-time acquaintance related (with humor rather than rancor) how he'd tried to pick me up once after Atsushi and I got together. At some point I turned to Teru, chuckling, to explain the meaning of some in-jokey thing.

And pulled up short. He looked mildly alarmed, like an anthropologist starting his first fieldwork and realizing that it was very, very different from reading journals in the library. Since then, it's become increasingly clear that Teru kind of wants help making friends. I'm happy to do the big brother things, but...how do I put this?...no one should feel forced to affect an outgoingness that really doesn't gel with his personality, but it still isn't fair to sit around expecting fabulous friendships and piquant potential love interests to start swirling around you spontaneously. If you never display more than a polite interest in people, they'll assume you're not interested in being more than polite to them. Arrogance tends to repel people, but a demeanor that suggests you're confident you have something to offer doesn't.

Yes, I've pointed this out, in a fashion that's as little like a sermon as possible. But Teru seems to think that once you've found friends, you'll be able to act engaged and lively, rather than the other way around. To a degree, I sympathize. After you go through all the upheaval of figuring out that you're gay and reorienting yourself toward your relatives and friends and coworkers, you just want some relationship...any relationship...to be effortless. In real life, though, coming out is the beginning of the job, not the end. Now you know you're gay. Great. Next question: what kind of gay guy are you? Quiet is fine, if you don't mind that your relationships will start slowly and develop pokily; but then you can't get all mopey over having trouble getting to know people.

I understand why gays would be excited about ousting Rick Santorum, but this kind of thing (via Michael) is ridiculous:

New Keystone Poll out in Pennsylvania and the news keeps getting worse for the current GOP number three in the Senate.

In the same poll in March Senator Santorum trailed by 1 point, in June by 7 points, in September by 13 points, and in the latest (Nov. 2 - 7) Casey leads by a whopping 16 points, 51% - 35%.

Bottom line, barring a major event that totally reshuffles the national playing field, or a major scandal involving Bob Casey, Santorum will lose in 2006.

WTF? There's a year until the next election. A YEAR. (The Malcontent points this out in Boi from Troy's comments.) Furthermore, let's remember an important political truth: Pennsylvania is weird.

Pennsylvania is still one of the most populous states in the union, though its relative population has been sinking like a stone for decades, and--as we're tediously informed every three seconds in the run-up to a close election--it's a swing state. There are pockets of hard Democrats in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (of course) but also on the West End of Allentown, in the college towns, and (I imagine, though I don't know the place well) in Erie. But there's also a very high rural population; outside the cities, Pennsylvanians, like upstate New Yorkers, are spread relatively smoothly over the land area. That's where a lot of the conservatives are.

Of course, there are plenty of people who don't vote in both town and country. But local coverage in election years always makes it very plain to people that, taking the commonwealth as a whole, we're pretty evenly split on a lot of hot-button issues. With that in mind, you also have to factor in the Specter Effect: we already have an influential, moderate, triangulating, peace-making man in the US Senate. I suspect--this is just a hunch on my part--that many people are willing to overlook Santorum's more extreme pronouncements because they just sent Finger-to-the-Wind Arlen back to Washington a few years ago, too. (Given a chance to replace Specter with my then-congressman, hard-conservative Pat Toomey, PA primary voters said, "No thanks" last go-round. And those were just the Republicans.)

For voters who lean right/libertarian, deciding between Santorum and Casey isn't likely to be quite as easy as deciding between Santorum and Harris "let's resurrect HillaryCare!!!!!" Wofford was ten years ago...or between Santorum and What's-his-face (Colonel Klink, I want to say?) in 2000. Casey's website takes the now-de rigueur line: "I'm for curbing government spending unless it goes to subisides for the elderly and mothers who need child care and public schools and small-business owners and...uh, have I missed anyone else who might vote for me?"

That makes it hard to tell what many of his particular policy proposals are going to be. Given Republican spending practices these days, if he can work the pro-family angle and strike a convincingly patriotic pose in connection with the WOT, he's unlikely to stand out as a statist. He could very well succeed in portraying Santorum as a freaky extremist by comparison, without making himself look like a milquetoast. Casey's family name is a well-known Pennsylvania brand, of course, and it's not hard to imagine his adding enough votes from moderate Republicans and Independents to those from his expected Democratic base to unseat Santorum. The idea that Santorum is already finished, though, is highly suspect.

Added later: Eric (also a Pennsylvanian) writes about Santorum's "scheduling conflict" with President Bush's visit to Scranton. He also characterizes himself this way:

I'm so used to being cynical and disappointed that I barely noticed, and I think it just goes with the turf of being a libertarian Republican. I just voted for the Republicans on Tuesday, and all that entitles me to is to have the label of "RINO" thrown at me by "real conservatives," and "conservative" thrown at me by liberals. If I registered and voted Democrat with my views, I'd be equally (if not more) suspect.

I downloaded and filled out the absentee ballot form, then decided not to vote. All the Pennsylvania seats this time around were low-level or local, and as someone who doesn't actually live at home, I didn't feel right sticking Lehigh County with, like, a vice-deputy-assistant commissioner that I was never going to have to deal with. But that's neither here nor there. The point I wanted to make is that this coming senatorial election is probably going to be utterly excruciating for those of us who are sick to death of being told we're not "real" members of a group whose label we never adopted to begin with. With Santorum and Casey looking like the candidates, there's room for endless please-make-it-stop finger-pointing over who's a RINO or DINO or covert totalitarian or closet socialist, all based on, say, the fact that one candidate favors ten or so million more dollars in federal layouts for prozac for senior citizens. Even from the opposite hemisphere, I am not looking forward to this.

Am I the only one who's noticed an awful lot of guys running around Tokyo in charcoal grey suits + pointed tan shoes that...you know...TOTALLY DON'T GO TOGETHER?

What's up? This has been over, I'd say, the last two or three weeks. Did some popular TV drama feature an actor in that kind of get-up in a pivotal scene? Did Donatella Versace send models down the runway that way? Did Men's Non-no do a five-page feature (complete with bossy pictorial how-to's) on healing the rift between antiqued brown leather and grey wool?

The look is utterly hein, and I can only hope it passes quickly. (When cocoa brown + black--both of which at least have cool, blue undertones to unite them--came in a decade ago, it was here for-flippin'-ever.) There are far better reasons to think about taking men's clothing off than that it's COMPLETELY HIDEOUS. Please, just stop.

Joanne Jacobs, whose wonderful blog was one of the first three or four I began reading five years ago or so, has a book out and wants to bum-rush Amazon with as many orders on 10 November as possible. Here's the rundown in her words:

Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds (Palgrave Macmillan) tells the story of a San Jose charter school that prepares students who are "failing but not in jail" for four-year colleges.

It really is an inspiring story. The average Downtown College Prep student comes from a Mexican immigrant family and enters ninth grade reading at a fifth grade level; 100 percent of graduates have been accepted at four-year colleges and 97 percent are on track to earn a bachelor's degree. DCP now scores well above the state average on the Academic Performance Index, ranking in the top third compared to all high schools, including affluent suburban schools. DCP follows what I call the work-your-butt-off philosophy of education. Its leaders analyze what's not working, adapt quickly and waste no time on esteem inflation or excuses.

While I discuss the charter school movement as a whole, Our School isn't written for wonks. I think it's a good read, sort of Tracy Kidder meets Up the Down Staircase.

My favorite part of the book is the part I didn't write. The book includes Pedro's rap, essays by Gil and Emilia, Roberto's speech, a discipline report on Hector, a teachers' list of DCP jargon, the principal's e-mail conversations with teachers, a phony field trip permission slip created by a girl who wanted a parent-free weekend and a copy of the school's budget.

I pre-ordered the book a while ago; if you're interested in education policy, either as an interested parent or just as a citizen who's frightened pallid at what the current state of schooling means for the future of civilization, it promises to be a valuable read.

Dale Carpenter finished his guest-posting on same-sex marriage at the Volokh Conspiracy nearly a week ago. I tried to read everything, including the comments, but rapidly started to get the feeling I'd been hanging out a little too long at the corner of Lawyerview Boulevard and Old Libertarian Pike, if you know what I mean. I suppose I'm only posting this about it myself so that I'll have a link in my own archives if I ever want to go back and look at what was written. My own mind isn't changed. The gay marriage advocates, however articulate and sober they are, still always sound to me as if they were casting us as First Runner-up straight people, which is kind of humiliating. It just doesn't bother me that homosexuality and heterosexuality aren't the same thing and therefore may not have the same requirements or social effects.

I love reading the book excerpts Joel chooses to post most of the time; the only problem is that it often means he doesn't deliver much of his own thinking on things, which is unfortunate. He's got a few posts up about the rioting in France that are well worth attention, though: here and here. It certainly is hard to buy the line that a feeling of downtroddenness is driving the miscreants. Wounded ego, sure, but not downtroddenness.

Koizumi's three-pronged reforms (usually more literally translated "trinity reforms") are not part of his campaign that we'd been hearing a whole lot about lately, what with the emphasis on Japan Post and the resulting landslide election victory and cabinet reshuffling. They're back in the spotlight these last few days, though. Yesterday, the government made a few announcements:

On 8 November, the federal government gave instructions to slash ¥630 billion from the budgets of seven ministries. The purpose of the move is to effect decreases in the amount spent on subsidies, in line with the ¥600 billion worth of the tax revenues that will no longer be transferred to the federal government as a result of the national and regional three-pronged reforms. Though the goal is to speed [the implementation of the Koizumi administration's platform through] cabinet-level leadership, Kasumigaseki has objected to what it sees as quotas. The government and the LDP have mobilized their machine to take the lead politically through, for example, the new establishment of regular talks between the vice-ministers and the party chairman.

"It is necessary for us as the cabinet to throw even more energy into coordinating [these reforms]. The relevant cabinet members, we would ask to marshall all their resources swiftly"--so said Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe at an informal gathering after an 8 November cabinet meeting. He requested concrete proposals for fulfilling [each ministry's quota of reductions in] allocations by 14 November.

That was one of those little articles that are easy to understand but surprisingly difficult to translate. (Or maybe the difficulties I was having in getting it into non-mangled English were a signal that I was missing something, but I don't think so.)

Assuming the vice-ministers referred to are the administrative vice-ministers, the meetings with the LDP point person are going to be very important. When cabinet ministers appointed by the PM (and their immediate subordinates) have problems, it's usually because they run afoul of and are outmaneuvered by those under them: the career bureaucrats, who are led by the administrative vice-ministers. These are the people who have devoted their entire post-university careers to going up the escalator in their chosen arm of the government, and they are notoriously resistant to change--especially the kind of change that involves cutting their budgets, and thus their power and influence.

To recap, the three prongs of reform are

• to slash outright federal subsidies to regional and local governments
  
• to overhaul the federal "revenue sharing" system, in which tax revenue comes from local taxpayers to Tokyo, is divided for redistribution in little packets after being haggled over by agencies in the federal ministries, then makes a U-ey back to local governments (or local branches of federal agencies)
  
• to make up for the resulting loss of federal subsidies by increasing the amount of locally collected taxes that goes straight into the coffers of regional and local governments--which is to say, to decrease the role of the federal middle man

You can imagine what the middle man thinks of all this, but self-serving complaints from Kasumigaseki are not the only ones being leveled at Koizumi's plan. The "three-pronged reforms" have been portrayed as simply shifting much of the government debt burden from federal to regional bodies. One might note that, given the federal government's notorious wastefulness in handling money, shifting its debt somewhere--anywhere--can hardly make things worse. There's another problem, though, as noted, for example, in this Asahi editorial from a month or so back: decision-making power is not necessarily being decentralized along with tax collection.

With regard to the transfer of 3 trillion yen in tax revenue, some people say a figure of 2.4 trillion yen has already been agreed upon. But in reality, the Education Ministry is still against slashing 850 billion yen from compulsory education fees now paid from national coffers. The Central Council for Education, an advisory body to the education minister, took an extraordinary vote during a recent meeting. It is scheduled to issue a report shortly recommending that state funding of compulsory education be maintained at current levels.

In addition, entities like the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, or the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, have refused to cooperate with a plan submitted by the National Governors' Association to abolish state subsidies.

Thus, the situation has not changed from last year. Koizumi is still at odds with the ministries.

Final resolution of the issue depends on the outcome of talks between the government and the ruling parties. In order to prevent having the subsidies under their control abolished altogether, the various ministries will probably offer their own versions of reducing subsidy rates, or suggest ways to switching to grants, whose purpose is not designated, and, therefore, more convenient for local governments.

But we cannot approve of switching purpose-specific subsidies to nonspecific grants. This would allow the ministries in Tokyo to retain their power of allocating money. That would be counterproductive to the decentralizing principles of reform.

It's worth noting that while left-leaning organizations such as the Democratic Party of Japan and, uh, the Asahi editorial board are reliably against privatization, they often do support decentralization of government budgeting and allocation. Whether that testifies to their economic liberal-mindedness or to the sheer undeniable inefficiency of the bureaucracies is an open question.

It will be interesting to see what happens on and after the fourteenth.

As a social commentator, Margaret Cho is a great stand-up comic. She writes the following:

I like Gwen Stefani, she's alright. She is very stylish and has a nice voice and a really flat stomach. She is a rock star, and quite good at it.

...

Now she has 4 things all together, the Harajuku Girls. I want to like them, and I want to think they are great, but I am not sure if I can. I mean, racial stereotypes are really cute sometimes, and I don't want to bum everyone out by pointing out the minstrel show. I think it is totally acceptable to enjoy the Harajuku girls, because there are not that many other Asian people out there in the media really, so we have to take whatever we can get. Amos 'n Andy had lots of fans, didn't they? At least it is a measure of visibility, which is much better than invisibility. I am so sick of not existing, that I would settle for following any white person around with an umbrella just so I could say I was there.

I think it's worth gently pointing out that Harajuku Girls--I mean, the real ones and not Stefani's backup dancers--are not Asian-Americans but actual Japanese. Many of them, I'd wager, would react to Cho's post along the lines of "Excuse me? We don't need you to defend us, you stupid Korean bitch."

Let me hasten to say that I do not endorse such an attitude. My love for Japan and the Japanese has never stopped me from pointing out, when people here intimate that they think Koreans are lazy and dumb, that South Korea now has some of the highest educational achievement stats in the world. I'm only pointing it out because you constantly hear Asian-Americans complaining about their lack of visibility and the stereotypical way the American media represent them. It always makes me wonder: surely many of them have visited relatives in their ancestral homelands, if they themselves didn't grow up there part of the time. They must be aware of the jaw-droppingly reductive and stereotypical ways foreigners are frequently depicted in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. So do they believe in racial equality as a universal moral principle--in which case the Far East has at least as bad a track record as the US--or do they think it's somehow America's job to be extra-special inclusive, while Asian countries get a pass if they fall back on local heritage as an excuse for treating people of other ethnicities like crap?

I'm not playing tu quoque here. I just think some perspective is called for. America is far from perfect when it comes to race relations, but it gives you an opportunity to carve out your own space in whatever place you find most hospitable. You'll meet hostile, or just plain provincial, people sometimes; but that's true everywhere. It wasn't long ago that people of Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Italian, and German descent would not have been indiscriminately identified with each other as equally privileged white people. Lasting social change takes time, even in this media age. I don't think Gwen Stefani's annoyingly twee cutesifying approach is all that helpful, but neither is drippy depressiveness.

(Thanks, Toren.)

Japan Airlines is about to pour ¥60 billion (US $550 million) into tightening safety standards:

JAL has announced a plan for corporate reform of which the pillars will include a ¥60 billion investment in increasing flight safety from fiscal 2006 to 2010. In addition to increasing its competitive edge by introducing state-of-the-art new aircraft, the company will implement cuts in remunerations to board members and base salaries for employees.

There are plans to retire thirty Boeing 747s currently in service, to add smaller 737s, and to increase the number of international routes, especially to China. The safety measures are set out more vaguely--the hiring of more technicians and a more systematic training program. Of course, JAL didn't come up with this idea on its own: the Ministry of Land, Transport, and Infrastructure has given it increasingly frequent warnings over procedural failures that nearly resulted in incidents. The publicity has not been good. But if JAL is serious (and I trust it to get Atsushi here and back at least once a month, so I hope so), this could be a welcome and too-uncommon case of a Japanese company's finding and addressing flaws in its safety procedures before a disaster happens.

Rondi Adamson is wondering about something that's so simple and obvious I hadn't noticed, and now I feel kind of stupid:

Hmm...Something's missing from the French riot news and analysis. I haven't heard about, or read of, anyone blaming the United States, George Bush, the Jews or Israel for all of this...yet. I may have just missed it.

It has been a full, what, ten days? Kind of odd. All the Reuters and CNN coverage I've seen has referred to "root causes," of course, and lack of integration into society; and there have been some gingerly references to anti-Semitic violence over the past few years. But the obvious role of America, and those Jews who have had the temerity to become affluent, in fostering a climate of disaffection and hate, hasn't been touched. Of course, I don't go near the op-ed pages of The Guardian unless someone I trust gives me a good reason. The front page of The Guardian is right now, BTW, referring to what's been going on in France as "urban unrest," which is euphemistic even for the English.

I ran into a French acquaintance last night, and it was all I could do not to blurt out, "I hope your family's cars are all okay, honey!"

Ann Althouse reminds us of Jonathan Rauch's wonderful article from a few years ago on being an introvert. There are too many good parts for an excerpt to do it justice, but I think this is my absolute favorite:

Are introverts misunderstood? Wildly. That, it appears, is our lot in life. "It is very difficult for an extrovert to understand an introvert," write the education experts Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. (They are also the source of the quotation in the previous paragraph.) Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.

Not the nicest way of putting it--but hey, truth hurts. It's funny that I should have run across a reference to Rauch's article again now because I was just told last week for the gajillionth time that I am "intimidating." There's just no good answer to that. "Why, I'm the most approachable guy in the world!" is not exactly something you want to be bellowing heartily in a crowded gay bar. I tried my stock response ("There's nothing intimidating about me; I'm just not very talkative") and got the stock response right back ("Well, that's intimidating"). At this point, in my experience, all hope for a fun conversation--let alone the germ of a potential friendship--is lost for good. Anyone who believes that the occasional silence signals contempt or lack of interest will fail to be satisfied by anything but non-stop smiling, eyes-shining banter. Not my strong suit. (My first boss once told me before a work function, when I offered to be sociable, "Oh, jeez, Sean, no--you're much scarier when you're trying to be nice.")

One of the many wonderful things about being in a relationship with Atsushi is that we're both introverted, so we get each other; but we're complementary types of introverts. When he doesn't need quiet time, Atsushi is very social. When I don't need quiet time, I need even quieter time. We give parties, and Atsushi chats and keeps food and drink circulating. I stay in the kitchen communing with the cutting board and gas range. It's become a joke among our friends, but it makes us both happy.

Actually, many of you know Connie and Kim, so it will mean something when I point out that one of the best things about visiting their home last year was that it was considered perfectly okay to shut the hell up sometimes. Of course, we talked a lot--and man, do you have to be sharp to keep up with that family. But you could read. You could savor your coffee. You could watch the television. You could stare out the window thinking deliciously naughty thoughts. And then you could share them after they'd had time to germinate in peace. It doesn't get any better.

Remember about eighteen years ago when Madonna had three number one singles off True Blue and the people complaining about her realized she wasn't a flash in the pan and were all like, "Damn! She's going to be pushing fifty and still shaking her T&A at us in music videos"? Lo, it has come to pass. Good grief, is she limber. But I kind of prefer the part where she's striding through the city...perhaps imitating Kylie striding through the city in "Giving You Up"...who was perhaps imitating Madonna striding through a cityscape/fantasy skyway surrounded by fairies* in "Love Profusion." Or the part where she's dancing in the club...sort of like Kylie in "Spinning Around"...which is sort of like Madge in "Deeper and Deeper" but much more pleasing to look at. All these circular references may be dizzying, but tracking them is much more fun than paying attention to what Madonna says these days when she stops singing and shimmying and starts talking.

* By which I refer to the presence of tiny CGI wingèd spirits, not of backup dancers.

It's a good thing I'm an atheist, because that way I don't have to believe I'm going to hell for guffawing at this:

[Criminologist Alain] Bauer said that, contrary to popular opinion, these youths are in a way quite well integrated into French society. The way they erupt in protest and violence against the strong central state reflects the model they see, he said, for example from protesting workers and far-left social agitators.

I like that man. He is sly. I also liked this (unintentionally, I'm sure) drocirc;le summing up of France's attempts to deal with its immigrant problems:

France promised liberty, equality and fraternity but failed to create the jobs that helped integrate earlier immigrants. Paris has tried everything from social programs to police crackdowns to deal with frustration that has resulted.

Market liberalization is apparently not even within the range of possibilities in its mental framework--of course, those protesting workers help to explain that.

When I first saw this story, I assumed the suspect had set things on fire to give himself more dramatic stuff to cover--faking stories is not unheard of at NHK, though we haven't had any really good scandals to laugh out loud over lately.

It appears, however, that he may just be seriously screwed up in the head. I can't decide whether that's more or less disturbing:

A 24-year-old NHK reporter was arrested Saturday on suspicion of attempted arson at a house under construction in Kishiwada, Osaka Prefecture, with police saying he was a suspect in 11 arson attacks, including burning down a house in Otsu.

Arrested was Hirofumi Kasamatsu, a reporter at the public broadcaster's Otsu Station, according to a joint force of the Shiga and Osaka prefectural police.

Hired by NHK in April last year, Kasamatsu was responsible for covering crimes and accidents in the prefecture at the time of the arson attacks. He is currently on leave from work.

According to the police, Kasamatsu admitted the alleged attempted arson, saying he lit the fire with a cigarette lighter. He also admitted setting a number of fires in the Shiga Prefecture capital in April and May.

...

Kasamatsu told the police that he regretted what he had done. He also said he had committed the arson attacks due to problems at work.

NHK Chairman Genichi Hashimoto said: "It's regrettable that a person of the media caused such crimes. I'd like to sincerely apologize. We're considering how to reprimand him in light of the investigation."

Reprimand? Firing him sounds like a pretty good idea, though I don't suppose administering a good scolding along with it wouldn't hurt.

Dear gay-friendly straight people,

You know, we love you lots. If you've never been told to your face that you're a menace to society and that your relationship with your partner should be illegal, you may not know just how much better it is to be considered witty and adorable. I don't think anyone's obliged to like gays, understand, but I appreciate it when people do.

Just, could you show your acceptance without the ooze? A lot of you already do, and if you're one of them, you don't really need to read this. "But maybe I'm oozing and don't know it, and it'd be nice to find out how I can tell," you say? Okay, here's the basic idea: When you meet a gay person, do you (1) ask the sensible, ordinary, non-intrusive questions that you would to a new acquaintance of any kind ("Are you married? Oh, anyone special then? Really? How long have you been together? Kids? Pets?")? Then you're not oozing. Alternatively, do you (2) start immediately in with the sort of catty joshing that makes it clear that it's okay for your new friend to let go and be as queeny as he does or doesn't care to? That kind of mateyness can be taken too far--we aren't all into serious down-in-it ribaldry with strangers--but it isn't ooze.

You ooze if you're the kind who can't decide between (1) and (2), so they get smushed together into an unbearable...(3) you wink and mug and smirk and keep making saucy talk that pointedly hovers around gay themes without actually addressing them, so that your interlocutor feels at once baited into and warned away from revealing that he's gay so the conversation can then move on to something--anything--more interesting. Like this:

Straight guy: "So, Sean, have you seen [glaring significantly across table] Far from Heaven?

Sean: "Uh, yeah, sure."

SG: "I'd be interested to hear what you thought."

S: "Thought? I thought it turned out really well. Genre exercises like that, there's always a temptation to look down on the originals you're aping, and I thought everyone did a good job of avoiding that."

SG: "What about [glaring more significantly] Dennis Quaid's character?"

S: "I don't know. I wasn't around in the 50s. It seemed realistic, given that the whole thing was purposefully stylized to begin with."

SG: "I mean more his [glaring very significantly] circumstances."

S: "I thought the house and office were pretty stylin'."

SG: "Of course! [laughs exaggeratedly] Oh, that's great! But by 'circumstances,' I was more talking about...well, he had choices to make, didn't he?"

See? Ooze. I've never actually snapped and replied, "ALL RIGHT, already. I'm a Madonna fan. My favorite movie is Auntie Mame. I serve Fortnum & Mason tea to my most intimate friends in Wedgwood cups. No, shocking though it may seem, I've never owned a copy of Judy at Carnegie Hall. Are we DONE now?" Felt like it, though.

At this point, there are good-hearted people who will point out that a lot of gays are touchy. Some are completely open, some are completely closeted, and some don't like to bring up the phenomenon of homosexuality itself but do socialize with their partners as a couple. Hell, you may not even know whether the person you're talking to is actually gay. It's easy to sympathize with the desire to indicate your comfort with open and honest homosexuals while giving yourself an escape hatch if, for whatever reason, it turns out not to be needed.

There's no faster way to cast doubt on your own posture of easy-going goodwill, though, than to intimate that you're especially eager to know whether you're in the company of a homo because we're freakishly interesting. Even if that is the case, I'd advise sticking to (1) above, which keeps a decent cover on it and lets people decide how much they care to tell you about themselves. If that means you have to wait until your third encounter to find out whether a new acquaintance has memorized the dialogue from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, too bad. Life is full of trade-offs, and you managed to live this long without knowing.

Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara is an endless source of provocation:

Tokyo Metropolitan Governor Shintaro Ishihara, on a visit to the US, gave a lecture at a think tank on 3 November and warned that, if thrust into a war with China, "the US, which reveres human life, would surely lose."

He indicated that the reason was that China, unlike the human-rights-valuing US, would not fear the loss of large numbers of human lives.

Well, not that long ago we fought a death-glorifying Asian enemy whose air force pilots were notoriously willing to sink our warships by flying their planes into them...uh, not the best historian here...who was that again? Anyway, I'm pretty sure we won, partially because our scruples about human rights didn't prevent us from striking big-time HARD at the enemy when the time came.

China has many, many people, true. It also has a decided nationalistic streak that could be used to get those people riled up in war time. But the CCP's troubles in coordinating its own government, let alone keeping the reins it would like on the Chinese populace, are well known. Invading and taking China over would be exceedingly diffcult; at the same time, projecting force in a coordinated and far-reaching fashion is something the US now has more sustained experience with than any other country on earth.

Be that as it may, Ishihara's recommendations go along predictable lines:

He argued that, to combat the rise of China, what was needed was not military might but "a policy of economic containment." He called for measures to isolate China by, for example, strengthening ties with India. Given that the Chinese economy is dependent on foreign technology, if exchange with foreign countries is restricted, Ishihara said, "it will dry up economically and be unable to maneuver."

Interesting how the best way for the US to further its interests would just, you know, happen to coincide with a policy that would seriously stick it to Japan's most ancient rival. What a felicitous coincidence, huh?

In real life, the gigantic Chinese market means a lot to Ishihara's own people, whose economy, he's surely noticed, has been having its own share of troubles. Additionally, if there are hazards involved in economic and technological investment in a country run by a regime like the CCP, there are also hazards involved in flagrantly attempting to stunt its growth and prosperity. Beijing would have no trouble using that to its own ends in fomenting anti-foreigner sentiment among its people--it welcomes every chance to deflect dissatisfaction away from itself--in which case our military power might come in handy after all.

There's pretty obviously no way to guarantee that China will not become a huge problem, but the current approach seems the best of the available options, even if specific policies sometimes err to far in the direction of making nice with the CCP. Making all billion-plus Chinese prosperous and content at once is impossible, but as long as a solid proportion of people think they have a shot at bettering their lives, they're less likely to get restive, even if US ally India becomes a major economic competitor and keeps China's growth in check somewhat.

The asbestos scandal has been one of the biggest news stories of the year here in Japan. It doesn't seem to be getting much attention from Western journalists here, though I suppose I could be missing things. I don't think so, though, and it's kind of bizarre, because the issue taps into the sorts of broad-brush changes in society that journalists like to play up--especially old favorites such as emerging problems with Japan's national health system.

This is from the latest from the Nikkei:

The Ministry of the Environment announced on 4 November that, in cooperation with the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, it will establish an investigative committee to determine the medical criteria for diagnosing illnesses caused by asbestos. The committee's goal is to set recognition criteria for confirming the presence of five kinds of ailments, including not only lung cancer but also mesothelioma and asbestos lung.

On 16 November, the Environment Ministry will gather six medical experts and open the committee's first meeting. The plan is for the committee to meet once a month and to have generated a report within a year. [I'm not sure whether they're referring to the fiscal year here; if so, that would be by April.--SRK]

The government is in the process of establishing new laws to give relief money to residents of areas upon which asbestos has had an impact on public health. The confirmation criteria will be centered around lung cancer. The government's judgment is that it is necessary to put in place medically detailed criteria for adding [people to the list of] relief money recipients, given that [diseases such as lung cancer] can also be caused by smoking and other factors besides asbestos exposure.

One of the growing number of televised specials on the asbestos problem, aired a few weeks ago, showed a thin, weak old man with mesothelioma (I never thought I'd need to learn that word in Japanese, much less use it so often) weeping piteously and telling the reporter, "I can't believe that they already knew about these health risks in America twenty years ago, and our government is only getting around to doing something now."

There was special pathos there. The Japanese health system is designed around the idea that collectivism and federal involvement produces better care. People are aware that there are treatments available abroad that are not available here, and there's the occasional scandal when a pharmaceutical company produces non-performing drugs. For the most part, though, people have tended to believe that the close ties between civil servants and health care providers ensured the best of both worlds--more standardized, more equitable, less expensive, more readily accessible. Japan's high average life expectancy seems to bear that out.

Japan's last major public health scandal involving industry was, of course, Minamata disease; there was a feeling that, with the money and resources poured into the health care system by the former Ministry of Health and Welfare--and with federal agencies for just about anything and everything--that sort of thing couldn't happen again. But it has. Bureaucracies in Japan love to keep records, but they don't like to share information with each other. The asbestos scandal, in which key ministries and agencies didn't communicate with each other, is like many of the hospital screw-ups that have become staples of the nightly news here: patient and personnel records often aren't transferred, and when they are transferred, they often aren't verified. It remains to be seen how many asbestos victims will qualify for compensation. The numbers reported vary widely, but it's at least in the thousands.

I love Erin O'Connor (what I know of her from her blog, that is) to death, but I hate opening her site because what she reports always makes me want to punch something. Get a load of this:

The University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire has forbidden RAs (students who work as residential assistants) from leading Bible-study groups in their dorms. Administrators claim they are compelled to forbid RAs from engaging in this activity because RAs who lead such groups risk seeming "unapproachable" to the students entrusted to their care.

Last summer, RAs who had been leading Bible study groups in their dorms--not as official dorm activities, but privately, on their own time, in their own rooms--received a letter from Associate Director for Housing and Residence Life Deborah Newman forbidding them to continue and threatening them with disciplinary action if they did. When one RA questioned the edict, Newman informed him that "as an RA you need to be available to your residents both in reality and from their perspective." The suggestion is not only that students who work as RAs don't have the same First Amendment rights that other students have, but also that religious RAs are off in some nether world, and that leading religious study groups violates in some manner their obligation to live in "reality" and to share their residents' presumably godless "perspective" on life. Newman has also forbidden RAs to lead Koran- and Torah-based study groups.

She also links to FIRE's report on the matter.

When I entered college, I was a creationist. None of this wimpy-ass, evolutionist-placating Intelligent Design crap, either--the religion I was brought up in believed that the Genesis account of creation was only marginally non-literal. That is (IIRC), the order of events was accurate, but since length of time doesn't bind God as it does us, the actual space between the steps was not necessarily what we humans, with our limited understanding, would know as a single day. I'm probably misrepresenting it somewhat--ten years of Japan-dwelling atheism and you get a little rusty--but that was the basic idea.

Anyway, my point is, both RAs I had the two years I lived in campus housing were very, very liberal. I think they were both atheists. But aside from the occasional Saturday when, coming back from church services, I'd be teased good-naturedly for being the only person on the hall who wasn't rising for the first time that day after nursing a hangover, it was never an issue. Yes, our differences in beliefs also emerged when we were discussing academic or intellectual issues, but it was a university, so I guess we just figured that, you know, that was what was supposed to happen. I would have found it incomprehensible if someone had asked whether I found Elise "unapproachable" because she was pro-abortion or Bob's "perspective" alienating because he didn't like my letter to the editor about some retarded column saying David and Jonathan were gay. (If you think I don't like gay leftism now, you can imagine what I was like when I was a conservative Christian!) What the hell does that have to do with a burned-out light bulb in the bathroom or whether Professor Soandso in the biology department is a good teacher?

Actually, I didn't go to Penn right out of high school. My parents' dream was for me to go to the college affiliated with our religious sect. It was in the middle of nowhere in eastern Texas (halfway between Tyler and Longview, for anyone who knows the area). I was devout at that time, too, and while I thought the academic standards were likely to be somewhat slack, it seemed a worthwhile sacrifice to be at a Godly college.

Until I actually got there and experienced it in practice. There were some ritual pronouncements about being all Berean and proving everything by testing it against reality and counter-arguments, but in the classroom and college-run discussion groups, you were shut down immediately if you deviated from the party line. I ventured the opinion that perhaps some women might hypothetically be able to serve in combat positions in the armed forces and WHAM! I was cut off.

After six weeks of this, I snapped. I might not have minded a frank Bible seminary, but the post-Enlightenment bait-and-switch act was more than I could take. I called my parents very agitatedly, and they sorrowfully sent me an Amtrak ticket home to Pennsylvania. I worked for a year at my high school restaurant job, reactivated my application to Penn, was reaccepted, and started gratefully the next fall.

When, in due course, I started hearing people talking about how silenced they were on campus, I thought they were insane. These were the most stridently voluble silenced people I'd ever encountered. There was a women's studies program. The newspaper always seemed to have at least one gay columnist. The WEB Dubois College House was expressly devoted to housing students who wanted to work for black community interests. There were arguments--real, substantive arguments over competing ideas--inside the classroom and out.

Most of the time, my religious beliefs made me the freak, but I don't remember more than two or three people in the entire four years I was in college being frankly disrespectful, even during that screaming match after we watched The Accused and had a discussion about rape. The idea was still in the air that people were supposed to bring their most sincere, reasoned beliefs to the table and pit them against each other. Everyone got a fair hearing, and everyone got the chance to approve or disapprove of what he heard.

But you could already see things hardening. It was in 1993 that the Eden Jacobowitz incident occurred, after all. Now, apparently, you don't even have to make specific remarks that could offend a given group at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. You just have to sit around reading a book that might kinda indicate something vaguely different about your "perspective" from those of unnamed hypothetical students. Oh, and you probably won't be surprised by this from the FIRE page:

FIRE also pointed out a 2004 article in UWEC's student newspaper in which the Office of Housing and Residence Life praised an RA who for three years in a row staged the controversial feminist play The Vagina Monologues as an official "residence hall activity." This praise came despite the RA's acknowledgement that "with the Vagina Monologues...she [did not have] as much time as she would have liked for her wing." UWEC has failed to respond to FIRE’s letter.

Well, she was probably still approachable in spirit. It's not as if she'd been reading the Bible, or anything.

Another Gay Republican links to this post by Chris Crain at the Washington Blade blog. As A.G. Republican says, it's a "justified bitch slap." As Crain says:

HRC strategists will claim in their defense that the public needs to be educated first on the issue, but how can we educate if we shirk from opportunities to talk about our lives?

Last year, when Laura Bush was pressed on whether she supported her husband's constitutional ban on gay marriage, her innocuous answer was that the issue was "something people should talk about and debate." Rather than welcome such a rare invitation, HRC's then-leader Cheryl Jacques released a letter criticizing the first lady, saying there were more important issues — like the economy! — for Americans to discuss.

When our biggest gay rights lobbying group is ducking opportunities to actually lobby for our equality, and then makes excuses for those who oppose us, is it any wonder we aren't winning?

This is, of course, a staple topic of gay conversation. The more loyal Democrats tend to frame it as "How far should gay advocacy groups go in compromising to help our DNC friends gain power so they're less politically vulnerable and can later effect the real change on our behalf that they desire with such obvious sincerity?" The rest of us tend to frame it as "Aren't these jackasses supposed to be working for us?"

Single-issue activism on the part of an individual often produces tunnel vision; but at the same time, if a group is going to exist for the express purpose of representing the interests of gays, then that's what it's supposed to do. Most of our organizations seem to veer between soft-pedaling anti-gay practices on the part of Democrats and implausibly claiming a gay stake in some favorite lefty sure thing or other (opposition to the war comes readily to mind, but so do Social Security privatization and the like).

This time around, it's Dale Carpenter guest-blogging (Here is the first post; I'd link the rest, but you can find them yourselves, and PowerBlogs sends an automatic trackback for every link.) Carpenter makes the best case I've seen--for example, he does a better job, I think, at arguing that community pressure will be brought to bear on gay marriages than Jonathan Rauch himself did in his book.

Well, Carpenter isn't perfect on that point, either:

In our culture, marriage is the way couples signal the ultimate commitment to one another; and through marriage they communicate this deep commitment to their families, to their friends and co-workers, and to their communities. That commitment is then reinforced by the web of familial and other relations, created by marriage, that they have around them. This reinforcement helps strengthen their bond, and therefore their family. It helps keep them together, especially in tough times.

Gay couples need this sort of reinforcement and suffer for the lack of it. As of now, no gay relationship can reach the cultural pinnacle signified by the words, "Will you marry me?" Telling your families and friends that you are "partnered" will not, usually, signal the same depth of commitment that marriage would. And if they doubt whether you have invested heavily in your relationship, why should your families, friends, and communities invest heavily in it?

Fine, but if people don't believe gay marriages are authentic, they're not going to invest in them heavily anyway. Some of these will be ignorant folks who don't believe there's genuine commitment within gay couples; others are the most gay-friendly types imaginable but believe the purpose of marriage is to ensure, as best we can, that children are provided for. In either case, I don't think the chicken-egg question is resolved as well as Carpenter appears to.

Be that as it may, Carpenter argues carefully, and his presentation is orderly. Of course, Britney Spears has already been mentioned in the comments, and embarrassingly, Eugene Volokh has been driven to gently pointing out the following [his emphasis]:

Folks, let me mention something that I hoped I didn't need to: If you don't like reading arguments that condemn homosexuality or homosexual relationships, don't read a debate on same-sex marriage. Conversely, if we were to exclude all arguments that you think of as "bigotry" against homosexuals, or that convey "moral disapproval" of homosexuality, it wouldn't be much of a debate, would it?

A few years ago, when Connie's site was in one of its former incarnations and Dean was still in his old World, I joined in a few discussions about gay marriage that frightened me in a big, bad way. One of them rattled me so much that I unloaded on Dean in very raw terms. (And cheese and crackers, was I PISSED that he printed some of it when I asked him not to. It was over two years ago now, so I don't really care anymore.) Several of the gay commenters that I disagreed with were people whose writing on other topics I've really enjoyed and been inspired by. I'd never liked lockstep gay leftism, but this was the first time that it was borne in on me how much question-dodging a lot of otherwise-reasonable gays were willing to do in order to get the Marriage seal of approval and have their relationships (glory be!) validated. Or they probably weren't dodging questions; they just didn't seem to understand what they were being asked, so they weren't addressing it.

The Nikkei's latest poll [insert usual caution] finds support for the Koizumi cabinet up to 56%:

The Nippon Keizai Shimbun Corporation conducted a rapid opinion poll on 31 October and 1 November in response to the formation of the third Koizumi cabinet. Support for the Koizumi cabinet was at 56%, an increase of 9 points from the last survey at the beginning of September. The proportion (down 6 points over the same period) that did not support the cabinet was 30%, a manifestation of [the administration's] maintenance of its vigor since its crushing victory in the lower house elections. The percent of those surveyed who "had esteem" for the members of the new cabinet was 49%. That far exceeded the 24% who "did not have esteem"; expectations have solidified around the struggle for reform to be waged through the "post-Koizumi" candidacies of [cabinet members] such as General Secretary Shinzo Abe.

That last sentence is so deformed in my version it gives me physical pain, but I don't really have the time to fuss over it. In any case, the idea comes through that, if the Nikkei poll is remotely dependable, Koizumi's continuing popularity with the Japanese electorate, combined with the reputations that several of his new cabinet picks have already been cultivating, mean that his new administration is starting out once again with the public's endorsement.

What's funnier than the fact that someone landed on this page after searching Google for "discreet chastity" (a sorely underused phrase, more's the pity)? That mine was the first site to come up.

Today Toshiba finally deigned to call me and tell me how much ransom I'm going to have to pay to get my laptop back with a new CD-ROM drive: about the equivalent of US $420. Not all that bad, I suppose. So I assume it's going to be ready within the week, because Nittsu came to pick it up Monday a week ago and the last person I talked to at Toshiba said the turnaround time shouldn't be more than ten to fourteen days. Yes, I'm aware of Toshiba's rep for atrocious customer service, but the hype is that they've been working hard to combat it, and all the people I talked to in tech support (when I first thought it was a driver/software/settings problem) were great. So I'm hoping to be wired at home again by this weekend.

I'll definitely need my Dynabook back within a few weeks, because I'm going to a company meeting at the beginning of December. I like travel, but I have to say that I find the idea of going all the way to the Caribbean a bit fatiguing, especially since Atsushi and I haven't been able to take a vacation together for a year and a half. I will, however, be able to sneak in an extra week to stay in the States after flying back to New York. I wasn't sure I'd be able to, but I have a month or so to get things arranged. I'll be writing to people individually, but let this be the first notice to friends in the NY-NJ-PA-DC area that I'll be around to shuttle frantically among you during the second third of December.

Actually, when the time comes, I don't think I'll mind the Caribbean so much. Today is the first day that the coldness is sharp enough that I may actually put on a sweater before leaving the apartment [!] later, and fall is my favorite season. (It's such a relief to be able to use that word--most Japanese people don't know what you're talking about unless you say "autumn.") But by December, there will be a fair amount of non-sharp, non-crisp, gritty-gelatinous rain. Love that particulate matter!

For those who are slow on the uptake--actually, your flue would have to be entirely blocked not to have noticed this--this is one of those scatty brain-dump posts I deposit here at regular intervals, usually when my datebook is beginning to do its tyrant act and I am VERY SLIGHTLY irritable. Time for home and a cup of tea.

Gaijin Biker has to be kidding.

Actually, what am I saying? The only surprise is that no one's already paved over Yoyogi Park. Nothing in this archipelago escapes the cement mixer once some politician sets his sights on it. Ever:

Via Taro Akasaka at Japan Real Estate Blog, the Yomiuri Shimbun reports that Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara is talking about paving over Yoyogi Park and building a new sports complex there to beef up Tokyo's bid for the 2016 Olympics.

...

This is, quite simply, a horrible idea. Tokyo is already one of the most under-parked major cities around. It needs more open spaces for the people who live here every day, not giant stadiums for athletes who will swing by once and then leave.

When I lived in Shibuya, I used to run at Yoyogi Park, one of the few places in the city where you can find enough trees together to call so much as a copse. To anyone coming here from just about any other world-class city, the paucity of green is something you don't notice much at first because the riotous visual interest--from all the neon signs and weird architectural shapes and highways stacked on train platforms stacked on footbridges--keeps you distracted. But then you walk down one of the few streets that are treelined, and you're like, Ooh! Wilderness! Do I have my Swiss Army Knife?

As Gaijin Biker says, vainglorious Olympic (or Olympic-equivalent) sports complexes nearly always end up windy, spookily underpopulated white elephants after the games end. The idea that Japan needs another underused monstrosity of a public works project is beyond lunatic.

Zak, who's begun commenting around here lately and has mercifully not laid into me about any of my free 'n easy translations from Japanese, has resumed his own blog and posted this today:

I’m sorry, I have no sympathy whatsoever for these people booted out of their church:

In a pair of decisions that bolstered conservatives, the highest court of the United Methodist Church defrocked an openly lesbian minister yesterday and reinstated a pastor who had been suspended for refusing to allow a gay man to become a member of his congregation.

Granted, I personally think it’s ridiculous to ban homosexuals based on the teachings of a man 2,000 years ago who apparently never said anything about gays and seems to have instead preached universal acceptance. For these homosexuals, however, I think it’s far more idiotic to want to worship that man in an organization that has confused those teachings to the point of exactly reversing them as far as you are concerned. Brings to mind the image of a woman who repeatedly begs her physically abusive husband to take her back: Who really has the bigger problem here?

My conclusion is basically the same as Zak's, though I'd get there somewhat differently. I don't think the Bible is infinitely stretchable, but there's enough give that I don't think people who are arguing for non-traditional tolerance of this or that are necessarily being disingenuous. Many of them probably do believe that the truest interpretation of whatever difficult scripture they're looking at is the one that's less obvious because of this ambiguity in Aramaic roots, or what have you.

Still, different Christian sects usually have a long-standing body of theological writing behind their doctrines, and it's not unreasonable for them to reject new understanding of scripture that they think unfounded. If you're gay or lesbian (or supportive of gays and lesbians), there are plenty of churches nowadays that will accommodate you. I suppose that switching sects to find the one that you think is most closely following Christ's intent is difficult if you've been brought up to believe, say, that the Roman Catholic Church is the only legitimate vessel for Godly spirituality; but I don't recall having been taught as a boy that the individual covenant with God was easy to navigate.

People who sincerely believe that the organizations to which they now belong are interpreting the Bible in error have what seems to me a pretty clear duty to present their arguments, but eventually someone is going to have to make a doctrinal decision, and it's not necessarily cruelty that produces one that hews to tradition.

Prime Minister Koizumi has announced the results of his cabinet reshuffling:

Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi, at the first meeting of his third cabinet of the evening of 31 October, laid out the fundamental direction [of his latest administration] in five items:

1. To persevere in [transferring power and resources] "from public to private" and "from Tokyo to local districts"
2. Economic vitality
3. Ensuring safety and security in [Japanese] life
4. Diplomacy, national security, disaster management
5. Political reform

Concerning structural reforms, he stated that "the October 2007 privatization of Japan Post will be smoothly executed" and that "the scale of government will be limited through a review of the financing of programs, general labor costs for private sector employees, and the management of government assets and bonds."

Particular positions of interest: Shinzo Abe is the new Chief Cabinet Secretary. Taro Aso is the new Minister of Foreign Affairs. Sadakazu Tanizaki was reappointed as Minister of Finance. Each has been tipped as a possible successor for Koizumi, who has vowed to step down in 2006 and has not been grooming any obvious candidates to take over at that point.

Aso, the new Foreign Minister, was previously Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications. A few weeks ago he got in PR hot water for calling Japan a "single-race" nation. You can imagine how resident Koreans and indigenous ethnic minorities loved that. He's had a reputation for being tart-tongued for quite a while, though, and he's been a rising star in the LDP for some time. The last outspoken rising-star Foreign Minister under Koizumi was Makiko Tanaka, and we all know what happened to her. The post of Foreign Minister is a particularly strategic one at the moment, given Japan's delicate relations with the PRC and the Koreas and its push to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Aso's profile on his website is here. A less interesting English version is here at his old ministry.

BTW, in addition to Minister of Finance Tanigaki, banking/Japan Post reform czar Heizo Takenaka was reappointed to his posts.

Added on 2 November: Didn't anyone catch that "Heizo Tanaka" screw up? Glad I seem to have seen it first.