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.