The White Peril 白禍

It came out yesterday that the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries had not held to a cabinet-level resolution to do site inspections of US meat-processing facilities before reopening Japan to beef imports. Naturally, the revelation constituted a signal for everyone who's ever walked past a government facility to deliver an opinion on the safety concerns thus raised. The one of most interest came, of course, from the opposition leader:

Around noon on 30 January, Democratic Party of Japan leader Seiji Maehara responded to questions from the press corp in the Diet Building about Agriculture Minister Shoichi Nakagawa's failure to conduct site inspections before deciding whether to reopen Japan to imports of US-produced beef. About Nakagawa's statement that "I did not act in accordance with the diet resolution, so I take responsibility," Maehara stated, "It's only fitting for him to resign. And it shouldn't stop there--responsibility must be extended to the entire cabinet."

Shinzo Abe weighed in also:

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe spoke at a lower house budget committee meeting on 30 January, delivering the government's official (unified) position revolving around the issue of the failure to conduct site inspections that were to have been carried out before the reopening of Japan to imports of US-produced beef: "The decision to resume imports has not conflicted with the government's original response."

...

In the afternoon, he emended his statement to "(After the issuing of the government's response paper), we judged that the efficacy of [procedures to] preserve safety had been secured through cooperation between Japan and the US. There has been no deviation from the response paper's main point that we need to secure the safety of the food supply." That evening, he retreated from his statement that morning, stating, "I have not said that [Nakagawa's actions] violated the cabinet resolution." He did not respond to calls for Nakagawa's resignation from the opposition parties.

Leaving aside whether the original cabinet resolution was excessively finicking and paranoid, it's pretty clear that Nakagawa and his team failed to follow it by not performing site inspections. It's not clear yet whether enough people will get worked up to force him to resign.

I'd been thinking that I'm about due for a weird-search-term post, but when I looked back, I realized that there hasn't been all that much variety after all. There's just a lot of variation on a few themes, some of which are kind of disturbing:

"japanese forget the year party grope"
"groping chik@n videos"

That first one is actually from almost a month ago; I started a post and saved it and then didn't get around to finishing it. Despite the fact that the New Year is long gone, the topic is a perennial.

You would not believe the number of searches I get looking for things about chik@n: "videos" and "instructions" especially. I can only assume it's the same for any other Japan-focused blogger who's been unwise enough to mention the phenomenon. I'm trying to believe that the overwhelming majority of Googles are from social scientists doing research. (Please don't show up to disillusion me.) But whatever the motivation--and I don't want to be encouraging any sickos here--I have to say: instructions??!! Who needs instructions to figure out how to grope?

"JAL close shave"

Which one, pray tell? There's been a new report issued about the turbulence-induced shake-up of a Tokyo-Fukuoka flight a few years ago that caused a bunch of injuries. But perhaps you mean the near collision a few years ago that would have been one of the highest-fatality disasters in civil aviation history if it hadn't been averted.

"gay culture kyushu"

HANDS OFF MY MAN, BITCH!

Oh, uh, sorry.

What I mean to say is, I think it's most active in Fukuoka, which would make sense since that's the largest city and a major transportation hub. Japanese friends are always going on and on about how hot Kyushu guys are; I've never really seen it. Now, Okinawan guys....

"do all white men have defined chests"

If only! Actually, there was another, almost identical search a few days ago, so either someone is investigating this with the assiduousness it deserves or there are two people out there who might do better in their quest if they pooled their resources.

BTW, do I really use the word chest that often? I don't rightly remember doing so, but I can't think of any other reason I'd be showing up in so many "chest" searches.

"smooth chest guys"

[smirk] Wrong blog, honey.

"Japanese ripening woman mature sex picture"

Also wrong blog, honey. Or buddy, or whoever you are. Though take my word for it: if that's your thing, I think it's great.

You know, over there somewhere.

Interesting, if not entirely unexpected:

Oscar favourite Brokeback Mountain has been effectively banned from cinemas in China, it has been reported.

Censors ruled the gay cowboy romance too controversial to be shown in the country where homosexuality is a taboo, industry paper Daily Variety said.

Brokeback Mountain - by Taiwanese director Ang Lee - is a firm favourite to be among the Oscar nominations when they are revealed in the US on Tuesday.

One wonders what Lee would have to say about that (via Gay Orbit):

Director Ang Lee says Asian audiences are more accepting of gay subject matter than Americans.

A Utah movie theatre, owned by a Mormon, pulled his new film, the gay cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain.

"I think Asian society is more open," said Ang. "I think there's pressure to condemn [homosexuality] in their [Americans'] religion which causes their homophobia."

In a way, of course, it's not fair to make such a comparison--theoretically, Lee could be right about Asia, and the PRC's censors could be abnormally uptight and lack understanding of what people are willing to see.

I wouldn't buy it, though. One doesn't hear a lot of open condemnation of homosexuality in Asia because people pretend it doesn't exist. You still get people telling you, "Homosexuality is a Western thing--we don't have it in Korea." That doesn't mean people are accepting, though (at least in Japan) I do think it means that as long as you're willing to be ultra-discreet, your likely to be able to live without really encountering open hostility.

It's important to note, though, that that tradeoff is forced here in ways it isn't in the States. In America, your choices are limited if you want to live somewhere where you can be a complete, 24/7 flamer and have lots of gay people and institutions at your disposal; but such places do exist, and finding out where they are is very easy. Everyone in America has heard of New York. You can choose to stay in a more socially conservative environment and be closeted to a greater or lesser degree if you like, but you don't have to.

In Japan, by contrast, my area of Tokyo is as good as it gets. There are no gay neighborhoods to speak of. There are quite a few areas with bars, of which Shinjuku 2-chome is the largest. Gay guys live in concentrations there and in certain parts of Nakano and perhaps elsewhere. But the social stigma attached to not marrying and having children is very pronounced, and it comes at you from all sides if you're Japanese. I've never lived in Taiwan or Korea, but friends from there tell me it's basically the same. People we know in Malaysia and Indonesia do have their bars raided; and for the Muslims, their religion is no more hot on homosexuality than Christianity is. (Ang Lee does remember that Asia doesn't stop at Tokyo, Taipei, and Hong Kong, doesn't he?)

So while Lee is Asian and I am not, I don't think he has any idea what he's talking about. One final note: Asian viewers, like foreign viewers in many other places, are often entertained by sexual and other behavior in pop-culture artifacts that they think shows what a crazy, disorderly, hedonistic place the West (especially the US) is. That says nothing about how they would react to similar behavior by their children, neighbors, or coworkers.

There's been more news about the Yamaha Motor flap:

Yamaha Motor Co. sold a top-of-the-line unmanned helicopter to a Chinese company that was established in 1993 by high-ranking officers of the People's Liberation Army, sources said over the weekend.

Yamaha is also suspected of having received several tens of millions of yen in rebates from another Chinese company that bought the helicopters, said the sources close to the police investigation into the alleged illegal exports.

Investigators now expect Yamaha will face charges of violating the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Control Law for the unapproved exports.

The PLA-linked company to which Yamaha sold the unmanned helicopter is Poly Technologies Inc., based in Beijing.

...

The vice chairman and president of China Poly Group is He Ping, the husband of Deng Rong, the youngest daughter of the late paramount Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.

It's not what you know....

*******

Though the new Japan Post holding company has just started operations, Nippon Express (Nittsu) is already planning its strategic response to the privatization (or "privatization"):

As a defensive move against the operations of the new Japan Post public corporation, Nippon Express will become the first private provider to deliver personal correspondence on a nationwide scale. The new service will target documents with a delivery cost of ¥1000 or higher; parcels will be picked up from the user's address and delivered by the next day. Nationwide delivery of personal correspondence is now monopolized by the Japan Post registered mail service, but Nittsu will provide delivery at lower cost in certain regions.

*******

Japan is modifying its approach to angling for a permanent UN Security Council membership:

Japan's new proposal has taken into account the United States' position that Security Council membership should not be expanded by more than six seats, to a maximum 21 from the current 15, including the five permanent members--Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.

The proposal calls for a country seeking permanent membership on the council to receive a seat if it can win the backing of two-thirds of the U.N. General Assembly in a vote, the officials said.

Under the plan, such permanent members, however, would not be given veto power, the ministry said.

The government is considering presenting the proposal at the United Nations this spring. Whether other countries concerned will support the plan is not known, they said.

The new draft seeks to have the present Security Council framework comprising the five permanent members and 10 nonpermanent ones increased by six to make the council a 21-member body.

According to the plan, a maximum of six countries--two each from Asia and Africa, and one each from Latin America and Europe--should be allowed to join the existing five permanent members.

Japan contributes almost a fifth of the UN's general budget.

Atsushi flew home this afternoon. This month was not only our fifth anniversary but also the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. Because I don't believe in asking questions I don't want to know the answer to, I didn't ask Atsushi which milestone was more significant to him.

Have I mentioned that my man is really into Mozart? And the Strausses. And pretty much every other Austrian who ever wrote music. They were running a series of Mozart performances on NHK this week; he brought a tape of The Magic Flute (2003 in Covent Garden) along. We didn't go to the orchestra when I was growing up, but we listened to classical music at home quite a bit. Mozart's 40th is probably about my favorite piece--yes, before you say it, it goes with my high-strung personality.

Opera? Not really my thing, but sometimes entertaining. Atsushi and I watched The Magic Flute while eating our brunch (contrived using the cast-iron frying pan and potato ricer my parents sent me for Christmas). Ichs and Neins were sung. Daggers were handed to psychologically vulnerable maidens with creamy bosoms. Heroes were aided by trios of altar boys sent by (I think) the Sun King. Magic flutes were played. Well, I guess one magic flute and one organ-grinder kind of thing with chimy bells inside. I kind of liked it. Atsushi, however, beamed the whole way through like a four-year-old boy whose dad had just given him his first toy train.

Since it's not a bank holiday tomorrow, he's back in Kyushu already, and I'm doing the laundry and clean-up thing. Great weekend, though, even if I am ending it sitting alone in the apartment eating smushed-together leftovers: mashed potatoes and a grilled peach (yes, obviously in heavy syrup--if God hadn't meant peaches to come in heavy syrup, he wouldn't have made cans) and some steamed vegetables. Hope everyone else enjoys the remaining time...about a half-day at home in the States, right?

John has posted again on one of my favorite (if that's the word) subjects, spurred by this at It Comes in Pints? (strong language alert, though it's in no wise gratuitous) and this at Ilyka Damen's. This is from a comment he also left at It Comes in Pints? about three-fifths of the way down the page:

[T]he expats who think they are something special because of the experience are even worse in Asia [than in Europe]. A lot of them have the "spiritual quest" thing going on, too, which makes them even more annoying (if you can imagine that).

Yes. If I ever start prancing around and getting lecture-y about how living in Asia has made me more Harmonious with Nature (because the post-War steel/glass/concrete/blacktop blanket over Japan is punctuated by the occasional decorative carp pond, don't you know), you are to punch me. Hard. The idea that Westeners are spiritually empty consumerist vessels, into which mystical Oriental wisdom must be poured to help them achieve cosmic wholeness, is a real menace. (However, it should be pointed out that most expats and travelers don't think that way; it's just that those who do are pushy about it.)

For once, a domestic JAL flight took off on time, so I'd just barely gotten out of the shower when Atsushi arrived; I ended up answering the door in a towel instead of my new Happy Anniversary sweater. "Just in time," he smirked as he stepped into the entryway in his overcoat and scarf.

I feel so objectified.

JAL itself, of course, has also been under scrutiny lately; it's decided--about time, too--to establish a Safety Awareness Center. One would like to think that safety awareness is so well integrated into the operations of any First World airline that having such a special division would be redundant, but JAL has been pretty mishap-prone lately, so

Japan Airlines revealed on 27 January that it will set up a Safety Awareness Center at Haneda Airport near the end of April; among other things, the remains of the fuselage of the jumbo jet that crashed in 1985 will be exhibited. The aim is to use the center for the safety training of employees in the JAL group, but JAL says that it will make it possible for others to come in and observe.

Of course, reprimands from the transport authority have as much to do with this move as the desire to serve customers better out of good business sense or saintliness. It's probably a wise one, though, given the multiple little incidents it's had over the last few years.

Mentee is the sort of coinage that sours my stomach, but the program described here at Penn is doing a good thing (via Gay News). I especially like that the interviewees (shut it) forgo the opportunity to make the campus out to be some sort of anti-gay minefield:

"I think it's great that [the program] is helping people figure out things for themselves," Thalmann said. "They are much more involved in activities and feel more comfortable at Penn."

Generally, gay or questioning students seem to find an accepting climate at Penn, Thalmann said.

"I had no qualms or concerns about the Penn community," Mangam said. For him, how to come out to his close friends and family presented a larger issue.

That squares with my experience a little over a decade ago, though it wasn't until after graduation that I came out conclusively. My college friends were the least of my worries--it often seemed that they were positively champing at the bit for me to be gay, though I know they really just wanted me to accept myself. In academic terms, well, I was in the comparative literature program--not exactly a hotbed of in-your-face anti-gay activity--but I doubt there were many places where being gay presented a problem besides (maybe) some of the sports teams or Greek organizations and, like, Campus Crusade for Christ.

And I'm not even sure about there. Nevertheless, some time around my junior or senior year, a bunch of people with too little to do decided that the LGBA wasn't militant enough or something and decided to form a loud(er)-mouthed group called QuIP: Queers Invading Penn. Like most postures of unregenerate in-your-face rebelliousness attempted by the milk-fed children of Bergen County, NJ, and Greenwich, CT, I went to school with, it was pretty damned pathetic. Wholly unnecessary, too, since by 1995 Penn was already deep into its current PC-sensitivo phase.

However, knowing that other people on campus are going to accept you only helps so much when you're wondering whether your parents are going to disown you. Level-headed, practical mentoring is a useful thing, and it's good to see that the program the gay center's program is being taken advantage of.

Today's sheesh-not-this-again story in Japan revolves around a business hotel chain and its enterprising approach to building codes:

It was revealed on 27 January that major business hotel chain Toyoko Inn (headquartered in Tokyo) had committed legal infractions involving renovations. After its Idzumo City, Shimane Prefecture, facility opened, the company converted a guest room designed for disabled guests into a meeting room; at four Osaka hotels, the company converted parking spaces for disabled users into storage and lobby space, in violation of the Building Standards Law.

There are now at least eight prefectures in which such cases of legal infractions by Toyoko Inn are suspected, and company president Norimasa Nishida [whose given name, 憲正, hilariously uses the characters for "codified law" (now referring to "constitution") and "rectitude"--SRK] revealed tonight that he intends to have inspections carried out on all 120 hotels owned by the conglomerate throughout Japan and to make the results public next week. The renovations at the Idzumo City hotel are said to have been conducted at the instruction of the company.

The Asahi English edition has a much lengthier article detailing the various conversions of facilities for the handicapped for other uses.

Violations of the Building Standards Law aren't exactly a novelty, now that the Aneha scandal has been going for several months; and in this case, of course, the stakes aren't as high as they are when buildings don't meet earthquake resistance codes. I'm not dismissing the need for handicapped people to have facilities that they can use, but the fraud involved in not providing them in order to have more space for smokers is not the same as the fraud involved in lying to people about how likely their house is to collapse on their heads in an earthquake.

Speaking of earthquake resistance, the Asahi also had an interesting report about retrofitting:

Many say that fixing up these old wooden homes remains the single most effective way to reduce the number of people dying in the next big earthquake.

They point to the so-called Imiya memo, a kind of "survey of the dead" compiled by practicing doctor Masahiro Imiya after the Kobe quake.

...

The document clearly reveals that most of the people who died in the quake were not killed by the temblor, or by fire.

They were killed by their houses.

And yet, comments Imiya, "If some minor measures had been taken, they wouldn't have died."

Enacting those "minor measures," however, is proving to be more difficult than it sounds.

...

In fact, in the 10 years since the government passed legislation in December 1995 to promote quakeproofing upgrades, as few as 10,000 houses across the country have actually had those upgrades.

...

Kimiro Meguro, a professor of urban safety engineering at the University of Tokyo, points to what he calls a "lack of disaster imagination"--the idea that people simply can't conceive of what could happen when disaster strikes.

Social psychologists also refer to the "normality bias," the habit of people to assume that they alone will survive. This kind of mentality impedes disaster preparation.

Both of those are probably part of it. Another part of it, for the old people who live in traditional wooden houses, is probably that they're just used to the idea that they could be toast when the big one comes. There's also--you hear this from a really shocking number of people--the conventional wisdom that says that the flexibility of old-fashioned wooden buildings makes them more likely to survive in an earthquake. That not only flies in the face of empirical evidence from Kobe and elsewhere, it flies in the face of common sense. Old houses have heavy clay roof tiles, flimsy walls, and inflammable materials all over the place. While there's a nice life-lesson sort of feeling to imagining that the lack of rigidity in their framing makes them more likely to survive--you know, you gotta roll with the punches and be adaptable and stuff--in real life, shear is not a good learning opportunity.

But I think another part of it is that unless you plan to barricade yourself into your house, you're going to be spending a lot of time on subway platforms, driving on overpasses, working in office buildings with lots of shelves above eye-level, and drinking in little basement bars. An earthquake can strike at any time. While we all want to be prepared, a comprehensive earthquake kit in a properly braced bedroom is of no use if the ground decides to convulse while you're in line at the video store. I still think it's irresponsible not to be prepared--you don't want to add post-disaster stress to fire and rescue services or to leave your family and coworkers in the lurch--but I can see how a lot of people figure a lot of fussing isn't worth it.

I hadn't noticed this a few days ago, assuming it was in the Japanese print media, but NHK News has just run a segment on it. From Stars & Stripes:

All Yokosuka-based Navy personnel, civilians and dependents were cut off from late-night drinking in Yokosuka on Thursday by a general order signed by Rear Adm. James Kelly, Commander Naval Forces Japan.

And all active-duty servicemembers in the Kitty Hawk Strike Group — the Navy's largest — are under a 1 a.m. curfew ordered by Rear Adm. Doug McClain, the strike group commander.

...

All personnel subject to the curfew must be back on base or in their off-base residences by 1 a.m.

In ordering the drinking restrictions, Kelly cited the recent spate of alcohol-related crime as the reason for his action.

William Reese, a Navy airman from the USS Kitty Hawk is in Japanese police custody in connection with the Jan. 3 beating death of a 56-year-old Yokosuka woman. Early Wednesday morning, USS McCain sailor Arlon Baker was arrested and accused of breaking into a Yokosuka junior high school. Both men were intoxicated, according to Japanese police reports.

...

The restriction applies only to alcohol consumption, said CNFJ spokesman John Wallach. If those covered by the drinking restrictions but not covered by the curfew "want to sit on a bar stool in the Honch till 5 a.m. drinking Coke, that's fine," he said.

The reaction is pretty predictable:

The alcohol ban is a "smart idea" during the week but extending it through the weekend is "pushing it," said Petty Officer 3rd Class Anthony Merlotte.

"Sunday through Thursday makes sense — that will keep us on our toes for work," he said. "But Fridays and Saturdays — that means more people will start drinking earlier."

Honch bartender Anastasiya Bandarenka predicted people likely will just move their drinking to barracks rooms and private houses. That will be bad for bars' business, she said, adding, "I think it's rather foolish to believe that people will stop drinking just because of an order."

Maybe. I'm not so sure about private houses--perhaps crashing for the night after having a few too many isn't feasible for visitors, in which case they'll be walking home pickled anyway. But if street crime, as opposed to mere drunkenness, is what the policy is designed to prevent, forcing people to get blotto in their own quarters (where they won't cause a diplomatic incident if they smash windows) doesn't sound like a bad idea.

So Hamas won big against Fatah in the Palestinian elections. Great:

International peace broking in the Middle East was plunged into turmoil on Friday by Hamas's shock Palestinian election win and a U.S. vow not to deal with the Islamic group until it renounced violence against Israel.

Many world leaders turned up the heat on Hamas to moderate policies and Israel itself ruled out talks with any Palestinian government that involved Hamas, which is sworn to its destruction and has been behind dozens of suicide bombings.

Fears of internal Palestinian unrest grew when hundreds of gunmen from President Mahmoud Abbas's long-dominant Fatah movement marched in Gaza City, firing in the air to protest against the Hamas victory and demanding that Abbas resign.

Hamas's triumph on Thursday in winning 76 seats in the 132-member Palestinian parliament against 43 for Fatah was widely seen as a political earthquake in the Middle East, triggered by voter disenchantment with corruption.

"I have made it very clear...that a political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of a platform is a party with which we will not deal," U.S. President George W. Bush told a news conference in Washington.

The US, Russia, the UN, and the EU (the Palestinian Authority's biggest financial backer) are pressing Hamas to soften its position against Israel. Since it's still calling for Israel to be wiped off the map, that's going to be some softening.

There's no cause-effect relationship here, but the Japanese cabinet resolved today to extend the deployment of SDF personnel in the Golan Heights:

In a 27 January cabinet meeting, the government decided to extend by six months the deployment of the SDF in the Golan Heights, which was to expire in March but will now last until September. The measure follows a half-year extension of peace-keeping activities by the UN Security Council's United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). The SDF has participated in UNDOF, which conducts peace-keeping operations, since 1996; it conducts operations that include the transporting of basic supplies for living, the dissemination of information from headquarters, and project implementation.

Chris Crain at the Washington Blade has a lengthy post about Virginia Governor Tim Kaine's statement that he will not veto a near-comprehensive ban on legal recognition of gay partnerships if it passes the legislature:

Not to worry, gay Virginians. You still have plenty of leverage here because Kaine is a Democrat and has aspirations to higher public office. Given the influence gay Democratic groups have within the party, pressure will surely be brought to bear on such an abject betrayal of an important constituency, not to mention the party's historical commitment to civil rights.

Enter Josh Israel, president of the Virginia Partisans Gay & Lesbian Democratic Club, which endorsed Kaine's election. Contacted by the Blade, Israel...well...he didn't exactly call on Kaine to veto the amendment. In fact, he didn't even ask Kaine to pressure the Senate to limit its scope. Instead, Israel begged (apparently from within Uncle Tom's quarters at the plantation, since that term is being bandied about so much these days) the governor to at least make sure the ballot wording is fair.

How's that? The ballot wording? Why not call on him to oppose the measure? Because, according to Israel in a remarkable bit of Orwellian spin, "it's not the governor endorsing this effort when he says he will send it to the ballot. It's just the governor doing his job."

With gay rights activists like that, who needs party hacks?

Still, even if gay Virginias [sic] are left unprotected by weak-kneed local leaders, they can be thankful there's a nationwide organization of gay Democrats to put the screws to Kaine. Only...the National Stonewall Democrats were a bit too busy this week to notice what was happening across the Potomac from their Washington headquarters.

Instead, they were pleasantly distracted by the goings on north of the nation's capital, in Maryland, where Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich was introducing legislation that would allow gay and unmarried straight couples to sign an official government registry ensuring they can make medical decisions for each other in time of emergency.

Just how did the National Stonewall Democrats react to a Republican governor in Maryland introducing legislation offering a modicum of legal recognition to gay couples, on the same week that the Democratic governor in Virginia said he would sign the broadest constitutional ban ever on legal recognition for gay couples? By attacking the Republican and not even mentioning the Democrat, of course.

"A bridal registry at Target would offer same-sex couples more benefits than this watered-down, election-year ploy by Governor Ehrlich," said Eric Stern, the Stonewall Dems' E.D., in a press release issued Friday.

Maybe so, but the Democrat in Richmond is poised to sign a ballot measure that would amend the state's constitution to forever ban even a "watered-down" registry like the one proposed by Ehrlich, and it would probably take the bridal book at Target down with it.

People are always asking me why, since I think about politics all the time, I'm not more active in any PACs or in my party. (I bet even my dear friends reading this forgot that I switched my registration to the GOP a few months ago, right? Of course, you did.) The main reason is, the moment discussions of politics veer off policy and into which senator's aide's back needs to be scratched to get X done, or why Congressman Y had to use this word instead of that word when responding to a question about a certain issue at this or that rubber-chicken banZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

I know glad-handing is necessary. I know maneuvering is necessary. I'm also aware that a lot of people make ringing declarations of "principledness" that, in effect, mean they want to hold themselves aloof from the job of getting in there and figuring out how we can all live together in the real world without killing each other.

But the major gay political organizations provide illustration after illustration of what happens when politicking becomes the end rather than the means. Jonathan Rauch's National Journal article from last week discussed a similar problem with the Republicans:

From 1981 through 1998, Republican reformers' thinking was dominated by Dave Stockman (President Reagan's first budget director) and Newt Gingrich (the reform-minded House speaker of 1995 to '98). Both were movement politicians who believed that, by cutting spending, Republicans could build prosperity, tame Big Government, and win majority status.

The trouble was that budget cuts brought short-term political backlashes that kept interrupting the program. Burned by President Clinton in 1995-96 and then spanked by voters in 1998, Republicans decided to reverse the sequence. First they would build a political machine; then, once safely entrenched, they would reform Social Security and Medicare, shrink government, and so on. The new course was set by DeLay and Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political strategist—both machine-builders par excellence.

And so, under DeLay and Bush, the Republicans spent generously, even profusely, to build their base. The number of budgetary earmarks increased from 2,100 in 1998 to 14,000 in 2005, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. To disarm the Democrats, the Republicans gave up on reducing entitlement spending and instead dramatically increased it, notably with an expensive new prescription drug program. (According to Richard Kogan, a senior fellow with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Republicans have added $540 billion to entitlement costs over the 2001-to-2011 period.) They cut taxes and spent heavily on the Iraq war and defense. (Real spending on defense and security has risen by more than 7 percent a year since 2001, Kogan says.)

When, last year, DeLay blurted out that the budget had no fat left, he meant that it had no political fat, and he was right. Every dollar now served a constituent group in DeLay's carefully built machine.

Naturally, there are a lot of ways in which the cases aren't analogous. The link I see is in the expediency-prioritizing operating procedure that involves playing the game to get ahead now and figuring you can revert to principle later. Maybe I'm just too trusting, but I find it hard to believe that most of the best-connected gay activists are just being cynical--that is, that they're consciously using their positions to curry favor with the DNC and its more powerful local pols even if it means selling out gays in general. Their reasoning is probably that you can't exert leverage you don't have, and that building leverage means demonstrating a willingness to compromise.

That's true enough, but if you haven't nailed down what it is you're not going to compromise on, you end up without any leverage anyway, even if you're invited to some pretty choice receptions. The organizations mentioned in the Blade entry are both Democratic, so you can't fault them for being partisan. That's their job. You can fault them for being both disingenuous and pathetic about it.

I fear that to some American readers, the Asahi's "NHK's aim to become BBC of Japan, duck Takenaka's control" headline will give the wrong impression. Here's how the accompanying article starts:

Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK), choked by scandals, a sharp drop in viewer fees and wariness of tighter government control, has unveiled a new management plan that tears pages from the BBC's book of operating.

The new three-year plan not only de-emphasizes NHK's old policy of expansion, but also stresses independence and stronger corporate self-governance.

That is apparently aimed at deflecting recent government moves to wield more control over the public broadcaster.

In December last year, Heizo Takenaka, minister of internal affairs and communications, set up an advisory panel to review NHK's operations.

Before you snigger, "More like the BBC?!" let's remember a few things. Like the BBC, NHK began as a government entity; unlike the BBC, it's still a government entity. [Whoops--thanks, Toby. I was sure the BBC had undergone that neither-here-nor-there semi-public-corporation thing--a la Japan Post, whose new corporation just started operations, BTW--but no.] No, it still hasn't been privatized; instead it's stuck in Japan's public-corporation limbo. That means there's been nothing over the line about the Koizumi administration's talk of reforming it. At the same time, it's perfectly reasonable for the board of governors to want to be able to operate as it sees fit. From the above link to the NHK's English website (corresponding Japanese here), this is its own wishful line about the way it functions:

NHK is financed by the receiving fee paid by each household that owns a television set. This system enables the Corporation to maintain independence from any governmental and private organization, and ensures that the opinions of viewers and listeners are assigned top priority.

Everyone in Japan knows that that's a crock. Plenty of households manage not to pay NHK fees (mostly by simply bringing a television into the house without letting NHK know, rather than in the process of righteously opposing its misconduct), its news service plays along with the chummy press club game as much as that of any other major broadcaster or publication in Japan, and viewers and listeners have been making a beeline for other broadcasters that give them what they actually want to watch and hear.

So in theory, it sounds like a great idea for NHK to undertake reform from within. Vice President Taeko Nagai, in an interview with the Asahi, "said NHK can learn a lot from the BBC, which puts priority on high-quality programs ranging from news to drama to comedy." Fair enough. NHK's historical dramas and documentary shows are frequently first-rate, but it certainly broadcasts plenty of junk. (Whether excising that junk would be in line with better serving consumer demand is an impolitic question that I will humbly receive the favor of not answering here.)

Additionally, the resignation of its last board president exactly a year ago, mostly over embezzlement but also over the possibility that LDP higher-ups (including current star Shinzo Abe) pressed the producer of a mock trial program about Japan's use of comfort women during the occupation of Asia to soften its contents. To be fair, that wasn't the first time NHK reports and "documentaries" were shown to have been cagily edited or even outright staged, and in other cases, NHK acted on its own volition.

In any case, the government views NHK as a public body with responsibility to Kasumigaseki, and NHK views itself as a government-funded semi-independent body striving toward (dare we say it?) BBC levels of objectivity and independence. Unfortunately, NHK wants to have its freedom of the press and eat citizens' money, too:

[Nagai] also indicated NHK's system of mandatory viewer fees should be maintained, because there are many high-quality programs that can only be provided by public broadcasters like NHK or the BBC.

Conveniently--and in this sense readers won't be getting the wrong impression at all--the arguments that have been made about the BBC apply pretty much equally to NHK: if it plans to wow us with all that high-quality programming and is serious about serving the public's needs, won't it be able to survive even if it's competing with other broadcasters? At least, wouldn't that be the case for its news service (which is the division in most obvious danger of being corrupted by too-close ties with the government)? NHK doesn't think so. I mean, it really doesn't think so.

Other elements of the new plan include offering services that play to NHK's strengths as a public broadcaster: strengthening news reports and disaster bulletins, and creating broadcasts catering to specific regions.

As for scrambling NHK programs for households that do not pay, a move recommended in some quarters, the plan insists it should be avoided.

It said steps will be taken to urge people to pay, and, as a last resort, preparations would be made to sue anyone who does not sign a contract.

I think that's pretty much what they are, indeed, going to have to be prepared to do.

Dear Mariah:

Because of you, I almost had the perfect weekend.

I mean, it's because of you that I had to add the "almost." Of course, Atsushi would have had to be here for it to be really perfect, but we had an appropriately tender anniversary call, and he seems less stressed by work lately, which is as perfect as things get while he's away. Yesterday, I got the most delicious little spring sweater at Zegna to wear when we have dinner this Saturday. My best friend appears to be cementing a new relationship with a man I approve of. On Saturday night, everyone was in a great mood--ran into guys I hadn't seen for ages but always enjoy talking too--and there was none of that slightly-strained merrymaking you sometimes get into over the New Year.

And then while I was talking to a cute, flirtatious Australian guy, I glanced up, and there was your hideous "Get Your Number" video. TOTALLY DESTROYED the combination of conviviality and aesthetic pleasure (did I mention that the boys at GB had managed to mix me a particularly yummy vodka tonic that go-round?).

Seriously, Mariah, or Mimi, or whoever you are now, I'm glad for your comeback. It's horrible to see people suffer in public, and with that suicidal website post and your career tanking and the nervous breakdown...well, I'm no more a fan of your music than I was before, but I'm glad you were able to come up with another album that sold in the gajillions because you clearly needed it to make you feel better.

Now that you do feel better, can we make the next project not looking like a whore? As another cute, flirtatious guy (this one from New York) remarked when that horrid video played yet again, you're working the "busted tramp" thing, and it's so...bad...so very, very bad. It's a lie that all (or most) gay men are misogynists, but it's not a lie that some are, and I fear you've managed to fall in with a stylist or two who really don't have your best interests at heart.

Same with your video director. Next time he says, "Okay, now that you've gotten into the shiny dress with the micro-miniskirt and the plunging neckline that exposes your appallingly obvious new rack-inflation job, I want you to perch on the edge of this here sofa with your knees three feet apart," here's your response--and I want you to practice this, dear: "LIKE HELL I WILL, BUSTER."

You'll be doing all of us a favor.

Still kinda feeling icky,

Sean K.

Considering what happens when communists take it into their heads to get bellicose, this is kind of nice to hear in a way. Unrealistic given the way the world has shaped up of late, but, you know, nice:

Kazuo Shii, chief of the Japan Communist Party secretariat, submitted an invitation to Social Democratic Party head Mizuho Fukushima to join the JCP in a struggle to oppose the revision of Article 9 of the constitution. The party leaders will conduct a meeting in the near future and discuss what kind of joint struggle is feasible. Shii addressed a press conference, saying "If we can come to an agreement between our parties, which hold Diet seats, we can wield a great deal of power to block the revision of the constitution." SDP chief party secretary Seiji Mataichi confined himself to telling the Diet press corps, "The Social Democratic and Communist parties are not in a position to make very great headway by ourselves. We're just part of a more broad-ranging citizens' battlefront for preventing constitutional revision."

How much citizen support the SDP and JCP can actually rally is very debatable. The public is ambivalent on the Koizumi administration's unqualified support for Bush's approach to the WOT; at the same time, China and North Korea have been emitting hostile noises with disturbing frequency, and Japan knows that it's small and potentially vulnerable next to them. Its alliance with the US allows it to be part of a proven winning team, the US has made it clear that it wants the revision of Article 9 to go through, and while the Japanese are proud of the reputation for peaceableness the non-aggression clause has helped them maintain since the war, hard-core anti-war types haven't succeeded in getting voters fired up against the LDP's revision proposals.

Well, it's finally happened: they've arrested Takafumi Horie. I haven't been writing about this latest Livedoor story because...oh, I don't know. Atsushi is the business person in the family, and focusing on Japan's diplomatic soap opera gives me enough to talk about. As of this morning, the questioning Horie was undergoing was voluntary; the Asahi's latest English installment outlines all the key points for those who are interested but haven't really been following along:

The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office's questioning is apparently focused on Horie's involvement in a number of dubious transactions, including the 2004 purchase of publisher Money Life Co. by Livedoor Marketing Co., a Livedoor affiliate.

Starting in autumn 2003, Livedoor took over six companies, five of them through stock swaps, and then manipulated their stock prices, sources close to the investigation said.

The profits gained through the manipulations were passed on to Livedoor in the form of fictitious transactions with its subsidiaries, the sources said.

Livedoor also listed gains through sales of its own shares as revenue, instead of assets, they said.

These maneuvers enabled Livedoor and its affiliates to window-dress their accounts, the sources said.Some said Livedoor had padded its earnings by about 9 billion yen.

...but so did his opponents, so that part of the outcome wasn't really under dispute.

The Governor of Okinawa spoke today with the head of the JDA on the restructuring of US military installations in Okinawa, which is an ongoing issue on which there seems to be little movement lately:

Okinawa Governor Keiichi Inamine visited Japan Defense Agency head Fukushiro Nukaga at the JDA offices on 23 January. Of the mayoral election in the city of Nago, he stated, "The new mayor will be someone who acts in good faith, but all three candidates stood opposed to the proposal to shift [US military] operations and facilities from the Futenma Base to the coastal areas of Camp Schwab. It will still be a difficult issue from here on." He went on to say of the Futenma restructuring issue that "from the Okinawa side, we will continue to act in good faith."

The JDA has asked for concessions from the US aimed at minimizing the burdens placed on locals where our bases are located. The Yomiuri had a good English-edition rundown of the election referred to above:

In fact, Shimabukuro [who won, BTW--SRK] is opposed to the relocation plan to which the Japanese and the U.S. governments agreed (under the agreed plan, the Futenma Air Station in Ginowan will be relocated to the southern coast of Camp Schwab in Nago). However, Shimabukuro wants to leave room for compromise should the plan be revised.

Henoko Ward Head Yasumasa Oshiro said: "Those who protest against the plan say, 'The money will be gone as it's spent, but the base will remain forever.' But these pretty words don't feed people. What's important is compensation."

Quite a few restaurants in the central part of the ward seemed to have closed down, others seem to be struggling, the English letters on their signs fading away.

An elderly taxi driver said, "This used to be a lively quarter, full of U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War, but now it's deserted, with no young people coming in."

Oshiro is opposed to the current relocation plan, which suggests building the air station only 300 meters away from the closest civilian residence. He does not approve of the way the central government overruled the local governments when it agreed to the plan.

Oshiro criticized the central government, saying: "We're not interested in dugongs and seaweed beds. The government should have dealt effectively with the opponents and promoted the idea of building the airport on reclaimed land in shallow waters off Henoko. It was their delinquency that didn't make it happen."

A few months ago, the US was the party pushing the original reclaimed-land proposal; local voters didn't go for it, and it isn't just a gambit by Okinawan politicians to shove the relocated facilities as far away from the locals as possible.

*******

Oh, and BTW, whoops!

Several unmanned helicopters produced by Yamaha Motor Co. may have been passed on to China's People's Liberation Army, it has been learned.

Suspicions have arisen that the helicopters, which are employed largely for industrial use but can be also used for military purposes, were illegally exported to China, investigators allege.

Yamaha Motor has denied the allegations, but suspicions have arisen that the helicopters may have been passed on to the People's Liberation Army. Police and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry are investigating the company over its actions.

Investigators said Yamaha Motor was involved in trade with an aircraft firm in Beijing. The aircraft firm's Web site says Yamaha Motor's unmanned helicopters have prospects for "wide use in civilian and military fields." An unmanned helicopter is pictured alongside a People's Liberation Army jet.

The bar where Atsushi and I were first introduced is one of those places with lots of shelves and niches full of stuff. The owner has a thing for Chinese culture, so you've got your gongs and your dragons and your red and gold things. He also brought in some books. Guys frequently take down and page through the ones about your zodiac sign or gay places to go in Singapore and stuff. Being a big dork, I frequently took down the one called 水生無脊椎動物 (suisei musekitsui doubutsu: "aquatic invertebrates," which title appears on the cover as Aquatic Invertebrates of the World) and looked at color drawings of the various varieties of starfish and cross sections of sea cucumbers. This drew such comments as "Sean, you're the only gay man on the planet who would sit at a bar and read a book called Aquatic Invertebrates of the World" and...well, that was pretty much the comment everyone made, actually. Until Atsushi. His comment was "Hmmm...," which with him frequently counts as a full sentence, as I would discover later.

You're thinking this is yet another post with no point, but you are WRONG. Knowing the Japanese word for invertebrate means you know the character for spinal cord, and that means you can understand why Japan decided to reinstate its ban on US beef again today, after spinal cord was found in a shipment. The usual statements have been made. No more gyudon from Yoshinoya (again) until things are sorted out.

You have got to be kidding me (via Ace Pryhill at Gay Orbit):

University of Florida employees have to pledge that they're having sex with their domestic partners before qualifying for benefits under a new health care plan at the university.

The partners of homosexual and heterosexual employees are eligible for coverage under UF's plan, which will take effect in February. The enrollment process began this month, and some employees have expressed concern about an affidavit that requires a pledge of sexual activity.

...

Kim Tanzer, chair of the Faculty Senate, said she could understand why some faculty might view the affidavit as invasive.

"I can see (Behnke's) point," she said. "If you ask married folks if they're in a platonic relationship, that's a personal question."

"Some faculty might view the affidavit as invasive"?

Some?

MIGHT?!

And the rest are perfectly sanguine about having a "must fuck" clause built into their health insurance policy? Even Ace herself ("Okay, so while that sounds great, and totally could be used as ammo when one partner doesn't think the other is giving up the booty with enough frequency, it's really a stupid stipulation") and North Dallas Thirty (in the comments: "True, but I can see their point.....DPs really are not meant to cover, as they put it, long-term roommate relationships that don't involve anything deeper than shared space and bills"), both of whom are usually reliably reasonable people, don't seem to see what an OUTRAGE it is to have bean counters passing judgment on one's sex life.

Because, you know? I really can't see their point. Not even kind of sort of in a way. In fact, it's so ludicrous that I clicked around the parent site a little just to make sure we weren't being suckered by an Onion-style parody played straight. No such luck. Normally, I would be chary of interpreting "non-platonic" as meaning "sexual" to the bureaucrats interpreting it, but that's how the UF people quoted sure appear to mean it. (And my understanding from people who have dealt with having their marriages observed for green cards and things is that even the INS only tries to determine whether you live together in an intimate way. If there's some kind of bald sex requirement, it's the one complaint about bringing a spouse back to the States that I've somehow avoided hearing.)

This kind of thing is the perfect illustration of how the campaigners for gay marriage, with their squalling emphasis on achieving "validation" and "respect" and "dignity" through paperpushing, have been shooting themselves in the foot. If two people of undisclosed sexuality decide they're never going to marry and want to be responsible for each other, why shouldn't a domestic partnership arrangement cover them?

I love seeing romance bloom, but I cannot for the life of me imagine having the effrontery to demand it of people. And when it comes to my own household, the only person whose business it is whether Atsushi's being adequately serviced is Atsushi. I don't even discuss what happens in our bedroom with my best friend.

UF's VP of Human Resources is quoted as saying he "had no plans to personally enforce the sex pledge," which is nice, because even if the idea weren't COMPLETELY CRACKERS to begin with, what would you do? Would a used condom with DNA from both partners suffice (in the case of men)? Or would they have to go for it right in front of a certified university employee who would then sign a confirmation that they both got off? And, for that matter, even if they weren't really in a "non-platonic" relationship, couldn't the benefits be good enough that gritting their teeth through one bone-dance session a year (if that were the qualifying minimum) would be worth it for two unmarried roommates?

Unreal. Just unreal.

Happy fifth anniversary to my wonderful boyfriend, who deserves a much better man but, luckily for me, has shown no inclination to look for one. Five years and a month or so ago, I would have said that long-term commitment and stability and stuff were great ideals. You know, for other people. For Atsushi's part, one of the first questions he asked me when we started tentatively dating was "Don't you think it's pretty much impossible to have a lasting relationship with someone whose cultural background is so different from yours?" Glad we were both wrong.

John at TP with Page Numbers says something that one wishes wouldn't have to be repeated quite so often:

What I came away with from those broadcasts [while studying in the then-Soviet Union] was the view that the American press wasn't reporting on the European reaction (mostly negative – we should have given sanctions more time). I used to tell people about that "missing" perspective a lot when I got back here. God, what a little snot I was. I like to think I've grown a lot since then. I was still in my "Americans are so provincial" phase, which I can partially forgive myself for, since I was the only person, outside of my college friends, in my social circle that spoke a language that wasn't high school French or Spanish. If you judge me more harshly, I don't blame you, though. I doubt most Europeans would speak more than one language if another language wasn't as close to them as the state line is to me. And really, even children with Down's syndrome can be taught another language. It's not a sign of intelligence, although it is a sign of diligence, especially if you are in a large monolingual country such as China, Russia, or the US. Most of the pretentious Western Euros I know don't speak the hard languages (non-Indo European, or even Indo-European ones that require a non-Latin alphabet).

I think most of us are kind of snotty when we're in our early twenties, and the "hard languages," as John flatteringly styles them, tend to attract competitive know-it-all types. (Yes, obviously, I'm including myself--I'm aware of my flaws. Or at least aware of that flaw.) So I'm not inclined to judge him harshly, because he was willing to look and learn as he grew up. It's people who retain the "Ooh, FRANCE! How learnèd!" mentality well after they've been around the block enough times to know better that drive me nuts.

Of course, not all change is progress:

And my, how things have changed in 15 years, no? The press is full of the European reaction today. As if American interests should be subject to the judgment of a bunch of snot noses who tear their continent apart every fifty to hundred years or so. My guess is that 15 years ago the old guys with a grain or two of sense, who came of age in the late 40s and early 50s were still around in the newsrooms to keep the Boomers in check, but now the Narcissist Generation is running the show according to the score of '68. For which a lot of Euros happily produce new refrains.

I rag on the Boomers myself, but I think it's useful to note that they developed as their post-War parents, anxious to make everything safe and comfortable and pain-free after the first half of the century, reared them to. Not that all the fatuous navel-gazing was an intended consequence, of course. And plenty of Boomers in the mass audience, if not behind editors' desks, wish the more pompous European commentators would go take a flying leap and probably ignore most of the yak time CNN provides for them. It's still annoying that they're deferred to so much.

I was going to post this immediately after putting this up about my trip to Taiwan. Then I just kind of didn't and figured it was expendable. Then I read a few things that kept reminding me of the topic and thought--this is one of the bad things blogging does to you--Hey, I've still got that post I didn't put up, and there's still time to GIVE IT TO THE WORLD! So this is the other thing that struck me, not for the first time, over the weekend.

I ended up staying at the apartment of the woman who runs the office there--my trip had been arranged pretty hastily, and I guess there are a lot of people trying to get things done in Taipei before the Chinese New Year. My flight was delayed by rain and fog here in Tokyo; when we got in at her building, we had a midnight supper (tortellini and green salad and beer--quick and casual but, for me, like la Tour d'Ar-freakin'-gent after the stuff on the airplane) and talked animatedly for a while before turning in. We had several other meals together in the next few days--we've known each other for years and have become friends, and food in Taiwan is yummy--and I went out for lunches and stuff in various pick-up groups with other people from the office. Some of it was shop talk; I was there for shop, after all. But a lot of it was just the kind of stuff you find yourself talking about with other foreigners who live in Asia (and with Asians who've spent time living in the West; the groups tend to be mixed).

And I kept finding myself thinking how much I like the people I'm surrounded by and, despite my need to spend loads of time alone and my spiel about being a loner, how easy it is to talk to them.

The sheer relief of being able to say that catches up with me at odd moments. Growing up, I never really expected to be in my element. Not that I expected to be a full-on hermit. I was a pretty unpopular kid, but I was never really, seriously, scarily isolated. I always had a few close friends. And they were real, serious friends. I'm only in consistent contact with one of them now, but there's enough writing back and forth with two or three of the others that if by some chance I do go to our twenty-year reunion, I won't be in the dark about which marriages and children and career paths go with whom.

But without really verbalizing it to myself, I essentially figured I'd turn into one of those elderly bachelors who dote on their books and stuff and don't socialize much and (needless to say) never really have even one serious romance. I genuinely love books, so I wasn't too bothered. The implied lack of romance also didn't disturb me, since my best efforts to get worked up over girls came to naught, anyway. And as I say, I always had a very small but genuine set of friends, and you can't complain about that.

Like most people who only really grew into their personalities in college and afterward, though, I found it a new experience to be able to talk to people--just people in general--without having that constant low-level hum in my head that I had to stay reined in so I didn't give myself away somehow. Most of it, yes, was that I'd lost the subconscious fear of inadvertently saying or doing something that might make me look like a fag. (You kind of have to get over that if you're going to call men "honey" as often as I do.) And yet it was a lot of other little general-personality things, too: Being around people who know what it's like to want to move far away from where you grew up even though you love your family and the upbringing they gave you--that's a big one. And having it just assumed in the background, so that you don't have to keep explaining it all the time.

This is turning into one of those posts that dissolve into purposelessness. Perhaps it's just that I've written so many querulous this-article-SUCKS posts this week that I seem to be projecting a rather crabby mood and wanted to write about something positive. Atsushi can't get back for our anniversary tomorrow, but we'll be celebrating next week. Several friends of mine whose relationships ended last year are finding love...or at least fun distractions. The 300th anniversary of Ben Franklin's birth was a few days ago. A close college friend is getting married in May. Things are good, even if a lot of people are saying dumb things about Japan.

Zak, who comments here frequently and has a good (if on-again-off-again) blog here, sent along a link to this article. It's a response, in part, to a Mark Steyn column from a little while back. It also seems to think it's offering a reassuring alternative to the standard line about how Japan should provide for its future, which is characterized thus:

In response to the increasing average national age, money-minded people push for privatization, pension reform, greater per-worker efficiency, less protection, greater ambition. (Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is of this school. Whether he'll call for immigration reform is another matter; some say Japan's amazing new caring, sharing domestic robots have a less-publicized function: to forestall the need to bring Filipina maids and nurses into Japan.) In this view, changing demographics mean that life must get harder, more ruthless, more efficient.

Harder and more ruthless? Well, okay, I guess you could put it that way. I don't see what the crime is in increasing worker productivity, especially given Japan's current level of same and the potential for technology to help. And privatizing social welfare programs does mean that people are more responsible for taking care of themselves. Some might find that more liberating rather than harder.

Not everyone agrees. The soft approach is summed up by Japan's burgeoning Slow Life trend. Ironically for a movement that seeks to shift the social focus from money to quality of life, Slow Life has its roots in marketing. In 2001 prefectural governments, chasing the "green yen" of eco-tourism, began advertising campaigns using the slogan "Ganabaranai! — Don't go for it!" Attempting to lure stressed city dwellers to their rural regions (no doubt on high-speed trains sporting the Koizumite slogan "Ambitious Japan!"), the prefectures devised an eight-point Slow Life Manifesto that stressed nonacademic, noncompetitive lifestyles — walking, wearing traditional clothes and eating food made from local ingredients; durable and sustainable building construction; forestry; respect for the old; self-reliance and living in accord with the rhythms of nature.

Make.

It.

STOP.

Please.

I'm not just saying that as a confirmed urbanite. Who knows? Maybe in forty years my idea of happiness will be living out in the sticks in a thatched hut with a firepit for a stove, communing with the crickets and affectionately straightening Atsushi's obi before sending him off once a week to walk to the co-op for rice. Stranger things have happened.

Additionally, the Slow Life movement, as described in the article, does make a few good points. Urban Japan is not just kinetic; it's downright stressful. And Japan, for all its vaunted love of nature, hasn't been kind to its own countryside in the process of industrializing and becoming rich. And the post-war economy stuffed as many workers as possible into an Organization Man mold that doesn't fit many of them; understandably, many young people are deciding to trade down on money so they can get more leisure time (or do work they find stimulating). Japan is a mature, affluent economy, and it's perfectly natural for people to start thinking about quality of life rather than subsistence and the reconstruction of basic infrastructure.

But the idyll depicted in the article leaves a lot of key points out; and I fail to see how its origin in marketing is in any wise "ironic," given the way it seems to wed a flashy surface come-on to a lack of substance. For one thing, third-rate countries may have delicious food and breezy, non-competitive lifestyles, but they also often have sucky, innovation-free health care (no small consideration in an aged society). Also, you know that rather large country over there? Yes, CHINA--that's the one. No one expects it to attack Japan next week, but enmities in this part of the globe are ancient and deep-running, there are developing economies around that are competing for resources...and I'm not at all sure Japan will find itself able to do without a strong, first-rate defense system if it just announces to the rest of East Asia that everyone in the archipelago is going to devote himself to growing leeks and raking sand from here on.

There are more basic problems, though. Momus (and, to the extent that he's roped in, Ryuichi Sakamoto) seems to assume that we're in a position to get complacent and say that Japan has Achieved Enough and we should just be happy with it and even pull back a bit. The article considers no factors that could be driving Japan's current economy but competitiveness and money-madness--no natural human curiosity...no need for a variety of possible ways of life to be available for individuals to choose from...and no sense of the way people with funky, undemanding occupations still enjoy and depend on things produced by workaholics, or at least by people who are willing to take more structured jobs. Respect for age is a great thing, but many of the protections civilization provides against nature and human depredation come from rambunctious, thrill-seeking, resilient youth.

Therefore, while whether Japan is doomed if its population decreases as predicted is obviously an open question, fantasies like those mentioned in the Wired article don't seem likely to pan out:

Some saw the Slow Life movement as a passing fad, but five years on magazine racks tell a different story. On a recent visit to an Osaka bookstore, I saw a plethora of new magazines using phrases like "slow living," "self-sufficiency" and "natural life" in their titles, all stressing "lifestyles of health and sustainability." As I flipped through them, recurrent themes appeared in the photographs: huts in the forest, wooden furniture (with discreet Apple computers), sleep, wabi sabi patina, simplicity, bare light bulbs, baking bread, little-house-on-the-prairie Puritan style [What on Earth is that supposed to be?--SRK], rustic Okinawa, bathing, artisanship, older Asian lifestyles, slow food, organic vegetables and a pervading urban longing for the rural.

Ah, yes, "self-sufficiency." It's worked so well for the DPRK, after all. (Speak of population decreases!) And those Apple computers you can pay for with a truckload of home-grown eggplants and run on...uh, where is the electricity supposed to come from, exactly? We'll need it for the lightbulbs, too, bare or not; but something tells me these Slow Life people aren't big on engineering new power plants. And the robots, come to think of it.

I think it's wonderful that Japan is rich and that people are making trade-offs that allow them to enjoy life more. It seems to me to be going a bit far to act as if the decline in population were some kind of spiritual opportunity in disguise, though.

I can't decide whether this discussion is interesting and revealing or just people talking past each other.

I understand that people can't control their visceral responses. It's not as if no uncharitable thought about the Japanese ever flashed through my head. Sometimes what I'm getting crabby about really is a thread in Japanese culture that has meaningfully contributed to some of its past misconduct, in which case I might pursue the line of thought and perhaps post about it. But sometimes I'm just being crabby, in which case I don't beat myself up for having stray nasty thoughts, but I don't air them for other people as if they were meaningful, either. Pace this commenter, only half of the comparison he's making works. "France balked at standing up to an enemy in 1940" and "France balked at standing up to an enemy in 2003" is a promising analogy.

"Japan performed unaesthetized vivisections on captives and brutalized POWs in the 1940s" and "Japan is threatening to pull out of an agreement on whaling that it believes is scientifically unsupported and culturally biased" (my composite or summary of his and others' objections, BTW, not direct quotation) may also prove fruitful eventually, but it is not the sort of comparison that can be honorably thrown into the middle of a discussion without defense. Hovering in there, there seems to be an implication that Japan's conduct on the whaling issue is a manifestation of some kind of characteristic, long-standing Japanese untrustworthiness and manipulativeness that bears watching.

Huh?

I can see playing the World War II card in a discussion of history textbooks, shrine pilgrimages, immigration policy, or hiring requirements for civil servants. I do so myself--while I agree with the Japanese government that it has paid its debts and made its apologies as demanded by the victors and should not be called upon to keep officially groveling in front of its neighbors, that isn't the same thing as saying it's handling its history well. There really are instances when the position taken comes perilously close to sounding like "Well, sure, we raped Nanking and forced the Koreans into labor and tried to eradicate Taiwanese culture--but the A-bomb was dropped on two of our cities, and our capital was firebombed, and our emperor was demoted, so can't we just call it even?"

I don't get the whaling connection, though. Japan believes the existing IWC ban on all commercial whaling is excessive, scientifically unsupported, and against its economic interests. The US used pretty much that rationale in not signing on to the Kyoto Protocols, and we've been accused of being cavalier, not being accountable to the "world community," and blah blah blah, too.

To my knowledge, Japan isn't doing anything that violates the IWC ban. It isn't underreporting catches, nor is it fishing--I'm pretty sure about this, but I haven't been able to verify it with a quick-and-dirty Googling--in waters that have been declared preserves by the IWC. Perhaps it would be nice if Japan recognized that Australia's maritime jurisdiction goes beyond twelve nautical miles offshore (or whatever it is; I think that's what we use in the States) for conservation purposes, but I don't see what's duplicitous about its not doing so. Neither does the Australian court system, apparently, BTW.

Additionally, recall that Norway has been exempted from the moratorium simply because it threw an official snit at its inception. Iceland, I think, is in the same position as Japan, though it's been less vociferous in its push to have the ban on commercial whaling lifted. In any case, this isn't just some funny idea of Japan's, and in trying to engineer a vote in its favor and playing show-me-where-it-says-I-can't when an agreement isn't in its best interests, I can't for the life of me see how it's doing anything that every other majoy geopolitical player doesn't do. You may approve or disapprove of such tactics, but you'd be hard-pressed to argue that they say anything about the Japanese particularly.

It's not for me to judge which peoples an individual should or should not sympathize with, but feeling free to trot out the WWII analogies every time Japan does something to protect its interests over the objections of others, in the guise of reasoned argument, strikes me as unseemly.

Most unnecessary book ever:

In between intense writing sessions for her next studio album, expected in 2007, Alanis Morissette will spend this year working on a memoir.

To which the only sensible response is "Good grief, woman--is there anything you haven't told us already?"

Apparently so. Look and be afraid:

"It will be all the wisdom I've accrued in the thirty-one years of my life [Be VERY afraid.--SRK]," the singer-songwriter says with a laugh. "A lot about relationships, fame, travel, body-image issues, spirit -- with a lot of self-deprecating humor peppered throughout, 'cause I just can't help it."

I happen to like Alanis. Jagged Little Pill exploded the summer after graduation, when I was living with a bunch of friends for a last few months in Philadelphia and we were all excited about the future and stuff, so I have great memories of that record. Also, unlike a lot of other confessional-bitch singer/songwriters (Hi, Tori!), Alanis doesn't mix in all kinds of fey and twee crap to convince you that she really is nice and cuddly after all. And she writes fantastic tunes--I'm a sucker for a good melody.

An Alanis memoir, though? Kinda thinking I don't really need it.

We let straight folk believe the Global Homosexual Conspiracy is organized around recruiting new members because...well, they seem to get a spy-novel sort of thrill out of thinking so, and why rob people of a source of excitement? Especially when all they'd have left to console themselves with if disillusioned is Rolling Rock and Lean Cuisine.

Anyway, the real purpose of the gay network was illustrated last night when I was out with a few people from our Taipei office at the night market. The Chinese New Year is coming up, so I figured that, since Atsushi has taken an interest in feng shui lately--don't ask me, I don't know either--I'd get him something lucky and Taiwanese. So we looked. There were dog statuettes whose contribution toward our household prosperity and longevity would, unfortunately, have been offset by the degree to which they would have fuglified our decor. Not a bargain, as far as I'm concerned. There were red and gold scrolls and things, but most of the nice ones were too big to fit in my carry-on.

We were getting desperate, so one of the girls from the office made an exaggerated leave-it-to-me-darling flourish with one hand and clapped her cell phone to her ear with the other. As we walked, you could hear her addressing whoever was at the other end as "sweetie." You got snatches of sentences like "No, he wants something AUSPICIOUS...for the Year of the DOG, you know?...yeah, it's for his BOYFRIEND." Minutes later, she hung up. She'd been talking to one of her gay friends. She had to cut out right then--family dinner, or something--but we were left with directions to a shop that furnished very cute bibelots and instructions to call his partner if we got lost. (Amazing the way no gay couple in any country I know of is rationed more than one partner who can give reliable directions.) I remain unconvinced they'll ensure Atsushi's good luck for the year--I'm not really superstitious, though it's nice to think you can guarantee that sort of thing by buying the same kind of useless wood/clay/mineral objets you would have lusted after anyway. But I have something suitably cool to present to him as my お土産 from Taiwan, thanks to two of our unseen boys who, on a work night, let themselves get roped into a twenty-minute discussion about helping a stranger shop. Membership has its privileges.

It's probably bad taste to think this way, but I can't decide whether Huser president Susumu Kojima was extraordinarily unlucky or extraordinarily lucky today.

He was delivering testimony before the Diet, though hardly of his own volition:

In [a further development of the] earthquake resistance falsification scandal, Susumu Kojima, president of Huser Corporation (Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo) gave testimony before the diet during a meeting of the lower house Land, Infrastructure, and Transport Committee on 17 January. Of suspicions that he was essentially aware of the falsifications and applied pressure to keep them from being made public, he repeated his refusal to testify: "It may tend to incriminate me." [Literally, he said that "there is the possibility of investigation and prosecution," but I assume that's the equivalent.--SRK]

Kojima has, it would appear, plenty to clam up about:

An executive of Tokyo-based developer Huser Ltd. repeatedly directed a contracting design firm to let disgraced architect Hidetsugu Aneha calculate the structural integrity of condominiums, citing Aneha's ability to work out "economical designs," The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Monday.

The design firm initially planned to use another structural design firm to conduct earthquake-resistance calculations on a condominium in 2002, but the Huser executive protested, saying: "That firm's designs use excessive materials. Use Aneha because he can do it economically," sources said.

The action highlights the close relationship between the developer and the 48-year-old former architect.

According to the sources, the design firm made a contract with Huser to design a condominium in Tokyo in 2002. It intended to entrust the condominium's structural calculations to the structural design firm with which it had business ties.

The Huser executive, however, criticized the structural design firm for designing buildings with excessive materials. He named Aneha, saying, "We should use the architect who knows how to economize."

Of course, that "Huser executive" didn't tell the Yomiuri that Kojima gave his blessing to this maneuver.

What's especially unlucky for Kojima is that it's 17 January. That is, it's the eleventh anniversary of the Great Hanshin Earthquake--the one in Kobe--and as always, it's getting a lot of media play. As I write, NHK is running a special called 活断層列島 (katsudansou rettou: "An Archipelago of Active Fault Lines"), complete with spooky, foreboding music like a wind tunnel in hell. It began with several shots of buildings that had not been expected to collapse in an earthquake. Naturally, they were rubble. The Kobe Earthquake is in living memory for everyone above high school age in Japan. This week more than any other in the year, Japan can be depended on to be keenly aware of how fragile buildings that aren't built properly to withstand earthquakes can be. Watching Kojima on television, as he's tearing up and proclaiming that he never meant anything bad for his firm's customers, one is hard pressed to be moved.

On the other hand, today also brought the news that the death sentence for Tsutomu Miyazaki--surely Japan's most famous serial killer--had been upheld by the Supreme Court. Considered against Miyazaki's blood-chilling example of sociopathy, mere insufficient girding of buildings doesn't seem quite such a horror. If there's anyone whose face all over the news can make a dirty contractor look unsullied by comparison, he's it:

Miyazaki's lawyers had argued that it was "obvious that (the defendant) is suffering from some kind of chronic mental disorder such as schizophrenia." They cited his use of psychotropic agents at the Tokyo Detention House and his auditory hallucinations that came into light during the high court sessions.

...

According to the lower court rulings, Miyazaki abducted and killed four girls ranging in age from 4 to 7 in Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture from August 1988 to June 1989. He was also held responsible for stripping a 6-year-old girl in Tokyo's Hachioji.

The cases were described as "theatrical crimes" because Miyazaki sent a letter and parts of the remains of one of his victims to her family.

He also claimed responsibility for the crime to the media using a female pseudonym, Yuko Imada.

He also incinerated one of the victims, and claimed he ate the body parts of one of the girls.

When Miyazaki was arrested in July 1989, investigators found about 6,000 videotapes in his room, many filled with sadistic and grisly scenes.

They also discovered many pornographic comic books dealing with young girls and pedophilia.

When Miyazaki is executed, it will probably be carried out without warning. The practice in Japan is not to give families a few days for final visits, and even in the cases of infamous criminals, the announcement of the execution is only made public on the same day.

If you want a good sense of why many of us Japanophile types need to fetch a cool compress for our foreheads when people start yanking out the Japan references, check this out: Erstwhile "manufacturing member of management" and current dumb-ass Jim Phipps writes to Mark Steyn:

The comment about Kerry and sending business overseas at the expense of American (and Canadian) workers was badly misunderstood by you. The large corporations and the U.S. Govt. have worked hard moving industry offshore. The result is increased unemployment, more need for social services, fewer opportunities for better jobs, taxation, crime, and similar problems. I am a former manufacturing member of management and have seen this happen in city after city. The only winner is the larger corporation, not the taxpayer or consumer. The rationale is to borrow a lesson from Japan and reject imports for any viable reason possible and retain American and Canadian industry. The Japanese use tariffs, restrictive trade laws, and similar reg's to protect their workers. MITI controls production and works hard to maintain some equality among the major firms. You are wrong about not understanding or caring about the loss of jobs. We will eventually fail from within without an industrial base. This is supported by history, not by Columnists Mark.

First, I will give everyone time to recover from the gales of laughter that result from the idea of using Japan as a model for how to fix the problem of enriching "the larger corporation" at the expense of the taxpayer or consumer.

Next, let's gently remind Mr. Phipps that MITI (the Ministry of International Trade and Industry) no longer exists, having been superseded half a decade ago by METI (the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry). A small point, perhaps, but not a mistake that anyone who's consistently been following developments in Japan, even casually, would be likely to make at this late date.

Additionally, WTF?

Sorry, I know that's not very specific, but what's so amazing about the above passage is that it's not just wrong in a few places. It's 100% cold-filtered wrong. The Japanese stock market collapsed fifteen years ago--you'd think people would, you know, remember that. Japanese manufacturing jobs are moving to China and Southeast Asia, and imports from those areas make up a large proportion of the economy. Major Japanese companies downsized, painfully. Our consumer prices in Tokyo are inflated to Goodyear Blimp levels.

And instead of proportional reduction (designed to assure, through government rigging, that established firms with the favor of the federal ministries didn't lose market share when they lost sales), what kinds of policies have been discussed lately? Why, privatization of the Postal Service (with its insurance and savings arms) and other financial institutions, liberalization of the National Pension and Social Insurance programs, reductions in the amount of local social welfare spending funded by federal subsidies, and cuts in the number of civil servants. Not all these are happening as fast as one might like, but the only people who don't seem to agree that they're necessary are those beneficiaries of the existing system whose careers are in their twilight years and who thus will find it difficult to switch gears.

So when I read letters like the above, I have to wonder, How is such refulgent ignorance possible, and how does it keep getting a serious, even if critical, hearing?

(Via Beautiful Atrocities, who was preening about something else but still provided the link)

Man, three-hour flights are short. You take off, they give you crap for breakfast, you doze a little, and all of a sudden Kunimoto, Your Chief Cabin Attendant, is all blaring, "ご案内いたします。Seatbelts FASTENED, seats and trays UP, bags STOWED, and don't even be THINKING about getting up to pee!" I'm hardly complaining, but it was all bewilderingly abrupt.

I haven't gotten a chance to really catch up on news--they had yesterday morning's Nikkei on the plane, but for those who can't stand missing a single volley in the diplomatic wars around here:

At noon on 17 January, Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi attacked a statement by South Korean Foreign Minister Ki-Mun Ban. Ban had expressed the point of view that the conducting of head-of-state visits [between the two countries] will be thorny as long as the Japanese Prime Minister makes pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine. Koizumi said, "We can meet at any time. Even if there are one or two differences of opinion and standoffs, communication and dialogue are necessary. I cannot understand the policy of refusing meetings because of a difference over a single issue." He was responding to a question from the press corps at the Prime Minister's residence.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, addressing a press conference after a cabinet meeting the same day, stated, "Our position as the nation of Japan is that we are always ready to talk."

So no change.

The Minister of Finance has an announcement to make:

Minister of Finance Sadakazu Tanigaki stated emphatically, in a lecture delivered in Tokyo on the afternoon of 16 January, that the current Japanese economy "has, I think, finally repeated the [recovery] process fifteen years after the Bubble burst and rebounded powerfully." As factors, he cited "the complete victory over the non-performing bond problem. Also, there's the fact that from the enterprise side, businesses have brought excesses in personnel, debt, and facilities under control. The resulting process has also been finished by which the robustness of performance in enterprise has come around to [improve] household finance and individual consumption."

Whether all those "completely"s deserve to be there could be questioned, and obviously this segment tactfully omits any mention of government spending. And, of course, the new thing to spaz about is that the Japanese population has started, in recorded terms, decreasing faster than was expected. But Tanigaki is right that street-level confidence does seem to be up. One anecdotal and qualitative but interesting measure that I trust I'm not the only one to notice over the last few weeks: end-of-year partying by companies was noticeably more lavish than it had been since 1997 or so. For the first time in years, there was trouble getting a cab in Shinjuku at 2:30 a.m. during the last week and a half of December, and the crowds pouring out of restaurants and bars were much later and livelier.

I normally think it a little unnecessary when bloggers post stuff like "Appointment with podiatrist and then probably stopping to pick up vacuum cleaner bags--posting will be light until about noon or maybe 12:15." It occurs to me, however, that it might have been a kindness to let everyone know that I was flying to Taiwan on Saturday afternoon and will return to Tokyo tomorrow. I may post a bit later today--Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage gave an interview in the Nikkei the other day that had a few things worth mentioning (such as, IIRC, "We don't want Japan to be a passenger [in the WOT]; we want it in the cockpit with us"). Otherwise, I've mostly been away from the computer, not least because the weather here is unseasonably warm and clear. Back later today or tomorrow.

You could subtitle this one "How to Break up with a Friend of Sean's."

I should start by saying that if you're lucky enough to be with one of my friends, I don't recommend breaking up with him. My friends are stand-up, interesting, fun guys, and (while this obviously isn't a characteristic I screen for in establishing friendhood) they're pretty cute, too.

Next I should probably say that I have no interest in passing judgment on whether your reasons for breaking up are valid. Most, or at least a lot, of us go through a kind of compressed adolescence after coming out, because we didn't spend our teenage years gradually growing into our sexuality and the all the possibilities for give-and-take with guys. My friends in their mid-20s tend to have boyfriends of around the same age, and while it's great to see someone find the love of his life right then, it's also perfectly natural to be restless. Not a phenomenon I'm unacquainted with.

So, if I might kind of secretly agree with you that giving my friend the heave is ultimately all for the best, what am I about to get crabby about? Just this: That too many men seem to be looking for a relationship-ender that they don't have to feel guilty about. They don't want to be the bad guy. Kind of understandable, maybe, but the thing is, if you're bent on recapturing the freedom to see what happens with that hottie across the bar who's giving you The Look by breaking it off with someone who's been happy with you (and to whom you gave every indication that you were happy with him), I've got news for you, honey: YOU. ARE. THE. BAD. GUY. Even if you can't see any other way and you feel you're going to lose your mind if you have to spend one more claustrophobic second in this relationship. Deal with it, and act like it.

I'm not saying you should, like, really sink your teeth into the bad-guy role and steal all of my friend's CDs and deface his coffee table books. Wrecking property isn't gentlemanly, and besides, I may have been planning to borrow it later. But you have to leave out all the backing and filling that you perversely think softens the blow, particularly such knife-twists as: "I still love you" and "I never meant for this to happen" and "I can't tell you how bad this makes me feel" and "It's your happiness I'm interested in; you deserve someone who can give you 100%."

Because you know what happens then? Friend of Sean comes to Sean to unload and says, "Of course, he still loves me" and "He's got to recognize, soon, that this is all a mistake" and "It's so obvious how guilty he feels" and "I think he just needs time apart to figure out what I really mean to him," and spends an hour talking about the pathetic little shards of (utterly baseless) hope he's managed to pick out of the rubble.

And then Sean has THE WORST time explaining why no, the relationship actually is clearly kaput, and yes, sweetie, you need to take some down time and then soldier on and look for a new boyfriend. In fact, sometimes it has to be explained every Friday night for several weeks in a row. This is inefficient. If, when breaking up with a friend of mine, you just stopped at "I'm sorry, but I need to do this, and I'll clear out as soon as I can," and then matched deed to word, then I would be able to proceed straight to "God, what a perfidious little bitch. Better to be rid of him sooner rather than later. You'll do much better next time." Not that that fixes everything, but as Miss Manners (and presumably Dad?) has been trying to tell you for eons, the faster the dumpee realizes the dumping is permanent and non-negotiable, the faster he can move on to the hottie across the bar who's giving him The Look.

And after all, it's his happiness you're interested in, right?

I try not to get all neurotic about linking to every article that refers to one of my pet issues, so usually I don't do anything with the short blurbs of which the Nikkei posts a lot. Sometimes little stories are telling, though:

Minister of Foreign Affairs Taro Aso addressed a press conference after a 13 January cabinet meeting, stating clearly that "There hasn't been a single moment when I've thought that the Yasukuni Shrine pilgrimage issue should be a point of contention" in relation to the LDP party presidential election in September.

In response to Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi's declaration that it "will be a major element in whether [a candidate] can win (the presidential election)," Aso stated, "I don't think there's anyone who has quite that much confidence (in the election). What will be a major factor (in the election) is whether [a candidate] has the kind of language that can speak directly to the citizenry."

Of course, they could both be right: Yasukuni may not be brought up explicitly often, but its presence as an issue could be felt in the background of debates over how Japan should deal with the friction that arises with its neighbors. Of course, Aso has a few reasons to downplay the Yasukuni issue. For one thing, he's on record as having dismissed Chinese and Korean protests over the pilgrimages as, essentially, their own odd little hangups. To be fair, as comes out in the interview linked in that last sentence, his reasoning isn't quite as cavalier as it might seem--his point, that Japan's offering reasons for continued pilgrimages by politicians only helps keep the discussion going around in circles, is not without basis. At the same time, it also seems reasonable to conjecture that the shrine might not be such a bone of contention were the textbook issue not there to amplify it. For another thing, he himself is one of the top contenders for LDP presidency post-Koizumi. Making a big deal out of the issue on which his pronouncements as foreign minister have been most controversial is hardly in his best interest.

File under: Tell Us Something We Don't Know:

Crowded commuter trains would likely be a major contributor to the rapid spread of influenza in the event of an outbreak of a new strain in Japan, researchers have found.

A simulation performed by researchers from the University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science and the National Institute of Infectious Diseases found that crowded commuter trains increased the number of infections, and suggested that halting them could decrease the number of infected people by as much as 30 percent.

Numerous simulations on the spread of new strains of influenza have been conducted, but the latest one is reportedly the first to take commuter trains into account.

...

The study found that without taking commuter trains into consideration, it would take about 50 days for the number of infected patients to peak, and more than 400,000 people would be infected.

However, when commuter trains were added into the equation, at a rate of 5 infections per 100,000 people per day, researchers found that it would take a dozen or so days for the number of infections to peak, with the number of patients increasing to 500,000.

I'm not an epidemiologist, but WTF? How is it possible to model the spread of a potential epidemic in contemporary Japan and just kind of NEGLECT to take the trains into account? Did they forget? Did they not feel they could map train travel effectively? That doesn't make sense--presumably civil engineers and railway schedulers have to do that kind of thing all the time. Very strange.

Added on 17 January: WTF? Where the hell are all these Australians coming from? Not that there's anything wrong with being Australian. Some of my best friends are Australian. My favorite band is Australian.

Kylie's Australian.

But normally, I have about five Australian visitors a week, and I know them all by name. Is there a sudden fashion there for American poofs living in Japan?

Oh, that's it. Thanks to Tim Blair for the link. Not to take anything away from Gaijin Biker, who has a very good blog, but I do feel compelled to point out that if it's Greenpeace's tomfoolery we're talking about, Ross at Romeo Mike's posted about this several days earlier.

One of Virginia Postrel's latest posts is a great potential discussion starter:

Some years ago, an editor asked me how he could give his children an appreciation for the English language. He wanted them to write well. Since he's an evangelical Christian, I told him he should teach them Psalms from the King James translation of the Bible. My mother did that with me as a child, and it gave me an early sense of metaphor and rhythm. It taught me to appreciate, and understand, complex, beautiful English.

My friend didn't like my suggestion. After all, nobody reads the KJV anymore. Forget poetry (not to mention sensitivity to the underlying Hebrew), today's suburban Christianity is all about accessibility. It's been dumbed down.

...

Megachurch Christianity may hone organizational and business skills, but it isn't teaching believers to think about abstractions or communicate in higher than "everyday" language. No wonder megachurches combine their up-to-date media with fundamentalist doctrine. It fits well on PowerPoint--no paragraphs required. Leaving aside the validity of what they preach, today's most successful evangelicals are spreading pap.

When I was growing up, every Bible I ever had was KJV. The sermons--our services were two hours long, and you were expected to take notes after you were around twelve--generally quoted scripture from the KJV, often with explanations about how obscure passages had been rendered. My mother once, on the recommendation of a friend, bought a New KJV Bible. She found it annoying and went back to the old one the next go-round.

To my knowledge, Virginia converted to Judaism (like 80% of my women friends from college) when she married but, unlike me, isn't an atheist. I will occasionally run into people who ask how my beliefs have evolved and mistakenly assume that the way to get me back to church is by playing the "But you know, lots of churches now are very user-friendly and focus on making the Word of God relevant to life today." Yech. I have my life, and what's relevant to it in the quotidian sense, running pretty well as it is. If I were convinced to go back to worshipping God, it would be because I believed Christianity was accurate about the nature of transcendence.

The KJV has a sense of the sublime. It's mostly understandable, but the language is also obviously old, and there are passages that you can't make your way through without your concordance. It gives a comforting sense of being navigable but containing mysteries. You're constantly reminded that not everything is explicable, even to theologians with expert knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic. And, if you care about literary history, the KJV is the one that inspired countless writers and speakers over the past few centuries, as Virginia points out. It's culturally allusive as well as having the feel of a book that's expansive and meant to take you outside yourself.

Once or twice I looked at a friend's New Revised Standard Version (is that what it's called?) when I was a teenager, and it was dead on the page. Like Dick and Jane Are Fruitful and Multiply and Fill the Earth. No intensity.

And Power Point presentations in services? Rock music instead of hymns? I know those aren't really new developments, but sheesh.

Myrick at Asiapundit and Hunter at East Asia Watch note that Kim Jong-Il recently made a state visit to the PRC that may have represented a CCP effort to keep his feathers smoothed over the nukes issue. Hunter says, "On Monday, the DPRK indicated an unwillingness to resume nuclear talks. Was the invitation to China an effort to persuade Kim to stick to a diplomatic path?" The article cited by Myrick indicates that that's the most likely possibility:

The secrecy makes it impossible to know what the exact purpose of Kim’s visit is. But a source in Beijing said Kim would spend four or five days in the country and meet with President Hu Jintao to discuss stalled six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program and expansion of economic cooperation between the two countries. The talks are in limbo as North Korea has said the U.S. must lift economic sanctions imposed over Pyongyang’s alleged counterfeiting activities.

The Nikkei's Beijing correspondent also reports that the PRC has "evaded" giving any confirmation that Kim was visiting, with equivocations along the lines of "China and North Korea are friends that share a border"...and therefore, presumably, their heads of state sometimes wander into proximity like billiard balls...though whether Kim has wandered toward Hu this particular week is not a topic that would be appropriate to discuss just now. We'll see what comes of it.

It seems to have been Pelt Sean with Memes Day when I wasn't looking, and since I didn't arrange to be on an inaccessible island in time, Ghost of a Flea got me.

Okay. This one is "five weird things about me," which means we need to get something out of the way right from the get-go: I'm normal; it's the other 6,499,999,999 of you who are weird.

Actually, I don't think there's much that's all that interestingly quirky about me. I'll focus on five things that other people are constantly telling me are weird.

1. I was named for the Beatles rhythm section. My first name is Sean (Irish form of John; also, it recalls Sean Connery, of whom Mom was a fan) and my middle name Richard (given name of Ringo Starr). My parents met just after high school, when they ended up playing in the same cover band. My mother drums and my father plays bass. I spent my years as a toddler playing around with stray cords and strings and brushes and things while they jammed with friends. It's a wonder I never strangled or electrocuted myself. Anyway, lots of people born in the early 70s were named after celebrities from the period, so as I say, other people think this is weirder than I do.
   
2. My favorite band is the Church. Whenever I say so to a hetero guy who actually knows who the Church is, he invariably--invariably--stares in disbelief and says, "But they're so STRAIGHT!"
   
3. I wear jeans until they basically fall off me in shreds. You would think that in the Shibuya-Shinjuku zone of Tokyo, wearing ripped up jeans would be so unimaginative as to be hardly worth commenting on. And it's not like I wear them to the office, or to dinner when everyone else is in coat and tie. I have plenty of proper trousers. But when things are cas, people are always like, "Wow! Those are some seriously air-conditioned jeans you've got there." Well, yeah, they're ten years old, and I'm from a thrifty family. Besides, good stuff ages well, even when it's threadbare. (One of my buddies responded to this with "I somehow don't think Granddad meant you to apply that to jeans through which guys can see your boxers when you're hanging out at gay bars." Some people just can't turn off the catty.)
   
4. About once every four months or so, I'll feel like a cigarette when everyone around me is smoking--and in Tokyo, everyone around you is always smoking--so I bum one, smoke it, and then...you know, go back to not smoking. Totally freaks people out. They're like, "Sean? YOU with a cigarette?" Well, sure. Considering that I live in one of the largest urban agglomerations on the planet, with the air to match, I don't think that my life expectancy is going to sink like a stone because of three cigarettes a year. I don't seem to have the addictive personality.
   
5. When I write in cursive, I turn the paper sideways. I'm a lefty, and we were away for the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkoth if you're Jewish; we were in a Sabbatarian Christian church) the week my third grade teacher starting teaching how to angle the paper, so when I got back and was hastily catching up, I kind of winged it. The way it ended up was, the paper was sideways and I was writing, essentially, vertically. Mr. Davis thought it was odd, but the letters were formed correctly, so he didn't go ballistic. But other people are constantly doing exaggerated double-takes. Once I was at...uh, Saks, maybe, or Barneys...you know, one of those places where the sales clerks cultivate an air of too-cool-for-you unflappability...and when I signed the credit card statement, the girl got all animated and asked her friend from another counter to come over and get a load of this guy who was writing sideways. What the big deal was, I have no idea. My signature is as illegible as anyone else's, anyway.

Now you know.

Today's lead Nikkei editorial is headlined "Toward small government: Give us serious ministry re-reform." Being an editorial, it doesn't stake out any new territory, but it lays out most of the essential problems:

A movement has appeared from within the government and the LDP, seeking re-reform of the central ministries and agencies. The current system has now passed through exactly five years since the restructuring of January 2001, so this is a good opportunity to examine whether it is functioning in a way that meets the goals first set out for it. There is still no small degree of waste and inefficiency in the central ministries and agencies. Politicians who want [to be key players in] post-Koizumi policy should articulate a bold vision of ministerial re-restructuing oriented toward [achieving] "small government."

...

In autumn of last year, the government settled on an objective of decreasing the raw number of federal civil servants by 5% in the next 5 years. In order to achieve that goal, some rather large-scale reforms are going to be necessary.

The ruling coalition is taking the tack of submitting its proposal to elevate the Japan Defense Agency to ministry level at this year's regular Diet session. This change in status is long overdue. Prime Minister Koizumi had already raised the possibility of forming a Ministry of Information and Communications. Consolidating this strategically crucial area--jurisdiction over which is now divided between the Ministry of Interior Affairs and the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry--is a promising approach.

To slim down the government, taking reductions in federal subsidies a step further will be indispensable. Through the Koizumi administration's Trinity Reforms, subsidies have already been reduced by 4 trillion yen, but even with the proportion of federal subsidy money toward compulsory education funding dropped from 1/2 to 1/3, the amount of paper-pushing to be performed by the federal ministries and agencies will not decrease. The second phase of Trinity Reforms must be orchestrated by [someone who] can aim for fearless abolishments of subsidies.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport and the Ministry of Health, Education, and Welfare remain gargantuan entities. By straightening out the subsidy system and structuring work more rationally, it should be possible to slim down even their regional branch offices. It will be necessary to put even the satellite agencies of the central federal ministries--take the Social Insurance Agency--under the knife of clean-up and reconfiguration. At the same time, the organizations and personnel that deal well with an administrative style of checks and verifications must be retained. Before it raises the consumption tax, the role of [a post-Koizumi] government will be to show the public that it has become, in concrete ways, a fine-tuned small government.

One of the problems is that Japanese post-War social structures, unlike its car and furniture industries, don't value modularity. People learned little in college, but it didn't matter because their training rotations when they entered their chosen company or public sector employer lasted a good year or two and gave them the skill sets they needed to negotiate its elaborate and idiosyncratic filigree of procedures. Switching jobs was frowned upon; you stayed with the same company for a lifetime and became an expert in its ways, the way an old tea master amasses an intimate knowledge of the esoteric practices of his school. Buying, selling, lending money, and glad-handing generally took place within one's own supply chain. Put all of that together, and you have...well, the problems Japan's grappling with right now. When making knowledge and skills transferrable isn't a priority, you get duplication of effort and multiple reinventions of the wheel. When you say "Japan," outsiders think Sony and Toyota, but in reality, efficient organizations that can compete on a global scale are a minority in the economy here, even after the painful downsizings since the bursting of the Bubble.

It's understandable that you don't have legions of minor civil servants standing up to say, "Well, gee, my job's kinda redundant. I guess I'll see whether they've got any openings at Nippon Lever," for the good of the state. But it's also understandable why people at the top, who are supposed to be able to have a more clear-eyed view, have trouble figuring out how to change things effectively. Japan Inc. was engineered to work as one gigantic, archipelago-spanning machine; its systems weren't supposed to have to be adaptable. Reform, though necessary, is going to continue to be painful as long as the many people who have a stake in keeping things as they are are still entrenched.

Gaijin Biker has tagged me with one of the blogosphere's endless number of variations on the Cosmo quiz. Get ready to, like, totally learn more about the real me.

*******

I. Seven things to do before I die:

Figure out how to rein in my class-clown/flirt impulse

Visit Poland (ancestral homeland on my mother's side of the family)

Own a pick-up truck

Go a week without wearing anything purple (a friend has bet me--handshake and all--that I will never be able to do this)

Learn Korean

Find a Soseki novel I enjoy

Take the Japanese Proficiency Test



II. Seven things I cannot do:

Play any instrument really well, though I've taken lessons on several

Follow the words to 「上を向いて歩こう」 (ue wo muite arukou: "I'll Walk with My Head Up," a.k.a. "Sukiyaki," which Japanese people think all Americans can sing) after ten drinks at the karaoke box

Drive in Japan

Remember anyone's birthday on time

Sleep with a shirt on

Function on too little sleep

Inflict blog-meme-things on people


III. Seven things that attract me to blogging:

It gives me a vehicle for showing Atsushi my unfiltered, in-English, American personality without subjecting him to endless in-person rants.

Translating news articles for an audience that includes others who are also proficient in Japanese forces me to make sure I'm understanding what I'm reading and not just doing that fluent-but-shallow skimming thing.

Reader feedback restores my faith in humanity.

The sicko search strings that bring some people here send my faith in humanity right back out the window, but they do tend to be good for a nervous chuckle.

It's led to several friendships I otherwise wouldn't have, some of which have now extended off-line.

I'm not nearly as naturally bold and unflappable as I like to present myself here. Knowing that whatever I write about my principles, my politics, and my sexuality is going to appear on a Google-able archived page with my full name there big as life has forced me to think harder about what I'm willing to commit myself to. I'm both more hesitant to jump to lazy conclusions and less hesitant to voice deeply held beliefs just to avoid ruffling feathers.

Crap television is much less grating--indeed, downright enjoyable--when 75% of your brain is occupied with composing a post.


IV. Seven things I say most often:

"honey"

"Atsushi"

"bureaucrat"

"bitch"

"hairy"

"civilization"

"harder"


V. Seven books that I love:

新古今和歌集

智恵子抄

A Benjamin Franklin Reader

The Future and Its Enemies

Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

Miss Pym Disposes

Sexual Personae

The Story of English


VI. Seven movies that I watch over and over again [Note to straight folk: If you're going to tag gay men with these things, you probably want to specify "feature films." Just for future reference.--SRK]:

2001: A Space Odyssey

Alien

Auntie Mame

Desperately Seeking Susan

Double Indemnity

The North Avenue Irregulars

Vertigo


VII. Seven people to whom I pass the meme:

See II, Item 7, above.

I'm not sure what Atsushi was looking for when he found the Mozart Liqueur page, but he thought some of the recipes sounded soothing to the throat, so we picked up a bottle on the way home last night.

I'm being generous with the word "recipe" there, BTW. The recipe for Hot Mozart Milk is, essentially "Dump as much Mozart liqueur as you like into 30 ml of hot milk." Tasty, to be sure, but more like what one would usually call a "serving suggestion." If you want to make even less effort, you can make an Angel's Kiss: "Dump 3 parts Mozart liqueur into a glass and float 1 part cream on top." For dessert tonight, after an arduous day of shopping, we're about to have Mozart Ice Cream, the recipe for which is--how'd you guess?--"Slap as much ice cream as you like in a bowl and pour 45 ml of Mozart liqueur on top." Well, okay, that one's a little more complex because step 3 in the instructions tells you to add a spoon (JIC you thought enjoying this treat the authentic Salzburg way required you to do the no-hands thing and stick your face in the bowl). Priceless.

I have a short work trip to a certain renegade Chinese province this coming weekend; I'll be flying to Taipei with Japan Asia Airways (JAA), a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan Airlines (JAL) that exists exclusively as a relic of make-nice moves toward the PRC in the 1970s. (For the life of me, I cannot figure out where the IATA code EG came from, BTW. Just one of those weird things.)




Unfortunately, make-nice moves toward the PRC are not all relics of the past, and not all of them simply involve ghettoization that's barely noticeable to consumers. (I ordered my JAA ticket through my JAL Mileage Bank portal just as I've done with every other ticket I've bought.) I'm probably the last Asia-focused blogger to be linking Rebecca MacKinnon's coverage of Microsoft's repugnant go-along-to-get-along policy toward Chinese bloggers--this post isn't the first chronologically, but it sets up the issues well and is probably a good starting point to scroll up and down from. Key passage:

In my view, this issue goes far beyond China. The behavior of companies like Microsoft, Yahoo! and others - and their eager willingness to comply with Chinese government demands - shows a fundamental lack of respect for users and our fundamental human rights. Globally.

Microsoft, Yahoo! and others are helping to institutionalize and legitimize the integration of censorship into the global IT business model.

Do not count on these companies to protect your human rights, if those rights are threatened by the over-stretching hand of any government anywhere on the planet.

These are not the usual garbage complaints about "censorship" in the West when one of many competing publications declines to disseminate the views of someone who can then look for other outlets, or when someone's published views are scrutinized and argued against in a way that bruises his ego. It's hard to read this as anything but Microsoft's blithe agreement to be an executive arm for the CCP's content managers. And as Mark Alger emphasizes--MacKinnon makes this point, too, but it's easy to lose it in all the column inches of coverage--Microsoft is being anticipatory. It's scrambling to avoid trouble rather than changing its policy after being warned by Beijing. Even more outrageous.

Can I just tell you how much I totally enjoyed typing that title?

Jeff flays gays whose idea of tolerance has gone from excessive to positively lunatic. It's the kind of thing that shouldn't have to be said again and again, but it does.

Eric is reminded that some people think we're uncritical vessels into which art pours messages. He also knew a gay Marlboro Man.

Fred at Gay and Right says something else that has to be repeated over and over: Gays have no genetic predisposition toward leftism.

Toby, the Bilious Young Fogey, linked something of mine (thanks!) as the point of departure for a post about settling post-war responsibility.

Tom uncharacteristically misses the opportunity to joke abou the use of the word "seminal."

Mike at Ex-Gay Watch finds, though he doesn't call it that, confirmation bias in an analysis of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Jeff at Alphecca has raised the linguist shortage issue again.

Michael at Gay Orbit may be finding love. As North Dallas Thirty says, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Chris at Coming out at 48 reminds me that it's been quite a while since I've thanked everyone for reading and writing. I'm always on the lookout for opportunities to avoid meeting new people, but in the nearly two years I've been posting, I've managed to make a few new friendships, deepen a few existing ones, and get sharp feedback from plenty of poeple I've never heard from again. Almost no incivility or hate mail, either. The constant reminder that the world is full of cool and interesting people is very welcome. Thanks.

The way I met my last boyfriend was this: A yenta-ish friend who runs one of the bars I go to showed me Ryuichi's photograph and asked whether I'd be interested in meeting him. When I arrived, a space was cleared and Ryuichi's friends--I swear, I'm not making this up--acted the part of his elders and protectors and interrogated me about my job, where I lived, and whether I was from an intact, respectable family! Good thing for him they were so adamant on that first point, too, since he quit his job soon after and decided to spend a year doing little but surfing.

This post from the always-interesting Cathy Young a few days ago isn't about Japan, or about gay life, but it illustrates the kinds of questions I was alluding to here--things Western journalists tend to neglect while cooking up Hamburger Helper articles about the evolution of Japanese household patterns:

Is anyone going to seriously argue that a man's resources--income, power, status--are generally irrelevant to women's preferences in the mating game in modern-day American culture? That doesn't mean most women are calculating golddigers (as some men's rights folks like to depict them), but yes, women generally prefer not to "marry down," and not just in terms of money but also in terms of prestige, education and intelligence, for which a college degree is considered a marker. To deny this fact is, shall we say, not very reality-based. Unlike many conservatives, I'm not saying that this is the way it should be or the way it always will be. But for now, such a trend is definitely there.

Japan's post-War constitution, interestingly enough, defines marriage as between a man and a woman not because of any prescience about the fight over gay marriage (there isn't any here) but in order to outlaw forced arranged marriages. Family elders could no longer use marriageable young adults as instruments by which to carry out politicking or feuds, at least legally.

But the practice of finding a spouse through お見合い (o-miai: lit., "looking at each other," a meeting between two eligible people, usually arranged by their families through a matchmaker) lingered on, and though people date freely now, it's still common. While marrying "for love" is much more the norm now than it used to be, a good job is still recognized up front as the major criterion when a man is under consideration as a potential husband. And that certainly would have been the case thirty-five years ago, when the women whose husbands are now retiring and driving them crazy around the house were sizing up the available men.

You don't get a sense of that or its implications as spouses aged together from the recent Reuters article:

"Japanese men's life expectancy falls by about 10 years if they divorce late in life," said Nishida, who now runs regular discussion days to help couples overcome the hurdle of retirement. "That's because they can't do anything for themselves."

She did not divorce but insisted her own husband at least learned to cook for himself.

"Couples need to rebuild their relationship," Nishida said. "Retired men still tend to act like the lord and master."

Not all men see a need for change.

"Mature Divorce" star Tetsuya Watari said in an interview on the program's Web site that he never cooks and has not bothered to give his wife a birthday present in decades.

"I don't think Kotaro's way of life is wrong," he said of the workaholic character he played in the drama.

Some viewers agreed with him.

"I can't agree with the wife's point of view," said one poster on the Web site.

"She says Kotaro works all the time and doesn't help around the house, but that's normal for someone devoted to his job — I think it's admirable. At least he's not a talentless loser."

The above passage gives every appearance of an effort at scrupulous fair-mindedness. But even in giving both the he-said and the she-said, it leaves a lot out. Retired men may act like the lord and master, but it's equally true that plenty of married women of that generation--and this is hardly a phenomenon unique to Japan--regarded the home as their turf alone and would hardly have encouraged their husbands to poke around in "my" kitchen cabinets or work less overtime if it meant a decrease in money and prestige for the household. True, one hears of wives who begged their husbands to trade down in employment so they had more time with their families, but that was not the norm in the era of post-War economic hypergrowth.

The viewpoint ascribed to the men--and I should take the opportunity to point out now that how much of the superficiality of the final version is due to Isabel Reynolds's reporting, as opposed to, possibly, an editor who was bent on giving the paying customers what they want out of their stories about the aging society in workaholic Japan--is just as reductive. The Japanese have been known for working long hours, but, especially before the end of the Bubble, the time spent away from home "for work" often involved a few hours of carousing with coworkers at the end of the day. Sure it was basically mandatory if you wanted to advance, but the reason it was possible to make it so was that men let the women take care of the household in its entirety. There were undoubtedly husbands who worked stone-cold sober at their desks right up until they had to dash for the last train and then collapsed wordlessly into bed and started snoring away when they got home; but most offices, at least, were not set up that way.

Also, a funny thing happened on the way to the year 2000: Japan became super-rich. It remains rich despite the bursting of the Bubble. When today's retirees were getting married, Japan was on its way to becoming a global economic power, but war and rice rations were still in living memory and made certain kinds of sacrifices seem fair enough, even necessary. Now that the Japanese are accustomed to the choices available to consumers in a First World country, those sacrifices are less palatable.

All of which is to say, it takes two to do the dysfunctional marriage tango. The bargain struck in Japanese marriages after the War was that the men worked themselves to death (sometimes literally--the word is 過労死 [karoushi: "death from overwork"]) until retirement, thereby earning themselves the right to do nothing but play golf from then on. Women were supposed to satisfy their desire for work by rearing the children and keeping the house, but they also had money and time to spend on flower arranging classes, movies, and lunch at trendy restaurants with the girls.

Of course their husbands never learned how to take care of themselves. Not only have they not been taught to, they've been taught not to. BY WOMEN. Mother did for them all through childhood; if they didn't live at home after college, they lived in a corporate dorm with a dining hall; and once they were married...well, see the above. (As someone who's dated three first-born sons of Japanese households, I could say a lot more about that, but it would be unseemly.) You can certainly point out plenty of ways that the system is unfair to women, but it doesn't strike me as unreasonable for a sixty-year-old man whose wife decides she wants a divorce to say, essentially, "Just a minute here--I fulfilled my end of the deal, and now you want to welsh on it and still have me support you!"

One final thing worthy of note: Reporters understandably cover conflicts and tensions and things because they're interesting, and the resulting problems tend to drive developments in society and policy. Unfortunately, if the only Japanese people you ever read about are homicidal teenagers, consumers of manga porn, and geriatric couples who hate the sight of each other, you can start to get the sense that the entire archipelago is utterly bonkers. Those problems and others do exist, and they're serious. I talk about them myself. But Japan is a great place that, in the main, does right by its people. Walk in Tokyo parks on weekends, and you'll see plenty of old couples who have an easy, if amusingly bickersome, intimacy and are clearly devoted to each other. Not the sort of thing that gets media attention, perhaps, but an important part of the picture.

Atsushi comes back for the three-day weekend tomorrow, sounding much worse than when he took off for Kyushu a few days ago. I would have said that that's what he gets for going somewhere where he's without my loving arms to hold him, but he hardly contradicts me on that point, so there's no point in being a punk about it. The day after our last social obligation, I used the leftovers from the holiday to make chicken soup with a pretty scandalous amount of ginger. And garlic. And pepper. Any self-respecing mucous membrane would have been positively euphoric. When I saw him off, he was much better than he had been, but he was going right back into the incubator. Anyway, the flu is pretty severe here, especially on the Sea of Japan coast; everyone stay healthy.

Wow. That's horrible. Atsushi and I watched the initial reports on CNN yesterday. Certain physical-labor jobs can only be made so safe--my father's gotten into a few scrapes at the steel plant over the years, and that's not a few hundred feet underground--but modern detection and rescue equipment is very sophisticated. With that and the memory of the PA incident a few years ago, I wasn't really all that worried (despite the regularity of reports of high-casualty disasters from the PRC). My thoughts are with the families.

Added later: CNN's thoughts are with the families, too, though for what appear to be slightly different reasons. I'm copying the link in the parenthetical even though it won't work from here:

It was about three hours after the first news — at roughly 3 a.m. — that Hatfield, the CEO of International Coal Group, announced that 12 of the 13 were dead. (Watch relatives weep over 'a miracle taken away' — 3:21)

Egads. I'm all for candor, but there's something to be said for keeping a decent cover on your exploitativeness, even if everyone recognizes that being pushy is part of your job.

There's this new phenomenon that's totally sweeping Japan. Read here at Reuters and be the first on your block to know.

See, this new phenomenon involves...it's like, Japanese society is aging, right? And husbands are retiring and then hanging around the house all day and being like, "Mama, where's my beer? I TOLD YOU A HALF-HOUR AGO I WANT A BEER!" And the wives are like, "You don't have the energy to shuffle into the kitchen yourself? It's not like you're working fourteen-hour days anymore, buddy. I'm practicing my calligraphy." And sometimes things get all, like, escalate-y from there:

With a new law set to come into force in 2007 allowing ex-wives to claim half their husband's pension, domestic media are warning of a possible divorce boom.

The number of Japanese couples parting ways has risen rapidly over the past 20 years to a 2002 peak of 290,000, while divorce among those married more than 20 years has increased even faster.

Now figures are drifting downwards, but many commentators speculate that women — who initiate the majority of divorces — are holding out until 2007.

Some Japanese women see their husbands as an obstacle to enjoying their sunset years.

With few hobbies or friends to turn to, many Japanese retirees, often nicknamed "wet leaves" for their tendency to cling to their wives, spend their time at home.

What's more, they expect their spouses to wait on them as they did when they were bread-winners.

"This was my problem. My husband reached retirement and didn't know what to do with himself, so he was always in the house," said Sayoko Nishida, author of a popular book called "Why are retired husbands such a nuisance?"

Now, at this point, you may be thinking, Gee, Sean, I'm kinda feeling like I've heard that somewhere before. If so, it may have been here. No? What about here? Way back here? It's hard to tell, since those are just the publications that are available on-line, and people have been talking about the divorcing-seniors problem in Japan FOREVER.

I'm not saying these things should be covered once and never again; the new family laws certainly are going to have an effect, and that's something reporters are justified in asking experts about. But phrases such as "set to retire in the next few years" and "speculate" give a sense that we're at the leading edge of a development that we can only guess about, when in fact we were learning about the 粗大ゴミ (sodai gomi: lit., "bulky trash," also used as a derogatory term for husbands who just sit there doing nothing around the house after retirement) issue in Japanese classes when I was in college more than ten years ago.

In other words, there should be all kinds of information, both hard and anecdotal, to talk about: how the middle-aged children react, whether enterpreneurial types are devising services for baffled and newly-single men, what it is about the Japanese family dynamic that makes it impossible for so many couples to talk over their new situation and make the necessary adjustments without splitting up, and what the counseling industry has found is the best way for couples to prepare for and work through the problem.

Instead, we get a desultory retread of the most rudimentary divorce rate and life expectancy stats, a few generic quotations from women moaning that their husbands can't boil water, and a few more from men grousing back that they devoted their lives to working for the money their wives used to run the household. None of this does much to enlighten those who don't know much about Japan, and it's yawningly familiar to those who do. In this case, the reporter also took the assertion that men have "preferred" to devote their lives to their jobs at face value, hinting that she may have a poor understanding of the tremendous pressure on men to work long hours. And the one actually new twist--that women will be able get half their husband's pensions if they divorce them once the 2007 law goes into effect--is only dealt with in a couple of passing sentences. Sheesh. Where do bloggers get the idea that anyone can be a journalist, huh?

Prime Minister Koizumi's neighborliness was on display this morning, as was his diffidence:

Regarding the PRC and ROK, the Prime Minister said that they have taken advantage of pilgrimages by Japanese government officials to chill relations with Japan: "Foreign governments are interfering in what is for us a matter of the heart. I cannot comprehend their posture that this is a diplomatic issue; there can be none of this closing off of avenues of discussion," he said, criticizing the positions of both nations for using the Yasukuni Shrine pilgimages as a reason to cease head-of-state visits.

He also revealed that "an understanding of the crucial importance of the Japan-US alliance and international cooperation" would be a condition for post-Koizumi [power within the LDP]. He indicated that his successor as prime minister would be expected to continue with not only his structural reforms but also his approach to diplomacy.

At the same time, he pointed out that "it is extremely important for top leaders to gain the support of the citizenry. At the same time, they must gain the cooperation and trust of the members of the Diet. We have reached the era in which both are vital," and revealed that he thinks the selection of a prime minister by leaders of an intra-party alliance undesirable.

Party politics since the War has often meant that, while voters obviously selected members of the Diet, much real power even in that body lay with unelected LDP officers.

The ROK foreign minister has weighed in already:

South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Ki-mun Ban addressed a press conference on 4 January, voicing opposition to Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi's statement on the same day criticizing the PRC and ROK for refusing to conduct head-of-state visits with Japan because of the Yasukuni Shrine pilgrimage issue: "We want the leaders of the Japanese government to listen to the point of view of neighboring nations and come to a correct perception of history."

Foreign Minister Ban sought effort from the Japan side, citing the Yasukuni Shrine issue, the Takeshima (Kor.: Tokuto) Island territorial dispute, and the history textbook issue: "The most important thing from the standpoint of maintaining ROK-Japan relations and cooperation in the Northeast Asia region is for the Japanese government to exert itself to adopt an posture in which it has a correct perception of history and can gain the trust and respect of neighboring nations."

DPJ leader Seiji Maehara chimed in, at least as far as the Yasukuni Shrine issue goes, at a press conference in Mie Prefecture: "[The Prime Minister] is losing opportunities to improve relations with other countries. It's irresponsible."

Added at 17:00: The Mainichi also has an English report of the Koizumi speech (including this line that wasn't in the Nikkei: "The United States is the only nation in the world that sees an attack on Japan as an attack on itself") and a report on the US government's thoughts on Japan's interactions with its neighbors:

The United States has asked Japan to reconsider its policies on Asia because of concerns about deteriorating Sino-Japanese relationships after Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, diplomatic sources have said.

U.S. President George W. Bush also asked Chinese President Hu Jintao during their summit meeting in Beijing in November last year to discuss issues of history with Japan in connection with the Yasukuni problem, U.S. sources who accompanied the president on his Asian tour said. In reply, President Hu simply said the U.S. presence in Asia was important for China.

Bush and other top U.S. politicians are apparently afraid that Japan will become isolated in Asia as Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan's Class A war criminals are worshipped, continue to antagonize and infuriate China and South Korea.

Here's a question for people: Which of the following is the more important to you?

1. living by your principles


2. making other people like you

Because the thing is, they're both worthy goals, but you can't prioritize them equally all the time. You can and should listen to others without assuming you already know what they're going to say. You can and should resist the temptation to put words in their mouths just because you heard them from the last few proselytizing [conservatives/liberals/heteros/homos/Atkins dieters/Steely Dan fans] you got into a tussle with. You can and should avoid second-guessing people's motivations and spinning out speculative narratives about their inner emotional lives (a pet peeve of mine, that). All of which is to say, you can and should be civil.

But that doesn't mean making nice at all costs. Something Camille Paglia wrote a decade ago in her "No Law in the Arena" essay impressed me greatly when I first read it, even though it clearly wasn't intended as one of her trademark rampaging-diva climaxes. She was talking about rape activism specifically, but her point has wider applications:

What I call Betty Crocker feminism--a naively optimistic Pollyannaish or Panglossian view of reality--is behind much of this. Even the most morbid of the rape ranters have a childlike faith in the perfectibility of the universe, which they see as blighted solely by nasty men. They simplistically project outward onto a mythical "patriarchy" their own inner conflicts and moral ambiguities.

It's hard to have a discussion with people whose view of reality starts with the fallacy that people naturally get along swimmingly, and that therefore whatever friction arises is only there because you--you evil [liberal/conservative/homo/hetero/carb consumer/only-owns-Gaucho-er]--artificially brought it in from an alien realm. Living, breathing people in a free society have deeply-held beliefs that are at loggerheads with other people's deeply-held beliefs. People also have internal conflicts that are hard to resolve. That doesn't make human empathy or the impulse toward kindness less real; it just means that it's not the only force we need to factor in when discussing our interests.

It also means that we have to deal with people on their own terms. No one's personality comes with a line-item veto. I don't see why LaShawn Barber should not write what she thinks about homosexuality in order to get a rep as the nice black female conservative any more than I plan to stop being a flaming homo in order to get more social conservatives to pay attention to what I'm saying about Japan-US relations. People who only like some aspects of a given blog are free to skip the posts they don't feel edified by; if the stuff they object too carries sufficient weight with them, they can decide the rest of the blog isn't worth it and skip the whole thing. People who freak the hell out at the possibility that they might applaud 80% of what a blogger writes and be outraged at the other 20% should probably skip reading blogs altogether and take up PlayStation. Those who are secure in their identities and convictions don't shrink from criticizing that which they believe reprehensible (or plain inaccurate), but they don't have a nervous breakdown over its very existence.

Open conflict is a part of life in democratic societies, and it has the advantage of sifting out and sharpening the best among competing ideas as well as the disadvantage of making life less harmonious. (See also Eric and Grand Stander) The alternative is rule by the collective, in which you the individual are peremptorily informed which tradeoffs will make you happy and then expected to live with them. The tendency of people from such societies to scramble aboard the nearest boat to America the minute they get the chance should indicate how attractive that option really is. In a classical-liberal society, we can't stop people from trying to impose their estimation of our dignity and worth on us--sometimes loudly and publicly--but we're not obliged to go along with it. Are there really people who don't think that's worth the compromise?

Don't answer that.

So am I the only one who's totally champing at the bit for the three final episodes of 古畑任三郎? I can see why they're ending it--Tamura Masakazu must be 102 by now, and Imaizumi-kun must be a total chrome-dome. (Actually, apparently no, on that latter point.)

This is so exciting.

Added at 21:36: Okay, actually, I'm going to record them so Atsushi and I can watch them together over the three-day weekend; the first DVD is being toasted now.

This is way cool.

Will Norito Yashima play a waiter this week? Or a taxi driver? Tomorrow's guest star murderer is Ichiro. Maybe Yashima will be a batboy? In this economy, you never know. That's how he ended up at the Japanese embassy in Spain, if I remember correctly.

And how will Ichiro kill his victim tomorrow? You know, when I say he's totally not my type, I don't really mean that in any sort of sententious way. What I really mean is that if, say, Fuji TV decides to show him in a steam room wearing only a towel and strangling someone with his bare hands, powerful forearms straining, I might possibly be persuaded to be a little less dismissive after all.

I'm just saying.

Added at 22:00: For anyone who's not Japan-based and is thinking, Huh? the show I'm referring to is a Japanese show modeled on Columbo. I wrote a little about it a while back, too.

Added on 5 January: WTF? A glam twin who murders her dowdier but more talented twin and then muddies up the time of death by impersonating her? Well, that's original. Never seen a mystery like that before.

Man, the hiding-in-plain-sight mistake she made that Furuhata catches her on had better be agonizingly good. PFFT!

Added later on 5 January: And the final double-cross didn't make up for it. Enjoyable, though.

Since Atsushi and I managed to yum-yum our New Year's rice cakes* right down without choking to death on them, it seems you're stuck with me for another year.

For that matter, in a few weeks' time, Atsushi will have been stuck with me for exactly five years. Not even by being transferred to another island has he managed to escape.

And--I don't know what precisely jogged my memory of this, except possibly the general reflections one does on the passage of time during the holidays--it's ten years ago today that I came out to my parents.

They were still officially living in their old place, the little rented townhouse they'd moved into after marrying in 1971 and were about to move out of now that my little brother was ready to start college.

The house they'd finally been able to put up a down payment for was a fixer-upper three or four miles down the road. It had been abandoned by tax evaders and left vacant for a few years, during which time someone had broken in and defaced it. The master bath was sooty with the remains of a fire in the shower. There were holes punched or hacked in some of the walls. And others had been spraypainted: "This is our house." "Satan lives in this house." The former message made my parents say that the malefactors had probably been the former owners' much-tried children. The latter message, which was accompanied by a point-up star inside a circle, made a college friend of mine [from McKean County] roll her eyes and say, "Trust rural Pennsylvania Satanists not to be able to draw a freakin' pentagram right."

I was home from New York for the New Year. My parents were full of talk about wallpaper patterns and rented floor sanders and other sweat equity stuff. Dad makes wooden furniture as a hobby, so Mom was coming up with all kinds of elaborate cabinets that could be contrived for this or that odd space. I'd been dating a man for over a year and out to myself, in that final way, for a few months. My only vague thought about telling my parents had been that it might be a good idea after I'd been in grad school for a few years, when I was twenty-five or twenty-six and my having lived in the City for a while had gotten them used to the idea that my life was not going to be the return to the hometown that they'd envisioned for me. After all, lots of gay men and women with conservative Christian families found ways not to break their parents' hearts without lying to them.

And then some time during those last few days of December, the thought creeped up on me that I had an opportunity that wouldn't come up again. The house was a project that would be occupying my parents for at least a good year; it was something ready to hand that they could throw themselves into if they were feeling distrait. The room I'd slept in for eighteen years before college wouldn't be down the hall every night. Everything at the house on Broad Street was going to be packed away and removed, anyway; if they decided they had to cut off contact with me, I could get whatever stuff I needed and leave without its being the only such Event going on.

I also knew that they were not the sort of parents to go to their grave resolutely believing that their son wasn't a homo but just a workaholic who hadn't found the right girl. I'd had the usual frictions with them as a teenager, but we'd always gotten along well and communicated frankly. Eventually, I'd be thirty-five years old and home for dinner, and Mom would deposit the platter of Swiss steak on the table with a clunk and demand to know just what was up with me and that long-term roommate of mine. Or Dad would hand me a cup of coffee one morning and ask, once I had a good mouthful, whether I really expected them to believe I'd been sleeping on a couch for six years. My parents have a talent for delivering a zinger when you least expect it.

Of course, this was going to be my zinger, and I knew that if I started trying to plan it, thinking about all the possibilities--I should probably have bus money in my pocket in case they throw me out right then and there--would make me lose my nerve. So I decided to wait for a good break in the conversation and improvise, but not to think too much about it until then. (That actually wasn't all that hard; we were really busy entertaining friends and running around and stuff. I was too exhausted at night to lie awake being anxious.)

Straight readers may find this surprising, but I honestly don't remember clearly how the actual conversation went. Not really. Not the way, with my lit-major brain, I can often replay other memorable scenes word for word in my head for years afterward. I know I said everything I thought I needed to say, without being halting about it they way I'd been afraid I'd be. I know they assured me they weren't going to disown me and then, after the inital shock wore off, qualified that by suggesting all the things you can imagine conservative Christian parents' suggesting.

And a few days later I was back in New York, and my parents were moving. And things were okay. That much I do remember clearly.



* お餅 (o-mochi: sticky rice, often cut into cakes of approx. 1 cm * 4 cm * 5 cm that are toasted and eaten wrapped in sheets of pressed seaweed). The Japanese can make deadly foods out of not only poisonous fish but also rice--that's how bottomlessly resourceful they are. It fills you with a kind of awe.

Added on 4 January: As a friend just pointed out to me, o-mochi is also often served in soup, which makes it more stretchy.

It is now the Year of the Dog in Japan. Japan follows the Chinese zodiac, but it celebrates the New Year on 1 January of the Western calendar. (The whole thing is very disorienting if you're studying classical poetry, because you have to keep straight the Western calendar, the solstices, and the traditional lunar calendar by which months and seasons were actually named. Happily, I don't have to contend with that right now, unless I decide to translate a poem at the end of this post.)

The personality typology you hear discussed the most here is by blood type, but the year of your birth gets a lot of play, too. When Atsushi and I began to date, it was considered very auspicious that he was a Monkey and I was a Rat--no wiseacre comments from the peanut gallery, okay?--two signs that are held to be compatible. (Of course, my last boyfriend had been a Dragon, and our supposed celestial compatibility hadn't seemed to help all that much.) With its preponderance of snakes, dogs, wild boars, and monkeys, the zodiac can start to sound like an extended lawyer joke, but none of the descriptions is negative in the main, of course.

I was born in March, so I'm a Rat according to both Chinese and Japanese measurements. As with all such things, you read your typology, and some of it is so dead-on it's kind of spooky...

One of the Rat's biggest fault is that they try to do too much at once. They often scatter their energies and get nothing accomplished.

...and some of it is so off the mark it makes you laugh.

They are very appealing. They have a bright and happy personality, and this keeps them busy socially. They love parties and other large gatherings.

Yeah, right.

In any case, those who are thinking about having a child may want to hurry things up so it's born by the end of this year. The traits associated with the Year of the Dog aren't bad at all:

People born in the Year of the Dog possess the best traits of human nature. They have a deep sense of loyalty, are honest, and inspire other people's confidence because they know how to keep secrets. But Dog People are somewhat selfish, terribly stubborn, and eccentric. They care little for wealth, yet somehow always seem to have money. They can be cold emotionally and sometimes distant at parties. They can find fault with many things and are noted for their sharp tongues. Dog people make good leaders. They are compatible with those born in the Years of the Horse, Tiger, and Rabbit.

Notice how every sign is described as being eccentric, BTW? And I guess most parents wouldn't be crazy about that "cold emotionally" part, though given the potential for heartache in life, it might come in handy later on.

No, I'm not drinking crushed dried plums in boiling water because I have a hangover.

And if, just theoretically, I were drinking crushed dried plums in boiling water because I had a hangover, it wouldn't be because I was with friends carousing until 6 a.m.

That racket. Please, you have to stop the racket.

Of course, some people's headaches are just beginning:

Looking beyond discredited architect Hidetsugu Aneha, police are now focusing on the companies that likely pressured him to fake his quake-resistance reports, sources said.

Kumamoto Prefecture-based Kimura Construction Co. and Tokyo-based Huser Co., both named as central players in the wide-reaching scandal, are apparently soon to face criminal charges.

The sources said a joint team of Metropolitan Police Department and Chiba and Kanagawa prefectural police investigators plan to hold Kimura Construction criminally responsible in the falsification of structural strength reports to cut costs.

Aneha has told police that Akira Shinozuka, the former Tokyo branch head of Kimura Construction, pressured him to reduce the amount of steel fortification in his designs.

All parties in the scandal have denied any wrongdoing, apart from Aneha.

...

Huser is known to have sold condominium units even after it learned in October that they might have had substandard quake resistance.

The Real Estate Business Law prohibits firms from signing contracts that intentionally withhold pertinent information from buyers.

Substandard earthquake resistance is, you know, kinda pertinent here.

Since Huser ordered the construction of the complexes, it can also be held in violation of the Building Standards Law.

But unlike Kimura Construction, which drew up the design blueprints, Huser merely ordered them, so its intent to falsify data must be proven for it to be held criminally responsible, sources said.

We can now look forward to months, perhaps years, of "Oh, yes, you did"..."Oh, no, I didn't."

The good news is that we seem to have gone a few days without the discovery of yet another substandard building. The number is almost certain to break ninety at some point in the new year, though.

Michelle Malkin links to a graphic from a Georgia teenager (via Q and O) who responded to an Atlanta Journal Constitution editorial cartoonist's rhetorical question about the Iraq invasion.