The White Peril 白禍

Hi, everyone. Remember me?

March wiped the floor with this bitch.

It wasn't bad, mind--there was a lot to accomplish, and it all got done--just intense. Last night I came home and realized that, for the first time in, like, ever, my head wasn't buzzing with 5000 things that had to be done TOMORROW OR ELSE. And I got into bed and talked to Atsushi when he called and read my book for a while (actually paying attention to it) and then went to sleep without once jumping up for my datebook to scrawl in something I'd forgotten.

Of course, I actually did have to do 5000 things today--I just wasn't anxious about them ahead of time. Now that the month is REALLY over, I need to do a punishing workout or something. But I can't because I got up early and worked out this morning. So I think it's a long walk up Meiji Avenue. Despite the pointlessness of the new subway line, I like the construction sites.

There don't seem to be many new stories or particularly fascinating developments on existing ones--which is good because I've been busy as hell. The cherry blossoms are blooming early, though--third earliest in Tokyo proper since record-keeping began, apparently.

The neighborhood in which my office is is called 桜ヶ丘 (sakura ga oka: lit., "cherry hill," though putting it that way has somewhat Joisey-ish connotations for me), and that is, of course, because the main through street is lined with cherry trees. By yesterday, the blossoms seemed to be about 80% open, and last night was the first night this year that they floodlit them. I spent yesterday doing a fair bit of end-of-year document-shredding and straightening up, so by 8 p.m. or so I was feeling a little dusty and decided a walk down to the bottom of the hill for a Coke or something was in order. When I got to the end of the alley from our building and looked up, there they were: clouds of cherry blossoms, like an apparition from some other, purer world, somehow feeling pink without actually looking pink. I may have gasped. It was one of those mono no aware moments that remind you why the Japanese have always regarded the natural surroundings in their native islands as spookily, mysteriously beautiful.

Then I was snapped back to Earth for another Japan moment, this one of somewhat more recent origin: I had to thread through all the people trying to take each other's pictures ("Yumi-chan, dame yo...you have to get closer in!") with the blossoms in the background, in addition to the usual steady procession of taxis, delivery guys on motorbikes, and sauntering students with their gigantic backpacks, in order to get down the street to the Family Mart. But hey, I'm always the one saying I like the crush, so no complaints. I still reserve the right to bitch about the kiln-like summer heat, though.

Work should clear up in a few days, leaving me not so much more time as more mind space to devote to other things.

I've been kind of distracted from the news this weekend, but it's been hard to miss the reports about the demonstrations in favor of illegal aliens.

I'm not one given to ambivalence, but I'm of two minds about what the best approach is to illegal aliens at this point. I'm a proper-channels kind of guy--which helps to explain why I like Japan, obviously--and find that the minute someone starts blaring about "rights" in connection with people who used unlawful means to enter the country, I want to grimace and turn away. And irrespective of whether Mexicans themselves are likely to be terrorists, porous borders and slack enforcement of immigration laws are security risks. At the same time, I'm not unsympathetic to the it-takes-two-to-tango argument: US de facto policy has made it possible for millions of people to live and work within our borders without documentation. Many of them come from corrupt countries in which scrupulously obeying the law is a great way to be played for a sucker. It's not difficult to believe that many people who were desperate enough to enter the country illegally are essentially honest and hard-working once they get there. I don't like the idea of an amnesty program that would reward illegal immigration for those who happened to get in under the wire; but neither do I like our cozy relationship with the al-Sauds, or negotiations with the thugs who run the DPRK, or the nice-making we have to do to conduct trade with PRC enterprises. Unpalatable compromises are sometimes necessary, and while it's good to reflect on how we got into this situation, we still have to deal with it. It may indeed be more humane and less wasteful for all concerned if we give those who already have established lives in the States a chance to get documentation. To avoid a run on green cards by people hoping to get in under the wire, we'll have to tighten the borders at the same time in a big, bad way. And if we're being all generous-minded toward non-citizens who want to live responsible lives within our borders, we might include the long-suffering foreign spouses of Americans who exist in a living hell thanks to the vagaries of the INS. For the future, as long as they're scrupulously enforced when enacted, I don't see why more liberal immigration laws would be a problem.

However.

If the purpose of the demonstrations over the last few weeks was to win over Middle America, I'm thinking there were some serious miscalculations. Waving the Mexican flag or painting your face in its colors is a poor way to indicate your loyalty to the US. And thronging the streets of LA in the hundreds of thousands is...I mean, only the Blue City liberals who recall 60s-era demonstrations fondly as opportunities for The People to Speak Truth to Power are likely to be moved to sympathize, and they're already on the side of illegal aliens, anyway.

Mass rallies are less likely to make the average television viewer be like, "Gosh, just look at all the clean, presentable undocumented workers already living responsible lives in this great land right now!" than to provoke a reaction of "Imagine if all those people did decide to rampage! The cops couldn't do a blessed thing. Yet there they are today monitoring and protecting them instead of protecting American citizens from crime. And even if only 0.5% of those people are terrorists, they can just melt away into the crowd, and no one will be the wiser!" Maybe that's fair, and maybe it isn't--there were plenty of supporters marching, presumably, who aren't illegal aliens themselves--but it strikes me as the most likely response. Given how long this has been a hot-button issue (it predates 9/11 by quite a bit, of course), it will, if nothing else, be interesting to see how it plays out given that this is an election year.

March is the last month of the fiscal year in Japan, and even though I'm not a banker or accountant, it's still raining Excel sheets for another week or so yet. And the fact that the cherry trees bloomed early this year means that everyone has essentially been scrambling to move up the planned blossom-viewing parties. Kind of busy.

A few news items of interest here while my attention was diverted elsewhere:

A district court has ordered a nuclear reactor shut, deeming its earthquake-proofing inadequate:

The Kanazawa District Court on Friday ordered Hokuriku Electric Power Co. to stop operating the No. 2 reactor at its Shika nuclear power plant in Shikamachi, Ishikawa Prefecture, ruling that the reactor may be susceptible to earthquakes.

The ruling recognized a demand by a citizens group that the 1,358-megawatt No. 2 advanced boiling-water reactor be shut down.

Hokuriku Electric has said it will appeal to the high court to overturn the ruling.

Presiding Judge Kenichi Ido said, "The reactor has a problem in its antiseismic design, and there's a real possibility that the plaintiffs might be exposed to radiation if there was an accident at the plant."

...

The district court then ruled, "An earthquake beyond Hokuriku Electric's expectations could occur," and pointed out the following:

-- The estimate that the largest earthquake that could possibly hit the area would have a magnitude of 6.5 is too conservative.

-- The probability of an earthquake occurring along the Ochigata fault line was not taken into consideration.

-- The method employed to determine the correct design needed to adequately cope with an earthquake is inappropriate.

Three reactors at Tohoku Electric Power Co.'s Onagawa nuclear power station in Miyagi Prefecture were automatically shut down in August after being rocked by an earthquake stronger than had been factored into the reactors' antiseismic designs.

I haven't heard much more detail than that, but it certainly doesn't sound out of the realm of possibility. The Yomiuri has a summary of the factors that are supposed to be considered in such assessments. Yesterday's main Nikkei editorial observed drily:

It's not that power generation would be disrupted by unanticipated vibrations, or that they would lead to the release of mass quantities of radioactive material. The issue is risk evaluation for the system in toto, and whether it's rational to go so far as to halt operations. In that respect, the ruling was on the abrupt side; however, we must give serious thought to grave indications that the state and [plant] operators have been slack about incorporating the latest technology and approaches into quake resistance evaluation.

The editorial points out that feel-good estimates about how severe an earthquake in any region could be fail to take into account hidden fault lines and other unpalatable possibilities.

Oh, yeah, and inspectors identified a crack in a pipe at another reactor, this one in Fukushima and owned by TEPCO.

If you'd like to escape the possibility of being double-whammied by a catastrophic earthquake and radiation exposure, you may want to fly out on ANA:

Trouble-plagued Japan Airlines Corp. was reprimanded yet again Wednesday for operating a 134-seat McDonnell Douglas MD-87 passenger plane for 10 days without conducting a mandatory inspection on its main landing gear.

The cause for the failure to inspect the landing gear was simple: The JAL official in charge forgot to give the instructions.

And when the airline finally did the required inspection on Monday, it bungled that as well.

...

The plane was supposed to have been thoroughly examined by March 11 for cracks in a metal part of the left main landing gear.

JAL maintenance workers had, in fact, scheduled the inspection for Feb. 26, well before the due date, and entered that date on their computers, airline officials said.

But the employee in charge of the inspection forgot to give the instructions.

On Monday, the employee realized the inspection had not been carried out when the computer flashed a warning.

The MD-87 was inspected Monday at Shin-Chitose Airport in Hokkaido. But JAL's problems did not end there.

The transport ministry found out Thursday that the JAL inspector who conducted the check omitted an important procedure.

The 44-year-old inspector was supposed to have used a fluorescent solvent to search for cracks. However, he did not use this solvent, and said he didn't find any cracks.

And if you decide you'd prefer to evade the risks of modern life by leaving this world of dew behind altogether, there's apparently a great doctor we could hook you up with:

Police are investigating the deaths of seven elderly patients at a hospital in Imizu, Toyama Prefecture, who died between 2000 and 2005 after a surgeon removed their artificial respirators, the hospital said Saturday.

Imizu City Hospital said it contacted the police last year as it suspected the surgeon euthanized the patients.

...

The first ruling by a court in the nation on a doctor administering a mercy killing was in March 1995, when the Yokohama District Court gave a doctor at the Tokai University School of Medicine Hospital a two-year suspended prison sentence for administering a lethal injection of potassium chloride in April 1991 to a patient suffering from terminal cancer. The doctor was arrested on suspicion of murder.

In the ruling, the presiding judge set four conditions that must be met to allow doctors to legally euthanize a patient:

-- The patient is suffering from unbearable pain.

-- Death is inevitable and close at hand.

-- There is no other way to relieve the patient's pain.

-- The patient has clearly expressed consent that his or her life be shortened.

I think it would be heartless to deny hopelessly ill people with untreatable pain the right to go off artificial respiration if their heads are clear and they know what they're doing; but of course, in this aging society, it would be exceedingly dangerous to set precedents that could allow doctors to off patients in an effort to free up beds or save money.

There was a not-too-bad article in The Japan Times a few days ago--how often do I type that?--about what real, live Japanese gays think of Masaki Sumitani, a.k.a. Hard Gay. The writer can't resist drawing hammy attention to what a broad-minded sensi-hetero he is, which is a little trying:

How right can it be to satirize people who are so marginalized in Japanese society that they have effectively no freedom to respond?

An official at Yoshimoto Kogyo Co., Hard Gay's promotion company, said neither the comedian nor the company intend [sic--dude, find yourself a persnickety-grammarian fag friend and get him to explain the finer points of correlative conjunctions--SRK] to insult anyone.

Still, the logical thing seemed to be to ask some Japanese homosexuals what they think of Hard Gay--whose handlers, by the way, say that he is straight and has a girlfriend.

What did he find when he asked around? Some gays think Hard Gay is funny. He makes them laugh. Some gays think Hard Gay is mocking homosexuals. That makes them sad. And some gays don't pay much attention one way or another. He makes them feel bored.

A real revelation, huh?

It's hard to fault the reporter, exactly. Being in the position of weighing the positions of people whose world he doesn't inhabit, he probably figured it was wise to keep asking around until he got one yes, one no, and one neither on the issue raised just to keep all the bases covered. Also, if you're a foreign reporter who wants to find out what gay people think about this or that, you probably have little choice but to wander to Shinjuku 2-chome, choose a prominently gay shop with an open front door (implying that non-regulars are welcome), and start talking to the guy behind the counter. Or to look up gay organizations in the phone directory and start dialing.

Unfortunately, that kind of approach produces the same problems that "researchers" who are taken more seriously get into when they conduct "studies" by trawling for subjects at bars or in classified ads, and they're worth looking at. While he got a set of varied opinions, it's questionable whether he talked to a representative sample of gay Japanese people.

Guys who own gay shops and bars are, obviously, those who have elected to work as well as socialize in gay life. Gay organizations have relatively low memberships, too--partially because a lot of people would be scared to be on their mailing lists and things, but also because such organizations just aren't very popular in Japan. (Most people have their hands full conforming to all the expectations within their companies and neighborhoods. The last thing they need is another group to be beholden to.) And obviously the sorts of people who are going to join a study circle dedicated to solemnly working out their feelings about a TV character are going to constitute a self-selecting sample. The Japan Times was therefore talking to a sample of the gay population that had an unusual amount of energy to devote to sitting around thinking about the meaning of homosexuality in society.

That doesn't mean there was nothing to learn from them. Their opinions are as genuine as anyone else's--though the reporter doesn't seem to have cared much that the guy from the Sapporo organization he talked is transgendered and not even gay. But experience leads me to suspect that the representative opinion was the one relegated to this throwaway paragraph:

Other gays felt pretty much the same, he said. "We don't really talk about him [Hard Gay] much."

I don't know a scientific sample of the gay Japanese population myself, probably, but my acquaintance would seem to square with that. I have quite a few friends who hang out in little pub-like Shibuya gay bars and rarely venture to Ageha or 2-chome or other more high-profile places. They tend to be ordinary office worker types who don't know many foreigners besides me. The other Japanese guys I know are those who like foreigners and hang out in 2-chome at the handful of foreigner-friendly places. Many of them have spent significant time in the States or places in the British Commonwealth and thus can compare gay life here to gay life in other places.

And I've only ever heard Hard Gay mentioned twice. Once, someone told an acquaintance of mine that he looked like him, which he does (his facial features, I mean). Another time, when I went out in a black T-shirt of somewhat unforgiving cut, one of the bar guys cracked that I was "looking very Hard Gay." ("No, he just looks like a homo as always," a friend piped up.)

Otherwise, nothing, even at gatherings where uncensored bitchy opinions are flowing freely about anything and everything. The implication of the article's conclusion, that there are a lot of gay Japanese who would protest about Hard Gay's image if they felt at liberty to, doesn't strike me as plausible. If pressed, I guess most people I know would say that while Sumitani's antics are a bit much, at least the stereotype he's reinforcing is one of vigor rather than nelliness, and you can't expect things to change in Japan overnight.

Even the acknowledgment that gays exist in Japan represents progress. Open homosexuals are at a disadvantage here, but so are career women and ethnic Koreans. This is a society that values conformity above all, and everyone is used to the fact. Everyone here has secrets. In general, if you preserve the expected public face, no one is going to interrogate you about your private life. We can question whether it should have to be that way in an ideal world, but the gay guys I know all pretty much seem to accept with equanimity that that's the way it is for now and that it's a trade-off they can live with.

Yesterday was a busy day in Pyongyang:

In a notice dated 21 March, the permanent committee of North Korea's eleventh Supreme People's Assembly (the equivalent of the Diet) announced a resolution to hold its fourth session on 11 April in Pyongyang. The resolution was publicized on the radio on 22 March by means of a Korean Central News Agency release. The focus of the session will be whether to hammer out a new economic policy program based on the results of Kim Jong-il's January visit to China. The backdrop for the session being the failure of 6-party talks after North Korea's objection to "financial sanctions" by the United States, [the world] will also be listening closely for any mention of the nuclear issue.

The Supreme People's Assembly will hold a session to discuss the state budget in spring of next year. Kim Jong-il attended last year's session, at which a state budget in which an 11.4% increase in spending over the previous year was approved. On the nuclear issue, North Korea has taken the the position that an end to sanctions by the US is the "minimum condition" for a resumption of 6-party talks.

This isn't exciting news; in a way, what moved me to cite it was its sheer everyday-ness.

You get regular, poker-faced reports in the Japanese media of stuff like the above--as if the Supreme People's Assembly were in any way, shape, or form actually comparable to the Diet! Japan has a gajillion political parties, a free press, freedom of movement for its citizens, a capitalist economy, and a high standard of living. (I mean, yes, I grouse a lot about the power held by bureaucrats rather than elected officials here, and there are plenty of things that would be more liberalized and transparent if I were running the place. Even so, there's no comparison.) Everyone knows that the DPRK is run by nut cases and their sane toadies whose idea of fun is shooting test missiles over our heads and who wouldn't know viable economic policy if it jumped up and bit 'em in the ass. On the other hand, it's close by. Knowing what's going on there is important, and frothing over its evil and craziness is not going to move it farther away. So Japanese reporters, and the citizens they report for, note important developments and then get on with business.

When American friends asked me what the Japanese (or at least, those Japanese who pay attention to international business and news stories) thought of the brouhaha over the Dubai Ports World deal, it was hard to put into words. I don't think it made us look anti-Arab or more generally racist, just kind of skittish and a bit silly.

We're not used to having enemies near to hand in America. Our only actual borders are with Canada and New Mexico. No one's worried about Cuba since the Bay of Pigs; and Alaska, despite its proximity to what was the USSR during the Cold War, has a low population and is isolated from the US mainland. We think of our enemies as far away.

But since most deep-seated ethnic and religious rivalries developed over local resources long before communication and transportation technology enabled animosity to be projected quickly over long distances, having hostile neighbors is a fact of life for much, if not most, of the world. Pakistan trades with India; China, Japan, and South Korea trade with each other; Israel trades with several of its Arab neighbors. The driving force, needless to say, is economics and not trust--the Israelis haven't suddenly forgotten what happened in 1948 in their zeal for selling their plastics. Trade is an economic good in general, and mutually beneficial economic ties also make mutually destructive war a riskier and therefore less likely response to frictions that arise.

The analogy to Dubai isn't perfect: I realize that with the ports deal, we weren't talking about whether to import its actual goods. But then, it turned out that we weren't talking about outsourcing port security to the UAE, either. Ultimately, it wasn't at all clear what the issue was; the jabber about "lack of transparency" seemed lame, given that none of those issuing it seemed to have been too worried about such matters before.

So I think it was difficult for businesspeople who followed the story to see it as being motivated by much beyond anxiety over the fact that people from around where the terrorists are--you know, over there--might be spending a lot of time at our ports. The UAE, despite having recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan a while back, is a known center of entrepreneurship and a major US ally in the region. So I think that, given that you can practically see the DPRK's missile silos with binoculars from Honshu's west coast, the reaction read as a bit on the hysterical side to Japanese people I know.

I have no objections to getting older--I've frequently been told numerous times that my level of crotchetiness will take me a good twenty years to grow into, and I find people get more interesting as they age, anyway. So turning thirty-four the other week didn't bother me at all.

It's funny what makes the passage of time hit you, though. Today is my father's and brother's birthday. My little brother is twenty-eight, which means I appear to have been distracted since a few moments ago when he was in his bassinet (home birth--it was the 70s) and I was reading him his first story.

Also, Dad is fifty-five, and for some weird reason I don't pretend to understand, having two parents who are now the conventional retirement age makes me feel kinda near the crest of the hill, if you know what I mean.

I may have to scale back tomorrow's workout from the usual. Wouldn't want to break my hip, or anything.

Anyway, happy birthday, guys.

The arguments over the relocation of US military facilities now housed in Futenma are still developing. Prime Minister Koizumi met with Japan Defense Agency head Fukushiro Nukaga this morning, and talks with the US are slated to begin the day after tomorrow:

The main focus of the talks will be the issue of who will pay for the relocation of Marines currently stationed in Okinawa to Guam. The US has asked Japan to pay 75% of the US $10 billion tab. Japan, the relevant cabinet ministers having agreed that they "cannot accept" such a burden, plans to negotiate for a lower percentage.

Of course, the price tag may be the focus of Thursday's talks, but it's not the only bone of contention:

Yoshikazu Shimabukuro, Mayor of Nago City in Okinawa Prefecture, the planned site to which certain US military installations are to be relocated from Futenma [USMC] Air Station as part of negotiations over restructuring, held a meeting in Naha with Okinawa Governor Keiichi Inamine on 21 March. The Mayor expressed his intention to oppose a new, slightly tweaked proposal by LDP Policy Committee Chairman Hidenao Nakagawa; the new plan would move the facilities to the shoreline of Camp Schwab.

Governor Inamine affirmed his own rejection of the tweaked proposal and his support for the Mayor's stance: "We will persevere together."

...

At the meeting, the Mayor emphasized that he would not consider negotiations unless there was a large-scale shift of the planned site of relocation offshore in the "shoreline proposal": "(Area residents have) acceded to (an existing plan, which would create a facility off the Henoko district of Nago), a variation on the 'offshore proposal.'"

A few months back, residents weren't keen about any plan at all. The federal government continues to state that it will not accommodate more than minor adjustments to the plan and will keep talking to residents until it gets them to accept it.

The Nikkei had an uncharacteristically squishy editorial about China-Japan relations the other day--squishy in that its recommendations were airy and unspecific:

Japan-PRC relations have been deteriorating for a while, but one can't help feeling especially anxious over the "war of condemnations" between the two governments since last month. On 8 February, Chinese State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan told a visiting group from the Japan-China Society, "We have no no more hopes for Prime Minister Koizumi."

On 7 March, PRC Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing harshly criticized Prime Minister Koizumi's pilgimages to the Yasukuni Shrine as "an imbecilic and immoral thing" at a National People's Congress press conference. Li's indignant manner was not characteristic of him. Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe countered, "It is inappropriate to criticize the leaders of other nations in terms so lacking in dignity." Quite so.

But on the other hand, on the Japanese side, Minister of Foreign Affairs Taro Aso has provoked the Chinese by repeatedly referring to Taiwan as a "country" (4 February, 9 March). Aso emended his statement on 9 March, stating, "Well, it's accurate to call it a 'territory,'" but there are reports in China that there are doubts there about whether the slip of the tongue was really unintentional. It's aberrant for those responsible for diplomatic relations between the two countries to repeatedly express themselves in ways that betray loss of a sense of good citizenship. [Our leaders] must not lose their reason and decorum in dealing with each other.

In the midst of all this, PRC Premier Wen Jiabao held a press conference for domestic and foreign journalists at which he tersely indicated what China's provisional Japan policy is. Of relations between the two countries while Prime Minister Koizumi, who continues to make pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine, is in office, Wen stated, "Smooth progress has hit extraordinary obstacles, but the responsibility lies with the leaders of Japan," thereby differentiating between the public and its leaders.

What makes it so squishy is the way it the way it focuses paragraph after paragraph on failures of nice-making and then gives its most concrete policy recommendation in a single blink-and-you-miss-it sentence later on: "Through expansion of exchange and economic cooperation between our peoples, we can prevent the deterioration of political relations from having a deleterious influence on economics and trade."

Well, sure. Liberalized trade is likely to strengthen bonds between China and Japan and make occasional diplomatic eruptions of their ancient enmity less damaging. But Japan still needs to draw lines about what it is and is not willing to concede. Could it make things easier on itself if Koizumi were less obstinate about the Yasukuni Shrine pilgrimages and Aso occasionally learned to rein it in about...well, anything? It's reasonable to think so. At the same time, the CCP is not populated by idiots. China knows how useful it is to be able to divert its citizens' dissatisfaction with their own rulers in the direction of Japan. (Remember last year's demonstrations.)

But let's not forget that Koizumi is no dummy himself. The course he's steering doesn't look so wise right now, given that things have gone from a cessation of meetings between heads of state to an open expression by the PRC that it doesn't think it can deal with Japan while he's running the government. After all, despite the PRC's operatic gestures of woundedness over Japan's bad faith, it's difficult to assess how much regional friction would actually be lessened if Japan decided to keep its own counsel about Taiwan and to stop the Yasukuni pilgrimages. China could very easily channel more of its animosity into the issue of development of East China Sea gas fields, or Japan's ongoing joint military programs with the US. Both of those are in and of themselves issues of material, and not just symbolic, significance. Perhaps Koizumi thinks he can smooth the way for more concessions from China on things that matter come this autumn if he's combative enough to make his successors look accommodating by comparison.

I would just like it to be known that I'm all topped out on Alans. My best friend is named Alan. There's a reader and commenter here with whom I sometimes correspond named Alan. There's another Alan--from the same city in the UK as my friend, no less--whom I've now met enough times that it's going to be considered rude pretty soon if I don't remember his name. And a few nights ago I met yet another Alan who's here in Tokyo indefinitely who will also, presumably, tire quickly of being told, "Sorry, man, I forgot your name again."

Major cognitive dissonance here.

I mean, when you're an American my age, you expect to know 90 Michaels (of whom, if you're gay and hang out with people in the Tribe a lot, only 15 will go by Mike), 80 Brians (bonus points for being able to remember who's an i and who's a y), 60 Jasons, and 50 Stephens (including the Stevens and Steves, naturally). You never start to greet someone you know casually and think, Wait a minute--this can't be Brian; I already saw Brian an hour ago. If you don't know multiple Brians, you don't get out much.

Also, if you live in Japan...well, the language only has forty-odd syllables, so you quickly become accustomed to not referring to Shinji or Jun or Taka in a conversation without making it clear whom you're talking about before proceeding.

Alan, however? Perfectly nice name. I've come to associate "Hey, Alan" with a feeling of "Am I ever glad to see you, honey!" and warm greeting back of "Hiya, darlin'." But I have trouble remembering names so as it is, and even though I'm aware that there can be clustering in perfectly random statistical samples, who knows four Alans? Anyway, the Alan-storage synapses in my brain are now officially full.

So if you're a gay guy called Alan and plan to be running into me in the near future, please distinguish yourself by changing your name to, say, Fred first. Or, if that seems like too much trouble, go hetero.

Much obliged.

The Japan Meteorological Agency has announced that the cherry blossoms are probably going to open early this year--prepare for falling-down-drunkness and inescapable karaoke in t - 6 days:

The JMA announced the dates that cherry (Prunus serrulata) blossoms are expected to open from Kyushu through the Tohoku region on 15 March. For the first time, this year's blossoms are predicted to open between 1 and 4 days earlier than the average in Tohoku.

...

The projected date for blossoms to open in Tokyo and Yokohama is 22 March.

There are scores of classic poems about cherry blossoms--in the seasonal-devotion sense. But of course, they're so woven into Japanese culture in March and April that they can become aesthetic placeholders for poems with other themes.

The following is the first poem I ever read and understood (at least lexically) in Japanese:

レモン哀歌

そんなにもあなたはレモンを待つてゐた
かなしく白いあかるい死の床で
私の手からとつた一つのレモンを
あなたのきれいな歯ががりりと噛んだ
トパアズいろの香気が立つ
その数滴の天のものなるレモンの汁は
ぱつとあなたの意識を正常にした
あなたの青く澄んだ眼がかすかに笑ふ
わたしの手を握るあなたの力の健康さよ
あなたの咽喉に嵐はあるが
かういふ命の瀬戸ぎはに
智恵子はもとの智恵子となり
生涯の愛を一瞬にかたむけた
それからひと時
昔山巓でしたやうな深呼吸を一つして
あなたの機関ははそれなり止まつた
写真の前に挿した桜の花かげに
すずしく光るレモンを今日も置かう

高村光太郎

*******

Lemon Elegy

You had waited so for the lemon.
In your sad, white, bright deathbed,
you took from my hand a single lemon
and plunged your pretty teeth into it.
Those few drops of heaven-sent lemon juice
from which a topaz-colored fragrance rose
snapped your consciousness back to normal.
Your blue, unclouded eyes laughed a bit
Your power so robust as you grasped my hand.
There was a storm in your throat,
and just at last possible second,
Chieko became the old Chieko,
and the love of a lifetime tipped into a single moment.
And in the next instant,
you took a deep breath as you had long ago at the top of a mountain,
and with that your machinery shut down.
In the shadow of the cherry sprig standing in front of your photograph,
I will put a cool, glistening lemon today.

Kotaro Takamura

Kotaro Takamura and Chieko Naganuma had one of the most famous artistic marriages in Japan in the last century. Kotaro considered himself a sculptor more than a poet; Chieko was a painter. They had twin studios and shared household duties. Chieko had always been unconventional in dress and demeanor, but decade and a half after their marriage, she began to have delusions. She tried to commit suicide in the early 1930s. Of course, artists are famous for their erratic temperaments, but Chieko's episodes developed into full-blown schizophrenia. Despite her tendency to break out of the house and harangue the neighbors, Kotaro kept her at home and took care of her for three years until it became too flat-out dangerous. She died another three years after he had her hospitalized.

智恵子抄 (Chieko-sho: "Winnowings [of poems about] Chieko"), the book of poetry Kotaro published three years after her death, contains the above poem and others about their life together. I wrote my undergrad senior research project about it. That was the time I was coming out, of course--and though it might not seem like the greatest idea to be studying poetry about such an unstable person right about then, it was something of a kooky comfort to think that you could be completely falling apart and still have someone who would remain so tirelessly devoted to you.

It's known that many of the poems are idealizations--or rather, that they couldn't possibly represent what their life was like in day-to-day terms. "Lemon Elegy" was composed in February, weeks before a cherry bough would have had swelling buds, let along blossoms, on it. Kotaro might have put a particularly shapely bare bough in a vase on the Buddhist altar with Chieko's photograph on it, or he may just have written the poem as a projection into a time later in the spring. (Perhaps there's some kind of critical consensus on that, but I've never seen it in any annotations.)

Added on 17 March: I remembered last night after posting this that my college language partner, who'd returned with her husband to Japan by the time I was coming here in 1996 and let me stay with them my first week here, had a video tape of a television special about Kotaro Takamura. We watched it the first night I ever spent in Japan.

Part of it was a dramatization of certain poems as they were read in voice-over. In the segment for "Lemon Elegy," when the actress playing Chieko Naganuma died, the lemon dropped from her hand, landed on the floor with a meaningful thud, sat there for one dramatically fleeting second, and then wobbled dolorously away.

I. LAUGHED. SO. HARD. It could hardly have been more campily entertaining if it had been performed in drag.

While television dramas with naturalistic acting have become more common here, it's non-mimetic theater, of course, that's traditional. Scenes of emotional intensity are frequently stylized or exaggerated. (When Chieko returned momentarily to sanity, the look that flashed across the actress's face was, like, Damn! I think I locked my keys in the car!) It's a credit to Kotaro's limpid, direct style that despite having those images in my head, I can still take the poems in question seriously.

Thomas Schieffer, who appears to keep a low profile as US Ambassador to Japan, is in the news today for having visited the beach from which Megumi Yokota was abducted by DPRK agents in 1977:

The ambassador was accompanied on the visit by Yokota's 73-year-old father Shigeru and others, who explained the kidnapping to him. It was the first abduction scene visit by a high-ranking U.S. government official.

In a news conference after the visit, Schieffer said he was moved by the experience, and that the injustice of the abductions should be solved no matter how many years it took. He added he intended to discuss the issue with U.S. President George W. Bush when he next met him.

...

The visit is seen as lending support to Japan's stance of seeking a solution to the abductions, following the failure of comprehensive talks between Japan and North Korea in February.

The abductee issue is a big one for Japan (both the government and the public). When there are talks between the DPRK and the US in which Japan is involved, it tends to get backburnered in favor of more attention to, you know, nuclear development and stuff. And Japan and North Korea certainly haven't solved it between themselves.

Megumi Yokota, BTW, is the abductee whose unknown whereabouts have been reported on most frequently since the issue really gained steam several years ago. The DPRK gave Japan a pile of bones that turned out not to be hers.

What would you think if you read something like this from a professional psychologist (via Eric Scheie)?

Personally, I'm skeptical about turning gay people straight. But shouldn't the client be the one to choose, not the APA? The APA has decided that the answer is no.

Not only did the APA deny CE (Continuing Education) credit to professionals attending the annual NARTH conference in November, stating that "The program content is not consistent with APA policy" but the APA is attempting to declare therapy to modify sexual orientation unethical (National Psychologist, March,April 2006). Nicholas Cummings and Rogers Wright, authors of Destructive Trends in Mental Health,talk about the APA's attempt to silence those who disagree with their positions.

There are plenty of possible responses to Dr. Helen here. For example, despite the APA's generally liberal political bent, perhaps it has honestly noticed that "reparative" therapists don't seem to be able to produce much beyond Carol Gilligan-level anecdotal evidence that their conclusions are grounded in reality. At the same time, she is clearly taking the position that people should be free to pursue happiness their own way without paternalistic interference. Bully for her for championing individual self-determination and raising thorny questions about a subject a lot of people reflexively avoid, right?

Well, not if you're downtownlad. If you're downtownlad, Dr. Helen should be named in a class action suit. She's a closed-minded conservative. She should also have another heart attack. And everyone who agrees with her is not only a moron but a stupid moron. There are probably a few more gems in his avalanche of comments there, but you get the general idea.

I've had downtownlad blogrolled for a while; I miss New York, and his posts about the City are often good reads.

Not so his stuff about gay issues.

His coming out was pretty recent and, by his own very moving account, rocky. As far as I'm concerned, people who haven't been out long get some leeway if they're a little touchy and extra-combative about gay stuff. But no one in his mid-30s gets enough leeway to accommodate looking forward to someone's next heart attack. I don't care whether you just came out ten minutes ago and were driven from your parents' house by your entire knife-brandishing extended family--if you've been an adult for over a decade, you are supposed to know how to handle yourself in public, and if you're not up to it, you keep still until you've regained your equanimity. When you cross a line or two--I've certainly been known to--you apologize and discipline yourself not to do it again.

Would that it were only his tone that was objectionable, but the content doesn't entirely wash, either. There are few beliefs propagated by some of my fellow homos that drive me up the wall more than the idea that the pain and isolation we experience up until we come out exhausts our full lifetime ration of misery and that, therefore, it's society's job to make us feel good about ourselves from that point on. No, no one ever actually puts it that way, but the implicit belief that any questions raised about gay life are in and of themselves anti-gay or [yawn] homophobic seems to govern a lot of the public debate.

But life doesn't work like that for ANYONE. Fat people, Mormons, and folks with Appalachian accents who move to the big city come in for their share of callous judgments, and they're expected to deal. If they decide they'd like to change, no one goes bananas trying to prevent them, even in cases in which it seems they'd probably be happier just accepting themselves.

Homosexual behavior only began to be decriminalized very recently. No one should be bowled over by the fact that a lot of people still have strong positions against it. Or by the fact that some people are unhappy being homosexual themselves. Or by the fact that parents who wish their kids weren't homosexual will try everything they can to remold them--the same way pushy parents who want their artistic kids to become lawyers or want their bookish kids to play on the football team do. One need not like such situations to acknowledge that bureaucratic fiat is a bad way to try to address them, especially when it's alloyed with identity politics. As Eric sensibly says:

The issue was once whether there's a right to be gay. Over the years that has morphed into the crazy idea that if you are gay, you must always remain gay because it is your identity, and that the slightest disagreement with this idea constitutes the direst threat, and actually causes harm. This makes no sense, and I think it's a form of intolerance motivated by a type of insecurity similar to (although not as extreme as) what we've been seeing in the case of people who went ballistic over the Muhammad cartoons.

A settled mind is generally a resilient one. People who have chosen their way of life by working candidly through their own inner conflicts and making peace with the elements do not, as a rule, get all edgy at the very idea that someone else might find happiness by making the opposite choice. As gays, we're a population that's almost impossible to study without sampling biases, so people have to do the best they can with fragmentary information. That's life. It is infantilizing to try to insulate people from reality rather than encourage them to meet it head-on. Is this what our elder brothers and sisters broke their heads against convention for three decades ago?

Citizens in Iwakuni voted against the relocation of USMC facilities there:

An overwhelming majority of residents of Iwakuni, Yamaguchi Prefecture, on Sunday said "no" to the planned relocation of 57 carrier-based aircraft to the U.S. Marine Corps' Iwakuni Air Base, casting a shadow over plans to realign of U.S. forces in Japan.

According to the Iwakuni municipal election administration commission, 43,433 citizens voted against the plan while 5,369 approved it.

The voter turnout was 58.68 percent, exceeding the 50 percent required for the votes to be counted.

...

Japan and U.S. governments are scheduled to make a final report on the realignment plan by the end of March. The central government is unlikely to change the relocation plan due to the Sunday's results because the plebiscite is not legally binding.

...

On March 20, eight days after the referendum, Iwakuni will be merged with six towns and a village. Six of these municipalities have already notified the central government of their general agreement with the plan.

This morning Shinzo Abe says:

[Abe] stated emphatically, "I'd like to be mindful of the result as we move forward and explain things to the residents in good faith." At the same time, "We're at the stage at which our negotiations with the US have basically gelled; that's our conclusion," he related, indicating that his view was that the relocation plans would not change.

The US agreed last week to return three facilities in Okinawa to Japan.

Here's Eric with more about the political strangeness of our shared state of birth:

One of the things I hate about the damned "red state"/"blue state" argument [with you there, honey!--SRK] is that I live in a red state that's blue.

Or is that a blue state that's red?

He has graphics. My home county (still my place of residence for electoral and tax purposes) is Lehigh, which is at the northwest tip of the blue region to the southeast of the state, where metropolitan Philadelphia shades upward into the Lehigh Valley.

I realize that the vast majority of us live in places which are varying shades of purple. But that's not sexy. Nor does it appeal to the us-versus-them, energize-the-base party activists. This is not to deny that there is real geographical (at least demographical) tension in this country. But it's more along the lines of "Big Cities" versus "The Rest." It is not the country which is blue; it is the cities which are blue. For the most part, the cities aren't even purple, the way the rest of the country is; Philadelphia is about as blue as it's possible to be.

Right. A lot of the red counties are solidly conservative, but they have more elk than people. (Yes, that's a mischievous joke, but I'm not being derisive. I'm a city person through and through, but there are plenty of times--morning rush hour on Monday, usually--when I understand why a lot of people aren't.) The cities, where most of the reliable voters are concentrated, may be heavily Democratic, but they're still parts of different population and cultural belts.

Philadelphia, Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, and Wilkes Barre-Scranton--despite their differences--are all BOS-WASH metro areas. They're part of the Northeast Corridor, oriented toward New York and DC. Pittsburgh and Erie are CHI-PITTS cities, more Midwestern in outlook. To people from the big Western states, Pennsylvania is pretty tiny, but the divide is real. The eastern and western halves of the commonwealth don't spend all their time throwing water balloons at each other over Penn State at University Park, or anything; but there really does seem to be a tacit feeling that the number of pols from each half should be roughly equal. And yes, obviously, part of that is because of the symmetrical tug of big contributors in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but it's also the way a lot of friends and neighbors will report voting.

As if just in time to illustrate why cracking down on loan sharks is a good idea, this story appeared in the Mainichi today:

Two former employees of a loan shark have admitted during questioning that they intimidated a debtor, who later killed herself with two relatives, in a bid to force her to repay her debts, police said.

...

Seven employees of the loan shark, including the two, extended a total of around 32,000 yen in loans to the woman who lived in Yao, Osaka Prefecture, between April and June 2003. They then threatened her into paying about 167,000 yen in interest, approximately 225 times the legal limit, police said.

32,000 yen is around US $300; we're not talking about a loan for big money here. Of course, you don't need to know that to realize that 167,000 yen is over 500% interest--and that someone who needs to go to a loan shark for $300 at past retirement age is hardly likely to be able to cough up over $1000 within a few years from then.

After obtaining the loans, the woman received phone calls from the loan sharks almost every day, saying, "You borrowed the money so repay it. Otherwise, I'll kill you." The victim recorded the threatening calls on tape.

In June, the woman, her 61-year-old husband and her 81-year-old brother killed themselves by jumping in front of a train on the JR Kansai Line. She left a suicide note saying, "I'm scared by the phone calls every night."

This is from the Yomiuri:

Japan and the United States successfully conducted the first test of a jointly developed ballistic missile defense system off Hawaii on Wednesday, the U.S. Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency said.

The U.S. Standard Missile-3 vehicle, which incorporates a new nose cone developed by Japan, was launched at 10:45 a.m., local time, on Wednesday by the USS Lake Erie, an Aegis-equipped cruiser, near Kauai Island, the agency said.

Within one minute of launching, the new nose cone opened, without the missile having to maneuver, releasing a kinetic warhead targeting an "enemy" missile, according to the agency.

The conventional SM-3 required maneuvering to eject the nose cone before releasing the warhead to hit its target, raising concern the missiles could go off course during such a procedure.

Cool. Japan's track record with high-profile launchables has been rather spotty over the last several years--and yes, I know that missiles and rockets aren't the same thing--so the recent successes should be good morale, uh, boosters. (I can't find it now, but there was a report somewhere the other day that the DPRK had test-fired a short-range missile or two this week.)

This is par for the course in my adopted corner of the world:

"It's a law-abiding state that has a mature democratic system and, in economic terms, espouses liberal economic policies. It's a country whose values Japan shares." So saying, Minister of Foreign Affaird Taro Aso, at a lower house budgetary committee meeting on 9 March, called Taiwan a "state." Immediately thereafter, he corrected himself: "Well, I'm speaking on the premise that China is recognized as one unified legal government. Fundamentally, it would be accurate to say, 'territory.'" However, there are those who are discomfited by such repeated "off-message" expressions, which are at odds with the official position taken within the government.

The LDP's Naoki Okada responded to Aso's backpedaling with "How do we get a handle on Taiwan strategically?"

The question is not an idle one, given the state of economics and diplomacy in the region. Naturally, the PRC was spitting nickels:

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang called on Japan to honor its commitments made to China over the status of Taiwan, reiterating Beijing's stance that Taiwan is an inseparable part of China.

"China strongly protests this crude interference in its internal affairs," Qin said, expressing "surprise that a high-ranking Japanese diplomat would make such remarks."

Aso has ruffled Chinese feathers repeatedly in recent months, most recently by accusing Beijing of using female spies to seduce Japanese diplomats and later blackmail them for classified information.

He also triggered protests from Beijing by calling China a significant threat in Asia, and suggesting that Taiwan's high educational standards were a legacy of Tokyo's 1895-1945 colonial rule over the island.

Japan, you may recall, plays the "interference in internal affairs" card about the Yasukuni Shrine pilgrimage issue frequently.

I don't think I ever posted about Aso's honey of a comment about Taiwan's education standards, BTW. The Nikkei cites part of it in the above article: "Taiwan has kept up with the times because it is a country with an extremely high level of education, thanks to improvements in literacy rates [during the occupation]." (In that bit, he called Taiwan a 国, which can be and usually is translated "country" but can also mean "province," but unlike yesterday didn't use the word 国家, which very explicitly denotes a "state" or "nation.") It doesn't seem to me unreasonable to point out that some of Japan's policies benefited the Taiwanese in some ways--though perhaps part of that is due to my American public education, in which a good half of the time spent on social science seems to be devoted to the complex legacies of colonial rule.

As the foreign minister, though, you'd think Aso would be diplomatic enough to have put in something along the lines of "our forebears did many things for both better and worse in Taiwan, but surely one accomplishment for which we can safely honor them is...." And given that a half-century has passed since Japan left Taiwan, it's rather odd not to acknowledge that the Taiwanese educational system wouldn't be of the high caliber it is were it not for the diligence of the Taiwanese themselves in keeping it up since then. The PRC accused Aso of "glamourizing colonization" in that case, BTW.

What would you do without your friends, right?

Yesterday I turned thirty-four. Dinner was arranged by the manager at a favorite bar of mine. I grew up in a religious sect in which you didn't celebrate people's birthdays--if we're not going to celebrate Christ's, we're not going to celebrate yours, right?--so I'm always a little uncomfortable with the idea of having attention lavished on me just because I happened to emerge from the womb the same day on the calendar as Taylor Dayne.

At the same time, you don't tell people you value that you don't feel like having the party they want to give you. So we went out for Thai food. Morning glory stems, and chicken satay, and green papaya salad, and chicken green curry, and all that. Yummy as always. Predictably but hilariously bitchy present from my friend A. Some incense--proper incense and no scented candle crapola--and some sweets. Made out like a homosexual bandit.

And then we went to GB. Cake. For me? Thanks, guys. Really. It's great. Very prettily covered with strawberries.

Very prettily.

You all know I'm allergic to strawberries, right?

Or I probably am. A few years ago, I ate a fruit salad, and my throat swelled up, and I had to go to the emergency room and they had to shoot me up with adrenaline. The doctors gave me the interrogation about what I'd consumed immediately before getting hives. Judging by what I was used to eating and, I can only assume, by what kinds of fruits tend to be responsible for allergies, the dermatologist on overnight duty told me that it must have been the strawberries or the star fruit. Or it might have been a one-time reaction brought on by stress. I'd lived in Japan for five years by that point, so I was used to hearing doctors make pronouncements along the lines of, "Maybe next time you eat strawberries, you'll be fine. Or you could go into anaphylactic shock and die. Do you really need to eat strawberries and find out?" Clearly not, especially since the sight of them now makes me vaguely nauseated.

Pretty much everyone I know knows this. I'm known for it. In fact, I mentioned it again a week or so ago when the guys asked whether I had any of those weirdo foreigner-type food preferences. Then they must have forgotten, which is perfectly understandable.

So last night the strawberry cake appeared. I smiled (sincerely) in gratitude and cut the cake for everyone (sincerely) and said it looked delicious (sincerely--I mean, they were very ripe, luscious-looking strawberries...that nauseated me, but I was editing that part out). I then, sotto voce, asked my friends sitting next to me to change plates with me and hork my slice so I didn't look as if I'd not eaten my share. One problem: the guy who'd gotten the cake--I've known him for years and he kind of has a soft spot for me--was tending bar right in front of us. Consternation. Pushing cake around on plate a bit, beaming with what I hoped looked like the anticipation of pleasure. Ooh, spied a friend on the opposite side of the bar. It would be rude to eat up my cake before going over and greeting him, especially since he's making a-toast-to-you-on-your-birthday signals at me. (His version of "Happy birthday!" consisted of "You don't look a day over thirty-six, baby!" These queers, I tell ya.)

Finally! An opening. The guy who'd been in charge of getting the cake went to the bathroom.

It was like one of Lucille Ball's sitcom machinations, only it actually worked. I shoved my plate in front of Friend 1, who inhaled the strawberries arrayed thereon. Friend 2--A. himself, who comes to my rescue way too often--was on lookout. When the toilet door opened, I was ready: sitting all calm-like with my fork idly mashing the remaining bits of cake. Since we'd all been complaining about how full we were from dinner, I figure it didn't sound strange for me to say, "Thanks a lot, man--it was beautiful" and push away my not-quite-clean paper plate.

I wasn't lying. It had been beautiful.

Added on 9 March: I seem to have done the forget-how-PowerBlogs-works thing again and revised this post from a window I reached through the Back button and not by choosing the Edit function the right way. I think I've caught everything redundant or fragmentary.

Attention to this is long overdue:

The Financial Services Agency has firmed up a new policy direction that will strengthen regulations on "excessive loans," those loans that exceed the borrower's ability to repay. The goal is to address a current [financial] reality in which the piling on of debts has ushered in such serious social problems as personal bankruptcy and suicide. The toughened regulations are intended to put the brakes on loans that result in debtors' having their houses seized and losing the means to live and to prohibit excessive requirements from loan guarantors. The FSA intends to eradicate "grey area interest," interest currently not subject to punishment even though it exceeds the [limit imposed by] the Interest Rate Restriction Law. In addition to improving oversight, the idea is to crack down on "excessive lending" by the loan industry.

The English version has just about as much detail as the original Japanese, though the order of facts is scrambled. I doubt that the solution lies in more restrictions on interest rates, usurious though they frequently are in Japan. The main problem here is more often out and out fraud, with unscrupulous lenders approving loans that they know borrowers will never be able to pay off. Requiring the sara-kin to put the results of their background checks on potential borrowers in writing sounds like a good first step, assuming the borrowers know what they're looking at and the regulators assigned actually check what they're supposed to be checking.

Brokeback Heap-o-Hype may not have won Best Picture, but its inevitable bunny parody is up (via Ghost of a Flea).

Richard Rosendall's newest column posted to IGF is on the verbose and meandering side, but he outlines the strategic problems in the current push for gay marriage or civil unions pretty well. One passage that puzzles me, as things like this always do:

Being in love, I sympathize with those who are unwilling to wait for a more conducive political climate. Unfortunately, wanting equality now does not make it so, any more than demanding my two-minute egg instantaneously will make it cook any faster. But while we remind our compatriots that our struggle is a long-term one, we must deal with the reality that some gay people will ignore us and go charging off making messes that the rest of us will have to deal with.

Not just the rest of us, though--those who come after, too. After all, that's what makes the "long-term" part important. The problem, to extend Rosendall's metaphor, is not just whether we get our eggs as fast as we'd like but whether it ends up that gays who come up in future generations get any eggs at all.

And that very first participial phrase suggests that Rosendall is also not attuned to one of the other crucial dividing lines in this debate: those who see public policy in the role of validating love and conferring dignity on people vs. those who simply want the government to get out of the way while they arrange to take care of each other.

The latter consideration is important enough. Last month, after the New York state legislature voted to allow people to make burial decisions for their domestic partners, Ex-Gay Watch posted about this astonishing bit of argument through cheap expediency by Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America:

"Family has been given preference for a reason," says the pro-family leader. "And to say that grieving parents, for instance, just have no rights over what happens to their child's body is a perversion of the law."

Interesting. I assume that if a single woman brought up in a Muslim (or Wiccan, or atheist) family converted to Christianity and then formally designated someone she trusted in her new congregation to take care of her body, CWF would say that the law should allow her parents to give her a non-Christian burial anyway?

The fact is that our country wouldn't even exist if men and women of principle had not been willing to leave behind traditions of their elders that they could not in good conscience agree with. It's a shame that estrangement within families sometimes happens, but it's a fact of life in free societies for plenty of reasons besides homosexuality. While we can all agree that community living involves duties, the idea that an adult's registered instructions regarding the disposal of his or her own body should be overridden as a sop to his weeping relatives should be chilling to anyone who professes to prize liberty.

Speaking of sentiment, framing the discussion about marriage or civil unions in terms of how much we loooooovvvvve one another only invites people to think of the issue in terms of feelings. Does it still need to be pointed out that most people's feelings about homosexuality are ambivalent at best? Even gay marriage advocates who have meatier arguments about rights and responsibilities to make frequently slip into lugubrious pronouncements about needing marriage for "validation."

All that notwithstanding, Rosendall's essential point is sound: On the gay side, we need to look for ways to give each other a fair hearing and find points to cooperate on, even as we acknolwedge that, in a free society, gay advocacy is never going to be "unified."

There was a demonstration over the weekend against the transfer of current Futenma base facilities to another location in Okinawa:

More than 30,000 people rallied in Japan's southern Okinawa island Sunday against plans to relocate a U.S. air base to another area on the island, demanding that the facility be moved outside the country, a news report said.

Organizers said an estimated 35,000 people participated in the two-hour rally in the city of Ginowan, site of the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station, Kyodo News agency said.

"The city of Ginowan strongly demands that Futenma ... be shut down immediately and relocated outside of Japan," Ginowan Mayor Yoichi Iha was quoted by Kyodo as saying.

...

The plan to move the base--agreed to by Tokyo and Washington in October--also calls for the transfer of 7,000 Marines from Okinawa over six years to the U.S. territory Guam and the shifting of some operations to other cities on Japan's main islands.

Okinawa is Japan's poorest prefecture, and areas surrounding US military installations there (well, and elsewhere, too, but especially in Okinawa) tend to have a love-hate relationship with the bases. Our personnel create entire economies that would disappear if they left; on the other hand, entertainment districts that cater to servicemen have higher incidences of street crime than do surrounding areas, and when there are off-base accidents (as in the crash of a helicopter in Okinawa a few years ago) military commanders can come off high-handed. While I support our military policy, obviously, when it comes to specific accusations of misconduct, it can be difficult to know whom to sympathize with.

Speaking of Okinawa-related characters of dubitable sympathy, I can only assume the translator who came up with the first paragraph of this piece for the Yomiuri was laughing so hard he or she could barely type:

Technical Councillor Mamoru Ikezawa, the former third most senior official at the Defense Facilities Administration Agency, was aware of the agency's illegal bid-rigging practices, but was unable to stop them--and ended up playing a leading role.

According to informed sources, Ikezawa told agency colleagues that he would put a stop to "illegal practices." This was an apparent reference to agency projects that included the relocation of facilities of the U.S. Marine Corps' Iwakuni Air Station in Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Ikezawa, 57, and two other agency officials were arrested in late January and have since been indicted on suspicion of rigging air-conditioning project bids.

Late last month, prosecutors served the three with fresh arrest warrants on suspicion they organized rigged bids for projects at U.S. bases in Yamaguchi and Nagasaki prefectures.

Ikezawa is suspected of putting a higher priority on amakudari--wherein retiring government officials get jobs with private firms or public-service corporations in sectors related to their previous occupations--than on putting an end to bid-rigging.

"Ended up playing a leading role"? Well, yes, I suppose it's safe to say that means he "was unable to stop them." I don't see any reason to doubt that he was sincere enough about his desire to put a stop to collusion and amakudari. However, he made his choice, and I don't see what point there is to the it's-the-thought-that-counts qualifications now. (The Japanese version of the article, which doesn't contain much more information than the English version, is here.)

It's been a while since there was much news about the disputed East China Sea gas fields, but another round of talks begins today:

At the third round of talks, Japan proposed joint development of gas fields at four locations that straddle the midline boundary [between Japan and PRC territories] and run along a fossil fuel vein, including the Shungyo field. China continues in its stance of not recognizing the midline as the boundary and, in addition, has taken the position that the Shungyo field is in "non-disputed waters" (in the words of the Foreign Minister) on the western side of the midline and that resources there are China's.

All kinds of progress, huh? The Asahi has an English report that's already much more detailed, though of course no specifics have emerged yet from this fourth round of talks. The new talks are in no small part the work of the new Minister of Trade, Economy, and Industry:

Since succeeding Shoichi Nakagawa as trade minister in October, Nikai has taken a more conciliatory stance.

Nakagawa had attempted to pressure China by granting test drilling rights over the disputed East China Sea gas fields to a private Japanese firm.

Nikai argued that even if the rights were granted, private companies would not be able to do any work if China maintained a confrontational stance.

Nikai's repeated calls for more talks apparently convinced China that compromise is possible.

China finished laying a pipeline from Chunxiao [I'm calling it "shungyo," the Japanized pronunciation for 春暁, though the Japanese name is supposed to be "shirakawa".--SRK] to the Chinese mainland in October. Experts thought China was about to start production, but there has been no noticeable work since then. Government sources say China has likely halted operations temporarily to save face for Nikai.

So the consensus, such as there is, seems to be that this particular round of talks will accomplish demonstrations of goodwill but no actual progress on exploration and drilling policy. Next time, maybe?

Whew. Fever-pitch week. Friend whose boyfriend dumped him a few weeks ago decided to break Rule #1. He--not making this up, guys--showed up at our hang-out looking for my friend. Found him. Proceeded to tell him, "You know our friendship is very important to me."

"It's not that I don't care about you--you know that, too, right?"

"I miss having you around."

"You have no idea how hard it was for me to break up with you."

You can imagine the rest. I showed up about halfway through this particular scene and took a post on the opposite side of the bar until it became clear that it was Intervention Time. I put on my best clueless-American-being-heartily-friendly act and wandered over. "Evan! [blink-blink] Have you been here the whole time? I just got here ten minutes ago." I gave him the chance to give me the look that says, "Now isn't a good time" and got the look that says, "Help!" Luckily, he's a strong-minded guy, so he just needed an hour or two of being listened to. I still entered the weekend kind of drained.

Luckily, Atsushi was here, which always improves things. When we went out for dinner last night, we were, purely by chance, given a private room at the restaurant. That was not only nice but also useful, since when the waiter brought our lamb ribs, he deposited moist handtowels next to the plates and said, in that gravely expressionless waiter voice, "To enjoy it to the last morsel, you'll have to pick up the bones and eat the meat off them." So Atsushi and I got to sit on opposite sides of a table and watch each other hungrily sucking meat off bones. Put me in a very...you know...primal mood.

Speaking of primal--or rather, atavistic--I also polished off While Europe Slept. Yet another reason to be glad Atsushi was nearby, since reading deeply disturbing stuff like that is always easier when your man is reassuringly at the other end of the sofa. And it was disturbing, though a lot of the reportorial details are familiar if you've been paying attention to the news over the last several years. Some passages also seem to be adapted from this essay of Bruce Bawer's a while back (not that that's a problem). In a way, the flat-out atrocities and terrorist acts weren't as rattling as, say, this passage on p. 57, which made me snarf my Earl Grey:

In many Western European countries, indeed, some laws are different for natives than for immigrants. For native Swedes, the minimum age for marriage is eighteen; for immigrants living in Sweden, there is no minimum. In Germany, an ethnic German who marries someone from outside the EU and wants to bring him to her to Germany must answer a long list of questions about the spouse's birth date, daily routine, and so forth in order to prove that the marriage is legitimate and not pro forma; such interviews are not required for German residents with, say, Turkish or Pakistani backgrounds, for it is assumed that their marriages have been arranged and that the spouses will therefore know little or nothing about each other.

I live in a country in which there are different rules for natives and foreigners, but here--quite justifiably, as far as I'm concerned--the laws favor, you know, the natives. (I try to hold out hope that the normally-exacting Bawer is misinterpreting something in the German legal code, but the phrasing he uses neither is ambiguous itself nor seems to refer to the kind of policy that could easily be misrepresented.) Sheesh. (See also this by the Grand Stander.)

Added on 6 March: My parents and I kind of have an arrangement whereby they treat Atsushi like one of the family but we don't discuss gay stuff head-on. I'm amused, though, by the way their Christmas present to him always manages to seem subliminally racy. Here's this year's:



Yes, yes, "Intercourse, PA" is a cheap schoolboy joke. But still, my parents live at the edge of Pennsylvania Dutch country. Every town significant enough to have a crossroads has some little collective of farms that makes jelly and relishes. There's nothing easier than NOT choosing the ones made in, of all places, Intercourse.

Of course, my thinking is probably affected by last year. This was what arrived for Atsushi for Christmas 2004:



As I said at the time, to the extent that I could form words while laughing, "I would call this a coded message of approval for our relationship, but I'm guessing there wasn't quite that much subtext intended."

As Michael says, The Onion knows exactly what it's doing...only...every straight man I've ever encountered has finished the sentence "If I were a gay man..." with "...dude, I would so totally HAVE SEX ALL THE TIME." I feel the omission of that particular soul cry lends a false note to the proceedings.

But the article, now a few years old, is still hilarious.

To switch to the comfortably out, Atsushi comes home for the weekend tomorrow. Since I have the day off and have the time to prepare something, I was going to ask him what he wanted for brunch, but I know the answer already. His favorite dish is plain broiled chicken--that's what he always asks for, even when I tell him I'm willing to go to National Azabu to get a turkey for Thanksgiving or try to find a goose for Christmas. I like a man with an appreciation for the austere.

Well, with pan gravy. Drippy, luscious pan gravy with way too much of the fat from butter.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Too much time, too little to do!

No, wait. That's not it.

Anyway, quick link to this Open Source radio interview with Camille Paglia about the resignation of Larry Summers from the presidency of Harvard (via Rondi Adamson).

I haven't actually heard her speak for a decade or so, so I was interested to hear what she sounded like at fifty-nine. Believe it or not, she's mellowed. I mean, she talks at a more leisured pace. Of course, you can still tell she's spent her entire life chatting with artfags--Girlfriend italicizes all her adjectives: everything is "extra-orrrr-dinary!" or "un-pah-latable!" But she actually talks slowly enough that you can digest what she's saying now. She certainly didn't the few times I heard her lecture in college, which was part of the fun.

Even more, I think, than Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, or Jonathan Rauch, Paglia gave me a feeling of assurance--her media fame was skyrocketing on the other side of the city while I was in college--that you could be bookishly gay without being either a picturesquely noble AIDS sufferer or a high-strung spoiled brat. I'm glad she's still materializing to talk about educational reform and PC perniciousness sometimes, because the problems she was addressing in 1991 are still with us.