The White Peril 白禍

The recent revelation that shops near the Ise Shrine (one of the holiest places in Japan) have been fraudulently altering the production and use-by dates for their sweets is getting a lot of attention:

At a press conference, [Ofuku-mochi president Masaki] Kohashi bowed very low and said, "I'd like to apologize deeply for having so stirred up the public." However, he withdrew after less than five minutes, pleading poor health.

Left to carry on after him at the press conference was the manager of the flagship shop Yoshihiko Morita (50), who explained, "We weren't knowledgeable about much of the content of the JAS [Japan Agricultural Standards], with the result that [improper labeling] continued. I became aware that this was a legal infraction half a year ago, but I didn't advise anyone of that."

Unsold products that had been pulled from shelves were "stored in the factory warehouse, then discarded as ordinary waste after the contents had been removed from the packaging," he emphasized.

Ofuku-mochi is not to be confused with Akafuku, a competitor that admitted not only to manipulating product date stamps but also to recycling products for sale after their sell-by date. (That's why the Ofuku-mochi store manager went out of his way to mention that old stock was thrown away.) The Ise Shrine is a major travel destination, and the confectioners in question are venerable purveyors of the souvenirs you're supposed to bring back for the homefolks whenever you go on a trip:

One housewife of sixty, who'd come as a tourist to Ise from her home in Kita Ward, Kobe, said, "And here I'd thought it would be nice to buy Ofuku-mochi sweets instead of Akafuku as my souvenirs. They're such an institution--you kind of feel betrayed."

Japan's Central Council for Education (CCE) is about to release an unsual report: one that backtracks on major proposed policy change that would have provided "breathing room" in education. (That's essentially a euphemism for not keeping students spent with study and other organized activities from dawn through midnight, which is often what happens when private cram school is tacked onto regular public school.)

Rearranging public school curricula and instruction to make cram school redundant sounds like a great idea. Unfortunately, when you look at the actual planks in the platform, you can see how trouble resulted:

However, wave upon wave of criticism was leveled at the policy when the main guidelines were implemented. Due to the decrease in the number of classroom hours, "Students' fundamental study skills suffered" and "The gaps among individual children's motivation to learn widened."

The CCE report will cite the following points as failings it has identified: (1) The government had not been able to convey to instructors what "life force" referred to and why it was necessary. (2) The platform cited "cultivation of the ability to learn and think for oneself" as symbolic of "life force." However, this signaled such respect for children's autonomy that there was an increasing tendency on the part of instructors to hesitate to provide guidance. (3) The platform set up time for comprehensive learning, but how that was defined was not clearly communicated. (4) Classroom time was cut so drastically that there was no longer sufficient time for the acquisition of basic knowledge, and thinking and expressive skills were not cultivated. (5) The new guidelines were not based on the decreased ability of family and community to provide education.

Airy, nice-sounding abstractions that couldn't be implemented effectively because they weren't grounded in concrete requirements--sound familiar? One thing it's important to bear in mind is that that whole "life force" thing, which sounds as insubstantial as "self-esteem" when rendered into English, is by no means a New Age joke in Japan, where suicide among the young is high and researchers are constantly reporting that they meet a lot of exhausted and listless children. "Comprehensive learning" is also more than chic theory in an education system that has been known for feeding students lots of discrete facts but teaching them little in the way of how to synthesize them and weigh new evidence.

It isn't clear from the Yomiuri article how the CCE plans to move forward. It's stated, without elaboration, toward the end of the article that the council plans to retain the "life force" guidelines while specifying more clearly how it's to be guaranteed that classroom hours and moral/ethical education will be sufficient. It remains to be seen whether the revised guidelines will help teachers find the sweet spot between being authoritative and fostering inquisitiveness.

Added on 31 October: The Yomiuri English edition actually had a version of the article cited above. There's a follow-up today on the concrete proposed changes, too.

Major news among foreigners in Japan this weekend is that NOVA, the largest chain of English conversation schools, has filed for bankruptcy and is in receivership:

The company had been reeling from an administrative punishment issued in June over illegal practices, including deceiving would-be students with misleading advertisements.

One focus of attention will be whether Nova's estimated 300,000 students will be able to receive refunds for the lesson fees they paid in advance.

The prepaid fees account for about 20 billion yen of the company's liabilities.

Another question concerns the wages in arrears to many of about 4,000 instructors and 2,000 other employees.

The money owed to the employees and some other types of debts have a higher priority than the prepaid lesson fees in repayment from the outstanding company assets secured by court-appointed bankruptcy administrators.

English conversation schools such as NOVA are low on the food chain. Their lessons aren't so much methodical instruction in English as a way to pick up some phrases while having structured contact with foreigners. Teaching jobs there tend to attract kids just out of college who want an easy way to live abroad for an adventurous year or two and then make the transition into something else.

That means that there are a lot of teachers in their early twenties who haven't been paid for a month or two, don't know any Japanese, and are feeling seriously screwed at the moment. The Asahi reports that at least one job placement center in Shinjuku has set up a window to help NOVA employees, and the Australian government is cooperating with Qantas Airlines to help Australian teachers get back home without having to pay full airfare.

Of course, the Japanese administrative staff have been suffering, too, since they've been fielding questions from both students and foreign teachers over refunds and wages that weren't forthcoming:

Employees, mainly in their 20s, remained at their workplaces until the last moment, while many teachers had already stopped reporting to work over delays in salary payments. Lesson fees were also refunded to students who canceled their contracts with Nova. An employee in her 20s, who was manager of a branch in an office district in the Tokyo metropolitan area, said she began working for Nova after graduating from university as she wished to help people who wanted to learn English.

...

She heard that the police had to be called to another branch because a student had become angry to the point of violence, apparently over a lesson contract dispute, but the headquarters offered no assistance in the matter. "I still told myself that I should hang on as long as I was getting paid," she said.

Foreign teachers started not showing up for lessons in mid-September when their salary payments were delayed. Consequently, dozens of complaints poured in, creating chaos for the company's inexperienced receptionists. One staff member complained of not being able to afford food, while another had been reduced to tears every day before she finally collapsed and stopped coming to the office.

It will be interesting to see whether the brand can be rehabilitated. More even than any of the other giant English conversation chains, NOVA has a McDonald's-ish image of being available everywhere at reliable quality. The last several months of bad publicity have certainly done damage, but if new management can reopen offices within a month or so, it may do a decent job of mollifying wound-up customers.

I'm not so sure what I think of the foreign teachers who stopped showing up for work. On the one hand, the responsible thing to do is to honor your commitments and expect payment when the company irons out its financial affairs. On the other, companies such as NOVA have a history of making it very clear to foreign teachers that they're not a permanent part of the team and are valued chiefly as interchangeable cogs. The fear of permanently getting the shaft from headquarters was probably very real to a lot of them, even in cases in which their local managers were doing their best to be helpful.

I just got the latest shakedown e-mail from my college. That's fine. They're doing they're first fund drive in twenty years. That's fine, too. What isn't fine is the purple overblownness of the enterprise—is it really assumed we'll only cough up money if we're come on to like this?

What we celebrated this evening was the beginning of what will be a five-year endeavor that will require the ongoing, thoughtful participation of our entire community. I promise you this: When we achieve our goal in 2012, we will hold the keys to an eminent and consummately interdisciplinary Penn that will have a vast, transformative impact on humanity.

Oh, my. That's some fundraiser.

More Penn-related stuff: Erin O'Connor links to a wonderfully crabby review of Alice Sebold's newly-disgorged novel. Sebold is a good example of why I rarely read fiction published after, like, 1950. I'm perfectly happy to listen to current music and watch current television and movies, but every time a friend whose taste I trust recommends a recent novel or short story, I end up giving up on the thing. I finished The Lovely Bones. Ick.

Lee Siegel says of Sebold's latest:

If you welcome the unreal disjunction between killing your mother and reflecting afterward how lucky you are compared with the children of the dead, “uncared for” mothers in Rwanda and Afghanistan, then this book will make you clap your hands with joy. If you find the idea that mothers shape their children’s “whole” lives original rather than simultaneously banal and puerilely overstated, then Barnes & Noble, here you come! This novel is so morally, emotionally and intellectually incoherent that it’s bound to become a best seller.

O'Connor charitably observes that writing in the first person makes it difficult to give the reader a sense of critical distance on the protagonist, and that (though she doesn't put it this way) Sebold just isn't a good enough thinker or writer to do so. Anyway, the whole review is hilarious. As O'Connor says, Siegel writes with real anger, not the airy contempt reviewers usually employ to dump on books they dislike.

Speaking of art that doesn't make good on its shock potential, a good friend and I went to see Death of a President this weekend. (It's a year old, of course, but just made it to Japan.) She and I have known each other for a decade; she's a very liberal history professor who's always ready for a good argument. I looked forward to tangling over the issues raised in the movie.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much meat to it. The assassination itself isn't presented in ghoulish graphic detail, and while the filmmakers' sympathies are rather clearly not with the Bush administration, no one comes off any more cartoonish than actual interviewees on Frontline. But the moral problems that flow from the response to the assassination are rushed through and not developed very well. A Muslim Syrian-American is prosecuted for the crime based on circumstantial evidence, now-President Cheney flirts with attacking Syria for not cooperating in the investigation, and a Patriot III act is passed to increase powers of surveillance even further. But it's hard to sink your teeth into anything because it's all rushed through. It's certainly possible to imagine a Muslim's being railroaded--prosecutors can get overzealous and develop fixations on suspects that fit their expectations, especially when they're under intense pressure from above to produce a case. It's also possible to imagine that a lead with genuine promise could be lost among the thousands of tips that would inundate the FBI during its investigation. But the misjudgments that come after the assassination aren't as fleshed out at those that lead up to it. The result is a nice lefty horror flick, presumably, but not all that hard-hitting about miscarriages of justice.

Reason has an entertaining interview with fark.com founder Drew Curtis about how the site developed and what it says about the future of the Internet. Like other commentators I've seen, he thinks that some sort of personal-shopper model is what's next up, since we're all swamped by the amount of information available.

I like Fark. My only problem is that frequently the funniest tag lines lead to the least interesting articles. My favorite example from this week:



The link takes you to a decent but decidedly non-fabulous piece arguing that presenting a well-groomed, pulled-together image is good for your career. Yawn.

Reason also--I assume this month is some sort of media issue, but I'm too lazy to look--has this piece defending The Onion in terms I very much agree with:

Most dailies, especially those in monopoly or near-monopoly markets, operate as if they’re focused more on not offending readers (or advertisers) than on expressing a worldview of any kind.

The Onion takes the opposite approach. It delights in crapping on pieties and regularly publishes stories guaranteed to upset someone: "Christ Kills Two, Injures Seven In Abortion-Clinic Attack." "Heroic PETA Commandos Kill 49, Save Rabbit." "Gay Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years." There's no predictable ideology running through those headlines, just a desire to express some rude, blunt truth about the world.

One common complaint about newspapers is that they're too negative, too focused on bad news, too obsessed with the most unpleasant aspects of life. The Onion shows how wrong this characterization is, how gingerly most newspapers dance around the unrelenting awfulness of life and refuse to acknowledge the limits of our tolerance and compassion. The perfunctory coverage that traditional newspapers give disasters in countries cursed with relatability issues is reduced to its bare, dismal essence: "15,000 Brown People Dead Somewhere." [The unforgettable dateline for that one was "OOGA-BOOGA LAND OR WHEREVER."--SRK] Beggars aren't grist for Pulitzers, just punch lines: "Man Can't Decide Whether to Give Sandwich to Homeless or Ducks." Triumphs of the human spirit are as rare as vegans at an NRA barbecue: "Loved Ones Recall Local Man's Cowardly Battle With Cancer."

A lot of what passes for irreverent satire is little more than sub-adult pushing of the obvious buttons. But skewering the tendency of journalists to airbrush any story into a palatable human interest feature, or to invest any story they write or broadcast about with selections from a tired laundry list of Deeper Human Significance it may not have, is a real service. And it's encouraging that it's so popular. Some satire is funny enough to stand alone, but most isn't. That people keep clicking on stories in The Onion and sending them to friends is a reasonable indication that they understand the news and issues that they're twisting into humorous new shapes, despite all the gnashing of teeth about how ignorant everyone is nowadays.

Perhaps this is even more disturbing than the result of that serial killer test, though I did answer the questions as accurately as possible (via Internet Ronin):



I didn't know I even had a shadow self.

Added later: "Emaciated do-gooder"? WTF?

You know what's really annoying? All you silly people out there who think you're in the best position to make decisions about your own lives. What gives you the right to make your own trade-offs when planners--people with credentials--have figured out the one true way to live?

Well, don't expect to win. The latest from here in Japan is a litany of targets for achieving the perfect national balance of work and family life. Just look at all these numbers, each the glorious result of expert cogitation:

The government has come up with a long list of numerical targets to let men in their 30s to 40s work less and spend more time with their families.

...

One target is to halve in 10 years the percentage of workers who put in 60 hours or more a week from 10.8 percent in 2006.

Another goal is to raise the percentage of male workers who take child-care leave to 10 percent, up from the current 0.5 percent.

The draft guidelines were presented Thursday to a task force under a high-level council working on the issue. The council consists of representatives from labor and management, Cabinet ministers and other experts.

...

The government will consider measures to achieve the targets included in the guidelines and seek cooperation from business organizations and labor unions.

The draft charter emphasizes that it is essential to review the nation's working style to maintain the vitality of society.

The numerical targets are aimed primarily at lightening the workload of men in their 30s and 40s.

To make up for the reduced work, the government has set employment-rate targets for women and elderly people.

For example, the government aims to have 69-72 percent of women between 25 and 44 in the work force in 10 years, up from the current 65 percent.

For people in the age bracket between 60 and 64, the employment-rate targets, also in 10 years, are 79-80 percent for men and 41-43 percent for women, up, respectively, from the current 67 percent and 39 percent.

The government also aims to raise the rate of women in employment after their first childbirth to 55 percent in 10 years, up from the current 38 percent.

In 2006, men with a child under 6 years old spent an average of one hour a day on child care and household chores.

The government's target in 10 years is 2 1/2 hours.

Of course, most of these things will not be legislated directly. No prefectural governor is going to be taken out and shot if his or her jurisdiction doesn't reach the approved average of 2.5 hours' worth of male domesticity by 2017. But what happens with these things is that they expand from high-level technocratic committees into offices, community programs, and ad hoc task forces that suck up money without demonstrably serving citizens. (Also, while Japanese men spend more time with their families than they used to, I suspect that plenty of them would use the extra time off from work to heft golf clubs rather than toddlers.)

Japan's not the only island country to exhibit such impulses. Perry de Havilland of Samizdata linked indignantly to BBC coverage of a new government report that essentially tells each Briton, "You're a porker, but it's not your fault."

The largest ever UK study into obesity, backed by government and compiled by 250 experts, said excess weight was now the norm in our "obesogenic" society. [Don't let's be spoilsports and point out that we're otherwise hearing how rail-thin models and actresses are setting unrealistic beauty standards and causing an epidemic of eating disorders--that was last Wednesday's problem.--SRK]

Dramatic and comprehensive action was required to stop the majority of us becoming obese by 2050, they said.

The government pledged to draw up a strategy to address the issue.

But the report authors admitted proof that any anti-obesity policy worked "was scant".

Details, details. The experts haven't figured out exactly how they're going to force you to be healthier, it might be noted, though they're full of consciousness-raising ideas:

From planning our towns to encourage more physical activity to placing more pressure on mothers to breast feed - believed to slow down infant weight gain - the report highlighted a range of policy options without making any concrete recommendations.

...

"The emphasis on cross-governmental initiatives is particularly welcome, as is the importance of addressing issues across society whilst avoiding blame," said its president, Professor Ian Gilmore.

Perhaps Professor Gilmore is a Japanophile. He's certainly got the ability to settle blame everywhere and accountability nowhere down pat.

And the result in the UK will probably be similar to what we see here in Japan: distortions of economic decision-making with the attendant unintended consequences. Those consequences will, it goes without saying, be interpreted as yet more evidence that individuals are incompetent to make their own decisions without "guidance."

Added later: Okay, the only connection between this and the above is Catherine Tate, but Michael mentioned yesterday that Larry Craig is still going on television to make pathetic attempts at damage control. Am I the only one who's spent the last few months thinking, "Who, dear? Me, dear? Gay, dear? No, dear" whenever his name comes up?

Added still later, after a glass of Coke that was large enough to be satisfying but not so large as to compromise health--so there: Kim has, naturally, already weighed in on the obesity report. He leads into it with a discussion of restaurant eating habits:

I remember seeing a lady once go up to the salad bar at a restaurant, and my initial reaction was, “Ohh, good—she’s going to eat something healthy.” Then I watched her coming back to the table, and I was nearly sick. It looked as though someone had put a brick on her plate, and covered it with salad—and drenched the whole thing with about two cups of salad dressing. Then I watched her eat all of it.

And then she went back for seconds.

I worked at Golden Corral in high school, back when very few restaurants had all-you-can-eat troughs salad bar/buffets. The experience was very instructive about human nature, though it was nearly enough to put me off food for the rest of my life.

One of the things I've trained myself to do when back in the States is to eat at a normal pace no matter how much food is Matterhorned onto my plate. When you have a lot of food in front of you, instinct tells you to start hoovering it up because there's so much to get through, which means you end up both failing to enjoy the sensual experience of eating and feeling excessively full when you're done. (And in that case, why not just stay home and fortify yourself with cold oatmeal?)

I'll give Connie the last word:

Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

And to add yet another of my pet peeves....

I did not suggest that there should be a law in what we should do. We can talk about the way things should be without bringing the law into it.

What does it say about me that I knew every answer on the first clue (via Rondi)?


NameThatSerialKiller.com - Test your serial killer knowledge

(Just to be pedantic, I think it should be pointed out that Cho Seung-hui was a spree killer, not a serial killer.)

I noticed Rondi had added some election-related application on Facebook, so I clicked through to look at it. The text at the right said something like, "The 2008 election is almost here." I didn't do a double-take until a few seconds later--that's how accustomed I am to the idea that we're already in the run-up to the election.

The good citizen in me is not looking forward to the coming year. Following politics can be good, wicked fun sometimes, but I mostly do it because I consider it a duty. I will listen to the debates and read up on candidates' records as legislators and seek out the opinions of commentators whose judgment I find helpful. But I am expecting this to be the least fun election season of my adult life.

A lot of that has to do with Hillary. My sainted aunt, I am so sick of hearing about Hillary. I'm not referring to her relentless spotlight-seeking in and of itself--what else do you expect an ambitious politician with designs on the Oval Office to do? She's actually become much less grating to watch and listen to over the years. As an old-fashioned celebrity-loving gay guy, I've taken some pleasure in watching her develop a more bankable image. Work it, Hills, I say.

Unfortunately, there's a flip side, which is that everything she says or does is examined to death, by friend and foe alike, for what it might indicate about her emergent Hillaryness. Of course, every politician makes tossed-off comments or clothing choices that get overworked in the media, but with Hillary the enterprise reaches a whole new level. Some sources speculate that Clinton's newest shade from Clairol suggests her commitment to the reconstruction of Iraq is less than sincere.... I understand that there are reasons for it--she may lack Bill's charisma, but in her own weird way, she may be just as compelling a figure. A lot of her fans seem to think she's some kind of saint, and a lot of her detractors seem to hate her more than they do Satan.

[Added on 15 October: Thanks to Eric for the link. He uses the obvious word in this context: "cult [of personality]." The reason I didn't myself is that I think it really bothers Hillary that that's what she has. However ruthlessly loyalty may be enforced in the Clinton inner circle, I think that with respect to the electorate, Hillary clearly wants to be the natural, rational choice for thinking people. Not that she'll refuse the votes of blind partisans, of course.]

You can imagine what I think of her politics. Hillary represents just about everything I detest about arrogant, technocrat-in-group statism. Since she's such an inveterate triangulator, I'm not sure how many of her overweening policy points she would actually work to push through in their purest illiberal form, but I'd prefer not to find out.

I will say that in one sense I sympathize with her: She clearly wants to be a natural at winning over voters. She works and works and works at it, all to little effect. It must be frustrating to want so much to be good at something for which you have no talent, especially when you're married to someone who could charm the spots off a leopard. She always reminds me of Tom Cruise, who refuses to settle into being a movie star with a presence a lot of people will pay to see. He struggles mightily to be an Actor, and it doesn't work because you can always see the gears turning. Same with Hillary. The more "on" she is with her gestures and her speech patterns in technical terms, the more she comes off as an animatronic Anna Lindh doll. It would be nice to see her just cut the crap and be the steely, high-handed bitch she clearly wants to be. (And America needs a steely, high-handed bitch or two, now that Madonna's been domesticated and run through the Brit-erator.) She would be utterly fabulous at that. But it would obviously cost her the election, so it's not going to happen.

Instead, we're going to spend the next year in the spin cycle perfected when Bill was in the White House, only with a senate term and a grown-up Chelsea ("See? At least one person in this family is normal!") sloshing around in it. Eric has two posts up about Control of the Narrative. While they don't address the election explicitly, they're pertinent here. Apropos of something else, he says, "I think media culture and hypersensitivity tend to fuel each other, and the result is a latent hysteria constantly lurking in the background, and ready to break out upon the slightest provocation." We're so used to hearing that every bracelet Hillary wears may say something about what's going on in that calculating head of hers that I think a lot of people have started to buy it without realizing they're doing it. We're in for an annoying year.

[Added on 15 October: Thanks to Eric for the other link, too. If you haven't read that post of his, BTW, you really must. The situation he's discussing is absolutely hilarious. Of course, if there were serious threats issued or an injury that drew blood, that's not funny. But the indignant haggling over which type of identity-political aggrievement is warranted on the part of which involved party is like something out of Through the Looking Glass. Eric's final comment: "You'd almost think they were trying to avoid getting on the wrong side of Cotton Mather."]

This guy's brother, who comments on Gay Orbit sometimes, sent me a link to an ad campaign that's apparently appearing on some McDonald's tray inserts in Kyoto, where his wife's visiting. He wonders WTF (ahem) is going on.

I doubt there's any subliminal message there, despite the artfully revealing shots of women's underclothes--that's what they're mostly selling, after all. The people who devised the campaign were thinking in Japanese, for a Japanese audience, and it probably didn't occur to them to consider that they might be using an expression that's considered coarse in English. That kind of thing happens all the time. A buddy of mine works for a company that once linked to one of its web products with the come-on "Let's Flash!" The accompanying image was...well, it wasn't a schlumpy guy in sunglasses and a trench coat, but it wasn't as far off as one might like. Foreign staff here and people from overseas offices tried to tell management that this was a problem. No one listened. Sometimes Japlish is harmlessly silly; sometimes it wanders into not-so-harmlessly silly. That's just the way it is.

Added on 14 October: Interesting how straight-boy commenters who haven't shown up for weeks will suddenly materialize to opine on a post about Japanese women's underwear.

So I get to the office this morning, and a colleague of mine says, "Did you hear about that thing with the turnstiles?" Since I don't take the train to work, I hadn't. But wow:

Trouble arose in over 400 stations on JR, subway, and private rail lines first thing in the morning on 12 October when electronic ticket gates failed to function after being turned on. To avoid massive headaches, nearly every station adopted the measure of allowing passengers to pass through the gates without checking tickets. This is the first time such large-scale trouble with automatic ticket gates has spread to multiple rail carriers. For a time, some private rail lines had no functioning ticket gates at any station, but they gradually began restoring service. Trains themselves have been running normally.

...

According to one private rail source, the trouble was confined to ticket gates manufactured by a single maker. All affected companies are scrambling to restore service while investigating the details and origins of the problem.

As you've no doubt seen in stock news footage designed to show how crowded Tokyo is, a LOT of people use the trains here on weekday mornings. I'm not sure how much revenue the rail companies lost--most people who are commuting to work use some kind of rail pass, usually paid up for a period of months rather than on a per-ride basis. But the manufacturer of the electronic turnstiles may have some explaining to do.

A Japanese tourist--he appears to be a backpacker type--has been abducted in an unstable part of Iran after crossing over from Pakistan:

According to a message received by the Ministry of Foreign affairs on 10 October, a 23-year-old Japanese university student was abducted by unspecified persons while traveling in southeastern Iran during the first ten days of the month. The abductors are thought to be members of a militant group that is demanding ransom. The ministry established an emergency task force, headed by Vice-Minister Itsunori Onodera, that is investigating in detail the circumstances in which the student was abducted.

According to the ministry, the Japanese embassy in Tehran received a midnight telephone call on 8 October saying that the student "had been abducted by a militant group while traveling through the southeast of Iran." The student also stated that "the group looks as if it has some other demands in addition to ransom."

Haven't heard much more.

The Fukuda administration's approval figures remain respectable, according to a Yomiuri poll. The figures seem plausible, as do the reasons offered:

Compared with 85.5 percent approval for former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Cabinet, 71.9 percent for former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa's Cabinet, and 70 percent for the Cabinet of Fukuda's predecessor, Shinzo Abe, the approval rating was the fourth highest since the interview surveys--conducted within the honeymoon period of the inauguration of a new cabinet--began with a survey of support for the Masayoshi Ohira Cabinet in 1978.

The interview survey was conducted at 250 locations across the country on 3,000 eligible voters, with 1,812, or 60.4 percent, of respondents giving valid answers.

By gender, 63 percent of female respondents supported Fukuda while 54 percent of male respondents backed him. Forty-four percent of the respondents, the largest number, cited the "feeling of reassurance" the Cabinet gave them as the reason they supported Fukuda. On how long the Fukuda Cabinet should continue, 32 percent of respondents, the greatest number, said as long as possible, followed by 25 percent who said two to three years and 9 percent who said the Cabinet members should step down as soon as possible.

Koizumi shook things up. Abe screwed things up. Voters aren't unaware that they have to undergo more pain to deal with the most pressing social and economic issues, but their "please, not just yet..." attitude is not surprising. Fukuda's soothing, avuncular style fits right in.

People still break down along party lines over the refueling mission:

Forty-nine percent of pollees said the Maritime Self-Defense Force should continue its refueling operation in the Indian Ocean as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, while 37 percent opposed its doing so.

By political party, 69 percent of supporters of the Liberal Democratic Party backed the mission and 22 percent opposed it.

Of those who support the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, 32 percent were in favor of the operation and 59 percent were against it. Of unaffiliated voters, 39 percent of respondents supported it and 42 percent opposed it.

...

The DPJ is playing up its fight with the government and ruling coalition parties by sticking to its policy of opposing the continuation of the MSDF's refueling operation, but the survey might have an impact on the party's handling of the issue.

Meanwhile, Fukuda scored higher points than DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa in leadership, political philosophy and goals, clarity and approachability.

A narrow majority of pollees said the opposition should make compromises with the coalition, which makes perfect sense in policy terms, since the DPJ et al. haven't offered a platform that distinguishes them much from the ruling coalition. They're against extending the refueling mission and (like everyone who happens to be out of power) very much morally affronted by all the corruption visible everywhere. But most of the other differences are in the details, many of which shouldn't be hard to trade horses over.

Over forty municipal employees in Kyoto who had already used up most of their paid vacation found a way to milk the city for more money. The city offers paid days off to arrange for or attend the funerals of family members, so they simply pretended their relatives were dropping dead at a clip of a half-dozen per year. The result was a total of 142 days of paid bereavement leave based on false claims:

The investigation found that a 49-year-old female official at the Kamigyo Fire Station's general affairs division illegally took 12 days off when she worked at the Higashiyama Fire Station. In fiscal 2005 alone, she took bereavement leave five times, saying relatives had passed away.

"I never thought she would lie in applying for bereavement leave," an official who was her boss at the time said. "I felt sorry for her, as she said so many of her relatives had died around that time."

An official of Nishikyo ward office's general affairs division applied for bereavement leave six times, saying his uncle died and then claiming aunts had died on four different occasions, from fiscal 2004 to 2006. In fiscal 2006, the 43-year-old official took bereavement leave five times.

His boss said: "I thought that was too many [deaths], so I did ask questions. But since it's a personal matter, I didn't ask him to provide evidence."

Some of the offenders' supervisors have also been disciplined. They do come off as easily gulled, but you have to feel sorry for them, too. It's not out of the realm of possibility that someone could lose several relatives in their eighties in rapid succession; parents and their siblings tend to approach average life expectancy around the same time, after all. As with so many of these scandals, this one was uncovered through what looks like luck: a worker at the environment agency was found to have fraudulently applied for leave, whereupon attendance records in general were inspected.

Glad this week is over--productive but super-busy. I was mercifully spared any cross-cultural encounters of the variety below (sent to me by my buddy--those Brits!):

Speaking of people from the UK, I'd feared, given the title, that Annie Lennox's new album would consist of Songs of Mass Sanctimony. After all, her attempts at social commentary with Eurythmics could be downright laughable. She and David should have won some sort of Freedom from Self-Awareness Award for this one:



Nothing really to fear, it turned out, fortunately--not even on the one with the Choir of Concerned Mommies. Nice to have her recording again.

I also truly enjoyed the opening salvo from this week's Popbitch:

"I theme-dress depending on where I'm going... if I was going to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, I would wear a kimono - it makes it more fun." Kelly Osbourne.

Good to know the child's as much as grammarian as she is a geographer, huh? Whatever you do, though, do NOT click on the Anna Nicole Smith link toward the bottom of this week's mailing. Ugsome. I still haven't recovered.

Out of here for the weekend. Have a good one, everyone.

There hasn’t been a high-profile story of defective Chinese goods for a little while, but the trend toward quietly pulling them is continuing:

One by one, convenience stores and supermarkets are making moves toward replacing Chinese food imports with domestic products and non-PRC imports. 99 Plus Corporation, which developed the everything-99-yen convenience store, will phase out frozen foods from the PRC starting this month and replace them with domestic equivalents. Ito Yokado and Inageya have switched from PRC-produced matsutake mushrooms to those from Canada. In each case, the trend towards consumers’ avoiding Chinese products because of concerns over safety is noticeable, and it is possible that other retailers will make similar moves.

99 Plus Corporation will gradually stop offering frozen foods from China such as pilaf and gyoza dumplings in its 800 Shop 99 stores nationwide. PRC products have made up about half of the frozen food items it offers, but it has investigated which items have ready substitutes and will replace most of them with domestic products. In order to maintain its everything-99-yen pricing, it will decrease per-package quantities in cases where supply costs increase by a wide margin.

The stores in question move a lot of food.

*******

One of the tie-ups the new Japan Post conglomerate has already scored is with Nippon Express (Nittsu) for package processing. Yu-Pack has an extensive delivery network for small parcels, and Pelican has its strengths in the corporate market. The brands will remain separate, but the companies hope to combine their logistical advantages to their mutual profit. (Naturally, there may also be mutual shareholding. *sigh*) The post and package arms of Japan Post have the lowest profit potential, so this first large-scale partnership will be important.

Speaking of ways Japanese consumers get scammed when looking for ways to invest, an operation called the L&G Group has been in the news all week. These companies usually pretend to market the sort of stuff you see hawked on infomercials--health drinks, odd undergarments, wonder pillows, things like that. L&G (the initials appear to stand for "Ladies and Gentlemen") had its own "research center" that managed to attract some big-name lecturers, giving it the appearance of a reputable going concern. Apparently not, though. Since it's a tawdry story, let's look to the Mainichi for the full effect:

Police on Wednesday raided the home of the chairman of the troubled L&G group and related facilities in Tokyo amid growing suspicion that the group had illegally solicited consumers to invest in its bedding goods sales business.

...

The latest move came after the National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan received a growing number of complaints from L&G investors about its failure to pay dividends or refund their invested funds. Investigators suspect that the group violated the Investment Deposit and Interest Rate Law.

L&G started paying its investors "dividends" in the form of gift certificates to outlets for its own goods--essentially a step up from Monopoly money.

This is not the first case of this sort of thing. Five years ago, Asia was riveted by the implosion of Genta Ogami's G.O. Group, which (of course) was supposedly marketing health teas. Time Asia ran an extensive story:

An estimated 90,000 individuals in Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia became G.O. "members," investing in the firm's schemes based on promises they could double or triple their savings. Until his operation unraveled earlier this year, Ogami, 39, had collected a total of $400 million, according to former G.O. Group executives, which he used to finance a lavish lifestyle, expand overseas and buy the offshore bank in the Philippines. He even financed his own action movie, Blades of the Sun, featuring himself in the starring role playing opposite a Filipina starlet.

What's fascinating is that Ogami's phoniness was recognized not by middle-class Japanese investors but by poor Filipino savings account holders. He bought a bank in the Philippines to begin using as his private slush fund, essentially. And then:

Ogami's hilarious bumblings over the following months bring to mind Dr. Evil in an Austin Powers sequel--hilarious, that is, if not for the fact that they torpedoed a bank serving 18,000 poor Filipinos. G.O. Group had raised the cash to buy Unitrust by selling unregistered bonds in Japan. He loaned the proceeds to dummy local owners to make the purchase, says Inoue, in order to sidestep Philippine laws prohibiting majority foreign ownership of banks. Ogami announced his September 2001 takeover by posting his face on billboards around Manila and running a two-page newspaper ad offering jobs at three times the going salaries. He ordered Citibank pamphlets photocopied, its logo replaced with that of the new "Bank of Ogami." He demanded fat personal loans, says Inoue, threw parties on the bank's dime, and had Genta Ogami figurines created as gifts for customers.

Instead of inspiring confidence, his behavior caused a bank run. Startled depositors yanked their accounts, and Philippine staffers--not inclined to swallow the weird, cultish rituals Ogami's officers tried to impose--quit in droves. Unitrust was forced to close its doors this January. With the bank in receivership, thousands of remaining depositors are unable to access their funds.

Ogami was sentenced to eighteen years.

I suppose that, given all I wrote about Japan Post privatization while it was being haggled over, it's odd that I didn't post anything about it on Monday, when the privatization plan went into effect. But of course, what's going to be interesting is what happens in the coming months and years; Monday was an important step, but not much happened that we could draw conclusions from. The single biggest problem is that the government still holds all the stock, with divestment from the financial services companies to be completed by 2017. But there's a lot else to consider. Here's the Nikkei editorial:

Since the former national rail service became JR twenty years ago, this is the first large-scale privatization. The postal service, which began as a public institution 130 years ago, became a privately held enterprise under the Japan Post holding company on 1 October. The holding company came into the world a behemoth group with four companies (postal processing, post offices, postal savings bank, and life insurance) under its umbrella, total capital of 338 trillion yen, 24000 post offices, and 240000 personnel.

What cemented the privatization was public opinion, which pressed for postal reform that moved "from public to private." In the election after the "postal dissolution" Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi decided on, the LDP gained an overwhelming majority in the lower house. [Koizumi called a snap election and flatly told voters that he regarded it as a referendum on Japan Post privatization.--SRK] This could be regarded as a vigorous rejection of the public investment [system] that, using trust in the government as a shield, corralled capital from postal savings and life insurance and led to bureaucratic bloat. We must not forget that that was the starting point.

...

The postal savings bank will be a sales outlet for housing loans from some regional banks, and also aims to fund its own entry into financing and foreign currency deposits. Financial institutions have cautioned about pressure on the private sector [that Japan Post Holdings could exert by exploiting its still-strong connections with the government], but on the other hand, there have been gestures toward seeking tie-ups with a clear eye on the post office network. What is more important than anything else is that conditions for fair competition between the privatized Japan Post and existing financial institutions be preserved. The Japan Post Privatization Committee, which will review these expansions of operations, has a lot of responsibility. The Finance Agency and the BOJ should also monitor its health unsparingly through inspections and similar measures.

What both internal and external investors will be paying attention to is where capital is routed by the two financial institutions after privatization. Under the shadow budget system, the postal savings bank had become a dumping ground for mass-issued federal bonds. It will be pressed to diversify deployment of capital into appropriate asset and debt management. The plan is to decrease the postal savings account balance (182 trillion yen at the end of August) moderately but steadily.

The Asahi editorial focuses more on how privatization will affect customers:

The most serious is poor legal compliance. Japan Post has been plagued by endless embezzlement and other scandals involving postal workers. Illegal business practices are rampant in postal insurance operations--postal insurance policies are often sold without the legally mandated direct meeting with the purchaser. In fact, compliance has been so poor, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has given the postal insurance service a record-low quality rating of "D." Recent evidence has also emerged that employees unlawfully destroyed documents that legally should have been preserved.
It might be pointed out that none of this makes Japan Post unique among government agencies or public corporations, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.

These episodes point to serious corporate ills. The new Japan Post management must ensure it competes with industry rivals in a legal and fair manner. The first test for the postal giant's compliance will be whether it starts properly explaining to customers the risks involved in its financial products.

With privatization has also come the end of government guarantees for postal savings and insurance policies--yet Japan Post will still be selling a wide range of risk-carrying financial products, such as investment trusts.

For many years, people have entrusted their savings to government-guaranteed postal accounts. Many have no understanding about risky financial products and the fact that investors can lose their initial investment principal if the market turns sour.

That makes it imperative for Japan Post to clearly offer detailed explanations about such risky investments to customers. Should troubles emerge over sales tactics, this would damage consumer trust--its reputation for reliability--and have a serious effect on its bottom line.

That's a genuine worry. Japan has a very good educational system, but financial products are complex things, and people's trust in known brands has enabled a lot of salespeople to put one over on a lot of consumers. It's people's responsibility to assess risks as best they can before pouring their money into an insurance policy or what have you; however, I agree that Japan Post's overseers need to be extra careful to make sure representatives are not using verbal legerdemain to imply that investments are still protected by the government in ways they are not.

While everyone else is debating whether there are gays in Iran, this fag (note unapologetic hegemonic-Western assertion of identity--BUTCH, huh?) is wondering anew at how beyond sexy Hugh Jackman is, even if the hair needs a trim (just the hair on his head, obviously).

Speaking of body hair, I'm normally pretty persnickety about this sort of thing--don't get me started on visible clip-on bow ties at black tie parties--but I'm not sure I can fall in line with this post (via Ann Althouse). I can see arguing that grown men shouldn't wear shorts because it violates adult etiquette. I can see pointing out that shorts flatter well-shaped legs and don't flatter dumpy ones. Hell, attractiveness isn't even always the issue. I've been fighting with friends who tell me I should show more chest hair when we go out for years. My relatively smooth buddies can have three buttons open, and you don't even notice. I have three buttons open, and I look as if I should have a sign around my neck that says, "Ask about my low all-night rates!"

But looking decent and looking comely are two different, if related, considerations that it's not good to slush together. (Is it proposed that we go the whole way and ask people who lost the genetic lottery on bone structure and complexion to wear paper bags over their heads?) Noisome breath and body odor or noisy chewing--that sort of thing is inescapable to people around you, so it's flat-out inconsiderate to inflict it on them. I have a hard time equating that with covering up your legs lest someone deem them too hairy.