The White Peril 白禍

Meaty Fly (who's commented on a few posts below and will presumably be another reader who can tell me when I mangle my translations from Japanese) has this post about Sino-Japanese relations and how their development affects US interests. He (I assume) quotes several Japanese news sources to make the following point, specifically with regard to a proposed natural gas pipeline but also with wider implications. I've left out the links in his original post:

The United States is the world's biggest oil consumer; China is in second place and rising. Japan depends on the Middle East for 90% of its oil. Thus, the stakes are high in all directions. The pipeline to Japan may also serve U.S. interests, because it "would also be a strategic asset for Russia, allowing it to export to other Asian countries and perhaps the US west coast."

Tensions between China and Japan over energy don't stop there. Japan is embroiled in a dispute with China over offshore natural gas fields.

Since US businesses and MBA programs stopped thinking of Japan's management and bureaucratic practices as sexy, and there are no more human interest features to write about how Japan, Inc., is going to leave the hard-working American family impoverished, events in Japan don't seem to make the news as much in the States anymore. Even here, little incidents between Japan and Korea, or Japan and China, over disputed islands and ships passing in the night are so frequent that they can obscure potentially big stories like these. One hopes that the US government is giving them due attention.

I don't really expect things to spiral out of control soon, given present conditions. Still, resentments run old and deep in this part of the world, even if you just think back as far as World War II. The generation that actually lived through the War is dying off, but in the last decade, several high-profile controversies--the proposed reparations suit by Korean comfort women, the dismissive trashing of Iris Chang's book The Rape of Nanking by Japanese historians, the whitewashing of Japanese aggression in its public school history textbooks--have kept the ill-feeling simmering. As far as strategic allies in the Pacific Rim go, China has a regime we flat-out can't trust; Korea and Taiwan (the latter of which could be forgiven for not trusting us entirely) have their own very immediate defense problems to worry about and won't have the ability to project much force for the foreseeable future. Japan is still basically the only game in town, no matter how fast the Chinese economy is growing.

The DPJ's Katsuya Okada has been busy since arriving in Boston. After meeting with Ezra Vogel and Joseph Nye, he seems to have met with Walter Mondale, telling him that the US needs to stay in Iraq until it's stabilized (actually, the phrasing is the usual "we must humbly receive the favor of your staying...," the we presumably referring to Japan and the rest of the world) but that Japan itself, despite the end of combat, cannot keep the SDF there because of constitutional strictures. None of that is surprising.

He also said that US-Japan relations have been relying too much on Armitage personally and that he wonders whether we would still be bestest buddies if Kerry were elected (well, he said "the administration changed to a Democratic one," but he's presumably talking about the upcoming election). I was surprised at myself, at first, for not having given that issue much thought. But I think my assumption was that since Japan has socialized medicine, federal initiatives for anything and everything, and a general tradition of ecstatic individual self-abnegation for the good of the collective...sheesh, what's for the Democrats, all the way to the left fringe, not to love? It's also a non-white society that always talks about how it loves nature, despite its actual records on ethnic diversity and environmental protection. Also, the people use less energy and throw away less trash per capita than Americans, so even if you have socialist tendencies, you can kind of justify how staggeringly rich the country is.

In any case, while my experience is that the States-side Democrats/liberals/leftists I know think of Japan as a beacon of the "Third Way," it's hard to predict how a Kerry administration might set its Japan policy because we don't seem to have much indication of who could be his ranking foreign policy advisors. Of course, that policy strategists are kindly disposed toward Japan may not mean that they know how to deal with it effectively; but East Asia specialists tend to study countries they're attracted to somehow.

Ooh. This I hadn't heard about the reunion of Hitomi Soga and Charles Jenkins:

Jenkins told them that he had been set to take Soga to North Korea if they had met in Beijing, according to Japanese sources.

North Korea authorities had promised a car with a driver and increased food rations if he managed to take Soga to Pyongyang, the sources said.

But Jenkins didn't reveal how he planned to take Soga to Pyongyang.

Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoya said on Tuesday that Jenkins had agreed to meet with a U.S. defense counsel to discuss a possible court martial to settle changes against him.

That Jenkins was prepared for court martial, as conveyed to a relative who visited Japan last week, was on the news yesterday. What hadn't been confirmed that was Soga's instincts had been right about the meeting in Beijing. Good call. (And remind me again why a country that has to ration food is superior to anything?)

***

And speaking of betrayals, yesterday, the Tokyo district court ordered a suspension of merger talks between Mitsubishi-Tokyo Financial Group and the UFJ Group (Japanese, English). The merger would involve reneging on an agreement between UFJ and Sumitomo Trust and Banking (why not get all the behemoth financial institutions to join in the fun while we're at it, huh?) for Sumitomo to buy UFJ's trust bank. Sumitomo, justifiably unhappy, is suing.

While everyone's busy wishing Bill Clinton could run for President again, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has been a quiet attendee at the Democratic Convention and has been making a few interesting contacts. Katsuya Okada, leader of the DPJ, has apparently met with Joseph Nye, one of Clinton's Assistant Secretaries of Defense now back at Harvard, and Ezra Vogel, the Harvard professor emeritus who's one of the few people to specialize equally in China and Japan. Naturally, they (the Nikkei article is very brief and doesn't say whether the three met together or Okada met the others individually) talked about security issues and US-Japan relations. No report of what they specifically discussed.

This is a few days old, and I didn't know what to make of it because I couldn't find any quotation of what Armitage had actually said to Nakagawa. The English versions of the Japanese papers are now writing about it, but they still don't say what his words were:

Officials in the ruling coalition as well as the opposition camp clearly were caught off-guard by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's remark last week that war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution is becoming an obstacle to strengthening the Japan-U.S. alliance.

Since it was uttered by a senior Bush administration official known for his deep understanding of Japan, they fear it may negatively affect Japan-U.S. relations and ongoing debate in Japan on revisions to the Constitution.

Opposition members also were critical of Armitage for pressing Japan to revise the Constitution.

Hidenao Nakagawa, chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party's Diet Affairs Committee, shook up lawmakers after he relayed the gist of a meeting with Armitage in Washington last Wednesday.

Armitage also told Nakagawa that while Washington supported Tokyo's moves to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, any nation with that status must be ready to deploy military force in the interests of the international community. Unless it is prepared to do that, Armitage said it would be difficult for Japan to become a permanent member.

The revision being discussed would appear to be a rather modest one; it just makes it possible for the SDF to provide combat assistance in defense of an ally. As written, the constitution doesn't allow Japan to go into combat for anything but defense of Japan itself. Here's what Article 9 says:

1. 日本国民は、正義と秩序を基調とする国際平和を誠実に希求し、国権の発動たる戦争と、武力による威嚇又は武力の行使は、国際紛争を解決する手段としては、永久にこれを放棄する。
2. 前項の目的を達するため、陸海空軍その他の戦力は、これを保持しない。国の交戦権は、これを認めない。

1. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
2. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceeding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

The "means of settling international disputes" is the part that's interpreted conservatively right now. I haven't seen anything to indicate what verbal formulation would be used for the amendment, so it may not have been put together yet, but everything the Koizumi administration (which is proposing it) says indicates that it would apply only to common defense agreements with allies. In the course of arguing for such an amendment, he has, naturally, pointed out that US armed forces personnel already defend Japan.

The PRC has been little mentioned in the most recent discussions on this point--at least, that I've seen--but as you may surmise, Beijing isn't exactly champing at the bit for an opportunity to welcome a Japan with the constitutional permission to project force as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

So yet again, the War on Terrorism is putting predictable stress on all kinds of tensely-balanced relationships in the Asia-Pacific region. If the push to amend the Japanese constitution remains front and center, we'll have long-time animosities surfacing in a snaky line from Australia and the Philippines northward through Japan and Russia. It ain't just vulcanism and plate tectonics making the Pacific Rim hot and frictive anymore.

Not that it ever was.

Occasionally, friends from back home will ask me, "So, is Japan really as expensive as they say?" I'm usually guffawing too hard to answer. Of course, there are qualifications to be made: Tokyo is uncommonly expensive for Japan, just as New York is uncommonly expensive for America. I've heard people say that the regional cities are more reasonable--Atsushi says so about the mid-sized city he lives in now, and I visited ex-boyfriends in their hometowns of Sendai and Sapporo and saw a noticeable difference. Anyway, Connie and I have been having a back-and-forth about what sorts of behavior are "Pennsylvanian," and it reminded me of my trip to the grocery store yesterday. Every week, I splurge on something even more overpriced than normal--maybe a little carton of fresh raspberries, or a mango from the Philippines (as soft and sweet as its government's position on terrorists--don't let anyone give you that "the Mexican ones are better" jazz), or whatever's in season--along with the stuff I base my meals on.

Well, the first rhubarb of the season is coming into the stores, so I decided to go for it. This image tells you a lot about Tokyo life (for the people who do the grocery shopping, that is):







The large, visible "331" is the tax-included price. It converts to US $2.84.

A single, slender zucchini will be attentively wrapped the same way and costs about the same--well, it's usually closer to 310 yen, but same difference. Of course, having grown up in a part of PA that was slowly going from rural to suburban/edge-city, I spent the first twenty years of my life thinking of zucchini and rhubarb as things you paid other people to take off your hands. You know, late summer and early fall are when bags of zucchini play Chinese fire drill. Everyone with a vegetable garden has too many, all the kids in the county are threatening to run away from home if Mom forces one more slice of zucchini bread on them, everyone eats more spaghetti than usual because you can cut the tomato sauce with a lot of zucchini puree before anyone notices. The rhubarb situation is never quite as bad, but every household seems to have at least one resident who flat-out refuses to eat anything with rhubarb, and most people don't want to eat stewed fruit that often, so it still takes a while to eat down the surplus.

All of which is to say, I'm sitting here with my rhubarb on household chore day and thinking, Sheesh! $7.50/lb. This had better be a damned good pie...I mean, largish tart, which is what I have enough for.

And the summer fruits here, while good, don't measure up to the nectarines, peaches, and plums we got at the farmers' market when I was little. That doesn't make the quality worse, necessarily; I just find Japanese peaches a bit on the perfumy side in taste.

Of course, living in Japan has its compensating pleasures. Figs don't seem to have caught on much in America, but in season, they're available at every supermarket and fruit stand here. And Japanese persimmons, while a shock to the palate if you bite into one expecting it to taste like the persimmons of the American South, are one of the joys of fall once your tastes adjust. You see them ripening on the trees, and the wind suddenly feels a bit cooler and lonelier, and you know summer's ending.

Given the kiln that is Tokyo during July and August, I'd welcome that feeling right about now, actually. Well, after I thoroughly enjoy my rhubarb.

Added at 17:40: Of course, you can't always be sure where your broccoli came from, among other potential pitfalls of produce-buying.

CNN's Atika Schubert is now doing a feature on Democrats Abroad Japan, which appears to be making big-time recruiting efforts among us resident US citizens here. I guess no one told me because I'm already a registered Democrat from a swing state...although, come to think of it, you'd imagine that would make them pretty eager for me to get an absentee ballot and actually vote on party lines. Not that I'm eager for anyone to come after me, or anything.

Anyway, Terry McMillan (to whom I know I, like you I'm sure, turn for expert political and moral authority whenever feasible) is here and espousing people power. Some upwardly mobile-looking guy says Bush is going down. Not surprising at a recruiting session for Democrats.

But all this makes me wonder what the distribution of political affiliations among expats here really is. And then there's the question of what the Japanese think of the War on Terrorism. My acquaintances are not a scientific sample of the population, and I don't necessarily see every poll, but I do know that the Japanese I know are divided over the morality of the war in Iraq and, especially, over whether Japan should have sent SDF troops even in a non-combat capacity. However, "divided" means "divided," not "uniformly outraged at America's blatant and hubristical empire-building." In the days after 9/11, I got dozens of messages from Japanese friends expressing deep, formal sympathy for America and saying things like, "You must be ready to kill! I hope your government takes revenge quickly." Many of those same people are now skeptical of whether the US government is managing the occupation well and preventing abuses of authority in its own ranks. But I know of very few (except some with degrees from major American universities) who take the full-on "America has squandered the goodwill of the world" line.

In the meantime, the GOP is also, according to CNN, going to be stepping up its recruitment efforts. Wonder which best-selling novelist they'll bring to rouse interest!

Someone at work mailed me this story with the subject line "WE'RE STILL NUMBER 1!" (Actually, I'm pretty sure Finland and maybe one of the other Scandinavian countries still have higher rates of suicide, but 34000+ out of 125 million people is still plenty high. The US has around 30000 suicides per year, but of course, we have double Japan's population.) The AP article touches on some of the reasons for the anomalies in the way suicide is distributed here.

Like everywhere else, the rate is highest among old people with failing health. But there's also been a major upswing, since the 1990-ish collapse of the economic bubble, of suicides among people who are hopelessly in debt. Lender liability law is effectively non-existent here, and a lot of people go to retail loan companies that lend at rates to which usury doesn't do justice. Unless the laws have changed when I wasn't looking, 40% (that's not a typo) is the highest legal rate lenders can charge. But, this being Japan, it's possible to add on courtesy fees, processing fees, and in-out-around-through fees that make the interest rate effectively 100% for the most desperate borrowers. And of course, being the most desperate borrowers, those are the people with the greatest difficulty paying the money back.

People in such situations who don't want to end their troubles and save their honor by committing suicide have another option: They can disappear. Through the '90's, the number of people who did 夜逃げ (yonige, "overnight escape") and took new identities in distant cities to escape the gangster collection agents who were harassing them was increasing by a good 50% per year. In each of the last several years, I think the figure has hovered at between 100000 and 150000.

The recent reforms of the National Pension and Social Insurance may not, to put it mildly, make debt and health issues easier to deal with. Plans to increase premiums and cut back on benefits (including both pension money and health care) will make things more difficult for the elderly and for cash-strapped workers--exactly the adult groups whose suicide rates are causing all the alarm.

Of course, suicide is not considered an honorable option unless it's the only way to make amends or discharge one's responsibilities. Otherwise--this is one of the most inspiring things about the Japanese--they have an amazing ability to persevere stoically through desperate circumstances. By this point, no one entertains the fantasy that the Japanese government is going to undertake the kinds of real reforms that will speed up economic recovery (as, say, South Korea did after the Asian financial crisis in 1997). So what we're in for, probably for several more decades, is more of the slow, painful, not-quite-catastrophic same. Suicide is unlikely to become epidemic, but there's little reason to expect rates to drop very quickly.

Added at 17:25, 26 July: Just so people don't think it's a total free-for-all here, I might point out that punishment is meted out to those who run outright scams in the moneylending business. Sometimes. If you click on the link, you have to promise you'll read to the end to see how the officer of one of the loan companies justifies himself. Unreal.

Several times a year, people in Japan die from eating home-prepared fugu, the blowfish prized as a delicacy here. Its neurotoxin, which causes tingling in the limbs, shortness of breath, paralysis (while you're still alert and helpless), and finally coma and death, is concentrated in the skin, ovaries, and liver. Guess which part of the fish is considered the greatest epicurean treat? The latest case happened last night in Fukuoka. The story is by the book: a man caught a fugu and brought it home to four friends. They added the liver and flesh to the miso soup with which they started dinner; the symptoms began two hours later. The two men (including the fisherman) are in serious condition and, though the article doesn't say in so many words, will die. The women, who I imagine left most of the liver for the men, are expected to recover. I wonder, though, not having read up on it much, whether people who recover from fugu poisoning suffer necrosis of the flesh the way a lot of people who recover from snakebites do.

In case you're wondering how it's possible to make the liver edible at all, the answer is: you can purge the poison so there's just enough left to give the mouth a stimulating little tingle if you hold the cleaned organ under running water for a very long time before serving. No, I'm not kidding. One wonders how many people through the centuries died agonized deaths along the trial-and-error path to that discovery.

By the way, the character compound for fugu is 河豚: "river" + "pig." The dolphin is called iruka, and written (if you're being stuffy) as 海豚: "sea" + "pig." Somewhat more recognizable, to us native speakers of English who were made to memorize Latin and Greek word roots as schoolchildren, is the compound for hippopotamus: 河馬, pronounced kaba and literally meaning, of course, "river" + "horse."

Since I was brought up on the Levitical health laws, my parents reared me not to eat pork because pigs were God's natural vacuum cleaners and were bad for the body, even though people who ate pork often seemed as healthy as everyone else. Clearly, the river pig of Japan makes its deleterious effects known rather more quickly, as one member of last night's unfortunate dinner party apparently knew: she ate none of the fugu miso soup, and she's fine.

Those following the five-way diplomatic tug-of-war over the family of Hitomi Soga and Charles Jenkins probably know already that they're...well, I was going to say "back in Japan, " but only Soga herself had been to Japan before. What Jenkins feared, and the Japanese government tried to avoid, has happened: the US government has at least preliminarily made moves to have him extradited so he can be charged as an armed forces deserter. The initial family reunion took place in Indonesia--Soga flew from here, and Jenkins and their two daughters from the DPRK--because Washington and Jakarta don't have a mutual extradition treaty (if that's what it's called).

But Jenkins has serious health problems and needs surgery that he had to come to Japan for, so he, Soga, and their two daughters flew in yesterday. NNN (the Japanese equivalent of CNN, sort of) followed their bus from the airport to one of Tokyo's research hospitals as if it were OJ's van. Atsushi, who's home for the bank holiday weekend, glanced up at a close-up of the family's caravan and deadpanned, "The government put them on a Mitsubishi Fuso bus? Great. At least they're headed for the hospital already."

The two daughters are 18 and 21, and much of the news coverage has focused on speculating what life will be like for them here. Me, I speculate that whatever happened to them would scramble their circuits. They grew up, after all, half-Japanese and half-American in an affluent family in North Korea. So both their parents were of intensely hated enemy peoples; their mother had been snatched from her home country when she was their age now. They were among the select families well-positioned enough to live relatively affluent lives in Pyongyang, and who knows whether they know what's been going on in the countryside for the last decade or so. The people they meet in Japan may know more about the famines than they do. At least for now, the whole family is here. Now we just need to find out what happened to the half-dozen abductees the DPRK has coolly failed to account for.

Virginia Postrel points to an expansive article by Bruce Bawer, which gives side-by-side reviews of a half-dozen books written by American and European authors about the US and its role in the world. It starts to be a bit of a slog toward the end, but it's great stuff, all of it. The first book he filets is by one Mark Hertsgaard, whose excerpts read like Amritas's Kevin Kusoyama, only more cartoonishly leftist. Here's Bawer's response to a spiel I've heard more times than Carter's has pills (the first sentence is his summary of Hertsgaard's argument, not his own opinion):

America, in short, is a mess�a cultural wasteland, an economic nightmare, a political abomination, an international misfit, outlaw, parasite, and pariah. If Americans don�t know this already, it is, in Hertsgaard�s view, precisely because they are Americans: �Foreigners,� he proposes, �can see things about America that natives cannot. . . . Americans can learn from their perceptions, if we choose to.� What he fails to acknowledge, however, is that most foreigners never set foot in the United States, and that the things they think they know about it are consequently based not on first-hand experience but on school textbooks, books by people like Michael Moore, movies about spies and gangsters, �Ricki Lake,� �C.S.I.,� and, above all, the daily news reports in their own national media. What, one must therefore ask, are their media telling them? What aren�t they telling them? And what are the agendas of those doing the telling? Such questions, crucial to a study of the kind Hertsgaard pretends to be making, are never asked here. Citing a South African restaurateur�s assertion that non-Americans �have an advantage over [Americans], because we know everything about you and you know nothing about us,� Hertsgaard tells us that this is a good point, but it�s not: non-Americans are always saying this to Americans, but when you poke around a bit, you almost invariably discover that what they �know� about America is very wide of the mark.

Honey, the stories I could tell! Lectures about how oppressive America is are especially comical coming from gay men visiting Tokyo from countries where homosexuality is illegal. (And I can't count how many times such guys have broken off in the middle of fulminating about America's spiritual emptiness to shriek, "I love this song! Don't you love this song?" when some Britney video came on over the bar.)

Later, Bawer cites a book by Jedediah Purdy, who has a more sensible approach to assessing how foreigners view us and what it means:

Plainly, Purdy has no delusion that the foundations of anti-Americanism are noble; and he finds it ridiculous to speak of an �imperial America.� Yet he can still see why even highly Americanized foreigners refer to the U.S. as an empire. Why? Because as they struggle to learn and speak English and to find a comfortable meeting place between America�s culture and their own, these foreigners are acutely aware that Americans don�t have to make a comparable effort. English is our language; American culture, our culture. It is our exemption from this otherwise global burden of adaptation, Purdy suggests, that makes us seem �imperial.�

I would only add that it really is true that Americans abroad--which is the only place foreigners who don't come to America will meet us--are frequently not on their best behavior. That's not unique to us, of course. Everyone feels unrestricted by the usual rules when away from home. But in combination with our political and cultural dominance, bad behavior from Americans feels like an extra affront to a lot of foreigners.

Added after the strongest earthquake we've had in weeks: Amritas noticed the Kevin Kusoyama remark above, so I'd just like to point out that I think the Professor's job is secure. Being a good writer and empathetic person, Amritas has managed, in creating him, to give Kusoyama a multi-dimensional personality. He annoys you the way a real person would.

Hertsgaard, however, writes like a computer-generated composite of the last ten years of Mother Jones and The Nation (and yes, I still read them frequently enough to feel qualified to make such a slam). Here's the excerpt that dumbfounded me most:

Our foreign policy is often arrogant and cruel and threatens to �blow back� against us in terrible ways. Our consumerist definition of prosperity is killing us, and perhaps the planet. Our democracy is an embarrassment to the word, a den of entrenched bureaucrats and legal bribery. Our media are a disgrace to the hallowed concept of freedom of the press. Our precious civil liberties are under siege, our economy is dividing us into rich and poor, our signature cultural activities are shopping and watching television. To top it off, our business and political elites are insisting that our model should also be the world�s model, through the glories of corporate-led globalization.

Actually, I guess he could be Pat Buchanan as easily as he could be the NPR commentator he actually is; those extremes met a long time ago. But anyway, what frustrates me about his type is that most of their policy criticisms have an important kernel of truth to them. I, too, am worried about our foreign policy, the creeping power of amoral and unaccountable bureaucrats, cronyism, and journalistic travesties--though probably not in the ways Hertsgaard has in mind.

The thing that's obscene is that he's saying these things in a book whose overall objective is to put America in the context of the rest of the world. I found myself staring at that "a den of entrenched bureaucrats and legal bribery" and wondering, Runaway bureaucracy and kickbacks? Dude, ever heard of France? Germany? Singapore? Japan? As Bawer says (he focuses more on the journalism and human rights angles than on political structures), Hertsgaard and so many of his fellow travelers have no sense of proportion. They can't articulate how the ability of the people to check excesses of government and corporate power varies from system to system, so even their accurate criticisms aren't very useful.

Added the next morning at 11-ish: Agenda Bender does a brief but deadly number on meaningless moves toward bureaucratic transparency and efficiency. He refers specifically to the Palestinians and the UN, but he could be talking about lots of countries in Europe and Asia, too.

I'm not sure whether anyone in these parts cares about the financial news--Japan is so '80's to pay attention to, anyway. But the Mitsubishi-Tokyo Financial Group and the UFJ Group just announced that they will merge into the largest financial institution in the universe by the end of the week, surpassing the globe-buggeringly huge Mizuho Group. Lip service is, naturally, being payed to their complementary strengths, kind of. UFJ is based in Kansai (Osaka-Tokyo-Kobe) and Nagoya and has a lot of small-business clients and individual accounts. MTFG is based here in Tokyo and has dealings with a lot of mammoth corporations (especially in guess which conglomerate), though it also has a retail bank, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.

A major reason for the merger, you will doubtless be shocked to hear, is that UFJ is carrying a lot of bad debt. (Not that MTFG still isn't, I'm sure, but in Japan, these things must be considered relative if you want to avoid a heart attack.) Whether this will actually streamline the operations of their trust banks, retail banks, and holding companies, which are all set to merge over the next few years, is anyone's guess. In Japan, companies often seem to merge just for the sake of getting bigger; but then, so do the federal ministries that are in bed with them.

The morning edition of the Nikkei says the LDP + Komei Party coalition won 59 seats, eight more than it was shooting for. There were still, when the dead-tree version was going to press, two seats that hadn't been decided. The chief opposition group (the Democratic, Communist, and Social Democratic Parties of Japan--no jokes from the peanut gallery, okay?) won 55 seats, so the result is, not surprisingly, an uneasy split. Voter turnout seems not to have been all that high, considering how it was hammered into us that this was a referendum on social welfare policy and the Iraq occupation.

Polls are closed, and vote counting has started. We'll see what happens.

Parliamentary elections here in Japan today. (Actually, unless you're Amritas, you probably want this link). There are 120-odd Diet seats up for election. The magic number for Koizumi's LDP base to stay solid is 51 seats won. CNN says:

Now he is struggling and his ratings have plunged to just 40 percent after he decided to keep Japanese troops in Iraq and pushed through an unpopular bill to reform the country's pension system.

The beleaguered system is unable to pay for its aging population and Koizumi's answer was to introduce legislation that increases payments and cuts payouts.

They were necessary reforms, Koizumi says, but it was not a popular policy.

On Iraq, the public is deeply divided over the wisdom of Koizumi's ambitious deployment -- Japan's riskiest mission since WWII.

When Koizumi announced that troops would be staying on after the Iraqi handover -- without consulting lawmakers -- the public was not pleased.

"The government is abusing its power. Since they represent the people of Japan, they should stand by us," voter Hiroko Furuya says.

The Japanese are clearly unhappy with Koizumi, but few are impressed with the opposition either. The result is that a chunk of former Koizumi supporters are now undecided.

The problem is that Japanese voters are like voters everywhere. At the bunting-and-motivational-speech stage, it's easy for 80% of them to approve of a candidate that represents change. When he's in office and actually wants to, you know, change things, it's a different story. That's not to say that I'm necessarily all that hot on the way the National Pension scheme is being reformed. It's just that there's no way to fix the damned thing without taking goodies away from some constituency or other, and most Japanese people (especially the appointed, unaccountable bureaucrats who actually run the place) would drop dead at the merest hint of privatizing it. Maybe they could just invest the whole thing in Mitsubishi Motors stock; then the whole problem, along with all the money, would disappear and we could start over. In any case, at least making contributors kick in more money and beneficiaries take less has the equal-treatment virtue of screwing everyone over.

Another thing to bear in mind is that, through the post-Nakasone '80's and '90's, Japan went through Prime Ministers faster than Madonna went through shades of Clairol. A lot of Japanese people don't feel that Koizumi fixed everything he talked about fixing and were opposed to the deployment of SDF troops in Iraq, but they're used to him, they're suspicious of the old guard of the LDP, and the economy has been pretty okay. It'll be interesting to see what the final count is.

Added at 20:00-ish: I'm apparently much too used to CNN's airbrush-everything style. When I cut and pasted from the article above, I didn't even notice that the SDF Iraq deployment was referred to as "Japan's riskiest mission since WWII." World War II was a...risky...mission...for the...Japanese? My sainted aunt.

Japanese abductee Hitomi Soga has arrived at her hotel in Jakarta after meeting her husband and daughters. They've been apart for a year and nine months. I wonder whether the girls have ever been outside North Korea--probably not, but I haven't read anything about it one way or another. The Nikkei says that the younger daughter addressed her as "Mommy" in Korean when they met, which reminds you of how much adjusting they're all going to have to do if they settle in Japan. I imagine their life in the DPRK was pretty privileged; the girls will probably miss home for quite a while before settling in if they come to Japan or settle elsewhere. BTW, it looks as if CNN is covering the reunion and has a nice summary of most of what led up to it.

What an entertainingly bonkers specimen of humanity Kim Jong-il is. It seems that he invented the hamburger, which is now providing nutrition to growing bodies at the DPRK's universities:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has introduced hamburgers to his reclusive, communist country in a campaign to provide "quality" food to university students, media reported Wednesday.

The hamburgers were introduced in 2000 and dubbed "gogigyeopbbang," Korean for "double bread with meat," according to the June 29 edition of the North Korean state-run newspaper Minju Joson. The report was carried by South Korea's Yonhap news agency on Wednesday.

Although reports from the isolated country have in recent years mentioned the introduction of the American fast food classic, the latest announcement seems to credit the country's leader for their advent.

The news marks a curious development for North Korea, where U.S. consumerism is routinely reviled in the official media and people refer to the soft drink Coca Cola as the "cesspool water of American capitalism."

Maybe that explains the last decade of famine: The Great (formerly Dear) Leader was confiscating all the produce to use in his test kitchen. And that patched-together Korean name sounds for all the world like the Académie Française screeching for everyone to say "pret à manger" instead of "fast food."

Speaking of cesspool water that keeps you from crashing during project meetings at your people-exploiting capitalist workplace: Here in consumerist Japan, we're part of the test market for a new Coke product called C2. It's low-calorie but has some real sugar in it, presumably for the have-it-both-ways market. (It's also being touted as low-carbohydrate.) My considered opinion, as someone who spent the better part of college knocking back a two-liter of Coke Classic per day without even thinking about it, is that it sucks.

Well, okay, I guess it doesn't taste that bad. But the combination of sugar and...Actually, I don't know what artificial sweetener is used here. It could be cyclamate for all I know. Anyway...the combination of sugar with the fake stuff tastes vaguely molasses-y. Nothing wrong with molasses, but it's not what I want my Coke reminding me of. Indeed, I disliked C2 so much that I thought of salvaging it by spiking it with Bacardi, as a semi-tribute to the climactic scene in Desperately Seeking Susan, in which Laurie Metcalf's character orders rum and Tab. Then I remembered that I could safely pour half a can of Coke down the drain without sacrificing a significant portion of the day's nutrients. I'm a wasteful bourgeois Westerner, after all.

The negotiations to get Hitomi Soga, one of the now-repatriated Japanese nationals snatched by North Korean agents twenty-five years ago, together with her husband and children, still in Pyongyang, seem to be gelling around setting the meeting in Indonesia. The president (the way it's phrased, I don't think it's Megawati's personal property) has a country house in a suburb of Jakarta, which is apparently more convenient than another presidential country house she has in Bali.

There haven't been many other notable updates on the whole appalling situation. Recurring headlines have tended to be about developments in the Mitsubishi Motors/Mitsubishi Fuso scandal, which that keiretsu has obligingly kept on low-boil since around 1998. If it doesn't get much play in America, the gist is: Mitsubishi cars and trucks have clutch problems. (I think most of the problems are with the housing, actually, and don't remember how the defect affects the clutch as it worsens.) I can't find links to corroborate my memory of the news stories at the time, but basically, a few car owners who were injured when their cars suddenly jumped into reverse sued. They lost (or the suits were dismissed--I don't remember) based in part on expert testimony from engineers in the employ of...why, yes, Mitsubishi Motors. Evidence since then has piled up, slowly but steadily, that Mitsubishi knew about these defects as early as 1993 and quietly repaired some of the affected vehicles rather than instituting a bad-PR recall. Unfortunately, a trucker was killed a few years ago in Yamaguchi Prefecture when his clutch malfunctioned, and a woman was killed and her children injured in Yokohama. So now we have the usual round of arrests of executives present and erstwhile, release of a decade-long paper trail of coverups and back-door settling, and accountability-dodging. And a recall. Another reason to be glad my man drives a Toyota.