The White Peril 白禍

(Susanna and Toren, you'll like this one.)

With fantastic timing, another nuclear power plant has developed a water leak. Good thing no one is, like, spooked from any other such recent incident, or anything. And this time it's not Reuters but the Mainichi that has the misleading headline. It reads, "Nuclear Water Leak Delays Plant Reopening," which sounds to me like a problem with radioactive water (though would you call that "nuclear water"?). In any case, the article says:

A water leak found at a nuclear power station has forced Tohoku Electric Power Co. to delay the scheduled reopening of the plant, officials at the firm said.

...

The leaked water was not radioactive and there was no chance of radiation leaking outside the plant, officials said.

These things are important because worries that radioactive water actually will leak from a power plant are more than just theoretical. This past spring (the same day Atsushi and I found out he was being transferred to Kyushu, actually), the Ikata nuclear power plant disgorged one and a half tons of radioactive coolant water in Ehime Prefecture. And then--I can't believe that in my previous posts on the subject, I forgot to mention this--there's the fact that TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which as you might guess serves us here in Tokyo) falsified years of inspection reports, including those pertaining to the presence of cracks in its containers and equipment.

A question from a friend reminded me that I started a post about this Nikkei report on the RNC platform that I then didn't finish. The daily exposure to the things foreign media (mostly Japanese, in my case) think are important about goings-on in the US is one of the most fascinating things about living abroad, as you might imagine. The Nikkei starts with the part about terrorism and ends with economic proposals to increase house ownership and private asset holdings, but it's clear that the important stuff to the audience is in the middle:

外交面では日本を「主要なパートナー」と位置づけ「日本が引き続き地域及び世界的な案件を巡り主導的な役割を築くことを支持する」と表明した。一方、中国に関しては「軍備増強は時代遅れ。結果的には国家の繁栄を妨げる行為」とけん制した。

In terms of international relations, [the RNC platform] positioned Japan as a "vital partner" and stated, "We support Japan in the ongoing project of building for itself a leading role in regional and global security." On the other hand, with respect to China, it proposed a check: "We have lagged behind in strengthening our military preparedness. This behavior could have the effect of interfering with national prosperity."

I'm not entirely sure I'm parsing that correctly, though I don't see how else it could be interpreted. It sounds kind of cryptic to me out of context, and I can't seem to connect to the gop.com text of the platform to see the original English. In any case, it cannot be construed as displaying warmth toward the PRC. Since the Japanese don't care about actual party politics--That's not a criticism. Why should they?--the article says nothing about gay marriage or respecting differences.

The Asahi reports today that child violence in schools increased dramatically in the last fiscal year:

The number of violent acts committed by children at public elementary schools reached a record 1,600 in fiscal 2003, up 27.7 percent from the previous year, education ministry officials said Friday.

When the elementary school figure is added to the number of violence acts committed by students at public junior and senior high schools, the total stands at 31,278, up 6.2 percent from fiscal 2002.

It is the first time in three years that the total number has risen, according to the ministry.

"It is a serious situation," a ministry official said. "We must strengthen our instructions on how to control emotions."

The ministry official here is exactly the type that I was talking about earlier when Susanna Cornett asked about this: More children are flipping out violently on classmates and teachers? Obviously, the solution is to wind 'em up tighter.

Again, I don't want to act as if the problem here isn't real. The relationship between childrearing at home and education at school is changing in ways that no planners are in control of, and the transition is not going to be easy. But these new figures from the Ministry of Education and Culture show a troubling rise in violence, predictable based on the economic and social changes over the last decade, not a descent into chaos. Japan is a nation of 125 million, after all. What could ensure that it does become a permanent problem is dogged pursuit of policies that no longer work but everyone is used to.

Given my skepticism about the CHILD CRIME WASHES OVER JAPAN LIKE TIDAL WAVE! motif on its upcycle in the media, it's only fair to point out this story:

Under current law, three courses of action can be taken against juvenile delinquents: They can be sent to a reformatory, placed in less restrictive "protective institutions," or based at home and required to meet regularly with government-appointed supervisors.

However, at the moment, only those 14 or older can be sent to a reformatory.

The planned revisions would abolish the age restriction, opening the reformatory door to virtually any minor.

...

The revisions would also expand the scope of police powers in investigating minors under the age of 14.

Under current Juvenile Law, police are not permitted to:

*Seize evidence;
*Search for evidence;
*Inspect the sites of the incidents; or
*Request the opinions of experts regarding possible evidence.

Because of these restrictions, police are often hamstrung in their efforts to make a detailed analysis of alleged criminal acts.

The revisions are designed to sweep away these restrictions, allowing police to deal with cases more quickly and effectively.

The Asahi article doesn't say that there's been any pressure, from the public or from the Diet, on the Ministry of Justice to toughen things up. That makes it hard to assess how much effect the recent high-profile crimes may have had on the proposed new policy. It's possible that the Ministry of Justice has been reviewing these things for years and is only now ready to submit changes to the Diet for passage, or that the review of search-and-seizure and sentencing laws spurred by the War on Terrorism has broadened to include all categories of offenders.

It's interesting that police powers are so delimited in the case of juvenile offenders. (I do realize, BTW, that sentencing guidelines affect judicial powers, not police powers, but I'm not really all that surprised about the way the institutional system is set up.) The Japanese police are famous for their liberal use of pressure tactics on suspects and, naturally and not unrelatedly, a confession rate that's about as high as the purity of Ivory soap. I suppose minors under 14 are treated differently, or at least the law is different.

Eight years ago today, I landed in Japan for the first time for a year-long program.

And I've lived here ever since. You just never know how things are going to work out, do you?

Sadly but not unexpectedly, a fifth worker injured in the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant accident a few weeks ago has died in the ICU of multiple-organ failure. His first daughter had just been born in May. I was going to say that I hoped he never knew what hit him, but the article says that despite being burned over 80% of his body, he escaped from the site of the pipe break on his own power (自力で). The poor guy. My father was burned in a pretty nasty accident at the steel plant when I was little. I don't remember it; he just described later going in and having the wounds scrubbed with wire brushes so they wouldn't scar over (this was the '70's); that sounded bad enough. Fortunately, one of the eleven injured workers was released on Tuesday, so maybe there's some hope for the remaining five.

The Japanese bid for permanent membership on the UN Security Council has been moving along, too. Minister of Foreign Affairs Yoriko Kawaguchi spoke to one of Kofi Annan's underlings a few days ago, and Prime Minister Koizumi announced today that the petition (I assume that's what it formally is) will go ahead with no promise to amend Article 9 of the constitution appended. I hope things work out.

Maybe this is why my Atsushi has such contempt for The Asashi Shimbun. One of its op-eds today is by a veteran correspondent about Japan-China relations, which is a topic that certainly demands attention. I'm not so sure the "high-minded" approach recommended by Yoichi Funabashi has legs, though:

This summer, I met a number of Chinese officials and business people in Shanghai and Beijing who are well versed in Japanese affairs. Here's what some of them said:

"China is about to acquire reflexes not to make China-U.S. relations worse than they are from a strategic viewpoint and is learning to be patient. But China-Japan relations show no signs of maturing. I'm worried that they could fall into a bottomless pit." (A senior Chinese Foreign Ministry official)

Yeah, I bet China's "about to acquire reflexes not to make China-U.S. relations worse than they are from a strategic viewpoint"--also known as trying to destabilize and unseat a rival quietly enough to avoid arousing its suspicions. I mean, I'm no hardened geopolitical strategist, but I'm not a Pollyanna, either. Antagonizing China is a dumb idea--can't dispute that. Market liberalization in China, distorted and disfigured as it is by being filtered through the appalling corruption in every crack and crevice of its economic and political systems, will keep taking the country in all kinds of unpredictable directions. As a free market guy, I believe in making people, ideas, and capital mobile. But the unequal way its happening in the PRC is going to continue to cause unrest in the short term that could boil over. We can't afford to ignore that, however much we don't want the place to go back to its old policies.

But Funabashi glosses over the conflicts of principle. With unintentional comedy, he waxes nostalgic about a former high Chinese official:

In advancing such initiatives, we must not forget that China once had a leader who seriously worked at reconciling Japan and China. This person was former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Hu Yaobang, who aimed for political reform and was ousted. In my view, no postwar Chinese politicians had a higher opinion of Japan's postwar peaceful development nor made a greater effort to seek cooperation with Japan than Hu.

Three cheers for Hu, then. But, um, are we supposed to glide over that "aimed for political reform and was ousted" bit? Maybe I'm just tactless, but it kind of caught my eye. Granted that the China of today is not the China of 20 years ago, that doesn't mean that we can just buy that the only factor that makes Japan-Korea and Japan-China relations different is who's received a written apology for Japan's wartime abuses. That kind of thing shouldn't be underestimated, certainly--Japan, China, and Korea all set great store by ceremonial gestures of respect. Recommending that officials not visit the Yasukuni Shrine, or that they make public apologies to China for the occupation, is fine. But Japan and Korea, though no strangers to corruption, still have stable, dynamic free societies that make them more systemically compatible with each other than either is with the PRC. High-mindedness should not be indulged in to a degree that obscures that.

I know I have this tendency to point out Japan-related stories and then kind of drop them. I figure that interested people are probably looking at the same news sources I do. For anyone who's been wondering, though:

Charles Jenkins--US Army deserter, defecter to North Korea, and husband of Japanese abductee Hitomi Soga--is considering making a plea bargain to avoid being imprisoned by the US, with which Japan has a mutual extradition treaty.

Mitsubishi-Tokyo Financial Group and UFJ Holdings are moving ahead with their plan to create the Bank That Ate the World, despite noises from Mitsui-Sumitomo Financial Group about UFJ's broken promises and its own continued desire for a merger (especially the trust banks, I believe). UFJ is in bad shape; MTFG has actually officially repaid its federal bailout, so the idea is for money to start flowing UFJ-ward as soon as possible.

Speaking of banks, Ashikaga Bank (for anyone who knows The Princess Mononoke, that's the same compound as the hero's name: 足利) will be the object of first bank bailout in a few years. Ashikaga had bad credit totalling around 36,000,000,000 yen (US $327,000,000). I don't know whether there's a connection, but it's also well-known here as the only Japanese financial institution with normal relations with DPRK banks.

Amritas writes that Arthur Golden's book Memoirs of a Geisha is going to be made into a movie. Now that it's mentioned, I'm surprised it didn't happen long ago, when the book was an event.

Not that I'm sad the movie hasn't been made or eager to see it once it is. I hated that freakin' book. And for once, I'm not heaping the usual Japan specialist's disdain on someone who didn't get things right. Golden has a lot of experience in Japan, by all accounts--and while the cutesy, contrived is-it-fact-or-fiction controversy was annoying, there were many passages that seemed genuinely revelatory of contours in Japanese thinking. (I should note, though, that the book is set in Kyoto and all my experience in Japan has been here in the Tokyo-Yokohama area.)

No, what I detested about Memoirs of a Geisha were two things. One was its prose. People writing about Japan or in the voices of Japanese characters just can't stop themselves from giving each word equal rhythmic weight. You know, that every-syllable-is-a-cherry-blossom-petal-floating-softly-to-the-surface-of-the-lake -while-a-crane-glides-by monotone that's supposed to convey Zen-like contemplativeness, or something. There are writers whom it's hard to translate without slipping into that, even if you try to put some gusto into it; Kawabata Yasunari is notorious for being difficult that way, for example. In Golden's case, he was probably just giving the paying customers what they want out of their Japan fantasies.

I'd imagine that's the source of my second problem with the book, also. That is, Golden breaks faith with his readers from the very first paragraph:

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so...was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon." I expect you might put down your teacup and say, "Well, now, which was it? Was it the best or the worst? Because it can't possibly have been both!" Ordinarily I'd have to laugh at myself and agree with you.

Surely Golden could reasonably assume that the way many in his book's potential readership were introduced to the very concept of the great novel was through reading Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities in junior high school (at least, those of us who managed to squeak through before Dickens was thrown over for Toni Morrison). It's hard to follow Sayuri into the world of the geisha when one is involuntarily giggling at the thought of putting down one's chocolate (dutifully fussed over by four servants, of course) with a rattle and demanding, "Well, now, which was it? The best of times or the worst of times? Wisdom or foolishness? Come on! Belief or incredulity? Which, then? Huh? HUH?"

But even for people who don't remember their Dickens, this opening is a micalculation. It's exactly because we've all felt simultaneously happy and sad, or triumphant and frustrated, that we go to novelists. The great ones, from Dickens to Austen to Melville, help us sort out and interpret and contextualize our own conflicts. The lesser-but-fun ones, like Agatha Christie, entertain us by turning human conflict into puzzle or drama. But whatever you're looking for in a novel, contradictory feelings are part of it. This passage requires you to confront, consciously, the certainly that Golden thinks either you or his own narrator is a simpleton. And that's before you even turn the first page.

Of course, things get worse from there. Golden can't be content to get some sexy good fun out of the fact that he's writing about geisha. Whenever something amusingly trashy happens--the heavy-handed way our heroine's rival descends from being one of the most popular and classiest performers to being a prostitute in the gutter is only the most obvious example--you're not allowed to just enjoy the pulpy soap-operaness. Golden has to have Sayuri jerk back into that reflective tone that signals Mysterious Oriental Wisdom, as if she'd taken a wrong turn and ended up in The Joy Luck Club.

All in all, an annoying read. The movie might actually be an improvement if it just gives way to stereotypes and, without asking to be taken seriously, titillates people for an hour or two.

Florida isn't the only place being hammered by bad weather. Typhoon 15 has been pounding western Japan; 5 people have been killed and 2 are missing. Actually, that was as of 6 p.m., so the number may be higher now. Luckily, Atsushi's city is getting wind and rain but is on the periphery of the storm. Let's hope there are no more casualties. Japan is, of course, mountainous; many areas are prone to mudslides.

Speaking of destructive forces, the juche ideal is doing its usual sterling job of keeping the people of North Korea fed and secure...so much so that yet again, 15 people have entered the South Korean embassy in Beijing seeking asylum. (BTW, there's a word for escaping from North Korea that...I think it existed before, but I've never seen it used in Japanese newspapers to refer to anything else: 脱北　["escape to the north"]. Desperation to get out of that hellhole is such a fixture of the news that it essentially has its own dedicated kanji compound.)

So it looks as if the recently announced US troop realignment in Europe and Asia will affect Korea but not Japan. (That second link goes to The Daily Yomiuri, which doesn't have separate URL's for each article. It's the one headlined "Govt Unfazed over Changes," and I was just lucky that I guessed which changes they were talking about.) Well, apparently, Korea and the US are "consulting" about the proposal to decrease by 12500 the number of armed forces personnel (currently 37000) in Korea and have come to a provisional agreement. The Asahi says that the number of soldiers stationed here may actually increase. The Yomiuri article also contains this comforting passage:

In the talks, the Japanese side repeatedly emphasized that the most important thing was to maintain the deterrent effect of U.S. forces in the region.

Even if U.S. forces in East Asia are reduced, a Defense Agency official said, "it's unlikely the realignment will prompt North Korea to cause a military emergency."

But there's also the PRC to worry about, especially since it's been making noises again over Taiwan's attempts to join the UN (or rejoin, since as CNN notes, the Chinese seat was taken from Taiwan and given to the Mao-era mainland in 1971).

Narita and Kansai International Airports are talking about tightening up security again. They're going to create a single intelligence center to deal with information on illegal entrants and, presumably, terrorist suspects. This is a good thing; you wouldn't expect it in a country with such a highly-developed bureaucracy, but coordination among agencies (and departments with agencies) vertically is not something Japanese organizational structures are strong in. In my experience, the people who work at departures/immigration are very thorough, but I have little trouble believing that the information they work with on actual people is very scattershot. (As a point of reference, there were 8000 people denied entrance at those two airports last year, up 9% from 2002.) Let's hope the new body devotes itself to addressing the problem and doesn't get caught up in the cycle of finding new ways to score and spend appropriations.

BTW, I haven't really heard anything about the case of the al Qaeda associate they think might have been money laundering and setting up a cell in Niigata last year.

Colin Powell follows Richard Armitage's remarks last month:

"We understand the importance of Article 9 to the Japanese people and why it's in your Constitution," he said in an interview with The Asahi Shimbun and other Japanese media representatives here.

"But at the same time, if Japan is going to play a full role on the world stage and become a full active participating member of the Security Council and have the kinds of obligations that it would pick up as a (council) member, then Article 9 would have to be examined in that light."

Powell added, however, the decision is "absolutely, entirely up to the Japanese people to decide because it is in your Constitution, and the United States would never presume to offer an opinion."

I don't know. That sounds like an opinion to me. It's not an order, perhaps, but it's a pretty clear recommendation. Not that I think there's anything wrong with that. Renouncing aggression, by a country that had just tried to take over half the neighboring continent and had a known history of belligerence, was a good thing for the post-War constitution. At that point, Japan's job was to take its place among free societies.

Of course, we want any free society to be committed, as Prime Minister Koizumi said at his war commemoration speech last week, to a world without war. But times have changed. Japan is rich and influential and is a possible target for terrorists. The US is still its protector, but we may be planning to shift forces out of Asia. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong have become the Tiger Economies (and the former two have democratized, while the last remains freer than the Chinese mainland). And the PRC has awakened from its Mao-era economic disasters and is showing renewed geopolitical ambitions.

You know, it's funny. When you live in Japan, this little row of rocks at the edge of the Pacific, you suddenly realize that China is a VERY LARGE country. From the viewpoint of the US, China is an ocean away. It's big, but we're big, too. We do have a neighbor of larger land area to the north, sure, but Canada has always been an ally and has a very low comparative population. When looking at a globe or map means reflexively putting that "You are here" sign in Tokyo, South Korea and Japan start to look like morsels being dangled in front of the Red Chinese. (And I mean right in front, since most of China's power centers are in its east-central region.)

Yes, I'm overdramatizing--and I'm leaving out the even larger Russia, though the farawayness of Moscow and St. Petersburg and the vast wilderness of Siberia make it seem less psychologically threatening--but the point remains. It's all very well for Japan to resolve that it won't just up and start wars to take over more territory...I'm sorry...to liberate Asians from their Western oppressors, just because it's feeling neighborly. It's another thing to say that "self-defense" is practicable if Japan is always going to wait until existing conflicts actually arrive on its shores.

It's nice for Japan's UN delegation to keep submitting nuclear disarmament resolutions, but surely it hasn't escaped anyone's notice that the PRC and North Korea were among the abstainers when last year's model came to a vote. I think we could all "express concern about the existence of a black market in nuclear weapons technology," but now that it exists, something with a bit more teeth than "concern" will be needed to deal with it.

(BTW, I know I've said this a billion times, but I never, ever get used to the fact that North Korea is allowed to be a member of the UN.)

Clear we-had-to-do-it combat to protect citizens or infrastructure will probably always be hard to distinguish perfectly from the use of defense issues as a smokescreen for securing access to strategic resources. But officially remaining a sitting duck--even if, as most analysts seem to believe, Japan has been for years quietly developing the ability to project force outside the archipelago--may be erring excessively in the direction of avoiding the appearance of evil. The structure of the UN Security Council is decades out of date, but as long as it exists, it would be wise for Japan to position itself for permanent membership.

Susanna Cornett sent me a link to this Instapundit mini-post about the latest spate of violence committed by Japanese children, and she flatteringly asked me for my thoughts on the issue. She also gave me her own interpretation, which I mostly agree with and will discuss below.

First, though, I'd like to note that, when you've lived in Japan for a while, you start to notice that the same stories surface in American news publications periodically. One of these is, "After suffering years of discrimination and sexual harassment, Japanese working women are laying claim to their rights to be promoted on merit, to work even after they have children, not to be considered eye candy for visitors, and not to have to arrive two hours before the men to sweep, dust, and make tea."

A second (the writer Alex Kerr had a whole segment on this in his last book) is, "Japanese youths are known for their school uniforms and conservative grooming, but a recent wave of adventurous teenagers is making dyed hair and body art the funky new norm."

Another is, "Unlike their antecedents, the latest crop of slatternly female J-pops stars write their own lyrics and can actually sing!"

Still another is, "Financial analysts have been shocked and horrified to find that XYZ Bank's bad debts may total several times the figure it released at the end of the last fiscal year, which raises new questions about the viability of the Japanese economic recovery."

And yes, yet another is, "The famed obedience culture in Japanese schools appears to be giving way as disturbed pre-teens take up knives to avenge bullying and insults."

Now, of course, none of these things is outright untrue or not worth reporting on. The problem is that journalists like to write stories that read like great novels: setup, conflict, technical climax, dramatic climax, resolution. That predisposes them toward pushing the never before seen! angle, even if the same reporter wrote essentially the same story for the same magazine two years ago. It also gives them a tendency to leave out facts and factors that don't fit the most compelling narrative arc.

The WaPo article Instapundit linked to is a good compilation of the more grisly child-on-child crimes that have captured national attention here over the last decade. Here's Susanna's take on it and on Glenn Reynolds's wife's piece:

The newspapers, as well as the communities
they're reporting on, seem to feel that it's about anomie (a sense of
disconnectedness from society) resulting from lack of obvious parental
affection and the violent video games/movies. Glenn's wife points to
building frustration and no one to listen, also a facet of anomie. My
brother (not in a post, in a private conversation) thought that it was the
influence of Westernization (the bad bits of it). I tend to think it's a
crumbling national culture in the face of changes, where traditional social
controls have lost much of their power but nothing has swept in to replace
it - which is actually a fairly classic setup for Durkheimian anomie.
Westernization *is* part of the force that's crumbling the old ways, but I
think it's also from the inside. And I think part of that is the lack of an
internalized moral code based on belief in a spiritual being (God), so that
when the exterior culture crumbles there's nothing inside to offer moral
guidance - so you see things like the prostitution for new purses mention in
the WaPo article, as well as the obviously horrific violence.

I think the closest we can come to a complete explanation is a synthesis of the points Susanna talks about here. (Well, I take exception to one thing. As a Christian, she understandably sees God as the necessary source of an individual's moral code; as an atheist, I don't agree with that part, though I think belief in God is more a positive than a negative force in most people's lives in practice. In any case, Japanese religion doesn't have the single Creator with a big, benevolent plan for mankind that we're used to in Judeo-Christianity. You have the various nature deities, and the spirits of the ancestors, and the manifestations of Buddha, and you do what they say because...well, they're wiser and more powerful than you are.)

The post-War Japanese educational system developed to go with the employment system developed to go with the regulatory system. After WWII, the Japanese needed a national goal, and economic advancement became it. This served two main purposes: It rebuilt the wrecked infrastructure and gave the returning soldiers something to do. The idea was to turn citizens into interchangeable units by standardizing their behavior and pushing them towards the mean in intelligence and achievement. That way, the country as a whole could move forward by allocating human resources where needed without impediment. So responsibility for childrearing was in many ways ceded to the school system. Children went to regular public school classes and then cram school. Fathers worked long hours of overtime. Mothers took care of the households (often including in-laws). Everyone was overworked and sleep-deprived, but the children could see prosperity increasing around them, and they could see how proud and purposeful their parents were. Students could see themselves as the next generation to score world-class achievements: the textile-metallurgy boom, the single-minute exchange of dies, the Walkman.

Now that Japan is no longer poised to take over the global economy, the incentives to conform beyond normal limits don't exist for a lot of kids. But the school system hasn't adjusted its relentless do-what-you're-told-do-what-you're-told message. Children aren't taught how to be resilient--the practical principles of morals and ethics that they can adapt to different situations with a little imagination and goodwill added. Additionally, many of them aren't home enough (remember, 2/3 of Japanese students go to cram school, meaning that they may get home at about 9 or 10 every night) for their parents to teach them good behavior through repetition. So when the vulnerable kids start to go off the rails, there isn't much to brake them. Naturally, even normal children aren't infinitely malleable, but most of them are pretty sturdy. The Japanese people I know wouldn't willingly go through their K-12 experiences again; but despite the hazards along the way, they ultimately became lively, centered, responsible adults.

And yet, to read reports in the Western press, you get the sense that the streets are a hair's breadth away from being mobbed by hysterical, X-acto knife-brandishing teens. It's that aspect that I wish they'd rein in a bit. Japan has social problems that I don't think are going to improve before they get worse for a while, but I don't see society collapsing. For one thing, the 30% of the economy that's world-class competitive is still robust enough to make up for the 70% that serves the domestic market and is plagued by duplication of effort, redundant personnel, and red tape. For another thing, families are slowly finding the benefits in not having Dad ready to drop dead from overwork and Mom driving herself nuts over whether the chambray of her jumper will meet the approval of the rest of the neighborhood housewives. (These are not exaggerations, BTW.)

Which is to say, Japan is still affluent enough to provide the average student incentive to study hard--not to study like a maniac, but to do well--with the prospect of making a decent living when he finishes school. There's no more direct conveyor belt from college to company to easy retirement, to be sure, but most people know they're unlikely to end up in tent villages. And families are rediscovering what it's like to be involved in the rearing of their children. This transition is proceeding in fits and starts, and there are always dangers involved (the economic threat from China is the most obvious), but I do think it's happening.

The big issue, again, is that Japan has not set itself up to help the most emotionally vulnerable children deal with pressure, and now that there are more of them, the problem is correspondingly larger. I'd love to have a fix for that one, but I think that what we can realistically expect is for changes to the relationship between schooling and child-rearing--and therefore improvements--to happen very slowly.

Added at 21:38: The latest crime just happened Sunday. A 15-year-old boy found that the classmate he wanted to stab wasn't home, so he murdered the classmate's mother instead.

Sheesh. I was just using this revelation the other day as a way to point out, for those who might not have heard, Japan's history of mismanagement of nuclear facilities and materials. I had no idea the matter would become topical again so soon:

経済産業省原子力安全・保安院に入った連絡によると、9日午後3時半ごろ、関西電力美浜原発３号機（加圧水型、82.6万キロワット）のタービン建屋内で蒸気漏れが発生した。保安院によると、11人が負傷。地元消防によると、うち5人が心肺停止状態という。

According to a message received by METI's Nuclear Power Safety and Security Commission, a steam leak developed (3:30 p.m.) in a turbine in Reactor 3 (82.6 kilowatts...the design is described as being "pressurized water," which I'm sure has some specialized English term it corresponds to) of Kansai Electric's Mihama Power Station. According to the Commission, 11 people have been wounded. According to the local Fire Department, of those, the heart and lungs of five have stopped functioning.

It looks as if the steam contains no radiation, and the Nikkei is reporting that four of the employees mentioned above (all from an outfit called Kiuchi Keisoku, which my cursory search says is, not surprisingly, a machine maintenance service firm） are dead. It's hard to tell what might have led up to the problem, but one thing is clear: The screens of those monitoring the turbine didn't pick up any anomalies, and weren't registering the leak even after the accident. It's fortunate that the danger to the surrounding community seems non-existent. On the other hand, the number of deaths and injuries is pretty high already, and we still don't know whether the other seven are okay.

Added at 18:24: The story's already on Reuters, which reports that the leak was caused by insufficient coolant.

Added on 11 August: The pipe that ruptured hadn't been inspected for 28 years.

Added on 16 August: J Bowen at No Watermelons Allowed (a sentiment with which I concur heartily) has posted a fuller explanation of the mechanics of the steam pipes and their relation to the reactor at the Mihama plant. It expands on the information in Toren's comment here.

Well, Japan just won the Asia Cup, 3-1 against China. Let's hope the players and fans aren't dismembered on their way to the airport.

Here we go again. It's been a few years since our last Keystone Kops-ish nuclear power screw-up, so I guess we're about due for one. At least this time, the problem has been discovered before anything went kablooie:

A former employee of a supplier of concrete-grade gravel to be used in turbines in Reactor 4 of Chubu Electric's Hamaoka Nuclear Power Station has made an internal report to the Nuclear Power Safety and Security Commission of METI (the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry), saying that he falsified reactivity test results on alkaline aggregate used to guarantee quality control in the gravel. The commission has begun investigations.

Okay, I can read that, but I admit that I only took a year of high school chemistry and don't know what it really means. But you don't have to be a nuclear engineer to understand that "falsified test results" + "guarantee quality control" = uh-oh. The nuclear power industry in Japan is notorious for lax enforcement of safety standards and endless cover-ups. Five years ago, two employees at the Tokaimura uranium processing facility were in a rush and dumped too much enriched uranium solution into a tank, setting off an uncontrolled fission reaction. (As a coworker said to me the day of the accident, you couldn't trust such jackasses to make Lipton onion soup.) Several hundred people were variously evacuated or imprisoned at home or school. It took hours to locate an appropriate counter to measure how much radiation had escaped. All told, several hundred thousand people may have been endangered to different degrees.

But the whole thing was played down. My favorite part came several days later when--I'll never forget this as long as I live--one of the sub-minister types from MITI (it was still the Ministry of International Trade and Industry then) was packed off to Tokaimura to sample the local produce, stagily smacking his lips over how fresh and succulent the melon was. The implication was that, since he didn't begin glowing immediately, no one had anything to worry about.

Mind you, this had been the most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl. That doesn't mean it was at the same level as Chernobyl, of course; it wasn't nearly. But it wasn't as if two janitors had accidentally mixed ammonia with Clorox in a bucket, either. No one really knows how extensive the safety and accountability problems are in the nuclear industry here. Happily, while Japan has more accidents than most other countries that use nuclear power, they're still pretty few and far between. One can only hope that controls are firmed up sufficiently before something big-time disastrous happens. It'd be unwise to bank on it, though.

In about five hours, it will be exactly 59 years since the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Every year, I feel deeply conflicted on 6 and 9 August, but for the most part, my sentiment is as follows:

I love the Japanese people. When I began studying Japanese freshman year in college, I hadn't the faintest clue that I'd end up making my life here, but I did. In personal terms, people have been overwhelmingly kind to me. In general terms, Japan, for all its systemic faults, is one of the freest countries in the world. Its citizens come and go as they please, its least bureaucracy-bound manufacturers regularly bring the technology of consumer goods to dizzying new heights, and there is no fear of being carted off by the police for criticizing its politicians on the streets. And with freedom comes prosperity--even after 14 years of economic woes, Japan is dumbfoundingly rich, clean, safe.

When I think of people immediately after the bombings, their faces obliterated by heat, expending their little remaining energy to bow in gratitude for the water volunteers brought to their lips (one of the most famous A-bomb memorials is inscribed with 水, the character for "water," because that's what so many victims cried out for), my heart aches. The same when...you know, bodies of water feature very prominently in Japanese literature, as they do the world over, as sources of refreshment and sustenance. Imagining people set afire, stampeding into rivers and lakes to cool themselves, only to find the water boiling hot, makes me cry. As an American who places the highest value on individuals, I wish we hadn't had to cause such suffering to anyone at all who wasn't irredeemably evil.

But we did have to. Emperor Hirohito was ready to surrender, but he had military leaders who were plotting to intercept his proclamation, and no one on the American side could be sure how long rank-and-file Japanese soldiers and citizens would keep fighting. That there were other, more unsavory motivations for dropping the atom bomb (such as scientific curiosity about its effects) is hard to dispute. There probably isn't any such thing as a guileless decision during wartime, for that matter. I wish the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs a peaceful eternal rest as much as anyone. But I'm glad America did what it took to win.

In a comment to a previous post, someone mentioned a report about displays of anti-Chinese sentiment at Japanese soccer matches. Not surprisingly, two are doing this tango. From a story headlined Anti-Japan feeling evident at Asian Cup:

After the game, a crowd of people surrounded a Japanese student wearing a Japan team jersey and began to verbally abuse him, telling him, "Go home, now!"

He was then pelted with sunflower seeds the Chinese had brought with them for a snack.

I'm glad they didn't use rocks, trust me. But I have to say that throwing sunflower seeds sounds like something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Let this shower of trace minerals, cholesterol-fighting lipids, and essential amino acids signify our unutterable contempt for you, you...archipelago-dweller!" And I think the complaint lodged with the Chinese government by the Japanese government sounds kind of silly as rendered by the Mainichi English edition, though the original makes it a little clearer that the goal was to get the PRC to prevent things from escalating into violence, not just to express pique at being booed.

Sports fans are the same worldwide, of course. I'm not saying they're all hooligans, just that there's nothing particularly Chinese or Japanese about passions that run high at soccer matches. Whether this sort of thing helps to defuse hostilities or ratchets them up is an arguable point. It probably depends on the circumstances. In any case, both Chinese and Japanese nationalism have been known to be unpredictable forces in the past. Given the shifting balances of economic and military power here on the Pacific Rim, we can only hope the belligerence stops at fistfuls of salty snacks.

Added at 19:45: I can't imagine how I missed it, especially since he pointed the issue out earlier here, but Meaty Fly put up a link-rich post about this issue a few days ago, tying it to the developing Sino-Japanese competition for resources. His update today is also more detailed than what I wrote here. Finally, CNN has posted an article that summarizes the current soccer-related goings-on.

BTW, I assume most of you know what angers Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chinese when some Japanese politician talks about how "regrettable" something that happened during the War was, but for those who've wondered: The specific word translated as "regret" varies from case to case, but 遺憾に思う is the favored expression. If memory serves, that's the phrasing the mayor of Hiroshima used in his widely-protested speech on the 50th anniversary of the A-bombing of that city.

The problem with the word is that it expresses free-floating, non-referential regret; it is not an apology. The tone of his speech was something like having someone who kidnapped and tortured your toddler to death tell you, "I've done some extreme and ill-advised things, and what happened to your child is a very deplorable thing indeed." To add insult to injury, there's still a voluble crew of hard-right Japanese who protest whenever a politician makes a move to apologize to Asia for Japan's wartime actions, reasoning that Japan was liberating the rest of Asia from Euro-American hegemony. You can imagine how much the former comfort women love that. In any case, that's how Japanese politicians who express "regret" generally make diplomatic incidents worse.

Tama Starr has a new article up at Reason about the latest of her hilarious adventures in trying to be an old-school, straight-shooting business owner who gets and retains contracts by, you know, doing good work and being answerable to clients. As you can imagine, she meets adversity at every turn. But she has a great sense of humor about it.

Something that made me laugh, in particular, about this piece:

A bank�s name change provided the tipping point. We sign people love bank mergers. Every sign, canopy, directory, ATM, teller cage, and nameplate has to be replaced -- sometimes, in the spirit of the famous Asiatic Fire Drill, overnight, per schedules set forth in the new company�s new charter.

We residents of Tokyo named Sean Kinsell detest bank mergers, for exactly the reasons laid out above. I'm fortunate enough to have my accounts at a bank (Tokyo-Mitsubishi) that was among the very first to merge after the bursting of the bubble, so its colors and insignia haven't changed since before I moved to Japan. Even so, like everyone else, I use bank signs to navigate around neighborhoods I'm only half-familiar with, and when the most recent merger causes a change, I get lost. Literally. A few years ago, when Mizuho was formed, I spent the next few weeks walking blithely past the corner on Aoyama Avenue where I turn to get to my chiropractor's office. Before then, I'd always gone right (without having to think about it) at the pinkish sign for Fuji Bank. The change to Mizuho's stolid navy blue meant that my sub-conscious didn't know when to turn off. Several times, I nearly went all the way to the next subway station without realizing it.

In any case, though, Starr's article is about becoming an officially approved Permanent Victim-owned company. It's not quite as funny/frightening as her 1996 article about compliance with various "equal opportunity" guidelines, but it's a great read, as always.

Possibly my favorite recent economy-related headline: 7月のビール・発泡酒販売、猛暑効果で前年比1割増 (Beer, Other Effervescent Alcoholic Beverages Effective for Dealing with Severe Heat; Sales Rise 10%). Asahi seems to have seen the highest increase when beer alone is considered; teetotalers may be reassured to know that people are also snapping up iced green tea.

On the other hand, this headline is from the tell-us-something-we-don't-know department: Ministry: Staff Took Kickbacks. Well, okay, we didn't know the specific ministry, agency, or amount:

Probe shows 180 million yen was pocketed from payments for checking official documents.

Thirty health ministry employees socked away 180 million yen in public money for department parties, late night cabs and personal use, say sources close to an in-house investigation.

The federal bureaucracy here doesn't attract fundamentally amoral people. But there is, built right into the system, an expectation that top graduates of the elite schools will take lower salaries than they would in the private sector in exchange for perks and, after retirement, the revolving door to a cushy job at one of the semi-public companies that oversee a lot of industries here. The deeply ingrained culture of patronage makes the line between being good to the people you deal with and outright corruption very difficult to draw. I'm pretty sure you can draw it somewhere before 180 million yen (US $1.6 million), though.