The White Peril 白禍

The Yomiuri reports that new Minister of Foreign Affairs Nobutaka Machimura believes* the constitution should be amended in order for Japan to become a permanent member of the UNSC:

"The Constitution should be amended to clearly position Japan's international peace-building activities," Machimura said at the Foreign Ministry. "The Constitution should be reformed because it is better to ensure that no confusion will arise when Japan fulfills its duties as a permanent member (because of a possible conflict between constitutional principles and the position)," he added.

Last week, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced Japan would seek a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council. Koizumi said the nation would be able to become a permanent member without amending the Constitution.

Interesting. It's hard to tell whether that could be a rift-making issue or Machimura is just giving voice to something Koizumi actually wants, too, behind the soothing public talk. The Nikkei print edition--it may be on the web, but I'm too lazy to look it up and happen to have it on top of the recycling pile--ran parallel front-page interviews last Friday with two business leaders on the hot-button constitutional issues. Kakutaro Kitashiro, the chair of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, said when asked about the amendment issue:

Having no military power is a policy that doesn't square with today's international circumstances. Even a secondary school student must sense the mismatch with Article 9 [the article of the constitution that renounces militarism]. Amending the constitution is preferable to just expanding its interpretation.

I'm partial--and not just for Japan--to that sort of thinking, too. Simply loosening the interpretation of Article 9 might seem like a more tactful way for Japan to smooth its way toward open super-powerdom, but there is no way in hell the rest of Asia will be convinced not to have a conniption anyway. Koizumi would probably have to bulldoze the Yasukuni Shrine, not just stop visiting it, to mollify the PRC on that one. But a clearly-worded amendment that gives the government leave to participate in ongoing conflicts but not to launch attacks might, conceivably, play well with others who could join together to lean on China a bit. (Nothing changes, but this time, it would be a good cause. I think the petitions of India, Germany, and Brazil make sense, too.)

Speaking of bargaining with allies, the proposed US troop realignment is still a sticking point (this is from the Yomiuri article again):

Japan has asked that the United States maintain effective deterrence through the Japan-U.S. security alliance in the area surrounding Japan, while reducing the burden on local governments where U.S. military bases are located.

It's not just the non-combat deployment of SDF personnel that has made things touchy with the public; a helicopter crashed in Okinawa two months ago, and the USMC's clampdown on the wreckage was widely perceived as high-handed. The "burden on local governments" referred to above is a bit elliptical, but it probably refers to that sort of thing--the strained relations between US soldiers and the Japanese who live near their bases, I mean, not our helicopters constantly falling out of the sky. Machimura has plenty to pay attention to.
* Like all links to the Yomiuri, this one will expire in a few days; if I forget to search for the Google cache and relink it, feel free to e-mail me.

This is not a good year to live in hurricane or typhoon country: The latest typhoon (Number 21) to hit Japan has once again made landfall in Kyushu. Five people are dead and eighteen missing at this time, but it's expected to have weakened to a temperate zone low-pressure system by tomorrow. Fortunately, there were no big boat accidents; that pushed the death toll to around 40 for one of the storms that hit at the beginning of this month. Atsushi's fine; we talked on the phone as always between 11:30 and midnight. The storm is moving east-northeast, so from Kyushu it's basically moved right over Shikoku and the southwest end of Honshu. We had a lot of rain and wind here in Tokyo, too, but nothing dangerous, though I guess the storm will come closest to us overnight.

Added at 23:55: The final figures are 16 dead and 12 injured, with a great deal of property damage.

Asahi has a new poll (here's the original Japanese version) indicating that voters don't care about Japan Post reform (which is what I should have called it earlier, rather than "Postal Service reform," which makes it sound as if only the handling of the mails were involved). That's interesting, if not all that surprising. It may be that people don't perceive what's at stake in the management of Postal Savings accounts--or it may be that they do but just think the "reforms" aren't going to help and therefore aren't worth fixating on:

Those polled were also asked whether they thought Koizumi would be able to exercise his leadership in realizing privatization of postal services, given that many influential members in the Liberal Democratic Party remain opposed to Koizumi's privatization plan.

About 39 percent said no, while about 37 percent said yes.

So people may understand the import of the issue but feel that nothing substantive can be accomplished. The English version leaves out the part specifically about Heizo Takenaka's new position as head of Japan Post privatization (39% think his appointment was a good idea; 25% do not). Predictably, most people chose pensions/welfare as the most important issues, with more general economic and employment issues next.

One of the big news items here in Japan over the last several months has been the reform and privatization of the Postal Service. I haven't avoided it for fear of boring you--though it's not the sort of topic likely to make you a hit at dinner parties. It's just that there's been so much back-and-forth. It is, though, a very, very important issue here in Japan, because Postal Savings accounts hold a lot of the wealth of Japanese households and put it at the disposal of Ministry of Finance project managers. This editorial (subscription only--sorry) from last week's Nikkei English on-line edition delineates pretty well how things have developed:

The privatization plan will divide Japan Post into four companies respectively operating the mail, savings and insurance services as well as the nationwide network of post offices, but the four operators will remain under the integrated management of a holding company.

The holding company will sell its shares in the savings and insurance units to turn them into private businesses, but it is not clear what percentage of the stock will actually be sold. Moreover, the government will continue to own at least one-third of the holding company, allowing it to maintain its involvement in the savings and insurance companies, at least to some extent, unless the holding company sells its entire interest in them.

The mail and network management entities, which will remain under the full ownership of the holding company, will be required to provide uniform services nationwide in exchange for receiving special treatment, including a continued monopoly in the mail delivery business.

The branch network management company will inherit post offices and workers from Japan Post. The government appears to be intent on ensuring that the other three new postal companies will use the offices and workers of the network firm to protect these politically important jobs. Such forced dependence on the existing post office network will frustrate the new companies' efforts to refashion themselves into more efficient and profitable players.

This scheme — creating an entity to take over Japan Post's infrastructure and virtually forcing the other postal companies to use it — seems to be simply a ploy to avoid radical changes in postal operations while making the reorganization look like a reform, just as the plan adopted to privatize public road corporations based on a two-tier structure was merely a scheme to keep building new roads.

The envisioned savings and insurance companies are unlikely to achieve management independence as long as they are tethered to the infrastructure operator, which will not be freed completely from government control. This is not a formula that lends itself to independent and transparent accounting at the postal companies.

The basic design of the privatization will certainly cause this crucial reform initiative to go awry and it will do nothing to further privatization's primary goal: ending the government's stranglehold on a big chunk of private savings that is causing serious distortions in the financial markets and undermining fiscal discipline. Achieving this goal requires a swift and complete end to the government's involvement in the privatized postal companies.

If you've got a sense of déjà vu here, you may be thinking of what happened to California's energy providers, which taught us all the difference between privatization and deregulation. (And I must note, in fairness, that unlike the USPS, the Japanese Postal Service provides mail handling of pretty much unexceptionable quality.)

Added an hour later: Because I'm distracted by the Vertigo DVD and am also a scatterbrained idiot, I forgot to note why I'm finally bringing up the Postal Service reform in the first place: It's what drove the selection of new appointees in the cabinet reshuffle Prime Minister Koizumi announced today. Heizo Takenaka, who's going to end up with more joint appointments than Stanley Fish soon, will still be in charge of economic policy and fiscal administration, and he's also been named the head of Postal Service privatization and reform. That's a new, ad hoc post, of course.

Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, who has distinguished herself largely by not having a big mouth like her predecessor Makiko Tanaka, is outgoing; she'd been reappointed in the last cabinet change. Her replacement is MP Nobutaka Machimura, who apparently has lots of connections in the US. He was Minister of Education back when (1) that's what the position was called and (2) there was last a flap over Japan's government-approved social science textbooks. More directly related to diplomacy, he was State Secretary of Foreign Affairs under...uh...Obuchi? Japanese PM's sprang up and died like Mayflies in the late '90's, so I don't remember. I wonder whether he was picked not just for his US ties but also because he's somehow seen as being a good figure to guide the Japanese push for permanent membership on the UN Security Council? I mean, he would almost have to have been, but I haven't seem him cast in that light in the preliminary reports.

Okay, I am so totally going to go to the office right after I post this, but Meaty Fly is resurfacing occasionally and noted, a week ago, that an advisory panel to PM Koizumi recommended that China be regarded as a potential threat. I can't imagine who in his right mind would think otherwise, but as MF says, it's the sort of thing that is guaranteed to get the PRC pissed. President Hu also told a Japanese official this week that visits by Koizumi and his cabinet to the Yasukuni Shrine are an obstacle that must be resolved to improve China-Japan relations.

See, this is the sort of murder we used to have in Japan before people started flipping out and doing spooky serial-killer/Se7en stuff:

A former nurse was sentenced to death on Friday for murdering the husbands of two other nurses to receive payouts on life insurance policies taken out on the victims.

Japan has what I believe is the largest life insurance market in the world--I'm pretty sure the UK's is second, but I may have them reversed. The offing of a spouse to get the cash used to be the sort of killing you'd read about once every few weeks. Now there seems to be some sort of competition on to see who can come up with the most motiveless crime and most macabre corpse disposal, in which climate you're almost tempted to applaud these women for hewing to tradition by committing murders with a point of some kind and trying to make them look like accidents.

Almost.

The DPRK may be preparing to test-launch another missile:

The United States and Japan have detected signs that North Korea is preparing to launch a ballistic missile capable of reaching almost anywhere in Japan, Japanese government sources said on Thursday.

The preparations were detected after the reclusive communist state refused to take part in a fourth round of six-party talks on ending its nuclear ambitions and said it would never give up its nuclear deterrent.

Tokyo and Washington had detected the signs after analyzing data from reconnaissance satellites and radio traffic, the Japanese government sources said.

The Nikkei Japanese edition also reports that the North Korean central news agency was published as saying, "If the US brings about a nuclear war (on the Korean Peninsula), it is inevitable that US bases in Japan will draw Japan into the same nuclear war as well.*" Don't you love that? The DPRK regime was just sitting there south of the Yalu, minding its own business, getting on with the quiet domestic tasks of deciding which citizens to imprison and which to let starve to death from its incompetent economic policies, when the US swaggered by and forced it to get all bellicose.

Fortunately, no one's certain that there's a launch planned; everyone's just on watch. We'll see. As far as the blow it might deal to the six-member talks goes, who seriously believes the DPRK would have been persuaded to give up its missiles, anyway? It has a notorious record for breaking agreements. I don't think negotiations should be stopped, of course--things could get really ugly if everyone openly gave up speaking to each other--but I think the disruption of this particular round of talks is less significant than having yet another show of animosity in the region.
* Lit., "US bases in Japan will become a fuse that draws the flame of that nuclear war to Japan, too." Evocative metaphor, huh?

Sometimes Amritas is too nice. He quotes a book by one Marie Nishimori called Warning! Never Imitate Him: A Collection of Bushie's English, which is--how's this for a novel idea that'll have you rolling in the aisles?--a collection of the President's solecisms with pointers on how to avoid them.

Amritas chivalrously refrained from pointing out what's on the lady's homepage, but if you look at the header, you can get a sense of her (unsurprising) politics. (Given Japan's notorious environmental policies--what one can only hope are the most destructive in the developed world--she's got her work cut out for her at home. Be that as it may, Nishimori wants the Japanese reading public to know that Bush sucks.) Her way of selling her book is this:

ブッシュの school yard bully「学校のいじめっ子」的政治にムカついてる方も
テッド・ニュージェントが日本人を Japs と呼んでることを知り怒ってる方も
単に英語をお勉強したい方も
この本を読んで背筋が寒くなりながら爆笑しましょう！

For those who are sick of Bush's schoolyard bully approach to politics...
For those who were angered when Ted Nugent called the Japanese "Japs"...
For those who simply want to study English...
Read this book, and you'll simultaneously laugh out loud and get the chills!

Ted Nugent? I haven't read the book, so it's possible that Ms. Nishimori pads out the Bush part with an excursus into anti-Japanese, anti-Gaia talk of all kinds. But taking things at face value, WTF does something Nugent said on some radio program a few years ago have to do with Bush? Yes, he's backed Bush for reelection. And Kim Jong-il hopes Kerry wins. So what? There are only two real choices in a US Presidential election; each candidate is going to have legions of supporters who did things he did not endorse. Unless we know that Bush heard of the incident and reacted along the lines of, "Japs? Heh-heh, that's a good one. Have to use that some time," it's irrelevant. And please tell me Ms. Nishimori and other lefties would be wringing their hands over Nugent's Lenny Bruce-like litany of racial slurs if he'd come out in favor of Kerry.

Sometimes, I simultaneously laugh out loud and get the chills myself when I think of my political position these days. I'm not really one of those people whose politics changed dramatically after 9/11. It's not that I was a fount of wisdom about terrorist threats before then, mark you; but I was a Reason-reading guy who believed (living in Asia has a funny way of doing this to you) entitlement programs were sucking energy away from the federal government's core responsibilities, including strong national defense. And of course, I'm "socially liberal," which isn't a term I'm fond of but gets the point across.

I've supported Bush in the WOT, and I think he's a sincere and likable person. But I'm not a fan. I'm from a working-class family and got into an Ivy League school on my brain; I studied hard to learn an Asian language and majored in comparative literature. Legacy kids like Bush push all my buttons, trust me. And no, the fact that he overcame his typical rich-kid problems with drink and dissolution doesn't get me all aquiver with admiration at how well he's redeemed himself.

Still and all, I was brought up to recognize when I'm being childish, and I know that my feelings about Bush's background don't necessarily say anything about his performance as President. There's plenty to criticize--he's offered to spend so much federal money that I sometimes wonder why he doesn't just go the whole way and order the USAF to drop silver dollars from helicopters over all US population centers--but to get to the point of criticizing it usefully, you have to stop foaming at the mouth and start paying attention to the policies. Or not even always policies, exactly: There are potentially troubling questions about the way the Bush family exercises its influence, even if you accept that influence-peddling is how old rich families operate. But you have to look at facts and tease out their implications dispassionately if you expect people to trust your interpretations, and almost no one on the left seems capable of that anymore. And then, of course, you eventually have to confront the question of why Kerry is a better alternative, which is not a task I would wish on my worst enemy at this stage. It's not surprising that some enviro-nut (if her name is pronounced ma-ree and not ma-ri-eh, as it appears from the way she spells it in Japanese, she may be a foreigner or half-Japanese, BTW) can't make a coherent case against Bush, and it's not her responsibility to push effectively for Kerry.

But I wish someone could. While I plan to vote for Bush, I'd prefer to do so knowing that I've had access to a variety of the best opposing arguments and have dealt squarely with them. I don't mind making a choice I'm not 100% enthusiastic about as long I know what trade-offs I'm making. Unfortunately, "He speaks ungrammatically, and Ted Nugent likes him!" appears to be about as good as the opposition is going to get.

The Ministry of Education and Culture is apparently doing a bang-up job of teaching elementary school children our place in the universe:

When 348 fourth- to sixth-year elementary school children from four prefectures including Hokkaido and Nagano were asked to choose one of two options to correctly describe the earth's relationship to the sun, only 56 percent correctly answered that the earth revolved around the sun. A total of 42 percent said the sun revolved around the earth.

The survey also asked 720 children from six prefectures about why the shape of the moon appeared to change. Less than half of them (47 percent) correctly chose the answer "Because looking from the earth, the positional relationship between the moon and the sun changes."

When the students were told, "Name the celestial object that revolves around the earth like a satellite," 39 percent answered, "the moon" while 27 percent chose "mars" and 24 percent said "the sun."

Now, the lesson here to my mind isn't that the vaunted Japanese educational system is a total sham. It's that it isn't the perfect engine for producing uniformly informed citizens that starry-eyed (heh-heh) collectivists of all stripes would have us believe. The sample size, it is true, is not very big. Also, the researchers tested children in some of the less-affluent prefectures (though it's possible that they went to schools in high-income areas within those prefectures--I haven't seen). But that shouldn't matter much if the apologists for the Monbusho are correct and the national Compulsory Education Curriculum is bringing the fruits of good central planning to all corners of the state, et c.

BTW, I think this is my favorite part:

The associate professor said there was a problem with the current curriculum introduced in 2000 that gives a Ptolemaic system-type explanation that only looks at the movements of the sun, moon and stars as observed from the earth. He said changes should be made when the curriculum is next revised.

I'm pretty sure that even in third and fifth grade, we were taught by the planetarium director--in simplified terms, obviously--about the Ptolemies and the Greeks in Greece.

And why they were...um...WRONG, even though their explanations made the most sense based on the best information available to them. Maybe Japan is saving that part for junior high school now.

Tomorrow I leave for Kyushu for the three-day weekend. Looking forward to it; it's the first time I'll be seeing Atsushi's new place. The weather also seems to have cleared some after the typhoon-hammering they've had there this summer. Still like an oven, though, apparently. But that's okay. Atsushi bought a new car when he moved, and this'll be the first time I'm seeing it, too. I mean, I don't expect to be surprised at what it looks like. He's the kind who likes what he likes, so he basically bought this year's model of his old car, in an even more conservative color. But that's one of his charms. Another is that he's big-time sexy when he's driving.

Unfortunately, one of the things Kyushu is famous for is tarako, or cod eggs. Friends have asked for it as an　お土産 (o-miyage, a gift consisting of a local specialty that you bring from home to friends abroad or bring back for the homefolks when you go on vacation). I like regular old fins-and-scales fish, but (possibly as a vestige of having been brought up following the Levitical health laws) I don't share the Japanese belief about seafood that the more it looks like a sci-fi movie monster, the more of a delicacy it is. However, I will be flying back from Kyushu with vacuum-packed cod roe in my luggage because...well, my friends refuse to be content with the usual tasteless cream-filled pastry that seems to be the "specialty" of most other places in Japan. One of these days, I'll tell you about the time I bought and airmailed 50 jars of farm-made apple butter from my hometown as an o-miyage. After that experience, I decided I don't love my friends quite that much.

Anyway, hope everyone who's been in the direct line of a giant storm is okay, and hope everyone else has a great weekend.

Amritas has got my number:

"[O]ppress their own people"? The average AmeriKKKan is oppressed by the fundamentalist fascist Racist� RepubliKKKan Reich. That's why Sean is in Japan. Why do you think Sarah is really in Germany?

It's true. I moved to Japan to escape racism and xenophobia.

Actually, not often, but every once in a while, someone does just baldly ask me, in the middle of a political discussion, "Okay, so if you're so damned rah-rah-America, why do you live abroad?" It's a fair enough question, I guess. I haven't gone back to America because I'm happy where I am and think I'm doing something worthwhile. I'm in a relationship with the MOMD. I have great friends. My job doesn't involve rescue work or treating lepers, but I really do get to feel as if I'm helping people discover their competencies and achieve their goals. It's a nice plot of the garden of civilization to be working in. And Tokyo, for all its flaws, is a wonderful city and suits my personality. Why disrupt any of that?

Oh, and as a sidelight: One good thing about Japan is that this whole Dan Rather memo thing could never have happened as it did. I mean, you can definitely picture NHK doing exactly the same thing--in fact, NHK would probably have generated the memos in its own newsroom.

But you wouldn't have the audience standing around gaping with disbelief about it. In Japan, everyone knows that 75% of what you see on the news is partial baloney, and the other 25% is total baloney. Ditto with government statistics and the figures on corporate financial statements. People feel betrayed but not surprised when yet another untruth is brought to light. Of course, part of the reason is sad resignation, not healthy skepticism: The bureaucrats who make a lot of the real decisions are not elected, so the public has less incentive to get gung-ho about politics than it does in the States. And much of the interaction between government and big business that's considered "negotiation" here would be called "corruption" at home.

On the bright side, where revelations of malfeasance tend to bring a humiliated-but-quick resignation (often by a sacrificial lamb who is not the chief malefactor) in Japan, this whole CBS thing has the potential to produce a deeply satisfying (to the public) explosion of humiliation for most of the major parties involved. CBS seems to be disposed to brazen it out, but you never know.

Another Mitsubishi Fuso vehicle has had clutch failure--though this time there was no accident. The shaft detached and caused the dumptruck involved to stop in the middle of the highway, though. It was a 1984 model and, thankfully, I suppose, had a clutch that was already under recall (thankfully because it means they haven't discovered yet another defective part).

*****

For obvious reasons, Hitomi Soga and her family have gotten much of the attention. But there are other touching stories among the repatriated abductees from North Korea. Kaoru Hasuike will be allowed by the law department of Chuo University to return to his studies. Hasuike is 46; he was abducted while a junior home in Niigata Prefecture on vacation in 1978. He hasn't decided whether to go back to classes or do distance learning--understandably, there are significant readjustments he's still making.

*****

More darkly, two death row inmates were executed today; one was Mamoru Takuma, who went on a stabbing rampage in an elementary school near Osaka in 2001, killing 8 children. As they always do when Japan carries out an execution, human rights groups (and the Japan Federation of Bar Associations) are understandably protesting the lack of transparency in Japanese capital punishment. This Reuters story outlines things pretty well. Japanese executions take place when they're least likely to dominate the news cycle, and there's no prior warning. I'm not familiar enough with the way it all works to know whether the ability to appeal is really significantly curtailed; the part about not letting the families of those to be executed know until the same day does seem pretty harsh.

Of course, the reporter can't resist ending this way:

Capital punishment has aroused little debate among Japanese, who are shown by polls to strongly support the death penalty, and occasional efforts to suspend or abolish it have made little headway.

But with Japan and the United States among a handful of advanced nations where the death penalty is carried out, questions are being raised and international pressure increased.

Unless I'm remembering wrong, a woman Minister of Justice, Ritsuko Nagao, was the one who signed the highest number of execution orders in a single year in recent history. I think it was six inmates in 1996, but I'm not finding confirmation. This was after a long stretch in which executions had been few and far between in Japan. Lately, I think two or three a year has been the norm.

Another Mitsubishi Fuso vehicle has had clutch failure--though this time there was no accident. The shaft detached and caused the dumptruck involved to stop in the middle of the highway, though. It was a 1984 model and, thankfully, I suppose, had a clutch that was already under recall (thankfully because it means they haven't discovered yet another defective part).

*****

For obvious reasons, Hitomi Soga and her family have gotten much of the attention. But there are other touching stories among the repatriated abductees from North Korea. Kaoru Hasuike will be allowed by the law department of Chuo University to return to his studies. Hasuike is 46; he was abducted while a junior home in Niigata Prefecture on vacation in 1978. He hasn't decided whether to go back to classes or do distance learning--understandably, there are significant readjustments he's still making.

*****

More darkly, two death row inmates were executed today; one was Mamoru Takuma, who went on a stabbing rampage in an elementary school near Osaka in 2001, killing 8 children. As they always do when Japan carries out an execution, human rights groups (and the Japan Federation of Bar Associations) are understandably protesting the lack of transparency in Japanese capital punishment. This Reuters story outlines things pretty well. Japanese executions take place when they're least likely to dominate the news cycle, and there's no prior warning. I'm not familiar enough with the way it all works to know whether the ability to appeal is really significantly curtailed; the part about not letting the families of those to be executed know until the same day does seem pretty harsh.

Of course, the reporter can't resist ending this way:

Capital punishment has aroused little debate among Japanese, who are shown by polls to strongly support the death penalty, and occasional efforts to suspend or abolish it have made little headway.

But with Japan and the United States among a handful of advanced nations where the death penalty is carried out, questions are being raised and international pressure increased.

Unless I'm remembering wrong, a woman Minister of Justice, Ritsuko Nagao, was the one who signed the highest number of execution orders in a single year in recent history. I think it was six inmates in 1996, but I'm not finding confirmation. This was after a long stretch in which executions had been few and far between in Japan. Lately, I think two or three a year has been the norm.

America and Japan are fellow travelers in more than just the WOT. If the Social Security debate has got you rattled, you might appreciate this "it could always be worse" news:

The Nippon Keidanren* (Chaired by Hiroshi Okuta) reported on 13 September that, by its calculations, if Japan's consumption tax is not raised [by 1% per year, it says elsewhere in the article], the balance of federal debt will reach 5 times GDP, the rate of hidden national burden (the ratio of tax and Social Insurance revenues to national income) will exceed 100%, and the government will go bankrupt by 2025.

Contemplating my retirement planning, I'm getting a real Auntie Mame moment here. As in, Vera Charles when her friends get the news that Black Friday has made their rock-solid investments worthless: "And everyone said I was such a fool spending all my money at Tiffany's!"
* Its website uses the transliteration as its English name, which would translate to something like "Japan Economics League." I should note that there's no guarantee that it has its figures right, but that's not all its own fault. No one really knows the extent of government or corporate debt in Japan, since rules for more transparent accounting were just put through (and incompletely) a few years ago, a decade after the Bubble burst.

Damn. Never published this last week. The Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta doesn't seem to be getting much play in the American press. Thankfully, there were only 9 deaths--multiple times fewer than in the Bali bombing--but there were nearly 200 people injured. Simon World makes the following point:

What matters is what the American people themselves believe. Using the major media and the blogosphere as (an admittedly imperfect) proxy, there has been some expressions of sympathy and interest, but far broader indifference and ignorance. Instead there's much concern over whether George Bush dodged a medical 30 years ago and whether the proof was faked. I agree it is an issue. So is John Kerry's Vietnam record. But there are nowhere near as important an issue as what does need talking about. Where are Bush and Kerry planning to take America in the next 4 years? What are they planning to do in the war on terror? On Iraq? On helping allies like Australia? On defeating al Qaeda, JI and their ilk? There seems to be a major case of not seeing the forest for the trees at the moment in American polity. The losers are not just Americans, but the world.

I think it's dangerous to take the blogosphere as representative of the American public, which was probably paying as little attention to the Dan Rather memo story as it was to the Jakarta bombing. I suspect that for a lot of people, the attention-grabbing issue was the 9/11 anniversary, which was impending last week and happening Saturday.

I generally only post on something if I think I have commentary to add, and I don't conceive of myself as a news source (though I'll occasionally give translations of key parts of Japanese articles). But Simon is right: Australia is an ally, it was targeted, and we should be showing support. So though it's late, let me say that we're with Australia.

In a veiled way, I've tried to indicate when I think the Koizumi administration deserves more expressions of solidarity from Americans for its support in the WOT, too, since much of it--especially the deployment of SDF personnel in Iraq--comes in the face of a good deal of opposition. (Thankfully, while Japan has been named as a target by al Qaeda, there have been no attacks here, and the Japanese taken hostage in Iraq have been released.)

Unfortunately, underappreciation of our allies' loyalty isn't the only problem; I wish Americans also had a better sense of what those allies are up against, in practical terms. The sheer number of people and shipped items that travel daily through Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai and Singapore is mind-blowing. The populations of most East Asian countries are huge, too. There was talk a few months ago that al Qaeda was setting up a cell here, probably for money laundering, and the Algerian-French man in question wasn't caught despite being wanted by Interpol. This is in Japan, a country with Westernized infrastructure, in which non-natives are very visible and the law enforcement systems highly developed. Most other Asian countries are far less organized, and those with home-grown terrorists cannot rely on better border patrols to help screen them out. I can understand why Iraq tends to absorb people's attention, since our own men and women are over there, but the world is a big place. Asia is probably the best place on Earth if you want to move yourself and your stuff undetected, and the evidence is that Islamist terrorists know it. Thanks to our friends here for doing what they can.

Okay, you know that mushroom cloud they saw over North Korea across the border from China on Friday? Well, we certainly heard about it here in Japan (flyover country for the DPRK's test missiles). There didn't seem to be much to say about it, since, unlike the explosion a few months ago, when casualties were reported almost immediately, there have been none from this weekend. It seems to be as certain as it can be that the explosion this weekend wasn't nuclear. The DPRK says it was for a hydroelectric project. North Korea is very mountainous and has plenty of hydroelectric potential--in fact, it's significantly more resource-rich in many ways than the South--so that's not a far-fetched explanation. Neither is South Korea's conjecture that the explosion might have been an accident in an underground munitions facility. In any case, the Chinese have reported no influx of the injured into their hospitals across the river, so it's possible that it was a controlled blast with no injuries, or (more darkly) that the operation was so secret that the DPRK is not allowing the injured to be treated where they might be noticed. You never know, especially since the North Korean government would account for its actions the same way no matter which was true:

The BBC said that when [DPRK Foreign Ministry official] Paek was asked why North Korea had not explained earlier about the blasts he told Rammell Pyongyang had not done so because all foreign journalists were liars.

It does not seem frivolous on 11 September to update the story of Hitomi Soga, a now-repatriated Japanese abductee to North Korea, and her husband Charles Jenkins, accused deserter from the US Army during the Korean War. Japan has a mutual-extradition treaty with the US, so there was a long series of negotiations over whether he would bring their two daughters to Japan so that the four of them could restart their lives here. Ultimately, the family was reunited in Indonesia and came to Japan to have Jenkins, who is said to be ill, admitted to one of the major research hospitals.

Japanese public sentiment is pulling hard for Jenkins to be permitted to settle with his wife in her hometown. The Japanese government, accordingly, pressed the US to show clemency. I don't know how much that has affected Jenkins's treatment--he just turned himself in--but I do know that it's hard to imagine the following scenario surrounding an accused military deserter almost anywhere else in the world:

Details are not yet clear, but according to the US Army, pay calculated at the rate for an officer of Jenkins' rank and years of service would amount to base pay of $2200 per month. Adding in housing and living allowances would bring the total to $3270.

[I'm snipping out the section that explains that he's been advanced some cash already and will not be asked to repay any money even if found guilty.]

[I]n Camp Zama, where Soga and Jenkins's family would be able to live together, there are, in addition to barracks, family housing, a school, and recreational facilities. Jenkins would also be free to use the 18-hole golf course and fishing pond.

Yeah, America's the real world center of barbarous, unforgiving inhumanity, huh?

I was going to wait to post this until I get home from the office tonight. But the date has been 11 September here in Tokyo for 11 hours now, and something about the way all the folks back home in the States are getting ready for bed, the way they did on 10 September three years ago, makes me want to say it now.

On 9/11, I came to Atsushi's apartment to watch what was happening on CNN. The whole night, while I sat staring at the television, shaking in anger, he came out to keep making me tea. He had to wake up at 6:30 as always, but he must have gotten up six or seven times overnight to boil water and change the leaves and express relief that the attacks had stopped. Over the next few days, messages from friends kept coming to my cell phone: "So sorry to hear about what happened in America. I hope your friends in NY and family in PA are safe. You must be white-hot mad--here's to a quick retaliation by your government." And last year, when I took Atsushi to meet my parents, his mother (who was a child during the War and married into a family whose property and holdings were wiped out by the bombing of Tokyo) asked him to offer a flower at Ground Zero while we were in New York.

Sixty years ago, Japan and America were in a war that made a disaster area of the Pacific Rim. By 2001, I could be an American man living in a gloriously rebuilt Tokyo, in a relationship with a Japanese man, with Japanese friends who expressed fellow-feeling with America when we were attacked. The Japanese Prime Minister has been one of our staunchest allies; the Japanese Self-Defense Forces have been sent on non-combat missions in Iraq. Japan's relationship with America and the rest of the West will always be complicated, but it is undeniable.

This is possible because our civilization is the real deal; the things we value are the things that are worth valuing. Our people are free. We feel a sense of control over our own destiny. We have hope and can-do resilience, which make it unnecessary to cling like death to grievances and turn them into inheritable grudges. Yes, America and Japan and the UK and the rest of the democracies sometimes do bad--seriously bad--things in our relations with the great wide world. We don't always live up to our ideals. We have plenty of individual resenters in our midst, too. But resentment and destructiveness aren't what characterize us. Indeed, we're even nice when we're vengeful: Since 9/11, we've spent our energy debating how to protect ourselves without having to be too hurtful to other people and peoples in the process. And we're still getting on passenger jets and taking elevators up skyscrapers.

I can't think of what to say about those who died without feeling as if I were exploiting them for symbolism, so I will just say that they aren't forgotten in the two languages I love, today those of allies rather than enemies:

Rest in peace.
安らかに眠って下さい。

Added at 23:00: Minutes after the moment of silence to mark the attack by the first plane, Atsushi sent me a cell-phone message: "CNNを見ていた？9・11から3年だね。悲劇を乗り越えるアメリカに敬服します。 [Were you watching CNN? 3 years since 9/11. I really admire America for so triumphing over tragedy.]" At the end of that sentence was a graphic of a star. I think I'm done crying now.

So it was stronger elsewhere; it usually is:

An earthquake measuring 6.8 on the open-ended Richter scale hit western Japan on Sunday, setting off tsunami waves along the Pacific coast, but there were no reports of serious damage, national broadcaster NHK said.

Two people were slightly injured in the city of Kyoto, although some of the strongest tremors were felt in the area of Nara, the ancient capital of Japan where there are many temples.

Here in Tokyo, it was one of those spooky swaying quakes that lasted for a while, as opposed to a quick shake. Glad there was no damage closer to the center. As the article from Reuters points out, people in the Kansai area are still on edge from the Kobe earthquake a decade ago. (The Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe region isn't considered an earthquake zone in Japanese terms, so construction codes were not the same as they are here in Tokyo-Yokohama.)

I also hope everyone in Florida is okay. This is a bad year for storms all over, it seems. Western Japan has also had its share of typhoon casualties and property damage this year, so when I haven't been watching the weather report to see what's happening in Florida, I've been worried about Atsushi in Kyushu. Yet another reason to look forward to fall.

I haven't had much to add to everyone else's comments about the sort of people who would keep hundreds of children captive for days, with no water, in midsummer, and then bring the roof down on their heads. It does dominate the thoughts, though, especially in combination with other news this week.

South Korea has been doing lab tests with uranium enrichment. The results were apparently a small amount that was "close to" weapons grade. Now, if there's going to be a headline that reads "----- May Be Close to Developing Nukes," I'd much prefer that the ----- be South Korea over some of the alternatives. (Additionally, the experiment was done four years ago, and the IAEA inspectors found no evidence it had been expanded upon since then.) And despite the clear potential for diplomatic problems that would result from the ROK's developing nuclear weapons, with the DPRK less than a two-hour drive from Seoul, who could possibly blame it for wanting to do so?

I wonder, does North Korea get much play in the US media? Here, it's in the news all the time. Some of the reasons for that are obvious: It's nearby, so the potential for patrol boat skirmishes and things is high, and there's some Japan-North Korea trade. But what you most memorably see (I'm talking over the last five years or so) on television are human interest stories about refugees. For a while there, it seemed as if there were a new Japanese wife of a North Korean escaping back here through China every Thursday. Often, she would tell the reporter, her voice and face distorted to protect her identity, about eating potatoes when there was no rice--a shocking deprivation to East Asians. And that was before the appalling Japanese abductee story broke and began dominating news coverage. Recently, the focus has also been more on diplomatic talks, particularly now that the six-way nattering over the DPRK's nuclear program is doing the on-again-off-again thing.

And that leads to the other exposure you get to North Korea here: excerpts from its news broadcasts, usually when some higher-up has made an anti-Japanese remark or some trade issue or summit has been reported on. The North Korean TV technology is so antiquated it has to be seen to be believed. The microphones have that dead sound the local news from an unaffiliated station had in the '80's. There's only one camera angle. And this creepy girl in traditional Korean costume (whose job is to grin like a lunatic and deliver fulsome praise about Kim Jong-il) often appears against a blue screen. And I mean just a blue screen, as if they'd forgotten to put in the background footage. In a humorous-but-not-funny way, it reminds you what riches we have: the lamest music video by the most faceless new pop-product non-talent in our world gets production values that are many times better than the broadcasts North Korea uses to remind citizens that they live in the perfect society.

I was going to say that this is all some comfort because, you know, if the DPRK can't get it together to make a decent news broadcast, they probably can't contrive something as tricky as nuclear warheads that detonate. But that's ridiculous, because if there's one thing all these types care about and will put every last resource into doing successfully, it's wrecking things. The reasoning runs, If your way doesn't produce a prosperous society that nurtures its citizens, don't bother changing; just blow the opposition and their artifacts up (and don't forget to torture the children while you're at it) until there's nothing left to stand as a rebuke to it. There's no fate bad enough for such people, but the Russian authorities had the right idea in making them dead, even if it's determined that they acted precipitously.

I haven't had much to add to everyone else's comments about the sort of people who would keep hundreds of children captive for days, with no water, in midsummer, and then bring the roof down on their heads. It does dominate the thoughts, though, especially in combination with other news this week.

South Korea has been doing lab tests with uranium enrichment. The results were apparently a small amount that was "close to" weapons grade. Now, if there's going to be a headline that reads "----- May Be Close to Developing Nukes," I'd much prefer that the ----- be South Korea over some of the alternatives. (Additionally, the experiment was done four years ago, and the IAEA inspectors found no evidence it had been expanded upon since then.) And despite the clear potential for diplomatic problems that would result from the ROK's developing nuclear weapons, with the DPRK less than a two-hour drive from Seoul, who could possibly blame it for wanting to do so?

I wonder, does North Korea get much play in the US media? Here, it's in the news all the time. Some of the reasons for that are obvious: It's nearby, so the potential for patrol boat skirmishes and things is high, and there's some Japan-North Korea trade. But what you most memorably see (I'm talking over the last five years or so) on television are human interest stories about refugees. For a while there, it seemed as if there were a new Japanese wife of a North Korean escaping back here through China every Thursday. Often, she would tell the reporter, her voice and face distorted to protect her identity, about eating potatoes when there was no rice--a shocking deprivation to East Asians. And that was before the appalling Japanese abductee story broke and began dominating news coverage. Recently, the focus has also been more on diplomatic talks, particularly now that the six-way nattering over the DPRK's nuclear program is doing the on-again-off-again thing.

And that leads to the other exposure you get to North Korea here: excerpts from its news broadcasts, usually when some higher-up has made an anti-Japanese remark or some trade issue or summit has been reported on. The North Korean TV technology is so antiquated it has to be seen to be believed. The microphones have that dead sound the local news from an unaffiliated station had in the '80's. There's only one camera angle. And this creepy girl in traditional Korean costume (whose job is to grin like a lunatic and deliver fulsome praise about Kim Jong-il) often appears against a blue screen. And I mean just a blue screen, as if they'd forgotten to put in the background footage. In a humorous-but-not-funny way, it reminds you what riches we have: the lamest music video by the most faceless new pop-product non-talent in our world gets production values that are many times better than the broadcasts North Korea uses to remind citizens that they live in the perfect society.

I was going to say that this is all some comfort because, you know, if the DPRK can't get it together to make a decent news broadcast, they probably can't contrive something as tricky as nuclear warheads that detonate. But that's ridiculous, because if there's one thing all these types care about and will put every last resource into doing successfully, it's wrecking things. The reasoning runs, If your way doesn't produce a prosperous society that nurtures its citizens, don't bother changing; just blow the opposition and their artifacts up (and don't forget to torture the children while you're at it) until there's nothing left to stand as a rebuke to it. There's no fate bad enough for such people, but the Russian authorities had the right idea in making them dead, even if it's determined that they acted precipitously.

The Daily Yomiuri has a dual interview with former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and US Ambassador to Japan (and White House Chief of Staff toward the end of the Reagan administration) Howard Baker. The English version focuses mostly on their impressions of Reagan and, against that backdrop, what leadership is. But in the Japanese (I'm assuming Baker spoke in English and Nakasone in Japanese, but I'm not sure whether to call it the "original"), there's more about Japan's role in the WOT and on current issues along the Pacific Rim:

The Japan-US relationship is one of amity. Japan sent SDF personnel to Iraq, but that was on its own behalf. It was not just predicated on the Japan-US friendship. Of course, America applauded the deployment, but the SDF was sent in the national interests of Japan. [Yes, it's that repetitious in the Japanese version.--SRK]

We are well aware that Japan has a pacifist constitution. We acknowledge fully that there are restrictions on the SDF. Howvever, the world perceives Japan as a superpower. Japan has begun to take on the responsibilities of a major nation. The deployment of peacekeeping forces (PKO) to the Golan Heights and East Timor is such a role of a superpower. And I think that the deployment of the SDF to Iraq was also in that vein.

For Japan, the chief threat now is not North Korea. The very biggest issue is Japan's China policy. China wields gargantuan economic and military power, and it is looking to expand it. For the sake of the world, and not just the Pacific Rim, it is extremely important for Japan and China to build an amicable relationship.

All of which makes me wonder--what exactly is in the RNC platform about China and Japan? Baker is an ambassador now, after all; you expect smooth talk from him. I still can't seem to get to the text. Maybe I'm just using harebrained search terms. It's clearly toned down from 2000, but I wonder whether it sounds like what I surmise from my slapdash back-translation from the Nikkei.

Added at 3 a.m. (don't ask): Nathan says that things in China are not as 1984-ish as they're often made out to be. He seems to be talking mostly about daily life for the people. I'd have no trouble believing that. Japan is a way more accessible country than China, and Western journalists still insist on doing that whole Mysterious Ways of Japan routine whenever they can. At the same time, the fact that police brutality may be less common than the press makes out doesn't mean that the PRC's foreign policy and designs on superpower-dom are any less troubling. Even if we agree that the Kuomintang was not populated by angels.