The White Peril 白禍

How very strange. Look at this Yomiuri story. The headline says, "Pakistan opposes UNSC seat for Japan," which makes sense. This is a Japanese newspaper reporting things from the vantage point of local importance. The beginning is fine:

Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said in an interview with The Daily Yomiuri and other English-language newspapers in Asia on Thursday night that his government would not support the envisioned permanent membership of Japan on the U.N. Security Council.

[There are two reform proposals. Under Model A, more UNSC permanent memberships would be created for countries such as Japan. Under Model B, permanent membership would not be expanded.]

"(With Model B), nobody gets on (the Security Council) permanently, but everybody has a chance to represent its own region," he said. "It is very clear that the Security Council does need reform...but we oppose anything being done to create another permanent class of countries...It has to be done on the basis of equity, justice and in a democratic way."

That sounds nice. Who knows? Maybe Aziz even means it, even if Pakistan itself is not a world-class beacon of democratic transparency in government. It's interesting, though, to note a word that the Yomiuri reporter fails to mention even once: India.

Cheese and crackers! The "It's me" scam--which has now taken so many forms that it's referred to more elegantly as 振り込め詐欺 (furikome-sagi: "the 'Pay up!' scam"*)--caused losses of 28,400,000,000 yen in 2004. (That's about US $258,000,000.) The figure is nearly four times what it had been in 2003--the phenomenon really took off last year. The Mainichi ran an article a few days ago about one of the rings from which some members have been caught:

The ring was divided into 10 groups, each of which comprised of some 10 "shops." Each shop was headed by a "manager" and staffed by approximately 10 "employees."

Each shop was required to net at least 10 million yen a month from such frauds. Employees who showed outstanding performances were invited to participate in tours of Okinawa and dine at hotels. While those who failed to fulfill their quota were beat by their bosses.

Managers received about 500,000 yen in fixed monthly salary and employees got 250,000 to 300,000 yen, plus additional pay in proportion to the money they earned. One manager received 5 million yen as a monthly wage, police said.

You know, kind of like Fuller Brush, only with kneecappings and not a single satisfied customer. Of course, the efflorescence of this particular swindle only seems sudden; in fact, it's been gradually becoming more common over the last few years, and there's nothing surprising in the way more miscreants have been drawn to it.
* Before Amritas gets over his cold and points it out: 振り込め isn't the imperative of the verb usually translated "pay." It's more like "make the bank transfer" (or, if we're being literal, "sprinkle it in" or "wave it in"). I was taking license, poetic or otherwise.

Something else from the Japanese courts, this time on a recurring topic here:

The Naha District Court on Friday rejected a lawsuit against the government and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that was filed by almost 100 people seeking damages over Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine.

The ruling dismissed claims from the 94 plaintiffs, who experienced or lost relatives in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, that Koizumi's visits to the shine had caused them to suffer, and rejected their demand for 100,000 yen each in compensation.

In handing down the ruling, Presiding Judge Kazuto Nishii refrained from saying whether or not Koizumi's visits to the shrine, which enshrines class-A war criminals, violated the Constitution or if they were made in an official role.

Of course, Judge Nishii refrained from saying so--that's the million-dollar question. But he didn't have to; the reason behind the dismissal was "that the legal right to strictly request the separation of religion and state was not a benefit for residents and that that they could therefore not demand compensation if this right was violated." Okinawans are Japanese citizens, so the issue is not the same as it is with comfort women; they do frequently get the country-cousins treatment, though.

One of the big stories this week is that the Supreme Court of Japan ruled that it was not unconstitutional for the government of Tokyo Metro (an entity equal in status to a prefecture, though I realize I've just made it sound like a tram line) to refuse to consider foreign nationals as candidates for management positions. I think it's the first time I've ever seen the same top story at all three English-version Japanese newspapers I read on-line (the Asahi, the Mainichi, and the Yomiuri), though of course it was in the Nikkei and elsewhere, too.

Those familiar with Japan will understand the issue here, but for those who are not: we're not talking about immigrants. The controversy is over ethnic Koreans and Chinese born and brought up in Japan--many of whom have no real ties to Korea or China--who nevertheless do not have Japanese passports and are considered resident aliens. This is from the Yomiuri report:

The Supreme Court said the metropolitan government's preventing its foreign workers from taking promotion exams therefore did not violate Article 3 of the Labor Standards Law, which bans discriminating against workers on the ground of nationality, and Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees "equality before the law."

Meanwhile, Justices Shigeo Takii and Tokuji Izumi said in their dissenting opinions that the metropolitan government's refusal to let the second-generation Korean resident sit the promotion examination just because she is not Japanese was "an illegal act of discrimination," and that rejection of the plaintiff who has special permanent resident status from the first round of promotion exams was "unconstitutional."

Japan's treatment of its resident non-Japanese Asians causes a great deal of strain, especially because of the restrictions on civil service jobs (which can include public health, the field of nursing in which the plaintiff in this case practiced, and public education). For some reason, I can't seem to find a report on it, but there was a case last year in which the parents of a family of illegal aliens died. They were, I think, Thai and had been living in Japan for years. The government decided to grant the teenaged daughter citizenship and send the younger children back to Thailand. The reasoning was that the girl had never really known any life but that in Japan and was old enough to have formed her personality around her life here, while the younger children still had time to return to their native country and adapt to it without trauma. There's a case of an orphan like that every few years, and citizenship is, if my memory serves correctly, often granted.

Second- and third-generation children of intact non-Japanese families are another matter, but it's worth remembering that pity for them must be carefully qualified. Japan-Korea ill-feeling goes both ways, even if there can be no debate over which side got the short end of the stick over the last century or so. A lot of permanent residents seem to be perfectly happy to retain their special permanent residency while working to expand the rights attached to it. And, well, while the mistreatment of non-Japanese here is real, you can't ignore the fact that desiring the rights of a Japanese citizen while maintaining one's identity (and presumably loyalty of some kind?) as a Korean means wanting to have it both ways.

I have no idea what the plaintiff in this case thinks on the subject. By all accounts, she was encouraged by her superior to take the qualifying exam for promotion; she didn't go looking for trouble to make a grand point, and she doesn't seem like a chronic rabble-rouser. The Supreme Court decision, which simply affirms that it's not unconstitutional for a local government to preserve positions of authority for Japanese citizens, is hard to fault. The court cannot, after all, fix long-standing animosity and divided loyalties.

Added at 18:00: Man, can I be retarded sometimes. I looked at today's "Asia by Blog" installment over at Simon's and didn't see that he'd linked to anyone's coverage of this story--as I say, it was big here. It's sort of odd that I missed it, because it's the FIRST LINE of the Korea/Japan section. Anyway, his first link was to Joi Ito's post, which mentions that the nurse in question is, in fact, genetically half-Japanese. I take the point that Japan is bringing many of these problems on itself, though it's not as if it had a monopoly on xenophobia. I still can't dismiss the idea of requiring citizenship as a qualification for ranking posts in the government as a trumped-up issue.

Added on 29 January: Maybe I'm losing my mind. I'm still looking for the story about that Thai girl, but the only one I keep running into is the (far, far more famous case) of the girl who's applying for permanent residency because her grandmother's Japanese husband has adopted her. Her parents are dead. But she doesn't have any siblings, and she didn't grow up here. I wouldn't be surprised if I weren't correctly remembering all the facts of the case I'm thinking of, but I'm usually not quite that much of a space cadet.

Even in death, Japanese abductee Megumi Yokota is getting no peace. The DPRK handed over a collection of bones said to be hers a while back. About a month ago, Japanese forensic experts determined that--surprise!--the North Koreans were lying. If I recall correctly, it was suggested that the bones received might not all be from the same person.

It's taken the DPRK a month or so to respond, and its response, relayed through its state news organ, is, "The Japanese forensic report is a complete fabrication; a thorough fact-finding investigation into the fraud must be undertaken and the responsible parties severely punished." Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machida replies, justifiably, that if the DPRK has accusations to make, it should make them through direct diplomatic communication.

Yokota's first name, BTW, is officially written in kana: めぐみ. The meaning, tragically unfulfilled in her case, is "blessing."

Speaking of problems in Japan that need addressing: Japan Post (you know, that agency that sells commemorative stamps, delivers mail and packages, and just happens to control a REALLY HUGE AMOUNT of the household savings of the second-largest economy in the world?) is still in the crosshairs of Prime Minister Koizumi's privatization gun:

The prime minister explicitly said he would stick to the basic privatization policy adopted by the Cabinet in September. One of the key planks of the policy is the creation of four entities--mail and parcel delivery, insurance service, savings service and an over-the-counter services network--under a holding company.

"The Fiscal Investment and Loan Program must be reformed because it's the connection between the entrance of funds, postal savings and kampo postal insurance, and the exit of funds to public corporations. The flow of funds should be shifted from public to private," Koizumi said. [You know the patronage and revolving-door systems that your econ professors said drive Japan? You're looking at the monetary engine right in this paragraph. All that's missing is explicit mention of the federal ministries involved.--SRK]

"The privatization is an indispensable administrative and fiscal reform to realize a smaller government," Koizumi added.

Regarding opposition to privatization within the Liberal Democratic Party, the prime minister said: "They say the number of public servants should be decreased, but they oppose the privatization. That's like instructing someone to swim but tying his arms and legs.

For all the bravado of that soundbite, there are critics who say the privatization plan in fact doesn't go far enough. In my favorite (in a bad way) analogy, it could create the sort of California-electricity fiasco in which bureaucrats still get to make all the rules while the new private owners get all the accountability. In committee, the proposal predictably got bogged down in the usual attempts to shut up everyone with a complaint. But that was December; this Yomiuri piece says, "The prime minister explicitly said he would stick to the basic privatization policy adopted by the Cabinet in September," which means not the further ground-down version from the very end of last year.

For those who are interested, the Yomiuri article leads with Japan Post privatization but gives a rundown of the issues the Diet hit in its first 2005 session.

When I talk about the cavalier way many Japanese doctors treat (in both senses of the word) their patients, friends of mine back home often chuckle, "Well, Sean, you don't have to go to Japan to find a high-handed doctor who thinks you're too stupid to be worth explaining things to!" The thing is that, here, it's been largely institutionalized. The behemoth Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare is taking some steps to remedy that, though:

The MHLW will, starting in April, make mandatory the disclosure by medical facilities to each patient of a receipt (itemized breakdown of medical costs) that indicates what was charged for what in a course of treatments. Patients will receive this receipt via the public health insurance programs they belong to. The aim is to increase the checks on the kinds of treatments prescribed by given patients themselves a handle on what the breakdown of their medical fees is. The new policy is expected to be an effective curb on the ballooning of health care expenditures, which have topped 30 trillion yen a year.

[ / wretched sight translation ]

I haven't seen all the details--the Nikkei report I've linked to here was the lead story in this morning's paper edition, too, but it focused on the projected effects of the new policy. It didn't say much about what the rules will be, so it's still possible to imagine crafty hospital administrators finding ways to hide inflated charges under bland, legitimate-sounding headings ("diagnostic equipment") if given sufficient leeway.

But even just as a gesture, the shift matters. "Doctor's orders" (unless he tells you to work less overtime) are pretty much law here; you don't have nearly the skepticism and comparison-shopping you do with US consumers. If it works, this could be a good first move. It doesn't set caps or micromanage; it just trusts that shame on the part of providers and knowledge on the part of consumers will sort things out. One can only hope it does. Health care expenditures in this aging society are an issue of archipelago-buggering proportions, and even small steps are preferable to the status quo.

It's been understood for a few months that Howard Baker will be stepping down as US Ambassador to Japan (although the post may officially be designated something "Ambassador to the Court of St. James's"-ish--I'm not sure). His successor, announced on the day of President Bush's inauguration, will be current Ambassador to Australia ("Ambassador to the Kangaroo Court," maybe? I kill me sometimes, I just kill me) Thomas Schieffer.

His official biography is here. He's the brother of Bob Schieffer, the CNN reporter. Bet their family dinners are interesting! His given name is also John Thomas, though he has the good sense to go by "Tom." And, I assume, not to have married a lady named Jane.

The Nikkei says that many credit Schieffer with building a close, trusting relationship with John Howard during his tenure in Australia. That's nice, but one is left wondering...well, what The Japan Times wonders:

Some experts have voiced concern over Schieffer's lack of involvement in U.S.-Japan affairs and his relative lack of political clout in comparison with former envoys to Japan.

Baker was a Senate majority leader, while his predecessor was former House of Representatives Speaker Thomas Foley. Among the other political heavyweights who have filled the Tokyo post in the past is former Vice President Walter Mondale.

But other experts say that political background is not the only factor that determines the selection of an ambassador. In Schieffer's case, his close ties with Bush make it easier to report directly to the president and to get White House policies reflected in diplomatic undertakings in Japan, they said.

A Republican congressional source said the appointment signals that the Bush administration's policy of prioritizing ties with Japan will stay intact, with Schieffer expected to be the president's closest ambassador. The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to confirm his nomination.

Well, okay. Given the deep-rooted cronyism in Japan, I suppose Tokyo can't feel slighted by having Baker replaced by a long-time friend of Bush's. (Schieffer was one of his partners in the ownership and development of the Texas Rangers.) Also, given the famed closeness between Bush and Koizumi themselves, Schieffer seems unlikely to have to work with Japanese bureaucrats to smooth over friction created between their heads of state.

Even so, Japan is in a delicate spot right now. No one disputes that the US is its most important ally, but plenty of people dispute the means by which mutual support is given: the US bases here, especially since the announcement that our forces worldwide will be redistributed; the SDF deployed in a non-combat capacity in Iraq; the petition to make Japan a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with the attendant debate over revising Article 9 of the constitution.

Given that context, and given that Baker hasn't left office, it isn't yet possible to know whether Schieffer's way of being close to the power center--through intimacy rather than through career-earned clout--will be helpful to the Bush and Koizumi administrations. It appears to have worked in Australia, but Australia does not have the self-image of being impossible for uninitiated foreigners to understand that Japan does. We'll see. In the meantime, best wishes to Howard Baker, who does not have loads of presence as a personality but, from what I've seen, was unshowy, workmanlike, and gentlemanly in going about his duties.

This post is addressing the several people who have asked me what they can do to learn Japanese, under the flattering assumption that I have useful information to give them. That I am addressing those people will not be very clear for the first few paragraphs, so I'm going to ask in advance for everyone to bear with me. Then, too, if you can't bear with me for a few paragraphs before figuring out what the topic of the post you're reading is...not to be rude, but...WTF are you doing coming back here?

Anyway. Connie du Toit recently posted a half-mischievous-half-serious set of new categories for websites in this general -osphere that, she contends, aren't blogs in the strictest sense. In it, she gives valentines to all her blog friends, and what's touching about them is that she's the sort of woman who doesn't give praise she doesn't mean. The section about me--no, I'm not going to quote it; linking it is quite sufficient as a gesture of fatuous self-regard--is something I'm very grateful for, but it's a little frightening, too. I say that because she pretty much hits all my specific points of vanity; what she wrote is the way I'd describe myself if I had the cheek to believe it's actually true. I mean, it was spooky.

One thing she called me was an expert in the Japanese language. Now, I don't think any linguist (or Japanese person) would agree. I mean, my Japanese is good. Considering that a lot of foreigners here are content to learn what they need to pick up guys (or girls, you know, if that's their thing), it's not really hard to distinguish yourself that way. And I've lived here for a quarter of my life by now.

However, the real reason is that I had fantastic teachers all the way through. Because my parents were willing to take out parent loans instead of telling me I could jolly well work my way through college if I wanted to go, I was able to loll about for four years at Penn, with only a work-study job (10 hours a week) to distract me from studying. Yes, I amused myself thoroughly, too, but I had the time and reserves of mental and physical energy to study. Having grown up around people who worked themselves to the bone, physically, I found this a new environment; and I really liked most of my classes, so I did the work gladly. The Japanese program was wonderful, taught mostly by native Japanese speakers who developed their own companion materials to go with Eleanor Jorden's books, which are classics in their way but are based on some implausible ideas about language acquisition. My mentor on the Japanese side of my comp. lit. degree was just fantastic as an advisor, reticent in that Japanophile way but also willing to express himself with clarity and point when necessary.

Where I ran into problems was during junior year. It was the worst year of my life, and I probably should have taken a year off to get myself together and resigned myself to being graduated late. But my grants and loans had already come through, and I'd spent the first two years piling on the courses, so I was able to take most things pass-fail and muddle through without disgracing myself (in schoolwork terms) or falling behind. I took fall semester of senior year to study abroad in London--it's becoming clear that I'm the most pampered son of a steelworker there ever was, huh? I wasn't able to take Japanese there, so I got the packets from the professor back home, and I worked through them and was able to enter second semester.

My assumption all along had been that I'd go to grad school. It wasn't just like, I woke up the summer after junior year, realized I hadn't learned anything marketable, and it was either a PhD program or law school. I was excited about becoming a professor. I loved Japanese literature; I read it for fun. Get paid to think and teach about it? Hell, yeah. I went to the place that gave me the most funding, a program that's known for being really demanding.

And WHAM! I hit a wall. See, for the last two years, I'd been getting by in my Japanese classes on my ability to memorize. It wasn't that I hadn't been trying, but I'd been distracted, so I'd focused my energies on getting through the next kanji quiz, the next sentence pattern test, the next translation assignment. I wasn't lazy, and I deserved my A's on the finals--I mean, I'd gotten most of the questions right. But the thing is, I was only really putting my heart into learning the hard stuff: the tricky two-part sentence structures, the gajillion-stroke kanji, the names of obscure little plants mentioned in poems. After the placement test and some trial and error, I was assigned to second-year Japanese.

That's second-year Japanese. As in, with the college sophomores. It is clear, is it not, that this site is generated by someone of no mean ego. Well, let me tell you, I was unutterably humiliated. Just ABJECT. This sort of thing DID NOT happen to me when it came to coursework. Now, everyone--the Japanese teacher, my mentor, the professors teaching my literature classes--fell all over himself to tell me that my talent as a critic wasn't in question, it was just that my language had to come up. Yeah, whatever. Lots of people are talented; I ACHIEVE, dammit, was my attitude. This sucked.

Now, luckily, in a perverse way, my junior year had been so extraordinarily bad that I had enough perspective to realize that this was not the end of the world. Being ashamed did not mean I was going to die, or anything. So I studied, and here, too, the university had its own first-rate materials and uncompromising instructors. Still, being in second-year Japanese was sub-par, and I didn't pass my review. I did great in all my lit classes, though, so it was agreed that I'd be given the chance to reapply the next year, as a new applicant.

There was nothing unfair about this; fully-funded spots in graduate programs are not the sort of thing a department can afford to waste on people who show early signs of not making it through. What they did--this is very Japanophile--was say that since I was already a student who belonged to the university, I'd be supported (not with my grad student funding, but by applying to the Japan Foundation and such) as one to do the next year at an affiliated language program here. In the interim, I could write what would be a master's thesis. So that's how I first came to Japan. I spent a year doing a program in scholarly Japanese here--classes about research and reading the newspaper and finally figuring out what the hell the newscasters were saying on NHK. Loved every minute of it, and made friends I still have today.

In that year, it became increasingly obvious that my mentor and I weren't right for each other. He's got a stratospheric reputation--it was not his problem. I didn't really fit the program, and, in his gentlemanly way, he kind of nudged me toward seeing that. At least, that's the way I interpreted it; one doesn't exactly talk openly about these things in Japanese departments.

Now that this post is longer than Middlemarch, you may be wondering what exactly, um, the message is. Don't bother studying Japanese, because you'll end up being wrong for grad school? No, not that. The message is: study Japanese. It's an adventure, and it's bloody hard. Like all adventurous, hard things, it teaches you about yourself and gives you the valuable experience of meeting and mastering obstacles. You can bluff your way through a lot of humanities courses nowadays, but, honey, when you're studying an Asian language, either you know it or you don't.

And yet....

Japanese teachers know that they are teaching a subject that foreigners find it hugely difficult to learn. They do their best to be rigorous, but unless you're the military, you can't ask people to sit still for 20 hours of instruction for a single course. There's no way to avoid cutting corners somewhere. That means that, of necessity, much of what they end up testing you on in the first several years comes down to short-term memorizing of lists. They can't help it. There's so much to learn that they can't make even the "cumulative" tests really cumulative. So if you're a quick study, it's easy to learn this week's lesson for Friday's quiz, cherry pick the things you think are cool enough to retain, and then re-cram everything for the midterms and final. And you won't even realize you're doing it, because sometimes, just cramming enough for the final will feel like a medal-worthy feat.

The Piper will show up to dun you eventually, though. You will be in your first class where you're supposed to read all those boring sentence patterns strung into paragraphs, and those paragraphs strung into a few pages of argument. And you'll realize you can't do it. You know most of the kanji, you've seen most of the 文型, but it's not clicking. The ideas aren't cohering into a main point, even though you can point to just about anything on the page and remember what it means.

Normally, I wouldn't generalize from my own experience about other people's weaknesses, but my friends who teach tell me that this is a very common problem among bright Westerners studying Japanese. Part of the thrill is that it's hard, so you gravitate toward the hard stuff. The easy stuff, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you'll remember that. Or, well, you recognize it on sight, which seems good enough, until you try to understand a five-page article in which you have to back-translate every phrase in your head to get what it means.

So here is what you must do: review, obviously, is the first thing. Don't wait until the next time you're threatened with a test to go back over p. 23, even though, it's, like, some stupid thing about when to use はand が. Trust me, p. 23 will come back later to hurt you bad.

But also remember that you can't learn a language just through classes. Nowadays, with amazon.com, you can get Japanese paperbacks and DVD's and audio CD's. I don't mean language lessons; I mean regular novels and television shows and movies and (heaven help us) J-pops albums. You won't understand almost anything at first; what you have to do is let it bathe your brain. Get used to the speech cadences, the way things flow. Get used to the way certain verb endings seem to appear in sentences with certain modifying phrases. Don't worry about learning the rules in the linguistic sense; that's why you're taking classes. Worry about getting an intuitive sense of what follows what. That's the way you think in your native language; you're constantly hearing traffic signals that give you a sense of what's coming next without having to be conscious of it. In your first year or so, books are a lost cause, to be blunt. It might be worthwhile to try reading a translation of a novel in English and then seeing whether you can run your eye over the original and get any glimmers of where you are in the plot. You won't, most of the time. On the other hand, kanji and kana jumbled together will become familiar to your eye, and you'll be able to practice reading the kana and recognizing kanji radicals, at least. You'll be moving closer to the day when your eye falls on a page of Japanese and reacts with, "Oh, words," instead of, "Huh? What are those squiggles?"

By this point, I'm sure I've lost just about everyone. Lately, most of my long posts have been due to my switched-off editing function, but this one is different. English will always be my favorite language. It's my native tongue, in which the founding principles of our country were first articulated, with its blend of modesty and plainspokenness. I consider it an immense gift, which I did nothing to earn, to have been born into a country in which my brain was reared to work in English, not just because of its market value, but because of the thoughts it plants in your head. But Japanese has had thousands of years of relative seclusion to develop into a language of formidable intricacy, subtlety, and power. It's beautiful, sometimes in that lovely way the world goes ga-ga over, but sometimes with a pleasing roughness that's not so famous. Japanese is worth learning, and it's worth learning right, which I'm grateful to have had a second chance to do. You won't need a second chance if you channel your energies properly the first time.

Okay, a small reward for those who've read this far: one of the most touching demonstrations of the way Japanese can use restraint and austerity to tap into large reservoirs of feeling is the best-known haiku by Kobayashi Issa, who lived, as it happens, through the time of the American Revolution. Unlike a lot of the haiku that Westerners take a shine to, this one has nothing quaint about it:

つゆの世は
つゆの世ながら
さりながら
小林一茶

tsuyu no yo ha/tsuyu no yo nagara/sarinagara
Kobayashi Issa

This world of dew
is a world of dew
and yet-- and yet--

Kobayashi Issa

That's not my translation; I don't know whose it is, but it's the one you normally see, and for good reason. It doesn't fit the syllable count, but it conveys the economy with which Issa conveys himself in the original.

The poem was written a month after the early death of his daughter. Buddhism, especially the Japanese strain, encourages an acceptance of the impermanence of life. Well, more like "requires." Dew is as ubiquitous in classical Japanese as the moon or cherry blossoms; it symbolizes, for obvious reasons, evanescence. Using essentially three concepts (dew, the world, and two related particles that mean something like "while"), he shows how he has not yet resigned himself to his daughter's death. (There's also, to me, something of a suggestion of the verb 去る [saru: "to pass"] in the use of the particle さりながら, but I don't think I've ever seen it identified as a pivot word, so that interpretation probably isn't an accepted one.) The different viewpoints and time frames come through, even though the poem could be said not even to be a complete utterance.

This is interesting:

Middle-aged and elderly men who smoke heavily are more likely to commit suicide, a major survey by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has found.

How, one is moved to wonder, did they go about finding the three non-heavy-smoking middle-aged and elderly men in Japan to serve as the control group?

Yeah, I know, ba-dum-bum. It's 2 a.m.--what do you expect? Phyllis Diller? What floored me was this part:

A total of 108 of the 173 people who committed suicide were smokers. The rate of suicide among people who smoked less than 20 cigarettes per day was about the same as for nonsmokers, but the suicide rate of people who smoked between 30 and 39 cigarettes per day was 1.4 times higher than those in the group who smoked under 20 cigarettes a day.

The rate of suicide for those who smoked 40 or more cigarettes a day was 1.7 times higher. Researchers said no differences were seen based on the number of years people had been smoking.

40 cigarettes a day? How do people do that? I'm not moralizing; I'm just trying to wrap my head around it. I mean, I dated a few guys who couldn't so much as say, "Good morning, dear," before taking their first drag, so it's not as if I haven't seen chain-smoking. But 40? I know, it's only a little over two per waking hour, which is not uncommon. It just sounds so huge when given as a total.

That it didn't matter how long people had been smoking is another interesting part. According to the article, MHLW thinks the nicotine itself may be the important factor, but it seems just as possible that people start puffing away more because they're feeling stress or depression.

Today, it's exactly ten years since the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which killed over 6500 people in and around Kobe. Given the recent catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in developing Southeast Asia, it's sobering to recognize that, even in a country known for its whizbang technology and millennia of dealing with these things, recovery goes in fits and starts. Reason ran a piece a few years after the quake about bureaucratic problems that hampered both immediate rescue and long-term rebuilding, which has an unsettling resonance given the already-emerging charges of incompetence against UN personnel handling disaster aid now.

There are a few other parallels. Kobe is not considered a hot earthquake zone in Japan. Neither is Niigata, which just got hit with a series of big ones in October. That means that building codes and disaster rehearsals were not up to the same standards as they are here in Tokyo, and not without justification. It just isn't rational to expend all kinds of time, energy, and money getting ready for something that's almost certain not to happen.

That's not to say that governments should rest on their laurels--the Mainichi published the results of a survey last week that indicated that many local governments don't feel prepared to deal with disasters. This year saw an unusual series of typhoons with their attendant floods and mudslides, followed by the Niigata earthquake, so the possibilities are very much fresh in the minds of municipal authorities. Many lessons from the Kobe earthquake have also been assimilated and put into practice--the city of Sendai fitted its gas lines with a different shutoff system, and when a 6.9 M quake happened in 2003, it had reason to be grateful. But no matter what the police and fire departments do, people scattered through buildings and streets still have to know how to live through the first strike long enough to be helped. (BTW, if you're reading this from Japan, do you have everything attended to?)

Added on 18 January: Thanks to Far Outliers for linking this post. He went to high school in Kobe (which used to have one of the largest communities of foreigners in Japan, I think), and he offers a few interesting slice-of-life details from what he remembers pre-earthquake.

Okay, last time I linked to something of Joel's, I changed his religion and made him the author of a book he hadn't written. And ended up in a long discussion about green beans. Therefore, I am making doubly sure he says he went to high school in Kobe, because I know he mentioned something about Kyoto in there...um, looks okay.

A few weeks back, an article about a multiple-organ transplant to be performed on a Japanese infant caught my eye. I hadn't heard much more about it, but today, tucked in between the more lurid stories in the Mainichi, is this update:

Five months after being born, the baby boy was diagnosed as suffering from twisted intestines, and his internal organs began to deteriorate.

His parents arranged for Yosuke to undergo a transplant of his stomach, pancreas, spleen, liver, and the large and small intestines at the University of Miami Jackson Memorial Center on Christmas Eve.

That's pretty much everything down there, isn't it, except his gall bladder and kidneys? The little guy's recovering well, so they expect to release him soon (the article seems to imply but doesn't actually say that it will be earlier than usual). And naturally, they have to watch for signs of rejection. It's good to hear things are going along smoothly so far, though.

When the OECD education survey was published, indicating lower rankings for Japan than it's accustomed to, it became clear that the Ministry of Education and Culture was worried.

We're now getting an indication how worried: the first national language survey in a half-century may be conducted as early as next year. The OECD isn't the only factor, though:

The move is being spurred by rising concern over the linguistic ability of the nation's youth-or rather, the lack thereof. The initial alarm went off last fall when the government extended its list of kanji characters approved for use in names.

It became apparent that the younger generation were choosing kanji characters for names more by the way they sounded or the number of strokes (for luck), rather than their meanings.

I believe that this is a gingerly way of saying that people are trying to give their children names that use kanji that aren't what you'd normally call auspicious:

Parents like to make minute adjustments, adding a stroke here and there, by choosing a similar-looking character with an extra radical added to the left hand-unconsciously changing the meaning of the whole character.

For example, the pretty character for "love" can turn into "dimwit" if an innocent-in-itself radical denoting a person is added to the left. So you get "dimwit" rather than the hoped-for meaning of "people loving."

There was a highly-publicized case when I first came to Japan of a couple who wanted to name their son 悪魔 (Akuma: "devil"), kind of like the baby named Satan Speaks in David Sedaris's hilariously satirical family Christmas letter from the fictional Dunbars. (It's in this book, which also includes a fantastic short story constructed as review of local children's Christmas pageants by an embittered old theater critic.) The couple lost their case.

Literacy problems are not just affecting the naming of newborns. People who arrived in this world long ago suffer, too. Everyone in Japan knows a 聡 (Satoru: "clever [boy]") who's sick of being inadvertently addressed in writing as 恥 (Hajiru (?): "shameful [boy]").

But, then, it's understandable why the naming system here gives people a headache. Some names usually come in just one permutation...say, 瑠璃子 (Ruriko: "lapis lazuli" + "child," which I've always thought was lovely). But the very common names are often not so restricted. Japan has scads of women named Yumiko, for instance, but the different kanji create different strings of meaning. The most basic is 弓子 ("bow [as in 'bow and arrow'] + "child"), which has a nice warrior-culture fierceness to it. You can make it more conventionally girlie by using 有美子 ("has" + "beauty" + "child") or 優美子 ("outstanding" + "beauty" + "child") or 由実子 ("source" + "fruit" + "child"). As one of the Asahi articles mentions, people often choose characters or pronunciations based on the advice of their priest.

BTW, the custom of gay guys' calling each other by the closest equivalent gals' name in sarcasm or bemused affection is just as strong here as at home. The other night, someone asked whether we'd see our friend Akihiro that night this way: "Is Akiko coming?" It's not that Aki (which is what we usually call him) is femme; neither is the friend who asked, for that matter. He was just kind of being mischievous. I didn't even notice until just now when I was thinking back for an example to use. I'm very used to it, but, oddly, it's not the sort of thing I usually do in English. Then, too, it's not always effective: When I've written with annoyance about Andrew Sullivan, the main reason I've never referred to him as Andrea is that there's no point--Andrea means "man" in Italian and is originally a guys' name.

In any case, it'll be interesting to see what the new survey turns up when it's actually conducted.

Added in yet another fit of free association: Something interesting with 愛 (ai: "love") and 僾 (honoka, I think, though it doesn't come up as a possibility when you input those kana: "dim, hazy") is that the same problem happens in reverse with one of the kanji that are used for names. I mentioned it above as one of the things that come up on the Yumiko slot machine: 優 (yu, in this case: "outstanding"). If you take away the person radical on the left, it becomes 憂 (yu: "apprehensiveness, depressiveness"). Kind of like naming your daughter Dolores, I guess. Actually, since 僾 and 優 look kind of similar, I wonder whether some parents are...not necessarily mixing them up, but looking at the first with the feeling they get from the second.

Added on 16 January: Okay, as Amritas points out, Andrea isn't the common noun that means "man" in Italian. I mean, I don't think it is. It's just the same male stem as in androgen or androgyny, so it probably means something more like "manful." If anything, that bolsters my original point. :)

Simon World has posted the results of the Asia Blog Awards 2004. The man is a saint for taking on the job, given that he does his Asia by Blog thing twice a week. For people who have blundered into my place here from search engines and don't know much about other blogs in Asia, the list of finalists (and Simon's extensive blogroll) is a good intro.

All this talk about warning systems for the Indian Ocean is no longer theoretical, apparently:

A government-envisioned system to help Asian nations facing the Indian Ocean construct a tsunami early warning system will utilize around-the-clock satellite monitoring of water pressure in the sea, government sources said Wednesday.

Any abnormal changes in water pressure would be relayed to an alert center to be set up in the region. On receipt of an alert, the center would inform regional governments of the threat, enabling them to issue evacuation orders.

...to those well-to-do people in a position to hear them. Don't misunderstand--I have nothing against affluence or the affluent. It must also be said that the planners seem to understand that the method of transmission is going to have to be basic and low-tech:

The evacuation advisory would be passed on at the local level by radio-linked loudspeaker systems similar to those used in Japan by local governments for public announcements.

Now everyone around the Indian Ocean gets to be constantly harangued by Japanese-style public service loudspeakers. This is called "development." (I'm assuming the local authorities won't take long to catch on to possibilities beyond the once-every-500-years imminence of a tidal wave. In Japan, at least, there isn't any greeting or caution too trivial to be blasted at you from municipal loudspeakers.)

Mrs. du Toit's new essay (it's bizarre that I almost never link to posts by the people I read most assiduously) covers an important element of this kind of thinking and why it's a problem. Nature does what it likes, and we can't get the pretty, rousing, life-affirming parts without also taking the cataclysms. People who haven't internalized that are thinking about the tsunami in ways that run together a lot of things that aren't comparable.

Or, if I'm going to be blunt, a lot of people who aren't comparable. Before a new reader ruptures an artery, let me hasten to say that I do believe we're all comparable in intrinsic human worth and that, in societies in which we have choices, it's our choices that distinguish us. I suspect, though, that when people envision a shiny new early warning system, they have visions of people living subsistence-level lives in remote fishing hamlets being saved from the next tsunami, and that's just not going to happen. Indonesia is one of the five most-populous countries in the world; it and the other countries of the Indian Ocean have thousands upon thousands of little islands where people are tucked away. A lot of these places haven't yet benefited from the extensive progress of receiving reliable plumbing and electricity; how likely is it that they'll all be kitted out with a relative luxury like a tsunami warning system?

What will actually happen is that population centers like coastal cities and resorts will get the loudspeakers, which means that we'll just be making it more likely that their relatively rich inhabitants can escape. Once again, my point is not that it's bad to help the well-to-do escape disaster; it's that people seem to be seeking a way to help the truly destitute, and this sort of thing simply is not going to do it. Economic development, in which villages find a way to provide something marketable and use the resulting income to upgrade their standard of living, will do it. But that has to be a thousand local projects, not a single gesture of international mega-magnanimity. In order to think in those terms, you have to have realistic hope for people, not just wishes.

This is uncharacteristic: the most recent Nikkei headline about the most recent tsunami-related developments says, 成田空港に無言の帰国、スリランカから７遺体 ("A silent homecoming at Narita Airport: 7 bodies of Japanese nationals arrive from Sri Lanka"). Normally, the Nikkei leaves headlines with human-interest hooks to the Mainichi and the news tabloids. The bodies today are all from the same tour group.

The local story that everyone seems to be following most intently is that of Ryohei Sugimoto, 12, who's the only member of his family left alive. They were on vacation on Pipi, an island close to Phuket in Thailand. He identified his father's body by his wristwatch and his little brother by his bathing suit. Mrs. Sugimoto was still missing yesterday, though her body may have been found since then. What's so hard to watch about Ryohei is that he seems shaken but is still composed, and he knows that what he's waiting for is his mother to turn up dead.

That's a Japan-specific story. In the regional media, the attention that isn't going to bottlenecks in the aid distribution chain is being spared to ask, in part, whether it's not just a little weird for people to be going through with their plans to vacation on parts of Phuket that are still intact. One certainly hopes that incoming tourists will not take the opportunity to go across the island and rubberneck, but I can't see the moral virtue involved in making sure that none of the businesses actually left standing make any revenue. Tourism is just about all there is to Phuket, and it's a big part of the overall Thai economy. The Thai Prime Minister has said that his country doesn't need more monetary aid, but that doesn't mean the economy can afford to stagnate while survivors are treated and rubble is cleared. From the point of view of the tourists, it probably takes more strength of character not to switch destinations to somewhere else, in a sense. There are, after all, many inexpensive tropical beach resorts in the region, and those that are away from the Indian Ocean would be the ideal places for people to forget the tsunami and such compassion fatigue as might interfere with a lighthearted good time in the sun.

Here's hoping you all had a better New Year than one Sumio Sugita of Kita-Kyushu:

A 77-year-old woman was arrested Saturday for fatally attacking her 89-year-old husband with sauce bottles, police said.

Kiyoko Sugita was arrested for the murder of her husband, Sumio, after allegedly bashing him over the head several times with sauce bottles.

She admits to the allegations.

"He did nothing around the home except complain and beat me up," the old woman told the police.

I can see how that, especially the second part, could get to you by the time you're 77. Normally, I don't post entries whose only significance is to show what weird and wacky things happen in Japan; other blogs have that covered ably and amply. (I'm not looking down on them, either; I read them myself.) What struck me about this story was the way the words "sauce bottles" were repeated over and over and over, to the point that you start getting distracted wondering what kind of sauce. If it'd been soy sauce, the report probably would have said so. Maybe ponzu, then? If so, konbu (kelp) or yuzu (a hard, sour citrus fruit) flavor? You'd think yuzu would sting more...you know, with that astringent lemoniness. Well, assuming there was sauce clinging to the inside, since the report says "sauce bottles" and not "bottles of sauce."

Added after searching for original Japanese story with Atsushi: The type of bottle isn't specified in the Japanese report, but a poignant clause about the woman's years of suffering appears to have been dropped for the English version:

Mrs. Sugita is reported to have said, "Not only did he constantly complain at me about my cooking and housekeeping, but I had to sit through endless yakking about his bonsai plants."

That's a more rational reason for murder than some we've heard this year.