The White Peril 白禍

Ruh-roh:

A Japan Airlines (JAL) jetliner barely avoided a collision with a plane that had just landed at New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido in January after it began to race along the runway for takeoff without clearance, government regulators said Tuesday.

It was not until last Friday that JAL reported the incident, which occurred on Jan. 22, to the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry in accordance with the Civil Aviation Law.

...

The JAL jet's captain has told company officials that he failed to confirm that his plane was cleared for takeoff. "I was preoccupied with preparations for takeoff and failed to confirm whether my plane was cleared. I thought no other aircraft was ahead of us."

At around 9:16 p.m., the captain of JAL Flight 1036 bound for Tokyo's Haneda Airport was ordered by an air traffic controller to wait at the south edge of the 3,000-meter-long Runway A, according to ministry and JAL officials. Nevertheless, the pilot of the Boeing 777 with 201 passengers aboard increased the engine's thrust and began to race along the runway for takeoff.

The controller who noticed that the jet was about to take off immediately ordered it to halt saying, "Stop! You're not cleared for takeoff yet!"

Details, details. JAL hasn't had a fatal incident in 20 years--in fact, I believe it'll be exactly 20 years this August. It was the single-plane incident with the highest number of fatalities in history, I think. At least, it used to be, and I don't think any have exceeded it since then. Japan's air safety record since then (and, for that matter, then) has been the envy of the world, and justifiably so. But there's a crew-error incident like this every few months nowadays; a few years ago, it was control-tower error. Luckily, there's always been only one person in la-la land, with everyone else on top of things and ready to make up for him.

Japan's H2A Rocket has been launched successfully. Good news. Japan's last several high-profile rocket launches have frequently ended in malfunctions and shoot-downs, so there was a lot of pressure for today to be, as the Nikkei blandly puts it, the first step in restoring confidence in Japanese aerospace development. That communications anomalies were discovered and delayed the launch by an hour and a half didn't help matters, but everything's fine, including the putting into orbit of the MTSAT (multifunctional transport satellite, or 運輸多目的衛星 if you prefer the Japanese mouthful) it was carrying, which will be used for air traffic control and meteorological observation.

Of course, this is a civil, not military, satellite. Whether its success bodes well for needed improvements in Japan's ability to gather strategic information by satellite is not clear. More military satellites are supposed to go up in the next year or so, so we'll see.

The Diet's Committee on the Constitution (or however it's being anglicized) has released the draft of its proposals, which are due in finalized form in April. The summary at the Yomiuri pulls things together pretty well.

The hottest topic at the meeting was whether the amended Constitution should clearly state the right to exercise collective self-defense.

An advocate of the change said, "It would be bad if the government's interpretation of the stipulation could be easily altered after a change in administration. An ambiguous constitution is problematic."

But an opponent said, "It's a matter of course that the nation can exercise the right to collective self-defense. There's no need to put it in the Constitution."

Of course this is the...culmination is probably the wrong word, since this could keep going indefinitely...latest stage in a protracted series of negotiations. The Shin-Komeito is the LDP's partner in its ruling coalition; one of the issues on which their alliance is shaky is the use of the SDF. The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the chief opposition party, opposes changing the constitution. I'm not sure whether its was a DPJ member or someone else who made the statement quoted as "It's a matter of course that the nation can exercise the right to collective self-defense," but it's hard to figure what that could mean. If conservative interpretations of the constitution didn't regard Article 9 as prohibiting Japan from entering international conflicts, this debate wouldn't be going in the first place.

Here's what Article 9 says:

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

1. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.


2. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceeding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

Added after looking at Reuters: You know what I don't get? Look for the latest Japan-related headlines on Reuters. I can see why Livedoor's attempted takeover of Fuji Television is a big, big story. I haven't written about it because, well, I usually don't report on business stuff; the case does say interesting things about the state of Japanese media, but nothing that's moved me to go off on it. The nice thing about having a vanity site (verging on Apollonia in my case) is that you get to write about whatever you please.

Reuters is not a vanity site (stop sniggering, you boys in the back!), and you'd think that it would see fit to give some attention to a proposed change in the Japanese constitution. I don't think it's especially newsworthy because I live here, you understand. Japan has the first ever constitution to renounce war explicitly. It's America's chief ally in a volatile region. We're not talking about a potentially insignificant shift here.

You know how I figured last night that I just had a 24-hour bug? I was mistaken. I forgot that aspirin, despite its commonplace-ness, is very, very good at what it does, and my reduced fever and achiness were its doing. The good news is that, since yesterday, my stomach has remembered that it's supposed to send things downward when it's done with them. The bad news is that I'm still lightheaded. Fortunately, there's news to match my mood. Take a gander at this, geese:

An overwhelming 96.7 percent of single women are bugged when they see men wearing trousers that are either too short or too long for them, a joint survey by two Japanese companies has found.

...

The women were asked to rate their response to such appearances in four levels, ranging from "It bothers me a lot," to "It doesn't worry me."

The appearance that bugged women most was "Trousers that don't match (are too long or too short)." A total of 69.4 percent of women responded, "It bothers me a lot," while 27.3 percent said it vexed them "a little" -- a combined total of 96.7 percent.

...

The survey also found that women took notice of what kind of socks men were wearing. When asked, "What item can cause you to become disillusioned and think that the person has no style?" a total of 18.4 percent of the women said, "Socks."

There are probably more than a few self-professed "stylish" businessmen in Japan who give a lot of thought to what kind of necktie they wear, but based on the results of the survey, maybe a look at their socks may also be in order.

The article focuses on the "stylish" angle, but I think that's probably not quite right--even if the women themselves were addressed that way in the questions. After all, we've all seen a billion and one of these hokey surveys about what drives women nuts about the way men dress, and when it comes to trousers, what's the usual top-ranked complaint? They bag around the ass, that's what. And Japanese women are no different from women elsewhere in that regard. (No, I haven't researched this scientifically, but tell me you seriously doubt me? Thought not.) That it either wasn't asked about or didn't concern the women surveyed suggests that the real issue isn't "stylishness" in the sense of attractiveness. (Well, I guess it could also suggest that wearing highwaters is an unusually common problem among Japanese men, but let me riff here.)

There are many lines of work that have adopted casual dress in the States but not in Japan; unless you work in a record store or funky cafe, you probably wear a suit to work. Straight guys in Japan don't care about clothes any more than straight guys in the States--yeah, yeah, generalization, outliers, nothing femme about troubling to dress well, lots of gay guys wear chambray shirts and dumpy khakis every day, blah, blah, blah, fine; the pattern is still a pattern. So if you see a man whose shoes are expensive and polished, whose suits are carefully selected to drape over his shoulders and break over his shoes correctly, and whose socks are discreetly dark, it probably means that he's management-track at a good company and dresses that way because he's figured out through trial and error that he has to. (There's also the fact that upscale men's magazines routinely carry pages and pages of completely scripted outfits for guys to copy in toto--they make John T. Molloy look like a total amateur.)

Now, before anyone goes bananas on me, I should clarify a few things. Japanese society still expects women to leave work to have children soon after marrying, to the point that the number of women even from the most prestigious universities who score management-track positions is very, very low. That means that the vast majority of women can realistically expect to have to run their households on their husbands' salary and status, returning to part-time work only when the children are grown. You may denounce this as retrograde or get Danielle Crittenden-type shivers of pleasure from it, but it's a fact that governs women's lives here, and they all know it.

Further, fewer women find their husbands through meetings arranged by family or company than used to. Clothing-related status markers aren't all that important to pay attention to when you know your suitor's entire CV from your elders' background check--once you're running the home, you can probably tell him what to wear, anyway. But they may be all you really have if you're meeting guys under self-introduction circumstances at a party.

I know this isn't really funny, but I'm kind of febrile from the flu, so I'm doing that cough-giggle thing while I type this. Holy moly:

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made an unusual angry outburst on Tuesday after seeing a police officer flee from a bat-wielding man in a news program.

"I watched a scene in which a police officer fled from a criminal. It's disgraceful for an officer to act like that," Koizumi reportedly said during Tuesday's Cabinet meeting.

...

The case Koizumi spoke of involved a 26-year-old man suspected of being addicted to drugs.

After he caused a traffic accident in Tokyo's Minato-ku on Feb. 19, an officer rushed to the scene and tried to arrest him. During the process, the man grabbed a metal baseball bat and approached the officer, reportedly saying, "Don't come near me or I will kill you."

Jeez Louise. You can only hope the cop completed the effect by fluting, "Help me, mommeeeeee!" as he ran along. Those reports a few months ago that the police here feel overwhelmed are starting, disquietingly, to make more sense.

I do understand that most Japanese police don't have to deal with much more dangerous than someone's getting a little huffy over being busted for having an outdated bike license. It does seem to me that if you're going to freak out at having a blunt instrument brandished at you, though, you might want to consider a different line of work from being a police officer.

BTW, those outside Japan may not know this, but Koizumi is thrillingly convincing when he gets pissed. There's not a trace of the scripted high dudgeon you often get with politicos; his eyes narrow, his voice gets clipped, and by God, you notice. I've said this many times before, but his speeches in support of the Bush administration's approach to the WOT and preservation of democracy are often, to my mind, more stirring than Bush's.

Wow. Just, wow.

Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai urged countries to take a leaf out of Japan's book by practicing efficient environmental protection aimed at cutting down "mottainai" wastefulness.

...

"I love the 3-Rs -- reduce, reuse and recycle. I think that's a wonderful call to the world. One of the reasons why some of the countries don't want to support the Kyoto Protocol is exactly because they don't want to reduce their over-consumptive life pattern. One way of reducing that over-consumption is by learning to reuse a lot of the resources that we use and just throw away," Maathai told Yoshinori Kando, the Mainichi's Director and Chief Editor of the Tokyo Head Office.

"This concept is extremely useful. I must congratulate the Japanese people. I don't know how they developed that in their culture."

Well, they mostly developed it because Japan is a row of volcanic rocks in the ocean with few resources and places to put junk. Before it was plugged into the modern economy of global trade, Japan's only choices were to make do or to take over Korea to get access to what it needed. It's been known to exercise both options.

That's not to say that the Japanese can't be congratulated on making conservation into an ethical value. Japanese resourcefulness is one of the things that make many of us foreigners fall in love with the place. Not only in use of materials for building, but also in food, poetry, and decoration, the Japanese ability to combine a few choice elements to achieve what other cultures could only do with a truckload of stuff is inspiring.

But let's know when to reel it in here, too, okay? Japan's illegal dumping problems are well-documented (though many of the most famous individual cases don't seem to be on-line, occurring as they did before the Internet became a commonly-used news source). There's a reason the illness that results from long-term, low-grade methyl mercury poisoning is named after a Japanese town (Minamata Disease).

I'm not arguing that Japan is actually the world HQ for environmental evil. I'm only pointing out that Japan has had its problems with the unforeseeable consequences of chemical emissions, the very foreseeable consequences of state-funded construction orgies, and moral hazard--neither more nor less than other countries that industrialized over the last two centuries. As Ms. Maathai's example illustrates, too many people take Japan's famous love of nature at face value and assume it indicates more than it does.

Oh, and I nearly forgot the kicker: word is, of course, that Japan has no coherent policy in place to implement the Kyoto Protocols. That doesn't bother free-market types such as me, but you'd think it would give pause to people who get all rapturous about austere living.

This was the lead story on yesterday's print edition of the morning Nikkei: "US and Japan agree on strategic goals for joint measures against terrorist threats to their regions." The result of this meeting (in Washington last week) isn't a surprise, or anything. There was, obviously, lots of hot air about peaceful solutions to problems in Korea and Taiwan and getting the DPRK to return to 6-party talks. Not that those things aren't important, but general statements that democratization is a good thing that the world could use more of aren't exactly revelatory. Two items that approached substantiveness:

• acceleration of talks related to the roles of the Japan SDF and US Armed Forces, and a reevaluation of the structuring of US forces deployed in Japan
  
• a strengthening of cooperation on missile defense

Attendees included Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Nobutaka Machimura, and Japanese Defense Agency Chief Yoshinori Ono. Their unsurprising conclusion was that poor sources of information (the Japanese use 不透明性, which literally refers to "opacity" or "lack of transparency") and instability made the DPRK and the Strait of Formosa the places to watch.

If you're in Japan, you might have seen the subtitled broadcasts from North Korean state television sputtering that recent changes in Japan's defense policy are a cover for a plotted full-scale invasion. There are plenty of long-standing animosities to go around in this region, and the DPRK milks every one of them regularly--one of its favorites, of course, being the understandable lingering Korean resentment over the Japanese occupation. Just to make sure the other big East Asian player isn't left out, we have the PRC trying to get the DPRK to return to the 6-party talks it huffily left last week. In the midst of all this, Japan knows it needs its partnership with the US, and as a proud American who loves Japan, I'm glad the ties are only getting stronger.

Now-former US Ambassador to Japan Howard Baker left yesterday. The Mainichi reports on his last few statements before leaving Japan. Close Bush associate Thomas Schieffer is his replacement.

The Asahi seems to me to be a bit slow on the uptake on this one, since it's been said for the last several years that the Kyoto Accord is basically impracticable for developed countries, but the results of its new survey at least provide dry humor on a topic that's often treated with poker-faced do-gooder high seriousness:

With the landmark Kyoto Protocol on global warming finally taking effect today, Japan probably should own up to a major embarrassment: that it may well be unable to meet its obligations under the treaty.

This possibility, suggested by an Asahi Shimbun survey, contrasts sharply with the fanfare that greeted Japan's decision to hold an international conference on climate change in 1997 in Kyoto to set reduction goals.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, Japan has agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions between fiscal 2008 and 2012 by an average 6 percent from the fiscal 1990 level.

The Asahi Shimbun established that only a few prefectural and municipal governments have done anything about it. In fact, a nationwide survey found that only three of the 47 prefectural governments and seven of the 13 major cities can actually boast decreases in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Also, latest statistics offered by about half the prefectural and municipal governments surveyed showed double-digit increases over the fiscal 1990 level in greenhouse gas emissions.

Unlike the central government, prefectural and major municipal governments are not obligated to establish emission reduction goals, and so are still not feeling the heat.

Well, that'll work. We'll just make sure the Diet Building only uses its incinerator on alternate Tuesdays. The archipelago will be pollution-free in no time.

Now, I cropped that segment of the article just at the laugh line, so it's only honest to point out that the next paragraph says, "On the other hand, many drew up plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and do away with chlorofluorocarbon replacements." You have to wonder, though, whether this is motivated by environmental consciousness? Market forces? Production costs? Consider:

Even local governments that reported emissions cuts acknowledged that the changes were not due to any particular policy measures being implemented.

For example, an official with the Osaka prefectural government said, "With our faltering economic base, a number of factories decided to move elsewhere."

A Kawasaki municipal government official said, "Basically, it was only by a stroke of luck that some companies were able to reduce their output of products that emit greenhouse gases."

What Osaka means by "elsewhere," of course, includes poorer areas in Japan but mostly refers to developing countries, especially China--and those places don't have the luxury of sufficient prosperity to devote resources to casting about for cleaner energy sources.

BTW, I wasn't aware that today was Kim Jong-il's birthday and the day the Kyoto Protocols were supposed to go into effect. Sheesh. It's enough to make you want to stay in bed until Thursday.

Added after the caffeine took effect: Some may remember that, a few months ago, some of those developing countries joined with the US to say no to the Protocols. I haven't seen any statements from Japan, but the EU is, naturally, talking:

"We will continue to pressure hard for all of our international competitors to hamstring their economies for our benefit partners to come on board," European environment chief Stavros Dimas said last Wednesday as the European Commission proposed such post-2012 steps as extending emissions reductions to aviation and shipping.

One must note, however, that the EU has instituted a point-trading system for emissions that is designed to adhere to the agreement it ratified.

Yesterday, Koizumi's cabinet finalized its proposal (Japanese, English) to give the Self-Defense Force more leeway in defense. Specifically, if there's a missile headed toward Japan, the proposal would allow the SDF to shoot the damned thing down without getting approval to mobilize from the Prime Minister.

Perhaps since I'm a military strategist the way Madonna is an actress, this sort of news makes me say, "This is a new proposal? What the hell was the idea before?" From the looks of things, the idea before was that a missile attack would come with plenty of warning. The cabinet is now considering that it may not.

There have been cases (as when our forces shot down an Iranian airliner) in which soldiers have misidentified aircraft, but the Prime Minister isn't exactly in a position to help with that. Preventing those mistakes involves the segment of the command chain a lot closer to those who first sounded the alert. Of course, I assume the expense of anti-missile missiles, which the government can hardly afford to sling around like arrows, was also taken into account. Even in these times of tension in the region...well, it's always tense, but a certain birthday boy has made things extra-special tense of late...one feels safe in presuming that the SDF is not going to get too trigger happy.

Added at 22:40: I'm not a military strategist or historian, apparently. The Iranian Airbus thing was bothering me--I associated it with high school, which for me ended the year before the Gulf War, so I did what I should have done initially and looked it up. I've fixed it above, but, you know, for any persnickety people who noticed....

There was an earthquake this morning. I think I felt it, but I may be dreaming...or something. Anyway, its epicenter wasn't far from Tokyo, in the southern part of Ibaraki Prefecture. Magnitude 5.4, not much below that of some of the severe quakes Niigata Prefecture had last autumn. It looks as if about 37 people were seriously injured, which is a higher figure than I can remember for any earthquake besides the Chuetsu Earthquake (that's what the seismologists call the Niigata quakes, after the village under which the biggest quakes were centered) in recent memory. Luckily, the Tokyo area hasn't come off a summer's worth of poundings by typhoons, which was the case in Niigata; there was lots of liquefaction that led to mudslides and cliffslides. It also is called the Kanto Plain for a reason: it's not as mountainous as most of Japan, so the number of rocks higher than your head is a lot lower. On the other hand, Tokyo has plenty of reclaimed land, which proved to be a real menace in the Great Hanshin Earthquake ten years ago.

I know everyone will join me in wishing Kim Jong-il a happy birthday tomorrow. I'm sure all in North Korea will be celebrating!

And they'd better.

Ghost of a Flea has yet another Kylie picture up, but what caught my attention even more was a link to this site, which gives animated instructions for Westerners about to go to Japan to work. You have a sequence about navigating the office, one about visiting people at home, and one about going out drinking with colleagues. If you can stand to watch the Beavis and Butthead-ish characters (I mean, they don't act like them, obviously, they're just drawn like them), the information is pretty good. Telling points:

• Like a lot of explanations of tricky Japanese ceremonial maneuvers for Westerners, the one for exchanging business cards on this site doesn't tell you about the little parts that can get you in trouble--in this case, how you're supposed to hold two at one time. I mean, obviously, there's nothing difficult about it physically, but if you've just received your visitor's card, is there a certain set of fingers you're supposed to hold it between while proffering yours? If you get it wrong, you could make it hard for your visitor to take your card from you. Or someone could get a nasty paper cut. Theoretically speaking, you understand.
  
• The house depicted in the home entertainment section is of the traditional Japanese kind with shutter-type front door, tatami rooms, side garden with stone lantern, and tokonoma (display alcove). What do the animators put right next to the front door to let you know you're looking at the exterior of a realistic Japanese house? A beer vending machine.
  
• The proprietress of the bar in the sequence about drinking looks like Barbara Hale.
  
• The writer of the text keeps saying that Japan doesn't differentiate between right and wrong. I think that's a bad way to put an excellent point. What she's talking about is the idea that Japan believes in extremes of behavior rather than moderation. In the West (sweeping generalization alert!), we like to get a sense of people's real, essential personalities even in formal circumstances. If you know someone who acts one way at work and 180 degrees the opposite way outside it, you regard him as untrustworthy. In Japan, the opposite is true. You defer utterly to the group and the demands of ceremony at work, and then you let off all the resulting stress by being sloppily demonstrative while getting drunk later. Being too honest about your actual opinions in formal circumstances makes you look, paradoxically, untrustworthy--because what you need to be trusted to do is cooperate, and you may not attend to other people's needs if you're busy articulating your own.
  
• On the same token, those of us who were ruthlessly schooled in most of these little rules are often told, after we arrive in Japan, "You sound like an old man--no one acts like that anymore!" Years ago, a friend of mine presented a gift of sweets to her middle-aged host mother and that lady's friends with the respectful words, "お口に合うかどうか分かりませんが" (o-kuchi ni au ka dou ka wakarimasen ga: "I'm not sure this will [be good enough to] suit your exalted palate, but [please take it]"). The assembled ladies were silent for a few beats and then burst out laughing. "You're talking as if you were about to be interviewed! We'd be more likely to say, 'Hey, I think you'll like this!'" True, meeting a group of elder friends for lunch isn't the same as doing a presentation at a prospective client's place, but friends who are around my age and older are always complaining when we get together that they've had to drop a lot of the etiquette with which they were brought up. The last half-decade's worth of hires at work don't understand them.
  
• I think my favorite sequence is when the guy's in the bathroom and there's an excursus on windchimes in the middle of the directions for using the Asian-style toilet. What might have been more useful was a warning that there may not be soap or a guest towel at the hand-sink, so you need to be satisfied with splashing your hands very thoroughly and having a handkerchief in your pocket to dry them on. I can't imagine how they missed that, since it's one of the first things people express shock over on arriving here. If you want to give yourself a fighting chance of avoiding nasty germs, you can get alcohol-soaked wet handwipes at any convenience store. Not soap and hot water with a clean, soft towel to follow, but better than nothing.
  

Oh, and while we're on this topic, I would just like to point out that in the months that Simon World has generously linked my little pieces on Japan Post privatization, Social Insurance reform, and Japanese views of the WOT, the link that has gotten me the most traffic from his site is my post about a musical toilet. I'm pretty sure there's a life lesson there, but I'd prefer not to know what it is.

Added on 12 February: And, as Atushi just reminded me, I forgot to congratulate Japan on its Founding Day. But, congratulations on Founding Day, Japan!

Having seen it first from Japanese sources, I was kind of surprised at the wording of the English wire reports on the DPRK's huffy departure from 6-way talks on its nuclear programs:

The United States has assumed since the mid-1990s that North Korean is able to make nuclear weapons, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday, playing down a dramatic announcement from Pyongyang.

"Playing down"? "Dramatic"? I mean, sure, it's newsworthy when high officials in a dictatorship have a fit of pique and storm out of a meeting, but these six-way talks have been rocky for months, and--maybe because its test missiles are fired directly over our heads--here in Japan, we've pretty much taken it as a given that North Korea has been developing nuclear weapons capability as quickly as it can. It's hard to imagine who could have been caught off-guard by today's announcement.

You know how your friends who have been to Tokyo complain about the groping problem? We are not kidding:

A record 2,201 cases of women molested on trains were reported in Tokyo last year, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) said.

However, MPD officials said that they believe this is just the tip of the iceberg, noting that numerous victims of such crimes choose not to file criminal complaints against their molesters.

Among the 2,201 cases, the MPD arrested, or sent investigation reports to prosecutors, on 1,886 suspects aged 14 to 80. Those in their 30s, some 37 percent, accounted for the largest number of suspects. About 30 percent of the victims were high school girls.

Now, before anyone starts drawing conclusions about fundamental kinkiness in the Japanese character...uh, well, truth be told, there is some of that. But I think it's fair to say that this is more a function of (1) having people packed so tight that you can essentially make mischief unobserved in the middle of a crowd of 200 people and (2) teaching women that part of modesty is not standing up for yourself in public.

Plans for the privatization of Japan Post are moving right along--and in predictable directions. Heizo Takenaka announced some of his team's new proposals last week; the Yomiuri has an English version:

It also proposed requiring the companies that will manage postal savings and life insurance services to entrust their business to the network management company for a 10-year transition period from April 2007 to guarantee universal service.

...

The government plans to restrict the new status to employees of the network management company and another company that will provide delivery services, including that for delivery of certified mail and court documents.

Takenaka did not say whether the new status would be quasi-government employee status, which would ensure employees are subject to the same anticorruption rules as government employees. [I feel better already.--SRK]

He said the government would consider a system to continue universal service, as a contribution to regional communities, of postal savings and life insurance after full privatization in 2017.

In addition, the government would stipulate that there should be more than one post office in each municipality. It will pledge under the postal privatization bills to secure residents' convenience and consider providing services in underpopulated areas.

Mail pickup and delivery is a public service, so I can see why maintaining universal access is a theoretical worry. Practically speaking, though, is there any area to which private courier or freight services refuse to deliver?

What the committee appears to be talking about is not just a one-line condition that the new corporation that handles the mails not restrict delivery by location. That bit about at least two post offices in every municipality, for example, is nice but arbitrary. If you're familiar with rural areas, you can imagine some of the municipalities we may be talking about. Recall also that Japan is essentially one long volcanic range poked above the Pacific; there are twisty, hard-to-traverse mountain and ravine roads all over. The Kanto (Tokyo-Yokohama-Kawasaki) and Kansai (Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe) megalopolitan areas may house an unusually high proportion of the Japanese population, but the outlying areas are still outlying. I'm not aware of any regulation that says every municipality must have at least two rice-sellers or general stores, though you never know in Japan. Is it necessary (or wise) to be reforming Japan Post so that it maintains universal service by mimicking its current, drag-prone structure as much as possible--while piling on the number of corporations and rule-making bodies involved?

Can't wait to see what they come up with for the savings and insurance divisions!

Having just sniggered at Westerners who gravely drop Oriental wisdom, I will now take the opportunity to discuss (briefly, at least for me) one of my favorite Japanese proverbs. Hypocritical, perhaps, but then, I own the place.

What brought it to mind was a Proverbs-quoting comment on this post at Dean's. The post links to an article called "How to Seem Smarter," and though the basic tone is tongue-in-cheek, there is a good deal of truth to it.

Anyway, the Japanese proverb I'm thinking of is this:

能ある鷹は爪を隠す。

nou aru taka ha tsume wo kakusu

"The astute hawk keeps its talons hidden."

Now, of course, there are other Japanese proverbs that more explicitly admonish you to keep your trap shut to avoid making a fool of yourself. This one, however, has always been one of my favorites because, for one thing, it covers varieties of show-offiness besides just babbling. It's like the German saying, "Always be more than you appear" (which, as Miss Manners once pointed out, "predates the invention of the Mercedes-Benz paid for on installments").

Another thing about it is the sensuality of the language. Except for the first word, which has a long-vowelled pronunciation borrowed from Chinese, the entire sentence is composed of native Japanese words. They flow along rapidly because of the alternating consonant-vowel structure and because most of the consonants themselves are unvoiced: k, t, ts, s. The sentence is sibilant and slightly menacing when you say it--pronounced conversationally, it comes out like noh'arutakawatsumewokox. You can imagine a hawk sitting in a tree, very still and observant, with the only sound the rustling of the leaves while he decides what to do next.

It's only been a little over a month since the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, but I'm sure it's seemed like much longer for Ryohei Sugimoto, 12, whose story has been the focus of much of the human interest coverage of the event here. When the rest of his family was swept away from the Pipi Island resort where they were vacationing, it fell to him to identify his father's and brother's remains. His mother's body has finally been found and identified (dental records). Ryohei and the uncle who went back to Thailand with him will be coming home.

With Mrs. Sugimoto, the number of Japanese confirmed dead comes to 26.

This, via Amritas, is great. There are few things more annoying than the view among many Westerners that spraying kanji all over something immediately lifts it from its actual mass-production banality into a realm of cosmic spiritual Significance.

The potential mistakes can be every bit as hilarious as the more-famous fractured English one sees here in Asia. One of the guys in my department, who started out in China studies, notes that the implicit message of the T-shirt in this post is "I have a rack."

A slightly different example, in that it dealt with concepts and not kanji, was on this week's episode of CSI. (I mean, they showed it this week on AXN here in Japan--it was probably filmed in 2000 or so.) Sara, the tough chick, was working overtime on some case that had struck a nerve, and Grissom, the handsome department head, leaned forward and said to her, with a comical air of profundity, "You know, Sara, if you chase two rabbits, you won't even get one." Maybe those weren't the exact words, but (as the subtitle writers knew) he was definitely citing the Japanese proverb ニ兎を追うものは一兎も得ず (nito wo ou mono ha itto mo ezu: "the man who chases two rabbits fails to catch either," or, if you insist on attaching a tone of Charlie Chan/Mr. Moto/Suzie Wong wisdom to all things East Asian, "he who pahsue two bahnny not obtain even won"). I half-expected a gong to sound during the ensuing pregnant pause, though I myself was rolling around on the sofa laughing.

Actually, before Friends declined into a self-referential snore, there was an episode that beautifully satirized this tendency. Ross talked about taking a self-defense class and learning to achieve "a state of total awareness" that he grandly announced was called "unagi." Rachel ("Isn't that a kind of sushi?") and Phoebe ("Yeah, it's...it's freshwater eel!") knew better, though.

Japan changed the design and composition of its ¥500 (about US $4.50) coins a few years ago, and a few months ago, it released new bills, too. The Japanese economy being huge and having a fair number of disgruntled unemployed people, it's a target for counterfeiters, and they've sunk to the challenge:

After a large number of counterfeit ¥500 coins were discovered in Postal Savings ATMs, Japan Post announced on 3 January that [its machines] would stop handling all coins at post offices in Tokyo Metro and in Fukuoka and Kumamoto Prefectures.

The fakes they're finding correctly use an alloy of nickel and zinc (the Sinitic compound for which is 亜鉛 [aen: "sub-lead"], which I've always found kind of cute), but the composition is different from that in real coins. They also have misaligned stamping and leave off some marks, but according to the authorities, you do have to look closely to see the problems.

There's also been a rash of fraudulent withdrawals of cash using faked cash cards. I believe it's the iC system (comfortingly, the one my JAL card is allied with) that's had the most problems, though I haven't paid close enough attention to understand where the chink is that makes it easy to trick. Anyway, they're still trying to determine whether the legal fault lies with banks or depositors. Koizumi says his financial team is working on it.

As far as the bills go, this is as good an explanation as I've seen of the new technology and the reasoning behind it--mostly, as I say, that Japan has a huge consumer economy and is a target for counterfeiters. Of course, counterfeiters have already started making funny-money versions of the new bills--as industrious and clever as these people are, couldn't they find a way to make their fortunes honestly?--and the fact that the old notes are still in circulation means that the tricky holograms aren't yet having much effect. After the New Year, it was discovered that large numbers of false bills had been used to buy fortunes and souvenirs at temples.

Many's the time I've sat on our toilet, patted its little control arm, and sighed, "O faithful ultramodern Washlet, you spray and dry and warm me faithfully at my command, and yet I feel among the world's poor because you never play me soothing music." Apparently, all that could change. This is one of the Mainichi's photo essay thingies, so I'm not sure whether the link will last, but clicking on the following graphic should get you to the original:





I think kitsch devotees have pretty much told the world about Japanese electronic toilet seats, but if you've not heard: a lot of private houses and more upscale office buildings have them. There's a seat heater (most Japanese bathrooms are unheated, so this is very useful in winter), a bidet, a butt-cleaning spray (warmed to your specifications), and a warmed-air drier. Many of the newer ones also have an air freshener. Toto is, to my knowledge, the market leader, if it does not, in fact, have a monopoly.

One of the ironies of our apartment--from my American perspective--is that you can set the toilet seat's jets to expel water at your tenderer membranes that's hot enough to seriously scald them...but the sink at which you're supposed to wash your hands afterward gives you only cold water. On the other hand, as a lover of baths (the English genes, maybe?), I am completely smitten by the bathroom. The control panel for the tub looks like something you'd find in a cockpit. To run a bath, you put the drain plug in and push the "On" button; if you keep the plug in out of habit, and you have the water level and temperature settings to your liking, you can turn it on from the kitchen. Either way, it fills and beeps when it's done.

This kind of system is designed, of course, to go with the traditional Japanese practice of taking baths at night, family member by family member from grandfather on down to the baby, using the same water. Everyone showers and lathers and rinses clean, then just uses the (wonderfully hot) bathwater to soak in for a while. Except in the middle of summer, when the slightest bit of standing water turns scummy practically overnight, the water is kept for a few days and reheated. Accordingly, there's another setting you use for 追い焚き (oidaki: "lighting the subsequent fire [under the cauldron]").

It's funny how you get used to these things, to the point that going back to the way you grew up is a shock. Whenever I'm at my parents' place, I have to remind myself that I can't just walk away from the whooshing taps and expect them to shut off when the tub is full. And that if I leave the water in when I'm done, my little brother will ask me just what I think I'm doing. (Well, I think his actual comment was, "What, are you thinking of buying a turtle, or something?" Everybody's a comedian.)

Returning to Toto's new technological gift to civilization, I suppose I don't mind that it can expel scents at you--by this point, one is all too accustomed to using bathrooms that have been contrived to smell like scratch-and-sniff stickers. That "soothing music" worries me, though, given Japan's track record. It's very common here to, for example, call a major corporation, be put on hold, and have a toy-synth version of "The Entertainer" or "Hungarian Dance No. 5" played at you. I can only hope that the "Off" button for the music is easily recognizable for those of us who prefer to commune with ourselves silently.

Added on 3 February: Eric also has tubs on the brain, largely because he no longer has one on his deck. In his case, of course, the subject is a hot tub, which strict Mid-Atlantic parents like mine regarded, in the Love Boat era, as a frothing symbol of hedonistic California excess.

I didn't mention in the original post here, of course, anything about Japan's famed devotion to hot springs, which aren't hot tubs but serve the same sort of purpose (assuming you just want to bathe). I like hot-spring bathing in the winter, with the cold air and stars above while most of your body is submerged in sulfurating heat. Mostly, though, I prefer the bath at home, which has a glass of white wine and Dusty Springfield playing. You can't really get away with sinking in languidly and sighing, "Oh, Mary Catherine, it's true--the others have no idea what you and I suffer" in public, even if you have a folded towel on your head.

Faced with one of the highest suicide rates even in Japan, Aomori Prefecture has at least one town that isn't just going to roll over and play dead. The government of Rokunohemachi is introducing a new "Save our reputation--stay alive!" program. Well, no, because they weren't savvy enough to hire me as their PR director, that's not their tag line. They decided to go with the old give-away ploy:

Alarmed, Rokunohemachi town office decided to provide each household within its jurisdiction with a "mental health card" appealing to anyone in emotional distress to visit one of five counseling offices.

Cardholders can seek help free of charge at any of the centers, located at three hospitals, a dental clinic and a home-care support center.

A dental clinic? Considering what a lot of dentists here dispense as care, you'd think visiting one would be likely, if anything, to send the unstable right over the edge. But here it is again:

Town officials hope that the project, which will begin Tuesday, will help detect the early signs of depression.

If depression is suspected, staff at the centers can refer the victim to a psychiatrist.

The five centers are staffed with a total of 16 nurses and dental hygienists.

They were registered as "mental care nurses" in November after completing a training seminar.

A training seminar is all you need to be certified as a mental care nurse? I have no professional knowledge of this, and the translation may not say the same thing as the original, but isn't dealing with depressed people who are thinking of offing themselves kind of...tricky? I suppose the "training seminar" could have covered a lot of material, and it's got to be better than the preparation the nurses had before. (As you might imagine, seeking professional help for mental and emotional problems is frowned on in Japan, and stimulus for the development of psychotherapy is correspondingly low.) If the idea is simply to prepare nurses to assess who needs referring to a psychiatrist who can make a real diagnosis, it might be a good investment.