The White Peril 白禍

Japan is contemplating an environmental tax:

On 29 march, the government's advisory body on global warming policy (Chair: PM Koizumi) decided on a new proposal for achieving environmental goals; the purpose is to hit targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions set by the Kyoto Protocols. The main pillar of the plan is to urge industries to make efforts independently, so factory-based reduction targets were increased and home- and office-based targets were relaxed. The proposal names an environmental tax as an possibility to be investigated but does not specify whether such a tax will actually be introduced. The proposal contains few concrete policy recommendations, so some have raised concern that targets are in danger of not being achieved.

Should we laugh or cry? All of this is in response, of course, to the realization several weeks back that the Kyoto Protocols were going into effect, but Japan had no plans in place to implement them.

Apparently under the assumption that any publicity is good publicity, Mitsubishi Fuso is taking the tack of spacing out its revelations of product malfunctions to make sure there's always a new one circulating:

The transport ministry started questioning executives of Mitsubishi Fuso Truck & Bus Corp. on Monday about suspicions the commercial vehicle manufacturer had hidden defect-induced accidents yet again, this time under new leadership.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport summoned three executives, including Hideyuki Shiozawa, senior executive officer in charge of recalls, for questioning over suspected violations of the road transportation vehicles law.

After a spate of scandals over defect cover-ups as well as pledges for improvement, it was discovered that Mitsubishi Fuso had delayed by six months reporting a series of vehicle fires and other problems involving its large trucks.

It was not until March 18 that the company reported 22 incidents, including seven fires, that took place after it filed for recalls of 4,454 large trucks due to faulty suspension parts in September 2004.

It's literally been years that these recalls have been in the news.

Japan's spy satellite development program combines technological research, communications infrastructure, and procurement of components from international sources. It is, therefore, the perfect project to fall prey to just about every weakness in Japanese organizational behavior.

You have a mishmash of government ministries, private corporations, and neither-here-nor-there public corporations in charge, which maximizes the number of people who can put claims on funds without being questioned too closely:

About 5 billion yen that went into the development and manufacture of Japan's first spy satellites was siphoned off by middlemen who added little value, sources said.

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The three independent institutions involved in the spy satellite procurement are the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).

The chartered corporation is the Japan Resources Observation System Organization (JAROS).

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The former Science and Technology Agency was in charge of the satellite and rocket. The former Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) was given authority over the satellite radar, and the former Posts and Telecommunications Ministry was in charge of data transmissions.

Get it straight--there will be a quiz later.

You have an initiative that sprang from ad hoc worries and that no one bothered to fit into an overall plan or mission:

The Cabinet of then Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi approved acquisition of a spy satellite in November 1998.

The main catalyst for that move was North Korea's launch in August 1998 of a Taepodong missile over the Japanese archipelago.

You have the sub-contracting of work in chains that recede into the infinite distance, sometimes crossing in odd places:

NEDO, for example, commissioned JAROS to do most of its work, such as radar design.

And you have the involvement of the Mitsubishi conglomerate, which just cannot stop getting itself in trouble lately (and frequently in ways that result in fires and explosions at inopportune moments--just what you want in a satellite):

The spy satellites were manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

Created ostensibly to provide guidance, the process actually led to some money being used to pay the difference in salaries for Mitsubishi Electric employees loaned out to the intermediaries, sources said.

Further, sources said that those institutions did little of the actual oversight work.

That Japanese link above, BTW, is to a story about soil pollution in Osaka by Mitsubishi Estate and Mitsubishi Materials for housing development; several executives are being investigated.

Notice that there's no mention of the Japan Defense Agency or the SDF anywhere in the article. Presumably, they're the ones that are actually going to be using the satellites? Did they have a say in things? If not, why not? Then again, given the size of the crowd, maybe it's just that no one noticed their absence.

The president and two other top men at Kansai Electric (KEPCO) will be stepping down over last year's disaster at the Mihama nuclear plant:

To take responsibility for Japan's worst accident at a nuclear power plant, Yosaku Fuji will step down as president of Kansai Electric Power Co. in June, the company said Friday.

The accident occurred at the Mihama nuclear power plant's No. 3 reactor last August. Five workers were killed and six injured when steam spewed from a ruptured, corroded pipe.

Fuji's resignation was also influenced by repeated requests that came from a government investigative committee asking KEPCO to revise an outline of measures to prevent a recurrence of the accident.

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Investigations revealed that the pipe that ruptured had not been replaced for years, despite clear signs of corrosion.

By "years" they mean "almost three decades."

The World Organization for Animal Health (for which the acronym is OIE--which, in addition to its long Japanese name of 国際獣疫事務局, makes it look as if there should be an Epidemiology in there somewhere) is proposing relaxed BSE policies:

The international organization OIE, which establishes safety criteria for livestock, has established a new set of standards that would broadly relax safety criteria related to BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy)* and is presenting them to its member nations, including Japan.

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Japan has mandatory inspection of every head of cattle, but other countries have been able to set their own standards.

However, the judgment of the WTO (World Trade Organization), which deals with trade issues that arise between countries, is that the OIE rules are the standard. When the OIE adopts new standards, if exporters such as the US appeal to the WTO with claims that Japan has placed limitations on beef imports based on its own excessive safety criteria, Japan could be backed into a corner.

Why, yes, it could, especially since even a cursory look at the information available on CJD (with its prefix-indicated variants, the human form of BSE, scientists think), reveals that most of it consists of "We don't really know..." and "While far fewer than the predicted 900,000 people have been infected, it's still theoretically possible that...." Of course, Japan's propensity for protectionism is the stuff of legend by this point, and though citizens may cry for their 牛丼 (gyu-don: lit., "beef bowl"), it seems inclined to keep dragging its feet in lifting the beef ban.

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* Interesting side note: the Japanese for BSE is, like many scientific terms, a direct translation: 牛海綿状脳症 (gyuukaimenjounoushou: "cow + sponge [as in, a member of the animal phylum Porifera, though the kanji sequence is literally "sea + cotton"] + form + brain + disease). They also, like us, informally call it 狂牛病 (kyougyuubyou: "mad + cow + disease").

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The PRC is once again set to send warships on a diplomatic visit to Japan. That "once again" describes "set" and not "send," since the last view plans for maritime military visits were scotched because of the pilgrimages of high Japanese politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine. The pilgrimages are also the reason that visits between heads of state have been suspended over the last few months, so this new development could mean either that the PRC is softening its stance (possibly because Koizumi did not go to the Yasukuni Shrine over New Year's) or that it recognizes that cold-shouldering Japan is bad policy.

The meeting at which this was decided, by the way, took place between Takemasa Moriya, the Administrative Vice-Minister at the Japanese Defence Agency, and the Vice-General Chief of Staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. He has a name, too: "bear + light + what I'm guessing is some kind of tree." I can't seem to find a Japanese source that has the pronunciation given (Yu Kou-kai?), or a Chinese source that Romanizes it.

By the way, I know what 次官 means just fine, but I wasn't sure how it was usually rendered in English. The JDA is an agency, not a ministry, but of course the Prime Minister is considered ultimately in charge. For those who are interested, this is the JDA organizational chart in Japanese, and here it is in English. Moriya is about the fifth level down.
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Japanese politicians are looking into the possibility of suing for sovereignty over Takeshima in international court:

Former Ministry of Foreign Affairs Masahiko Takamura indicated that he believes that Japan should investigate the possibility of taking its case for the ownership of Takeshima to the international courts, saying in a joint meeting of the LDP on diplomacy, "At this point, finding and coming to a resolution of this issue between the two countries [Japan and Korea] will be difficult. We need to seek a way to communicate through a third party."

Most of the attendees approved of Takamura's plan, and it seems to be set to solidify as the party's stance.
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A Diet panel (lower house) on the constitution has recommended that the SDF be permitted to participate in collective self-defense (with Japan's allies). How that can be permitted given the constitution remains the subject of debate:

With regard to the exercise of the right to collective self-defense, however, the panel's opinions were mixed, with some saying the legal basis for such use should be provided in the Constitution, while others argued such use could be permitted by changing the interpretation of the current Constitution.

In any case, the LDP's coalition partner, the Shin-Komeito, is blocking the introduction of a bill that would change legislation governing the SDF. The bill, if passed, would have made deployments abroad regular duties (as opposed to just extraordinary measures in exigencies) for the SDF.

What is going ahead is the plan to make SDF equipment production and management better:

The Defense Agency has decided to establish multifunctional teams to ensure uniform control of some Self-Defense Forces equipment, such as next-generation, short-range surface-to-air missiles, from the research and development stage right through to disposal, agency officials said.

Following private sector examples, the agency aims to streamline operations by organizing multifunctional teams for each type of equipment, bringing together needed personnel for each team from different divisions in the agency and the SDF as well as from the private sector.

That part about lack of horizontal communication is typical of Japanese organizations. People often forget that the inefficient 70% of the economy that serves the domestic market is carried by the 30% that has to compete on international terms. If the SDF actually succeeds in restructuring to put the highest priority on getting results (which is not a given), it can only be a good thing.

What the SDF is and is not allowed to do is of increasing importance not just because of the WOT but also because of Japan's petition to become a permanent member of the UNSC. Kofi Annan has said that if the reforms that are put through involve expanding the number of permanent seats, two of the six new memberships will be reserved for Asia, of which "one would naturally go to Japan." How natural it would be to have a permanent UNSC member that may not be permitted, under normal circumstances, to participate in collective defense is still a matter for discussion.


Added on 25 March: The Yomiuri has a story this morning that itemizes the limitations on the SDF better than it did yesterday, for those who haven't read them. When it calls these the recommendations of "the government," though, I don't know that that conveys what's actually going on. This is an internal panel of LDP lower house Diet members. As the Asahi reported yesterday, the Shin-Komeito doesn't seem to want to go quite this far right now, and that means that these recommendations may be held in abeyance for some time.

The government has some important information for us Japan-dwellers:

The government's Earthquake Research Committee has compiled a nationwide "map of earthquake risk," which indicates through different colors the probability that different regions will be visited by a severe earthquake. The map was released on 23 March. Areas in which it is believed there is at least a 26% chance that an earthquake of a weak 6 JMA or above will occur in the next 30 years (equivalent to once in every hundred years) extend across 24 prefectures from Tokai to the Kii Peninsula, centered around the Pacific coast of Shikoku.

These things are probably useful to seismologists and insurance companies, but they don't seem to be much more than dark entertainment to us laypeople. After all, what's most meaningful to people in Fukuoka is that there's a 100% chance there was an earthquake of a weak 6 JMA or above this weekend. That no one expected it to happen there rather than, say, here in Tokyo doesn't count for a whole lot.

Indeed, if you prefer to bet on precedent and let your math be a little dodgy if need be, the last ten or so years would seem to indicate that the next major earthquake is likely to hit somewhere outside a hot zone. Hokkaido and Miyagi Prefecture have had their expected high-magnitude quakes recently; Japan's other severe ones have been in places such as Fukuoka on Sunday, Niigata last autumn, and (of course) Kobe ten years ago.

What all this indicates is something that should be fairly obvious: Japan is a row of volcanic islands along a major plate boundary. Some of the volcanoes are still active. (Ooh, speaking of which: Atsushi and I went up to the crater of one on Kyushu over the weekend. I'd upload a picture or two, but I'm apparently not posting my graphics files properly to avoid chewing up bandwidth. Once I figure out what to do, I'll post them. I tell you, sometimes nature is almost as cool as a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.) That means that, pretty much wherever you are in Japan, you're somewhere that's at risk of a serious earthquake, and you need to plan accordingly.

I thought going to Kyushu to visit Atsushi would be a break from the news cycle. It was not. Saturday and Sunday, especially, were big days, so for anyone who hasn't gotten the rundown:

There aren't many serious earthquakes in northern Kyushu, but there was one when I was there (go figure). We felt it at level 4 in Atsushi's city--quite a lot of shaking, but nothing disturbed. The quake was centered just off Fukuoka, a city of about 2 million, where it registered a weak 6. There was an island with about 700 inhabitants, I think, that had bad damage. The houses were built into a hillside, so they slid on top of each other. The greater part of the population has had to be evacuated. There were also a few Fukuoka downtown buildings that had windows that broke and dropped out onto the street. A few water mains burst--things like that. Of course several hundred people were injured, though there was only one death. All things considered, the damage was minimal. There are still, however, lots of evacuees who can't return to their houses.

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20 March was exactly ten years after the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system. Last year, NHK (I think it was NHK) ran a documentary that dramatized the network of rescue workers, civil engineers, police investigators, and chemical analysts that springs into action when something like this happens. This year being the tenth, the coverage largely consisted of short interviews with the wives of a few of the commuters who died. (There were 12 deaths out of thousands injured.) In most Japanese Buddhist sects, the tenth year after a death isn't considered significant. Most have special rites on the seventh anniversary, and the focus on Sunday was on Western-style laying of wreaths. There was also a statement of apology from Aum Shinrikyo, which has renamed itself Aleph and changed leadership since conducting the attacks.

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Talks during Condoleezza Rice's visit were focused mostly on the ban on US beef imports, the tiresome back-and-forth over which is going to turn all our brains to mush even if we never eat a morsel of the stuff again. The ban may be lifted...it may not be lifted...our two great nations cherish their close allegience but that's not contingent on it's being lifted...we're considering lifting it...you said that before but you still haven't lifted it. Et c., et c. Condoleezza Rice and Jun'ichiro Koizumi have the exact same hair, which made them look comically symmetrical in their poses together for the press. That's about the most interesting thing that seems to have come out of her being here. It was certainly more interesting than the beef and rice jokes.

If you want to find out what Rice said about non-cow issues, you'll have to see the reports of her visit to Seoul after she left Tokyo. (She and President Roh agreed that the DPRK should return to the suspended six-party talks, for instance. Of course, South Korea has also imposed a ban on US beef imports, so it was a topic there, too.)

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Three crewmembers of a Japanese tugboat were released by their pirate captors yesterday. (Okay, that didn't happen on Saturday or Sunday, but it's a story I've been following.) The Asahi article has pretty much all the details that were being reported yesterday. Well, it leaves out the fact that the chief-engineer guy is gorgeous, but I assume that was a question of column-inch restrictions.

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There's also been more about Japan Post reform and shifts in the SDF structure, but I've been busy since arriving back and haven't really had a chance to look closely at what's going on.

Added at 22:20:
Joel at Far Outliers posted about the anniversary of the subway attacks here, with fascinating information about the angles the media used when covering them at the time and, further, about whether Aum Shinrikyo's nature and motives were adequately understood.

Simon World's Asia By Blog feature is up for this round. One (among many) of the interesting links is to this discussion by Riding Sun of an Australian professor who appears to do that horrid the-only-reason-Japanese-customs-seem-unethical-to-us-is-that-we-can't-understand-their-nuanced-underpinnings thing:

In general, Japan is very welcoming to foreigners. Nevertheless, people who are not ethnically Japanese are regularly shut out of certain bars and restaurants here. Some are shady nightclubs connected to the Yakuza � the Japanese Mafia. But others are completely legitimate establishments that just don�t feel like dealing with gaijin.

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Clark [the professor in question--SRK] has consistently argued that Japanese storeowners are justified in banning all foreigners if they claim they've had a bad experience with particular foreigners in the past. (Or, presumably, if they suspect they might have trouble with foreigners in the future.)

Riding Sun cites Clark's reply to a book review that mentions him unfavorably. To me, the interesting part is this:

I also object to the automatic and pejorative use of the term "racial discrimination" when people or societies decide that some of the many cultural distinctions that are needed for fair and effective social organization should be based on race, ethnicity or nationality rather than some other cultural characteristic. It was the moralistic efforts to deny these distinctions that led directly to the tragedies of former Yugoslavia and the tragedy of the Aborigine community in Australia.

Well, you don't have to deny that the distinctions are meaningful to people and argue that we can all be one big happy family to say that there are certain things you shouldn't be allowed to do to someone just because of his ethnicity.

But let's assume that the guests are supposed to follow the hosts' rules on their territory without complaint. If the Japanese believe that that rule applies to the Japanese activities abroad, they have a funny way of showing it. And the issue's not always as trivial as where you get to take a bath, either. Remember the Daiwa Bank scandal?

In Iguchis confessional letters to Daiwa in mid-summer 1999 (he sent a stream of letters and notes to the bank after that initial July 13 letter) the rogue custody officer suggested that his superiors keep the losses secret until appropriate measures could be taken to stabilise the situation. It was a suggestion that was taken up. In the period after July 13 and before about September 18, when Daiwa belatedly advised the Federal Reserve Board of the loss, certain of Daiwas managers connived with Iguchi to prevent the losses being discovered, despite a legal requirement to report misdoings immediately to the US regulators.

For example, during September 1995, Iguchi was told to pretend to be on holiday so that a scheduled audit would have to be postponed; he was in fact in the New York apartment of a Daiwa manager helping to reconstruct the trading history of his department. Daiwas managers seem to have been hoping to transfer the loss to Japan, where it could have been dealt with outside the scrutiny of the US regulators and markets.

After Daiwa told regulators about the loss on September 18, Iguchi was taken to a motel and questioned directly by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. He told FBI agents about what had gone on in the months following his initial confession to Daiwa, and the bank was shocked to find itself facing a 24-count indictment for conspiracy, fraud, bank exam obstruction, records falsification and failure to disclose federal crimes.

Daiwa argued, rightly, that not a single customer of the bank had lost any money. At the time of the incident, Daiwa was one of Japans top 10 banks and one of the top 20 banks in the world in terms of asset size. Like most other Japanese, and some European, banks, it had massive hidden profits on its balance sheet that were not accounted for due to the legitimate historical accounting method that it employed. That gave Daiwas management considerable freedom of action if unexpected problems arose. One of the bank's crisis management actions after Iguchi confessed was to pump back into the defrauded account securities equivalent to those that their New York head of custody had sold off.

But the US regulators were deeply unhappy at the attempted cover-up, and at the way Daiwa had seemed to ignore regulatory warnings over a number of years. They were also unhappy that at least one senior member of Japan's ministry of finance knew about the Daiwa scandal in early August and had not informed his US regulatory counterpart.

This pushed the Daiwa scandal onto the international political stage and led to a telephone conversation in which Japans finance minister, Masayoshi Takemura, was obliged to make apologetic noises to US Treasury secretary Robert Rubin for his staffs failure to pass on the information. (The call was made only after Takemura had annoyed US officials by denying at an earlier press conference that his ministry had failed in its duties; his aides later denied that any formal apology had been made to Rubin.)

I've cut and pasted all of that to help make a point: my understanding is that the initial problems that made it possible for Iguchi to do what he did were not specific to Japanese trading operations; it was the shameless cover-up and the protesting (not mentioned here) that the US government was only flipping out because it didn't understand cultural differences. You know, like reporting losses even if they made you look bad.

Now, there were rogue traders seemingly everywhere in the early 1990s. I'm not saying that blowing large sums of money illegally is a characteristic Japanese activity, any more than possibly having diseases from weeks in close quarters on-sea is a characteristically Russian activity. But much as I love the Japanese, many of them really do have a way of regarding their own ways as special and others' as not.

Then, too, maybe they don't feel the need to because they keep themselves apart abroad. Atsushi and I usually travel using tour packages run by JAL, and as a working-class boy, I can tell you, they're the darnedest thing I've ever experienced in my life. Especially in Singapore, Malaysia, and Bali ("For faggots, you two sure like visiting police states," one of our friends once remarked), I was floored. We didn't go for the super-premium packages, but there was a Japanese-speaking guide to meet us at the airport, whisk us into a car, and explain on the way to the hotel all the things Japanese people like to do and the dangers they might encounter. Hotels frequently have a separate reception/concierge desk for Japanese guests. In Singapore, we were on one of several all-Japanese floors.

The Japanese are comparatively rich, and if they can pay to have things to their liking, why not? If I thought it were somehow immoral, I wouldn't shell out for it myself. The more tourist money, the better for many of these economies. And as an American, I'm well aware that the Japanese are not the only people with a reputation for being demanding abroad. But I do think that it serves to illustrate that for many Japanese, travel abroad means mostly interacting with artifacts and not with people. A society this structured does not work if too many unexpected things are possible. People are brought up to stick together in safety, and they do. Adventure means the unexpected, which is one reason so many disaffected young Japanese are taking the backpack-across-Asia route.

Foreigners also mean the unexpected, to get back specifically to Riding Sun's original topic, which is the reason some Japanese who stay at home want to avoid us. I disagree with their reasoning, but UN resolutions about discrimination aside, the law isn't likely to change here any time soon. Some change requires experience. I've more than once had people I meet, especially shopkeepers and cabdrivers, tell me that I was so easy to deal with that I'd changed their assumptions about foreigners. It's not that I'm particularly charming; it's just that I acted like a regular old person, didn't make special requests, and spoke politely. They hadn't figured that was possible.

But it is, which is why logic such as Clark's is so screwy. Much of what we're talking about here isn't just reliance on well-documented cultural characteristics. It isn't even using a poor experience with a single person to tar everyone of his ethnicity, bad as that is. It's often, as Riding Sun, making preemptive judgments about hypothetical bad experiences one might have with people one knows nothing about. What does that have to do with "fair and effective social organization," pray tell?

Virginia Postrel has a post and column today about consumer choice--as in, does the existence of too many options throw people into states of high anxiety over whether they've selected the one perfect flavor of Wilkin & Sons' jam? By extension, the question becomes whether research indicates that privatizing social security and providing a profusion of investment options would decrease people's satisfaction with the results they get. An interesting left turn.

A story in today's Asahi English version is also interesting, though it follows a more conventional consumer-advocacy script: providing choices to Japanese consumers in the produce aisle wastes resources, drives prices up by deluding them that lettuce is better from X Prefecture than from Y Prefecture, and sucks up fresh water to produce feed for beef cattle. And, really, next to smoking--which the Japanese do plenty of, anyway--what better evidence could there be that the Japanese have gone over the cliff of capitalist sin than they they eat beef?

The weird thing is the measure that's touted in the article:

Takashi Shinohara, a Lower House member of Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), has expressed concerns about the future of Japan's agriculture. At a Feb. 22 Lower House Budget Committee meeting, he asked Yoshinobu Shimamura, the agriculture, forestry and fisheries minister, about the current situation concerning Japan's food mileage.

Food mileage is calculated by multiplying the transportation distance with the volume of food transported. The higher the food mileage the larger the load placed on the global environment for the sake of a more varied diet for a nation's population.

The agriculture ministry's calculations in response to Shimamura's query confirmed the worst: Japan's food mileage for 2001 was about 900 billion ton-kilometers, the largest figure in the world.

Since Japan is an island nation, transportation distances are expected to be high. But still, Japan's food mileage is about 2.8 times that of neighboring South Korea. Compared to the United States, which has about twice the population and is the most affluent nation in the world, Japan's food mileage is about three times as large.

Of course, this doesn't follow the usual line that it's okay for Japan to be obscenely rich because its nature-worshipping culture makes it an inspiration to niggling conservationists everywhere. But the yardstick used strikes me as strange. Multiplying food volume by transportation distance seems to me to be a good rough number that could tell you...erm...some things that you already know, such as that Japan consumes a lot of food that's transported long distances and doesn't grow a whole lot itself (comparatively). I have no trouble believing it was devised by a consumer advocate rather than a research economist--or, more precisely, that it's a consumer advocate who's pushing it as an indicator that policy Must Change. The same volume of different foods can deliver different levels of nutritional value and can have different unit costs; transportation can be efficient or inefficient.

That the Japanese agricultural distribution system is full of inanities is well-known. There are a few major federal ministries and dozens of agencies and public corporations involved--always a way to guarantee that decision-making will be distorted like a fun-house mirror and the amount of huffing and puffing involved in getting broccoli from field to supermarket will be maximized. At the same time, this is disturbing:

Four years ago, when Shinohara was director-general of the Policy Research Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, he said he was stunned by what he saw at a supermarket in Kagoshima Prefecture at the southern end of Kyushu. Among the vegetables sold was lettuce grown in the highlands of Honshu.

"I thought it was such a waste to bring lettuce from so far away when it can easily be grown nearby," Shinohara said.

But that's how things are in Japan. Many vegetables that have never been associated with one particular locale are now displayed at supermarkets with ads boasting their place of growth, often a prefecture hundreds of kilometers away.

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The availability of food from around the country could be one reason why there is so much waste.

It's one thing to question whether lettuce from Honshu is better than lettuce from Kyushu--but hearing that it's a "waste" to ship vegetables from one place to another to see whether consumers go for them is a little unsettling coming from a government official. What solution does he have in mind? you kind of have to wonder.

Since any moves by the government would be likely to create more regulations and hoops for producers and distributors to jump through, we can take small comfort in the knowledge that officials seem to be sufficiently baffled that they're not sure how to proceed:

One agriculture ministry official couldn't find a specific explanation for the leftovers.

"It may be because they were busy, or maybe they were on special diets," the official said.

Uh, what? People waste food because Japan is rich and the generation of grandparents who lived through wartime and post-war deprivation, complete with rice rations, has faded into lack of influence on most of today's workers. Most people can afford to leave behind some miso soup or rice or even high-quality fish without feeling prodigal. It's also not clear from the wording of the article whether the part of the food that's pared away before serving was counted.

Anyway, there's more about the beef ban and about agricultural subsidies for those who are interested. The reporter doesn't seem very critical, but the descriptions of how policy plays out, while abbreviated, give you a sense of how things work.

Usually, talk of piracy in Southeast Asia refers to DVDs nowadays. But a Japanese tugboat has encountered the real deal, being attacked in the Strait of Malacca--very important shipping lane, which sees a lot more than tugboats--with three hostages taken. Two are Japanese; one is Filipino. It looks as if it just happened a few hours ago, so there's little news. The rest of the crew are fine, and the Malaysian police are looking for them and their abductors. Very odd. Hope they're recovered safe.

Added on 17 March: The English Asahi has a follow-up story:

The tugboat was on its way to Myanmar (Burma) from Singapore while towing a barge, Kuroshio 1, which carried 154 Japanese and Malaysian workers.

In most cases of abductions committed by pirates, captains and chief engineers are taken simultaneously, and key documents stolen. Several days after an attack, the pirates demand ransom from the vessels' owners after finding the right phone number written in the documents.

The amount of ransom is usually several million yen so that the ship owners can easily pay, according to marine transportation industry sources. Once the ransom is paid, the hostages are released in one or two weeks at the earliest, they added.

The Malacca Strait is notorious for pirate activity. But after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami off Sumatra in late December, there were no reports of piracy incidents for about two months. Some pirates apparently died in the disaster or lost their weapons.

All of that makes sense. I mean, not as an honest way to make a living but as the way crime would work in the Strait of Malacca. I still think--sorry, guys--that this story is weird. You just don't hear about things like this in Japan, unless I'm missing all the stories. And it's not as if I were particularly hawk-eyed, but I do read multiple Japanese news sources per day, often watch the news on NHK or another network, and (most importantly) subscribe to the dead-tree Nikkei. Piracy in a major shipping lane is the sort of thing that affects commerce. If Japanese ships were being raided consistently, I'd expect the Nikkei, of all news outlets, to be all over it. You do hear about lots of encounters in the Sea of Japan (that's the East Sea if you're Korean), in the East and South China Seas--you know, suspicious boats passing without identifying themselves, or turning out to be North Korean patrols, things like that.

In any case, no word today that I've seen that there's any update on the case itself. Japan is, however, offering to help patrol the Strait of Malacca. There's good reason:

The decision, which came Tuesday, represents the first time the government will offer vessels to a developing country free of charge to deter pirates.

The Malacca Strait has long been plagued by piracy. About 90 percent of Japan's oil supply from the Middle East passes through this sea artery.

South Korea is considering--it's not clear how seriously--recalling its ambassador to Japan. The points of contention include a disputed island (called Takeshima in Japanese, called Tokto in Korean). Shimane Prefecture claims it and is poised to celebrate "[We Own] Takeshima [So Leave It the Hell Alone] Day." Korea takes this as a diplomatic affront. The other major issue is that perennial favorite, Japan's history textbooks, which the ROK understandably believes demonstrate that Japan has not fully owned its actions of the early 20th century.

Added on 15 March: China sees Korea's bitterly-disputed island and will raise it one renegade-province-type island:

[PRC Premier Jiabao] Wen proposed that three conditions be met in order to resume the top leaders' visits. The conditions involve looking at the future while reflecting upon past history, supporting a "one-China" policy apparently aimed at reuniting Taiwan, and stepped up cooperation between Beijing and Tokyo.

...

Wen also insisted that the issue of Taiwan was China's issue, asking both the United States and Japan to stay out of the matter. The premier explained that he was concerned about references to Taiwan by U.S. and Japanese officials in a recent meeting.

China's National People's Congress on Monday enacted a law designed to block Taiwan's declaration of independence. [More at Reuters on that--SRK]

"Looking at the future while reflecting on past history" refers to visits by federal politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine. At least, that's what's mentioned in the Mainichi article. China is no more fond of Japan's history textbooks than Korea is, however, and I imagine that figures in, too.

Japan has absorbed the term 不安定の弧, or arc of instability, to refer to the line that runs from North Korea down through to North Africa by way of Southeast Asia. The SDF plans to use imaging satellites to cover it:

The system is expected to draw controversy over increased fears of unified military deployment with the USAF, since sharing capability at the highest command levels will jump significantly.

That's a gentle way of saying that Japan's military use of satellites is still pretty primitive. There are dedicated military transmission channels, but they're sonic, low-speed, and low-capacity. The new satellite system will be of the same commercial type used by television; SDF personnel deployed abroad will be able to transmit images back in real time.

The "fear" mentioned above, of course, is not just that Japan is casting its lot with favorite-target America, but also that the two defense agencies will get so chummy that they go overboard on the information-sharing. The LDP's major partner in its ruling coalition, the New Komeito, is generally dovish and has called for caution. Article 9 of the constitution still hasn't been revised, after all, so the degree to which Japan can legally contribute to "collective self-defense" with its allies remains debatable.

My energy has been diverted elsewhere, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, before the date expired around the globe, that yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the fire-bombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 people during World War II. Atsushi and I watched the hour-long NHK special over the weekend. Information about the sequence of events is, to my knowledge, covered well here. I believe war is essentially a fact of human nature, and I'm thankful daily that I've spent my entire life in powerful, dynamic societies with bad-ass armed forces staffed by volunteers. I also, naturally, am glad we did what we needed to do to win World War II.

But winning a war against a ruthless opponent requires ruthless tactics:

The Superforts returned in force at the end of the month, flying at altitudes that insured immunity from attacks by Japanese defenders. Although their high altitude provided a shield for the bombers, it also decreased the accuracy and impact of their bomb runs. To correct this deficiency, Major-General Curtis Lemay (newly appointed commander of the American Bomber Command) ordered a dramatic change in tactics. The bomber runs would be made at night, at low altitude and deliver a mixture of high explosive and incendiary bombs. The objective was to turn the closely-packed, wooden homes and buildings prevalent in the Japanese cities into raging infernos and ultimately into the most destructive of all weapons - the firestorm.

The Allies had first encountered the phenomenon of the firestorm when the British bombed the German city of Hamburg in August of 1943. The night raid ignited numerous fires that soon united into one uncontrollable mass of flame, so hot it generated its own self-sustaining, gale-force winds and literally sucked the oxygen out of the air, suffocating its victims. Lemay hoped to use this force to level the cities of Japan. Tokyo would be the first test.

A successful incendiary raid required ideal weather that included dry air and significant wind. Weather reports predicted these conditions over Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945. A force of 334 B-29s was unleashed - each plane stripped of ammunition for its machine guns to allow it to carry more fire-bombs. The lead attackers arrived over the city just after dark and were followed by a procession of death that lasted until dawn. The fires started by the initial raiders could be seen from 150 miles away. The results were devastating: almost 17 square miles of the city were reduced to ashes. Estimates of the number killed range between 80,000 and 200,000, a higher death toll than that produced by the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki six months later.

Those who've studied the reconstruction of Japan after the war will recognize Lemay as a key figure--it's worth noting that, while he was willing to go to extreme lengths to fight the Japanese, he was also there to get their country going again--by structuring the SDF!--after they surrendered. That doesn't necessarily make him a nice person, but, unfortunately, you don't win wars by being nice.

Journalist David McNeill ran a piece yesterday asking why the Japanese don't pay much attention to the anniversary of the Tokyo firebombing. In it, he raises and then glides over that issue. He finishes with a quotation from one of the survivors:

�Youngsters do not understand the horror of war,� agrees Mrs. Suzuki Ikuko. �When the Iraq War started I couldn�t watch it on TV. It was too painful. But my grandson said he though it was cool. He said it was like a videogame.�

I agree that Mrs. Suzuki is entirely justified, having lived through an incendiary raid that leveled part of her city, in shying away from war footage. But ending the discussion here implies that her example is generalizable--that the only possible reactions to the carnage of war are raw sensitivity or complete insensitivity. Both postures are sometimes necessary: we don't want soldiers flying off the handle and murdering civilians out of revenge or frustration, and we do want them shoving aside their finer feelings to go after enemy combatants however they must.

But most situations are murkier. The calculations that led to the bombing of Tokyo 60 years ago included the fact that one of the city's primary industrial sectors was located next to a residential district. Perhaps if the Japanese had put all their factories in isolated, easy-to-target rural areas and bussed their workers in from a safe distance, the US would have had the choice of taking out the facilities without hurting women and children. But for obvious reasons, the Japanese didn't build that way, and we didn't bomb that way. Furthermore, it's an exaggeration to say that every last Japanese citizen worshipped the emperor as a god, but it's not an exaggeration to say that Japan was working as one big machine to maintain the war effort. Fears about what would happen if we had to invade the Japanese mainland were well-grounded. We'll never know whether incinerating 100,000 civilians saved, in some direct way, more from dying in combat; but we do know that breaking Japan's will required that we demonstrate as unpleasantly as possible that we could hurt them bad. It was a war. May all who died rest in peace, and may we continue to look for non-deadly ways to address conflict without flinching from the deadly ones when we need them.

Which brings me to one last thing: I'm sure McNeill was overjoyed to have a link between the Tokyo fire-bombing and the Iraq invasion provided for him so he didn't have to force it himself. (Usually, I try to avoid reading the feelings of writers, but the slant in his article is not exactly hidden.) But it doesn't work the way I'm guessing he thinks it does. America has put lots and lots and lots of energy into making its bombs work more precisely and efficiently. Much of that comes of non-humanitarian considerations--we don't want to waste personnel, material, and materiel. But we also don't like wrecking people's lives for the hell of it and will avoid doing so where we can. And pre-invasion Iraq was not a racially homogeneous nation that mostly supported its half-divinized leader. And we haven't wiped out a 100,000-person section of a city.

I don't think it's exploitative to use yesterday's anniversary to raise questions about whether we could have won with fewer civilian casualties. Self-criticism is good.* But the implication that goes "Tokyo fire-bombing barbaric" = "Subsequent wars barbaric" = "Iraq invasion barbaric" is cheap.

Added on 12 March: Joel at Far Outliers did something I elected not to do here: he posted parallel (so to speak) information about Dresden, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. He's right--you can't really see the significance of the bombing of Tokyo without having a handle on the way the war was going in general. By the way, I hope I made it clear above that I think the fire-bombing of Tokyo was justified. While I don't believe it's wussy to ask whether an air raid that killed 100,000 people was really necessary, investigating the question requires more than just saying, "Women and children died? A barbarism!" And even if you do accept it as iffy, it says nothing about the Iraq invasion.
* McNeill may not be American, but I'm assuming he's from a country that's part of the coalition in Iraq.

I haven't seen this on Reuters or CNN yet, but maybe I just haven't wandered into it. The Japanese Yomiuri says the following:

General Leon LaPorte, the commander of US forces stationed in South Korea, addressed the Senate Armed Services Committee on 8 March, reporting that the DPRK's air force pilots get no more than 12 to 15 hours of flight training per year and that its army is in such straits that it uses only one-third to one-half of the combat vehicles and tanks it possesses. Additionally, he indicated that, in his opinion, that North Korea's conventional military capability has weakened remarkably has motivated it to develop WMDs such as nuclear, biological, and chemical arms.

None of this is shocking news. It was widely rumored during the worst of the North Korean famine in the late 90s that things had gotten so bad that soldiers' food rations were being cut--unthinkable in a country that had so burdened its armed forces with maintaining national glory. I hadn't heard those actual numbers for flight training, though. Also, you usually don't, for some reason, see that last connection so baldly stated: making nuclear and bio-chem weapons takes technology, some gifted scientists, and manufacturing capability, but it has to be cheaper than the daily investment in keeping a million soldiers fed, equipped, and trained, decade upon decade, when you have lousy agricultural and distribution systems.

In other news, did everyone see that press conference given by the PRC Foreign Minister over the weekend? Atsushi was here for my birthday, so we had a great time chortling over what China's devotion to "peaceful solutions" for problems involving Taiwan, the DPRK, and its own military could mean in concrete terms. I considered the whole thing a present from the CCP.

Okay, in all seriousness, sandblast away some of the diplomo-speak, and you got some actual interesting content. The growing feeling that Taiwan is becoming a closer partner with the US and Japan in Asia was addressed:

In my view, the military alliance between the US and Japan is a bilateral arrangement that occurred under special circumstances during the Cold War. Therefore it ought to be strictly restricted to a bilateral nature. If it goes beyond the bilateral scope, definitely it will arouse uneasiness of the rest of Asian countries and also bring about complicating factors to the regional security situation. Taiwan is a part of China and the Taiwan question is an internal affair of China. Any practice of putting Taiwan directly or indirectly into the scope of Japan-US security cooperation constitutes an encroachment on China's sovereignty and interference in China's internal affairs. The Chinese government and people are firmly against such activities.

Not a surprising sentiment. On the China-Japan-DPRK love triangle, specifically in response to a question from Tokyo Broadcasting System about the current cessation of diplomatic visitors between the Chinese and Japanese heads of state:

It is imperative for the two countries and for the peoples of China and Japan to carry forward their friendship from generation to generation. In the past couple of years, the leaders of China and Japan have met for several times on multilateral occasions, where they had very good discussions. We hope China and Japan can proceed from the fundamental interests of the two peoples and work to create proper conditions and atmosphere for the high-level exchange of visits between the two countries in the spirit of taking history as a mirror and looking to the future.

With regard to whether the DPRK has already possessed nuclear weapons or whether it has uranium enrichment program, I believe maybe you know more than I do. [If I recall correctly, this was a laugh line at the press conference. Or maybe just Li laughed.--SRK]

Let me tell you that after receiving the relevant verbal message from President Hu Jintao, the DPRK supreme leader indicated that the DPRK side still pursues the objective of a nuclear-weapon-free Korean Peninsula and remains ready and willing to continue to participate in the six-party talks and that the DPRK side hopes to see more sincerity to be displayed by the relevant parties.

No mention of the Yasukuni Shrine issue, even obliquely, which is odd. Assurance that the DPRK is sincerely seeking peace and stability in the region, which is not odd.

There's a lot more--the al Jazeera reporter invokes the current atmosphere of "unilateralism and hegemony" to ask about China's energy consumption, China Radio International asks about the Foreign Ministry's overall course for the foreseeable future, and the reporter from Singapore asks a more flattering version of a question Simon posed after the tsunami disaster: does China really see itself as ready to be a leader as well as just a really big-ass country?

One last thing that struck me. This is from Li's reply to a question from The People's Daily about those in Washington who still view China as a potential threat:

Although they are living in the new century, their minds still linger in the Cold War era. It is those few people who are spreading the so-called "China threat theory," which is totally unfounded.

It's fascinating to hear someone from a region in which centuries-old resentments are routinely thrown around as reasons for this or that diplomatic conflict--and, specifically, from a country that is more than happy to play on lingering ill-feeling from the Japanese occupation--accuse cautious figures in the US of not putting the Cold War behind them. This isn't the first time China has shrewdly used the end of the Cold War to make bland arguments that, in this new and friendlier time, we should let Communist-era bygones be bygones. But Li is very good at working the angle, and he seemed relaxed and affable. As always, there's plenty to pay attention to around here.

Atsushi arrives for the weekend any minute, so one last bit of news from the Nikkei: Japan, Germany, India, and Brazil have come to an agreement on their joint proposal that permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council be expanded to include them. Some of you may take comfort in the knowledge that airy diplomatic clichés sound just as trite in Japanese as in English, even if they contain truth:

日本は「現在の安保理は国際社会の多様化に対応していない」として常任理事国の拡大を主張。

Japan argued for the expansion of permanent UNSC membership this way: "The current UNSC does not address the diversification of our global society."

Japan and Germany have more specific issues than that, of course. Japan itself is involved in a more general debate over the recognition that the Self-Defense Force is no longer as strictly reactive as it used to be, and the UNSC petition is connected. A permanent member of the Security Council that can't get involved in international disputes would be in a strange position.

Added after lunch: Man, I'd forget my head if it weren't attached. In my haste to edit this down for clarity--yes, I do that sometimes; just imagine what my posts look like when I draft them!--I cut out the interesting part of today's story. The interesting part of today's story is that the four petitioning countries agreed that the reforms should be decided by vote (including all UN member countries, not just those on the UNSC, and certainly not just the permanent members of the UNSC); Germany and India had been balking.

As Japan continues to strengthen its ties with the US, it's naturally moving away from the PRC:

Now that China is no longer considered a developing nation, Tokyo has told Beijing it plans to begin cutting the size of its low-interest yen loans from this fiscal year, aiming to phase them out entirely by fiscal 2008, sources said.

Beijing likely will protest, the sources said.

Some members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party are calling for an immediate end to all official development assistance (ODA) to China.

This would be the rightist wing of the party, which believes (not without justification) that, in financing China, Japan is aiding a trade and military rival.

However, loans will continue to be extended for projects that have already started, and grants and technical aid will be given for training and environmental protection programs.

The decision to turn off the loan tap to China reflects the government's belief that China's economy has taken off and the country has taken its place in the international community, the sources said.

In addition, development in China's coastal cities is now about equal to that of industrialized nations, meaning that China no longer can be regarded as a developing nation, the sources said.

Sources close to both governments said Beijing will press Japan to continue the loans beyond 2008 because provincial authorities across China are pressed for funds to develop their economies. Also, Beijing is unhappy about being told unilaterally by Japan that the ODA well will soon run dry.

...

Japanese officials would like to reach agreement on the loan reduction plan this month so that the government can begin implementing cuts soon, the sources said.

But LDP hard-liners want ODA to China stopped right away, sources said. Thus, there likely will be strong opposition to the plan for gradual reductions.

...

Criticism in Japan of ODA to China surged following anti-Japanese outbursts at the Asian Cup soccer matches last summer in China. Further straining relations was the November intrusion by a Chinese submarine into Japanese territorial waters.

Tokyo is also finding that ODA no longer carries much diplomatic leverage in talks with Beijing.

Meaty Fly, by the way, has posted twice in the last several days. Japan-China relations are right up his alley--his last post in September was, after all, headlined "Japan to designate China as military threat"--so it's possible that he'll get back to more regular writing. On his blog, I mean.

The Japanese government has put out its guidelines for how to proceed in the event of a military or large-scale terrorist attack. Comfortingly (I'm using that word straight for once), it lays out in detail what's to be done to secure Japan's nuclear power plants and fuel processing centers. Authority rests with the Ministry of Economics, Trade, and Industry and, in connection with research facilities it operates, the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. Japan, of course, has few natural resources, including hydroelectric potential and fossil fuels. We use a lot of nuclear power.

The prefectures and special metropolitan areas are expected to have their own plans in place by the middle of this year. Municipalities are to have theirs finalized by this coming year.

Idle thought: several months ago, there was talk that Japan was going to be modeling its new security measures on Israel's. I wonder whether it ultimately did; today's Nikkei article doesn't really mention anything about the background of the new policies.

It's snowing in the Tokyo area, so we are all much in distrait. The news team is interviewing people in the requisite posture of windmilling the arms and screaming, "AIEEEEEE! What is this white stuff? And why is there a whole centimeter of it?!" It's like the manna story in the Exodus. Well, except for the fact that not even G-d himself could convince me to ingest anything that falls out of the sky in Tokyo. (And since it's Friday, we'd have to hold it over in the freezer for tomorrow's ration. I'm sure particulate matter is even yummier when it's allowed to ripen for a day.)

Anyway, it's accumulating, sort of. The ground wasn't frozen most places in the city--that heat-island effect you get in population centers that are hopelessly lost to capitalism and commerce. I haven't seen anything to say that there are major train lines closed, which tends to be the biggest potential pain; and in any case, we always settle into a general well-at-least-it-wasn't-an-earthquake feeling before long. Atsushi's flying in for the weekend tomorrow, though, so I hope flights aren't disrupted. The snow's supposed to fall all weekend.

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.