The White Peril 白禍

It rained over the weekend, and I snapped this at the new Marui building in Shinjuku when I was on my way to meet friends for a drink. My cell phone is two or so years old, so the camera doesn't have as good resolution as the new ones:



All those objects of like colors, with clean lines, grouped together and arranged in beautiful neat rows. Doesn't it remind you of your sweater chest (if you're gay, I mean)?

Actually, it also kind of looks like the climactic confrontation scene from a '50s sci-fi film: Day of the Umbrellas. I somehow don't expect seawater, of all things, would kill them?

It also sort of reminds me--have I mentioned that I love this song?--of Tracey Thorn's newest video.

Actually, while I was taking snapshots of umbrellas, enjoying my freedom without a care in the world, one of the friends I was supposed to meet was trapped on the bullet train. No, I don't mean the monorail here in Tokyo--that was another accident. My friend was on the Shinkansen headed here from Kyoto, where he lives. He'd planned on a night of carousing and bitchy one-liners, but someone threw himself...er, a wrench in the works. So he got this:

The unidentified man may have leaped or fallen from a bullet train after operating an emergency latch and manually opening a door, Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai) officials said.

However, the door had been closed again. That does not occur automatically after a door is manually pulled open, which leaves open the possibility that the man was pushed out.

The discovery prompted officials to halt the Tokaido Shinkansen Line for more than three hours.

At first, they were reporting it as an apparent suicide--that's the first explanation you think of here when you hear "dead body on train tracks." But as the Asahi says, there's a significant chance the closing of the emergency door indicates someone else was involved.

And, in case you missed it, there's a lesson to be learned from yesterday's earthquake:

The earthquake was unexpected in the region, and so provided us with a lesson that any place in Japan can be hit by a disastrous temblor.

Do we still need that lesson? Just two and a half years ago, there was an earthquake in Niigata Prefecture that was unexpected. And in 1995, there was--you may have heard about this--an earthquake that wrecked Kobe, killing 6000 people, leaving thousands more homeless, and severing several major transportation arteries. By this point, anyone who doesn't know a disastrous earthquake is possible outside the historical hot zones is brain dead.

I have my iwamatodjishi.com domain name set up for auto-renewal, but apparently it didn't work this time around. Not sure why. I assume it'll be back up in a day or two.

In the interim, northeastern Honshu had yet another high-magnitude earthquake this morning, a strong 6 on the JMA scale (which measures shaking at the surface), and a 6.9M Richter:

According to the police, one woman has died in the city of Wajima; in addition, in Ishikawa, Toyama, and Niigata Prefectures, there have been 159 cases of injuries. According to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, around 100 dwellings in Ishikawa Prefecture have been destroyed or partially destroyed.

The one death was--very Olde Japan, this--from a stone lantern that toppled and crushed a woman in her 50s. (In the ghoulishly vivid Japanese expression, she 下敷きになった [shita-jiki ni natta]: "became underpaving.") Parts of Japan far from the major metropolitan areas still tend to have a lot of older buildings, so fallen clay roof tiles and stone fixtures are common after earthquakes. The Nikkei also says there have been at least 130 aftershocks already; I haven't seen word that any of them have been serious. As in the Niigata Prefecture earthquake a few years ago, there's a good chance that some of the aftershocks will be almost as intense as the first quake. The terrain there is rugged, and it's been rainy, so landslides are a constant danger.

Interesting week in Japan. Livedoor's Takafumi Horie has been sentenced to 2.5 years for securities law violations:

Horie, the 34-year-old founder of Internet services company Livedoor Co., pleaded innocent to the charges of window-dressing and stock market manipulation.

He argued that he was simply the victim of a witch hunt by prosecutors who had concocted a story to punish the young businessman who shook up the Japanese business world with his aggressive tactics.

But the court sided with the arguments of the prosecutors.

"He illegally boosted his company's share price by announcing fake business performances," Judge Kosaka said. The crimes "could not possibly have been conducted without (Horie's) instructions and approval."

From what I can tell, neither side is entirely in the right. Horie is right that the business-bureaucratic machine left over from the Japan Inc. era hates him for succeeding without playing their game. There is no doubt in my mind that the prosecution and other government agencies involved investigated every potential charge with grim, intense relish. But this isn't the Japanese version of the Martha Stewart case; Horie was pretty clearly involved in real violations, though the court disagreed with the prosecution's contention that he'd masterminded the whole shell game.

Turning to coverups of a more frequent kind, we see that yet another nuclear power plant operator failed to report an accident:

Hokuriku Electric Power Co., known as Hokurikuden, failed to report a criticality accident in 1999 at its nuclear power plant in Shikamachi, Ishikawa Prefecture, in which there was an uncontrollable chain reaction for 15 minutes, the government and the power company said Thursday.

On June 18, 1999, three of the 89 control rods inserted from underneath into the reactor core suddenly slipped out during a regular checkup at Shika Nuclear Power Station, causing the reactor to reactivate.

The reactor was not automatically stopped and the chain reaction lasted for 15 minutes. But the company did not sufficiently inspect the cause, and failed to keep records of the accident or report it to the government.

...

Nobody was exposed to radiation, however, because there were no workers near the reactor in the building at the time of the accident.

One of the operating errors stemmed from an erroneous description in the procedure manual for operating the water pressure control valve.

That's just what we want in operations manuals for nuclear facilities, huh? Erroneous descriptions of equipment! There seems to have been no major threat to human life here; the point is that we hear about these little mishaps based on slack procedure or faulty maintenance at power plants every few months. And it's not as if it were always the same power company. The problems seem more systemic than that.

The Chinese premier is set to visit Japan in April. Head-of-state visits were suspended a few years ago, mostly over the Yasukuni Shrine pilgrimages and history textbooks:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will visit Japan for three days from April 11, government sources said Thursday.

Wen will meet Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the first day of his trip and then plans to visit Kyoto.

This will be the first visit by a Chinese leader in about seven years--the last such visit was made by former Premier Zhu Ronji in October 2000.

China initially proposed a weeklong visit for Wen from April 9-15, but this was cut short because he decided to visit South Korea before coming to Japan. As a result, Wen's planned appearance on Japanese television for direct interaction with the public will be canceled. Even so, Wen still plans to make a speech in the Diet--the first Chinese premier ever to do so.

Presumably, Wen and Abe will discuss the DPRK, those disputed gas and petroleum fields in the East China Sea, and trade policy. Neither side likes the other's nationalists.

Interesting week in Japan. Livedoor's Takafumi Horie has been sentenced to 2.5 years for securities law violations:

Horie, the 34-year-old founder of Internet services company Livedoor Co., pleaded innocent to the charges of window-dressing and stock market manipulation.

He argued that he was simply the victim of a witch hunt by prosecutors who had concocted a story to punish the young businessman who shook up the Japanese business world with his aggressive tactics.

But the court sided with the arguments of the prosecutors.

"He illegally boosted his company's share price by announcing fake business performances," Judge Kosaka said. The crimes "could not possibly have been conducted without (Horie's) instructions and approval."

From what I can tell, neither side is entirely in the right. Horie is right that the business-bureaucratic machine left over from the Japan Inc. era hates him for succeeding without playing their game. There is no doubt in my mind that the prosecution and other government agencies involved investigated every potential charge with grim, intense relish. But this isn't the Japanese version of the Martha Stewart case; Horie was pretty clearly involved in real violations, though the court disagreed with the prosecution's contention that he'd masterminded the whole shell game.

Turning to coverups of a more frequent kind, we see that yet another nuclear power plant operator failed to report an accident:

Hokuriku Electric Power Co., known as Hokurikuden, failed to report a criticality accident in 1999 at its nuclear power plant in Shikamachi, Ishikawa Prefecture, in which there was an uncontrollable chain reaction for 15 minutes, the government and the power company said Thursday.

On June 18, 1999, three of the 89 control rods inserted from underneath into the reactor core suddenly slipped out during a regular checkup at Shika Nuclear Power Station, causing the reactor to reactivate.

The reactor was not automatically stopped and the chain reaction lasted for 15 minutes. But the company did not sufficiently inspect the cause, and failed to keep records of the accident or report it to the government.

...

Nobody was exposed to radiation, however, because there were no workers near the reactor in the building at the time of the accident.

One of the operating errors stemmed from an erroneous description in the procedure manual for operating the water pressure control valve.

That's just what we want in operations manuals for nuclear facilities, huh? Erroneous descriptions of equipment! There seems to have been no major threat to human life here; the point is that we hear about these little mishaps based on slack procedure or faulty maintenance at power plants every few months. And it's not as if it were always the same power company. The problems seem more systemic than that.

The Chinese premier is set to visit Japan in April. Head-of-state visits were suspended a few years ago, mostly over the Yasukuni Shrine pilgrimages and history textbooks:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will visit Japan for three days from April 11, government sources said Thursday.

Wen will meet Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the first day of his trip and then plans to visit Kyoto.

This will be the first visit by a Chinese leader in about seven years--the last such visit was made by former Premier Zhu Ronji in October 2000.

China initially proposed a weeklong visit for Wen from April 9-15, but this was cut short because he decided to visit South Korea before coming to Japan. As a result, Wen's planned appearance on Japanese television for direct interaction with the public will be canceled. Even so, Wen still plans to make a speech in the Diet--the first Chinese premier ever to do so.

Presumably, Wen and Abe will discuss the DPRK, those disputed gas and petroleum fields in the East China Sea, and trade policy. Neither side likes the other's nationalists.

This weekend, the delivery guy brought an envelope bearing those three little words every gay man loves to hear: "Unframed art enclosed." A present for my birthday (today--exactly ten years younger than Taylor Dayne) from my old roommate in New York. Of course, since I haven't found a new apartment yet--in the middle of looking--it's going to stay enclosed and unframed for a bit.

In less aesthetically pleasing news, Empress Michiko is suffering from stress-induced intestinal bleeding. (Irreverent question: if they're the intestines of the sitting empress, do we call them 御腸--miwata, maybe? Seems like a word that might do nicely in a waka written by her exalted husband to celebrate her recovery.) I'm being flippant about the level of detail, but of course the condition is serious enough. For those who might have thought that Princess Masako's adjustment problems were the kind of thing that might iron itself out in a decade or three, the example of the empress, who's been beset by stress-related ailments pretty regularly, sadly offers little hope. Empress Michiko was also a commoner before marrying Akihito. She wasn't an up-and-coming diplomat like Masako, but she was the active daughter of a rich industrialist and lived a varied life.

Japan and the DPRK will be discussing the abductee issue and possible normalization of relations between the two countries. You will not be surprised to hear that it's Japan that wants to know what happened to the remainder of its abducted citizens and the DPRK that wants money:

Japanese and North Korean delegations agreed Tuesday to discuss the abduction issue on Wednesday and diplomatic normalization Thursday during a two-day bilateral working group meeting within the framework of the six-party talks.

The two sides agreed during informal talks Tuesday that the two sides would separately discuss "pending issues including the abduction issue" on Wednesday and "normalization" on Thursday.

The government welcomed the fact that the North Korean side agreed to first discuss the issue of the abduction of Japanese nationals by North Korea, as Pyongyang has claimed the issue has already been settled. The government hopes to see some progress during the Wednesday talks.

I guess we'll know by the end of the day.

One nice thing about being on vacation was that during the inclement weather and the flights, I had time to read without that nagging feeling that I should be doing something for the office instead. The books I chose were worth investing time in, though I thought they both felt kind of short of what I'd hoped.

One was Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne, a themed biography of sorts by Australian reporter Ben Hills. I don't remember seeing any egregious factual mistakes, though there were little inaccuracies and self-contradictions; but I was distracted by the way Hills has trouble controlling his voice. There are writers who can move from journalistic sobriety to flippancy to human-interest bathos with ease; Hills isn't one of them. Sure, that's subjective on my part, but when the meat of a book is speculation--as an attempt at explicating how the forces operating on Masako got her into her current state necessarily is--its author needs to come off as unusually trustworthy and sensible. The swings in tone are jarring and subliminally make Hills seem a bit flighty.

I was also a little unsettled at the unremittingly flat way Masako was cast as a victim. One doesn't want to underestimate the way the royals in Japan are treated by their handlers as living museum pieces, which Hills is hardly the first to document. (Under pressure from the palace governing agency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kodansha isn't going to publish the planned Japanese translation.) But as he himself notes, plenty of other eligible women turned down the opportunity to marry Crown Prince Naruhito. I was especially charmed by those unnamed candidates who threatened to make themselves unfit to be royal brides by getting body piercings or tattoos--never underestimate the resourcefulness of the Japanese woman!

Naruhito's mistake seems to have been in promising Masako that she could channel her talent for and credentials in diplomacy into modernizing the role of the Crown Princess and, later, Empress; Masako's mistake was in believing him. Even so, she was an experienced woman of the world by that point and presumably knew how to weigh her options. She also had the example of the current Empress Michiko to learn from. No, she probably didn't know exactly what she was getting into--otherwise, it's hard to imagine that she would have accepted the prince's proposal. But part of being an adult who makes a risky decision is that you might lose.

Princess Masako was better than Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, which I picked up while hanging out with Eric. I was distracted by Marc Eliot's inability to do basic math and by his factual errors. (For a gay man, I'm hardly a film expert, but I'm pretty sure that if Auntie Mame had won the Oscar for Best Picture, I'd have remembered. It's also pretty obvious that you can't say Cary Grant retired from acting a half-decade before making North by Northwest.) And to read Eliot's summaries of Stewart's own movies with Hitchcock, you'd never know how deeply, powerfully disturbing they are. In fact, nothing Eliot writes indicates why Stewart was a fascinating enough character to warrant a four-hundred-page biography.